Dear Reader,
In the wake of last week's attack at Chabad headquarters in Crown Heights, associate editor Jonathan Mark pays a visit to the shul-study hall where Levi Rosenblatt was stabbed in the head. He found some of Rosenblatt's yeshiva mates trying to make sense of the attack, and others in Crown Heights wondering whether security measures at "770" will have to change. Read more...
Darkness Over Crown Heights In Attack’s Wake
Stabbing has Chabad asking why — and how.
Jonathan Mark
Associate Editor
Chabad yeshiva students poring over texts this week in the shul/study hall at “770.” Michael Datikash/JW
The heart of Chabad-Lubavitch, 770 Eastern Parkway, has passed from address into legend.
Once home, office, yeshiva and shul to the sixth and seventh Lubavitcher rebbes, both of whom escaped Europe in the 1940s, the growing Chabad eventually purchased two adjacent buildings, breaking through the basements and backyards to create the vast shul and study hall (all generically known as 770).
The space is open around the clock, never without someone in the room, and like other endlessly open spaces like Jerusalem’s Wall or the Lincoln Memorial, it is often most beautiful in the wee small hours. It is from here that 5,000 emissaries were sent from the Arctic Circle to the Congo, and here chasidim recount dazzling spiritual encounters and revelations. It has been everything a building can be — but never a crime scene.
On Dec. 9, at 1:40 a.m., Israeli student Levi Rosenblatt, 22, was stabbed in the skull by a man wielding a five-inch blade; his assailant, Calvin Peters, 49, a native of Trinidad, reportedly screamed “I want to kill Jews” before being shot dead by police as he lunged with his knife.
For 25 years, Chabad felt danger closing in. Police were first stationed outside 770 in the 1970s, when Mayor Ed Koch ordered police protection after violent threats from Satmar, their chasidic rivals. In 1991, Yankel Rosenbaum was stabbed to death during the Crown Heights riots. In 1994, a Lebanese immigrant, driving on the Brooklyn Bridge, shot into a van carrying Chabad students, hitting 14-year-old Ari Halberstam in the head, killing him, seriously wounding three others. In 2008, Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg, along with four others, were murdered in the Mumbai Chabad House. Earlier this summer, blacks and Jews held tense meetings over “knockout” incidents, in which several Jews were randomly sucker-punched, knocked unconscious as they walked in the street.
It wasn’t just a question of locking 770’s doors; Rosenbaum and Halberstam were killed on a sidewalk and a bridge. For all its emphasis on being welcoming, at what point, chasidim were asking, does security become the better part of Chabad’s valor? The Mumbai Mirror, an Indian paper, reported this month that the new Chabad emissary to Mumbai, Rabbi Israel Kozlovsky, said, “When you want to fight darkness, you cannot chase it away with a stick or an AK-47… [only] with light and peace.” Meanwhile, even as one might suppose from his words that nothing will change, the Mirror reports that the entire ground floor of the building, on narrow Hormusji Street, has been taken over by Israeli security agencies, with an outer ring handled by the Mumbai police, with visitors having to pass through two layers of security before getting to the Chabad restaurant where “everybody will be welcome.” Well, almost everybody.
The mood this week in Crown Heights was similar to Mumbai. First, nothing will change. Then, something must.
Devorah Halberstam, mother of the murdered Ari, first said, “The mood is we shall overcome, that’s Lubavitch.” She paused. “But it’s very troubling to me. As soon as I heard what happened, my heart started to pound. With my history, I’ll always have that.”
She said, for 20 years “I lived on the corner of 770. My kids would run in there, day and night. It was home. We think of it as the safest place. The fact that this guy [from Trinidad] was even in there, well, that’s what 770 is, everyone goes in there, with all kinds of faces,” Ethiopians, South Americans, Israelis, Chabad has become so international. “We don’t look at anyone and think twice. At 770 there’s an open-door policy. It will never change. However, now, when we see someone who looks out of place, we have to say something.”
During holiday seasons, Halberstam continued, “if I tell you, how many times people ring my bell for tzedakah … I can look at the [closed-circuit] cameras and see people who are dressed frum [Orthodox], they have a beard, but I never ever open my door anymore. Who says its real?” The kidnapped boys in Israel were taken and killed by terrorists dressed as religious Jews, “We don’t know who anybody is anymore. Once we did; those days are over. I’m sorry about it, but they just are. We’re living in a new world.”
