Rebecca Spence
By Rebecca Spence
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Culture Preschoolers Get a Head Start in Hebrew
Los Angeles – Jewish day-school educators have long been flummoxed by the fact that, despite their best efforts to teach Hebrew, the vast majority of students graduate with little grasp of the language. In this city, that story is finally changing. Some four years since the launch of a pilot program to teach Hebrew at…
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Culture Group Teaches Teenage Girls Positive Messages
Rosh Hodesh, the monthly Jewish celebration of the new moon, has a special significance for teenage girls around the country. “Rosh Hodesh: It’s a Girl Thing!” is a program designed to counter the onslaught of negative messages broadcast to American girls through the media, using monthly group meetings to strengthen adolescent girls’ Jewish identity and…
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News Finance Minister Could Face Probe
Tel Aviv – Adding to Israel’s rapidly ballooning list of politicians mired in scandal, the finance minister is now being dragged into the fray. The national police are weighing whether to question Finance Minister Avraham Hirchson about his involvement in the cover-up of an embezzlement of $1.3 million from a labor union associated with the…
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News Students Flock To Aid North, but Did They?
Kiryat Shmona, Israel – In the months since last summer’s war in Lebanon, an eerie quiet has taken hold in the north of Israel. The wail of sirens warning of Katyusha rocket attacks has long since ceased, and the loud din of explosions no longer pierces the fresh air of the Galilee. Just beneath the…
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News Kabbalah Centre Scion on the Defensive at Jewish Mysticism Parley
San Diego – With Hollywood starlets donning red-string bracelets and toting the Zohar around as if it were the latest fashion accessory, serious proponents of Jewish mysticism find themselves struggling over the commercialization and popularization of Kabbalah. In particular, students and teachers have been trying to figure out whether they should be ecstatic or despondent…
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News Overseas Seminaries Set To Reject Gay Ordination
While gay activists and their supporters are hailing last week’s vote permitting the ordination of gay and lesbian rabbis and the sanctioning of same-sex unions within Conservative Judaism, many of the movement’s far-flung branches — including most overseas branches — appear likely to reject the options. In Los Angeles, the rabbinical school of the University…
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News Tensions Divide L.A.’s Iranian Jewish Community
Los Angeles – By now, the large Iranian Jewish influx into this city — giving it the nickname “Tehrangeles” — is no secret. But, perhaps as with any growing community, fault lines are emerging. And since almost nothing reveals differences as sharply as an internationally broadcast controversy, the brouhaha over President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s apparent antisemitism…
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News Conservative Panel Votes To Permit Gay Rabbis
In a historic vote, leaders of Conservative Judaism on Wednesday approved a rabbinic opinion allowing ordination of gay and lesbian rabbis and sanctioning same-sex unions. The Committee on Jewish Law and Standards — the 25-member lawmaking body of the Conservative movement — opted to follow the rabbinic tradition of approving separate, mutually contradictory opinions, each…
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