Wednesday, July 15, 2015
Dear Reader,
Now that the Iran deal is a reality, Israel faces an agonizing choice in terms of fighting it in Congress, which could further isolate the Jerusalem government, or make the best of the new reality. Israel Correspondent Josh Mitnick reports, and closer to home, Staff Writer Steve Lipman measures reactions in the Jewish community. Also, an Editorial: "A Deal With The Devil."ISRAEL NEWS
Israel Facing Agonizing Choice On Iran Deal
Tough line against pact could further isolate Jewish state, as Netanyahu appears to gear up for congressional push.
Joshua Mitnick
Israel Correspondent
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in a tough spot on how to proceed in wake of Iran deal. Getty Images
Tel Aviv — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s reaction to the deal to curtail Iran’s nuclear ambitions announced on Tuesday in Vienna was swift and unambiguous.
The deal, he said, will prove to be an “historic mistake for the world.” He accused Western negotiators of accepting a deal “at any price,” and said that Israel doesn’t consider itself bound to the agreement.
The response seemed further confirmation that the prime minister is gearing up to wage a fresh diplomatic offensive against the ratification of the agreement by Western countries, known as the P5+1 group. One of the main questions in the next few months, say analysts, will be how intensively Israel will lobby the U.S. Congress against the deal; Congress has 60 days to debate the deal, and President Obama has promised a veto if Congress votes it down.
The deal, which seeks to prevent Iran from producing a nuclear weapon for at least a decade and, in return, end economic and oil sanctions against Tehran, is already generating controversy. It will sharply reduce Iran’s uranium enrichment program and, the U.S. says, increase the breakout time for Iran to produce a bomb from about two or three months now to about a year. Nuclear facilities will be inspected but visits must be arranged first.
After U.S.-Israel ties were aggravated following Netanyahu’s speech to a joint session of Congress criticizing the deal, the prime minister needs to decide whether he wants to immerse Israel again in what is likely to shape up as a partisan battle, analysts say.
“Israel has to consider how to react on the Hill,” said Oded Eran, a former Israeli ambassador to the European Union. “Right now the Israeli prime minister and the government will have to weigh the pros and cons between mounting an open campaign to block approval, and the benefits of starting a dialogue with the U.S. on how to deal with a possible violation of the agreement.”
Eran said a decision to jump into the congressional debate on blocking the president at this point would carry much higher stakes for U.S.-Israeli relations than Netanyahu’s criticism of the negotiations earlier this year.
“It’s one thing to raise objections and criticize elements of the agreement before it is reached, it’s a different issue to come out campaigning before Congress debates it and votes on it,” Eran said. “We already sustained damage following the address to Congress. I’m not sure Israel wants to be perceived as the one causing the failure of the agreement in the U.S., especially when there’s an option of conducting a dialogue.”
The former ambassador suggested Israel draft its own analysis of the agreement but refrain from actively lobbying House and Senate members. In an interview with the Times of Israel, Foreign Ministry Director General Dore Gold said that Israeli officials would give their opinion if approached by U.S. legislators, but that they would seek to “respect” the positions of the administration.
However, in an initial reaction to the agreement, Deputy Foreign Minister Tzippi Hotovely signaled that the Israeli government is likely to take an aggressive approach, saying it will “employ all diplomatic means to prevent the confirmation of the agreement.’’
Tzachi Hanegbi, a Likud Knesset member, also signaled in an interview with Israel Radio that the Netanyahu government believes that it can make a difference in Congress. While he acknowledged that it would be a struggle to get a vote overriding a presidential veto, he said there were several Democrats who were unhappy with the deal. (At least 13 Democrats would need to break with their party to override a presidential veto.) Hanegbi said that Israel “will review day to day, and hour to hour what is going on in Iran. … It always has the right to defend itself.”
In New York, a coalition of Israel backers is already gearing up to wage a public campaign against the Iran deal in Times Square on Wednesday. Under the slogan, “Stop Iran,” the organizers are hoping that thousands will show up to hear opponents of the deal such as Alan Dershowitz and former CIA Director James Woolsey weigh in. In a warning, rally organizers said in a press release, “if the deal is not stopped, New Yorkers will know who to blame,” a reference to Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer, widely seen as a key figure in the debate because he is a strong supporter of Israel and of Obama.
Opposition to the deal crosses Israel’s familiar left-right political divide, with opposition leader Isaac Herzog of the dovish Zionist Union party called it “dangerous” for Israel. “This is a bad deal for Israeli security in the future and dangerous tomorrow morning,” he wrote on his Facebook page.
Herzog’s former candidate for defense minister, former military intelligence chief Amos Yadlin, told reporters that the agreement is “full of holes,” with the most problematic being an inspection procedure that would limit when and where inspectors could visit certain nuclear sites.
Despite his concerns, Yadlin said, “I am not in a position [to say] that this is a new Holocaust. Israel is strong and Israel will know how to deal with the risks that come with the agreement. The main change should be to leave Israel’s concerns with the allies, and to reach a side agreement.”
Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli consul general in New York, also believes that the prime minister will continue with a full-court press against the deal. “He is going to use the next 60 days using everything he can,” a move Pinkas opposes because he believes Netanyahu is unlikely to persuade 13 Democratic senators and 44 Democrats in the House to oppose the president, and that Congress doesn’t have the power to nullify a multilateral agreement.
Pinkas said Israel should instead huddle with the U.S. discretely and discuss a package of security aid that will enhance Israel’s defensive posture to face the possibility of a nuclear Iran.
“This is the first time that Israel has ever dismissed and denounced a major U.S. foreign policy agreement championed by the president,” he said. “We are now totally isolated.”
An aggressive push against the agreement risks isolating the prime minister domestically as well. Even though opposition politicians agree with the prime minister that the nuclear agreement is a bad one, Herzog and other opposition leaders have taken the prime minister to task over the rift with the U.S. Yair Lapid, the former finance minister and leader of the centrist Yesh Atid, called for Netanyahu’s resignation, saying the prime minister’s friction with the White House is hampering Israel’s relationship with the U.S.
Herzog also faulted the prime minister for the rift with Obama. “One of the most grave issues in the current situation is that the agreement that has the most impact on the existence of Israel in the last generation was signed without [Israel] being in the picture,” he said. “Israel’s interests were abandoned.”
editor@jewishweek.org
NATIONAL
Split Community Looks To Congress
Sixty-day period of congressional debate seen as crucial, with Schumer as ‘canary in the coal mine.’
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
Sen. Charles Schumer and Rep. Nita Lowey to figure in congressional debate on Iran deal. Getty Images
As the Jewish community digests the historic deal to limit Iran’s nuclear capability in exchange for lifting crippling economic sanctions — with more or less predictable reactions from groups on the left and right — the focus now shifts to Congress.
Once President Obama submits the agreement to lawmakers, they will have 60 days to scrutinize it. If they vote to reject it, they will need a supermajority to override Obama’s veto, which, in practical terms, means 13 Democrats in the Senate and 44 in the House would need to break with their party. Quashing the bill doesn’t technically prevent the president from signing the treaty, but it does stop Obama from lifting sanctions on Iran, making it impossible for the U.S. to uphold its end of the deal.
In the wake of Tuesday’s announcement, Republicans and representatives of right-leaning Jewish groups condemned it or expressed cautious skepticism; Democrats and left-leaning groups praised the agreement.
The deal, reached after negotiations between the U.S. and its P5+1 partners — France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Russia and China — seeks to halt Iran’s ability to make a nuclear weapon for at least 10 years. “Every pathway to a nuclear weapon is cut off,” President Obama said in a speech from the White House on Monday morning.
Douglas Bloomfield, a Jewish Week political blogger and former legislative director forAIPAC, wrote that Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, who has given himself the title “Shomer Yisrael” (guardian of Israel), for his record of protecting the interests of the Jewish state, will play a crucial role in the forthcoming congressional discussions.
“Many of his colleagues … will be watching to see what Schumer does,” Bloomfield wrote this week. “He will be the canary in the coal mine who will give the first signals as to whether the deal can survive or will quickly run out of air.”
Schumer, who has so far refused to take a position on the agreement, did not reveal this week which way he is leaning.
“Over the coming days, I intend to go through this agreement with a fine-tooth comb, speak with administration officials, and hear from experts on all side,” he said in a statement. “I supported legislation ensuring that Congress would have time and space to review the deal, and now we must use it well. Supporting or opposing this agreement is not a decision to be made lightly, and I plan to carefully study the agreement before making an informed decision.”
New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) also said she was withholding initial judgment on the agreement.
Other members of Congress were not so reticent, and a flurry of press releases quickly followed the announcement.
“If this agreement is what the administration says it is, it is a major, historic diplomatic breakthrough,” said Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.).
But, said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a GOP presidential candidate, “There is no chance that this deal will be approved by Congress.” He predicted the agreement’s rejection by “an overwhelming super-majority in both the House and the Senate.”
Graham, who called the deal “akin to declaring war on Israel and the Sunni Arabs,” also said the deal would lead to an arms race in the Middle East and increased hostilities between Shiite and Sunni Arabs across the region. “If I had property in the Middle East, I would think about selling it after this deal,” he said.
Rep. Nita Lowey (D-Westchester/Rockland) said she has “long-standing concerns about the enforcement and verifiability of any agreement with Iran, given their long history of deception and well-documented illicit activity in the region.”
Opponents of the agreement scheduled a “Stop Iran Now Mega Rally” on Wednesday in Times Square with Jerusalem Post columnist Caroline Glick, Alan Dershowitz, and former CIA Director James Woolsey scheduled to speak.
Analyzing the deal, Jeffrey Goldberg, a national correspondent for The Atlantic, struck a nuanced chord this week in the magazine:
“I worry that Obama’s negotiators might have given away too much to the Iranians. On the other hand, Netanyahu’s dream — of total Iranian capitulation — was never going to become a reality. And yet the deal, though representing a morally dubious compromise with a terror-supporting theocracy, might be, from the perspective of U.S. national security, a practical necessity.”
Goldberg pointed out that with the lifting of sanctions, billions of dollars “will soon flow to Tehran,” money that could be used by Iran-backed terror groups like Hezbollah.
“But here is the most important question to ask going forward: Does this deal significantly reduce the chance that Iran could, in the foreseeable future ... continue its nefarious activities under the protection of a nuclear umbrella? If the answer to this question is yes, then a deal, in theory, is worth supporting.”
A number of Jewish leaders disagreed.
Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, said in a statement that “we may have entered into an agreement that revives the Iranian economy but won’t stop this regime from developing nuclear arms in the long term.” He called the nuclear deal “just a piece of paper … not a legally binding treaty.”
Barry Curtiss-Lusher, the Anti-Defamation League’s national chair, and Abraham Foxman, its national director, called themselves “deeply disappointed by the terms” of the agreement, which “relies entirely on Iran’s good faith and the ability of the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] to effectively carry out its inspection obligations,” they said.
“In 10 years, Iran will be able to rapidly expand its enrichment capacity,” the ADL leaders added. “At best, if Iran fully complies with the terms of the [agreement], its nuclear weapon ambitions will be deferred during the 10-to-15-year term of most restrictions. At worst, in the view of many highly respected experts, Iran will continue to clandestinely pursue illicit activities, like weaponization research.”
Hadassah, in a statement, said it “view[s] with alarm Iran’s nuclear ambitions — an immediate and existential threat to Israel, the region, and the world …we remain acutely concerned that the proposed agreement will fail to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.”
Americans for Peace Now’s president, Debra DeLee, praised the deal. “The achievement of this landmark deal demonstrates that where there is a sufficient political will, diplomacy can work,” she said, adding that “key elements” of the agreement “will make Israel, the region and the world more secure.”
J Street also welcomed the deal, which it said “appears to meet the critical criteria around which a consensus of the U.S. and international non-proliferation experts has formed for a deal that verifiably blocks each of Iran’s pathways to a nuclear weapon.”
The deal, said The Jewish Voice for Peace, which supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, represents “the only way to alleviate international concern about Iran’s nuclear program and avert war.”
Both the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and the American Jewish Committee stressed Congress’ role in the coming days and weeks as the deal is debated.
AJC Executive Director David Harris said “it is now incumbent on the United States Congress … to thoroughly review, debate, and, ultimately, vote it up or down.”
“The nuclear deal concluded in Vienna does not appear to address other extremely troubling aspects of Iranian behavior — Iran’s ICBM program … its repeated calls, including in recent days, for the annihilation of Israel … its direct involvement in terrorism and support for terrorist groups,” Harris said.
JCPA called the threat posed by a nuclear Iran “a matter of the greatest concern,” and stressed the importance of world leaders staying “focused on the ultimate goal: preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. The 60-day congressional review window opens a critical period to examine the agreement and ensure that it has the rigorous inspection and compliance components that are necessary.”
editor@jewishweek.org
EDITORIAL
A Deal With The Devil
We are as hopeful for the prospects of a nuclear-free Iran as we are skeptical of the deal announced this week after several years of negotiations.
Last Friday, millions of Iranians, including President Hassan Rouhani, marched through the streets of Tehran chanting “Death to America, Death to Israel.” That sentiment has not changed as Iranians celebrate the agreement with the U.S. and world powers intended to curb Iran’s nuclear program for the next decade in return for easing sanctions that have seriously hurt the country’s economy.
The fact that the White House can hail the agreement as an historic achievement for peace while it allows Iran’s network of terror and warfare to continue unabated, and unaddressed in the talks, is only part of the problem. Equally worrisome, the U.S. backed down on key elements in the negotiations that it has long insisted on. The critically important “anytime, anywhere” inspections are now subject to prior requests and coordination, with the United Nations given a key mediation role. Iran’s nuclear facilities, including the underground one at Fordo, will not be dismantled. They will remain in place and continue to operate, albeit at low levels. And the prospects of a “snapback,” where economic sanctions can be renewed by the U.S. and its partners if Iran violates the agreement is the stuff of dreams, especially since China and Russia are eager to deal with Tehran.
We acknowledge President Obama’s sincerity in asserting Tuesday that “this deal … makes the world safer and more secure.” But we worry that his strong desire for the deal clouded his strategy, hampered his negotiators overseas, and trumped his ability to secure a more equitable agreement with a revolutionary government whose leaders take pride in duping the West, consistently and successfully.
They have lied about their nuclear program being intended purely for peaceful purposes, lied about their leaders’ repeated calls for Israel’s destruction, and lied about the extent of their nuclear program over the years. Most telling now is that they plan to go on lying about the program; how else explain why Iran insisted on preventing inspectors from coming to their facilities unannounced? What reason would Iran have to oppose such an arrangement if it planned to abide by the rules?
The U.S. can ill afford such a risky agreement, but for Israel, a regional neighbor and hated enemy of Iran, the stakes are far higher and more immediate. That’s why this week Israelis — left, right and center — are decrying the agreement as a major blow to the security of the Jewish state. Even if Iran is constrained from producing nuclear bombs in the short term, it will be able to do so a decade from now. And it is certain to use the billions of dollars freed up when sanctions are lifted for furthering its arms support of Hezbollah, Hamas and other terror groups in the Mideast rather than feeding its poor.
As the debate shifts to Congress over the next two months, it seems clear that Obama will prevail in seeing the deal through. The Jerusalem government must decide whether to step up its already forceful opposition to the agreement or cut its losses, swallow its pride and make the best of a bad situation. Prime Minister Netanyahu deserves credit for alerting the world to the nuclear threat and pushing the U.S. to enforce economic sanctions. But his effectiveness in dealing with the White House now is limited. Still, rather than sit back and wait for the next U.S. presidential election, the prime minister should lobby for serious U.S. responses to Iran’s future violations of the agreement, including possible U.S. military action. And Israel should seek U.S. military hardware, all too certain to be needed in future confrontations with Iran’s terror surrogates in Gaza and Lebanon.
