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Visitors thronged the bima of Kensington's Temple Emanuel as Rabbi Warren Stone unrolled a Torah with a poignant story.
The Jews of Slonim, Belarus, buried the scroll in a chest in a field outside the town during the 1920s when the Soviet regime quashed Jewish life there. Later, during the Holocaust, the invading German Nazis slaughtered most of the town's Jews and torched the Jewish quarter. Unearthed by survivors in the 1990s, the Torah has found a home at Temple Emanuel.
A tale of the earth sheltering a Torah in time of danger seemed to resonate for this gathering of Jews bent on guarding the earth from human depredation.
The field trip to Temple Emanuel was part of this year's Jewish Environmental Leadership Institute, held largely at the District's Omni Shoreham Hotel this week. The Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life sponsored the three-day event.
With 115 registrants, COEJL could not boast the hotel's biggest Jewish conference this week, trailing the Jewish Council for Public Affairs annual meeting, which mustered 500 people and Charlotte B. and Jack J. Spitzer B'nai B'rith Hillel Forum on Public Policy, which drew 372.
But the youthful cast of its participants -- most looked under 40 -- seemed to signal a growing tug toward ecology by North American Jews, said participants.
From across the United States and Canada, COEJL conference-goers ranged from the secular to the observant, and included Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative and Orthodox Jews.
"It is incredibly exciting," Rabbi Fred Scherlinder Dobb of Bethesda's Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation, said about their relative youth. "More than any other aspects of Jewish life with which I'm involved, this both speaks to younger Jews and, in turn, gets helped by their presence and their energy."
Among them was Evonne Marzouk, 28, director of the recently created Orthodox environmental organization Canfei Nesharim (Wings of Eagles) and...