Greetings From Space
NEW YORK — Astronaut Garrett Reisman sent greetings from space to Israel on its 60th birthday. Reisman, 40, a New Jersey engineer, is the international space station’s first Jewish crew member. He’s been in space since March 11. “Every time the station flies over the State of Israel, I try to find a window… it never fails to move me when I see [its] familiar outline,” he said.
New OU Head Named
NEW YORK — The rabbi of the largest U.S. Orthodox shul outside the New York area was named to lead the Orthodox Union. Rabbi Steven Weil, 42, of Beth Jacob Congregation in Beverly Hills, Calif., will succeed Rabbi Tzvi Hersh Weinreb as the umbrella group’s executive vice-president on July 1, 2009. The graduate of Yeshiva University’s rabbinical seminary has a master’s in business from New York University. His congregation has 750 member families.
Parents Win Trip
NEW YORK — Taglit-Birthright Israel awarded free trips to Israel to 16 parents of program alumni. It announced the winners May 8 of its “Let My Parents Go” contest. North American Birthright alumni were asked to submit video applications on why their parents should be given a free trip. Since 2000, Birthright has sent more than 160,000 Jews aged 18 to 26 on free 10-day trips to Israel. The videos of 60 parents were posted on Birthright’s website, and the public chose the winners, all of whom are American.
Boycott Rejected
NEW YORK — Three Orthodox groups rejected calls for Jewish tourists to boycott the Beijing Olympics. The Orthodox Union, Agudath Israel of America and the National Council of Young Israel issued statements in the days after a recent call by 185 Jewish leaders – mostly clergy – to boycott the Games. The call was initiated by two Orthodox rabbis in New York, Haskel Lookstein and Irving Greenberg, who drew parallels to Germany’s use of the 1936 Olympics to whitewash Nazism and noted that China is preparing a kosher kitchen for tourists. The Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee have also rejected the boycott. Other U.S. Jewish groups, including the Reform movement, want President George W. Bush to boycott the opening ceremony, which they say will have symbolic value but won’t harm athletes.
Uganda Gets Rabbi
LOS ANGELES — Rabbi Gershom Sizomu will become the first officially ordained rabbi of Uganda’s Abayudaya Jews. Rabbi Sizomu, like his father and grandfather, has served as the isolated African community’s spiritual leader. After five years at American Jewish University in Los Angeles, he will become a Conservative rabbi May 19. Some 1,000 Abayudaya Jews live in five Ugandan villages. The group, which has been isolated from the Jewish world since its 1919 founding, based its traditions on a literal reading of the Old Testament until western rabbis visited in the mid-1990s. Most converted in 2004.