Felafel Fund
We thank Jewish Press readers so much for their past help with our Felafel Fund.
Once again this year we hope to send many poor religious families for a felafel, french fries, and a drink the week of bedikas chametz, thus allowing mothers to take a break from cooking meals for their large families and giving the entire mishpachah the thrill of eating in a “restaurant” (really their neighborhood felafel store).
Checks should be made out to Tzvia Klein and sent to Arzei HaBira 49/32, Jerusalem.
Thank you in advance and may we all have a happy, healthy, and kosher Pesach.
Tzvia Ehrlich-Klein
Jerusalem
Synagogue Closings
In their excellent Feb. 26 op-ed article, “Conservative Jews Deserve More Than PR,” Rabbis Menken and Lerner did not discuss the proverbial elephant in the room: Many synagogues of all denominations are closing their doors (as noted in the Pew report).
I am on the steering committee of the Institute for Adult Jewish Studies, which for the past 54 years has sponsored a fall and winter lecture series in Central Long Island. This group, founded by synagogues from all denominations, has been responsible over the years for bringing in speakers ranging from Wolf Blitzer and Dennis Prager to Rav Moshe Meir Weiss and Rav Dovid Goldwasser.
Sadly, we have witnessed the closing of many of our founding congregations over the past ten years. These include two Orthodox congregations, at least two Conservative synagogues, and one Reform temple. Yet the number of participants at our lectures continues to rise and speakers are baffled when they come on a Monday evening to see more than three hundred faces looking up at them from the audience.
More than a third of our participants list themselves as being affiliated with no synagogue and for many of them their only connection with Yiddishkeit is our lecture series. We often have to advise our speakers to tailor their lectures to people who in many cases do not even know an aleph from a beis and are a madreigah lower than those we used to describe as “three-day-a-year” synagogue attendees.
Dr. Elliot Udell
Plainview, NY
Naming A Successor To Scalia
Re the controversy over naming a successor to the late Justice Scalia (editorials, Dec. 19 and 26):
President Ronald Reagan left office on January 20, 1989. After the withdrawal of Supreme Court nominee Douglas Ginsburg, Reagan nominated Anthony Kennedy on November 11, and he was confirmed on February 3, 1988.
In other words, Reagan was a lame duck president who nominated a Supreme Court justice 14 months and 9 days before he left office. If President Obama were to nominate a Supreme Court justice sometime in March, it would be approximately 10 months before he left office.
Who can say how much time a president needs left in his second term in order to nominate a Supreme Court justice and have that nominee receive a fair hearing by both parties? To use a football analogy, whenever there is a challenge on the field the officials’ ruling stands unless there is compelling evidence to change it. I don’t see any compelling evidence to cause President Obama to defer his presidential power on this matter.
Even before he took office in 2009, some members of the Republican Party vowed to defeat anything President Obama tried to do. Now, it seems, they’ve gotten so used to that mindset that they don’t even want him to act as president even though he has nearly a year left in his presidency.
I heard one Republican official say the next president should nominate the Supreme Court justice so that the will of the voters in the upcoming election would be respected. How about the will of the people who voted to reelect President Obama?