In the boys’ classroom at Lamplighters Yeshivah in the Hasidic Jewish stronghold of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Montessori number-counting boards and decimal beads share space with Hebrew-learning materials. A colorful timeline on the wall shows two strands of world history in parallel: secular on the left, Jewish on the right. A photo of the grand rabbi of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement hangs above a list of tasks that children perform individually: make a fractions poster, practice cursive, learn about the moon’s phases.

Into the classroom on a recent morning came Rivkah Schack, one of the school’s principals, holding a tool whose form, if not its content, would be familiar to any Montessori teacher: a small nomenclature booklet in which the students were to write words from the Bible by hand and illustrate them. In secular Montessori, the booklets might be used to teach botanical terms; here, they were for Hebrew.

“Not to mix our metaphors, but that’s our holy grail,” said Ami Petter-Lipstein, the director of the Jewish Montessori Society, based in Highland Park, N.J., as Ms. Schack gathered a few pupils around her on the rug for a group Hebrew lesson.

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Not many Orthodox rabbis, especially not ones immersed in Jewish hubs of the Northeast, raise their hands to serve small communities such as the Lowcountry, where a kosher deli is harder to find than a snowball or skyscraper.

But Rabbi Michael Davies did.

At 31, he was installed last week as the first rabbi of Dor Tikvah, a new modern Orthodox synagogue in West Ashley.

His installation brings to five the number of rabbis in town leading Jewish entities, remarkable given the area’s Jewish population barely numbers 7,000, most of whom aren’t even affiliated with a synagogue.

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The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby welcomed the presidents of the Council of Christians and Jews to Lambeth Palace yesterday, for their first meeting since Archbishop Justin and Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis took office last year.

The presidents, including Archbishop Justin, the Chief Rabbi, the Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols and Rabbi Laura Janner-Klausner, pledged to take a more upfront role in the CCJ activities at local and national level.

Among the topics discussed were the importance of encouraging local CCJ branches, the need to confront a worrying increase in anti-Semitism, and the role of CCJ in enabling churches and Jewish communities to discuss the situation in the Holy Land in a spirit of mutual respect and generosity.

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Who is a Jew? This question is becoming ever more pressing for Jews around the world. It looks like a religious issue, but is bound up with history, Israeli politics and the rhythms of the diaspora. Addressing it means deciding whether assimilation is a mortal threat, as many Jews think, or a phenomenon to be accommodated. The struggle over the answer will shape Israel’s society, its relations with Jews elsewhere, and the size and complexion of the global Jewish community.

For Orthodox Jews like Rabbi Tubul, the solution is simple and ancient: you are a Jew if your mother is Jewish, or if your conversion to Judaism accorded with the Halacha, Jewish religious law. Gentiles might be surprised that for Jews by birth this traditional test makes no reference to faith or behaviour. Jews may be atheist (many are: apostasy is a venerable Jewish tradition) and still Jews. Joel Roth, a Conservative rabbi at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, likens this nativist criterion to that for American citizenship: Americans retain it regardless of their views on democracy or the constitution. Some strict rabbis even think that a child is not Jewish if born to a devout mother but from a donated gentile egg….

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As Christmas neared, an 85-foot-high tree presided over the little square in front of the Greek Orthodox Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth. Kindergarten children with Santa Claus hats entered the church and listened to their teacher explain in Arabic the Greek inscriptions on the walls, while a group of Russian pilgrims knelt on their knees and whispered in prayer. In Nazareth’s old city, merchants sold the usual array of Christmas wares.

This year, however, the familiar rhythms of Christmas season in the Holy Land have been disturbed by a new development: the rise of an independent voice for Israel’s Christian community, which is increasingly trying to assert its separate identity. For decades, Arab Christians were considered part of Israel’s sizable Palestinian minority, which comprises both Muslims and Christians and makes up about a fifth of the country’s citizens, according to the Israeli government.

But now, an informal grass-roots movement, prompted in part by the persecution of Christians elsewhere in the region since the Arab Spring, wants to cooperate more closely with Israeli Jewish society””which could mean a historic change in attitude toward the Jewish state. “Israel is my country, and I want to defend it,” says Henry Zaher, an 18-year-old Christian from the village of Reineh who was visiting Nazareth. “The Jewish state is good for us.”

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At 45, [Dana] Rothschild faced a terrifying new reality: She was suffering end-stage kidney failure and would need a transplant to save her life.

