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Ellen Jaffe-Gill
Tova’s Songs Good for Yiddish’s Image
Israeli Conductor Soars in ‘Butterfly’
Madame Butterfly," the story of a trusting 19th-century Japanese girl who falls in love with a fickle American naval officer, first captivated American audiences in 1900 as a play by impresario David Belasco.
Sacred Sounds All Over Town
Vanessa Paloma's performance at the 200-year-old mission is one highlight of the 2005 World Festival of Sacred Music, which will be spread out among many Los Angeles locations over a two-week period beginning Saturday.
The Silver-Haired Bar Mitzvah Boy
My husband was called to the Torah as a bar mitzvah in 2001, more or less on the sixth anniversary of his conversion to Judaism. People started asking Spencer when he was going to have a bar mitzvah when his hair was barely dry from the mikvah.
Emanuel’s Jumpin’ at the Synaplex
It's erev Shabbat, and this joint is jumpin'. As dusk deepens, seniors who have just emerged from a talk on globalization mingle with new arrivals in the lobby of Temple Emanuel's school building on Burton Way in Beverly Hills, where "Cafe Synaplex" has been set up.
Off the Bimah: A Concerted Effort
With her slender figure, long, shining strawberry-blonde hair and big hazel eyes, Alison Wissot looks more like a stage ingénue than most people's conceptions of a cantor -- not surprising, since that's what she was 10 years ago.
Wissot's cantorial career is off to a brilliant start: Less than three years after graduating from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion's School of Sacred Music in New York, she is filling the largest Reform cantorial pulpit in the San Fernando Valley, the 1,300-household Temple Judea in Tarzana and West Hills.
L.A. Music Man Is Homeward Bound
Zubin Mehta, one of Southern California's favorite musicmakers, will return to his old stomping grounds Dec. 10 to conduct the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra's (IPO) first Los Angeles concert in three years.
Mothers, Daughters Bond Over Torah
Netivot, the women's Torah study institute, will begin a program next month on a subject not often associated with Orthodoxy: bat mitzvah.
Bias Hits Rabbis on Mommy Track
Today, the 377 women in Reform's Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR) constitute about 20 percent of Reform rabbis -- closer to 25 percent when retired and inactive rabbis aren't counted -- up from about 10 percent in 1991. Currently, there are 246 Reconstructionist rabbis, 45 percent of whom are women.
Part-Time Work, Full-Time Families
Women form slightly more than 11 percent of the RA's membership today, with both JTS and the University of Judaism (UJ) ordaining them as rabbis.
Hebrew High Parents Accept The Shlep
West Side and South Bay parents who send their teenagers to Los Angeles Hebrew High School (LAHHS) had to contend with some extra miles and a longer school day this week as the program moved its Sunday classes from the University of Judaism (UJ) to Pierce College.
Symphony’s Sephardic Premier
Ten years ago, it was a first -- and it's still an only. When Noreen Green established the Los Angeles Jewish Symphony (LAJS) in 1993, Los Angeles became the only city in the world with a resident symphony orchestra devoted to Jewish music, and the city maintains that unique status today.
Orthodox Mother Opens New Opera
File under Incongruities, Major: One of the latest luminaries in the world of grand opera is an Orthodox mother of four from Brooklyn.
Power of Song Gives Hope to Mourners
Chayim Frenkel, cantor at Kehillat Israel in Pacific Palisades, conceived "Nishmat Tzedek" ("A Righteous Soul") in 1993 after his brother Tzvi, 39, died suddenly, the victim of an undetected blood disease.
Milken Opens Vault of Jewish Music
The Milken Family Foundation, well-known for its philanthropy to education and medical research, has announced that it will begin to issue recordings this fall from its 13-year-old music archive project, an enormous undertaking spanning more than three centuries of American Jewish music.
Seminaries Issue New Crop of Rabbis
Los Angeles' three rabbinical schools will present the Jewish community with 26 freshly minted rabbis this month as the seminaries hold their ordination ceremonies.
Conservative Cantors Converge
Aside from the exposure to new music and techniques and the camaraderie of being with peers, one purpose of the convention is to explore the role of cantor as klei kodesh (literally, holy vessel), or clergy member, a position that transcends music-making, said Joseph Gole, senior cantor of Sinai Temple, a local co-chair of the convention.
Goodbye, Rabbi
"Sandy is everything a rabbi should be," Dan Giesberg, LBT's president, told The Journal. "He has filled the spirit of the temple for years."
