And two completely unrelated articles.
May. 13th, 2005 08:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
This one is on a Reform temple in a very Orthodox neighborhood.
Reform Jews, Adrift in a Sea of Black Hats
By ANDY NEWMAN
A few minutes into a Saturday service last month, two teenagers in dark suits and broad-brimmed black hats crept into Progressive Temple Beth Ahavath Shalom in Borough Park, Brooklyn. They were not pleased with the proceedings.
Rabbi Karen Bookman Kaplan was leading the two dozen congregants in a prayer: "God of light and sun, we thank you for the morning and the day to come."
The cantor, Jill Hausman, sang, "Of you, who are my soul's delight."
The two young men had seen enough. They ducked out and headed toward their own, much larger synagogue two blocks away.
"I was really surprised to see such things going on," said one of them, David Waldman, 17, a member of a Hasidic sect called the Bobov. "The real Jewish law says there should not be any women as rabbis or cantors."
He had often wondered about the temple as he walked past, had heard stories about it. Now he knew. "This place should not be known as a Jewish shul," he said. "It's a fake."
It is strange sometimes to be the last Reform Jewish congregation left in Borough Park, home to one of the city's largest concentrations of Orthodox Jews, including ultra-Orthodox sects known as Hasidim.
Inside the temple, life actually seems fairly ordinary. Children go to religious education twice a week. The congregation's newsletter carries an item from the Sisterhood announcing the donation of a new vacuum cleaner.
In the sanctuary, a comfortably worn-in space of red pews and dropped ceilings, the Torah is fetched from its wooden ark on Saturday mornings. Rabbi Kaplan, in the open-ended style that characterizes many Reform services, leads discussions on what the writers of the holy books might have intended. Prayers are offered for the sick and the dead.
Outside, though, in Progressive Temple's corner of Borough Park, which is almost completely Hasidic, some temple members said they felt like outcasts.
"When I say 'Good Shabbos,' some of them say it back to me," Rabbi Kaplan said. "Some of them."
When members hop into their cars after services to head home, said Stan Hollander, a vice president of the temple who had his bar mitzvah there in 1953, "we are looked at somewhat askance." Orthodox Jews do not drive on the Sabbath.
For much of the last century, Borough Park belonged to the motherland of liberal-leaning American Judaism that spanned central and southern Brooklyn. But as Jews fled for the suburbs, they were replaced by, among other immigrant groups, fast-growing Hasidic populations. A 2002 study done for UJA-Federation of New York found that only about 2 percent of Borough Park's 75,000 Jews identified themselves as Reform, while nearly three-quarters said they were Orthodox.
Progressive Temple Beth Ahavath Shalom, housed in a modest gray former Presbyterian church on 46th Street, was born of the merger of two dwindling congregations. The one that had been at the site since the mid-1950's, Borough Park Progressive Synagogue, no longer had a full-time rabbi. The other temple was Beth Ahavath Shalom of Bensonhurst, whose larger but still shrinking congregation was forced to sell off its stately building on Benson Avenue, three miles south of Progressive Temple.
Rabbi Kaplan, who was the leader of the Bensonhurst temple but whose contract, which expires next month, is not being renewed, said that when her temple's board decided on the move, "My first reaction was 'Borough Park question mark exclamation point.' "
Though the marriage was to some extent one of convenience - "We had a building, and they had a congregation," Mr. Hollander said - the blended family seems to get along.
"We kind of liked the people that were here," the Bensonhurst temple's former president, Brian Wilkow, said before a recent temple board meeting, to which Mr. Hollander of Borough Park quickly added, "And now they're stuck with us."
But not everyone from Bensonhurst made the move. For some older congregants, said Roz Kirschenbaum, a trustee of the merged temple, "The idea of taking two buses was too much."
Madeline Kaye, one of the temple's presidents, said, only half-jokingly, "There were people worried that the ultra-Orthodox were going to stone us in the street."
