Two amazing scholarship opportunities are now available for Beach Hillel students:

*Jewish Studies Program Scholarships – due March 25.
Student Awards in Jewish Studies – Application 2010

*National Council of Jewish Women – Long Beach Chapter Scholarships – due May 15.
NCJW scholarship application 2010

Good luck to all of our students!

Please join the board of Beach Hillel as we honor the Booksteins for their 5 years of dedicated service to the Jewish college age youth of Long Beach and nearby communities.

All alumni, parents, community members, students, and friends of Beach Hillel are welcome to attend!

11 am – 1 pm
Sunday, August 16
Home of Leon and Barbara Shoag
4120 Locust Avenue
Long Beach, CA 90807

RSVP by August 10
bshoag@aol.com
562-400-8124

If you would like to make a donation to Beach Hillel in honor of the Booksteins, please make the check payable to Beach Hillel and send to 3801 E. Willow St., Long Beach, CA 90815.

We need a few volunteers to help with set-up about an hour before the event. If you are available, email ebanarie@gmail.com.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Additionally we want to give a big thank you to the Long Beach chapter of NCJW for their support of her studies through their scholarships! Dana contributes so much to the Long Beach Community, it is a pleasure for us to see the community supporting her!

-beachhillel

Nationwide Man-hunt for Stephen Morgan

(CNN) — A man suspected of killing a Wesleyan University junior may be targeting the university and its Jewish population, Middletown, Connecticut, police said Thursday. Police have launched a nationwide search for Stephen Morgan, 29, who is suspected of killing Johanna Justin-Jinich.

The young woman was shot and killed Wednesday at a bookstore in Middletown near the Wesleyan campus, police said.

“Evidence uncovered overnight suggests that Mr. Morgan may be focused on the Wesleyan community campus as well as the Jewish community,” said Middletown Police Chief Lynn Baldoni, who did not elaborate.

A statement from the university alleges that Morgan had written threats against “Wesleyan and/or its Jewish students.”

While Justin-Jinich is a student at Wesleyan and is Jewish, there was another connection between her and her alleged killer, authorities said.

In July 2007, Justin-Jinich filed a harassment complaint against Morgan while the two were both taking the same six-week summer course at New York University, NYU spokesman John Beckman told CNN.

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]]> http://beachhillel.org/2009/05/07/jewish-student-shot-at-weslyan-jewish-community-may-be-target/feed/ 0 http://beachhillel.org/2009/04/06/follow-us-on-twitter/ http://beachhillel.org/2009/04/06/follow-us-on-twitter/#comments Mon, 06 Apr 2009 06:03:25 +0000 Rabbi Yonah http://beachhillel.org/?p=791 Just went live on the micro-blogging phenom TWITTER. We will send our new posts to Twitter, so if you follow us you will know the latest news from Beach Hillel.

FOLLOW US

]]> http://beachhillel.org/2009/04/06/follow-us-on-twitter/feed/ 0 http://beachhillel.org/2009/01/14/uc-irvine-law-school-open-full-scholarships-available/ http://beachhillel.org/2009/01/14/uc-irvine-law-school-open-full-scholarships-available/#comments Wed, 14 Jan 2009 18:22:03 +0000 Rachel Kaplan http://beachhillel.org/?p=706 More >]]> UC Irvine is opening a law school that will begin next fall. The inaugural class will only have 60 students, as the university has set a goal of making this a top 20 Law school in the next 10 years. The first class will also be offered full tuition scholarships. So any of you thinking of Join to Law School it is an opportunity not to be missed.

The University of California, Irvine School of Law will open to our first class of students in August 2009. Most of our founding faculty and administrators already are in place for a year of planning that will help ensure an extraordinary experience for our inaugural group of students while building a framework to advance legal education for the 21st century. We have a significant opportunity to transform the approach to teaching and learning in law school—combining the best of established curricular practices with pioneering methods to ensure you are thoroughly prepared for the demands of practice today and in the future.

