| Dear Reader, As tensions between the mayor and the NYPD escalated this week, Jewish leaders urged civility, and a Jewish organization hosted a program to build trust between the police and the community. Doug Chandler reports.
Amid Vigils For Police, Calls For Healing
Jewish leaders urging civility as rhetoric in city escalates; ‘all lives matter.’
Doug Chandler
Jewish Week Correspondent
Members of several Jewish institutions in Riverdale and Kingsbridge gather at a police precinct in the Bronx Monday.
As New Yorkers mourned two fallen police officers ambushed Saturday as they sat in their patrol car in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and as tensions escalated between police unions and city officials, a 12-year veteran of the police force and four local teens sat around a table in another section of Brooklyn Monday night and drew pictures.
Officer Mathew Pierre and the four children — Emily, two Anthonys and Soshil — also viewed artwork by Israeli children, toured a replica of an Israeli bomb shelter and discussed what it means for them to feel angry or happy, emotions they depicted in their drawings.
One of the youngsters, 18-year-old Anthony, said it was a “shame” that children in southern Israel “have to live through” the trauma of rocket fire, while Pierre, 42, likened the experience to what urban police officers face every day.
The Israeli kids and cops begin each day without “knowing whether it might be your last,” said Pierre, a native of Haiti whose younger brother, also a policeman, serves in the same precinct as one of the murdered officers, Rafael Ramos. “A week earlier, he was sitting in the very same patrol car in the very same location.”
Pierre and the four children are all involved in the New York Police Department’s Law Enforcement Explorers, a program aimed at building trust between the NYPD and members of the community, and the bonds they’ve created offer a counterpoint to the troubles around them.
But just as noteworthy from a Jewish perspective is that the organization hosting them, The Bridge, is closely associated with the Jewish community. Founded by Mark Meyer Appel, a prominent Orthodox activist, the center is aimed at bringing together members of different racial, religious and ethnic groups in Midwood, where it’s based, and other parts of Brooklyn.
Moreover, the workshop in which the officer and teens participated is designed by Artists 4 Israel, a group that sends art therapists to Israel to work with children traumatized by rocket attacks. The group is now planning to conduct similar workshops in local schools to help inner-city children cope with the trauma in their lives, said Michelle Rousseau Laytner, an art therapist who has partnered with the program.
Monday’s workshop came as members of the Jewish community responded to last weekend’s killings, which were carried out by an emotionally disturbed man, Ismail Brinsley, who posted a comment on Facebook before the ambush, saying he would murder two cops to revenge the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown.
Garner and Brown were both black men killed by police in different localities — Garner on Staten Island, Brown in Ferguson, Mo. — under what many people believe were questionable circumstances. But grand juries in both cases decided not to issue any indictments, sparking days of protests and riots.
Even before Saturday’s tragedy, rhetoric over the Garner case heated up considerably, with Patrick Lynch, president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, calling on members to request that Mayor Bill de Blasio stay away from their funeral in case they are killed in the line of duty. Among the NYPD’s critics, some protesters — including some at a march organized by Jews for Racial and Economic Justice — chanted about “racist police.” On Saturday, after the ambush, Ed Mullins, president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, said in a statement that “the blood of these two officers” was on the mayor’s hands.
The rhetoric spurred one religious leader, New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan, to write an op-ed for the Daily News saying that calling all police officers bigots is akin to “pouring kerosene on the fire” and that it’s “equally unfair and counterproductive to dismiss our mayor and other leaders as enemies of the police.” Meanwhile, the mayor has implored protesters to refrain from holding any marches or rallies until after the two funerals, the first of which is this Saturday.
Agreeing with the cardinal, Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, executive director of the New York Board of Rabbis, told The Jewish Week that everyone needs “to stop our verbal assaults on one another.” Moreover, he continued, “We need to listen to each other. More discourse and no more diatribes. This city needs to heal, and that won’t happen without talking to each other.”
The rabbi, who also serves as the Jewish chaplain of the city’s Fire Department, said he paid a visit Sunday to the 84th Police Precinct, where the two officers were killed. Everyone was “devastated,” he recalled, “but what they said is, ‘We’re family in the NYPD, and we’ll get through this because we’re family.”
Rabbi Potasnik also said that he and other interfaith leaders are planning an observance at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Thursday, Jan. 15, to honor Martin Luther King, Jr. The ceremony will include the mayor, as well as police officials, he said, adding that it’s bound to be “a unifying moment in the City of New York. People need to see us together.”
Elsewhere around the city, at least two vigils took place Monday under Jewish auspices to express solidarity with local police officers.
In the Bronx, about 100 people gathered at a precinct in Kingsbridge, near Riverdale, for a vigil organized by synagogues across the denominational spectrum and two Jewish day schools, according to Rabbi Ari Hart, associate rabbi at the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale.
The rabbi said that many of the people at the vigil are concerned about “how the justice system works in New York,” but he added that everyone has to remember that the NYPD is a diverse force whose members risk their lives every day “to protect us.”
What happened in the Garner case is a terrible injustice, Rabbi Hart continued, adding that “some cops respond too aggressively or with excessive force” and that some cops are racist. Those issues need to be addressed, he said, but the solution rests with proposals like those offered by State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman that would allow his office, rather than county prosecutors, to handle cases like Eric Garner’s.
“To me,” he said, “that’s the solution. White people marching through the streets and calling black and Hispanic police officers racist is not the solution.”
The other vigil took place in Midtown Manhattan, where Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum led members of Congregation Beit Simchat Torah to NYPD’s Traffic Control Division, located next door to the congregation’s future home.
Rabbi Kleinbaum said she sent a condolence letter to the division’s commander before the vigil, asking if congregants could gather in front of the building with a menorah and candles, and received a welcoming response.
The rabbi said she believes the vigil and her earlier participation in a protest against racial injustice are both connected. The lives of young blacks matter, she added, so, too, do the lives of police, who should be treated with dignity and respect.
As the vigils took place, organizations and leaders associated with the protests deplored the loss of life and said that violence against police officers is not what anyone had in mind.
“No one was calling for the murder of police officers, God forbid,” said Rabbi Jill Jacobs, executive director of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, a national group that seeks to involve rabbis in calls for social justice. She added that the one “consistent message” throughout the movement is that demonstrations have to be peaceful and that all lives matter.
But Marjorie Dove Kent, executive director of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, said the tragedy hasn’t caused any change in strategy on the part of her group.
