Daily Archives: March 21, 2021

The book of Vayikra preoccupies itself with korbanot, what today we might describe as the peculiarities of ritual sacrifice: which types of animals should be sacrificed, where they should be offered, what accompaniments should be presented alongside them and how and when they should be presented.

The nature of sacrifice as we understand it has shifted dramatically in the last 2,000 years. We have no temple and no animal sacrifices, so what then are we meant to learn from korbanot? Why need we concern ourselves with the details of sacrificial law?

Lets begin with the word itself. In Latin, sacrifice finds its root in two words: sacer, meaning sacred rites traditionally performed by priests, and the verb facere, meaning to place something. The implication is that sacrifice is the act of making something sacred by setting it aside for a specific religious purpose. In Hebrew, this is more often the translation associated with the word kadosh, or holy. We see this later on in the book of Leviticus, when we are commanded kedoshim tihiyu: be holy. The commentator Rashi explains this command as telling us to be separate and keep distance from illicit sexual relationships. In both words, sacrifice and kadosh, there is an implicit distance between that which we wish to designate as holy and all other things. This distance could be either physical or metaphysical. Shabbat, for example, becomes imbued with holiness by setting it aside from the remaining days of the week.

The act of bringing sacrifices doesnt create distance and separateness in the way that the word might normally imply. Rather it requires closeness. The individual must be at a certain location and must offer the animal in a certain way. It is very much a hands-on activity. The word korban itself comes from the Hebrew root meaning close. The korban not only requires closeness, but can also be said to engender closeness between the giver and God.

Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler notes that the way one grows their love for another or for God is by giving unconditionally. One might think that what makes us love another person is all the wonderful things they do for us and that our love grows as those individuals continue to grow in their devotion to us. In fact, Rabbi Dessler asserts the opposite. Relationships become more powerful when we give to them unconditionally without expectation of return. This constant giving creates a sense of buy-in or connectedness to that which you have given, and engenders an investment on the part of the giver which in turn initiates more giving. Giving begets loving which in turn begets giving. This is probably most apparent with parents and children. Parents give unconditionally before they ever get anything in return.

The act of korbanot is teaching us this very lesson. Korbanot are about creating closeness; closeness with God and closeness with community. The korban creates a paradigm for how to build, connect and deepen devotion. It is the opposite of sacrifice, which puts things aside and designates them as separate. Korbanot are about connecting and giving unconditionally.

When we read the Torah portion of Vayikra, we can hear the message of the korbanot calling us to the message of closeness and connectedness with others. We can use this time to think about what we can each be giving unconditionally to those around us and to the community so that we can continually build a more cohesive society.

Read this Torah portion, Leviticus 1:1 5:26 on Sefaria

Sign up for our Guide to Torah Study email series and well guide you through everything you need to know, from explanations of the major texts to commentaries to learning methods and more.

Subscribe to A Daily Dose of Talmud: Daf Yomi for Everyone every day, youll receive an email that offers an insight from each page of the current tractate of the Talmud. Join us!

About the Author: Anat Barber is an alumna of the Ruskay Institute for Jewish Leadership and the Wexner Graduate Fellowship Program and completed a dual degree program in Jewish studies and Public Service at NYU. Anat is currently the assistant director of capital gifts and special initiatives at UJA-Federation of New York.

Empower your Jewish discovery, daily

More here:

Parashat Vayikra: I Give, Therefore I Love - My Jewish Learning

LONDON (JTA) Newcastle, the heart of northeast England, is not a small city with its approximately 300,000 inhabitants.

But to the few British Jews that cast their eyes northward from Manchester and London, the city is little more than what it was in Roman times an outpost straddling the edges of Hadrians Wall.

To the Romans, Hadrians Wall marked the edge of the civilized world. To many Jews in London, Newcastle might as well be the edge of the Jewish world.

The some 600 overlooked Jews who call Newcastle home are a microcosm of the challenges that have affected U.K. Jewish communities outside the London Bagel Belt: how to sustain a shrinking and aging community.

Yet just across the slow-running River Tyne, the redbrick houses of Europes last great yeshiva town are visible in the smaller neighboring city of Gateshead.

As if etched from an Isaac Bashevis Singer story, Gateshead is where prayer and Yiddish jokes escape through the open windows of the towns multiple yeshivas, and where on a Friday evening black-frocked Talmud scholars sprint home to place Shabbat candles in windows. The Tyne crossing takes you to a different Jewish world.

Perhaps it was always meant to be this way Gateshead was founded, so the histories go, by a shocked and dismayed group of Lithuanian Jews who, having stepped off the bows of the ships that ferried Jews from the Russian Baltic to the beating heart of industrial England, thought that the Newcastle community had anglicized to such a degree that they had lost their authentic connection with Judaism.

By 1929, Gateshead had become the British outpost for a prestigious network of Eastern European-style yeshivas, and over the decades its early winter nights played host to the best and brightest scholars of the haredi Orthodox world.