The normal wait? Seven to 10 years, depending on various factors. And given her medical history, finding a suitable match would take nothing short of finding the old needle in a haystack.

To find that needle, Rothschild traversed an agonizing maze of blocked passageways and frightening unknowns ahead. Her faith dwindled with despair.Read it all.

Held’s new book, Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Call of Transcendence, requires focused attention; it is an academic work with scores of footnotes. But it is also for the general reader who wants to know what exactly Heschel is trying to say in the sometimes repetitive maze of his beautiful utterances. What does Heschel mean when he insists, over and over again, that “God is in need of man?” What kind of reminder or awakening is Heschel proposing when he tells us, “We do not have to discover the world of faith, we only have to recover it. It is not terra incognita, an unknown land; it is a forgotten land.”

Held explains, patiently and clearly. He places Heschel’s thought against the background of other Jewish texts and thinkers from Maimonides to the Kotzker Rebbe, but also explains him in relationship to the Christian thought of his time: Merton, Underhill, Barth, Brunner, and others. How does a Jewish thinker differ from his Christian contemporaries, with whom he was close? (Heschel delivered a eulogy at the funeral of his friend, the great Christian thinker Reinhold Niebuhr).

Held’s emphasis is not on Heschel’s life but on his thought. How does he use the idea of ”˜hester panim,’ the concealment of God, to show God’s presence?

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Sir Nicholas Winton organized the rescue and passage to Britain of about 669 mostly Jewish Czechoslovakian children destined for the Nazi death camps before World War II in an operation known as the Czech Kindertransport.

After the war, Nicholas Winton didn’t tell anyone, not even his wife Grete about his wartime rescue efforts. In 1988, a half century later, Grete found a scrapbook from 1939 in their attic, with all the children’s photos, a complete list of names, a few letters from parents of the children to Winton and other documents. She finally learned the whole story.

In the video [at the link] the survivors gathered to give him a wonderful surprise. Watch it all (Hat tip DR).

For the first time since the 1800s, the first full day of Hanukkah coincides with Thanksgiving Day this year, and according to many in the Jewish community, the two holidays have much more in common than just a calendar date. They both celebrate gratitude, community, and religious tolerance. ”The story of Hanukkah is a story of religious freedom. It’s a story of a people yearning to truly live as full Jews and yet also be fully integrated into a secular society. The story of Thanksgiving is of pilgrims yearning for their own religious freedom and trying to find their identity in a new world that they didn’t even know yet,” says Rabbi David Paskin.

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The once-in-a-lifetime convergence of Thanksgiving Day with the first day of Hanukkah has inspired culinary fusions like deep-fried turkey, song parodies and clever T-shirts. One enterprising lad has even invented the “Menurkey”: a menorah (candelabrum) in the shape of a turkey. Humor aside, one group of American Jews””the members of New York’s Congregation Shearith Israel ””have reason to find in this year’s calendrical happenstance a source both of institutional memory and of profound pride. Of all American synagogues, Shearith Israel has been celebrating both Hanukkah and Thanksgiving from the very beginning.

As with the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, the origins of Shearith Israel trace back to a small group of religious freedom-seekers and a treacherous ocean passage to the New World. In September 1654, 23 Jews set sail from Recife, Brazil, where the Portuguese Inquisition had made practicing Judaism impossible. Intending to return to Europe but captured by pirates mid-voyage, they gave themselves up for lost””until, as a congregational history puts it, “God caused a savior to arise unto them, the captain of a French ship arrayed for battle, and he rescued them out of the hands of the outlaws . . . and conducted them until they reached the end of the inhabited earth called New Holland.”

Once arrived safely in New Holland, better known as New Amsterdam, the refugees formed the first Jewish community in North America.

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Faith should be seen as an integral part of peace-making in the Middle East, said Israel’s ambassador to the United Kingdom in a unique presentation at the annual meeting of the Church of England’s highest legislative body.

“I no longer think the standard negotiator’s toolbox is wide, deep or rich enough to solve the most difficult disputes,” said Ambassador Daniel Taub on Wednesday afternoon, who offered his reflections on negotiating in the Middle East, and spoke about his emerging conviction about the role of faith in reconciliation.

“Faith and our faith texts offer untapped tools for transforming our dialogue.”

