- 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
…ute certainty. But that’s no longer the case – read this week’s New Haven Independent article on the walk-in DNA testing clinic for a local solution to the problem. This issue touches me personally, as you probably know. My two granddaughters – Ariel and Zohar – are being brought up in a traditional Jewish home where kabbalat Shabbat happens every week, the Sh’ma is sung every night at bedtime, and the kitchen is kosher. But their mother is not Je…
…of our current electrical system and do something about it. Thank you friends and family for being here and sharing this day with me. Shabbat Shalom. Email Tsvi Benson-Tilsen tsvibt@gmail.com. For more information on Tsvi’s Photovoltaic project at BEKI, see The sun will shine on BEKI bar mitzva, by Howard Blas, Connecticut Jewish Ledger, 6 January 2006 A Higher Power, New Haven Independent, 19 December 2005 Student Power, SmartPower, December 200…
…with me. Before moving to New Haven, I lived in Port Jefferson on Long Island, and was involved in a women’s tefila group at my synagogue. At that time, the Rabbi allowed only men to read Torah or lead services. After some difficult negotiations, we got his permission for interested women to gather once a month in a classroom, to tallit. Wrapping myself in a tallis for the very first time was a strange and very moving experience. I felt the weight…
…ive families, and the context of a congregation that respects, encourages and indeed welcomes in its egalitarian yet traditional way, all of us to do reach and grow and do as much or as little as each of us ready for to fully participate. For some of us it has been precisely that aspect of the BEKI culture that drew us in here and made us want to learn more. We have always felt the encouragement and support of the congregation to grow and learn an…
…foretells the return of the Jewish people to their homes in Palestine. To understand Isaiah better, imagine for a moment what it must have been like to have been forcibly taken from a city and culture that you thought was that chosen for you by your God, where you had viewed yourself as very special and blessed, to the distant capital of your conqueror. Babylon at the time was an extraordinary city, huge in size with a population of over 100,000….
…g World War I, although 80 percent later returned. During Israel’s War of Independence (1946-48), some 750,000 Arab and Bedouin residents fled or were expelled (official U.N. figure: 711,000), some by the urging of local Arab leaders, some by foreign Arab leaders, and some by local Jewish forces. Many of those persons bore greater or lesser responsibility for their fate. Some of them fled from areas that were at the end of the war under Arab, not…
…The Second, feeling of the tusk, Cried, “Ho! what have we here So very round and smooth and sharp? To me ’tis mighty clear This wonder of an Elephant Is very like a spear!” “So this is all very nice,” you may be saying, “but what do we do with the explicit prohibition in the Torah?” We are not the first generation to struggle with and even be offended by a text. In Deuteronomy (21: 18-21), we are told: When a man has a rebellious and disobedient…
…h that is not entitled “Rabbi.” We also noted that non-Ashkenazi Jews are under-represented. There are two wonderful prints of watercolors of Yemenite Jewish men by the Romanian-Israeli artist David Gilboa, and the previously mentioned work by Rafael Avraham Shalem, and many ethnically ambiguous works, but in general this is an exhibition with many exclusions. Additionally, only three works in the exhibition were created by women artists, includin…
