Tag Archives : observance


JCC to open on Shabbat

Rabbis, community react to new hours Beginning Friday, April 1, JCC Rockland will be open for the first time ever past sundown and the beginning of Shabbat. That change, along with the addition of Saturday hours, was passed overwhelmingly by the organization’s board of directors in early March. It marks a new chapter for the […]


These five days

This September, on the second day of Sukkot, JCC Rockland did something it had never done before. It opened for business. The way in which it did business was qualitatively different than a normal weekday. No money changed hands. The Fit Café was closed. The vending machines didn’t operate. There were no art programs, classes […]


Finding the way through time, mourning and ritual

In the first weeks of saying kaddish for my father, the sun still hung below the horizon when I’d wake to go to minyan. I’m just now out of sheloshim, the first thirty days of mourning proscribed by Jewish law, and now, instead, the morning sky is the cold milky white of late winter. Watching […]