Siddur Left In Harrisburg
Our shul in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, is only about 20 minutes from Hershey. As such, we enjoy the many visitors who pass through during the summer. The other week a traveler came to our minyan and left behind a small nusach Sefard siddur with the Hebrew name “Shimon Asher Pinsky” in it.
I’m hoping Reb Shimon or someone who knows him will see this so that our shul can reunite him with his siddur. I can be contacted at 717-238-0763 or [email protected].
Rabbi Akiva Males
Kesher Israel Congregation
Harrisburg, PA
Gullible Dems
Re “Notwithstanding Bibi’s Pleas, Top Dems Signal Openness to Iran’s New President” (front-page news story, Aug. 16):
Why is anyone surprised that top Democrats are signaling their readiness to give the allegedly moderate new Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, an opportunity to prove that he is “worth hearing out”?
He has, in fact, fairly boasted of his past success in hoodwinking credulous diplomats in his role as Iranian negotiator to the IAEA, convincing them that Iran had brought its nuclear activities to a halt while the centrifuges were in fact furiously spinning and advancing their capacity to “cross the nuclear threshold.”
When – not if – Rouhani’s duplicity is finally revealed, the repercussions will be disastrous for Israel, and ultimately the entire region and the U.S.
Fay Dicker
Lakewood, NJ
Denied A Jewish Education (I)
I’m sorry, but without more information I can’t help but believe there is more to the story as to why Michelle Gross’s daughter was rejected by various day schools (“Rabbis Denied My Daughter a Jewish Education,” op-ed, Aug. 16).
I’m sorry for the suffering both she and her daughter have had to endure, and I am troubled that our community as a whole does not make provision for accommodating all youngsters unable to make the grade in mainstream schools. But whether the schools that rejected her daughter were wrong to do so is not a judgment I can make without knowing more.
Ira Newman
(Via E-Mail)
Denied A Jewish Education (II)
I am appalled that a Jewish girl will be denied intense Jewish religious training because of the elitist attitudes of some religious-school officials too busy with themselves or meaningless conferences to remember what their mission is. (I’ll remind them: it’s educating Jewish children in our faith and its traditions.)
I think it’s shameful and a sad commentary on the state of day-school education in America that these Jewish educators would turn away a young woman knowing full well that the only alternative would be public school.
Yocheved Halper
Jerusalem
‘Orthodox’ Ordination (I)
Kudos to Rabbi Steven Pruzansky for his thoughtful and thorough treatment of the issue of women’s ordination (“The Incredibly Shrinking Rabbinate,” front-page essay, Aug. 16).
The Rabbinical Council of America has stated the following about the effort to ordain women by an institution that calls itself Orthodox: “…we cannot accept either the ordination of women or the recognition of women as members of the Orthodox rabbinate, regardless of title.”
Tellingly, Sally Preisand, the first Reform woman to be ordained, was an honored guest at the allegedly Orthodox ordination ceremony of women. Obviously, feminism was more important to the organizers of that event than the chillul Hashem of honoring Preisand, whose Reform theology denies most of the tenets of Orthodox Judaism.
Rabbi Pruzansky does Klal Yisrael a real service by exposing the fact that many of those on the far left have gone beyond the pale of Orthodox Judaism and use that label to advance their hidden and not so hidden agendas and fool the uninformed.
Robert Markowitz
Brooklyn, NY
‘Orthodox’ Ordination (II)
I was surprised to see that of the three letters The Jewish Press published last week in response to Rabbi Steven Pruzansky’s Aug. 9 front-page essay about women in the rabbinate, two were negative.
I hope you will even the score with my reaction to those negative reactions. Rabbi Pruzansky has, in fact, pointed to an emerging problem – the growing movement to redefine Orthodoxy from within in order to accommodate the drive for women rabbis. No longer are those dissatisfied with halacha content to label themselves Reform or Conservative. They can simply take advantage of the expanding definition of Orthodoxy preached in certain quarters.