JFREJ is now engaged in conversations over the best strategy for mobilizing and for pushing its message, Kent said. But the tragedy won’t affect “our longtime work to achieve justice for people of color,” she said. That strategy will continue to include civil disobedience, she said, calling it “a tool that could really keep this issue up front for white communities.”
Asked about the chants that have disturbed many people, including some who’ve attended the protests, Kent said that the movement has to continue pushing “the analysis that [bias] is part of the racist system as a whole. … It’s not about whether this cop or that cop is racist.”
One program that may contribute to healing the city is the NYPD Law Enforcement Explorers, which has close to 4,000 participants throughout the city.
Pierre, the program’s coordinator in his precinct, said he’s grown to love working with the children he’s advised and befriended through the program. Some, he said, are now studying to become police officers themselves, while others have entered the army or one of the helping professions.
Being involved in the program “stops the clock,” getting his mind off of whatever troubles are plaguing the city or world at the time, he said.
Fifth graders at the Schechter School of Long Island took special comfort in learning of the release of Alan Gross from a Cuban jail. As Staff Writer Stew Ain reports, they'd been praying for and writing to him all year. Read more...
‘Keeping The Flame’ For Alan Gross
L.I. Schechter class’ bond with freed captive puts students close to historic news story.
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
Schechter second-grader Olivia Lynch with her Welcome Home card. Courtesy of Schechter School of Long Island
Last Tuesday, just 90 minutes after the fifth-grade class at the Schechter School of Long Island recited its customary morning prayer for the release of Alan Gross from a Cuban prison, principal Marcey Wagner announced his release on the school’s public address system.
“A year ago the present to Alan was our letters,” she said. “Today, the present to us was his freedom.”
Gasps and cheers filled the elementary school in Jericho, L.I.
“The first thing out of the children’s mouths was, ‘When is he going to come here?’” Wagner recalled.
The children’s unwavering bond with Gross began two and a half years ago when the fifth-grade class began reciting both a prayer for his release and the number of days he had been held on charges of espionage for attempting to connect the 1,500-member Cuban Jewish community with the Internet.
They started the count after the October 2011 release of another prisoner they had prayed for — Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier abducted in 2006 by Palestinian terrorists in a cross-border raid — and they never missed a day.
Gross’ release, which came at the end of 18 months of secret talks facilitated by Pope Francis and Canadian officials, occurred just hours before President Barak Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro announced simultaneously that their two countries were resuming diplomatic relations after more than 50 years.
But some lawmakers — particularly Republicans — immediately denounced the move, saying they would vote against lifting the economic blockade of Cuba. They argued it is wrong to restore diplomatic relations without exacting any promises from Castro to change what former Republican Gov. Jeb Bush called a “repressive regime.” And Sen. Lindsey Graham said that as a member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations he would seek to block any funding for the construction of an American embassy in Cuba and refuse to confirm any ambassador appointed by Obama.
Nevertheless, Obama’s decision to restore diplomatic relations is likely to have an impact on Israel, which was the only country in the United Nations to vote along with the U.S. in support of America’s economic embargo of Cuba.
One Israeli official told the Times of Israel that the Israeli Foreign Ministry is at “the beginning of a long process” of reassessing Israel’s relationship with Cuba, which severed relations in 1973.
Fidel Castro, whom Raul succeeded as president, has been critical of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, comparing it to Nazi genocide. On the other hand, he is pointedly not anti-Semitic and attended a Chanukah celebration in 1998; Raul attended in 2010.
Obama’s move to restore diplomatic relations with Cuba may also pave the way to the resumption of U.S. relations with three other Latin American countries — Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua — according to Dina Siegel Vann, director of the Arthur and Rochelle Belfer Institute for Latino and Latin American Affairs at the American Jewish Committee.
She said plunging oil prices are making this reassessment particularly fortuitous because Venezuela’s economy is built on oil and it must import virtually all of it staples, like food, sugar and even toilet paper.
“Venezuela has been providing oil to Cuba for free and Cuba understands that with the Venezuelan economy about to implode, it has to look for other alternatives,” Vann said. “So there is not only diplomatic reasoning behind Cuba’s moves, it is important for economic reasons as well.”
The economies of both Bolivia and Nicaragua are growing, Vann said. However, she noted, much of the Bolivian economy is based on its sale of gas and other minerals to China, and the economic slowdown there is having ramifications in Bolivia even though it has a diversified economy.
But it takes two to tango, and Vann noted that all four Latin American countries were responsible for severing relations with Israel. And she said anti-Israel rhetoric has been particularly prevalent in Venezuela, where it is “part of the official media.”
But diplomacy was never an issue for the Schechter students, whose only focus was on securing the release of Gross and the other two captives whom they have prayed for (in addition to Shalit, they also prayed for private first class Bowe Bergdahl, the U.S. Army soldier who disappeared in Afghanistan in 2009 and was captured by the Taliban until he was released in May in exchange for five Taliban officials imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba).
“The children always fought over who was going to do the count,” said their teacher, Lizet Romano. “They wanted their voices heard. They learned that saving one person is comparable to saving the entire world.”
Their belief that Gross might one day visit their school stemmed from a letter he sent Wagner last December in which he thanked the fifth-graders for the letters they sent him in prison. Adele Dworin, president of the Hebrew Community of Cuba, had brought the letters to him during one of the infrequent visits she was permitted.
“I was deeply moved by the warmth of their messages,” Gross wrote. “Please share with them how much I appreciate their prayers and good wishes. Assure them that these are truly felt and that they are a meaningful source of hope for my family and me. … This was the first Chanukah present that I received since I was detained. … The students did a real mitzvah.”
He added that he looked forward to one day being freed and being able to “join with Schechter school to celebrate that occasion.” And while on Long Island, he said he would like to visit the house in New Hyde Park where he spent his first 10 years.
Wagner said she sent an email to one of Gross’ lawyers with whom she had been in touch, Richard Shore, to tell him how excited the school was about Gross’ release.
“Your students should be very proud of themselves,” Shore replied, “and they have every reason to share in the joy of Alan’s release and return to freedom in this wonderful country, and the mitzvah of taking action to help bring this about.”
By the end of the week, all of the students in the k-5 school had written Welcome Home letters to Gross, most written in both Hebrew and English. And the sixth graders, whose letters Gross had received last year, were promised they could join the celebration should Gross actually visit the school.
Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, said last week that his organization was waiting to hear from Gross before making plans for a welcome by the New York Jewish community.
Hoenlein said Gross had been released by Cuba for “humanitarian” reasons. He stressed that his release was not part of the prisoner swap that occurred at the same time. That involved the U.S. release of three Cuban nationals convicted by the U.S. of spying in 2001 in connection with the shooting down of two small planes by the Cuban military. In return, Cuba freed an American intelligence agent who had been imprisoned for 20 years.
But Rabbi Sheldon Zimmerman, spiritual leader of The Jewish Center of the Hamptons in East Hampton, L.I., who was visiting Cuba with 19 congregants when Gross was freed, said the Cuban government and media “lumped Gross together” with the release of the intelligent agent.
“They were both called spies,” Rabbi Zimmerman said. “They haven’t changed their mind about him.”
He said he and his congregants learned of Gross’ release when they walked into the offices of the American Interests Section for a briefing.
The group had arrived in Cuba the previous week and had visited two small communities in which a number of Jews lived.
“In one town there were four Jewish families and one was a grandmother who had converted to Judaism and raised a Jewish family,” he said, adding that the two daughters were the only Jews in their schools.
“We also met a man who had rebuilt a synagogue for 10 or 15 families that were there,” Rabbi Zimmerman recalled.
He said they also met with Dworin, the Jewish community’s president, who told them that although her friends decided to leave, she stayed “to guard the Judaism that is here. She said she feels very positive that this is a new beginning”
“What is amazing is that they have kept the light,” the rabbi said. “We lit [Shabbat] candles in Havana with the youth group of a congregation. They are totally Cuban and [conducted] a traditional service.”
And they joined Cuban Jews in lighting Chanukah candles.
“These are people who are living in a community where they are a minority and who struggle to keep the flame alive,” Rabbi Zimmerman observed. “For me, this has changed my view — I now have a different view of what one candle can mean.”
DA’s Ties To Satmar Leader Raising Eyebrows
Son of key figure in Kellner extortion case was hefty contributor to Thompson’s campaign.
Jewish Week Correspondent
Brooklyn DA Ken Thompson, right, pays a recent shiva call to Satmar leader Moshe Friedman, left.
When the bribery and extortion charges against chasidic sex-abuse whistleblower Sam Kellner were finally dropped last March by incoming Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson, advocates for abuse victims hailed the decision. At the same time, they urged Thompson to investigate and bring to justice those who allegedly framed Kellner, who was indicted in 2011 under the administration of the former DA, Charles Hynes.
It has now been almost 10 months since the Kellner case was dismissed and the district attorney has taken no action against those who were behind the trumped-up charges.
Now, advocates suggest, there may be at least a partial explanation: Leo Friedman, the son of one of the three witnesses who apparently gave false grand jury testimony against Kellner, Satmar power broker Moses Friedman, was a hefty contributor to Thompson’s campaign.
Moses Friedman, who is known in the Satmar community as Moshe Gabbai for having served as the longtime personal secretary of the previous Satmar rebbe, Moses Teitelbaum, is also a cousin by marriage of Baruch Lebovits, a convicted child molester whom Kellner helped to put in jail.
Both Friedman and Lebovits’ son, Meyer, testified that Kellner had attempted to extort the Lebovits family in return for a promise that he would persuade Lebovits’ alleged victims — who included Kellner’s own son — to withdraw from the case. A third witness, whom sex crimes prosecutors believe was a genuine Lebovits victim who had been pressured into backing out of testifying against him, told the grand jury that Kellner had paid him to fabricate his allegations against Lebovits. When Thompson threw out the Kellner case early this year, his office found the witnesses lacking in “credibility to such an extent” that the case “could not be prosecuted.”
Moses Friedman, who now acts as the gabbai for Zalman Teitelbaum, the Satmar rebbe who presides over Williamsburg (his brother Aaron is the leader of the upstate Satmar community, Kiryas Joel) is also the editor of the influential Zalman-affiliated Satmar paper, Der Yid. He has long been counted on by politicians to deliver Williamsburg’s substantial Satmar bloc vote. A 2009 article in an Israeli magazine described him as being “well known outside of [chasidic] and [haredi] circles in the U.S., with many senators and politicians flocking to his door throughout the year, especially before elections.”
Indeed, according to campaign finance records, Thompson received over $30,000 in campaign donations from companies connected to Leo Friedman last year. Campaign financial disclosures show that in August of 2013, several weeks before the hotly contested Democratic primary, which pitted Thompson against longtime incumbent Hynes, Thompson received $5,000 from Advanced Care Staffing LCC, a nursing care company run by Leo Friedman. (Both Satmar factions endorsed Hynes in the primary, but the Zalis, as members of the Zalman faction are known, did so only the day before the election. In Williamsburg districts with a significant percent of chasidic voters, Hynes received 62 percent of the primary vote while Thompson garnered 13 percent.)
In October of 2013, after Thompson had clinched the Democratic nomination — which, in Brooklyn, all but guaranteed an electoral victory — he received two additional contributions from Advanced Care, for $5,000 and $16,750 respectively. In that same month, he also received $5,000 from Red Star Care LLC, whose president as of 2010 is listed as Leo Friedman. (Before the general elections, in which Hynes unexpectedly decided to run, community endorsements switched to Thompson, who ended up winning 74 percent of the vote in the Orthodox districts of Williamsburg versus Hynes’ 26 percent.)
A few weeks ago, photos of Thompson paying a shiva call to Moses Friedman (his father had died) began circulating throughout the Satmar community and beyond. While politicians often pay their respects to chasidic leaders, these photographs, combined with the campaign contributions, have set off alarm bells among anti-sex abuse advocates both inside and outside the chasidic world. To them, the photos are not merely a record of shared mourning but an unsettling bit of data about the Satmar leadership’s continued power and political influence.
“Thompson cannot claim that he is not aware of … Friedman’s pivotal role acting as a main witness against Sam Kellner in order to free the serial rapist Baruch Lebovits from prison,” sex abuse survivor and victims’ advocate Joel Engelman told The Jewish Week.
“Thompson’s continuing spectacles of support [for] Friedman demonstrates that he condones the intimidation of child sex-abuse victims in the Orthodox community,” Engelman, who grew up in Satmar Williamsburg, continued. “Thompson’s shiva visit to Friedman is akin to a visit to the Gambino family, and is an explicit message to the Satmar community that he is a politician who is willing to be influenced for votes and political power.”
