Wednesday, July 8, 2015
Dear Reader,
On the eve of its annual board meeting here, the Claims Conference, which represents world Jewry in restitution negotiations with Germany, is dealing with allegations from its outgoing ombudsman that he was thwarted in his work by top leadership - a charge they adamantly deny. I spoke with ombudsman Shmuel Holland and Claims Conference president Julius Berman who tell very different stories.INTERNATIONAL
Ombudsman Out At Claims Conference
Allegations by watchdog of mismanagement by are countered by charges he was ‘wrong man for the job.’
Gary Rosenblatt
Editor and Publisher
Shmuel Hollander charges, in stinging letter, that “relevant information was withheld” from ombudsman’s office.
Shmuel Hollander, a highly respected Israeli public servant for four decades, made headlines in 2013 as ombudsman for the Claims Conference when he issued a stinging internal report, blaming the group for allowing a multimillion-dollar fraud to take place for years — unnoticed — within its New York office.
Now, two years later, as he leaves his post on the eve of the annual Claims Conference meeting here, Hollander has again accused the organization’s leadership of serious mismanagement, and of thwarting his efforts to help Holocaust survivors in their efforts to gain restitution. He also asserts that Claims Conference president Julius Berman told him in a June 3 phone call that his contract was not being renewed as a result of the report he, the ombudsman, wrote in 2013, which was embarrassing to the organization in general and Berman in particular.
In a letter dated June 29 and sent to the 64 members of the board of the ClaimsConference, obtained by The Jewish Week, Hollander asserted that in his three-year tenure as ombudsman, which ended June 30, he was repeatedly and deliberately thwarted in his attempts to fulfill the mandates of his post by Berman and executive vice president Greg Schneider. And he said that the federal fraud case he reported in 2013 likely totals far more than the $57 million that has been reported. (Several individuals with knowledge of the case say the number may well be closer to $100 million.)
The ringleader of the group that committed the fraud, a senior Claims Conference official, was imprisoned for processing false applications to the organization.
Hollander, the first appointee to the ombudsman post, wrote that from the outset Schneider “perceived me as a hostile element whose actions must be blocked. Punitive actions towards my office quickly followed. Numerous obstacles were placed in our path, hampering our work. Relevant information was withheld from us, and formal obligations were violated,” all of which “constituted a gross violation of the mandate” that empowers the ombudsman to operate independently within the organization, which represents world Jewry in negotiations with Germany to secure compensation and restitution for survivors of the Holocaust and heirs of victims. Since its founding in 1951 it has negotiated for more than $70 billion in reparations, and distributes more than $700 million a year.
In his first interview about the situation, Hollander told The Jewish Week, “I don’t understand the decision made by Mr. Berman, and I am very hurt and disappointed.” (He was speaking by phone from Jerusalem, where he lives and works.) “Not because I am offended personally, but for the sake of the Holocaust survivors we helped so much.”
He said he turned down a prestigious diplomatic posting to take the Claims Conference job, in part because his parents were Holocaust survivors and he wanted to be of service to that generation and their heirs. The mandate for the ombudsman includes receiving, investigating and resolving complaints from victims and heirs applying forfinancial assistance. But Hollander was deeply disillusioned by the experience, convinced that those at the top of the organization “wanted only a ‘yes man’ — a fig leaf or a charade of an ombudsman. If this was indeed the goal, I was not the right person for the role,” he wrote.
In response, Berman told The Jewish Week that Hollander’s criticisms are unfounded on every level. “If we wanted to hire someone we could control, we wouldn’t have brought in a person of Hollander’s sterling reputation,” he said. And in regards to the allegation that Hollander’s contract was not extended in revenge for the fraud report he wrote two years ago, Berman noted that Hollander was given an 18-month contract six months after the fraud report was submitted. “Would we engage him so that we could let him go 18 months later?” he asked. “It’s absurd.”
Berman was not specific about why Hollander’s contract was not renewed, emphasizing that as president he avoided direct involvement in the process. He said the decision went through a committee and then was voted on, unanimously, by the group’s leadership council. In a July 1 letter to the board — an effort to counter Hollander’s own salvo to the board two days earlier — Berman implied that cost effectiveness of the ombudsman’s office might have been a factor.
His letter urged board members to wait until the issues could be discussed fully at the July 14-15 meetings here in New York, “including about the actual volume of complaints, worldwide, received by the office of the ombudsman in relation to budget and staff, among other things.”
A key Claims Conference official, who asked to remain anonymous given the sensitivity of the issue, said the budget for the ombudsman’s work, which included salary for Hollander, a full-time legal assistant, a secretary, and rent for a Jerusalem office, was about $500,000 a year and did not warrant the volume of cases handled.
As a new department, requests and queries were slow at first, but have increased significantly each of the three years of operation. It is estimated that the ombudsman’s office dealt with about 500 cases so far this year, a figure that was expected to double by year’s end.
“In the beginning, the phone didn’t ring,” Hollander told The Jewish Week, “but now it doesn’t stop.” He said he resented that Claims Conference leadership was always asking about the number of cases being processed. “It’s not right to analyze these cases in terms of numbers,” he said. “You sometimes have to work a long time to save a life,” in providing for the survivors’ needs. “We’re not a factory that makes TVs or washing machines; we deal with people.”
Hollander said he was never asked to reduce the budget, which he said was $400,000, or to cut his salary, and that he would have done so, given his commitment to help survivors. He feels the Claims Conference leadership is being untruthful about why his contract was not renewed. He attributes it to dissatisfaction with his recommendations about the need for systematic changes in its operations. His letter to the board said “the real problem is not the arbitrary dismissal of the ombudsman, but the manner in which the organization is managed — an area that requires a thorough and dramatic change.”
He noted with pride that he held a number of top Israeli government positions over his four-decade career, serving under six prime ministers, most recently as a senior official for 14 years supervising personnel management of Israel’s entire civil service system. Never before, he said, had he been treated with such disrespect.
A key board member of the Claims Conference who often found himself in the middle between Hollander and the organization’s leadership attributed the problem to both the volume (or lack thereof) of casework handled by the ombudsman’s office and the “bad chemistry” between Hollander and the top brass. He asked not to be named and would not discuss specifics.
Abe Biderman, a member of the leadership council of the Claims Conference, spoke on the record and more bluntly in saying Hollander is “a nice man but the wrong man for the job. He had a different sense of what the job was, and over time it became clear that the role he wanted to play was not the role of ombudsman.” He said Hollander “misinterpreted” the role and saw himself as “the quasi head of the Claims Conference.”
Biderman said “expense was a factor” and that Hollander’s allegations about lack of cooperation were “beyond bizarre.”
Berman In Charge
The Claims Conference (officially the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany) is no stranger to controversy. Over the years, critics, primarily survivors, have asserted that all funds should go directly to survivors, many of whom are needy, and not fund educational projects related to Holocaust memory.
Isi Leibler, a lay leader of the World Jewish Congress, has been most outspoken in alleging that the Claims Conference lacks oversight and refuses to accept accountability or calls for reform. It was the multimillion-dollar fraud case, which came to light in 2009, that prompted the creation of an ombudsman for the organization and the hiring of Hollander. His report on the case found that in 2001, Berman, then pro bono counsel to the Claims Conference, had received an anonymous letter describing how several Claims Conference employees were stealing millions of dollars through false applications for assistance. Berman did not inform the board or take further action at the time. The issue came to light eight years later and resulted in the FBI arresting 31 people, including 11 former employees of the New York office of the Claims Conference.
The fact that Berman, a New York attorney and prominent Jewish leader who has been president of the organization since 2002, was re-elected to that post immediately after the 2013 Hollander report — despite its calls for sweeping reforms — underscores the impression that he is virtually unchallenged in his leadership role. Several lay board members acknowledged privately that they are too involved with their own professional careers to keep close tabs on or buck the system in general and Berman in particular.
Even members and advocates of the Claims Conference admit that it is less than transparent in some of its dealings, and even some of its strongest critics note that it has accomplished remarkable achievements in negotiating for and helping to disburse tens of billions of dollars for Holocaust victims and their heirs.
Both Hollander and Berman say they held great respect for each other until discovering, to their great surprise, that the other spreads untruths. Hollander, in his exit letter to the board, concluded that “the Claims Conference is an organization that is incapable of hearing criticism regarding its senior management.” Berman told The Jewish Week that he “tried to take the high road” in not publicizing the dispute with Hollander, whom he says is “making a big mistake” by airing his false grievances.
Berman said the Claims Conference is committed to maintaining the position of ombudsman and has appointed a committee to find a new candidate, hopefully in the next 90 days. He did not think it would be difficult to find an independent expert in the field after this controversy.
“My first charge to the committee will be to analyze what we went through and look for lessons to be learned,” he said.
Gary@jewishweek.org
A year after a 50-day war in Gaza, Israelis living close to the border "feel more vulnerable than ever," reports our Michele Chabin.ISRAEL NEWS
Near Gaza Border, Waiting For ‘Next War’
A year after Protective Edge, new ISIS fears along with an old resolve.
Michele Chabin
Israel Correspondent
A factory in Sderot is hit during last year’s war. Wikimedia Commons / Michele Chabin/JW
Kibbutz Ein HaShlosha, Israel — When the latest Israel-Hamas war erupted a year ago this week, Danny Cohen, a member of this kibbutz a mile from the Gaza border, prepared to evacuate his four children while trying to keep the kibbutz’s main factoryopen — despite the barrage of mortars and rockets, 18 of which hit the kibbutz.
“Ordinarily we have 50 workers, but for two months just 10 people made it to work. Kibbutz families with children fled the area and workers from outside the kibbutz were afraid to come due to the rockets and the tunnels,” Cohen, theproduction manager, said in the community’s loose-leaf binder factory, the largest in Israel.
Cohen noted that the Iron Dome anti-rocket system that defended much of the country last summer, “doesn’t work here because we’re too close to the border.”
Residents have four seconds at most to run for shelter, he said, “but lots of times we hear the rocket explode before we get the alert.”
Although life on Ein HaShlosha has been blissfully quiet since the war’s end last August (the few rockets Gaza militants have launched in recent weeks have fallen farther inland), “there’s quite a bit of disappointment that we’re no closer to peace,” Cohen said. “I can’t see us achieving a long-term calm. We’re living in anticipation of the next war.”
A year after the start of Operation Protective Edge, Israelis living close to the border say they feel more vulnerable than ever.
Although the IDF has beefed up its surveillance of Hamas’ activities and taken steps to quickly identify the construction of new “terror tunnels,” many residents cannot envision an end to the cycle of violence with Gaza militants. They are worried, too, about the growing threat of Islamic State (ISIS) fighters in the nearby Sinai, whose violent clashes with Egyptian forces have escalated in recent days.
At a military briefing at Ein HaShlosha last week, Maj. Nir Peled, deputy operations officer of the IDF’s Gaza Division, acknowledged that monitoring the border “is a difficult task.”
“We realize there are many enemy troops within our defense lines, and the distances between our communities and the Gaza Strip are very small. If you add to this the enemy’s maneuvers underground, it’s not easy,” he said.
Peled said one of the 34 Hamas-built tunnels the IDF discovered during 51 days of fighting, all of them now “neutralized,” ended just a kilometer from Ein HaShlosha.
“Hamas has declared many times it is rebuilding its forces and the tunnels we destroyed,” he said.
The officer said the IDF is utilizing “a variety of technology” to discover any cross-border tunnels, but declined to elaborate.
“It’s only when you slide down 30 meters [98 feet] below ground into one of these tunnels do you realize how high-tech they are and how close they are to our communities. It’s definitely not a comfortable situation for the people who live near the Strip,” Peled acknowledged.
Hamas, Peled said, spent years building the tunnels, each costing up to $3 million, in order to send terror squads into Israel either to murder border residents and soldiers on Israeli soil or to abduct and imprison them in Gaza.
During a tour of one such tunnel located less than a mile from Ein HaShlosha — discovered two years ago and kept as a kind of IDF show-and-tell venue for visiting dignitaries and journalists — military spokesman Maj. Aryeh Shalicar pointed out the communications and electrical wiring running along either side of the structure, which goes down 75 feet at its greatest depth.
Above ground Shalicar pointed to the miles of now-dissembled metal tubing, which he likened to homemade train tracks, Hamas used to transport tons of sandy dirt.
“This tunnel is a sophisticated piece of construction,” Shalicar said.
At nearby Kibbutz Magen, less than two miles from the border, Martin Sessler, 68, eating in the community’s communal dining hall, said “there is no possibility of peace here and that is sad.”
Sessler, a 45-year-resident of Magen and professor of Jewish law at Ben-Gurion University, said he spent most of last year’s war in a northern kibbutz with his young grandchildren, who were evacuated from Kibbutz Nirim, a mile from the border.
Some 50 mortars and rockets touched down in Nirim during the war, killing two residents and blowing the legs off a third the hour before the final ceasefire went into effect.
In Sessler’s view, the conflict between Israel and Arab countries “has turned from a nationalist conflict to a religious conflict. If you, as a Jew or a Muslim, believe God gave only you this land or this place to build a temple or mosque, it makes compromise much more difficult.”
Not that Sessler, a secular left-wing activist, believes Hamas or any other Islamic regime will accept Israel if Israel withdraws to its pre-1967 borders.
“I have no illusions that this is a question of the ‘occupied territories.’ For them, Tel Aviv is occupied territory, and Jews should go home to where they came from.”
Nava Etzion, whose husband, Ze’ev Etzion, 55, was one of the two Kibbutz Nirim members killed by a mortar the last day of the war, also has no illusions. But she does have dreams.
“We want to ensure that children on both sides of the border will not live in fear,” said Etzion, a mother of five. “Both sides need to learn how to stop making war.”
Asked how this could be accomplished, she signed and said, “That’s the million-dollar question. Our leaders need to speak to each other and perhaps we, the residents on both sides, will be able to speak to each other as well.”
Etzion said the first year without her husband has been difficult for her and her children, ages 13 to 23, but that her family and friends have been with them every step of the way.
Although several families have moved away from their homes near the Gaza border during the past year — most of them to spare their children the trauma of intermittent war — Etzion said she is staying on Nirim.
“This is my home and we live within the internationally recognized borders of the State of Israel. Our lives, like Palestinian lives, are worth saving,” she said.
Jonathan Mark visits the Catskills, where an anti-bungalow effort is growing and turning ugly, perceived as anti-Orthodox.NEW YORK
A Serpent In Catskills’ ‘Garden?’
As an anti-bungalow backlash flares, critics and zoning codes say ‘enough is enough.’
Jonathan Mark
Associate Editor
A colony in the rain: A summer tradition is threatened by zoning and resentment. Eli Wohl/Courtesy Vos Iz Neias
Woodbourne, N.Y. — Summer comes to the Catskills like Creation itself, each day a revelation: The Neversink River flows to waterfalls. A moon rises over ice caves. There are salamanders in the grass, bears in the forest, a bald eagle in the sky. In the Sullivan County hamlet of Callicoon, just prior to the solstice, farmers parade 260 tractors. One trucker for Balford Farms, driving along the Delaware River on a June morning, spied a wounded bald eagle in a ditch, saving its life.
“Just to live in the country is a full-time job,” wrote E.B. White. “You don’t have to do anything. The idle pursuit of making a living is pushed to one side, where it belongs, in favor of living itself.” In that spirit, Jews return each summer to “the country,” where there’s nothing much to do but “living itself.”
And yet, there’s a serpent in the “Garden,” some say. Last October, the Town of Fallsburg passed zoning laws aimed at stifling the bungalows: a colony can now only build on less than 15 percent of its lot; new replacement cabins can’t be larger than the old; there now must be 31 feet of grass between cabins, and 250 feet between the cabins and the road (an increase of 75 feet). Similar codes to Fallsburg’s have been enacted recently across the county, in Liberty, Thompson, Mamakating and Bethel — site of the Woodstock festival, “the garden,” Joni Mitchell called it, made possible by the hospitality of Max Yasgur, a local Jewish dairy farmer.
