Wednesday, October 28, 2015
Dear Reader,
On the eve of the 20th anniversary of the murder of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, our special report includes Michele Chabin from Israel on what if he had lived; an interview with Rabin speechwriter and aide Eitan Haber; peace advocate Michael Lerner looks back; and my column recalls Rabin's last night in America.Israel News
Two Decades Later, What If Rabin Had Lived?
Amid current terror spate, left struggles to make ‘peace with security’ not sound naïve.
Michele Chabin
Contributing Editor
A young woman mourns Yitzchak Rabin days after his assassination. Getty Images
Jerusalem — Twenty years after Yigal Amir, a far-right-wing religious nationalist and law student, gunned down Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin at a Tel Aviv peace rally, members of Israel’s peace camp still wonder what might have been.
This week, Hadag Nahash, the popular Israeli hip-hop band, released a new song to commemorate the assassination, which Israelis are marking this week with memorials, lectures and a Saturday night rally in the Tel Aviv square named in his memory.
The song, “What Would Have Been If,” released in collaboration with the Yitzhak Rabin Center during the latest wave of Palestinian terror, addresses the nation’s collective exhaustion and unfulfilled yearning for peace.
“But you should know,” the group sings, as if addressing the slain leader directly in a song with a mournful yet soulful, almost gospel feeling, “that there are moments / When I see high above the Cypress trees / And above the heads of my exhausted people / A bubble floats and inside three words: ‘What would have been if.’” (In Hebrew, the phrase is said in three words.)
Yariv Oppenheimer, director general of Peace Now, told The Jewish Week he often asks himself “What if?” It’s a question, of course, that has been
asked about Presidents Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy.
“I wonder, first of all, about Israel’s character had this horrible event not taken place,” Oppenheimer said. “I think we would be a much less violent, more democratic society. I believe there would be a feeling of unity. I honestly believe there would have been a good chance to conclude the peace process and achieve peace with our neighbors. I would hope Israel would be the place we all dreamed it could be.”
The assassination, Oppenheimer said, had a “chilling effect” on the peace camp so strong that, to this day, leftists are less vocal than they used to be.
“The political climate is much less tolerant and people, including decision-makers, have the feeling that if you say something others don’t like, you could be killed for it. Rabin’s murder crossed a societal line we never thought would be crossed.”
Oppenheimer believes that, if Rabin had lived, he would have beaten Netanyahu during the 1996 election.
“If Shimon Peres was nearly able to beat Netanyahu, Rabin, who was at the height of his career, could have. He’s still remembered as a general, the man people thought could bring peace with security.”
Yet, notes Seth Frantzman this week in the Jerusalem Post, surveys in Israel continually show that Israelis are losing touch with Rabin’s legacy. A recent Maariv poll revealed that only 65 percent of respondents thought Yigal Amir killed Rabin. Other data shows large segments of the population pay no heed to Rabin. Former Knesset member and commentator Yossi Sarid claims that this is part of the “second assassination” of Rabin, his being forgotten.
But Oppenheimer, the Peace Now activist, insisted Israel’s political left wing “isn’t dead.”
“It isn’t effective enough, but it’s not dead,” he said. “It’s still fighting.” But he acknowledged that it has yet to find a leader with the military and diplomatic credentials “who can make ‘Peace with Security’ not sound naïve.”
Rightists say the political left may be alive but it’s hardly kicking. The “peace” rallies it has held around the country over the past couple of weeks, often in conjunction with moderate Israeli Arabs to denounce both terror and xenophobia, have attracted perhaps 20,000 people in total.
Knesset member Stav Shaffir, an outspoken member of the Zionist Union Party, believes the low turnout doesn’t reflect the real status of the left and center-left. What it does reflect, she said, is a woeful lack of coordination.
“If you add up all the left and center-left parties, from Meretz to Kulanu, you’ll see we have more support than the right-wing parties,” Shaffir told The Jewish Week. “The problem is that the two-state camp supporters aren’t united. If we really want a solution to the conflict, we have to replace the government with a government that is both pragmatic and pro-solution and not one full of fear and despair. I believe we can do that.”
Gerald Steinberg, a Bar-Ilan University political scientist, believes the center-right is on the rise for the first time in a long time.
“This was the best showing they’ve had in an election in years,” he said of the March 2015 election the Likud Party won, but not by a landslide. “The center-left is growing and it wouldn’t surprise me if there was a Herzog-Netanyahu government in the next few months,” Steinberg said, referring to opposition leader Isaac Herzog and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Steinberg said Herzog, who heads the Zionist Union, sees himself as a centrist pragmatist much like Rabin. Many Israelis see him that way as well, he added.
“Herzog and other centrist leaders are seen as a realistic alternative to the more fringe right wing dominating the Likud,” he said. “Herzog and the left realize they can’t force a peace plan that most Israelis consider unrealistic.”
Steinberg insisted Herzog and Netanyahu aren’t as far apart politically as most people think.
“Netanyahu has taken steps among his constituency considered moderate and influenced by the left. Declaring there can be no Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount is just one example. The differences between him and Herzog on Iran are related to style, not substance.”
The challenge for Herzog, Steinberg said, is to resist calls from the “radical left” to push for a Palestinian state.
“At the moment the majority of Israelis fear a return of Oslo and other failures,” he said. “If being left is seen as promoting an unrealistic peace it won’t succeed.”
Oppenheimer from Peace Now acknowledged that when Rabin and the left were supporting the Oslo Accords 20 years ago, they failed to recognize the genuine fear many Israelis felt over the prospect of arming Palestinian police and relinquishing land to the Palestinians.
Should the peace camp once again have the chance to push for a viable peace process, “I would respect much more the needs of the public to feel secure,” he said.
That chance, say most Israelis, seems like a distant one. As if to sum up the country’s somber mood as it struggles through the latest spate of terror attacks, Hadag Nahash sings, “The present is known with no need to expand / How it drains and shakes how it pressures with no quiet ... / And our untrustworthy future what does it have in store / What more can it bury.”
And yet a hope, however distant, survives. The band concludes …
“And to think that you had the courage to change / And to think you knew how to plant hopes / And to think that you raised up to fly and went far enough to see / And to think that you managed to understand: What would be if …”
editor@jewishweek.orgIsrael News
‘He Was A Soldier Of Peace’
Eitan Haber, Rabin’s closest aide and speechwriter, remembers his boss.
