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Wednesday, 14 January 2015
Dear Reader,
Our focus this week is on France, the impact of the terror attack on French Jewry and its ripple effect on Israel, our community and diaspora communities around the world.
Our report includes: an essay by the niece of a kosher supermarket victim on "When The Terror Hits Home"; Staff Writer Hannah Dreyfus on calls for local Jewish institutions to increase security; Staff Writer Steve Lipman talks to French Expat Jewsin New York on their concerns for relatives back home; and Israeli Correspondent Josh Mitnick explores the delicate dance over French aliyah.
Also this week, "The Betrayers" by David Bezmozgis wins the National Jewish Book Award; Peter Geffen describes being inspired by Martin Luther King and Abraham Joshua Heschel to volunteer in the South in the `60s; and George Robinson reviews several Israeli films at the New York Jewish Film Festival.
Émigré Novelist Takes Jewish Fiction Prize
David Bezmozgis wins National Jewish Book Award for ‘The Betrayers.’
Sandee Brawarsky
Canadian native David Bezmozg is honored for novel about onetime-refusenik turned Israeli politician.
David Bezmozgis has won this year’s National Jewish Book Award for fiction for “The Betrayers” (Little, Brown), and the “Jewish Lives” series published by Yale University Press was named the winner of the Everett Family Foundation Award.
For Bezmozgis, who has won several literary awards in his native Canada, this is his first National Jewish Book Award. His novel is about a former ex-Soviet refusenik turned Israeli politician who escapes a scandal in Israel to encounter the man who betrayed him to the KGB years earlier.
The Yale series, edited by Anita Shapira and Steven Zipperstein with Ilene Smith as editorial director, matches subjects and writers for original essay-like biographies. Already published works include “David: The Divided Heart,” by David Wolpe, “Rav Kook: Mystic in a Time of Revolution,” by Yehudah Mirsky and “Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt,” by Robert Gottlieb.
First given out in 1950, the National Jewish Book Awards are the longest-running award for books of Jewish interest in North America, said Carolyn Starman Hessel, director of the Jewish Book Council, which sponsors and administers the awards.
Other winners include George Prochnik’s “The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World” for biography (Other Press); Kathryn Hellerstein’s “A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish, 1586-1987” (Stanford University Press) for women’s studies; James A. Grymes’ “Violins of Hope: Violins of the Holocaust — Instruments of Hope and Liberation in Mankind’s Darkest Hour” (Harper Perennial) for the Holocaust category.
The award for outstanding debut fiction, presented in memory of JJ Greenberg, was given to Stuart Rojstaczer for “The Mathematician’s Shiva” (Penguin Books). In children’s and young adult literature, the award will be presented to Devra Lehmann for “Spinoza: The Outcast Thinker” (Namelos).
For history, the award went to “The Golden Age Shtetl: A New History of Jewish Life in East Europe,” by Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern (Princeton University Press); in American Jewish studies to “The Rag Race: How Jews Sewed Their Way to Success in America and the British Empire,” by Adam D. Mendelsohn (NYU Press); and in scholarship to “Outside the Bible, 3-Volume Set: Ancient Jewish Writings Related to Scripture,” edited by Louis H. Feldman, James L. Kugel and Lawrence H. Schiffman (Jewish Publication Society).
Awards are also presented in the categories of education and Jewish identity, modern Jewish thought and experience, Sephardic culture and illustrated children’s books. A full list of winners and finalists is available at the Jewish Book Council’s website (jewishbookcouncil.org).
When asked about what was distinctive about this year’s winners, Hessel, who is stepping down from her post later this year after more than two decades, noted that the winners and finalists come from a greater variety of publishers than in past years. The list includes 18 university presses, as well as books that are self-published and from Israeli publishers, along with commercial presses.
“This represents the honesty of the judges. They really picked the best books, with the best message, in each of the 16 categories. I give them credit for that.”
The National Jewish Book Awards will be presented at the Center for Jewish History, 15 W. 16th St., on March 11 at 8 p.m. The ceremony is open to the public.
King And Heschel: Moral Grandeur And Spiritual Audacity
Special To The Jewish Week
The author, right, with Mickey Shur (now Rabbi Moshe Shur), center, and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
On June 16, 1963, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel sent a telegram to President John F. Kennedy accepting an invitation to attend a meeting of religious leaders to discuss the growing racial tensions in the country. It read in part:
“Please demand of religious leaders personal involvement not just solemn declaration. We forfeit the right to worship God as long as we continue to humiliate Negroes. Church and Synagogue have failed. They must repent. Ask of religious leaders to call for national repentance and personal sacrifice. Let religious leaders donate one month’s salary toward fund for Negro housing and education. I propose that you Mr. President declare state of moral emergency. A Marshall plan for aid to Negroes is becoming a necessity. The hour calls for moral grandeur and spiritual audacity.”
Many of my peers grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust. Pre-1960 we knew two primary facts about World War II: millions of Jews and others had been killed, and good people all over Europe looked the other way. As the civil rights struggle began to fill our television screens with footage of confrontations between hate-filled violent white people and idealistic non-violent blacks, we young Jews made the obvious connection without ever being instructed to do so.
But we were inspired to do so by a rabbi and a minister who were giants of the spirit. Rabbi Dr. Abraham Joshua Heschel told us: “A hundred years ago the emancipation was proclaimed. It is time for the white man to strive for self-emancipation, to set himself free of bigotry.” The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King told us: “The time is always ripe to do right.”
It was now our turn to stand up and be counted. Now we were being called to the ultimate test. Would we put our lives on the line to help end discrimination and violence against African-Americans, or would we become the “good Germans” of our time and simply look the other way?
The advancement of civil rights in America took place in the legislatures and courts of the United States, but it began in the streets of Selma and Montgomery with everyday citizens standing up for what was right and civil. Leadership in the people’s struggle came from Dr. King, for whom I was privileged to work in the summers of 1965 and ’66 in Orangeburg, S.C. As young Jews, my friends and I were as moved spiritually by hearing King preach in a Baptist church as by Heschel speaking at public rallies for civil rights and against the war in Vietnam. We witnessed him marching with Dr. King at the front of the line of the famous march from Selma to Montgomery in March 1965. When Heschel returned to New York he told us, “I felt as if my legs were praying.” We knew where we belonged.
Being a civil rights worker was not without risk, and my classmate at Queens College, Andy Goodman, was one of the three boys lynched in the summer of 1964. Rabbi Heschel’s inspiring words lifted us up and gave form to our innocent youthful spirit. He removed the fear from our hearts.
In this universal arena of civil rights he mixed the religious and secular worlds in his thoughts and spoken word. “That equality is a good thing, a fine goal, may be generally accepted, what is lacking is a sense of the monstrosity of inequality.” He found original ways to express the link between Judaism and the civil rights struggle: “God is every man’s pedigree. He is either the Father of all men or no man. The image of God is either in every man or in no man.”
The struggle for civil and human rights remains a poignant and demanding one all over the world. The lesson of the American civil rights movement is that “We Shall Overcome!” and it is taught to and understood by children and adults across the globe. Dr. King and Rabbi Heschel set in motion a process that became international in scope and will not end because a new tyrant or tyranny arises to threaten us.
It is, however, a challenge to live in a time without a Heschel and King to guide and focus us. Their parallel teachings in word and deed are remarkable. Heschel’s definition: “A Jew … is a person whose integrity decays when unmoved by the knowledge of wrong done to other people.”