Prosecutorial ethics expert Bennett Gershman, a professor at Pace University Law School, believes Engelman’s concerns may have some merit.
“Moses Friedman is pandering to Thompson, the same way he did with Hynes,” Gershman told The Jewish Week. “Thirty thousand strikes me as quite a hefty campaign donation. He obviously expects [his family’s] money to buy influence with Thompson. What does he want? Kellner has been cleared after being falsely charged by Hynes. If there is an investigation by the DA into how Kellner was framed, then Friedman appears to be a principal target of that investigation.
“If that is so,” Gershman said, “then it would reasonably appear that Friedman may be trying to buy his way out of being a target in any investigation into the Kellner scandal. I’m not suggesting that Thompson should have given back the money, or not made the shiva call. But as one begins to connect the dots, it certainly makes for a troubling picture.”
A spokesperson for Thompson’s office told The Jewish Week that “we do not confirm, deny or comment on investigations.” An attempt to get a comment from Leo Friedman was unsuccessful.
For his part, the elder Friedman, reached by phone at his office at Der Yid, dismissed the notion that the donations or the shiva call were evidence of anything improper.
“I have no special relationship with the DA,” Friedman told The Jewish Week.
“The DA came to visit as other politicians came. I had a visit from other politicians, councilmen, senators. It’s nonsense. It’s a shame even to talk about it.”
Nonsense or not, advocates for victims of sex abuse believe that even the mere appearance of Satmar influence on the DA’s office undermines their cause.
“As long as the power brokers in Satmar demonstrate political influence in the DA’s office, victims of abuse in the community will not speak up,” Rabbi Yosef Blau, the director of religious guidance at Yeshiva University’s rabbinical seminary, told The Jewish Week. (What made Kellner’s case unusual was his willingness to bring sex-abuse allegations to the police rather than to local rabbis.)
“Without complaints,” Rabbi Blau concluded, “the DA’s office will have no one to prosecute.”
Borscht Belt’s Newest Bet
Casino on former Concord site may be good for the economy, but some local Jewish voices express reservations.
Staff Writer
A rendering of Montreign Resort Casino near Monticello. Photo via mediad.publicbroadcasting.net
Shira Dicker, a longtime summer resident of a bungalow in upstate Monroe, has vivid memories of her father, a Conservative rabbi, traveling up to the Concord Resort Hotel during the 1960s and ’70s to attend an annual rabbinical convention.
“My mother would pack her one yellow cocktail dress, and together they would head up to the Borsht Belt,” she said. “Back then, everyone’s lives were connected to the Catskills in one way or another. But the Concord, and the Catskills as we knew them, are long gone.”
For better or worse, poker chips have now replaced mah jongg tiles.
Last week’s announcement by the New York Gaming Facility Board that a casino will be built on the former Concord grounds near Monticello — where two generations of Jews whiled away their summers breathing fresh mountain air and feasting on fatty foods — confirmed that a new chapter in the Catskills story is at hand.
Out of nine competing proposals to build a casino in the Catskills region, the sole winner was Empire Resorts’ Montreign Resort Casino’s proposal for an $800 million project that will feature an 18-story casino and a 391-room hotel. The casino and hotel will be part of the Adelaar Resort that will be built by Empire Resort’s partner, EPR Properties, and include a water park, retail shops, cabins, a movie theater, hiking and biking trails and zip lines.
The casino, a decades-long pursuit by county officials as vacation habits changed and the area’s many hotels were shuttered, is hoped to revive Sullivan County’s depressed and struggling economy.
“Once you’ve hit rock bottom, the only way you can move is up,” John Conway, president of the Sullivan County Historical Society and longtime resident of the area, told The Jewish Week. Conway said that efforts to build a casino date back to the 1970s. “Predictably, people are very excited about the news. They see it as a positive catalyst for change and growth.”
Local residents were elated by the news, as was Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who championed the campaign to expand gambling north and west of New York City as part of a larger economic strategy to revitalize depressed regions. Developers aim to begin building within the next three months.
“There is no question in my mind that this is what we need to re-energize Sullivan County,” said William J. Rieber, town supervisor of Thompson in Sullivan County. “The resort industry is the only one we’re good at — we’re going to make this work.”
Still, those who have long been opposed to the casino are continuing to express quality-of-life concerns.
“We are concerned for the safety of our children,” said Rabbi Shea Hecht, member of the executive committee of the National Committee for Jewish Education, the umbrella organization that manages the several Chabad institutions in the area, including two large summer camps and two local synagogues, one in Ellenville and one in Kingston.
“If anyone has the right to comment, we do,” he said, noting that Chabad has been in the area since Camp Emunah, the first Chabad summer camp, was established in 1953. (The camp was founded by and is still directed by Rabbi Hecht’s mother.) “There is no difference between drug addicts and gambling addicts — they will do anything to get their fix. We don’t want undesirables to be our neighbors,” he said.
Rabbi Hecht’s brother, Rabbi Shalom Hecht, was active in the anti-casino efforts that preceded the board’s decision last week. Along with over a dozen other prominent Orthodox rabbis in late 2013, Hecht collaborated on a public proclamation urging their followers to vote against the referendum that would legalize casino gambling in the area.
Opposition to the casino proposal, though very vocal in the past, was notably subdued this time around, said Rieber, describing the anti-casino efforts as “de minimis.”
John Conway, who lived in the county during the many previous bids for a casino, agreed that protestors were much quieter this time.
“There was the least noise ever made,” he said. “I think the economy is just so depressed that people figure not much worse can happen.”
According to Hecht, over 200,000 Orthodox Jews visit the Catskills during the summer. Aside from the “undesirable” elements, he expressed concerns that the presence of a casino would deter Orthodox visitors.
“Orthodox visitors have bought thousands of homes in the area; there are over 50 Jewish camps and bungalow colonies there. A whole lot of money has been spent and invested there,” he said. “Though the casino might employ a certain population, it might estrange a different population.”
A local Orthodox rabbi from the county, who preferred to remain anonymous in order to avoid the politics of the situation, expressed concerns that the new casino might woo the local Orthodox youth.
“Teenagers and young adults make up a large part of our community, especially during the summers,” said the rabbi, whose local congregation has 120 family units year-round. “Gambling is addictive. No one should put himself in a situation where he could be vulnerable.”