As for 770, said Halberstam, “we won’t even have metal detectors. It ain’t happening. It’s up to the people who daven and learn in 770; they know who the regulars are, they have to be vigilant. The minute this guy [with the knife] walked in, someone should have walked out and called for the police,” who have a Brooklyn South command van on the corner, and at least a half-dozen policemen on the sidewalk. The fact is, police responded so quickly to the stabbing because they were stationed outside 770 all along.
Levi Rosenblatt is still in the hospital, his condition improved from critical to stable.
Two fellow students from the yeshiva of more than 500 students, all in their early 20s, Yosef Schtroks, 23, from Vancouver, and Levi Dubov, 22, from Princeton, N.J., shared his dorm and daily schedule.
They said their days begin, even before morning prayer, with a trip to the mikveh, then at least an hour of studying chassidus [chasidic teachings and culture] in 770’s study hall, in preparation for prayer. Sitting under scattered chandeliers and ceiling fans, beside one of the many tan-painted wooden tables, often chipped at the ends, Dubov pointed out the rebbe’s old chair, on a carpet beside the ark. There’s a second ark in an alcove for smaller minyans that spontaneously form during the day. “That’s why our studying is in the rear,” said Dubov. “It’s a little quieter.”
Dubov compared it to “an old shtetl shul; books all over the tables; bochurim (students) sitting and learning; a minyan over there; and all the way over there, people saying hello.” In fact, Dubov jumps up to greet an old friend, Rabbi Mendel Shemtov, the shliach to Montevideo, Uruguay, and Dubov’s old counselor in Camp Gan Israel in the Catskills.
Duubov pointed out the tables where Rosenblatt used to study. “It breaks your heart that something like that should happen to a fellow student, in such a horrible way, in such a holy place.” But Dubov and Schtroks still intended to come there after midnight. “One of the amazing things about the life of bochur [a yeshiva student],” said Schtroks, “is the day is not over when seder is over [when yeshiva is done for the day]. I know Levi [Rosenblatt] — I don’t know if he would say this about himself — spent a lot of his own time learning the rebbe’s reshimos [private notes]. I know that Levi [Rosenblatt] was part of a chevra [fellowship] that was very involved in learning, and using as much of his time, while he was in the United States, to be in the rebbe’s shul.”
Dubov added that, aside from basic Jewish law, “we’re told a person should always learn what your heart is drawn to, and late at night is the perfect time for that. It’s less formal. It’s a very beautiful time, before you go to sleep, to learn something that draws your heart.”
This week, he was in 770, bloodstained a few days ago. “It’s very disturbing on so many levels,” said Dubov, “such a horrifying act. ... And that [the assailant] came all the way to here …”
Exactly, said Rabbi Avraham Berkowitz. “I don’t believe he acted alone. I recognize that he’s bipolar, but he didn’t go to his neighborhood church or the synagogue nearest his home. He drove all the way to 770 from Valley Stream.”
Rabbi Berkowitz, 38, is one of the most intriguing young leaders in Chabad. When the Soviet Union collapsed, he was sent to direct Chabad operations in Russia, helping to establish Chabad shuls and schools from Siberia to the Chinese border to the Black Sea. When the Mumbai Chabad was pocked by bullet holes, with the Chabad emissaries murdered and the community demoralized, Rabbi Berkowitz was sent to Mumbai to guide the transition and rebuilding until new shluchim could arrive.
Now, essentially a minister without portfolio based in 770, he pointed out that the stabber “had to know exactly where he was going.” After all, the shul and study hall are a flight of stairs down from the street, and there is not even a single sign to indicate what this building is.
“Yes,” said Rabbi Berkowitz, the assailant “had mental issues, but there are dangerous people who hate Israel and the Jewish people, and they influence some of these [sick] people, whether on websites or directly, to kill Jews. [Peters] wasn’t some sick person roaming the neighborhood with a knife. He parked his car, a very nice silver Honda Accord, right in front of the [unmarked] steps. He had a GPS. He knew where he was going. I would like to know why. What websites was he reading? That’s the connection, for me, to our other enemies who want to wipe us out or wear us down until we say there’s no place for us, in Israel or anywhere.”
Darkness came to 770, and with it, the evening prayers: “Blessed is the God who brings on the night.”
‘Ticking Time Bomb’ On Northern Border
Farming communities near Lebanon wary of Hezbollah tunnels, though tense calm prevails.
Joshua Mitnick
Israel Correspondent
Koby Cohen, a deputy security chief of the border town of Zarit. Joshua Mitnick/JW
Zarit, Israel — The winding mountain roads leading to the eastern sector of Israel’s border with Lebanon were crawling with army forces on Monday: teams of soldiers in combat gear camped out at the entrance to villages as convoys of vehicles plied the highways.
Though the area remained peaceful, the regional training exercise of the Israel Defense Forces 91st Division was a sign of the nagging unease. The soldiers from the unit are charged with security along the border with Lebanon and were likely simulating a response to a Hezbollah infiltration into a northern Israeli town, according to a local security expert. Smaller scale exercises are held on a frequent basis.
“It’s always tense here,” said Koby Cohen, the deputy security chief of Moshav Zarit, a border agricultural cooperative with fields in the shadow of southern Lebanon buildings just a few hundred yards away across the Israeli border fence.
Ironically, after years of intermittent Katyusha rocket salvos and the 2006 war with Hezbollah, the Lebanon border has become one of Israel’s calmer frontiers (while formerly calm borders like the Golan Heights have become destabilized), thanks to the mutual deterrence agreement established in the wake of the war. That calm was strengthened when Hezbollah became embroiled in the Syrian war, making it more difficult for the Iranian-backed militant group to handle a second front with Israel.
But the constant drills of the army along the border reflect an assessment that the calm is nonetheless fragile, and that the military must be ready for an unexpected collapse of stability or a miscalculation by one of the sides that triggers an escalation. Indeed, the Israeli military has taken note of the combat experience that Hezbollah fighters have gained fighting in Syria (albeit at a high cost in dead soldiers).
“Intelligence is working day and night regarding Hezbollah,” said Mordechai Kedar, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at Bar-Ilan University and a reserve intelligence officer with the IDF’s northern command. “Nobody goes to sleep thinking that they are our friends.”
The tension along Israel’s northern border escalated a notch last week amid accusations by the Syrian government and footage of a daytime air strike on one of Damascus’ airports. Israel’s government remained mum even though some officials made general statements interpreted as indirect acknowledgement that Israel had made good on a promise to block the movement of strategic weapons from Syria into Lebanon to Hezbollah. The attack spurred questions in Israel about whether the strike — believed to be the latest Israeli offensive — might push Syrian President Assad into a serious military response.
Might Hezbollah respond to an attack on its Syrian ally by striking across the Lebanon-Israel border? Israel has already blamed Hezbollah for launching a strike from Syria at Israeli forces in the Golan. Kedar believes that Hezbollah doesn’t need an excuse to strike Israel, and could even inflict damage on northern communities with rockets while still embroiled in Syria. But that involvement in Syria leaves Lebanon and Hezbollah’s bases there more exposed to an Israeli ground offensive. Furthermore, Hezbollah’s allies in Iran want to save their firepower to deter an Israeli attack on Iran. Taken together, Kedar says the risk of a major flare-up with Hezbollah in the coming year is low.
“As long as we don’t have any problems with Iran, I don’t see Hezbollah attacking Israel because they have nothing to gain from it,” Kedar said. “They only will attack if they assess that Israel will not retaliate. But they’ve miscalculated in the past, like in 2006.”
Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, a spokesman for the Israeli army, said that while Hezbollah has a vast missile arsenal and improved on the battlefield, they are constrained by their commitments in Syria and the Lebanese the Lebanese polity which doesn’t want a war with Israel. Still, he said. “our forces need to be ready.”
Lately, however, that tension ticked up a notch at Zarit and other border farming cooperatives; residents there believe that Hezbollah is trying to tunnel under the border to carry out attacks, the way Hamas did in the recent Gaza war. Locals claim to have spotted a Lebanese operative emerging from a tunnel opening behind the Zarit mushroom factory to do surveillance, said Cohen, the deputy security officer. The army, however, has largely ignored the claims, Cohen said.
