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Brooklyn DA Kenneth Thompson has launched an investigation into witness tampering in a high-profile sex abuse case, The Jewish Week has learned. Hella Winston has the story.NEW YORK
Brooklyn DA To Probe Tampering In Abuse Cases
Source: Thompson to investigate witness intimidation tied to Lebovits prosecution.
Hella Winston
Special Correspondent
Brooklyn DA Kenneth Thompson. WIREIMAGES
In a move that advocates for sex abuse victims in the Orthodox community have long urged, the Brooklyn district attorney has launched an investigation into witness tampering in connection with a high-profile abuse case, The Jewish Week has learned.According to a source with knowledge of the situation, the investigation by Brooklyn DA Kenneth Thompson’s office relates to the case of chasidic cantor Baruch Lebovits. His 2010 prosecution and conviction for child sexual abuse and subsequent 10 2/3-to-32-year prison sentence caused a firestorm in the chasidic community, where rumors about his preying on children had circulated for years.
In 2012, Lebovits’ conviction was vacated because of a prosecution error, and a new trial was ordered. Ultimately, in 2014, Lebovits pleaded guilty to the charges and was given a two-year sentence; with credit for time served and good behavior, he spent only a few additional months in jail.
The 2012 reversal of Lebovits’ initial conviction came a year after another man, Samuel Kellner, was indicted for bribing a witness to falsely testify against Lebovits and attempting to extort the Lebovits family in exchange for a promise he would persuade the witnesses against Lebovits to withdraw their charges.
The convoluted case against Kellner, who alleged that Lebovits had abused his son, began to fall apart in the summer of 2013 and was dismissed in March of 2014; the dismissal came after an investigation by then-incoming District Attorney Thompson determined that the witnesses against Kellner lacked credibility to such a degree that the case could not be prosecuted. (Kellner’s attorneys and supporters have always maintained that he was framed in an effort to undermine the case against Lebovits and keep him out of jail).
Among those witnesses was a man named MT, who had, with Kellner’s help, first come forward to detectives as a victim of Lebovits in 2008 but abruptly withdrew from the case in 2009. About a year later, MT told prosecutors that Kellner had paid him to fabricate the allegations against Lebovits, which he then recanted before going on to testify against Kellner in the grand jury.
An investigation by The Jewish Week, begun in 2012, uncovered information that suggested that MT’s withdrawal from the Lebovits case — and his subsequent allegations against Kellner — was likely the result of tampering and intimidation by people with connections to Lebovits. The Jewish Week investigation also found that much of this information, along with other evidence of witness tampering and intimidation in the case, had been in the possession of the district attorney, who nonetheless failed to act on it.
Indeed, the problem of witness intimidation is seen as a significant impediment to getting sex abuse victims in the tight-knit charedi world to come forward to law enforcement rather than bring allegations to local rabbis to handle. And while abuse survivors and their advocates have long spoken out about the issue, almost no one has been charged with these crimes.
In 2000, Bernard Freilich, who had served on former Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes’ advisory board and was at the time a special assistant and spiritual adviser to Superintendent James McMahon of the New York State Police, was charged with threatening an alleged incest victim and her husband in order to prevent them from testifying against him. Freilich was ultimately acquitted, but in the wake of the case, influential members of the charedi community began calling for Hynes’ removal for what the Village Voice wrote was “seen as the latest in a series of wrongs directed against the Orthodox community.”
Hynes, who was seen as having very close ties to the charedi community, did not pursue another Orthodox witness intimidation case again until 2012. At that time, he charged four men with trying to silence the victim of Nechemya Weberman. While all of the men pleaded guilty, only one received jail time, a sentence of four months.
Before Kellner’s case was dismissed, prosecutors had indicated to the court that they were conducting an investigation into one man in particular, Zalmen Ashkenazi, and his connections to the Lebovits family. Ashkenazi’s name first surfaced publicly after The Jewish Week obtained a tape recording in which MT told an acquaintance that he was told to “go against” Kellner by Ashkenazi, who, he claimed, had also supplied him with an attorney.
As it turned out, by that time the Kellner prosecutors had already obtained financial records showing that Ashkenazi was paying for MT’s travel to and from Israel. To date, however, no charges have been brought against Ashkenazi or anyone else in connection with tampering allegations related to the case.
A spokesperson for Thompson declined to comment on the intimidation probe.
Attempts to reach Ashkenazi were unsuccessful and an email to MT’s lawyer, John Lonuzzi, did not receive a response by press time.
Lebovits attorney, Arthur Aidala, also declined to comment.
Kellner attorney Niall MacGiollabhui, who says he is cooperating with the DA’s office, told The Jewish Week, “We know that Ashkenazi and others, such as Joe Levin, who helped a serial rapist of children evade justice, are just the tip of the iceberg.” (Levin is a private investigator who told The New Yorker magazine last November that, while working for the Lebovitses, he had bugged Kellner’s van).
“The test for the district attorney,” MacGiollabhui continued, “is whether the full extent of what lurks beneath will be exposed.”
News of the investigation was greeted with guarded optimism among abuse survivors and their advocates, including Chaim Levin, who says he is personally acquainted with an alleged Lebovits victim. Levin also helped to organize a rally in support of Kellner when he was still under indictment.
“The injustice that was done in the Lebovits case has shattered the trust of so many survivors in the DA’s office,” Levin told The Jewish Week Tuesday.
“This case has served to remind us that power and influence still trumped justice,” he said, “and I’m hopeful that this new development will change that perception for the future.”
For other advocates, that hopefulness is balanced with a sense of skepticism about how far the DA’s investigation will go.
Ros Dann, a spokesperson for Survivors for Justice, an organization that advocates and educates on issues related to child safety, said: “We have been waiting impatiently for this DA to prosecute the bad actors who perverted justice in the Lebovits and Kellner cases. Unfortunately, based upon his performance to date, we are anticipating, if anything, the prosecution of a low-level scapegoat, as opposed to the powerful people who are really behind what went on in these cases, and what continues to go on.
“We call upon DA Thompson to demonstrate that he won’t tolerate the witness intimidation and obstruction of justice that prevents sex abuse victims from reporting these crimes to the police.”
Reporting from Israel, our Josh Mitnick notes that an emboldened Hezbollah poses a serious threat in the north. Closer to home, Staff Writer Amy Sara Clark describes the influx of Orthodox families into the Marine Park neighborhood of Brooklyn.ISRAEL NEWS
Hezbollah Is 'Emboldened'
Tensions in north, not Iran, now seen as country’s most pressing problem.
Joshua Mitnick
Israel Correspondent
Israeli soldiers stand guard near Quneitra on the Israel-Syria border after two m ortars fired from war-torn Syria.Getty
Tel Aviv — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has spent the last few months focusing the world’s attention on the threat of the Iran nuclear program, but in recent days many Israeli analysts and officials have suggested that Israel’s most immediate threat actually comes from Iran’s proxy in Lebanon: Hezbollah.The possibility of a serious flare-up between the Shiite militants and Israel was once again at the center of discussion this week as tensions flared along Israel’snorthern border for the second time since the beginning of 2015.
Arab reports of Israeli attacks in Syria against targets with so-called “game-changing” weapons — potentially destined for Hezbollah in Lebanon — spurred an attempted retaliation along the Golan border by operatives in Syria that most Israelis consider linked in some way to the Shiite militants. Israel responded by calling in an air attack on the border that killed four Syrians who were attempting to plant an explosive device near the border fence outside the Druze village of Majdal Shams.
In January, Israel was accused of launching a one-of-a-kind strike on a Hezbollah convoy in the Syrian Golan Heights that killed an Iranian general and the son of Hezbollah’s former military chief. Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon repeated this week what Israeli officials said after reports of the January attack emerged: “We won’t allow Iran and Hezbollah to establish a terrorist infrastructure with Syria.”
Quiet for more than 30 years despite the lack of peace, the Golan has become, over the last four years, the site of battles between Syrian regime forces and rebels in the civil war — hostilities that occasionally have spilled over the Israeli border. But analysts say a strategic shift has taken place in recent months as Hezbollah, which has focused mainly on propping up the Assad regime in the ongoing civil war, has started targeting Israel from across the Golan.
The move has expanded the Hezbollah-Israel standoff from Lebanon — where there’s been nine years of stability and quiet —into new uncertain territory where the so-called ground rules are much more murky.
Israel’s United Nations ambassador, Ron Prosor, complained in a letter to the Security Council Tuesday about the “growing threat” to Israel from terrorists using Syrian territory as launching pads. He said Hezbollah is “openly operating in the Golan Heights and preparing for a violent confrontation with Israel.”
“The international community can no longer ignore the warning signs,” he added. “The threat to our region is very real.”
“The stakes are much higher,” said Daniel Nisman, head of Levantine Group, a Tel Aviv-based defense analyst who focuses on the Middle East. “You have a Hezbollah that is seemingly emboldened to directly retaliate against Israel.”
Indeed, earlier this month, a Foreign Ministry policy paper authored by Director Gen. Nissim Ben Shitrit described the need to formulate a stance toward Hezbollah and the rising threat on the northern border as the “most severe problem” facing Israel. “Themilitary experience that Hezbollah is getting in Syria and the amount and quality of ammunition that is being smuggled from there into Lebanon makes dealing with the organization the most pressing and critical problem for Israel,” the paper said.
Though the paper seems like a divergence from the prime minister’s talking points, Haaretz military commentator Amos Harel said that the nuclear talks with Iran has rendered the probability of a military confrontation between Israel and Tehran unlikely. That makes Hezbollah the most pressing problem.
