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Our New Rabbi
August 2010
rabbi reinerShir Hadash is happy and excited to welcome Rabbi Fred N. Reiner to our congregation for 5771!
Rabbi Reiner served as Senior Rabbi of Temple Sinai, Washington, DC, from July 1985 to June 2010. During his tenure the congregation doubled in size to nearly 1200 households, added a nursery school, expanded its religious school, enlarged its building, and enriched its ritual, educational, and programmatic offerings.
Rabbi Reiner has been president of the Washington Board of Rabbis and president of the Mid-Atlantic region of the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR).  He continues to serve on the Board of Trustees of the national CCAR and on the Washington Advisory Council of Avodah.  He has taught at Howard University Divinity School.  
He provided leadership nationally and in the Washington area on issues such as reproductive rights, church-state separation, housing, D.C. voting rights, and aging concerns. He has published articles in both academic and popular journals.
A native of Chicago, Rabbi Reiner received his B.A. degree from the University of California-Berkeley, where he was a campus leader following Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement.  In 1973, he was ordained and received a M.A. in Hebrew Letters degree from the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati (HUC-JIR) in 1973.
Since ordination, Rabbi Reiner has served as Director of Admissions at Hebrew Union College and in pulpits in Topeka, KS, and the Chicago area.
He is married to Dr. Sherry Levy-Reiner. They have a son, David, who was ordained as a rabbi in 2009.

Rabbi Mark Loeb
October 2009
rabbi loebIt was with great sadness that members of the congregation learned of the death of Rabbi Mark Loeb, who died Wednesday, October 7 in Milano. He was to have served as Rabbi for Shir Hadash and Beth Shalom until June 2010. When he led services for Rosh Hashanah, the congregation was impressed by his warm manner and sense of humor.  "We regret not having been able to get to know him better," said Sarah Rubenstein, Ritual Chairperson.
Rabbi Loeb had already postponed his collaboration with Shir Hadash for a year when in 2008 he underwent emergency heart surgery. Sources indicate that he died suddenly after dinner Wednesday evening. He was 65.
Born in Boston, Rabbi Loeb studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and was ordained at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. Before his retirement last year, he had served as senior rabbi for Beth El Congregation in Pikesville, near Baltimore, Maryland for 28 years.
Rabbi Loeb was very active in community affairs: he was national president for MAZON, a Jewish Response to Hunger, served on various gubernatorial commissions for the state of Maryland, chaired the board of Baltimore Hebrew University, and was co-founder of the Institute for Christian and Jewish studies, promoting interfaith dialogue.


Holocaust Memorial Day 2009
January 2009
mayor and others with plaqueJanuary 29th the town council of Bagno a Ripoli (FI) presented a plaque in memory of the political dissidents and Jews confined in Villa La Selva. From 1940 to 1944 this neoclassical villa at the top of a hill on Via del Carota was used as a concentration camp for civilian prisoners and as a way-station for many destined for the extermination camps.
For Luciano Bartolino, mayor of Bagno a Ripoli, the plaque represents the zenith of the work of the city’s Peace Commission, involved in reassembling the memory of the local sites associated with the Shoah. At the ceremony, he introduced Matilda Jones, a journalist from Viterbo, whose father was a prisoner of the Villa La Selva camp.
Current president of the Bagno a Ripoli section of A.N.P.I. (National Association of Italian Partisans) Luigi Remschi, recalled when, as a young man, he listened to the testimony of those who had lived through the events we were commemorating. He emphasized that the responsibility to pass the memory to the next generation falls on each of us.
Daniel Vogelman, of the publishing house La Giuntina, talked of his father, a Shoah survivor also detained at Villa La Selva before being transported to Auschwitz. Then, Shir Hadash member Giovanni Cipani, who has been instrumental in the promotion of Bagno a Ripoli’s Holocaust Memorial Day projects, read a prayer sent for the occasion by Rabbi Robert Rothman:
Giovanni reads prayer
Creation did not end with man, it began with him. When God created man, God gave him a secret...and that secret was not how to begin but how to begin again. ...To begin is God's privilege alone but man begins again every time he chooses to defy death and side with the living. Remembering those who needlessly died and trying to live meaningfully is our way of partnering with God in preserving and enhancing life itself.

We recall with loving reverence all of those who perished through the cruelty of oppressors. They lie at rest in nameless graves in far off lands, forests and lonely fields. Yet they shall not be forgotten. Through this shared hour we take them into our hearts and give them a place beside the cherished memories of our own beloved deceased. They are now ours.

A laurel wreath was placed against the pedestal of the plaque. The inscription reads:
AT VILLA LA SELVA FROM 1940 TO 1944
     JEWS AND OPPONENTS OF THE
FASCIST REGIME WERE IMPRISONED
        FROM HERE MANY DEPARTED
       FOR EXTERMINATION CAMPS.

“CONSIDER THAT THIS OCCURRED...
IT TOOK PLACE AND THEREFORE
IT CAN HAPPEN AGAIN.”
            PRIMO LEVI
            “IF THIS IS A MAN”


Congregation Shir Hadash, Reform Judaism in Florence
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