Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Yom Kippur and diversity in groups

[Jeanne Goodman (GoodmanJ]

Perhaps Jews feel it more necessary to remind people that we exist, that we
have a place in cohousing and that we wish to be fairly included. If
Muslims, Pagans, Buddhists or anyone else involved in cohousing have had
their major holidays ignored I wish they would do the same.

Look, Jewish holidays are sometimes a challenge to work around because they
are based on a different date. I understand that. We just had to reschedule
a meeting because the chair (Jewish) realized that she had scheduled a
meeting for 10/7. Oops! If you don't know to look you won't notice.

Ideally, when major cohousing events are scheduled to coincide with a
religious holiday, the leaders will say "Sorry! We didn't mean to. We are
too far along to change it now." If on the other hand, they knew it was
going to fall on Yom Kippur, then that is something that I would consider
wrong-headed.

What I would wish is that the leaders of the events say, "We've heard you.
We made a mistake. We don't plan to repeat the mistake for future events,"
rather than trying to explain away why it was valid to do something that
made people feel alienated.

Jeanne Goodman
JP Cohousing, Boston

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Racheli Gai" <racheli [at] sonoracohousing.com>
To: <cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org>
Sent: Friday, September 26, 2003 10:35
Subject: [C-L]_Yom Kippur and diversity in groups



Does anyone out there know when Muslim holidays happen?
Does anyone take care not to schedule then?
I doubt it!  I haven't belonged to one group as yet which took notice of
other minorities, but whenever anyone forgets when a Jewish holidy takes
place, recriminations start flying in no time.

WHY???

R.


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