Michael Hafter’s Hatan Torah Speech 5786
I grew up in a little town in New Jersey called Hammonton, which is known for blueberries — and for being the most Italian town in the country. There was a small synagogue — ninety seats. At its peak, the Jewish community in Hammonton was about twenty-four families. When my family moved there, in 1965, […]
Hazzan Jessi: Lessons from My Elders — and from Noah
by Hazzan Jessi Roemer I’d like to tell you about three of my elders: My dad, Dr. Peter Roemer, who died at age 86 this past May; Rabbi Dr. Arthur Waskow, who died at age 92 this week; and my mom, Cantor Susan Roemer, who died in May 2010, almost fifteen and a […]
#ItTakesAVillage
by Rabbi Nathan Kamesar I’d like to share with you the teaching I delivered in honor of our Hatan Torah and Kallat Bereshit this past Friday night, honoring two great annually-selected service leaders in our community, this year, Michael Hafter and Susan Berman: I’m as familiar as anybody else with the by-now dated notion of a hashtag. A hashtag, […]
Susan Berman’s Kallat Bereshit Speech 5786
I have tried many times to reject Judaism, but I have always been pulled back in. The first time was when I was in 10th or 11th grade, at Temple Sinai in Marblehead, Massachusetts – a seacoast town about 20 miles north of Boston. It’s a conservative synagogue – a right wing conservative synagogue. I […]
Hope and Healing
by Rabbi Nathan Kamesar It’s hard to put to words the experience of relief many of us are feeling in response to the release of the living Israeli hostages this week, and an apparent end to the war — an experience, which, to state the obvious, must be but a shade of the experience […]