Arnav

JOFA on the MapThis summer, JOFA Chicago launched the Ahuzat Nahala Beit Midrash, a new Torah learning initiative accessible to all members of the Chicago community. The beit midrash is a welcoming and inclusive learning space with a focus on havrutah-style learning. Participants will meet once a month to develop strong text study skills.JOFA Philadelphia […]

By Eliezer Hirsch The topic of the synagogue mehitzah has generated impassioned discussion spanning more than a century. Widely debated in the United States throughout the twentieth century, mehitzah (and even separate seating) was not always the standard for Orthodox synagogues. In the 1950s, a significant number of synagogues that identified as Orthodox did not

By Blu Greenberg Item: A Modern Orthodox community in Queens, New York, celebrating an aufruf, holds Shabbat services in the social hall of the local yeshiva. The opaque mehitzah separating front from back is hung ceiling to floor, completely blocking sightlines. The rabbi, much beloved by his community, delivers his sermon in a voice inaudible

Walls and Mehitzot: A Big DifferenceBy Bat Sheva Marcus Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,And spills the upper boulders in the sun,And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.In Robert Frost’s “Mending Walls,” the poet complains about the need for a wall between himself and his neighbor. Walls,

By Rachel Kohl Finegold “But where will you sit?” That was the very first question I was asked by the very first reporter to interview me after I was hired to serve as a member of the clergy at Shaar Hashomayim, my Montreal synagogue. This first question was not about my job function, nor about

Brandeis University Press/HBI Series on Jewish Women, 2015, $40 (paperback), $34.99 (ebook) By Roberta Rosenberg Farber The family is an institution most of us take for granted. We grow up in families and hope to create our own. So why has the family become such an important topic in the Jewish community today?According to the

Illuminations and Commentary by Debra BandHoneybee in the Garden, 2016, $49.95By Roselyn Bell Debra Band’s new volume of illuminated texts for Kabbalat Shabbat and Friday night home rituals is both visually breathtaking and conceptually very ambitious. She has provided multiple commentaries, artistic and literary, for the texts, as well as conceptual approaches to them from

By Michael J. HarrisVallentine Mitchell, 2016, $36.94By Roselyn Bell What is Modern Orthodoxy? Michael J. Harris, a rabbi serving the Hampstead Synagogue in London as well as an academic with a Ph.D. in philosophy, teaching in the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge, applies the skill sets of both his disciplines to answering this question. He

By Yehudit Robinson I didn’t expect to say Kaddish with any regularity. When my father, Morris Robinson, died in late January 2020, I intended to recite only the three Kaddishes at the end of the Shabbat davening each week and, instead, focus on helping raise my three young children. At the shivah minyanim at my