After more than a year of negotiations, this week the de Blasio administration finally revealed the compromises it's willing to make to its signature universal pre-K program to accommodate Jewish schools. Orthodox groups had a variety of reactions, ranging from lukewarm to boiling mad.
Pre-K On Sunday? Orthodox Groups Divided On New UPK Options
Changes like allowing schools to open six days a week called a good first step by some, unreasonable by others.
Amy Sara Clark
Staff Writer
While Agudath Israel of America, an umbrella organization for chasidic and black-hat Orthodox groups, said the new rules represent “meaningful changes,” the Orthodox Union called the changes “cosmetic.”
Since the universal pre-K program was announced, Jewish schools have been asking the city to expand its half-day program in order to have time for religious instruction off the city-funded clock. But the de Blasio administration’s goal is to provide as many full-day spots as possible and says it hopes the modifications will allow more Jewish schools to participate in the 6-hour-and-20-minute full-day option.
“These are common-sense changes that open doors for more institutions and families to participate,” Wiley Norvell, the city’s deputy press secretary, wrote in a statement to The Jewish Week.
Deputy Mayor Richard Buery announced the new rules Wednesday in a letter to preschool directors.
The most significant change allows schools to take “a short break” during the day, which doesn’t count towards the required secular hours, allowing teacher-led prayerafter lunch. Currently schools must provide the 6 hours and 20 minutes of secular education contiguously. Schools that have a break will be required to offer a supervised meaningful activity for children who don’t want to participate in the prayers.
A second change allows schools to hold classes on federal holidays. Because all schools are required to offer 180 days of instruction during the school year, Jewish holidayscan make it difficult to meet that requirement. Schools are already closed for Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, but not for the eight additional Jewish holidays that observant students must take off. In years when these holidays fall mostly on weekdays, and especially if a snow day or two are thrown in, meeting the requirement can be dicey. Schools will also be allowed to hold mandated staff development days over the summer instead of closing school during the school year.
A third change gives schools more flexibility with the length of each school day. Currently schools must offer five 6-hour-and-20-minute school days a week, on either a Sunday-Thursday or Monday-Friday schedule. The new rules allow schools to hold classes six, or even seven days a week, as long as they meet the total weekly requirement of 31 hours and 40 minutes. A school, for example, could hold classes six days a week with 5.5 hours of secular education per day. (Any religious education would come on top of that.)
Both the Orthodox Union and Agudath Israel agree that requiring fewer hours overall would be the best solution, either by offering more half-day seats or by allowing schools to follow the state mandate for full-day preschool of five hours. Where they split is on how reasonable it is to expect parents to send their kids to school onSundays, and, to a lesser extent, federal holidays.
On the more conservative, charedi end of the spectrum, older boys already go to school on Sunday, so the idea of sending preschoolers to school six days a week is more palatable, and in some cases, perhaps even desirable.
On the Modern Orthodox end of the spectrum, the five-day week is the norm. As is the celebration of non-Jewish holidays.
“We have a pathway put forward by the mayor where our Jewish day school students would be in school on federal holidays, they would be in school on Sundays,” said Maury Litwack, the political affairs director for OU Advocacy, which has been in negotiations with City Hall over UPK requirements since the program was announced. His group has been lobbying especially hard for the city to allow a five-hour full-day option or to create more half-day slots.
“The objective of the OU is for universal pre-K for all 4-year-olds. There are simple reasonable ways to get to that objective,” he said. Asking 4-year-olds to go to school six days a week, he said, is not one of them.
“It’s not a reasonable solution and should never have been proposed as a method of actual inclusion of the day school population,” Litwack said.
“If you’re interested in universal pre-K for your 4-year-old next year and you’re planning on sending them to a Jewish day school, the mayor’s office appears to be saying that the doors are closed to you,” he added.
Rabbi David Zwiebel, Agudath Israel’s executive vice president for government and public affairs, agreed that the changes were “not by any means a panacea that’s going to bring everyone into the picture,” but saw them as a good first step.
“If you measure progress in incremental stages, this is a nice little increment, I think. It will prove to make a difference, and that’s good,” he told The Jewish Week.
“I don’t think that they will work for everybody,” Rabbi Zweibel said of the rule changes. “There will be a number of families for which the long hours that are necessary to meet these requirements are going to be difficult. ... [B]ut I think probably the outcome is that this will expand to some extent at least both the number of schools that are prepared to undertake this kind of programming and the number of families who are prepared to send their children to these kinds of programs.”
Both OU and Agudath Israel agree, however, that more half-day seats are needed and fear that the mayor’s office is pulling back on its promise in December to add at least a few additional half-day seats for next year.
Buery’s letter addressed the half-day option. “As we have already stated, we anticipate continuing a modest half-day program, however, we believe the flexibility explained here will make full-day a viable option for even more families and providers, consistent with our vision to provide full-day, high quality pre-K for every 4-year-old in the city whose family is seeking that option,” he wrote.
The wording set off alarm bells for Rabbi Zweibel, who fears the December commitment to more half-day seats may not hold. “The letter says the city anticipates putting out an RFP [Request for Proposal] for half-day programming,” he said. “The word ‘anticipate’ is somewhat of an equivocal word. I hope that this does not represent in any way a backing off from that commitment.”
Norvell, the city's deputy press secretary, responded to the concern by saying, "I think they're reading too much into that."
More signs that the de Blasio administration might be pushing half-day programs to the sidelines include the fact that the city has not yet given preschools the chance to apply to participate in half-day programs for next year (putting out an RFP), and this year, for the first time, parents will have to apply separately to half-day and full-day programs, with the full-day application expected to come out first, The Jewish Week has learned.
amyclark@jewishweek.org
Changes like allowing schools to open six days a week called a good first step by some, unreasonable by others.
Amy Sara Clark
Staff Writer
The city's new rules will allow preschools to operate six days a week. But would they want to? Michael Datikash/JW
The de Blasio administration announced rule changes aimed at making it easier for Jewish schools to participate in its signature free universal preschool program. But Jewish organizations are divided on just how helpful these changes will be.While Agudath Israel of America, an umbrella organization for chasidic and black-hat Orthodox groups, said the new rules represent “meaningful changes,” the Orthodox Union called the changes “cosmetic.”
Since the universal pre-K program was announced, Jewish schools have been asking the city to expand its half-day program in order to have time for religious instruction off the city-funded clock. But the de Blasio administration’s goal is to provide as many full-day spots as possible and says it hopes the modifications will allow more Jewish schools to participate in the 6-hour-and-20-minute full-day option.
“These are common-sense changes that open doors for more institutions and families to participate,” Wiley Norvell, the city’s deputy press secretary, wrote in a statement to The Jewish Week.
Deputy Mayor Richard Buery announced the new rules Wednesday in a letter to preschool directors.
The most significant change allows schools to take “a short break” during the day, which doesn’t count towards the required secular hours, allowing teacher-led prayerafter lunch. Currently schools must provide the 6 hours and 20 minutes of secular education contiguously. Schools that have a break will be required to offer a supervised meaningful activity for children who don’t want to participate in the prayers.