For now, only time will tell if this significant deal will be remembered for having a moderating effect on the revolutionary government of Iran, or for allowing it to propel its efforts to dominate the region.
editor@jewishweek.org
As Confederate flags come down, Associate Editor Jonathan Mark reflects on strong Jewish ties to the South, long forgotten.NATIONAL
The Lost Cause, Jewishly
As Confederate flags come down, remembering a forgotten history.
Jonathan Mark
Associate Editor
The pained yet powerful Confederate leader Judah Benjamin. Wikimedia Commons
In this season of Tisha b’Av, remembering our Temple and kingdom destroyed for our sins, the humbled Jewish heart contemplates the Confederacy, also destroyed for its sins. Were there ever two nations less inclined to accept defeat, convinced we will “rise again?” And though few Jews think of the Confederacy as “we,” we were there. Even the Confederate flag, today more embattled than at any time since last carried by the Army of Northern Virginia, has something Jewish about it.
John Coski, author of “The Confederate Battle Flag,” writes that it was Charles Moise, a self-described “southerner of the Jewish persuasion,” who respectfully argued in 1860 at the flag’s inception that its cross design was too Christian. Confederate leadership, respecting the critique, then approved the “X” design, also a cross but considered less ecclesiastical.
That Jewish-influenced flag is the one now being lowered everywhere from South Carolina to Hollywood, in the wake of the killings of nine innocents in a black church in Charleston.
Until the 1830s, more Jews lived in Charleston than in any American city, including New York. It was a time when almost all of Charleston’s Jews were Sabbath observant. By the 1850s, almost one-third of American Jews lived amidst Louisiana’s bayous, magnolias and New Orleans.
A non-observant Charleston Jew, such as Judah Benjamin, could escape to New Orleans and intermarry with a creole woman. It is unknown whether the Christian taunts or his wife’s infidelities proved more humiliating. In time, she left her husband, moving to Paris with their daughter. Benjamin became the first Jew elected to the U.S. Senate in 1852. That same year, President Millard Fillmore offered Benjamin a seat on the Supreme Court — 64 years before Louis Brandeis became the first Jewish justice — though Benjamin declined. He went on to become attorney general, secretary of war, and secretary of state for the Confederacy. Say what you will about Jefferson Davis, but it was 45 years before any other president, rebel or not, appointed a Jew to the cabinet, and over 100 years before another Jew, Henry Kissinger, was appointed secretary of state.
Respected but lonely, pained yet powerful, on what continent, in what other nation, would a Jew such as Benjamin find greater political success than in the Confederacy? Stephen Vincent Benet, in his epic poem “John Brown’s Body,” imagined the “well-hated” Benjamin thinking, “I am a Jew. What am I doing here? … A river runs between these men and me [and] we speak to each other across the roar of that river, but no more.”
Eli Evans in his biography, “Judah P. Benjamin, The Jewish Confederate,” notes that “Both Benjamin and Davis were exemplary slaveowners [who] did not abuse their slaves.” In the last months of the Confederacy, with the support of Robert E. Lee and Davis, Benjamin called for a Confederate Emancipation Proclamation. In “an extraordinary episode of the war,” writes Evans, Benjamin spoke “before 10,000 people in Richmond, delivering a remarkable speech in favor of a Confederate offer to free the slaves.” His words were all the more courageous for his being increasingly being singled out as the Judas responsible for the Confederacy’s misfortune.
Benjamin was also damned in the North. On the eve of the Civil War, Sen. Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, who would be elected Grant’s vice president in 1872, said Benjamin’s loyalty to his native South proved him an ingrate to the United States that gave “equality of rights even to that race that stoned prophets and crucified the redeemer of the world.”
And yet, in the South, writes Evans, “Benjamin, as a Jew, would have to be more loyal to the Cause than anyone else.” The editor of the Richmond Examiner “took special pleasure in linking Benjamin and Jewishness to Confederate failure, speculators, gamblers and all manners of ills.” J.B. Jones, a journalist based in Richmond, wrote, “Illicit trade has depleted the [Confederacy] and placed us at the feet of Jew extortioners. ... These Jews… have injured the cause more than the armies of Lincoln.”
At least 10,000 Jews went to war for the South, but the Richmond Examiner wrote that Southern families suffered from the draft while “thousands of Jews… have gone scot free simply [by] denying their allegiance to the country [which they] pretended to adopt.”
Yet, in comparison to Gen. Grant’s infamous wartime order (overturned by Lincoln) that called for the expulsion of Jews from Union-controlled Tennessee, Kentucky and Mississippi, Gen. Lee responded graciously to a Virginia rabbi who requested a furlough for Jewish soldiers during the High Holidays. Lee replied, “Reverend Sir… It would give me great pleasure to comply [but] the necessities of war” precluded the request. Lee continued, “I feel assured that neither you or any member of the Jewish congregation would wish to jeopardize a cause you have so much at heart…” Lee added his hopes that Jewish prayers “be accepted by the Most High, and their petitions answered.” Signed, “Your obedient servant, R.E. Lee.”
And so on Passover, a Confederate soldier, Isaac Levy, 21, celebrated the seder in the field. He wrote to his family, “We are observing the festival in a truly Orthodox style. On the first day we had a fine vegetable soup,” and “a pound and a half of fresh [kosher] beef.” That soldier was killed in battle, August 21, 1864, under the flag now scorned. Levy’s yahrtzeit is Av 19, if anyone cares to say Kaddish or light a candle.
As the war took its toll, the music of war lost much of its jaunty confidence. Like the sad piyuttim of Tisha b’Av, Stephen Foster composed songs expressing the pain: “Tell me, tell me, weary soldier from the rude and stirring wars, was my brother in the battle where you gained those noble scars? He was ever brave and valiant, and I know he never fled. Was his name among the wounded, or numbered with the dead?”
With the Lincoln assassination, writes Evans, “The ancient blood ritual hung heavily in the air… Lincoln would become Christ crucified and [Benjamin] would be transformed into the guilty Christ killer. No Jew would have a chance in such a spectacle of revenge and hatred. The search for an American Judas [would be] more thrilling if the mob could blame [the] the Jew in the Confederate cabinet.”
Benjamin fled to England, never to return.
Back in Richmond, the defeated Confederate capital, in St Paul’s Episcopal Church, a black man advanced to the communion table. In his history, “April 1865,” Jay Winik writes, even the minister was stunned. It was one thing “to accept that slaves were now free,” quite another for a black man “to stride up to the front of the church as though an equal.” The black man lowered his body, kneeling, “while the rest of the congregation tensed in their pews.” And then Robert E. Lee, still weary from his recent surrender, but loyal to Benjamin’s Emancipation, arose out of the pews and walked to the front, kneeling alongside the black man. Watching Lee, other whites followed in his path. Those who want to take down all the statues of Lee, as they do the flag, make the same mistake as did the Biblical prophet Jonah, who couldn’t accept that Nineveh could honestly repent and be granted all the honors of penance.
Today, Lawrence Brook, publisher and editor of the Birmingham, Ala.-based Southern Jewish Life, covering Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and the Florida panhandle, told us by phone, “Most of the Jews fighting for the Confederacy didn’t have slaves themselves. But they felt they owed it to this home, to defend it against a foreign invasion, as they saw it. There is pride that Samuel Ullman, a Jew wounded fighting for the Confederacy, 40 years later was fighting for the establishment of a black high school in Birmingham. Of course, in the 1960s the flag was an in-your-face symbol against integration. But for those of us who came of age after the civil rights battles, the flag simply represented, ‘Hey, I’m from the South. Period. I’m proud of it.’ There was no thought of offending anybody. Symbols are what you make of them.”
In 1884, Judah Benjamin died in Paris. In 1938, on the eve of another war, the Daughters of the Confederacy donated a gravestone for him in the Pere Lachaise, a Christian cemetery in Paris, where a Southern Jew didn’t belong but where he spends eternity, alone, as always.
jonathan@jewishweek.org
My report on pressure on the Claims Conference, as its annual board meeting takes place here this week, notes calls for reform from within and a possible probe by the State Attorney General into charges of mismanagement.GARY ROSENBLATT
Claims Conference Facing New Pressures
Board members call for reforms; AG said to be exploring charges of ‘mismanagement.’
Gary Rosenblatt
Editor and Publisher
Gary Rosenblatt
On the eve of the annual meeting of the Claims Conference this week, a member of its leadership council demanded that the council be shown a document suggesting a serious conflict of interest — with legal ramifications — involving the organization’s lay president, Julius Berman, and its executive vice president, Greg Schneider, The Jewish Week has learned.
Berman refused the written request from Robert Goot, leader of the Australian Jewish community and one of the 14 members of the conference’s leadership council, which was created last year in part to decentralize the authority of the organization’s president. Berman responded that to release the document now would violate the spirit of the group’s decision two years ago, during a particularly contentious time, to move ahead and not look back.
Berman was referring to the summer of 2013, when the Claims Conference’s annual meeting focused on a report by the group’s ombudsman, Shmuel Hollander, a highly respected former Israeli public servant. He had been tasked with looking into the conference’s level of culpability for an embarrassing, multimillion dollar in-house fraud that went unnoticed for years, perpetrated by a number of employees of the New York office through false restitution claims.
Initially thought to total under $1 million, the amount stolen was later estimated to be $57 million, though Hollander believes now it is far more, with some insiders putting the figure at as much as $100 million.
Hollander issued a stinging report at the 2013 meeting, asserting that “the absence of professional control systems” was a “key factor in enabling, and certainly facilitating, the fraud.” Berman was cited for not acting sufficiently on an anonymous letter to him in 2001 that outlined the details of the fraud. The fraud was not discovered by the conference until 2009, when the FBI was alerted.
The Claims Conference (officially the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany) represents world Jewry in negotiations with Germany, which has released more than $70 billion in restitution and compensation for survivors and their heirs since its founding in 1951. It is widely seen in the Jewish world as a sacred trust, distributing more than $700 million annually; its actions are watched closely by survivors and the broader Jewish community.
The polite-but-contentious exchange of letters between Goot and Berman, obtained by The Jewish Week, has not been discussed publicly. But it signifies a growing concern inside and outside the conference regarding its oversight, management, transparency and adherence to laws governing charities.
At the two-day board meeting this week, Goot and several other members of the conference were expected to demand reform and an independent study of the organization’s operations. Perhaps more worrisome to Berman, who has headed the conference since 2002 and weathered previous storms of dissatisfaction from within, is that the office of New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is said to be looking into allegations of mismanagement of the conference, The Jewish Week has learned.
A spokesman for the attorney general told The Jewish Week his office “cannot comment on ongoing or potential investigations,” a verbal formulation whose non-denial suggests to some that there is substance to reports of a probe.
‘Absolutely Entitled’
At the moment, the central figure in this complex case is Hollander, the ombudsman with an impeccable portfolio of four decades of service in Israel, whose contract with the conference expired June 30 and was not renewed. He claimed, in a June 29 letter to the board, that Berman told him June 3 in a phone call that the decision not to rehire him was “in response to the report” he prepared in 2013 that criticized Berman and the conference top management.
In his letter to the board, obtained by The Jewish Week, Hollander charged that top lay and professional leadership repeatedly and deliberately thwarted his attempt to do his work over the last three years. He asserted that “numerous obstacles were placed in our path. … Relevant information was withheld from us, and formal obligations were violated.”
Hollander also asserted that shortly after the leadership council fully endorsed his 2013 report, Berman and Schneider and two other conference leaders, Roman Kent and Reuven Merhav, sent a letter to German Finance Ministry officials disavowing themselves of the very report they had approved — a report that, in part, blamed them for their failure to recognize and respond to the fraud. According to Hollander, “the findings of the report were repudiated” by the four conference leaders, an act he believes places Berman and Schneider “in a position of personal conflict of interest” and raises “suspicion of the violation of proper administrative behavior.”
Hollander further alleges that while Berman explained to him that the German Finance Ministry demanded the letter and said that without it “there would be future financial consequences,” in fact Hollander later learned there was no such demand from the Germans.
Just what did the Berman and Schneider letter to the German Finance Ministry say, and why is it being withheld from conference board members?
That’s what Robert Goot wants to know. In response to Berman’s refusal to release it, Goot insisted that he and the other members of the leadership council are “absolutely entitled” to see a copy of the letter. “The letter is required by me to discharge my fiduciary obligation,” he wrote to Berman, suggesting that “such entitlement … is recognized under Australian law” and presumably under New York law as well since the conference is a “not-for-profit New York regulated corporation.”
Berman strongly denies all of Hollander’s allegations, which he attributes to bitterness over not being rehired. In one of his emails to Goot, Berman wrote: “Personally, I find Hollander’s tactics despicable and I refuse to participate in furthering the result he is working for.”
In a sense, the letter to the German Ministry of Finance is the equivalent here of what famed movie director Alfred Hitchcock called “the MacGuffin,” the plot device “that motivates the characters and advances the story.” The letter in question appears to be just one of many points of contention that speak to concerns, at the very least, over lack of communication within the conference itself.
If and how these issues will be resolved, and whether the conference leadership will allow a truly independent report on its management practices remains to be seen, particularly after Hollander’s allegations as the organization’s first ombudsman. And hovering over this week’s proceedings is the specter of an outside probe by the attorney general, which surely would be an embarrassment to the conference and affect its standing as a representative body of world Jewry.
gary@jewishweek.org
Also this issue, Israeli teen is the 'new face' of Dior; Reform movement boasts an 'audacious' new hire; UJA-Federation campaign finishes strong; the joys of sex ed; Sandee Brawarsky on Martha Mendelsohn's debut novel on subtle anti-Semitism at a `50s era upscale girls school; and our special "The Good Life" supplement includes features on moving forward and moving back.ISRAEL NEWS
Israeli Teen, The New Face of Dior
14-year-old Sofia Mechetner was cleaning apartments before she was discovered.
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
Via Dior.com
Move over, Bar Rafaeli — there’s a new Israeli “It girl."
Sofia Mechetner, a 14-year-old from Holon, a small suburb outside Tel Aviv, has been signed as the “new face” of Dior, one of France’s top fashion houses. Israel’s Channel 2 accompanied Sofia for several days leading up to Paris Fashion Week, where she opened the show last week.
The daughter of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, Mechetner’s story is a classic tale of rags to riches. Before being discovered by Israeli modeling agency Roberto earlier this year, the lanky blonde teenager helped her mother clean apartments and looked after her two younger siblings in order to make ends meet. In the modest one-bedroom apartment, she shared a bedroom with her two siblings and slept on a mattress on the floor— her mother slept on a couch in the living room.
At 5-feet-10, people were constantly telling her she should pursue modeling. The Roberto staff was so impressed by her look, they suggested her to the exclusive Viva Agency in Paris, which works with only 70 models worldwide, none of them Israeli. Upon her arrival in Paris, Mechetner was turned away because of her age.
The story didn’t stop there. While wandering around Paris with her chaperone from the Israeli agency, the two walked into a Dior store and recognized Dior’s head designer, Raf Simons, who happened to be in the same store.
Simons, struck with Mechetner's look, exchanged contact details, and called Dior’s casting director. The Paris agents, though surprised Simons was interested in a young Israeli model with no prior experience, immediately rushed to call her back.
When Mechetner found out she had been signed with Dior, with a contract around $250,000, she immediately called her mother. “You can quit your job, mom,” she says in the Channel 2 footage.
Mechetner is not the first Russian model to be discovered on the fly and delivered from a life of poverty. Natalia Mikhailovna Vodianova, known for her seven-figure contract with Calvin Klein and one of Forbes' top-earning models, grew up in a poor district of the former Soviet Union with her mother and two half-sisters, one of whom had cerebral palsy. As a teenager, she helped her mother sell fruit on the street. Similar to Mechetner, her father had also left the family. Discovered at age 15, she singed with Viva models and moved to Paris by age 17.