The Fallsburg zoning legislation is less charming: “It is the intent of the Town of Fallsburg to not promote the expansion of bungalow colonies.”
One Jew, a year-round resident of Fallsburg who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, told The Jewish Week, “There’s a distinct attitude — the town wishes someone else would come.” Someone who isn’t Orthodox. “That’s actually been voiced to me” by people on the town’s planning board. “Without any embarrassment, they say that. I stopped going to the planning board because I’m kind of disgusted.”
Murray Goldwag, who winters in Jerusalem, returns to South Fallsburg every summer, where he is the proprietor of the famous Kosher Sox. “I’ve been schlepping to the mountains for 39 years,” he tells us. “Nothing’s changed. The goyim don’t want the Jewish interference.”
There are 77,547 residents in Sullivan County (roughly 10 percent are Jewish), but in summer the population nearly quadruples — mostly Jews returning to second homes, to the predominantly Orthodox bungalow colonies, and to nearly 100 Orthodoxsummer camps. The summer population “can reach 300,000 at its peak,” according to the county’s Economic Development Corporation.
One summer directory, an Orthodox yellow pages of sorts, is now almost 500 pages long. Some Catskill hamlets have 15 Orthodox minyans each weekday morning, a new minyan every 20 minutes, and again at night; and at least 11 mikvahs, as well.
On Saturday nights in the hamlet of Woodbourne, every head is covered, other than the fellow pumping gas, or the Orthodox girls, their arms akimbo, their denim skirts grazing pale ankles, watching Woodbourne’s post-Havdalah midnight promenade, the sidewalks illuminated by the glow from kosher food shops.
But Woodbourne empties in winter. In October, Monticello attorney Steve Kurlander, writing in The Huffington Post, threw down the challenge: “Say goodbye to bungalows,” forever. Yes, they contribute to the economy but when the summer folks go home? “Drive down … Woodbourne’s main street,” Kurlander writes, and witness the post-summer residue of “that seasonal bungalow mentality. A decrepit-looking business district that once serviced local residents and tourists alike remains empty of year-round stores, a basic ghost town 10 months a year.”
It would be better to “attract new middle-class families with good, affordable year-round housing,” people who would “commute to New York City instead of just visiting for the summer.” And, say the critics, the wooden bungalows are fire hazards, and hardly aesthetic. “There are enough bungalows in the Catskills as it is,” writes the attorney. “Enough is enough.”
Such antagonism has been noted in recent years by Barry Lewis, editor of the Times Herald-Record, who writes, “summer in Sullivan County must be near. Our mountain air is starting to fill with the sounds of intolerance. You’d have to be practically deaf not to hear the hate. … [The] venom is often aimed at the tens of thousands of Orthodox Jews.”
A few miles away, in Bloomingburg, there’s another zoning fight, not about bungalows but the permanent housing the county supposedly wants. In Bloomingburg, a Jewish developer wants to build 125 homes (some expect that to double) for the Orthodox. Newsweek, sensing that this went beyond the usual zoning dispute, sent a national reporter to the scene.
A non-Jewish resident of the area told Newsweek: “You know what this is all about? All these chasids have their own private places around here. They’ve got their own camps and s---t…. and they pull off their drug deals. And the state police can’t go on the properties because they’re ‘religious.’ That’s where all the f------ deals take place. You know what I’m saying?”
One Fallsburg real estate agent, in defense of Jewish bungalows and housing, told The Jewish Week: In an economically depressed county, “The Orthodox community, that’s who’s buying. They pay taxes, even though they don’t use the schools, or any facilities other than water and sewer. They pay a lot of money into the town, so why give them a hard time?”
Some locals say they only shop on Saturdays, when the Orthodox don’t. On Sundays, the roads are jammed, to everyone’s annoyance, but every driver carries a wallet, to the economy’s delight. Tax revenues swell by more than a million dollars in summer; 18 percent of the workforce is employed in what’s called the “tourism” sector. “People would be surprised by how much Orthodox groups contribute,” the SullivanCounty treasurer told the Times Herald-Record. “Yes,” says Goldwag of Kosher Sox, but what Orthodox Jews add to the economy, he tells us, is appreciated “only by the people with a businesses. Many locals couldn’t care less.”
Goldwag has one of the larger emporiums, selling everything from blechs to bathing suits to, well, socks. But “the locals are afraid to come into my store,” says Goldwag. Kosher Sox? “They don’t know what it means.” Goldwag explains, when he first bought the store, decades ago, a new sign cost $900, so he bought a used sign from a kosher store. Goldwag liked “kosher,” and kept it, but “socks” didn’t fit. Goldwag replaced the “c-k-s” with an “x.” And there you have it, he says laughing: “Kosher Sox.”
When talk turns to the local problems, the laughter stops. “Nothing new,” says Goldwag. “Nah, it’s just the standard ‘We hate the Jews who come up here.’ Why? Well, in one shot, you move Williamsburg and Borough Park into the Catskills. They’ll triple-park anywhere, speed through crosswalks, pick up hitchhikers in the middle of the road, make U-turns on Route 42 — chutzpadik and dangerous. People don’t act responsibly. Clearly, many do but others are not respectful of the locals. You can’t say all the people hate the Jews, that’s not true, but there’s a lot of frustration, so you hear [when the season begins], ‘Oh, they’re coming back again.’”
This summer as in recent summers, a notice circulated among the Orthodox: “It is a warm feeling watching the mountains fill up with dear fellow Jews … . Please be aware that there are thousands of people who live here all year-round that are not accustomed to the heimishe [homey] city way of life. They are used to a quiet, country atmosphere, and are not overly excited about the changes that the summer brings. They are not aware of the sweetness of the Torah way, and when they look at us, they have no way of seeing the inner beauty of a Torah Jew… We are quick to be branded as unwelcome intruders… Whether driving, shopping, out at the park … let’s not leave room to be accused of anything improper … . Nobody wants — chas v’sholom [may it never happen] — to make a chillul Hashem [a desecration of God’s name], but without a little precaution it is often automatic … . Sincerely, your fellow Ohave Torah [lover of Torah].”
jonathan@jewishweek.org
Also this week, Olympic gold medalist Aly Raisman bares all in ESPN video; post Mikvah-gate report recommends improving Orthodox conversion process; Staff Writer Steve Lipman recalls interviewing Nicholas Winton, "the British Schindler," who died last week in London; and Culture Editor Sandee Brawarsky reports on David Wander's "Visualizing the Bible" show on display at Cong. Emanu-El's museum.NATIONAL
WATCH: Jewish gymnast Aly Raisman strips down for ESPN
Aly Raisman, a two-time Olympic gold medalist, stripped down for ESPN The Magazine’s annual Body Issue
JTA
Aly Raisman, a two-time Olympic gold medalist, stripped down for ESPN The Magazine’s annual Body Issue. ESPN
It sounds like a Jewish mother's nightmare: A 21-year-old Jewish gymnast agrees to be photographed and filmed fully naked.
But Playboy it's not.
Aly Raisman, a two-time Olympic gold medalist, stripped down for ESPN The Magazine's annual Body Issue, which features photos of top athletes without clothes, but also without revealing everything.
And Raisman manages to leave plenty to the imagination as she moves around and strikes poses on the balance beam and the rings. She says her muscular physique is on the bulky end of the spectrum for gymnasts. But you won't hear her complaining.
"I think imperfection is beauty," she says. "Instead of being insecure about my muscles, I've learned to love them. I don't even think of it as a flaw anymore because it's made me into the athlete that I am."
Raisman, a native of Needham, Massachusetts, was the captain of the gold-medal winning U.S. women's gymnastics team at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. Just 18 years old at the time, she individually won gold on the floor and bronze on the balance beam.
But in the magazine interview that accompanies the ESPN video, Raisman says she dwells on her failures more than her victories.
"At the last Olympics I got two golds and a bronze, she says, "but I think more about the fact that I didn't medal in the All-Around than the fact that I did really well."
In her gold-medal floor routine, Raisman performed to "Hava Nagila," delighting Jews around the world. Before the routine, she told JTA that she was proud to be using the popular Israeli folk song "because there aren’t too many Jewish elites out there.”
Raisman noted that the song had the added advantage of encouraging audience participation, saying, "I like how the crowd can clap to it."
After the performance, Raisman's rabbi, Keith Stern of Temple Beth Avodah in Newton Centre, Massachusetts, gushed to the New York Post about her victory and her guts for saying she would have supported a moment of silence for the 40th anniversary of the Munich massacre of Israeli Olympians and trainers.
“She’s very proud and upfront about being Jewish,” Stern said at the time. “Neither she nor her family explicitly sought to send a message. But it shows how very integrated her Jewish heritage is in everything that she does."
Raisman's parents also got some press when a video went viral showing them agonizing over their daughter's second "Hava Nagila" performance to qualify for the individual all-around finals.
In the ESPN video, Raisman says she is a perfectionist when it comes to her intense training regime. One mistake in a beam practice qualifies as a "horrible day," she says in the video.
She reports working out up to seven hours a day and maintaining strict habits.
"I'm always eating healthy, always going to bed early," she says in the interview.
"Everything I put into my body is for the purpose of gymnastics.
Still, when it comes to her appearance Raisman refuses to obsess, explaining that she's never had an eating disorder.
"I think gymnastics in the past had a bad reputation for that, but it's not an issue anymore," she says. "I've never seen an issue among the girls on the national team."
If Raisman qualifies for the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, at 22 she will be the oldest member of the team.
editor@jewishweek.org
NATIONAL
Post-Freundel, New 'Gold Standard' For Conversion
In response to mikvah scandal, committee urges sensitizing rabbis to conversion students’ concerns.
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
Mandel spoke of her increasing disillusionment with Orthodoxy.
Two months after the sentencing of mikvah-voyeur Rabbi Barry Freundel, the Orthodox community’s leading rabbinical council has released what it calls the new “gold standard” for preventing rabbinic abuses of power during the conversion process.
The 22-page report was prepared by a special committee chosen last fall, made up of 11 members, including five women – two of whom are converts to Judaism. It seeks to improve the Rabbinical Council of America’s Geirus Protocol and Standards (GPS) conversion process that, ironically, was implemented by Rabbi Freundel in 2007. Though the GPS process initially sought to standardize and centralize conversion procedures, it allowed breaches in the system to go unchecked, the report notes.
“Don’t make the mistake of thinking the crime was just about the cameras,” said Bethany Mandel, a convert and one of the members of the review committee. “Freundel was abusing his power long before that.”
Aside from his crimes of voyeurism, the rabbi employed seemingly arbitrary benchmarks for assessing a candidate’s readiness for conversion, and was vague about how long the conversion process would take. The report found that Freundel was not alone in causing potential converts to feel unsettled about a lack of precise requirements and timetables.
A primary goal of the GPS review was improve the conversion experience based on the experiences of converts while maintaining halachic standards. According to RCA executive vice president Rabbi Mark Dratch, the report marks the beginning of a new era.
“This is the first time the stakeholders themselves are deeply involved in the process,” he said, referring to the converts on the committee as well as the 835 Jews by choice and conversion candidates who were surveyed. “We learned the most from looking at this through their eyes.”
The report included several recommendations, including increased transparency of expectations for converts; additional training for sponsoring rabbis to sensitize them to conversion students’ concerns; support for converts during and after the process; a mechanism to deal with concerns and complaints; exploring the possibility of establishing more beit dins around the country; and hiring a full-time RCA employee committed to national oversight of the process.
Though the report was “just step one,” Rabbi Dratch said attention is already being directed towards the “implementation phase.” Details are not yet set but the RCA aims to appoint an implementation committee, with many of the same members from the review committee, he said.
Additionally, increased standards of modesty will be enforced at local mikvahs, robes and other pre-immersion coverings will be mandatory, and in the case of female converts, another woman will always be present, according to the rabbi. (The survey found that 78 percent of converts in the RCA-Beth Din of America network are women, and the peak years for conversion are ages 20 to 29.)
“Involving converts in the process gave us an important new perspective, and we gave them a voice,” said Rabbi Lenny Matanky, president of he RCA. “I view the entire review as a major accomplishment.”
Still, though the GPS review is widely seen as a significant step forward, the report has rekindled debate over a return to conversions performed by local rabbis versus the centralized system of 12 regional bet dins around the country, which the RCA maintains.
“Power in the hands of the few has several pitfalls,” said Rabbi Adam Starr, a member of the GPS Bet Din in Atlanta, Ga., and a member of the review committee.
In some ways the discussion here about keeping a centralized system or broadening the process mirrors the debate in Israel. On Sunday, the Israeli cabinet repealed a measure intended to decentralize the process and allow regional rabbis to establish local conversion courts. The move, which was supposed to make conversion more approachable for tens of thousands of Israelis who have Jewish ancestry but are not considered halachically Jewish, signaled the renewed clout of charedi parties in the ruling coalition formed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Rabbi Seth Farber, founder of Itim, an independent advocacy group that helps people navigate the Orthodox bureaucracy in Israel, said that while the GPS review is a positive step, it failed to address the larger issues at the core of conversion reform. He referred to the initial implementation of the GPS system in 2007 as a “huge error for the future of Orthodoxy in America.”
“If conversion is one solution to intermarriage, than it is an embarrassing statistic that only 1,300 candidates have converted to Judaism through the GPS process,” he said, noting the report’s additional qualifying statistic that 45 percent of the converts surveyed already had Jewish ancestry. “I speculate that GPS has undermined the conversion process for hundreds of Orthodox hopefuls by taking the power to perform acceptable conversions away from local rabbis.”
He said that each week at Itim “people come to me because their conversions are being questioned.”
Though not responding directly to Farber’s comments, Rabbi Shmuel Goldin, chair of the review committee and honorary president of the RCA, said that though he was once skeptical of the GPS network because of the added layer of bureaucracy it imposed, interviewing converts led him to appreciate the system’s “tremendous benefits.”
“Converts want a degree of clear acceptability, above all else,” he said. “They want to know that once converted, they won’t be questioned.” He described meeting with converts in Washington, D.C., directly after Rabbi Freundel was arrested in October 2014. “The first thing they wanted to know was the status of their conversions,” he said.
Rabbi Avi Weiss and Rabbi Marc Angel, frequent critics of the RCA’s centralized conversion system, wrote last fall that it causes emotional distress, overly strict standards, and ultimately fewer converts. (Rabbi Weiss has allowed his RCAmembership to lapse, in part because of this issue.)
Acknowledging such criticism, Rabbi Goldin said the GPS review, pending implementation of the committee’s recommendations, will “cut down the negative dimensions of a system that largely works.” He noted that among the converts surveyed, it was a minority who experienced problems.
For the two female converts who were part of the review committee, the focus remained firmly on improving the current reality rather than overturning the system.
Evelyn Fruchter, an attorney, convert and member of the review committee, said that she does not take a position about whether a centralized system for managing conversions should exist or not. For her, the operating question was how to improve the existing GPS system. “If we take for granted that the system is needed, how do we make it work?” she said. “The RCA needs to be prepared to meet the duty of care associated with operating this system.”
With regard to the survey results from converts, Fruchter said as a general matter the data “didn’t reveal problems that weren’t self-evident.”
Bethany Mandel, the other convert on the committee, said that although many of its recommendations seem obvious, like respect for punctuality and empathy between sponsoring rabbi and convert, these basic courtesies were not always taking place.
“One-third of the converts surveyed described feeling ‘vulnerable,’ ‘powerless,’ or ‘judged critically’ during discussions with the conversion court,” she said. “That’s not OK. Why did less than half of converts feel any sense of ‘encouragement’ or ‘empathy’ from the court? It shouldn’t be that way.”
Mandel, who was converted by Rabbi Freundel, spoke of her increasing disillusionment with Orthodoxy, even as she struggles to remain within the fold for the sake of her two children. But knowing her work on the review committee will improve the conversion process has been a source of comfort. “I signed up for this,” she said, “with the explicit understanding that we can make a positive difference for the next convert.”
editor@jewishweek.org
INTERNATIONAL
‘Fundamentally Reasonable’ Heroism
Remembering Nicholas Winton,‘The British Schindler,’ who saved 669 children from the Holocaust.
