Middle East Envoy Suffers Envy
Dennis Ross, the former Middle East envoy, has been spending a lot of time on the road and in synagogues these days.
Since joining joining Barack Obama on a Middle East trip and then publicly coming out in support of the Democratic presidential nominee, Ross has been on a tour of the Jewish community in battleground states.
On Sunday, he stumped for the Democratic nominee in Tampa and then Parkland, Florida.
While imparting the reasons he’s supporting Obama, Ross, looking around at Congregation Kol Tikvah’s new shul in Parkland, Broward County, noted how he’s also gleaned some valuable insights of his own.
“I have shul building envy,” Ross told about 75 people seated in the building that opened earlier this year.
Ross explained that he’s co-chair of the capital campaign at Kol Shalom, a seven-year-old Conservative egalitarian congregation in Maryland that is raising money to construct a synagogue.
His timing couldn’t be worse to be chair of a campaign hitting up donors, Ross said in a reference to the global financial meltdown.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO