Dear Reader,
New York Jewry came together this week in rallies and in prayer, as did Jews around the world, in support for the three kidnapped Israeli teens. Associate Editor Jonathan Mark reports on the local scene, and Israel Correspondent Michele Chabin describes the political "blame game" in Jerusalem.
NEW YORK
Kidnapped Teens Are ‘Us’
Rallies and psalms as community seems to transcend differences in shared grief for ‘the boys.’
Jonathan Mark
Associate Editor
A woman in the West Bank town of Gvaot takes part in prayer for three kidnapped yeshiva students. Getty Images
There are rallies for politics, and for social causes, but here was a rally of such intimacy, so intensely personal, that the most frequently heard words were “us,” “love,” “imagine” — and “kidnapped.”
The sidewalk opposite the Israeli consulate in Midtown was as somber as a chapel, though hundreds were jammed from the building line to barricades and spilling over more than a lane into Second Avenue. The people came, of course, for the three Israeli teenaged boys who, while hitchhiking, opened a car door and stepped into oblivion, driven by terrorists on the West Bank roads, away from Gush Etzion.
The kidnapping of Eyal Yifrah, 19, Gilad Shaar, 16, and Naftali Frenkel, 16, was not something over there, this was “us,” as close as a phone call. Rabbi Avi Weiss, whose Amcha group organized the rally, was quiet, contemplative, standing alone before the event. He said that his daughter Elana lives in Efrat, a town in Gush Etzion. Elana telephoned her father and said that she looks at the mothers of the three boys, “and they’re us.” Rabbi Weiss spoke to his grandson, an Israeli soldier, who called after 48 hours of searching the dusty Hebron alleys just blocks from Isaac’s tomb; if only an angel would appear, as it did to stop Isaac’s sacrifice.
“We have to be very careful that this not be politicized, a right-wing yeshiva thing,” said Rabbi Weiss. “This is all of Am Yisrael [the Jewish people], no matter our denomination or politics. This is not right to left, it’s human.”
Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun, a far-left publication, agreed, e-mailing us that he was “shocked and outraged” by the kidnappings, adding that it was “ridiculous” for anyone to try to “contextualize” the crime within the futility of West Bank politics. “These teens,” e-mailed Rabbi Lerner, “were not the perpetrators or the creators of the occupation. They were children doing what their parents had brought them up to do and to be.”
A reading of Tehillim (Psalms selected for healing dire situations) was scheduled at Seton Park in the Bronx with a chasidic rabbi, a Conservative rabbi, and a Young Israel rabbi. International Chabad-Lubavitch asked that everyone take on a special mitzvah. The Orthodox Union, in partnership with Bnei Akiva and the Rabbinical Council of America, launched an around-the-clock schedule of learning, prayer, and mitzvot, asking people to select a day and 30-minute slot, and an activity for that time.
The Reform movement posted a prayer on its website. There were similar requests, vigils, Tehillim recitations and e-mail blasts in every neighborhood, from every denomination, elementary school, rabbinical seminary, charity group and federation. Jewish rivalries and denominations were obliterated for “the boys.” Rabbi David Kalb, director of Learning and Innovation at Central Synagogue, a Reform congregation on the East Side, told a reporter at the Amcha rally, “We’re all worried about these students and hope and pray they will come home soon.”
Across the New York area, at Jewish high school graduations this week, audiences rose to say Psalms for the three high school students who just had a Shabbat unlike any before. Rabbi Steinsaltz, head of Yeshiva Mekor Hayim in Gush Etzion, attended by two of the teens, recommended Psalm 142: “I am in desperate need; rescue me from those who pursue me, for they are too strong for me. Set me free from my prison.” Many others were adding Psalm 121, popularized by Shlomo Carlebach’s “Esa Eini,” which reads “I lift up my eyes to the mountains… the Guardian of Israel will neither slumber nor sleep…. God will guard you from all evil….”
At the rally, Isaac Geld said, “We take this very personally. You can just imagine, Jewish kids held in the dark, shackled, what are they thinking? It’s easy to identify with that, even if we don’t know if they’re alive or dead.”
Ethan Stein, 22, a graduate of Ramaz and now at Brandeis University, said he came out of love “for the State of Israel, the Land of Israel and the people of Israel.” He had just returned from staffing a Birthright trip to Israel, heard about the rally via Facebook and “I immediately knew I had to be here.” He said he kept thinking of those “innocent souls.” Stein was telling people near him in the crowd how the official Palestinian media turned “the World Cup emblem into a pro-kidnappers cartoon,” as well as publishing a cartoon depicting three rats upside down, with Jewish stars on their sides, caught on a string.
SAR sent two busses to the rally, including 30 high school students who volunteered to come, even during exams. Rachel Meyer, a junior, was carrying her chemistry notes after that morning’s final exam in Jeremiah. “Even in finals week,” she said, “there are certain things that are priorities. These are kids just like us, our own age. They could be our friends. They might have had a big test Monday, and so do I, but I’m here to be there for kids who need me much more than I need my grades.”
Meyer, who lives on the Upper West Side, said she will be working as a bunk counselor this summer at Camp Koby, a camp for victims of terror. “This is all very close to me,” said Rachel. “I plan to raise my children in Israel someday, and hopefully they’ll have safe lives.”
Numerous placards featured photos of the captives, Eyal, Gilad and Naftali, already known by their first names in the Jewish imagination. Daniela Krausz, a sophomore, said, “You look into the eyes of these boys, kids you could see walking down [our high school’s] hallways; someone you could be sharing a laugh with. It’s devastating to think what they could be suffering through, while we’re here, safely studying for our finals.”
“As a high school student,” said Jake Brzowsky, “it feels all the more personal. There’s not a lot that we can do, but being here just felt important to me.”
Neither Jake, who will be studying at Israel’s Technion this summer, nor his classmate, Solomon Bergwerk, who will be visiting his sister in the Israeli air force this summer, said they planned to hitchhike when they’re there. “Absolutely not,” said Jake. “Not anymore.”
Karen Fromowitz, from Woodmere, whose son attended Yeshivat Har Etzion in 2008, told The Jewish Week by phone, “Sending my son across the Green Line [to the West Bank] was a huge leap to begin with. Before he went, I was very clear: absolutely no hitchhiking. … I don’t know if he listened, but I made it clear.”
At the rally, one rabbi on the sidewalk who often took leftist positions and asked not to be identified, admitted that Gush Etzion was over the Green Line but “The Gush is part of Israel. We don’t treat it as part of the West Bank. According to previous agreements, this area will go into ‘basic’ Israel, so this kidnapping feels like they penetrated the heartland.”
Avrum Hyman, former president of the Riverdale Jewish Center, e-mailed that there was once a greater awareness that Gush Etzion was not a settlement, as most countries see it, but a place with unique meaning to many Zionists; a Jewish area that was lost in 1948 when Arab armies massacred the Jews living there. In 1967, with the area back in Israeli hands, the orphans of 1948 returned to rebuild. “One Shabbos morning,” wrote Hyman, Rabbi Yitz Greenberg [at the time the shul’s rabbi] told the story of Gush Etzion, “saying they needed $10,000 to build a Quonset hut to serve as a new school building. He asked for $50 donations to fund this facility. … the whole appeal took less than 10 minutes.”
Across from the rally, an Israeli flag hung limp on a ledge of the consulate’s building. In an echo of the Treyvon Martin murder case, when President Obama said, “If I had a son he’d look like Treyvon,” Rabbi Weiss told the crowd, “To the president of the United States … not as a president but as a father. ... A young boy, an American citizen [Frankel], coming home from school, was brutally kidnapped. Respectfully, we need to hear your voice… We need to hear you declare that ‘My heart is broken because Naftali Fraenkel is my son.’”
Rabbi Weiss, raising his voice like a shofar, cried out each boy’s name, each name followed by the crowd roaring “Am Yisroel Chai,” the affirmation of Jewish eternity. Singing Hatikvah, with the yearning of a love song, the high school students swayed with their arms draped over each other’s shoulders. Some kept reciting Tehillim after the rally was over.
Somewhere, if alive, Eyal, Gilad and Naftali were surely reciting Tehillim, too, but in a hush.
Staff writer Hannah Dreyfus contributed to this report.
jonathan@jewishweek.org
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ISRAEL NEWS
In Israel, Left, Right Laying Blame For Kidnapping
Michele Chabin
Israel Correspondent
An Israeli soldier searches Hebron for the three kidnapped yeshiva students. Getty Images
Jerusalem — The June 12 kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank seems to have spurred more accusations than soul-searching in Israel.
For reasons that speak to people’s fears of living in a small, embattled country, the abduction of the boys — Gilad Shaar, 16, Eyal Yifrach, 19 and Naftali Frenkel, a 16-year-old dual U.S.-Israeli citizen — has hit home here in a very personal way. Perhaps it was because the students were on their way home from their schools in the West Bank and, evoking every parents’ nightmare, never arrived. At least one of the boys still has braces on his teeth.
As David Horovitz, editor in chief of the Times of Israel, wrote five days after their disappearance, “We hope and pray for the best. But we fear the worst. Each passing hour increases the fears. Each passing hour with no confirmed claim of responsibility, no demands.”
Israelis, Horovitz said, are also united in a “sense of helplessness.” Its leadership “deploys its troops, orders arrests, talks tough and contemplates home demolitions and deportations and the recapture of the terrorists it has set free in the past.”
While much of the finger-pointing has been aimed at Hamas, which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insists is behind the abduction, the blame game hardly stops there.
The country’s political left and right are blaming each other’s policies for the conditions that, they say, fostered the snatching in the first place.
The left insists the kidnapping, which, they emphasize, took place in Area C — under full Israeli security control — is the direct result of Israel’s “occupation.”
“Nothing can justify the kidnapping of 16-year-olds and using them as pawns. The Palestinians who did this committed an indefensible act,” said Larry Derfner, a left-wing blogger for +972 Magazine.
“But the occupation is ultimately responsible. The Palestinians are living under a military dictatorship and people will fight back, and they have.”
Derfner also questioned how Israel can suddenly blame the new Palestinian Fatah-Hamas unity government for the boys’ disappearance when it says that it has thwarted more than a dozen terror attacks in the West Bank when it was controlled solely by the Fatah-backed Palestinian Authority.
Knesset member Hanin Zoabi from the United Arab List party, went considerably further Tuesday, during an interview with Radio Tel Aviv.
“They are not terrorists,” Zoabi, who participated in the Turkish flotilla to Gaza and is well known for her incendiary statements, said of the Palestinians who abduct or hurt Israelis. “They have seen no other way to change their reality, and they have to resort to these measures until Israel sobers up a bit and feels the suffering of others.”
The right, in contrast, says the abduction just demonstrates that Hamas is trying to flex its muscles in the new Palestinian Fatah-Hamas unity government (and thumbing its finger at a weak Israel in the process), and that ceding any land or security responsibility to the Palestinians is a recipe for disaster.
“After this latest act of terror by Hamas it should now be clear to the U.S. that President Abbas chose a pact with a terror organization over peace with us,” said Danny Danon, the deputy defense minister, in an interview with The Jewish Week. “It was a terrible mistake for the Administration to announce that they would continue to work with the Hamas-backed government. Now is the time for action. I call on our American friends to implement the 2006 Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act, which prohibits funding for the Palestinian Authority if they form a government that is influenced by Hamas.”
Other right-wing Israeli politicians say the U.S. government’s ongoing pressure on Israel to make concessions, including Palestinian prisoners, emboldened Palestinian terror organizations.
The U.S. administration “pushed for releasing more and more terrorists, and the kidnappings were the result,” said Knesset member Orit Struck from the Jewish Home party. “But the Americans never take responsibility for anything. They prefer to just sling mud at Israel. They would never accept their children being kidnapped on the way home from school and their mothers worrying.”
Much of the criticism surrounding the kidnapping has been directed toward the Israel Police, which failed to launch an investigation for several hours after receiving a distress call (its contents are being debated) from one of the abducted teens. The chief of police, who was attending a U.S.-based conference, was also slammed for arriving home three days after the abduction.
The Israeli public, too, has gotten into the blame game in a very big way.
Via Facebook, blogs and tweets, people have criticized the kidnapped boys for hitchhiking in the West Bank, especially at night, and for living or simply attending school in the West Bank; others have skewered the boys’ parents and school principals for not teaching them to be more responsible and providing them with transportation.
Interviewed over the hitchhiking issue, settlers have explained that the West Bank is vastly underserved by public transportation and that few buses shuttle between the various settlements.
Sherri Mandell, the mother of Koby Mandel, who was murdered near his home in the Jewish settlement of Tekoa when he was 13, spoke to The Jewish Week just moments after leading a support group for bereaved mothers in Jerusalem.
“People often blame the victim as a way to distance themselves from the event and pretend they’re immune and that this sort of thing could never touch them. They think if they can find a reason for it they can explain it away and duck it instead of acknowledging that we have a terrible enemy.”
What Israelis need to understand, Mandell said, is that the boys “could have been kidnapped while waiting for a bus. Hitchhiking is how we get around.”
“Hamas wants to terrorize and annihilate the people of Israel. It’s sworn to the destruction of Israel and doesn’t want a Jewish state. When the Palestinian Authority aligns itself with Hamas, it is an alliance of destruction,” she added.
To alleviate their feelings of helplessness, some Israelis launched a food drive to feed the many soldiers searching for the boys; others signed petitions urging Israel to cut off water and electricity to Gaza residents; thousands joined the international Bring Our Boys Home campaign that went viral on social media; and 30,000 participated in communal prayers at the Kotel while countless others said special prayers in schools and synagogues.
“I don’t know if the prayers are working,” said a woman on Facebook, “but they can’t hurt either.”
editor@jewishweek.org
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Rep. Eric Cantor's surprise defeat in a Virginia primary election has sparked debate about the role of Jewish Republicans as the Tea Party becomes increasingly influential. Staff Writer Steve Lipman reports.
NATIONAL
Tea Party Too Close For Jewish Comfort?
Cantor’s loss, isolationist foreign policy and Jews in the GOP.
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
Cantor silenced: The Virginia Republican was defeated by a Tea Party candidate. Getty Images
Rep. Eric Cantor’s surprise loss in a primary election last week will leave Congress without a Republican Jewish member and Jewish organizations without one of their strongest advocates on Capitol Hill, but it will likely not diminish support for the Jewish community’s legislative agenda, political observers said this week.
However, Cantor’s loss has sparked a debate in parts of the Jewish community about Jewish Republicans’ role — and comfort level — in a party that is increasingly being influenced by the conservative Tea Party movement.
Observers, some of them with close ties to the GOP, told The Jewish Week that bipartisan congressional backing for Israel, and for such issues as opposition to anti-Semitism, will continue under other members of Congress after Cantor (R-Va.) leaves the House of Representatives at the end of the year. He has served seven terms, and risen to the rank of majority leader, the No. 2 Republican leadership position in the House.
The experts said the growing strength of the Tea Party movement, which favors an isolationist approach to foreign policy and largely opposes foreign aid, does not threaten continued U.S. financial support of Israel.
“There will be no change in the GOP’s support for Israel,” said Nathan Diament, the Orthodox Union’s executive director for public policy. “Evangelical Christians — a key bloc in the Republican coalition — are thoroughly committed to Israel’s security and welfare.”
The experts said that Tea Party leaders — even one as prominent as Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, who is considered a leading Republican contender for the Republicans’ 2016 presidential nomination — have reached out in recent months to the Jewish community and have spoken in positive terms about the U.S.-Israel alliance.
“Paul,” said Fred Zeidman, a Houston businessman-philanthropist who has served as an official of the Republican Jewish Coalition and is a major donor to Republican campaigns, “could not be more supportive of Israel.”
Paul’s position on Israel has “evolved,” said Matthew Brooks, executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition. “He started off wanting to cut all foreign aid. Now he sees it as a long-term strategy. He wants to start scaling back to countries burning [American] flags in their streets.”
“You’re not talking about Taft isolationism,” Breger said, referring to the extreme isolationist views of Ohio Sen. Robert Taft, who from 1939 to 1953 advocated strict “non-interventionism” overseas.
Some outside observers, however, disagree with such sanguine assessments.
“With respect to its foreign policy direction, it remains to be seen how the Republican Party will respond to the conservative pull that has been championed by the Tea Party supporters,” Gilbert N. Kahn, professor of political science at Kean University in Union, N.J., writes in this issue of The Jewish Week. (See analysis on page 23.)
“As the Tea Partyers move into leadership positions or threaten to do so, much of their isolationist ideology will also move into a more dominant position among elected Republican officials,” Kahn wrote. “The Tea Party already has demonstrated a clear isolationist tendency that ought to disturb American Jews, given its historical, nativist direction and tendency.”
And Bret Stephens, Wall Street Journal deputy editorial page editor, warned last week in a talk sponsored by The Jewish Week at Manhattan’s Park East Synagogue that “the Tea Party, at least as represented by someone like Rand Paul, is a worrisome development for the Republican Party.” Stephens said Paul’s positions “hark back” to Sen. Taft’s.
“When you start to listen to what Tea Party people have to say on a number of issues, it sounds an awful lot like what the progressive left has to say,” Stephens said. Both groups, he said, want the U.S. out of Syria, for instance.
Stephens sounded an ominous note regarding Israel should an isolationist foreign policy take hold in Washington. “We may be entering into a different kind of post-American world, that is to say a world in which the United States isn’t asserting itself as forcefully as it used to. … Israel has only known one international order. What happens when America renounces its responsibilities as the guarantor of international order? What happens to a small country like Israel? Who are its new allies?
“Israel,” Stephens continued, “has reflexively thought that when push comes to shove, America would be at its side, or have its back. … Israelis and those who care about Israel need to start thinking about the security arrangements Israel will have to make to survive in a new kind of post-American world where … Americans won’t want to die for Doha [Qatar’s capital] and they might not want to die for Tel viv, either.”
♦The discomfort that many Jews, including Republican Jews, have expressed about Paul is reminiscent of the feelings they had about Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, a strong proponent of Tea Party policies. When when she was chosen as Sen. John McCain’s presidential running mate in 2008, her choice was seen as harmful to his chances among Jewish voters.
Paul was part of a 2013 tour of Israel with a group of Christian Zionists, and he recently proposed legislation that would cut funding to the Palestinian Authority unless it recognizes Israel as a Jewish state.
“Our [Jewish community] access is not going away,” Zeidman said of Jewish post-Cantor lobbying efforts in Congress. “We haven’t had to rely only on Eric.”
“Substantively, there is no loss to Jewish interests,” said Marshall Breger, an expert on Republican politics who served in the administrations of presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. “You still have a strong neocon [neoconservative] element” in Congress. The neoconservative branch of the Republican Party, which includes many Jews, has traditionally been sympathetic towards Israel.
Congressional support for Israel “has nothing to do [only] with Cantor,” Breger said.
Following his loss to economics professor David Brat, who comes from the far-right Tea Party, Cantor announced that he will relinquish his post as the House’s majority leader next month.
Without Cantor, Republicans will lack a natural conduit to financial contributors in the Jewish community, the experts who spoke to The Jewish Week agreed. New Republic quoted a former GOP congressman as saying that Cantor’s Jewish background gave him “access to donors we didn’t have access to.”
While Republican candidates for office come from all Jewish denominations, the Orthodox community remains the party’s main source of support, the experts said. This is especially evident in such haredi areas as Borough Park, Brooklyn, and Lakewood, N.J., where conservative Orthodox Jews are in the majority, said David Wasserman, a political analyst at the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. “There are pockets of the country where Jewish republicans predominate.”
Jewish Republicans, caught off guard by Cantor’s defeat, are not pessimistic about their party’s electoral future; they will continue to work for mainstream GOP candidates who do not represent the Tea Party, and they do not think anti-Semitism was a factor in the Cantor-Brat race, observers told The Jewish Week.
Cantor, who became the first majority leader to lose a primary race since the position was created in 1899, said he might run for public office again. “I want to … continue to promote and be a champion for the conservative cause,” he said on ABC’s “This Week.” “I do want to play a role in the public debate.”
In a previously scheduled Father’s Day weekend appearance at the Hampton Synagogue, Cantor credited his religious faith with giving him the strength to deal with his electoral defeat. He did not discuss politics.
“He spoke about how his Jewish values and his understanding of the Torah have given him the strength to cope with what was a shocking defeat and personal setback,” said Rabbi Marc Schneier, spiritual leader of the Hampton Synagogue.
Cantor’s loss means that for the first time since 1959, there is not a Jewish Rerpublican member in the House. Israeli-based columnist Shmuel Rosner wrote last week that “Jewish Republican representation, as low as it was to begin with, is … continuing its decline.” But political experts contacted by The Jewish Week said Cantor’s loss does not indicate that Jewish involvement in the Republican Party — for decades far less than for Democrats — is on the wane, or that the party is less welcoming to Jews.
“I don’t believe Eric’s defeat will make those Jewish individuals inclined to run as GOP candidates less likely to do so,” the OU’s Diament said in an email interview. “If a person is committed to Republican positions on issues and wants to get into politics, they’re not going to do so as a Democrat.”
“The [Republican] party is as open to Jews today as it was two weeks ago,” Breger said. “It didn’t have anything to do with anti-Semitism,” said Zeidman.
