RELIGION NEWS SERVICE

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Paul O’Donnell, Editor-in-Chief

Index of Daily Report
Friday, January 3, 2014

Six articles are being transmitted today:

Congregations turn to compost for lessons on life, death and the environment
By ADELLE M. BANKS

Family, ethics, medicine and law collide in Jahi McMath’s life — or death
By CATHY LYNN GROSSMAN

Seventh-day Adventist pastor plans to flirt with atheism for 12 months
By KIMBERLY WINSTON

Holocaust survivor meets her liberator after 68 years
By NAOMI NIX

COMMENTARY: Jewish wisdom and the progressive agenda
By JACK MOLINE

CORRECTION: A Brooklyn museum has every biblical animal — but no money to stay open
By DAVID GIBSON

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Congregations turn to compost for lessons on life, death and the environment
900 words
By ADELLE M. BANKS
c. 2014 Religion News Service

WASHINGTON (RNS) The wheelbarrow outside the sanctuary was overflowing with vegetable scraps; decomposing matter filled the baptismal font; and a pile of rich brown soil replaced the Communion table.

Ashley Goff, minister for spiritual formation at Church of the Pilgrims, wanted to convey a message about the cycle of nature this fall, and she could think of no better analogy than the congregation’s growing enchantment with compost.

“I wanted them to see the process of life and death and change,” she said of her Presbyterian Church (USA) congregation of 70. “It’s a dying and a rising, where new life begins.”

Across the country in the past decade, hundreds of houses of worship have started composting, relating it to theological concepts of resurrection and stewardship.

Stacey Kennealy, sustainability director of GreenFaith, said congregations used to be put off by the challenges of composting — such as odor and pests — but now urban, suburban and rural houses of worship are digging into the practice.

“Compost is good for gardens, and as more and more congregations ‘green’ their food operations, and focus on waste reduction, they view composting as part of that,” she said.

Some congregations create the compost on site and others work with a commercial composting company that makes weekly collections.

Goff has written an article for a forthcoming issue of Union Theological Seminary’s Quarterly Review about how her congregation turned from ignoring its soil to preparing food for hungry neighbors with vegetables grown from its composted soil.

She compares her time in her church’s backyard to making lasagna — spreading vegetable scraps in one layer, straw in the next.

“We have a way of discarding our scraps that is a holy process rather than just unconsciously throwing it into the trash can as if it doesn’t matter anymore,” said Goff, who oversaw the blessing of her church’s first compost bin in 2010.

Yaira Robinson, associate director of Texas Interfaith Power & Light, said a synagogue and a Methodist church in Austin have used new composting services available in that city.

“Most everything from the lunch is compostable because we switched to compostable plates,” she said of the weekly Saturday meal served by Congregation Agudas Achim, a Conservative synagogue that she attends.

With reports that 40 percent of food goes to waste, Robinson said, houses of worship are starting to take action.

“That’s just outrageous, especially when congregations are many times on the front line of people who don’t have enough to eat,” she said.

Barbara Rossing, a New Testament professor at Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, said more than earthy-crunchy congregations have taken to composting.

“It’s not just a bunch of liberal, left-wing people,” she said. “It’s people who’ve grown up on going to camp, people who have grown up on farms, people who for some reason love the watershed, love saving. I think it taps into some of the spirit of conservation and conservative values, too.”

The theological school produces 400 cubic feet of compost each year for its vegetable and landscape gardens, diverting more than 800 cubic feet of waste from the landfill, said Jim Schaal, sustainability coordinator.

From Baptists in North Carolina to Sikhs in California, composting has been adopted as an environmental and humanitarian pursuit. Compost in Methodist and Jewish vegetable gardens enriches produce delivered to local food banks.

Rabbi Fred Scherlinder Dobb said the leftovers from preparations for the vegetarian luncheon served after services each Saturday at his Bethesda, Md., congregation amount to “a lot of peels, cores, stems, coffee grinds, etc.,” that get turned in a hand-cranked metal drum.