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
Sir Nicholas Winton is greeted by one of the 669 now-grown children he had rescued from Nazi-annexed Prague. Getty Images
In a hotel room in Midtown Manhattan 13 years ago, I learned a lesson about the simplicity of heroism.
Joe Schlesinger, a Czech-born, semi-retired journalist whose work on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation I had watched for years while growing up in Buffalo, sat across from me. Next to him was Nicholas Winton, a one-time stockbroker in London whose good works were the subject of a documentary that had premiered here the previous day.
“The Power of Good” described how Mr. Winton had formed a one-man Kindertransport in 1939 that brought nearly 700 children from Nazi-annexed Prague, most of them Jewish, to safety in England.
Schlesinger, it turned out, was a member of the group that came to be known as “Nicky’s Children.” He narrated the documentary.
I asked Mr. Winton an obvious, yet admittedly dumb, question.
“Was it reasonable to think that someone with no diplomacy or relief training, who had no official authorization, no connections in Czechoslovakia and was not independently wealthy could start his own rescue organization and save so many people?” I asked.
Mr. Winton, who died last week at 106 at a hospital near his home in suburban London, paused for a second, then looked me in the eye.
“Well, wasn’t it?” he answered. “There is nothing that can’t be done if it’s fundamentally reasonable.”
In other words, of course it was reasonable. He saw a need and filled it. He stepped up when most people stepped aside. It was that simple.
Sensing danger in what was becoming Nazi Europe, Mr. Winton set up headquarters in the lobby of his Prague hotel, declared himself “Honorary Secretary” of the non-existent children’s section of the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia and interviewed parents who were willing to send their children away. He recruited friends as volunteers, met secretly with Gestapo officials, offered bribes and forged travel documents. He wrote President Roosevelt, raised thousands of dollars to guarantee that the kids would not become a public burden, spent his own money on the initiative, and returned to England to badger British officials, line up foster families and greet the arriving children at a London railway station.
All this, while working full time as a stockbroker.
Mr. Winton organized seven transports; the eighth was cancelled by the outbreak of World War II. The results: 669 rescued children, and their descendants, numbering between an estimated 6,000 and 10,000.
Mr. Winton outlived many of the children he rescued.
In later years he joined the Red Cross as an ambulance driver, served as Royal Air Force pilot, and supported the International Refugee Organization as well as a British charity for children with learning disabilities.
Mr. Winton — actually, Sir Winton, knighted by Great Britain and honored in recent decades by virtually every Western country with a conscience — came to be known, after his exploits belatedly came to light, as “The British Schindler”; the title likened him to Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist whose life-saving bravery was featured in Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning film.
Mr. Winton hated the title and the comparison. “I feel very embarrassed,” he would say.
He was no hero, he would protest.
“There was no threat at all” to his safety, a few months after the Third Reich annexed the Sudetenland, Mr. Winton told me. “The only Germans in Prague were the spies.” Nazi spies.
Matej Minac, who directed “The Power of Good,” disputed Mr. Winton’s understatement. “He was in terrible danger,” he said. German spies were known to kidnap and torture people at odds with the Third Reich. “The Gestapo was following him,” he said.
Whatever the risk, the question remains: Why did Mr. Winton do it? Why did he inconvenience himself for strangers?
He heard the question many — too many for him — times.
“We’ve asked him this question 500 times,” Minac said, and always got the same dismissive answer: “I tried to do good, and I get asked this silly question.”
Mr. Winton exhibited the same it-was-the-right-thing-to-do, I-had-no-choice attitude as the two-dozen Righteous Gentiles I have interviewed over the years.
For him, his rescue activities were not an expression of ethnic solidarity. “I didn’t bring out Jews,” he said. “I brought out children.” While born to German-Jewish immigrant parents (original name, Wertheimer), his parents converted to Christianity to fit into gentile British society (though they but were not churchgoers). He considered himself an agnostic and did not identify as a Jew. His Jewish ancestry made him ineligible for Yad Vashem’s designation as a Righteous Gentile.
A bit chubby, with thick glasses and white hair lining the back part of his head, Mr. Winton was 93 when I met him. He seemed uncomfortable with his unexpected fame — he was featured in several documentaries; streets and schools are named for him; statues of him stand in Prague and London — but humored everyone who sought to honor or interview him.
Though he was very polite — in other words, very British — Mr. Winton covered his humanitarian interior with a sometimes gruff, no-nonsense exterior. He had needed that crustiness to battle indifferent British bureaucrats. “I’m stubborn in a nice way,” he said, detailing how he had operated.
“It was fairly obvious,” he said with a shrug, “that these people were in a fairly dangerous situation.” He was talking mainly about the children, who drew his attention. Politically astute, he had, on a friend’s recommendation, visited some decrepit refugee camps, heard horror stories, and realized the pending threat.
So he started his lifesaving work.
Public figures praised Mr. Winton last week. A “giant of moral courage,” said Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, former chief rabbi of Great Britain. “A great man,” said British Prime Minister David Cameron. “He had no reason to be humble, but was very humble,” said Michael Berenbaum, Holocaust scholar and author.
Few people, including the children whom Mr. Winton had saved, knew their savior’s identity. Mr. Winton rarely discussed what he did in 1939. “I didn’t really keep it secret,” he would say. “I just didn’t talk about it.”
“For 50 years we didn’t know who had saved our lives,” Schlesinger told me. “I knew there was some sort of organization” behind the rescue effort. “I was shocked. I thought it was a Jewish group, [like] HIAS.”
Then, in the late 1980s, Mr. Winton’s wife, Grete, brought his actions to the attention of philanthropist Elizabeth Maxwell, widow of industrialist Robert Maxwell. Newspaper profiles and a BBC program that featured an unexpected reunion with then-grown Nicky’s children followed.
One of the children saved by Mr. Winton, Hanna Slome, now 90, who lives in Flushing, Queens, frequently gives speeches about her wartime memories.
“It was my mother who must have found out about Nicky Winton and signed me up,” Slome said in an email interview. She went to England in May 1939, then came to the United States in 1944, invited by an uncle.
“I met Nicky for the first time in 2002,” she said. “I took my daughter and a grandchild to England to visit him.
“He was an unbelievable person — lived alone, took care of himself, embroidered tapestry in his spare time and expressed to us that if he had known only what success this ‘small event’ in his life would bring, he could have done so much more with all his fame.”
“I owe so much to him,” Slome said.
Mr. Winton’s death had as much symbolism as his life — he died on the 76th anniversary of the day his largest transport of children, 241 in all, left Prague.
steve@jewishweek.org
MUSEUMS
Drawing The Tradition
In his ‘Visualizing the Bible’ show, David Wander makes the Torah his own.
Sandee Brawarsky
Culture Editor
Wander in his studio: “Writing, burning, writing it again.” Courtesy of David Wander
David Wander makes books that might be 50 feet long, illustrating biblical and other stories with great artistic skill, creativity and appreciation of the text and its layers of meaning. One page leads to the next, and the handmade books fold up like accordians.
“Visualizing the Bible: Works by David Wander” at the Herbert & Eileen Bernard Museum of Judaica at Temple Emanu-El is a gem of an exhibition, not to be missed this summer. It is made up of eight books that seem inspired by Renaissance artists who illuminated manuscripts with spectacular imagery, as well as by contemporary creators of stylized graphic novels, who also tell a story in a frame.
“There’s a concept that everyone should write their own Torah. If they can, well, great, but everyone has to deal with what Judaism means to them and how to make it theirs,” the New York artist says in an interview.
In black-and-white and somber tones, his “Eicha,” Lamentations — read later this month on Tisha b’Av — powerfully captures the mood of the day, with images of skulls in the streets of Jerusalem, chains suggesting captivity, people walking in the dark in a maze and jackals.
His treatment of the text mirrors the book’s themes of destruction. Wander wrote the letters with white ink on black, then ripped and burned some of the text, then rewrote those letters and affixed the repaired, burnt fragments of text to the pages.
“Writing, burning, writing it again,” Wander says. “It’s why we’re here — to keep telling.”
Each of the narratives — which might take a year to create — is in a distinctive style, whether resembling an African story quilt, like “Megillat Esther” or a dreamscape, like “The Jonah Drawings.”
Warren Klein, curator of the museum, says that this is the institution’s first exhibition featuring a living artist and also its first show featuring biblical and religious texts. One of the challenges of the exhibit was displaying the books in full, so the presenters came up with a system of showing most, but not all, of the pages.
Born in New York City, Wander is the son of a printer and photo engraver who became a painter. David studied at Pratt, the School of Visual Arts and the Rhode Island School of Design, and later worked as a fine art printmaker here and in Europe (including work for the Picasso family). A cousin commissioned him to create an illustrated Haggadah linking together themes of the seder and the Shoah, in memory of relatives who perished. Working in Jerusalem, he completed The Wolloch Haggadah in 1985 — a 300-copy edition that was shown at Yad Vashem, with copies now in the permanent collection at JTS, Harvard and other institutions.
On exhibit here is a page showing the four sons of the text. Wander’s version features four books: One open with black letters, one on fire, one with blank pages and one closed.
Through the Haggadah project, he met David Kraemer of JTS, and they began a biweekly chevruta, or study session, in which they look at texts along with midrash, or commentary. The two men have been learning together for eight years. The ideas generated in their sessions animate these works, which Kraemer, the Joseph J. and Dora Abbell Librarian and professor of Talmud, describes as “a kind of midrash on the midrash.”
“David does something that not’s radically new,” Kraemer says, “but the continuation of a tradition. This is a very old tradition that most people who work with traditional texts don’t know much about. People often make comments about how new it is for Jews to be producing images, and it’s just not true — Jews have been doing so all along. It hasn’t been studied, except by specialists — it’s not that it hasn’t been done.”
Wander’s “Book of Judith,” with a style inspired by ancient Greek terra cotta pottery, includes no text, but a dramatic rendering of the biblical story in bold illustration done in acrylic and colored rice papers. At the end, Judith, with her expressive eyes and long gray hair, appears as a wise figure.
“The Golem of Prague,” which also has no text, is a retelling of the 16th-century tale in a richly colored panorama. Wander traveled to Prague to sketch the city’s monuments, which appear floating in the background, along with kabbalistic symbols and flying angels carrying stones. According to legend, the stones from Prague’s Altneu Shul, built from the remnants of the Second Temple, will be returned by angels to Jerusalem with the coming of the Messiah.
Set in contemporary times, “Ruth” highlights social issues that are still current. The text is English, in a comics font. But the story of honor, love, loyalty and the possibility of redemption — with stirrings of the Messiah — moves from right to left. The title character wears a little black dress, black pumps and pearls as she goes to meet Boaz.
Wander, who teaches art at SAR High School in Riverdale, also paints landscapes and streetscapes, and has shown that work widely. His books invite repeated viewing and a return to the text itself to see it anew.
“Visualizing the Bible: Works by David Wander” is on display at the Herbert & Eileen Bernard Museum of Judaica, Congregation Emanu-El, One E. 65th St., Manhattan, through Oct. 18.
editor@jewishweek.org
Enjoy the read,
Gary Rosenblatt
P.S. A reminder to check out our website anytime for breaking news and exclusive videos, blogs, opinion essays, feature stories, and more.
http://www.thejewishweek.com/
GARY ROSENBLATTBETWEEN THE LINES
Gary Rosenblatt
Michael Oren And The Debate That Won't Die
The former ambassador brought criticism on himself by writing provocative opinion pieces when his book was published.Michael Oren, the highly respected historian and former Israeli ambassador to the U.S., has become the latest lightning rod in the bitter struggle among those who profess to know what’s best for Israel. And like the Jewish state he served as diplomat, and now as Knesset member, Oren has gone from chief unifier to deep divider for many American Jews.
In his review, Bret Stephens, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Wall Street Journal, called Oren’s new book, “Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide” (Random House), the “smartest and juiciest diplomatic memoir that I’ve read in years, and I’ve read my share.”
He and other right-of-center supporters of Israel have praised Oren for describing a seemingly endless series of Obama administration slights, and more serious differences with Israel, during his four-and-a-half year tenure in Washington. The cumulative effect, on reading “Ally,” is of a president who views Jerusalem as more obstacle than ally, determined to pressure Prime Minister Netanyahu rather than Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas into a peace deal, and willing, if not eager, to publicize U.S. policy differences with Israel.
But Oren has been rhetorically pummeled from critics in the center and on the left, here and in Israel. He is accused of fabricating and exaggerating events, telling secrets out of turn, and playing armchair psychologist in attributing Obama’s outreach to the Muslim world as, at least in part, a response to his being abandoned as a child by his father and stepfather, both of whom are Muslim.
U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro called the book untruthful; Moshe Kahlon, Oren’s new boss as leader of the Kulanu Party, distanced himself from the fray; and even the Anti-Defamation League’s national director, Abraham Foxman, weighed in, describing Oren’s portrait of Obama as an “insensitive and unjustified attack on the president” and a case of “amateur psychoanalysis.”
Perhaps most seriously, Oren, a proud American who gave up his citizenship to take on the ambassador post in 2009 and sees himself as a potential healer of the U.S.-Israel rift, is accused of seriously misreading American Jewish discomfort with Israel of late.
Leon Wieseltier, the longtime literary editor of The New Republic now writing from his new perch at The Atlantic, called Oren’s book “slinky and self-aggrandizing.” Further, he asserted that it is Israel’s policies, particularly regarding settlements, that is the greatest cause of a distancing from the Netanyahu government, not fear of anti-Semitism, as Oren suggests.
Sadly, the dispute has grown personal, fueled in part by an article in Haaretz by New York correspondent Chemi Shalev shortly before “Ally” was published. It focused on Oren’s criticism of Jews in mainstream journalism whom he felt were unduly harsh in reporting on Israel. Oren cited the New York Review of Books and journalists like Tom Friedman of The New York Times, New Yorker editor David Remnick, and Wieseltier, who wrote in The Atlantic last week that he was speaking ironically when he told Oren his dislike of Netanyahu was “pathological,” a comment Oren cited in the book.
Some of Oren’s supporters claim that the widespread attacks on him and his book have been orchestrated by an Obama administration seeking to minimize the impact of the charges against the White House and shift the focus to Oren’s alleged bias rather than U.S. policy.
In defending himself against the barrage of criticism, Oren, in the U.S. on a book tour, said most of the harsh comments have been leveled against him personally as “basically a money-grubbing politician, a liar and delusional,” he told The Jerusalem Post, rather than dealing with the substance of the book.
But Oren brought a good deal of criticism on himself by writing a series of provocative opinion pieces around the time of the book’s publication, presumably to call attention to it and boost sales. One was an essay in The Wall Street Journal titled “How Obama Abandoned Israel.” Oren didn’t write the headline, but the piece accuses the president of deliberately causing the rift with Jerusalem. Another controversial column Oren wrote appeared in Foreign Policy and explored what he perceives of as Obama’s psychological issues — a child abandoned by Muslim fathers, now bent on a foolhardy outreach effort to Iran and the Muslim world.
Critics didn’t have to read “Ally,” and probably hadn’t, to conclude that Oren was deeply partisan against Obama. And that’s a pity because the strength of the 400-page book, as I wrote here (“No Way To Treat An Ally,” June 19), is that it is far more nuanced than those essays Oren wrote. It offers numerous examples of the administration not living up to its repeated claims of “having Israel’s back” in regard to political and diplomatic issues.
Most of the critics have focused on a couple of relatively minor, alleged mistakes attributed to Oren, like the timing of the arrival of the Israeli medical team in Haiti after its devastating earthquake. (Oren said Obama did not cite Israel as one of the countries lending emergency aid; detractors noted Obama spoke the day before the Israelis arrived on the scene; Oren supporters respond that the White House knew help was on the way; etc.)
