To borrow a concept from the Passover Haggadah, had Barry Ivker been able only to present his three children with copies of a family Haggadah he complied, “Dayenu.”
Instead, he was able to sell about 1200 copies of “All My Bones Shall Speak” before Hurricane Katrina destroyed the rest of the printing. Now, he has come out with a second edition.
Ivker, who resettled in Birmingham after Hurricane Katrina, said he has hosted Seders at his home for 30 years. When his children attended the Lakeshore Hebrew Day School in New Orleans, they brought home new material for the Seder, which he incorporated into the evening.
“Part of what I wanted to do” with the Haggadah “was acknowledge their contribution to the Seder.”
He wanted to create a book that “the educated layman” could use. It has a traditional text, along with transliterations for those who want to learn Hebrew. There is also what he calls five times the amount of commentary that anyone could use for a Seder, but that enables one to use different material each year.
Central to this Haggadah is a series of 111 artworks of his that he calls “visual midrash.” It took him five years to complete the series.
He took the name of the Haggadah from a phrase in Hallel. Normally, Hallel is recited only during the morning service, but during the Seder, parts of the morning service are recited at night. He calls the title “a celebration — you’re celebrating from the depths of your being.”
The new edition has only minor changes from the first. He added the Miriam’s Cup and changed some of the section on women’s roles. “If it were not for the virtuous women, there would have been no Exodus,” he noted.
When he was a child, Ivker said, the women played no role at the Seder table, and the men would recite the Haggadah by rote, not really knowing what they were saying.
He and his sister would ask questions. “We’d find parts of the text humorous, the language arcane, the logic a little ridiculous,” he said, adding that they did not have the background to understand what the texts were trying to convey. The commentaries he included give some background for many of the more perplexing passages.
Some of the pieces from “All My Bones Shall Speak” were exhibited at the New Orleans Museum of Art, and in 2006 he was one of seven artists featured at the Washington Jewish Community Center’s exhibit, “Different Nights: Interpretations of the Seder by Contemporary Artists.”
Just before Katrina struck, Ivker was officiating a wedding. Returning home for a few hours before evacuating, he moved the original artwork to the second floor. His wife, Fran, asked “what are you doing? We’ve never flooded before,” but they discovered there was a first time for everything.
While the artwork was saved, about 3800 copies of the Haggadah were not. And like so many Katrina losses, insurance did not cover that.
A Philadelphia native, Ivker attended Indiana University during the Vietnam era. Looking for something positive to do during a tumultuous time in history, Ivker said fellow students spoke of going to predominantly black universities to teach.
“I felt this was a time to get involved, there were exciting things happening,” he said.
He looked at a map. “I didn’t know the Deep South at all,” he said. They first chose Atlanta, but his wife found a greater bias against women than against blacks when applying for positions.
Instead, she found a position at the University of New Orleans and he wound up at Dillard, where he taught for 11 years. He then taught at Xavier University for five years.
The Ivkers settled into active roles at Tikvat Shalom, now known as Shir Chadash in Metairie.
At Indiana, Ivker had taught a class on literature and the other arts. After a few years, he decided to try his hand at the other arts. “I didn’t have a good handle on it for seven or eight years.”
Then he picked up the overlay technique, and “I began to know where I was headed.” It is a tedious technique, but “even the tedium can be restful.”
As a scholar working in the field of words, he said, it was “very liberating” to work with color and form.
He finds inspiration in the style of Matisse, “irreverent and celebratory, coming out of his own incapacities.”
His series on the sons of Jacob, along with Dinah, is on display at Shir Chadash. He also has works on display at Chabad in New Orleans, Anshe Sfard, Temple Sinai, the New Orleans Jewish Day School and the rehab unit at Touro Infirmary.
He has also done series on the Intifada, Sept. 11 and “After Katrina.” He is now working on a series from the Book of Esther.
Ivker said he works best artistically if it is a series of pieces. “It enables me to sustain focus for a long period of time.
Also lost in Katrina were manuscripts for other projects, from “Song of Songs” and “Ruth.”
The Haggadah is available directly from Ivker, or at the Temple Beth-El Gift Shop in Birmingham and the Shir Chadash Gift Shop in Metairie. A website is in the planning stages.
Though the Haggadah is filled with color images, Ivker said he wanted to keep the cost down so people would buy copies to use, rather than just display one copy on a coffee table. Copies ordered directly from him are $25 plus shipping.