Cantor’s unexpected defeat was caused, in part, by his Jewish identity — but not by growing anti-Semitism among Tea Party voters, according to Wasserman.
He called Cantor’s Judaism one of many dissonant cultural factors that increasingly separated the incumbent from the leanings of the mostly Christian, mostly very conservative electorate in Virginia’s redrawn 7th Congressional District.
Cantor, who narrowly won his first race for the House in 2000 and did not face “credible opposition” in subsequent Republican primaries, always was “quite different,” from most of the area’s electorate, Wasserman told The Jewish Week. “He was never a perfect fit for this electorate”; part of “the base was never comfortable with him.” In recent years, Cantor drew criticism for his change regarding immigration policy, eventually saying he did not want to punish the children of parents who had come to this country without documentation.
Conservative voters tend to favor a stricter immigration policy.
Cantor “was culturally dissimilar,” his “very polished, buttoned-down style” and campaigning in “very swanky venues” a contrast to many voters’ less flamboyant, middle-class norms, Wasserman said. “His religion is one facet of that.” Christian candidates could use “Evangelical imagery to connect with the base.” Cantor, of course, could not. “It was something he was always aware of.”
steve@jewishweek.org
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Also, the hottest ticket in town last Friday night was at Central Synagogue; Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bret Stephens tells Write On For Israel graduates why it's "decidedly unfashionable," but vital, to support Israel; pressure mounts in Ramapo school case; and Culture Editor Sandee Brawarsky on Boris Fishman's well-received debut novel, "A Replacement Life."
SHORT TAKES
‘Hottest Ticket’ Friday Night Was To Central Synagogue
Gary Rosenblatt
Editor and Publisher
Rabbi Peter Rubinstein was feted at Central Synagogue after 23 years as its spiritual leader. Wikimedia Commons
Standing in the midst of a long line on Friday afternoon, as it wrapped around Lexington Avenue at 55th Street and reached all the way toward Park Avenue, one saw curious passers-by wondering what the attraction was. Especially when people in line referred to their having “the hottest ticket in town.”
Turns out that ticket was not for a rock concert or movie premiere. It was for a Friday evening Shabbat service at Central Synagogue honoring Peter Rubinstein on his leaving his post as senior rabbi after 23 years. More than 1,300 people filled every seat in the sanctuary, and when the rabbi appeared at precisely 6 p.m., when the service began, he was greeted with spontaneous and extended applause.
The outpouring of affection lasted throughout the service as congregation presidents, past and present, paraphrased Rabbi Rubinstein’s “love letter” to the congregation from his sermon of last Yom Kippur, expressing their love in return.
In remarks posted on the synagogue’s website, David Edelson, the current president, explained that “this service is not about saying goodbye. Rather, it is about reflecting on and celebrating all that you have meant to us. It is about thanking you and reiterating our love for you.”
Central Synagogue’s former president, Howard Sharfstein, presented the rabbi with a book of 18 of his most memorable sermons; he noted on the website that Rabbi Rubinstein gave the congregation “hope and strength” following the devastating fire of August 1998 that destroyed the sanctuary, and at difficult times like the 9/11 terror attack and the financial crisis of 2008. “You challenged us to become better people, more highly valued people. You showed us how to be better Jews, and how our faith must be part of our lives every day that we have the blessing of breath.”
Rabbi Rubinstein is known as a leader not only of the Reform movement but in interfaith work, in part through his association with the Manhattan-based Auburn Theological Seminary, whose board he chaired.
During a 10-minute video that featured colleagues, family and synagogue officials, Rabbi Rubinstein was described as a man of humility, a change agent who saw potential in his congregation and challenged its members to strive for excellence.
Other honors included the naming of the chapel in Rabbi Rubinstein’s honor; a fund in his name for “the renaissance of Reform Judaism”; and a “flash mob” of students dancing to Rabbi Angela Buchdahl’s soaring rendition of “Higher Love.”
Rabbi Buchdahl, who is giving up her position of cantor at Central Synagogue to succeed Rabbi Rubinstein, led the rousing Kabbalat Shabbat service with her clear, ringing voice.
Rabbi Rubinstein announced last year that he would step down from his post June 30 of this year. Last month he was named director of Jewish community programming at the 92nd Street Y.
In his moving remarks at the conclusion of the service, also posted on the synagogue’s website, the rabbi thanked the congregation for its affection, for allowing him his “missteps” and “failures,” and for always being at his side. He closed by saying the evening was “not about loss. It is something about heartache, but above all it is about truth and the wonder of what you and I have done together. Together — and we must never forget that.”
editor@jewishweek.org
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LENS
Israel Isn’t A Popularity Contest
Gary Rosenblatt
Editor And Publisher
Columnist Bret Stephens was interviewed by Write On alum Joshua Fattal on the Mideast situation. Michael Daitkiash/JW
Bret Stephens, the Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign affairs columnist for the Wall Street Journal, wondered aloud last Thursday evening, “When will Israel be more a state than a cause?”
He told the 12th graduating class of the Write On For Israel program for high schools students, and an audience of several hundred people at Park East Synagogue: “It won’t happen in my lifetime or in my grandchildren’s lifetime.”
In an address to the graduates and, later, in a public forum — both sponsored by The Jewish Week — he asserted that “it will always be necessary to defend Israel, and it is incumbent on us to do so.” He added that “to be pro-Israel is to be decidedly unfashionable” and that his own advocacy is based on “a strong sense of fidelity” to Jews who suffered in past generations and “a profound sense of duty” to honor their memory.
Stephens, 40, encouraged the graduates to think independently and question conventional wisdom, charging that pro-Palestinian advocates “are artful in the use of fake facts,” like saying that Gaza is one of the most crowded places on earth or that the Palestinians accepted the Saudi peace plan of 2000. Neither is true, he assured the young people.
Forty-seven students completed the two-year Write On program, which seeks to educate young people about modern Zionism, providing them with the facts and confidence to speak out for Israel when they get to campus.
Judah Joseph, of the Write On class of 2012, was one of four alumni honored for pro-Israel activities on campus. Based on his leadership role at the University of Southern California, he advised responding to anti-Israel arguments rationally rather than emotionally. “Debate leads to frustration while engagement can lead to progress,” he said.
In the public forum, Write On alum Joshua Fattal, a student leader in several pro-Israel groups at Columbia University, interviewed Stephens, whose caustic criticism of American foreign policy were often greeted by cheers in the audience. The columnist sharply criticized Washington for “playing a game of make-believe” in the Mideast, accepting the unity government of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, and for negotiating with leaders of Iran, “masters at playing for time,” on their nuclear program.
gary@jewishweek.org
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NEW YORK
Ramapo Gets Monitor
Chasidic school board president calls state oversight 'hateful bigotry'; activists hope for transparency.
Amy Sara Clark
Staff Writer
From left, East Ramapo school activists Steve White, Carole Anderson and Antonio Luciano. Michael Datikash/JW
Tensions in a Rockland County public school district ratcheted up another notch last week after the state appointed a fiscal monitor to oversee a school board composed primarily of Orthodox Jews that manages a public school system where nearly all the students are black or Latino.
