Letters

LETTERS To the Editor: Just a short update on the Reines family described in Blu Greenberg's sensitive "Encounters in Russia," (February-March 1977). Dr. Reines writes his American relatives from...

...The problem is that while the Catalog tried to fill a small gap it fell into a big hole...
...We read them aloud from time to time, and we look forward eagerly to more in this series...
...The Catalog was supposed to be a retreat from "prefabricated, spoonfed, near-sighted Judaism," and has been taken to be predigested pablum instead...
...I stood with the Reines family at the Absorption Center looking at the lights of Jerusalem...
...We are grateful to moment for providing us this opportunity, and we are proud to subscribe to a magazine that is clearly interested in the views not only of its writers—but of its readers as well...
...There are no easy answers or comprehensive solutions to the complex issues of creative Jewish living...
...Richard A. Siegel Port Jefferson, New York To the Editor: One of the things we like best in moment is the occasional appearance of Marc Gellman's series of children's midrashim...
...The failure of the Jewish Catalog is that people expect it to be an answer— some even want it to be "the answer"—to the complexities of modern Jewish life...
...In fact, I would question the use of the term "movement" to describe such disparate and unintegrated phenomena as synagogue havurot (more often than not, simply renamed study groups), tz'dakah collectives, university batim, and kosher food cooperatives...
...To the Editor: I just had to write to tell you how much our family enjoyed and appreciated the poll on intermarriage...
...The failure is not in its inability to live up to the expectations placed upon it, but rather that Jews are placing these expectations on it, rather than on themselves...
...One night after dinner we all stayed around the table to fill it out...
...It is becoming increasingly apparent to me, and Novak's article reinforces this feeling, that the Catalog has failed in spite of its commercial success...
...The Catalog proposes some approaches—tentative and often conflicting—with the intention to open "an awareness that there are manifold ways of approaching the facets of Judaism...
...Please keep them coming...
...In the absence of anything approaching a guiding text of ideology for this kind of Jewish commitment, one naturally looks to the Catalog as a kind of authority by default...
...Thelma Cooper Albany, New York...
...Although it could have been done in one minute, our family spent well over an hour in animated discussion over our various answers...
...As you know, we Soviet Jews are completely deprived of any possibility to get a Jewish education...
...The proliferation of disconnected groups appropriating the trendy name "havurah" does not attest to a vigorous or vital movement...
...To expect it to be more—to provide the integrative structure for a personal Jewish life-style—is witness not to the Catalog^ failing, but to the failure of those who read it to accept responsibility for their own Jewish lives...
...However, no matter how it is tugged and pulled, lauded and canonized, the fact is that neither the Jewish Catalog nor the Second Jewish Catalog—or any number of volumes, for that matter—can be the descriptive cure for the ills of the Jewish community...
...I think that for new immigrants from the USSR it is as necessary to be acquainted with such things as Torah as it is to study Hebrew...
...It's hard for us here," said Leonid's still-fiery seventy-three-year-old mother, "but all new beginnings are hard, and here we are starting a new life...
...The Catalog proposes ways of approaching them, yet the reader's desire seems to be to escape from them entirely...
...Glenn Richter Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry New York, New York To the Editor: William Novak's article "The Future of Havurah Judaism" (January) merely begs the question...
...Yet even more questionable is Novak's praising the "movement" for its eclecticism which carries "no overriding organizational or theological structure," on the one hand, while criticizing that same movement for not developing a systematic ideology on the other...
...It's important for us to learn at least something about Jewish values and to understand why the Torah for us is the guide to living...
...Reines writes his American relatives from the Me-vasseret Tzion Absorption Center near Jerusalem: "There are several things I expected to find here, but didn't...
...As Novak described, the conflicts of living as a Jew in the contemporary world are confusing and frustrating...
...And I think it should be included as a necessary part of the Ulpan program...
...Ian and Iris Fineberg Lancaster, Pennsylvania The series resumes elsewhere in this issue...
...Of greatest concern to me, however, is the role in which the Jewish Catalog is cast in this discussion...

Vol. 2 • April 1977 • No. 6


 
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