Your Daily Phil: Reimagining the sukkah at Yale + Granting survivors’ wishes

The Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale University recently launched a competition to design a new sukkah for this coming Sukkot, a structure that would be beautiful, inspiring and in line with halachic precepts. Having started Slifka’s inaugural artist residency earlier this year, organizers Aviva Green and Rabbi Jason Rubenstein wanted to build on the center’s legacy of fostering Jewish creativity, Daniela Cohen reports for eJewishPhilanthropy.

Functional and beautiful: “We were talking about what it would look like to have this new sukkah be really focused and grounded in the arts, to not have it be just a functional system that follows all of the rules that it needs to comply with. It’s also an architectural project, an artistic and aesthetic add-on to the space and something that is both grounded in this artistic creative practice and also in sort of the more metaphorical themes that come about,” Green told eJP.

Greater meaning: After speaking with an architect, Green and Rubenstein decided to organize a learning session led by Slifka’s associate chaplain, Rachel Leiken, to provide prospective applicants with a clearer idea of potential concepts, like the clouds of glory, the sukkat shalom (shelter of peace), the inversion of the ephemeral and permanent and the harvest festival. “She talked a lot about the idea of Sukkot as a harvest holiday and what it means to have this temporary dwelling as a part of the harvest,” Green said. “And she also talked about the different ideas of how this building is meant to be temporary. And this sort of like play between a permanent structure and a temporary structure and how that goes into the ways that … people dwell in it and also the way that it’s built.”

What is a Hillel?: The winner will need to travel to the Slifka Center in New Haven, Conn., in the fall to begin work on the structure, as the goal is to have it ready before this year’s Sukkot. In Rubenstein’s view, this type of competition showcases how Slifka conceptualizes the role of a Jewish institution. “If your definition of what a Hillel is, is an entity that puts on programs for students, you would probably never do anything like this,” he said. “When you start to actually take a step back, we’re stewards of a place… and part of our responsibility to the Jewish community is to actually create ways for artists to create beautiful things that people come to.”

Read the full article here.

Note: Below, we preview the first installment of a new investigative series about the 1984 unsolved murder of Rabbi Philip Rabinowitz in Washington, D.C., by Gabby Deutch for eJewishPhilanthropy’s sister site Jewish Insider. Read the full story here.

The door was ajar.

That was the first thing Howard Smith noticed when he arrived at the pale brown townhouse on 25th Street NW, a stop he did not intend to make on the cold, clear morning of Feb. 29, 1984. The home sat just across the M Street Bridge and a short walk from Georgetown in Foggy Bottom, but it was located on a quiet, low-key block that felt a world away from the tony homes in the popular Washington neighborhood.

Smith, an up-and-coming astrophysicist working at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, was already running late for work, but that wasn’t unusual for him that year. His mother had died a few months before, and Jewish law dictates that the immediate family members of the deceased should recite the Mourner’s Kaddish prayer every day for 11 months following the death. Each morning, he walked to Kesher Israel Congregation, a small Orthodox synagogue in Georgetown, and joined its daily minyan, or prayer service. His colleagues knew that he often arrived at the office after 9 a.m.

On that day, he wouldn’t get to work until well into the afternoon. First, he would make a gruesome discovery that would shock Washington and reverberate in Jewish communities around the world.

Normally, the congregation’s longtime rabbi, Philip Rabinowitz, would arrive before the morning prayers started, but sometimes — when the assembled group was especially prompt — he got there a few minutes late. Rabinowitz never skipped the service entirely.

The morning minyan required a prayer quorum of 10 men, and that morning, only nine men showed up, with the rabbi nowhere to be found. Someone called Rabinowitz to see if he could come to fill out the group. When he didn’t answer, the congregants grew concerned.

Most of them had to head off to work or to drop their kids at school. Smith, along with a Department of Energy attorney and two of the synagogue’s unhurried retirees, drove the five blocks to Rabinowitz’s home and walked up to the door.

Smith paused when he saw that the door was not closed. The rabbi would not purposely have left it unlocked; he always kept it dead-bolted shut, fearful of intruders.

Something was wrong.

Read the rest of Part One, ‘An Open Door,’ here.

“The Talmud teaches that ‘Whoever saves a life, it is as if they have saved a world.’ The recent findings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s youth behavior risk survey is a terrifying reminder of how the lives of many teens in this country are at risk,” writes Rabbi Amanda Schwartz, family life director at Judaism Your Way in Denver, in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy.

Many students consider suicide: “The study found that, ‘22% of high school students seriously considered attempting suicide during the past year.’ This number is far higher in girls and LGBQ+ teens. Even more striking is the number of teens who reported feeling sad and hopeless every day. The report makes it clear that our teens are hurting and they need a lifeline.”

Lifelines: “One such lifeline proposed by the CDC is creating a sense of connectedness, which can ‘help reduce high-risk substance use and mental health issues, and help keep students from committing or being victims of violence.’ An amazing opportunity already exists for Jewish students to feel this sense of connection and belonging; the Be Mitzvah process. Yet, to create this feeling for belonging, the Be Mitzvah process requires more flexibility.”

Read the full piece here.