In recent years Gateshead, which previously had little contact with their brethren across the Tyne, has begun to extend a helping hand, even throughout the COVID crisis, by ferrying men needed to complete the minyan of 10 needed for daily prayers at Newcastles one Orthodox synagogue. They also bring bread from a well-regarded Gateshead kosher bakery.

Two Jewish men make their way home from synagogue in Gateshead, England, on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, Sept. 18, 2020. (Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

We are very different sides of the same coin, but it is the same coin because we are all Jewish but they are very different community from ours, said Anthony Josephs, the chair of Newcastles Orthodox congregation.

Nestled in a north Newcastle suburb, the modernist building that the Jews of Newcastle built for themselves in 1986 was supposed to be the future, a statement of intent that the community was here to stay even though it went up during a time when the citys Orthodox community condensed from three synagogues into one.

Now the brown-bricked building that was billed as a new long-term home for the community has been sold. It will be replaced by an apartment building.

When that shul was built, I dont think that anybody could have anticipated that it would only be in operation for 35 years but thats the reality, sadly, Josephs said.

The former 300-seat synagogue is in many ways a window into the predicament of regional Jewish communities across Britain, many of which are shrinking quickly and trying to figure out where they are going. Where once were small and thriving communities, there is now only a flicker of a Jewish presence. Today Sunderland and Middlesbrough the northeasts second and third largest cities have Jewish populations of one and four, respectively.

Josephs, a bespectacled white-haired man, is blunt.

Im sad to say that in 10 or 20 years there may be no traditional Orthodox Jewish community in Newcastle, he said. The projections that were done some years ago saw the community was dwindling, and unfortunately that is still the case it is dwindling still, but at a faster rate now.

In 1950, there were nearly 2,500 Jews in Newcastle, but as the city entered a long industrial decline, the population has plummeted. The city was once a big producer of steel and materials to build trains and ships, as well as an import-export center for commodities such as coal. The import-export traffic has shifted out of the region, and other industries have become less profitable.

A view of Newcastle, a city in northeast England, on Sept. 29, 2020, after tighter restrictions were put in place to help mitigate the spread of COVID-19. (Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty Images)

For years, the pattern has been that students leave Newcastle for university and never return.

It is a vicious cycle, Josephs said. We have shrunk because we are small to begin with, and as a result the ability to find a Jewish partner has diminished and, of course, the streets of London are paved with gold and opportunity.

In the region, only haredi Gateshead driven by high birth rates, low housing prices and a constant supply of students into the community (fueled in part by the lower-than-London cost of living) is growing.

But Newcastles Jewish future is, if not like Gatesheads, perhaps a little more optimistic than many suggest.

In a redbrick former Methodist Hall, nestled in a suburb north of Newcastle, the Newcastle Reform Synagogue is bubbling along.

Well still be here, said Linda Scott, the cheerful chair of the synagogue. Our numbers arent high, but weve recently had an influx of young families. Scott estimates that her congregation stands at somewhere around 100 families, although far fewer attend regularly.

Across Britain, Liberal and Reform synagogues are increasingly coming to be seen as the only viable Jewish denominations outside of the major Jewish hubs, sustained by a diverse and geographically spread-out group of Jews who dont want to attend more traditional synagogues.

Many midlevel towns that once had small but well-established Jewish populations such as Blackpool, York and Bradford have seen their once large Orthodox congregations melt away and their Reform or Liberal counterparts remain. Even nearby Darlington, with its own tiny Jewish population, saw its only congregation read the room and switch denominations in the late 1980s.

A view of the Gateshead Talmudical College, the citys most prestigious yeshiva. (Jacob Judah)

Newcastles Orthodox may well be facing the same fate, says the synagogues part-time rabbi, Sybil Sheridan, who believes that the future in the region is increasingly in the more flexible progressive denominations.

Sheridan, 66, who in normal times zips up and down the railway line from London once a week to tend to her small flock, says that students some of whom will stay are a likely avenue that will sustain the community in the long run.

But in Newcastle, the rabbi warns, it would be a mistake to see the decline of one congregation as a net positive for the other.

It is a mutual dependence, and neither can really survive without the other, as each plays their role and operates institutions that the small community desperately need.

Condensation is a pattern. In June 2019, one progressive synagogue in Dundee, Scotland, decided to move to the nearby university town of St. Andrews after its congregation dwindled. Newcastle has also received the refugees from around the region the last Jews of Middlesbrough, Sunderland and countless smaller cities that have shrunk and vanished.

Judaism outside of the major Jewish cities, Sheridan says, is a different and more traditional experience for many.

In London, communities dont feel the need to be involved. They come along to have Judaism done to them, she said.

But, Sheridan added, with the sort of size at Newcastle Reform, people feel they have a stake in the community and so they work that bit harder to keep it going.