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
Haber doesn’t play the “what if”? game when it comes to Rabin. Wikimedia Commons
Ramat Gan, Israel — He still thinks about his old boss all the time. Still refers to him simply as “Rabin.” Still thinks — “almost every day, all day” — about what Yitzchak Rabin, the slain prime minister, would think of the latest political or military news. What would Rabin think about Iran? About the Israeli budget? About the “quality of life” in Israel today?
Rabin’s closest aide and the man who penned his lofty speeches, Eitan Haber is sitting in the lobby of the Kfar Maccabiah hotel here on the grounds of the Maccabiah sports complex, near Haber’s home in this upscale suburb of Tel Aviv.
With a full head of white hair and a typical Sabra’s uniform of open-collar, short-sleeve white shirt and black pants, he has the same gruff personality that some said characterized Rabin’s image. At 75, he still snaps at questions he considers uninformed, and, though most of the interview was conducted in English, he challenges an American-born translator’s rendition of the answers he decided to give in Hebrew.
That day 20 years ago, when a religious nationalist student named Yigal Amir pumped two bullets into Haber’s boss’ back, is, of course, etched in his, and all Israelis’, memory. People here remember the details of where they were when they heard the news, just as Americans of a certain age remember the exact details of the day President John F. Kennedy was killed.
But when the topic of the assassination comes up, Haber speaks about it unemotionally, stoically.
On the morning of Nov. 4, 1995, Haber spoke with his boss — for the last time, it turned out. By phone, early that Saturday, they arranged to meet that night, after a peace rally Rabin was to attend in Tel Aviv and a party for an Israeli diplomat Haber was to attend near Tel Aviv. They were to review the prime minister’s schedule for that week.
Instead, Haber, who had met Rabin three decades earlier when Haber was a reporter for the Israeli Army Bamachane newspaper and Rabin headed the Army’s Northern Command, rushed to Ichilov Hospital when news of the shooting reached him. And it was Haber who announced “in dismay, in great sadness, and in deep sorrow” Rabin’s death at an assassin’s hand that evening. Less than two days later Haber delivered a eulogy, “the final speech,” at Rabin’s funeral, declaring, “Yitzchak, we already miss you.”
Haber, a prolific author and veteran military correspondent who in the two decades since the assassination has returned to his career as a journalist, and as a businessman — among other jobs, he serves as a representative of Korean businesses — is often recognized on the streets of Israel.
A behind-the-scenes adviser and speechwriter for Rabin in the years before Rabin’s murder, Haber became a public figure afterwards. One image is seared into the minds of many Israelis: Haber, at Rabin’s funeral, holding up the blood-stained piece of paper that bore the lyrics of “A Song for Peace” that Rabin had sung in Kikar Malchei Yisrael (Kings of Israel Square) minutes before he left the stage and was shot.
In the wake of the assassination, and the subsequent collapse of the Oslo peace process, there are tantalizing “alternate history” questions that are never far from the surface. How would history be different if Rabin were still alive? Would peace have taken hold? Would the religious nationalist movement have taken off?
There is a set of more personal questions that seem irresistible as well: What would Rabin see as his legacy? Would he feel vindicated for the political — and personal — risks he took for supporting Oslo?
And there are the inevitable questions of leadership: If he were alive today, how would Rabin have met the challenges his successors have faced in these last two decades?
Haber refuses to answer any of these questions. He stays out of the prediction or speculation business, he says. “There is no ‘if’ in history. History doesn’t recognize the word ‘if.’”
One question he does answer: Did Rabin, the object of death threats and vociferous right-wing rallies by opponents of the rapprochement with the PLO, fear being killed? “No. Never. That a Jew would do it? Never.”
An aide to the Labor Party’s Rabin, Haber wrote a biography of the Likud Party’s Menachem Begin. Not doctrinaire or narrowly partisan in his political views, he often speaks for many Israelis when he writes.
In print he remains a curmudgeon, often challenging Israeli accepted wisdom across the political spectrum. In an essay headlined “Enough with the illusions” earlier this year on the Ynet website, he challenged a series of assumptions that “Israelis, Palestinians, Americans, Europeans” hold. Among his pronouncements:
♦ “The leftists are wrong in thinking that at the stroke of one signature and one agreement, peace will reign on earth.”
♦ “The rightists are wrong in believing that we can continue to control millions of citizens of a different nation and religion.”
♦ “The national-religious are wrong in basing their faith on God Almighty to save us from all evil, and are wrong in thinking that we are fulfilling a divine ownership certificate of the patrimony and that the land was promised only to us. We didn’t come to an empty land.”
♦ “The secular Israelis are wrong if they think that Zionism has come to an end. … They are also wrong in their scorn and ridicule towards anyone who is not them.”
Because of his close association with Rabin, and because of his ubiquitous writing — particularly for Yediot Achronot, and for Ynet — Haber’s opinions, and his memories of Rabin are still in demand. He usually appears at a commemoration ceremony or academic panel on the anniversary of the assassination, but says he isn’t sure what he will do on that date this year.
One question he frequently hears: Was Rabin — a career military man who had earned the reputation as Israel’s strongest advocate of a strong defensive posture; who earlier as defense minister had urged bone-breaking measures against Palestinian demonstrators; who reluctantly shook Yasir Arafat’s hand during the peace treaty signing on the White House lawn in September 1993 — a firm believer in the peace treaty with the Palestinians that Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, his left-leaning, long-time political rival, had surreptitiously brought about? Did Rabin trust Arafat?
“I don’t believe for a second that Arafat was a partner, and I’m not sure at all that Rabin believed he was,” Haber said in a 2012 interview with the Times of Israel. “But Rabin believed — and of this I am certain, because we spoke about it — that peace is made with these [unsavory] types. I cannot say that he liked him, but toward the end of his life, relations between them were good.”
“The accords brought the State of Israel a considerable benefit, Haber said in the Times of Israel interview. “Dozens of countries … recognized the State of Israel. The prime minister traveled, for the very first time, to various Arab states, to Oman for example, to Indonesia, to Morocco and a few other countries.” Israel’s leader “had not, until then, ever been to Russia, or China, Japan, Korea. All of those countries opened up to us.”
But Olso hasn’t brought a full peace to the Middle East.
“They didn’t bring peace,” Haber told the Times of Israel, “because, I think, it became clear to everyone … that the problems are much deeper and harder and wider than it was possible to imagine. You need years, even decades, of education” to eliminate the deep-set hostility.”
Since Rabin’s assassination, Kings of Israel Square has been renamed for Rabin, and the bloodstained sheet from which Haber read at Rabin’s funeral is in the National Archives. “I gave it to them,” he says matter-of-factly.
