TOP STORY: JEWISH HIGH HOLY DAYS: Away from home for the High Holy Days

c. 1996 Religion News Service (UNDATED) When a research project kept Washington University junior Deborah Schnitzer at school in St. Louis on the Jewish new year, she and her apartment-mates welcomed 25 guests to an after-services potluck brunch. To keep from feeling homesick, the guests consulted their mothers for long-distance help with recipes _ everything […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) When a research project kept Washington University junior Deborah Schnitzer at school in St. Louis on the Jewish new year, she and her apartment-mates welcomed 25 guests to an after-services potluck brunch.

To keep from feeling homesick, the guests consulted their mothers for long-distance help with recipes _ everything from bagels and lox to blintz souffle to Deborah’s mother’s ice cream pie. “We found something at school we were comfortable with. It was an extension of what we had always had at home,”Schnitzer said.


But Howie Berman had a far less nurturing experience a few years ago when he found himself far from home on the High Holy Days, which this year begin at sundown, Sept. 13, with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and conclude at sundown, Sept. 23, with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.

As a freshman at the University of Richmond, a private school in Virginia with few Jewish students, Berman’s Rosh Hashanah celebration was solitary. On Yom Kippur, he recited prayers alone in his dorm room and broke the traditional Yom Kippur fast at a table for one.”It’s harder to be away for the High Holy Days than for my birthday,”he recalled.

But that lonely first experience motivated Berman, now a senior, to reach out. The following year, with the help of the Richmond Jewish Community Center, he connected with a local Jewish family who welcomed him for the Holy Days.”I’m a self-starter to begin with, so I went out on my own and looked for an outlet on my own,”he said.

In Judaism, children officially take on adult religious responsibilities at age 13. A less formal but equally significant rite of passage occurs later when young Jews go to college, join the military or find jobs in distant cities. And as Berman and Schnitzer discovered, observing religious traditions without the support of their families requires some creative responses.”There’s a kind of intimacy and security you get participating in that rhythm (of the Jewish calendar),”Los Angeles psychotherapist Marilyn Hershenson explained.”So for some of these people, they’re going to experience a loneliness they’ve not experienced before.” More than 85 percent of American Jews attend college at some point in their lives, according to Hillel, the Foundation for Jewish Campus Life. Joseph Kohane, executive director of Ohio State University Hillel, which caters to a Jewish student population of more than 4,000, said the High Holy Days represent a particularly delicate moment in a Jewish freshman’s life because the holidays come so early in the school year.”Some feelings of estrangement, loneliness and isolation are inevitably part of their experience.”Kohane said.

In the military it takes a certain kind of bravado to be an observant Jew, according to the Air Force’s 11th Wing senior chaplain, Col. Joel R. Schwartzman, a rabbi stationed at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, D.C.

Schwartzman said that enlisted troops must make a concerted effort to attend local High Holy Day services when there is no military chaplain available.”They have to have some real forwardness about them,”he said.

Senior Airman Kely Davis, 28, enlisted in the Air Force after graduating from the North Carolina School of the Arts in 1990. Davis found there was little organized Jewish life at Bolling, where she has lived with her husband since completing basic training in 1993.


So Davis, currently stationed at Arlington National Cemetery, took it upon herself to initiate a program of regular Jewish services, including High Holy Days services, for Bolling’s transient Jewish population.

Davis estimates that there are as many as 250 Jewish enlisted personnel at Bolling. But Rabbi Schwartzman said that only 10 are officially registered Jewish.

One reason, Schwartzman said, is that some Jewish soldiers are reticent to declare their religion officially _ meaning that”Jewish”would appear on their dog tag identifications _ because of the potential danger of being captured in wartime by individuals who may be hostile to Jews.

Young Jews on and off campus may face confusion and anxiety about their religious identity when away from their families and home communities. However, according to Rabbi Richard Marker, vice president and director of international affairs for Hillel, they must look inward to resolve the nearly inevitable anxiety of spending the High Holy Days away from home.”You can’t overstate what a powerful experience the High Holy Days can be if you create the right kind of environment, which tries to be exactly what it is _ a community that creates itself each year from scratch and yet is recognizable,”said Marker.

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The introspection that characterizes the High Holy Days provides an opportunity for many young Jews to connect with a new community and solidify their newly independent identities.

Young professional Jews, living in a new city after graduating from college or graduate school, face a renewed set of questions of identity and affiliation at High Holy Days.


When Ian Marinoff graduated from college and began a job at the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, an advocacy group in Washington, D.C., he realized that the Jewish-identity issues that had followed him throughout his college career did not disappear on graduation day.”Growing up, I was more observant than my family,”said 22-year-old Marinoff of his Miami childhood. But paradoxically, during four years at Brandeis University, which has 60 percent Jewish enrollment, he grew less observant of Jewish laws such as wearing a skullcap and abstaining from work on the Sabbath, although he maintained a strong Jewish identity.

Marinoff said he now feels a tension between his commitment to the Conservative movement and his self-acknowledged sporadic observance, and he struggles with how his religious commitment will evolve.”It takes really active steps to re-make those connections, which must evolve with you,”he said.

MJP END LEBOWITZ

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