The New York Jewish Week - Connecting the World with Jewish News, Culture, Features, and Opinions for Thursday, 24 April 2014Dear Reader,
With Passover behind us, we turn our thoughts to more wordly matters, and JewishWeek.com offers plenty of those today.
Reporter Amy Clark has a breaking story about a pro-Palestinian action at NYU: the group Students for Justice in Palestine papered a heavily Jewish dorm with "eviction" notices in an attempt to evoke the plight of displaced Israeli Arabs.
NEW YORK
NYU Dorm Flooded With 'Eviction' Notices
Heavily Jewish building targeted; action aims to draw attention to ongoing Palestinian reality.
Amy Sara Clark and Miriam Lichtenberg
An NYU dorm known for its large Jewish population was papered with fake eviction notices that aimed to draw attention to “the reality Palestinians confront on an ongoing basis."
Students found the fliers at Palladium Hall on Thursday morning.
“We regret to inform you that your suite is scheduled for demolition in three days. If you do not vacate the premise by midnight on 25 April, 2014 we reserve the right to destroy all remaining belongings. … Charges for demolition will be applied to your student accounts,” reads the fliers, which were slipped under students' doors Wednesday night.
“Eviction notices are routinely given to Palestinian families living under Israeli occupation for no other reason than their ethnicity. … Palestinian homes are destroyed as part of the state of Israel’s ongoing attempts to ethnically cleanse the region of its Arab inhabitants and maintain an exclusively ‘Jewish’ character of the state. By destroying Palestinian homes, the state makes room for illegal Israeli settlements. The Israeli government itself describes the process as ‘Judaization,’ the flier continues.
It concludes, “This is not a real eviction notice. This is intended to draw attention to the reality that Palestinians confront on a regular basis."
The fliers have left students feeling “uncomfortable” and “targeted,” said Laura Adkins, who broke the news of the fliers on The Times of Israel’s website Thursday morning.
“I've heard of things like this happening at other schools, but I guess I never imagined seeing it under my own door,” a student texted to a Jewish Week reporter. He wished to remain anonymous. “I was more surprised than anything. Although I was also irritated because I feel like what is being stated is dramatically generalized and mostly erroneous." He requested his name not be used but confirmed to the Jewish Week that he received a flier.
Another student told The Jewish Week that the flier was also sent to a Jewish listserv at the school.
NYU spokesman John Beckman released a statement saying that dorm officials would be "looking into the matter, and following up appropriately." He said that if the activists targed Palladium Hall because they "perceived" it to have a high percentage of Jewish students, "that would be troubling, dismaying and a matter of deep concern for our community."
"A flyer titled "eviction notice" anonymously slipped under doors at night is not an invitation to thoughtful, open discussion; it is disappointingly inconsistent with standards we expect to prevail in a scholarly community," the statment said.
According to an NYU alumni whose daughter is planning to live in Palladium Hall in the fall, students in the dorm (and their parents) are afraid.
“We are scared for our children’s safety. I have a daughter who is going to go there in the fall, but now I’m having second thoughts,” said the alumni in an interview Thursday afternoon with The Jewish Week. The source asked to remain anonymous to protect her daughter’s privacy.
“I’m livid. … This was done in the middle of the night, the cowards. This is NYU, NYU. It’s unbelievable,” she said, adding that she plans to organize a demonstration against the fliers.
No organization listed its name on the fliers, but chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine have distributed similar notices on several campuses, including Northeastern University, where the group was briefly suspended.
Adkins, who is vice president of TorchPAC, NYU’s pro-Israel advocacy group, said her organization is “taking steps to make sure SJP is held accountable” but does not plan to organize a protest. ”Our article will probably be the biggest public response, as we aim to be proactive rather than reactive," she said via email.
Students for Justice in Palestine did not respond to a request for comment.
William Rapfogel, once the high-flying communal leader behind the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, has admitted to knowingly stolen more than $1 million from the council. He faces prison time. Long-time Jewish Week reporter Stewart Ain has the whole story, and our homepage features extensive background material on the scandal.
NEW YORK
Met Council’s Rapfogel Pleads Guilty
Admits to stealing $1 million in scheme; faces at least 3 ½ to 10 years; agrees to repay $3 million.
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
Police led William Rapfogel away from court after his arrest last summer. Marcos Santos/Daily News
In a soft voice, William Rapfogel, the disgraced former CEO of the Jewish community’s well-connected anti-poverty agency here, pleaded guilty Wednesday to inflating the agency’s insurance bills in order to steal $9 million over 20 years for politicians, others and himself.
“I knowingly stole more than $1 million from the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty,” Rapfogel, 59, told Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Larry Stephen.
Some of the skimmed money was used to make political contributions to influential elected officials, as well as to political organizations. Many of the donations were made in the names employees of Met Council’s insurance company, Century Coverage Corporation of Valley Stream, L.I.