Earlier this year, Israel banned models with a BMI of less than 18.5 (a female model who is 5-feet-8 can weigh no less than 119 pounds). The law, nicknamed the “Photoshop Law,” was an attempt to reform the industry, which has become infamous for causing models to develop eating disorders.
With such a young new face in Mechetner, the question of age seems to be the next issue. For the time being, Mechetner plans to spend her earnings on a new apartment, with her own bedroom, she told Channel 2.
hannah@jewishweek.org
Featured Video
<iframe width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6vllO1o1KZ8?feature=player_embedded" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>SHORT TAKES
URJ Boasts Bold New Hire
April Baskin, former president of Jewish Multiracial Network, takes post as VP of 'Audacious Hospitality.'
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
April Baskin, URJ’s new vice president of audacious hospitality, hopes to create a legacy of inclusion in the Reform movement.
What’s in a job title? Plenty of symbolism, it turns out, in the new post the Union for Reform Judaism has just filled.
Fueling the organization’s 2020 vision to strengthen congregations and expand the movement, April Baskin, former president of the Jewish Multiracial Network, is joining URJ in a newly created position: the audaciously named “vice president of audacious hospitality.”
“Our goal is to advance inclusion in the broadest sense,” said Baskin, who most recently served as a national director for InterfaithFamily, which offers resources for welcoming intermarried couples. “I’m interested in designing for the margins, for those who have walked into a synagogue in the past and felt they didn’t belong.”
The position, though not yet fully defined, is aimed at increasing engagement among unaffiliated Jews, which has fallen drastically according to the 2013 Pew Study of American Jewry. Though the Reform movement makes up the largest slice of the Jewish denominational identity pie at 35 percent, 35 percent of Jews who grew up Reform identify as “Jews of no religion,” non-Jewish, or as having no denomination as adults.
In many cases, this includes families who have felt estranged from Jewish communal life, Baskin said.
Baskin, a Sacramento, Calif., native, grew up in a multiracial, interfaith family and draws inspiration from her roots. With African-American, Native American and Jewish bona fides, she hopes her “deep ownership of identity” will inspire confidence in others.
“For many, I believe they would love to be involved in congregational life, they just need the right invitation,” she said. “They need to see the right images, whether they’ve adopted a child of color, or they have a transgender child, or a child with a disability. No one wants to be the only one.”
Baskin, who grew up Reform, recalled the pain of having her own Jewish identity questioned as a young adult. In college, she remembers being asked if she was Jewish at a Friday night Shabbat meal.
“For many American Jews, even if they are deeply engaged in Jewish life, they just don’t consider themselves ‘religious,’” said Baskin, citing the Pew study. According to the study, 55 percent of Jews by religion (as opposed to Jews of no religion) said being Jewish is mainly a matter of ancestry and culture. Only 17 percent considered their Jewish identity to be defined by religion.
The goal, according to Baskin, is not necessarily to increase those numbers, but to meet people where they are.
“I hope this can be one more step in their Jewish journey,” she said.
URJ President Rabbi Rick Jacobs described Baskin, who will assume the position in August, as both a Reform “insider” and “outsider.”
“She is perfectly positioned to lead our work reaching beyond the synagogue walls,” Rabbi Jacobs said in a news release. He noted that no more than 50 percent of American Jews are members of synagogues at any one time. “Unless we change our approach, there is little chance that Jews in their 20s and 30s will even enter the revolving door of synagogue affiliation.”
But getting people back in the door is not just a matter of proactive programming, said Baskin. It’s also a matter of healing.
“People have been hurt, and they’ve become disenchanted,” she said, describing what it feels like to walk into a synagogue feeling like a stranger. “The forces of exclusion and embarrassment are strong. But if we don’t try to heal together, the dial won’t move forward.”
editor@jewishweek.org
NEW YORK
‘Strong Year Across The Board’
UJA-Fed’s annual campaign tops $150 million; increase in donors seen.
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
UJA-Federation CEO Eric Goldstein: Increased outreach to millennials and emerging “tech community.”
The annual fundraising campaign of UJA-Federation of New York closed at the end of June with a total of $150.8 million, an increase of $3.9 million over the 2014 campaign, the philanthropy announced this week.
The 2015 figure represented the sixth consecutive year of an increase in the campaign, following a decrease caused by the national recession that began in 2008.
The $150.8 million figure represents an increase of 2.65 percent. As a point of comparison, overall charitable giving by individuals nationally rose by 5.7 percent between 2013 and 2014.
The total raised by UJA-Federation in fiscal year 2015, including planned giving, endowments, capital projects and special initiatives — including the Israel Emergency Campaign during last summer’s war in Gaza — was $207.8 million, an increase of $21.8 million or 11.7 percent, a steeper jump than the national average for total charitable giving, which rose by 7.1 percent between 2013 and 2014.
“I’m deeply satisfied with the results. Across the board it was a strong year,” said Eric Goldstein, who marked his one-year anniversary as the charity’s CEO this month. “We are doing a good job explaining to our community the work we do.”
Nearly 53,000 donors contributed to the 2015 campaign, a 3.9 percent increase over the 2014 total of 51,000.
Over the past few years the UJA-Federation has made an effort to reach out to donors in more parts of the Jewish community, some of whom make relatively small contributions, instead of emphasizing large-scale contributions from donors in the core of the Jewish community, Goldstein said. The philanthropy has increased outreach to such groups as millennials who have not reached their maximum earning potential, the emerging “tech community,” and Orthodox Jews, he said.
A growing part of this outreach includes use of social media, and site visits to recipients of UJA-Federation funding.
“More events, more volunteers, more people going on site visits,” Goldstein said. “This is ongoing. We’ve made it a greater priority to go deeper.”
Fundraising among members of the area’s Russian-speaking émigré community is increasingly conducted in UJA-Federation’s extant professional divisions, such as Wall Street, of which young Russian-speaking Jews constitute a growing part, rather than through the philanthropy’s Russian Division, which for decades worked with the early newcomers from the former Soviet Union.
UJA-Federation’s annual campaign, co-chaired this year by Jeffrey Schoenfeld and Jeffrey Stern, remains the largest single philanthropic effort by any local community in the world.
“This fundraising accomplishment is testament to a tremendous caring and committed community,” UJA-President Alisa Doctoroff said in a statement.
The record raised in the annual campaign was $153.7 million in 2008, before the worst affects of the recession were apparent, Goldstein said.
Leaders of the annual campaign will set a 2016 fundraising goal later this year. Based on this year’s results, next year’s figure will probably exceed the amount raised in the recently concluded drive, Goldstein said. “I would be surprised if [it were] otherwise.”
steve@jewishweek.org NEW YORK
The Joy Of Sex Ed
Orthodox increasingly looking to pre-marriage classes to learn about sexual pleasure as well as purity.
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
Orthodox sex expert Dr. Bat Sheva Marcus lectures participants. Hannah Dreyfus/JW
When Sasha Kesler, 25, was preparing for her Orthodox wedding two years ago, she participated in a routine “kallah class,” which were created to teach religious brides about the laws of family purity.
“It was pretty bare bones, just the basics of what to do, what not to do,” said Kesler, who was then living in Portland, Oregon. The wife of the local Chabad rabbi taught the course.
“Things were painted in black and white that shouldn’t have been,” said Kesler, who described often thinking she was a niddah, the Hebrew term for a state of ritual impurity, when she was not.
Today, Kesler, a social work student at Hunter College, has committed herself to a different kind of bride instruction. Along with 22 others, she participated in the first co-ed Chatan and Kallah Teacher Training (CKTT) workshop, a conference geared towards coaching bride and groom teachers on how to be sex educators.
The course, which spanned four days, included candid discussions about the first-night, masturbation and methods of enhancing sexual pleasure. At one point, Dr. Bat Sheva Marcus, clinical director of the Medical Center for Female Sexuality, produced a bag of vibrators to pass around the room. Close up pictures and life-size models of male and female genitalia were also passed around.
“If our educators aren’t able to speak about these topics freely and honestly, where does that leave our students?” said Marcus, who encouraged bride and groom teachers not to shy away from introducing more adventurous options to their students. “Only 30 percent of women can orgasm through vaginal intercourse alone — brides should know that so they don’t assume something is wrong with them when intercourse isn’t enjoyable.”
The conference, which brought together rabbis, teachers, and professionals from around the country, comes at a time when Orthodox Jews’ expectations for marriage preparation courses are shifting. While, in the past, the local rabbi or rabbi’s wife was tacitly appointed to the task of educating brides and grooms, today, professionals and laypeople with specific expertise in the area of family purity laws and sexuality are being approached to teach these courses. Bride and groom educators are increasingly looked to as mentors, confidants and relationship coaches, especially when it comes to sex.
Sarah Antine, 39, the rebbetzin of a Modern Orthodox synagogue in Potomac, Md., with 450 families, referred to the shift as a “revolution.”
“People don’t just want to learn the laws — they’re looking for a holistic approach that leaves them feeling empowered,” said Antine. Though she has not yet taught brides in a formal capacity, she hopes to begin after the conference. “I first want to gain the vocabulary and expertise to be an effective instructor,” she said. “There’s so much more to this than teaching the mechanics of the first night.”
Hosted by the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance (JOFA), Yeshivat Maharat andYeshivat Chovevei Torah Rabbinical School (YCT), there were over 60 applicants for only 20 spots according to one of the conference organizers.
The packed itinerary included detailed sessions about male and female sexual dysfunction, and role-play in which participants pretended to be troubled newlyweds seeking council. One hypothetical case involved Sarah, a 21-year-old Modern Orthodox woman determined to have sex on her wedding night, but petrified.
“The first night can be a perfect recipe for disaster if our brides and grooms are not prepared,” said Marcus. “Our job is to reel in crazy expectations about what the first-night night should be, and instead educate brides and grooms about the different possibilities of what it can be.”
While some Orthodox rabbis encourage couples to consummate their marriage on the first night, Rabbi Dov Linzer, one of the conference presenters and a head rabbi at YCT, encourages couples to wait it out and explore other options.
“Sex is not synonymous with intercourse, and it’s a good thing for couples not to set that precedent at the very beginning of their marriage,” he told participants.
Aside from those serving in rabbinic roles, many in the crowd had started teaching marriage prep courses simply because they’d been asked.
Meira Wolkenfeld, a 27-year-old graduate student living in Washington Heights, described the system of appointment as increasingly democratic.
“People kept approaching me and asking if I could teach them before their weddings,” said Wolkenfeld, a Judaic studies graduate student at Yeshiva University. She wore a flowered scarf on her head, an indication of being married in Orthodox circles. “They wanted someone they felt comfortable with,” she said.
One teacher at an Orthodox high school, who preferred to remain anonymous for privacy reasons, said she felt a responsibility to formally train as a kallah teacher because her former students frequently sought her counsel on sexual matters.
“It’s less of something I chose, and more of a role that developed,” she said. Though only in her 20s, she’s formally instructed three brides and two couples. “My main goal isn’t to be a sex-educator, but I need to be more equipped to talk about sex,” she said.
Other professionals, including several social workers and two doctors, joined the group.
Dr. Debbie Raice Fox, an endocrinologist who practices in Pomona, N.Y., was petitioned by a rabbi in her community to start coaching brides and grooms 17 years ago. She has since counseled over 50 couples.
“The rabbi came over to me in shul and said ‘Debbie, you need to do this,’” she described. “There was a real need for teachers who were educated about sex.”
While other teachers in the area did their best to prepare brides, most of whom had absolutely no sex education, the teachers themselves knew little about sexuality, and talked about it as little as possible, she said. “They would use lots of euphemisms — they were afraid to name the anatomical parts.”
Today, she works with both charedi and Modern Orthodox soon-to-be-weds to inform, and often to correct misconceptions about sex.
“I’ll have clients who go to a traditional kallah teacher first, and then they’ll get referred to me to learn the sex piece,” she said.
Many of her students arrive unhappy, confused, and fearful about sex. “This has taken too long to catch on,” she said, referring to revitalized efforts to bolster the pre-wedding curriculum. “How do we expect our couples to navigate their sexual lives together if we don’t give them the information?”
While she has worked “in isolation” up until now, Dr. Fox, who is Orthodox herself, was glad to find out about the conference. “It’s a relief to find others doing the same work.”
Though two similar training courses have taken place over the past six years, this is the first time men and women have learned side by side. And, according to JOFA executive director Sharon Weiss-Greenberg, there’s no going back.
“If couples are going to learn together, men and women educators can learn side by side,” she said, praising the “equal gender dynamic.” Too many times, couples learn the laws separately just to discover later that they were given conflicting information, she said.
Rabbi Aviad Bodner, the rabbi of the Stanton Street Shul on the Lower East Side, said this was the first time he learned the laws of family purity from a female perspective. “In the past, I’ve only learned from other male rabbis,” he said, noting the nuance he gained from adding the opposite gender. “When these laws are taught by men and women, you understand things in a fuller way.”
Several times throughout the lectures on Jewish law, female participants would interrupt Rabbi Dov Linzer, the Rosh Yeshiva of YCT, to correct a fact or perception from a woman’s point of view.
In one such instance, while discussing the laws of hand holding after the chuppah, Rabbi Linzer said in very specific cases, the couple should avoid the custom.
Amanda Klatt, 27, raised her hand. “Rabbi, every woman dreams about that moment,” she said, as the women in the room all nodded in agreement. “There are some experiences you just can’t get back. The law doesn’t have to ignore that.”
editor@jewishweek.org
BOOKS
Poodle Skirts And Prejudice
Martha Mendelsohn’s first novel looks at the subtle anti-Semitism at an Upper East Side girls school in the ’50s.
Sandee Brawarsky
Culture Editor
In “Bromley Girls,” Mendelsohn draws on her own years at a prestigious Manhattan school. Courtesy Texas Tech University Pres
Martha Mendelsohn’s first novel conjures up a time in New York when a handful of nickels could bring forth a generous slice of lemon meringue pie and steaming strong coffee at the Automat.
When “Bromley Girls” (Texas Tech University Press) opens in 1955, Jews aren’t welcome to live at certain Park Avenue addresses, join established clubs, or enroll in some of the city’s top private schools. Mendelsohn takes on the subtle anti-Semitism of an all-girls school, recreating a world just across Central Park from Herman Wouk’s bestselling 1956 novel, “Marjorie Morningstar.” Bromley sounds a lot like Brearley, the school Mendelsohn attended back then.
The novel’s backstory begins when Mendelsohn was contacted by a classmate planning their 40th class reunion. As the author explains in an interview, the classmate told her there were some girls she knew nothing about, and enlisted Mendelsohn to describe them. Seeing the list, she realized it included all the Jewish girls in the class (less than 10, including some with only one Jewish parent), with Mendelsohn having been the only one who would take off for all the Jewish holidays.
Brearley was known to admit Jewish students from its beginnings, yet the Jewish girls attended one dance school (the only way to meet boys) and the gentiles went to another. Mendelsohn remembers a random comment here and there, like a classmate asking about her (lack of a) Christmas tree, but didn’t feel anti-Semitism. Still, she was puzzled by her grown-up classmate’s questions about the Jewish girls.
She contacted a close friend from those days, who wasn’t Jewish, and the friend admitted that the gentile girls did have “this thing about the Jewish girls” — about their poodle skirts, television sets and new uniforms (in a kind of reverse snobbery, the wealthy gentile girls bought used uniforms). “We called them the Clothes Girls,” her friend told her, embarrassed at the thought.
Mendelsohn was inspired to interview her classmates — who were eager to talk — for an article titled “Poodle Skirts and Prejudice.” Then, when she read a young adult novel by a classmate of her son’s, “Nobody Was Here” by Alison Polett, which dealt with an elite private school, she realized that she wanted to return to her Brearley years and questions of anti-Semitism in fictional form.