Concerns have not only been voiced from the Orthodox community. Tempering the enthusiasm from the county’s political leaders, Phil Brown, professor at Northeastern University and founder of the Catskills Institute, an organization that promotes research on the significance of the Catskills for Jewish-American life, wondered about the long-term economic outlook of the casino industry.
“Look at Atlantic City,” he said. “There are lots of glitzy casinos, and huge amounts of very poor people.” In the past year, four out of 12 casinos on Atlantic City’s famed boardwalk have closed, costing thousands of people their jobs. The Trump Taj Mahal, which was expected to close in November, was only able to remain open after receiving a $20 million lifeline from billionaire Carl Icahn last week.
“Casino workers, even if they can get and keep jobs, aren’t paid well,” said Brown. “Though many are convinced that the new casino guarantees an economic turnaround, many casinos don’t end up doing well.”
Asked if the casino might affect the area’s Jewish community, Brown said, “The Jewish culture of the place won’t be affected at all. The chasidic community keeps to itself. They’re going to stay away.”
Conway said that the casino resort’s model might mitigate the trickle-down effect to the local residents. “The casino model is similar to the ‘fortress hotel’ of the 1950s, where everything, from barber shop to sundry shop, was available on the resort grounds,” he said. “My feeling is that this is a poor model to replicate. If everything is available on-location, less jobs will be available for small businesses and restaurants in the area. … Recapturing the glory days is not going to happen.”
But Dicker is optimistic about the new project. “I’m hoping for some classy sin,” she said, though she is doubtful that the casino will be a “golden solution.”
“I’m not a prophet of doom saying the end is nigh, but I’m also not standing on my chair applauding,” she said. “I’m optimistic and interested to see what will happen.”
Marisa Scheinfeld, a photojournalist whose evocative and poignant pictures document the decline of the Borscht Belt, is not concerned with the ethical or economic ramifications of the decision. Rather, as someone who has “found solace in the natural beauty” of the Catskills, Scheinfeld hopes the new industry won’t “shift the whole focus” of the region.
“There are a lot of pros that come along with having a casino,” she said. “It will provide jobs, bring people back, and hopefully restore pride to the county. But people initially found the Catskills because of the quiet and peace of mind they provide. With the new glitz and glam, I hope the serenity isn’t lost.”
Real Opposition Politics
A ‘shadow cabinet’ would give Israelis an organized, effective way to hold lawmakers accountable.
Contributing Editor
Nathan Jeffay
Election frenzy is underway in Israel, and everyone wants to know who will win and what they’ll do. I want to know who will lose and what they will do.
The next government will make key decisions about the direction of the state. But it could well be the next opposition that will succeed or fail in holding together the social fabric of the state.
Israelis love to win. That desire is a great asset in many areas, such as high-tech where the “fail fast, move on” ethos sees Israelis try new ideas, give up when they don’t work out, and move on to come up with the next great idea.
Unfortunately, elections here are treated by parties in the same way that pitches to investors are treated by start-ups. Came out smiling? Great. Failed to get the result they want? Redevelop the product (rebrand the party, change the leader, or start a new party) and wait for the next opportunity to pitch again (the next election — it’s never far off).
What is lacking is a culture of organized and constructive opposition politics. In fact, the culture that you have on the opposition benches is that the lawmakers who shout the loudest and come up with the most outrageous camera-grabbing antics get the attention, while those with a semblance of intelligence may as well be invisible.
It is not a new problem, but one that has intensified since 2005, when Ariel Sharon established Kadima, and Israeli politics were no longer dominated by a strong Likud facing off against a strong Labor.
Israelis have the power to change the haplessness of their opposition, if only they would insist that parties representing them make detailed promises regarding how exactly they will conduct themselves if they don’t win gold. Yet voters don’t bother — they have come to accept that the opposition benches are just a prep area for the next election.
Why does the sorry state of the Israeli opposition matter so much? Because it signals political instability, keeps political discussion at a base and populist level, and most importantly, because it means that those Israelis who didn’t back the winning horse and whose views are not reflected in the government feel unrepresented in the Knesset.
Many people become cyclical about the whole political system. For others, the answer lies in voices outside the Knesset — reputable or less reputable — which have become a kind of proxy opposition. The lack of opposition politics has led to a situation where critiquing the government has fallen almost entirely to volunteers. On settlements and the peace process it has rested upon non-governmental organizations. On economic issues it has fallen to the social protest movement, which was too young and inexperienced to demand real gains. And on Iran it has fallen to retired military and intelligence chiefs.
Whatever the outcome of the upcoming election, a large proportion of the population will find itself outraged by the new government’s direction. If there is a victory for the left, Israel may well find itself withdrawing from large parts of the West Bank, to the horror of settlers and their supporters. If there is a victory for the right, policies are likely to cause dismay among Israeli Arabs and left-wing Jews.
In both of these scenarios, tensions are likely to boil over into violence and strife — both ends of Israel’s political spectrum have proved in recent months and years that they have people who are prepared to unleash violence and disobedience if things don’t go their way. To keep these fringes in check people must feel that there is a real outlet for their frustrations in the political system. Israelis need an organized and effective opposition.
To understand just how badly broken the Israeli opposition is, consider the most important deal reached with Palestinians of recent years. In 2011, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a deal with Hamas to release 1,027 Palestinian prisoners in return for the freedom of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier Hamas was holding. Then head of the opposition Tzipi Livni — candidate for prime minister in the coming election — was against the deal, but kept quiet and only announced her position afterwards. As a result, objections to the deal were muted in the Knesset.
The Israeli electoral system serves as an invitation for lawmakers to wait out their time in opposition. There is no particular group of people making demands of them, keeping them accountable, and insisting on knowing their positions on given issues during their term in office. This is because, unlike in the U.S. and many other countries where lawmakers have residents of their electoral district placing expectations on them, Israeli lawmakers don’t represent a certain electoral district — they simply come from their party’s national list of candidates. They can choose to be hardworking and try their best to challenge the government, as some do, or to sit doing little, as too many do.
But there is a simple way to change things.
Israel is crying out for a “shadow cabinet,” a lineup of lawmakers from the opposition benches that reflects the composition of the actual cabinet, as found in the UK and several other countries. The shadow defense minister scrutinizes the defense minister and serves as the main address for comment on policy; the shadow justice minister does the same for the justice minister, and so on.