“In recent years there’s been a rise in
the boldness of Hezbollah regarding Israel and its desire to show that Hezbollah is not paralyzed by fear in the face of [Israel’s] military strength,” Harel wrote.
Though attacks in Syria attributed to Israel in recent years have usually passed without a significant response by the Assad regime, Hezbollah’s new Golan operations are seen by Israeli analysts as an effort to rewrite the rules of engagement across the Israel-Syria frontier. Every time Israel is fingered by reports as going on the offensive in Syria, Hezbollah is expected to try and mete out revenge along the Golan Heights.
At stake is the rising potential for an all-out escalation in which Hezbollah might unleash some of the tens of thousands of rockets in an arsenal capable of covering all of Israel, hitting close to targets, and raining thousands of missiles a day. Such a conflict would be exponentially worse in terms of damage and casualties than Israel’s battle against Hamas in 2006.
Nisman said Israel may be betting that Hezbollah still doesn’t want an all-out war at a time when its units are propping up Assad in Syria and fighting ISIS in northern Lebanon. If that bet is wrong, the analyst noted, the timing for a flare-up with Hezbollah would still favor Israel.
“Israel’s willingness to go ahead with these strikes — even though it knows that it has a real risk of escalation — begs the question of whether Israel wants to take the initiative against Hezbollah while it is involved in Syria,” Nisman said. “In my opinion, Israel believes a new conflict might be inevitable with Hezbollah, and some may think that now is preferable to when the conflict in Syria is over and Hezbollah is stronger.”
In the hours after the attempt to place the explosive and the Israeli air attack, Arab news networks reported that Israel carried out a fresh attack on weapons targets in Syria. The Israeli media, however, reported that a defense official — who was presumably worried about a further escalation —- broke Israel’s usual silence to issue a rare denial of responsibility.
The border fighting was audible from the Golan village of Majdal Shams, where residents reported hearing three explosions overnight on Sunday. There have been at least two other border incidents near the village in the last year, said Salman Fakhir Aldeen, a resident and a human rights activist.
“Israel and Hezbollah are sending text messages to one another at the border,” he said ironically. “It’s a bloody dialogue.”
Some prominent Israeli national security experts are worried that officials here might be misreading the intent of those signals coming from Hezbollah. In a recent opinion article in Haaretz, former Defense Minister Moshe Arens wrote that even though Israel has relied on the deterrence established during the 2006 war with Hezbollah and threats to obliterate Lebanese villages in case of an all-out war with the Shiite group in the future, there is a substantial threat that Hezbollah may one day resort to its missiles.
“Despite the efforts that were made over the years to interfere with the supply of weapons to Hezbollah from Iran and Syria, the Shiite group’s capabilities to cause severe damage to civilian population and infrastructure has continued to grow,” Arens wrote. “It should be clear the hope that Israel will be able to deter Hezbollah from utilizing this capability cannot be considered an adequate strategy for Israel.”
Some believe that Israel’s deterrence against Hezbollah is already eroding and in need of bolstering. Kobi Marom, a former colonel who served in southern Lebanon and now lives in the Golan Heights resort of Neve Ativ, said that Israel erred by not retaliating after Hezbollah killed two IDF soldiers in a tit-for-tat attack in January.
He said that Hezbollah is trying to establish new “rules of the game” for hostilities along the Golan border in which it is acceptable for the Shiite group to retaliate for attacks linked with Israel. Marom, currently a research fellow at the Herzilya Interdisciplinary Institute, said that Israel should take advantage of Hezbollah’s relative weakness to reestablish that deterrence.
Despite the concern about an emboldened Hezbollah and the possibility of the Syrian war coming close to Israel, he said, life in the Golan continues as normal.
“I just came from the border, and it’s really quiet,” he said. “We continue our life here in the northern Golan Heights. Our kids went to school this morning, and everything is working as normal.”
The question is, whether time is running out on that sense of normalcy.
editor@jewishweek.org
NEW YORK
Orthodox Influx Remaking Marine Park
Opening of second JCC is sign of changing makeup as families priced out of Midwood.
Amy Sara Clark
Staff Writer
Several kosher eateries have sprung up in Marine Park to serve a growing Orthodox clientele. Michael Datikash/JW
When Shalom Gurgov began looking to buy a house 18 months ago, he had hoped to find something close to where he was renting in Borough Park, or perhaps a place in Kensington, where his parents lived. But he saw quickly that staying in either neighborhood wasn’t in the cards.“The prices were too high, or if the price was right, the condition was bad,” he said. The 32-year-old computer programmer and father of four eventually found himself looking in Marine Park, the South Brooklyn neighborhood named for the adjacent 530-acre wildlife preserve and city park that has a golf course, cricket fields, playgrounds and sports fields.
“I noticed there were a lot of young families. We felt like we would fit right in,” he said. In October he and his family moved to a house on Avenue P and East 36th Street, and he hasn’t looked back. “There are playgrounds for the kids. Marine Park itself is close by. It’s pretty quiet. It’s like the suburbs of Brooklyn,” he said.
Gurgov is not alone. In recent years, hundreds of Orthodox families have moved to Marine Park, looking for affordable housing that is walking distance from their families living in Midwood and Flatbush and the kosher amenities offered there. Between the late 1990s and today, the number of Orthodox synagogues in the neighborhood shot up from none to 16, and a second Jewish Community Council of Marine Park building opened in January.
The approximately 1-mile square neighborhood is just west of Midwood and Sheepshead Bay, roughly bordered by Kings Highway to the north, Flatbush Avenue to the east, Avenue U to the south and Nostrand and Gerritsen avenues to the West. It’s long been populated by Irish and Italian civil servants — policemen, firemen and sanitation workers. Twenty or 30 years ago it also had a “substantial Jewish community,” said Marine Park Councilman Alan Maisel, but that generation died off, and membership at the neighborhood’s sole synagogue, Marine Park Jewish Center, dwindled.
Then, in the late 1990s young Jewish families began considering the neighborhood as prices in areas like Borough Park and Midwood soared. In an indication of the changing demographics of the neighborhood, Marine Park Jewish Center, established as a Conservative synagogue in 1951, is now an Orthodox congregation.
“Somewhere around 15 or 17 years ago, I put my very first Orthodox couple in Marine Park; there wasn’t even one [Orthodox] synagogue. ... I was thinking: Are they crazy? Where are they going to go to shul?” said Lisa Lilker Reich, associate broker at Madison Estates, a Marine Park-area real estate firm.
“At the time there was not one single [Orthodox] synagogue in a 10 to 15 block radius,” she said. “Now it’s completely young frum couples, the streets are filled with baby carriages.”Reich said she was surprised at “how fast and furious” the influx of Orthodox families was. “There was a five-year period when it went crazy,” she said.
The growth of the Orthodox community in Marine Park reflects a borough-wide boom in Orthodox communities. In 2002, 37 percent of Brooklyn Jews, or 168,720 people were Orthodox. In 2011, 41 percent of Brooklyn Jews, or 230,051, were Orthodox, according to the UJA Federation of New York’s Jewish Community Studies in 2002 and 2011.
Particularly notable is the explosion of growth of the number of chasidic and black-hat Jews in the Borough. Between 2002 and 2011, the number of charedi Jews living in Borough Park rose by 71 percent and the number in Williamsburg rose by 41 percent, according to the UJA Federation of New York report.
Marine Park is one of several Brooklyn neighborhoods seeing spillover from bursting-at-the-seams Orthodox areas. Bedford Stuyvesant and South Williamsburg have increasingly become home to Satmar Jews spilling over from Williamsburg, and Kensington has been getting Orthodox Jews from Borough Park.
In Marine Park, most of the spillover comes from Midwood, where a three-bedroom home can sell for $900,000, and most of the houses are much larger, in the five- and six-bedroom range, and sell for $1.5 or $1.6 million. In Marine Park, the houses are smaller, and it’s still possible to get a three-bedroom house for around $450,000.
“The prices are affordable,” said Reich.
“It’s unbelievable, the growth of the Jewish community in the past 10 years or so,” said Rabbi Baruch Pesach Mendelson of Kehilah Marine Park, which was founded in 2005 and was one of the first Orthodox shuls to open in the neighborhood.
“Every six months or so, another rabbi opens another synagogue,” Rabbi Mendelson said. Currently the neighborhood has about 16 Orthodox synagogues.
Kehilah Marine Park has a membership of between 40 and 50, which is the norm in the area, said Rabbi Mendelson. A lot of synagogues are in basements, or on the first floor of a rabbi’s house.
“I think in our neighborhood people are used to small synagogues,” he said. “Everybody finds their own little corner and camps there and hopefully enjoys it. If they don’t enjoy the experience, they walk two blocks over to the next one.”
“The location gives it a feel of being slightly outside of the hubbub of Brooklyn Orthodox life, but at the same time it’s close enough that you have all the conveniences. ... People live close enough to walk to their parents and in-laws,” he said.
Today there are about 1,000 Jewish families in Marine Park, but despite the influx, the neighborhood doesn’t have a kosher supermarket or many kosher restaurants. Most Orthodox residents drive over to Midwood to do their shopping. They are already used to buying their food there, and the stores are less expensive than kosher stores that have attempted to make a go of it in Marine Park, said Mendelson.
