Volume 50, Issue 1

A chance discovery at the funeral of her mother’s 103-year-old friend has given a Portland woman the opportunity to fulfill her mother’s dream to become "somewhat famous"—albeit nearly 20 years after her death.

PRAGUE  (JTA)—Ha’aretz columnist Danny Rubinstein had the unrepentant last word after being dropped by a British Zionist organization that objected to his calling Israel an "apartheid" state at a U.N. Palestinian rights conference in Brussels.

JERUSALEM (JTA)—In the run-up to the American-initiated Middle East peace parley in November, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas are accelerating efforts to reach an agreement on the principles of a final peace deal.

The presidents of two Oregon universities were among nearly 300 U.S. university presidents who signed an Aug. 8 full-page ad sponsored by the American Jewish Committee in the New York Times.

Two women, each with a long history of Jewish community service, have partnered to head up this year’s Opening Night celebration, the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland’s Annual Campaign kickoff event.

Charles Vanik dies

NEW YORK (JTA)—Charles Vanik, a former U.S. congressman who co-authored a historic law designed to pressure the former Soviet Union into allowing freer emigration of Jews and other dissidents, died Aug. 30.

SILVER SPRING, Md. (JTA)—"Turn it and turn it again, for everything is in it. ... Stir not from it for you can have no better rule than it" (Pirke Avot 5:25).

As program offerings mushroom at Mittleman Jewish Community Center, the center has created three special membership offers to ensure that the ranks of people flocking to the center to take advantage of those programs will swell as well.

If you want to read unbiased reports about Israel, don’t rely on newspapers, television or even the wire services, said Jerusalem-based journalist Judy Lash Balint, who spoke at Congregation Shaarie Torah Aug. 23.

Librarian Lin Rainier travels the world wearing clothing and accessories from the National Council of Jewish Women’s Council Thrift Shop.

A search for a new cantorial professional that began in January 2006 has come to a successful conclusion for Temple Emek Shalom with the hiring of Cantor Bella Feldman.

The best possible solution to the Israeli-Palestinian impasse in the Middle East may not include the creation of a new Palestinian state—at least not in the view of one seasoned observer.

William Mehlman of Jerusalem is the Israel representative of Americans For a Safe Israel, a New York-based organization that consistently takes a very conservative view on Israel’s existential dilemma.

In conjunction with its change in tax status to a public charity under IRS sections 501(c)(3) and 509(a)(1), the Oregon Jewish Community Foundation has altered its board structure to more broadly represent the community in which it operates.

The Chadad Jewish Center in Clark County will launch a new program designed especially for moms, babies and toddlers with the first five-week session, led by Director Tzivie Greenbe

An effort to revitalize Portland’s sister city relationship with Ashkelon, which was created in 1988, is gaining momentum after being dormant for the past eight years.

Morasha: The Jewish Community Education Alliance is expanding its offering in keeping with its mission to enhance adult Jewish education.

Chabad of Oregon is growing again.

A new Chabad Center serving Jewish students on all Portland-area campuses joins existing Chabad Centers in Portland, Ashland, Hillsboro and Salem, as well as a Chabad House serving the University of Oregon campus in Eugene.

Ad Olam

Rabbi Hanan Sills will be holding Torah and Text classes this fall on Wednesday evenings. Specific dates and times announced at www.adolam.org or call 541-344-7945.

MOSCOW (JTA)—Adolf Hitler appears once a year on stage at a small playhouse in central Moscow.

See the multiple Tony-Award-winning play "Cabaret" and support the Oregon Jewish Museum at the same time.

The OJM benefit includes tickets to the Oct. 10 performance of "Cabaret" by Portland Center Stage as well as an Oct. 1 panel discussion on social issues of the era depicted in the play.

"I’m no prophet, nor a moral exemplar, nor a visionary to whom God speaks," writes David Klinghoffer. "I’m a journalist, one whose observations are informed by the universally relevant insights of traditional Judaism."

Joan Freed’s one-woman musical comedy "Chocolate Confessions" opens at Portland’s World Trade Center Theater, 25 SW Salmon, on Sept. 14 and continues through Nov. 18.

People have often described their visits to Israel by saying that from the moment of their arrival they felt suddenly and inexplicably "at home."

The sights and sounds and smells were familiar to them, even on a first trip. Yet the emotions they felt—the pride, the sense of history and the feeling of inspiration—were brand new.

Critics of Israel often complain that when they try to speak out on the Middle East, they are effectively silenced: Jewish organizations and individual Jewish activists target them for public scorn and blacklisting, denying them an audience and delegitimizing them.

SEPTEMBER

Nearly 10 years after buying property to accommodate its growing congregation, Temple Beth Israel of Eugene broke ground for a new 21,500-square-foot synagogue at the corner of 29th Avenue and University Street in Eugene.

During High Holidays at Congregation Neveh Shalom, teenagers have the chance to bring to life the ideal that their b’nai mitzvot serves as a gateway to participatory Jewish life.

Young adults invited to Gesher holiday dinners

For High Holy Days this year, Gesher, a nationally acclaimed home-based program of outreach to unaffiliated Jews, has expanded its Rosh Hashanah seders for Jewish young adults.

OCTOBER

BERLIN—The remains of more than 50 people, many of them children, were discovered in a mass grave in Menden, Germany. Experts suspected the dead were victims of the Nazis’ so-called euthanasia program, in which disabled people were murdered.

JERUSALEM (JTA)—The Jewish year 5767 saw a widening of the rift between moderates and radicals in the Middle East, which in turn produced a paradox for Israel: The rift heightened both a chan

SAN FRANCISCO (JTA)—When 63-year-old Steven Fruh was growing up in Manhattan, his parents didn’t belong to a synagogue. “They couldn’t afford it,” he says.

LOS ANGELES (JTA)—Most Germans today will acknowledge the wartime atrocities of Hitler's Waffen SS units, but many insist that the regular army Wehrmacht soldiers fought and behaved honorably

WASHINGTON (JTA)—Covering Israel, its relationship with the United States and the influential lobby that straddles the two often requires the basic skills and instincts of a reporter on the neighborhood beat.

NEW YORK (JTA)—Jewish communal executives and non-Jewish politicians will spend the week between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur living on a budget that would barely cover the price of an appeti

WASHINGTON (JTA)—In her new position paper on Israel, Hillary Rodham Clinton comes not only to praise the Jewish state but to bury doubts that she would be any less vigilant in its protection

PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad (JTA)—Hindu temples, Muslim mosques and Catholic churches can be found all over this oil-exporting island famous for Carnival, callaloo soup and calypso. But don't look for synagogues in Trinidad—there aren't any.