In the novel, Emily Winter, 14, the new girl at Bromley, lives on Park Avenue in a building resembling a castle, with turrets and a moat-like driveway. Most of her new classmates’ fathers went to Ivy League colleges, and the girls wear the striped scarves of their schools in the winter. Emily’s father went to night school and worked in her grandfather’s stationery store before inventing Whirlex, a circular card file of enormous popularity.
After quickly making a good friend, Emily is dismayed when she learns that the girl is part of a secret anti-Semitic club that won’t allow its members to speak with her. Mendelsohn is particularly skilled at portraying the emotional lives of these girls; she says that those feelings have stayed with her over the years. With sensitivity, she deals with jealousy, loyalty, prejudice, anorexia and the power of friendship.
A lifelong New Yorker, Mendelsohn’s love for the city is evident on the page. Wouk’s “Marjorie Morningstar” is among her favorite books, and she loves John Cheever and John Updike. She thought about following her Bromley girls in a sequel, but instead has begun work on an adult novel.
Mendelsohn’s late father invented the Rolodex. While he was a worldly Modern Orthodox man, her mother was not religious at all but kept a kosher home. Throughout her life, Mendelsohn attended shul weekly. She began school at Ramaz and then, after her mother visited Europe and returned a Francophile, she switched to Lycee Francais, even though she didn’t speak a word of French. There, she faced absolutely no anti-Semitism and the school even had a rabbi giving the Jewish students instruction while the Catholics did catechism. When she moved to Brearley for high school, it was “a whole new world.”
On Saturday nights, she attended Viola Wolf Dancing School with the other Jewish students, and the Jewish young men wore white gloves (and Mendelsohn learned to fox trot, waltz and Lindy hop, even as the tall young woman towered over her partners). It was confusing, she says, going to a school where one of the main social events was Lenten Vespers at St. James Episcopal Church on Saturdays, and she couldn’t go.
But it was a school with academic rigor that gave girls a sense that they could do anything, and for that she’s grateful. After graduation, she fell in love in Israel on a summer visit and then attended Sarah Lawrence College.
Now living on the Upper West Side, Mendelsohn regularly attends the Conservative shul Congregation Or Zarua. She has worked as a translator for the French Embassy, as an associate editor of Tikkun magazine and she has published articles in The Jewish Week and elsewhere.
As the novel ends, Emily has a sense that everything is changing, that the pizza place, the Automat, their regular coffee shop might be gone, along with 1163 Park. “But not Bromley. Emily had a feeling it would last forever.” Brearley still flourishes, in the same location right off the East River, although the student body is diverse, and there’s usually a class mother who maintains a calendar with bat mitzvah dates. Mendelsohn’s granddaughters are students there.
editor@jewishweek.org
The Good Life July 2015
American olim cultivating the volunteer spirit. Kosher Meals on Wheels empowers seniors, volunteers. Remembering Hank Greenberg’s sacrifice.
Tuesday, July 14, 2015
INSIDE THIS SPECIAL SECTION
Enjoy the read,
Gary Rosenblatt
P.S. Our website is always there for you so check it out for breaking news and exclusive videos, blogs, op-eds and features.
http://www.thejewishweek.com/
BETWEEN THE LINES ARY ROSENBLATT
Claims Conference Facing New Pressures
Board members call for reforms; AG said to be exploring charges of ‘mismanagement.’
Gary Rosenblatt
Editor and Publisher
Gary Rosenblatt
On the eve of the annual meeting of the Claims Conference this week, a member of its leadership council demanded that the council be shown a document suggesting a serious conflict of interest — with legal ramifications — involving the organization’s lay president, Julius Berman, and its executive vice president, Greg Schneider, The Jewish Week has learned.
Berman refused the written request from Robert Goot, leader of the Australian Jewish community and one of the 14 members of the conference’s leadership council, which was created last year in part to decentralize the authority of the organization’s president. Berman responded that to release the document now would violate the spirit of the group’s decision two years ago, during a particularly contentious time, to move ahead and not look back.
Berman was referring to the summer of 2013, when the Claims Conference’s annual meeting focused on a report by the group’s ombudsman, Shmuel Hollander, a highly respected former Israeli public servant. He had been tasked with looking into the conference’s level of culpability for an embarrassing, multimillion dollar in-house fraud that went unnoticed for years, perpetrated by a number of employees of the New York office through false restitution claims.
Initially thought to total under $1 million, the amount stolen was later estimated to be $57 million, though Hollander believes now it is far more, with some insiders putting the figure at as much as $100 million.
Hollander issued a stinging report at the 2013 meeting, asserting that “the absence of professional control systems” was a “key factor in enabling, and certainly facilitating, the fraud.” Berman was cited for not acting sufficiently on an anonymous letter to him in 2001 that outlined the details of the fraud. The fraud was not discovered by the conference until 2009, when the FBI was alerted.
The Claims Conference (officially the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany) represents world Jewry in negotiations with Germany, which has released more than $70 billion in restitution and compensation for survivors and their heirs since its founding in 1951. It is widely seen in the Jewish world as a sacred trust, distributing more than $700 million annually; its actions are watched closely by survivors and the broader Jewish community.
The polite-but-contentious exchange of letters between Goot and Berman, obtained by The Jewish Week, has not been discussed publicly. But it signifies a growing concern inside and outside the conference regarding its oversight, management, transparency and adherence to laws governing charities.
At the two-day board meeting this week, Goot and several other members of the conference were expected to demand reform and an independent study of the organization’s operations. Perhaps more worrisome to Berman, who has headed the conference since 2002 and weathered previous storms of dissatisfaction from within, is that the office of New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is said to be looking into allegations of mismanagement of the conference, The Jewish Week has learned.
A spokesman for the attorney general told The Jewish Week his office “cannot comment on ongoing or potential investigations,” a verbal formulation whose non-denial suggests to some that there is substance to reports of a probe.
‘Absolutely Entitled’
At the moment, the central figure in this complex case is Hollander, the ombudsman with an impeccable portfolio of four decades of service in Israel, whose contract with the conference expired June 30 and was not renewed. He claimed, in a June 29 letter to the board, that Berman told him June 3 in a phone call that the decision not to rehire him was “in response to the report” he prepared in 2013 that criticized Berman and the conference top management.
In his letter to the board, obtained by The Jewish Week, Hollander charged that top lay and professional leadership repeatedly and deliberately thwarted his attempt to do his work over the last three years. He asserted that “numerous obstacles were placed in our path. … Relevant information was withheld from us, and formal obligations were violated.”
Hollander also asserted that shortly after the leadership council fully endorsed his 2013 report, Berman and Schneider and two other conference leaders, Roman Kent and Reuven Merhav, sent a letter to German Finance Ministry officials disavowing themselves of the very report they had approved — a report that, in part, blamed them for their failure to recognize and respond to the fraud. According to Hollander, “the findings of the report were repudiated” by the four conference leaders, an act he believes places Berman and Schneider “in a position of personal conflict of interest” and raises “suspicion of the violation of proper administrative behavior.”
Hollander further alleges that while Berman explained to him that the German Finance Ministry demanded the letter and said that without it “there would be future financial consequences,” in fact Hollander later learned there was no such demand from the Germans.
Just what did the Berman and Schneider letter to the German Finance Ministry say, and why is it being withheld from conference board members?
That’s what Robert Goot wants to know. In response to Berman’s refusal to release it, Goot insisted that he and the other members of the leadership council are “absolutely entitled” to see a copy of the letter. “The letter is required by me to discharge my fiduciary obligation,” he wrote to Berman, suggesting that “such entitlement … is recognized under Australian law” and presumably under New York law as well since the conference is a “not-for-profit New York regulated corporation.”
Berman strongly denies all of Hollander’s allegations, which he attributes to bitterness over not being rehired. In one of his emails to Goot, Berman wrote: “Personally, I find Hollander’s tactics despicable and I refuse to participate in furthering the result he is working for.”
In a sense, the letter to the German Ministry of Finance is the equivalent here of what famed movie director Alfred Hitchcock called “the MacGuffin,” the plot device “that motivates the characters and advances the story.” The letter in question appears to be just one of many points of contention that speak to concerns, at the very least, over lack of communication within the conference itself.
If and how these issues will be resolved, and whether the conference leadership will allow a truly independent report on its management practices remains to be seen, particularly after Hollander’s allegations as the organization’s first ombudsman. And hovering over this week’s proceedings is the specter of an outside probe by the attorney general, which surely would be an embarrassment to the conference and affect its standing as a representative body of world Jewry.
gary@jewishweek.org
Read More
MUSINGS
Louis Armstrong: Horn Of Plenty
Rabbi David Wolpe
Rabbi David Wolpe
Can a single gesture change a life? On New Year’s Eve 1913, a shot rang out. A boy was playing with a pistol, and he was taken by police and put into a house of correction, called The Colored Waifs Home for Boys.
His behavior there was so difficult that the director, one Peter Davis, decided to try quieting him by handing him a trumpet. Exchanging the metal of the revolver for the metal of the instrument, 12-year-old Louis Armstrong coaxes from the trumpet the first notes of a legendary career.
The world is awash in talent, but most of it will languish if we do not provide chances for people to prove their gifts. The Torah is an education in the potential of human beings. Moses was a runaway shepherd with a speech impediment, Ruth a lonely widow from another country, David the youngest and seemingly least promising of his brothers. But seeing possibilities is one way of showing faith. There is Armstrong in the lost boy, Einstein in the patent clerk. All human beings are in the image of God. Many of them just need the chance to show the world who they are and what they can contribute.
Rabbi David Wolpe is spiritual leader of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter: @RabbiWolpe. His latest book is “David: The Divided Heart” (Yale University Press).
editor@jewishweek.org
Read More
The surf and dunes at Edgartown's South Beach. Hilary Danailova
TRAVEL
The Politics Of Summer
Hilary Danailova
Travel WriterBernie Sanders, America’s only Jewish socialist senator and lately a presidential candidate, seems to be following my mom around these days.
He turns out to have been the college roommate of Mom’s own college chum. Hours after she realized the connection, there Sanders was on Martha’s Vineyard, zipping around the same hydrangeas as my parents, and savoring the same salty air (while presumably raising money from the 1-percenters for his populist campaign).
My parents, longtime Vineyarders — though sadly, not 1-percenters — have gotten used to Democratic politicians on the ever-popular resort island. Bill and Hillary Clinton generally pop by at some point in August, hanging with their friend Vernon Jordan. And as everyone knows, President Obama and his family are regulars on the South Shore, holing up amid the shrub oaks and blueberry thickets and snarling up island traffic for a week or two.
Democrats here (which is most people) have been seething ever since then-President George W. Bush told a reporter in 2002 that “most Americans don’t sit in Martha’s Vineyard, swilling white wine.” It’s safe to assume that most Americans probably do their swilling elsewhere, but judging from the crowds I saw walking around Edgartown in late June, more visitors than ever seem to be following the Clintons and Obamas to this island off Cape Cod. I’ve rarely seen so many people on the island — and Sanders notwithstanding, Democratic heavyweights have yet to put in an appearance.
There are plenty of reasons for the Vineyard’s enduring popularity, especially for vacationers more interested in raising sandcastles than campaign funds. An awful lot of Vineyarders fit the Bernie Sanders mold — Jewish, retirement age, with roots in New York and New England — and they come for the combination of natural beauty, low-key socializing and a stimulating intellectual and arts scene.
Your neighbors on the beach might well be celebrities, but unlike their peers in the Hamptons, they don’t advertise it. At the twice-weekly West Tisbury Farmer’s Market, sandals and a floppy hat are the uniform for browsers of local snap peas, sweet corn and raspberries.
The prettiest farmhouses in Chilmark are plainly visible over lichen-covered stone walls, not barricaded behind manicured hedges. And when the sun sets over west-facing Menemsha Beach, the nightly beach-chair crowd applauds in sweatshirts — though a fair amount of white wine swilling does go on.
The Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center is, as always, a hive of cultural activity for summer learners — a multigenerational, interfaith set that mingles at Friday services, stays for afternoon concerts on the patio and lines up for the venerable Summer Institute, a season-long speaker and film series that tackles weighty issues in depth. Foreign policy, American economic stagnation and the Iran nuclear deal are just a few of those issues to be discussed this year; highlights include Geraldine Brooks and Allegra Goodman on being Jewish novelists, while Yossi Klein Halevi parses the question, “Israel: Jewish State, Democracy or Both?”
More intellectual ferment is evident at the biennial Martha’s Vineyard Book Festival, celebrating its tenth anniversary as a showcase for the island’s rich literary heritage. This is a place, after all, where William Styron found inspiration, where David McCullough scratches out his bestsellers and where Judy Blume endowed a room in the local library.
Jewish authors and themes are prominent in the early August lineup, which includes Laurie David, the author of “The Family Cooks”; Barney Frank, the former Massachusetts House member who will read from his new memoir; Sarah Wildman, who unveiled her grandfather’s Holocaust love story in “Paper Love”; and David Kertzer, the Brown University historian who won a Pulitzer Prize for his book investigating Mussolini, Pope Pius XI and the fate of Italian Jews.
Culture is also the preferred nightlife on the island, where some towns are still officially “dry” (no alcohol is bought or sold). The few Vineyard bars cater more to college-age summer workers than to locals, who on soft summer evenings take their seats in the wood-beamed Chilmark Community Center or the polished pews of the Edgartown Whaling Church to hear the Martha’s Vineyard Chamber Music Society. As always, Jewish artists — including Israel-born Yael Weiss of the Weiss-Kaplan-Stumpf Trio — and Jewish composers are well represented in the summer-long program of intimate ensemble work, now in its 45th year.
Vineyarders may cherish their first-class cultural life — but on sunny afternoons, it’s the beach that beckons. Despite the throngs shopping for sundresses and wampum jewelry in town, Vineyard beaches are rarely crowded.
From the dunes of Edgartown’s South Beach, soft and powdery white, you can glimpse the swells popular with surfers; State Beach, a long, sandy stretch hemmed with wild roses, is the choice of families. At dusk, as dogs frolic and fishermen cast their lines, you might even see a few swillers of white wine.
And you can assume they’re Democrats.
editor@jewishweek.org
Read More
Featured on NYBLUEPRINT
Hip Hop's Jewish Commander: An Interview With Jake Miller
Carly Stern and Talia Lakritz
Editorial Interns
Read More
THE GOOD LIFE
Special Supplement of The Jewish Week
American olim cultivating the volunteer spirit. Kosher Meals on Wheels empowers seniors, volunteers. Remembering Hank Greenberg's sacrifice.
The Good Life July 2015
American olim cultivating the volunteer spirit. Kosher Meals on Wheels empowers seniors, volunteers. Remembering Hank Greenberg’s sacrifice.
Tuesday, July 14, 2015
INSIDE THIS SPECIAL SECTION
Read More
TOP STORIESISRAEL NEWS
Israel Facing Agonizing Choice On Iran Deal
Tough line against pact could further isolate Jewish state, as Netanyahu appears to gear up for congressional push.
Joshua Mitnick
Israel Correspondent
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in a tough spot on how to proceed in wake of Iran deal. Getty Images
Tel Aviv — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s reaction to the deal to curtail Iran’s nuclear ambitions announced on Tuesday in Vienna was swift and unambiguous.
The deal, he said, will prove to be an “historic mistake for the world.” He accused Western negotiators of accepting a deal “at any price,” and said that Israel doesn’t consider itself bound to the agreement.
The response seemed further confirmation that the prime minister is gearing up to wage a fresh diplomatic offensive against the ratification of the agreement by Western countries, known as the P5+1 group. One of the main questions in the next few months, say analysts, will be how intensively Israel will lobby the U.S. Congress against the deal; Congress has 60 days to debate the deal, and President Obama has promised a veto if Congress votes it down.
