- 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
…rman-Schiff is always available to answer questions and offer support. Contact her at anormanschiff@beki.org, 860-502-5337. • If parents relax and have fun, children will too. And if the children have fun in synagogue, we are doing a great job….
…scroll and the kohen shall blot them out in the water. And the kohen shall offer the drink of bitter waters to the woman. Thus reasoned Rabbi Yohanan, since the preparation of the bitter waters requires erasing God’s name, and since erasing God’s name is forbidden by Torah law, changes in the moral culture of his time required the sota ceremony to be abolished, if, as Hosea predicted, it would no longer work! The Mishna states Rabbi Yohanan’s posi…
…earning needs. The breadth and quality of Shabbat and weekday programs for children and youth expanded, and the number of minors grew from under 70 in 1994 to over 225 a decade later. A typical Shabbat morning includes simultaneous programs or services for children and youth, as well as youth participating in the main service and Shabbat Shalom Torah Study. In 2003, the congregation began a process of building renovations, aimed at improving acces…
…y on Shabbat mornings – Cosmic Conversations, the name our Shabbat morning children’s services coordinator, Anne Johnston, has bestowed upon the Torah study group for our 6th to 8th graders. My commitment blossomed from having sat in on two wonderful study sessions for this age group led by Rob Forbes during the High Holidays last fall. In one of our Cosmic Conversations, we read Parashat Teruma about the design of the Mishkan, or Tabernacle, the…
…that time in the portion of Mandatory Palestine under its control, but the offer was declined by the Arab states. The majority of these displaced persons were tenants who suffered the tremendous trauma of dislocation, regardless of how the blame is apportioned. After Yasir Arafat and his associated organizations came out publicly in favor of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait (1990), some 400,000 ethnic Palestinian Arabs were expelled (i.e., “eth…
…he notes for the text that in many congregations, Shavuot is the time when children are initiated into the formal study of Jewish religion and Hebrew language. Some temples give children their first siddur [prayer book] at this time. The parallel here speaks for itself. You’ll note also that today’s parasha resounds with the number seven – the seventh year is the sabbatical year- the seven days of Passover, the seven weeks until the Feast of weeks…
…d’s developing Jewish identity and the reinforcement of classroom lessons. Children in the K-1 class meet Sunday mornings. Children in grades 2 through 6 meet Sunday mornings and Wednesday afternoons. There are also Shabbatons and holiday celebrations. To download registration information, click here or call the BEKI office at (203) 389-2108 x114 or email the office at office@beki.org. To arrange a visit or for more information, email Education Di…
…New Haven at this moment. I was born and raised in Los Angeles, the oldest child of two native Angelenos: my mother, an Ashkenazi Jew with roots in Chicago, Vilna, and Trochenbrod, and my father, himself the son of a mestiza immigrant woman from Oaxaca and a white man whose Dust Bowl wanderings had carried him from Oklahoma to LA. I am deeply proud of my Mexican and Jewish background, but as a child and young adult I sometimes worried that I was n…
…d activities that have been flourishing for years. And we’ve initiated any number of new programs that you have suggested. There is energy in the air that encourages people to think, “We can do it.” Our attitude is, “Just say yes.” Last June we had a tribute dinner, honoring the rabbi and Miriam and raising a lot of money for the shul. A zillion people worked to make that happen. Prior to that, the last tribute dinner anyone could recall took plac…
…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…