The implication seems to be that if Oren, a noted historian, made an error, his credibility is suspect and his central thesis is undermined.
That thesis is two-fold and compelling; let the critics address it directly. First, that the White House has chosen to pressure Israel on the Palestinian issue, consistently and insistently, while giving the Palestinian Authority a pass. And, even more importantly, that Obama has been so committed to finding a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear threat that he has jeopardized Israel’s security, underscored by conducting secret talks with the Iranians and not informing America’s most vital and vulnerable ally in the region.
It is on those points that a serious debate about the merits of the book should be held.
“Ally” was slated for publication in September, but as a result of the author’s urging that it come out before the final deadline of the critical nuclear talks with Iran, it was published on June 23.
Oren had hoped that his book, with what he calls its “difficult truths” about the administration’s weakness in dealing with Iran, might play a role in preventing the “bad deal” of which Israelis are so fearful. Not unexpectedly, though, it has bolstered critics of the deal and been dismissed by supporters of it — another painful example of Oren’s “journey across the American-Israeli divide.”
gary@jewishweek.org
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MUSINGS
The Angels And Us
Rabbi David Wolpe
Special to the Jewish Week
Rabbi David Wolpe
We gather around the Shabbat table, put our arms around one other and sing “Shalom Aleichem” — the song that greets the Shabbat angels. By the time we have finished the Shabbat song, three minutes later, we are concluding with “Tzaitchem L’shalom” — go in peace, already asking them to leave. The poor angels must wonder why we do not wish them to stick around!
For a clue we can look at the Kotzker Rebbe’s comment on the verse in Exodus 22:31: “You shall be holy human beings to me.” The Kotzker said that God has enough angels, and what God needs is holy human beings. Human beings are effortful and striving; we fail and overcome. We are human.
So Rabbi Soloveitchik made the comment that we usher the angels out so quickly because human beings cannot live with angels. Our mission is tounderstand that no one is perfect, that we are cracked and fissured and flawed, and need forgiveness. Together around the Shabbat table, we are delighted to welcome and entertain the angels — but not for too long. We need to eat and argue and forgive — and love. Shabbat Shalom.
Rabbi David Wolpe is spiritual leader of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter: @RabbiWolpe. His latest book, “David: The Divided Heart” (Yale University Press), has recently been published.
editor@jewishweek.org
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Washington's state capital also serves as an art gallery and a popular park. Wikimedia Commons.
TRAVEL
How Green Is My Capital
Hilary DanailovaTravel Writer
It can take days — maybe a week, if you’re on the scenic route — to see all of California’s major cities. But next door in Washington State, Olympia, Seattle and Tacoma are all within a drive of less than two hours.
In fact, you can reach Olympia, the state’s small-town capital, from either Seattle or Portland in 60-90 minutes. Connoisseurs of small cities will appreciate Olympia’s lovely waterfront and legendary farmer’s market, while the students at Evergreen State College give the town an artsy, boho spirit. Nature lovers will appreciate Olympia’s spectacular mountain scenery and abundant opportunities to savor views over Puget Sound.
Washington’s state capital is a miniature city: fewer than 50,000 people call it home. But the students at Evergreen State, consistently ranked among the top Pacific liberal-arts schools, keep downtown lively.
Known for its progressive atmosphere and emphasis on environmental studies — students are known as “Greeners,” and biking was a thing here long before Citibike — Evergreen, with its vegan menus and acres of hiking trails, is the crunchy soul of Olympia. The school counts myriad creative types among its graduates, including cartoonist Matt Groening of “Simpsons” fame, Michael Richards of “Seinfeld” and Carrie Brownstein, the singer and “Portlandia” star.
Olympia’s Jewish population is tiny, with many Jews — like Brownstein — arriving as students. (“Being Jewish in Olympia” was the topic of a recent senior project at Evergreen, a tidbit that drives home how marginal the community really is.)
Still, Jewish Olympians can find each other at no fewer than three congregations. There’s Temple Beth Hatfiloh, which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary; once an Orthodox shul that served Olympia’s turn-of-the-century merchant class, the temple is now a Reconstructionist affiliate. Twenty years ago, a breakaway group formed the Conservative Congregation B’nai Torah, and a Chabad center hosts frequent events for students and locals.
Olympians of all persuasions take pride in their imperious State Capitol, a white domed neoclassical building that looks as though it had been lifted out of the other Washington. The Capitol is one of the city’s top attractions, offering guided tours of the building’s graceful, colonnaded interior and an impressive art collection.
Outside, the art continues on a gorgeously landscaped campus — courtesy of Law and Olmsted, the team behind Central Park — that makes the Capitol not only a place of legislation, but also a popular park, with views that extend over Puget Sound. Outdoor sights include a Winged Victory, numerous war memorials and lots of great sculpture.
Indeed, with the State Capital Museum closed for renovation, Olympia’s true glories are found out of doors. On a clear day, the snowcapped peaks of Mount Rainier and the Olympic Mountains loom from above; down below, the placid waters of Budd Inlet and Capitol Lake snake through the city.
The capitol campus may be the grandest of Olympia’s 40 parks, but a stroll through Olympia reveals many other oases worth checking out. Throughout the city center, so-called “art” benches, designed by local artisans, offer respite for pedestrians exploring the vibrant downtown.
Tiny Sylvester Park, just north of the capitol, hosts a weekly summer concert series featuring popular and retro acts. A few blocks away, the circa-1920s Capital Theater has been restored to its vintage splendor; today it plays host to the Olympia Film Society, which has a lineup of independent and art-house movies as well as concerts and art exhibits.
Just north along the eastern shore, Percival Landing Park is arguably Olympia’s most popular spot for waterfront outings, with picnic tables and a lovely boardwalk that wraps around a mile of Capitol Lake shoreline. From these verdant lawns, the Capitol dome fairly shimmers in West Coast sunshine.
Many picnickers nosh on fare from the Olympia Farmers Market, which was a star attraction long before the foodie revolution. Open Thursday through Sunday in the warmer months, the legendary market — located just north of Percival Landing — features the local, organic produce, meat, fish and pastries you’d expect. There’s also live musical entertainment, several restaurants and wares by local artisans, from pottery and glass to handmade soaps and jewelry. (There are at least a half-dozen smaller farmers’ markets throughout Olympia, too.)
If kids are along, take them to the Hands On Children’s Museum, which re-opened three years ago in a sparkling new facility on Olympia’s eastern waterfront. As you would expect, the museum emphasizes science and nature: galleries are devoted to Puget Sound, forests and tides, and kids will love exploring a driftwood fort, a mud pie pit and several gardens with edible flowers.
editor@jewishweek.org
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Aly Raisman is one of the tamer photos from a naked shoot in ESPN The Magazine's "Body Issue." JTA
Featured on NYBLUEPRINTNATIONAL
WATCH: Jewish gymnast Aly Raisman strips down for ESPN
Aly Raisman, a two-time Olympic gold medalist, stripped down for ESPN The Magazine’s annual Body Issue
JTA
Aly Raisman, a two-time Olympic gold medalist, stripped down for ESPN The Magazine’s annual Body Issue. ESPN
It sounds like a Jewish mother's nightmare: A 21-year-old Jewish gymnast agrees to be photographed and filmed fully naked.
But Playboy it's not.
Aly Raisman, a two-time Olympic gold medalist, stripped down for ESPN The Magazine's annual Body Issue, which features photos of top athletes without clothes, but also without revealing everything.
And Raisman manages to leave plenty to the imagination as she moves around and strikes poses on the balance beam and the rings. She says her muscular physique is on the bulky end of the spectrum for gymnasts. But you won't hear her complaining.
"I think imperfection is beauty," she says. "Instead of being insecure about my muscles, I've learned to love them. I don't even think of it as a flaw anymore because it's made me into the athlete that I am."
Raisman, a native of Needham, Massachusetts, was the captain of the gold-medal winning U.S. women's gymnastics team at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. Just 18 years old at the time, she individually won gold on the floor and bronze on the balance beam.
But in the magazine interview that accompanies the ESPN video, Raisman says she dwells on her failures more than her victories.
"At the last Olympics I got two golds and a bronze, she says, "but I think more about the fact that I didn't medal in the All-Around than the fact that I did really well."
In her gold-medal floor routine, Raisman performed to "Hava Nagila," delighting Jews around the world. Before the routine, she told JTA that she was proud to be using the popular Israeli folk song "because there aren’t too many Jewish elites out there.”
Raisman noted that the song had the added advantage of encouraging audience participation, saying, "I like how the crowd can clap to it."
After the performance, Raisman's rabbi, Keith Stern of Temple Beth Avodah in Newton Centre, Massachusetts, gushed to the New York Post about her victory and her guts for saying she would have supported a moment of silence for the 40th anniversary of the Munich massacre of Israeli Olympians and trainers.
“She’s very proud and upfront about being Jewish,” Stern said at the time. “Neither she nor her family explicitly sought to send a message. But it shows how very integrated her Jewish heritage is in everything that she does."
Raisman's parents also got some press when a video went viral showing them agonizing over their daughter's second "Hava Nagila" performance to qualify for the individual all-around finals.
In the ESPN video, Raisman says she is a perfectionist when it comes to her intense training regime. One mistake in a beam practice qualifies as a "horrible day," she says in the video.
She reports working out up to seven hours a day and maintaining strict habits.
"I'm always eating healthy, always going to bed early," she says in the interview.
"Everything I put into my body is for the purpose of gymnastics.
Still, when it comes to her appearance Raisman refuses to obsess, explaining that she's never had an eating disorder.
"I think gymnastics in the past had a bad reputation for that, but it's not an issue anymore," she says. "I've never seen an issue among the girls on the national team."
If Raisman qualifies for the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, at 22 she will be the oldest member of the team.
editor@jewishweek.org
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TOP STORIES:NEW YORK
A Serpent In Catskills’ ‘Garden?’
As an anti-bungalow backlash flares, critics and zoning codes say ‘enough is enough.’
Jonathan Mark
Associate Editor
A colony in the rain: A summer tradition is threatened by zoning and resentment. Eli Wohl/Courtesy Vos Iz Neias
Woodbourne, N.Y. — Summer comes to the Catskills like Creation itself, each day a revelation: The Neversink River flows to waterfalls. A moon rises over ice caves. There are salamanders in the grass, bears in the forest, a bald eagle in the sky. In the Sullivan County hamlet of Callicoon, just prior to the solstice, farmers parade 260 tractors. One trucker for Balford Farms, driving along the Delaware River on a June morning, spied a wounded bald eagle in a ditch, saving its life.
“Just to live in the country is a full-time job,” wrote E.B. White. “You don’t have to do anything. The idle pursuit of making a living is pushed to one side, where it belongs, in favor of living itself.” In that spirit, Jews return each summer to “the country,” where there’s nothing much to do but “living itself.”
And yet, there’s a serpent in the “Garden,” some say. Last October, the Town of Fallsburg passed zoning laws aimed at stifling the bungalows: a colony can now only build on less than 15 percent of its lot; new replacement cabins can’t be larger than the old; there now must be 31 feet of grass between cabins, and 250 feet between the cabins and the road (an increase of 75 feet). Similar codes to Fallsburg’s have been enacted recently across the county, in Liberty, Thompson, Mamakating and Bethel — site of the Woodstock festival, “the garden,” Joni Mitchell called it, made possible by the hospitality of Max Yasgur, a local Jewish dairy farmer.
The Fallsburg zoning legislation is less charming: “It is the intent of the Town of Fallsburg to not promote the expansion of bungalow colonies.”
One Jew, a year-round resident of Fallsburg who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, told The Jewish Week, “There’s a distinct attitude — the town wishes someone else would come.” Someone who isn’t Orthodox. “That’s actually been voiced to me” by people on the town’s planning board. “Without any embarrassment, they say that. I stopped going to the planning board because I’m kind of disgusted.”
Murray Goldwag, who winters in Jerusalem, returns to South Fallsburg every summer, where he is the proprietor of the famous Kosher Sox. “I’ve been schlepping to the mountains for 39 years,” he tells us. “Nothing’s changed. The goyim don’t want the Jewish interference.”
There are 77,547 residents in Sullivan County (roughly 10 percent are Jewish), but in summer the population nearly quadruples — mostly Jews returning to second homes, to the predominantly Orthodox bungalow colonies, and to nearly 100 Orthodoxsummer camps. The summer population “can reach 300,000 at its peak,” according to the county’s Economic Development Corporation.
One summer directory, an Orthodox yellow pages of sorts, is now almost 500 pages long. Some Catskill hamlets have 15 Orthodox minyans each weekday morning, a new minyan every 20 minutes, and again at night; and at least 11 mikvahs, as well.
On Saturday nights in the hamlet of Woodbourne, every head is covered, other than the fellow pumping gas, or the Orthodox girls, their arms akimbo, their denim skirts grazing pale ankles, watching Woodbourne’s post-Havdalah midnight promenade, the sidewalks illuminated by the glow from kosher food shops.
But Woodbourne empties in winter. In October, Monticello attorney Steve Kurlander, writing in The Huffington Post, threw down the challenge: “Say goodbye to bungalows,” forever. Yes, they contribute to the economy but when the summer folks go home? “Drive down … Woodbourne’s main street,” Kurlander writes, and witness the post-summer residue of “that seasonal bungalow mentality. A decrepit-looking business district that once serviced local residents and tourists alike remains empty of year-round stores, a basic ghost town 10 months a year.”
It would be better to “attract new middle-class families with good, affordable year-round housing,” people who would “commute to New York City instead of just visiting for the summer.” And, say the critics, the wooden bungalows are fire hazards, and hardly aesthetic. “There are enough bungalows in the Catskills as it is,” writes the attorney. “Enough is enough.”
Such antagonism has been noted in recent years by Barry Lewis, editor of the Times Herald-Record, who writes, “summer in Sullivan County must be near. Our mountain air is starting to fill with the sounds of intolerance. You’d have to be practically deaf not to hear the hate. … [The] venom is often aimed at the tens of thousands of Orthodox Jews.”
A few miles away, in Bloomingburg, there’s another zoning fight, not about bungalows but the permanent housing the county supposedly wants. In Bloomingburg, a Jewish developer wants to build 125 homes (some expect that to double) for the Orthodox. Newsweek, sensing that this went beyond the usual zoning dispute, sent a national reporter to the scene.
A non-Jewish resident of the area told Newsweek: “You know what this is all about? All these chasids have their own private places around here. They’ve got their own camps and s---t…. and they pull off their drug deals. And the state police can’t go on the properties because they’re ‘religious.’ That’s where all the f------ deals take place. You know what I’m saying?”
One Fallsburg real estate agent, in defense of Jewish bungalows and housing, told The Jewish Week: In an economically depressed county, “The Orthodox community, that’s who’s buying. They pay taxes, even though they don’t use the schools, or any facilities other than water and sewer. They pay a lot of money into the town, so why give them a hard time?”
Some locals say they only shop on Saturdays, when the Orthodox don’t. On Sundays, the roads are jammed, to everyone’s annoyance, but every driver carries a wallet, to the economy’s delight. Tax revenues swell by more than a million dollars in summer; 18 percent of the workforce is employed in what’s called the “tourism” sector. “People would be surprised by how much Orthodox groups contribute,” the SullivanCounty treasurer told the Times Herald-Record. “Yes,” says Goldwag of Kosher Sox, but what Orthodox Jews add to the economy, he tells us, is appreciated “only by the people with a businesses. Many locals couldn’t care less.”
Goldwag has one of the larger emporiums, selling everything from blechs to bathing suits to, well, socks. But “the locals are afraid to come into my store,” says Goldwag. Kosher Sox? “They don’t know what it means.” Goldwag explains, when he first bought the store, decades ago, a new sign cost $900, so he bought a used sign from a kosher store. Goldwag liked “kosher,” and kept it, but “socks” didn’t fit. Goldwag replaced the “c-k-s” with an “x.” And there you have it, he says laughing: “Kosher Sox.”