No stones have been cast, but congregation members said they had been greeted coolly by the neighborhood's Hasidim, who - with their combination of strict conformity to Jewish rites and conservative dress - purposely set themselves apart.
"Culture shock," was how one Bensonhurst transferee, Shara Cohen, described the feeling of walking down the street.
Sherry Burns, a member of the board, said that neighborhood children had called temple members "Shabbos goyim," the phrase for the non-Jews that Orthodox Jews sometimes use to do tasks forbidden on the Sabbath.
A spokesman for the Bobover Hasidim, Yitzchok Fleischer, said that as far as he was concerned, Progressive Temple was "not even an entity."
On the other hand, the children in the neighborhood have at least shown an interest in the place, Rabbi Kaplan said. "Kids are dying to know what's going on," she said. "Especially in the warm weather, they're crowding around the door. It's the only thing in the neighborhood that's a little bit different."
Progressive Temple could use a lot more young members. Though the temple claims a membership of 139 families, two recent Saturday morning services each drew about 25 people, nearly all of whom appeared to be over 60 years old.
Marcia Wilkow, a past president, said that the temple would try to recruit members from the unaffiliated Jews who are being priced out of neighborhoods like Park Slope and heading south.
A mainstream Orthodox rabbi in the neighborhood, Gershon Tannenbaum, director of the 800-congregation Rabbinical Alliance of America, said that while Progressive Temple was "very welcome here," he doubted it could survive much longer.
Mr. Hollander said that despite the demographics, the congregation had no plans to move the temple to more fertile ground. "We just merged," he said. "The mortgage is paid. Consider the expenses of finding a building or building a new building.
"Besides," he said, "we were here first."
And this one is about Japan's trash-sorting.
How Do Japanese Dump Trash? Let Us Count the Myriad Ways
By NORIMITSU ONISHI
YOKOHAMA, Japan - When this city recently doubled the number of garbage categories to 10, it handed residents a 27-page booklet on how to sort their trash. Highlights included detailed instructions on 518 items.
Lipstick goes into burnables; lipstick tubes, "after the contents have been used up," into "small metals" or plastics. Take out your tape measure before tossing a kettle: under 12 inches, it goes into small metals, but over that it goes into bulky refuse.
Socks? If only one, it is burnable; a pair goes into used cloth, though only if the socks "are not torn, and the left and right sock match." Throw neckties into used cloth, but only after they have been "washed and dried."
"It was so hard at first," said Sumie Uchiki, 65, whose ward began wrestling with the 10 categories last October as part of an early trial. "We were just not used to it. I even needed to wear my reading glasses to sort out things correctly."
To Americans struggling with sorting trash into a few categories, Japan may provide a foretaste of daily life to come. In a national drive to reduce waste and increase recycling, neighborhoods, office buildings, towns and megalopolises are raising the number of trash categories - sometimes to dizzying heights.
Indeed, Yokohama, with 3.5 million people, appears slack compared with Kamikatsu, a town of 2,200 in the mountains of Shikoku, the smallest of Japan's four main islands. Not content with the 34 trash categories it defined four years ago as part of a major push to reduce waste, Kamikatsu has gradually raised the number to 44.
In Japan, the long-term push to sort and recycle aims to reduce the amount of garbage that ends up in incinerators. In land-scarce Japan, up to 80 percent of garbage is incinerated, while a similar percentage ends up in landfills in the United States.
The environmentally friendlier process of sorting and recycling may be more expensive than dumping, experts say, but it is comparable in cost to incineration.
"Sorting trash is not necessarily more expensive than incineration," said Hideki Kidohshi, a garbage researcher at the Center for the Strategy of Emergence at the Japan Research Institute. "In Japan, sorting and recycling will make further progress."
For Yokohama, the goal is to reduce incinerated garbage by 30 percent over the next five years. But Kamikatsu's goal is even more ambitious: eliminating garbage by 2020.