Education Commissioner John King said he took the rare step in East Ramapo because of a “history of and continued signs of fiscal distress” in the district. Two days later, the school board’s president, Yehuda Weissmandl, fired back, calling the move a “shameful and profoundly offensive” capitulation that legitimizes the “libelous accusations” of “bigots.”
“They assume — based upon our religion alone — that we have stolen from the very children we have been elected to serve. This is nothing but hateful bigotry. And no evidence of any such malfeasance by anyone associated with our Board has been produced,” he wrote.
Located 30 miles north of New York City, the East Ramapo Central School District includes the haredi enclaves of Monsey, Spring Valley and New Square. The nine-member board has seven fervently Orthodox members overseeing a district of about 20,000 yeshiva students and 9,000 public school students, about 90 percent of whom are from families of Caribbean and Latin America immigrants and two-thirds of whom qualify for free or reduced lunch.
In recent years the school board has been accused repeatedly of misconduct and is currently under investigation for fiscal irregularities that include diverting public funds to private yeshivas.
In 2010, the board’s sale of a public school building to a yeshiva was annulled by the state for being millions of dollars under market value, and the appraiser was indicted.
In addition, the state Education Department has cited the school for paying for special needs students to go to yeshivas without demonstrating why they couldn’t be served in public schools, an accusation that the board steadfastly denies and is currently appealing.
The board has also been criticized for spending millions on legal fees to fight several lawsuits including one charging it with using taxpayer money to subsidize religious education in yeshivas.
In 2005, candidates from the growing haredi and Orthodox communities began winning seats on East Ramapo’s school board on a platform of bringing more district resources to yeshivas and of keeping taxes low by cutting wasteful spending. Since then, the board has slashed academic offerings, extracurricular programs and more than 400 staff positions. Between 2009 and 2012, elementary school class size has risen from an average of 20 to 25.
The reductions have not only stripped the extras from the school district, they have also made it difficult for students to fit the electives that remain into their schedules, said Steve White, a Spring Valley nutritionist whose son graduated from East Ramapo High School in 2012.
White’s son, for example, tested into AP English but couldn’t take it because it conflicted with the only open section of a health class he needed to graduate.
Anthony Luciano, a retired NYPD lieutenant who lives in Chestnut Ridge, also witnessed the cuts.
“Sports programs have been dropped, music in the elementary schools has been eliminated, guidance counselors, elementary assistant principals — every support system that a school system needs they have dropped,” said Luciano, whose son graduated in 2011.
“He took violin beginning in fourth grade. Music was introduced to him beginning in kindergarten,” said Luciano. “He was in gifted and talented, that’s been eliminated. He started playing baseball in middle school, that’s been eliminated, he played on the [now eliminated] freshman baseball team in high school.”
Weissmandl declined an interview, but staunchly defended the cuts in a Jewish Week Opinion piece last month.
“Our district has 9,000 public students, and more than 21,000 private students,” he wrote. “The math is simple. Any aid calculation that looks only to the number of public school students — recognizing that funding must be used to serve both public and private students — is profoundly unfair and inadequate for our unique demographic.”
In his letter to Commissioner King he further argues that state officials not only knew about the cuts but ordered them, telling the board in December of 2012 to "take dramatic actions to reduce the budget deficit" while protecting its academic programs.
Oscar Cohen, education committee chairman of the Spring Valley NAACP, which is part of a coalition trying to restore services to the schools, says blaming the cuts entirely on a lack of state funding is misguided.
“The reductions and elimination of educational services in this district far exceeds other districts,” said Cohen, who is a former superintendent of the Lexington School for the Deaf in New York City; he said that although a state-mandated limit on property tax increases has squeezed all school districts, that doesn’t explain the extent of the cuts in East Ramapo.
“Every district has experienced the 2 percent cap, but no district has come close to having those cuts,” he said.
Rabbi Ari Hart, founder of Uri L’Tzedek, an Orthodox social justice organization that is part of a coalition of clergy pushing for state intervention, agreed, pointing out that if a lack of money was the only reason for the cuts, the board would have accepted a $3.5 million advance of state aid instead of rejecting it because it came with additional oversight.
“The state pledged $3.5 million designated to go towards programs that had been cut, but the board has refused to take the money. That is proof that this is not just about money, this is about oversight,” he said.
Activists have been lobbying the state to intervene in the district for years without success. In April, they tried a new tack, organizing the Rockland Clergy for Social Justice, a coalition of about 90 Christian, Jewish and Muslim clergy members, about a third of whom lobbied lawmakers in Albany on April 30.
Laura Barbieri, an attorney with the Advocates for Justice Legal Foundation, said she thinks the trip was a major factor in King’s decision because the coalition represented “a consensus of opinion of the clergy” that something needed to be done.
“I think the governor heard this message,” said Barbieri, who is representing a coalition of district residents in a lawsuit against the board.
Although the commissioner is appointed by the Board of Regents, which is independent of the governor, the fact that King chose for the post Hank Greenberg, who was counsel to Cuomo when he was attorney general, suggests that the governor may have had a hand in the decision.
White, who ran unsuccessfully for the school board in 2008, agreed that the clergy's lobbying efforts might have made the difference, “That’s what made it clear that it was going to be more of a problem to do nothing than to do something.”
White called the appointment a positive “first step,” while Luciano, who ran twice for school board, losing in 2011 by a vote of 8,000 to 7,700, said he’s only “cautiously optimistic.”
“I realize that for the past four years [Gov. Andrew] Cuomo has ignored the pleas from parents, and I recognize it’s an election year he has greater aspirations,” Luciano said. He added that Cuomo’s suspension of the anti-corruption Moreland Commission makes him skeptical of the potential impact of the move.
“I want to take a ‘wait and see’ approach to see what the monitor can and can’t do,” he said.
In fact, the newly appointed monitor has only been given “advisory” powers.
But Barbieri said she thinks the appointment of Greenberg, in particular, shows that the is more than an attempt to relieve political pressure.
“From all that I’ve heard about Hank Greenberg, I believe that he is a solid lawyer,” she said. “I think the governor is sincerely trying to do something. He would have put somebody else, a do-nothing or political hack, if he wanted to just put window dressing on the situation.”
And Uri L’Tzedek’s Rabbi Hart said he thinks even a monitor with only advisory powers can have a real effect by bringing “openness and transparency,” to the workings of the board.
“I think this is an opportunity for everyone to turn a new page and to begin working collaboratively and openly with each other.”
Amy.jewishweek@gmail.com
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BOOKS
Boris Fishman Stakes His Claim
With an eye and an ear for Malamud, he tells a modern (and Holocaust-tinged) immigrant tale in his debut novel.
Sandee Brawarsky
Culture Editor
“A Replacement Life” centers on a Claims Conference-like Holocaust restitution scam in Brooklyn’s Russian community.
Slava Gelman had the kind of grandmother who would have walked under a tank for him.
Boris Fishman’s impressive debut novel, “A Replacement Life,” (Harper) opens on an early summer morning in 2006 when Slava picks up the phone to learn from his mother that his beloved grandmother Sofia “isn’t.” In Russian, as the narrator explains, “you didn’t need the adjective to complete the sentence, but in English you did.”