King taught: “History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.”
Heschel’s direction: “‘To be or not to be’ is not the question. How to be and not to be is the question. The true problem is how to survive, what sort of future to strive for. It is the power and the vision of time to come that determines time present.”
King proclaimed: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
Heschel’s demand: “Equality is a good thing … what is lacking is a sense of the monstrosity of inequality.”
King understood: “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.” “A right delayed is a right denied.”
The observance of Martin Luther King Day always comes in close proximity to the observance of the traditional yahrtzeit of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. In the dead of winter, their words speak of spring, of hopefulness, of optimism, of spiritual audacity and moral grandeur.
Peter A. Geffen is founder and executive director, Kivunim, a gap year program in Israel.
Israeli Films, Front And Center
The Elkabetzes’ ‘Gett,’ two from Yossi Aviram and the latest Amos Gitai offering show off the country’s cinematic creativity.
Special To The Jewish Week
Ronit Elkabetz as Viviane Amsalem in “Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem,”: Courtesy of Music Box Films DUNE: Filmsdupoisson
In the first of three articles on this year’s New York Jewish Film Festival, now underway at Lincoln Center, the continuing growth of the event was attributed in part to the splendid creative effulgence of the Israeli film industry during the nearly quarter-century of the festival’s existence. This year’s festival, the 24th annual, is an excellent example, with the final film in a splendid trilogy and a debut feature of consummate art and feeling contributed by Israeli filmmakers.
Ronit Elkabetz is one of the most gifted Israeli actresses and the closest thing to Anna Magnani in the world today. With her brother Shlomi she has been working for a decade on a three-film series tracing the marriage and divorce of Viviane Amsalem, a character originally based loosely on the filmmakers’ mother, a Jew of Moroccan heritage who marries a fellow Moroccan, Elisha (Simon Abkarian), endures a rocky relationship with her husband and both their families and finally, unable to withstand any more marital tensions, seeks a divorce.
The Elkabetz siblings co-wrote and -directed “To Take a Wife” (2004), “7 Days” (2008) and “Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem,” the trilogy’s final installment, nominated for an Oscar for best foreign-language film and part of this year’s NYJFF before it opens theatrically in February. The three films represent a rising curve of accomplishment and ambition, with the first two gaining in self-assurance and an increasingly canny blend of comedy and drama. But seeing those two earlier films could not prepare a viewer for the quantum leap represented by “Gett.” Quite simply, it is a brilliant film, a rare mixture of laughter, rage and helplessness, such as any woman would face in the religious courts of Israel.
Like a well-constructed comedy routine, “Gett” (a variation on the spelling of a Jewish divorce) is a slow-burn device that builds from restrained absurdities like the judges asking Viviane’s attorney (Menashe Noy) to put on a kipa, to extended perorations from opposing counsel (Sasson Gabbai) so over the top that Perry Mason would blush. Viviane’s ordeal will go on for five years, although the film is so elegantly paced that its 115-minute running time passes swiftly. The Elkabetzes structure the film around long takes in close two- and three-shots, moving into close-ups frequently. Where “7 Days” used a similar reliance on long takes but with the camera set back a bit more to create a sense of the imploding community, “Gett” is about the increasing emotional isolation of its two lead characters and their supporters. It is also about the gradual flow of emotional states over the uninterrupted screen time. In the hands of a trusting director there is nothing more eloquent than the human face, and “Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem” is a vivid reminder of that principle.
It is highly unusual for a young filmmaker to have two feature films in a single festival — one fiction, one non-fiction — but on the basis of “The Dune,” Yossi Aviram is an unusual director. “The Dune” opens with a 13-minute long pre-credit sequence set in Israel, establishing Hanoch (Lior Ashkenazi) as a slumping bicycle repair specialist whose relationship with his girlfriend unravels when he asks her to get an abortion. Suddenly we are in France, where Reuven Avari (Niels Arestrup) is drawing to the end of his career as a police detective specializing in missing-persons cases. His most recent case has ended badly, and his lover (Guy Marchand) is eager for him to retire. Then Hanoch is found on a sand dune on a French beach, without identification and unwilling to speak; the case intrigues Reuven and he begins to investigate.
Aviram, a cinematographer whose previous work has been on documentaries, brings a strong visual sense to this story, using the relationship between character and environment cunningly to peel back the layers of emotional deception. As a writer he is no less deft, artfully planting evidence for the audience, gently suggesting possible solutions to the film’s riddles and setting up at least one significant narrative point that turns out to be a red herring. The film is visually graceful, emotionally sensitive and effective and beautifully acted, in short a sterling debut.
If I say that Aviram’s other film in this year’s festival, a documentary called “The Polgar Variant,” is merely intelligent and workmanlike, you will get some idea of how impressive “The Dune” is. Intriguingly, what links the two films is a fascination with chess. Although the chess connection between the characters in “The Dune” turns out to be of secondary importance, Aviram invests it with much resonance and, looking at “Polgar” one can easily see why. The non-fiction film recounts the unusual story of the three Polgar sisters, Zsuzsa, Sofi and Judit, the daughters of two Jewish-Hungarian schoolteachers, who were the extraordinarily successful result of their father’s experiment in home schooling during the dark days of the post-1956 Communist regime in Hungary. Each of the three sisters hurled herself against the massive edifice of world chess, utterly dominated by men for its entire history. Each was a commanding figure in the women’s game, but only Judit was fortunate enough to win a men’s tournament at the highest level, although Zsuzsa came close. Aviram was fortunate that almost all of the participants in the story are alive and many of the major players — including all of the Polgars — were willing to talk on-camera about their lives. The film is brisk and frequently quite funny. It’s not “The Dune,” but it is intelligent and entertaining.
With the future of Israeli film seeming exceptionally bright, we turn to one of the mainstays of the industry, Amos Gitai; he is represented in this year’s festival by one of his rare literary adaptations, from the work Aharon Appelfeld, the acclaimed Israeli novelist and a survivor of the Shoah. Rereading Appelfeld’s 1983 novel “Tzili: The Story of a Life,” it’s not hard to see why he hasn’t attracted much interest from filmmakers. The prose of this dark picaresque novel, indeed of most of his work, has a brute simplicity and the hypnotic rhythm of someone chiseling the writer’s words onto hard stone, at a great cost to the artisan. If a reader imagines the scenes Appelfeld describes, it is probably as a snarling medieval woodcut. Film images would only aestheticize what should be primitive, haunting and ominous.
Amos Gitai would seem an unlikely candidate to film “Tzili” as the film is now titled. He is capable of moments of great, daunting violence, tinged with a sense of the absurd. His penchant for long takes with dizzying camera movement would seem a paradoxically apt choice for a novel in which the central character is constantly in motion yet never seems to get anywhere.
Gitai is a cerebral filmmaker, even cold, and the detachment with which he approaches his characters should serve as a guarantee against the Disneyfication of the Shoah, which Appelfeld has always rebuffed with his own brand of adamantine disengagement. Gitai defuses the most emotionally fraught material from the book by rendering it as voice-over narration in a late scene in a makeshift field hospital, almost without context, or by using it as dialogue spoken in extreme long-shot by a character we barely know. The only concession to comventional psychology and emotion is a long-take close-up of Tzili (played as a young adult by Sarah Adler), with tears welling up and rolling down her cheeks.