At the University of California, Irvine School of Law, you will have the unprecedented opportunity to gain a top-20-caliber experience at a school on the cutting edge of legal education. We hope you will join us!
Check it out on their web site

]]> http://beachhillel.org/2009/01/14/uc-irvine-law-school-open-full-scholarships-available/feed/ 0 http://beachhillel.org/2008/09/12/working-better-together/ http://beachhillel.org/2008/09/12/working-better-together/#comments Fri, 12 Sep 2008 08:26:25 +0000 Rabbi Yonah http://beachhillel.org/?p=435 More >]]> Those who know my wife Rachel, know that she is an amazing woman. A recent article in the LA Jewish Journal, Rachel Bookstein: Working Better Together, has made this a little more well known. It also reveals some steamy details you won’t want to miss. While I have not read through all the articles in this lengthy report, I imagine they are worth the read. I thank the Jewish Journal and Danielle Berrin for including Rachel, a 21st Century, blogging, Oxford educated, non-profit directing, inspirational Rebbitzin.

For the Booksteins, partners in building the Long Beach Hillel community and the co-creators of the popular youth-oriented Jewlicious Festival, work and home are completely entwined. More than rabbi and rebbetzin, they serve as a model married couple for hundreds of Jewish students. Unlike many of Bookstein’s rebbetzin contemporaries, her journey as a powerfully identified Jewish woman began long before she married a rabbi. She studied feminism in college and has long struggled with how to live as an observant Jewish woman in the modern world.

Working on a college campus, Rachel Bookstein is constantly talking to students about sex. She has very strong opinions about it — as does her husband of 11 years. A self-declared “Torah-observant feminist,” Bookstein found the place where she thinks Judaism and feminism meet in the halachic concept of shomer negiah, which restricts physical contact.

“People are always surprised by what I say, because they expect the standard frum answer,” Bookstein, 35, says in reference to the many Cal State Long Beach students she counsels as director of Hillel, where her husband, Rabbi Yonah Bookstein, 38, is the campus rabbi. “Sometimes I’ll say things, and they’ll be totally shocked.” . . . .

She tells me about the Shabbat dinner, just after she and her husband became engaged, when their hands brushed under the table.

“It was so erotic!” she exclaims. “We had this moment, and it was really exciting — that future taste of what it would be like to be together uninhibited.”

For the Booksteins, partners in building the Long Beach Hillel community and the co-creators of the popular youth-oriented Jewlicious Festival, work and home are completely entwined. More than rabbi and rebbetzin, they serve as a model married couple for hundreds of Jewish students. Unlike many of Bookstein’s rebbetzin contemporaries, her journey as a powerfully identified Jewish woman began long before she married a rabbi. She studied feminism in college and has long struggled with how to live as an observant Jewish woman in the modern world.

Born in Northern California’s Marin County, Bookstein grew up in an academically and Jewishly engaged family, although not strictly observant. During her freshman year at UC Santa Cruz, she took a seminar on Jewish women, in which she had an epiphany.

“Everyone had to say their name and ‘I am a Jewish woman,’” Bookstein recalls. “That statement of identification was a moment where I started to think about ‘I am a Jewish woman, what does that mean?’ That was the moment when I decided to engage in Jewish life, text and community.”

She went from wanting to be a lawyer who would change the world to high-tailing it to Israel for her junior year. When she returned, she applied to a Jewish studies master’s degree program at Oxford University. She arrived with “a giant computer and two giant bags,” and when she stepped out of the car, a young man in a yarmulke and jeans asked if he could help carry her things.

When they began dating, Yonah was more observant, and she was still searching for her own path. They engaged in “traditional dating,” spending time together only in public, walking in parks, meeting in coffee shops. They talked on a pay phone twice a day, avoiding each other’s homes and any kind of physical relationship. Early on, Yonah was forthright about his intentions.

“He said, ‘I want you to know I think you’re amazing, and I really like you, but I am not looking for any more friends — I am dating for marriage,’” she recalls.