One institution that has flourished in Marine Park is the Jewish Community Council of Marine Park. It was started in 2008 by Shea Rubenstein, Shua Gelbstein, Yossi Sharf and Jeff Leb, who all lived in the area at the time, to provide social services,legal assistance, computer classes, food assistance, a Sunday girls program and other programs for Jews in the area. The main site on Flatbush Avenue and Avenue P, was joined in January by a second location that includes a large social hall and room for additional social service providers on Quenton Road and East 35th Street.
The JCC’s flagship program is Project Machel, which provides subsidies to families that aren’t able to qualify for food stamps but that need help with the expense of buying kosher food. Instead of a traditional food pantry, the program gives families a $50 credit at a local store.“When a person loses their job there is a huge shame factor,” said Rubenstein, JCC of Marine Park's executive vice president. “They don’t want to go to a food pantry to pick up food they do not need. So instead they ... can essentially walk into the store and purchase anything they need."
The program, said Leb, “really took off” and today distributes $90,000 per year to families in need. “We had government funding, but a lot of the funding was grassroots. It really gave people a good feeling to know that they were helping people around the corner,” he said.
“It’s a very warm, comfortable neighborhood,” said Reeves Eisen, Councilman Maisel’s chief of staff.
“I think it really provides a nice place for people to raise their families,” said Rabbi Mendelson. “It has a strongly religious atmosphere; you can feel it in the streets.”
Most in the Orthodox community are yeshivish, and about 20 to 25 percent are Modern Orthodox, said Rubenstein. The rest, he said, are unaffiliated.
But despite the diversity of affiliation and disparate shul membership, community leaders describe the neighborhood as unified.
“I think the amazing quality about it is that it’s a very nonjudgmental community,” said Leb. In other Orthodox communities, he said, people tend to cluster together based on religious affiliation. But, he said, “Marine Park really is a melting pot ... no judgments.”
amyclark@jewishweek.org
Also this issue, Rand Paul wins over a group of skeptical pro-Israel supporters; Holocaust survivorconfronts Auschwitz guard at trial in Germany; remembering Rabbi Allan Schrantz of Sutton Place Synagogue and Vladimir Slepak, the father of the refusenik movement; and Erica Brown on a voice for Jewish singles.
NEW YORKRand Paul Tackles Perceptions In Charedi Brooklyn
Disputes image as isolationist, insensitive to Jews.
Jonathan Mark
Associate Editor
Sen. Rand Paul, center, at meeting with Orthodox leaders, spoke warmly about Israel, religious virtues, tuitiontax credits.
Does Sen. Rand Paul’s reputation as the candidate most disconnected from Jews have validity, or is it misinformation that precedes him?Rabbi Pinchas Lipshutz, publisher of the highly influential charedi weekly Yated Ne’eman, told the Republican presidential candidate at a meeting in Kensington last week, that when he was first invited to meet Paul, the rabbi said, “Paul? Are you crazy? He’s an anti-Semite. It’s the elephant in the room,” said Rabbi Lipshutz, “so I’m bringing it up.”
Rabbi Lipshutz was among several dozen Orthodox leaders invited to meet with Paul at the headquarters of Torah Umesorah, the National Society For Hebrew Day Schools, one of the largest Orthodox institutions with 675 yeshivas and nearly 200,000 students. Paul was peppered with questions on the perception that he’s an isolationist (he offered nuanced reflections on the mistakes of interventionists, yet supported war as an option); Iran (he supports negotiations but he doesn’t trust Iran); questions on Israel (he seemed on Prime Minister Netanyahu’s wavelength); and whether he supported school vouchers and tax credits for yeshiva tuition (he did, “I’m a big supporter of school choice,” though he thought education should be more of a local issue than a federal one).
When he spoke of his strong belief in religion as vital to American civilization — his opening statement was not political but completely philosophical about the virtues of religion — along with his pleasurable recollections of a Shabbos dinner in Jerusalem, singing and dancing with Mir yeshiva boys, he so enchanted the Orthodox leaders in the room that almost all skepticism vanished as they stood in the line to pose for smiling pictures with the libertarian Kentucky senator.
Rabbi Lipshutz, who was at that Shabbos dinner with Paul in Jerusalem, told the candidate in front of the other leaders, “I saw that you’re a decent, really a genuine, nice, intelligent, loving person. And everything I read about you [being disconnected from Jewish concerns] was a lie. It was not true. I thought that you could really win.” The Torah Umesorah conference room erupted with applause. “I told [a friend] I’m going to support this guy,” he said.
Although polls show that the Democrats are increasingly vulnerable to Orthodox defections in the wake of President Obama’s public annoyance, even contempt, for Netanyahu, and the growing sense that the president pressures Israel but not the Palestinians, nevertheless, Republican candidates have been zeroing in on the Orthodox community in this first furlong of the campaign. Even before announcing, Sen. Ted Cruz gave such a stirring keynote address at the Zionist Organization of America dinner in December that many wearing yarmulkes interrupted him with ongoing chants of “Run Ted, Run!” Last week, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush attended a private gathering at the Ramaz School. Now, Paul was staking his claim in Brooklyn.
Also last week, in Las Vegas, Politico reported that the biggest contributors to the Republican Jewish Coalition met at the home of Sheldon Adelson, who contributed $100 million to candidates in 2012. Politico added that the coalition has “long been suspicious of the Kentucky senator.” In 2010, Matt Brooks, the RJC’s longtime executive director, called Paul a “neo-isolationist” and said he was “outside the comfort level of a lot of people in the Jewish community.” This year, Politico reported, Paul has “been surpassed in early polling by a group of more outwardly pro-Israel candidates,” such as Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Jeb Bush.
At Torah Umesorah, Paul asked softly, “What are perceptions?” He said things are improving. Recent polling on his Israel positions didn’t reveal “as much of a problem as it might have been, two or three years ago, before people knew me.” He sponsored a bill called “the Stand With Israel Act. It says that we shouldn’t give money to the Palestinian Authority, allied with Hamas, because indirectly we may be funding missiles being launched against Israel. And AIPAC doesn’t support me on the bill. In fact, they lobbied against me on the bill. So, what is that saying, two Jews, three opinions? Every Jewish person isn’t the same, or has the same thoughts. ... I think Israel is one of our best allies and best friends around the world. ... I don’t think there’s any question where I stand … but there will be naysayers who for competitive advantage will spread untruths.”
As for Iran’s nuclear threat, said Paul, “If there’s a way that we can have a negotiated peace, I want peace as opposed to war. And that’s exactly what [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu said when he came before a joint session of Congress. … That doesn’t mean that I favor a bad deal, though. My main concern about the deal right now [is that] the president writes 1,300 words and says the agreement means this, and then the Iranians come out with 500 words, they tweak it in English, saying exactly the opposite … and I think that goes to the sincerity or the credibility of whether or not we can believe they will keep their word and the agreement.”
Another problem, said Paul, is Iran maintaining “that they’re only talking about nuclear enrichment and not terrorism or ballistic missiles. I think that was a good point Netanyahu made when he came here, that we really need to be talking about all of this,” missiles and terrorism included.
Paul said the interim agreement with Iran is better than no agreement, or no inspections, “and it’s better than the military option, frankly, at this point.” Nevertheless, “I’m very, very skeptical of the Iranians since they’re [saying that the agreement] doesn’t mean what Obama says it means.”
Asked by one of the rabbis whether the label of “isolationist” was an unfair assessment, the senator replied, “The short answer is yes. I think foreign policy is a spectrum,” between isolation and intervention. “In recent years, I think we’ve been too close to [trying to be] everywhere all the time, and sometimes it’s been to our detriment, with unintended consequences.” What Paul called “Hillary’s war” in Libya “is, was, and continues to be an utter disaster. [Slain Libyan strongman Muamar] Kaddafy wasn’t a good guy but he suppressed radical Islam. Now that Kaddafy is gone, the country’s in civil war, our ambassador was killed, our embassy fled, a third of the country now supports ISIS, so I would ask the question, are we better off or worse off with Kaddafy gone?”
He gave the examples of the fiasco of Syrian involvement, and giving weapons “supposedly to the moderates ... those weapons would end up in the hands of ISIS. Saudi Arabia has flooded weapons in there. Saudi Arabia is an ostensible ally, an ostensible friend, and they haven’t been helpful. They have supported radical Islam in our country, they support radical Islam around the world, and they indiscriminately put weapons into the Syrian civil war.”
He added, “I think it was a mistake to topple [Saddam] Hussein. Hussein was the bulwark against Iran. Now Iraq is a vassal state of Iran.”
So, said Paul, for opponents to call him an isolationist is too simple. “There are times you fight and times you don’t.” If we do fight, we have to realize that “there are sometimes unintended consequences. … I’m not an isolationist. I am somebody who believes that war is the last resort. If we use it, we use it effectively and we use it to win.”
After 9/11, for example, “I would have voted to go into Afghanistan,” said Paul. “I would have voted to do anything we had to do to get Bin-Laden. So there are times you do have to act. Now ISIS is a threat, and I am for military action and I am for the bombing campaign.”
Other than the charedi Yated Ne’eman, the media was not invited to ask any questions, and so there was no discussion about even religious issues in the news, such as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (regarding the rights of a religious person to refrain doing business with a gay wedding). However, Paul said, “I think freedom requires tradition … liberty requires virtue. ... You have to have religion. You need a religious backbone for a culture, or for a civilization.”
jonathan@jewishweek.org
INTERNATIONAL
Survivor Confronts Auschwitz Guard At Trial In Germany
Indiana’s Eva Kor, face to face with Oskar Groening during recess.
