A Hanukkah Rededication Ceremony in Memory of Dr. Alfred Gottschalk
A moving program in memory of Dr. Alfred Gottschalk took place on the sixth night of Hanukkah in The Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archive's Jewish Foundation of Cincinnati International Learning Center. The evening included remarks from Dr. Michael Berenbaum, former Director of the United States Holocaust Research Institute at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and now Director of the Sigi Ziering Institute on the Holocaust at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles. Addressing the gathering via video-conference from Macedonia in the AJA's Electronic Classroom, Berenbaum shared his remembrances of working with Dr. Gottschalk during the earliest days of planning the proposed U.S. Memorial Holocaust Museum in Washington, recalling how Dr. Gottschalk made the staff of HUC-JIR available to the Museum for planning its new Library and Archive.
Click here for the video tribute to Dr. Alfred Gottschalk presented that evening
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Dr. Michal Muszkat-Barkan Appointed to the Government Commission on Jewish Culture and Tradition
Dr. Michal Mushkat-Barkan, the Director of HUC-JIR/Jerusalem's Department of Professional Development and Education since 2005, was recently appointed to the Government Commission on Jewish Culture and Tradition in the Israeli State Schools. The Commission for the Ministry of Education, headed by Dr. Benyamin Ish-Shalom of Beit Morasha, will help conceive a new curriculum for secular schools. Rabbi David Ellenson said, "We take pride in Dr. Muszkat-Barkan's new appointment, which reflects the important influence HUC-JIR is having on education in the State of Israel, through the activities of our extraordinary faculty and administration."
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Dr. Lisa Grant Reports from Jerusalem on Rosh Chodesh Services with Women at the Wall
Dr. Lisa Grant, Associate Professor of Jewish Education at HUC-JIR/NY, attended Rosh Chodesh Kislev services with the Women at the Wall with over 100 members of the HUC community. She explains, "We gathered at the back of the Women's section at the Kotel, clustered tightly under umbrellas, and joined together in prayer while surrounded by a chorus of voices shouting out bitter epithets ranging from the rather mild 'shame,' to the more shocking 'die' and 'you're the reason why the Intifada happened.' ... On this seventh day of Hanukkah, we sang out for religious freedom and the right to pray peacefully and respectfully in this most holy of sites that belongs to the entire Jewish people."
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Faculty Presentations at Major Academic Conferences
HUC-JIR is proud of its faculty members who have presented at major academic conferences throughout the world:
Association for Jewish Studies
Sarah Bunin Benor presented "Young Adults, Leadership, and 21st-Century American Jewish Cultural Change" and was the Chair and Respondent for the session on "Approaches to the Jewish Linguistic Spectrum"
Bill Cutter presented "1958--One Year in Israeli Literature: Reflections on Historiography"
Dr. Jonathan Krasner presented "Soviet Jewish Activism and the Transformation of Jewish Identity"
Panelist, "The Five Original Colleges of Jewish Studies: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow"
Bruce Phillips participated in the sessions on "Including Jewish Social Networks in Applied Research" and "Interfaith Wedding Ceremonies: Who What Where"
Dr. Haim O. Rechnitzer participated in the sessions on "Modern Hebrew Poets as Theologians" and "Teaching, Inquiry and Texts: New Approaches to Jewish Education"
Dvora Weisberg presented "The Practice of Academic Mentoring" in a session organized with Rabbi Jane Kanarek, Ph.D of Hebrew College in Boston
Wendy Zierler presented "Words Worthy of Being Shown and Heard": The Diary of Hava Shapiro
Society for Biblical Literature
Joshua Garroway presented "A New Sort of Priest for a New Sort of People: Reconfiguring Descent in Hebrews and Romans"
University of Minnesota " Center for Medieval Studies
Susan Einbinder presented "A Jewish Physician in Medieval Castile: The Case of Meir Alguades"
American Dialect Society
Sarah Bunin Benor presented 'Ethnolinguistic repertoire: Avoiding contradiction in research on language and ethnicity"
North American Jewish Choral Festival
Benjie Schiller presented "Izzun Tefillah" and "Singing from Within; Cultivating compassionate attention toward one's singing"
Conservative Judaism: Halakhah, Culture and Sociology at The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute
Michael Meyer presented a Hebrew version of a lecture whose English title is "Conservative Judaism in Relation to Reform Judaism"
Ludwig-Maximilians University Lecture Series
Susan Einbinder will present "When the Ending Comes First: The Death and Life of Meir Alguades"
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HUC-JIR Museum Internship Opportunity
The Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion Museum in New York is seeking Museum Interns who will assist in the development of exhibitions. The HUC-JIR Museum is recognized as a leading center for the presentation of works by contemporary artists exploring Jewish identity and experience. Its exhibitions and cultural programs illuminate Jewish history and contemporary creativity and foster interfaith and multiethnic understanding. The Museum encourages contemporary artists of all faiths to explore Jewish themes in their work, serves as an experimental laboratory for research in new and progressive theories of museum education, and provides a forum to explore the role of the arts as an expression of spirituality.