Haber says he is still in touch with many of the people, Israelis and Palestinians, who were a major part of his life 20 years ago.
His memory of Rabin, an Army man and reluctant politician, remains unchanged, Haber says. “Rabin believed in the army. He believed in the State of Israel. He was a soldier of peace. He understood the price of war.”
steve@jewishweek.orgIsrael News
Oslo And The Politics Of Meaning
Michael Lerner remembers a tumultuous time.
Jonathan Mark
Associate Editor
About the broken shards of Oslo, Lerner says, “You have to speak with compassion to everyone involved in this.” Michael Lerner
The Oslo years now seem as improbable as a dream, outside of time, headlines from messianic to murder, answered prayers turning to screams. But when Michael Lerner, founder and editor of Tikkun, the leading Jewish leftist journal, sat on the sun-drenched White House lawn, Sept. 13, 1993, invited by the president to witness the signing of the Oslo Accords and the epic handshake between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin and Yasir Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization – it was vindication, not just for Lerner but for all the peaceniks who for years were mocked for their naiveté.
Before there was J Street, before Peter Beinart, back in the days before there was any serious Jewish “pro-peace” lobby, at a time when Jewish peace groups rose and fell like colts finding their legs, there was Tikkun, founded in 1986, critical of the right and what Lerner calls “the religio-phobic” secular left. In 1988, then-Gov. Bill Clinton wrote a complimentary letter to Lerner about Tikkun. In 1993, the Washington Post described Lerner as Hillary Clinton’s “guru.” The first lady gave a speech invoking the “politics of meaning,” Lerner’s creed that statecraft had to be soulcraft, addressing “ethical and spiritual needs.”
That Lerner, a grizzled Berkeley-San Francisco veteran of the radical SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and Free Speech Movement of the 1960s, should find himself sitting on the White House lawn … well, what wasn’t possible on a day when Rabin and Arafat were shaking hands as if the previous 50 years were a game of tennis?
Lerner, frequently aligned with Israel’s own left-wingers, had declared that Israel’s response to the first intifada was “morally incorrect,” underlined by then-defense minister Rabin’s famous order to Israeli soldiers to “break their bones.” Lerner, ordained as a Jewish Renewal rabbi by Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and leading a Renewal synagogue “without walls” in Berkeley, says that several congregants once told him, “We Jews have become Pharaoh to the Palestinian people — so we would be hypocrites to sit around our Passover table celebrating our own freedom, rejoicing at the way the Egyptians were stricken… while ignoring what Israel is doing today in the name of the Jewish people.” Lerner told them, “This is precisely the kind of discussion that is appropriate for the seder table.”
After the Rabin-Arafat handshake, Lerner found himself shmoozing with Rabin in the Israeli embassy. Lerner, now 73, recalls telling Rabin, “If you want to make this peace a real peace, go back and tell our brothers and sisters to learn Arabic; embrace the Palestinians with warmth; see them as created in the image of God…”
Lerner remembers, “When I said ‘God’ he rolled his eyes,” and Lerner laughs at the memory. Rabin was ultra-secular, perhaps the most secular leader Israel ever had.
“I urged him to make it a warm peace, not a cold peace,” says Lerner. “He went back to Israel and did exactly the opposite. Instead of saying, ‘Here is a chance for a new reality,’ he said, ‘I don’t trust them, I’m not going to implement this too quickly.’ He didn’t challenge the fear, he played to it. The peace movement in Israel was very critical of him.”
What could Rabin have done? “He should have stopped the building of any settlements,” says Lerner, “offering significant benefits and incentives for settlers moving back from the West Bank.”
But the Oslo Accords didn’t say one word about settlements being illegal, or settlers having to leave. According to Oslo, the matter of settlements was to be negotiated down an unmapped, unpaved road. “That’s right,” says Lerner, “Oslo didn’t deal with it. Of course, settlers should be able to stay. No country in the world should have a policy of ‘no Jews allowed.’ Arabs live in Israel according to the laws of Israel, so Jews should have every right to live on the West Bank, by the laws of Palestine.” It can work “if both sides really want peace.”
In the early 1990s, Lerner was commuting between the United States and Israel, where his son was in the army, with Lerner’s blessing, “a manifestation of my love for Israel. I was in Israel at least twice a month because I wanted to give my son a place to go on Shabbos, if he had leave. I washed his clothes on Friday afternoons, and made Shabbos meals for him.”
Lerner would sometimes find himself in the Knesset dining room, visiting political friends. He’d see Rabin there. “I knew him before he was prime minister. Rabin was always alone. Everybody else was sitting with other people. Nobody came to talk to him. Why? Because he was impossible to talk to. He was arrogant to everyone. We had several conversations but he had a commander’s perspective. Rabin was a general with a military consciousness. He thought if had a plan, people should follow.”
Lerner says, “When I tried to speak to him about the spiritual needs of the people, Rabin was just deaf to that. He didn’t know what I was talking about. He had very little capacity to communicate in a caring way to those who disagreed with him, whether on the left or the right.”
Few politicians were as contemptuous of a constituency as Rabin was of the settlers. As far back as 1979, Rabin in his memoirs, “Pinkas Sherut,” called settlers “a cancer in the body of Israeli democracy.” In the agreement known as Oslo II, Rabin placed Rachel’s Tomb (the second most visited holy site) under complete Palestinian civil and military control.
Two Orthodox Knesset members pleaded with him, would Rabin give away Ben-Gurion’s grave? MK Menachem Porush reportedly stood up and embraced Rabin, saying through tears, “Reb Yitzchak … You are planning to give away Mama Ruchl’s grave. The Jewish people will never forgive you if you abandon Mama’s kever [tomb].’”
Rabin relented. Nevertheless, Dan Ephron, author of “Killing A King” (Norton), a new book about the assassination, writes, “By late 1993,” Rabin already “had enough of the settlers. ... Rabin had virtually no skills in diplomacy — he couldn’t hide his contempt. … Rabin had no religious sentiment at all.”
Are all settlers guilty? Yigal Amir wasn’t a settler but a Modern Orthodox law student from Herzliya.
“Not all settlers,” says Lerner, “but I would assume it was at least 10,000-20,000,” out of more than 100,000 settlers. “A minority that was very articulate and active in attempting to prevent the implementation of the policy of the State of Israel. Like other criminals they should have been arrested, tried and put into prison — like I was!” Lerner laughs, admitting that he was arrested for anti-Vietnam war activity that, like settler protests, shut the roads, demeaned the president, and tried preventing the implementation of American policy.