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
Oskar Groening, a wartime SS guard at the death camp who is on trial for his role in the deaths of 300,000 prisoners. Eva Kor
It happened during the lunch recess Tuesday, the first day of the trial in Germany of the former Auschwitz guard being tried on 300,000 counts of complicity in the murder of Hungarian Jews who were sent to the gas chambers in the summer of 1944.Eva Kor, a 4-foot, 10-inch 81-year-old woman, walked up to the former SS officer, Oskar Groening, 93, as he sat at the defense table.
“I was curious to see how he would react to me,” she later told The Jewish Week by phone from Germany. “I walked up to him and introduced myself. I said I am a survivor of Auschwitz. He grabbed my hand and tried to get up. He had a warm, strong hand. Suddenly, he fainted and fell back.
“The chair was no longer under him and his head was falling to the ground. At that moment, he was not a Nazi but an old man who was going to fall to the ground, and I was an old woman trying to save him.
“But I’m too small and too old to save him, so I screamed, ‘He is falling and I can’t stop him.’ It happened so fast and nobody was paying attention. But then two guys grabbed his chair and lifted him into it.”
Groening, who had shuffled into the courtroom using a walker, must have fainted from standing up “too fast,” Kor surmised. “I remember that his feet were like mush — he couldn’t hold them on the ground — and couldn’t even hold his body up.”
Kor of Terre Haute, Ind., one of 67 Auschwitz survivors who are co-plaintiffs in the case, had a chance to address Groening the next day. It came after he had testified for many hours and requested an adjournment for the day. The panel of five judges deciding his fate agreed, but Groening said he first wanted to hear the testimony of Eva Kor.
“He seemed to know something about me personally,” she said later. “I believe he knew I forgave the Nazis and that therefore I am not a threat.”
She was referring to the letter she famously wrote in 1995 to a former Nazi doctor, Hans Munch, saying she had decided to forgive all Nazis.
She mentioned that letter in the statement she read to the court, explaining that it was her way of thanking Munch for agreeing to accompany her to Auschwitz on the 50th anniversary of its liberation and for signing a statement at the ruins of its gas chambers to attest to their existence.
“For me, it was a life-changing experience,” Kor said in her statement. “I realized I had power over my life. I had the power to heal the pain imposed on me in Auschwitz by forgiving the people who imposed that pain.”
And then, addressing Groening, Kor said: “It is true, but sad, that we cannot change what happened in Auschwitz. I am hoping that you and I, as former adversaries, can meet as people who respect one another as human beings and can relate to one another to understand, to heal, and to express thoughts that would not be possible any other way. …
“I am probably the only survivor who has forgiven all the Nazis, including you, in my name alone. My forgiveness does not absolve the perpetrators from taking responsibility for their actions, nor does it diminish my need and right to ask questions about what happened at Auschwitz.”
She said that although her parents and two older sisters were murdered at Auschwitz, she and her 10-year-old twin sister, Miriam, survived because Dr. Josef Mengele used them as guinea pigs for his experiments. Kor then asked Groening why only Auschwitz inmates were tattooed, whether he knew Mengele, knew of his experiments, what happened to Mengele’s files, and what he injected into her body that nearly killed her.
Groening did not answer her questions that day, but Kor said she hopes he will during the course of what is expected to be a three-month trial. If convicted, Groening faces up to 15 years in prison.
Of the approximately 6,500 members of the SS who worked at Auschwitz, only 49 have been convicted of war crimes. Groening himself had been previously cleared of war crimes by a German court, but these new charges were filed after a former guard at the Sobibor death camp, John Demjanjuk, was tried and convicted in 2011 for his involvement in the murder of 28,000 people there. He died in 2012.
That conviction led German prosecutors to change their policy when dealing with suspected Nazi war criminals, according to Efraim Zuroff, founder and director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem and its chief Nazi hunter.
“Prior to that, prosecutors had to prove [the defendant] had committed a specific crime against a specific person,” he told The Jewish Week by phone from Israel. “It applied to those who served in the six camps in Poland that had the ability for mass extermination, and to those who served in mobile killing units that were used in the Soviet Union.”
Demjanjuk had been an “armed SS guard who took people off trains at Sobibor and pushed them into the assembly line of mass annihilation,” Zuroff said.
Groening, on the other hand, was “not someone who pulled the trigger,” he noted. Rather, he was known as the accountant of Auschwitz because he “was in charge ofmaking sure that the money brought by deportees was used for the benefit of the Reich. He was among those who facilitated the mass murder; he made it possible to happen.”
But unlike other accused Nazis, Zuroff said, Groening has not only admitted what he did but has spoken openly of the atrocities he witnessed at Auschwitz.
“In the 35 years I have been doing this, I can’t think of someone else openly speaking critically of the crimes committed where they were,” Zuroff observed.
Groening first spoke about it in 1985 when he was handed a book written by a Holocaust denier. He returned it after writing in it: “I saw everything. The gas chambers, the cremations, the selection process. … I was there.”
He later wrote a memoir for his family and gave interviews to a German news magazine and the BBC.
On the first day of his trial in the northern German city of Lueneburg near Hamburg, Groening, speaking in a firm voice, told the court: “It is beyond question that I am morally complicit. This moral guilt I acknowledge here, before the victims, with regret and humility. I ask for forgiveness. You have to decide on my legal culpability.”
Asked if there is a difference between being morally complicit and legally culpable, Zuroff said a person is guilty either because of his “physical participation or administrative participation.”
“He is hoping to get off on a technicality,” he said. “Without these people, the whole system could not have worked.”
Asked about the thinking of the German legal system that refused to prosecute such people until 2011, Zuroff said, “People had said why should they [SS officers] be punished when those who had more important jobs were not prosecuted, acquitted or given light sentences. But if you have a gang that carries out a series of murders and the top people get away, the others may not be as guilty as the leaders but that is beside the point. They must be tried as accessories to murder.”
Prosecutor Jens Lehmann acknowledged as much when he told the court that Groening had made “at least a low-level contribution” to the “smooth operation” of Auschwitz.
Groening testified that shortly after being assigned to Auschwitz in 1942, he saw drunken guards speak of “getting rid” of prisoners. He said he witnessed that himself in December of that year when he was awakened to chase down inmates who were attempting to escape. In the process, he saw prisoners herded into a building and gas poured into an opening on the side of the building. Then he heard screams from those inside.
The cries, he said, “grew louder and more desperate, until they fell silent. … That was the only time I saw a complete gassing. I did not take part.”
An estimated 1.1 million people — primarily European Jews — were murdered between 1940 and January 1945 at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Groening also recounted seeing an SS guard kill an apparently abandoned baby who was found lying amid some trash. To stop the child from crying, he smashed its head against a truck.
Groening said he complained to a superior but that no action was taken. And he said that on three separate occasions he asked to be transferred from Auschwitz but that his requests were denied.
“What kind of hatred was behind it?” he asked rhetorically about the Holocaust. “I just can’t understand it.”
During May and July 1944 — the period for which Groening is being tried — about 425,000 Hungarian Jews were sent by train to the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex; most were gassed immediately. Groening testified that there were so many trains arriving that they often piled up and would have to wait with their doors closed until the one in the station was “processed.”
“The capacity of the gas chambers and the capacity of the crematoria were quite limited,” he was quoted as saying. “Someone said that 5,000 people were processed in 24 hours, but I didn’t verify this. I didn’t know. For the sake of order, we waited until train one was entirely processed and finished.”
He later said that it was clear to him that none of the arriving Jews were expected to leave the camp alive.
“I couldn’t imagine that” happening, he said.
Kor said the “value of his testimony” is the impact it might have on neo-Nazi groups and young people who don’t believe the Holocaust existed.
“For a Nazi to admit in court what happened sends an important message,” she said.
This story first appeared last week on The Jewish Week’s website,thejewishweek.org.
NEW YORK
Sutton Place Rabbi: ‘A Preacher’s Preacher’
Rabbi Allan Schranz, 68, remembered as brilliant, compassionate.
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
Rabbi Allan Schranz: Combined sensitivity for people with intellectual curiosity. Courtesy of Asher Schranz
During his days as a university student in Los Angeles three decades ago, Marco Greenberg, not a regular attendee at synagogue services, received a call one day from his grandmother. She praised a new rabbi at her congregation, Sinai Temple, as brilliant and inspiring.Intrigued, Greenberg went to Sinai Temple. And he kept going back.
“I, too, was blown away,” Greenberg, now an Upper West Side resident who works in marketing, said of Rabbi Allan Schranz, former spiritual leader of Manhattan’s Sutton Place Synagogue. Rabbi Schranz died at the age of 68 at his home on April 16 from complications of a rare degenerative disease.
Rabbi Schranz stepped down in 2012 from the East Side pulpit, where he had served since 1998.
People who knew Rabbi Schranz recalled him as a combination of scholarly and street-smart, expert in secular literature and Jewish holy texts, eloquent sermonizer and teacher and compassionate pastor to the members of his congregation.
“He was a preacher’s preacher — an intellectual who enjoyed sharing knowledge,” said William Berman, rabbi emeritus of the Commack Jewish Center and a friend of Rabbi Schranz since their student days together at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. “He was very insightful — he did not like clichés.
“He had deep Jewish feelings. He had a deep appreciation for Jewish learning,” Rabbi Berman said of his friend’s motivation for entering the rabbinate. “He knew what he was good at.”
Greenberg said he “always considered him my rabbi,” even when he and Rabbi Schranz lived across the continent from each other; Greenberg said he would call on Rabbi Schranz to officiate at family life cycle events although he eventually belonged to a congregation on the other side of Manhattan from the rabbi.
