By N. Richard Greenfield, Publisher ~

The Ledger was pleased that our article on the problems surrounding the Colchester Jewish cemetery (“Dispute over interfaith cemetery in Colchester gains national attention,” Jan. 27, 2012) was received by all parties as being fair. In all of these types of situations, we do not attempt to make policy, rather we seek to discuss the issues in a way that allows all those concerned, as well as the community at large, to better understand the perspectives of others. We believe that our staff writer Cindy Mindell, and our editor, Judie Jacobson, did exactly that.
The Jewish Week of New York cited our article in their paper last week under the heading “Hallelujah for local Jewish newspapers.”
The following is an excerpt of what the Jewish Week’s Julie Weiner had to say about our article in her blog entry.  The posting can be read in its entirety on here.
—nrg

“The Connecticut Jewish Ledger has a great article this week that thoughtfully fills in many of the holes the mainstream media left in the Ahavath Achim cemetery story that I blogged about last week.
“What’s interesting about this story to me is that it brings together so many of the tensions in modern American Jewish life: what happens when two synagogues (especially of different denominations) merge, an increasingly common occurrence as the number of synagogue-affiliated Jews declines; how do we include and welcome growing numbers of interfaith families without alienating more traditional folks or diluting an institution’s Jewish character; how do we respond to the fact that American Christians appear to be not only less and less anti-Semitic, but increasingly philo-Semitic — so much so that they want to be buried in Jewish cemeteries according to Jewish customs!”