A second change allows schools to hold classes on federal holidays. Because all schools are required to offer 180 days of instruction during the school year, Jewish holidayscan make it difficult to meet that requirement. Schools are already closed for Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, but not for the eight additional Jewish holidays that observant students must take off. In years when these holidays fall mostly on weekdays, and especially if a snow day or two are thrown in, meeting the requirement can be dicey. Schools will also be allowed to hold mandated staff development days over the summer instead of closing school during the school year.
A third change gives schools more flexibility with the length of each school day. Currently schools must offer five 6-hour-and-20-minute school days a week, on either a Sunday-Thursday or Monday-Friday schedule. The new rules allow schools to hold classes six, or even seven days a week, as long as they meet the total weekly requirement of 31 hours and 40 minutes. A school, for example, could hold classes six days a week with 5.5 hours of secular education per day. (Any religious education would come on top of that.)
Both the Orthodox Union and Agudath Israel agree that requiring fewer hours overall would be the best solution, either by offering more half-day seats or by allowing schools to follow the state mandate for full-day preschool of five hours. Where they split is on how reasonable it is to expect parents to send their kids to school onSundays, and, to a lesser extent, federal holidays.
On the more conservative, charedi end of the spectrum, older boys already go to school on Sunday, so the idea of sending preschoolers to school six days a week is more palatable, and in some cases, perhaps even desirable.
On the Modern Orthodox end of the spectrum, the five-day week is the norm. As is the celebration of non-Jewish holidays.
“We have a pathway put forward by the mayor where our Jewish day school students would be in school on federal holidays, they would be in school on Sundays,” said Maury Litwack, the political affairs director for OU Advocacy, which has been in negotiations with City Hall over UPK requirements since the program was announced. His group has been lobbying especially hard for the city to allow a five-hour full-day option or to create more half-day slots.
“The objective of the OU is for universal pre-K for all 4-year-olds. There are simple reasonable ways to get to that objective,” he said. Asking 4-year-olds to go to school six days a week, he said, is not one of them.
“It’s not a reasonable solution and should never have been proposed as a method of actual inclusion of the day school population,” Litwack said.
“If you’re interested in universal pre-K for your 4-year-old next year and you’re planning on sending them to a Jewish day school, the mayor’s office appears to be saying that the doors are closed to you,” he added.
Rabbi David Zwiebel, Agudath Israel’s executive vice president for government and public affairs, agreed that the changes were “not by any means a panacea that’s going to bring everyone into the picture,” but saw them as a good first step.
“If you measure progress in incremental stages, this is a nice little increment, I think. It will prove to make a difference, and that’s good,” he told The Jewish Week.
“I don’t think that they will work for everybody,” Rabbi Zweibel said of the rule changes. “There will be a number of families for which the long hours that are necessary to meet these requirements are going to be difficult. ... [B]ut I think probably the outcome is that this will expand to some extent at least both the number of schools that are prepared to undertake this kind of programming and the number of families who are prepared to send their children to these kinds of programs.”
Both OU and Agudath Israel agree, however, that more half-day seats are needed and fear that the mayor’s office is pulling back on its promise in December to add at least a few additional half-day seats for next year.
Buery’s letter addressed the half-day option. “As we have already stated, we anticipate continuing a modest half-day program, however, we believe the flexibility explained here will make full-day a viable option for even more families and providers, consistent with our vision to provide full-day, high quality pre-K for every 4-year-old in the city whose family is seeking that option,” he wrote.
The wording set off alarm bells for Rabbi Zweibel, who fears the December commitment to more half-day seats may not hold. “The letter says the city anticipates putting out an RFP [Request for Proposal] for half-day programming,” he said. “The word ‘anticipate’ is somewhat of an equivocal word. I hope that this does not represent in any way a backing off from that commitment.”
Norvell, the city's deputy press secretary, responded to the concern by saying, "I think they're reading too much into that."
More signs that the de Blasio administration might be pushing half-day programs to the sidelines include the fact that the city has not yet given preschools the chance to apply to participate in half-day programs for next year (putting out an RFP), and this year, for the first time, parents will have to apply separately to half-day and full-day programs, with the full-day application expected to come out first, The Jewish Week has learned.
amyclark@jewishweek.org
OPINION
Modern Orthodoxy Has Its Costs – Not Just Financial
When cost of living pushes $300,000, what else is sacrificed?
Elli Fischer
Special To The Jewish Week
Cost of living in Modern Orthodox households pushes $300,000. via fotolia.com
American Modern Orthodoxy is an elitist phenomenon. According to the well-known 2013 Pew study, it represents less than 10 percent of American Jews but is the best-educated and has the largest percentage of high-income earners. No group puts more of a premium on ethical life, intellectual curiosity, Israel, or community. In the aggregate, Modern Orthodox espouses more "essentials" of Jewish identity than any other segment, and by a wide margin. Its adherents are most likely to understand Judaism as both ethnicity and religion (a mature and correct understanding of reality). This is all in addition to the large families and high rate of day-school attendance that characterize Orthodoxy in general. As its name indicates, a multiplicity of emphases and core values is characteristic of Modern Orthodoxy.It follows that if Modern Orthodoxy is elitist, it is also very expensive. An old joke within this segment of the community has it that day school tuition is the best form of birth control. Some writers have begun to notice as well: according to a widely-discussed article by Dmitriy Shapiro, families can find themselves struggling even with annual household incomes as high as $300,000.
That such large incomes are barely sufficient is only part of a larger problem. The other side of the coin is that Orthodox parents, as stated by the OU’s Nathan Diament in the Shapiro article, are “driven to higher paying professions,” specifically law, medicine, and finance. A community that constrains the career choices of its young people incurs a cost that cannot be measured only in dollars and cents.
In a 2012 essay, Rabbi Aryeh Klapper enumerated encouraging young Jews to pursue only those professions that will support the chosen lifestyle among several “moral” costs of rising day-school tuition. We can understand why pressuring someone into an unsuitable career would be considered immoral, but beyond the disservice toindividuals, the community as a whole pays a steep price.
Take, for instance, the case of Joseph Cedar, an American-born acclaimed Israeli filmmaker who is observant. At first glance, he is a Modern Orthodox dream come true. Last year, during an interview, I asked him whether he thinks the same avenues would have been open to him had his parents not moved to Israel. Despite my fears that he would consider the question counterfactual and ridiculous, he responded that he asks himself the same question all the time, and that no, he does not think he could have managed his particular balancing act had he grown up in the United States.
That is, the pressure to produce high earners discourages and marginalizes those members of the community whose calling is in music, literature, the visual arts, or the performing arts. The problem is not only that creative types will likely be unable to afford the Modern Orthodox lifestyle; the community itself tends to marginalize those who pursue artistic careers, viewing them as irresponsible. Some creative types will gravitate toward the rabbinate or Jewish education, careers that can offer a creative outlet, financial incentive in the form of tuition reductions, and social acceptability. Many will either give in to the pressure to pursue a stable, lucrative career, or leave Orthodoxy behind.
Some will move to Israel, where artistic careers are more acceptable and where, despite the economic challenges it poses, Jewish religious education is free. The Jewish state is also home to a variety of high schools and colleges for the visual arts specifically geared to Orthodox students. Yarmulkes and other Orthodox paraphernalia are ubiquitous in Israel’s music scene—from classical on down—which in turn has been tapping into Jewish liturgical and poetic traditions.