To contact Ivker, email drfbi (at) netzero.com, or call (504) 920-5226.
After drawing great crowds last year, the Birmingham Holocaust Education Committee and Birmingham Public Library are once again offering a month of Brown Bag Lunch programs about the Holocaust.
The meetings are every Wednesday in March, starting at noon in the Arrington Auditorium in the Linn-Henley building downtown.
On March 5, Robert Adler of the University of North Alabama will speak on “A Reluctant Journey from Vienna to New York.” The topic deals with the development of the Holocaust in Austria, focusing on his father’s personal experience before, during and after his capture by the Nazis and his final arrival in the United States. He will also speak briefly about the role of Spain in the Holocaust and the conflict between Francisco Franco and Adolf Hitler over the fate of Spanish Jews.
On March 12, Holocaust survivor Max Herzel of Birmingham will speak about his experiences. At the age of 10, Herzel, along with his family, escaped from the German invasion of their home city of Antwerp, Belgium, and sought refuge in France. Soon after their arrival in France, the Herzels, along with other Jews, were rounded up there, and during the next five years until his rescue, Herzel faced harrowing experiences.
On March 19, Holocaust survivor Max Steinmetz will speak. Born in Romania, Steinmetz was captured by the Nazis at age 17 in 1941, and was incarcerated at Auschwitz, imprisoned at Birkenau and Dachau and escaped from the German Death March, seeking refuge in a farm house.
On March 26, Matthew Levey of Birmingham-Southern College will speak about “The Holocaust Writings of Primo Levi.” Levi is an author and Holocaust survivor. Levey will examine how the increasing adoption of some of these works, particularly “Survival in Auschwitz,” by high school curricula fits in the changing landscape of American memory of the Holocaust.
Ethan Zohn, the charismatic winner of TV’s “Survivor: Africa,” will speak to Jewish Endowment Foundation B’nai Maimonides fund holders, their families and friends, on “Doing Well and Doing Good” on March 2, at the Uptown Jewish Community Center in New Orleans.
Students who are having a Bar or Bat Mitzvah in 2008 are also invited to attend the 12:30 p.m. program, and bring their families and friends.
Zohn was the winner of the third season of “Survivor.” He used the proceeds from his “Survivor” win to establish a nonprofit organization called “Grassroots Soccer,” which trains Africa’s professional soccer players to teach children about HIV/AIDS infection and prevention.
Zohn played soccer in Zimbabwe and Hawaii and coached the U.S. Pan American Maccabiah team in Chile, as well as playing for the American teams in 1997 and 2001 in Israel.
Zohn is also a spokesman for “America Scores,” an organization that helps inner city children participate in educational soccer programs.
Reservations are required and can be made by calling the JEF office, (504) 524-4559.
The JEF B’nai Maimonides program is part of a national movement to involve Jewish youth in philanthropy.
Since April 1, 2007, when the program restarted after Hurricane Katrina, 21 teens have opened B’nai Maimonides funds, bringing the group total to 55.
“B’nai Maimonides is a matching program in which bar or bat mitzvah teens contribute $250 of their gift money to the Jewish Endowment Foundation,” said Bonnie Lustig, the program’s New Orleans director. “This contribution is matched by a generous anonymous donor and by JEF. The total of $500 is used to establish a B’nai Maimonides Fund in the young person’s name. He or she can begin making small distributions from the fund immediately.”
The principal is invested in fixed income securities through JEF. The fund grows through interest earnings and additional donations that can be made at any time. Each year for 10 years, the child may choose one or more worthy causes to receive 5 percent of the fund’s balance: $25 the first year and more as the fund increases.
After 10 years, if the fund totals over $5,000, it becomes the child’s own JEF Donor Advised Fund. Funds under $5,000 remain in the child’s name and become permanent JEF funds. Their annual income is used to support Jewish community programs.
At least half of the distributions from the funds must be given to Jewish causes. JEF presents programs for fundholders to familiarize them with eligible nonprofit groups. Participants meet dynamic speakers and activists like Zohn who are celebrating Jewish life throughout the world.
Representatives from the Jewish Children’s Regional Service and the New Orleans Jewish Day School will make presentations at the March 2 meeting to explain their agencies’ work.
