By: Dina Kraft
Jewish Telegraphic Agency 
July 13, 2009

Members of the U.S. Maccabiah team participate in a group b'nai mitzvah in Jerusalem on July 6, 2009.

TEL AVIV (JTA) -- Singing "Shalom Aleichem," the group of Maccabiah athletes usher in Shabbat together at a brightly lit hotel dining hall, their Hungarian, Spanish, Finnish and British accents momentarily melting into a unified chorus of Hebrew.

Leading them is an energetic young rabbi who has come to provide spiritual context to their first Shabbat together in Israel ahead of their participation in this week’s Maccabiah Games, the so-called Jewish Olympics.

“It’s exciting to be here getting to know Jews from other countries," said Maxim Poljakov, 23, a member of the Finnish indoor soccer (futsal) team. "It’s a much stronger feeling of our Jewish identity being here than we have in our everyday life in Finland.”

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By Ron Kampeas, Jewish Telegraphic Agency

An open letter to Joseph Lieberman is asking the Connecticut senator to “repent” and support a health care bill with a public option.

“Many of us were delighted in 2000 when you were nominated for Vice-President and proclaimed to all that you were an observant Jew, carrying into the highest level of public service the values of the Jewish people,” said the open letter organized by the Shalom Center, a Philadelphia-based progressive Jewish group, and signed by nearly 2,000 Jews, including 126 clergy.

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By Linda Morel, JTA.org

NEW YORK (JTA) -- Purim is a busy holiday. It starts with an evening reading of the Megillah of Esther, followed the next morning by the second reading of a story that rivals the pace of a best-selling novel.

The plot features a brave and beautiful heroine, a despotic king, a clever uncle and a villain who is destroyed by his own evil plans.

After the morning reading, many people visit family and friends to distribute "mishloach manot," packages filled with two baked goods and a drink. They also give "matanot l’evyonim," donations to the needy.

Finally comes the highlight of any Jewish holiday -- a delicious meal. But unlike most Jewish celebrations, where dining occurs at night, the Seudat Purim is a feast served midday, often lingering until evening. 

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by Sue Fishkoff, JTA.org

Moishe House Baltimore

SAN FRANCISCO (JTA) -- Ben Levinson, 28, was born and raised in St. Louis. He returned after college to find most of the Jewish friends he grew up with had moved away.

That’s not unusual: St. Louis is one of many U.S. cities with shrinking Jewish populations and, as in other cities, the young are the first to leave.

“There are no hard figures, but there’s a tendency to lose young Jews from St. Louis,” said Meg Crane, senior writer at the local Jewish federation.

The last Jewish population study of the city, in the mid-1990s, counted 54,000 Jews.

Levinson thought about leaving, too, he told JTA.

“Then I started to get involved with Moishe House," he said. "That helped keep me here.”

Moishe House is a national organization that provides rent subsidies and a programming budget for groups of three to five Jews in their 20s who agree to live in downtown neighborhoods with large numbers of 20-something Jews. They must turn their home into a hub of regularly scheduled Jewish activities for their peers.

From one house in San Francisco in 2006, the network has grown to 36 houses in 14 countries -- 22 of them in the United States. More than 40,000 young Jews each year take part in Moishe House events, which range from Shabbat meals and Jewish learning to service projects and social get-togethers.

"We're getting a lot of applications," said David Cygielman, 29, the organization’s founder and CEO.

The original goal was to help young Jews build their own community and find meaning in their Judaism. But as the houses multiplied, the peer-led houses of rollicking Jewish energy became seen as a great way for foundations and Jewish federations to engage the next generation of Jews in Jewish communal life, especially in cities where young Jews are moving away.

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by Suzanne Kurtz, JTA.com

Ben & Jerry's co-founder Jerry Greenfield recently spoke at a Jewish Federation of Greater Washington event. (Photo: Jewish Federation of Greater Washington)

WASHINGTON (JTA) -- A scoop of Ben & Jerry’s may taste like heaven, and for company co-founder Jerry Greenfield, the business of making ice cream has a spiritual side as well.

“There is a spiritual aspect to business, just as there is to people,” Greenfield told a crowd of 300 last month at a networking event for the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington.

The ice cream company known for its colorful pint-size containers, funky flavors and creative marketing has implemented smart business practices that have advanced its bottom line as well as its do-good corporate culture.

Raised on suburban New York’s Long Island, Greenfield, 60, and his longtime friend and business partner Ben Cohen met in gym class in junior high school after discovering a shared dislike of running track. They were chubby kids who always enjoyed eating, Greenfield said, and both attended Hebrew school and had their bar mitzvahs at the Reform Congregation of Merrick.

Though a self-described “cultural Jew,” Greenfield said that his religious education helped sensitize him to discrimination, marginalization and the needs of “other people in society and around the world.”

In his mid-20s, after being rejected from some 20 medical schools and not content with working as a lab technician, Greenfield split a $5 Pennsylvania State University correspondence course in ice cream-making with Cohen and embarked on a new business venture.

In 1978, with $12,000 scraped together from loans and savings, they opened Ben & Jerry’s Homemade, Inc. in a renovated gas station in Burlington, Vt. Their single storefront venture would grow eventually into a $300 million global ice cream empire owned by the Unilever Corp.

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