In the last four years, Kamikatsu has halved the amount of incinerator-bound garbage and raised its recycled waste to 80 percent, town officials said. Each household now has a subsidized garbage disposal unit that recycles raw garbage into compost.
At the single Garbage Station where residents must take their trash, 44 bins collect everything from tofu containers to egg cartons, plastic bottle caps to disposable chopsticks, fluorescent tubes to futons.
On a recent morning, Masaharu Tokimoto, 76, drove his pick-up truck to the station and expertly put brown bottles in their proper bin, clear bottles in theirs. He looked at the labels on cans to determine whether they were aluminum or steel. Flummoxed about one item, he stood paralyzed for a minute before mumbling to himself, "This must be inside."
Some 15 minutes later, Mr. Tokimoto was done. The town had gotten much cleaner with the new garbage policy, he said, though he added: "It's a bother, but I can't throw away the trash in the mountains. It would be a violation."
In towns and villages where everybody knows one another, not sorting may be unthinkable. In cities, though, not everybody complies, and perhaps more than any other act, sorting out the trash properly is regarded as proof that one is a grown-up, responsible citizen. The young, especially bachelors, are notorious for not sorting. And landlords reluctant to rent to non-Japanese will often explain that foreigners just cannot - or will not - sort their trash.
In Yokohama, after a few neighborhoods started sorting last year, some residents stopped throwing away their trash at home. Garbage bins at parks and convenience stores began filling up mysteriously with unsorted trash.
"So we stopped putting garbage bins in the parks," said Masaki Fujihira, who oversees the promotion of trash sorting at Yokohama City's family garbage division.
Enter the garbage guardians, the army of hawk-eyed volunteers across Japan who comb offending bags for, say, a telltale gas bill, then nudge the owner onto the right path.
One of the most tenacious around here is Mitsuharu Taniyama, 60, the owner of a small insurance business who drives around his ward every morning and evening, looking for missorted trash. He leaves notices at collection sites: "Mr. So-and-so, your practice of sorting out garbage is wrong. Please correct it."
"I checked inside bags and took especially lousy ones back to the owners' front doors," Mr. Taniyama said.
He stopped in front of one messy location where five bags were scattered about, and crows had picked out orange peels from one.
"This is a typical example of bad garbage," Mr. Taniyama said, with disgust. "The problem at this location is that there is no community leader. If there is no strong leader, there is chaos."
He touched base with his lieutenants in the field. On the corner of a street with large houses, where the new policy went into effect last October, Yumiko Miyano, 56, was waiting with some neighbors.
Ms. Miyano said she now had 90 percent compliance, adding that, to her surprise, those resisting tended to be "intellectuals," like a certain university professor or an official at Japan Airlines up the block.
"But the husband is the problem - the wife sorts her trash properly," one neighbor said of the airlines family.
Getting used to the new system was not without its embarrassing moments.
Shizuka Gu, 53, said that early on, a community leader sent her a letter reprimanding her for not writing her identification number on the bag with a "thick felt-tip pen." She was chided for using a pen that was "too thin."
"It was a big shock to be told that I had done something wrong," Ms. Gu said. "So I couldn't bring myself to take out the trash here and asked my husband to take it to his office. We did that for one month."
At a 100-family apartment complex not too far away, Sumishi Kawai was keeping his eyes trained on the trash site before pickup. Missorting was easy to spot, given the required use of clear garbage bags with identification numbers. Compliance was perfect - almost.
One young couple consistently failed to properly sort their trash. "Sorry! We'll be careful!" they would say each time Mr. Kawai knocked on their door holding evidence of their transgressions.
At last, even Mr. Kawai - a small 77-year-old man with wispy white hair, an easy smile and a demeanor that can only be described as grandfatherly - could take no more.
"They were renting the apartment, so I asked the owner, 'Well, would it be possible to have them move?'" Mr. Kawai said, recalling, with undisguised satisfaction, that the couple was evicted two months ago.
