Rabbi Elie Kaunfer is co-founder and executive director of Mechon Hadar. Elie has previously worked as a journalist, banker, and corporate fraud investigator. He completed his doctorate in liturgy at the Jewish Theological Seminary and is a co-founder of the independent minyan Kehilat Hadar. He was selected as an inaugural AVI CHAI Fellow and is the author of Empowered Judaism: What Independent Minyanim Can Teach Us about Building Vibrant Jewish Communities (Jewish Lights, 2010).
Previous Article Next Article On November 18, 1656, Jacob Zahalon, a rabbi and a doctor, stood in an apartment in an Italian ghetto, shouting out a window to deliver his Hannukah sermon. Below him stood a number of Jews, unable to enter the synagogue. Why? The bubonic plague was afflicting the community, and no one…
The posts on The New Spirituality blog are responses to Rabbi Sid Schwarz’s lead essay in his book, Jewish Megatrends: Charting the Course of the American Jewish Future (Jewish Lights). In that essay, which was posted on this site on May 5, 2016, Schwarz argues that any organization that hopes to speak to the next…
Last June, Jane Eisner participated in a private roundtable discussion at the Israeli Presidential Conference in Jerusalem about Israel’s Jewish identity. What came out of the talks was the sense that Jews in Israel and in the Diaspora face a similar challenge — how to be a modern people in a modern world while holding…
This is the thirteenth entry of an ongoing series exploring Jewish feminism. I am a Jewish feminist because my mom decided to put on a tallit and tefillin when I was 10. I remember that she asked my younger brother and me if we were okay with this decision. After all, she was also our…
The Jewish community is expert at anticipating failure, even disaster. Declining affiliation rates, rampant intermarriage, collapsing schools and synagogues — these are the problems that top the communal agenda. Judaism, it is said, is a product that no one wants to buy anymore. The question is then posed: How can we convince people that Judaism…
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