JewsByChoice.Org

Avi is a Jew by choice who converted to Judaism in the spring of 2006 after two years of study and participation in Ottawa’s Jewish community. Although he began his Jewish journey as part of a Reform congregation, he now calls the Conservative movement home. Read More

For more Information you can email Rabbi Leider of Temple Beth Am directly or if you prefer, simply request more information via the comments section below.
Hope to see you there.
Avi

How cool is this!

Every Bracha comes in Hebrew, English and transliterated. Learn to pronounce by reading the transliterated version, learn to understand by reading in English. And then brush up your Hebrew!
Complete Birkat Hamazon Face it: It’s quite long. But it’s also extremely rewarding to say it.
Some blessings for special occasions. [...]

I’m not sure if anyone remembers but last March we launched a discussion forum here at JewsByChoice.org. Unfortunately our first attempt at a discussion forum only met with limited success, so we’ve decided to start everything over from scratch. Essentially we’ve scrapped the old Discussion Forum software and replaced it with something we believe [...]

Lately Tallit Katan have been coming up a fair amount in conversations I have been having with other JBC’s. For example a female JBC friend of mine was recently telling me how she felt that Jewish men (I’m presuming she was referring to men of the non-ortho variety,) had all sort of physical way [...]

Shalom readers! We are in the process of switching from our old Feed URL to a new one and I wanted to give people a heads up because as of a little later this week, our old feed URL will probably no longer be working.
In order to continue receiving JBC.org RSS feed updates we [...]

I just stumbled across an interesting documentary on the life and work of Simon Wiesenthal (available) online and thought it was worth sharing here on the blog. I haven’t watched it yet myself but I’m guessing that its probably the kind of thing every JBC or soon to be JBC should see at least once. [...]

Update: I originally stated that this was an orthodox only documentary but it looks like I may have been incorrect in assuming this, as some of the scenes may have been filmed at JTS which is a conservative institution. I will update the post again once I find out for sure.
Anyhow as Chavi has [...]

Last May Tamara did a post about the first Abayudaya Ugandan Jew to be ordained at the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies (and in fact the first ever from any American rabbinic program). Anyhow it looks like this Rabbi has been a busy beaver since receiving his ordination, because last week he was involved in [...]

We received the latest issue of Moment Magazine in the mail today and it has an interesting Op-Ed piece in it by Jerusalem based journalist Gershom Gorenberg on the recent conversion controversy in Israel.
Here is a snippet for anyone who is interested, with points of interest underlined by yours truly.

Israel’s Supreme Rabbinic Court [...]

This week my wife is at AJU taking a one week intensive Intro to Hebrew course, so needless to say when I cam across this video I found it to be both timely and relevant to what’s going on at home this week. However besides the personal relevance ‘stuff’ I also believe this video might [...]