“Genesis 2 tells us that the human (adam) comes from the earth (adamah), and that our mandate is ‘to serve and to guard’ the land,” said Dobb, who leads Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation. “That starts, literally, with guarding and conserving the organic matter upon which our crops and our lives depend.”

Maryland Presbyterian Church, in the northern suburbs of Baltimore, initially used its own composter to recycle coffee grounds and leaves. But members were concerned that the large amounts of paper towels used by their Montessori school could not be recycled. Now they work with a veteran-owned composting company and have reduced their weekly trash for the dump from six cans to two.

“We are painfully aware of how Earth’s complex systems are in danger of breaking down, to a large extent because of how we humans have exploited Earth’s resources and have ignored the ways in which we pollute the air, the water and the soil,” said Bill Breakey, a member of the church’s Environmental Stewardship Action Group.

At St. Columba’s Episcopal Church in Washington, composting started with the nursery school and now the children are setting the example for the adults of the church, said science teacher Kate McLynn.

“Our composting and recycling was so successful at our church picnic this summer that we had only a couple pounds of waste from a gathering of several hundred,” she said.

Now at Church of the Pilgrims, about 10 people bring their compostable material with them to church.

David Galbraith, who has attended for 14 months, has changed the routine at home, where his 5-year-old has learned to put an apple core in a bowl next to the sink instead of in the trash. It then is transferred to a container in the fridge, then to a bag carried inside another for the bus ride to church each week.

“Both food and faith are very central elements to people’s life so it’s natural that in the context of faith that food would be considered,” he said.

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Family, ethics, medicine and law collide in Jahi McMath’s life — or death
1025 words
By CATHY LYNN GROSSMAN
c. 2014 Religion News Service

(RNS) Is Jahi McMath, the 13-year-old whose entire brain has ceased to function, dead or alive?

Must doctors at a California hospital operate to prepare her for a move to a care facility in New York even though the hospital insists she is dead? No doctor can be compelled to treat the dead.

Or is she alive now and wanting to live on? Her mother, Nailah Winkfield, insists that removing the life-support machinery, which is performing all Jahi’s bodily functions, is the same as killing her daughter. Only a court order keeps Jahi still on life support, and that order expires on Tuesday (Jan. 7).

On Friday, a federal magistrate was expected to begin mediating the three-week-long dispute between Children’s Hospital & Research Center in Oakland and Jahi’s parents. But the battle goes beyond the courtroom, the hospital, and Jahi’s family because American society still struggles with defining death.

Jahi, a once-healthy girl who only went to the hospital for a simple tonsillectomy, cannot make a choice.

Thinking and speaking come from the cerebral cortex. According to doctors’ testimony, Jahi’s cerebral cortex stopped functioning after a cascade of post-surgical complications left her brain without oxygen. Her brain stem, which controls involuntary actions such as breathing, was also destroyed, the doctors testified.

In this critical way, Jahi’s medical situation differs from the headliner case of Terri Schiavo in March 2005.

Although the brother of Terri Schiavo has rallied to Jahi’s parents’ side, Schiavo was not brain-dead. She had some brain stem functioning. The life-support-or-death fight over Schiavo turned on the issue of her quality of life without consciousness.

Such distinctions are a 20th-century dilemma, said William Colby. He is the ethicist and attorney who successfully argued for the parents of Nancy Cruzan to be permitted in 1990 to remove life support for their permanently unconscious daughter. The case turned on testimony by someone who said Cruzan would not have wanted to endure on machines.

“It is so hard to communicate the legal definition of death because, for most of recorded time, we didn’t have one and we didn’t need one. Your heart, your brain and your lungs all stopped at the same time. Technology has changed that equation,” said Colby, who is now general counsel for Truman Medical Centers in Kansas City, Mo.

Colby acknowledged it is hard for a parent to look at a child who appears, even mechanically, to breath, and accept that the law and society view this as a dead body.

The 1980 Uniform Determination of Death Act defined death as “the “irreversible cessation of all functioning of the brain, including the brain stem.”