Sequence by sequence, “Tzili” is thoughtfully and intelligently directed. Taken as a whole, the film is a cryptic, ahistorical conundrum with none of the impact of Appelfeld’s novel and little of the resonance. Stripping away the connecting tissue of the book, removing characters’ motivations and eliding important plot elements, Gitai and co-scriptwriter Mari-José Sanselme have universalized a highly specific tale to no purpose. The result, sadly, is like Beckett without humor or Appelfeld without the underpinning reality of the Nazi rampage.
The 24th New York Jewish Film Festival, produced by The Jewish Museum and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, runs through Jan. 29. Screenings will take place at the Walter Reade Theater and Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, both located on West 65th Street in Lincoln Center. For more information, go to www.filmlinc.com.
Finally, our hearts go out to the victims of terror - journalists, Jews, Muslims - and we pledge never to take our freedoms for granted.
Sincerely,
Gary Rosenblatt
P.S. Check out our website for breaking news and exclusive videos, blogs, advice and opinion columns, and more.
http://www.thejewishweek.com/ |
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Are Jewish Victims Less Worthy Of Empathy?
How many would have marched if the kosher market murders hadn’t followed Charlie Hebdo?
The headline across the front page of The Jewish Week following the 9/11 terror attack read: “America: The New Israel,” and the tag line under it asked: “As fear and vulnerability grip U.S., will empathy with Israel increase?”
Some readers were deeply offended, later writing that our point of view was too narrow, too parochial.
But remember the context. Our words were written on the day of the shocking, massive assault on America and its way of life; one year into the horrific second intifada, with Palestinian suicide bombers detonating themselves almost daily in Israel; and only a few days after the conclusion of the infamous U.N. World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, which branded Israel an “apartheid, racist” state and accused Jerusalem of “genocide and ethnic cleansing.”
The 9/11 tragedy suggested to us, and many others, a link between Islamic fanatics seeking to bring down Western culture and create a worldwide Muslim caliphate, and Arab militants aiming to destroy the State of Israel and establish a Judenrein Palestine. In both cases: hate-driven terrorism as a means of defeating democracy.
Now, more than 13 years later, in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo and kosher market killings in Paris and the renewed terror attacks on Israeli citizens the last seven months, the question remains: Are these appalling acts of violence all part of the same assault by Islamic militants on democracy, freedom, human rights and freedom of speech — in truth, on Western civilization — or, in the eyes of the world, is the Arab-Israeli conflict a separate and distinct political battle, and therefore not subject to the same standards of solidarity and empathy?
Sadly, French reaction suggests there is a distinction being made. The common slogan as more than a million people marched through the streets of Paris on Sunday was “Je suis Charlie,” in unity with the slain cartoonists and editors of the French satirical publication.
But banners proclaiming “Je suis Juif” (I am Jewish), honoring the four young hostages murdered at the kosher market, were mostly limited to demonstrators near the site of the killings. Of course the cause of freedom of the press is compelling, and deserving. But so is outrage at Jews being killed for being Jews.
According to Israeli news reports, French President Francois Hollande asked that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu not attend the massive march on Sunday “to avoid anything liable to divert attention to other controversial issues, like Jewish-Muslim relations or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” according to Haaretz. It also reported that Hollande walked out of the Grand Paris Synagogue on Sunday evening just as Netanyahu came to the podium to speak.
Would a million French men and women have taken to the streets to decry terrorism if “only” the four Jews murdered in the kosher supermarket were the victims of Islamic terror last week? Elliott Abrams, a U.S. foreign policy expert, posed that question in his blog, Pressure Points, and noted that “in 2012, a terrorist murdered three schoolchildren and a rabbi at a Jewish school in Toulouse. There was no million-citizen march.”
Are French Jews less French than their fellow countrymen? Jews in France, numbering about 500,000, have faced a sharp increase in anti-Semitic violence of late, acknowledged by national leaders, despite government support and police protection, which has now been increased to 5,000. Last year, in the wake of angry protests against Israel during the Gaza war, about 7,000 French Jews made aliyah, more than twice the number of the previous year; for the first time, more Jews immigrated to Israel from France than from any other country. Estimates previous to last week’s violence predicted 10,000 new French immigrants to Israel in 2015, and those numbers may well rise. It is a sad statement when Jews are fearful living in their own democratic country, and it is ironic — yet inspiring — that they would choose Israel, under constant threat of violence, as a safe haven.
Abbas Out Of Step?
Looking at the now-iconic photo of world leaders marching together Sunday, I wondered how many others shared my sense of cynicism in seeing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas participating in the name of democracy and in condemnation of terror. Here, after all, was an autocrat who praises as martyrs those who murder Israeli children and accuses Jerusalem of genocide, walking arm in arm with other statesmen in support of human rights. Further proof that Palestinian violence against Israeli citizens is viewed internationally as less appalling than other instances of murderous attacks, perhaps even justified.
When rabbis at prayer in a synagogue in the Har Nof section of Jerusalem were slaughtered in the name of Allah two months ago, there was widespread revulsion at the terrible sight of prayer shawls drenched in blood, but no public protests outside of the Jewish community. The same applies to the murder of three Jewish teenage boys in Israel in June.
Was the blood of these innocents less worthy than that of the French cartoonists? Too few appreciate that Jews and Israel are the canary in the coal mine, the initial target of haters in a world loathe to acknowledge that the toxic mix of Islamic militancy, anti-Semitism and bias toward, if not hatred of, Israel is threatening the future not only of the Jewish State, but of Jews in Europe, and of Western civilization.
‘Common Battle’
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu this week sought to connect Israel and Europe as targets of fanatic Islamic hatred. “We understand we are in a common battle for our values and a common battle for our future,” he told the French ambassador to Israel,” adding: “Israel stands with Europe; Europe must stand with Israel.”
His clear message was that the French vote in the United Nations Security Council last week in favor of a resolution on Palestinian statehood was exactly the wrong message — abandoning Israel and its insistence on resolving the issue through direct negotiations — at a time when the Palestinians have ratcheted up their confrontational stance.
Netanyahu was renewing the case he made in September in his address to the UN General Assembly, asserting that “militant Islam is on the march,” with global ambitions and consisting of “branches of the same poisonous tree.” Those branches include Hezbollah, al Qaeda, Boko Haram and Hamas, as well as the Islamic State, or ISIS, he said, with Iran the greatest threat of all to Western civilization.
On the Israeli left, Haaretz columnist Anshel Pfeffer, who often writes from Europe, asserts that Europeans don’t see the Israel-Palestinian conflict as a “struggle between Islam and the West; they see it as a kind of unjust occupation of Palestinian territory,” he told The New York Times. But French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, a Socialist who speaks forthrightly about anti-Jewish attitudes of Muslims, insists “there is something more profound taking place now,” different from “the old anti-Semitism” of the extreme right. In an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, he said “this new anti-Semitism” comes from the large Muslim immigrant population that has “turned anger about Gaza into something very dangerous.”
Valls distinguished this strain from legitimate criticism of Israeli policies. “This is radical criticism of the very existence of Israel, which is anti-Semitic,” he told Goldberg. “There is an incontestable link between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Behind anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.”
In the end, whether or not Hezbollah in Lebanon or Hamas in Gaza subscribe to the ISIS vision of worldwide domination is less important than the fact that terrorist acts simply cannot be justified or rationalized.
How sad that centuries later, Shylock’s “hath not a Jew eyes?” speech in Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” still resonates: “If you prick us, do we not bleed? … If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, do we not revenge?”
This is not a call for revenge, though. This is about the need to turn the rhetoric of the moment, the French national motto, from a slogan into reality — not selectively but for all — starting today: “Liberty, equality, fraternity.”