If you look historically, Jews have always lived in small villages think of the shtetlach of Eastern Europe. You dont need big buildings to live a Jewish life. You need a community, but that community doesnt need to be big. Having small communities as well as your large central ones is the way it should be.

Members of the Newcastle Reform Synagogue celebrate a recent Hanukkah. (Courtesy of Newcastle Reform Synagogue)

Ed Horwich, the chairman of the Jewish Small Communities Network, an organization that supports Britains regional communities, agrees.

It is important for the Jew in North London and the Jew in Manchester to know that there is Jewish life outside of those bubbles, he said. They have exactly the same Jewish life, in fact, probably more so because in North London you can drive on Shabbat and eat a bacon bagel and everyone will still call you a Jew. In Newcastle, you could never get away with that.

The rest is here:

The Jewish community in Newcastle, England, is shrinking. But it's getting some unexpected help. - Jewish Telegraphic Agency

The poet and teacher Jessica Greenbaum, a friend for over 30 years, and her co-editor, Rabbi Hara Person, recently guided me through their new Haggadah, Mishkan HaSeder: A Passover Haggadah. I was so happy to have their company and wisdom. It is natural and genius to illuminate the Haggadahs questions and metaphors with poetry. The result is one of the most moving Haggadot that I have read. Greenbaum and Person have elevated the familiar and cast new light on a story that has been retold for generations. Their work around the foundational story of the Jewish people enables readers to fulfill the commandment of experiencing the Exodus personally and meaningfully.

Never miss the best stories and events! Get JewishBoston This Week.

Greenbaum said her interface with Judaism and spirituality is through metaphor. Her poetry selections for the Haggadah highlight the organic connection between the contemporary poems and historical text. The editors also pay homage to the Jewish tradition of reading a text closely. Texts are cherished in Jewish tradition. They are read over and overto parse, deepen and, as my children said when they were little, to understand them more better. The poems Greenbaum and Person have offered in this Haggadah make it so.

In the spirit of the Talmud, contemporary and historical texts converse over time and space in Mishkan HaSeder. We have this double spread, or the conversation between the right side of the page and the left side of the pagethe historical text and the contemporary text, Person explained. On the left is a counter text, arguing and challenging the historical text. Its a dialogue, the ultimate re-engagement with what is on the right side of the page.

A brilliant example of this traditional back-and-forth dynamic across the page, and across the generations, is the editors deconstruction and rebuilding of the Four Questions. This seder classic is on the Haggadahs right page. Greenbaum and Persons version of the questions on the left page inspire seder participants to delve more deeply into them. In their adaptation, the first question asks: Havent we taken this trip before? Just last year? Why go again? Is it possible to see different things upon arriving this time?

The next three questions innovate by requesting people to fill in the blanks. For example: What about our neighbors we left behind? The ones visited by the Angel of Death? How do I live with their tears? How do we live with the tears of_______? These deliberately open-ended questions grew out of discussions between Greenbaum and Person on social justice issues, such as working for others freedom. Person noted that the underlying question is about myriad aspects of personal liberation. Have we been redeemed? she asks. Have we done all we could to help the stranger? Have we done all we could to hear the call, the cry of the oppressed, the call to justice?

Greenbaum connects the questions to tikkun olam and poetry. Poetry has always had a voice of social justice, she said. Sometimes its more overt. But if youre observing the world, youre observing sorrow. In your own world, you might make meaning from sorrow by creating a poem out of it. Thats tikkun olam, as much as you can do it for yourself and others.

Greenbaum and I read some of the poems in the Haggadah together. She asked me to bear in mind that were sharing a way toward revelation. She added: There is also the goal of bringing our whole lives to the moment and to the seder. Poems are written out of the experience of a whole life, not from a homogeneous slice of it. Theyre about the human condition. Greenbaums selections tap into the holiness inherent to the themes of inclusion, disability, immigration and transgender equality.

She pointed out that Erika Dreifuss poem Dayenu is important for the way it describes how a family has experienced distress and is in the present moment with joy. Dreifus writes:

At Passover, we read aloud from the Haggadahand we mention four children.When I was growing up, we laughedas each found its match around the table:the wise child, the rebellious, the simple.But later, the laughter stoppedWhen we reached the child who is unable to ask.

Greenbaum noted that Rose Blacks poem Invitation shows how people can feel like a stranger at a seder. Everyone is invited to come and partake. But how does it relate to a persons tradition and their family? Black begins her poem:

half of me from pickled herring in New Yorkhalf of me from fields of corn in Indiana

all my mothers ancestors from Polandall my fathers from Alsace-Lorraine

all the Jews who came before Jewish and Catholicever existed, before the pyramids of Egypt

Greenbaum said that she and Person read each poem out loud together. Emma Lazaruss poem The New Colossus, which includes the iconic lines, Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free/The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, brought them to tears.

Karl Shapiros poem The 151st Psalm complements the immigrant theme, portraying God as the ultimate immigrant who is very much in the world with the poet.