The deal, which seeks to prevent Iran from producing a nuclear weapon for at least a decade and, in return, end economic and oil sanctions against Tehran, is already generating controversy. It will sharply reduce Iran’s uranium enrichment program and, the U.S. says, increase the breakout time for Iran to produce a bomb from about two or three months now to about a year. Nuclear facilities will be inspected but visits must be arranged first.
After U.S.-Israel ties were aggravated following Netanyahu’s speech to a joint session of Congress criticizing the deal, the prime minister needs to decide whether he wants to immerse Israel again in what is likely to shape up as a partisan battle, analysts say.
“Israel has to consider how to react on the Hill,” said Oded Eran, a former Israeli ambassador to the European Union. “Right now the Israeli prime minister and the government will have to weigh the pros and cons between mounting an open campaign to block approval, and the benefits of starting a dialogue with the U.S. on how to deal with a possible violation of the agreement.”
Eran said a decision to jump into the congressional debate on blocking the president at this point would carry much higher stakes for U.S.-Israeli relations than Netanyahu’s criticism of the negotiations earlier this year.
“It’s one thing to raise objections and criticize elements of the agreement before it is reached, it’s a different issue to come out campaigning before Congress debates it and votes on it,” Eran said. “We already sustained damage following the address to Congress. I’m not sure Israel wants to be perceived as the one causing the failure of the agreement in the U.S., especially when there’s an option of conducting a dialogue.”
The former ambassador suggested Israel draft its own analysis of the agreement but refrain from actively lobbying House and Senate members. In an interview with the Times of Israel, Foreign Ministry Director General Dore Gold said that Israeli officials would give their opinion if approached by U.S. legislators, but that they would seek to “respect” the positions of the administration.
However, in an initial reaction to the agreement, Deputy Foreign Minister Tzippi Hotovely signaled that the Israeli government is likely to take an aggressive approach, saying it will “employ all diplomatic means to prevent the confirmation of the agreement.’’
Tzachi Hanegbi, a Likud Knesset member, also signaled in an interview with Israel Radio that the Netanyahu government believes that it can make a difference in Congress. While he acknowledged that it would be a struggle to get a vote overriding a presidential veto, he said there were several Democrats who were unhappy with the deal. (At least 13 Democrats would need to break with their party to override a presidential veto.) Hanegbi said that Israel “will review day to day, and hour to hour what is going on in Iran. … It always has the right to defend itself.”
In New York, a coalition of Israel backers is already gearing up to wage a public campaign against the Iran deal in Times Square on Wednesday. Under the slogan, “Stop Iran,” the organizers are hoping that thousands will show up to hear opponents of the deal such as Alan Dershowitz and former CIA Director James Woolsey weigh in. In a warning, rally organizers said in a press release, “if the deal is not stopped, New Yorkers will know who to blame,” a reference to Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer, widely seen as a key figure in the debate because he is a strong supporter of Israel and of Obama.
Opposition to the deal crosses Israel’s familiar left-right political divide, with opposition leader Isaac Herzog of the dovish Zionist Union party called it “dangerous” for Israel. “This is a bad deal for Israeli security in the future and dangerous tomorrow morning,” he wrote on his Facebook page.
Herzog’s former candidate for defense minister, former military intelligence chief Amos Yadlin, told reporters that the agreement is “full of holes,” with the most problematic being an inspection procedure that would limit when and where inspectors could visit certain nuclear sites.
Despite his concerns, Yadlin said, “I am not in a position [to say] that this is a new Holocaust. Israel is strong and Israel will know how to deal with the risks that come with the agreement. The main change should be to leave Israel’s concerns with the allies, and to reach a side agreement.”
Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli consul general in New York, also believes that the prime minister will continue with a full-court press against the deal. “He is going to use the next 60 days using everything he can,” a move Pinkas opposes because he believes Netanyahu is unlikely to persuade 13 Democratic senators and 44 Democrats in the House to oppose the president, and that Congress doesn’t have the power to nullify a multilateral agreement.
Pinkas said Israel should instead huddle with the U.S. discretely and discuss a package of security aid that will enhance Israel’s defensive posture to face the possibility of a nuclear Iran.
“This is the first time that Israel has ever dismissed and denounced a major U.S. foreign policy agreement championed by the president,” he said. “We are now totally isolated.”
An aggressive push against the agreement risks isolating the prime minister domestically as well. Even though opposition politicians agree with the prime minister that the nuclear agreement is a bad one, Herzog and other opposition leaders have taken the prime minister to task over the rift with the U.S. Yair Lapid, the former finance minister and leader of the centrist Yesh Atid, called for Netanyahu’s resignation, saying the prime minister’s friction with the White House is hampering Israel’s relationship with the U.S.
Herzog also faulted the prime minister for the rift with Obama. “One of the most grave issues in the current situation is that the agreement that has the most impact on the existence of Israel in the last generation was signed without [Israel] being in the picture,” he said. “Israel’s interests were abandoned.”
editor@jewishweek.org
Read More NEW YORK
‘Strong Year Across The Board’
UJA-Fed’s annual campaign tops $150 million; increase in donors seen.
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
UJA-Federation CEO Eric Goldstein: Increased outreach to millennials and emerging “tech community.”
The annual fundraising campaign of UJA-Federation of New York closed at the end of June with a total of $150.8 million, an increase of $3.9 million over the 2014 campaign, the philanthropy announced this week.
The 2015 figure represented the sixth consecutive year of an increase in the campaign, following a decrease caused by the national recession that began in 2008.
The $150.8 million figure represents an increase of 2.65 percent. As a point of comparison, overall charitable giving by individuals nationally rose by 5.7 percent between 2013 and 2014.
The total raised by UJA-Federation in fiscal year 2015, including planned giving, endowments, capital projects and special initiatives — including the Israel Emergency Campaign during last summer’s war in Gaza — was $207.8 million, an increase of $21.8 million or 11.7 percent, a steeper jump than the national average for total charitable giving, which rose by 7.1 percent between 2013 and 2014.
“I’m deeply satisfied with the results. Across the board it was a strong year,” said Eric Goldstein, who marked his one-year anniversary as the charity’s CEO this month. “We are doing a good job explaining to our community the work we do.”
Nearly 53,000 donors contributed to the 2015 campaign, a 3.9 percent increase over the 2014 total of 51,000.
Over the past few years the UJA-Federation has made an effort to reach out to donors in more parts of the Jewish community, some of whom make relatively small contributions, instead of emphasizing large-scale contributions from donors in the core of the Jewish community, Goldstein said. The philanthropy has increased outreach to such groups as millennials who have not reached their maximum earning potential, the emerging “tech community,” and Orthodox Jews, he said.
A growing part of this outreach includes use of social media, and site visits to recipients of UJA-Federation funding.
“More events, more volunteers, more people going on site visits,” Goldstein said. “This is ongoing. We’ve made it a greater priority to go deeper.”
Fundraising among members of the area’s Russian-speaking émigré community is increasingly conducted in UJA-Federation’s extant professional divisions, such as Wall Street, of which young Russian-speaking Jews constitute a growing part, rather than through the philanthropy’s Russian Division, which for decades worked with the early newcomers from the former Soviet Union.
UJA-Federation’s annual campaign, co-chaired this year by Jeffrey Schoenfeld and Jeffrey Stern, remains the largest single philanthropic effort by any local community in the world.
“This fundraising accomplishment is testament to a tremendous caring and committed community,” UJA-President Alisa Doctoroff said in a statement.
The record raised in the annual campaign was $153.7 million in 2008, before the worst affects of the recession were apparent, Goldstein said.
Leaders of the annual campaign will set a 2016 fundraising goal later this year. Based on this year’s results, next year’s figure will probably exceed the amount raised in the recently concluded drive, Goldstein said. “I would be surprised if [it were] otherwise.”
steve@jewishweek.org.
Gary Rosenblatt
P.S. Our website is always there for you so check it out for breaking news and exclusive videos, blogs, op-eds and features.
http://www.thejewishweek.com/
BETWEEN THE LINES ARY ROSENBLATT
Claims Conference Facing New Pressures
Board members call for reforms; AG said to be exploring charges of ‘mismanagement.’
Gary Rosenblatt
Editor and Publisher
Gary Rosenblatt
On the eve of the annual meeting of the Claims Conference this week, a member of its leadership council demanded that the council be shown a document suggesting a serious conflict of interest — with legal ramifications — involving the organization’s lay president, Julius Berman, and its executive vice president, Greg Schneider, The Jewish Week has learned.
Berman refused the written request from Robert Goot, leader of the Australian Jewish community and one of the 14 members of the conference’s leadership council, which was created last year in part to decentralize the authority of the organization’s president. Berman responded that to release the document now would violate the spirit of the group’s decision two years ago, during a particularly contentious time, to move ahead and not look back.
Berman was referring to the summer of 2013, when the Claims Conference’s annual meeting focused on a report by the group’s ombudsman, Shmuel Hollander, a highly respected former Israeli public servant. He had been tasked with looking into the conference’s level of culpability for an embarrassing, multimillion dollar in-house fraud that went unnoticed for years, perpetrated by a number of employees of the New York office through false restitution claims.
Initially thought to total under $1 million, the amount stolen was later estimated to be $57 million, though Hollander believes now it is far more, with some insiders putting the figure at as much as $100 million.
Hollander issued a stinging report at the 2013 meeting, asserting that “the absence of professional control systems” was a “key factor in enabling, and certainly facilitating, the fraud.” Berman was cited for not acting sufficiently on an anonymous letter to him in 2001 that outlined the details of the fraud. The fraud was not discovered by the conference until 2009, when the FBI was alerted.
The Claims Conference (officially the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany) represents world Jewry in negotiations with Germany, which has released more than $70 billion in restitution and compensation for survivors and their heirs since its founding in 1951. It is widely seen in the Jewish world as a sacred trust, distributing more than $700 million annually; its actions are watched closely by survivors and the broader Jewish community.
The polite-but-contentious exchange of letters between Goot and Berman, obtained by The Jewish Week, has not been discussed publicly. But it signifies a growing concern inside and outside the conference regarding its oversight, management, transparency and adherence to laws governing charities.
At the two-day board meeting this week, Goot and several other members of the conference were expected to demand reform and an independent study of the organization’s operations. Perhaps more worrisome to Berman, who has headed the conference since 2002 and weathered previous storms of dissatisfaction from within, is that the office of New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is said to be looking into allegations of mismanagement of the conference, The Jewish Week has learned.
A spokesman for the attorney general told The Jewish Week his office “cannot comment on ongoing or potential investigations,” a verbal formulation whose non-denial suggests to some that there is substance to reports of a probe.
‘Absolutely Entitled’
At the moment, the central figure in this complex case is Hollander, the ombudsman with an impeccable portfolio of four decades of service in Israel, whose contract with the conference expired June 30 and was not renewed. He claimed, in a June 29 letter to the board, that Berman told him June 3 in a phone call that the decision not to rehire him was “in response to the report” he prepared in 2013 that criticized Berman and the conference top management.
In his letter to the board, obtained by The Jewish Week, Hollander charged that top lay and professional leadership repeatedly and deliberately thwarted his attempt to do his work over the last three years. He asserted that “numerous obstacles were placed in our path. … Relevant information was withheld from us, and formal obligations were violated.”
Hollander also asserted that shortly after the leadership council fully endorsed his 2013 report, Berman and Schneider and two other conference leaders, Roman Kent and Reuven Merhav, sent a letter to German Finance Ministry officials disavowing themselves of the very report they had approved — a report that, in part, blamed them for their failure to recognize and respond to the fraud. According to Hollander, “the findings of the report were repudiated” by the four conference leaders, an act he believes places Berman and Schneider “in a position of personal conflict of interest” and raises “suspicion of the violation of proper administrative behavior.”
Hollander further alleges that while Berman explained to him that the German Finance Ministry demanded the letter and said that without it “there would be future financial consequences,” in fact Hollander later learned there was no such demand from the Germans.
Just what did the Berman and Schneider letter to the German Finance Ministry say, and why is it being withheld from conference board members?
That’s what Robert Goot wants to know. In response to Berman’s refusal to release it, Goot insisted that he and the other members of the leadership council are “absolutely entitled” to see a copy of the letter. “The letter is required by me to discharge my fiduciary obligation,” he wrote to Berman, suggesting that “such entitlement … is recognized under Australian law” and presumably under New York law as well since the conference is a “not-for-profit New York regulated corporation.”
Berman strongly denies all of Hollander’s allegations, which he attributes to bitterness over not being rehired. In one of his emails to Goot, Berman wrote: “Personally, I find Hollander’s tactics despicable and I refuse to participate in furthering the result he is working for.”
In a sense, the letter to the German Ministry of Finance is the equivalent here of what famed movie director Alfred Hitchcock called “the MacGuffin,” the plot device “that motivates the characters and advances the story.” The letter in question appears to be just one of many points of contention that speak to concerns, at the very least, over lack of communication within the conference itself.
If and how these issues will be resolved, and whether the conference leadership will allow a truly independent report on its management practices remains to be seen, particularly after Hollander’s allegations as the organization’s first ombudsman. And hovering over this week’s proceedings is the specter of an outside probe by the attorney general, which surely would be an embarrassment to the conference and affect its standing as a representative body of world Jewry.
gary@jewishweek.org
Read More
MUSINGS
Louis Armstrong: Horn Of Plenty
Rabbi David Wolpe
Rabbi David Wolpe
Can a single gesture change a life? On New Year’s Eve 1913, a shot rang out. A boy was playing with a pistol, and he was taken by police and put into a house of correction, called The Colored Waifs Home for Boys.
His behavior there was so difficult that the director, one Peter Davis, decided to try quieting him by handing him a trumpet. Exchanging the metal of the revolver for the metal of the instrument, 12-year-old Louis Armstrong coaxes from the trumpet the first notes of a legendary career.
The world is awash in talent, but most of it will languish if we do not provide chances for people to prove their gifts. The Torah is an education in the potential of human beings. Moses was a runaway shepherd with a speech impediment, Ruth a lonely widow from another country, David the youngest and seemingly least promising of his brothers. But seeing possibilities is one way of showing faith. There is Armstrong in the lost boy, Einstein in the patent clerk. All human beings are in the image of God. Many of them just need the chance to show the world who they are and what they can contribute.
Rabbi David Wolpe is spiritual leader of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter: @RabbiWolpe. His latest book is “David: The Divided Heart” (Yale University Press).
editor@jewishweek.org
Read More
The surf and dunes at Edgartown's South Beach. Hilary Danailova
TRAVEL
The Politics Of Summer
Hilary Danailova
Travel WriterBernie Sanders, America’s only Jewish socialist senator and lately a presidential candidate, seems to be following my mom around these days.
He turns out to have been the college roommate of Mom’s own college chum. Hours after she realized the connection, there Sanders was on Martha’s Vineyard, zipping around the same hydrangeas as my parents, and savoring the same salty air (while presumably raising money from the 1-percenters for his populist campaign).
My parents, longtime Vineyarders — though sadly, not 1-percenters — have gotten used to Democratic politicians on the ever-popular resort island. Bill and Hillary Clinton generally pop by at some point in August, hanging with their friend Vernon Jordan. And as everyone knows, President Obama and his family are regulars on the South Shore, holing up amid the shrub oaks and blueberry thickets and snarling up island traffic for a week or two.
Democrats here (which is most people) have been seething ever since then-President George W. Bush told a reporter in 2002 that “most Americans don’t sit in Martha’s Vineyard, swilling white wine.” It’s safe to assume that most Americans probably do their swilling elsewhere, but judging from the crowds I saw walking around Edgartown in late June, more visitors than ever seem to be following the Clintons and Obamas to this island off Cape Cod. I’ve rarely seen so many people on the island — and Sanders notwithstanding, Democratic heavyweights have yet to put in an appearance.