But technology can keep people apparently “alive,” leaving patients or their families with wrenching decisions. Two states, New Jersey and New York, allow religious exemptions for people who refuse to accept brain death criteria.

Research shows Americans have mixed views on when to let go of life. Two in three U.S. adults (66 percent) say there are circumstances when a patient should be allowed to die, according to a Pew Research study released in November.

However, the answers are flipped if the question is asked about babies: 57 percent say an infant should receive as much treatment as possible in the case of a life-threatening birth defect, even if parents want to refuse treatment.

Whether society considers adults, babies or teens, Colby sees overarching questions: “What is the purpose of medicine, when do we use it and when do we stop?”

John DiCamillo, staff ethicist at the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia, says humans have “no way to know when there’s been metaphysical death — the separation of the soul. But we can trace the signs in the body.”

“If there is any lingering uncertainty, it must be medically resolved” beyond doubt, DiCamillo said.

“If there is any sign of brain stem function, even if someone is in a persistent vegetative state like Schiavo, that is sufficient to say this person is alive. And this person deserves the full dignity of the human person and must be sustained with proportionate medical treatment.”

That was the ethical argument behind Catholic support for Schiavo’s parents and brother when they fought her husband over maintaining the woman’s artificial feeding and hydration. Every court found for the husband, and Schiavo died in 2005.

In Jahi’s situation, DiCamillo said if rigorous testing showed there was no medical doubt that her entire brain no longer functioned, “there would be no Catholic ethical objection to ending mechanical support for her.”

Children’s Medical Center did not return a request for comment. Federal privacy laws do not allow the center to release specific information on Jahi’s medical situation. The hospital has issued press releases expressing sympathy, calling her deceased and linking to doctors’ statements to the court that repeatedly say her entire brain is irreversibly destroyed.

Not all ethicists agree, however, with the very idea of a uniform legal standard for death.

Dr. Griffin Trotter, professor of health care ethics and of surgery at St. Louis University, said: “The idea that there is a uniform conception is, to me, tyrannical. To enforce a conception of life and death is an overstepping by government.”

“Existentially, you could ask why would you want to continue treatment for someone whose brain is no more biologically functional than a fern. But ferns are alive and these people’s cells are alive, even if only by artificial means.”

Still, Trotter sees the moral distress of the hospital’s position. It is the antithesis of the medical mission to impose futile treatment, he said.

Meanwhile, Jahi’s family clings to hope for their daughter’s life. That hope can sustain them or it can prolong their agony, said Dr. James Salwitz, a New Jersey oncologist who teaches courses on death and dying at Rutgers University and writes a blog on end-of-life issues.

Over decades of bringing difficult news to patients whose lethal cancers cannot be halted, Salwitz said he’s seen false or misdirected hope exact a terrible price. It can transform into a powerful force — denial.

“Denial is an important survival mechanism we all use. But when denial becomes false hope, bad decisions get made and people suffer significantly more.”

But if people face difficulties clearly, Salwitz said, “they can be incredibly powerful, incredibly strong. If they have the tools to approach the challenges of death, they can share, they can teach, they can love.”

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Seventh-day Adventist pastor plans to flirt with atheism for 12 months
925 words
By KIMBERLY WINSTON
c. 2014 Religion News Service

(RNS) California pastor Ryan Bell has a novel New Year’s resolution. For one year, he proclaimed, he will “live without God.”

It’s an odd resolution for an ordained minister, former church pastor, teacher at two highly regarded Christian universities and church consultant. Yet for the next 12 months, Bell, 42, plans to refrain from praying, reading the Bible and thinking about God at all.

Instead, he will read atheist authors, attend atheist gatherings and seek out conversation and companionship with unbelievers. He wants to “do whatever I can to enter the world of atheism and live, for a year, as an atheist.”

Still, his resolution is only an experiment — he is not, he said, an atheist. “At least not yet,” he wrote in an essay for The Huffington Post, where, on New Year’s Eve, he announced his plan and a new blog to document it.

