What We Eat - United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism

HALACHAH IN THE MODERN WORLD
SKYPING THE MINYAN
BY RABBI DAVID LERNER
PEOPLE WERE GIVING
me strange looks.00000000
I guess it was to be expected
– I had come into the minyan
and opened up my laptop,
which now was making
strange noises. People were curious about why
the rabbi would be disturbing the sanctity of
the daily minyan by playing with his email.
At the end of services, the mourners
observing yahrzeit got up to recite the
Mourner’s Kaddish. At that point I turned
to the laptop and looked in, and a woman
on the screen stood up to recite the Kaddish
with them.
I explained to the minyannaires that we
had a new participant in the Temple Emunah
daily minyan. Her name is Maxine Marcus,
though everyone calls her Max. She lives
in Amsterdam and works in the Hague,
where she serves as a war crimes prosecutor
at the International Criminal Tribunal
for the former Yugoslavia.
The story behind the story: My wife,
Sharon Levin, and Max have been close
friends since they participated in USY’s
Poland Seminar/Israel Pilgrimage 25 years
ago. Theirs was among the first USY groups
to visit Poland to see the instruments of
the Nazi death camps. Both Max and Sharon
were profoundly moved and transformed
by that experience.
Max’s parents were survivors of the Holo-
48 CJ — VOICES OF CONSERVATIVE/MASORTI JUDAISM
caust. Her mother was deported from the
Hague in 1942 at age 12 and was imprisoned
in more than 10 concentration camps.
She spent her 14th birthday in Auschwitz
and endured unspeakable horrors, tortured
by the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele. Growing
up in the 1970s and ’80s, Max heard
these stories and internalized a profound
commitment to Judaism and a deep sense
of justice.
During her college years, Max spent her
summers volunteering at a Bosnian Muslim
refugee camp helping the victims of war
crimes, often Muslim women. My wife also
was a volunteer during the Yugoslavian war
in the early 1990s. After law school, Max
worked for human rights in Africa and eventually
wound up in the Hague.
In recent years, Max had been dealing
with her parents’ aging and the cancer that
Rabbi David Lerner is the spiritual leader
of Temple Emunah in Lexington, Massachusetts.
He is president of the New England
Rabbinical Assembly and co-chairs the
RA’s Commission on Keruv, Conversion and
Jewish Peoplehood. Max Marcus and her mother, Stella Marcus, z’l.
eventually took
her mother’s
life. She discovered
that it
is not easy to
say Kaddish in
Amsterdam. She and I realized that she could
participate in our daily minyan through the
free internet video calling service known
as Skype.
But would it be kosher? Interestingly
enough, 10 years ago Rabbi Avram Reisner
wrote a teshuvah, a religious responsum
for the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards
of the Rabbinical Assembly, explaining
that should such technology arise (Skype
had not yet been created), it would be permissible
for someone to join in a minyan,
although not to count in the quorum of 10,
and to recite the Kaddish. While it also