Immigrant God, You follow me;You go with me, You are a distant tree;You are the beast lows in my hearts gates;You are the dog that follows at my heel;You are the table on which I lean;You are the plate from which I eat.

Greenbaum also includes President Bidens favorite poem, The Cure at Troy by Seamus Heaney, in the Haggadah. The president read it with Lin-Manuel Miranda atthe inaugural gala. Heaney writes:

So hope for a great-sea-changeOn the far side of revenge.Believe that a further shoreIs reachable from here.Believe in miraclesAnd cures and healing wells.

That stanza, said Greenbaum, is built for Passover. It says that our story is archetypal, and not just for us.

It is only right to end this literary tour of Mishkan HaSeder with Greenbaum and Persons poems. Person addresses the fact that Passover is a home-based holiday and that it has traditionally fell to women to clean and cook for it. In her resonant poem Passover Love Song, Person writes: The seder is a love song written/in the language of silver polish/and dishpan hands.

Greenbaum pointed out that her poem After Reading Fatimah Asghars Ghazal, WWE is about a Muslim immigrant family whose aunt loves to watch wrestling on television. Asghars poem reveals that the aunts husband has been abusing her and shows that she is only free when she watches wrestling. Here are the first lines of Greenbaums affecting poem:

If you ask around you find that the immigrant grandparents of the 1950sLoved watching wrestling. I was discussing Fatimah Asghars spell-binding poemIn relation to Jacob, you know, wrestling, and also how Rebecca stealsThe house gods and co-opts misogyny to take control, as Asghars poem does,and everyone started chiming in about their own grandparents, how, whenstill learning the language, they would watch Channel 5 on Fridays

In Mishkan HaSeder, sacred texts and contemporary poetry interact across the page like the brightest of fireworks. This is a Haggadah that asks us to think about what is missing in our understanding and execution of social justice. It asks to honor the strangers among us. Its a stunning achievementa wholly distinct way to distill Judaisms central narrative.

Never miss the best stories and events! Get JewishBoston This Week.

Continued here:

And Then: New Haggadah Captures Ancient and Contemporary Aspects of Passover - jewishboston.com

Newcastle, the heart of northeast England, is not a small city with its approximately 300,000 inhabitants.But to the few British Jews that cast their eyes northward from Manchester and London, the city is little more than what it was in Roman times an outpost straddling the edges of Hadrians Wall.To the Romans, Hadrians Wall marked the edge of the civilized world. To many Jews in London, Newcastle might as well be the edge of the Jewish world.The some 600 overlooked Jews who call Newcastle home are a microcosm of the challenges that have affected UK Jewish communities outside the London Bagel Belt: how to sustain a shrinking and aging community.Yet just across the slow-running River Tyne, the redbrick houses of Europes last great yeshiva town are visible in the smaller neighboring city of Gateshead.As if etched from an Isaac Bashevis Singer story, Gateshead is where prayer and Yiddish jokes escape through the open windows of the towns multiple yeshivas, and where on a Friday evening black-frocked Talmud scholars sprint home to place Shabbat candles in windows. The Tyne crossing takes you to a different Jewish world.Perhaps it was always meant to be this way Gateshead was founded, so the histories go, by a shocked and dismayed group of Lithuanian Jews who, having stepped off the bows of the ships that ferried Jews from the Russian Baltic to the beating heart of industrial England, thought that the Newcastle community had anglicized to such a degree that they had lost their authentic connection with Judaism.

cnxps.cmd.push(function () { cnxps({ playerId: '36af7c51-0caf-4741-9824-2c941fc6c17b' }).render('4c4d856e0e6f4e3d808bbc1715e132f6'); });

But in Newcastle, the rabbi warns, it would be a mistake to see the decline of one congregation as a net positive for the other.

It is important for the Jew in North London and the Jew in Manchester to know that there is Jewish life outside of those bubbles, he said. They have exactly the same Jewish life, in fact, probably more so because in North London you can drive on Shabbat and eat a bacon bagel and everyone will still call you a Jew. In Newcastle, you could never get away with that.

Read the original:

Jewish community in Newcastle, England, shrinks, but has unexpected help - The Jerusalem Post

This week on Behind the Headlines, pioneering Orthodox feminist Blu Greenberg gives a video interview about wrestling between faith and faith in womankind.

This special Womens History Month episode is already live for Times of Israel Community members, but its not too late to join ToI Community nowand access this weeks segment, along with past episodes and the rest of our wide-ranging library of exclusive content.

Greenberg, who is married to Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, is an American writer specializing in modern Judaism and womens issues. She is well known for her books On Women and Judaism: A View from Tradition, How to Run a Traditional Jewish Household, and Black Bread: Poems, After the Holocaust.

Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition by email and never miss our top storiesFree Sign Up

She gave the opening address at the first National Jewish Womens Conference in 1973; she chaired the first and second International Conference on Feminism and Orthodoxy; and she is the founder and first president of JOFA, the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance. In 2000, she received the Woman Who Made a Difference award from the American Jewish Congress Commission for Womens Equality.

The cover of Blu Greenbergs On Women and Judaism: A View from Tradition. (courtesy)

Greenberg speaks with The Times of Israels deputy blogs editor Anne Gordon, who also hosts the Talking Talmud podcast on daf yomi and The Chochmat Nashim Podcast, which speaks from inside the Jewish community about respect for tradition, and the need for justice.

The two discuss how Greenberg got her serendipitous start on this journey toward Orthodox feminism and how not everything in secular feminism aligns with Orthodoxy/religion. Greenberg identifies six areas of change for female access in Orthodoxy: learning (Torah); leadership (rabbinical degrees, programs, titles, credentials); life cycle ceremonies (bat mitzvah, simhat bat); liturgy (tefillah communal and individual); legal testimony (as witnesses); and officiating in legal roles, and divorce and agunot, or chained women.

Orthodox feminists have their plate full with internal issues, said Greenberg, but they should also be involved in global issues, such as the suffering of women around the world from abuse or poverty.

And finally, Greenberg answers the question of what she would do differently if she were coming of age now, in 2021.

To see this and future episodes of Behind the Headlines,join the Times of Israel Community today. Youll also gain access to all of our exclusive online content, an ad-free experience of the ToI site and apps, and a weekly insider letter from David Horovitz.

If you are already a ToI Community member, youll receive a link to all Behind the Headlines sessions by email.

I'm proud to work at The Times of Israel

Ill tell you the truth: Life here in Israel isnt always easy. But it's full of beauty and meaning.

I'm proud to work at The Times of Israel alongside colleagues who pour their hearts into their work day in, day out, to capture the complexity of this extraordinary place.

I believe our reporting sets an important tone of honesty and decency that's essential to understand what's really happening in Israel. It takes a lot of time, commitment and hard work from our team to get this right.

Your support, through membership in The Times of Israel Community, enables us to continue our work. Would you join our Community today?

Thank you,

Sarah Tuttle Singer, New Media Editor

Youre serious. We appreciate that!

Were really pleased that youve read X Times of Israel articles in the past month.

Thats why we come to work every day - to provide discerning readers like you with must-read coverage of Israel and the Jewish world.

So now we have a request. Unlike other news outlets, we havent put up a paywall. But as the journalism we do is costly, we invite readers for whom The Times of Israel has become important to help support our work by joining The Times of Israel Community.

For as little as $6 a month you can help support our quality journalism while enjoying The Times of Israel AD-FREE, as well as accessing exclusive content available only to Times of Israel Community members.

See the original post here:

Join ToI Community and meet the matriarch of Orthodox feminism, Blu Greenberg - The Times of Israel

The Jewish Education Center of Cleveland announced the six recipients of its 2020 educator awards.

The awards will be presented at the JECs 27th annual celebration, which will be held virtually May 11.

Rebecca Faur, art specialist and second-grade teacher at Bnai Jeshurun Congregation in Pepper Pike, and Rabbi Rick Schindelheim, a seventh- to 12th-grade Talmud, Chumash and Jewish history teacher at Fuchs Mizrachi School in Beachwood, will receive the Albert B. Ratner and Jack and Esther Goldberg Israel Fellowship, which provides funding for study opportunities in Israel. The fellowship is given annually to two outstanding teachers, one from a day school and one from a supplementary school, according to a news release.

Sora Berger, who teaches seventh- to 12th-grade history at Yeshiva Derech Hatorah in Lyndhurst, will receive the Steiger Family Education Grant, which is given annually to an exceptional day school teacher to cover partial costs of formal Judaic study.

Vicki Teitelbaum, an early childhood educator at Gross Schechter Day School in Pepper Pike, will receive the Libbie L. Braverman Award, a parent-nominated award that recognizes a teacher who has demonstrated dedication and devotion to teaching, and has significantly contributed to developing methods or materials to the Jewish teaching profession, the release said.

Jacqueline Lausin of Jewish Day Nursery in Shaker Heights will receive the Dr. Lifsa Schachter Early Childhood Educator Award, which recognizes an early childhood educator who possesses a professional skill set and sophisticated understanding of the unique developmental, social, emotional and educational needs of children from birth to pre-K.

Estee and Yaakov Fleischmann, co-directors of Camp Stone in Sugar Grove, Pa., will receive the first S. Lee Kohrman Award in Jewish Experiential Education. This award recognizes an outstanding experiential or informal beyond-the-classroom Jewish educator or educators in the Cleveland Jewish community. This award is focused on educational experiences that take place outside of a traditional classroom.

We congratulate these outstanding educators and the institutions in which they work, for being models of excellence in Jewish learning and impacting the Jewish identities and journeys of learners of all ages, said Seymour Kopelowitz, executive director of the JEC, which is based in Cleveland Heights, in the release.