Twenty years later, the dream has faded, if it hasn’t died. Mahmoud Abbas told the U.N. that the Palestinians were no longer bound by Oslo. In fact, wrote Scott Anderson in The New York Times, “The Palestinians, seeing themselves as the aggrieved party, have never taken the initiative in offering up peace terms, and whatever the Israelis have offered has never been enough.”
As for the broken shards of Oslo, Lerner suggests, “the only way to speak about this conflict is to speak in a compassionate tone to both peoples. You have to speak with compassion to everyone involved in this,” from the settlers to Shuafat, a Palestinian village. Both peoples are still in the image of God. “That’s why I feel a lot of compassion to the settlers,” first one makes peace with his own, “not the violent among them but the overwhelming majority of the settlers are good and decent people.”
Does he ever hear from Hillary anymore? “All I can tell you is that in the last conversation we had I promised I would never answer that question.”
editor@Jewishweek.orgGary Rosenblatt
Remembering Rabin: The Man And The Promise
The religious and political tensions within world Jewry spilled over from hateful words to a deadly deed.
Gary Rosenblatt
Editor And Publisher
Gary Rosenblatt
I interviewed Yitzhak Rabin on the last evening he spent in America.
Our meeting took place around the dining-room table in his suite at the Waldorf Astoria on a Saturday night in October 1995. The prime minister, wearing an open white shirt and with a cigarette never far from his mouth, spoke with three Jewish journalists in his usual taciturn style, though he seemed to me more shy than cold in nature.
He talked about his just-completed meetings in the U.S. and his plans to convince his countrymen, upon his return, to trust him that making peace with the Palestinians would increase, rather than diminish, security in Israel. He had credibility because he was a military hero with a tough, sober approach to Israel’s needs, a pragmatist who based his policies on strategic analysis. “No longer is it true that the whole world is against us,” he told his countrymen on his election in 1992, seeking to counter a widespread Israeli sense of victimhood. His goal, he said, was for Jews and Arabs “to live together on the same soil in the same land.”
What I remember most vividly about that night was the surreal scene outside the Waldorf after our interview, as the Rabin motorcade was about to leave directly for JFK Airport and the flight home to Tel Aviv. I marveled at the amount of security in the area, with streets closed to traffic all around the hotel and dozens and dozens of police cars, lights flashing, at the ready.
I remember thinking how extraordinary the level of precaution was to protect this one man.
Exactly two weeks later, on leaving a huge peace rally in Tel Aviv, Rabin, who refused to wear a bullet-proof vest in his own country, was shot at point-blank range by Yigal Amir, a 25-year-old Israeli Jew and law student who believed he was fulfilling the mitzvah of rodef, the obligation to pursue someone who seeks to bring harm or death to others.
In this case, Amir symbolized those who believed Rabin’s concessions to the Palestinians would result in national suicide for Israel. Critics of the Oslo Accords, initiated two years earlier, had asserted in increasingly large and angry public demonstrations and media statements, that the prime minister had to be stopped, at all costs.
Looking back at The Jewish Week’s reporting on the political climate in Israel and among American Jews in the months leading up to the assassination, I recall how ugly the debates were within our own community at the time. With the stakes so high — Israel’s continued existence at stake — some on the hard right characterized Rabin in the harshest of terms. Likud Party leader Benjamin Netanyahu, the former and future prime minister, was criticized for speaking at a large rally where some demonstrators shouted that Rabin was a traitor, a murderer; there were posters depicting the Israeli leader as a Nazi.
A number of Orthodox rabbis here and in Israel spoke out against the peace agreement in religious terms and some called on Israeli soldiers to defy any army orders that would cede Jewish land.
In an instant, the deep religious and political tensions within world Jewry spilled over from hateful words to a deadly deed.
It’s difficult to convey the degree of shock, anger and shame prompted by the murder of the prime minister at the hands of a fellow Jew. There was an overwhelming outpouring of grief, and a sense of respect and affection from world leaders as well as the world Jewish community for the soldier-turned-peacemaker. I wrote at the time of the feelings of remorse and responsibility many of us felt for words not spoken and actions not taken as the bitter factionalism grew. Neither the proponents nor the critics of the Oslo peace process were blameless.
Many of the most vocal and angry critics of the deal were observant Jews living in communities in the West Bank who believed the ground was holy and feared their homes and land would be displaced. They, in turn, were marginalized by many Israelis as less worthy of protection than their fellow Jews. Rabin himself referred to them as “crybabies” and an obstacle to peace.
One tragic lesson was that there was no longer a distinction between character assassination and assassination.
“It is now our burden to make Rabin’s death the tragedy that opens Jewish eyes and hearts to our self-destructive nature,” a woman from Kings Point, N.Y., wrote in a letter published in The Jewish Week a few days after Rabin’s state funeral. “His death must be the catalyst that enables us all to accept our fellow Jews, one to another, and recognize with dignity the differences that divide us.”
Describing a feeling shared by many, she wrote: “Rabin’s greatest legacy may not only be peace between Jew and Arab but peace between Jew and Jew.”
But her heartfelt words ring hollow two decades later. For a short time Oslo brought hope, but it turned out to be a false hope. The dream of conciliation has become a nightmare of unresolved conflict. Arab frustration with the status quo has led to murderous attacks on Jews, confirming Jewish fears that many Palestinians want Jewish victims, not Jewish neighbors.
Peace between Palestinians and Israel is now but a distant dream as yet another wave of terror threatens Jewish lives — and Jewish life — in Israel. Sadly, too, we Jews have not learned to treat each other with respect, to appreciate that our differences are grounded in a common concern for the Jewish future. Rather, our internal debates, whether on Mideast peace or, most recently, the Iran nuclear agreement, have grown increasingly hostile, each side convinced the other’s policies would bring disaster.
In death Yitzchak Rabin was able to accomplish what he could not in life — to unite us as Jews, if only for a brief moment. But that moment of sadness and soul searching soon evaporated like the tears shed at his funeral. And the man who hoped to lead the way from resistance to reconciliation is mourned for who he was and the promise he stood for. Today he is remembered as the one who might have made a difference had he lived. But we will never know.
Gary@jewishweek.orgStaff Writer Steve Lipman visits three midtown "trade" synagogues that have survived a bygone era.New York
The Tricks Of The Trade Shuls
Established in a bygone era, three Midtown congregations stitching together a path forward.