The novel is bracketed with loss, beginning with Sofia’s death after a long illness, and ending three months later when Slava visits her grave. In between, the scenes are alive with humor, and crowded with Russian immigrants and their families extending across generations, as Fishman unfolds the story of how Slava gets involved in forging Holocaust-restitution documents for these elderly Russian Jews. In pitch-perfect sentences full of word play, Fishman raises questions about family honor and empathy, as well as legal and moral issues.
The 25-year-old Slava moved out of Brooklyn into Manhattan. A junior staffer for the legendary Century magazine, Slava is pushed into fabricating claims by his grandfather Yevgeny. For the elder Gelman, who learned to exploit the system in order to survive in the Soviet Union, truth is highly overrated. When a letter arrives for Slava’s grandmother soon after her death inviting her to apply for restitution — she is eligible as a survivor of the Minsk ghetto — Yevgeny wants to substitute his own claim.
After Slava tries to explain the approved categories and why his experience doesn’t fit, Yevgeny replies, “What are you, Lenin’s grandson? Maybe I didn’t suffer in the exact way I need to have suffered but they made sure to kill all the people who did. We had our whole world taken out from under us.”
So Slava skillfully twists her story into his. The process of inventing his grandmother’s history in its details keeps her alive for him, and for that he is grateful. In one story, he has her savoring dark bread with sunflower oil.
In Brooklyn, the memorable Yevgeny keeps up an underground economy of his own making, hustling salmon and flounder from truckers and selling at a discount to a neighbor, procuring prescription medicine (his own oversupply) for another neighbor in exchange for cognac, and giving haircuts to the Mexicans in the illegal basement apartments. Although Yevgeny is told not to breathe a word about the application, Slava begins getting calls from other elderly Russians asking for help with their stories.
“Slava wasn’t a judge: He was a middleman, a loan shark, an alchemist — he turned lives into facts, words in to money, silence into knowledge at last, “ Fishman writes.
In a recent interview, Fishman explains that the novel was inspired by his own experience in preparing his grandmother’s application for restitution. Born in Belarus, Fishman moved to the United States — first to Brooklyn and then New Jersey — when he was nine. As the best English speaker in his immediate family (his parents and maternal grandparents), he was the administrator of official paperwork. As the application asked for little documentation, he realized that it was more about telling a persuasive story than historical record.
“I bet someone was going to have a field day with these applications and start making up well-told stories,” he says. “That felt provocative in the way you want fiction to be — you want it to explore touchy questions like whether there are any Jews who would abuse memory of the Holocaust for profit.” First he wrote a short story on the subject, and then wanted to write a novel.
“I ran with it, and it ran with me,” Fishman says.
And while writing, his hunch proved true. In 2010, more than a dozen employees of German restitution funds — all Russian speakers — were indicted for fraud and embezzlement of more than $50 million by using invented tales of suffering.
Along with Slava’s grandmother and mother, who “held the world record for fastest trip from tender to brutal,” Fishman writes of two women in Slava’s romantic life, the American Arianna, the fact-checker in the cubicle next to his at work, and the Russian Vera, the daughter of family friends with whom he spent hours as a child, as all of them waited to leave Rome for America.
Fishman captures New York as a city of immigrants, in particular South Brooklyn, “a foreign city, if you were coming from Manhattan.” Yevgeny’s neighbors are Russians, Belarussians, Ukrainians, Moldovans, Georgians, Uzbeks and Mexicans. In some corners of the neighborhood, the “average time since arrival was under twelve months. These American toddlers were only beginning to crawl. Some, however, has already found the big thumb of American largesse.”
He also portrays the immigrants’ emotional lives. There are many widowers like Yevgeny — the women seemed to die first. As Fishman writes, “The homes of Soviet Brooklyn were filled with men who had been left to themselves by the last people to know how much looking after they needed. These men were terrified of being alone. An old Russian friend is “stooped as a branch being reclaimed by the ground.” The image of two elderly men, shuffling along the sidewalk as they take their evening walk dressed in their house slippers, supporting each other’s arm, stays with the reader.
When asked about his powers of description, Fishman admits, “I observe everyone. Too much so.” He also attributes his highly attuned observation skills to being Jewish in the Soviet Union, where one had to be vigilant always, and to being an immigrant. Cast in the role of outsider, he honed his abilities as a storyteller.
“As immigrants, all we’ve got is stories. We gave up the soil,” he adds.
His humor is dark, but not mean-spirited. He identifies with one of his favorite writers, Bernard Malamud.
“Malamud is melancholy. Ultimately, he has a grim view of the world as a place of suffering, but with blasts of magic and light. That’s how I see the world. It’s a very old-world view. You do your best, but things don’t often go your way. I connect to that sensibility,” he says. “And his prose is so whittled, like a rock. There’s not one extra word. He achieves a quality of myth, it’s so elemental. I worship him. Even his failures.”
As if to keep the reader still wondering about the nature of borrowed truths, Fishman includes an author’s note at the back of the book, attributing certain phrases to his own previous work and to other writers including Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” and Malamud’s “The Fixer.” (“The tea was bitter and he blamed existence” is a variation on Malamud.)
Fishman has several projects in the works, among them a new novel about a New Jersey couple that adopts a boy from Montana who turns out to be wild, “Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo,” and a memoir about his father and grandfather. He’s also thinking about a cookbook of Ukrainian delicacies like the spread prepared by Yevgeny’s home aide Berta in the novel that is piled onto plates rimmed in gold filigree; it includes chicken steaks in egg batter, herring under potatoes, salmon soup, marinated peppers with buckwheat honey, sour cabbage with beef and pickled cabbage.
He says that when he’s blessed to have children, he wants them to know Russian language and literature, his family’s history (he tricked his own grandmother into telling him what happened to her during the war, by saying that he needed the information for a school project — he knew she wouldn’t hold back to help him get a better grade), as well as Jewish history and culture. He describes himself as “not observant and a very proud Jew culturally.”
As his book tour shapes up around the country this fall, Fishman is hoping for the opportunity to speak in Jewish venues. “I really want to start the conversation about the relationship of American Jews to Russian Jews. It feels overdue. There’s a lot of expectation and hope, but a real divide.”
He explains that for American Jews, religion is a lot more central to their identity and understanding, and for Russian Jews, it’s World War II and being second-class citizens. “American Jews talk about the holidays. Russian Jews talk about the war.”
editor@jewishweek.org
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Enjoy the read.
Sincerely,
Gary Rosenblatt
P.S. Check our website anytime for breaking news and exclusive videos, blogs, opinion and advice columns, and more.
http://www.thejewishweek.com/
Between the Lines - Gary Rosenblatt
The New Israeli: Inching Back Toward Tradition
Gary Rosenblatt
Micah Goodman, 39, a rising star in Israel as a philosopher, author, television personality and catalyst for change, makes a strong case that the deep divide between religious and secular Jews in Israel is narrowing.He points to the fact that Jewish texts and values have made their way in recent years into Israeli mainstream culture, including feature films, prime-time television shows, popular music and books. Case in point: Two of his books, one on the writings of Maimonides and the other on the “Kuzari,” the famous work by the Spanish philosopher-poet Rabbi Yehuda HaLevi, were best sellers in Israel despite dealing with ancient Jewish history.