Their friendship, which began on the West Coast, continued when both moved here.
A native of Manhattan who grew up in the Bronx, Rabbi Schranz attended Yeshiva University’s High School for Boys and Hunter College, where he was president of a campus Jewish group. He was ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary. He served at JTS and the Conservative movement’s University of Judaism in Los Angeles, and was a pulpit rabbi at several congregations before coming to Sutton Place.
He was also active in interfaith affairs and was a vice president of the New York Board of Rabbis.
“He was brilliant, and not fearful of taking a stand,” said Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, executive vice president of the Board of Rabbis.
“You have to be intellectually stimulating yet be able to hit [congregants] in the gut,” Rabbi Schranz said in an interview with The Jewish Week when he joined Sutton Place. “It’s like tefillin. You wear tefillin on your head, and on your arm, next to your heart … you need both.”
When he became Sutton Place’s spiritual leader, he instituted a film salon series and short story course, inviting such authors as Pete Hamill and Stephen Dubner.
“The arts are very important,” he said. “When it’s good and not just entertainment, it makes us think about how we lead our lives.”
In his various congregations, Rabbi Schranz built a reputation as a powerful speaker.
“He spoke with the conviction and gravitas of a great orator, and argued his case like a top trial lawyer,” Greenberg wrote in a remembrance essay. “While retaining his Bronx penchant for not beating around the bush, Allan combined his street instincts with genuine intellectualism. When he got off the bima, he would scale back his high energy to listen and meet people where they were at, with caring and sensitivity. He was always available.”
“I like being a public person,” Rabbi Schranz said in the Jewish Week interview. “I enjoy communicating my love of Judaism to people.”
In his pulpit, Rabbi Schranz exhibited a combination of respect for tradition and modern innovations.
Greenberg, who continued to visit regularly after the rabbi became ill, said, “He fought valiantly … gracefully,” never expressing pity or pain.
“Life,” Rabbi Schranz would say, “isn’t always what we plan.”
Rabbi Schranz is survived by his wife, Ellen; children Molly and Asher; and three sisters, Bernice Pleeter, Esther Cohen and Toby Rusgo; and two brothers, Howard and Mitchell Schranz.
steve@jewishweek.org
NEW YORK
‘Father’ Of The Refusenik Movement
Remembering Vladimir Slepak, whose efforts help to free millions.
Haskel Lookstein
Special To The Jewish Week
Natan Sharansky said that Vladimir Slepak, above, was “the heart and the pulse” of the Soviet Jewry movement. Jerusalem Post
About very few people can it be said that they changed history. Vladimir Slepak, who died last Thursday in New York City at 89, was one such person. He changed the course of Jewish history in two places.First, as one of the principal fathers of the Soviet Jewry refusenik movement, he transformed the status of Soviet Jews and, quite possibly, influenced the ultimate dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Reacting to his passing, Natan Sharansky told Slepak’s son, “Thousands of us stood on his shoulders.” Yosef Mendelevich, one of the most celebrated prisoners of Zion said, “The chief of the tribe is gone; he was the heart and the pulse of the movement; millions of people were born free because of Volodya,” as he was known to friends.
Vladimir Slepak was not only the father of the refusenik movement, he was probably the longest lasting refusenik. He waited for 18 years to receive his visa to Israel, where he spent much of the last years of his life. When he and his wife applied to Ovir for a visa in 1969, they were told, “Others may or may not get out but you will never get out.” It almost happened that way.
When someone wanted to leave the former Soviet Union, he needed several letters confirming the desire to leave. After all, why would anyone want to leave “paradise?” One letter had to be from one’s employer, and asking for it usually meant getting fired. Another had to come from one’s parents. Slepak could not get that letter because his father had been a high official in the Communist Party and was adamantly against his son’s “craziness.” Therefore, the warning “you are never getting out” was a harshly realistic one.
My wife and I first met Volodya Slepak in his home in Moscow in 1975, at a Shemini Atzeret dinner. He greeted us warmly with a big smile on his face, his dramatic beard making him look like a rebbe. He embraced us as old friends though he only knew of us through his wife, Masha, whom we had met on our first visit to Moscow three years earlier. Slepak was in jail at that time for 15 days because President Nixon was due in Moscow the next week and the Soviet authorities wanted the chief “trouble maker” out of the way.
The yom tov dinner guests included the leading refuseniks of Moscow: Anatoly (now Natan) Sharansky, Alexander Luntz, Ida Nudel, Vitaly Rubin, and about 15 others. One by one they got out. The Slepaks didn’t.
He and Masha were dramatic examples of courage and fortitude. They hung a sheet from their balcony overlooking Gorky Street (equivalent to Park Avenue in New York) on which were written the words, “Let us join our children in Israel.” Imagine flaunting such an expression in the face of the police state that was the former Soviet Union.
On June 1, 1978, Slepak was arrested, imprisoned and tried. Ultimately, he was exiled to Siberia for five years.
In May of 1987, my wife and I were going for our third mission to the Soviet Union. Our friend and mentor, Elie Wiesel, told me to tell Volodya that, “We will get him out.” His protégé, Natan Sharansky, had been released a little more than a year before and the Slepaks were very depressed after more than 17 years of refusal. One will never know how it happened, but five months later, in October of 1987, the Slepaks received their exit visas and made aliyah. The father of Soviet refuseniks finally was able to fulfill his dream.
Because of his efforts and those of his followers, the course of Jewish history in the former Soviet Union was irrevocably altered. Two million Jews got out. One million of them are now living in Israel while another million are scattered through the Western world. It was a miracle, but a miracle made possible by the work of the refusenik movement of which Vladimir Slepak was the father.
Slepak changed the course of history not only in the former Soviet Union but also here in America. American Jews in the 1960s were still hesitant to show their Judaismoutside in the streets. They were growing more confident inside but few wore a kipa outside and no one marched for Jewish causes in the streets of America. One of the major factors in changing all of this was the Soviet Jewish refusenik movement. American Jews understood that if Slepak and his followers could stand up to the terrifying repression of a police state, we in America could stand up proudly as Jews in this free society, show our Judaism confidently and demonstrate for Jewish causes when necessary.
Slepak and his refusenik comrades changed the course of history on two continents. Nothing would ever be the same in the Soviet Union or in the West. Jews would be free over there and confident and courageous here.
At the funeral here last Sunday, Vladimir Slepak’s son, Leonid, said. “They don’t make men like him anymore … men like him make us.”
Slepak spent the last four years of his life in New York, cared for by his sons. After the funeral, his body was flown to Israel and he was buried in Jerusalem. For the second time in his life, he was blessed to make aliyah.
Rabbi Haskell Lookstein is rabbi of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun in Manhattan and principal of the Ramaz School.
JEW BY VOICE
A Voice For Jewish Singles
Erica Brown
Special To The Jewish Week
Erica Brown
I’m about to enter a parking garage. The static is just starting on the radio when I put the car into reverse and park. One of my favorite songs is on, and I wasn’t prepared to lose it in a car garage: Freddie Mercury’s “Somebody to Love.” I cannot actually write those words without hearing his unusual, high-pitched, magical voice singing the lyrics. Because I stopped just to listen to the song, I heard it with increased intensity.I know that Freddie Mercury was not referring to the Jewish singles’ scene when he wrote this song. I also appreciate that he might not have been every Jewish mother’s dream on JDate. Yet the lyrics create a certain kind of compassion and dialogue with us that should make us willing to answer his question in the affirmative. Yes. I will find you somebody to love. Or at least I’m going to try.
“O, each morning I get up I die a little,” Mercury sings. Not all of us appreciate the wound that some single people feel because, try as they might — and sometimes they’ve been trying for years — they feel that each rejection is another opportunity that has died. A little of themselves went along with it.
“Take a look in the mirror and cry.” And sometimes that pervasive disquiet, the sense that there isn’t a match out there, fills people with acute anxiety. A friend I know described an enchanted single life that would have been really terrific had she known that she wasn’t going to spend a life without a partner. Self-doubt takes over: Am I loveable if I have not found somebody to love?
“I work hard every day of my life.” Just when the pain creeps in, there’s another voice that says not to look desperate, to keep it inside because it doesn’t have a place in the community conversation. I am strong. I work hard. I can go it alone. Even though the God of Genesis tells us it’s not good for humans to be alone, we may try to convince ourselves that we’re not lonely, just independent, when we can’t find that right someone. A lot of singles have shared with me the additional hurt when someone tells them — often a parent — that they’re not working hard enough at dating or are just too picky.
“I have spent all my years believing in you, but I just can’t get no relief, Lord!” Being single for a long time has prompted many to leave the fold or traditional observance. It’s hard to be single in a faith-based community or any community where family is upheld as a central value. Our Jewish organizations are filled with children and young couples, a nuclear family image that can be visually daunting and off-putting for singles. “I hated going to shul,” said a friend of her single years. Believers may put this question to God: “I am a religious/cultural Jew. I want to be married and raise a family, just like I thought You wanted of me. Why are you punishing me?” We underestimate the spiritual pain of being single and being Jewish.
So what are you doing to help those who want to be married — to find their somebody to love? Everyone needs to lavish attention and adoration on someone. Some of us make excuses for not setting people up: I am not good at it; I just don’t know anybody; I don’t have time; I don’t want to change our relationship. This isn’t my issue.