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
The Garment Center Congregation now attracts worshipers who are largely professionals. Michael Datikash/JW
Two small nail holes on one of the plaster walls at the front door of a building on West 29th Street are the only hints of the site’s rich Jewish past.
The building, 230 W. 29th, was from 1965 to 1995 the home of the Fur Center Synagogue, one of a handful of small but thriving congregations in Midtown that were established in the middle of the last century to serve the spiritual needs of specific trades; the holes, at shoulder height, likely helped hold a mezuzah in place.
A victim of shifting Jewish demographics and the economic forces of globalization, the old synagogue today houses the Chelsea Subud Center, headquarters of the non-denominational spiritual movement based on the “experience which arises from within.” Scaffolding stands on the street for repairs on the building’s brick façade.
Besides the small holes, no Magen David or Hebrew letters are visible outside. Joan Rosenfelt, a member of the congregation for a decade in its final years who now lives in Sullivan County, remembers the synagogue’s halcyon days. “It was a lovely place,” headed by a young charismatic rabbi, she said. “It was a beehive of activity.”
That is the past.
Here is the present.
On the sidewalk outside the Millinery Center Synagogue, on Sixth Avenue at West 38th Street, pedestrians browse through piles of sheet sets and towels stacked on small tables. The items, bought wholesale, sometimes at closeout sales, are sold for a profit, bringing some much-needed funds into the congregation, whose original membership base of men and women in the hat-making industry is largely gone.
On the sidewalk outside the Actors’ Temple, a half-mile northwest on West 47th Street between Eighth and Ninth avenues, theatergoers line up several nights a week to attend the plays staged in the synagogue’s sanctuary. The temple has rented its space to Off-Broadway shows since 2006 to supplement the congregation’s limited income, which decreased once the performers in vaudeville and television, who gave the congregation its name and character, disappeared, dying or moving to Los Angeles.
And outside the Garment Center Congregation … actually, there is no outside now. The congregation, based for a half-century in a building on West 40th Street around the corner from Seventh Avenue, has been meeting since the summer in a second-floor office suite two blocks away on Broadway. The congregation will meet in its temporary home for the next three or four years while its site is torn down, to be rebuilt in expanded quarters, part of a 20-story hotel complex. The synagogue’s move drew attention because the developer, Sharif El-Gamal, is a Muslim and better known as one of the backers of the scaled-back plan to build an Islamic community center two blocks from the World Trade Center.
The three surviving synagogues, and the now-defunct Fur Center Synagogue, represent a small slice of 20th-century Jewish history, a phenomenon that has roots in the Jewish communities of Europe but that has a uniquely New York flavor.
“Once upon a time,” said Jonathan Sarna, professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University, “many synagogues brought together people of similar trades.” The butchers’ synagogue, the bakers’ synagogue, the tailors’ synagogue. Particularly in the Old Country.
“In the U.S., it’s very uncommon,” Sarna said. “It was more usual in this country to bring together people based on where they came from [landsmen].”
Only New York City had the critical mass of Jews who dominated certain professions to be able to form such congregations, Sarna says. “To my knowledge, outsiders were not kept out, but they did often feel like outsiders.
“Of course, today,” he said, “when most Jews live far from their place of occupation, these synagogues are less needed. There are certainly synagogues known for having large numbers of doctors, or large numbers of folks in high-tech, but the synagogue is not named for them and does not cater to them on that basis. Most Jews today are not exclusively interested in interacting just with people in their own business — or part of their business culture.”
Which makes the survival of Midtown’s few trade-based congregations, and their efforts to stay afloat, all the more remarkable.
The Midtown congregations were formed for the sake of Jewish furriers, hat makers and garment workers — the Actors’ Temple began as a standard neighborhood house of worship, before it began its outreach to members of the entertainment profession — who typically worked within a mile or two of their fellow tradesmen. Most lived on the Lower East Side or the outer boroughs, taking the subway to work. Many wanted a place where they could say memorial prayers during the day or on Jewish holidays; others, somewhere where they could pray on Shabbat or Jewish holidays before heading off to their jobs.
Typical is Marc Abramson, executive vice president of the Garment Center Congregation, who said, “Basically we get members who come to say Kaddish.
“We’re the second shul” for most members, who belong to a first congregation where they live, said Abramson. Which means the trade synagogues can’t charge much for membership — typically $75 to $150 a year, far under the four-figure range of most area congregations.
For all the extant trade synagogues, membership is a fluid concept; the congregations count as members men and women who show up regularly, or occasionally, making a token donation or none at all.
The synagogues, all facing diminished membership numbers (the original members’ children went into more prestigious, better-paying fields), buildings in various degrees of disrepair (leaky roofs are a common complaint), and shaky budgets (overhead is kept to a minimum), are a study in survival; all have reached out to a new profile of members and worshippers, while trying, with varying degrees of success, to hold onto the remaining members of their founding professions.
CPAs and IT experts and attorneys have largely replaced the manual laborers.
The Actors’ Temple has the best record of maintaining its ties to the type of people who gave the congregation its fame. “We do have actors and performers,” said Jill Hausman, the synagogue’s rabbi and cantor. But they’re a minority of the membership. “We don’t have the big names.”
Rabbi Hausman is a veteran singer who previously served as part-time spiritual leader of the Boro Park Progressive Synagogue in Brooklyn and as an environmental biologist. She has made an effort to stress the building’s unique past and to make entertainers feel at home, by inviting members to perform or speak at the synagogue, and by posting on the walls biographies of the boldface personalities (like E.G. Robinson, Sophie Tucker and some of the Three Stooges) whose names appear on the synagogue’s stained-glass windows and memorial plaques.
“I felt accepted there,” said Steve Greenstein, an actor-writer who lives in northern New Jersey and has belonged to the Actors’ Temple since he moved back to the Northeast from Los Angeles in 1999. “I needed a place to worship,” where he would not be “harangued” by people unfamiliar with life in the entertainment industry, he said. At the Temple, he said, he hears no silly questions.
The congregation’s finances are shaky, said Rabbi Hausman, “a fulltime rabbi on a part-time salary”; membership was down to a dozen people when she came in 2006; now it’s up to 200. A few dozen show up on Friday nights, fewer on Saturday mornings.
To pay for repairs, the Temple holds occasional fundraising events, conducts a High Holidays appeal, and rents out its sanctuary to Off-Broadway, non-union theatrical productions. “We don’t always have access to our space,” the rabbi says.
“Not Your Grandfather’s Temple!” a flyer declares.
