Life cycles

BAT MITZVAH

RENATTA ROSE ROGERS

Renatta Rose Rogers, daughter of Marcelyn and Charles Rogers, will celebrate her Bat Mitzvah on Saturday, April 10, at Temple Israel. Renatta is a seventh-grade student at Beveridge Magnet Middle School. Renatta enjoys playing the violin for orchestra in middle school & spending much of her summer at Lake Okoboji. Her hobbies include competitive swimming, ice skating, long boarding, kayaking and spending time with friends and family. For her mitzvah project, Renatta and her friend Cadee Scheer are making drawstring "Rose Bags." They are named this because both the girls have the middle name "Rose." The bags include an assortment of activities/toys/games to be presented to Project Harmony for the children. She has a sister, Mallory, a brother, Gavin and a pug named Clovis. Grandparents are Karolyn Kagan Marti and the late Donald Lloyd Marti of Lincoln, NE and Arnolds Park, IA., and Charles and Patricia Rogers of Papillion, NE. Great-grandparents are the late Gertrude and Moses Kagan of Omaha, the late Lloyd and Elizabeth Marti of Lincoln, NE, the late Darwin and Vera Rogers of Omaha, and the late Howard and Velma Carpenter of Mount Airy, North Carolina.

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The first Reform rabbi

JTA On Tuesday night, after Israeli TV stations broadcast the first exit polls from the country’s elections, a rabbi who had just won a seat in parliament tweeted out a traditional blessing of thanks, called the “Shehechiyanu.” “Blessed are you, Hashem, our God, ruler of the universe, who has kept us alive and sustained us and brought us to this day,” wrote the rabbi, Gilad Kariv. “Thank you to all my partners on this long journey.” Rabbis in parliament are far from an oddity in Israel, which sees multiple Orthodox parties serve in each term. But Kariv is not a member of any of those parties, nor is he quite like the rabbis who have sat before him in Israel’s legislative body, the Knesset. When he is sworn in, Kariv will be the first Reform rabbi to ever serve in Knesset. The leader of the Israeli Reform movement and a longtime religious pluralism activist, Kariv has been running in Israeli elections over the span of almost nine years, but has never won until now. He plans to advocate for religious pluralism and work to counter haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, control over religious affairs in Israel.

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The Brexit Passover food shortage

JACOB JUDAH

LONDON | JTA It has become a staple of British and Irish political analysis to say that the tangled Brexit trade arrangements will push Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland closer together. Ultimately, it could lead to a United Ireland, some analysts say. This year, in the run-up to Passover, the two countries’ Jewish communities are showing one unusual sign of collaboration. Thanks to a Passover food shortage brought on in part by the post-Brexit trade agreement, holiday supplies are being closely coordinated between Dublin and Belfast. “That dynamic is definitely playing out among the Jewish communities,” said Maurice Cohen, the head of Ireland’s Jewish Representative Council. “Before, we very seldom cooperated on much – if anything at all.” Great Britain is normally the main supplier of kosher and kosher for Passover products for both the Irish and Northern Irish Jewish communities. But as part of the U.K.’s withdrawal from the European Union, new regulatory checks have been introduced on trade between Britain and the E.U., raising the cost of exporting British products into members of the European single market, like Ireland. Since it is part of the U.K., one would expect Northern Ireland to have maintained its ability to freely procure supplies from England and elsewhere. But under the so-called “Northern Ireland Protocol,” part of the Brexit agreement, Northern Ireland is to remain within the E.U.’s single market for goods as part of an attempt to keep the border between it and the Republic of Ireland open. “It has been a nightmare,” said Michael Black, the chairman of Belfast’s Jewish community organization. “It has taken me since January to be able to get a supply of kosher meat from England – and even then, it took an extremely convoluted arrangement that will only be a one-off.” London has introduced a temporary grace period in an attempt to ease disruptions by temporarily suspending some checks on imports into Northern Ireland, but the underlying

difficulties have remained. The fortunes of the Belfast and Dublin Jewish communities have diverged in recent years. After decades of emigration, Belfast’s community has shrunk to below 100 members, the vast majority of whom are elderly. Across the border, Dublin’s Jews have benefitted from an influx of young Jews coming to work in the republic’s booming technology sector. For the first time since the 1950s, the community is growing again. Current estimates place the number of Jews in Dublin at around 2,000. Belfast used to receive supplies from a kosher butcher in Manchester every eight to 10 weeks. Since January, even with a butcher who offered to “drive it over himself” to make sure it arrived, the mountains of new paperwork and added costs demanded a reassessment. “Nobody’s going to starve, but it just seems ridiculous that we’ve come to this impasse,” Black said. “It’s either change religion or go vegetarian.” Black managed to secure a mass Passover delivery after intervention by the British secretary of state for Northern Ireland. A British government spokesperson told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that it recognizes the “importance of ensuring the Jewish community in Northern Ireland can continue to access kosher meats and that the process of getting these goods to them is as smooth as possible for traders.” The spokesperson added: “We were made aware of an issue with a single supplier and have worked proactively and constructively with those concerned to ensure that an alternative GB supplier is now in place.” This is not what Black understood. He says the arrangement that had been struck was a “one-off” that would tide the community over but had not solved the long-term issue. “When the grace period ends, we’ll be back to square one and we will have to work out what to do again,” he said. “I’m abashed about all this because we are a tiny community,” he added with a sigh. “Getting these supplies in has become a matter of principle with me — and having principles is expensive.” Belfast is paying 15 euros for a single chicken, he added, while the meat shipment that was coming in — expected for perhaps a dozen families — had added 400 euros to its total cost, all of which came out of a shrinking community budget. While Jewish communities continue to shrink and consolidate across the U.K. as populations condense into cities such as London and Manchester, cooperation might seem inevitable. “We have certainly got together in the last two years, more so than before. It’s something that has evolved,” Cohen said, adding with a chuckle: “We’ll see where it ends up going.”

A man walks past a sign promoting Brexit and graffiti against

an Irish sea border, in Belfast, Feb. 2, 2021. Credit: Paul Faith/AFP via Getty Images