Joseph Lustig, who opened a fund several years ago, is a senior at Benjamin Franklin High School. He recently met with his family to choose beneficiaries for his fund. His diverse list included JCRS; MAZON, which funds soup kitchens and food pantries nationwide; Doctors Without Borders; Magen David Adom, the Israel version of the Red Cross; and the Hebrew Free Burial Association, an organization that buries indigent Jews.
Young Philanthropists
JEF also sponsors the Young Philanthropists Program. Through Young Philanthropists, minor children of any age can become philanthropists with an initial tax-deductible gift of $500 or more. They do not receive matching funds; however, they can begin making distributions from the fund’s income once the fund is established and can participate in the same training and leadership programs as B’nai Maimonides teens when they are of bat or bar mitzvah age or older.
For more information on B’nai Maimonides, contact Ellen Abrams, (504) 524-4559 or ellen@jefno.org.
Rabbi Seth Farber,at his office in the Jewish Life Information Center in Jerusalem, helps potential converts navigate the rabbinate bureaucracy.
By Dina Kraft
JERUSALEM (JTA) -- Stacks of booklets on Jewish life-cycle rituals are piled high in the back closet at the Jewish Life Information Center’s Jerusalem offices. One, a 49-page handbook, describes the process of conversion in Israel in three languages: Hebrew, English and Russian.
The booklet, produced by the center and since adopted by the government as its official handbook on conversion, is intended to remove some of the fog surrounding the subject of conversion in Israel.
"We get hundreds of calls a month from people, including immigrants stuck in the system," said Seth Farber, an Orthodox rabbi and immigrant from New York who founded the center, known as ITIM. "The conversion process has been transformed from a personal experience to a very disempowering one."
Largely as a consequence of frustration with the sluggish pace of converting immigrants -- Israel has some 300,000 immigrants from the former Soviet Union who are not Jewish according to halachah, or Jewish law -- the government is planning a new state conversion agency.
This will be the government’s fourth such attempt in the last decade to improve a process long criticized for being overly rigid.
Advocates of the new authority say it will be a more user-friendly agency, with staff to help shepherd prospective converts through a yearlong course of study and rabbis to help speed up the process at conversion courts.
Others, however, question whether the authority will eliminate what many see as the major stumbling block to conversion: seemingly harsh and arbitrary decisions made by the rabbis who oversee the process and demand that converts follow a high level of religious observance.
Orit Lev, a client of ITIM who adopted a baby girl from Guatemala, said she was rebuffed by the rabbinical conversion courts for not leading a religious enough lifestyle. Lev has little hope the new agency will help her situation.
"I come from a traditional home. We are Yemenite and celebrate the holidays and lead a very traditional Jewish life, but that is not enough for them," she said of the rabbinical court judges who turned down her conversion request. "So I am skeptical. It's hard to imagine that with such an Orthodox rabbinate still in place they will be anything but inflexible."
Jewish conversions traditionally have been conducted by the same rabbis who tutored the intended convert. In Israel, rabbis who are state employees have assumed that role.
"Here it is very bureaucratic, and the challenge is to make it more seamless," said Farber, whose organization has become a watchdog on conversion issues but whose broader mission is to provide support and information on Jewish life.
ITIM runs a 24-hour hotline for those who need assistance on anything related to the Jewish life cycle.
In its effort to help clients seeking conversions, ITIM has been lobbying the Chief Rabbinate to recognize overseas conversions for the purposes of marriage, has petitioned Israel’s Supreme Court on recognizing overseas conversions for the purpose of aliyah and is working to help non-Israelis be allowed to begin the conversion process.
Under the new conversion agency, Rabbi Shlomo Amar, the chief Sephardic rabbi of Israel, will oversee the entire constellation of conversion in Israel, including the hiring of 10 rabbinical court judges. Amar is considered more progressive on conversion issues than his Ashkenazi counterparts.
But critics say they are concerned that as long as the process is under Amar's jurisdiction, candidates will endure the same bureaucratic complications they do today: confusion about the basic steps in the conversion process, the irrelevant personal questions in interviews and delays in receiving conversion certificates that are approved.
An aide to Amar told JTA the rabbi plans to streamline the conversion-related bureaucracy and took issue with the charge that rabbinical judges are overly stringent in their demands of potential converts. He said he was aware of some problematic judges but that the majority did impeccable work.