Worship services there take place on Shabbat, “a Reform-style service with a Conservative prayer book.” The Temple, which was at first Orthodox then became Conservative, is unaffiliated — “post-denominational,” Rabbi Hausman said.
Of the three still-surviving trade synagogues, the Millinery Center Synagogue has the most distinctive approach to fundraising.
Tuvia Yamnik, a part-time cantor and handler, peddles sheets and towels outside several afternoons a week, shouting “100 percent Egyptian cotton!” and splitting the profits with the shul.
The money helps, says Rabbi Hayim Wahrman, who has served there since 1992. The congregation “was wealthy in the ’50s and ’60s,” he says nostalgically.
The rabbi leads services, teaches Kabbalah classes, recruits members, books concerts there and orchestrates the building’s repair.
Inside, it is musty, the wooden walls peeling and the bookshelves collapsing, the result of recent flooding.
Mendy Mittelman, from Flatbush, a frequent davener at the Synagogue, shows a visitor the damage after a recent Mincha service. “The floor,” he said, pointing down. “The roof,” he said, pointing up. He keeps pointing around the sanctuary.
Does the disarray bother him? No. “It’s convenient” – the Synagogue is near his midtown office.
Compared to the Actor’s Temple and the Millinery Center Synagogue, the Garment Center Congregation is in the best financial condition.
“We have a [full-time] rabbi and a 99-year lease for a dollar” — a dollar a year rent, arranged about 50 years ago by Albert List, a wealthy industrialist and backer of the congregation who bought the land and arranged the favorable terms, said Arnold Brown, a retired garment manufacturer who has been an active member for a few decades. The synagogue runs no activities besides services every day. “If you have very little overhead,” Brown said, “you can maintain a shul.”
“We never miss a minyan” — the required ten men in an Orthodox service, he said.
The rabbi is Norman Listokin, a raconteur who greets — and alternately berates — both first-time visitors and old-time members, establishing an atmosphere of familiarity.
Rabbi Listokin declined to be interviewed for this article, but Brown and Abramson said the number of men and women attending the synagogue’s daily services has remained constant since the move to the temporary quarters.
The Garment Center Congregation’s future?
Brown and Abramson said they are optimistic and looking forward to returning to the congregation’s old site; the new building will feature a refurbished sanctuary and two floors below for social events. The area that was home to the garment workers who founded the congregation still attracts a large number of Jewish visitors and Jews working in nearby office buildings, Abramson said. “Midtown is exploding.”
steve@jewishweek.orgIsraeli couture bridal designers are flourishing here, and Staff Writer Hannah Dreyfus has the story.New York
Dressed To Thrill, And Coexist
Israeli couture bridal designers hit high mark in NYC, despite some global pushback.
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
Designer Merav Solo with model Lara Vosburgh after a recent show. Hannah Dreyfus/JW
Merav Solo spends her working life at the seam — the delicate one between pieces of a wedding gown, and the even more delicate one between pieces of the patchwork quilt that is Israel society.
“It doesn’t matter if a bride is Arab, secular Israeli, charedi or Druze — they want the same thing when they visit me,” the Haifa-based couture Israeli bridal gown designer said. While a Druze bride might request no transparent lace and sleeves that reach the wrists, a secular Israeli bride might want a plunging neckline or backless number. In spite of the complicated cultural mores, differences Solo must negotiate sensitively but stylishly, she said, “Every woman wants to feel beautiful and sexy on her wedding day.”
Solo was speaking at a reception recently following an event during New York International Bridal Week, an annual gathering of more than 250 bridal gown designers from around the world. She had just watched as models paraded her seductive gowns down a runway at Pier 94 on the Hudson River. As designers, buyers and models in sleek white gowns mingled and sipped flutes of Champagne, Solo, dressed in a short black dress, was beaming. In a career spanning more than 20 years, this was the first time her creations were being shown in New York.
The Oct. 11 show, which exclusively featured Israeli designers, was also a first. According to noted Israeli bridal designer Pnina Tournay, known for her risqué designs, the show marked a “historic moment” for Israeli designers.
Inside the Pier 94 hangar, with sweeping views of the Hudson, eight emerging Israeli designers sent their lines down the runway to a medley of upbeat Middle Eastern tunes, including a remix of “Hava Nagila.” Organized in part by the Israeli Foreign and Tourism ministries, the show highlighted Israeli designers’ influence in the world of bridal fashion.
According to Susan Glick, vice president of women’s apparel at Merchandise Mart Properties, the corporation that hosts New York bridal fashion week, the last three [shows] have shown an “influx of couture Israeli bridal designers.
“At first you just saw a couple [Israeli designers], and now buyers are asking for Israeli bridal couture,” said Glick. This year, more than 20 Israeli designers showed their collections, a high for the market, said a representative from the Israeli trade ministry.
Samantha Kane, a brand management executive at Brides, the bridal fashion magazine of Condé Nast, said that editors are showing an increasing interest in Israeli designers, particularly Inbal Dror, a leading designer from Tel Aviv who completed her fashion studies in Israel. While it is difficult to quantify the influence of Israeli fashion designers, Kane said, their collective name recognition has gone up drastically.
To be sure, Israeli designers are no strangers to international acclaim. In the wake of Lea Gottlieb, who made a splash with her swimsuit designs going back to the 1960s, a handful of well-known Israelis already are established in the fashion world; they include Alber Elbaz from the Parisian house of Lanvin and Yigal Azrouel, who has a boutique in the meatpacking district.
At New York’s bridal fashion week, this year a total of 22 Israeli designers, including the eight participating in the show with Solo, had booths.
The weeklong fashion affair is considered one of the leading commercial events in the American wedding market, which generates revenue estimated at more than $54 billion a year. Seven percent of this amount is spent on bridal gowns. Six runway shows over the course of three days introduced more than 450 different collections, said Glick. Though bridal tradeshows are held in cities around the world, including London, Barcelona, and Chicago, New York’s show is among the largest, she said.
There was also a significant increase in buyer and press attendance, according to a fashion week sales representative.
Since Tournay burst onto the scene in the early 2000s, Israelis have developed a special niche in bridal fashion, said Israel’s economic minister to North America, Nili Shalev. Tournay, whose curve-hugging collection is housed at Kleinfeld, one of New York’s most well-known bridal salons, is known for introducing sexy, revealing dresses to the mainstream, and for her role as lead designer on the reality TV hit, “Say Yes to the Dress,” which airs on the American network TLC.
“Israeli designers are willing to be adventurous, even in the most conventional settings,” said Shalev.
