In his article in The Jewish Week, Stewart Ain has attempted to address the issue of High Holiday services at the Levis JCC in Boca Raton, Florida. In our interview, I tried to help him see that the issue is not High Holiday services or after-school Hebrew classes. The issue is how we engage more Jews. Whether 12 or 15 percent of the Jews in Boca are affiliated is not the important point. Over 80 percent are not! The chances of these young families affiliating with a synagogue will increase if they have been exposed to comfortable, engaging Jewish learning and experiences. Every study of Jewish life validates the conclusion that multiple affiliations and engagements with Jewish life leads to more Jewish-identity activities. Yes, we need to collaborate wherever possible. Yes, the best educators, be they from JCCs, synagogues, or day schools, need to be involved in these programs to make young families feel comfortable. Is there a teacher out there who wouldn’t appreciate more work and more opportunities to make a living in the Jewish community?
I’d like us to throw out the old, overplayed, repetitive tapes about “stepping on each other’s” turf, and focus all this energy on reaching and engaging more people, and bringing them into Jewish life wherever we can. I’d stake my career on my confidence that we won’t lose synagogue members, or bar/bat mitzvah kids—we’ll gain.
We have to create new rules of engagement and take some risks, and be willing to think together. No one disagrees. The problem isn’t that this agency or that congregation is trying to reach Jews in ways that are nontraditional. The problem/challenge is that not enough Jews are engaged; the rest is technique, or as Hillel says, commentary.
At the JCCs of North America Biennial in May, we introduced the idea of “1000 Jewish conversations,” hoping to engage a continent-wide range of people in discussion about major issues that impact Jewish life, and how the work of JCCs can address those issues.
In Miami, High Holiday Services are sponsored by our Greater Miami Jewish Federation and is held at our Michael-Ann Russell JCC. We have over 1000 in attendance each year. Services are coordinated by two Conservative Synagogues. Our Federation also priovides tickets to many schules in our area. The response has been excellent as the services opens the doors for many of our unaffilitaed Jewish members in our Jewish Community of Miami. The turf issue is old and has been replaced with our area Rabbis woking with our JCC in many community initiatives including Israel advocacy and youth leadership development. Our JCC Association Israel Office shares wonderful programs around Israel that we use to bring all members of our Jewish Community together. I beleive our Rabbis need to harness their energies in the direction of how to best solve major issues rather than getting involved in ol thoughts that no longer make sense. The JCC is not the enemy but rather a partner in dealing with critical issues facing our Jewish world
This was historically challenged by the a movement that flourished in the medieval period retains several thousand followers today and maintains that only the Written Torah was revealed. Orthodox Judaism maintains that the and Jewish law are divine in origin eternal and unalterable and that they should be strictly followed. A typical Reform position is that Jewish law should be viewed as a set of general guidelines rather than as a set of restrictions and obligations whose observance is required of all Jews.
In 2006 he received an award from the San Francisco Jewish federation that funded a year s study in Israel..He also was born a female..Dzmura 48 is one of a growing number of transgender Jews who are open about their status taking leadership roles in the synagogue and trying to carve out a place in the Jewish community for those who fall outside the standard definitions of male and female..It s not easy he acknowledges.. Transgender people have tended historically to go stealth blend in as a non-transgender person or opt out of Jewish communal life altogether he wrote in Balancing on the Mechitza a collection of essays about transgender Jews in the Jewish community that Dzmura edited in 2009. Ladin disputed that it was a choice saying it was something she had to do..Rabbi Avi Shafran director of public affairs for the haredi Orthodox Agudath Israel of America said changing one s gender through surgery or other medical intervention is prohibited according to Jewish law.. Halachically and theologically from the perspective of the Jewish religious tradition a person s sexual identity is dependent on the sex he or she is born as assuming that the person s genitals are unambiguous Shafran said..The Conservative movement also regards genitals as the final determinant. Although the movement has not said whether sex reassignment surgery is allowed a 2003 responsum by its committee on law and standards holds that individuals who complete surgery and whose new gender is accepted by state authorities should be so recognized by Jewish law..There are a variety of Reform responsa on the topic..Dzmura Zellman and their colleagues in the trans-Jewish activist community want to encourage the next generation of transgender Jews to join the Jewish community instead of avoiding it..The goals they have set range from the mundane to issues of ritual and worship.