Word: rabbi
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...most Jewish Israelis feel and act as a single people, a family united by its religious heritage, whether its members choose to observe its rules to a greater or lesser degree. The populace in Israel is not polarized, nor on the brink of a religious civil war. RABBI AVI SHAFRAN New York City
...rabbinical monopoly on marriage and burial is increasingly controversial, especially in light of the mass immigration from the former Soviet Union. Immigrants who are not officially Jews, meaning their mothers are not Jewish or they have not been converted by an Orthodox rabbi, cannot get married in Israel. There are very few places where they can be buried. After one such teenager died in a recent terrorist attack, his corpse wandered the country looking for a final resting place. A man was dug up five years after his death when rabbinical authorities questioned his Jewish credentials...
...chauvinism. Last June in Jerusalem rioting haredim pelted men and women with excrement for praying at the Western Wall in a mixed group. In 1996 haredi "modesty patrols" began attacking women on Jerusalem's streets for exposing their arms or legs. Secular women were offended last year when Rabbi Yosef pronounced that men should not walk between two women, just as they should not walk between two donkeys, lest they take on the attributes of these lesser beasts...
Manned by James Carroll, Boston Globe columnist and former Catholic Priest; Rabbi Sanford Seltzer of Temple Ohabei Shalom in Brookline; Christoph Wolff, celebrated Bach scholar and Dean of Harvard's Graduate School of Arts & Sciences; and Stephan Jay Gould, a self-proclaimed "agnostic Jew" and Harvard professor of paleontology, the panel neither skirted nor mistreated the issue...
...Rabbi Seltzer concentrated on the immediate, practical effects of the St. John Passion. His eye-opening speech revealed the dichotomy between Jewish and Christian impressions of Gospel texts and the symbol of the cross, noting that these key-stones of Christian heritage (and consequently much of Christian liturgy) implicitly blame Jews for the events of the Gospels. Both he and Carroll traced a connection between this unavoidable implication and the history of anti-Semitism in Western and especially German culture that has more or less continuously marked two millennia of Christian tradition...