Reform Jews, Adrift in a Sea of Black Hats
By ANDY NEWMAN
A few minutes into a Saturday service last month, two teenagers in dark suits and broad-brimmed black hats crept into Progressive Temple Beth Ahavath Shalom in Borough Park, Brooklyn. They were not pleased with the proceedings.
Rabbi Karen Bookman Kaplan was leading the two dozen congregants in a prayer: "God of light and sun, we thank you for the morning and the day to come."
The cantor, Jill Hausman, sang, "Of you, who are my soul's delight."
The two young men had seen enough. They ducked out and headed toward their own, much larger synagogue two blocks away.
"I was really surprised to see such things going on," said one of them, David Waldman, 17, a member of a Hasidic sect called the Bobov. "The real Jewish law says there should not be any women as rabbis or cantors."
He had often wondered about the temple as he walked past, had heard stories about it. Now he knew. "This place should not be known as a Jewish shul," he said. "It's a fake."
It is strange sometimes to be the last Reform Jewish congregation left in Borough Park, home to one of the city's largest concentrations of Orthodox Jews, including ultra-Orthodox sects known as Hasidim.
Inside the temple, life actually seems fairly ordinary. Children go to religious education twice a week. The congregation's newsletter carries an item from the Sisterhood announcing the donation of a new vacuum cleaner.
In the sanctuary, a comfortably worn-in space of red pews and dropped ceilings, the Torah is fetched from its wooden ark on Saturday mornings. Rabbi Kaplan, in the open-ended style that characterizes many Reform services, leads discussions on what the writers of the holy books might have intended. Prayers are offered for the sick and the dead.
Outside, though, in Progressive Temple's corner of Borough Park, which is almost completely Hasidic, some temple members said they felt like outcasts.
"When I say 'Good Shabbos,' some of them say it back to me," Rabbi Kaplan said. "Some of them."
When members hop into their cars after services to head home, said Stan Hollander, a vice president of the temple who had his bar mitzvah there in 1953, "we are looked at somewhat askance." Orthodox Jews do not drive on the Sabbath.
For much of the last century, Borough Park belonged to the motherland of liberal-leaning American Judaism that spanned central and southern Brooklyn. But as Jews fled for the suburbs, they were replaced by, among other immigrant groups, fast-growing Hasidic populations. A 2002 study done for UJA-Federation of New York found that only about 2 percent of Borough Park's 75,000 Jews identified themselves as Reform, while nearly three-quarters said they were Orthodox.
Progressive Temple Beth Ahavath Shalom, housed in a modest gray former Presbyterian church on 46th Street, was born of the merger of two dwindling congregations. The one that had been at the site since the mid-1950's, Borough Park Progressive Synagogue, no longer had a full-time rabbi. The other temple was Beth Ahavath Shalom of Bensonhurst, whose larger but still shrinking congregation was forced to sell off its stately building on Benson Avenue, three miles south of Progressive Temple.
Rabbi Kaplan, who was the leader of the Bensonhurst temple but whose contract, which expires next month, is not being renewed, said that when her temple's board decided on the move, "My first reaction was 'Borough Park question mark exclamation point.' "
Though the marriage was to some extent one of convenience - "We had a building, and they had a congregation," Mr. Hollander said - the blended family seems to get along.
"We kind of liked the people that were here," the Bensonhurst temple's former president, Brian Wilkow, said before a recent temple board meeting, to which Mr. Hollander of Borough Park quickly added, "And now they're stuck with us."
But not everyone from Bensonhurst made the move. For some older congregants, said Roz Kirschenbaum, a trustee of the merged temple, "The idea of taking two buses was too much."
Madeline Kaye, one of the temple's presidents, said, only half-jokingly, "There were people worried that the ultra-Orthodox were going to stone us in the street."