When talk turns to the local problems, the laughter stops. “Nothing new,” says Goldwag. “Nah, it’s just the standard ‘We hate the Jews who come up here.’ Why? Well, in one shot, you move Williamsburg and Borough Park into the Catskills. They’ll triple-park anywhere, speed through crosswalks, pick up hitchhikers in the middle of the road, make U-turns on Route 42 — chutzpadik and dangerous. People don’t act responsibly. Clearly, many do but others are not respectful of the locals. You can’t say all the people hate the Jews, that’s not true, but there’s a lot of frustration, so you hear [when the season begins], ‘Oh, they’re coming back again.’”
This summer as in recent summers, a notice circulated among the Orthodox: “It is a warm feeling watching the mountains fill up with dear fellow Jews … . Please be aware that there are thousands of people who live here all year-round that are not accustomed to the heimishe [homey] city way of life. They are used to a quiet, country atmosphere, and are not overly excited about the changes that the summer brings. They are not aware of the sweetness of the Torah way, and when they look at us, they have no way of seeing the inner beauty of a Torah Jew… We are quick to be branded as unwelcome intruders… Whether driving, shopping, out at the park … let’s not leave room to be accused of anything improper … . Nobody wants — chas v’sholom [may it never happen] — to make a chillul Hashem [a desecration of God’s name], but without a little precaution it is often automatic … . Sincerely, your fellow Ohave Torah [lover of Torah].”
jonathan@jewishweek.org
Read More ISRAEL NEWS
Near Gaza Border, Waiting For ‘Next War’
A year after Protective Edge, new ISIS fears along with an old resolve.
Michele Chabin
Israel Correspondent
A factory in Sderot is hit during last year’s war. Wikimedia Commons / Michele Chabin/JW
Kibbutz Ein HaShlosha, Israel — When the latest Israel-Hamas war erupted a year ago this week, Danny Cohen, a member of this kibbutz a mile from the Gaza border, prepared to evacuate his four children while trying to keep the kibbutz’s main factoryopen — despite the barrage of mortars and rockets, 18 of which hit the kibbutz.
“Ordinarily we have 50 workers, but for two months just 10 people made it to work. Kibbutz families with children fled the area and workers from outside the kibbutz were afraid to come due to the rockets and the tunnels,” Cohen, theproduction manager, said in the community’s loose-leaf binder factory, the largest in Israel.
Cohen noted that the Iron Dome anti-rocket system that defended much of the country last summer, “doesn’t work here because we’re too close to the border.”
Residents have four seconds at most to run for shelter, he said, “but lots of times we hear the rocket explode before we get the alert.”
Although life on Ein HaShlosha has been blissfully quiet since the war’s end last August (the few rockets Gaza militants have launched in recent weeks have fallen farther inland), “there’s quite a bit of disappointment that we’re no closer to peace,” Cohen said. “I can’t see us achieving a long-term calm. We’re living in anticipation of the next war.”
A year after the start of Operation Protective Edge, Israelis living close to the border say they feel more vulnerable than ever.
Although the IDF has beefed up its surveillance of Hamas’ activities and taken steps to quickly identify the construction of new “terror tunnels,” many residents cannot envision an end to the cycle of violence with Gaza militants. They are worried, too, about the growing threat of Islamic State (ISIS) fighters in the nearby Sinai, whose violent clashes with Egyptian forces have escalated in recent days.
At a military briefing at Ein HaShlosha last week, Maj. Nir Peled, deputy operations officer of the IDF’s Gaza Division, acknowledged that monitoring the border “is a difficult task.”
“We realize there are many enemy troops within our defense lines, and the distances between our communities and the Gaza Strip are very small. If you add to this the enemy’s maneuvers underground, it’s not easy,” he said.
Peled said one of the 34 Hamas-built tunnels the IDF discovered during 51 days of fighting, all of them now “neutralized,” ended just a kilometer from Ein HaShlosha.
“Hamas has declared many times it is rebuilding its forces and the tunnels we destroyed,” he said.
The officer said the IDF is utilizing “a variety of technology” to discover any cross-border tunnels, but declined to elaborate.
“It’s only when you slide down 30 meters [98 feet] below ground into one of these tunnels do you realize how high-tech they are and how close they are to our communities. It’s definitely not a comfortable situation for the people who live near the Strip,” Peled acknowledged.
Hamas, Peled said, spent years building the tunnels, each costing up to $3 million, in order to send terror squads into Israel either to murder border residents and soldiers on Israeli soil or to abduct and imprison them in Gaza.
During a tour of one such tunnel located less than a mile from Ein HaShlosha — discovered two years ago and kept as a kind of IDF show-and-tell venue for visiting dignitaries and journalists — military spokesman Maj. Aryeh Shalicar pointed out the communications and electrical wiring running along either side of the structure, which goes down 75 feet at its greatest depth.
Above ground Shalicar pointed to the miles of now-dissembled metal tubing, which he likened to homemade train tracks, Hamas used to transport tons of sandy dirt.
“This tunnel is a sophisticated piece of construction,” Shalicar said.
At nearby Kibbutz Magen, less than two miles from the border, Martin Sessler, 68, eating in the community’s communal dining hall, said “there is no possibility of peace here and that is sad.”
Sessler, a 45-year-resident of Magen and professor of Jewish law at Ben-Gurion University, said he spent most of last year’s war in a northern kibbutz with his young grandchildren, who were evacuated from Kibbutz Nirim, a mile from the border.
Some 50 mortars and rockets touched down in Nirim during the war, killing two residents and blowing the legs off a third the hour before the final ceasefire went into effect.
In Sessler’s view, the conflict between Israel and Arab countries “has turned from a nationalist conflict to a religious conflict. If you, as a Jew or a Muslim, believe God gave only you this land or this place to build a temple or mosque, it makes compromise much more difficult.”
Not that Sessler, a secular left-wing activist, believes Hamas or any other Islamic regime will accept Israel if Israel withdraws to its pre-1967 borders.
“I have no illusions that this is a question of the ‘occupied territories.’ For them, Tel Aviv is occupied territory, and Jews should go home to where they came from.”
Nava Etzion, whose husband, Ze’ev Etzion, 55, was one of the two Kibbutz Nirim members killed by a mortar the last day of the war, also has no illusions. But she does have dreams.
“We want to ensure that children on both sides of the border will not live in fear,” said Etzion, a mother of five. “Both sides need to learn how to stop making war.”
Asked how this could be accomplished, she signed and said, “That’s the million-dollar question. Our leaders need to speak to each other and perhaps we, the residents on both sides, will be able to speak to each other as well.”
Etzion said the first year without her husband has been difficult for her and her children, ages 13 to 23, but that her family and friends have been with them every step of the way.
Although several families have moved away from their homes near the Gaza border during the past year — most of them to spare their children the trauma of intermittent war — Etzion said she is staying on Nirim.
“This is my home and we live within the internationally recognized borders of the State of Israel. Our lives, like Palestinian lives, are worth saving,” she said.
Read More INTERNATIONAL
Ombudsman Out At Claims Conference
Allegations by watchdog of mismanagement by are countered by charges he was ‘wrong man for the job.’
Gary Rosenblatt
Editor and Publisher
Shmuel Hollander charges, in stinging letter, that “relevant information was withheld” from ombudsman’s office.
Shmuel Hollander, a highly respected Israeli public servant for four decades, made headlines in 2013 as ombudsman for the Claims Conference when he issued a stinging internal report, blaming the group for allowing a multimillion-dollar fraud to take place for years — unnoticed — within its New York office.
Now, two years later, as he leaves his post on the eve of the annual Claims Conference meeting here, Hollander has again accused the organization’s leadership of serious mismanagement, and of thwarting his efforts to help Holocaust survivors in their efforts to gain restitution. He also asserts that Claims Conference president Julius Berman told him in a June 3 phone call that his contract was not being renewed as a result of the report he, the ombudsman, wrote in 2013, which was embarrassing to the organization in general and Berman in particular.
In a letter dated June 29 and sent to the 64 members of the board of the ClaimsConference, obtained by The Jewish Week, Hollander asserted that in his three-year tenure as ombudsman, which ended June 30, he was repeatedly and deliberately thwarted in his attempts to fulfill the mandates of his post by Berman and executive vice president Greg Schneider. And he said that the federal fraud case he reported in 2013 likely totals far more than the $57 million that has been reported. (Several individuals with knowledge of the case say the number may well be closer to $100 million.)
The ringleader of the group that committed the fraud, a senior Claims Conference official, was imprisoned for processing false applications to the organization.
Hollander, the first appointee to the ombudsman post, wrote that from the outset Schneider “perceived me as a hostile element whose actions must be blocked. Punitive actions towards my office quickly followed. Numerous obstacles were placed in our path, hampering our work. Relevant information was withheld from us, and formal obligations were violated,” all of which “constituted a gross violation of the mandate” that empowers the ombudsman to operate independently within the organization, which represents world Jewry in negotiations with Germany to secure compensation and restitution for survivors of the Holocaust and heirs of victims. Since its founding in 1951 it has negotiated for more than $70 billion in reparations, and distributes more than $700 million a year.
In his first interview about the situation, Hollander told The Jewish Week, “I don’t understand the decision made by Mr. Berman, and I am very hurt and disappointed.” (He was speaking by phone from Jerusalem, where he lives and works.) “Not because I am offended personally, but for the sake of the Holocaust survivors we helped so much.”
He said he turned down a prestigious diplomatic posting to take the Claims Conference job, in part because his parents were Holocaust survivors and he wanted to be of service to that generation and their heirs. The mandate for the ombudsman includes receiving, investigating and resolving complaints from victims and heirs applying forfinancial assistance. But Hollander was deeply disillusioned by the experience, convinced that those at the top of the organization “wanted only a ‘yes man’ — a fig leaf or a charade of an ombudsman. If this was indeed the goal, I was not the right person for the role,” he wrote.
In response, Berman told The Jewish Week that Hollander’s criticisms are unfounded on every level. “If we wanted to hire someone we could control, we wouldn’t have brought in a person of Hollander’s sterling reputation,” he said. And in regards to the allegation that Hollander’s contract was not extended in revenge for the fraud report he wrote two years ago, Berman noted that Hollander was given an 18-month contract six months after the fraud report was submitted. “Would we engage him so that we could let him go 18 months later?” he asked. “It’s absurd.”
Berman was not specific about why Hollander’s contract was not renewed, emphasizing that as president he avoided direct involvement in the process. He said the decision went through a committee and then was voted on, unanimously, by the group’s leadership council. In a July 1 letter to the board — an effort to counter Hollander’s own salvo to the board two days earlier — Berman implied that cost effectiveness of the ombudsman’s office might have been a factor.
His letter urged board members to wait until the issues could be discussed fully at the July 14-15 meetings here in New York, “including about the actual volume of complaints, worldwide, received by the office of the ombudsman in relation to budget and staff, among other things.”
A key Claims Conference official, who asked to remain anonymous given the sensitivity of the issue, said the budget for the ombudsman’s work, which included salary for Hollander, a full-time legal assistant, a secretary, and rent for a Jerusalem office, was about $500,000 a year and did not warrant the volume of cases handled.
As a new department, requests and queries were slow at first, but have increased significantly each of the three years of operation. It is estimated that the ombudsman’s office dealt with about 500 cases so far this year, a figure that was expected to double by year’s end.
“In the beginning, the phone didn’t ring,” Hollander told The Jewish Week, “but now it doesn’t stop.” He said he resented that Claims Conference leadership was always asking about the number of cases being processed. “It’s not right to analyze these cases in terms of numbers,” he said. “You sometimes have to work a long time to save a life,” in providing for the survivors’ needs. “We’re not a factory that makes TVs or washing machines; we deal with people.”
Hollander said he was never asked to reduce the budget, which he said was $400,000, or to cut his salary, and that he would have done so, given his commitment to help survivors. He feels the Claims Conference leadership is being untruthful about why his contract was not renewed. He attributes it to dissatisfaction with his recommendations about the need for systematic changes in its operations. His letter to the board said “the real problem is not the arbitrary dismissal of the ombudsman, but the manner in which the organization is managed — an area that requires a thorough and dramatic change.”
He noted with pride that he held a number of top Israeli government positions over his four-decade career, serving under six prime ministers, most recently as a senior official for 14 years supervising personnel management of Israel’s entire civil service system. Never before, he said, had he been treated with such disrespect.
A key board member of the Claims Conference who often found himself in the middle between Hollander and the organization’s leadership attributed the problem to both the volume (or lack thereof) of casework handled by the ombudsman’s office and the “bad chemistry” between Hollander and the top brass. He asked not to be named and would not discuss specifics.
Abe Biderman, a member of the leadership council of the Claims Conference, spoke on the record and more bluntly in saying Hollander is “a nice man but the wrong man for the job. He had a different sense of what the job was, and over time it became clear that the role he wanted to play was not the role of ombudsman.” He said Hollander “misinterpreted” the role and saw himself as “the quasi head of the Claims Conference.”
Biderman said “expense was a factor” and that Hollander’s allegations about lack of cooperation were “beyond bizarre.”
Berman In Charge
The Claims Conference (officially the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany) is no stranger to controversy. Over the years, critics, primarily survivors, have asserted that all funds should go directly to survivors, many of whom are needy, and not fund educational projects related to Holocaust memory.
Isi Leibler, a lay leader of the World Jewish Congress, has been most outspoken in alleging that the Claims Conference lacks oversight and refuses to accept accountability or calls for reform. It was the multimillion-dollar fraud case, which came to light in 2009, that prompted the creation of an ombudsman for the organization and the hiring of Hollander. His report on the case found that in 2001, Berman, then pro bono counsel to the Claims Conference, had received an anonymous letter describing how several Claims Conference employees were stealing millions of dollars through false applications for assistance. Berman did not inform the board or take further action at the time. The issue came to light eight years later and resulted in the FBI arresting 31 people, including 11 former employees of the New York office of the Claims Conference.
The fact that Berman, a New York attorney and prominent Jewish leader who has been president of the organization since 2002, was re-elected to that post immediately after the 2013 Hollander report — despite its calls for sweeping reforms — underscores the impression that he is virtually unchallenged in his leadership role. Several lay board members acknowledged privately that they are too involved with their own professional careers to keep close tabs on or buck the system in general and Berman in particular.
Even members and advocates of the Claims Conference admit that it is less than transparent in some of its dealings, and even some of its strongest critics note that it has accomplished remarkable achievements in negotiating for and helping to disburse tens of billions of dollars for Holocaust victims and their heirs.
Both Hollander and Berman say they held great respect for each other until discovering, to their great surprise, that the other spreads untruths. Hollander, in his exit letter to the board, concluded that “the Claims Conference is an organization that is incapable of hearing criticism regarding its senior management.” Berman told The Jewish Week that he “tried to take the high road” in not publicizing the dispute with Hollander, whom he says is “making a big mistake” by airing his false grievances.
Berman said the Claims Conference is committed to maintaining the position of ombudsman and has appointed a committee to find a new candidate, hopefully in the next 90 days. He did not think it would be difficult to find an independent expert in the field after this controversy.
“My first charge to the committee will be to analyze what we went through and look for lessons to be learned,” he said.
Gary@jewishweek.org
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RCA Report Seeks To Improve Conversion ProcessNATIONAL
Post-Freundel, New 'Gold Standard' For Conversion
In response to mikvah scandal, committee urges sensitizing rabbis to conversion students’ concerns.
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
Mandel spoke of her increasing disillusionment with Orthodoxy.
Two months after the sentencing of mikvah-voyeur Rabbi Barry Freundel, the Orthodox community’s leading rabbinical council has released what it calls the new “gold standard” for preventing rabbinic abuses of power during the conversion process.
The 22-page report was prepared by a special committee chosen last fall, made up of 11 members, including five women – two of whom are converts to Judaism. It seeks to improve the Rabbinical Council of America’s Geirus Protocol and Standards (GPS) conversion process that, ironically, was implemented by Rabbi Freundel in 2007. Though the GPS process initially sought to standardize and centralize conversion procedures, it allowed breaches in the system to go unchecked, the report notes.
