- 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
…vely small financial contribution is reasonable, since anyone can pray for free on the High Holy Days (just not at our shul), and that anyone can come to BEKI “for free” the rest of the year. (If a reader would like to make that case, we’ll print it.) But the old formulas for synagogue financing are not working well enough, and the level of community participation in synagogues is radically lower than it was generations ago. The world has changed,…
…o BEKI. At the same time, we also admire and love the fact that a sizeable number of congregants can daven and read Torah! The unrestrained excitement of little ones further adds to the pleasure in feeling that Am Yisrael Chai! Tom Goldenberg & Jessica Holzer and Ainsley Tom is a New Haven Mayoral candidate and was previously a public sector consultant. Jess is the chair-elect of the University of New Haven’s public health department. Ainsley is i…
…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…
…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…
…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…
…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…
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…
…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…
…ene. Each member of the household has their own Hanukia, and each lights a number of lights corresponding to the number of the day of the holiday. We are fortunate that we are able to do this mitzva in such a complete and beautiful way. But what of the poor person who can not afford all of this “hidur mitzva” but must struggle to light even one lamp? The Mishna Berura, written at the beginning of the twentieth century by the Hafetz Hayim, comments…
