SPECIAL REPORT: IsraAid helping Syrians off the boats in Greece

From JewishNewsOnline UK

Volunteers from Israeli aid agency IsraAid are helping Syrian refugees off the boats in Greece. But they need your help, hears Stephen Oryszczuk

The man supervising Israel’s rescue of Syrian refugees off the Greek coast is lost for words. He’s been asked to sum up the scale of the crisis. “You’re standing there on the beach, with all these little rubber boats bringing thousands of people every day,” he says finally. “Honestly? It’s like a tragic scene from a Hollywood epic.”

This is Yotam Polizer, regional director at IsraAID, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) that relies on donations to offer emergency medical and psychological support to Syrian refugees arriving in Greece, Serbia, Croatia, Jordan and Iraq.

His social activism has taken him from the Negev to Nepal via Japanese tsunamis and typhoons in the Philippines, but only now is he speechless. It’s not surprising. He is on the front-line of a mass migration, the biggest movement of people in 70 years, with 70,000 arriving in Europe every week. And he has just 12 people to help him.

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Move Over, Matzo Balls. Here Come Kreplach, the Metaphysical Dumplings

On Hoshana Rabbah, as the High Holidays’ period of judgment comes to a conclusion, give your chicken soup a taste of something meaningful

By Carol Ungar for Tablet Magazine
Hoshana Rabbah—the holiday that falls on the seventh day of Sukkot—includes one of the strangest of Jewish rituals: beating willow branches against the floor.

This beating occurs right after the Hoshana prayers, long liturgical poems whose main theme is visceral request for God’s mercy. The word hoshana literally means “save us.” After all of the Hoshanas have been said (on Hoshana Rabbah there are seven; during the rest of Sukkot, only one) everyone takes out their bundles of five willow branches (not by dismembering the lulav but from another arava set purchased specifically for this day), and then comes the high point of the holiday: Everyone bends down and whacks their bundles against the floor five times.

This is nothing new; Jews have been doing this since the First Temple was standing, in preparation for the following day’s holiday of Shemini Atzeret, when the prayer for rain is recited. Willows are related to rain and water; that is how the plant is able to thrive. But what is the beating all about? No one seems to have a good answer. Even Eliyahu Kitov, the leading expert on the Jewish holidays and their lore, seems to throw up his hands at this one: “The custom of beating of the arava on the ground contains profound esoteric significance and only the Great of Israel merit the knowledge of those secrets,” he writes in his classic work The Book of Our Heritage.

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Reconstructionist Rabbinical College Will Accept Students With Non-Jewish Partners

Josh Nathan-Kazis for The Jewish Daily Forward

The rabbinical seminary of American Judaism’s smallest mainstream denomination will become the first major rabbinical school in the United States to admit and ordain rabbinical students who have non-Jewish spouses and partners.

The Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, which made its announcement September 30, has been debating the issue for years. Some leaders of Reconstructionist congregations had said they might leave the movement over the change.

“The issue of Jews intermarrying is no longer something we want to police,” said Rabbi Deborah Waxman, RRC’s president, in a press release.

The long debate was finally resolved in a lengthy RRC faculty meeting September 21, culminating in a vote. Waxman would not share the vote tally, citing the confidentiality of faculty deliberations.

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The 11 Craziest Sukkahs In The World

With Sukkot coming up Sunday night, Jews around the world will be sitting in Sukkahs (or Sukkot) - outdoor huts with roofs of branches or reeds. While the basic blueprint is the same, different locations lend to some pretty crazy iterations.

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UN tosses sins into river in first-ever Tashlich ceremony

At Jewish pre-Yom Kippur service, Israeli envoy calls on world body to ‘reestablish role as temple of peace’

By Joshua Davidovich for The Times of Israel

New York’s East River was a little more polluted than usual Monday night, after United Nations envoys and other dignitaries dumped a year’s worth of trespasses and regrets out of their pockets and into Turtle Bay.

Among dignitaries taking part in the Jewish sin-cleansing rite of Tashlich were UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and envoys to the world body from the US, Britain, Canada, Australia, Ukraine, Brazil and elsewhere, including Israel.

The service, dating back to medieval Germany, is traditionally held next to a flowing body of water on or shortly after the Jewish Day of Atonement or Yom Kippur, and involves the symbolic casting off of sins, which usually take the form of bread, to be gobbled up by fish and other fauna.

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Singing Yiddish Road Songs With Syrian Refugees

By Lisa Goldman for Jewniverse

Thousands of Syrian asylum seekers have been stuck for weeks in Hungary, prevented by security forces from boarding trains that would take them to Germany, their final destination. The media has been showing horrible images of families with small children sleeping on the bare concrete outside the Budapest train station — scenes that inevitably churned up memories of the last time thousands of unwanted refugees were abused and shunted around Europe.

Eventually Austrian and German volunteers drove to Budapest and transported refugees to Germany in convoys of private cars. One of those volunteers is an Austrian singer named Hans Breuer, who filled his van with Syrian-Palestinian refugees. In this unforgettable video clip, Breur sings with them a famous old sentimental Yiddish lullaby, “Oyfn Veg Shteyt a Boym” (“A Tree at the Side of the Road“), and they join him in the wordless chorus (ay bitty bitty boym).

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Choose Your Rosh Hashanah Menu: Sephardi, Ashkenazi or Asian (With a Hint of Israeli)

Haaretz's food specialist Vered Guttman curates three menus for you to wow your Jewish New Year guests.

By Vered Guttman

Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews start the Rosh Hashanah meal with a series of symbolic foods.
Each of the foods, including black eyed pea, squash, pomegranate and dates, are accompanied by a blessing, called Yehi Ratzones (Yehi ratzon, meaning “May it be your will” in Hebrew), based on their name in Hebrew or Arabic.
This opens a window of opportunity of making a whole meal based on these food items, all of them in season now.
It also gives the beginning of the new year a new meaning.

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