Beyond ‘Avinu Malkeinu’
To most people, "Jewish music" is something familiar: the
"Avinu Malkeinu" they hear every Rosh Hashana, a Yiddish lullaby or the theme
from "Schindler's List."
A New Voice for Jewish Music
When Dr. Richard Braun started hanging out with his temple's organist in the late '60s, he probably didn't think he'd become a player in the
evolution of synagogue music.
To Life, L’Chayim
Chayim Frenkel grew up in the Pico-Fairfax area, where his father, Uri Frenkel, was cantor for Judea Congregation on South Fairfax Avenue. With his mother, Shari, working as a kosher caterer, both parents were "servants of the Jewish community," Frenkel told The Journal, and "role models of what a mensch (good guy) should be."
The Musical Sound of ‘Lights’
Not all Chanukah music is kiddie music -- even when it's played by kids. On Sunday, Dec. 1, the Skirball Cultural Center will host the West Coast premiere of Russell Steinberg's suite, "Lights On!"
A Life to the Mind
What you notice in almost every shot is the hair: abundant, snow-white, carefully coiffed.
It's an apt metaphor for Jacques Derrida's mind, which is prolific with ideas, yet well-ordered and consistent in its probity and depth. In a new documentary, filmmakers Amy Ziering Kofman and Kirby Dick make arresting cinema from the mind, memories and habits of a man whose life has been devoted to thought.
Derrida, a Jew born in Algeria in 1930, is identified with deconstructionism, a system of thought that challenges established assumptions about the knowledge of what is true and real. But the 85-minute film is far from a static parade of talking heads. Exposition of Derrida's ideas comes mostly through voice-over readings from his books that accompany shots of the philosopher walking from one place to another or scenes of a gritty, industrial Paris rushing past a moving car.
Music in a Universal Key
A Turkish-born cantor will bring tunes of his Sephardi heritage to a festival next week celebrating Southern California's religious diversity.
A Song in His Heart
Singer-pianist-archivist Michael Feinstein's new album, his first with a symphony orchestra, is all standards and all Jewish.
Harmonic Convergence
Singers and lovers of Jewish music will gather in Sepulveda Pass this week for a festival celebrating Jewish choral music of the past and present.
A Tough Farewell
It's hard to know who will suffer the greater wrench this summer: Rabbis Jackie and David Ellenson, as they leave Los Angeles, or Jewish Los Angeles for losing them.
Maseng of Many Hats
Somebody must have perfected human cloning, because no way is Danny Maseng just one person.
When the singer-songwriter-guitarist-actor-poet-dramatist-lay rabbi-teacher-visionary, who will headline the Fund for Reform Judaism's annual fundraiser at Temple Isaiah in Rancho Park on June 13, isn't performing, he may be teaching the Zohar, leading a service at his New York congregation or dashing off a new setting for a passage in Jewish liturgy.
Or he might be working institutionally on innovations in Jewish arts, Jewish worship, Jewish music or Jewish camping.
Hess Kramer Turns 50
It has been a training ground for hundreds of Jewish professionals, and it has caused Shabbat candles to glow in countless homes.
Worth Waiting For
With pomp, ritual and the added joy that comes when a long wait precedes a happy event, the Los Angeles school of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR) ordained its first rabbis May 5 at Wilshire Boulevard Temple.
Into the Words
People are always asking Dvora Weisberg's parents, "Where did you go wrong?"
Heart and Soul
The voice on the CD is smoky, sultry, exotic, spinning out messages of devotion in a foreign tongue. But when a reporter calls at 9 p.m. on a Monday night, the owner of that voice says, prosaically enough, "Let me turn down the TV," and the next thing coming over the wire is Peter Boyle yelling at Doris Roberts.
No News Is Bad News
Thousands of Jews in Southern California, among hundreds of thousands worldwide, carry the gene for a fatal disease that's as prevalent as Tay-Sachs and just as devastating, but local Jewish leaders have failed to let the public know that the disorder exists -- and is now preventable.
Why I Love Yom Kippur
To many if not most Jews, Yom Kippur is an enormous drag. You're not supposed to eat or drink, which, considering how food-centered most other Jewish holidays are, just seems weird.
A Different Path
Update July 29, 2007: Rabbi Meyers passed away last week. Obituary here.
This has been a poignant month for Rabbi Carole Meyers. When The Journal visited her study in late May, she had just filed her last column for the temple newsletter. The next week was also her last family service. It's been more than a month of lasts, leading up to her last Shabbat service.