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Rabbi Stephanie Alexander of Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim, a Reform congregation downtown, said that unlike in a church or mosque, belief in God is not the singular underpinning of Judaism.

At her synagogue, involvement is as much about worship as assembling in a community and studying Judaism.

“It is an openness to God that is essential,” Alexander said. “It’s a willingness to wrestle with whether or not you believe in God.”

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George Horner, 90, is the oldest musician to make his debut in Boston’s Symphony Hall. During the Holocaust, he played music to lift the spirits of other prisoners, and shared some of those arrangements during a concert organized by the Terezin Music Foundation. NBC’s Stephanie Gosk reports.

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Early Thursday morning at a Jewish high school here, Elan Kainen donned the prayer shawl that had been a gift from his maternal grandfather and recited the prayers of the Shacharit service. Nine hours later, he went through another ritual, one involving pads, cleats and a helmet, as he suited up for what might be the final game of his high school football career.

The Hurricanes of Scheck Hillel Community School were going up against a conference rival, the Berean Christian School Bulldogs, with a spot in the postseason playoffs hanging in the balance. For Elan and his teammates, who attend one of the only Jewish religious schools in the nation to play varsity football, Friday evening is for Shabbat dinner. Their gridiron action takes place under Thursday night lights.

For Scheck Hillel’s team, the fall football schedule bends in deference to the string of holidays that run from Rosh Hashana to Simchat Torah. Before getting the usual locker-room exhortation from their coach, players hear a d’var Torah, a sermon about the week’s Torah portion, from a rabbi. At home games, the Israeli national anthem, “Hatikvah,” is played over the stadium loudspeaker.

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KIM LAWTON: It was a massive party as some 1,200 Conservative Jews gathered to celebrate their movement’s 100th anniversary. The meeting was sponsored by the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, the umbrella group for the nation’s more than 630 Conservative congregations. From its beginning a century ago, the movement has taken a middle road between the more traditional Orthodox Judaism and the more liberal Reform movement. Rabbi Steven Wernick is head of United Synagogue.

RABBI STEVEN WERNICK (United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism): Conservative Judaism is a centrist approach to Jewish life. It’s a Judaism that is deeply rooted in tradition, yet informed by modernity.

LAWTON: In 1971, about 41 percent of American Jews were part of the Conservative movement. But, according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center, today, only 18 percent of US Jews identify with Conservative Judaism. Wernick believes that’s in part because of how well Jews have fared in American society.

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Tom Leopold is a comedy writer who has written and produced for classic shows including “Seinfeld” and “Cheers,” as well as for the shows honoring Tina Fey and Will Ferrell for the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. Three years ago Leopold converted from Judaism to Catholicism. He chronicled that spiritual journey in a one-man show, “A Comedy Writer Finds God.” The show also explores how his family coped with his daughter’s struggle with an eating disorder. Tom can also be found cohosting the radio show “Entertaining Truth” with Fr. Leo Patalinghug on SiriusXM’s The Catholic Channel. Here he talks with Managing Editor Kerry Weber.

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The most important goal in comparative theology is to create a symmetrical model, that is, a structure that compares the traditions of each faith without misrepresenting or idealizing one over the other. This is perhaps the greatest challenge to anyone who does comparative studies, and in this case there are some instances where more fruitful comparisons could have been made. One of the asymmetrical comparisons in this book comes from the use of sources. On the one hand, academic debates about Christology by pluralists (including non-Christians) are portrayed as if they were normative for Christianity. Yet their views are compared with traditional Islamic thinkers. In another instance, the book gives a detailed historical-critical assessment of Jesus but nothing about the historical Muhammad. Eliminating these skeptical analyses of Jesus, or adding them for Muhammad, would actually put the two figures in closer symmetry.

One value to Siddiqui’s book is its honest Islamic inquiry into the relationship of Islam to Christianity. We need more Muslims making honest attempts to understand Christianity. Reading Christian sources and taking them actually to mean what they say is an important step in entering dialogue. This attitude is taken for granted in Western cultures, but it needs to be taught at the popular level in the Islamic world, where polemics still pervade the mindset of religious communities. Finally, Siddiqui’s book is welcome because it encourages Muslims to read the Bible in order to understand the context of their own scripture. Siddiqui’s analysis of the Bible and what Christians believe is important, despite some analytical asymmetries. Instead of repeating polemical mantras of the past, Siddiqui has put forward a book demonstrating that Muslims and Christians are in dialogue. Books like this should be encouraged from academia and the wider Islamic community.