No stones have been cast, but congregation members said they had been greeted coolly by the neighborhood's Hasidim, who - with their combination of strict conformity to Jewish rites and conservative dress - purposely set themselves apart.
"Culture shock," was how one Bensonhurst transferee, Shara Cohen, described the feeling of walking down the street.
Sherry Burns, a member of the board, said that neighborhood children had called temple members "Shabbos goyim," the phrase for the non-Jews that Orthodox Jews sometimes use to do tasks forbidden on the Sabbath.
A spokesman for the Bobover Hasidim, Yitzchok Fleischer, said that as far as he was concerned, Progressive Temple was "not even an entity."
On the other hand, the children in the neighborhood have at least shown an interest in the place, Rabbi Kaplan said. "Kids are dying to know what's going on," she said. "Especially in the warm weather, they're crowding around the door. It's the only thing in the neighborhood that's a little bit different."
Progressive Temple could use a lot more young members. Though the temple claims a membership of 139 families, two recent Saturday morning services each drew about 25 people, nearly all of whom appeared to be over 60 years old.
Marcia Wilkow, a past president, said that the temple would try to recruit members from the unaffiliated Jews who are being priced out of neighborhoods like Park Slope and heading south.
A mainstream Orthodox rabbi in the neighborhood, Gershon Tannenbaum, director of the 800-congregation Rabbinical Alliance of America, said that while Progressive Temple was "very welcome here," he doubted it could survive much longer.
Mr. Hollander said that despite the demographics, the congregation had no plans to move the temple to more fertile ground. "We just merged," he said. "The mortgage is paid. Consider the expenses of finding a building or building a new building.
"Besides," he said, "we were here first."
And this one is about Japan's trash-sorting.
How Do Japanese Dump Trash? Let Us Count the Myriad Ways
By NORIMITSU ONISHI
YOKOHAMA, Japan - When this city recently doubled the number of garbage categories to 10, it handed residents a 27-page booklet on how to sort their trash. Highlights included detailed instructions on 518 items.
Lipstick goes into burnables; lipstick tubes, "after the contents have been used up," into "small metals" or plastics. Take out your tape measure before tossing a kettle: under 12 inches, it goes into small metals, but over that it goes into bulky refuse.
Socks? If only one, it is burnable; a pair goes into used cloth, though only if the socks "are not torn, and the left and right sock match." Throw neckties into used cloth, but only after they have been "washed and dried."
"It was so hard at first," said Sumie Uchiki, 65, whose ward began wrestling with the 10 categories last October as part of an early trial. "We were just not used to it. I even needed to wear my reading glasses to sort out things correctly."
To Americans struggling with sorting trash into a few categories, Japan may provide a foretaste of daily life to come. In a national drive to reduce waste and increase recycling, neighborhoods, office buildings, towns and megalopolises are raising the number of trash categories - sometimes to dizzying heights.
Indeed, Yokohama, with 3.5 million people, appears slack compared with Kamikatsu, a town of 2,200 in the mountains of Shikoku, the smallest of Japan's four main islands. Not content with the 34 trash categories it defined four years ago as part of a major push to reduce waste, Kamikatsu has gradually raised the number to 44.
In Japan, the long-term push to sort and recycle aims to reduce the amount of garbage that ends up in incinerators. In land-scarce Japan, up to 80 percent of garbage is incinerated, while a similar percentage ends up in landfills in the United States.
The environmentally friendlier process of sorting and recycling may be more expensive than dumping, experts say, but it is comparable in cost to incineration.
"Sorting trash is not necessarily more expensive than incineration," said Hideki Kidohshi, a garbage researcher at the Center for the Strategy of Emergence at the Japan Research Institute. "In Japan, sorting and recycling will make further progress."
For Yokohama, the goal is to reduce incinerated garbage by 30 percent over the next five years. But Kamikatsu's goal is even more ambitious: eliminating garbage by 2020.
