Originally posted on the blog of RJ.org, News and Views of Reform Jews. Last fall, as a junior attending the University of Florida (UF), I was considering all the possibilities for the upcoming spring break. I know that typical UF students spend their spring breaks on cruises and at beaches, drinking and getting awkward tan …
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This month, in the Ashram where Mahatma Gandhi began India’s independence movement, AJWS’s World Partners Fellows begin their own journey of study and service in India. In a setting of simple living, fellows explore the mutual roots of Jewish belief and concepts of justice, human rights and service. Using AJWS’s curriculum, Live the Questions, fellows …
Read MoreSweating in the hot sun, my rabbinical student peers and I sat opposite a group of Senegalese villagers, most of whom were in their late teens and twenties. We were in Senegal for a 10-day AJWS service-learning program, and this meeting of American rabbinical students and Senegalese villagers was an opportunity for cultural exchange.
Read MoreThe Israelites’ first building project—the Mishkan—is about to be completed. We can recognize similarities between its construction and the building of our own communal structures: raising the funds, enlisting a contractor and choosing design elements. And yet, though modern communal leaders often ceremonially lay the cornerstone—complete with the entertaining and tellingly odd juxtaposition of dress clothes, shovel and hard hat—they rarely actively participate in the physical construction.
Read MoreMy father, Rabbi Morris Bernstein was drafted into the U.S. Navy and served as a sailor, aiding Israel during the Yom Kippur War. My grandfather, Sidney Bernstein, served in the U.S. Army during WWII. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge and liberated the slave labor camp of Ulm, among others. Reading Parashat Bamidbar, …
Read MoreThe flour, salt, oil, sugar, yeast, eggs and cinnamon were spread out on the vinyl tablecloth. We had moved the table to the modest cement block porch that jutted out from the doorless entryway to Marta’s house. It was Friday afternoon and this Salvadoran woman had opened her home to our group of American Jews …
Read MoreIn the wake of hurricane Sandy I felt immensely blessed. My home was warm, light and entirely unscathed. When I ventured downtown two days later to volunteer on New York’s Lower East Side, however, it was as if I had crossed into another dimension, one in which people lugged buckets of water up a dozen …
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