More here:

Six educators to receive awards from JEC of Cleveland - Cleveland Jewish News

Breadcrumb Trail Links

The B.1.351 variant first detected in South Africa and shown to be more resistant to some vaccines has spread to a fifth region in the province.

Author of the article:

The more contagious COVID-19 variants continued to spread across Quebec on Tuesday, with the number of confirmed cases rising by 179 to a cumulative total of 522.

Meanwhile, seven schools four in Montreal and three in Laval announced they had suspected variant cases among students, according to covidecolesquebec.org, the website run by Nuns Island parent Olivier Drouin that tracks COVID-19 in the educational sector.

Talmud Torah Elementary School in Cte-des-Neiges and Michelangelo International Elementary School in Rivires-des-Prairies are closing temporarily as a result of the variants. Michelangelo is overseen by the English Montreal School Board. Although the EMSB had installed air purifiers in 30 of its buildings, it did not deem it was necessary at Michelangelo.

The latest figures by Quebecs public health institute found that the B.1.351 variant first detected in South Africa and shown to be more resistant to some vaccines, including the one by AstraZeneca has spread to a fifth region in the province: the Montrgie, with one confirmed case. The variant first appeared in Abitibi-Tmiscamingue in western Quebec, where the number of confirmed infections has climbed by five to 100.

This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

(Lanaudire confirmed a second B.1.351 variant case Tuesday. The other regions with B.1.351 are the Laurentians and Montreal, each with one case.)

However, the variant that is circulating the most is B.1.1.7, which originated in the U.K. and has been found to be at least 50 per cent more transmissible than the older strains of the coronavirus. The number of confirmed cases of B.1.1.7 which is also considered to be more lethal jumped by 118 to 311 in Montreal. The total number of B.1.1.7 cases in Quebec now stands at 413.

However, that is half the picture. The other half are presumptive variant cases. The Institut national de sant publique du Qubec (INSPQ) revised that total downward by 66 to 2,179. (The INSPQ has previously explained that once confirmed, cases are withdrawn from its chart on presumptive variants. The INSPQ had also removed presumptive cases at one point because it had counted them twice.)

This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

Still, the INSPQs chart on presumptive cases shows that the number in Chaudire-Appalaches has nearly doubled, to 43 from 22.

A presumptive case is indeed a more transmissible so-called variant of concern that awaits lengthier genetic sequencing to determine its lineage: B.1.1.7, B.1.351 or P.1, the strain that is sweeping through Brazil, causing a spike in hospitalizations.

On Tuesday evening, Premier Franois Legault warned B.1.1.7 will become the dominant strain by the end of April.

We have to be realistic. By the end of next month, the majority of cases in Quebec will be with this variant, Legault said.

Despite the proliferation of the variants, Legault defended his decision to reopen theatres and concert halls in Montreal and other red zones as of March 26. In a previous announcement, the government scheduled the reopening of gyms on March 26, too.

This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

We still consider that its under control, Legault said. We have to be prudent. Thats why we announced only a few new measures.

Dr. Horacio Arruda, Quebecs chief public health officer, noted that around 21 per cent of COVID-19 cases in Montreal comprise the new variants. In the Capitale-Nationale region, its 33 per cent, he added.

The Laboratoire de sant publique du Qubec is now screening all positive COVID-19 samples for variants. Although such screening (known in French as criblage) is faster than genetic sequencing, there could still be some lag time in reporting results.

These variants are lurking behind the overall number of COVID-19 cases, which have declined for three days in a row in the province and for four days in Montreal.

This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

Its worth noting that a similar scenario of declining cases played out in Ontario, which was hit earlier with the variants than Quebec, and which may now be at the start of a third COVID-19 resurgence. On Tuesday, Ontario reported a total of 1,208 confirmed variant cases, up by 27. Ontarios cumulative tally for presumptive variant cases rose by 501 to 9,131 a stark reminder of what might lie ahead for Quebec.

aderfel@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/Aaron_Derfel

All our coronavirus-related news can always be found atmontrealgazette.com/tag/coronavirus.

Sign up for our email newsletter dedicated to local COVID-19 coverage atmontrealgazette.com/coronavirusnews.

Help support our local journalism bysubscribing to the Montreal Gazette here.

This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

Sign up to receive daily headline news from the Montreal Gazette, a division of Postmedia Network Inc.

A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it please check your junk folder.

The next issue of Montreal Gazette Headline News will soon be in your inbox.

We encountered an issue signing you up. Please try again

Postmedia is committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion and encourage all readers to share their views on our articles. Comments may take up to an hour for moderation before appearing on the site. We ask you to keep your comments relevant and respectful. We have enabled email notificationsyou will now receive an email if you receive a reply to your comment, there is an update to a comment thread you follow or if a user you follow comments. Visit our Community Guidelines for more information and details on how to adjust your email settings.