Wrong. If you live in a community this is your issue because it’s our issue. Make a list. Write down the single people you know. Remember: This is not only about young singles but anyone widowed, divorced or never married. If you can’t come up with anybody, then open your eyes wider.
For her 25th anniversary, a friend celebrated her own marriage by asking friends to come over with a list and description of the single people each knew. In every round we described one person to see if anyone thought there might be a potential match. We followed up by inputting the information into a computer program to save and use it as more such circles met and collaborated. She cared enough to spread the love.
Not everyone wants to be set up (Drop “fixed up”; no one is broken.) For those who do, it’s hurtful when others, especially friends, have done little to help. Make an effort. If it’s not a perfect match, you both got information for next time. Who knows? Someone might walk down an aisle and build a Jewish family simply because you picked up the phone.
We all need somebody to love. Thanks for the reminder, Freddie.
Erica Brown, whose column appears the first week of the month, is the author of “Seder Talk: A Conversational Haggada.”
Enjoy the read,
Gary Rosenblatt
P.S. Be sure to check out our website any time for late breaking and updated stories, and exclusive videos, blogs, opinion columns, and more.
http://www.thejewishweek.com/
BETWEEN THE LINES
Gary Rosenblatt
Israel: The Canary
In The Coal Mine After Arab terrorists killed nearly 3,000 innocent Americans on Sept. 11, 2001, I thought the world would see Israel’s plight in dealing with terrorists in a new light: a democracy subject to the violent hatred of those seeking to destroy “Big Satan” (the U.S.) and “Little Satan” (Israel), along with Western values of human rights and freedoms.
Perhaps there were those who came to see Israel as the canary in the coalmine, the warning sign of imminent danger to our way of life. Others failed or refused to see the connection.
In following world events I can’t help hearing the echoes of the Israeli experience. Most recently, two major issues in the news regarding American foreign policy — the use of drones in conducting a war against terror, and negotiations with Iran in preventing a nuclear war — have me thinking about comparisons to Israeli strategies and recent history, and lessons that could be learned.
The pained look on President Obama’s face, and his words of personal apology in announcing that an American drone strike killed two innocent non-combatants, spoke volumes about the moral dilemma involved in the use of the increasingly popular formof warfare that is imperfect in its implementation.
The appeal of UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), particularly for the U.S. after more than a decade of sending soldiers to fight, and too often die, in Iraq and Afghanistan, is that they can pinpoint and kill the enemy without the risk of endangering American lives. The downside, as underscored by the news of the accidental deaths of two civilian aid workers, Warren Weinstein, an American, and Giovanni Lo Porto, an Italian, who were being held hostage by al Qaeda in Pakistan, is that hitting the intended target is based on available intelligence analysis, subject to human error.
With calls now for the U.S. to review and revise its drone policy, which is based on the “near certainty” that innocents would not be harmed in attacks on the enemy, it would be helpful to look to Israel and its stringent approach to the use of drones. Israel’s defense forces go out of their way to avoid civilian casualties — warning non-combatants in advance of an air strike and often calling off a “hit” against terror leaders because of the possibility of killing innocents as well. It’s a problem compounded by the fact that Hamas fighters operate from civilian locations, defying the rules of civilized warfare. The bitter irony, though, is that Israel is accused of crimes against humanity when in fact its army may well be the most humane in the world.
Amos Guiora, an Israeli-American law professor and expert on the ethics of warfare, has criticized the U.S. for too broad a definition of a legitimate target, which he characterizes as “far too suggestive of ‘guilt by association.’”
He notes that the Obama administration’s targeting of those “likely” to be engaged in terrorist activity “casts an unacceptably wide net.” (The definition was upgraded recently to the target being an imminent threat to the U.S., but drone strikes in Pakistan were exempted.)
By contrast, Israel’s policy, which Guiora helped carry out when he served in the IDF, is based on “going to great lengths to gather and verify intelligence to ensure that potential targets are, in fact, still actively involved in terrorism.” In addition, Israel applies a proportionality analysis, taking into account whether the military gain in eliminating the target is worth the risk of civilian casualties.
True, mistakes have been made, but the IDF’s criteria and track record reflect a deep commitment to maintaining a high moral standard. The U.S. and the rest of the world would do well to emulate it.
On the Iran negotiations front, I have written here of my fear that Obama is so invested in the effort to normalize Iran’s revolutionary government that he seems willing to ignore the growing evidence that it will not change its goal of establishing an Islamic hegemony, backed by a nuclear arsenal. The president’s dismissal of recent, virulent comments by Iran’s supreme leader about the U.S. as “devil” and Israel as a pariah state deserving elimination recall the reaction of Shimon Peres to Yasir Arafat’s calls for jihad soon after the Oslo Accords were signed.
“Give the man his rhetoric,” Peres told me in an interview at the time.
He, too, was so committed to the peace effort that he and other Israeli leadersturned a blind eye to repeated violations of the agreement.
Jewish history has taught us all too well that when your enemy publicly states his intention to destroy you, take him seriously.
Even the pragmatic Yitzchak Rabin believed that at the first post-agreement terror attack, Israel would send in its forces and wipe out the Palestinian threat. But that was not to be, and the situation festers two decades later.
Similarly, Iran already insists the interim agreement differs markedly from the understanding the U.S. and its partners have of it. And Obama’s comments on the ability to “snap back” sanctions into place if Iran violates the accord seem especially fanciful. China and Russia, who make up part of the U.S.-led international effort, are anxious to resume trade with Iran, and Moscow has already announced a deal to provide Tehran with sophisticated defense missiles.
The president would be more believable if he were more realistic. He should make the case that the planned agreement would delay for a decade or so an Iran with nuclear arms -- not prevent it, as he has long pledged.
I am well aware that it is easier to expose large holes in the interim agreement than to offer a practical alternative that would keep Iran from ever having a nuclear weapon. But it is sophistry for Obama to frame the debate as simply a choice between going to war with Iran or signing a deal that offers potential peace. He leaves out the possibility of toughening up the deal or further tightening the sanctions.
We should not be more afraid of Iran walking away from the talks than they are of facing more economic hardship and the real threat of military action.
As Israel marked its 67th anniversary of statehood last week, a pessimist would focus on the existential threat a nuclear Iran represents for the Jewish state and the increasing diplomatic isolation it faces. An optimist would emphasize the miraculous existence and growth of this tiny state, flourishing as a dynamic democracy in an increasingly chaotic neighborhood.
Both views reflect truths, and the ongoing struggle to survive and thrive despite hardships is the story of the Jewish people since our forefather Jacob — later named Israel — wrestled with an angel.
I take comfort in the biblical assurance that Jews are an eternal people. And in times of stress, I am reminded of the three words of wisdom King Solomon, the wisest of all men, engraved on his ring: Gom zeh ya’avor — this, too, shall pass.gary@jewishweek.org
MUSINGS
Rabbi David Wolpe
Gary Rosenblatt
P.S. Be sure to check out our website any time for late breaking and updated stories, and exclusive videos, blogs, opinion columns, and more.
http://www.thejewishweek.com/
Gary Rosenblatt
Israel: The Canary
In The Coal Mine After Arab terrorists killed nearly 3,000 innocent Americans on Sept. 11, 2001, I thought the world would see Israel’s plight in dealing with terrorists in a new light: a democracy subject to the violent hatred of those seeking to destroy “Big Satan” (the U.S.) and “Little Satan” (Israel), along with Western values of human rights and freedoms.
Perhaps there were those who came to see Israel as the canary in the coalmine, the warning sign of imminent danger to our way of life. Others failed or refused to see the connection.
In following world events I can’t help hearing the echoes of the Israeli experience. Most recently, two major issues in the news regarding American foreign policy — the use of drones in conducting a war against terror, and negotiations with Iran in preventing a nuclear war — have me thinking about comparisons to Israeli strategies and recent history, and lessons that could be learned.
The pained look on President Obama’s face, and his words of personal apology in announcing that an American drone strike killed two innocent non-combatants, spoke volumes about the moral dilemma involved in the use of the increasingly popular formof warfare that is imperfect in its implementation.
The appeal of UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), particularly for the U.S. after more than a decade of sending soldiers to fight, and too often die, in Iraq and Afghanistan, is that they can pinpoint and kill the enemy without the risk of endangering American lives. The downside, as underscored by the news of the accidental deaths of two civilian aid workers, Warren Weinstein, an American, and Giovanni Lo Porto, an Italian, who were being held hostage by al Qaeda in Pakistan, is that hitting the intended target is based on available intelligence analysis, subject to human error.
With calls now for the U.S. to review and revise its drone policy, which is based on the “near certainty” that innocents would not be harmed in attacks on the enemy, it would be helpful to look to Israel and its stringent approach to the use of drones. Israel’s defense forces go out of their way to avoid civilian casualties — warning non-combatants in advance of an air strike and often calling off a “hit” against terror leaders because of the possibility of killing innocents as well. It’s a problem compounded by the fact that Hamas fighters operate from civilian locations, defying the rules of civilized warfare. The bitter irony, though, is that Israel is accused of crimes against humanity when in fact its army may well be the most humane in the world.
Amos Guiora, an Israeli-American law professor and expert on the ethics of warfare, has criticized the U.S. for too broad a definition of a legitimate target, which he characterizes as “far too suggestive of ‘guilt by association.’”
He notes that the Obama administration’s targeting of those “likely” to be engaged in terrorist activity “casts an unacceptably wide net.” (The definition was upgraded recently to the target being an imminent threat to the U.S., but drone strikes in Pakistan were exempted.)
