How I Became a Sukkot Evangelist (And You Can, Too!)

By Nina Badzin for Kveller

I have unexpectedly become an evangelist for Sukkot. Though like any born-again-anything, I wasn’t always such a fanatic for this particular holiday.

Once upon a time I saw Sukkot as an event that only took place as part of a religious school’s curriculum. Along with the other students who came to Hebrew school three times a week, I’d help decorate the synagogue’s sukkah, stringing wire through bizarre looking gourds on the temple’s enormous property overlooking Lake Michigan. The next Sunday morning we’d have apple cider and cinnamon-sugar doughnuts in the sukkah instead of the regular slice of challah and grape juice in the classroom. We’d take turns shaking the lulav and smelling the etrog.

It was a holiday we religious school students approached with an anthropological eye. An ancient people used to build these huts, we seemed to understand. They slept there and ate there. The end. And although most of my childhood friends were Jewish, I didn’t know anyone whose family celebrated Sukkot.

When my husband and I bought our first house in Minneapolis, however, I learned that he enjoyed having a sukkah for a year or two when he was a kid. He mentioned the memory to his father, and within weeks we had a Chabad rabbi and a team of helpers in our driveway erecting a wooden sukkah in our front yard. This was even before we had kids. Eating dinner at a table for two in our dark sukkah I thought, “What now?” Then, “This place needs a light.”

In the next few years we made some friends who took the time to put up a sukkah with an eye for warmth, light, and fun decorations. Our kids would come home with projects from their Jewish preschool we were able to use for our sukkah’s bare walls, and the idea of eating all these meals with extra guests for a week grew on me more from year to year. We eventually traded in our small wooden shed-like structure for a canvas sukkah with a bamboo mat roof. Now that we’re a family of six we might even need a bigger one that can accommodate all of us and the people I like to invite.

But why do I love Sukkot so much? Why do I think it is one of the most underrated of all the Jewish holidays? My top four reasons are below:

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Peres to honor Spielberg, Wiesel with annual award

President to give award to two figures known for their work commemorating the Holocaust, among other recipients

By AP and TIMES OF ISRAEL STAFF

President Shimon Peres will award this year’s Presidential Medal of Distinction to a group that includes Hollywood director Steven Spielberg and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel.

The statement commended Spielberg for his work on Schindler’s List, “one of the most important films in the history of cinema.”

Wiesel, a world-renowned author, intellectual and Nobel laureate, survived the Holocaust and is being honored for his work commemorating it across the world, and especially in the US.

Other recipients include medical advisor Rabbi Elimelech Firer, Association for the Wellbeing of Israel’s Soldiers (AWIS) director-general Brig.-Gen. (res.) Avigdor Kahalani, physicist Harry Zvi Tabor, Or Yarok road safety association founder Avi Naor and “a member of Israel’s security services who must remain anonymous.”

Israel’s Presidential Medal of Distinction is comparable to the France’s Legion of Honor or the Order of Canada. Previous winners include US President Barack Obama, former president Bill Clinton, former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, conductor Zubin Mehta and Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz.

The award “is conferred upon private individuals and organizations that have made unique and outstanding contributions to Tikkun Olam (Bettering the World), Israeli society and the State of Israel’s image around the world, and which constitute examples of initiative, innovation, creativity and vision,” according to a statement released by Peres’s office Thursday.

The Story Behind NBC’s Historic Yom Kippur Broadcast on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Seventy years ago, two marketing geniuses harnessed the power of mass media to bring Jews into the American mainstream

By Charlotte Bonelli for Tablet

A few days before Yom Kippur in 1943, NBC aired a radio play dramatizing the horrific events and tragic end of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising earlier that year. For half a minute, Americans from coast to coast, many of them Jews but most of them not, listened to a cantor chant el malei rachamim, the traditional Ashkenazi prayer for the dead. “Hear him with reverence,” the announcer instructed. “In the Ghetto, thirty-five thousand stood their ground against an army of the Third Reich—and twenty-five thousand fell. They sleep in their common graves but they have vindicated their birthright. Therefore, let him sing and hear him with reverence, for they have made an offering by fire and atonement unto the Lord and they have earned their sleep.”

This historic broadcast was the first mainstream dramatic representation of the uprising, detailed reports of which only began reaching New York in September 1943, five months after the battle and a few weeks before the High Holidays. The radio play detailed the horrific suffering of the ghetto inhabitants, the heroics of the fighters, and their inevitable deaths. The response was so overwhelming that the program was aired again for Hanukkah in December 1943.

“The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto” wasn’t just a piece of timely wartime programming by NBC. It was the capstone of an American Jewish Committee program to combat anti-Semitism by promoting the idea that, with the world at war, anti-Jewish bigotry wasn’t just a problem for the Jews—it was also essentially un-American.