At Zarit, residents say that for the last year they have been hearing the sound of knocking, gravel being moved and drilling from heavy machinery.
Ohad Adoni, a Zarit resident, said he heard knocking noises twice — once at noon and the other time at 3 a.m. “It’s like small knocks on the wall,” he said.
The anxiety is understandable: In the middle of the war in Gaza, residents of farming cooperatives of Shetula and Avivim, which are just a few hundred yards from the border fence, complained of similar noises in interviews with Channel 10 television. Kibbutzniks who live at the border with Gaza also complained about such noises in the months before the war.
The notion that Hezbollah and Hamas would use the same tunneling tactic against Israel is a reasonable assumption, said Atai Shelach, the former head of the IDF warfare department and the former head of the army’s elite combat engineering unit charged with dismantling tunnels.
“No one would be surprised that someday Hezbollah will emerge from the ground near northern border settlements,” he said while noting that he had seen no proof to that effect. “The terrain is different, but Hezbollah already proved to us in 2006 that they have the ability and technology to dig in the north.”
Standing in front of an Israeli vineyard that abuts the border fence, Cohen points out new buildings erected on the Lebanese side of the border that bear down on Zarit. Hezbollah flags that once fluttered along the border are noticeably absent, but a lone Palestinian flag hangs from a pole. A white watchtower, jeeps and an outpost of UNIFIL, the United Nations observer force for southern Lebanon, are distant, but clearly visible on the border horizon. UNIFIL observers monitor the implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1701, the 2006 cease-fire declaration that forbids Hezbollah from rearming in southern Lebanon.
Speaking to reporters on the Israeli side of the border crossing at Rosh Hanikra, UNIFIL spokesman Andrea Tenenti said the 10,000-man force hasn’t found any evidence of a Hezbollah military buildup in southern Lebanon, as the Israeli army has claimed over the years. The same goes for tunneling, the spokesperson said. Even the Israeli army hasn’t brought up complaints of cross-border tunnels in meetings with counterparts from the Lebanese army. He said “there’s no appetite” among residents in southern Lebanon — including local Shiite leaders who identify with Hezbollah — to destabilize the border.
Back at Zarit, it’s unlikely that the UN spokesman’s words of reassurance would do much to calm nerves. Though the Israeli army generally has its “finger on the pulse” regarding Hezbollah’s activities on the border, Cohen, the moshav’s deputy security chief, believes that the Israeli army has refrained from acknowledging their concerns because they want to keep residents along the border calm.
“We want them to just start digging,” he said. “The situation is like a ticking bomb. It’s going to go off eventually.”
Jewish Journeys 2014
Take that Borat! Next year in Kazakhstan. Nature beckons in Eilat. Hummus in Berlin? The Israelis are here. Aulus-les-Baines and the need to remember.
Monday, December 15, 2014
INSIDE THIS SPECIAL SECTION
Freedom Has Its Costs
Ridley Scott’s theologically tentative and sluggish ‘Exodus: Gods and Kings.’
Special To The Jewish Week
Christian Bale as Moses in “Exodus: God and Kings.” 20th Century Fox
It is unlikely that anyone could have made a satisfying film out of “Exodus: Gods and Kings,” the Ridley Scott-directed biblical epic that opened last weekend. The script, by four different writers including Steve Zaillian of “Schindler’s List” fame, is a sluggish, unbalanced mess; the first third of the film is an entertaining irrelevance and the most important part of the story is relegated to the last 10 minutes of a long two-and-a-half hours.
Despite that, Scott, who made the film in 3-D, keeps the action moving. And make no mistake, this is mainly an action film with a little oddball theology thrown in for respite; the result is brisk enough that one is never bored. But interested? Barely. Engaged? Hardly. Intellectually challenged? C’mon. But never bored.
Inevitably, the filmmakers put their own spin on the Exodus-from-Egypt backstory, which is their privilege. When the rabbis do it, we call it midrash. The Torah isn’t a 19th-century novel; it’s not long on psychological motivation or introspection, and for modern readers/viewers the desire to fill in those gaps is probably inevitable. While most people, when told that Scott would be making the film, might have thought he was a logical choice because of his practiced hand with big set-piece period films like “Gladiator,” “Kingdom of Heaven” and “Robin Hood,” the really interesting element of the match of director and subject is Scott’s affinity for deracinated, dispossessed and homeless protagonists, buffeted by historical (and trans-historical) forces that they cannot understand. From Ripley in “Alien” to Moses in the new film, Scott’s central characters are either rootless wanderers or will be within a few minutes of the film’s opening.