Visit link:

Confirmed COVID-19 variant cases jump by 179 in Quebec, including in schools - Montreal Gazette

Majesty and humility. These two words have been swirling through my mind.

After consulting with health experts who confirmed my role as a community educator, I received the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine at the Moscone Center in San Francisco on March 10. The experience was breathtaking. Standing in an incredibly-well organized series of lines, having my appointment registered through a QR code, and watching the dozens of volunteers and healthcare workers vaccinate hundreds of humans within the span of one hour that I was there; it was the first time in my life that I felt as though I was taking part in a generation-defining moment of human progress.

Rav Soloveitchik in his Lonely Man of Faith famously described that the first responsibility God gave humanity (Adam 1) was to conquer the world with scientific progress and innovation. I saw that before my eyes at the Moscone Center.

The Ravs second term in the dialectic of humanity (Adam 2) is about the humility to stand in awe. The deeply emotional moment of receiving my first dose of vaccine brought back the immense feeling of humility.

Almost everything about this last year has been unbelievable in the literal sense of the term. As I was standing in line, I realized that I had not seen remotely that number of people at one time or place since Purim 2020. Back then, the thought of even a short lockdown was beyond grasp. How little do we know about the future? How little do we know about ourselves before we are tested in ways we could not have imagined?

These same feelings came to mind the following Sunday morning, when we opened doors and windows, plugged in industrial-sized fans, and held our first indoor service back in the Beth Jacob sanctuary in over one year. Our sanctuary that during the High Holy Days can hold close to 400 individuals was filled by fewer than 20 women and men. How majestic. And how humbling.

While I was sitting for the mandatory 15-minute waiting period after my vaccine, filled with gratitude and hope, I recited the blessing: Baruch Atah Hashem Elokeinu Melech Haolam, HaTov VeHameitiv. Blessed are You, God, Master of the Universe, Who is Good and bestows good.

Gods ways are beyond my comprehension. The line between exile and redemption is razor thin. And yet, I feel how our community is slowly inching back towards hope, towards renewal, towards life.

Our first service inside Beth Jacob in over a year was to celebrate Rosh Chodesh Nissan, the month of redemption. The Talmud states: In Nissan we were once redeemed. And in Nissan we will again be redeemed in the future. (Rosh Hashanah 10b)

With a sense of awe for the majesty of scientific achievements, and humility for how little we know of Gods ways in this world, may that redemption come soon in our days.

View original post here:

Getting vaccinated was a lesson in humility and gratitude J. - The Jewish News of Northern California

Nobody knows exactly when Jews first arrived in what later would become Germany. In all probability they came with the Romans who had been warring with Germanic tribes even before the Common Era. Arguably, there were Jews living as Roman citizens in the Rhineland as early as the second century CE.

What is known is that there was a Jewish presence in 321 CE in Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium, a Roman colony on the Rhine River and the historical nucleus of todays city of Cologne. It was in that year that Emperor Constantine in a written edict allowed the colonia to appoint Jews to the municipal council. This is why a German organization, the Association 321 2021: 1,700 years of Jewish Life in Germany, decided to declare 2021 an official anniversary and celebrate it with a big splash with the blessing of the body politic as well as that of the Jewish community.

For the Jewish world, the anniversary year is a good opportunity to look back at the enormous contribution to the development of Judaism by the Jewish community in Germany. Many features of the Jewish world as we know it today, can be traced to German Jewry.

Ashkenaz, of course, is the original name of Germany in Jewish tradition while the term Germania is of Roman provenience. Ashkenaz appears in the Torah as the name of one of Noahs great-grandsons, but starting in the 11th century CE it came to designate the area of the Rhineland, the Palatinate (today in Western Germany) and parts of Northern France. How the biblical name ended up being identified with this specific region, is not really clear.

In any case, it was the cradle of German Jewry in particular and of Ashkenazi Jewry in general. A defining influence on the emerging Ashkenazi world originated in the 10th and the 11th century in the so-called SHUM cities, an acronym for Shpira, Vormayza, and Magentza, todays Speyer, Worms and Mainz. None other than Rashi whose commentary we still read in Talmud editions studied at the Worms yeshiva around 1060.

Groundbreaking halachic rulings were issued by poskim (scholars who determine Jewish law) from the SHUM cities. The most prominent among the SHUM rabbis was Rabbenu Gershom. Gershom was born in 960 in Metz, in the Lorraine area today in France but later he headed the famous yeshiva in Worms.

cnxps.cmd.push(function () { cnxps({ playerId: '36af7c51-0caf-4741-9824-2c941fc6c17b' }).render('4c4d856e0e6f4e3d808bbc1715e132f6'); });

ONE OF his formative rulings was the prohibition of polygamy, which adapted the structure of Jewish families to that of the Occident. Interestingly, Gershom also forbade reading letters by people who were not their intended recipients. In the 12th and 13th centuries SHUM deciders issued additional important edicts, known as Takkanot Shum, which dealt, among other topics, with business ethics.

