Or Chadash has a beautiful building with a spectacular view of Haifa Bay, and they sponsor many activities going on all the time. It's not the sort of place that appeals that much to us, but we still enjoyed our visit. Groups of people from 2 different congregations in the States were visiting there that evening, together with their respective rabbis. Both visiting rabbis spoke, partly in Hebrew but mostly in English. One of them was quite fluent in Hebrew and had relatively little American accent. The other had a really bad American accent! At any rate, I was pleased to find that I understood virtually ALL the Hebrew, from the American rabbis AND from the rabbi of the congregation.
The most moving part of the evening for both of us was the welcoming of a couple of new converts to Judaism. They live in Katzrin, the city in the Golan that we can see from our house. They were a middle-aged to older couple, and by their names we could tell that they were Russian. They had traveled for something like a year, every week, all the way to Haifa (a drive of at LEAST an hour and a half to two hours!) to study at Or Chadash for their conversion. According to the rabbi, a full 2% of all people converting in Israel study at Or Chadash! However, they all have to appear before and be approved by an orthodox Beit Din (religious court). After introducing them and reading the official proclamation, the rabbis led us in welcoming them by saying 3 times:
את אחותינו at akhoteinu ("You are our sister.")
אתה שחינו ata akhinu ("You are our brother.")
What a wonderful way to welcome new Jews! Both David and I were moved to tears.
2 comments:
Our family visited that Reform synagogue in Haifa during our trip to Israel in 1994 [Ari's bar mitzvah year]. I still recall the beautiful view. Even more I remember Ari's 'aha' moment when he realized that the Israeli bar mitzvah boy got to chant Torah in his native language, Hebrew, while Ari had to learn it anew.
I know what Ari was experiencing. I'm always a little jealous of the bar mitzvah boys, who can read so fluently from the siddur, even the ones who are almost completely secular and have hardly ever seen a siddur before! On the other hand, I've lived with the siddur for years, but when I try to read some parts, I still sound like a 2nd-grader. Of course, some of them do stumble just slightly over words or expressions that are not much used in modern Hebrew, and I also chuckle a little to myself when they "correct" some of the vowels to match modern practice, such as saying "toratcha" instead of "toratecha".
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