Rabbi’s Update 4/24/2026

Dear Friends:

We sometimes forget how rapidly means of communication have changed in our world. Here’s an interesting statistic for you to ponder: in 1994, half of the world’s population had never made a telephone call. Fifteen years later, in 2009, there were 3.3. billion mobile phone subscribers out of a total world population of five billion.

Within the last few weeks I appeared in two different types of new media but in both cases the appearances were to some extent products of relationships going back over four decades.

In 1934, a group of German Jewish refugees in New York started a publication which they called Aufbau which means “rebuilding.” For most of its history in New York, which lasted until 2004, it was a monthly but during the Second World War it was published as a weekly. It had a circulation as high as 40,000 at times. In 2004 it was bought by a publisher in Switzerland and is now a glossy German-language monthly, still aimed at German-speaking Jews.

Doug Chandler is a free-lance journalist covering the Jewish world, and we have known each other since the mid-1980s. He contacted me for an interview for an article he was writing on American rabbis and the current immigration enforcement situation. He submitted it in English and it was translated for publication in Aufbau in German. The article Doug submitted can be found here.  A pdf of the entire issue can be found here. 

Aufbau goes back to 1934 but podcasts are a much newer form of communication, first appearing in 2003. One of my Georgetown classmates, Rev. Dr. Trish Sullivan Vanni, is the co-host of a podcast called “Cutting Edge Catholics.” Rev. Dr. Vanni taught for many years in Roman Catholic colleges and seminaries until about eight years ago, when she left the Roman Catholic Church and joined a denomination called the Ecumenical Catholic Church and got ordained as a priest. The Ecumenical Catholic Church and other “Independent Catholic” groups maintain most of the same beliefs and practices as the Roman Catholic Church but are not under the authority of the Pope. They ordain women and “out” LGBT people and allow their priests to marry. She and her co-host Rev. Dr. Jayme Mathias interviewed me for a podcast called “Things Christians Should Know About Judaism Today.”

I do not imagine that everyone reading this update will agree with everything I say in either the Aufbau article or the podcast, and I of course welcome your feedback on either or both.

Speaking of newer forms of communication, every once in a while we encounter problems making our Shabbat morning services available on Zoom. For whatever reason, the reliability and bandwidth of the wifi in the Sanctuary seems to deteriorate which causes the signal to drop or disappear. The problem seems definitely to be the bandwidth of our Internet connection and not with any of the equipment we are using; so until that’s resolved, we’ll be using a hotspot rather than the synagogue’s wifi network for Zoom. This doesn’t affect how you connect to or view our Shabbat morning Zoom, but I did want to share this info with you. This past Shabbat the Zoom finally worked, using a hotspot, after a couple of weeks of problems.

If you or someone you know is in need because of having been laid off, or has  lost benefits of some type and needs immediate help, please let me know. I can access limited funds through the Jewish Federation almost immediately. For longer-term help, the Hebrew Free Loan Society will loan up to $18,000 interest-free and the Jewish Federation has set up a hotline to  access assistance at 703-JCARING.

As a reminder, I am having drop-in hours on Thursday afternoons from 2 to 4 at the shul. For my drop-in hours, you do not need to make an appointment -- that would negate the whole point of drop-in hours -- but I’d urge you to check and make sure I am there regardless as sometimes there are unavoidable pastoral or other emergencies which might take me away from the building. 

As always, if I can do anything for you or you need to talk, please contact me at rabbi@kehilatshalom.org rather than through the synagogue office. I am happy to meet you at the synagogue by appointment; if you want to speak with me it’s best to make an appointment rather than assuming I will be there when you stop by. 

Additionally, if you know of a Kehilat Shalom congregant or another member of our Jewish community who could use a phone call, please let me know.

L’shalom,

Rabbi Charles L. Arian