JewsByChoice.org

I didn’t get to the Selichot service in Atlanta. The rehearsal dinner that night went to 10:30pm and although there would have just been time to get to the shul for the beginning of the service, I was too tired and just wanted to go to bed. It had been a week of late nights [...]

It is not all that uncommon for the non-Jewish or converted spouse of a Jew to help their Jew-by-birth spouse to re-connect with or become more serious about their Jewish identity. In my own household, I was the one who pushed to make our kitchen kosher, not my JBB husband’s idea. Seeing that happen is [...]

I’m glad you had a good serious discussion with your boyfriend. I don’t know your boyfriend’s parents, but just be sure that your plans do not depend on waiting for them to “come around”. They might come to accept you with a non-Orthodox conversion as “Jewish”, but it sounds like it could be years after [...]

I’m going to be in Atlanta this weekend for the wedding of a friend—the best man at our wedding 23 years ago. I’m hoping that after the rehearsal dinner Saturday night, we will be able to get to a community-wide Conservative Selichot service that is less than 2 miles from our hotel. Luckily, the service [...]

@Tara: “Joyful”? Well, when I finally converted, yes. But I spent a lot of time in the 25 years leading up to it agonizing about what I wanted to do and what I felt I could or could not do. “Soul searching” is hard. And in looking back, I realize that because it was hard, [...]

Well, I was writing a long reply, but the Chabad rabbi suggesting a quickie Orthodox conversion in Canada has definitely got me wondering about my assumptions about his behavior. @Dena: A Chabad rabbi might think a non-O convert (whom he considers to be non-Jewish) is leading a nice Jewish boy to a severe transgression of intermarriage, [...]

But were those non-religious people Jews by Choice? I’m guessing that they were Jews by Birth, which is entirely different. The reality is that some Jews, particularly those who affiliate with Orthodox groups, will have trouble accepting your Jewish status regardless of how observant you are (in fact, if you are quite observant, they will [...]

About Koach trips: Conservative rabbis will accept any conversion that includes circumcision (for males), immersion, and a beit din (regardless of the movement affiliations of the members of the beit din). And if for special cases, they are willing to be very lenient so as not to deny someone’s Jewish status. So I doubt conversion [...]

You should ask the OU one directly if there is an issue with your non-Orthodox conversion. I’m sure that you would not be allowed on the “Orthodox” trips, and there might still be an issue on the “non-affiliated” ones. The applications for OU children’s summer camps ask questions about ancestry, so their trip applications might [...]

Well, I just looked randomly looked at a few prayers on the Kakatuv website and I’m kind of disappointed because they are not complete: all the prayers for a given service are not given and only part of some of the prayers are given. For example, it gives only the first paragraph of Aleinu (in [...]

@Rebecca, If you like the “interlinear” translations, you’ll like the Kakatuv website which uses that mode of “translation” too. But even better is that the transliteration uses standard Israeli pronunciation, not Ashkenazi like the Artscroll. We have a few members in our minyanim who still daven (pray) or leyn (chant Torah) with the Ashkenazi pronunciation. [...]

Mechon Hadar resources for the High Holidays:

Audio files and also documents such as explanation booklets and study resources

Selichot
http://www.mechonhadar.org/web/guest/selihot

Rosh Hashanah
http://www.mechonhadar.org/web/guest/rosh-hashanah
(Includes a pdf of “Explanation booklet for Rosh HaShanah”: “designed to make the service more accessible to beginners”)

Yom Kippur
http://www.mechonhadar.org/web/guest/yom-kippur
(Includes a “Explanation booklet for Yom Kippur”)

As a traditionalist, what i like about the “Mishkan T’filah” is that it does have most of the traditional prayers as options. Last year, when a minyan member died, one of the shiva services for weekday mincha/maariv was held at the Reform synagogue where she had been the director of the pre-school. A traditional service [...]

I am grateful that that is one chumra that even our most observant Orthodox friends did not follow. Various Orthodox friends invited us to their home for meals on Yom Tov before I converted. And they ate at our home even when I was a non-Jew who was cooking the food. As I recall, you [...]

This is a site with Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform prayers in Hebrew, Transliteration, and English translation: http://kakatuv.com/prayers.html It has Shacharit for Shabbat for all three streams and some of the weekday prayers for Orthodox and Conservative. Here is an awesome site that let’s you create your own Shabbat service ( Friday Evening Service, Saturday Morning [...]

@Brittni: I personally really like Rabbi Hammer’s books. They are definitely Conservative in flavor in that the full, traditional liturgy is taken as a given, but with a lot of information about historical context and sources (e.g. Positive-Historical Jewish study), while at the same time there is also discussion of spirituality and the relationship between [...]

Here are links to the Amazon listings for the books by Rabbi Hammer:
“Entering the High Holidays” http://tinyurl.com/2a29w9m
“Entering Jewish Prayer” http://tinyurl.com/2b7ssuc

And a review in the Forward about “Or Hadash” http://www.forward.com/articles/8465/

I was looking for our copy of the new “Mahzor Lev Shalem” which was not on the shelf I expected it to be on. When I finally found that book, I also found a book that had simply been stacked with it, but seems appropriate to the season: “On Apology” by Aaron Lazare (Oxford Univ [...]

55 minutes! What in the world did they do for nearly an hour? Read all the wonderful piyyutim that weren’t in the Harlow? I think I’ll pass on that one unless I ever have really bad insomnia. One thing that is interesting on the RA website is a spread sheet comparing the Lev Shalem with [...]

Here’s the website for information on the new Mahzor Lev Shalem: http://www.rabbinicalassembly.org/welcome.html It is a very nice machzor. When my family bought the four copies that we will need plus another for “guests”, we also bought a copy for our own family’s library. We were lucky in being able to get it at the special [...]