Word: hebrewism
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...high summer of the adult Bat Mitzvah. The ritual retrofitting is becoming standard in Judaism's Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist branches. In the Reform movement alone, 600 of some 900 congregations offer the necessary 18-or 24-month adult preparatory courses in Hebrew, ritual and Scripture. Both Reform and Conservative movements offer guides to facilitate the adult rite. Such ceremonies, says Jack Wertheimer, provost at the Conservative arm's Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan, have not only "generated the spark of transformation within individuals [but] transformed congregational life...
...1900s and saturated liberal Judaism only in the 1970s. Inevitably, there was a generation of Jewish women who had fought for women's equal ritual participation but had themselves missed out on Bat Mitzvah training. "They got all these rights," says Lisa Grant, a professor of Jewish education at Hebrew Union College in Manhattan, "and realized that [ritually] they couldn't do anything. They felt like frauds...
...familiarizing more adults with language and liturgy, the trend helped fuel liberal Judaism's escape from a somewhat arid buy-Israel-bonds communalism into greater ritual and spiritual engagement. A case in point was Reform Judaism's 1999 public recommitment to the use of Hebrew in its services: "You've learned how to pray in Hebrew," says Rabbi Sue Ann Wasserman of Reform's Union of American Hebrew Congregations. "Why shouldn't you use it?" The women's group Hadassah periodically celebrates the ascendant rite with mass Bat Mitzvahs of as many as 122 women...
...such spectacles should not obscure the singular journey implicit in every adult Bat Mitzvah, Elaine Weiss's included. Weiss grew up Orthodox. Her brothers were Bar Mitzvahed--she remembers flinging celebratory candy from the women's balcony--but she never even took Hebrew. Feeling "empty" at mostly Hebrew services, she gravitated to Reform Judaism, whose prayer book provides English translations. A son was Bar Mitzvahed at Temple Israel and two daughters Bat Mitzvahed. But something was still wrong. One day Weiss visited the grave of a grandfather who had been a rabbi. She could not read the Hebrew...
...with victims' families, an Arab social worker usually stationed in the E.R. no longer works there immediately after terrorist attacks. E.R. technician Assaly is also wary of victims' relatives, who often lash out at him on the wards. As he develops Lekior's chest X ray, Assaly, who learned Hebrew from a suicide-bomb victim he treated, recalls stopping at the site of a terrorist attack last year and administering first aid. An Israeli identified him as an Arab and tried to drag him away, he says. Assaly's mother, who was with him then, tells him to keep...