“I am not sure what I am. That’s part of what this year is about.”

But so far, it has also been about loss. Since announcing his plans, Bell has been asked to resign from one of his teaching positions and lost a consulting job. In the months before his decision to, as he put it, “try on” atheism, his health and his family relationships suffered too.

But even this early in his experiment, Bell feels he has gained something. Among the 20,000-plus people who have visited his new blog are many who have written to say that they, too, dance with doubt, but feel they cannot do so publicly because of the cost.

“In a way, it is like being gay and not being able to come out to your family,” Bell said in a conversation from his home in the Los Angeles area. “There have just been so many people who said they have wanted to ask questions too and didn’t feel that they could. So they are living vicariously through my spiritual journey.”

“Which,” he added, “in a way, is a lot like being a pastor.”

Indeed, Bell’s path has been marked by controversy before. Born to Methodist parents who converted to Seventh-day Adventism, he eventually led Hollywood Adventist Church, a Los Angeles congregation known as a liberal outpost in a mostly conservative denomination.

Over the years, Bell’s once-fundamentalist views became more progressive, he said. He advocated for women’s ordination and the full recognition and inclusion of gays and lesbians, both prohibited by current church doctrine. He also took issue with the church’s literal interpretation of a six-day period of creation and its end-times teachings.

Last March, after eight years at Hollywood Adventist, he was asked by denominational leaders to resign. And that, he said, in part led him to his yearlong experiment with atheism.

“Not being a pastor for nine months has given me the freedom to not have to believe in something for other people’s sake,” he said.

Others have documented their yearlong spiritual quests, although usually from a more religious point of view. A.J. Jacobs tried to follow every arcane rule in the Bible for “The Year of Living Biblically” and Rachel Held Evans did the same for “A Year of Biblical Womanhood.” Others, including former Louisiana pastor Jerry DeWitt, have written about their loss of faith after the fact.

Linda LaScola, a clinical social worker and co-author of “Caught in the Pulpit,” a book of interviews with clergy who have lost their faith, said while no one knows how many clergy struggle with unbelief, various denominations deal with them differently. She knows of one Episcopal priest who admitted to a parishioner that he did not believe in the Nicene Creed, a core statement of Christian faith that’s recited every Sunday in Episcopal parishes. There were, she said, “no repercussions.”

“While it’s OK and even expected for many clergy to feel doubt — with the assumption that it is a temporary situation that defaults back to faith — clergy may hesitate to express their doubts openly to their congregation for fear it could affect people’s faith,” she said.

“For literalists like the Seventh-day Adventists and Mormons, there is little room for doubt. They know certain things to be true.”

Bell decided to share his doubts on a blog because writing has always been a way he processes his experiences. “Vocationally and spiritually, it was something I wanted to share with other people,” he said.

So far, reaction from the atheist community has been lukewarm. Hemant Mehta, writing at his Friendly Atheist blog, commended Bell for exploring atheism, but said until he gives up belief in God, his experiment is flawed. Others, Bell said, have condemned him as a “mole” and a “fake.”

But Bell seems to have struck a chord among readers who can be classified as “nones” — the 20 percent of Americans who say they have no religious affiliation, according to a 2012 report by the Pew Research Center.

“There are so many other ways to think about and experience life than through the lenses of dogmatic Christianity, or dogmatic atheism,” one such reader commented. “I hope you find one that resonates with you.”

That’s Bell’s hope, too.

“If I have to be absolutely certain that there is no God, I don’t know if I can ever qualify for that group,” he said. “And if I need to acknowledge with certainty that there is a God, I don’t know if I can ever be a part of that group. But I am excited because this feels like a continuation of my spiritual journey. People seem to think I am leaping into this, but really this is just the next step for me.”

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Holocaust survivor meets her liberator after 68 years
900 words
By NAOMI NIX
c. 2013 The Star-Ledger

LIVINGSTON, N.J., (RNS) It’s been almost 70 years, but Marsha Kreuzman still remembers the moment she laid outside the steps of a Nazi crematorium wishing she could die.