As played by the perpetually dour Christian Bale, Moses is another in this long line; he’s a prince of Egypt sort of by adoption, a man who has risen through his prowess, perspicacity and appetite for battle. But he is a man whose past is obscured and whose ostensible family ties turn out to be spurious. Bale does best with the early part of the film, bringing a certain dry wit and undeniable swagger to the princely Moses. Unfortunately, as he becomes increasingly entangled in the struggles of the Hebrews, the actor reverts to his tried-and-true scowling self and, regrettably, the audience must experience the transition as a loss rather than an elevation.
By contrast, Joel Edgerton’s Pharaoh Ramses is perpetually uncertain, hounded by self-doubt and an almost palpable loathing for fleshly things. When the plagues hit Egypt, Ramses clearly becomes a man appalled by the sheer ickiness of things like boils, frogs and locusts.
If you’re going to make a film that follows the source material even minimally, the Exodus story presents a massive structural problem: the supposed hero, Moses, is more the bearer of really bad tidings than an active cause of the downfall of the Egyptians. With an actor as iconic as Charlton Heston (and a script as reverentially linear as Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments”) that presents little problem. Heston’s Moses is like a leg-breaker for a loan shark. He makes painful things happen to people who don’t follow the rules. By contrast, Scott’s Moses, despite a certain strange echoing of narrative tropes from the western film, is a veritable sleepwalker, a reluctant servant of a God by whom he is utterly baffled.
A lot of the abuse heaped on “Exodus: Gods and Kings” has fallen on the decision of Scott and the writers to represent God as a small, rather petulant boy. It is an oddly inspired choice. In a film that is obsessed with the generational transmission of community values, the idea of a mysterious youngster as Supreme Being actually makes a certain thematic sense. There are a million ways to depict the Ineffable, and all of them are wrong. This one at least has the minor benefit of being original.
The way that Scott and Co. handle God’s appearance to Moses is indicative of the theological tentativeness of the film. Moses is caught in a rockslide while chasing some straying livestock, struck on the head and buried in geological sludge except for his face. When he comes to, there’s that burning bush and the boy. After that, whenever Moses is seen arguing with the phenomenon, an eavesdropping Joshua (Aaron Paul) sees him seemingly talking to empty air. If not for Bale’s earnestness, the result would feel like “Topper in Egypt,” but it has a cynical logic. Viewers are offered two versions of events and can pick and choose for their own philosophical comfort.
The treatment of the plagues is similar. The script sets in motion a chain of ecological catastrophes that wreck Egypt, and there seems to be an at least superficially plausible explanation until things escalate beyond any scientific interpretation. Scott treats the big set pieces like a mixture of action choreography and horror-film imagery, with the result that it seems all too familiar to a jaded moviegoer.
The film’s use of 3-D is no help. Indirectly, it merely points a large neon arrow at what is really wrong with this film. Whether you are DeMille or Ridley Scott, you are enslaved to the dominant narrative paradigms in which you work. If the only tool you have is a hammer, the world is filled with nails; if the stories you are used to telling are genre stories with a strong line in narrative convention, you will make everything into a western/science fiction thriller/detective film/historical epic. Which is what Scott has done.
It would take a very different kind of film sensibility to look at the last four books of the Torah and see a story about nation-building, lawgiving and developing a relationship to 613 commandments, however you conceive that relationship. If you see the story as a duel between “Gods and Kings,” between slaveholders and slaves, good guys and bad guys, the result is always going to be a film like this one.
“Exodus: Gods and Kings” is in wide release.
Landmark Day For Flatbush Conservative Synagogue
East Midwood Jewish Center, a demographic anomaly, marks 90 years, and a change on the pulpit.
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
Members of the East Midwood Jewish Center celebrated the synagogue’s 90th anniversary Sunday in the sanctuary.Jeremy Gordon
Last Sunday was a big day for one synagogue in Flatbush.
