- Congregation Beth El–Keser Israel
85 Harrison Street, New Haven, CT 06515-1724 | P: 203.389.2108 | office@beki.org
85 Harrison Street, New Haven, CT 06515-1724 | P: 203.389.2108 | office@beki.org
…t and inform sponsors that they will not support businesses whose revenues support hate-radio. Ken Hamblin regularly uses racist epithets to describe people and belittles those who disagree with him. Recently he attacked people who receive welfare using adjectives like “dark,” “dirty” and “hairy” and claimed that African Americans were incapable of serving American cities as decent mayors. It does not seem unreasonable to me, or an abridgement of…
…flat-rate (fixed percentage) system if not a genuinely progressive system. Support of the Temple as envisioned by our Torah was on the basis of “from each according to their means.” It is for that reason that I applaud the efforts of those BEKI officers and members of the Board of Directors who are working to develop what is by Torah-values a more equitable set of expectations for supporting the shul through a scaled dues structure. This is not an…
…the Torah and perform their aliya properly. If there were no limit on the number of people who may go up for an aliya at once, then what if a Bar- or Bat-Mitzva family were to want to send up a group of five or ten at once? And what if two groups of ten are called up in succession? The result might violate even our minimal demands of decorum. If we were to limit joint aliya to two people per aliya, then on the one hand we would run into some fami…
…th lists start with a broad thing to give up and then narrow it down: list number one — go from your land, your birthplace, your father’s house. List number two — take your son, your only son, the one you love, Isaac. This similarity led me to still others. One of the first, and most obvious, comparisons between the two instances of lekh lekha was that in both, God is sending Abraham on a journey. In the first lekh lekha, God is starting Abraham o…
…Abby Fraade, the volunteer who manages sponsorships. Please note that cellphones and photography are permitted on weekdays, but not on Shabbat or Yom Tov. If you choose to have a ceremony at BEKI on some other day, please work out the general plan in advance with Office Manager Peggy Hackett. She will arrange kitchen supervision and custodial services. Please note that we do NOT allow self-catering or a plan that’s “friends will take care of setu…
…e Ely House, Center for Contemporary Art, New Haven, CT, and has curated a number of independent exhibitions. She studied at the Akademie fuer Angewante Kunst in Vienna, Austria, and received her MFA from San Jose State University. Anna Broell Bresnick has collaborated with dancers and musicians in the creation of installations for performances. These have included large sculptural str uctures, floor drawings and video. Broell Bresnick has taught…
…of all the people. Imagine if the parshah has told us, tribe by tribe, the number of people in each tribe, and separately, the number of males, 20 and up, who were fit for service. Would that kind of census send a different message to us, a message saying, “everyone counts”, including all the women? The second census, what I’ll call the redemption census, I find a strange one. It requires counting of all the male Levites who were at least a month…
…ll do it that way, too. But this procedure often created a dilemma: If the number of qaddishes was limited, there might still be some who did not get to say one; if there was no limit to the number of qaddishes added, the service became burdensomely long. So after careful scrutiny the rabbis allowed all mourners to say qaddish simultaneously. This rabbinic solution was adopted only after careful consideration, and after it was determined that mour…
…rs, words and spaces, although exact layout (number of words in a line and number of lines in a column) may vary, as will the quality of the materials and calligraphy. We take out the particular scroll or scroll that is set to the portion that we are reading on the given occasion. The weekly reading goes in sequence, so each shabbat we begin reading from the spot we left of the previous week. But on festivals and other occasions we may read from a…
For today’s services, a number of congregants have added touches of beauty to the synagogue and the services. In my Devar Torah, I would like examine the place of beauty and art in the Sanctuary. The sanctuary is a place where we pray together, where we venerate the wisdom of the Torah, where we tell stories that celebrate our shared past. It is also a place where our spirits and our community can be invigorated, nourished, and rested. It is a sa…