“Don’t make the mistake of thinking the crime was just about the cameras,” said Bethany Mandel, a convert and one of the members of the review committee. “Freundel was abusing his power long before that.”
Aside from his crimes of voyeurism, the rabbi employed seemingly arbitrary benchmarks for assessing a candidate’s readiness for conversion, and was vague about how long the conversion process would take. The report found that Freundel was not alone in causing potential converts to feel unsettled about a lack of precise requirements and timetables.
A primary goal of the GPS review was improve the conversion experience based on the experiences of converts while maintaining halachic standards. According to RCA executive vice president Rabbi Mark Dratch, the report marks the beginning of a new era.
“This is the first time the stakeholders themselves are deeply involved in the process,” he said, referring to the converts on the committee as well as the 835 Jews by choice and conversion candidates who were surveyed. “We learned the most from looking at this through their eyes.”
The report included several recommendations, including increased transparency of expectations for converts; additional training for sponsoring rabbis to sensitize them to conversion students’ concerns; support for converts during and after the process; a mechanism to deal with concerns and complaints; exploring the possibility of establishing more beit dins around the country; and hiring a full-time RCA employee committed to national oversight of the process.
Though the report was “just step one,” Rabbi Dratch said attention is already being directed towards the “implementation phase.” Details are not yet set but the RCA aims to appoint an implementation committee, with many of the same members from the review committee, he said.
Additionally, increased standards of modesty will be enforced at local mikvahs, robes and other pre-immersion coverings will be mandatory, and in the case of female converts, another woman will always be present, according to the rabbi. (The survey found that 78 percent of converts in the RCA-Beth Din of America network are women, and the peak years for conversion are ages 20 to 29.)
“Involving converts in the process gave us an important new perspective, and we gave them a voice,” said Rabbi Lenny Matanky, president of he RCA. “I view the entire review as a major accomplishment.”
Still, though the GPS review is widely seen as a significant step forward, the report has rekindled debate over a return to conversions performed by local rabbis versus the centralized system of 12 regional bet dins around the country, which the RCA maintains.
“Power in the hands of the few has several pitfalls,” said Rabbi Adam Starr, a member of the GPS Bet Din in Atlanta, Ga., and a member of the review committee.
In some ways the discussion here about keeping a centralized system or broadening the process mirrors the debate in Israel. On Sunday, the Israeli cabinet repealed a measure intended to decentralize the process and allow regional rabbis to establish local conversion courts. The move, which was supposed to make conversion more approachable for tens of thousands of Israelis who have Jewish ancestry but are not considered halachically Jewish, signaled the renewed clout of charedi parties in the ruling coalition formed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Rabbi Seth Farber, founder of Itim, an independent advocacy group that helps people navigate the Orthodox bureaucracy in Israel, said that while the GPS review is a positive step, it failed to address the larger issues at the core of conversion reform. He referred to the initial implementation of the GPS system in 2007 as a “huge error for the future of Orthodoxy in America.”
“If conversion is one solution to intermarriage, than it is an embarrassing statistic that only 1,300 candidates have converted to Judaism through the GPS process,” he said, noting the report’s additional qualifying statistic that 45 percent of the converts surveyed already had Jewish ancestry. “I speculate that GPS has undermined the conversion process for hundreds of Orthodox hopefuls by taking the power to perform acceptable conversions away from local rabbis.”
He said that each week at Itim “people come to me because their conversions are being questioned.”
Though not responding directly to Farber’s comments, Rabbi Shmuel Goldin, chair of the review committee and honorary president of the RCA, said that though he was once skeptical of the GPS network because of the added layer of bureaucracy it imposed, interviewing converts led him to appreciate the system’s “tremendous benefits.”
“Converts want a degree of clear acceptability, above all else,” he said. “They want to know that once converted, they won’t be questioned.” He described meeting with converts in Washington, D.C., directly after Rabbi Freundel was arrested in October 2014. “The first thing they wanted to know was the status of their conversions,” he said.
Rabbi Avi Weiss and Rabbi Marc Angel, frequent critics of the RCA’s centralized conversion system, wrote last fall that it causes emotional distress, overly strict standards, and ultimately fewer converts. (Rabbi Weiss has allowed his RCAmembership to lapse, in part because of this issue.)
Acknowledging such criticism, Rabbi Goldin said the GPS review, pending implementation of the committee’s recommendations, will “cut down the negative dimensions of a system that largely works.” He noted that among the converts surveyed, it was a minority who experienced problems.
For the two female converts who were part of the review committee, the focus remained firmly on improving the current reality rather than overturning the system.
Evelyn Fruchter, an attorney, convert and member of the review committee, said that she does not take a position about whether a centralized system for managing conversions should exist or not. For her, the operating question was how to improve the existing GPS system. “If we take for granted that the system is needed, how do we make it work?” she said. “The RCA needs to be prepared to meet the duty of care associated with operating this system.”
With regard to the survey results from converts, Fruchter said as a general matter the data “didn’t reveal problems that weren’t self-evident.”
Bethany Mandel, the other convert on the committee, said that although many of its recommendations seem obvious, like respect for punctuality and empathy between sponsoring rabbi and convert, these basic courtesies were not always taking place.
“One-third of the converts surveyed described feeling ‘vulnerable,’ ‘powerless,’ or ‘judged critically’ during discussions with the conversion court,” she said. “That’s not OK. Why did less than half of converts feel any sense of ‘encouragement’ or ‘empathy’ from the court? It shouldn’t be that way.”
Mandel, who was converted by Rabbi Freundel, spoke of her increasing disillusionment with Orthodoxy, even as she struggles to remain within the fold for the sake of her two children. But knowing her work on the review committee will improve the conversion process has been a source of comfort. “I signed up for this,” she said, “with the explicit understanding that we can make a positive difference for the next convert.”
editor@jewishweek.org
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The Jewish Week
The former ambassador brought criticism on himself by writing provocative opinion pieces when his book was published.Michael Oren, the highly respected historian and former Israeli ambassador to the U.S., has become the latest lightning rod in the bitter struggle among those who profess to know what’s best for Israel. And like the Jewish state he served as diplomat, and now as Knesset member, Oren has gone from chief unifier to deep divider for many American Jews.
In his review, Bret Stephens, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Wall Street Journal, called Oren’s new book, “Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide” (Random House), the “smartest and juiciest diplomatic memoir that I’ve read in years, and I’ve read my share.”
He and other right-of-center supporters of Israel have praised Oren for describing a seemingly endless series of Obama administration slights, and more serious differences with Israel, during his four-and-a-half year tenure in Washington. The cumulative effect, on reading “Ally,” is of a president who views Jerusalem as more obstacle than ally, determined to pressure Prime Minister Netanyahu rather than Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas into a peace deal, and willing, if not eager, to publicize U.S. policy differences with Israel.
But Oren has been rhetorically pummeled from critics in the center and on the left, here and in Israel. He is accused of fabricating and exaggerating events, telling secrets out of turn, and playing armchair psychologist in attributing Obama’s outreach to the Muslim world as, at least in part, a response to his being abandoned as a child by his father and stepfather, both of whom are Muslim.
U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro called the book untruthful; Moshe Kahlon, Oren’s new boss as leader of the Kulanu Party, distanced himself from the fray; and even the Anti-Defamation League’s national director, Abraham Foxman, weighed in, describing Oren’s portrait of Obama as an “insensitive and unjustified attack on the president” and a case of “amateur psychoanalysis.”
Perhaps most seriously, Oren, a proud American who gave up his citizenship to take on the ambassador post in 2009 and sees himself as a potential healer of the U.S.-Israel rift, is accused of seriously misreading American Jewish discomfort with Israel of late.
Leon Wieseltier, the longtime literary editor of The New Republic now writing from his new perch at The Atlantic, called Oren’s book “slinky and self-aggrandizing.” Further, he asserted that it is Israel’s policies, particularly regarding settlements, that is the greatest cause of a distancing from the Netanyahu government, not fear of anti-Semitism, as Oren suggests.
Sadly, the dispute has grown personal, fueled in part by an article in Haaretz by New York correspondent Chemi Shalev shortly before “Ally” was published. It focused on Oren’s criticism of Jews in mainstream journalism whom he felt were unduly harsh in reporting on Israel. Oren cited the New York Review of Books and journalists like Tom Friedman of The New York Times, New Yorker editor David Remnick, and Wieseltier, who wrote in The Atlantic last week that he was speaking ironically when he told Oren his dislike of Netanyahu was “pathological,” a comment Oren cited in the book.
Some of Oren’s supporters claim that the widespread attacks on him and his book have been orchestrated by an Obama administration seeking to minimize the impact of the charges against the White House and shift the focus to Oren’s alleged bias rather than U.S. policy.
In defending himself against the barrage of criticism, Oren, in the U.S. on a book tour, said most of the harsh comments have been leveled against him personally as “basically a money-grubbing politician, a liar and delusional,” he told The Jerusalem Post, rather than dealing with the substance of the book.
But Oren brought a good deal of criticism on himself by writing a series of provocative opinion pieces around the time of the book’s publication, presumably to call attention to it and boost sales. One was an essay in The Wall Street Journal titled “How Obama Abandoned Israel.” Oren didn’t write the headline, but the piece accuses the president of deliberately causing the rift with Jerusalem. Another controversial column Oren wrote appeared in Foreign Policy and explored what he perceives of as Obama’s psychological issues — a child abandoned by Muslim fathers, now bent on a foolhardy outreach effort to Iran and the Muslim world.
Critics didn’t have to read “Ally,” and probably hadn’t, to conclude that Oren was deeply partisan against Obama. And that’s a pity because the strength of the 400-page book, as I wrote here (“No Way To Treat An Ally,” June 19), is that it is far more nuanced than those essays Oren wrote. It offers numerous examples of the administration not living up to its repeated claims of “having Israel’s back” in regard to political and diplomatic issues.
Most of the critics have focused on a couple of relatively minor, alleged mistakes attributed to Oren, like the timing of the arrival of the Israeli medical team in Haiti after its devastating earthquake. (Oren said Obama did not cite Israel as one of the countries lending emergency aid; detractors noted Obama spoke the day before the Israelis arrived on the scene; Oren supporters respond that the White House knew help was on the way; etc.)
The implication seems to be that if Oren, a noted historian, made an error, his credibility is suspect and his central thesis is undermined.
That thesis is two-fold and compelling; let the critics address it directly. First, that the White House has chosen to pressure Israel on the Palestinian issue, consistently and insistently, while giving the Palestinian Authority a pass. And, even more importantly, that Obama has been so committed to finding a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear threat that he has jeopardized Israel’s security, underscored by conducting secret talks with the Iranians and not informing America’s most vital and vulnerable ally in the region.
It is on those points that a serious debate about the merits of the book should be held.
“Ally” was slated for publication in September, but as a result of the author’s urging that it come out before the final deadline of the critical nuclear talks with Iran, it was published on June 23.
Oren had hoped that his book, with what he calls its “difficult truths” about the administration’s weakness in dealing with Iran, might play a role in preventing the “bad deal” of which Israelis are so fearful. Not unexpectedly, though, it has bolstered critics of the deal and been dismissed by supporters of it — another painful example of Oren’s “journey across the American-Israeli divide.”
gary@jewishweek.org
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MUSINGS
The Angels And Us
Rabbi David Wolpe
Special to the Jewish Week
Rabbi David Wolpe
We gather around the Shabbat table, put our arms around one other and sing “Shalom Aleichem” — the song that greets the Shabbat angels. By the time we have finished the Shabbat song, three minutes later, we are concluding with “Tzaitchem L’shalom” — go in peace, already asking them to leave. The poor angels must wonder why we do not wish them to stick around!
For a clue we can look at the Kotzker Rebbe’s comment on the verse in Exodus 22:31: “You shall be holy human beings to me.” The Kotzker said that God has enough angels, and what God needs is holy human beings. Human beings are effortful and striving; we fail and overcome. We are human.
So Rabbi Soloveitchik made the comment that we usher the angels out so quickly because human beings cannot live with angels. Our mission is tounderstand that no one is perfect, that we are cracked and fissured and flawed, and need forgiveness. Together around the Shabbat table, we are delighted to welcome and entertain the angels — but not for too long. We need to eat and argue and forgive — and love. Shabbat Shalom.
Rabbi David Wolpe is spiritual leader of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter: @RabbiWolpe. His latest book, “David: The Divided Heart” (Yale University Press), has recently been published.
editor@jewishweek.org
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Washington's state capital also serves as an art gallery and a popular park. Wikimedia Commons.
TRAVEL
How Green Is My Capital
Hilary DanailovaTravel Writer
It can take days — maybe a week, if you’re on the scenic route — to see all of California’s major cities. But next door in Washington State, Olympia, Seattle and Tacoma are all within a drive of less than two hours.
In fact, you can reach Olympia, the state’s small-town capital, from either Seattle or Portland in 60-90 minutes. Connoisseurs of small cities will appreciate Olympia’s lovely waterfront and legendary farmer’s market, while the students at Evergreen State College give the town an artsy, boho spirit. Nature lovers will appreciate Olympia’s spectacular mountain scenery and abundant opportunities to savor views over Puget Sound.
Washington’s state capital is a miniature city: fewer than 50,000 people call it home. But the students at Evergreen State, consistently ranked among the top Pacific liberal-arts schools, keep downtown lively.
Known for its progressive atmosphere and emphasis on environmental studies — students are known as “Greeners,” and biking was a thing here long before Citibike — Evergreen, with its vegan menus and acres of hiking trails, is the crunchy soul of Olympia. The school counts myriad creative types among its graduates, including cartoonist Matt Groening of “Simpsons” fame, Michael Richards of “Seinfeld” and Carrie Brownstein, the singer and “Portlandia” star.
Olympia’s Jewish population is tiny, with many Jews — like Brownstein — arriving as students. (“Being Jewish in Olympia” was the topic of a recent senior project at Evergreen, a tidbit that drives home how marginal the community really is.)
Still, Jewish Olympians can find each other at no fewer than three congregations. There’s Temple Beth Hatfiloh, which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary; once an Orthodox shul that served Olympia’s turn-of-the-century merchant class, the temple is now a Reconstructionist affiliate. Twenty years ago, a breakaway group formed the Conservative Congregation B’nai Torah, and a Chabad center hosts frequent events for students and locals.
Olympians of all persuasions take pride in their imperious State Capitol, a white domed neoclassical building that looks as though it had been lifted out of the other Washington. The Capitol is one of the city’s top attractions, offering guided tours of the building’s graceful, colonnaded interior and an impressive art collection.
Outside, the art continues on a gorgeously landscaped campus — courtesy of Law and Olmsted, the team behind Central Park — that makes the Capitol not only a place of legislation, but also a popular park, with views that extend over Puget Sound. Outdoor sights include a Winged Victory, numerous war memorials and lots of great sculpture.
Indeed, with the State Capital Museum closed for renovation, Olympia’s true glories are found out of doors. On a clear day, the snowcapped peaks of Mount Rainier and the Olympic Mountains loom from above; down below, the placid waters of Budd Inlet and Capitol Lake snake through the city.
The capitol campus may be the grandest of Olympia’s 40 parks, but a stroll through Olympia reveals many other oases worth checking out. Throughout the city center, so-called “art” benches, designed by local artisans, offer respite for pedestrians exploring the vibrant downtown.
Tiny Sylvester Park, just north of the capitol, hosts a weekly summer concert series featuring popular and retro acts. A few blocks away, the circa-1920s Capital Theater has been restored to its vintage splendor; today it plays host to the Olympia Film Society, which has a lineup of independent and art-house movies as well as concerts and art exhibits.
Just north along the eastern shore, Percival Landing Park is arguably Olympia’s most popular spot for waterfront outings, with picnic tables and a lovely boardwalk that wraps around a mile of Capitol Lake shoreline. From these verdant lawns, the Capitol dome fairly shimmers in West Coast sunshine.