The theft occurred between the time Rapfogel assumed the leadership of Met Council in 1992 and his dismissal last August.
As part of a plea agreement with New York State Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman, Rapfogel has agreed to pay $3 million in restitution. Prosecutors said he has already paid $1.48 million and that if pays the full $3 million by his sentencing date of July 16, he will receive 3 1/3 to 10 years in prison. If not, he will be sentenced to serve from 4 to 12 years in prison.
Rapfogel’s predecessor at Met Council, David Cohen, also pleaded guilty Wednesday before Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Michael Obus to felony charges of grand larceny and conspiracy in connection with the same kickback scheme.
Cohen was executive director of Met Council from 1989 to 1992 and executive vice president from 1992 to 1995. He served thereafter as a paid consultant until the scandal surfaced in August after Met Council received an anonymous letter alleging wrongdoing with insurance payments. An outside law firm was called in to conduct an internal investigation, which led to Rapfogel’s firing and the start of a state probe by Schneiderman and State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli.
Investigators from Schneiderman’s office went to Rapfogel’s homes here and in Monticello in August and reportedly found a total of $400,000 in cash hidden at both locations. At the time, Rapfogel’s salary was $400,000.
Authorities said Rapfogel regularly received envelopes stuffed with cash or checks made out for personal expenses. According to the criminal complaint, Rapfogel converted one of those checks to $100,000 in cash to help his son buy a house. And he is said to have paid $27,000 in cash to a contractor doing work on one of his homes.
Cohen’s lawyer, Alan M. Abramson, told The Jewish Week that under a plea deal worked out with his client, if Cohen “fully cooperates” with authorities he will be sentenced July 9 to a jail sentence of one year. Prosecutors said Cohen admitted illegally receiving approximately $650,000 in cash kickbacks and payments for personal expenses.
News of Rapfogel’s firing came as a shock when it was announced in August. He had been a political powerhouse in the city, a longtime friend of Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver. Rapfogel’s wife, Judy, who still serves as Silver’s chief of staff, has said she knew nothing about the kickback scheme and has not been charged.
Joseph Ross, 58, the owner of Century Coverage. In December, Ross, the first defendant to admit guilt in the scheme, pleaded guilty to money laundering, tax fraud and conspiracy charges. He was charged with stealing at least $1 million.
In a statement, Schneiderman said Rapfogel and Cohen “abused positions of trust to steal millions of dollars from a taxpayer-funded charitable organization — one that is dedicated to serving New York City’s poor. Those who rip off taxpayers and charitable organizations will be prosecuted. While New York has the greatest nonprofit sector in the country, this case reminds us that we must vigilantly protect it. … I also thank the Met Council board of directors for bringing this activity to light and cooperating with our investigation.”
DiNapoli said in a statement that this was “a troubling and sad case of personal gain at the expense of important community services.”
editor@jewishweek.org
http://www.thejewishweek.com/
And just to bring that Passover sweetness along with us a bit longer, we've also got a new piece from beloved Rabbi David Wolpe, whose short weekly writings are among the most consistently popular things we publish. He notes that there's a reason no Egyptians are named in the Passover story. Tyranny, he reflects, destroys names in favor of anonymity, while love restores them.
MUSINGS
A Name, A Soul
Rabbi David Wolpe
The Book of Exodus, in Hebrew, is called “Sh’mot,” or names. Yet the first extended story, about the slavery from Egypt, records none of the names of the Egyptians save for the midwives, Shifra and Puah. (Although some commentators claim them as Jews, it seems clear the Torah intends them to be taken for Egyptians). Even Pharaoh is a title, not a name — one of the reasons it is so difficult to determine which Pharaoh should be associated with the time period.A society where names are not known is a totalitarian state. Names grant individuality, personality and a certain status. “Do you know my name?” is another way of asking, “Am I distinguished in your eyes?” In the story of the Tower of Babel, no names are given, for there was a collectivity without individuality. Wisely was the museum in Israel named “Yad Vashem” — because the quote from Isaiah 56:5, “a place and a name,” means that each one lost was a unique soul.
The crown of a good name, teaches Pirke Avot, is the greatest of all crowns. In a graveyard, whatever other inscription a stone bears, it invariably records the deceased’s name. Tyranny seeks to erase names. Memory and love restore and preserve them.
Rabbi David Wolpe is spiritual leader of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter: @RabbiWolpe.
Thank you for reading.
Best,
Helen Chernikoff, Web Director
The Arts
Lauren T. Mack plays Ethel in Jane Prendergast's "Ashes," set after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.
