Almost every year I've been living here I, and my family, have attended the Salute to Israel Parade in Manhattan. When the children were small, we watched from the sides, but as they got older, and less apt to complain about walking, we took to marching. There is something to be said for…
It's been about four months that I've been in my new office at the Rockland Jewish Community Campus at 450 West Nyack Road. I could not have predicted the effect this would have on my life or on the newspaper, but the change has been profound. Moving to this new building, as we members of…
Recently the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life conducted a sweeping survey designed to give a broad picture of how Americans practice their religion. This survey is the largest and most in-depth one conducted on American religious life in decades. Researchers surveyed 35,000 people, out…
In the first weeks of saying kaddish for my father, the sun still hung below the horizon when I'd wake to go to minyan. I'm just now out of sheloshim, the first thirty days of mourning proscribed by Jewish law, and now, instead, the morning sky is the cold milky white of late…
When I was a teen, some family friends invited us to Simchat Torah services at their synagogue. My synagogue, a large Reform one, had always had a somewhat antiseptic approach to the raucous holiday, with solemn hakafot around the sanctuary, rather than the dancing with the Torah scrolls…
