Its been my pleasure and honor to work with Rabbi Kurland, not only here at Federation, but as co-clergy at Congregation Shir Shalom. I met Rabbi Kurland in 2004 when I first interviewed with the then Nanuet Hebrew Center. When I came to the congregation in 2005, I found a colleague who was 100% supportive of my role. As the dean of my cantorial school said when he learned who my rabbi was, “you’ve got a honey”. He was right; in Rabbi Kurland I have found a great colleague and a true fr...

One of his missions in life is to make people smile.

Not a quick, polite smile. An ear to ear grin, perhaps accompanied by an eyeroll, but always aimed to lighten the heart and the burdens it carries, both seen and unseen.

I am grateful for the almost five years I’ve known him.

Who am I talking about? The Rabbi with the twinkle in his eye and oldest, corniest, and funniest stories in Rockland. Of course, I could only be writing about one person. Rabbi Paul Kurland has spent the last 29 y...

Growing up in a Conservative Jewish environment offered many opportunities to find expressions of Judaism beyond simply attending services. I am a second generation American and forever generation Jew. The sense of spirituality and belonging was reinforced through my younger years of youth group and later on adult roles in volunteering at my synagogue or community at large. These experiences allowed me to find an outlet for extending the meaning of believing, observing traditions, giving back...

Growing up Jewish in America meant straddling two societies, living among two cultures. My childhood experiences vacillated between Jewish pride and respectful reticence. The Pennsylvania city where I spent my youth was home to a significant number of Jewish families, mostly professionals and merchants, who supported four synagogues and three kosher butchers. I was raised in a conservative kosher home, attended after-school Talmud Torah for eight years, and was active in youth groups like B�...

Yesterday, I read (with the kind of resigned, predictable anger tempered with fatalism that we’ve all come to know) of the British Museum’s decision to postpone a lecture on “Ancient Israel and Judah in the British Museum” set for this week. It came as a part of the Museum’s participation in Britain’s first ever ‘Jewish Culture Month’, but the Museum determined that they had to postpone because of a flood of registrants who were known agitators, intent on disrupting and endang...

Once upon a time, there was a riot. Weeks after Yasser Arafat refused what President Clinton called the best offer anyone would ever get at Camp David in the fall of 2000, he directed the beginning of what was initially called the second intifada, but what would become the AL Aksa war. Among some Arab residents of east Jerusalem, that meant dragging Tuvia Hoffman, a young American Jewish student in Israel for a gap year program, from a taxi in Wadi Joz, and proceeding to beat and stab him blo...