A Rent In The Garment
Ted Merwin - Special to The Jewish Week
Some scars are more visible than others. In Jane Prendergast’s “Ashes,” set in the period following the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, a teenage Jewish girl is caught between her mother, who disapproves of her having a baby, and her husband, a survivor of the fire who wants to start a new life. The one-act drama runs as part of Metropolitan Playhouse’s new batch of “East Side Stories,” a festival of one-act plays and monologues inspired by life on the Lower East Side.Directed by Jason Jacobs, “Ashes” takes place as the mother, Irma (Elisa London), and her 19-year-old daughter, Ethel (Lauren T. Mack), are setting out special dishes for the seder in their apartment on Elizabeth Street. Ethel’s husband, Nathan (Ryan Michael Hartman), a garment cutter whose face was badly burned in the fire, has been unemployed since he testified against the factory owners, who were — to the horror of many — ultimately not just acquitted, but paid insurance money for each of the victims.
Nathan, who has just taken an interim job as a trash collector, itches to get out from under his mother-in-law’s thumb; he compares the couple’s moving out to the Israelites’ fleeing bondage in Egypt.
Prendergast, who grew up in Brooklyn, studied chemistry in the Brown Building at NYU, which is the same building where the infamous fire took place. After earning a master’s degree in music from Teacher’s College, Prendergast started writing plays. One of her previous works is “Echoes: Fall of 1938,” which focuses on a radical Jewish family in Brooklyn whose son was crippled while serving in the Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War.
For “Ashes,” Prendergast read through hundreds of pages of the Shirtwaist Factory trial transcript, which is available online. She was shocked by the lawyers’ success in exculpating their clients by casting doubt on the survivors’ story that the fire escape doors were locked.
The play, she noted, is set “when the ashes have gone cold, and people are trying to sort out the horrendous injustice of what happened.” The connection with Passover, she said, is that the holiday “was the beginning of the Jews’ march out of slavery” and the fire was a “watershed in the struggle for unions and worker safety.”
But, she lamented, the rest of the world has, a century later, still not learned from the tragedy. “I’m probably wearing clothes right now that were made [unethically] in Third World countries,” she said. “These tragedies are still happening today.”
“Ashes” runs at Metropolitan Playhouse, 220 E. Fourth St. Performances are Friday, April 25 at 7 p.m., Sunday April 27 at 1 p.m., Wednesday, April 30 at 7 p.m., Saturday, May 3 at 1 p.m., and Sunday, May 4 at 4 p.m. For tickets, $15-$20, call (800) 838-3006 or visit www.metropolitanplayhouse.org.
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Mission Accomplished: An Adjustable Torah Reading Table
Editor's Note: When Paula Fox first wrote for the New Normal, her tale of learning to read Torah only to struggle to reach the reading table inspired us to create the Bima Project. The idea was that we would help an interested synagogue create a more fully accessible bima that included an adjustable table. Paula and the folks in her shul moved rapidly toward this goal on their own and we are now thrilled to share their creative solution.I learned to read Torah a year ago and now have read three times at Adath Jesurun Congregation in Minnetonka, Minnesota. As a wheelchair user, I was sitting too low to see the Torah on the regular Torah reading table.
Food & Wine
"Recipes Remembered" by June Feiss Hersh.
Recipes With A Dark Past
Holocaust-related cookbooks tell tragic stories through food.
Amy Spiro - Jewish Week Online columnist
Tabrys doesn’t often talk about her experiences during the Holocaust, but she spoke to June Feiss Hersh about her memories for the 2011 book “Recipes Remembered: A Celebration of Survival.”
“One of the things that kept me going during the war were memories of my family, and so many of those revolved around family gatherings and food,” Tabrys told Hersh. “We would remind ourselves of the simplest things that we ate at home, especially during the holidays…I can still taste the sweet blintzes that my mother would make. Those memories came with me to America and those are the recipes I still lovingly prepare today.”
Tabrys also shared her recipe for sweet and creamy cheese blintzes in the book, which includes the stories of more than 80 survivors and more than 170 of their recipes. Hersh published the book in conjunction with The Museum of Jewish Heritage in downtown Manhattan, which also receives all the proceeds from sales.
It is a somewhat jarring juxtaposition—recipes alongside stories of starvation and terror—but Hersh is not alone with her project. There are now a handful of books that seek to retell the stories of the darkest chapter in Jewish history through the common bond of food. Joanne Caras published the “Holocaust Survivor Cookbook” in 2007, and followed it up with a second volume, “Miracles and Meals,” in 2012. And in 1996 Cara de Silva edited “In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezin,” a collection of handwritten notes and recipes written down by women in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. The books are all remarkably different, with unique backstories, compositions and tones. Hersh’s is undeniably a cookbook, with tested recipes ready for any kitchen. “In Memory’s Kitchen” is a jarring historical document, revealing more about the lives of the women in Theresienstadt than it does any culinary heritage. And Joanne Caras skirts that line, offering ostensibly workable recipes from survivors that she did not edit or change.