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Special To The Jewish Week
In “How Much Land Does a Man Need?,” Tolstoy tells of a man who discovers that for a small fee, he can have as much land as he can walk around in a single day. Driven by greed, the man wakes early, walks so far that he cannot get back to his starting point, and in the end dies of a heart attack brought on by the effort. He is buried in a six-foot plot of land, thus ironically answering the title’s question.
How much money does a person need? This is the modern analogue to Tolstoy’s question. Many people who have more money than they could spend in a lifetime drive themselves to acquire more. They don’t make money in order to endow causes, or as a byproduct of productive work, but simply to run up numbers in their accounts and in their heads.
Most of us have much more than we need, and many have more than they could ever use. The drive to accumulate for its own sake is a spiritual malady; it is a poor substitute for creation, connection and wonder. Don’t succumb. As the Torah teaches us, “Guard your soul carefully [Deut. 4:9].”
Rabbi David Wolpe is spiritual leader of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter: @RabbiWolpe. His latest book, “David: The Divided Heart” (Yale University Press), has recently been published.
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Lens
Winter Dumps On Israel
Steve Lipman
An early winter cold snap that struck much of the Middle East last week left most of Israel shivering. The snow across the length and breadth of the Jewish state closed schools and major roads, knocked down power lines, and sent Israelis scurrying for electric heaters and rarely needed cold weather clothing.
For many citizens, the below-freezing temperatures meant burst water pipes. Even citizens of normally balmy Tel Aviv experienced the freeze. In Jerusalem, visitors crowded into Sacher Park to see the green grounds covered in white.
In the brief time before typical Mediterranean temperatures returned and the show melted, Jews in Israel and Arabs in the West Bank played outside, skating and sledding and snowboarding and throwing snowballs, walking tenuously on the frozen ground and making short-lived snowmen.
A worshipper at the Western Wall found plenty of space for prayers, with most of the plaza virtually deserted.
One group of Israelis found the snowfall particularly disappointing. Skiers. The road to the country’s sole skiing resort, on Mount Hermon in the Golan Heights, was closed. By snow.
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| The rocky coast of Lanzarote. WIKIMEDIA COMMONS |
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Lanzarote: Lava And Light
Hilary Larson
The rocky coast of Lanzarote.
When the midwinter chill sets in, New York Jews head to Florida; British Jews head to Lanzarote, the most spectacular of Spain’s Canary Islands.
In terms of climate, Lanzarote is actually more Los Angeles than Florida — dry and sunny, with winter afternoons that hover around 70 while mainland Spain shivers. But Lanzarote is more than a warm-weather getaway. It is a dramatic, largely treeless sweep of volcanic mountains, arid craters and black-sand beaches — an otherworldly landscape that is a change of scene from pretty much anywhere else.
The big cities and established Jewish communities lie on the larger, more developed Canary islands of Tenerife and Gran Canaria. Lanzarote, by contrast, is favored precisely for its remove; it’s an outpost of Spain that, despite the palm trees and luxury hotels, feels nothing at all like the mainland’s popular tourist destinations in Costa del Sol.
Hot, arid winds sweep across Lanzarote’s wide expanses of sand and sun-baked lava — a reminder that Lanzarote, like its Canary sisters, is far closer to Africa than to Europe. The smallish island lies just off the southwest coast of Morocco, an easy flight connection from Western European hubs. (Paying the bill will also be easier this winter, thanks to the tanking euro, which at press time was hovering around $1.20 — down about 25 percent from a few years ago).
Despite its popularity among British holidaymakers, Lanzarote still feels remote and unspoiled. Its rocky coasts are dotted with low-slung, whitewashed pueblos instead of high-rise resorts, and large swaths of the island are parks and nature preserves.
Nature itself destroyed as much as it preserved of Lanzarote. Settled in classical times, Lanzarote was crisscrossed in the succeeding eras by Moors, Mediterranean pirates, colonial slave traders, the French and, of course, the Spanish. Here and there, amid the quiet alleys of Arrecife on the southern coast, you can still see churches and forts from turbulent epochs.
Then in the 18th and early 19th centuries, what may be the most violent series of volcanic eruptions in modern history put Lanzarote on the map once again. Nearly a third of the island was coated with melting rivers of thick black lava, transforming a jungly paradise into the austere, barren moonscape that captivates today.
While many come to Lanzarote just to sprawl, lizard-like, on miles of sandy beaches, outdoors enthusiasts relish exploring the exotic interior. Windsurfers flock to the Atlantic waves; cyclists and hikers roam paths through the volcanic ruins, savoring vistas of sea between dune and peak.
The less-rugged among us can catch a bus tour through still-steaming lava fields, along centuries-old craters and over wave-battered cliffs at Timanfaya National Park, on the island’s west coast. The more adventurous can sign on for a tour across the dunes by camel.
Tucked into one particularly scenic cove here is El Golfo, a tiny, whitewashed pueblo (virtually all of Lanzarote’s buildings are a blinding shade of white, a stark contrast against the ashen mountains). El Golfo’s appeal lies in its setting — a limpid green lagoon surrounded by jagged black and red clay cliffs, which you can contemplate from a wooden-barrel bar stool if the weather isn’t warm enough for sunbathing.
Try a glass of local wine from Geria — a central winemaking region where neat circles of grape vines flourish, improbably, amid the sandy black soil. White varietals predominate, with an emphasis on semi-sweet and muscatel wines that pair well with the island’s fresh fish and vegetables (indeed, compared to the pork-and-shellfish-heavy mainland, vegetarians have a far easier time on Lanzarote).
Many of Lanzarote’s manmade attractions are creative adaptations of the natural setting. All along the coastline, bathers lounge in natural pools that fill ocean craters; many island dwellings appropriate this volcanic detritus to architectural effect.
Thousand-year-old subterranean lava tubes have been turned into shimmering grottos, as at Cueva de los Verdes and Jameos del Agua at the island’s northern tip, which occupy two caverns within the same nature preserve. These surreally beautiful caves — which served as hideouts during pirate raids — have been developed into cultural centers, with concert halls and exhibition spaces carved into the poolside rock.
Not all of Lanzarote is twisted and charred. Some of the more popular beaches, like the southern resort at Playa Papagayo, boast white sand alongside sparkling turquoise waters. Papagayo is Lanzarote at its most docile. But as the shadow of those black volcanoes reminds you, here in the Canaries, the wild unpredictability of nature is always present.
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| Alan Dershowitz. Wikimedia Commons |
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In The Beginning
Defending Dershowitz, To A Fault?
Alan Dershowitz. Wikimedia Commons
Former Harvard Law School professor and staunch Israel supporter Alan Dershowitz has been accused of having sex with an underage girl, the “sex slave” of a Dershowitz’ client, financier Jeffrey Epstein — which has, what exactly, to do with Israel?
The case involves four women who allege that they were sexually exploited by Epstein. They claim the government violated the Crime Victims’ Rights Act by agreeing to Epstein’s plea bargain without consulting them; that legal maneuver apparently led one of the women (Jane Doe No. 3) to say she slept with Epstein’s friends, Prince Andrew and Dershowitz.
Dershowitz denies ever meeting Jane Doe. Well, none of this had anything to do with Israel, until Rabbi Shmuley Boteach penned a column in the Observer (Jan. 5) defending Dershowitz because he is “America’s best known defender of Israel,” deserving our “gratitude,” so “where are the Jewish leaders to rise to Mr. Dershowitz’ defense?”
