Poway Rabbi Wants Kids to Skip School

Just before sundown on Monday, dozens of children on the back patio of the Altman Family Chabad Community Center were carrying around ram’s horns, working sandpaper across the rough shell or trying to blow a note, any note, through their new shofars.

The kids were participants in a workshop hosted by Chabad of Poway to impart a sense of history, and to send the students home with their own traditional Jewish horns just before the start of the fall holiday season.

“Everybody take your shofar in your hand, and we’re going to practice the tekiah, the long sound,” Rabbi Mendy Rubenfeld, the Chabad’s youth director, said over a bullhorn. “Put it right to the side of your mouth, like that, and take a finger and close off the hole.”

Only a handful of the young pupils were able to make a musical note, and among them was 12-year-old Joey Baer.

“I play the trumpet also, so it overlaps,” explained Baer, who wore a Boy Scout uniform shirt to the workshop. “I’m also my troop’s bugler.”

Baer lifted his new horn and blew a long, high-pitched note through it, sounding something like a wooden train whistle.

Like the other kids at the workshop on Monday, Baer was sanding and shellacking a cured ram’s horn that had already been drilled, but he said it won’t be long before he has shelves of fancy shofars.

“I’m going to get a ton at my bar mitzvah —- I’ll get, like, 50 of them. That’s what everybody seems to get you, a shofar,” he said, adding that his family uses the traditional horn each fall. “We play it during the holidays. There’s three substantial patterns —- you play one long note, then you play three, and then you go da, da, da, da, da.”

Unlike the trumpet or the bugle, the shofar has a history that stretches back thousands of years, with ties to such foundational Jewish figures as Abraham and Moses.

Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, will be observed Sept. 28-30 this year, followed by Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, from Oct. 7-8, according to chabad.org.

The website says that the “central observance of Rosh Hashanah is the sounding of the shofar,” a unique and ancient reverberation that represents the coronation of a people’s king, as well as a call to repentance.

On Monday, the students were introduced to a live ram, 1 year old and already shaggy with curls of wool, in the back of a pickup in the Chabad parking lot.

The woman who owned the ram was explaining the difference between horns and antlers —- “Horns are never shed, they’re part of the animal for all of the animal’s life; antlers are dropped each year” —- and that the shofar is only the shell on the outside of the horn.

Inside the shell is living tissue that is cleared out when the ram dies, allowing for the sound to wind down the spiral of a longer, traditional shofar.

While smoothing the smaller versions handed out on Monday with an electric grinder, Rubenfeld said that giving kids a chance to handle a shofar as it is being made helps solidify the abundant history lessons associated with the ancient horn.

“We like it when the kids get hands-on experience,” the rabbi said through his dust mask. “They’ll never forget this.”

Still clutching his horn, young Baer smiled when asked whether it was good enough to be used for something like Rosh Hashana.

“Yeah, definitely. This one’s very nice, I’m very happy with this one,” he said, confirming that playing the shofar requires a musician’s touch. “Well, you have to play it sort of like a trumpet —- you have to find the right spot on your lips.”

Skipping School

A Rabbi wants Jewish kids in North County to skip school at the end of the week so they can observe the religion’s high holy days.

It’s a request Rabbi Mendy Rubenfeld has made before, but this year the youth director at Chabad of Poway kicked it up, issuing a provocative press release with a headline that “urges students to skip school” in favor of attending a synagogue on Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year.

Observances start at sundown Wednesday, but run two days —- thus affecting this Thursday and Friday’s school days.

“I tell my students, ‘Don’t go to school,’” Rubenfeld said Monday. “It’s not just a holiday, but a high holiday. … My point really is that every Jewish child should take off some time, to remember who they are. They have an incredibly rich heritage.”

Rubenfeld wants such an observance also made for Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, which this year starts at sundown on Friday and runs through Saturday —- and thus is not in conflict with public school schedules.

And that, he said, goes for people with children who are not affiliated with a particular synagogue, folks he referred to as “once-a-year-Jews.” Think of practice in the same way that a number of people seem to only attend Christian churches on Christmas or Easter.

So, what do the schools —- who are paid by the state per student, per day —- think of the rabbi’s request? In Poway, district spokeswoman Sharon Raffer said the schools have a policy that allows students, with their parents OK, to skip school to observe major holidays. But such absences are not excused by the state, and the schools cannot claim money for the student for that day, she said.

Students who miss school for religious observances, she said, will be allowed to make up their work without penalty, as per district policy, Raffer said.

Rubenfeld said Chabad of Poway estimates there are about 4,000 families in North County who define themselves as Jewish, either by religion, culture or ethnically.

The U.S. Census is barred from asking for religious affiliations in mandatory questioning, but through self-volunteered information in the American Religious Identification Survey from 1990 to 2008, an estimated 3.3 percent of Californians said they consider themselves Jewish, according to the Census Bureau.

And for Jewish kids whose parents do keep them home but don’t attend synagogue, well, he’d like to see the kids print out information about Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur ahead of time, to read about on the holidays themselves. Ideally, he said, Jews should consider keeping gadgets such as TV and computers dark on such holidays.

“I have Christians who come up and say ‘Happy New Year,’ but there are Jewish kids who don’t know about it,” Rubenfeld said of the Jewish holidays, and Rosh Hashanah in particular.