The aide, who asked that his name not be used, said Amar was working to make the overall process more welcoming.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has said the new authority will help those who wanted to integrate into Israel.
"Jews from all corners of the globe continue to arrive in Israel. We must not pile up more difficulties than they have already encountered on their way here," Olmert said recently. "Over the years, many unnecessary impediments were added to the conversion process."
The decision to establish the new agency was based on the recommendations of a committee headed by Erez Halfon, the director general of the Absorption Ministry.
A senior official in the Absorption Ministry told JTA the authority would only be a success if all its recommendations were implemented. He said he was concerned that the recommendation for the appointment of so-called "friendly rabbis” who might make the process more welcoming and accepting had not yet been approved.
"If everything we recommended will be accepted, it will be nothing short of a revolution, but if they are not implemented the situation will be worse in the future than it is today," said the official, who insisted on anonymity.
Some say things have deteriorated in recent years as a Chief Rabbinate dominated by the fervently Orthodox has waged a power struggle with Modern Orthodox Jews, including those in the Diaspora. More than a year ago the rabbinate declared it would no longer accept all conversions conducted by Orthodox rabbis abroad but rather only those from a list of approved rabbis would be accepted.
"Power is being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and only into the hands of those who agree to adopt stringent and restrictive positions,” Rabbi Marc Angel, past president of the Rabbinical Council of America, the main Orthodox rabbinic association in the United States, wrote in the Forward newspaper last fall.
“The result is that many non-Jews who considered halachic conversion will turn to non-halachic means of conversion or will give up on conversion altogether," Angel wrote. "This is a tragedy -- and an unnecessary one at that, since there is no halachic reason why the Chief Rabbinate's view should carry the day. The Talmud and classic codes of Jewish law actually grant considerable leeway in the halachic acceptance of converts.”
The RCA, however, agreed to create regional rabbinic courts and new conversion protocols.
Meanwhile, at the ITIM office in Jerusalem, the phone and fax line continues to ring.
One call is from a refugee from the Ivory Coast wants to know about the possibility of conversion. Another is from a woman who was a child when her mother converted and wants to know whether she will be allowed to marry as a Jew.
"We are always emphasizing that we want people to make decisions based on knowledge, not based on what some rabbi or clerk says,” Farber said. “Here we are applying that to Judaism.”
Children at Jewish summer camp enjoy a day out on the lake.
By Jacob Berkman
NEW YORK (JTA) -- Two foundations are joining forces to launch a groundbreaking incubator program to create a new breed of Jewish summer camp.
The Jim Joseph Foundation has allocated $8.4 million to the Foundation for Jewish Camping to start the Specialty Camp Incubator, which will develop and launch four camps. The camps will combine a Jewish curriculum with a specific concentration in a skill area such as sports, computer science or the arts.
Leaders of both foundations say they are attempting to tap into a market, specialty camps, with few Jewish-themed options by using a business model that has been widely adopted by the philanthropic world in the past several years.
"We are looking to increase the market share of Jews not going to Jewish camps but going to specialty camps because there is no Jewish alternative," said Jerry Silverman, the executive director of the camping foundation. "Nike has about 60,000 kids going to basketball camp, and computer technical camps have about 12,000 kids, but there are only a couple of" specialty camps operated under Jewish auspices.
The camping foundation will use the Jim Joseph gift to provide seed money and mentoring services for not-for-profit camps, with the aim of helping them become viable and financially self sufficient within the next several years.
The foundations are specifically looking for camps to run on existing sites, such as college campuses and boarding schools, to minimize costs. Starting a camp can run about $25 million, including capital costs, while a camp that uses an existing facility can be started for closer to $1.4 million, Silverman said.
The camping foundation will start taking proposals for prospective camps in the next month; those with innovative ideas are welcome to apply, Silverman said.
The Jim Joseph Foundation is trying to seize on the results of recent studies showing that Jewish camps provide one of the Jewish community's most effective methods for engaging young Jews.
"Our vision is to see an increasing number of Jews involved in Jewish learning and living Jewish lives, and you don't have to do the research to see the effect of camping on Jews," the executive director of the Jim Joseph Foundation, Chip Edelsberg, told JTA. "It is clear that they tend to opt into Jewish life. That, along with six to 10 years of Jewish day schools and Israel immersion, is one of the reliable indicators of people choosing Jewish lives."
