Modern methods of education pertaining to Jewish prayer services in schooling had been seen to be lacking when looking at the connection students feel while praying. Students will often be distracted or deliberately avoiding prayer since they are unaware of what is happening. The following research hopes to propose a system to increase engagement and connection by having individuals follow the prayers during the orated portions of prayer. By exposing a set of participants with limited knowledge of the Jewish prayer services to repeated exposure of reading while following along with the words, we hope to show an increase in connection and retention of the prayer to take with them to the next service they attend so they can feel a part of the community.

During the 17th and 18th century a number of Jews settled on the English island of Barbados and the Dutch island of St. Eustatius. The Jews on both islands erected synagogues and a number of key structures essential for a practicing religious community. Although they had strong connections that spanned across geo-political boundaries, the synagogue compounds on each island became key places for the creation and maintenance of a Jewish community. I argue that these synagogue compounds represented diasporic places that must be understood through a tri-partite model that explores the relationships between the Jewish community and its hostland, other dispersed Jewish communities, and the homeland. Furthermore, during the early modern period, these compounds were "heterotopias" within the colonial landscape. Heterotopias, as places of alternative ordering, speak to the constructions of social and cultural difference. For the Jews, the synagogue compounds provided them a chance to create a place founded on their cultural values and ideals within the Christian controlled spaces of both islands. Alternatively, for the Christian communities on the islands, the synagogue compounds highlighted how the Jewish community had different loyalties and values than they did. In exploring the ways that these places served as heterotopias, and for how long they were sites of alternative ordering, this dissertation demonstrates the fundamental role that places play in the formation and maintenance of diasporic communities and the dynamic relationship between spaces, places, and identities in the early modern period.

In this paper I will undertake a study of the worship practices of two major religions, Judaism and Christianity, as they existed during the early days of the Christian Church. Through an examination of specific aspects of worship, historical developments, and especially the prayers of the two communities, I wish to demonstrate that the worship of the Synagogue community had a definite influence upon the liturgy and theology of the church.

Thesis (M.A.)--Lehigh University, 2009. / Advisers: Roger D. Simon; John Pettegrew.

<p> The purpose of this grant project is to educate and train leaders within the Orthodox Jewish community to act as culturally sensitive first responders to mental health crises within the Orthodox Jewish community. Mental illness is highly stigmatized among this population. Having trained, trusted, and culturally sensitive community leaders capable of identifying individuals and families in need of mental health services increases the chances that they may use these supports. The proposed leadership training program consists of a series of psycho-educational training groups. The educational emphasis will be on understanding and identifying mental illness, educating leaders about stigma, and approaching community members in need of referrals. The Walter and Elise Hass Foundation is the identified potential funding source. A line-item budget and an evaluation tool are included in the proposed program. The actual submission or funding of this grant was not a requirement for the successful completion of the project.</p>

<p> The Jewish community has increasingly relied upon Experiential Education as a pedagogical approach to instilling Jewish identity and communal affiliation over the past twenty years. The Experiential Education format of travel programs has specifically been emphasized and promoted for Jewish Emerging Adults for this purpose, and outcome studies of these trip programs have demonstrated success in instilling identification and affiliation with both the Jewish community and the state of Israel among their participants. However, little is actually empirically known about the processes that impact the participant during the trip experience &ndash; the so-called "black box" &ndash; or how significant a participant's predisposition towards Israel and Judaism are in how they process their trip experiences. Even less is empirically known about the identity development of Jewish Emerging Adults in large part due to a pre-disposition to study Jews developmentally only as affiliates of a religion rather than members of a distinctly multi-layered group. </p><p> This grounded theory study examines participants in two different trip experiences, Taglit Birthright Israel and an Alternative Spring Break, through post-trip interviews. The emergent theory suggests three conclusions: The predisposition of a participant towards their own Jewish identity can influence how they process their experiences on the trip; the actual trip experience can be best understood as repeatedly processing multiple and ongoing experiences within the trip itself; the processing of those experiences can be descriptively modeled as a theory that allows an glimpse in to the "black box." Such a theoretical model can be used to better train trip staff on how the trip experience impacts the Jewish identity of those participants and also to plan trip itineraries to optimize the trip's experiential impact on participant Jewish and Zionist identity and communal affiliation.</p>

