Teetering on the Edge of the Mikveh

From the Jewish Daily Forward, The Seesaw

The Seesaw is a new kind of advice column in which a a broad range of columnists will address the real life issues faced by interfaith couples and families. Join the discussion by commenting on this post, sharing it on Facebook or following the Forward on Twitter. And keep the questions coming. You can email your quandaries, which will remain anonymous, to: seesaw@forward.com
Why Convert Anyway?

I am a non-Jewish young woman engaged to a Jewish man. I am truly excited about our Jewish wedding, and from there on out welcome any Judaism he wants to bring into our family life. It is with joy that I will join him at synagogue or observe the fasts for Passover and Yom Kippur, and anticipate that I will find meaning in these traditions and sharing them with our kids. With all this in mind, is there any reason I should convert? Right now I have no plans to and he doesn’t need me to. I would rather embrace Judaism on the terms my fiance and I feel comfortable with, and not the terms of the conversion process. — Ambivalent in Arizona

Converting is Like Becoming a Full Citizen

HAROLD BERMAN Your excitement about Judaism coupled with your ambivalence about converting reminds me of my wife when we met. She was a church leader, and wasn’t interested in conversion even as she enjoyed various Jewish practices. We remained intermarried for 16 years — today, she is a passionately observant Jew. At some point, doing Jewish without being Jewish didn’t make sense. She felt she was living a double life and sending mixed signals to our children.

Continue reading.

How One Community is Conducting an Interfaith Yom HaShoah/Holocaust Memorial Day

What is your community doing?

by Shiela Steinman Wallace

Film to Tell Survivors’ Stories with Teen Perspective

This has been a year of upheaval and often violence from the overthrow of the government in Ukraine and the takeover of Crimea by Russia to the long and bloody civil war in Syria and the political instability and harsh, rapid trials in Egypt to ethnic wars in Africa and drug wars in South and Central America.

Many of these situations are rooted in hatred and prejudice. All result in human rights abuses that give us pause. It seems the world needs to be reminded of the lessons of the Holocaust.

In Louisville, each year, the Jewish Community Relations Council sponsors a community-wide Yom HaShoah Program to strengthen our commitment as friends and neighbors of all faiths to treat our neighbors with tolerance, compassion and dignity.

This year’s program, Pouring Out the Heart: Learning from Personal Holocaust Stories, will be Monday, April 28, at 7 p.m. at the Kentucky Center for the Arts, in the Bomhard Theater. This year’s program will include a film that presents excerpts of interviews conducted by Catholic and Jewish middle school students with local Holocaust survivors.

In addition, two Israeli soldiers, participants in the Hatikvah [the hope] Program will speak about the Holocaust from an Israeli point of view.

There will also be the opportunity to remember those who perished in the Holocaust with prayers and ceremony.

Listening to Holocaust survivors tell their stories has always been an important part of this program, but as the years go on, fewer survivors remain to tell their stories. Yom HaShoah Committee Chair Fred Whittaker, who teaches at St Francis of Assisi, and his students teamed up with Jewish teens from the JCC’s Teen Connections program to produce this film.

Continue reading.

How to Make non-Jewish Guests Feel Welcome at Your Seder

1. Tell your non-Jewish friends that Passover is the holiday that celebrates the Jews being freed from slavery in the land of Egypt, and having to survive in the desert for forty years to arrive in Israel, The Promised Land.

2. If they feel out of place, explain to them that Jewish law considers it a blessing to invite guests over. Tell them the Passover service includes the invitation: "Let all who are hungry, come and eat."

3. Explain the Seder. Non-Jews attending Passover Seder can become quickly overwhelmed by all that's going on. Let them know what to expect ahead of time, and let them know that Seders can run for 2 to 4 hours.

4. Explain the food. Tell your non-Jewish friends that because the Jews were on the run, they didn't have time to wait for the bread to rise, so they ate it flat, which is called unleavened bread, and it's eaten for eight days. The only kosher food they're allowed to buy is food that says "Kosher for Passover," "May Be Used for Passover," and "Kosher for Passover All Year Round."

5. Prepare the Traditional Passover Meal. This usually includes gefilte fish, chicken soup with matzo balls, and either chicken or turkey, with cooked honey carrots, and applesauce, and non-dairy desserts.

Continue reading.

For more last minute ideas, visit Jvillage's Passover Spotlight Kit.

Kiddush with Grace

Joshua Berman from Mosaic for Times of Israel

This was an academic conference like no other.

Barely an hour after landing in Houston, following 19 hours of travel from Tel Aviv, I found myself sitting in the courtside front row of Toyota Center, home to the NBA Houston Rockets. The fourteen biblicists, archaeologists, and Egyptologists flown in were special guests at this January night’s game against the Oklahoma City Thunder. Three feet in distance and a foot in height were all that stood between me and scoring sensation Kevin Durant. It was a pinch-me, Willy Wonka moment. But it was hardly the last.

The next morning we arrived at the conference site, the well-kept 40 acre estate of a prominent Houston attorney. The eye is drawn to a magnificent Gothic library, housing over 100,000 volumes devoted to the Bible and religion. Adjacent is the attorney’s private chapel where the conference proceedings would be held: a full scale replica of a sixth century Greek Orthodox church, replete with masonry, vaults, two-foot thick walls, frescoes of biblical scenes, and pews for nearly 300 people.

But between the two edifices you see narrow gauge train tracks, the type you see at the zoo, or at an amusement park. Walk a little further into the estate (we were encouraged to) and you come across a full size replica of a 1940′s retro-style station house. Dummies in period dress wait for the train. And then there’s the train: Thomas the Tank engine, hooked to cars for forty passengers. A certain whiff redirects your attention to the llama corral, and the enormous lemur enclosure. Where am I? The NBA? Oxford? Byzantium? Neverland?

Continue reading.