By contrast, Israel’s policy, which Guiora helped carry out when he served in the IDF, is based on “going to great lengths to gather and verify intelligence to ensure that potential targets are, in fact, still actively involved in terrorism.” In addition, Israel applies a proportionality analysis, taking into account whether the military gain in eliminating the target is worth the risk of civilian casualties.
True, mistakes have been made, but the IDF’s criteria and track record reflect a deep commitment to maintaining a high moral standard. The U.S. and the rest of the world would do well to emulate it.
On the Iran negotiations front, I have written here of my fear that Obama is so invested in the effort to normalize Iran’s revolutionary government that he seems willing to ignore the growing evidence that it will not change its goal of establishing an Islamic hegemony, backed by a nuclear arsenal. The president’s dismissal of recent, virulent comments by Iran’s supreme leader about the U.S. as “devil” and Israel as a pariah state deserving elimination recall the reaction of Shimon Peres to Yasir Arafat’s calls for jihad soon after the Oslo Accords were signed.
“Give the man his rhetoric,” Peres told me in an interview at the time.
He, too, was so committed to the peace effort that he and other Israeli leadersturned a blind eye to repeated violations of the agreement.
Jewish history has taught us all too well that when your enemy publicly states his intention to destroy you, take him seriously.
Even the pragmatic Yitzchak Rabin believed that at the first post-agreement terror attack, Israel would send in its forces and wipe out the Palestinian threat. But that was not to be, and the situation festers two decades later.
Similarly, Iran already insists the interim agreement differs markedly from the understanding the U.S. and its partners have of it. And Obama’s comments on the ability to “snap back” sanctions into place if Iran violates the accord seem especially fanciful. China and Russia, who make up part of the U.S.-led international effort, are anxious to resume trade with Iran, and Moscow has already announced a deal to provide Tehran with sophisticated defense missiles.
The president would be more believable if he were more realistic. He should make the case that the planned agreement would delay for a decade or so an Iran with nuclear arms -- not prevent it, as he has long pledged.
I am well aware that it is easier to expose large holes in the interim agreement than to offer a practical alternative that would keep Iran from ever having a nuclear weapon. But it is sophistry for Obama to frame the debate as simply a choice between going to war with Iran or signing a deal that offers potential peace. He leaves out the possibility of toughening up the deal or further tightening the sanctions.
We should not be more afraid of Iran walking away from the talks than they are of facing more economic hardship and the real threat of military action.
As Israel marked its 67th anniversary of statehood last week, a pessimist would focus on the existential threat a nuclear Iran represents for the Jewish state and the increasing diplomatic isolation it faces. An optimist would emphasize the miraculous existence and growth of this tiny state, flourishing as a dynamic democracy in an increasingly chaotic neighborhood.
Both views reflect truths, and the ongoing struggle to survive and thrive despite hardships is the story of the Jewish people since our forefather Jacob — later named Israel — wrestled with an angel.
I take comfort in the biblical assurance that Jews are an eternal people. And in times of stress, I am reminded of the three words of wisdom King Solomon, the wisest of all men, engraved on his ring: Gom zeh ya’avor — this, too, shall pass.gary@jewishweek.org
Rabbi David Wolpe
Special To The Jewish Week
A Turkey UnderRabbi Nahman of Bratslav once told of a prince who suffered from delusions and thought he was a turkey. A wise man cured him by emulating his behavior: crawling under the table, pecking at his food and behaving just like a turkey. Gradually, he began to ask the prince — “Can’t a turkey wear a shirt?” And, “Can’t a turkey eat with utensils?” In that way the wise man gradually brought the prince back to acknowledging his humanity.
As with all of Rabbi Nahman’s renowned tales, this has beeninterpreted in many ways, both theological and existential. But we should not overlook the tremendous psychological insight it offers. The noted humanist psychologist R.D. Laing once behaved very much like the wise man in Rabbi Nahman’s story. When faced with a naked schizophrenic woman rocking silently to and fro in apadded cell, Laing took off his own clothes and sat next to her, rocking to the samerhythm until she spoke for the first time in months.
Everyone needs another willing to enter her world. When we mirror each other, we acknowledge that reality takes many forms, and we reassure the sufferer that he is not alone.
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.
SPECIAL SUPPLEMENT
Eyes On Jerusalem
The Israel Museum At 50
The Pulse Of Jerusalem
The Youthful Ancient City
A Turkey UnderRabbi Nahman of Bratslav once told of a prince who suffered from delusions and thought he was a turkey. A wise man cured him by emulating his behavior: crawling under the table, pecking at his food and behaving just like a turkey. Gradually, he began to ask the prince — “Can’t a turkey wear a shirt?” And, “Can’t a turkey eat with utensils?” In that way the wise man gradually brought the prince back to acknowledging his humanity.
As with all of Rabbi Nahman’s renowned tales, this has beeninterpreted in many ways, both theological and existential. But we should not overlook the tremendous psychological insight it offers. The noted humanist psychologist R.D. Laing once behaved very much like the wise man in Rabbi Nahman’s story. When faced with a naked schizophrenic woman rocking silently to and fro in apadded cell, Laing took off his own clothes and sat next to her, rocking to the samerhythm until she spoke for the first time in months.
Everyone needs another willing to enter her world. When we mirror each other, we acknowledge that reality takes many forms, and we reassure the sufferer that he is not alone.
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.
Eyes On Jerusalem
The Israel Museum At 50
The Pulse Of Jerusalem
The Youthful Ancient City
Eyes On Jerusalem 2015
The Israel Museum At 50; The Pulse Of Jerusalem; The Youthful Ancient City
INSIDE THIS SPECIAL SECTION
The Israel Museum At 50
All In The Family
The New Hotel Food Wars
A Taste Of Jerusalem
The Pulse Of Jerusalem
For Repeat Visitors, Try Niche Museums
The Youthful Ancient City
TRAVEL
Regionalism Still Exists
Hilary Larson | Travel WriterAs Oggi and I sped through the cactus-spiked wilderness of southeast Arizona, I reflected that more than a quarter-century had passed since my first cross-country road trip. And from behind the wheel on Interstate 10, it was surprising how little had changed visually from the summer of 1988 — when my parents took my sister and me on a three-week odyssey from Phoenix to Connecticut.
To traverse America by car is to understand, in a visceral way, the vastness of our land. In the time it takes to speed through three European countries, you can spend all day in the Southwestern desert, with only subtle variations on a landscape of mesas and canyons to mark your progress.
Exits whizz by in a homogenized blur of chains: Mobil, McDonald’s, Target. But if you drive long enough and pay attention, you glean a new appreciation of America’s regionalism — and I’m not just talking about how you can’t find In-and-Out Burger in Rhode Island, or Dunkin’ Donuts in Los Angeles (funny how “America Runs On Dunkin,” is its slogan, yet it’s still far more common in Europe than west of the Mississippi).
In New England, white-clapboard churches, town greens and place names like Falmouth and Manchester-by-the-Sea remind us of settlers from the old England. The first Waffle House you pass along I-95 driving south roughly coincides with the Mason-Dixon line.
Brooklyn-style bagels and delis dot the manicured pink strip malls along Florida’s East Coast, providing a taste of home for Jewish snowbirds — but just a few hours across Alligator Alley, you’re in the Bible Belt, land of mega-churches and pickup trucks. From Texas westward, taquerías are as ubiquitous as pizza joints on Long Island. Michigan has cherry festivals; quirky California has place names like Needles and Mecca.
That regionalism is also detectable on the radio, if — like me — you eschew plug-in devices in favor of the serendipity of whatever’s on air. The soundtrack of America is as diverse as the country itself, but listen closely and you hear more NPR on the coasts, Mexican polka in Arizona, Bible programs throughout the South, salsa in Miami and foreign-language programming that reflects local demographics everywhere — Greek hour, Creole hour, Russian-language news.
I ran into fellow Members of the Tribe nearly everywhere I went: in a New Mexico post office, over enchiladas in Palm Springs, at the next table in a café somewhere near the Gulf of Mexico. It can be inspiring to see how Jews maintain and cherish community, often centered around a historic temple built by pioneer ancestors, in places where non-Christians are a tiny minority.
A Spanish-speaking friend in California asked me how to say “agua carbonada” in English, and I told him: “In New York, it’s seltzer. But in California, you have to say sparkling water, and in Texas it’s soda water.” When I used “schlep” in a sentence, my Dallas-raised cousin looked at me funny.
It took my husband Oggi and me a little over a week to schlep our Toyota from Los Angeles to Boston, where we picked up our daughter; when we arrived, the trip odometer read 3,500 miles. Most road trippers figure on a maximum of about 500 miles a day — about eight hours of highway driving. Throw in fuel stops, lunch and chocolate breaks, and those 500 miles take about 10 hours.
We traveled at a far slower place, taking advantage of the freedom of driving to detour according to whim. If I saw a sign for a historic district or a local farmer’s market, I stopped to check it out. I lingered to chat with baristas in New Orleans, browsed for fiery-hot chilies in New Mexico — and since the forecast was clear, we changed our northward route at the last minute to travel I-81 over the spine of the Appalachians.
The seeming monotony of those hours behind the wheel foment contemplation in a way that is rare in modern life. After all, other than sleeping, how many activities do we engage in for six hours straight? It is amazing how in their aggregate, those miles along prosaic landscapes — the endless green blur of forests, the asphalt and exit signsand 7-Elevens — can transcend the mundane, giving rise to insights about the land and its people.