“This could not have happened 10 years ago,” he says.
And most significantly, based on an experimental leadership program he directs in the Judean Hills for post-army, pre-university young men and women, Goodman asserts that Israelis in their 20s are showing increasing interest in their Jewish heritage and traditions. Not, he emphasizes, out of a desire to become more observant religiously, but rather to explore and understand how and where Judaism can fit into their secular lives.
“It’s not about the secular becoming religious,” he says. “It’s about Israelis becoming Jewish.” His goal is to deepen their “Israeliness.”
During a recent visit Goodman made to New York, I spent enough time with him — during a lecture, a long lunch and then an interview — to be convinced that he has his pulse on the current Israeli zeitgeist, with its hopeful signs of a Jewish renaissance.
“Israel is changing,” he told his audience at the outset of a lecture in Teaneck, N.J. “For the past 15 years something has been happening under the radar,” a renewed interest in things Jewish, which now is gaining traction and attention.
He then launched into a lengthy explanation of why that is so, going back to the historical and philosophical underpinnings of Zionist ideology. He focused on the tensions between the writings of Micah Joseph Berdichevsky (1865-1921) and Ahad Ha’am (the pen name for Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg, 1856-1927), two Russian-born thinkers from chasidic families who wrote of the tensions between Jewish tradition and assimilation.
That may sound academic, even boring. But Goodman was dynamic, engaging and often humorous as he moved around the room, speaking with no notes, sprinkling his points with personal anecdotes and observations.
He described Berdichevsky as a key figure among those early Zionist thinkers whose attitudes towards their fellow Jews had a twinge of anti-Semitism.
The notion of the “ugly Jew,” someone “impossible not to despise,” also ran through the writings of founding fathers like Zeev Jabotinsky and Theodor Herzl; they believed that Zionism was the answer to anti-Semitism, Goodman said.
“These early Zionists saw Judaism as an environmental disease,” he noted. Their approach was part political, part therapeutic as they sought to expunge Judaism in creating The New Jew — strong, bold, and a reaction to the long-held fear of non-Jews and of religious authority. The result was a Zionism that “cured” the Jews by rejecting Judaism.
“They wanted to create a state and a kind of Jew that didn’t exist, liberating the Jew from his past and his fear of goyim and of God,” according to Goodman.
By contrast, Ahad Ha’am sought to incorporate the ethical and cultural values of Judaism into the Zionist state. In his work he called for “a Jewish state and not merely a state of Jews,” and, though secular, he envisioned Israel as a spiritual center for Jews, where Jewish texts like the Bible would be a source of inspiration.
In the end, Ahad Ha’am’s vision lost to Berdichevsky’s, Goodman said, and sadly, “we paid a terrible price because secularism turned into ignorance [of Judaism]” in Israeli society, and many of Israel’s citizens have “an allergic reaction to tradition.”
Part of the ripple effect was that Israelis became disconnected from the Jewish traditions that diaspora Jews shared.
Thriving In The Desert
‘Now we can better understand Israel today,” Goodman said as he turned to the present-day phenomenon that finds young secular Jews studying Talmud and other traditional texts and attending Friday evening services outdoors in Tel Aviv. Perhaps this renewed interest in tradition is best exemplified by innovative educators like Ruth Calderon, whose inspiring maiden speech as a Knesset member last year, asserting that Jewish texts are for all Jews, went viral and captured the imagination of many.
While Calderon came to Talmud study from a secular background, Goodman had the opposite experience: he grew up observant, and studied at a traditional yeshiva. He launched his leadership program, Ein Prat, in 2006, and its most popular element is a four-month, 24/7 course at a remote spot in the Judean Hills. There the young men and women — who find themselves in that uniquely Israeli limbo between completion of the army and beginning university — study Bible, Talmud, secular philosophy and literature, with a large dose of yoga and other physical exercise thrown in the mix.
Six people were in the initial group; seven the next year. But the program grew by word of mouth, and now there are more than 350 participants; about 70 percent of them are secular and 30 percent observant. What’s more, they pay to attend and live in an old trailer camp, start their long days at 6:30 a.m. and get no university credit. Why do they do it?
I visited Ein Prat for a day last year (“Narrowing The Secular-Religious Gap In Israel,” June 14, 2013) to see for myself, and came away impressed with the students and faculty, and with a program that combined the passion of traditional study halls and the rigor of university inquiry and debate.
One young Sephardic woman from Rishon L’Zion told me, “I came to learn who I am and where I come from, and because I want my children to know where they come from.”
Goodman observes that secular graduates say they came to Ein Prat and “got connected.” The observant ones say they came and “opened up.”
In a presentation he made while in New York to members of the Jewish Funders Network, he described the growth and reach of the Jewish Renewal movement in Israel -- a loose collection of programs offering learning opportunities for Israelis. The programs touch on Jewish identity, text, prayer, spirituality and/or social action, all anchored in the principles of pluralism and autonomy. Ein Prat is a prime example.
(JFN recently published a “Guide to Jewish Giving” on the subject of “Jewish Renewal In Israel.”)
Goodman observed that American Jewish philanthropists seem to appreciate the values and goals of the Renewal movement more readily than their Israeli counterparts. The Israelis, he said, find it hard to believe that the goal of the programs is not about making the participants more religious. By contrast, the Americans are more aligned with the movement, he said, because it reflects how Judaism is widely practiced here — primarily out of choice, with an emphasis on pluralistic values.
He’s hoping that increasing numbers of young Israelis, confident in their secular lifestyle, will think of Judaism as a source of inspiration to explore rather than of constrictive rules and obligations to avoid. He sees his work as “helping to empower this generation of Israelis to radiate” their openness and curiosity in creating a more balanced society, renewing rather than rejecting Jewish tradition.
Gary@jewishweek.org
New York News
Roman Kent, left, last week received Germany's Order of Merit from Consul General Busso von Alvensleben. Jörg Windau
Remembering The Lessons Of The Holocaust, Without Bitterness
German consulate bestows Order of Merit on Holocaust survivor and Claims Conference negotiator Roman Kent.
Stewart Ain - Staff Writer
The incongruity of the moment was inescapable.Roman Kent, an 89-year-old, Polish-born Auschwitz survivor, stood in the living room here of German Consul General Busso von Alvensleben’s home last month and heard the German official describe him as a man who “went through hell and yet brought the message of tolerance and solidarity to so many.”
As Kent’s wife, Hannah (also an Auschwitz survivor), their two children and three grandchildren watched, von Alvensleben then pinned to Kent’s suit pocket the German government’s Order of Merit that German President Joachim Gauck had ordered bestowed upon Kent for his work on behalf of Holocaust survivors and for “reminding the world of the lessons the Holocaust has taught … [without] bitterness or hatred.”
Obviously moved, Kent replied: “How could I, a Holocaust survivor, even remotely envision such an incredible scenario when enslaved in Auschwitz.”
This is the first time the German consulate has bestowed the award on a Holocaust survivor, a spokesman for the German consulate said. The award reflects achievement in the political, economic, social or intellectual realm and for outstanding service to Germany in the field of social, charitable or philanthropic work.
Kent has served as president of the International Auschwitz Committee, chairman of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, and treasurer of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. It is as a Claims Conference negotiator with the German government seeking additional compensation for survivors that Kent is most well known to them and for which he won von Alvensleben’s praise.
