Yom Kippur

Members of a Jewish congregation and a Roman Catholic parish gathered yesterday at an Owings Mills synagogue for a Yom Kippur discussion on today's troubled youth and how parents, educators and religious leaders can pass on values to children.The program, titled "L'dor v'dor, From Generation to Generation, Passing a Moral Legacy to our Children," is the start of a yearlong effort by Owings Mills' Beth Israel Congregation and Glyndon's Sacred Heart parish to help parents instill values.The discussion takes on greater poignancy and urgency, organizers said, in the wake of the series of school shootings and other incidents of teen-age violence and alienation.

The High Holidays are a stressful time of year for any rabbi, but in the days leading up to Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, Rabbi George B. Driesen was more nervous than most.A newly minted rabbi at age 66, Driesen stood before the 300 or so families at the Columbia Jewish Congregation and lead his first Rosh Hashana service.He worried that something would go wrong or that he would offend somebody, or he wouldn't fit in. He worried that some congregants -- the ones who usually come only during the High Holidays -- would turn from religion once and for all.But then the service began, and everything went more or less smoothly, and Driesen became more and more convinced that he had made the right decision in becoming a rabbi.

Aviva Kempner grew up in Detroit, where every Yom Kippur her father, a Jewish immigrant, would tell her the same story about how the legendary Detroit Tiger Hank Greenberg refused to play baseball on the Jewish Day of Atonement."

Jordan's king goes undercover to hear citizens' complaintsAMMAN, Jordan -- Jordan's King Abdullah, showing glimpses of the common touch that made his father, King Hussein, hugely popular, dressed up as an old man to investigate operations at a duty-free zone.The monarch, who assumed the throne in February, listened to complaints and harsh criticisms of a bloated bureaucracy. "How can an application take four days to process when there are 40 customs officials at 40 windows?" one investor was quoted as saying.

JERUSALEM -- A remarkable thing happens in this holy city on Yom Kippur.The frantic cacophony dissipates. Pedestrians and children on bicycles own the streets that have emptied for this day of fasting, prayer and atonement.For Jews, there is no holier day than Yom Kippur, which translates as Day of Atonement. It is the culmination of a 10-day period that inaugurates the new year. And on that final day, Jews retire from the business of the world to reflect on the year past, atone for their sins and remember the dead.

AS JEWS around the world celebrate Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the religious calendar, I think about the Viennese grandmother I never knew. And though she lived only to age 39, her life, and her suicide hours after leaving Yom Kippur services in 1934, have affected me profoundly -- so much so, in fact, that some 60 years after her death, I found myself on a shockingly similar path.My mother tried to shield her four children from the disturbing truth by telling us somewhat cryptically, when we asked, that our grandmother had been sick a long time before she died, when my mother was 10.When I was a few years older than that myself, I learned the harsher truth -- that my grandmother's illness was chronic depression, that she had tried in her teens to kill herself, that she frequently used threats of suicide as a weapon in her unhappy marriage, and that in the middle of the night of Sept.

As Jews gather for Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement that begins at sundown today, their focus will fall accordingly on sin and the need to set things right with God and neighbor.With the Clinton scandal dominating the national news, the notions of sin and reconciliation are very much at the forefront of public -- and Jewish -- consciousness.Current events have made the ancient Jewish obligation of atonement, called teshuva, more relevant than ever during this year's High Holy Days, the 10 days of reflection and renewal that started with Rosh Hashana and conclude with Yom Kippur.

Neither party up to campaign finance reformAs desperately as our nation craves campaign finance reform, neither party is equal to the emergency.The Republicans have just rejected it out of hand. The Democrats are compromised so long as they feel obliged to nurse the presidential hopes of Vice President Al Gore, who refuses to admit he has done anything wrong -- although he promises not to do it again.Many Americans outside the Capital Beltway, in either party and no party, have the greatest admiration for the senior senator from Arizona.

In the Jewish season of atonement, there comes to the Suburban Orthodox Congregation a letter of apology. It arrives from a moment 29 years in the dimly recalled past, from a man finally coming to terms with his own conscience."

Yom Kippur, which begins today at sundown, is the culmination of the Jewish Days of Awe, the High Holy Days of personal introspection and reconciliation.Synagogues will be filled with worshipers listening to the strains of the haunting Kol Nidre, which asks for the release from vows and forgiveness of transgressions.But there is an increasing sense of alarm in the Jewish community that too many Jews have been shunning such religious observance, a phenomenon that many believe ultimately threatens the existence of American Judaism.