For more information, please click here
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Highway to Justice – The Jerusalem Post
Rabbi Michael Marmur, Vice President for Academic Affairs at HUC-JIR, writes: "Since 2002, Route 443 (like a number of other roads bordering on or in the Occupied Territories) has operated as an Israelis-only road. The policy has improved our sense of security on that road, but it has also contributed to a palpable sense of injustice. Much of the land for the road was confiscated from Palestinians, who have not been allowed to travel on it. There is a word for this, and the word is: wrong. There is a growing trend to seek partition solutions in this country: Israelis-only roads, Ashkenazi-only schools for ultra-Orthodox girls, men-only buses in Ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods. If our state is to be true to its mandate, if is to be Jewish and democratic, this separatist tendency must be resisted."
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Tutoring Trends Test Jewish Values – The Jewish Week
With the number of unaffiliated Jewish families in New York on the rise, the Director of HUC-JIR/NY's School of Education Jo Kay is often asked to provide private tutors to teach children Jewish education. Kay, along with many other Jewish educators, fears that the individualized approach of private tutors poses a threat to the Jewish community. Jewish life has been centered around the communal values and privatized education "fails to teach about, or expose children to, the broader Jewish community." Kay explains that she gives families the names of tutors because "The more families are turned away the less likely they are to connect ever." Kay hopes that these tutors, often her graduate students, will inspire the families to get involved in congregational life.
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From DP Camp to the White House – Baltimore Jewish Times
Rabbi Avraham Shemtov, the head of the international umbrella organization of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidim, prays alongside Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the President of the Union for Reform Judaism. Elsewhere, members of the liberal, peace-oriented J Street advocacy group are engaged in intense conversations with leaders of AIPAC, the more conservative pro-Israel lobby. In the Bergen-Belsen Displaced Persons camp, the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, religious and secular, Yiddishists and Hebraists, lived and struggled together, as did Zionists covering the broad political spectrum from left to right who coexisted easily with non-Zionists. They understood that they had suffered a shared fate and faced a common future. In the White House this week, Jewish leaders of all stripes and denominations seemed to let go of their differences, if only for a few hours, and revel in the freedom and dignity of America.
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An Unusual Torah "Outing" – The Jerusalem Post
The editors of Torah Queeries, Gregg Drinkwater, David Shneer and Joshua Lesser, have gathered together many leading rabbis and scholars to provide a perspective through what they call a "bent lens." This exceptional collection brings together the voices of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and gay-friendly writers, including some of the best-known names in the Jewish world, from all of the major denominations, including Orthodox. The contributors include the likes of Amichai Lau-Lavie, the founder of Storahtelling; Elliot Dorff, rector and professor at the American Jewish University; Judith Plaskow, professor at Manhattan College and a leading Jewish feminist theologian; David Ellenson, president of Hebrew Union College; and Steven Greenberg, an Orthodox rabbi, who has served as a senior educator for CLAL.