The project to start new camps is a shift from the camping foundation's strategy, which until now has been focused on doubling the number of children who attend existing Jewish camps to 150,000 over the next decade. This is the foundation's first effort to build new camps.
Silverman estimates that the four new camps will serve 275 children each once they are running and up to 2,200 over the next five years.
The foundations join a growing list of Jewish organizations and foundations starting incubator programs that help seed and grow new, innovative Jewish projects. Originally a model used in the business world, the incubator model has been embraced by Jewish philanthropies in recent years:
* Bikkurim, a joint initiative of the Jewish Educational Services of North America and the United Jewish Communities, has helped found 21 new Jewish organizations;
* Six Points Fellowship, a project backed by several organizations, including the UJA-Federation of New York, the Foundation for Jewish Culture and JDub Records, is helping to groom a new generation of Jewish artists;
* The Andrea and Charles Bronfman Family Philanthropies is offering a two-year visiting professorship at Brandeis University and a book deal to someone with the "next big idea in Judaism";
* The Harold Grinspoon Foundation recently awarded a $200,000 incubator grant to Rabbi Ethan Tucker to help him grow projects to engage Jews from different streams of Judaism.
The Jim Joseph gift is the second significant allocation made by the $900 million San Francisco-based foundation to the camping foundation since it started making grants last year.
Leaders of the Jim Joseph foundation estimate that eventually it will give more than $25 million per year to Jewish causes. Last year it gave $11.2 million to the camping foundation, to be spent over the next four years, to provide significant stipends to first-time campers between the ages of 11 and 13 at Jewish camps on the West Coast.
The specialty camps incubator idea was in the works for six months, according to Edelsberg, who worked closely with his board and the camping foundation board to put it in motion.
"Our directors pushed them and said, 'What are your big ideas, and what will it take in order to incentivize you to work with them?' " Edelsberg said.
Hebrew College's first class of eleven transdenominational rabbis, set to graduate on June 1, 2008.
By Sue Fishkoff
SAN FRANCISCO (JTA) -- When Ruach Ami, a small, lay-led Conservative congregation in Santiago, Chile, began looking for a rabbi, it did not turn to the movement’s Latin American seminary.
Formed last April after the disintegration of Santiago’s only other egalitarian congregation,Ruach Ami members wanted to preserve the spiritual and progressive focus of its parent synagogue, says member Victor Grimblatt. They feared a rabbi from the Masorti seminary would take them in a different direction.
Then they heard about Hebrew College in Newton Centre, Mass., whose rabbinical school is set to graduate its first class of 11 transdenominational rabbis on June 1.
“When we found out it was not affiliated with any movement, we said, 'That’s interesting,' ” Grimblatt told JTA. “Our group of 20 families is partly Conservative and partly Progressive.”
This summer, if all goes well, newly ordained Rabbi Chaim Koritzinsky will take that pulpit.
“I’m learning Spanish fast,” Koritzinsky says from his Boston-area home.
The rabbis Hebrew College expects to ordain this year, and the 41 others coming up in four classes behind them, will join a fast-growing group of rabbis produced by a handful of seminaries not affiliated with the major Jewish streams.
These rabbis, and their teachers, say they are answering a growing need. They are training to serve an American Jewish community where denominational lines are increasingly fluid, where independent, lay-led minyans are popping up from coast to coast, and where Hillel and birthright israel programs provide hundreds of thousands of Jewish college and post-college students a taste for pluralistic Jewish life.
America's growing number of new non-Orthodox rabbis
Like their colleagues from the movement seminaries, many of these new rabbis are finding jobs outside the pulpit, often as chaplains, Hillel directors and Jewish educators. It's when they aim for pulpit positions in affiliated congregations that the walls go up, as they compete for jobs with movement rabbis on a playing field that is controlled by the denominations.
Despite the challenges, the number of students entering non-affiliated seminaries continues to grow, says Rabbi David Greenstein, the rosh yeshiva at the Academy for Jewish Religion in New York. The unaffiliated seminary he heads has ordained 114 rabbis since 1956, 39 of them --more than one-third -- since 2000. The school currently has 60 rabbinical students.
“We’ve been growing exponentially,” Greenstein says. “People are beginning to understand the denominations were not given at Sinai.”
