Thursday, July 19, 2007

Eruvin in the News: Palo Alto, CA 3

New Eruv Reopens Old Church-State Debates in Palo Alto

By Josh Richman

Oakland, Calif. - Some lines, it seems, cannot be crossed.

In 1999, Rabbi Yitzchok Feldman and his synagogue, Congregation Emek Beracha, approached the city of Palo Alto — an urbane community of tree-lined lanes that some of Silicon Valley’s and Stanford University’s finest minds call home — about creating an eruv, a delineated area in which Orthodox Jews can engage in certain activities normally forbidden on the Sabbath. City officials initially reacted warmly, but the following year a community outcry about separation of church and state, and perhaps about less high-minded issues, as well, beat back the proposal into obscurity. Read on...

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The Bais Ephraim Revisited

  As I have written on numerous occasions the argument that the Bais Ephraim maintains that pirtzos esser [breaches of ten amos wide] is ...