In Israel, the head of a yeshiva is also a best-selling and award-winning novelist. In America, we get excited about holiday-themed a capella parodies, newly (and briefly) observant reggae artists, paint-the-parsha programs, and novelists who do not know the difference between Tosafot and the Tosefta but know and use a dozen Yiddish words for genitalia.
A reader might be tempted to ask: “So what?” As long as Modern Orthodoxy is producing rabbis, teachers, and enough big earners to support the community’s infrastructure and personnel, does it matter that it is not producing playwrights, poets, and pianists?
It does. Modern Orthodoxy is, or ought to be, a rich and challenging lifestyle that profoundly engages a broad range of thick Jewish experiences. It has a great deal to offer the Jewish world and the broader religious world. But without a vibrant creative class, there is no communal unpacking of that experience, no collective expression or catharsis, no mirror to show the community how it looks from the outside, no legacy of the community’s unique contributions.
There is a personal dimension here as well. Soon after moving to Israel, I changed careers, from the rabbinate to writing. For the most part, I earn a living by translating, yet I still aspire, even as I push 40, to become a full-time writer, and I hope that my writing challenges readers, sparks interesting and important conversations, and occasionally blows people away with its insight and wit. If I were to move back to the U.S., I would have to give up these pursuits—this calling—to sustain a Modern Orthodox lifestyle.
Is there a remedy, or will Modern Orthodoxy export and outsource creativity to Israel? Let this important conversation begin.
Elli Fischer is a frequent contributor to these pages.
On a lighter note, Blueprint editor Maya Klausner looks at the 10 best and most missedJewy moments from SNL's 40th anniversary special last weekend.
NATIONAL
10 Best And Most Missed Jewy Moments From The SNL 40th Anniversary Special
Live from Jew York…It’s 40 years of Saturday Night Live.
Maya Klausner
Blueprint Editor
adam and andy
Saturday Night Live became Sunday Night Live for one night this past weekend. Lorne Michaels' colossal tribute to the 40th anniversary of the cherished, laudatory sketch comedy show that has been airing on NBC at 11:30 p.m. for the last four decades, served up a potent dose of hilarity blended with nostalgia on Sunday night. With the recent retiring of two late night talk show kings to make way for new rulers, following Leno's dethroning last February, 2015 has been a transformative and monumental year for comedy. So it is only fitting that the head chef of satire would cook up a lavish feast.Throughout these transitions one ingredient has remained constant in the funny-sphere. Jews. Starting with the original cast, SNL has been touched by the chosen people with icons like Gilda Radner, Billy Crystal, Jon Lovitz, Adam Sandler, Sarah Silverman, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Andy Samberg, Seth Meyers, Rachel Dratch, Rob Schneider and Chris Kattan. Although Schneider and Kattan are only half Jewish, according to Adam Sandler's math in the "Hannukah Song", if you put them together they would make one "fine lookin' Jew."
The three and a half hour special, which streamed live online, had an all star attendance. Michaels invited everyone who has ever played a role in the making of SNL, from cast members to guest hosts to musical guests to the unseen forces who operate their magic from behind the curtain. The results made for an epic stew of comedy laureates including Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase, Martin Short, Eddie Murphy, Alec Baldwin, Steve Martin, Norm Macdonald, Chris Rock, Kristen Wiig, Will Ferrel, Melissa McCarthy and musical icons like Paul Simon and Paul McCartney. Find the full list of attendees here.
The celebratory evening delivered a rich panoply of beloved sketches and tributes to late cast members. If comedy is tragedy plus time, then the Jewish people have a lot of material to work with. However, while there were a number of Jewy moments, there were also a few Jewish gems whose absence we noticed.
1. Yes. Emma Stone as Gilda Radner. Stone paid tribute to the legendary cast member, Gilda Radner, on Weekend Update with Amy Poehler, Tina Fey and Jane Curtin with a revival of one of Radner's most famed personas, Roseanne Roseannadanna.
2. Missed. Drake's bar mitzvah rap. When Drake aka Aubrey Graham was both the host and musical guest a few years ago, he rapped about becoming a man in a flashback sketch of his 1999 Canadian bar mitzvah where he spat the following rabbinically inspired rhymes, "I'm black and Jewish, don't be foolish" "I celebrate hannukah, dated Rihana-Kuh" "I eat hova with nova...a bagel and cream cheesy with my boy his name is Weezy." Rabbi Akiva would be proud.
3. Yes. Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David's Q&A. At one point Jerry Seinfeld came out to answer questions from the audience, otherwise known as celebrity royalty, and Larry David jumped in with, "Hey let me ask you something, was I really a writer on Saturday Night Live?" to which Seinfeld responded, "Yes Larry you were, you wrote here for one season."
4. Missed. Coffee Talk with Linda Richman. In this canonized sketch, Mike Meyers played an embellished version of a stereotypical, middle-aged Jewish woman with a magnified New York accent, long painted fingernails, a ton of gold jewelry, large dark tinted glasses and a galaxy of hair that always required constant adjusting. The parody was based off of Myers' actual mother-in-law.
5. Yes. Jon Lovitz lives. The veteran SNL cast member, was "paid tribute" to in a memoriam given by Steve Martin, who honored "SNL greats who are no longer with us..." Lovitz, who is known for his Hannukah Harry sketches, is also now known for being alive.
6. Missed. Jewish Willy Wonka. A few years ago, Ben Stiller's opening monologue had a shaky start due to Stiller "feeling faint" from fasting for Yom Kippur. To Stiller's good fortune, Willy Wonka-vich (Andy Samberg), came to the rescue escorting Stiller to a magical land of Jewish delicatessen offering the hungry host, "Everything you've every dreamed of...from salty to fishy."
7. Yes. Adam Sandler and Andy Samberg singing in wigs. The special night was peppered with digital shorts, including a music video featuring Jewish SNL vets Sandler and Samberg, who sang about the inevitable breaking of the fourth wall that many cast members face when battling a case of the giggles. They held it together despite wearing funny wigs.
8. Missed. Adam Sandler's "Hannukah Song." Speaking of Sandler, though he did make an appearance as the adored "Opera Man" on Sunday, we were saddened not to be serenaded by his famous holiday anthem that reminds us that O.J. Simpson is "Not a Jew."
9. Missed. Jacob the Bar Mitzvah Boy. Played by current cast member, Vanessa Bayer, the recurring character who appears on Weekend Update, is Seth Meyers' 13-year-old podiatrist's son who delivers tips on foot care couched in Talmudic tutorials.
10. Missed. Jewess Jeans with Gilda Radner. The slogan "You don't have to be Jewish...but it wouldn't hurt" became synonymous with Gilda Radner's over the top Jewish personality and farcical look in the spoof commercial that parodied the jean commercial for Jordache Jeans. Radner played Rhonda Weiss in the hilarious tribute to the original, shamelessly cheesy ad that was almost a lampoon on its own. The sketch closed with the catchy line, "Jewess jeans. Guaranteed to ride up."
With or without all of the prized tribe-influenced moments whose absence we lamented, the black tie evening was a tremendous tribute and an impressive feat. Here's to another 40 years.
Mazal Tov Lorne.