There are plenty of reasons for the Vineyard’s enduring popularity, especially for vacationers more interested in raising sandcastles than campaign funds. An awful lot of Vineyarders fit the Bernie Sanders mold — Jewish, retirement age, with roots in New York and New England — and they come for the combination of natural beauty, low-key socializing and a stimulating intellectual and arts scene.
Your neighbors on the beach might well be celebrities, but unlike their peers in the Hamptons, they don’t advertise it. At the twice-weekly West Tisbury Farmer’s Market, sandals and a floppy hat are the uniform for browsers of local snap peas, sweet corn and raspberries.
The prettiest farmhouses in Chilmark are plainly visible over lichen-covered stone walls, not barricaded behind manicured hedges. And when the sun sets over west-facing Menemsha Beach, the nightly beach-chair crowd applauds in sweatshirts — though a fair amount of white wine swilling does go on.
The Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center is, as always, a hive of cultural activity for summer learners — a multigenerational, interfaith set that mingles at Friday services, stays for afternoon concerts on the patio and lines up for the venerable Summer Institute, a season-long speaker and film series that tackles weighty issues in depth. Foreign policy, American economic stagnation and the Iran nuclear deal are just a few of those issues to be discussed this year; highlights include Geraldine Brooks and Allegra Goodman on being Jewish novelists, while Yossi Klein Halevi parses the question, “Israel: Jewish State, Democracy or Both?”
More intellectual ferment is evident at the biennial Martha’s Vineyard Book Festival, celebrating its tenth anniversary as a showcase for the island’s rich literary heritage. This is a place, after all, where William Styron found inspiration, where David McCullough scratches out his bestsellers and where Judy Blume endowed a room in the local library.
Jewish authors and themes are prominent in the early August lineup, which includes Laurie David, the author of “The Family Cooks”; Barney Frank, the former Massachusetts House member who will read from his new memoir; Sarah Wildman, who unveiled her grandfather’s Holocaust love story in “Paper Love”; and David Kertzer, the Brown University historian who won a Pulitzer Prize for his book investigating Mussolini, Pope Pius XI and the fate of Italian Jews.
Culture is also the preferred nightlife on the island, where some towns are still officially “dry” (no alcohol is bought or sold). The few Vineyard bars cater more to college-age summer workers than to locals, who on soft summer evenings take their seats in the wood-beamed Chilmark Community Center or the polished pews of the Edgartown Whaling Church to hear the Martha’s Vineyard Chamber Music Society. As always, Jewish artists — including Israel-born Yael Weiss of the Weiss-Kaplan-Stumpf Trio — and Jewish composers are well represented in the summer-long program of intimate ensemble work, now in its 45th year.
Vineyarders may cherish their first-class cultural life — but on sunny afternoons, it’s the beach that beckons. Despite the throngs shopping for sundresses and wampum jewelry in town, Vineyard beaches are rarely crowded.
From the dunes of Edgartown’s South Beach, soft and powdery white, you can glimpse the swells popular with surfers; State Beach, a long, sandy stretch hemmed with wild roses, is the choice of families. At dusk, as dogs frolic and fishermen cast their lines, you might even see a few swillers of white wine.
And you can assume they’re Democrats.
editor@jewishweek.org
Read More
Featured on NYBLUEPRINT
Hip Hop's Jewish Commander: An Interview With Jake Miller
Carly Stern and Talia Lakritz
Editorial Interns
Screams pierced the quiet concentration of The Jewish Week offices in Times Square on Thursday afternoon. The reason for the disturbance? Five floors down, across the street at the Best Buy Theater on West 44th Street, 22-year-old singer/songwriter and rapper Jake Miller had just stepped out of his “Dazed and Confused” tour bus, pausing for a quick Snapchat before heading backstage to prepare for his concert.
His fans, who call themselves the “Miller-tary,” had been waiting since 9 a.m. to make sure they’d be close enough to the stage to drink in every word of original songs such as “Like Me,” a celebration of individuality and self-confidence. Miller’s new EP “Rumors” dropped last night and already snagged the top spot on iTunes from Taylor Swift. Aside from being a YouTube star and teen heartthrob, Miller is also a member of the Tribe. He spoke to The Jewish Week before his concert about traveling to Israel, “pulling a Beyonce,” and marriage proposals.
Tell us about your Jewish background.
We’d celebrate Shabbat every now and then, I had a bar mitzvah, which was a great time in my life. I went to Hebrew school growing up, I went to Israel with my family and my friends, so Judaism is definitely important to me.
How was Israel? Did you tour?
I just went for a vacation before I got into music. It was awesome, it was really cool, a lot different than I would have thought. Everyone was nice there, and the food was great. It was a lot of fun.
How do you relate to your Jewish identity today?
I don’t think it’s really changed my whole life, but I think it’s always going to stick with me. It’s more of a family thing. We would have family dinners on Shabbat, and I’m probably going to do the same thing with my kids when I’m older. I’ll definitely have my kids go to Hebrew school and have a bar mitzvah.
You’ve cited some other Jewish rappers like Mac Miller, Drake, and Asher Roth as inspirations. How do you think Jews fit into the rap world?
I think nowadays, the acceptance for skin color and race and religion is becoming a lot better. If you’re talented, it’s going to bleed through everything no matter if you’re Jewish, Christian, black, white, orange, no matter what you are. I think nowadays people are becoming a lot more tolerant and accepting them for their talent instead of their religion or background.
You released an EP last night, and “pulled a Beyonce”-what’s the fan response been so far? You seem to have a close relationship with them through social media.
Yeah, my fans, they’re just killing it right now. It’s been the number one on top of Taylor Swift in pop charts for the past two days. And, they love it. I mean, think it’s the perfect little present for them. It’s a little something to start getting them excited. It’s been awhile since I last released new music so, it’s really cool.
Can we expect anything exciting over the course of the tour?
I’m definitely gonna be performing my new music from the new ep. It’s a better show. Visually, it’s a lot cooler than my last show. A lot of cool surprises, I don’t wanna give too much away but, I play a live instrument for the first time on stage so, that’s one of the many cool things that we do.
Do you think the Miller-tary sees you as a nice Jewish boy?
I want people to know that I’m Jewish, it’s something that I’m definitely proud of. But I don’t wanna be known as a “nice Jewish boy.” I’d like to be known as a mature pop/hip-hop artist that just happens to be Jewish.
We were talking to some of your fans outside the theater, and overwhelmingly they wanted us to ask if you would marry them.
Yeah, I get that a lot. I unfortunately can’t marry everybody, but I love my fans.
Watch the official music video for Jaker Miller's hit song "Rumors"
His fans, who call themselves the “Miller-tary,” had been waiting since 9 a.m. to make sure they’d be close enough to the stage to drink in every word of original songs such as “Like Me,” a celebration of individuality and self-confidence. Miller’s new EP “Rumors” dropped last night and already snagged the top spot on iTunes from Taylor Swift. Aside from being a YouTube star and teen heartthrob, Miller is also a member of the Tribe. He spoke to The Jewish Week before his concert about traveling to Israel, “pulling a Beyonce,” and marriage proposals.
Tell us about your Jewish background.
We’d celebrate Shabbat every now and then, I had a bar mitzvah, which was a great time in my life. I went to Hebrew school growing up, I went to Israel with my family and my friends, so Judaism is definitely important to me.
How was Israel? Did you tour?
I just went for a vacation before I got into music. It was awesome, it was really cool, a lot different than I would have thought. Everyone was nice there, and the food was great. It was a lot of fun.
How do you relate to your Jewish identity today?
I don’t think it’s really changed my whole life, but I think it’s always going to stick with me. It’s more of a family thing. We would have family dinners on Shabbat, and I’m probably going to do the same thing with my kids when I’m older. I’ll definitely have my kids go to Hebrew school and have a bar mitzvah.
You’ve cited some other Jewish rappers like Mac Miller, Drake, and Asher Roth as inspirations. How do you think Jews fit into the rap world?
I think nowadays, the acceptance for skin color and race and religion is becoming a lot better. If you’re talented, it’s going to bleed through everything no matter if you’re Jewish, Christian, black, white, orange, no matter what you are. I think nowadays people are becoming a lot more tolerant and accepting them for their talent instead of their religion or background.
You released an EP last night, and “pulled a Beyonce”-what’s the fan response been so far? You seem to have a close relationship with them through social media.
Yeah, my fans, they’re just killing it right now. It’s been the number one on top of Taylor Swift in pop charts for the past two days. And, they love it. I mean, think it’s the perfect little present for them. It’s a little something to start getting them excited. It’s been awhile since I last released new music so, it’s really cool.
Can we expect anything exciting over the course of the tour?
I’m definitely gonna be performing my new music from the new ep. It’s a better show. Visually, it’s a lot cooler than my last show. A lot of cool surprises, I don’t wanna give too much away but, I play a live instrument for the first time on stage so, that’s one of the many cool things that we do.
Do you think the Miller-tary sees you as a nice Jewish boy?
I want people to know that I’m Jewish, it’s something that I’m definitely proud of. But I don’t wanna be known as a “nice Jewish boy.” I’d like to be known as a mature pop/hip-hop artist that just happens to be Jewish.
We were talking to some of your fans outside the theater, and overwhelmingly they wanted us to ask if you would marry them.
Yeah, I get that a lot. I unfortunately can’t marry everybody, but I love my fans.
Watch the official music video for Jaker Miller's hit song "Rumors"
THE GOOD LIFE
Special Supplement of The Jewish Week
American olim cultivating the volunteer spirit. Kosher Meals on Wheels empowers seniors, volunteers. Remembering Hank Greenberg's sacrifice.
The Good Life July 2015
American olim cultivating the volunteer spirit. Kosher Meals on Wheels empowers seniors, volunteers. Remembering Hank Greenberg’s sacrifice.
Tuesday, July 14, 2015
INSIDE THIS SPECIAL SECTION
Read More
TOP STORIESISRAEL NEWS
Israel Facing Agonizing Choice On Iran Deal
Tough line against pact could further isolate Jewish state, as Netanyahu appears to gear up for congressional push.
Joshua Mitnick
Israel Correspondent
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in a tough spot on how to proceed in wake of Iran deal. Getty Images
Tel Aviv — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s reaction to the deal to curtail Iran’s nuclear ambitions announced on Tuesday in Vienna was swift and unambiguous.
The deal, he said, will prove to be an “historic mistake for the world.” He accused Western negotiators of accepting a deal “at any price,” and said that Israel doesn’t consider itself bound to the agreement.
The response seemed further confirmation that the prime minister is gearing up to wage a fresh diplomatic offensive against the ratification of the agreement by Western countries, known as the P5+1 group. One of the main questions in the next few months, say analysts, will be how intensively Israel will lobby the U.S. Congress against the deal; Congress has 60 days to debate the deal, and President Obama has promised a veto if Congress votes it down.
The deal, which seeks to prevent Iran from producing a nuclear weapon for at least a decade and, in return, end economic and oil sanctions against Tehran, is already generating controversy. It will sharply reduce Iran’s uranium enrichment program and, the U.S. says, increase the breakout time for Iran to produce a bomb from about two or three months now to about a year. Nuclear facilities will be inspected but visits must be arranged first.
After U.S.-Israel ties were aggravated following Netanyahu’s speech to a joint session of Congress criticizing the deal, the prime minister needs to decide whether he wants to immerse Israel again in what is likely to shape up as a partisan battle, analysts say.
“Israel has to consider how to react on the Hill,” said Oded Eran, a former Israeli ambassador to the European Union. “Right now the Israeli prime minister and the government will have to weigh the pros and cons between mounting an open campaign to block approval, and the benefits of starting a dialogue with the U.S. on how to deal with a possible violation of the agreement.”
Eran said a decision to jump into the congressional debate on blocking the president at this point would carry much higher stakes for U.S.-Israeli relations than Netanyahu’s criticism of the negotiations earlier this year.
“It’s one thing to raise objections and criticize elements of the agreement before it is reached, it’s a different issue to come out campaigning before Congress debates it and votes on it,” Eran said. “We already sustained damage following the address to Congress. I’m not sure Israel wants to be perceived as the one causing the failure of the agreement in the U.S., especially when there’s an option of conducting a dialogue.”
The former ambassador suggested Israel draft its own analysis of the agreement but refrain from actively lobbying House and Senate members. In an interview with the Times of Israel, Foreign Ministry Director General Dore Gold said that Israeli officials would give their opinion if approached by U.S. legislators, but that they would seek to “respect” the positions of the administration.
However, in an initial reaction to the agreement, Deputy Foreign Minister Tzippi Hotovely signaled that the Israeli government is likely to take an aggressive approach, saying it will “employ all diplomatic means to prevent the confirmation of the agreement.’’
Tzachi Hanegbi, a Likud Knesset member, also signaled in an interview with Israel Radio that the Netanyahu government believes that it can make a difference in Congress. While he acknowledged that it would be a struggle to get a vote overriding a presidential veto, he said there were several Democrats who were unhappy with the deal. (At least 13 Democrats would need to break with their party to override a presidential veto.) Hanegbi said that Israel “will review day to day, and hour to hour what is going on in Iran. … It always has the right to defend itself.”
In New York, a coalition of Israel backers is already gearing up to wage a public campaign against the Iran deal in Times Square on Wednesday. Under the slogan, “Stop Iran,” the organizers are hoping that thousands will show up to hear opponents of the deal such as Alan Dershowitz and former CIA Director James Woolsey weigh in. In a warning, rally organizers said in a press release, “if the deal is not stopped, New Yorkers will know who to blame,” a reference to Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer, widely seen as a key figure in the debate because he is a strong supporter of Israel and of Obama.
Opposition to the deal crosses Israel’s familiar left-right political divide, with opposition leader Isaac Herzog of the dovish Zionist Union party called it “dangerous” for Israel. “This is a bad deal for Israeli security in the future and dangerous tomorrow morning,” he wrote on his Facebook page.
Herzog’s former candidate for defense minister, former military intelligence chief Amos Yadlin, told reporters that the agreement is “full of holes,” with the most problematic being an inspection procedure that would limit when and where inspectors could visit certain nuclear sites.
Despite his concerns, Yadlin said, “I am not in a position [to say] that this is a new Holocaust. Israel is strong and Israel will know how to deal with the risks that come with the agreement. The main change should be to leave Israel’s concerns with the allies, and to reach a side agreement.”
Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli consul general in New York, also believes that the prime minister will continue with a full-court press against the deal. “He is going to use the next 60 days using everything he can,” a move Pinkas opposes because he believes Netanyahu is unlikely to persuade 13 Democratic senators and 44 Democrats in the House to oppose the president, and that Congress doesn’t have the power to nullify a multilateral agreement.
Pinkas said Israel should instead huddle with the U.S. discretely and discuss a package of security aid that will enhance Israel’s defensive posture to face the possibility of a nuclear Iran.
“This is the first time that Israel has ever dismissed and denounced a major U.S. foreign policy agreement championed by the president,” he said. “We are now totally isolated.”
An aggressive push against the agreement risks isolating the prime minister domestically as well. Even though opposition politicians agree with the prime minister that the nuclear agreement is a bad one, Herzog and other opposition leaders have taken the prime minister to task over the rift with the U.S. Yair Lapid, the former finance minister and leader of the centrist Yesh Atid, called for Netanyahu’s resignation, saying the prime minister’s friction with the White House is hampering Israel’s relationship with the U.S.
Herzog also faulted the prime minister for the rift with Obama. “One of the most grave issues in the current situation is that the agreement that has the most impact on the existence of Israel in the last generation was signed without [Israel] being in the picture,” he said. “Israel’s interests were abandoned.”
editor@jewishweek.org
Read More
NEW YORK‘Strong Year Across The Board’
UJA-Fed’s annual campaign tops $150 million; increase in donors seen.
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
UJA-Federation CEO Eric Goldstein: Increased outreach to millennials and emerging “tech community.”
