DIGITAL
CHARITY EASY FAST
Ross Lefkowitz’s Pushka updates tzedekah for
those who no longer carry cash.

SEPTEMBER 9, 2021 / 3 TISHRI 5782
PAGE 26
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM — WHAT IT MEANS TO BE JEWISH IN PHILADELPHIA —
$1.00 OF NOTE
LOCAL New Barrack
Head Discusses
School’s Future
Rabbi Marshall
Lesack returns to
his alma mater.

Page 4
LOCAL What’s Your
Fasting Strategy?
How to keep Yom
Kippur hunger
pains at bay.

Page 6
OBITUARY State Rep. Babette
Josephs Dies at 81
Josephs served for
28 years in the
state house.

Page 8
Volume 134
Number 22
Published Weekly Since 1887
Rabbis Refl ect on
Changing Sermons
After 9/11
JARRAD SAFFREN | JE STAFF
ON THE MORNING of Sept. 11, 2001,
Rabbi Eliott Perlstein was working at
home on his Rosh Hashanah sermon.

Aft er a while, the Ohev Shalom of
Bucks County leader decided to take a
break, so he walked into the kitchen and
fl ipped on the television.

“Th e fi rst tower had already fallen,”
Perlstein said of the terrorist attack that
rocked New York City, the United States
and the world that day.

Th e Conservative rabbi immediately
scrapped his sermon. Later that week, he
started working on a new one about 9/11
and all the fear, confusion and anger it
sparked. Sept. 11, 2001 was a Tuesday; Rosh
Hashanah began less than a week later, on
Monday evening.

Many synagogue leaders kept their
original sermons for the second day of
Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. But on
A housing unit at State Correctional Institution-Phoenix
Courtesy of Pennsylvania Department of Corrections
Teshuvah on the Inside:
Jewish Alternatives to
the Prison System
SASHA ROGELBERG | JE STAFF
FRANK JORDAN HAS wanted to visit
his sick friend for a while now.

Jordan has been incarcerated for 36
years on homicide charges and is living at
State Correctional Institution-Phoenix in
Montgomery County.

Jordan hasn’t been able to see his
friend, who’s being treated at a hospital on
the outside, and he isn’t sure when he’ll
see him next. Jordan is hoping the prison’s
part-time rabbi will give him an update,
but things seem grim: “We don’t think
See Sermons, Page 18
See Teshuvah, Page 18
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