On the runway, the designers’ bold choices were evident. Sequins, crystals and plunging necklines seemed favorites among buyers, and several looks were completed with impressive silver tiaras and crowns. Many of the gowns had a vintage feel, with one fringed number inspired by the 1920s.
Still, despite their sense of creativity, Israeli designers often struggle to sell their products in European and Eastern markets, said Yoav Davis, a branding consultant for one of the featured designers. He recalled being curtly turned away by a boutique in Dubai after he mentioned that his client was Israeli.
“The Israeli fashion industry is sadly not immune to boycotts,” said Davis, referring to the global movement (known by the acronym BDS — Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) to boycott Israeli goods and servies. He added that in Arab countries, many of which have thriving bridal industries, it is “impossible” to market gowns by Israeli designers.
“It’s good to be in New York, where the creativity and raw talent of these designers is appreciated,” Davis added.
Tournay, who attended the show and stayed for the reception, told The Jewish Week that she will never “shy away from my Israeli identity,” despite global challenges. “I am proud of who I am and where I’m from,” she said, long blonde hair styled to perfection.
Yoav Rish, another Israeli designer who sent wedding gowns down the runway, grew up in a charedi family in the city of Petah Tikvah, east of Tel Aviv. From a young age, he loved experimenting with different types of fabric. His parents, though surprised by their son’s unconventional passion, were very supportive.
Today, Rish lives in Tel Aviv with his male partner and their two daughters.
“I learned to sew on my grandmother’s sewing machine,” said Rish, minutes before the show was about to begin. He wore black skinny jeans and short hair shaved on one side. When asked about further training in fashion, Rish clarified that he is completely self-taught. His designs, which include two-piece wedding dresses with skirt and top, are known for being comfortable and relatively affordable. (His gowns typically range from $7,000-8,000.)
“Hope you enjoy!” he said, before rushing off to perfect the models’ looks backstage.
After the runway show, designers returned to their booths to meet with buyers and brides. At her booth, Solo reflected on fashion as a bridge between cultures. When she designs for Druze and charedi brides, she makes sure to cover more. A secular Israeli bride often wants to push the envelope regarding what to reveal, or not reveal. Still, a desire to look “unique” is shared by all.
“When you speak with brides, you realize we are all the same person,” Solo said. Though her English was broken, she seemed to be grasping at a more philosophical point. “It’s not just about dresses, it’s about beginnings,” she said, using the Hebrew word for beginning, techila. “Every woman wants a beautiful beginning.”
editor@jewishweek.orgAlso this week, a global conference for JCCs; Israel under diplomatic attack for using excessive force in thwarting knifings; `Wonderama' star Sonny Fox comes home; Orthodox rabbis confront intermarriage; a preview of The Other Israel Film Festival here; and our special Healthcare section has the latest on breast cancer screening, and more.
JCCs As The ‘Big Tent’
Global executive director Smadar Bar-Akikva says JCCs allow Jews and non-Jews from very different backgrounds to socialize.
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
Smadar Bar-Akiva, head of JCC Global.
The leaders of Jewish community centers from 30 countries will meet in Jerusalem Nov. 3-6 for the 9th World Conference of Jewish Community Centers. With more than 1,000 JCCs around the world, the conference, convened by JCC Global, is billed as the largest international Jewish network. The Jewish Week interviewed Smadar Bar-Akiva, JCC Global executive director, by email; this is an edited transcript.
Q: Many Jewish communities, especially in big cities like New York, have no lack of educational programs, gyms and Starbucks where Jews can learn and meet. What unique role do JCCs serve today?
A: Because in today’s age Jews can find services in so many places, especially in New York, JCCs focus on programs that go beyond a specific service. For example, when parents send their children to a JCC preschool, they are also invited to a cultural event in the evening, to a Shabbat program for parents and children and more. Another special aspect of a JCC is that they are the Big Tent that welcomes Jews and non-Jews of all types. JCCs provide an opportunity to strengthen Jewish peoplehood by allowing Jews and non-Jews from very different backgrounds, with very different points of view, to socialize in a welcoming and nonjudgmental ambiance.
How has the mission of JCCs changed over the years? In other words, will a member today see his or her grandfather’s JCC?
In North America, JCCs were founded at the end of the 19th century in order to acculturate the Jews that came from Eastern Europe and help them become Americans. In the old days, they provided English language lessons, helped with employment and provided services for Jews that could not join YMCAs and other [Christian] institutions. JCCs throughout the years were quick to adapt. A grandfather coming in today would recognize the “family-like” atmosphere where in one building there are kids, teens, seniors and adults. At the same time I’m sure he would be surprised by some of the programs offered such as Judaism and Buddhism, programs for intermarried families, programs that take place at malls etc. etc.
With all the competition, what financial shape are JCCs in? Are many closing their doors or curtailing their activities?
JCCs are a mirror of their community and culture. In North America most JCCs are doing very well financially. The 350 JCCs in North America, under the auspices of JCC Association of North America, serve upwards of 1 million members each year as well as an additional 1 million users who walk through JCC doors. Their estimated total budget is approximately three quarters of a billion dollars. Yes, at times, some JCCs may encounter financial problems, but at the same time new JCCs are opening very year.
In general, JCCs’ main income comes from fees for service with additional money coming from local federations, private donors and campaigns. In some parts of the world, such as Russian-speaking countries and Eastern Europe, JCCs are still funded significantly by the North American Jewish community via JDC [American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee].
The upcoming World Conference will highlight a new Global Leadership Network that will focus on teen leadership, special needs members and ecology. How will the fellowship program add to existing JCC activities?
The AMITIM-Fellows program connects 25 JCCs from 11 countries. After spending a week together in Budapest in June 2014, the 25 JCCs are now working on seven global projects. The main funding for this program comes from JCC Global and from a generous grant allocated by the Commission on the Jewish People of UJA-Federation of New York through the Jewish Agency for Israel.
A large delegation from New York will also attend the conference, including four JCCs that are AMITIM Fellows — the Shorefront Y, Sid Jacobson JCC, the Jewish Community House in Bensonhurst and the JCC in Manhattan.
steve@jewishweek.orgNew York
Excessive Force Charge Comes Roaring Back
Jewish, Christian leaders here push back against UN secretary-general as focus in Israel turns to approach to ‘lone-wolf’ attacks.
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon criticized Israel for “excessive force.” Getty Images
As Israel tries to combat what some are calling the “stabbing intifada,” the debate over whether it is using excessive force to quell the attacks has re-emerged.