Rabbi Geller Honored
Next Thursday, May 31, the day school of Temple Emanuel in Beverly Hills, where Geller has served as senior rabbi since 1994, will honor her as this year's Eishet Chayil (Woman of Valor) at its annual scholarship luncheon.
A Fresh Crop
A delicious breeze wafted through the white tent erected on the brand-new, football field-sized parking lot of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR) on May 14, cooling gowned graduates, faculty, and alumni -- plus a bevy of proud relatives and friends -- as the school awarded degrees to a group of freshly minted Jewish educators and communal service professionals and a clutch of rabbis-to-be.
Two Mothers
At first glance, it would be hard to imagine two women with less in common than my mother and my husband's mother. You can begin with the obvious differences in cultural and religious background: my mother grew up Jewish in the Bronx, while my mother-in-law, a Presbyterian, has lived in Virginia all her life.
And while neither exactly bears out a stereotype, each carries somewhat predictable ethnic and regional markers. My mother, Lois, is voluble and huggy, a devotee of popular arts, an ace shopper. Lloyd (yes, Lloyd -- like many other Southern women, she was assigned a family surname as her given name) is much more reticent and reserved. To me, she seems very much the patrician Virginia gentlewoman, while my mother has a large measure of what one novelist once called the "yolky warmth" typical of many Jewish women.
Grasping the Shoah
In a small town in eastern Tennessee, a town without Jews, teenagers are almost halfway through a project that will give them a visual handle on the enormity of the Shoah.
Eighth-grade students at the 425-student Whitwell Middle School -- whose student body is all white except for five Black children -- are amassing 6 million paper clips to represent the 6 million Jews who died during the Holocaust.
Leading With His Left
Rabbi Leonard I. Beerman's art-filled home on a quiet, verdant Brentwood street is a world away from the gritty industrial world in which he lived as a child during the Depression and again as a young man on the cusp of World War II. But it's his experiences in that world of assembly-line workers that led him to the rabbinate and to his 52 years in Los Angeles.
Benefiting Women’s Theater
Doris Roberts, who plays Marie Barone on the popular sitcom "Everybody Loves Raymond," will read the Grace Paley story "Goodbye and Good Luck" at a fundraiser for the Jewish Women's Theatre Project (JWTP) on April 23.
125 and Still Growing
This Sunday, HUC-JIR's Los Angeles school will celebrate the seminary's 125 years with a day of study, song, and partying.
Strangers at the Feast
My worst Passover was my first in Los Angeles, more than half a lifetime ago. I had nowhere to go the first night, and the second night, a college friend took me to an institutional seder that was so sterile and faceless that I went home early and, paraphrasing Scarlett O'Hara, vowed, "As God is my witness, I'll never go without a seder again."
Passover Escapes
At our Ski Passover, experience the thrill of the 2002 Winter Olympics ... Ski the mogul run and view the aerial jumping hill; ride the snowboard half-pipe and ski the giant slalom course ... take a bobsled or luge ride or even try Nordic jumping ...
Help Wanted
If the New Economy has let you down and the Old Economy holds no charms, there may be a career opportunity for you in the Shul Economy.
Keeping Connected
How can anyone command us to be joyous?" Bill Cohen, director of Los Angeles Hebrew High School (LAHHS), paces in front of the junior seminar meeting in the University of Judaism's (UJ) chapel, his hands in the air, his eyes delighted as he conducts a spirited give-and-take with 11th-graders on the theology, rituals and liturgy of Sukkot.
Yiddishe Shvestern
Women always have been the private voice of Yiddish, which is, after all, called the mameloshn (mother tongue).
Open for Discussion
When Kelly Smith and Brian Bloch met at a convention in Long Beach in 1999, sparks flew. As they developed their long-distance relationship via e-mail -- Brian at his computer in Houston, Kelly at hers in the Valley -- they were astounded to find out how much they had in common.
Tough Dames in a Tough Game
Glamour, betrayal, influence and heartache, all in a day's work. In her first book, "Is That a Gun in Your Pocket? Women's Experience of Power in Hollywood," Rachel Abramowitz, a former writer for Premiere magazine, lays out in impressive detail what the first significant wave of women in the film trade, a wave that hit the studios in the 1970s, had to go through to get women to be taken seriously by the industry.
Welcome Home
When her first liturgical tune popped into Debbie Friedman's head almost 30 years ago, she had no clue that she would become the queen of contemporary American Jewish music.
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Filmmaker writes from experience for post-Holocaust drama ‘Mighty Fine’
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