“We Germans are grateful to Roman Kent for the gift of his trust, a gift by all means not to be taken for granted from someone who has suffered so much from German hands,” he said.
In his remarks to about 75 guests — including Brooklyn Federal Judge Edward Korman and David Marwell, director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage–A Living Memorial to the Holocaust — Kent said he does not hold the German government of today responsible for the Nazi atrocities.
“You, the new generation, just like we the survivors, have miraculously rebuilt our past lives,” he said. “The new generation of Germans rose from the ashes, and must be commended for replacing totalitarianism with democracy, accepting responsibility for their wrong-doings, and apologizing for the deeds of an earlier generation. ... By having the courage to face the past, by having the decency to assume responsibilities to the victims of the past, Germany is creating a foundation for an impressive future.”
stewart@jewishweek.org
Food and Wine
Kraft Puts Bacon In Cream Cheese
New flavor causes other, non-treyf products to lose certification.
Hannah Dreyfus - Staff Writer
Kraft is rushing in where Ritz feared to tread.
Unlike Bacon Flavored Ritz Crackers (which boast the highly reputable O.U. symbol on every box), Kraft is producing a new cream cheese that's got bacon in it. Not artificial flavoring. Not Bac-Os. Real bacon.
Needless to say, this spread is not kosher, but the OK, which certifies other Kraft cream cheese products, released a memo saying just that -- and more. Ten other Philadelphia cream cheese products, including Philadelphia Original Fat Free Cream Cheese Spread, Milk Chocolate Cream Cheese Spread, Brown Sugar & Cinnamon Cream Cheese Spread, and Strawberry Fat Free Cream Cheese Spread, have also lost their certification because they are made on the same production line as the new bacon spread. The original Philadelphia cream cheese has been spared.
When the world’s first kosher cheeseburger is a thing of the past, it’s a wonder that kosher bacon cream cheese remains a forbidden fruit — especially when Jews are known for schmear, artificial flavorings and engineered food. The landmark parve (not meat, not dairy) burger was created by harvesting stem cells from a portion of cow shoulder muscle that were then multiplied in petri dishes to form tiny strips of muscle fiber. The five-ounce burger, requiring 20,000 strips and costing $325,000 and two year to make, is still far from market viability. So, nu — why can’t they do that for cream cheese?
Bac-O Bits, used to add a crunchy kick to salads and sides, is kosher certified and has long been a hit among Jewish circles. Morning Star Farms Veggie Bacon Strips can peacefully coexist on the diary shelf of a kosher refrigerator. And, of course, the latest entry into the kosher bacon pantheon: those Ritz crackers.
Is it only matter of time before Kraft catches on to the trend?
hannahdreyfus@gmail.com
Travel
Beyond just produce: The green market in Studio City. Hilary Larson/JW
The Green Market As Cultural Hub
Hilary Larson - Travel Writer
Shortly after being sent to Los Angeles for work, my husband developed a grapefruit addiction.He started showing up at the office with a bag of grapefruits every morning, working his way through a pound or two of citrus before lunch. His colleagues apparently found this amusing. When I went out to visit, I quickly honed in on the source of his addiction.
It was the Canoga Park Farmer’s Market, a modest, one-block affair in a working-class neighborhood of the San Fernando Valley. Oggi’s source was an organic farmer from Oxnard who sells Oro Blanco grapefruits, a variety that tastes like a cross between lemons and honey; from the farmer’s enthusiasm, I could tell Oggi was his most devoted grapefruit client.
And over the next few weekends, I quickly discovered what Angelenos all know. Farmer’s markets in the nation’s sunny agricultural mecca are much more than places to shop; they’re the perfect entertainment for our local-and-seasonal, foodie-obsessed era, brimming year-round with mouthwatering selections of just-picked produce.
In a city short on public spaces, markets are oases of communal activity, places where Californians of diverse backgrounds meet over such common human denominators as cherries, broccoli and squash. As such, any traveler looking for something to do — or something to eat — on any morning, not just Sunday, ought to check out the listings on the L.A. Times website (projects.latimes.com/farmers-markets) and explore.
While Oggi remained faithful to his grapefruit source, he indulged my curiosity in a tour of markets that ranged from the very basic (a handful of produce stalls) to elaborate layouts resembling amusement parks, complete with carousels and petting zoos. We started in the hills just north of Malibu, worked our way across the Valley, and ended our survey on the trendy West Side.
Northwest L.A. is home to smaller, more modest markets like the one in Agoura Hills. This picturesque Western town, nestled into the mountains and dotted with cactus, hosts nearby farmers, bakers and fishmongers in a sprawling parking lot. The market is sparsely populated and has absolutely no atmosphere — but there was no denying the freshness of the Navel oranges I bought.
Canoga Park was nearly as low-key, though the downtown location, the guitar player and the Mexican families lining up for chicharrones lent a neighborly feel. Moving east, we found a much larger array of produce in Encino, where a particularly strong flower selection as well as artisanal honeys and jams spread out across two vacant lots and a lawn. In the back, a corner with prepared-food trucks offered a nosh under shady trees — shade being a rare, precious thing in L.A.
Mere produce is almost a sideline at some of the bigger, more popular markets. First came the crepe stands, taco trucks and falafel stalls, catering to all the shoppers who ignored the advice about not going shopping while already hungry. Then came makeshift benches and tables, encouraging families to picnic.
The result was several blocks of pupusas, Korean tacos and quinoa bowls in Studio City, where the farmer’s market — on an urban block just off Ventura Boulevard — has distinctly Brooklyn vibe. Bearded fathers wearing Baby Bjorns and spectacled tamale connoisseurs abounded. They all seemed to be heading toward one end of the strip, where the delighted shrieks of children called attention to a swing set, a giant inflatable playpen and a carousel of live horses. Goats, rabbits, chickens and at least one black hog found eager hands and laps at the petting zoo.
Encino and Studio City drew a sizeable Jewish crowd, so it was striking that we made it all the way to Mar Vista before hitting on a genre that is puzzlingly rare: kosher prepared food. At Kosher Palate, pareve dishes offer a modern, locally sourced spin on global Jewish tastes. But amid the plethora of dietary options — raw, vegan, low-glycemic, gluten-free, paleo-friendly (this is L.A., after all) — this was the only glatt kosher fare we found.
Another commodity in short supply is parking, a real problem at the more popular urban spots. On a Sunday in Santa Monica, which hosts several highly competitive markets, it took well over a half-hour to stow our Toyota within walking distance of the market. I’m still debating whether the congestion, hassle and outrageous private-parking rackets outweighed the loveliness of the experience — an incredibly tasty array of food and an attractive young crowd, all on a charming, boutique-dotted stretch of Main Street. If you’re already strolling with a latte in hand, it might be just perfect.
But if you prefer something a little more relaxed, there are literally dozens of markets on any given day of the week — and each one is like a little microcosm of the surrounding community, given that people tend to shop where they live. Sometimes I filled my tote with fresh berries; other times, I stopped by for lunch and peoplewatching.
The one constant? You guessed it: a fresh supply of grapefruit.
editor@jewishweek.org
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