Word: customs
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...streets, as fighters roared overhead, youngsters danced and shouted. Newly arrived Jewish immigrants from Iraq and North Africa watched the festivities, shyly amazed at the sight of husky girls in shorts. One old woman, her veil dropped just below her chin as a compromise with the Moslem custom she had always known, crouched silently for 30 hours on a Jerusalem street corner, spellbound by the goings-on in her new homeland. To make the newcomers feel at home, villagers at two new settlements, halfway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, performed Kurdish and Arab dances instead of the Jewish ones...
...Sunday, the Greek Orthodox Easter, the general visited the Greek battalion in Korea, who welcomed him as a vividly remembered friend. He remembered some of them, too. After the inspection, he went to a table where Metaxa Brandy and red-dyed Easter eggs were set. It is an Orthodox custom for two friends each to take an egg and strike them together; he whose egg remains unbroken is supposed to be the better man. Van Fleet tried this with the Greek commander, and there was much good-natured guffawing when the American's egg cracked...
...Pretoria, South Africa's Dutch Reformed Church (1,400,000 members) held a synod, solemnly condemned: 1) cremation ("a heathen custom"), 2) commercial radio programs on Sundays, 3) American comics ("doing untold harm"), 4) Freemasonry, 5) the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. The churchmen rejected racial and sex equality ("God spoke to Adam, not to Eve"), as well as freedom of speech and opinion: "Heresy and untruth may not be spoken freely . . . The devilish tendencies in man place very definite limits on these freedoms...
...weekly observance of the Sabbath-from Friday's sunset to Saturday after sundown-as a day in which no work may be done, except for self-protection or to save life, is the core of Jewish religious practice. Rabbi Bernstein takes pains to point out how this custom of a day of rest "hewn from the social consciousness of a little desert tribe became in time an established practice for the entire civilized world...
...have teas for the faculty. The faculty and administration swap teas. Every dormitory has a weekly tea. Societies bring in new pledges through a system of "open" and "closed" teas. Teas vary in tone from the high-heeled formality of administrative, faculty, and alumnae gatherings to the lower echelon custom of assuming varying degrees of proximity to the floor...