In the Regency Room of the East Midwood Jewish Center was a family Chanukah party that more than 100 people attended. Afterwards, in the elegant and soaring sanctuary, more than 200 people celebrated the installation of the congregation’s new rabbi and celebrated the shul’s 90th anniversary. There were speeches and singing, prayers and members’ reminiscences, and a cocktail reception in the ballroom.
Sunday was also a symbolic day for the East Midwood Jewish Center, or EMJC, the only remaining Conservative synagogue in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood, and one of the few in the entire borough.
In recent decades, Flatbush’s Jewish community has become increasingly Orthodox, and several Conservative congregations have closed their doors. Others have merged in an effort to save money and preserve their denominational identity.
“We’re still operating,” said Rabbi Alvin Kass, who became EMJC’s emeritus spiritual leader earlier this year after serving there for 36 years. (At 78, Rabbi Kass is still chief chaplain of the New York City Police Department. “Retirement? I don’t know of such a word,” he said).
He can list several nearby Conservative synagogues that have folded during his tenure while EMJC has stayed open — albeit with a diminishing membership.
“What we have accomplished is in a way extraordinary,” Rabbi Kass said.
EMJC now has some 250 households on its membership roster, about a quarter of its peak about two generations ago. But the members and supporters who came Sunday saw the results of extensive renovations throughout the 85-year-old domed Renaissance Revival building, and heard the success of synagogue leaders who have mounted an effort in recent years to enter the social media era.
To balance the budget, the congregation rents out space to karate and gymnastic programs, an independent day school and a Protestant church, which holds services there. The onsite gym and swimming pool also bring in money. “We have people in all the time,” said Toby Sanchez, EMJC’s co-president and historian.
She noted that each merger brought in both new members and active, often younger, leaders.
To attract young, progressive-minded people, two decades ago the congregation opened its worship services to women in the egalitarian fashion that now characterizes most of Conservative Judaism, and subsequently has added activities like Room J, a program for families with young children, and a monthly “Shabbat-a-Bim-Bom,” a musical, participatory service aimed at young families. To spread the word, the congregation uses Facebook (facebook.com/emjc.org), various listservs and weekly email blasts.
“We have younger members who are working very hard at that. We inherited the spirit of the founders,” a handful of residents of the then-undeveloped area of Brooklyn who established a congregation that was part of the synagogue-center movement of the 1920s, said Sanchez. “They were go-getters.”
Rabbi Matt Carl, who was installed as the synagogue’s spiritual leader on Sunday, said the online efforts are a means to an end.
“Social media is a tool,” he said.
Rabbi Carl, who earlier served at the Battery Park Synagogue and as director of community development and engagement at Hazon, called his decision to come to the Flatbush congregation a vote of confidence in its future. “The shul is growing. Slowly, but it is growing,” he said in an email interview. “We’re growing larger and younger.”
The latter was reflected in the dozens of children at Sunday’s Chanukah party.
Sanchez agreed that the synagogue is up the upswing. “We’re not a dying shul,” she said. “Our neighborhood is 50 percent Orthodox. But it’s 50 percent non-Orthodox,” potential members who are not interested in an Orthodox lifestyle.
According to UJA-Federation’s 2011 Jewish Community Study, the Flatbush/Midwood/Kensington area, with a Jewish population of 111,100, “contains one of the highest concentrations of Orthodox Jews (58 percent) alongside the borough’s two largest Orthodox areas, Borough Park (80 percent Orthodox) and Williamsburg (82 percent Orthodox).”
“On a one-to-one level, there is a warm relationship between our members and their Orthodox neighbors,” Rabbi Kass said.” There are many Orthodox Jews who use our physical facilities.
“They would swim with us, but they wouldn’t daven with us,” he said.
Over the last three-plus decades, three local Conservative congregations have merged into the EMJC.
“We benefited from the influx of cash and new members from each merger,” Sanchez added later via email. “These mergers took place in 1980 (Shaare Torah), 1990 (Progressive Shaare Zedek), 2000 (Jewish Communal Center of Flatbush
To finance expensive repairs on the building’s dome, stained-glass windows and other out-of-repair features, the synagogue has launched fundraising campaigns, receiving money from the New York Landmarks Conservatory and the state’s Environmental Protection Fund.