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And on a heavier - but sweeter - note, writer Joanna Broder looks back at the history of the Doberge cake, a New Orleans tradition created by a Jewish woman who wanted to adapt another Jewish favorite, the Dobos torte, to the Big Easy's warmer climate.The King Cake has a Queen … And She’s Jewish
Joanna Broder
Special To The Jewish WeekMost people are familiar with the glittery, New Orleans’ King Cake, a cross between a coffee cake and acinnamon roll sprinkled with colored sugar that is the dessert of choice on Mardi Gras.
What many people may not know is that there is another, perhaps equally popular show in town that a Jewish woman brought to the New Orleans’ dessert market about 80 years ago. The Doberge cake has also stood the test of time in the Big Easy, the original foodie city.
Doberge cake is special because it is a New Orleans’ original, Judy Walker, food editor at The Times-Picayune, said. “When you look at it, it doesn’t look like anything else. It’s tall and pretty.”
Beulah Ledner developed Doberge cake in about 1935 by adapting the popular Dobos torte, a cake originating from Austria-Hungary, to make it better suited for the hot, New Orleans climate. (Read more about the differences between the two here.)
Doberge is a multi-layered butter cake that has somewhere between six and eight layers. Each layer of cake is baked individually. The layers are so thin --not more than 3/8 of an inch—that one needs a special pan to bake them, notes Ledner’s son Albert Ledner, 91.
In between the cakes lies a spread of custard. A thin film of buttercream frosting coats the cake and on top of that is a hard layer of chocolate, lemon or raspberry icing, Albert Ledner and his daughter Catherine Ledner said.
“It’s a lot of layers,” Catherine Ledner said. “You open that thing and it looked like, you know, a pin stripe shirt on the inside.”
Beulah Ledner, who was known affectionately as the “Doberge Queen of New Orleans”, her daughter Maxine Ledner Wolchansky wrote in 1987, based her Doberge cake on the Dobos torte — a cake made up of thin layers of sponge cake with buttercream between the layers and on the outside of the cake and a layer of hard caramel or chocolate on top.
“… She intuitively knew that it [Dobos torte] was too rich and heavy for the New Orleans’ climate,” Maxine Wolchansky Ledner, now deceased, wrote in a self-published cookbook of her mother’s recipes titled “Let’s Bake with Beulah Ledner: A Legendary New Orleans Lady.”
Ledner’s version of the cake used custard instead of buttercream frosting between the layers. She also made butter cake rather than sponge cake.
“This produced a torte with subtle richness and lighter quality,” Maxine Ledner Wolchansky wrote in her cookbook.
The cake stayed cool because it required refrigeration, Catherine Ledner said. “She felt like it was great for New Orleans.”
Beulah Ledner created the French-sounding name Doberge (pronounced either Do-bage or Do-berge by New Orleanians), because she thought the name should reflect regional traditions, Maxine Ledner Wolchansky wrote.
A love for the cake requires a sweet tooth that even some of Ledner’s descendants don’t possess.
Albert Ledner, well known for his residential and commercial architecture around New Orleans and the country, says he likes it, but it is a bit too sweet and rich for him.
Catherine Ledner, a photographer based in Los Angeles, said that although the cake is supposed to be lighter than dobos torte (pronounced do-bosh), it is still pretty rich. “I’m really not into icing and there’s a lot of icing on that cake,” she said.
Still, not too many people in New Orleans will dispute the popularity of Doberge cake.
“I think the importance of it is self-evident because … 90 percent of bakeries in New Orleans do their own version, “ Albert Ledner said.
Mine Is The Best
No bakery in New Orleans makes the Doberge cake exactly the way his mother made it, Albert Ledner says. That is because the baking process is so labor-intensive that commercial bakeries today cannot make it the way she did and still recoup their money. His mother never made much money on Doberge, Albert Ledner said. She did it on the basis of ‘this is the way it should be done’.
That is not to say that individuals cannot make the cake the right way. Last year, when Albert Ledner turned 90, a neighbor and caterer made a Doberge cake, which he described as “very close and very good.”
Unsurprisingly, bakers in New Orleans tend to think they are the best at making Doberge.
At Debbie Does Doberge — the name is just a tease and they don’t really make erotic cakes, owner Charles Mary IV confesses — they use their own recipe to make the confection.
“We wanted a lighter version than what is on the market today,” Mary says. “It’s an oppressively humid place, New Orleans, and lighter, more delicate flavors are what cater to palates here in the 21st century.”
So the pop-up bakery and supplier of desserts to restaurants also uses their own spin on the custard. Theirs is actually a pudding with more updated flavors such as maple bacon, cream cheese, cherry and banana. Traditional flavors for doberge have always been chocolate, lemon and maybe caramel, Mary said.
Sam Scelfo, who owns Joe Gambino’s Bakery, said a lot of bakeries and grocery stores in New Orleans try to emulate his bakery’s doberge cake but it’s a lost cause.
“They’ll take one layer and slice it and we literally bake each layer individually … because you don’t want your custard to be absorbed within the layer,” he said.
Scelfo visited Ledner in her bakery that she opened in Metairie. She was charming, but tough, he recalled: “You did it right or you just didn’t do it.”
Gambino’s originally purchased Beulah Ledner’s recipe and shop name in 1946. Albert Ledner said ingredients were hard to come by during World War II and so his parents had to close the bakery during the war. Afterwards, Gambino’s approached the couple with an offer to buy the name and the recipe. They decided it was best to sell it, but after a year of idleness, Ledner reopened a new bakery under a new name in a different parish, or county.
Jean-Luc Albin, owner of Maurice French Pastries in Metairie, said his bakery follows Beulah Ledner’s original recipe. The cakes appeal to people who remember them from Beulah Ledner’s time, but also are big on major holidays like Thanksgiving, Father’s Day and birthdays. Not to miss out on Mardi Gras, he started offering a petifore version of Doberge cake as well.
Albin bought the bakery 26 years ago from Maurice Ravet, who purchased the bakery and Doberge cake recipe from Beulah Ledner, this time in the early 1980s, when she retired at age 87 after 50 years in baking and catering.
More of a New Orleans’ Cake than a Jewish Cake
Everyone knew that Beulah Ledner was Jewish, Catherine Ledner said. She went to synagogue. She was a member of the Jewish Community Center in New Orleans. But her Doberge cake is more of a New Orleans thing than a Jewish thing, she said.
“It’s the birthday cake of New Orleans,” Mary said. “We love to celebrate.”
Slideshow
Best,
Amy Sara Clark
Staff Writer
THE NEW NORMAL
8 Lessons From A Spectacular Special Needs Bar Mitzvah
Rabbi Margot Stein
Editor's Note: Thanks to Jewish Learning Venture for sharing this important blog.
My son, a high functioning child with autism, did not speak until he was four and is only now, in 7th grade, learning to read independently. Yet he chanted from the Torah, recited the Sh’ma, helped lead the service, and delivered a D’var Torah that was unique in several important ways. He was thrilled, and so were we.
How can you make your child’s celebration equally memorable?
1). Know your child and make accommodations accordingly. Do not hesitate to ask your rabbi to work with you on this. If your child is outgoing as our son is, and can handle a lot of guests, fine. If she is fearful of crowds or has performance anxiety, keep it intimate.
While we are close with our synagogue rabbi at Congregation Mishkan Shalom, we also asked Rabbi Zev Baram from the Philly Friendship Circle to be a spiritual mentor for our son, since the Barams’ work with the special needs community has taught our son much about what it means to be Jewish.