In fact, the denominations are barely more than a century old, the lines drawn according to levels of ritual observance that are no longer set in stone, says Rabbi Arthur Green, the rector of Hebrew College’s rabbinical school.
Green says the program was created five years ago not just to serve a communal need but to provide a home for future rabbis who don’t fit movement categories.
“We have people who are Reform theologically and Conservative in practice, or who consider themselves Conservadox,” he says.
The seminary’s curriculum reflects that pluralism, combining traditional text study with wide-ranging commentaries, including thinkers from Reform to Orthodox. The faculty also spans the denominational spectrum.
Additionally, the curriculum includes required training in community organizing and pastoral counseling.
“We think the wave of the future is the transdenominational congregation, or a multiplex congregation that welcomes many kinds of Jews and holds different styles of services,” Green says. “We are preparing people to serve in those flexible, varied kinds of settings.”
At 34, Koritzinsky is the youngest in his class. Most are in their 40s and 50s, and are entering the rabbinate as a second career. But he shares with his colleagues a similar eclectic background.
Koritzinsky was raised Reform in a family that was “more culturally Jewish than religious.” His interest in Judaism bloomed during college. A Russian studies major, he worked with Hillel in the former Soviet Union, and helped run Jewish family camps with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in the late 1990s. He also studied at Pardes, an unaffiliated, coeducational yeshiva in Jerusalem.
“Those were pivotal years, when I committed myself to international Jewish communal work,” he says.
When Koritzinsky decided to pursue a rabbinical career, he chose Hebrew College because it offered the same pluralist vision.
“It’s about serving the entire community, not one denomination,” he says.
Rabbi Sharon Cohen-Anisfeld, the dean of the rabbinical school, says the 2008 graduating class has been flooded with job inquiries.
“We’re at the beginning of the process,” she says, “but it’s wonderful to see the interest and need and range of possibilities out there.”
Many of those offers are for non-pulpit positions with Hillel or religious schools, or as chaplains.
Judy Ehrlich, 52, plans to take a job as chaplain at Hebrew Senior Life, an assisted and independent Jewish living facility in Boston.
Ehrlich grew up Orthodox in South Africa, but she and her husband have been members of a Conservative minyan in Newton for the past 17 years. The minyan’s combination of traditional worship style with a diverse membership feels “comfortable,” she says, adding that she “identifies with Conservative ideology” but maintains an observance level she describes as Modern Orthodox.
That eclecticism led her to Hebrew College.
“No Orthodox community would accept me as a rabbi,” she says.
Some Hebrew College students transferred from other seminaries, preferring a transdenominational approach.
Rogerio Cukierman, 36, a second-year student from Brazil, received his master's degree in Judaic studies from the Reform movement's Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles, but switched to Hebrew College for his rabbinical training.
“Rabbinical school is supposed to be a transformational experience,” Cukierman says. “At a denominational seminary I have to decide the kind of rabbi I’ll be without going through the experience. I might consider myself Reform now, but in five years I could see myself becoming a Conservative or nondenominational rabbi.”
The biggest challenge for these rabbis is finding pulpit positions.
It’s no trouble for non-affiliated congregations to hire them. The question isn't relevant among Orthodox congregations because no Orthodox congregation is likely to hire a pulpit rabbi from a non-Orthodox institution.
Synagogues affiliated with the Reform and Conservative movements present a challenge. They are bound by the regulations of their rabbinical associations.
Congregations affiliated with the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism are given a list of approved candidates by the movement’s Rabbinical Assembly. Rabbis that serve Reform congregations must be members of the Central Conference of American Rabbis.
While rabbis from the non-movement seminaries may apply for membership in these associations, their acceptance is decided on a case-by-case basis.
The CCAR may soon give accreditation to Hebrew College, so its graduates would immediately become eligible.
While they are applying for jobs, the non-movement rabbis must avoid antagonizing the movements or placing a congregation in an untenable position.
Some of the fifth-year rabbinical students at Hebrew College are interviewing at congregations affiliated with the movements, but none of those congregations except the one in Chile would speak to JTA.
Gottlieb accepts that rabbis from the movement seminaries “get first dibs” on affiliated pulpits.
“We are careful not to invade the boundaries of the denominations or threaten them in any way,” he says. “But some congregations come to us when the lists don’t fit their needs.”