Many picnickers nosh on fare from the Olympia Farmers Market, which was a star attraction long before the foodie revolution. Open Thursday through Sunday in the warmer months, the legendary market — located just north of Percival Landing — features the local, organic produce, meat, fish and pastries you’d expect. There’s also live musical entertainment, several restaurants and wares by local artisans, from pottery and glass to handmade soaps and jewelry. (There are at least a half-dozen smaller farmers’ markets throughout Olympia, too.)
If kids are along, take them to the Hands On Children’s Museum, which re-opened three years ago in a sparkling new facility on Olympia’s eastern waterfront. As you would expect, the museum emphasizes science and nature: galleries are devoted to Puget Sound, forests and tides, and kids will love exploring a driftwood fort, a mud pie pit and several gardens with edible flowers.
editor@jewishweek.org
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Aly Raisman is one of the tamer photos from a naked shoot in ESPN The Magazine's "Body Issue." JTA
Featured on NYBLUEPRINTNATIONAL
WATCH: Jewish gymnast Aly Raisman strips down for ESPN
Aly Raisman, a two-time Olympic gold medalist, stripped down for ESPN The Magazine’s annual Body Issue
JTA
Aly Raisman, a two-time Olympic gold medalist, stripped down for ESPN The Magazine’s annual Body Issue. ESPN
It sounds like a Jewish mother's nightmare: A 21-year-old Jewish gymnast agrees to be photographed and filmed fully naked.
But Playboy it's not.
Aly Raisman, a two-time Olympic gold medalist, stripped down for ESPN The Magazine's annual Body Issue, which features photos of top athletes without clothes, but also without revealing everything.
And Raisman manages to leave plenty to the imagination as she moves around and strikes poses on the balance beam and the rings. She says her muscular physique is on the bulky end of the spectrum for gymnasts. But you won't hear her complaining.
"I think imperfection is beauty," she says. "Instead of being insecure about my muscles, I've learned to love them. I don't even think of it as a flaw anymore because it's made me into the athlete that I am."
Raisman, a native of Needham, Massachusetts, was the captain of the gold-medal winning U.S. women's gymnastics team at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. Just 18 years old at the time, she individually won gold on the floor and bronze on the balance beam.
But in the magazine interview that accompanies the ESPN video, Raisman says she dwells on her failures more than her victories.
"At the last Olympics I got two golds and a bronze, she says, "but I think more about the fact that I didn't medal in the All-Around than the fact that I did really well."
In her gold-medal floor routine, Raisman performed to "Hava Nagila," delighting Jews around the world. Before the routine, she told JTA that she was proud to be using the popular Israeli folk song "because there aren’t too many Jewish elites out there.”
Raisman noted that the song had the added advantage of encouraging audience participation, saying, "I like how the crowd can clap to it."
After the performance, Raisman's rabbi, Keith Stern of Temple Beth Avodah in Newton Centre, Massachusetts, gushed to the New York Post about her victory and her guts for saying she would have supported a moment of silence for the 40th anniversary of the Munich massacre of Israeli Olympians and trainers.
“She’s very proud and upfront about being Jewish,” Stern said at the time. “Neither she nor her family explicitly sought to send a message. But it shows how very integrated her Jewish heritage is in everything that she does."
Raisman's parents also got some press when a video went viral showing them agonizing over their daughter's second "Hava Nagila" performance to qualify for the individual all-around finals.
In the ESPN video, Raisman says she is a perfectionist when it comes to her intense training regime. One mistake in a beam practice qualifies as a "horrible day," she says in the video.
She reports working out up to seven hours a day and maintaining strict habits.
"I'm always eating healthy, always going to bed early," she says in the interview.
"Everything I put into my body is for the purpose of gymnastics.
Still, when it comes to her appearance Raisman refuses to obsess, explaining that she's never had an eating disorder.
"I think gymnastics in the past had a bad reputation for that, but it's not an issue anymore," she says. "I've never seen an issue among the girls on the national team."
If Raisman qualifies for the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, at 22 she will be the oldest member of the team.
editor@jewishweek.org
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TOP STORIES:NEW YORK
A Serpent In Catskills’ ‘Garden?’
As an anti-bungalow backlash flares, critics and zoning codes say ‘enough is enough.’
Jonathan Mark
Associate Editor
A colony in the rain: A summer tradition is threatened by zoning and resentment. Eli Wohl/Courtesy Vos Iz Neias
Woodbourne, N.Y. — Summer comes to the Catskills like Creation itself, each day a revelation: The Neversink River flows to waterfalls. A moon rises over ice caves. There are salamanders in the grass, bears in the forest, a bald eagle in the sky. In the Sullivan County hamlet of Callicoon, just prior to the solstice, farmers parade 260 tractors. One trucker for Balford Farms, driving along the Delaware River on a June morning, spied a wounded bald eagle in a ditch, saving its life.
“Just to live in the country is a full-time job,” wrote E.B. White. “You don’t have to do anything. The idle pursuit of making a living is pushed to one side, where it belongs, in favor of living itself.” In that spirit, Jews return each summer to “the country,” where there’s nothing much to do but “living itself.”
And yet, there’s a serpent in the “Garden,” some say. Last October, the Town of Fallsburg passed zoning laws aimed at stifling the bungalows: a colony can now only build on less than 15 percent of its lot; new replacement cabins can’t be larger than the old; there now must be 31 feet of grass between cabins, and 250 feet between the cabins and the road (an increase of 75 feet). Similar codes to Fallsburg’s have been enacted recently across the county, in Liberty, Thompson, Mamakating and Bethel — site of the Woodstock festival, “the garden,” Joni Mitchell called it, made possible by the hospitality of Max Yasgur, a local Jewish dairy farmer.
The Fallsburg zoning legislation is less charming: “It is the intent of the Town of Fallsburg to not promote the expansion of bungalow colonies.”
One Jew, a year-round resident of Fallsburg who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, told The Jewish Week, “There’s a distinct attitude — the town wishes someone else would come.” Someone who isn’t Orthodox. “That’s actually been voiced to me” by people on the town’s planning board. “Without any embarrassment, they say that. I stopped going to the planning board because I’m kind of disgusted.”
Murray Goldwag, who winters in Jerusalem, returns to South Fallsburg every summer, where he is the proprietor of the famous Kosher Sox. “I’ve been schlepping to the mountains for 39 years,” he tells us. “Nothing’s changed. The goyim don’t want the Jewish interference.”
There are 77,547 residents in Sullivan County (roughly 10 percent are Jewish), but in summer the population nearly quadruples — mostly Jews returning to second homes, to the predominantly Orthodox bungalow colonies, and to nearly 100 Orthodoxsummer camps. The summer population “can reach 300,000 at its peak,” according to the county’s Economic Development Corporation.
One summer directory, an Orthodox yellow pages of sorts, is now almost 500 pages long. Some Catskill hamlets have 15 Orthodox minyans each weekday morning, a new minyan every 20 minutes, and again at night; and at least 11 mikvahs, as well.
On Saturday nights in the hamlet of Woodbourne, every head is covered, other than the fellow pumping gas, or the Orthodox girls, their arms akimbo, their denim skirts grazing pale ankles, watching Woodbourne’s post-Havdalah midnight promenade, the sidewalks illuminated by the glow from kosher food shops.
But Woodbourne empties in winter. In October, Monticello attorney Steve Kurlander, writing in The Huffington Post, threw down the challenge: “Say goodbye to bungalows,” forever. Yes, they contribute to the economy but when the summer folks go home? “Drive down … Woodbourne’s main street,” Kurlander writes, and witness the post-summer residue of “that seasonal bungalow mentality. A decrepit-looking business district that once serviced local residents and tourists alike remains empty of year-round stores, a basic ghost town 10 months a year.”
It would be better to “attract new middle-class families with good, affordable year-round housing,” people who would “commute to New York City instead of just visiting for the summer.” And, say the critics, the wooden bungalows are fire hazards, and hardly aesthetic. “There are enough bungalows in the Catskills as it is,” writes the attorney. “Enough is enough.”
Such antagonism has been noted in recent years by Barry Lewis, editor of the Times Herald-Record, who writes, “summer in Sullivan County must be near. Our mountain air is starting to fill with the sounds of intolerance. You’d have to be practically deaf not to hear the hate. … [The] venom is often aimed at the tens of thousands of Orthodox Jews.”
A few miles away, in Bloomingburg, there’s another zoning fight, not about bungalows but the permanent housing the county supposedly wants. In Bloomingburg, a Jewish developer wants to build 125 homes (some expect that to double) for the Orthodox. Newsweek, sensing that this went beyond the usual zoning dispute, sent a national reporter to the scene.
A non-Jewish resident of the area told Newsweek: “You know what this is all about? All these chasids have their own private places around here. They’ve got their own camps and s---t…. and they pull off their drug deals. And the state police can’t go on the properties because they’re ‘religious.’ That’s where all the f------ deals take place. You know what I’m saying?”
One Fallsburg real estate agent, in defense of Jewish bungalows and housing, told The Jewish Week: In an economically depressed county, “The Orthodox community, that’s who’s buying. They pay taxes, even though they don’t use the schools, or any facilities other than water and sewer. They pay a lot of money into the town, so why give them a hard time?”
Some locals say they only shop on Saturdays, when the Orthodox don’t. On Sundays, the roads are jammed, to everyone’s annoyance, but every driver carries a wallet, to the economy’s delight. Tax revenues swell by more than a million dollars in summer; 18 percent of the workforce is employed in what’s called the “tourism” sector. “People would be surprised by how much Orthodox groups contribute,” the SullivanCounty treasurer told the Times Herald-Record. “Yes,” says Goldwag of Kosher Sox, but what Orthodox Jews add to the economy, he tells us, is appreciated “only by the people with a businesses. Many locals couldn’t care less.”
Goldwag has one of the larger emporiums, selling everything from blechs to bathing suits to, well, socks. But “the locals are afraid to come into my store,” says Goldwag. Kosher Sox? “They don’t know what it means.” Goldwag explains, when he first bought the store, decades ago, a new sign cost $900, so he bought a used sign from a kosher store. Goldwag liked “kosher,” and kept it, but “socks” didn’t fit. Goldwag replaced the “c-k-s” with an “x.” And there you have it, he says laughing: “Kosher Sox.”
When talk turns to the local problems, the laughter stops. “Nothing new,” says Goldwag. “Nah, it’s just the standard ‘We hate the Jews who come up here.’ Why? Well, in one shot, you move Williamsburg and Borough Park into the Catskills. They’ll triple-park anywhere, speed through crosswalks, pick up hitchhikers in the middle of the road, make U-turns on Route 42 — chutzpadik and dangerous. People don’t act responsibly. Clearly, many do but others are not respectful of the locals. You can’t say all the people hate the Jews, that’s not true, but there’s a lot of frustration, so you hear [when the season begins], ‘Oh, they’re coming back again.’”
This summer as in recent summers, a notice circulated among the Orthodox: “It is a warm feeling watching the mountains fill up with dear fellow Jews … . Please be aware that there are thousands of people who live here all year-round that are not accustomed to the heimishe [homey] city way of life. They are used to a quiet, country atmosphere, and are not overly excited about the changes that the summer brings. They are not aware of the sweetness of the Torah way, and when they look at us, they have no way of seeing the inner beauty of a Torah Jew… We are quick to be branded as unwelcome intruders… Whether driving, shopping, out at the park … let’s not leave room to be accused of anything improper … . Nobody wants — chas v’sholom [may it never happen] — to make a chillul Hashem [a desecration of God’s name], but without a little precaution it is often automatic … . Sincerely, your fellow Ohave Torah [lover of Torah].”
jonathan@jewishweek.org
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ISRAEL NEWSNear Gaza Border, Waiting For ‘Next War’
A year after Protective Edge, new ISIS fears along with an old resolve.
Michele Chabin
Israel Correspondent
A factory in Sderot is hit during last year’s war. Wikimedia Commons / Michele Chabin/JW
Kibbutz Ein HaShlosha, Israel — When the latest Israel-Hamas war erupted a year ago this week, Danny Cohen, a member of this kibbutz a mile from the Gaza border, prepared to evacuate his four children while trying to keep the kibbutz’s main factoryopen — despite the barrage of mortars and rockets, 18 of which hit the kibbutz.
“Ordinarily we have 50 workers, but for two months just 10 people made it to work. Kibbutz families with children fled the area and workers from outside the kibbutz were afraid to come due to the rockets and the tunnels,” Cohen, theproduction manager, said in the community’s loose-leaf binder factory, the largest in Israel.
Cohen noted that the Iron Dome anti-rocket system that defended much of the country last summer, “doesn’t work here because we’re too close to the border.”
Residents have four seconds at most to run for shelter, he said, “but lots of times we hear the rocket explode before we get the alert.”
Although life on Ein HaShlosha has been blissfully quiet since the war’s end last August (the few rockets Gaza militants have launched in recent weeks have fallen farther inland), “there’s quite a bit of disappointment that we’re no closer to peace,” Cohen said. “I can’t see us achieving a long-term calm. We’re living in anticipation of the next war.”
A year after the start of Operation Protective Edge, Israelis living close to the border say they feel more vulnerable than ever.
Although the IDF has beefed up its surveillance of Hamas’ activities and taken steps to quickly identify the construction of new “terror tunnels,” many residents cannot envision an end to the cycle of violence with Gaza militants. They are worried, too, about the growing threat of Islamic State (ISIS) fighters in the nearby Sinai, whose violent clashes with Egyptian forces have escalated in recent days.
At a military briefing at Ein HaShlosha last week, Maj. Nir Peled, deputy operations officer of the IDF’s Gaza Division, acknowledged that monitoring the border “is a difficult task.”
“We realize there are many enemy troops within our defense lines, and the distances between our communities and the Gaza Strip are very small. If you add to this the enemy’s maneuvers underground, it’s not easy,” he said.
Peled said one of the 34 Hamas-built tunnels the IDF discovered during 51 days of fighting, all of them now “neutralized,” ended just a kilometer from Ein HaShlosha.
“Hamas has declared many times it is rebuilding its forces and the tunnels we destroyed,” he said.
The officer said the IDF is utilizing “a variety of technology” to discover any cross-border tunnels, but declined to elaborate.
“It’s only when you slide down 30 meters [98 feet] below ground into one of these tunnels do you realize how high-tech they are and how close they are to our communities. It’s definitely not a comfortable situation for the people who live near the Strip,” Peled acknowledged.
Hamas, Peled said, spent years building the tunnels, each costing up to $3 million, in order to send terror squads into Israel either to murder border residents and soldiers on Israeli soil or to abduct and imprison them in Gaza.
During a tour of one such tunnel located less than a mile from Ein HaShlosha — discovered two years ago and kept as a kind of IDF show-and-tell venue for visiting dignitaries and journalists — military spokesman Maj. Aryeh Shalicar pointed out the communications and electrical wiring running along either side of the structure, which goes down 75 feet at its greatest depth.
Above ground Shalicar pointed to the miles of now-dissembled metal tubing, which he likened to homemade train tracks, Hamas used to transport tons of sandy dirt.
“This tunnel is a sophisticated piece of construction,” Shalicar said.
At nearby Kibbutz Magen, less than two miles from the border, Martin Sessler, 68, eating in the community’s communal dining hall, said “there is no possibility of peace here and that is sad.”
Sessler, a 45-year-resident of Magen and professor of Jewish law at Ben-Gurion University, said he spent most of last year’s war in a northern kibbutz with his young grandchildren, who were evacuated from Kibbutz Nirim, a mile from the border.
Some 50 mortars and rockets touched down in Nirim during the war, killing two residents and blowing the legs off a third the hour before the final ceasefire went into effect.
In Sessler’s view, the conflict between Israel and Arab countries “has turned from a nationalist conflict to a religious conflict. If you, as a Jew or a Muslim, believe God gave only you this land or this place to build a temple or mosque, it makes compromise much more difficult.”
Not that Sessler, a secular left-wing activist, believes Hamas or any other Islamic regime will accept Israel if Israel withdraws to its pre-1967 borders.
