Patrilineal Descent

The Reform movement's watershed resolution said you do not need a Jewish mother to be considered a member of the Tribe.

By Dana Evan Kaplan

On March 15, 1983, the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR), the Reform movement’s body of rabbis, passed a resolution prepared by a committee on patrilineal descent entitled “The Status of Children of Mixed Marriages.” The CCAR resolution stated that “we face, today, an unprecedented situation due to the changed conditions in which decisions concerning the status of the child of a mixed marriage are to be made.” Contrary to nearly 2,000 years of tradition, the resolution accepted the Jewish identity of children of Jewish fathers and non-Jewish mothers under certain circumstances.

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A Second Chance for a Jewish Education

By Olivia Gordon for Tablet Magazine

As a child, I hated the classes at my synagogue’s cheder. Now I send my own children there—and I’m falling in love with Sunday school for the first time.

When I first walked my children into Sunday classes at the synagogue in Oxford, England, it felt like coming home after a long journey. The building had changed in the 22 years I’d been away, but the plastic curtains and utilitarian seats in the bleak, post-modern shul were still there.

I never thought I’d come back to Sunday school. Growing up, I hated cheder. Really, truly hated it. One of my clearest memories of childhood is of sitting in the classroom at the Oxford synagogue, aged 7, gazing at that plastic curtain, which separated my small group from the children a year above. “It’s 1986, and I am bored,” I imprinted on my mind, telling myself to remember this uninteresting moment for the rest of my life.

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Jewish Calendar: Solar and Lunar

MyJewishLearning Staff

How the Hebrew calendar works.

The rhythm of Jewish time is determined both by the sun and by the moon. The basic unit of time is naturally enough the day, which is a unit of time determined by the amount of sunlight reaching the earth as it rotates on its axis. In the Western world a day begins in the middle of the night and lasts until the next midnight. Since the standardization of time, days are divided into regular segments of 24 hours.

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Shavuot 101

Shavuot begins after sundown on Saturday night, June 11, 2016

 MyJewishLearning.com    

Shavuot, the “Feast of Weeks,” is celebrated seven weeks after Passover (Pesach). Since the counting of this period (sefirat ha-omer) begins on the second evening of Passover, Shavuot takes place exactly 50 days after the (first) seder. Hence, following the Greek word for “fifty,” Shavuot is also referred to sometimes as Pentecost. Although its origins are to be found in an ancient grain harvest festival, Shavuot has been identified since biblical times with the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai.

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