A shadow cabinet in Israel should be an alliance of several parties; it would be something like the coalition Livni announced in 2009 when she said she was forming a “shadow team,” though her team was merely a lineup of people from her own party that proved an irrelevance and fizzled out. The arrangement would shift critiquing the government from a media circus where publicity-hungry lawmakers can say anything so long as it makes a good sound byte, to an opposition that would need to be carefully considered. In short, Israelis would hear from their opposition a realistic alternative vision for running the country on all matters.
The level of political discourse would rise enormously, the government would feel hawked and therefore perform better and become more accountable, and Israeli democracy would gain a new relevance in the eyes of the citizens. Israelis who are dismayed by the government’s path will hear their voice expressed clearly by designated people in the Knesset, and feel less frustration and less pull to join hot-headed protest groups.
If the lawmakers have the issues in hand, citizens will be less likely to take the law into their own hands.
Nathan Jeffay’s column appears twice monthly.
Can Mohels Still Cut Up?
Ted Merwin
Special To The Jewish Week
Ted Merwin
By the time young Jews from my hometown of Harrisburg, Pa., marry and have children, most have already relocated to larger urban areas and joined other Jewish communities. So it was with particular pride and pleasure that I recently attended the bris of the son of one of my former students who grew up in my neighborhood and has now settled just a few houses away from me. Representatives of all the local synagogues were there, the buffet tables groaned with food, and the mood was joyful and uplifting. There was only one thing missing; the mohel, who was imported from Baltimore for the occasion, missed almost every opportunity for humor.
What’s a bris without comedy? Time was, the mohel did a stand-up routine throughout the ritual, slicing not just the foreskin but also the nerve-wracking tension that arises from an unusually public, but highly sensitive, procedure on such an essential part of the male anatomy. From pointing out that the men in attendance were all unconsciously covering their groins with their hands to “reassuring” the bawling infant that “it won’t be long now,” mohels kept everyone (metaphorically) in stitches.
Given the preponderance of Jews in entertainment, mohels have also been routinely featured in popular culture. A mock 1977 commercial on “Saturday Night Live” showcased a car with such a smooth ride that a mohel was able to perform a circumcision in the back seat. A 1990 episode of “L.A. Law,” called “The Pay’s Lousy, But the Tips are Great,” included a lawsuit against an elderly mohel for “nicking” a child’s penis during the operation. A 1993 installment of “Seinfeld,” titled “The Bris,” shows a high-strung mohel with such shaky hands that he ends up cutting Jerry’s finger.
And don’t get me started on mohel jokes. Who hasn’t heard the one about the wallet made of foreskins that, when rubbed, turns into a briefcase? Or about the mohel who displays timepieces in his window because clocks are more socially acceptable than the similar, vulgar word for the penis? Or about the mohel who retired because he “just couldn’t cut it” any more?
So how come brises are so solemn nowadays?
Cantor Mark Kushner, a well-known Philadelphia mohel, told me that because so many brises are now performed by doctors, the ritual tends to be conducted in a more formal fashion. “The key to being a successful mohel,” according to Kushner, “is not to be a comedian but to touch people’s hearts and souls.” When he first apprenticed with a mohel in Jerusalem almost three decades ago, Kushner learned that, as he put it, “It’s a fine line to walk between sanctity and humor. They will forget the stupid jokes, but they won’t forget the holiness of the moment.”
Dr. Sanford Wohlstadter, an obstetrician and mohel in New Jersey, agrees. “Inappropriate humor should be eliminated,” during brises, he told me. He noted that while he “wants everyone to be relaxed” during the procedure, he frowns on turning the ritual into a joke fest. But his best efforts at making the ceremony more sober can be thwarted; the gags are so well known, he said, that instead of his telling them at the ceremony, the guests inevitably tell them to him!
Nevertheless, especially in New York and Los Angeles, where Jews remain entrenched in the entertainment industry, the bris, even without humor, can still be highly theatrical. Dr. Fred Kogen was profiled in The New York Times in 1996 as a mohel to the stars. He told me that doing a “celebrity bris” means that his performance is itself potentially being critiqued by Oscar-winning actors. Kogen described himself as a “psychologist, set designer, producer, director, religious officiant, and minor surgeon” all rolled into one. But especially at a time when anti-circumcision activists are protesting the rite, he pointed out that performing a bris is “welding a link in the chain of the Jewish people. You want to do it in a joyful way, with a wink and a nod,” rather than with all-out comedy.
At this season, when so many around us are celebrating with great mirth and merriment the birth of a baby Jewish boy 2,000 years ago, it’s fitting to point out that circumcision has never occasioned much humor in Christian circles.
But it’s never too late for comedy about circumcision. Even some Christian comedians have started to crack wise about the subject. Jim Gaffigan, who grew up Catholic, jokes in his stand-up routine about how Abraham explained his self-circumcision to his wife. “God told me to do it,” he tells her. “If God told you to sacrifice your first born son?” Sarah asks indignantly, “would you do that too?”
Ted Merwin teaches religion and Judaic studies at Dickinson College (Carlisle, Pa), where he also serves as Hillel director. He writes about theater for the paper.tedmerwin.com
Modiano’s Paris
Three novellas by the Nobel Prize winner, all shadowed with loss.
Culture Editor
“Suspended Sentences,” a trilogy by Nobel Prize laureate Patrick Modiano, is now available in English.
Patrick Modiano’s newly translated novellas are mysteries of remembering and forgetting. The fictional narrators, who resemble the author, search for truth about an elusive past, always linked to the Nazi occupation of Paris.
When Modiano was named winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature, few Americans were familiar with the bestselling French writer’s work. Now, three novellas are available in English for the first time, in a translation by Mark Polizzotti, as the trilogy “Suspended Sentences” (Yale University Press). Published separately in French between 1988 and 1993, the novellas are linked in their tone and texture and their strong suggestions of autobiography.
Born in 1945 in a suburb of Paris, Modiano is the son of a Jewish businessman from a Sephardic background and a Belgian-born actress who was frequently away on tour; his parents divorced when he was a child. Since the publication of his first novel, “La Place de l’Etoile,” in 1968, Modiano has published many other books, and also worked with director Louis Malle on the Academy-award winning feature film “Lacombe Lucien.”
In fact, it’s easy to imagine each of the novellas as a short film. The characters are distinctive, particularly the band of circus and nightclub performers who take care of the narrator and his younger brother in the title story. The scenes of Paris and its outskirts are richly colored and, also, shadowed with loss. Modiano’s characters walk a lot and sit in cafés, so there’s much urban landscape here, what the author calls a “romance of lost itineraries” around the City of Light.