The congregation is an example of a forward-thinking Conservative synagogue, which has presented a vision of involvement with the wider Jewish community outside the synagogue’s walls, said Rabbi Steven Wernick, executive vice president of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism.
EMJC is a member of Flatbush’s largely Orthodox Council of Jewish Organizations, and its members volunteer at the local kosher Masbia soup kitchen.
Members have participated in the movement’s leadership training programs, and the shul has offered job-finding programs for the unemployed and under-employed. “This is an example of a synagogue that has good leadership. This is a synagogue that seems to be thinking strategically, asking the right questions” about members’ “personal journeys,” he said.
While the old Jewish Center model has not served as a draw to many young Jews, in the opinion of Jeffrey Gurock, professor of American Jewish history at Yeshiva University, EMJC is an example of a congregation that creatively presents a 2014-style version of the nine-decades-old, everything-under-one-roof philosophy.
In an effort to attract increasingly disenchanted Jewish youth then, synagogues offered athletic facilities and social events that buttressed a congregation’s spiritual activities. The so-called “shul with a pool.”
In addition to its pool, EMJC has a gymnasium and kitchens.
“In 1875 … the American synagogue was little more than a worship hall with a few dark and dingy classrooms in its basement,” David Kaufman notes in “Shul with a Pool: The ‘Synagogue-Center’ in American Jewish History” (University Press of New England, 1999). “By 1925, the complex synagogue-center had become the leading trend in modern Jewish life.”
This was especially evident in Brooklyn, then home to the city’s largest Jewish population. “The very act of settling a new area gave rise to the synagogue-center concept. The first Jews in such a new neighborhood soon felt the need for either a religious congregation (as in the case of the Ocean Parkway Jewish Center) or a Hebrew school for their children (as in the case of the East Midwood Jewish Center).”
Over the years, the synagogue ranks have included such notables as Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (member), author-talk show host Dennis Prager (Hebrew school teacher), and composer Sholom Secunda (music director and choir conductor).
Rabbi Kass said he is optimistic for the congregation’s future — the population of Brooklyn is growing, but in-demand neighborhoods like Park Slope and Brooklyn Heights are rapidly becoming too expensive for young families. Rents and home prices are less expensive in the synagogue’s area, he said. Flatbush “will be rediscovered.”
Sunday’s celebrations will not be the last at the East Midwood Jewish Center, Sanchez said. “We have not disappeared. We are not going to disappear.”
Would the U.S. veto a Security Council resolution for Palestinians? Stewart Ain Staff Writer All eyes turned to France this week after the Palestinians failed to round up enough votes in the United Nations Security Council for a resolution recognizing a Palestinian state and setting a two-year deadline for Israel to withdraw from the West Bank. Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki said Tuesday that he would meet with French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius to discuss a French proposal designed to restart peace talks leading to a peace treaty in two years. It reportedly would not set a timetable for withdrawal but would refer to the need for “mutual recognition.” The two-year deadline and other provisions in the French proposal may make it objectionable to Israel — which is said to be against any resolution that would spell out a timetable for either talks or Israeli withdrawal. As of Tuesday, the Obama administration said it hadn’t decided whether to threaten a veto if the resolution were presented for a vote by the end of the year. Nor was it clear whether France would proceed in the face of such a threat. A diplomatic source noted that Fabius conferred Monday with his German and British counterparts. Although there were reports that they failed to reach a consensus, France later reaffirmed its desire to submit a resolution on the Palestinian issue. Asked if France was prepared to wait until after Israel’s March 17 election, the source said that was not in the cards. “The quicker the better,” he said. “It is time to move ahead on this.” He added that as of Tuesday it was still unclear whether Jordan was preparing to introduce a resolution on behalf of the Palestinians. “The Jordanian delegation is being encouraged by the Palestinian Authority to present a resolution,” he said. “I don’t know whose resolution will be submitted. It depends on what Jordan proposes and whether it is a good, balanced resolution. If it needs more work, France will propose its own. And the U.S. is saying it wants to see the resolutions before making a decision.” Another diplomatic source has been quoted as saying the U.S. is now open to a resolution calling for binding Israeli-Palestinian peace talks if the timeframe remains unspecified. But Aaron David Miller, a former adviser to six U.S. secretaries of state and