Rabbi Boteach admits, “There is no way any of us can know” if the charges are true. But who needs to know? The rabbi knows Dershowitz. “I believe Mr. Dershowitz, and not just because he denies it.”
Some Palestinian activists agree with Rabbi Boteach, at least insofar as this plea bargain dispute that has nothing to do with Israel is indeed about Israel.
Rania Khalek, writing in Electronic Intifada, a pro-Palestinian website based in Chicago, argues, “Dershowitz always felt children were fair game for Israeli missiles. Now the question is whether he thinks they are fair game for the sexual exploits of his powerful associates and himself.”
As for Rabbi Boteach, Khalek writes, “Demanding that Jews collectively and unquestioningly support Dershowitz against child molestation allegations as a form of tribal ‘gratitude’ for Dershowitz’s lifelong commitment to defending Israeli atrocities is both absurd and appalling.”
Dershowitz paused from his own counter-attacks against Jane Doe and her lawyers to tell the Jerusalem Post, yes, this case is about Israel, and that he was getting “all kinds of [antagonistic] emails [from] anti-Israel and anti-Semitic groups.”
Ronn Torossian, founder and the executive of 5W Public Relations, emails, “I do not believe he is a good spokesman for Israel or the Jewish people.”
For example, writes Torossian, whose clients include those on the Jewish right, Dershowitz defends President Obama, speaks out against settlements, and “advocates for the discrimination of Jews when he proclaims that Jews should not live in Hebron,” the flammable yet holy West Bank city, from which Jews were driven out in 1929 before returning in 1967.
Says Torossian, “As a proud Jew, I find the argument that [Dershowitz] should be protected because of his Jewishness to be despicable.” Torossian doubts Dershowitz even received all that many emails from anti-Semites, “but it is smart PR — sympathy does help when you are accused of rape.”
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FOOD & WINE
The government opens a six-week culinary arts program to train professional chefs for Jerusalem restaurants.
Wednesday, January 14, 2015 - 11:37am
Jerusalem — Five haredi Orthodox men are standing around a large wooden table crowded with bowls of chopped tomato, garlic, carrots and greens, their ritual fringes poking out from under their aprons. Each is wielding a large chef’s knife.
Their instructor, wearing an embroidered chef’s outfit and grasping a raw chicken thigh, tells his charges to cut the limb along the bone and pull it apart with their hands.
Hunched over their cutting boards, the men get to work.
“I like good and tasty food, and I think I need to get to a higher level,” said Avraham Blau, a haredi father of seven hoping for a career as a cook. “I’m always critical of others’ food.”
Blau and his four classmates are the first students in a six-week culinary arts program run by the Jerusalem Kivun Center, a government-funded initiative launched last year to train haredi Orthodox Israelis for full-time employment. After the program, they hope to become professional chefs in Jerusalem restaurants.
Increasing haredi participation in Israel’s labor force has been a central goal of the Israeli government, which has passed a raft of legislation since 2013 aimed at integrating haredi Israelis into the country’s military and economic ranks. Many haredi men receive stipends to study Torah well into adult life and only 45 percent participate in the labor force, as opposed to 81 percent of all Israeli men.
Most of the 2,500 haredim who have attended Kivun’s classes have trained for desk jobs with minimal physical labor and relatively steady hours. But Kivun director Yehiel Amoyal said the culinary class helps meet Jerusalem’s high demand for chefs and appeals to those who want to work with their hands.
“We want to stream jobs to where there’s employment,” Amoyal said.
In an effort to help the job search, Kivun invited hotel and restaurant managers to watch the students chop vegetables. Managers offered jobs to students pending completion of the course based on, among other things, how fast they chopped, whether they maintained posture and how many chopped carrots fell on the ground.
Though seven of the initial 12 students dropped out of the course, the remaining five are guaranteed jobs in kosher Jerusalem restaurants after they graduate this month.
“Regarding inclination to cook, whoever has the motivation to learn and advance will get where he wants,” said Maor Gross, the manager of Papagaio, a South American restaurant that will be hiring one of the trainee chefs. “I’m looking for good people who want it, who have a work ethic.”
A love of cooking drove some of the students to the course.
Blau, 37, who has managed a print shop and jewelry store, revels in cooking at home and has long dreamed of becoming a chef. But concerns about cooking non-kosher food and working with women kept him from culinary school until he learned of Kivun’s course.
“I have a lot of experience with meat, and I was weak on dairy,” said Blau, who now enjoys making lasagna and quiche and will work at a branch of Cafe Cafe, a chain of upscale dairy restaurants, after the course. “Cooking entrecote, I would do it too well done. Now I do it medium-well and it’s much juicier. That raised my skill level.”
The course, which meets two to three times each week, covers 21 cooking skills, from desserts to pasta, meat and fish. Instructor Itai Farkas calls it a crash course in what can be a demanding profession.
“It’s like basic training — taking people who haven’t worked and making them work 200 hours a week,” Farkas said.
Cooking may prove difficult for haredi men, as restaurants and hotels often demand they work nights, weekends and holidays — times the men are used to spending with their families. But Blau says he’s willing to make that sacrifice to pursue a craft he loves.
“If I have a career and a salary, it’s worth it to take evenings, Saturday nights and minor holidays,” he said. “In a few years I’ll have experience and a salary, and the ability to go far.”
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A Delicate Dance Over French Aliyah
Israeli leaders’ comments spark debate.
Joshua Mitnick
Friends and relatives seen mourning Tuesday at the funeral ceremony in Jerusalem for the four Jewish victims in Paris’.Flash90
Tel Aviv — None were Israeli citizens, but they were all laid to rest in Jerusalem on Tuesday afternoon.
Set against the backdrop of the Israeli flag and the French Tricolore, the joint funeral for the four Jewish victims of the terrorist attack on a Paris kosher supermarket was attended by Israeli dignitaries, a member of the French cabinet, and hundreds who came to pay respects to Yohan Cohen, Yoav Hattab, Philippe Braham and Francious-Michel Saada.
Mr. Saada’s son Yonatan said at the ceremony that his father had wanted to live in Israel. “He was in love with Israel,” he said. “He’s here now, and I’m sure that he’s really happy.”
The Jerusalem funeral was the latest memorial event following the spate of terror attacks that started with a massacre at the headquarters of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and ended Friday evening when French police burst into Hyper Cache to rescue hostage shoppers and kill the attacker.
Israeli speakers paid tribute to the ties between Israel and French Jewry, Europe’s largest diaspora community at about 500,000, but the remarks also reflected an ongoing debate here about how to handle the delicate the issue of rising anti-Semitism in Europe and the rising numbers of French immigrants who have arrived in Israel in recent years.
After Israel’s president, Reuven Rivlin, called on European leaders to take “firm measures to restore a sense of security and safety to the Jews of Europe,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he concurred but added, “I believe that they know deep in their hearts that they have only one country, the State of Israel, the historic homeland, that will accept them with open arms, like beloved children.”
Opposition leader Isaac Herzog seemed to strike a counterpoint. Recalling the synagogue that his great-grandfather presided over as the chief rabbi of Paris a century ago, he paid tribute to a “proud,” and “Zionist” community and predicted it would continue to thrive.
“It has absorbed painful blows through the years, but it will continue to ... develop majestic education and impressive cultural life and cultivate leaders in all realms of life in France,” he said.