The annual fundraising campaign of UJA-Federation of New York closed at the end of June with a total of $150.8 million, an increase of $3.9 million over the 2014 campaign, the philanthropy announced this week.
The 2015 figure represented the sixth consecutive year of an increase in the campaign, following a decrease caused by the national recession that began in 2008.
The $150.8 million figure represents an increase of 2.65 percent. As a point of comparison, overall charitable giving by individuals nationally rose by 5.7 percent between 2013 and 2014.
The total raised by UJA-Federation in fiscal year 2015, including planned giving, endowments, capital projects and special initiatives — including the Israel Emergency Campaign during last summer’s war in Gaza — was $207.8 million, an increase of $21.8 million or 11.7 percent, a steeper jump than the national average for total charitable giving, which rose by 7.1 percent between 2013 and 2014.
“I’m deeply satisfied with the results. Across the board it was a strong year,” said Eric Goldstein, who marked his one-year anniversary as the charity’s CEO this month. “We are doing a good job explaining to our community the work we do.”
Nearly 53,000 donors contributed to the 2015 campaign, a 3.9 percent increase over the 2014 total of 51,000.
Over the past few years the UJA-Federation has made an effort to reach out to donors in more parts of the Jewish community, some of whom make relatively small contributions, instead of emphasizing large-scale contributions from donors in the core of the Jewish community, Goldstein said. The philanthropy has increased outreach to such groups as millennials who have not reached their maximum earning potential, the emerging “tech community,” and Orthodox Jews, he said.
A growing part of this outreach includes use of social media, and site visits to recipients of UJA-Federation funding.
“More events, more volunteers, more people going on site visits,” Goldstein said. “This is ongoing. We’ve made it a greater priority to go deeper.”
Fundraising among members of the area’s Russian-speaking émigré community is increasingly conducted in UJA-Federation’s extant professional divisions, such as Wall Street, of which young Russian-speaking Jews constitute a growing part, rather than through the philanthropy’s Russian Division, which for decades worked with the early newcomers from the former Soviet Union.
UJA-Federation’s annual campaign, co-chaired this year by Jeffrey Schoenfeld and Jeffrey Stern, remains the largest single philanthropic effort by any local community in the world.
“This fundraising accomplishment is testament to a tremendous caring and committed community,” UJA-President Alisa Doctoroff said in a statement.
The record raised in the annual campaign was $153.7 million in 2008, before the worst affects of the recession were apparent, Goldstein said.
Leaders of the annual campaign will set a 2016 fundraising goal later this year. Based on this year’s results, next year’s figure will probably exceed the amount raised in the recently concluded drive, Goldstein said. “I would be surprised if [it were] otherwise.”
steve@jewishweek.org.
Read More
NEW YORK
The Joy Of Sex Ed
Orthodox increasingly looking to pre-marriage classes to learn about sexual pleasure as well as purity.
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
Orthodox sex expert Dr. Bat Sheva Marcus lectures participants. Hannah Dreyfus/JW
When Sasha Kesler, 25, was preparing for her Orthodox wedding two years ago, she participated in a routine “kallah class,” which were created to teach religious brides about the laws of family purity.
“It was pretty bare bones, just the basics of what to do, what not to do,” said Kesler, who was then living in Portland, Oregon. The wife of the local Chabad rabbi taught the course.
“Things were painted in black and white that shouldn’t have been,” said Kesler, who described often thinking she was a niddah, the Hebrew term for a state of ritual impurity, when she was not.
Today, Kesler, a social work student at Hunter College, has committed herself to a different kind of bride instruction. Along with 22 others, she participated in the first co-ed Chatan and Kallah Teacher Training (CKTT) workshop, a conference geared towards coaching bride and groom teachers on how to be sex educators.
The course, which spanned four days, included candid discussions about the first-night, masturbation and methods of enhancing sexual pleasure. At one point, Dr. Bat Sheva Marcus, clinical director of the Medical Center for Female Sexuality, produced a bag of vibrators to pass around the room. Close up pictures and life-size models of male and female genitalia were also passed around.
“If our educators aren’t able to speak about these topics freely and honestly, where does that leave our students?” said Marcus, who encouraged bride and groom teachers not to shy away from introducing more adventurous options to their students. “Only 30 percent of women can orgasm through vaginal intercourse alone — brides should know that so they don’t assume something is wrong with them when intercourse isn’t enjoyable.”
The conference, which brought together rabbis, teachers, and professionals from around the country, comes at a time when Orthodox Jews’ expectations for marriage preparation courses are shifting. While, in the past, the local rabbi or rabbi’s wife was tacitly appointed to the task of educating brides and grooms, today, professionals and laypeople with specific expertise in the area of family purity laws and sexuality are being approached to teach these courses. Bride and groom educators are increasingly looked to as mentors, confidants and relationship coaches, especially when it comes to sex.
Sarah Antine, 39, the rebbetzin of a Modern Orthodox synagogue in Potomac, Md., with 450 families, referred to the shift as a “revolution.”
“People don’t just want to learn the laws — they’re looking for a holistic approach that leaves them feeling empowered,” said Antine. Though she has not yet taught brides in a formal capacity, she hopes to begin after the conference. “I first want to gain the vocabulary and expertise to be an effective instructor,” she said. “There’s so much more to this than teaching the mechanics of the first night.”
Hosted by the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance (JOFA), Yeshivat Maharat andYeshivat Chovevei Torah Rabbinical School (YCT), there were over 60 applicants for only 20 spots according to one of the conference organizers.
The packed itinerary included detailed sessions about male and female sexual dysfunction, and role-play in which participants pretended to be troubled newlyweds seeking council. One hypothetical case involved Sarah, a 21-year-old Modern Orthodox woman determined to have sex on her wedding night, but petrified.
“The first night can be a perfect recipe for disaster if our brides and grooms are not prepared,” said Marcus. “Our job is to reel in crazy expectations about what the first-night night should be, and instead educate brides and grooms about the different possibilities of what it can be.”
While some Orthodox rabbis encourage couples to consummate their marriage on the first night, Rabbi Dov Linzer, one of the conference presenters and a head rabbi at YCT, encourages couples to wait it out and explore other options.
“Sex is not synonymous with intercourse, and it’s a good thing for couples not to set that precedent at the very beginning of their marriage,” he told participants.
Aside from those serving in rabbinic roles, many in the crowd had started teaching marriage prep courses simply because they’d been asked.
Meira Wolkenfeld, a 27-year-old graduate student living in Washington Heights, described the system of appointment as increasingly democratic.
“People kept approaching me and asking if I could teach them before their weddings,” said Wolkenfeld, a Judaic studies graduate student at Yeshiva University. She wore a flowered scarf on her head, an indication of being married in Orthodox circles. “They wanted someone they felt comfortable with,” she said.
One teacher at an Orthodox high school, who preferred to remain anonymous for privacy reasons, said she felt a responsibility to formally train as a kallah teacher because her former students frequently sought her counsel on sexual matters.
“It’s less of something I chose, and more of a role that developed,” she said. Though only in her 20s, she’s formally instructed three brides and two couples. “My main goal isn’t to be a sex-educator, but I need to be more equipped to talk about sex,” she said.
Other professionals, including several social workers and two doctors, joined the group.
Dr. Debbie Raice Fox, an endocrinologist who practices in Pomona, N.Y., was petitioned by a rabbi in her community to start coaching brides and grooms 17 years ago. She has since counseled over 50 couples.
“The rabbi came over to me in shul and said ‘Debbie, you need to do this,’” she described. “There was a real need for teachers who were educated about sex.”
While other teachers in the area did their best to prepare brides, most of whom had absolutely no sex education, the teachers themselves knew little about sexuality, and talked about it as little as possible, she said. “They would use lots of euphemisms — they were afraid to name the anatomical parts.”
Today, she works with both charedi and Modern Orthodox soon-to-be-weds to inform, and often to correct misconceptions about sex.
“I’ll have clients who go to a traditional kallah teacher first, and then they’ll get referred to me to learn the sex piece,” she said.
Many of her students arrive unhappy, confused, and fearful about sex. “This has taken too long to catch on,” she said, referring to revitalized efforts to bolster the pre-wedding curriculum. “How do we expect our couples to navigate their sexual lives together if we don’t give them the information?”
While she has worked “in isolation” up until now, Dr. Fox, who is Orthodox herself, was glad to find out about the conference. “It’s a relief to find others doing the same work.”
Though two similar training courses have taken place over the past six years, this is the first time men and women have learned side by side. And, according to JOFA executive director Sharon Weiss-Greenberg, there’s no going back.
“If couples are going to learn together, men and women educators can learn side by side,” she said, praising the “equal gender dynamic.” Too many times, couples learn the laws separately just to discover later that they were given conflicting information, she said.
Rabbi Aviad Bodner, the rabbi of the Stanton Street Shul on the Lower East Side, said this was the first time he learned the laws of family purity from a female perspective. “In the past, I’ve only learned from other male rabbis,” he said, noting the nuance he gained from adding the opposite gender. “When these laws are taught by men and women, you understand things in a fuller way.”
Several times throughout the lectures on Jewish law, female participants would interrupt Rabbi Dov Linzer, the Rosh Yeshiva of YCT, to correct a fact or perception from a woman’s point of view.
In one such instance, while discussing the laws of hand holding after the chuppah, Rabbi Linzer said in very specific cases, the couple should avoid the custom.
Amanda Klatt, 27, raised her hand. “Rabbi, every woman dreams about that moment,” she said, as the women in the room all nodded in agreement. “There are some experiences you just can’t get back. The law doesn’t have to ignore that.”
editor@jewishweek.org
Read More NATIONAL
The Lost Cause, Jewishly
As Confederate flags come down, remembering a forgotten history.
Jonathan Mark
Associate Editor
The pained yet powerful Confederate leader Judah Benjamin. Wikimedia Commons
In this season of Tisha b’Av, remembering our Temple and kingdom destroyed for our sins, the humbled Jewish heart contemplates the Confederacy, also destroyed for its sins. Were there ever two nations less inclined to accept defeat, convinced we will “rise again?” And though few Jews think of the Confederacy as “we,” we were there. Even the Confederate flag, today more embattled than at any time since last carried by the Army of Northern Virginia, has something Jewish about it.
John Coski, author of “The Confederate Battle Flag,” writes that it was Charles Moise, a self-described “southerner of the Jewish persuasion,” who respectfully argued in 1860 at the flag’s inception that its cross design was too Christian. Confederate leadership, respecting the critique, then approved the “X” design, also a cross but considered less ecclesiastical.
That Jewish-influenced flag is the one now being lowered everywhere from South Carolina to Hollywood, in the wake of the killings of nine innocents in a black church in Charleston.
Until the 1830s, more Jews lived in Charleston than in any American city, including New York. It was a time when almost all of Charleston’s Jews were Sabbath observant. By the 1850s, almost one-third of American Jews lived amidst Louisiana’s bayous, magnolias and New Orleans.
A non-observant Charleston Jew, such as Judah Benjamin, could escape to New Orleans and intermarry with a creole woman. It is unknown whether the Christian taunts or his wife’s infidelities proved more humiliating. In time, she left her husband, moving to Paris with their daughter. Benjamin became the first Jew elected to the U.S. Senate in 1852. That same year, President Millard Fillmore offered Benjamin a seat on the Supreme Court — 64 years before Louis Brandeis became the first Jewish justice — though Benjamin declined. He went on to become attorney general, secretary of war, and secretary of state for the Confederacy. Say what you will about Jefferson Davis, but it was 45 years before any other president, rebel or not, appointed a Jew to the cabinet, and over 100 years before another Jew, Henry Kissinger, was appointed secretary of state.
Respected but lonely, pained yet powerful, on what continent, in what other nation, would a Jew such as Benjamin find greater political success than in the Confederacy? Stephen Vincent Benet, in his epic poem “John Brown’s Body,” imagined the “well-hated” Benjamin thinking, “I am a Jew. What am I doing here? … A river runs between these men and me [and] we speak to each other across the roar of that river, but no more.”
Eli Evans in his biography, “Judah P. Benjamin, The Jewish Confederate,” notes that “Both Benjamin and Davis were exemplary slaveowners [who] did not abuse their slaves.” In the last months of the Confederacy, with the support of Robert E. Lee and Davis, Benjamin called for a Confederate Emancipation Proclamation. In “an extraordinary episode of the war,” writes Evans, Benjamin spoke “before 10,000 people in Richmond, delivering a remarkable speech in favor of a Confederate offer to free the slaves.” His words were all the more courageous for his being increasingly being singled out as the Judas responsible for the Confederacy’s misfortune.
Benjamin was also damned in the North. On the eve of the Civil War, Sen. Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, who would be elected Grant’s vice president in 1872, said Benjamin’s loyalty to his native South proved him an ingrate to the United States that gave “equality of rights even to that race that stoned prophets and crucified the redeemer of the world.”
And yet, in the South, writes Evans, “Benjamin, as a Jew, would have to be more loyal to the Cause than anyone else.” The editor of the Richmond Examiner “took special pleasure in linking Benjamin and Jewishness to Confederate failure, speculators, gamblers and all manners of ills.” J.B. Jones, a journalist based in Richmond, wrote, “Illicit trade has depleted the [Confederacy] and placed us at the feet of Jew extortioners. ... These Jews… have injured the cause more than the armies of Lincoln.”
At least 10,000 Jews went to war for the South, but the Richmond Examiner wrote that Southern families suffered from the draft while “thousands of Jews… have gone scot free simply [by] denying their allegiance to the country [which they] pretended to adopt.”
Yet, in comparison to Gen. Grant’s infamous wartime order (overturned by Lincoln) that called for the expulsion of Jews from Union-controlled Tennessee, Kentucky and Mississippi, Gen. Lee responded graciously to a Virginia rabbi who requested a furlough for Jewish soldiers during the High Holidays. Lee replied, “Reverend Sir… It would give me great pleasure to comply [but] the necessities of war” precluded the request. Lee continued, “I feel assured that neither you or any member of the Jewish congregation would wish to jeopardize a cause you have so much at heart…” Lee added his hopes that Jewish prayers “be accepted by the Most High, and their petitions answered.” Signed, “Your obedient servant, R.E. Lee.”
And so on Passover, a Confederate soldier, Isaac Levy, 21, celebrated the seder in the field. He wrote to his family, “We are observing the festival in a truly Orthodox style. On the first day we had a fine vegetable soup,” and “a pound and a half of fresh [kosher] beef.” That soldier was killed in battle, August 21, 1864, under the flag now scorned. Levy’s yahrtzeit is Av 19, if anyone cares to say Kaddish or light a candle.
As the war took its toll, the music of war lost much of its jaunty confidence. Like the sad piyuttim of Tisha b’Av, Stephen Foster composed songs expressing the pain: “Tell me, tell me, weary soldier from the rude and stirring wars, was my brother in the battle where you gained those noble scars? He was ever brave and valiant, and I know he never fled. Was his name among the wounded, or numbered with the dead?”
With the Lincoln assassination, writes Evans, “The ancient blood ritual hung heavily in the air… Lincoln would become Christ crucified and [Benjamin] would be transformed into the guilty Christ killer. No Jew would have a chance in such a spectacle of revenge and hatred. The search for an American Judas [would be] more thrilling if the mob could blame [the] the Jew in the Confederate cabinet.”
Benjamin fled to England, never to return.
Back in Richmond, the defeated Confederate capital, in St Paul’s Episcopal Church, a black man advanced to the communion table. In his history, “April 1865,” Jay Winik writes, even the minister was stunned. It was one thing “to accept that slaves were now free,” quite another for a black man “to stride up to the front of the church as though an equal.” The black man lowered his body, kneeling, “while the rest of the congregation tensed in their pews.” And then Robert E. Lee, still weary from his recent surrender, but loyal to Benjamin’s Emancipation, arose out of the pews and walked to the front, kneeling alongside the black man. Watching Lee, other whites followed in his path. Those who want to take down all the statues of Lee, as they do the flag, make the same mistake as did the Biblical prophet Jonah, who couldn’t accept that Nineveh could honestly repent and be granted all the honors of penance.
