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Sounds Of Silence: A coed children's choir performance at an upcoming Jewish gathering was canceled due to Jewish legal concerns
Abelated halachic, or Jewish legal, opinion, sought by a Jewish fair's committee resulted in the cancellation of a coed children's choir performance just weeks before its scheduled appearance.
The Yeshivat Rambam Choir, consisting of 61 students in the school's third through fifth grades, spent the past few months preparing to sing at the 11th annual Jewish Food & Life Expo, to be held this Sunday, Dec. 16, at the Maryland State Fairgrounds in Timonium.
But shortly before Thanksgiving, the children learned they would not be singing there after all. "I feel a little disappointed about it, and we'd been practicing a long time for it," said Gabrielle Levey, 8, a third-grader and choir member at Yeshivat Rambam. "People looked like they had a frown on their face" when the news was announced to choir members.
After inviting the choir,some expo committee members wondered if boys and girls singing together -- even if they were younger than b'nai mitzvah age -- was acceptable to people of all religious perspectives attending the expo.
Rabbi Shlomo Porter, director of the Etz Chaim Center for Jewish Studies and the expo's posek, or Jewish legal expert, said he was asked about the choir but needed guidance. So he brought the question to his own posek, Rabbi Moshe Heinemann of Agudath Israel of Baltimore, who ruled that...