My Niece’s Mitzvah Project

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

If you want to be technical about it, Alexis isn’t my niece–she’s the daughter of one of my three first cousins. But she calls me “Auntie Erika,” and I love her to pieces. Which is why I’m so proud to share the project she has undertaken prior to being called to the Torah as a Bat Mitzvah.

In her own words:

Please sign up for my ProjectSave18 group. This is my Mitzvah Project and starting April 1, I will be posting facts about organ and tissue donation daily. I will be doing this throughout the entire month of April, Donate Life month. My grandma Alexis was in need of a heart and kidney transplant and partly because of this she passed away. Please help me spread the word by this cause by joining my group and sharing with all of your Facebook friends.

(Interestingly—or maybe it’s not so interesting, since it IS Donate Life month—an item from MyJewishLearning.com crossed one of my social-media accounts a few days ago on the subject of “misgivings and misconceptions” re: organ donation.) (more…)

Words of the Week

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

“What made me so distressed was not that SOCC had asked me about divestment, but that they had thought my Jewishness might make me a poor Senator. There are Jews who support divestment, there are Jews who do not take a position and there are Jews who are against divestment. My involvement in Hillel, my praying in synagogue, my love of the Hebrew language, my study of Talmud, my celebration of Rosh Hashanah and Hannukah and Purim and Passover have nothing to do with divestment.”

–Molly Horwitz, “Dear Stanford: Don’t Quiz Me on BDS Because I’m Jewish” (Forward)