“I have no illusions that this is a question of the ‘occupied territories.’ For them, Tel Aviv is occupied territory, and Jews should go home to where they came from.”
Nava Etzion, whose husband, Ze’ev Etzion, 55, was one of the two Kibbutz Nirim members killed by a mortar the last day of the war, also has no illusions. But she does have dreams.
“We want to ensure that children on both sides of the border will not live in fear,” said Etzion, a mother of five. “Both sides need to learn how to stop making war.”
Asked how this could be accomplished, she signed and said, “That’s the million-dollar question. Our leaders need to speak to each other and perhaps we, the residents on both sides, will be able to speak to each other as well.”
Etzion said the first year without her husband has been difficult for her and her children, ages 13 to 23, but that her family and friends have been with them every step of the way.
Although several families have moved away from their homes near the Gaza border during the past year — most of them to spare their children the trauma of intermittent war — Etzion said she is staying on Nirim.
“This is my home and we live within the internationally recognized borders of the State of Israel. Our lives, like Palestinian lives, are worth saving,” she said.
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INTERNATIONALOmbudsman Out At Claims Conference
Allegations by watchdog of mismanagement by are countered by charges he was ‘wrong man for the job.’
Gary Rosenblatt
Editor and Publisher
Shmuel Hollander charges, in stinging letter, that “relevant information was withheld” from ombudsman’s office.
Shmuel Hollander, a highly respected Israeli public servant for four decades, made headlines in 2013 as ombudsman for the Claims Conference when he issued a stinging internal report, blaming the group for allowing a multimillion-dollar fraud to take place for years — unnoticed — within its New York office.
Now, two years later, as he leaves his post on the eve of the annual Claims Conference meeting here, Hollander has again accused the organization’s leadership of serious mismanagement, and of thwarting his efforts to help Holocaust survivors in their efforts to gain restitution. He also asserts that Claims Conference president Julius Berman told him in a June 3 phone call that his contract was not being renewed as a result of the report he, the ombudsman, wrote in 2013, which was embarrassing to the organization in general and Berman in particular.
In a letter dated June 29 and sent to the 64 members of the board of the ClaimsConference, obtained by The Jewish Week, Hollander asserted that in his three-year tenure as ombudsman, which ended June 30, he was repeatedly and deliberately thwarted in his attempts to fulfill the mandates of his post by Berman and executive vice president Greg Schneider. And he said that the federal fraud case he reported in 2013 likely totals far more than the $57 million that has been reported. (Several individuals with knowledge of the case say the number may well be closer to $100 million.)
The ringleader of the group that committed the fraud, a senior Claims Conference official, was imprisoned for processing false applications to the organization.
Hollander, the first appointee to the ombudsman post, wrote that from the outset Schneider “perceived me as a hostile element whose actions must be blocked. Punitive actions towards my office quickly followed. Numerous obstacles were placed in our path, hampering our work. Relevant information was withheld from us, and formal obligations were violated,” all of which “constituted a gross violation of the mandate” that empowers the ombudsman to operate independently within the organization, which represents world Jewry in negotiations with Germany to secure compensation and restitution for survivors of the Holocaust and heirs of victims. Since its founding in 1951 it has negotiated for more than $70 billion in reparations, and distributes more than $700 million a year.
In his first interview about the situation, Hollander told The Jewish Week, “I don’t understand the decision made by Mr. Berman, and I am very hurt and disappointed.” (He was speaking by phone from Jerusalem, where he lives and works.) “Not because I am offended personally, but for the sake of the Holocaust survivors we helped so much.”
He said he turned down a prestigious diplomatic posting to take the Claims Conference job, in part because his parents were Holocaust survivors and he wanted to be of service to that generation and their heirs. The mandate for the ombudsman includes receiving, investigating and resolving complaints from victims and heirs applying forfinancial assistance. But Hollander was deeply disillusioned by the experience, convinced that those at the top of the organization “wanted only a ‘yes man’ — a fig leaf or a charade of an ombudsman. If this was indeed the goal, I was not the right person for the role,” he wrote.
In response, Berman told The Jewish Week that Hollander’s criticisms are unfounded on every level. “If we wanted to hire someone we could control, we wouldn’t have brought in a person of Hollander’s sterling reputation,” he said. And in regards to the allegation that Hollander’s contract was not extended in revenge for the fraud report he wrote two years ago, Berman noted that Hollander was given an 18-month contract six months after the fraud report was submitted. “Would we engage him so that we could let him go 18 months later?” he asked. “It’s absurd.”
Berman was not specific about why Hollander’s contract was not renewed, emphasizing that as president he avoided direct involvement in the process. He said the decision went through a committee and then was voted on, unanimously, by the group’s leadership council. In a July 1 letter to the board — an effort to counter Hollander’s own salvo to the board two days earlier — Berman implied that cost effectiveness of the ombudsman’s office might have been a factor.
His letter urged board members to wait until the issues could be discussed fully at the July 14-15 meetings here in New York, “including about the actual volume of complaints, worldwide, received by the office of the ombudsman in relation to budget and staff, among other things.”
A key Claims Conference official, who asked to remain anonymous given the sensitivity of the issue, said the budget for the ombudsman’s work, which included salary for Hollander, a full-time legal assistant, a secretary, and rent for a Jerusalem office, was about $500,000 a year and did not warrant the volume of cases handled.
As a new department, requests and queries were slow at first, but have increased significantly each of the three years of operation. It is estimated that the ombudsman’s office dealt with about 500 cases so far this year, a figure that was expected to double by year’s end.
“In the beginning, the phone didn’t ring,” Hollander told The Jewish Week, “but now it doesn’t stop.” He said he resented that Claims Conference leadership was always asking about the number of cases being processed. “It’s not right to analyze these cases in terms of numbers,” he said. “You sometimes have to work a long time to save a life,” in providing for the survivors’ needs. “We’re not a factory that makes TVs or washing machines; we deal with people.”
Hollander said he was never asked to reduce the budget, which he said was $400,000, or to cut his salary, and that he would have done so, given his commitment to help survivors. He feels the Claims Conference leadership is being untruthful about why his contract was not renewed. He attributes it to dissatisfaction with his recommendations about the need for systematic changes in its operations. His letter to the board said “the real problem is not the arbitrary dismissal of the ombudsman, but the manner in which the organization is managed — an area that requires a thorough and dramatic change.”
He noted with pride that he held a number of top Israeli government positions over his four-decade career, serving under six prime ministers, most recently as a senior official for 14 years supervising personnel management of Israel’s entire civil service system. Never before, he said, had he been treated with such disrespect.
A key board member of the Claims Conference who often found himself in the middle between Hollander and the organization’s leadership attributed the problem to both the volume (or lack thereof) of casework handled by the ombudsman’s office and the “bad chemistry” between Hollander and the top brass. He asked not to be named and would not discuss specifics.
Abe Biderman, a member of the leadership council of the Claims Conference, spoke on the record and more bluntly in saying Hollander is “a nice man but the wrong man for the job. He had a different sense of what the job was, and over time it became clear that the role he wanted to play was not the role of ombudsman.” He said Hollander “misinterpreted” the role and saw himself as “the quasi head of the Claims Conference.”
Biderman said “expense was a factor” and that Hollander’s allegations about lack of cooperation were “beyond bizarre.”
Berman In Charge
The Claims Conference (officially the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany) is no stranger to controversy. Over the years, critics, primarily survivors, have asserted that all funds should go directly to survivors, many of whom are needy, and not fund educational projects related to Holocaust memory.
Isi Leibler, a lay leader of the World Jewish Congress, has been most outspoken in alleging that the Claims Conference lacks oversight and refuses to accept accountability or calls for reform. It was the multimillion-dollar fraud case, which came to light in 2009, that prompted the creation of an ombudsman for the organization and the hiring of Hollander. His report on the case found that in 2001, Berman, then pro bono counsel to the Claims Conference, had received an anonymous letter describing how several Claims Conference employees were stealing millions of dollars through false applications for assistance. Berman did not inform the board or take further action at the time. The issue came to light eight years later and resulted in the FBI arresting 31 people, including 11 former employees of the New York office of the Claims Conference.
The fact that Berman, a New York attorney and prominent Jewish leader who has been president of the organization since 2002, was re-elected to that post immediately after the 2013 Hollander report — despite its calls for sweeping reforms — underscores the impression that he is virtually unchallenged in his leadership role. Several lay board members acknowledged privately that they are too involved with their own professional careers to keep close tabs on or buck the system in general and Berman in particular.
Even members and advocates of the Claims Conference admit that it is less than transparent in some of its dealings, and even some of its strongest critics note that it has accomplished remarkable achievements in negotiating for and helping to disburse tens of billions of dollars for Holocaust victims and their heirs.
Both Hollander and Berman say they held great respect for each other until discovering, to their great surprise, that the other spreads untruths. Hollander, in his exit letter to the board, concluded that “the Claims Conference is an organization that is incapable of hearing criticism regarding its senior management.” Berman told The Jewish Week that he “tried to take the high road” in not publicizing the dispute with Hollander, whom he says is “making a big mistake” by airing his false grievances.
Berman said the Claims Conference is committed to maintaining the position of ombudsman and has appointed a committee to find a new candidate, hopefully in the next 90 days. He did not think it would be difficult to find an independent expert in the field after this controversy.
“My first charge to the committee will be to analyze what we went through and look for lessons to be learned,” he said.
Gary@jewishweek.org
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RCA Report Seeks To Improve Conversion ProcessNATIONAL
Post-Freundel, New 'Gold Standard' For Conversion
In response to mikvah scandal, committee urges sensitizing rabbis to conversion students’ concerns.
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
Mandel spoke of her increasing disillusionment with Orthodoxy.
Two months after the sentencing of mikvah-voyeur Rabbi Barry Freundel, the Orthodox community’s leading rabbinical council has released what it calls the new “gold standard” for preventing rabbinic abuses of power during the conversion process.
The 22-page report was prepared by a special committee chosen last fall, made up of 11 members, including five women – two of whom are converts to Judaism. It seeks to improve the Rabbinical Council of America’s Geirus Protocol and Standards (GPS) conversion process that, ironically, was implemented by Rabbi Freundel in 2007. Though the GPS process initially sought to standardize and centralize conversion procedures, it allowed breaches in the system to go unchecked, the report notes.
“Don’t make the mistake of thinking the crime was just about the cameras,” said Bethany Mandel, a convert and one of the members of the review committee. “Freundel was abusing his power long before that.”
Aside from his crimes of voyeurism, the rabbi employed seemingly arbitrary benchmarks for assessing a candidate’s readiness for conversion, and was vague about how long the conversion process would take. The report found that Freundel was not alone in causing potential converts to feel unsettled about a lack of precise requirements and timetables.
A primary goal of the GPS review was improve the conversion experience based on the experiences of converts while maintaining halachic standards. According to RCA executive vice president Rabbi Mark Dratch, the report marks the beginning of a new era.
“This is the first time the stakeholders themselves are deeply involved in the process,” he said, referring to the converts on the committee as well as the 835 Jews by choice and conversion candidates who were surveyed. “We learned the most from looking at this through their eyes.”
The report included several recommendations, including increased transparency of expectations for converts; additional training for sponsoring rabbis to sensitize them to conversion students’ concerns; support for converts during and after the process; a mechanism to deal with concerns and complaints; exploring the possibility of establishing more beit dins around the country; and hiring a full-time RCA employee committed to national oversight of the process.
Though the report was “just step one,” Rabbi Dratch said attention is already being directed towards the “implementation phase.” Details are not yet set but the RCA aims to appoint an implementation committee, with many of the same members from the review committee, he said.
Additionally, increased standards of modesty will be enforced at local mikvahs, robes and other pre-immersion coverings will be mandatory, and in the case of female converts, another woman will always be present, according to the rabbi. (The survey found that 78 percent of converts in the RCA-Beth Din of America network are women, and the peak years for conversion are ages 20 to 29.)
“Involving converts in the process gave us an important new perspective, and we gave them a voice,” said Rabbi Lenny Matanky, president of he RCA. “I view the entire review as a major accomplishment.”
Still, though the GPS review is widely seen as a significant step forward, the report has rekindled debate over a return to conversions performed by local rabbis versus the centralized system of 12 regional bet dins around the country, which the RCA maintains.
“Power in the hands of the few has several pitfalls,” said Rabbi Adam Starr, a member of the GPS Bet Din in Atlanta, Ga., and a member of the review committee.
In some ways the discussion here about keeping a centralized system or broadening the process mirrors the debate in Israel. On Sunday, the Israeli cabinet repealed a measure intended to decentralize the process and allow regional rabbis to establish local conversion courts. The move, which was supposed to make conversion more approachable for tens of thousands of Israelis who have Jewish ancestry but are not considered halachically Jewish, signaled the renewed clout of charedi parties in the ruling coalition formed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Rabbi Seth Farber, founder of Itim, an independent advocacy group that helps people navigate the Orthodox bureaucracy in Israel, said that while the GPS review is a positive step, it failed to address the larger issues at the core of conversion reform. He referred to the initial implementation of the GPS system in 2007 as a “huge error for the future of Orthodoxy in America.”
“If conversion is one solution to intermarriage, than it is an embarrassing statistic that only 1,300 candidates have converted to Judaism through the GPS process,” he said, noting the report’s additional qualifying statistic that 45 percent of the converts surveyed already had Jewish ancestry. “I speculate that GPS has undermined the conversion process for hundreds of Orthodox hopefuls by taking the power to perform acceptable conversions away from local rabbis.”
He said that each week at Itim “people come to me because their conversions are being questioned.”
Though not responding directly to Farber’s comments, Rabbi Shmuel Goldin, chair of the review committee and honorary president of the RCA, said that though he was once skeptical of the GPS network because of the added layer of bureaucracy it imposed, interviewing converts led him to appreciate the system’s “tremendous benefits.”
“Converts want a degree of clear acceptability, above all else,” he said. “They want to know that once converted, they won’t be questioned.” He described meeting with converts in Washington, D.C., directly after Rabbi Freundel was arrested in October 2014. “The first thing they wanted to know was the status of their conversions,” he said.
Rabbi Avi Weiss and Rabbi Marc Angel, frequent critics of the RCA’s centralized conversion system, wrote last fall that it causes emotional distress, overly strict standards, and ultimately fewer converts. (Rabbi Weiss has allowed his RCAmembership to lapse, in part because of this issue.)
Acknowledging such criticism, Rabbi Goldin said the GPS review, pending implementation of the committee’s recommendations, will “cut down the negative dimensions of a system that largely works.” He noted that among the converts surveyed, it was a minority who experienced problems.
For the two female converts who were part of the review committee, the focus remained firmly on improving the current reality rather than overturning the system.
Evelyn Fruchter, an attorney, convert and member of the review committee, said that she does not take a position about whether a centralized system for managing conversions should exist or not. For her, the operating question was how to improve the existing GPS system. “If we take for granted that the system is needed, how do we make it work?” she said. “The RCA needs to be prepared to meet the duty of care associated with operating this system.”
With regard to the survey results from converts, Fruchter said as a general matter the data “didn’t reveal problems that weren’t self-evident.”
Bethany Mandel, the other convert on the committee, said that although many of its recommendations seem obvious, like respect for punctuality and empathy between sponsoring rabbi and convert, these basic courtesies were not always taking place.
“One-third of the converts surveyed described feeling ‘vulnerable,’ ‘powerless,’ or ‘judged critically’ during discussions with the conversion court,” she said. “That’s not OK. Why did less than half of converts feel any sense of ‘encouragement’ or ‘empathy’ from the court? It shouldn’t be that way.”
Mandel, who was converted by Rabbi Freundel, spoke of her increasing disillusionment with Orthodoxy, even as she struggles to remain within the fold for the sake of her two children. But knowing her work on the review committee will improve the conversion process has been a source of comfort. “I signed up for this,” she said, “with the explicit understanding that we can make a positive difference for the next convert.”
editor@jewishweek.org
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