As Polizzotti explains in a thoughtful introduction to the book and also to the work of Modiano, this is a Paris that no longer exists, “or that most people’s eyes do not see.” He compares the atmosphere to “Marcel Carné’s fog-drenched films, Edith Piaf’s smoky laments and Brassai’s nocturnal photographs.”
In the first novella, “Afterimage,” the narrator tells of his connection to a photographer he met in a chance meeting in 1964, and he thinks back about him 30 years later. The photographer, Francis Jansen, had been close to Robert Capa, who took the younger man under his wing. The only two photos in his studio are of a younger Jansen with Capa, and a portrait of a woman. The narrator learns that after both of their deaths, the photographer has withdrawn into himself.
“He was a man of few words. He did everything he could to be forgotten,” the narrator says of Jansen. A prominent influence on his photos, and his life, was his desire to keep silent. His favorite of all punctuation marks was the ellipsis.
The narrator takes on the task of organizing the photographer’s oeuvre of 25 years, stored in a stack of three leather suitcases. He learns that Jansen had been imprisoned in the transit camp of Drancy, and that while he survived, others close to him did not. The two men walk Paris together as Jansen documents places of meaning to people who are no more, adding to his portfolio of silence, before he slips out of town. The narrator understands that he won’t return and is left to make sense of the photographer’s life. He is the gatekeeper of Jansen’s memory, even as he feels his own memory and identity are slipping away.
Modiano’s writing is straightforward and his language, as translated by Polizzotti, is beautiful and spare; he piles on details, but between sentences he leaves questions unanswered, things unsaid.
The author, who has also won prestigious French literary awards including the Prix Goncourt, has said, as quoted by Polizzotti in the introduction, “The more obscure and mysterious things remained, the more interested I became in them.”
In the trilogy’s middle novella, “Suspended Sentences,” he imagines a 10-year-old’s view of life as he and his brother are in the care of a houseful of women, while his mother is off performing and his father is also away. Among the women is a former circus rider and acrobat who was injured and can no longer perform, and another who wears a leather jacket and then exotic blue jeans from America. Many others passed through the house, treating the boys with exceptional kindness, and sometimes taking them along on errands. The narrator’s memories are dreamlike, remembering these figures by their faces, expressions and the kinds of cars and motorcycles they park outside. He wonders about the secrets they share with each other, unsuspecting any criminal activity. Later, he would question whether they existed.
There’s also a scene here that is signature Modiano, which is found in some guise in many of his works. The narrator’s father, who is Jewish, is arrested by the French police working with the Gestapo, and then quickly and mysteriously freed by a black marketer collaborating with the Nazis. This is how Modiano’s father survived, working with those who freed him.
In the final novella, “Flowers of Ruin,” the narrator is an adult, sharing intriguing details about the man who helped his father get out of Nazi detention. Sitting at a café, after he had met the man, whose name is Pacheco, he constructs all the hypotheses he can and begins writing what becomes his first book.
“It was neither a vocation nor a particular gift that pushed me to write, but quite simply the enigma posed by a man I had no chance of finding again, and by all those questions that would never have an answer.”
Polizzotti, who has previously translated many books from French to English and serves as director of the publications program at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, notes that in an omnibus edition of his French novels, Modiano comments about these works, which, taken together, “form a single work. ... I thought I’d written them discontinuously, in successive bouts of forgetfulness, but often the same faces, the same names, the same places, the same sentences recur from one to the other.”
Next fall, Yale University Press will publish Modiano’s “Pedigree,” a memoir of his first 21 years, revealing the stories behind his novels. While his fiction contains autobiographical elements, this book, first published in 2005, was written as a memoir. It speaks most directly and fully about his parents’ lives under the Nazi occupation.
As Modiano writes in the memoir, also translated by Polizzotti, “I’m writing these pages as one might compile a report or resume, for documentation and to have done with a life that wasn’t my own.”
A Time Of War, A Time Of Peeping Tom-ism
From Gaza to a D.C. mikveh to a Cuban jail cell, a look back at the top stories of 2014, plus leading figures we lost. Compiled By Jewish Week Staff
“Death of Klinghoffer” protestors,” Getty Images
1. The Gaza War
In July, Israel launches its third major Gaza operation in six years. Dubbed Operation Defensive Edge, the campaign begins with 10 days of intensive airstrikes in Gaza. After several failed cease-fire attempts, a ground invasion of Gaza follows.
Hamas fires thousands of rockets into Israel, striking as far away as Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and a Haifa suburb. In four weeks of fighting before a 72-hour cease-fire in early August, some 1,800 Palestinians are reported killed. Israel comes under heavy criticism for attacks that kill children, strike UN facilities and damage civil infrastructure. Israel blames Hamas for using civilians as human shields and schools, hospitals and UN facilities as weapons depots. The death toll in Israel includes 64 soldiers and three civilians. Several of Israel’s casualties are due to Palestinian infiltrations of Israel through tunnels burrowed under the Israel-Gaza border. Israel’s prime minister says destroying the tunnels is one of the war’s main objectives.
In the U.S., the war fuels a bitter debate in the Jewish community, with liberal Zionists questioning whether Israel’s conduct of the war led to a disproportionate number of civilian casualties in Gaza, and the pro-Israel community staunchly backing Israel’s right to defend itself against Hamas rocket fire.
2. Peace Talks End
After weeks of near breakdowns in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks brokered by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, Israel, in April, suspends all negotiations after Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party signs a unity accord with Hamas, a designated terrorist organization. President Obama responds by saying it may be time for a pause in Middle East peacemaking. Kerry later expresses regret for saying that Israel risks becoming an “apartheid” state or a non-Jewish one if the two-state solution is not implemented. U.S. negotiators blame Israel for the talks’ collapse.
3. Naftali, Gilad And Eyal
In June, three Israeli teenagers, later identified as Naftali Fraenkel, Gilad Shaar and Eyal Yifrach, are kidnapped in the West Bank from a hitchhiking post. Israel responds with three weeks of intensive searches, including mass arrests in the West Bank of Hamas members and the re-arrest of dozens of Palestinians released as part of the Gilad Shalit prisoner-exchange deal. Three weeks on, Israeli authorities find the teens’ bodies and announce that the boys were believed to have been killed the night they were kidnapped. The incident sparks the revenge killing by Jews of an Arab teen, riots and a surge of rocket fire from the Gaza Strip. The Israel Defense Forces responds by launching Operation Protective Edge – Israel’s deadliest foray into Gaza since its 2005 withdrawal – on July 8.