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They’re rarely at worship services and indifferent to doctrine. And they’re surprisingly fuzzy on Jesus.

These are the Jewish Americans sketched in a new Pew Research Center survey, 62 percent of whom said Jewishness is largely about culture or ancestry and just 15 percent who said it’s about religious belief.

But it’s not just Jews. It’s a phenomenon among U.S. Christians, too.

Meet the “Nominals” ”” people who claim a religious identity but may live it in name only.

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A priest has been appointed to look into the possible canonisation of G. K. Chesterton, the writer known for the Father Brown stories. The move has reopened the debate over his alleged anti-Semitism.

The Bishop of Northampton, the Right Rev Peter Doyle, has appointed Canon John Udris to carry out a fact-finding exercise to consider the possibility of opening a “cause” for Chesterton.

The writer, who died in 1936, lived in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, which is part of the Northampton diocese. Like Cardinal Newman, he was a convert from Anglicanism. He smoked cigars and was an accomplished journalist.

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Let’s say that your religion considers one day a year to be especially holy. On that day, people complete a 10-day period of self-examination and making amends. Meanwhile, God decides what is in store for the coming year. Members of the community ”” even many who rarely attend services ”” gather to chant special prayers.

ow imagine that, to be there on that day, you have to pay hundreds of dollars.

That is the situation faced by millions of American Jews every Yom Kippur. At most synagogues, to attend services on that holiday, which this year ends Saturday night, one must have paid annual dues or have bought special tickets. The fees also cover tickets for Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, which was last week.

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On the eve of Rosh Hashana last year, as Lois Kittner was passing through security at the airport in Newark, a security screener halted her. He had a question about several strange items in her carry-on bag. One looked like some kind of animal bone; the other was a piece of metal that came to a suspiciously narrow point.

So Ms. Kittner set about explaining. She was a cantorial student at the Academy for Jewish Religion and was headed to North Carolina to help lead services at a synagogue there. The bony thing was a shofar, the instrument fashioned from a ram’s horn and blown to herald the Jewish New Year. As for that supposed weapon, it was a yad, a thin rod with a tip shaped like a pointing hand, which is used to follow the handwritten text on a Torah scroll.

“You don’t want to be that person in security who looks scared and uncomfortable,” Ms. Kittner, 56, recalled in a recent interview. “It didn’t even occur to me there’d be a problem. Friends tell me there’s never a problem with shofars when you go to Miami.”

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The American bar mitzvah, facing derision for Las Vegas style excess, is about to get a full makeover, but for an entirely different reason.

Families have been treating this rite of passage not as an entry to Jewish life, but as a graduation ceremony: turn 13, read from the Torah, have a party and it’s over. Many leave synagogue until they have children of their own, and many never return at all ”” a cycle that Jewish leaders say has been undermining organized Judaism for generations.

As Jews celebrate the new year Wednesday night, leaders in the largest branch of Judaism, the Reform movement, are starting an initiative to stop the attrition by reinventing the entire bar and bat mitzvah process.

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One of the highlights of the Rosh Hashanah service for me is the thanksgiving song of Hannah, which speaks of God’s power to change, to give all that is needed and more. It is with this song as inspiration that I wish you every blessing. May we be able to say with Hannah, ”˜There is no Holy One like the LORD, no one besides you; there is no Rock like our God!’

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Society is “losing the plot” as it becomes more secular and less trusting, the UK’s outgoing Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks has said.

Lord Jonathan Sacks told the BBC the growth of individualism over the past 50 years was responsible for a pervasive breakdown in trust.

He highlighted the 2008 financial crisis and the declining marriage rate.

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On the Sunday in mid-June when a yeshiva in Manhattan ordained three women as Orthodox Jewish religious leaders, Nelson Mandela lay in a Pretoria hospital for the second week with a life-threatening lung infection. Six time zones and 8,000 miles separated these two events. One golden thread, however, bound them together.

That connection was Sara Hurwitz, the dean of Yeshivat Maharat, which had educated the women. She was the first woman ever to have been designated a maharat ”” an acronym from the Hebrew words for a teacher of Jewish law and spirituality ”” and to subsequently receive the title of “rabba” from the maverick Orthodox rabbi who had trained her, Avi Weiss. For Ms. Hurwitz, born and raised in South Africa during the turbulent years of apartheid, Mr. Mandela had long served as the inspiration for her journey to breaking the gender barrier in the Orthodox Jewish rabbinate.