2). Choose a time and place where you have more control. A big sanctuary with two b’nai mitzvah each week is probably not going to be the right setting if you want to bend rules and develop an individualized event. We chose a minha (afternoon) service, beginning an hour before sundown on Saturday afternoon and culminating with havdallah. It’s a beautiful time of day, and one that has fewer requirements in terms of the liturgy but does include a Torah service (be sure to calculate the correct reading based on the following week’s parsha).
3). Determine how your child learns best. Is she a natural mimic? Can he read with ease? Would a kinesthetic, hands-on approach be more effective? I can’t tell you how helpful it is to work with a qualified tutor who is able to develop a multisensory plan. Rabbi Michelle Greenfield brought Alef-Bet games, developed a reward system to motivate learning, created an enlarged xeroxed notebook of the appropriate pages from the prayer book, used highlighters and other visual cues, and created a visual schedule of each week’s tutoring session. As parents, we also made recordings, built rewards into his week for practicing, and made arrangements with his special needs camp to continue his tutoring over the summer.
4). Don’t be afraid to veer off the beaten path (and get help from others along the way). As the weeks went by, we realized our son would not be able to deliver a traditional D’var Torah. So we asked a beloved adult friend to help: together, they prepared the story, decided what was important about it, and designed a conversation that elicited the points they wanted to make. On the big day, this friend gently guided him through their foam core note cards, asking questions and elaborating here and there. Our son’s natural talkativeness and preference for relational experiences shone through.
5). Do some things that are just plain fun. In our case, announcing the page numbers seemed to fit the bill (the rabbi whispered them in his ear and he repeated them aloud). One boy wrote a song for his D’var Torah and sang it with his dad, with the whole congregation joining in on the choruses. If your child has a special interest, build that into the service in some way.
6). Plan the party or festive meal to follow with as much support as you need and in a way that works for YOU. In our case, we wanted the dinner to follow right downstairs for the easiest possible transition. With 15 classmates with a range of special needs in attendance, we also invited a parent chaperone (both parents, if we knew them or had socialized with them), plus we hired two teenaged girls to help the kids dance and follow directions for games on the dance floor. Work with your band leader or DJ to make the whole party as easygoing and kid-friendly as possible, or skip the music if your child dislikes loud noise.
7). Do a Mitzvah Project. Sometimes we let kids with special needs off the hook when it comes to helping others. I think this can be a mistake; all kids feel better about themselves when they are helping others. Choose a project that is attainable for your child, and support her every step of the way. Our son wanted to help animals (which integrated perfectly with his study of Noah and the Ark). We were lucky to find Sam’s Hope, which packs donated food and delivers it to Food Pantries, shut-ins, and others who cannot keep their pets at home without food support.
8). Delegate someone to troubleshoot logistics once the service begins. Your job is to sit up front, surrounded by loved ones, and enjoy every second as it unfolds!
Rabbi Margot Stein is the Music and Liturgy Resource Specialist at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Wyncote, PA. She trains kids with special needs for their bar/bat mitzvah, but wisely chose a colleague to train her own son.
MATCHMAKERA Girl From Rio Meets A Guy From Brooklyn
Bianca Benoliel and Steve Shoenfeld. Leticia Schwartz/JW
Guests hoist the happy couple aloft. Leticia Schwartz/JW
Can you really find your soul mate?Recently I went to a wedding that made me think that perhaps, despite all the technology inserted in our lives and all the match-dating sites available on the internet, some things never change. And that maybe, just maybe, it is possible, in this day and age to find your beshert.
Bianca Benoliel was born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and graduated from Ithaca College in upstate New York. From there, she got a job at Coty and worked her way up the ladder at such high-end companies as L’Oreal, Diageo, Conde Nast and Louis Vitton. She has lived in Paris, Mexico City, New York and São Paulo. She is cultivated, well-traveled and speaks many languages. To say that she is kind, smart, beautiful and charismatic is just scratching the surface of her qualities.
Steve Shoenfeld was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Woodmere, NY. He graduated from Clark University, got his masters in International Relations at Johns Hopkins and receive a Fulbright to study economics in Singapore. He began investing in Israeli equities while managing global stock portfolios at Barclays Global Investors (now Blackrock). He served on several advisory boards for Israel's capital market regulator, and advised the Tel Aviv stock exchange in 2009. In 2011, he founded Blue Star Global Investors, a research firm that specializes in Israeli stocks.
Incredible back rounds, for bride and groom. Solid citizens. But single people. Despite all their strong credentials, and a desire for a lasting connection, all of their previousconnections eventually ended.
Until one day. Steve was having drinks with friends at the bar of The Jade Hotel inNYC. He explained to his friends that it’s actually very hard to find a nice lady in the city. One of them said: ”I think I know someone who you might want to meet.”
Bianca and Steve met over Facebook. Steve had a trip scheduled to Brazil and Bianca agreed to meet him at a bar in Rio. Their first date lasted 8 hours. He thought: “I must find a way to make this long distance relationship work.” She thought: “What a nice gringo!”
Bianca was living in São Paulo at the time, looking for a new job after her employer,Louis Vuitton, decided to downsize their offices due to a recession in Brazil. Now get this: On the very same day that she and Steve met, Bianca checked her e-mail and found a job proposal to be the marketing manager for Bulgari in NYC.
And this is what strikes me as female Jewish wisdom at its highest: Instead of telling Steve the glittering news, Bianca held on to the information until she was certain that he was the guy.
It took a while for these two to find each other, but they both waited, patiently, hopefully, wisely and with a special composure, long enough to get some help from that fickle entity known as luck. Most people would have turned their lives into gritty, rocky sagas by then, which is why their story is quite a useful lesson in this crazy age of ours. It remind us that luck comes in many different forms, and some people have what can be described only as talent for persistence.
This January, Steve and Bianca got married at The Jade Hotel, the very same place where he first heard about her. She is 42 and he is 51. First marriage for both. Can you believe it?
I can, because they both set this up to happen. This marriage is the return on the bets they both made when they both had the chance to settle with the wrong people at different periods in their lives. They kept faith across decades, infusing their lives with a profound sense of Judaism and an even more profound sense of gratitude, despite loneliness along the way.
Mazel tov, Bianca and Steve!
And for those of you who want to try a little treat from the wedding, here is the recipe for the national candy of Brazil, Brigadeiro, which is an incredible chocolate fudge rolled in chocolate sprinkles. You can make this easy recipe at home, but I am also happy to announce the first Brigadeiro Bakery ever to open in New York City. It’s the creation of Mariana Vieria, whose recipe you can find over at The JW’s Food & Wine section if you click here. Mazel tov to you, too, Mariana!
Bianca Benoliel, Blue Star Global Investors, Brazilian candy, Brazilian Jews, Brigadeiro,Bulgari, Louis Vuitton, Steve Shoenfeld
OPINION
Joining Forces, Across The Park And Other Divides
Adena Berkowitz and Daniel Kraus
Special To The Jewish Week
Daniel Kraus
We’ve all heard the old Jewish joke about the man alone on the desert island who builds two synagogues — one where he prays and the other where he wouldn’t walk in, even if you paid him.The story is all too true when it comes to many of our Jewish communities. We can’t get along and we duplicate resources, inconsiderate of the overall communal impact. It is as if we have taken the dictum of Noah’s Ark — two-by-two — to mean that in every Jewish endeavor there must be more than one of what is being offered whether or not it makes economic or communal sense.