The initiative was the brainchild of Richard Rothschild, a philosopher-turned-advertising executive who was recruited in the late 1930s to craft AJC’s national strategy to combat anti-Semitism. Rothschild introduced the concept of “salting in,” whereby notable Jewish figures were folded into radio programs or print material. Their names alone, he felt, would identify them as Jews; there was to be no discussion of the character’s religion or ethnicity. The Jew was to be presented, quite simply, as a natural part of the landscape. At the same time, non-Jewish stars like James Cagney were recruited to perform AJC material. Meantime, millions of Americans saw full-page newspaper advertisements, school posters, and comic books prepared by AJC but distributed through partner organizations.

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A Great Thinker Rediscovers His Judaism on the Day of Atonement

Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig was set to convert to Christianity a century ago. Yom Kippur services changed his mind.

By James Winchell for Tablet

In October 1913, 100 years ago these High Holidays, 26-year-old philosopher (and Jew) Franz Rosenzweig was preparing for a crucial conversion ceremony: his own, to Christianity.

However, because he insisted on converting “as a Jew, not as a ‘pagan,’ ” Rosenzweig dutifully attended services on the Day of Atonement 1913 at a small Orthodox synagogue in Berlin. In his mind, participation in the Day of Atonement was a necessary, preparatory step toward his Christian baptism. “Here was a Jew,” writes Nahum N. Glatzer in his biography of Rosenzweig, “who did not wish to ‘break off,’ but who deliberately aimed to ‘go through’ Judaism to Christianity.”

What happened to him thereafter constitutes a paradox difficult to grasp: How is it possible that Rosenzweig’s reconnection with his native Judaism could occur only when he stood upon the virtual threshold of a Christian altar? And what role did his participation in the Yom Kippur service for 1913 play in his ultimate decision not to convert to Christianity?

Rosenzweig’s life after that determinate day, writes Glatzer, is nothing less than “the story of a rediscovery of Judaism.” Rosenzweig’s subsequent writings—most notably “Atheistic Theology” (1914), the magisterial Star of Redemption (1919), Understanding the Sick and the Healthy (1921), and “The New Thinking” (1925)—serve to short-list him among a handful of the greatest of Jewish thinkers since Rashi, Yehuda Halevi (whose Hebrew poetry Rosenzweig translated into German), and Maimonides.

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Dirty Dancing? Ultra-Orthodox rabbis ban all-female Zumba classes

Rabbi panel in Haredi settlement Beitar Illit rules Brazilian dance and songs associated with it indecent; 'They want want to turn our town into Afghanistan,' says one resident.

By Allison Kaplan Sommer for Haaretz

Rabbis in an ultra-Orthodox settlement have come out publicly against the trendy Brazilian the trendy Brazilian fitness dance known as Zumba.

A rabbinic panel in Beitar Illit ruled against Zumba classes, the Hebrew-language website Mako reported, even as it is practiced in this religious community - with a female instructor and all-female participants.

In the document issued by the Rabbinical Court of the Ashkenazi Community in Beitar and headlined "warning," women are explicitly forbidden from running or taking Zumba classes, deemed indecent because they involve moving parts of the body.

"Recently our city has seen the opening of classes employing the South American 'Zumba' method,” it reads. “After having established that both its form and manner, the activity is entirely at odds with both the ways of the Torah and the holiness of Israel, as are the songs associated to it, I hereby announce that the organization and participation in such classes is forbidden.”

According to the report, the existence of the women’s Zumba classes in the city had infuriated extremist elements in the Haredi-dominated town, leading to the publishing of the warning. It quoted an angry resident of the town who accused the Zumba opponents of “wanting to turn our city into Afghanistan, and we won’t go along with it. The rabbis and judges can’t determine whether or not we participate in Zumba classes. I’m sick of them strangling us with these illogical halachic rulings.”

It is unclear what consequences women who flout the decision and carry on with Zumba will face, but the city has a history of vigilante punishment of members of the community who ignore local standards.

In February, Israel Police probed the activities of a local ‘modesty patrol’ in Beitar Illit. Two men were arrested for allegedly threatening and attacking residents whose dress or behavior was deemed inappropriate. As part of the investigation, the mayor of the town was questioned on suspicion that he knew of the actions of the men, who worked for the municipality as youth counselors, and that he told residents who complained not to inform the police.

Not an anniversary we enjoy remembering but one which we must never forget

President Shimon Peres' greeting for Rosh Hashana Shana Tova!

From everyone at Jvillage Network a Shanah Tovah u'metookah

שנה טובה ומתוקה