4. Anti-Semitism In Europe
A riot outside a French synagogue in July is one of several incidents related to the Gaza war that threaten Jews in Europe. The riot by Palestinian sympathizers outside the Synagogue de la Roquette in central Paris traps some 200 people inside the building. A street brawl ensues between the rioters and dozens of Jewish men who arrived to defend the synagogue.
5. Rabbi Barry Freundel Voyeurism Charge
In October, Rabbi Barry Freundel, longtime spiritual leader of Washington’s prestigious Kesher Israel synagogue, is arrested on a voyeurism charge. Police say he videotaped women undressing in the synagogue’s mikveh. In the wake of the arrest, the Rabbinical Council of America, the largest organization of Orthodox rabbis in the world, establishes a committee (six men and five women) to review its conversion process; it is the largest appointment of women to an RCA committee in its 80-year history, according to the group’s president.
6. ‘Death Of Klinghoffer’ Protests
“The Death of Klinghoffer,” a Metropolitan Opera production that centers around the 1985 terrorist murder of a Jew in a wheelchair aboard the Achille Lauro cruise ship, ignites protests in the Jewish community in September. Protestors claim that the opera, written by leading composer John Adams, is anti-Semitic and excuses Palestinian terrorism. The Met’s general manager, Peter Gelb, agrees to cancel a worldwide simulcast of the production, but the protests continue, amid calls for the Met to cancel the production. Gelb accuses protestors of fomenting a possible backlash against the Jews for seeming to want to control a major arts institution. The show, according to Met figures reported in The New York Times, drew more concertgoers than any in the Met’s fall season.
7. Iran Talks
In July, Iran and the major powers, led by the United States, agree to extend negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program for another four months, citing progress in a number of areas. But the potential deal breaker remains: Iran does not want to reduce its number of its centrifuges, and the world powers say they won’t accept Iran maintaining its existing capacity for uranium enrichment. The deadline was extended again in November.
8. Alan Gross Released From Cuba
In mid-December, five years after he was arrested in Cuba on a charge of providing illegal technical assistance to the country’s small Jewish community, New York-born Alan Gross, who inadvertently became one of the world’s most prominent Jewish political prisoners, is a free man. Gross, 65, was released from a Cuban prison on “humanitarian grounds” and flew back to the United States on an American military plane, joined by his wife, Judy, and several members of Congress. “I’m free,” Gross declared to his daughters during a phone call from the plane.
As he reunited with friends and family after landing at Andrews Air Force base near Washington, President Obama, who called Gross’ imprisonment “a major obstacle” to improved bilateral ties, announced a thaw in U.S.-Cuban relations, including a start of the process to full diplomatic relations, and the weakening of the American trade embargo and other sanctions against the island nation. At the same time, Cuban President Raul Castro on Cuban TV announced the “normalization” of ties. Both cited Pope Francis, who had urged both leaders to bring about Gross’ release and an end of bilateral hostilities.
9. J Street Nixed By Presidents Conference
In a sign of the continuing split between liberal Zionists and the Jewish establishment over Israel, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations rejects J Street’s bid for membership. J Street, the liberal Washington group that lobbies for increased American pressure to bring about a Mideast peace deal, lost its bid for membership in the main communal group on foreign policy issues by a vote of 22-17, with three abstentions. J Street needed the support of two-thirds of the conference’s 51 members to gain admission.
Those We Lost
Ariel Sharon, the controversial warrior-turned-statesman who served as Israel’s prime minister from 2001 until 2006, when he was rendered comatose by a stroke, dies in January at age 85.
In May, Sol Adler, the previous longtime executive director, who was fired after revelations that he had a long-term affair with his assistant, hangs himself in his Brooklyn home. The suicide takes place shortly after the 92nd Street Y names its first non-Jewish executive director, Henry Timms.
Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, the father of the Jewish Renewal movement, which sought to introduce more music, dance and meditation into prayer and Jewish life, dies in July in Boulder, Colo., at age 89.
Joan Rivers, a Jewish comic who broke barriers for women in comedy and on television, dies in September at age 81.
Ralph Goldman, former executive vice president of the Joint Distribution Committee and a close associate of Israel’s founding leaders, dies in October in Jerusalem at 100.
Writer and liberal activist Leonard Fein dies in August at age 80. Fein had founded Mazon: A Jewish Response to Hunger and the National Jewish Coalition for Literacy, and co-founded Americans for Peace Now and Moment Magazine. A few weeks later, Fein’s older brother, Rashi Fein, a Harvard professor known for his contributions to medicine and social policy, dies at age 88.
Rabbi Harold Schulweis, activist and path-breaking Conservative spiritual leader in Encino, Calif., dies in December at 89.
Transitions
In November, the Anti-Defamation League chooses White House aide Jonathan Greenblatt, a social entrepreneur, to succeed Abraham Foxman as national director. Greenblatt’s appointment receives a lukewarm reception in the Jewish community because he is not a well-known figure, and lacks a strong record of activity in the Jewish communal world.
In July, John Ruskay steps down as CEO and executive vice president of UJA-Federation of New York, a post he held for 15 years. Ruskay is credited with championing the cause of centralized philanthropy in an age of boutique giving, and stressing that the charity was actually in the business of creating “caring communities.” Fifty-four-year-old attorney Eric Goldstein takes over. His appointment is seen as significant because he did not come up through the ranks of Jewish communal life, and that he is Modern Orthodox.
In a political shocker in June, Rep. Eric Cantor, the majority leader in the U.S. House of Representatives and the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in American history, is upset in the Republican primary for Virginia’s 7th Congressional District by a Tea Party challenger. Dave Brat, an economics professor, wins handily after attacking Cantor for drifting from conservative principles. Days later, Cantor resigns his post as majority leader.
In the mid-term elections in November, Long Island State Sen. Lee Zeldin, a former soldier in the U.S. Army who served in Iraq, wins his race for the 1st Congressional District. Zeldin becomes — with the primary defeat and subsequent resignation of Rep. Eric Cantor — the only Republican member of Congress. Zeldin defeated incumbent Tim Bishop.
JTA contributed to this report.
Gary Rosenblatt P.S. Our website is there for you any time for breaking news and exclusive videos, blogs, features and opinion pieces. Check it out. http://www.thejewishweek.com/ |
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