Bookstein was floored. She’d found the male feminist; the guy who was more interested in her personality than her physical expression. She also loved how Judaism values the institution of dating for marriage, where a woman doesn’t just give away her body.

“To connect in a nonverbal way is really powerful, but if deployed at the wrong time, can keep you in a bad relationship. We could have totally wrecked our relationship if we were too young and too intimate,” Bookstein says. Yet, she admits, “Not being together is really hard if you’re in love with someone.”

The couple met in October, met each other’s families in December, got engaged in February and married in June.

“We were totally certain and totally in love,” she says. “It was unimaginable to us that we wouldn’t want to be married. It was this totally obvious reality that ‘this is my soul mate; this is my life partner.’ My family raised me with enough self-confidence to make that decision.”

Once married, they did everything together: yeshiva in Israel, running the Ronald Lauder Foundation in Poland — he was the director; she the program director — and it was there that she gave birth to their first two children. When they left Poland, Yonah completed his smicha in Israel and then New York, and Rachel decided that his rabbinic journey would determine their geography. Eventually, a private philanthropist hired Yonah to be campus rabbi at Long Beach Hillel, and Rachel was recruited as Hillel director, which made their private and public lives one and the same.

“I can’t balance. I make informed choices,” Bookstein says about negotiating between work life and home life. “When my kids are sick and there are things I need to do at work, work gets put on hold.”

The greatest challenge they face as a couple is getting away from their work. With four young children, going on dates is nearly impossible, but nurturing their relationship is essential. Last year, they sat on the porch, lit candles and drank tea together.

“My greatest sadness is that I don’t have any friends,” she confesses.

She always has to be the rebbetzin, available to students if they want to have coffee or need advice, ready with an ample Shabbos table for constant guests and always astute enough to have something “intelligent, thoughtful and positive to say.” She also says she feels pressure to validate her work for the organizations she works for, the donors who support them and the students she and her husband devote their lives to teaching.

“Working with my husband, one thing I feel grateful about is that we both work better together than we do apart. When we work together, we are more of who we are, more than the sum of our parts,” Bookstein says. “We’re each other’s cheerleader, copy editor, best and worst critic and, because we are totally committed to each other, it gives us a lot of strength.”

]]> http://beachhillel.org/2008/09/12/working-better-together/feed/ 0 http://beachhillel.org/2008/08/25/alperts-endow-jewish-studies-at-csulb/ http://beachhillel.org/2008/08/25/alperts-endow-jewish-studies-at-csulb/#comments Tue, 26 Aug 2008 01:34:19 +0000 Rabbi Yonah http://beachhillel.org/?p=428 More >]]> Barbara and Ray Alpert, Beach Hillel’s biggest supporters, alter the landscape at CSULB with a huge gift, endowing a Jewish Studies Chair at Cal State Long Beach
Brad Greenberg in the Jewish Journal writes:

Ten years after its creation, the Jewish studies program at Cal State Long Beach has received a $1 million endowment for a chaired professor.

Barbara and Ray Alpert, whose name is on the Long Beach Jewish Community Center they heavily support, donated the funds for the new faculty position, The Barbara and Ray Alpert Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies.

“The Jewish studies program is an important department for the university, one that can enhance the understanding of history, especially the Holocaust and its implications, as well as the study of language, ethics and other related areas,” Ray Alpert, whose father co-founded Alpert &Alpert Iron &Metal seven decades ago, said in a statement.

“It’s wonderful to contribute to a program that helps students understand and appreciate this great heritage, history and culture, a program that attracts students from all over the world,” Alpert added. “Our hope is that our contribution will further the growth of the program for years to come.”

University President F. King Alexander and Jewish studies faculty said the Alperts’ donation would help the program expand both in size and scholarship. The program, which offers a minor and major in Jewish studies, provides more than 20 courses annually, hosts a speakers series, invites guest lecturers and organizes campus symposia.

“This gift,” said Jeffrey Blutinger, program co-director and a professor of Jewish history, “will have a profound impact.”

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