<p> Thessaloniki, a city with an Ottoman, Byzantine, and Sephardic past, is located in the Balkan area of Macedonia, in northern Greece. Its history is the story of people who have come from someplace else. For several hundred years, the majority population of the city was comprised of Spanish speaking Sephardic Jews who contributed to all aspects of the development of the city. This significant presence is no longer visible unless one specifically knows where to look for its traces. It is not a history that has been silenced or erased, but rather obliterated. In this dissertation, I present the documented presence and transformations of the Jewish population in Thessaloniki from the earliest contributions to present day. This work on absence uses visual anthropology to explore the present day urban environment through an ethnographic account of the city of Thessaloniki. The visual is used to investigate how cities present their past and how people learn to see the world, what reflects their world vision, and the ways their vision is socially and culturally influenced. Anthropology is concerned with material artifacts that act as representatives of the past and as visual symbols. This is a work about what happens when intentionally omitted histories remain absent from the public sphere. What remains physically present but unrepresented proves equally important in creating and reinforcing memory. Our relationship to our environment also may be compromised by what is absent. This project examines absence through the circumstances by which the past is represented in the present, and looks at how the past is experienced in ways that may be used to invoke, challenge, or re-direct the way a community is remembered.</p>

<p> In 1947, the National Panhellenic Conference invited Jewish sororities to join its ranks, constituting the first time in the organization's history that non-Jewish sororities officially recognized their Jewish counterparts. The period of 1947-1964, I argue, became an era based on a new understanding between the Jewish and non-Jewish sororities, a "Gentlewoman's Agreement." This unspoken arrangement offered Jewish sororities unprecedented status in Greek affairs and a more visible presence within student life on college campuses across the country. However, membership came at a cost; the Jewish women had to ensure that their individual organizations' spoken beliefs conformed to those articulated by the larger, socially conservative non-Jewish groups. This significantly impacted the ways in which they responded to civil rights and the anticommunist hysteria that enveloped American society in these years. In addition to offering an appraisal of the ways in which gender shaped Jewish encounters with American higher education, the postwar Jewish sorority experience serves as a previously unexplored entry point into an examination of the limits of Jewish liberalism and provides a reevaluation of Jewish-Christian relationships during the period scholars have deemed the "Golden Age" of American Jewry </p>

The Apocalypse of Abraham, a pseudepigraphon only extant in a fourteenth century Old Church Slavonic manuscript, has not received much attention from scholars of Ancient Judaism, due in part to a lack of readily available information regarding the history and transmission of the Slavonic Pseudepigrapha. This dissertation examines the historical context of these works with the aim of assessing the probability that they contain ancient Jewish material. The rest of the dissertation is focused on the Apocalypse of Abraham specifically, discussing its date and provenance, original language, probability that it comes from Essene circles, textual unity, and Christian interpolations. This includes treatments of the issue of free will, determinism, and predestination in the Apocalypse of Abraham as well as the methodological complexities in trying to distinguish between early Jewish and Christian works. It also provides an in-depth comparison of the Apocalypse of Abraham with 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch and takes up the question of the social setting for these texts based on relevant precedents set by recent scholars of midrash who seek to probe the “socio-cultural and historical situatedness” of midrashic texts. This discussion includes a survey of parallels between the content of the Apocalypse of Abraham and rabbinic literature to support the argument that a sharp distinction between apocalyptic ideas and what later became rabbinic tradition did not exist in the time between 70 and 135 C.E. Overall, this dissertation argues that the Apocalypse of Abraham is an early Jewish document written during the decades following the destruction of the Second Temple. While seeking to warn its readers of the dangers of idolatry in light of the apocalyptic judgment still to come, it also provides sustained exegesis of Genesis 15, which gives cohesion to the entire document.

Abstract not available.