In the initial hours of trauma after the attacks, news reports cited the rising tide of French immigration in recent years and said that Israeli kibbutzim were girding to absorb a new upsurge. According to the Jewish Agency the number of French immigrants doubled last year to 7,000, and the agency had predicted nearly a 50 percent increase in 2015 even before the attacks.
Netanyahu and other government ministers helped spark the debate with remarks on the eve of the Sunday mass solidarity march in Paris urging French Jewry to make aliyah — the Hebrew word for ascension that also means immigration to Israel.
While Netanyahu said Saturday evening that French Jews should consider Israel as a home, not just an object of religious devotion, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman went a step further in his remarks.
“The most important message to French Jewry is: Ascend to Israel,” Lieberman said while in Paris. “If you are looking for security and a safe future for your children, there is no alternative.”
The remarks sparked a firestorm in Israel. Jewish Agency Chairman Natan Sharansky warned Israeli politicians not to “dance on the blood” of the Paris victims.
An official at the Jewish Agency called the remarks by Lieberman and other Israeli officials “irresponsible,” and said that Israel should not be seen as aiming to exploit the violence.
Writing for the Israeli news site Walla! from Paris, journalist Amir Tibon observed that French Jewish leaders in parliament and the government were not pleased with the Israeli remarks. Even though there was no public backlash against Israel by French Jews this week, Netanyahu’s call was seen as weakening the community rather than strengthening it.
To be sure, encouraging aliyah to Israel has always been in the country’s ideological DNA, ever since the Zionist founders of the country sought to realize the messianic vision from the Bible of a “kibbutz galuyot,” an ingathering of the exiles.
Alon Liel, a former director general of Israel’s Foreign Ministry, said encouraging diaspora Jews to immigrate to Israel has always been a national priority. Over the decades Israeli governments have worked to promote aliyah from widespread locations such as the Middle East, Russia, Ethiopia and Argentina. Immigration has helped boost Israel’s Jewish population tenfold since the country was founded.
“Aliyah has always been seen to have strategic importance, and maybe even existential importance,” Liel said. “There was always a focus on distressed communities, because those communities would be more open to aliyah,” he said. “Now the problem is with anti-Semitism in France.”
Liel noted, however, that this goal always risked creating tension in diplomatic relations because may countries — particularly France — did not look kindly on public calls to move or activities encouraging aliyah. Liel noted that when Ariel Sharon made such a public appeal when he was prime minister, “France was furious.”
Roger Cukierman, the leader of French Jewish umbrella group CRIF and vice president of the World Jewish Congress, told Israel Radio that while the community was reeling and insecure after the hostage attack, he expected the vast majority of them to remain in France.
“I am very worried. I remember Toulouse, when they shot at Jews from point-blank range,” he said referring to a 2012 attack on a Jewish school that killed a rabbi and three children. “They said all of the red lines had been crossed, and now they are killing Jews again.”
Since the attacks, members of Israel’s community of French Jewish immigrants have spent much of their time connecting with relatives back at home by phone and through social media. Franck Valensi, who moved his family of six from Paris to Israel three years ago, said most of his relatives are in France and he is worried for their safety.
Valensi, 44, said that when his sister moved to Israel 15 years ago he did not understand the decision. However, the string of anti-Semitic attacks in recent years persuaded him that the best place to raise his kids in safety is Israel.
Valensi said Jews could not walk in public with yarmulkes in France, and that they felt on the defensive whenever there is a flare-up in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, such as last summer’s war in Gaza. Though tightened security around Jewish community institutions is supposed to give a feeling of reassurance, Valensi said it had the opposite effect.
“The problem is not with the government; they are doing everything they can. They can’t protect every Jewish person personally. They are overwhelmed,” he said. “The problem is in the neighborhoods,” a reference to Paris suburbs that are home to large numbers of disenfranchised Muslims, many of them immigrants from North Africa.
Colette Avital, a former deputy director general at the Foreign Ministry for Europe and a former parliament member who headed the committee for immigration absorption, said that threat of anti-Semitism is a relatively recent problem in France.
“From what we know, 80 to 85 percent of anti-Semitic incidents come from the North African community,” said Avital, who also served as Israeli consulate general in New York.
European anti-Semitism, driven by centuries-old [and now disavowed] Catholic Church theology portraying Jews as Christ killers, is on the wane, Avital said. She said European countries are much more proactive about anti-Semitism than in the past, and have passed laws to punish it, as well as those outlawing Holocaust denial. “You can’t term [European] countries as anti-Semitic,” she said.
She added that while Israel should quietly encourage immigration from France, the prime minister’s public appeal was “a faux pas.” Israelis would not have liked it if countries like the U.S. or France encouraged citizens living here to return home during waves of Palestinian bus bombings, she said. “You don’t do that when a country is licking its wounds.”
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When The Terror Hits Home
Niece of kosher supermarket victim reflects on the City of Light, hit by darkness.
Special To The Jewish Week
Mouchka Heller and her uncle, Philippe Braham, who was killed at a kosher market on Jan. 6. Courtesy of Mouchka Heller/Getty
Last Saturday night, a day after the terror attacks in Paris, my father called to say that my uncle, Philippe Braham, was killed as he was checking out at the Hyper Cache kosher supermarket, just before Shabbos. He was murdered in a neighborhood I know well, Porte de Vincennes, a few minutes away from my high school, and a mere 10-minute ride from my childhood home. He was one of mine, a relative, but together with all the other victims of the horrific crimes last week, he was also one of ours.
Philippe, who was 45 when he was killed last Friday, was anyone who has ever run into a grocery store with plans to run back out in a few minutes, just as the cartoonists killed in the Charlie Hebdo attack were anyone who has ever exercised their right to speak their mind. We fought for these rights in Europe and in the United States, first for some, then for all, regardless of opinion, religion, race or gender.
History books say that we won the battle. Yet, while the Jewish community in France was shocked and shaken by the events on Friday, we were also aware of a lengthy history of targeted violence.
I remember when everyday life in France began to change.
It was about a dozen years ago, and I was not yet a teenager. We lived in the 10th arrondissement, and all of a sudden, it seemed, I had to stop going to the library by myself to get my books for the weekend. I had a beautiful Magen David with blue gemstones, and my mother did not let me wear it outside. My sister and I were not allowed to go in the lobby of our apartment building alone to get the mail.
Around that time, we found swastikas scratched with car keys on our front door. Our mezuzah was stolen. We put another one on, and it too was stolen. Our car was broken into more times than I can recount. A heter, or religious edict, was given for Jewish men to not wear their kipas outside, to protect them from potential attacks.
Then, in 2006, Ilan Halimi was tortured by a gang of North African immigrants; he is remembered by us, forgotten by many others. Cars were burned. A friend was attacked with an ax. In 2012, Toulouse witnessed a Jewish school shooting that took the lives of a rabbi and three children
I remember the pain, every time a little bit sharper. The France I loved was under attack.
French Jews often talk about aliyah as a potential necessity, but never as something easy. (North African Jews immigrated to France during and after the wars of independence there in the 1960, largely because they felt a cultural tie to France.) Thousands have already left, many heading for Israel. After events like last week’s, the old questions are resurfacing, in my family and in many others in France. How could you not leave, when your child might not make it back from school, on a continent that knows the dangers of obscurantism all too well? At the same time, how could you leave, when these are the streets where you learned to walk, this is the language in which you say “I love you,” this is the first image your brain shows you when someone talks about home? On a very basic human level, when conditions threaten to pull you out of your home by the collar, how could you not hold on to the doorknob?
