- 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
…and survived starvation and typhus to eventually start a new life in this country. Their children and grandchildren, some of whom are with us today, are the result of this miracle. Aunt Charlotte has been an example of charity, integrity, good deeds and faithfulness for all of us. These stories of God’s protection raise as many questions as they answer. You can be a good Jew in our tradition and not believe in angels. In fact, going way back in J…
…re in New York and had dinner with a couple, Isaac and Miriam, that lived across from the Twin Towers. Their five-year-old daughter had watched from her bedroom window as the second plane crashed into the towers. She hadn’t seen the first because she was in bed reading a book. She watched the towers crumble. Every time she does a drawing, a collage, or an art project there is always some reminder in it of that day. “See Momm, these are stairs we r…
…familiar symbolic images embedded as decorative elements. “All That Remains” will next be presented at the Virginia Holocaust Museum, Richmond, VA, in October 2020. The works in this show include images from each of these series. In this retrospective of her work, a number of works in private collections are represented by photographic reproductions, thus providing context for the entirety of exhibition. for more information and for purchasing wor…
…” The Westville building was built at Whalley Avenue and Harrison Street, across the street from the original site, and was dedicated on the weekend of 24-26 June 1960. The new congregation called itself Congregation Beth El. Rabbi Jordan Ofseyer was formally installed in December 1962, with the installation address given by Dr. Mordecai M. Kaplan. At that time, the congregation comprised 230 families. In January 1967, Congregation Beth El formall…
…d by the Good Book: “While the flesh was still between their teeth,” etc. (Numbers 11:33). Partly for that reason we are enjoined to wait a period of time after eating meat before eating dairy. But after some time, the “food” in your mouth (and stuck on or between your teeth) ceases to be “food.” Who would eat it? If your toothbrush is used at that point, it is not really in contact with “meat” or “dairy” and thus, strictly speaking, you would not…
…The other days of Creation are denoted, as you would expect, using ordinal numbers – second, third, and the like; but not the first day, Yom Ehad – Day One. Rashi teaches that “Day One” is to be understood as the Day of the One, the Day of God, and that God created everything in all its potential on that Day. From that day on, it follows that, as my daughter Sarah has recently begun quoting Martin Buber in the tag line to her email messages — To p…
…ou all. Please help us again, this time by passing along our thanks to the number of congregants who are away this weekend of Thanksgiving, giving thanks of their own elsewhere. The morning of the surgery I prayed and learned another prayerbook lesson, this time explicit. At my request, Marsha had brought me a copy of our Siddur, Sim Shalom. Uncharacteristically, I admit, I started from the beginning of the Shaharit, or morning, service. There I d…
…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…
…essage. Over the course of the school year, the kids would memorize a fair number of these. The sayings she chose reflected her particular take on Judaism, which tended to the ethical rather than the spiritual. In cleaning out her apartment last year, my sister Naomi and I came across some of these sayings, which I’ve brought with me to show you. Some of the pitgamim were easy to memorize and therefore were very popular with the kids: “Tov shem m’…
…, a very complex distribution network. The way it operates is by a certain number of power plants producing energy, usually by burning fossil fuels, and then feeding it into the massive grid of electrical power lines. I think this is quite similar to the societal structure of the monkeys and the medieval Jewish court system, in that the majority of interactions, or in this case, power transmissions, are local, but the network is able to transmit p…