Kreuzman had already lost her mother, father and brother to the Holocaust, and death seemed inevitable, she said.

But then an American soldier picked up her 68-pound body and whisked her to safety.

“I wanted to kiss his hand and thank him,” she said. “From the first day I was liberated, I wanted to thank them, but I didn’t know who to thank.”

Since then, the now-90-year-old Holocaust survivor has been on a decades-long quest to find American soldiers who liberated the Mauthausen concentration camp, one that didn’t have any success until she met Joe Barbella, two months ago, quite by chance.

Their unlikely meeting — and now a budding friendship — has given Kreuzman a pleasant twist to an otherwise-tragic story.

That tale begins in Krakow, Poland.

After the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939, Kreuzman and her family were sent to the Krakow ghetto. In 1940, her mother was taken to the Majdanek concentration camp, where she was killed.

Marsha Kreuzman says the rest of the family was then taken to the Plashov, a labor camp just outside of Krakow, built on top of two former Jewish cemeteries.

There, she recalls, Nazis would punish or kill those who were too sick or weak to work.

“If they were able to work, they would be able to live,” said Michael Riff, director of Ramapo College’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. “It was a matter of life or death

It was a strategy Kreuzman and her family would come to know intimately.

“They didn’t let us live, but they didn’t let us die,” Kreuzman said.

At one point, Kreuzman didn’t finish building a road because it was raining, and guards responded by beating her with a wet horse’s whip. The scars from knots that were tied into the whip remain on her back to this day, she said. Another time, they hung her upside down on a door for several hours during the night after she tried to visit her brother, she said.

On Yom Kippur in 1943, Kreuzman’s father was found hiding in a ditch, where the camp’s bathrooms were. Nazi soldiers lined up him and dozens of other Jews one by one in front of the camp’s occupants and shot them to death, according to Kreuzman.

“They shot him in front of us,” she said.

Her brother, Stephan Grunberg, would be next.

On May 13, 1944, Nazi soldiers rounded up some of the camp’s prisoners, including Grunberg. German doctors inspected each person and sent those they deemed capable of working to the right and those who were considered unable to work to the left.

Grunberg was sent to the left — and later to Auschwitz to be killed.

“Then I was alone,” Kreuzman said.

In January 1945, Kreuzman and other prisoners were marched for five days and four nights to Auschwitz. She said she was eventually transferred to concentration camps across Eastern Europe: Bergen-Belsen, then Flossenbürg and finally Mauthausen.

By that time, Joe Barbella was serving in the 11th Armored Division. Because he had learned to type at Central High School in Newark, when he was drafted into the Army, he was quickly assigned to be a record keeper for the division’s medical unit, he said.

On May 5, 1945, U.S. soldiers from the 11th Armored Division would cross the Linz border in Austria and liberate Mauthausen. Barbella wouldn’t enter the camp with the medical unit until the day after it was liberated, he said.

“When we got there, we saw all these people were skin and bones,” Barbella said.

Kreuzman said she remembers lying down just outside the camp’s crematorium when the soldiers arrived. She heard the words: “You’re free.”

She fainted and a soldier carried her to a field hospital, where doctors would start nursing her back to health, she said.

After the war, Kreuzman spent a few years in England before moving to the United States in 1952. Barbella returned to New Jersey, building a comfortable life with his wife, Anne.

Working as a nurse and living in New Jersey, Kreuzman always wondered about the American men who crossed enemy lines to free her and other Jews from the Austrian concentration camp.

She even wrote letters to men in telephone books she thought might have been connected to the Army division that liberated Mauthausen.

“I always look for liberators,” she said. “I wasn’t giving up.”

Then, in October, nearly 70 years after her liberation, she came across a wedding anniversary announcement in The Star-Ledger for Joe and Anne Barbella’s 65th anniversary.

“A veteran of World War II, Joseph served in the 11th Armored Division which liberated the Mauthausen concentration camp,” the announcement said.

The next day, a tearful Kreuzman called the Barbellas and told Anne Barbella that she was one of the Jews whom Joe liberated.