“I think I finally understand why some people own guns,” observed Oggi one morning in Arizona, as we awoke to the eerie creak of a motel door in a desolate prairie town. And when I puzzled over the high cost of lodging in what appeared to be the middle of nowhere — Fort Stockton, Texas, the midpoint and sole motel on a four-hour stretch of empty highway — the desk clerk clued me in. “This is the oil industry,” she explained. “There’s a lot of work here, and there’s not much else anywhere around.”
I am always sorry to leave behind the dramatic peaks and exotic flora of the Western landscape, and it was hard to put on jackets again as we drove into the chilly North. But when I finally located NPR on the radio and ordered a seltzer without having to explain myself, I felt happy to be back at home — at least for awhile. editor@jewishweek.org
The Israel Museum At 50; The Pulse Of Jerusalem; The Youthful Ancient City
INSIDE THIS SPECIAL SECTION
The Israel Museum At 50
All In The Family
The New Hotel Food Wars
A Taste Of Jerusalem
The Pulse Of Jerusalem
For Repeat Visitors, Try Niche Museums
The Youthful Ancient City
Regionalism Still Exists
Hilary Larson | Travel WriterAs Oggi and I sped through the cactus-spiked wilderness of southeast Arizona, I reflected that more than a quarter-century had passed since my first cross-country road trip. And from behind the wheel on Interstate 10, it was surprising how little had changed visually from the summer of 1988 — when my parents took my sister and me on a three-week odyssey from Phoenix to Connecticut.
To traverse America by car is to understand, in a visceral way, the vastness of our land. In the time it takes to speed through three European countries, you can spend all day in the Southwestern desert, with only subtle variations on a landscape of mesas and canyons to mark your progress.
Exits whizz by in a homogenized blur of chains: Mobil, McDonald’s, Target. But if you drive long enough and pay attention, you glean a new appreciation of America’s regionalism — and I’m not just talking about how you can’t find In-and-Out Burger in Rhode Island, or Dunkin’ Donuts in Los Angeles (funny how “America Runs On Dunkin,” is its slogan, yet it’s still far more common in Europe than west of the Mississippi).
In New England, white-clapboard churches, town greens and place names like Falmouth and Manchester-by-the-Sea remind us of settlers from the old England. The first Waffle House you pass along I-95 driving south roughly coincides with the Mason-Dixon line.
Brooklyn-style bagels and delis dot the manicured pink strip malls along Florida’s East Coast, providing a taste of home for Jewish snowbirds — but just a few hours across Alligator Alley, you’re in the Bible Belt, land of mega-churches and pickup trucks. From Texas westward, taquerías are as ubiquitous as pizza joints on Long Island. Michigan has cherry festivals; quirky California has place names like Needles and Mecca.
That regionalism is also detectable on the radio, if — like me — you eschew plug-in devices in favor of the serendipity of whatever’s on air. The soundtrack of America is as diverse as the country itself, but listen closely and you hear more NPR on the coasts, Mexican polka in Arizona, Bible programs throughout the South, salsa in Miami and foreign-language programming that reflects local demographics everywhere — Greek hour, Creole hour, Russian-language news.
I ran into fellow Members of the Tribe nearly everywhere I went: in a New Mexico post office, over enchiladas in Palm Springs, at the next table in a café somewhere near the Gulf of Mexico. It can be inspiring to see how Jews maintain and cherish community, often centered around a historic temple built by pioneer ancestors, in places where non-Christians are a tiny minority.
A Spanish-speaking friend in California asked me how to say “agua carbonada” in English, and I told him: “In New York, it’s seltzer. But in California, you have to say sparkling water, and in Texas it’s soda water.” When I used “schlep” in a sentence, my Dallas-raised cousin looked at me funny.
It took my husband Oggi and me a little over a week to schlep our Toyota from Los Angeles to Boston, where we picked up our daughter; when we arrived, the trip odometer read 3,500 miles. Most road trippers figure on a maximum of about 500 miles a day — about eight hours of highway driving. Throw in fuel stops, lunch and chocolate breaks, and those 500 miles take about 10 hours.
We traveled at a far slower place, taking advantage of the freedom of driving to detour according to whim. If I saw a sign for a historic district or a local farmer’s market, I stopped to check it out. I lingered to chat with baristas in New Orleans, browsed for fiery-hot chilies in New Mexico — and since the forecast was clear, we changed our northward route at the last minute to travel I-81 over the spine of the Appalachians.
The seeming monotony of those hours behind the wheel foment contemplation in a way that is rare in modern life. After all, other than sleeping, how many activities do we engage in for six hours straight? It is amazing how in their aggregate, those miles along prosaic landscapes — the endless green blur of forests, the asphalt and exit signsand 7-Elevens — can transcend the mundane, giving rise to insights about the land and its people.
“I think I finally understand why some people own guns,” observed Oggi one morning in Arizona, as we awoke to the eerie creak of a motel door in a desolate prairie town. And when I puzzled over the high cost of lodging in what appeared to be the middle of nowhere — Fort Stockton, Texas, the midpoint and sole motel on a four-hour stretch of empty highway — the desk clerk clued me in. “This is the oil industry,” she explained. “There’s a lot of work here, and there’s not much else anywhere around.”
I am always sorry to leave behind the dramatic peaks and exotic flora of the Western landscape, and it was hard to put on jackets again as we drove into the chilly North. But when I finally located NPR on the radio and ordered a seltzer without having to explain myself, I felt happy to be back at home — at least for awhile. editor@jewishweek.org
NEPAL EARTHQUAKE: How To Give
Jewish organizations can help you make a contribution.
American Jewish World Service
45 West 36th Street, New York, NY 10018
Jewish Federations of North America
25 Broadway, New York, NY 10004
UJA-Federation of New York
130 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022.
Joint Distribution Committee
PO Box 4124, New York, NY 10163
Nepal Jewish Relief Fund
770 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY 11213
United Hatzalah 78 Yirmiyahu Street, Jerusalem 91361, Israel
Tevel B'Tzedek
37 Pierre Koening St. Jerusalem 91530
World Jewish Relief
Oscar Joseph House, 54 Crewys Road, London, NW2 2AD
INTERNATIONAL
How To Give
Jewish organizations can help you make a contribution.
Hundreds of people gather in Queens to light candles for the victims of the earthquake in Nepal. Getty Images
To contribute, contact:American Jewish World Service, 45 West 36th Street, New York, NY 10018
Jewish Federations of North America, 25 Broadway, New York, NY 10004
UJA-Federation of New York, 130 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022.
Joint Distribution Committee, PO Box 4124, New York, NY 10163
Nepal Jewish Relief Fund, 770 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, New York 11213
United Hatzalah, 78 Yirmiyahu Street, Jerusalem 91361,Israel
Tevel B’Tzedek, 37 Pierre Koening St. Jerusalem 91530
World Jewish Relief, Oscar Joseph House, 54 Crewys Road, London, NW2 2AD
Douglas Bloomfield
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) wants to be the prime minister's water carrier when debate begins next week on the "Iran Nuclear Review Act." He's signaled he plans to offer the Netanyahu amendment, which calls for Iran to publicly recognize Israel's right to exist as a precondition for any nuclear agreement. Rubio, a presidential hopeful tapping the wallet of Bibi's billionaire backer, casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, for campaign contributions, was quick to take up the cause.
AIPAC isn't really opposed to the Netanyahu Amendment and would be delighted to make Bibi happy but it knows what Rubio is actually proposing is a poison pill for a bill the lobby wants to see pass. The problem for the pro-Israel lobby group is timing, not substance.
President Obama has said he will veto the bill, a bipartisan compromise crafted by Senators Bob Corker (R- Tennessee) and Ben Cardin (D-Maryland), the chairman and ranking minority member of the Foreign Relations Committee, if it contains amendments like Rubio's that the President feels would undermine the nuclear talks with Iran.
As much as it would like to kill any Iranian deal and eventually hopes to do so, AIPAC wants this bill to avoid a veto because it gives the Congress authority to review the agreement and vote on it.
"Our priority is to make sure the bill gets passed with the strongest possible bipartisan majority so that Congress is guaranteed the opportunity to pass judgment on thefinal agreement. To achieve that goal we are supporting the leadership of Senator Corker and Senator Cardin on the bill," an AIPAC official told Reuters.
AIPAC is lobbying against this and other poison pill amendments that would be veto bait.
The problem with that strategy is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. The Kentucky Republican, usually a close AIPAC ally, is encouraging a slew of amendments that are intended to force Democrats to appear to be casting anti-Israel votes, even if it risks a veto.
McConnell still wants to force Obama to submit any nuclear agreement forCongressional approval, but not before inflicting a lot of pain on the Democrats.
He wants to force Democrats to choose between Obama and Netanyahu on several votes. A number of other Republican senators are preparing their own poison pills. One would link sanctions relief to Iranian release of four Americans it currently holds. Others involve Tehran's missile program, support for terrorism and compensation for American diplomats held hostage 1979-1981.
McConnell is looking for "a robust amendment process" that will give Republicans an arsenal of ammunition to use in 2016 for raising more money from Jewish conservatives and painting the Democrats as the anti-Israel party.
After the votes are counted and Republicans have collected their evidence to portray the GOP as Israel's best friend in Congress and Democrats as unreliable, you can look for the veto bait amendments to be quietly stripped from the final bill in a conference committee and a signable sent to the White House.
Mission Accomplished. A string of votes by Democrats that can be branded anti-Israel and a law giving the Republican-led Congress the power to kill any deal Obama makes with Iran.
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