A German-Trained American Rabbi in Yorkshire

I heard the term “fake Jew” for the first time at a small Shabbos dinner gathering many years ago.  It was actually a celebratory pot-luck for a friend that had just had her Beit Din and had successfully converted to Judaism.  She had an Israeli boyfriend and had planned to move to Israel with him, but her conversion had been a personal matter that predated this relationship.  One of the invitees in a quite varied group was an older lady, a born Jew of Sephardic heritage.  She had at one point after the discussion of making Aliya asked my friend about her own parentage.  When my friend responded and then commented that she has just converted, the guest nodded and quipped, “Oh, so you are one of those fake Jews.” This wasn’t the last time that I have heard this term or some crass variation used.  Sometimes those commenting simply are repeating something that they have unfortunately learned and on which they have never been challenged, others have driven the words into others’ f

It was an especially difficult week to be a Jew.  The week started as I opened my computer Sunday morning to read of the shooting at the Jewish Museum in Brussels, Belgium.  Then came the news of the European elections where far right parties all over Europe had picked up an astonishing amount of votes, including three seats in the Parliament for the Greek essentially neo-Nazi Golden Dawn Party.  And of course before last Shabbos even began, the news starting coming out of the states of yet another mass shooting.  Perhaps I should say it was a particularly hard week to be a human. Usually what a rabbi is supposed to do is to find a great passage in the weekly Torah portion that will give us some sense of comfort in these times.  Religious attendance and communal gatherings will go up for a few weeks especially in Santa Barbara and in Brussels as we try to make sense of all these things and hope that our rabbis and priests and imams and ministers and teachers and philosophers can f

Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany January 27, 2014 It has become tradition on such occasions to chant a version of our memorial prayer, El Malei Rachamim, to the martyrs of the Shoah.   But as we listen to these words and hear the melody, we also need to remember that before martyrs become martyrs they are victims, and before they are victims they are subject to discrimination, violence and displacement, and before they can be so treated they must have been dehumanized. In the Shoah those subjected to this progression of horror were not only Jews, but as well mentally and physically handicapped, political opponents of National Socialism, Roma, Sinti, Slavic peoples, POWs, religious dissidents, homosexuals and transsexuals.   All were subject to a type of de-humanization before the mass mobbing could take hold and inevitably lead to genocide. Now here we are today in Germany, doing that which is so critical—gathering together with youth, concerned citizens, members of the