Rabbi

It wasn't so much that about 85 high school kids were in a synagogue for a Passover Seder; it was that there was hardly a Jew in sight. But that was the idea for this gathering, to teach Catholic high school students about the holiday that commemorates Moses' leading the Jews out of Egypt and slavery. "Your faith wouldn't have existed if we weren't rescued from Egypt," Rabbi Isaac Jeret told the students who gathered at Congregation Ner Tamid in Rancho Palos Verdes last week.

Re "Rabbis criticized for Gaza stance," March 25 Wow! Israel's army uses rabbis to serve as chaplains. Who could've figured that? Next we'll be told they minister in Hebrew. Sounds like a disproportionate praying force versus Gaza Arabs, who probably don't have a single rabbi in their chaplain corps. Joe Siegman Los Angeles -- To the almost 1,400 Palestinians killed during the winter assault on the Gaza Strip, it really doesn't matter what the military rabbis told the soldiers.

The winter assault on the Gaza Strip was officially portrayed in Israel as an attempt to quell rocket fire by militants of Hamas. But some soldiers say they also were lectured about a more ambitious aim: to banish non-Jews from the biblical land of Israel. "This rabbi comes to us and says the fight is between the children of light and the children of darkness," a reserve sergeant said, recalling a training camp encounter.

Two and a half years ago, a young Orthodox rabbi from New York set down in the port city of Vladivostok, family in tow. Yisroel Silberstein came with a mission, and he expected to stay for good. Out on Russia's rough-and-tumble eastern frontier, Silberstein set out to revive a Jewish life that, he says, had almost disappeared. He reached out to several thousand local Jews, organizing services, holiday parties and a summer camp where children learned about Judaism and swam in the Sea of Japan.

A major Islamic group based in Orange County has questioned U. S. customs officials about the recent deportation of an Australian family that was detained at Los Angeles International Airport and prevented from attending a reunion with a seriously ill relative in La Habra.

Rabbi David L. Lieber, the president emeritus of what is now American Jewish University and the guiding force behind a modern Torah commentary for Conservative Judaism, died of a lung ailment Monday at his Beverly Hills home. He was 83. Lieber was president for 29 years of the University of Judaism, which last year was renamed American Jewish University after merging its Bel-Air campus with Brandeis-Bardin Institute in Simi Valley.

Groups of bearded men in black blazers and wide-brimmed hats prayed aloud and chanted inside the Chabad-Lubavitch headquarters in Brooklyn on Friday, grieving the loss of friends killed in the terrorist siege in India this week. Many had not slept in two days. They had been frantically e-mailing and calling contacts around the world, searching for any word on the people being held hostage in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish center during the terrorist attacks in Mumbai.

Just minutes before donning her prayer shawl, Rabbi Lisa Edwards beckoned the couple she was about to marry and sat them down to run through her checklist. As usual, Edwards had meticulously compiled notes about the ceremony in the pages of a giant black binder. She reviewed the lineup of guests who would read during the ceremony of the two men. "Lee and Marvin," she said, naming Josh Wayser's mother and her husband. "It's 'Martin,' " Wayser corrected her. She grimaced.

The bank robber was looking to steal a getaway car and had a choice of two minivans, parked next to each other outside Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld's house here. One was a nondescript silver Toyota Sienna. The other was an old Dodge Caravan decorated with Stars of David and sporting a rooftop ad for a synagogue. Guess which one the robber took. "I don't know what he was thinking," said a mystified Herzfeld, rabbi of Ohev Sholom synagogue. "He thought he would blend right in?" Police say the robber used the synagogue's van when he held up a Commerce Bank in suburban Clinton, Md., on Sept.

Southern California's largest collection of rabbis voted overwhelmingly this week to oppose Proposition 8, the proposed amendment to the California Constitution that would define marriage as between only a man and a woman. Leaders of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California -- with representatives from the Reconstructionist, Reform, Conservative and Orthodox movements -- said they wanted to protect the civil rights of gay and lesbian couples. "For many rabbis it speaks on a personal level in terms of people they deal with whose lives have been impacted over the issue," said Rabbi Stewart Vogel of Temple Aliyah in Woodland Hills and the board's president.