They arranged a meeting at the Barbellas’ home later that month.

“They really welcomed me with open arms,” Kreuzman said about the two-hour visit.

Barbella said he felt like he has known Kreuzman for years, though he shied away from her descriptions of his work as heroic. “I’m just an ordinary solider,” he said.

Since they met, the two have become fast friends. Kreuzman talks to the Barbella family regularly on the phone. Recently, she invited Barbella, his wife and daughter for lunch at her apartment.

And last week she brought him a Christmas gift.

“He deserves to be honored.”

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COMMENTARY: Jewish wisdom and the progressive agenda
525 words
By JACK MOLINE
c. 2014 Religion News Service

(RNS) Those who arrive for morning worship earliest recite a teaching from the Talmud designed to remind them of the foundational values of a good Jewish life even before the prayers begin in earnest.

“These are the things that benefit a person in life and form a sustaining fund in the world beyond,” it begins. They are: honoring parents, acting with compassion, frequenting the study hall, welcoming visitors, visiting the sick, providing for a bride, burying the dead, prayer and making peace between two people.

It’s quite a roster of activities, but it makes clear what the agenda is for a Jew in this world. It seems to me that anyone who takes our tradition seriously cannot help but commit to the values that are inherent in a righteous Jewish life. And if these activities are to be the personal aspirations of a committed Jew, then certainly they are the aspirations of the Jewish people for the society in which we live.

Here in the United States, where the Jewish community is blessed with the freedom, even the invitation, to advocate for its values, this small Talmudic lesson has large implications. The collective voice of our scholars from centuries ago has an extraordinary echo for those of us who take its wisdom seriously. Each of these actions is an investment both in one’s self and in the distant future, and each one has a contemporary analog in public policy.

When we speak of honoring parents, we speak of Social Security and Medicare benefits.

When we speak of acts of compassion, we speak of service agencies that tend to the vulnerable.

When we speak of the study hall, we speak of support for education.

When we speak of welcoming visitors, we speak of a hospitable immigration policy.

When we speak of visiting the sick, we speak of affordable and accessible health care.

When we speak of providing for the bride, we speak of attending to the rights and needs of women.

When we speak of burying the dead, we speak of the opportunity for a dignified end of life for all.

When we speak of prayer, we speak of the protections of religious freedom.

When we speak of making peace between people, we speak of effective diplomacy.

If there is a stronger mandate for a progressive agenda, I don’t know what it is. And if there is a countervailing teaching, one that puts the weight of Jewish sensibilities behind privatizing compassion and justice and thus taking it out of the public realm, I have yet to discover it in my years of learning.

I taught those values in my career as a rabbi. Now I am proud to identify with them in my work with the National Jewish Democratic Council, to remind our nation of its wellspring of Jewish wisdom and to remind the Jewish community of the forum in which that wisdom resonates.

The teaching ends with “the study of Torah equals them all.” It has an analog, too: We must never overlook the source of that wisdom: the deep wellsprings of Jewish learning.

(Rabbi Jack Moline is the executive director of the National Jewish Democratic Council, a political lobbying organization dedicated to promoting Jewish values within the Democratic Party and the political process.)

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CORRECTION: A Brooklyn museum has every biblical animal — but no money to stay open
975 words
By DAVID GIBSON
c. 2014 Religion News Service

BROOKLYN, N.Y. (RNS) The Torah Animal World exhibit can seem a bit like the zombie version of Noah’s Ark — 350 animals crowded into a row house museum in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood, at least one of every species mentioned in the first five books of the Bible, and then some.

But they’re all stuffed, and now the museum isn’t looking too good either: Its director, Rabbi Shaul Shimon Deutsch, says he needs $1 million to keep the place open or he’ll have to relocate the odd but fascinating — and instructive — menagerie to the Catskills. This is no joke.

“I want to change the way people learn about the Bible,” an animated Deutsch said as he handed out ancient artifacts to a pair of women touring the various displays.