In the last four years, Kamikatsu has halved the amount of incinerator-bound garbage and raised its recycled waste to 80 percent, town officials said. Each household now has a subsidized garbage disposal unit that recycles raw garbage into compost.
At the single Garbage Station where residents must take their trash, 44 bins collect everything from tofu containers to egg cartons, plastic bottle caps to disposable chopsticks, fluorescent tubes to futons.
On a recent morning, Masaharu Tokimoto, 76, drove his pick-up truck to the station and expertly put brown bottles in their proper bin, clear bottles in theirs. He looked at the labels on cans to determine whether they were aluminum or steel. Flummoxed about one item, he stood paralyzed for a minute before mumbling to himself, "This must be inside."
Some 15 minutes later, Mr. Tokimoto was done. The town had gotten much cleaner with the new garbage policy, he said, though he added: "It's a bother, but I can't throw away the trash in the mountains. It would be a violation."
In towns and villages where everybody knows one another, not sorting may be unthinkable. In cities, though, not everybody complies, and perhaps more than any other act, sorting out the trash properly is regarded as proof that one is a grown-up, responsible citizen. The young, especially bachelors, are notorious for not sorting. And landlords reluctant to rent to non-Japanese will often explain that foreigners just cannot - or will not - sort their trash.
In Yokohama, after a few neighborhoods started sorting last year, some residents stopped throwing away their trash at home. Garbage bins at parks and convenience stores began filling up mysteriously with unsorted trash.
"So we stopped putting garbage bins in the parks," said Masaki Fujihira, who oversees the promotion of trash sorting at Yokohama City's family garbage division.
Enter the garbage guardians, the army of hawk-eyed volunteers across Japan who comb offending bags for, say, a telltale gas bill, then nudge the owner onto the right path.
One of the most tenacious around here is Mitsuharu Taniyama, 60, the owner of a small insurance business who drives around his ward every morning and evening, looking for missorted trash. He leaves notices at collection sites: "Mr. So-and-so, your practice of sorting out garbage is wrong. Please correct it."
"I checked inside bags and took especially lousy ones back to the owners' front doors," Mr. Taniyama said.
He stopped in front of one messy location where five bags were scattered about, and crows had picked out orange peels from one.
"This is a typical example of bad garbage," Mr. Taniyama said, with disgust. "The problem at this location is that there is no community leader. If there is no strong leader, there is chaos."
He touched base with his lieutenants in the field. On the corner of a street with large houses, where the new policy went into effect last October, Yumiko Miyano, 56, was waiting with some neighbors.
Ms. Miyano said she now had 90 percent compliance, adding that, to her surprise, those resisting tended to be "intellectuals," like a certain university professor or an official at Japan Airlines up the block.
"But the husband is the problem - the wife sorts her trash properly," one neighbor said of the airlines family.
Getting used to the new system was not without its embarrassing moments.
Shizuka Gu, 53, said that early on, a community leader sent her a letter reprimanding her for not writing her identification number on the bag with a "thick felt-tip pen." She was chided for using a pen that was "too thin."
"It was a big shock to be told that I had done something wrong," Ms. Gu said. "So I couldn't bring myself to take out the trash here and asked my husband to take it to his office. We did that for one month."
At a 100-family apartment complex not too far away, Sumishi Kawai was keeping his eyes trained on the trash site before pickup. Missorting was easy to spot, given the required use of clear garbage bags with identification numbers. Compliance was perfect - almost.
One young couple consistently failed to properly sort their trash. "Sorry! We'll be careful!" they would say each time Mr. Kawai knocked on their door holding evidence of their transgressions.
At last, even Mr. Kawai - a small 77-year-old man with wispy white hair, an easy smile and a demeanor that can only be described as grandfatherly - could take no more.
"They were renting the apartment, so I asked the owner, 'Well, would it be possible to have them move?'" Mr. Kawai said, recalling, with undisguised satisfaction, that the couple was evicted two months ago.