Another important influence on the development of Jewish thinking was the Hassidei Ashkenaz movement. Starting out in the Bavarian city of Regensburg and in the SHUM cities in the 11th century, the movement took hold throughout Germany and later spread to other countries as well. Hassidei Ashkenaz stressed Gods incorporeality and omnipresence. In order to better understand Gods nature and true will, members of the movement immersed themselves in the study of supernatural phenomena and miracles, making an important contribution to Jewish mysticism. Their search for the right path also included turning away from worldly things.

In the following centuries, Talmud study and deep piety remained the foundation of Jewish life. If there was a continuous Jewish presence in Germany in the Middle Ages, it was primarily for lack of a strong central rule in German territories. Thus, German Jews escaped wholesale expulsion like the edicts of expulsion in England in 1290 or in Spain in 1492.

This does not mean that there were no regional acts of wanton and violent persecution, including regional banishments. Yet, despite the ups and downs, or, often enough, downs and downs, German Jewry remained a strong force in the Jewish world. The list of rabbinical luminaries living and teaching in Germany was long, even as the demographic center of European Jewry shifted to the east. According to estimates, some 60,000 to 80,000 Jews lived in Germany in the second half of the 18th century just one tenth of the Jewish population in the Polish-Lithuanian dual monarchy at that time.

In the 19th century, changes that took place in Germany would substantially shape the development of the modern Jewish world. Germany became the cradle of three streams of Judaism as we know them today: Reform, Conservative and Modern Orthodox (or Neo-Orthodox as it was originally called).

The point of departure of Reform Judaism in Germany was liturgy. Its pioneers strove to adapt services to modern times. In Reform synagogues, which began appearing in the second decade of the 19th century, the separation between men and women was gradually eased, organs were introduced and German at least partially replaced Hebrew as the language of the services.

There was, however, more than liturgy at stake. Rabbi Abraham Geiger, considered the key founder of the Reform movement, called for a new understanding of those mitzvot that he saw as the result of historical developments and therefore alterable among them the rules of kashrut, as opposed to those mitzvot that were regarded as universal.

FOR SOME Jews the Reform movement went too far, even though they favored a modernization of Jewish religious life as well. One of them was Rabbi Zacharias Frankel who founded the Conservative movement which put greater emphasis on Jewish tradition and the history of the Jewish people.

Change was introduced in Orthodox Judaism, too. Rabbis Samson Raphael Hirsch and Azriel Hildesheimer insisted on the compatibility of an Orthodox way of life with secular education, including academic education, which both of whom had enjoyed in addition to their religious studies. In 1873, Hildesheimer founded the rabbinical seminary in Berlin, which soon became an important rabbinical training center known and respected throughout the Jewish world.

Many Orthodox Jewish educators set out to ensure that young Jewish children obtained profound Jewish knowledge even as the winds of change were blowing strong. One of the most prominent was Rabbi Seligmann Baer Bamberger of Wrzburg, the Wrzburger Rav. In 1856, he founded, the Israelite Institution for Education and Studies an elementary school which combined secular studies with a rigorous religious curriculum.

Germany was also the home of a forerunner of religious Zionism, Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer (1795-1874). Kalischer, a Talmudic scholar, considered Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel as a contribution to the coming of the Messiah. In this, his views were similar to the concept of the State of Israel as the beginning of redemption.

In the 19th and early 20th century, Germany also became a magnet for countless Jewish intellectuals and ideologues from across the Jewish political spectrum, mainly from Eastern Europe. Many studied at German universities while planning a new Jewish future each one according to his own Weltanschauung. This rich Jewish life came to a tragic halt when Nazi hordes forced a major part of German Jews into exile and murdered nearly all of those who had not managed to escape (and repeated throughout much of Europe).

Today, there is a thriving Jewish community in Germany again. The registered membership of the Jewish communities is close to 100,000 while many other Jews among then a large number of Israelis living in Germany chose to remain unaffiliated.

Let there be no mistake: We know that the historical glory of German Jewry cannot be restored. We have, however, succeeded in creating quite a vibrant Jewish life. In todays Germany, there are some 90 Jewish communities, Jewish day schools, including five high schools and a multitude of Jewish institutions dealing with all aspects of communal life.

Without trying to go back in time, we do try to remember and to commemorate the history of Jews on German soil. This is why our three rabbinical seminaries, a liberal, an orthodox and a conservative one, are named after the founding fathers of the movements whose traditions they represent: Rabbi Abraham Geiger, Rabbi Azriel Hildesheimer and Rabbi Zacharias Frankel. Yes, 2021 is a good year to honor the illustrious past as we march on into the future.

The writer is the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany.

Go here to read the rest:

The imprint of Jews in Germany on the Jewish world - opinion - The Jerusalem Post