“I believe that if you touch history, history touches you,” he explained as he walked through a series of rooms, their walls painted various shades of bright blue to better show off the biblical bestiary. “Why are museums boring? Because everything is behind glass!”

For Deutsch, 47, it’s all about making the old and beloved stories of the Scriptures come alive for contemporary audiences, especially children.

The bearded rabbi, wearing the distinctive black garments and white shirt favored by strictly Orthodox Jews, has three attached homes in Brooklyn’s Borough Park neighborhood; one is his home and another houses the Living Torah Museum and a remarkable collection of artifacts from pre-modern Israel that illustrate the history recounted in the Bible.

For years, Deutsch’s fellow rabbis kept telling him how their students grew excited by the citations of so many different animals in the Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) and in the Talmud, the ancient compendium of Jewish teaching and wisdom.

And Deutsch himself was “sick and tired” of watching kids sit in class trying to learn only by listening or reading. So he started collecting the Torah taxidermy and opened Torah Animal World in 2008 in the third venue. All of the specimens died of natural causes, he swears, and were not hunted in the wild: “Instead of turning them into a fur coat I use them for education.”

Many of the animals are quickly recognizable from the Bible: serpents and rams, of course, and an ox and a lamb, a lion and an antelope.

But he also has species that may not immediately leap to the mind of even the more attentive Sunday school student — such as the wolf, because of the verse in Genesis that compares Benjamin to “a ravenous wolf.” Or the Arabian oryx, whose long straight horns — and a later mistranslation in the King James Version of the Bible — may have been the source of a scriptural reference to a unicorn.

There are bears (the book of Kings and Samuel) and deer (Psalm 42 or many other places) and crocodiles and all manner of birds of the air. Plus a penguin.

Wait, a penguin?

“The penguin we only use to show that it has the signs of a kosher bird” — that is, one permissible for an observant Jew to eat — “but there is not a tradition of eating it, so it’s not kosher,” Deutsch explained.

Obviously the rabbi is not shy about pushing the boundaries of his collection beyond a strict reading of the Torah. He includes references to creatures in other books of the Hebrew Bible, especially passages from elaborate prophetic visions that often use animal imagery.

And the Talmud is fair game, as well as instances — like the penguin — of animals not in the Bible because they can teach something about animals that are. (Or were back then: Some of the animals mentioned, and on display, are extinct from the Holy Land today, though a surprising number of them still roam the region.)

There is a giraffe, which may be a stretch, scripturally speaking. But it sure is fun, or maybe creepy, to see up close. And it’s kosher, in case anyone’s wondering. The peacocks, too, are kosher, as are 29 other stuffed birds on display. (There are no pigs — perhaps no surprise. And no dinosaurs — they’re “not a problem for me” but Deutsch doesn’t want to get into that whole debate.)

“I could spend 12 hours with you on biblical and Talmudic references to animals,” he says with delight.

The problem: As with pretty much everyone else who expanded when times were good, the 2008 recession took a big bite out Deutsch’s donor base. Purchases such as a $40,000 elephant head also hurt, and he soon found himself overextended and running annual deficits. Also, the space is small and can only accommodate 75 to 100 visitors on a good day.

So with no savior in sight, Deutsch has been forced to put the house on the market, “the funkiest listing in recent memory,” as one real estate blog put it, for nearly $1 million. If he sells he will move as much of the collection as possible to another location upstate.

But that’s far from the growing number of Orthodox Jews and their children in Brooklyn. (The rabbi also stresses that he happily tailors his tours for Christians; the Amish are apparently big fans of the place.)

In fact, Deutsch’s real dream is not to be in the row house on 41st Street but to have “a massive complex,” as he puts it, complete with an auditorium where he could host hundreds of people every day while displaying all of the animals and artifacts together.

And he has his eye on a warehouse nearby that “I could buy tomorrow” to convert into his ideal venue — for $15 million. But for now he’d settle for keeping the Torah Animal World afloat with a cool million, if he can find a donor.

“You know what,” he says. “I’m a big believer in miracles.”