Case in point: the Upper East Side and the Upper West Side are less than one mile apart. Yet Central Park creates more than just a geographical divide in Manhattan. For many of the city’s Jews, it creates two very separate and distinct communities. In a time when social networkingmakes it easier than ever to connect with people across the world, programming that brings together people from both sides of town is conspicuously absent on Shabbat and other Jewish holidays.
We are two individuals professionally engaged in reaching out to unaffiliated Jews, not-yet-affiliated Jews, and Jews in search of something more meaningful. We are on two different sides of town, one on the Upper East Side and one on the Upper West Side. Both of our institutions, Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun and Kol HaNeshamah, deeply value outreach and make it a priority to reach out to all Jews young and old. While the two neighborhoods are indeed very different, when you look beneath the surface you will find some similarities that unite. One commonality is the thousands of Jews who are still on the periphery of the community — those that have not yet been engaged or who have fallen out of touch with their community. Last summer, in the midst of a conversation about what could be done to try to reach more of our fellow co-religionists we wondered: What would happen if, instead of trying to reach out only through our own institutions, we joined together to offer a unified program that would not only merge East and West Sides, but different ages and stages in life?
We both have noticed a very disturbing trend of the Balkanizing of the Jewish community. In a quest to make everyone feel comfortable and maximize their religious group experiences, Jewish programs and synagogue activities have broken down into smaller and smaller divisions — young professionals, older professionals, senior groups, children’s groups, etc. While this bifurcation certainly has a role to play, the increased divisions of religious services according to one’s age or status in life serves to divide people. It robs younger people of the exposure to older people and their life experience, and it deprives the older people from contact with those younger, often more youthful souls.
With this in mind, we designed and piloted a program, which we hope to expand, of Friday night services geared towards beginners. The inspirational Kabbalat Shabbat services are augmented by the pairing of the inspiring cantor and an a cappella group, adding ruach, or spirit, and making the davening, the praying, more accessible. Through the sharing of our explanations and Divrei Torah throughout the service, people are touched both intellectually and emotionally. The hot buffet kiddush afterwards allows time for socialization and a meal in honor of Shabbat, for those that might not ordinarily have the chance to participate in the Friday night rituals. Those attending the services are from across the age spectrum. Some married, others single, older and younger, babies and toddlers. The services speak to the beauty and totality of our community and are a sensible use of communal resources. We hope that this type of alliance can become a model for synagogues of all denominations and independent minyanim across the country. At the very least it adds a new definition to what a partnership minyan can be about.
It’s just the beginning.
Dr. Adena Berkowitz is a cofounder of Kol HaNeshamah, where she is scholar-in-residence. Follow her at @DrAKBerkowitz.
Rabbi Daniel Kraus is an MBA candidate and director of community education atCongregation Kehilath Jeshurun. Follow him at @rabbidkraus.
Catherine Mary Stewart in the disco-rock opera "The Apple," one of the films by Menachem Golan and Yoran Globus. Film Comment.
THE ARTSThe Kings Of The B Movies
Documentary tells the story of Hollywood's Go-Go Boys, Menachem Golan and Yoram Globus.
George RobinsonSpecial To The Jewish Week
Catherine Mary Stewart in the disco-rock opera “The Apple,” one of the films by Menachem Golan and Yoram Globus. Film Comment
The 1980s were arguably the worst decade in American film history. So if I tell you that there are not one but two new documentaries about Cannon Films, the schlocky ’80s film production company led by Israeli cousins Menachem Golan and Yoram Globus, you probably will shake your head and ask why. I would have thought even one film about those two characters would have been excessive, but after seeing “Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films,” a new film by Australian film maven Mark Hartley, I have to admit that it was worth a couple hours of my time.“Electric Boogaloo,” which is the opening night film of the annual Film Comment Selects series that kicks off on Friday, Feb. 20, is a very, very funny kaleidoscopic history of the studio that gave us “Death Wish 2, 3, 4, and 5,” an avalanche of Chuck Norris epics and such profoundly outré efforts as “The Last American Virgin.” Early in the film, one of their old retainers describes Menachem Golan as “the father of Israeli cinema.” On some level that statement is true, but it explains why it took so many generations for the offspring to live down its paternity. Hartley repeatedly shows us footage of Golan swearing his undying love for movies and moviemaking, but even his most loyal friends admit that Menachem had more enthusiasm than talent.
Or, to be fair, no talent for filmmaking. Paired with his closer-than-a-brother first cousin Yoram — they were known around Hollywood as the Go-Go Boys — Menachem displayed a talent for deal-making and sales. When it comes to making financially successful films, those skills are more helpful than artistic genius. The pair muddled along in Israel, but they wanted to make it in L.A. where the real stars were. When a small U.S. film company became available for next-to-nothing, they jumped at the opportunity to realize their American dream. Which is how Cannon Film Group became the fastest rags-to-riches-to-total disaster story in Hollywood.
As long as they followed certain basic rules of B moviemaking, Golan and Globus were safe. If you keep your budgets low — no star names, no costly special effects or expensive literary properties — and your product reliably unambitious, you can make and sell low-budget movies and even earn a few bucks. Cannon embroidered the formula successfully by developing a real facility for preselling projects, convincing distributors and exhibitors to pay upfront for a film to be delivered at an agreed-upon date in the near future. This meant that they weren’t hurting for capital but, as the frenzy to expand took hold, it turned them into the cinematic equivalent of a Ponzi scheme, with every project in hock to the ones to follow. And when they added real estate holdings and pretentions to art…
One of the strengths of “Electric Boogaloo” is that it makes the labyrinthine workings of the industry that invented the term “creative accounting” seem relatively straightforward (well, at least as straightforward and sharply pointed as your average corkscrew). But the real focus for Hartley is the sheer and hilarious crassness of Cannon’s product. At a time when Roger Corman was distributing Bergman and Fellini (while producing exploitation films directed by young directors like Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme and Joe Dante), Cannon was making films like “Sahara,” secure in the belief that Brooke Shields would win the Best Actress Oscar, and “The Apple,” a personal project of Golan’s that one interviewee calls “the Mount Everest of bad musicals.” They would eventually cut deals with Jean-Luc Godard and other art-film luminaries and that didn’t work out too well either.
Cannon had a distribution agreement with MGM, then headed by Frank Yablans; it lasted slightly less than a year because Yablans quickly realized that not only was the production company’s product rubbish, it was money-losing rubbish. Yablans is the most outspokenly negative of the voices in the film, as might be expected, since the Cannon fiasco probably greased the rails of his departure at Metro.
Surprisingly, almost everyone else interviewed for the film, from actors to production people to Cannon executives, speaks of Golan and Globus with real affection. The story ends badly, with the company many millions of dollars in debt and the two cousins not on speaking terms, and by that point it is impossible not to feel a little sad for the pair. They reached a point at which each released a film about “the forbidden dance, the lambada” on the exact same day; the enmity had become that powerful.
Which brings us back to the opening question — why two films about Cannon? Because Golan and Globus, who made up with one another not long before Menachem’s death last year, didn’t want to let strangers have the last word. As a title card at the end of “Electric Boogaloo” explains, they made their own film, “The Go-Go Boys” and sped it to completion three months before Hartley’s effort. It is, in a typically Cannonesque way, the perfect happy ending.
“Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films,” written and directed by Mark Hartley, will open this year’s Film Comment Selects series, presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, on Friday, Feb. 20 at the Walter Reade Theater (165 W. 65th St.). The series will also screen three fairly typical examples of Cannon product: “10 to Midnight,” starring Charles Bronson, “The Last American Virgin” and “Ninja III: The Domination.” For information, call (212) 875-5601 or go towww.filminc.com.
FOOD & WINE
What happens when a high-end kosher caterer teams up with a luxury hotel?
Mark David and Bruce Seigel’s business is hospitality. Fittingly, when the two met, it was a match made in heaven.
MD Catering is a high-end kosher caterer based in the New York area. Bruce Seigel is the Director of Sales and Marketing of the Ritz-Carlton Resorts of Naples, the venerable hotel brand whose story goes back to fin-de-siecle Europe – but he also spent 15 years learning the hospitality business in the Borscht Belt as the General Manager of the Pines Hotel.
They met when David approached Seigel to pitch the idea of hosting Passover at The Ritz-Carlton in Naples, FL. Seigel liked the idea and the two made it happen, but their story didn’t end there. That experience proved to the two of them MD Hospitality’s keen understanding of the Ritz-Carlton mystique and began to brainstorm a revolutionary model for bringing upscale kosher events to the luxury kosher consumer.
“This was beshert,” said Seigel. “It was meant to be.”
In the traditional kosher catering model, the customer contracts their own kosher caterer that is responsible for all aspects of food preparation and execution. Luxury hotels have been faced with the dilemma of caterers not understanding luxury brand standards and culture.
This, David and Seigel realized, was a big lost opportunity. They cooked up a plan to make The Ritz-Carlton the premier luxury brand host of kosher events. MD Destinations trains the culinary team of The Ritz-Carlton on kosher rules and regulations; the Orthodox Union supervises the kashering of the kitchen, securing of kosher product and implementation. But the execution team are Ritz-Carlton chefs creating a Ritz-Carlton culinary experience and service excellence.
“People want the Ritz-Carlton service standard, and the experience that we create,” Seigel said. “So we decided to bring kosher cuisine and those standards together. The key element is luxury.”
When the client desires it, David teaches the chefs how to make traditional dishes.
“Some dishes, we’ll tell them this is how Bubbie used to make it,” David said. “But the real learning happens around the logistics and the restrictions.”
Often, the bride will want a mix of dishes for her guests; one destination wedding David loves to recall featured family-style kibbeh, beef or lamb and bulgur meatballs, at Shabbat; a southern-style feast on Saturday night and a high-toned, elegant meal for the wedding reception itself.
The program started in the Amelia Island property in Florida two years ago; now it’s in 10 properties in North America and the Caribbean.
“This brings us a new market,” Seigel said. “It brings us business we wouldn’t otherwise get, creating an incremental business opportunity within the niche luxury kosher consumer market.”
Slideshow
Three Israeli Pals Take Shakshuka To City Streets
JTA
Josh Sharon, Solomon Taraboulsi and Gabriel Israel with The Shuka Truck in Midtown. Courtesy of The Shuka Truck
About a year ago, Israeli friends Josh Sharon, Solomon Taraboulsi and Gabriel Israel moved to New York to pursue professional dreams: Sharon and Taraboulsi to prove themselves in real estate, and Gabriel to attend the Culinary Institute of America in upstate Hyde Park.Instead, the 20-somethings may have found something even better: serving up shakshuka, the Middle Eastern egg-and-tomatoes dish, on the streets of Manhattan. The three childhood friends from suburban Tel Aviv launched The Shuka Truck in December, and it is already generating an array of media coverage. (Rabbi Shaltiel Lebovic of Go Kosher is the kosher certifier.)
I sat down with Israel and Sharon, both 23, to hear their story; Taraboulsi, 24, was unable to join us. The interview has been condensed and edited.
Q: Where did the idea for a shakshuka truck originate?
A: Israel: When I got to America, I started at the Culinary Institute of America but left very quickly and then was working at Boulud Sud [an upscale Mediterranean restaurant in Manhattan]. Well, I was making the shakshuka for brunch service on Saturdays andSundays, the other cooks even started calling me Shuka, and then the idea came to me one day. The only kind of Israeli street food widely sold in New York is falafel. So I thought, let’s do shakshuka.
Sharon: I remember when he called me with the idea for this. We immediately understood the opportunity – Gabriel is really the visionary, and Solomon and I are the implementers. But then it took six months to put together all the logistics. The most challenging part was finding food suppliers with the right ingredients for us.
Where do you get your ingredients?
Israel: We want to buy the best products we can find within our budget and want to support local farms as much as possible. Our eggs are organic free range from Pete and Gerry’s. We also get specialty ingredients from abroad because the quality in the U.S. is just not the same — we get the tahini from Lebanon and the za’atar and olive oil from Israel. In fact, we get most of our spices from Israel.
Whose recipes are you using?.
Israel: They are all my own. The red shakshuka is just traditional. But I had to do something different as well. My family is originally French-Algerian, and so I wanted to pull a little inspiration from my roots. The green shakshuka is actually a mousse made with spinach, asparagus, pickled onion, zucchini and goat cheese with honey. The white shakshuka also has French inspiration with charred eggplant, onion and blue cheese, but it has a bit of Middle Eastern flair with cumin, za’atar and fresh oregano.
Has there been anything that has surprised you since your launch?
Sharon: We never expected such overwhelming support from the Jewish community for what we are doing. Most of our clientele has been Jewish or Israeli, but they are also bringing their friends from their offices to try shakshuka for the first time.
Israel: Being here in New York has made us feel even more Jewish because of this support. We’ve also been surprised by the support from others in the food business. We expected people to be competitive, but everyone really helps one another..
Why do you think there are so many Israelis now involved in the New York food scene, like Einat Admony of Balabusta and Uri Scheft of Breads Bakery?
Sharon: It seems there is growing popularity for Mediterranean and Middle Eastern food in New York, so Israelis like us are really seizing this opportunity to open new businesses.
Are there any food trucks in Israel?FIRST PERSON
Jews, Muslims And A Hamsa
Diane ColeSpecial To The Jewish Week
Diane Cole
Israel: There are a few kinds of trucks/trailers for parties, but there is no food truck scene the way there is here. But what happens in New York and America often influences trends in Israel, so at some point, yes, I think there will be.
She writes The Nosher blog for MyJewishLearning.editor@jewishweek.org
“Well, that’s surprising. The only other woman I know who wears one is Muslim, and she probably would be on the other side of where you stand,” he said.
His words sparked an unfading memory: of having been held hostage on March 9, 1977 by armed Muslim gunmen in a “Jewish” building, the B’nai B’rith headquarters, in Washington, D. C., where I then worked. That was when 12 Hanafi Muslims, armed with shotguns and machetes, seized three buildings in Washington: the District Building (Washington’s city hall), the Islamic Center, and B’nai B’rith. The total number of hostages taken at all three locations came to 149, and the ordeal — which left two people dead and others seriously injured — lasted 39 hours.