What is happening in France is very real and concrete, and it can be mistaken for a specifically French issue. It isn’t. The question is not about French Jews making aliyah or not. It isn’t about whether France should be blamed for not being safe enough. Jihadism is a transnational issue that affects values that we all claim to stand for. The families of the victims feel the loss of their loved ones, and they hear the cries of their children. These were innocents who were cut down for no reason other than what they represented. But what they represented is all of us. And this is what was attacked. By shooting the journalists at Charlie Hebdo, the terrorists shot all of us who write, read, talk and think. By shooting policemen and policewomen, they shot all of us who have ever protected someone. And by shooting the consumers of a kosher grocery store, they killed all of us who go about the life we have chosen for ourselves.
But if we keep the memory of those who have fallen, then the attackers shot at the power to write, but they missed; they shot at the power to read and think, but they missed; they shot at the responsibility we have in protecting our own, but they missed; they shot at our right to live the lives we have chosen for ourselves, but they missed.
Even as I write this, jihadists are likely walking around Paris with the keys they use to draw swastikas on car hoods, while we carry the keys of the friends’ apartment whose kids we are babysitting, or of the synagogue that we are opening up for a late-night shiur, or class. We are solidifying old institutions, and building new ones. Rather than succumbing to fear, we are rallying around the concept of solidarity, and hoping that the sentiment will hold. Resilience has shaped my generation. We’ve needed it.
In the midst of everything, all we hope for is to carry on with daily life, and in these times of distress, to stay strong and drink to life. Also, to remember the life of my uncle and the other victims of last week’s attacks. And to be able to stand shoulder to shoulder with the others doing their last-minute grocery shopping as another Shabbos arrives in Paris.
Mouchka Darmon Heller, who attended Yeshiva University, lives in New York City and works in the field of corporate regulatory strategy.
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Experts Call For Active-Shooter Drills Here In Wake Of Paris
Local Jewish institutions ramping up security. ‘This threat is not going away.’
Hannah Dreyfus
France deploys 5000 troops to Jewish sites. Jeff J. Mitchell/Getty Images
As 5,000 French police and soldiers fanned out across the country to protect hundreds of Jewish institutions in the wake of last week’s attack at a Paris kosher supermarket, Jewish leaders here scrambled to assess security protocols and ramp up security measures.
In the days since Friday’s attack on the Hyper Cacher kosher market in Paris, which killed four Jews shopping for Shabbat, leaders here have convened emergency security briefings and been in contact with the New York Police Department. And, in a sign of the seriousness of the security threat, some have even suggested exercises on how to respond to an active shooter inside a synagogue or JCC.
The NYPD has extra officers at high-profile Jewish sites, Mayor Bill de Blasio told reporters Monday. “If there’s an attack on a Jewish target anywhere in the world, we reinforce and support major Jewish community locations instantaneously throughout this city,” he said.
Rabbi Arthur Schneier, senior rabbi at Park East Synagogue, addressed the tragedy at length in his Saturday morning sermon. Though the synagogue neighbors the NYPD’s 19th Precinct on East 67th Street, the shul has “spent a considerable expense” to augment its security system in the days since the attack, Rabbi Schneier told The Jewish Week. “We cannot rely on police alone. We don’t want congregants to be afraid to come to synagogue, and they should not be.”
Shabbat services at Park East Synagogue were packed Friday night, as many turned out to find solace in the hours after the attack, according to Rabbi Schneier. All entrances to the high-profile synagogue were flanked by security guards.
“What occurred in France is a paradigm change,” said Paul Goldenberg, director of the Secure Community Network, the homeland security initiative of The Jewish Federations of North America. “These are not lone-wolf attacks,” he said, referring both to the attack on the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine, which killed 12, and at the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket, where four hostages died. “Well-established affiliates of terrorism are seeking to disrupt Western nations, and local Jewish populations are caught in the crosshairs.”
Goldenberg, who was in Paris when the attack took place, suggested all Jewish institutions in New York review best practices and practice how to respond to an active shooter or suspicious person.
“It’s too late when an individual has already entered a building firing shots to determine what to do,” said Goldenberg, who attended the European Jewish Security Summit in Brussels days after the attack. “You can have all the technology in the world, but unless people know how to behave when something happens, an attack could be fatal,” he said.
The NYPD told The Jewish Week that a detective stationed in Paris has been coordinating with police officers here in order to continue monitoring the situation.
John Miller, the NYPD’s deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism wrote via email: “New York City has the most sophisticated counterterrorism capability in the U.S. There are standing contingency plans in place to adjust police deployments based on any unfolding situation in the world. That includes how we use and where we position and deploy specialized police resources.”
According to Rabbi Shaul Robinson, senior rabbi of Lincoln Square Synagogue on the Upper West Side, the NYPD has been proactive about ramping-up security after the Paris attack.
At a memorial service for the terror victims on Sunday night attended by more than 800 people, according to the shul, the synagogue’s security team partnered with the NYPD and community volunteers to ensure safety.
“There is always someone stationed outside the synagogue,” said Rabbi Robinson. “Safety will only become more of a priority after this.” He declined to detail other augmented security precautions because of safety concerns.
Immediately after the attacks, the Jewish Community Relations Council of New Yorkposted safety recommendations for New York’s Jewish institutions on its website. The bullet-pointed emergency notice recommended training sessions with law enforcement and Homeland Security leaders, reporting suspicious activities, and preparing for an active-shooter situation.
David Pollock, the council’s director of public policy and security said JCRC is planning to work with the NYPD to ramp up active shooter-training sessions at Jewish schools and camps. The NYPD is “very sensitive” to the reality that Jewish communal institutions are targets, he said.
“We will continue to do what we have done in the past: make sure people are prepared as possible for any given situation,” Pollock said. “The most important thing learned from all of this is that institutions need to have a policy in order to prevent unauthorized personnel from entering a premises.”
Anticipating security concerns, the Simon Wiesenthal Center in cooperation with the New York Board of Rabbis held a dial-in emergency briefing on Sunday, with Shimon Samuels, director for international relations at the Wiesenthal Center in Paris. According to Rabbi Steven Burg, eastern director of the Wiesenthal Center, hundreds called in.
“There’s a sense that this threat is not going away,” said Rabbi Burg. “Aside from a deep concern for our European brethren, people in America are becoming more serious about these threats.” He declined to provide further details about how the Wiesenthal Center, located on East 42nd Street, has bolstered security out of safety concerns, but said they are in touch with local law enforcement.
“We encourage all New York Jewish institutions to reach out to local law enforcement,” said Rabbi Burg. “It didn’t used to be the norm to have security guards in front of Jewish day schools. Now, it’s an imperative.”
Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, executive vice president of the New York Board of Rabbis, partnered with Rabbi Burg on the emergency briefing.
“This is not the first time we’ve experienced heightened security concerns,” he said. “We’ve encouraged communal leaders to be in conversation with their constituents. If more needs to be done to fortify security, now’s the time,” he said, citing the installation of surveillance cameras in synagogues as a priority.
Rabbi Potasnik also warned Jewish communities against complacency after the immediate scare from the attack ebbs.
“We tend to get comfortable when nothing goes wrong. But when we’re lax, we’re most vulnerable. At this stage, we cannot afford to lower our security consciousness,” he said.