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Blessing and Redeeming a Sorry Childhood – The Jewish Week
Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman, professor of liturgy at HUC-JIR/NY, writes: "Our parents die and much as we wanted their blessing, we get lingering recollections of parental disappointment. Other people point nostalgically to family photos on their mantle or piano. Not us. The pictures we most honestly conjure are of parents who showed us little unadulterated love, even at the end. We are saddened, even angry, that they left us with wounds that may never heal." Rabbi Hoffman questions how to deal with this sense of parental disappointment, and claims that Jewish custom provides an answer and an opportunity to free oneself from these feelings.
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Why New Rituals? – My Jewish Learning
Recent years have seen an explosion of new Jewish rituals. From mimeographed rituals to Xeroxed rituals to desktop-published rituals to rituals that have been performed but not recorded, the willingness to capture the large and small moments of our lives through ritual has become part of the landscape of Jewish life. Why are so many Jews creating new rituals? Rabbi Laura Geller, one of the first women rabbis, tells about her epiphany at Hebrew Union College when one of her teachers said, "There are no important moments in a Jew's life for which there is not a blessing," and, daydreaming, Laura started cataloguing all the moments in her life which had gone unmarked.
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HUC-JIR Recruitment Staff Visiting Campuses in Your Area!
Colorado (DU and UC, Boulder) - January 14-15, 2010
San Francisco, HUC-JIR Presents: Perspectives on Jewish Education - January 26, 2010
UC Berkeley - January 27, 2010
UC Santa Cruz - January 28, 2010 (tentative)
Stanford University - January 29, 2010
University of Pennsylvania - January 29, 2010
Pardes Institute, Jerusalem - February 1, 2010
For more information, please contact: dabelson@huc.edu
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Student Services, Sermons, Recitals, and more!
Cincinnati - at 10:50 am unless otherwise noted:
Jan. 11: Leading Services: Brent Guttman; Torah Reader: David Spinrad
Jan. 12: Leading Services: Jordan Helfman;
Jan. 13: Leading Services: Jon Kleinman
Jan. 14: Leading Services: Jessica Heutlner Rosenthal; Torah Reader: Meredith Kahan
Los Angeles - at 10 am:
Jan. 11: Schlichai Tzibbur: Ilana Schachter, Cantor Bernstein; Reading Torah: Aron Klein; Dvar Torah: Leah Jordan; Gabbai: Rachel Ackerman
Jan. 12: Schlichai Tzibbur: Ilana Schachter
Jan. 13: Schlichai Tzibbur: Callie Souther
Jan. 14: Schlichai Tzibbur: Callie Souther, Cantor Kent; Reading Torah: Laura Abrasley; Sermon: Heath Watenmaker; Gabbai: Ethan Bair
New York - at 10 am unless otherwise noted:
Jan. 11: Leading Services: Rabbi: Amy Goodman; Cantor: Amanda Winter; Dvar Torah: Alyson Adler
Jan. 13 at 10:45 am: Practica: Faryn Kates, "Kabbalat Shabbat" and Sarah Krevsky, "Maariv L'Shabbat"
Jan. 14: Leading Services: Rabbi: Amy Goodman; Cantor: Amanda Winter; Reading Torah: David Frommer; Gabbai: Andrea Rae Markowicz; Sermon: Sara Newman; Torah
Jerusalem:
Jan. 16 at 9:30 am: Leading Services: Rabbi Yoshi Zweiback
Jan. 18 at 8:30 am: Leading Services: Avigail Eitam; Sermon: Or Zohar
Jan. 21 at 8:30 am: Leading Services: Yoni Regev; Sermon: Rachel Levin
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Founded in 1875, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion is the nation's oldest institution of
higher Jewish education and the academic, spiritual, and professional development center of Reform Judaism.
HUC-JIR educates men and women for service to American and world Jewry as rabbis, cantors, educators, and
communal service professionals and offers graduate and post-graduate degree programs for scholars of all faiths.
With campuses in Cincinnati, Los Angeles, New York, and Jerusalem, HUC-JIR's scholarly resources comprise
renowned library, and museum collections, the American Jewish Archives, biblical archaeology
excavations, research centers and institutes, and academic publications. HUC-JIR invites the community to an array
of cultural and educational programs that illuminate Jewish history, culture, and contemporary creativity, and
foster interfaith and multi-ethnic understanding.
Visit us at
www.huc.edu.
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