Back then I hadn’t worn a hamsa, and even if I had it would not have provided the supposed protective power, accorded by Jewish folklore, to shield against the evil eye, which explains why an eye often appears in the palm part of the “hand.” And, as the conversation was reminding me, the hamsa is also a common motif in Islamic art, where it represents the Hand of Fatima, in honor of Muhammad’s daughter. It appears in Christian art, too, as the Hand of Mary. Because the three religions all stem from the same general region in the Mediterranean, this commonality in symbol and meaning should not be surprising.
And yet, religious enmities being what they are, it can astonish us to discover any mutuality.
That’s why it’s headline news that a young Muslim employee heroically saved Jewish customers at the Paris supermarket.
And that’s why I keep turning back to 1977, when the outcome of that long-ago siege would almost undoubtedly have been far worse had it not been for the intervention of — yes — Islamic peace makers.
With more than 100 of us at the B’nai B’rith building as his literally captive audience, Hamaas Abdul Khaalis, the lead hostage-taker and head of the Hanafi Muslim group, harangued us with endless anti-Jewish rants. Ominously, he told us that nobody promised us tomorrow. Whatever God we prayed to, he added, we should pray.
But it wasn’t until after we were freed that we discovered that the most significant prayers appeared to have come from the Koran, as conveyed by Ambassadors Ashraf Ghorbal of Egypt, Ardeshir Zahedi of Iran and Sahabzada Yaqub-Khan of Pakistan, who had agreed to meet with Khaalis at the request of the D.C. police department and with the approval of the State Department and President Jimmy Carter.
During their three-hour meeting with Khaalis in the B’nai B’rith building, the three ambassadors read extensively from the Koran, with Ghorbal of Egypt quoted as describing these passages as “songs of compassion, forgiveness, understanding.” Suggestions for the particular passages came from an Islamic scholar, Mohammad Javad Farzaneh. “And let not the hatred of some people in once shutting you out of the sacred mosque lead you to transgression and hostility on your part,” one passage read. “Help ye one another in righteousness and piety, but help ye not one another in sin and rancor.”
The appeals worked. Although the police — and we who were held hostage inside — had feared the siege would end violently, shortly after this session with the ambassadors, Khaalis agreed to release everyone in all three buildings.
Even then, the strategy seemed improbable. The Shah still ruled Iran, and Egypt’s then president, Anwar Sadat, had not yet begun the historic dialogue with Israel that led to the 1979 peace accords at Camp David. Afghanistan’s government was teetering, but the Soviet Union had not yet invaded, and the Taliban party did not exist. Nor were we in the United States as aware as (in retrospect) we already should have been of the threats posed by Islamic fundamentalists.
But so saturated are we today with anti-Islamic fear and mistrust that this real-life fable of the multiple leaps of faith taken — by the Islamic ambassadors who were willing to negotiate with a man of their own faith, as well as by the police and government officials who endorsed the strategy — seems all the more remarkable for the choice made then to chance crossing a deep chasm.
It will take far more than the thought of a hamsa to do it — but at the very least, let it remind us of what we share.Diane Cole, the author of the memoir “After Great Pain: A New Life Emerges,” writes for The Wall Street Journal among other publications.
The Jewish Week
She writes The Nosher blog for MyJewishLearning.editor@jewishweek.org
I wear a necklace with a hand-shaped charm that’s called a hamsa as a point of Jewish pride. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Paris in January, I was asked at a gathering in Manhattan if I wore it because I was Muslim.
“Je suis juif, I am Jewish,” I replied, flooded by thoughts of the hostages murdered at the kosher grocery store just outside Paris.“Well, that’s surprising. The only other woman I know who wears one is Muslim, and she probably would be on the other side of where you stand,” he said.
His words sparked an unfading memory: of having been held hostage on March 9, 1977 by armed Muslim gunmen in a “Jewish” building, the B’nai B’rith headquarters, in Washington, D. C., where I then worked. That was when 12 Hanafi Muslims, armed with shotguns and machetes, seized three buildings in Washington: the District Building (Washington’s city hall), the Islamic Center, and B’nai B’rith. The total number of hostages taken at all three locations came to 149, and the ordeal — which left two people dead and others seriously injured — lasted 39 hours.
Back then I hadn’t worn a hamsa, and even if I had it would not have provided the supposed protective power, accorded by Jewish folklore, to shield against the evil eye, which explains why an eye often appears in the palm part of the “hand.” And, as the conversation was reminding me, the hamsa is also a common motif in Islamic art, where it represents the Hand of Fatima, in honor of Muhammad’s daughter. It appears in Christian art, too, as the Hand of Mary. Because the three religions all stem from the same general region in the Mediterranean, this commonality in symbol and meaning should not be surprising.
And yet, religious enmities being what they are, it can astonish us to discover any mutuality.
That’s why it’s headline news that a young Muslim employee heroically saved Jewish customers at the Paris supermarket.
And that’s why I keep turning back to 1977, when the outcome of that long-ago siege would almost undoubtedly have been far worse had it not been for the intervention of — yes — Islamic peace makers.
With more than 100 of us at the B’nai B’rith building as his literally captive audience, Hamaas Abdul Khaalis, the lead hostage-taker and head of the Hanafi Muslim group, harangued us with endless anti-Jewish rants. Ominously, he told us that nobody promised us tomorrow. Whatever God we prayed to, he added, we should pray.
But it wasn’t until after we were freed that we discovered that the most significant prayers appeared to have come from the Koran, as conveyed by Ambassadors Ashraf Ghorbal of Egypt, Ardeshir Zahedi of Iran and Sahabzada Yaqub-Khan of Pakistan, who had agreed to meet with Khaalis at the request of the D.C. police department and with the approval of the State Department and President Jimmy Carter.
During their three-hour meeting with Khaalis in the B’nai B’rith building, the three ambassadors read extensively from the Koran, with Ghorbal of Egypt quoted as describing these passages as “songs of compassion, forgiveness, understanding.” Suggestions for the particular passages came from an Islamic scholar, Mohammad Javad Farzaneh. “And let not the hatred of some people in once shutting you out of the sacred mosque lead you to transgression and hostility on your part,” one passage read. “Help ye one another in righteousness and piety, but help ye not one another in sin and rancor.”
The appeals worked. Although the police — and we who were held hostage inside — had feared the siege would end violently, shortly after this session with the ambassadors, Khaalis agreed to release everyone in all three buildings.
Even then, the strategy seemed improbable. The Shah still ruled Iran, and Egypt’s then president, Anwar Sadat, had not yet begun the historic dialogue with Israel that led to the 1979 peace accords at Camp David. Afghanistan’s government was teetering, but the Soviet Union had not yet invaded, and the Taliban party did not exist. Nor were we in the United States as aware as (in retrospect) we already should have been of the threats posed by Islamic fundamentalists.
But so saturated are we today with anti-Islamic fear and mistrust that this real-life fable of the multiple leaps of faith taken — by the Islamic ambassadors who were willing to negotiate with a man of their own faith, as well as by the police and government officials who endorsed the strategy — seems all the more remarkable for the choice made then to chance crossing a deep chasm.
It will take far more than the thought of a hamsa to do it — but at the very least, let it remind us of what we share.Diane Cole, the author of the memoir “After Great Pain: A New Life Emerges,” writes for The Wall Street Journal among other publications.
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