Rabbi Julie Schoenfeld, the director of rabbinic development for the Rabbinical Assembly, doesn’t see that as problematic as long as the congregations go through the approved search process first.
Noting there is “plenty of work” to go around, Schoenfeld says she would not view the Academy for Jewish Religion or Hebrew College as "impinging on the opportunities for Conservative rabbis.”
The situation is different in the Reform movement, says Rabbi Arnold Sher of the CCAR’s rabbinic placement office. He says the three North American Reform seminaries have had “unusually large” graduating classes recently, ordaining 61 rabbis in 2007 and 56 more expected this year.
“There will be more rabbis ordained than there are openings," Sher says, "and that won’t help Hebrew College.”
Israeli police stand over the body of a Palestinian suicide bomber following a double bombing attempt on Feb. 4, 2008 in the southern Israeli town of Dimona.
By Roy Eitan
JERUSALEM (JTA) -- The first Palestinian suicide bombing in more than a year has provided Israelis with a stark reminder of the security risks overshadowing recent peace efforts.
Two Palestinians wearing explosives belts walked into the southern town of Dimona early Monday, mingling with shoppers in a mall. The first terrorist detonated his bomb, killing an Israeli woman and wounding nine.
The attack prompted a major security alert at a nearby nuclear reactor.
Among those floored by the blast was the second terrorist. Medics who stripped him to administer treatment saw the bomb, and a police narcotics agent passing by shot him dead.
"It was like a war zone," said vendor Haim Mor-Yosef. "I heard a blast and immediately knew it was a terrorist attack because of the body parts."
Al-Aksa Brigades, an armed wing of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah faction, claimed responsibility for the attack. Other terrorist groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad issued statements of praise for an action they described as revenge for Israel's blockade on the Gaza Strip and military raids in the West Bank.
Fatah denied involvement, while Abbas, who has been strongly praised by President Bush, issued a statement of tepid censure.
"The Palestinian Authority expresses its full condemnation of the Israeli military operation in Kabatiya early this morning, just as it condemns the operation that took place today in Dimona," he said, adding a call for an end to "all operations that target civilians, whether they are Palestinians or Israelis."
The "civlians" referred to in Kabatiya, a West Bank village, were two Islamic Jihad gunmen shot dead by Israeli commandos.
Israel responded angrily to the equivocation by Abbas. At least one Cabinet member, Industry and Trade Minister Eli Yishai of the Sephardic fervently Orthodox Shas party, called for the end of peace talks with Abbas that were revived last November and for Israel to redouble its crackdown on the Palestinians.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in remarks to his Kadima party faction said, "There is a war on between us and the terrorists, and it is being waged without let-up."
Referring to an Israeli airstrike that killed a Palestinian terrorist rocket chief in the Gaza Strip a few hours after the Dimona bombing, he said, "The security forces managed to eliminate a head of one of the terror groups. We have had many such success in recent days and weeks, though of course this cannot be detailed in public."
Jerusalem sources said they expected no change of diplomatic direction. An official government statement avoided dramatic pronouncements on policy.
"Plain and simple: The terrorists' goal is to kill as many Israeli civilians as they can, wherever and whenever they can -- in their homes, schools and shopping centers," the Israeli Foreign Ministry said. "Israel will continue to fight this murderous terrorism and will act in keeping with its right, and its duty, to protect the lives of its citizens."
Israel's immediate concern was determining from where the bombers came.
Dimona is 20 miles from the West Bank, but also 40 miles from the Egyptian border. Israeli officials have been warning that Palestinians who streamed out of the Gaza Strip after Hamas recently blew up the border fence with Egypt would end up infiltrating the Jewish state.
Egypt has since begun sealing its border with Gaza -- known in Israel as the Philadelphi Corridor -- and tried to round up Palestinians in the Sinai Desert. But Israeli right-wingers said such steps by the Egyptians was a case of too little, too late.
Yuval Steinitz of the opposition Likud Party called the Dimona bombing "a direct result of Israel's failure to do what is necessary in Gaza militarily and control Philadelphi.
"What we have to do now is demand that the Egyptians, finally, make good on their security obligations," Steinitz said.
After a suicide bombing on Jan. 29, 2007 killed three Israelis in Eilat, Israeli officials vowed to erect a fence along the Egyptian border, which is little more than a line in the sand. A year later, no such project has been undertaken, though Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak has pledged to find the funds.
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