Word: yom
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Many readers still remember the alcoholic hero of The Lost Weekend desperately trying to hock his typewriter to buy booze and finding the New York pawnshops closed; the shops are owned by Jews, and they are closed because it is Yom Kippur, the most important of Jewish holidays. This novel presents a similar but even more poignant dilemma. The heroine's older sister has got herself pregnant by her boss, a married man; she tries desperately to cash a check for an abortion, but finds she cannot because Franklin Delano Roosevelt has just closed the banks...
...historians who want to get it all nice and fine on paper, you haven't learned how much in this world is determined by non-syllogistic reasoning." On the subject of religion, he is gently detached. He recalls how as a young man, in the midst of a Yom Kippur service, he looked around as pious Jews were "beating their breasts with intensity of feeling and anguishing sincerity," and he decided that his presence among them was "a kind of desecration" since their creed no longer had any meaning for him. Years later he listened to a sermon...
...centuries rolled on. Then, tradition relates that some time in the 12th century a Jew named David Rahabi, believed to be from Egypt, discovered them. Noting that they abstained from work on the Sabbath, circumcised their male children when they were eight days old, stayed indoors on Yom Kippur, and refused to eat fish without fins and scales, he decided they must be Jews. Rahabi set about rescuing their religion; he gave them prayers and rituals, and taught Hebrew to three of their most promising young men. Ever since, the community has observed the Sephardic rites they learned from...
...youngster ever shows up at the shack that serves as a synagogue. Friday nights and Saturdays, on the Jewish Sabbath, Cantor Kaplan (there is no rabbi) leads prayers for 30 persons, more women than men. Last Yom Kippur, the most important Jewish holiday, 400 worshipers walked to the little house, about half a mile from the paved city center...
...exodus began last September. On the holiest of Jewish holy days, Yom Kippur, word spread through Bucharest synagogues that after six long years their prayers had been answered. The Communist Rumanian government was registering Jews for permits to leave for Israel...