But what all three books have in common are the memories of better times with family and community, cherished dishes passed down from generation to generation, and almost wiped out by Nazis.
“It’s not a Holocaust cookbook, it’s a cookbook about those who have survived the Holocaust,” Hersh said of “Recipes Remembered.” “These are people who lived through a tragic time, but they are not tragic people and so their food is joyful and it’s uplifting…it’s the ultimate comfort food. This is an effort to preserve the food memories of a community.”
Even the women of Theresienstadt, deprived not only of food but also the ability to provide for themselves and their families, wrote down their recipes “as a form of psychological resistance,” de Silva said. “The whole book is an amazing testament to the power of food to sustain people, not just physically, but also spiritually.”
Today, the recipes from those lost communities sustain so many more.
“I’m not the child or grandchild of survivors,” Hersh told The Jewish Week, “but I do feel like I gained 80 additional grandparents—that their traditions, their foods and their heritages have become a part of my personal history.”
Hersh spent a year interviewing survivors and learning their stories before requesting a treasured family recipe to print alongside. The author tested all the recipes so that they would be “easy to replicate, clear, concise and representative of what they wanted to convey.”
The book is organized by geographical region. Lily Margules, a concentration camp survivor from Poland who lost both her father and her aunt in the Holocaust, shared a recipe for Tsimmes Chicken with Prunes. Evelyn Pike Rubin, who escaped Germany for Shanghai in 1939, gave Hersh her recipe for Sweet Summer Peach Cake.
“In its heart it’s a cookbook, but in its soul it’s a storybook,” Hersh said.
The book is now in its fifth printing and has sold more than 20,000 copies. With each printing, Hersh said, she updated the pages of those survivors who have passed away since the book’s publication.
Joanne Caras with her two books.
When she returned to the U.S., gung-ho about her project, Caras asked the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to send out an email requesting submissions, and sent notes to Jewish publications around the country.
“Six months went by and I didn’t get one story,” Caras recalled. She said she was close to giving up, and felt that “people don’t want to talk about food and the Holocaust.” But her mother convinced her to stick with it, “so I kept asking and asking and eventually they started to come in the mail in handwritten letters, and then they started to come via email, and then we’d get phone calls.”
Eventually, Caras self-published the first book with 129 stories and 250 recipes contributed by survivors and their families from the U.S., Israel, Canada and even New Zealand, South Africa and South America. To date the books have raised $275,000 for Carmei Ha’ir, and Caras has traveled to more than 250 cities around the world to talk about it.
The recipes range widely, from traditional eastern European dishes like mandelbread, chicken paprikash and gefilte fish to more modern takes, including those with ingredients like onion soup mix, pareve cream and store-bought piecrusts.
“I did ask them for family recipes if they had them,” said Caras, “but some of these young children” left their native countries at such a young age that they had few recipes from their parents and grandparents. So Caras also accepted recipes that spoke to the survivors’ newly adopted countries, or those they loved to make for their children and grandchildren, she said.
Caras didn’t edit or test any of the recipes, which garnered some criticism from readers, but she stands by the decision.
“We took these recipes exactly how they were given to us,” she said. “Some of them say gefilte fish—put it in a bathtub. Some will say a bissel of this [Yiddish for a little]. I didn’t want to change them because this was our history, this was the way this recipe was given from a parent or grandparent to the child.”
"In Memory's Kitchen" by Cara De Silva.
“To alter the recipes would be to violate history and to misrepresent the experiences of the women who produced them,” she wrote in the introduction to the book.
Female prisoners in Theresienstadt concentration camp wrote the original manuscript in the 1940s. Its primary author, Mina Pachter, died there in 1944, but not before she gave the handwritten manuscript to a friend, and asked him to get it to her daughter in Palestine. It took 25 years and changed many hands before it arrived on the doorstep of her daughter, Anny Stern, in New York. And it was many years after that before the book came into the public eye, when it was published in 1996 in a volume edited by de Silva, a journalist and food historian. Even close to 20 years later, de Silva said, the book is “eternally on my mind.”
Although the women wrote down their cherished recipes, this “was not a manuscript that was really meant for cooking, it was not a regular cookbook—no matter what the women thought,” de Silva said. If one were to cook from the book, she said, “it would have to be done with profound understanding of the circumstances under which these [recipes] were recorded.”
After the book was first published, de Silva held a gathering to commemorate it, featuring adaptations of the book’s recipes cooked by chef Rozanne Gold.
“The feeling that I was tasting the food of their dreams was profoundly overwhelming and moving,” de Silva said, “because it was the materialization of something they could only dream and remember. We were celebrating them by celebrating their food.”
For a recipe for cheese blintzes from "Recipes Remembered," click here. For a recipe for sweet and sour tongue from "The Holocaust Survivor Cookbook," click here.
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