Volume xiX, Issue XV | thejewishvoice.org Serving Rhode Island and Southeastern Massachusetts
24 Elul 5773 | August 30, 2013
Special Issue: Rosh Hashanah
Kagan’s speech recognized as ‘among the finest given at Touro’
Mike Greenberg, of ESPN, will speak in Providence
Mike Greenberg, of ESPN fame, will speak at Alliance Campaign launch Be someone who makes a difference By Nancy Kirsch nkirsch@jewishallianceri.org PROVIDENCE – Mike Greenberg, co-host of ESPN’s “Mike & Mike in the Morning,” will be the featured speaker at a community event sponsored by the Jewish Alliance of Greater Rhode Island. The Tuesday, Sept. 17 event, at 7:30 p.m. at the Providence Biltmore Hotel in downtown Providence, is the Alliance’s official launch of the 2014 Annual Campaign. Neil and Randi-Beth Beranbaum and Alan and Marianne Litwin are cochairs of “An Evening with Mike Greenberg.” After his wife, Stacy Ste-
ponate Greenberg, lost one of her closest friends to breast cancer, Greenberg, aka “Greeny,” wrote “All You Could Ask For,” a novel that depicts the lives of three women, all diagnosed with breast cancer. The novel’s characters, he said, are only loosely based on three women he knows. However. he added, these women “don’t have cancer … but I wanted to create these voices, so I assigned an actual voice to each of these characters,” he explained. In conjunction with the book’s April 2013 publication, OBLIGATION | 4
By Sam Shamoon Touro Synagogue Foundation Board Member and Linda Shamoon Special to The Jewish Voice NEWPORT – More than 400 people crowded into two venues in Newport – Touro Synagogue and the Newport Community Church next door – to hear Elena Kagan, associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, deliver the keynote address to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Touro Synagogue. Kagan, whose speech many attendees declared “among the finest given at Touro Synagogue,” spoke at Touro as part of the 66th annual reading of the George Washington letter – one assuring congregants of the Hebrew Congregation of Newport promising them, among other commitments, “to bigotry no sanction.” Kagan, who is the Supreme Court’s 112th justice, fourth female justice, and one of three Jews currently serving on the bench, entered the synagogue about 15 minutes before the start of the letter-reading ceremony. Even at that early arrival time, most of the colonial-style chairs that fill the synagogue’s sanctuary were already occupied by synagogue officers and members, invited guests and a
SAM SHAMOON
COURTESY | ESPN
Supreme Court justice shares stories of success in America
Elena Kagen, associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, enters Touro Synagogue on Sunday, Aug. 18; a member of the Newport Artillery is at right. wide array of Rhode Island dignitaries, including, among others, Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chafee, U.S. Senators Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse, Rhode Island State Senate President Teresa Paiva-Weed and Newport Mayor Henry F. Winthrop, as well as synagogue copresident Bea Ross. Kagan and these dignitaries
came on Sunday, Aug. 18, to participate in the afternoon’s celebratory program and to declare publicly the crucial importance of the words in Washington’s letter. Those words – that the new government of the United States of America would give, “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance” – are KAGAN | 18