Today, Lawrence Brook, publisher and editor of the Birmingham, Ala.-based Southern Jewish Life, covering Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and the Florida panhandle, told us by phone, “Most of the Jews fighting for the Confederacy didn’t have slaves themselves. But they felt they owed it to this home, to defend it against a foreign invasion, as they saw it. There is pride that Samuel Ullman, a Jew wounded fighting for the Confederacy, 40 years later was fighting for the establishment of a black high school in Birmingham. Of course, in the 1960s the flag was an in-your-face symbol against integration. But for those of us who came of age after the civil rights battles, the flag simply represented, ‘Hey, I’m from the South. Period. I’m proud of it.’ There was no thought of offending anybody. Symbols are what you make of them.”
In 1884, Judah Benjamin died in Paris. In 1938, on the eve of another war, the Daughters of the Confederacy donated a gravestone for him in the Pere Lachaise, a Christian cemetery in Paris, where a Southern Jew didn’t belong but where he spends eternity, alone, as always.
jonathan@jewishweek.org
Read More
The Jewish Week
NEW YORK
The Joy Of Sex Ed
Orthodox increasingly looking to pre-marriage classes to learn about sexual pleasure as well as purity.
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
Orthodox sex expert Dr. Bat Sheva Marcus lectures participants. Hannah Dreyfus/JW
When Sasha Kesler, 25, was preparing for her Orthodox wedding two years ago, she participated in a routine “kallah class,” which were created to teach religious brides about the laws of family purity.
“It was pretty bare bones, just the basics of what to do, what not to do,” said Kesler, who was then living in Portland, Oregon. The wife of the local Chabad rabbi taught the course.
“Things were painted in black and white that shouldn’t have been,” said Kesler, who described often thinking she was a niddah, the Hebrew term for a state of ritual impurity, when she was not.
Today, Kesler, a social work student at Hunter College, has committed herself to a different kind of bride instruction. Along with 22 others, she participated in the first co-ed Chatan and Kallah Teacher Training (CKTT) workshop, a conference geared towards coaching bride and groom teachers on how to be sex educators.
The course, which spanned four days, included candid discussions about the first-night, masturbation and methods of enhancing sexual pleasure. At one point, Dr. Bat Sheva Marcus, clinical director of the Medical Center for Female Sexuality, produced a bag of vibrators to pass around the room. Close up pictures and life-size models of male and female genitalia were also passed around.
“If our educators aren’t able to speak about these topics freely and honestly, where does that leave our students?” said Marcus, who encouraged bride and groom teachers not to shy away from introducing more adventurous options to their students. “Only 30 percent of women can orgasm through vaginal intercourse alone — brides should know that so they don’t assume something is wrong with them when intercourse isn’t enjoyable.”
The conference, which brought together rabbis, teachers, and professionals from around the country, comes at a time when Orthodox Jews’ expectations for marriage preparation courses are shifting. While, in the past, the local rabbi or rabbi’s wife was tacitly appointed to the task of educating brides and grooms, today, professionals and laypeople with specific expertise in the area of family purity laws and sexuality are being approached to teach these courses. Bride and groom educators are increasingly looked to as mentors, confidants and relationship coaches, especially when it comes to sex.
Sarah Antine, 39, the rebbetzin of a Modern Orthodox synagogue in Potomac, Md., with 450 families, referred to the shift as a “revolution.”
“People don’t just want to learn the laws — they’re looking for a holistic approach that leaves them feeling empowered,” said Antine. Though she has not yet taught brides in a formal capacity, she hopes to begin after the conference. “I first want to gain the vocabulary and expertise to be an effective instructor,” she said. “There’s so much more to this than teaching the mechanics of the first night.”
Hosted by the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance (JOFA), Yeshivat Maharat andYeshivat Chovevei Torah Rabbinical School (YCT), there were over 60 applicants for only 20 spots according to one of the conference organizers.
The packed itinerary included detailed sessions about male and female sexual dysfunction, and role-play in which participants pretended to be troubled newlyweds seeking council. One hypothetical case involved Sarah, a 21-year-old Modern Orthodox woman determined to have sex on her wedding night, but petrified.
“The first night can be a perfect recipe for disaster if our brides and grooms are not prepared,” said Marcus. “Our job is to reel in crazy expectations about what the first-night night should be, and instead educate brides and grooms about the different possibilities of what it can be.”
While some Orthodox rabbis encourage couples to consummate their marriage on the first night, Rabbi Dov Linzer, one of the conference presenters and a head rabbi at YCT, encourages couples to wait it out and explore other options.
“Sex is not synonymous with intercourse, and it’s a good thing for couples not to set that precedent at the very beginning of their marriage,” he told participants.
Aside from those serving in rabbinic roles, many in the crowd had started teaching marriage prep courses simply because they’d been asked.
Meira Wolkenfeld, a 27-year-old graduate student living in Washington Heights, described the system of appointment as increasingly democratic.
“People kept approaching me and asking if I could teach them before their weddings,” said Wolkenfeld, a Judaic studies graduate student at Yeshiva University. She wore a flowered scarf on her head, an indication of being married in Orthodox circles. “They wanted someone they felt comfortable with,” she said.
One teacher at an Orthodox high school, who preferred to remain anonymous for privacy reasons, said she felt a responsibility to formally train as a kallah teacher because her former students frequently sought her counsel on sexual matters.
“It’s less of something I chose, and more of a role that developed,” she said. Though only in her 20s, she’s formally instructed three brides and two couples. “My main goal isn’t to be a sex-educator, but I need to be more equipped to talk about sex,” she said.
Other professionals, including several social workers and two doctors, joined the group.
Dr. Debbie Raice Fox, an endocrinologist who practices in Pomona, N.Y., was petitioned by a rabbi in her community to start coaching brides and grooms 17 years ago. She has since counseled over 50 couples.
“The rabbi came over to me in shul and said ‘Debbie, you need to do this,’” she described. “There was a real need for teachers who were educated about sex.”
While other teachers in the area did their best to prepare brides, most of whom had absolutely no sex education, the teachers themselves knew little about sexuality, and talked about it as little as possible, she said. “They would use lots of euphemisms — they were afraid to name the anatomical parts.”
Today, she works with both charedi and Modern Orthodox soon-to-be-weds to inform, and often to correct misconceptions about sex.
“I’ll have clients who go to a traditional kallah teacher first, and then they’ll get referred to me to learn the sex piece,” she said.
Many of her students arrive unhappy, confused, and fearful about sex. “This has taken too long to catch on,” she said, referring to revitalized efforts to bolster the pre-wedding curriculum. “How do we expect our couples to navigate their sexual lives together if we don’t give them the information?”
While she has worked “in isolation” up until now, Dr. Fox, who is Orthodox herself, was glad to find out about the conference. “It’s a relief to find others doing the same work.”
Though two similar training courses have taken place over the past six years, this is the first time men and women have learned side by side. And, according to JOFA executive director Sharon Weiss-Greenberg, there’s no going back.
“If couples are going to learn together, men and women educators can learn side by side,” she said, praising the “equal gender dynamic.” Too many times, couples learn the laws separately just to discover later that they were given conflicting information, she said.
Rabbi Aviad Bodner, the rabbi of the Stanton Street Shul on the Lower East Side, said this was the first time he learned the laws of family purity from a female perspective. “In the past, I’ve only learned from other male rabbis,” he said, noting the nuance he gained from adding the opposite gender. “When these laws are taught by men and women, you understand things in a fuller way.”
Several times throughout the lectures on Jewish law, female participants would interrupt Rabbi Dov Linzer, the Rosh Yeshiva of YCT, to correct a fact or perception from a woman’s point of view.
In one such instance, while discussing the laws of hand holding after the chuppah, Rabbi Linzer said in very specific cases, the couple should avoid the custom.
Amanda Klatt, 27, raised her hand. “Rabbi, every woman dreams about that moment,” she said, as the women in the room all nodded in agreement. “There are some experiences you just can’t get back. The law doesn’t have to ignore that.”
editor@jewishweek.org
Read More
NATIONALThe Lost Cause, Jewishly
As Confederate flags come down, remembering a forgotten history.
Jonathan Mark
Associate Editor
The pained yet powerful Confederate leader Judah Benjamin. Wikimedia Commons
In this season of Tisha b’Av, remembering our Temple and kingdom destroyed for our sins, the humbled Jewish heart contemplates the Confederacy, also destroyed for its sins. Were there ever two nations less inclined to accept defeat, convinced we will “rise again?” And though few Jews think of the Confederacy as “we,” we were there. Even the Confederate flag, today more embattled than at any time since last carried by the Army of Northern Virginia, has something Jewish about it.
John Coski, author of “The Confederate Battle Flag,” writes that it was Charles Moise, a self-described “southerner of the Jewish persuasion,” who respectfully argued in 1860 at the flag’s inception that its cross design was too Christian. Confederate leadership, respecting the critique, then approved the “X” design, also a cross but considered less ecclesiastical.
That Jewish-influenced flag is the one now being lowered everywhere from South Carolina to Hollywood, in the wake of the killings of nine innocents in a black church in Charleston.
Until the 1830s, more Jews lived in Charleston than in any American city, including New York. It was a time when almost all of Charleston’s Jews were Sabbath observant. By the 1850s, almost one-third of American Jews lived amidst Louisiana’s bayous, magnolias and New Orleans.
A non-observant Charleston Jew, such as Judah Benjamin, could escape to New Orleans and intermarry with a creole woman. It is unknown whether the Christian taunts or his wife’s infidelities proved more humiliating. In time, she left her husband, moving to Paris with their daughter. Benjamin became the first Jew elected to the U.S. Senate in 1852. That same year, President Millard Fillmore offered Benjamin a seat on the Supreme Court — 64 years before Louis Brandeis became the first Jewish justice — though Benjamin declined. He went on to become attorney general, secretary of war, and secretary of state for the Confederacy. Say what you will about Jefferson Davis, but it was 45 years before any other president, rebel or not, appointed a Jew to the cabinet, and over 100 years before another Jew, Henry Kissinger, was appointed secretary of state.
Respected but lonely, pained yet powerful, on what continent, in what other nation, would a Jew such as Benjamin find greater political success than in the Confederacy? Stephen Vincent Benet, in his epic poem “John Brown’s Body,” imagined the “well-hated” Benjamin thinking, “I am a Jew. What am I doing here? … A river runs between these men and me [and] we speak to each other across the roar of that river, but no more.”
Eli Evans in his biography, “Judah P. Benjamin, The Jewish Confederate,” notes that “Both Benjamin and Davis were exemplary slaveowners [who] did not abuse their slaves.” In the last months of the Confederacy, with the support of Robert E. Lee and Davis, Benjamin called for a Confederate Emancipation Proclamation. In “an extraordinary episode of the war,” writes Evans, Benjamin spoke “before 10,000 people in Richmond, delivering a remarkable speech in favor of a Confederate offer to free the slaves.” His words were all the more courageous for his being increasingly being singled out as the Judas responsible for the Confederacy’s misfortune.
Benjamin was also damned in the North. On the eve of the Civil War, Sen. Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, who would be elected Grant’s vice president in 1872, said Benjamin’s loyalty to his native South proved him an ingrate to the United States that gave “equality of rights even to that race that stoned prophets and crucified the redeemer of the world.”
And yet, in the South, writes Evans, “Benjamin, as a Jew, would have to be more loyal to the Cause than anyone else.” The editor of the Richmond Examiner “took special pleasure in linking Benjamin and Jewishness to Confederate failure, speculators, gamblers and all manners of ills.” J.B. Jones, a journalist based in Richmond, wrote, “Illicit trade has depleted the [Confederacy] and placed us at the feet of Jew extortioners. ... These Jews… have injured the cause more than the armies of Lincoln.”
At least 10,000 Jews went to war for the South, but the Richmond Examiner wrote that Southern families suffered from the draft while “thousands of Jews… have gone scot free simply [by] denying their allegiance to the country [which they] pretended to adopt.”
Yet, in comparison to Gen. Grant’s infamous wartime order (overturned by Lincoln) that called for the expulsion of Jews from Union-controlled Tennessee, Kentucky and Mississippi, Gen. Lee responded graciously to a Virginia rabbi who requested a furlough for Jewish soldiers during the High Holidays. Lee replied, “Reverend Sir… It would give me great pleasure to comply [but] the necessities of war” precluded the request. Lee continued, “I feel assured that neither you or any member of the Jewish congregation would wish to jeopardize a cause you have so much at heart…” Lee added his hopes that Jewish prayers “be accepted by the Most High, and their petitions answered.” Signed, “Your obedient servant, R.E. Lee.”
And so on Passover, a Confederate soldier, Isaac Levy, 21, celebrated the seder in the field. He wrote to his family, “We are observing the festival in a truly Orthodox style. On the first day we had a fine vegetable soup,” and “a pound and a half of fresh [kosher] beef.” That soldier was killed in battle, August 21, 1864, under the flag now scorned. Levy’s yahrtzeit is Av 19, if anyone cares to say Kaddish or light a candle.
As the war took its toll, the music of war lost much of its jaunty confidence. Like the sad piyuttim of Tisha b’Av, Stephen Foster composed songs expressing the pain: “Tell me, tell me, weary soldier from the rude and stirring wars, was my brother in the battle where you gained those noble scars? He was ever brave and valiant, and I know he never fled. Was his name among the wounded, or numbered with the dead?”
With the Lincoln assassination, writes Evans, “The ancient blood ritual hung heavily in the air… Lincoln would become Christ crucified and [Benjamin] would be transformed into the guilty Christ killer. No Jew would have a chance in such a spectacle of revenge and hatred. The search for an American Judas [would be] more thrilling if the mob could blame [the] the Jew in the Confederate cabinet.”
Benjamin fled to England, never to return.
Back in Richmond, the defeated Confederate capital, in St Paul’s Episcopal Church, a black man advanced to the communion table. In his history, “April 1865,” Jay Winik writes, even the minister was stunned. It was one thing “to accept that slaves were now free,” quite another for a black man “to stride up to the front of the church as though an equal.” The black man lowered his body, kneeling, “while the rest of the congregation tensed in their pews.” And then Robert E. Lee, still weary from his recent surrender, but loyal to Benjamin’s Emancipation, arose out of the pews and walked to the front, kneeling alongside the black man. Watching Lee, other whites followed in his path. Those who want to take down all the statues of Lee, as they do the flag, make the same mistake as did the Biblical prophet Jonah, who couldn’t accept that Nineveh could honestly repent and be granted all the honors of penance.
Today, Lawrence Brook, publisher and editor of the Birmingham, Ala.-based Southern Jewish Life, covering Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and the Florida panhandle, told us by phone, “Most of the Jews fighting for the Confederacy didn’t have slaves themselves. But they felt they owed it to this home, to defend it against a foreign invasion, as they saw it. There is pride that Samuel Ullman, a Jew wounded fighting for the Confederacy, 40 years later was fighting for the establishment of a black high school in Birmingham. Of course, in the 1960s the flag was an in-your-face symbol against integration. But for those of us who came of age after the civil rights battles, the flag simply represented, ‘Hey, I’m from the South. Period. I’m proud of it.’ There was no thought of offending anybody. Symbols are what you make of them.”
In 1884, Judah Benjamin died in Paris. In 1938, on the eve of another war, the Daughters of the Confederacy donated a gravestone for him in the Pere Lachaise, a Christian cemetery in Paris, where a Southern Jew didn’t belong but where he spends eternity, alone, as always.
jonathan@jewishweek.org
Read More
The Jewish Week
1501 Broadway, Suite 505
New York, New York 10036 United States
___________________________________
___________________________________
No comments:
Post a Comment