More than any of the content at this year’s General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America, what fascinated me was the effect of social media – particularly Twitter – on the conference itself, and more broadly, on the Jewish community.
Although this was my seventh GA as a reporter, I’m a relative newbie to Twitter, having opened my account in June. Before the Nov. 6-8 meeting in Denver, Colo., I’d never tweeted from an event I was covering.
I discovered that not only was it not considered rude to use my Blackberry while presenters were speaking, it was encouraged. One moderator instructed us, “Please feel free to tweet throughout the session. It will enliven our discussion. It will spread the word.”
The Jewish community must abandon the paradigm of Jewish continuity as an end in itself, Rabbi Elie Kaunfer told an audience of almost 3,000 delegates at the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA) last Sunday afternoon in Denver.
The 80th annual GA, a three-day event, had representatives from 115 federations and six networked communities, said Judy Silverman, a co-chair of the gathering.
I want to challenge one of the mainstay assumptions of organized Jewish life: Jewish continuity is the end goal, and everything is in service of that goal.
It’s been 20 years since the release of the 1990 National Jewish Population Study, which found an unprecedented rate of intermarriage. It launched 1,000 ships of Jewish identity efforts in the service of ensuring Jewish continuity. Indeed, in our current language, everything is in service of Jewish identity. Birthright strengthens Jewish identity. Day schools strengthen Jewish identity. Summer camps strengthen Jewish identity.
Our theory: Strengthen Jewish identity and Judaism will continue.
Rabbi Elie Kaunfer, the co-founder and executive director of Mechon Hadar, a traditional Jewish educational institute on the Upper West Side, said that arguments commonly arise in orthodox communities when congregants who are otherwise observant use their devices on the Sabbath. (There’s a term for this style of observance: “Keeping half-Shabbos.”) At Mechon Hadar’s yeshiva, where Kaunfer runs prayers three times a day during the week, he sees people use their devices to pray on: “It’s a little jarring,” he told me, “because you don’t know if they’re communing with God or checking e-mail.”
Rabbis lead eleven of the sixty organizations named yesterday to the annual Slingshot Guide of the most innovative Jewish organizations. Four of these organizations are new additions to the list this year. An additional two organizations were led by rabbis at the time of the application.
Slingshot added a Top 10 list to its newly released annual guide to innovative Jewish programming in North America.
A list of 10 top “standard bearers” was added to the annual list of the 50 “most inspiring and innovative organizations, projects, and programs in the North American Jewish community today” by Slingshot, a project of the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies.
The scene that will play out just after sundown this evening in a room at BMH-BJ Synagogue in south Denver will seem typical.
A group of more than 50 men and women will recite Kol Nidre as a prelude to Yom Kippur, the most holy day on the Jewish calendar.
But this opening to Day of Atonement services is anything but ordinary. It will be one of the few times during the year that Minyan Na'aleh assembles anywhere other than the east Denver homes of its members.
Three Jewish educators have been named the recipients of the prestigious 2011 Covenant Awards for excellence in Jewish education and innovation.
The Covenant Awards are given by the Covenant Foundation, a program of the Crown Family Foundation and the Jewish Education Service of North America. The program honors outstanding Jewish educators and supports creative approaches to Jewish education.
Joey Weisenberg, 29, is the musical director at the Kane Street Synagogue in Brooklyn and is in charge of musical education at Yeshivat Hadar in Manhattan. He plays guitar, mandolin and percussion and sings in 10 different bands, is an artist-fellow at the 14th Street Y’s LABA program and a faculty member at KlezKanada. He also teaches music privately. He does all this, and still spends half or more of his time teaching congregations around the country how to build singing communities and conduct spontaneous choirs.
Rabbi Elie Kaunfer is being called an “it” rabbi.
He’s been named by Newsweek magazine as one of the top 50 rabbis in America. As co-founder of Mechon Hadar, an education institution seeking to empower Jews to create and sustain vibrant, practicing, egalitarian communities of Torah learning, prayer and service, he is gaining quite a following.
“You’ve got to read his book,” said Jill Maidhof, the associate executive director of the Jewish Community Center who is also serving as interim head of its adult Jewish learning department.
The Covenant Foundation announced today that Rabbi Shai Held, co-founder, dean and chair in Jewish Thought at Mechon Hadar, has won the prestigious Covenant Award.
Selected from hundreds of nominees, Shai was chosen "for committing to excellence in Jewish education and pursuing innovative approaches that inspire and empower students, colleagues and community."
Music changes when other people enter the scene, often miraculously and for the better. The same note I was playing on the guitar by myself an hour ago sounds drastically different when it combines with a drummer's beats. The note I'm singing might sound like a different note altogether when somebody sings an unexpected harmony. Or, that note I played might gain a brand new energy when I know somebody else is listening or whispering "bravo"! Theoreticians describe the interactions of musical overtones, but mostly what I feel is the interactions of energies. Often these energies add up to much more than the sum of their parts. What's more, they create a combined, unpredictable magic that can only be experienced once, for next time it will change. Shared music, in short, is ephemeral, a product of the here and now.
One of the advantages of getting older is that one can personally experience social changes. I remember as a child in the fifties having
friends who belonged to the local Conservative synagogue who went to Hebrew school four afternoons a week. When I visited them at their services, I was struck by the absence of women on the bimah. On the other hand, I also had an Orthodox friend. When we had to work on a messy task together, we both wore pants. Her mother didn’t cover her head, except for the fancy hats she wore to shul. Today, of course, none of these observations hold true. The center of the Conservative Movement has shifted to the left, while mainstream Orthodoxy has moved to the right. As the gap has widened, different groups and organizations are trying to fill the vacuum. Perhaps the most intriguing and dynamic is the confederation of independent minyanim, which strive to be both halachic and also egalitarian, and attract mainly Jews in their twenties and thirties. The granddaddy of these minyanim is Kehilat Hadar in Manhattan. Now, one of the founders of that minyan, Rabbi Elie Kaunfer, has written a book about his minyan. Empowered Judaism is both a philosophical justification of these minyanim and a how-to for creating one’s own Hadar-style minyan.
בישיבת "הדר" באפר-ווסט במנהטן לומדים מהמקורות. ישיבה לכל דבר, בהבדל אחד. הלימוד משותף לבנות ולבנים. לימוד בחברותא. לימוד לשם לימוד משום שמי שמגיע לשם מחפש זהות יהודית. גם יש קהילת "הדר", שגם בה התפילה יוצרת עונג שבת לא מוכר. הנוסח אורתודוקסי לחלוטין.
New study finds number of innovative projects up dramatically in last two years. Wednesday, April 6, 2011 Tamar Snyder, The Jewish Week Despite the tough economic climate and increasingly...
“It blew me away on a spiritual plane,” says Rabbi Ethan Tucker of matzah-making. Rabbi Tucker, who co-heads Yeshivat Hadar, the egalitarian learning institution on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, will host the organization’s first matzah workshop on April 13 from 6-9 p.m. at Shaare Zedek on West 93rd Street. Rabbi Tucker baked matzah for the first time in 2003, while studying in northern Israel as a rabbinical student. “In the past I had either bought matzah off the shelf in a store, or went to a factory that was not in my community — which was like an anthropological experience,” says Rabbi Tucker. But after that first experience, “I haven’t been able to go back,” he says.
by Rabbi Aaron Schonbrun Posted on March 21, 2011, Rabbi's Corner This week I wanted to call your attention to a unique and innovative organization within the American Jewish community, Mechon...