“I looked at this person as someone who could have been so angry and so disappointed at the land that incarcerated him for so many years for civil disobedience,” Rabba Hurwitz, 36, said in a recent interview. “And he walked out of prison and formed a peaceful government. He could have focused on the injustice of it all, the time he had lost. But instead he saw this newfound freedom as a chance to make change and do what was right. Marching forward, one step after the other, toward justice, without anger.”

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“Spiritual Nazism.” Those are the first words out of my rabbi’s mouth when I tell him I’m reporting on Messianic Judaism. To him, the prospect of Jews accepting a Christian salvation narrative, but still identifying as Jews, constitutes nothing short of the destruction of the spiritual life of a people.

But after nearly a year of studying and reporting on this phenomenon, I have my doubts about this dire indictment. Messianic Judaism, despite its promoters’ predictions, will not be radically changing Judaism anytime soon. It is, however, radically changing how Jews and evangelicals relate to one another and how evangelical, Pentecostal and charismatic Christians perceive Judaism, Jewish-Christian relations and the politics of the Middle East.

To some Jews, the growth of Messianic Judaism represents a mortal threat. There are an estimated 175,000 to 250,000 Messianic Jews in the United States, 350,000 worldwide, and 10,000 to 20,000 in Israel. This isn’t too dramatic, although it’s difficult to assess the future impact of new religious movements as they’re developing””who knew in the mid-19th century that the Mormon Church would be what it is today?

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The morality of payday loan firms is under the spotlight. But what do faiths say about money lending and interest?

In general, usury defined as the lending of money at high interest rates, is frowned upon by religion. The three Abrahamic faiths – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – take a very firm stance against it.

Several passages in the Old Testament condemn usury, in particular when lending to the poor and destitute. This led to lending money at interest being forbidden in the Jewish community, explains Dr Alastair McIntosh from the Centre for Human Ecology: “In Jewish tradition charging interest was forbidden within the community, but it was permitted to outsiders.”

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If I ruled the world I would resign immediately. It’s hard enough, individually and collectively, to rule ourselves, let alone others. But if offered an hour before I resigned I would enact one institution that has the power to transform the world. It’s called the Sabbath.

The idea of a weekly day of collective rest was unprecedented in the ancient world. Months and years are natural ways of structuring time, based respectively on the appearance of the moon and the sun. But the seven day week corresponds to nothing in nature; nor does a day of rest.

The Greeks and Romans could not understand the Sabbath at all. They wrote that the Jews kept it because they were lazy. The interesting fact is that within a relatively short space of time after making that judgement, Greece, and later Rome, declined and fell. Without institutionalized rest, civilizations, like individuals, eventually suffer from burnout.

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In yesterday’s press there was a fascinating article about adoption parties, held by some local authorities to bring together groups of prospective parents and children so that social workers can find the right match between them. Some people are critical of the idea. They say it’s like speed dating for toddlers. It’s just not the right way to decide. And at such gatherings, emotions are fraught on both sides, prospective adopters wondering whether the right match will be made, some of the children fearing they will never find a forever-family.

Regardless of the merits and demerits of deciding this way or that, the story made me feel all over again what an extraordinary gesture it is to adopt a child, creating a bond of kinship by an act of choice and love. And it reminded me of one of the most unexpected stories in the Bible….[which] occurs near the beginning of the book of Exodus.

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Writer and scholar Reza Aslan was 15 years old when he found Jesus. His secular Muslim family had fled to the U.S. from Iran, and Aslan’s conversion was, in a sense, an adolescent’s attempt to fit into American life and culture. “My parents were certainly surprised,” Aslan tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross.

As Aslan got older, he began his studies in the history of Christianity, and he started to lose faith. He came to the realization that Jesus of Nazareth was quite different from the Messiah he’d been introduced to at church. “I became very angry,” he says. “I became resentful. I turned away from Christianity. I began to really reject the concept of Christ.”

But Aslan continued his Christian scholarship, and he found that he was increasingly interested in Jesus as a historical figure. The result is his new book, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth ”” a historical look at Jesus in the context of his time and Jewish religion, and against the backdrop of the Roman Empire.

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