In response to the Paris attacks, the Anti-Defamation League sent out a national security advisory last Friday detailing “action steps” for local Jewish institutions. Reporting suspicious packages, checking that security devices are in good condition, and reviewing the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s guide to responding to an active shooter were among the pointers.
The last time a security advisory like this was sent was after the April 2014 Jewish community center shooting in Kansas City, said Evan Bernstein, the ADL’s New York regional director.
“We’re stepping up vigilance at this time,” said Bernstein. “The particular vulnerability of the Jewish community in New York needs to be taken seriously.”
At Sutton Place Synagogue, a large Conservative congregation on the East Side, security is being taken seriously. But in addition to security guards and cameras, Rabbi Rachel Ain, the congregation’s leader, feels the spiritual fortification of her congregants is key.
“People came Friday night to find solace,” said Rabbi Ain. “At a time like this, when we fear for our safety and security, it’s important to reflect on our emotional needs as well.”
During a particularly crowded Friday night service, Rabbi Ain read aloud a poem written by one of her colleagues for the Jews of Paris.
“Dear God. This hurt we know too well/ has taught us to stand strong through our pain/We will not cease our prayers,” the poem read. “May this broken world of ours/See no more of this.”
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French Expat Jews: So Far, So Near
Many here urging relatives back home to leave. ‘What are you waiting for?’
Steve Lipman
French police patrol this week near a Jewish school in Paris as part of a massive security effort around Jewish institutions.Get
For Stella Amar-Cohen, a Jew from western France who has lived in Manhattan for 10 years, the most recent day of horror for French Jewry began before dawn last Friday.
Jetlagged from a recent trip to relatives back in her homeland and in Israel, she was up by 5 a.m. She checked Facebook and other social media, a common point of connection for the several hundred French Jews here and in France, and discovered the bare facts of the erev-Shabbat act of terrorism — an unknown number of gunmen had taken an unknown number of hostages at Hyper Cacher, a popular kosher supermarket in eastern Paris.
Between calls and texts to relatives and friends in France, and updates every few minutes on French-language media sites, she checked the latest news throughout the day — by about 2:30 p.m. she’d learn the details of who was safe and who was dead.
In shul the next day, at the West Side Sephardic Synagogue, which has a large number of Jews with roots in France, “everyone was sad, in shock and upset,” Amar-Cohen said.
New York’s community of French Jews has become increasingly vocal in the wake of last week’s terrorist attack. Most were in touch with Jews still living in France, and many helped organize a memorial service Sunday night on the Upper West Side.
Myriam Rebibo, who moved here from a southeastern suburb of Paris 10 years ago, found out about the hostage-taking a few hours later on Friday, also via Facebook. By then, “nothing was confirmed.” No details were available about the anti-Semitic terrorism that followed by two days the fatal shootings at the Charlie Hebdo satirical weekly newspaper in the French capital.
Like Amar-Cohen, Rebibo lives on the Upper West Side. Like Amar-Cohen, she called her kin in France immediately. She told them to leave France. “Absolutely.” For Israel or the United States, “anywhere” they will be safer as Jews. “We were already telling them to leave,” following a few decades of anti-Semitic attacks in France, usually committed by Muslim Arabs whose families come from northern Africa.
Ari Afilalo, a native of Paris who came to the nearly U.S. three decades ago, received an email Friday at 7 a.m. from his brother Lionel, who works near the supermarket. “We have to leave France quickly,” Lionel wrote — their mother also lives in Paris.
“The rest of the day we were glued to the news,” mainly to a French TV station, Afilalo said. “It was so tense — rumors, conflicting reports.” The atmosphere in the city reminded him of the days after 9/11, he said.
The events that followed last week’s hostage-taking at Hyper Cacher — including an evening of solidarity at Lincoln Square Synagogue and expressions of support from a wide range of French political and Islamic leaders — has both coalesced the already close-knit group of French-Jewish expatriates in the Greater New York area, and brought them an unprecedented amount of attention.
“It’s a sad way [for outsiders] to become aware” of French Jews here who are their neighbors, said Brigitte Dayan, a journalist with Moroccan Jewish roots who moved to Manhattan from Chicago a dozen years ago and is knowledgeable about the French Jewish community.
At the packed Lincoln Square event, “people were comparing stories” of how they discovered the grim news, of how they kept in touch with people back home, of their own visits to the kosher supermarket. “Everyone has a connection,” everyone has shopped there or know someone who still does, Dayan said.
While no one keeps track of the exact number of French Jews who live here — they usually are considered a subgroup of Sephardic Jews with roots in northern Africa — anecdotal evidence suggests that the community has at least hundreds of Jewish families and is growing rapidly.
The Upper West Side has become a hub of transplanted French Jewry. Sizable numbers of French Jews also live in Great Neck, L.I.; and in Englewood, N.J. Most work in finance. They are “hardworking” but not always wealthy; “traditional if not Orthodox,” Dayan said. They’re mostly singles who came here for an education or a job, or young families.
On the Upper West Side alone, the number of synagogues with a sizable number of French Jews on the membership rolls has risen to three, from a single Shabbat-only minyan two decades ago. Now there are lectures and social activities geared towards French-speaking Jews, and the establishment of French soccer league in the summer.
The number of French Jews in New York has risen steadily over the last two decades, as rising anti-Semitism has caused the country’s 500,000-member Jewish community to feel increasingly unsafe, Dayan said.
“Jewish life in Paris is becoming increasingly difficult,” she said.
In the U.S., especially in the New York City area, where open expression of one’s Jewish identity and where resources like kosher food and Jewish classes are readily available, “the ease of Jewish life” makes this country increasingly attractive, she said.
At the West Side Sephardic Synagogue, “the mood … was extremely somber on Shabbat morning,” Dayan said. “We were shocked, but many of us were not surprised.”
French Jews are familiar with the harassment on the street and in the subway system, the rapes and murders, the terrorist attack at a Jewish school in Toulouse three years ago that killed a rabbi and three students. “It’s becoming more and more frequent,” Rebibo said.
Asked what she believes the future holds for Jews in France, Dayan said, “It’s at a crossroads now.” More French Jews than ever — though they are still loyal patriots, she stresses — are thinking of leaving. “Is it going to end?” she said.
French aliyah is clearly increasing; an aliyah fair in Paris on Sunday drew more than 500 people and some 7,000 French Jews immigrated to Israel last year, the most in recent years.
Dayan and other French Jews here interviewed by The Jewish Week praised the government’s reaction to the latest terrorism attacks: President Francois Hollande’s declaration that the Hyper Cacher attack was clearly an act of anti-Semitism and his appearance at the Great Synagogue of Paris; the statement by Prime Minister Manuel Valls that wide-scale emigration of French Jews would diminish the character of the French Republic; the assigning of 5,000 French police to protect Jewish schools.
Are these demonstrations of support too little too late? Do large numbers of French Jews fail to see a future there?
It’s too early to give a firm answer, Dayan said, adding, “I don’t think it’s too late.” But she attributed the recent increase in aliyah to the increase last year in anti-Semitic attacks spurred by Israel’s war in Gaza.
French Jews are also immigrating elsewhere. There’s a new French-language Shabbat service at St. John’s Wood Synagogue in London, and reports of an increase of French Jews in Montreal.
“The bottom line is, do you leave France?” Afilalo said. He thinks his brother will end up in Israel. “The young people will all leave. They won’t stay,” he said.
Since last week’s killings at Hyper Cacher, Rebibo has urged her French relatives leave the country.
“What are you waiting for?” she said she asks them. “Are you waiting to die?”
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