a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, said he is confident the Obama administration would veto any resolution that calls for Israel to end its occupation within two years. “And it would be hard pressed to abstain on such a resolution,” he added. Gerald Steinberg, a political science professor at Bar-Ilan University, said an abstention would be comparable to a yes vote in the 15-member Security Council in which the U.S. is one of five permanent members. Miller explained that it would be “risky for an [American] administration that is so reluctant to be hard and tough against Israeli settlements to now — during an Israeli election campaign — to all of a sudden go after the Israelis. It would be viewed as a transparent effort to intercede in the Israeli election campaign.” He added that if the Obama administration can’t get the French to adopt compromise language or to defer the whole issue until after the Israeli election — and if the Palestinian resolution contains deadlines or policy positions — it will “probably veto it.” “Things in the region now are so bad that a veto of a text that some of the Europeans do not support strikes me as something the administration is prepared to live with,” Miller observed. American failure to veto a Security Council resolution that sets a timeframe and defines Israel’s borders would serve only to deepen the divide between the Obama and Netanyahu governments, Steinberg noted. “It would be a symbolic vote without any real impact on the ground, but it would have a very strong impact on U.S.-Israeli relations if it was not vetoed,” he said. “It would not be unprecedented,” he pointed out, recalling that during the Carter administration the U.S. refused to veto UN resolutions critical of Israel. Asked about the Palestinian demand of a peace treaty in two years along with an Israeli withdrawal to its 1967 borders, Steinberg replied: “Two years in the Middle East is a very long time. Everything will be different in two years. We could have a different Israeli government and [Mahmoud] Abbas might not be president of the Palestinian Authority. And Hamas may have reinserted itself into the West Bank.” The Palestinian decision to press for UN recognition before the end of the year comes after its successful campaign to convince European parliaments that the time for Palestinian statehood is now. Among the parliaments that approved non-binding resolutions calling for Palestinian statehood were Britain, France, Spain, Portugal and Ireland. Only the Swedish government actually recognized a Palestinian state, but the government collapsed shortly thereafter. Steinberg said the Swedish action was “meaningless because Sweden is a member of the European Union and foreign policy is made collectively.” Nevertheless, the Palestinian effort for recognition is now reaching a crescendo and to “back down now would be a huge loss of face,” he said. As for waiting until after the Israeli election to see if the next government would be more receptive to Palestinian demands in peace talks, Steinberg stressed the Palestinians believe “they can’t wait.” And delaying a UN Security Council vote is not an option because the issue “becomes less predictable [after the new year] because the process would have to start again.” “The key issue is not whether the Palestinians get a majority vote in the Security Council, it is whether America will veto it,” he said. David Makovsky, the Ziegler Distinguished Fellow of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said he is troubled by two sets of issues. “One is decoupling the issue of Palestinian statehood from the issue of peace,” he said. “The UN plays to Palestinian strength because it focuses on rights. But nations have to have responsibilities — and that means peace. … There is a reason the Palestinians have intertwined peace and statehood. And one could understand why they want to bring the issue to the UN. But I question the wisdom of doing so when there is still a chance the parties could negotiate a deal. … Only if it should become clear that there is no hope for direct talks should there be legitimate debate about the value of the U.S. pursuing a more balanced Security Council resolution.” And raising this issue now at the start of the Israeli election campaign makes it “political dynamite,” Makovsky said. “The narrative of the Israeli right is that Israel is the only force that stands between an imposed solution,” he explained. “And any imposed solution would be bound to bolster [Benjamin] Netanyahu [in his re-election campaign for prime minister] and the right. It is ironic that Netanyahu would effectively turn to Abbas to bolster his electoral hopes.” Should the Obama administration opt not to veto a resolution calling for Security Council recognition of a Palestinian state, a poll of Americans found it has considerable public leeway on the issue. stewart@jewishweek.org Have a good week. The Editors. P.S. Please check out the newest version of our website faster and easier to navigate and read for breaking stories, videos and exclusive blogs, op-eds and features. http://www.thejewishweek.com/ |
|
|
|
|
The Jewish Week
1501 Broadway, Suite 505
New York, New York 10036 United States
____________________________
No comments:
Post a Comment