The charge by human rights groups and Palestinians that Israel used disproportionate force in its battle with the terrorist group Hamas in the Gaza Strip, in the summer of 2014, gained some traction as the civilian death toll mounted. But Israel and its supporters pushed back strongly, questioning the death count and who counted as a Hamas fighter or civilian, thereby blunting some of the criticism. The fact that Hamas was often firing its rocket from civilian areas bolstered Israel’s case.
This time around, the debate hinges on how Israel is trying to thwart what are referred to as “lone-wolf” attacks — often with knives — by young Palestinians not thought to be connected to any organized resistance group. The knifings, together with gun and car attacks, have killed eight Israelis since the beginning of October.
A telling tweet came from Human Rights Watch’s director, Kenneth Roth: “Horrible deadly cycle: ‘lone wolf’ Palestinian attacks, excessively lethal Israeli response.”
Similar comments came from the office of the United Nations Secretary General and UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency). Nine human rights groups in Israel expressed the same concerns over what they said was a “worrying trend to use firearms to kill Palestinians who have attacked Israelis or are suspected of such attacks.”
And Amnesty International, despite acknowledging that “Palestinian demonstrators have thrown rocks and firebombs towards Israeli forces in many demonstrations, and there are reports that Palestinians have shot at Israeli forces in isolated cases,” condemned “the widespread use of excessive force by Israeli forces against demonstrators across the occupied West Bank.”
The excessive force charge got some fuel when the U.S. State Department said there had been “credible reports” of such force, an echo of claims made by officials of the Palestinian Authority, including Saeb Erekat, who said the Palestinian Authority wants the Criminal Court of Justice to investigate Israeli “crimes.”
But a few days later State of State John Kerry withdrew the comments.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was livid when he heard the claims, insisting that Israel was using “exactly the kind and amount of legitimate force” that any other government faced with such attacks would use.
Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon was equally incredulous, telling Israel Army Radio, “We are using excessive force? If someone is wielding a knife and killing people, [our response is] excessive force? What are we talking about here? This is nonsense.”
And Gilad Erdan, Israel’s Internal Security Minister, accused the State Department of “accepting lies … without investigation.”
“The police do not bother innocent people,” he was quoted as saying. “When police or Israeli citizens take action, it is to protect life, within the parameters of the law.”
A delegation of 20 Jewish and Christian leaders met with representatives of U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon last Wednesday to present a formal letter of protest over Ban’s claim about “Israel’s use of excessive force” in response to the escalating Palestinian violence.
“Every member state has a legitimate right of self-defense in the face of wanton terrorism,” it said. “Sadly, the United Nations does not grant this moral right to Israel and consistently sees Palestinians as victims and Israelis as aggressors. This morally bankrupt stance contravenes the human rights principles upon which the United Nations was founded.”
\It added: “Contrary to the wrongful assertions that violence is attributable to ‘the longstanding occupation’ and ‘the lack of a political horizon,’ it is clearly hate speech coupled with incitement which create this bloody climate of conflict. … We also ask, Mr. Secretary General, that you take note that the attacks are taking place in areas of Bersheva, communities over the Green Line, Jerusalem, Jaffa, Petah Tikva, Afula, Kiryat Gat and Ra’anana, which have no geographical connection to so called land settlements.”
In a statement, Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, executive vice president of the New York Board of Rabbis, called upon Ban to “fully condemn” the “murder of innocent Israelis … without equivocation or statements of moral equivalence which fail to distinguish between victim and aggressor. Disputes about land should be resolved at a peace table, not through shootings and stabbings in the streets.”
Professor Gerald Steinberg, president of NGO Monitor, a Jerusalem-based research institute, told The Jewish Week that despite Israel’s denials, the allegation “keeps coming up over and over again.”
Asked about Kerry’s apology, Steinberg said, “Once it is on the record — even if it is taken back — the damage is out there. … It just shows how the slogans get picked up and repeated without any thought behind it.”
Maj. Gen. (res.) Gadi Shamni, Israel’s military attaché to the United States and former commander of the Central Command, adamantly denied that soldiers were given a “shoot to kill” order in dealing with Palestinian attacks.
“The Israel Defense Forces and the police have adjusted the rules of engagement as well as their equipment — weapons and ammunition — so that they are used in such a way as to cause minimum casualties,” he told The Jewish Week. “But when you deal with such a high level of violence, you cannot avoid the fact that people will get wounded and killed on both sides. The IDF and Israeli police use of live fire as the last resort — and only when there is a real danger to soldiers or police or the civilians they are protecting.”
“There is a huge effort not to cause death,” Shamni added. “We understand that every funeral becomes a demonstration for Hamas and jihad — and that is not productive. But when you have to protect yourself or a friend and when someone is stabbing, it is very difficult to stop him unless you use the right level of force. And sometimes that can cause fatalities … otherwise you or your friend will be stabbed in the heart or neck and you are not doing your mission.
“There are no orders to shoot to kill. The rules of engagement are to do whatever is needed to stop it immediately. If someone is a yard from you and stabbing you and you shoot in the leg or hand, he will keep stabbing. So there has to be a more fatal action otherwise it won’t remove the threat immediately. That is the dilemma — it is the soldier’s life or the attacker’s life.”
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas blamed Israel Tuesday for an occupation that makes “Palestinian lives unbearable.” He reportedly said at a news conference that young Palestinians had been driven to despair, that they were disenchanted with their lives and the lack of a diplomatic end to the Israeli occupation and aggression of Israeli settlers.
But Shamni said he is convinced that were Abbas “more determined, he could have stopped” the Palestinian attacks. He charged that “senior people” in Abbas’ Fatah movement are behind the incitement campaign that is encouraging Palestinians to attack their Jewish neighbors.
Steinberg noted that Abbas’ assertions that Palestinian attackers are simply acting out of despair are a refrain he has sung many times before. In fact, he said he is convinced the attackers are not simply “lone wolves.”
“Most attacks have Hamas involvement,” he explained, noting that the wife of the Palestinian man who opened fire at the Beersheba bus station this week killing an Israeli soldier and wounding about 10 others was from Gaza. In the attack, an Israeli mob beat an Eritrean man who had mistakenly been shot by a security guard in the belief he was a second attacker — and he later died. Netanyahu decried the “lynching” and ordered a full investigation.
“Many of the attackers from Jerusalem came from families who were activists,” Steinberg observed. “There is evidence to connect them to Hamas and to suggest that they were prepared for this like sleeper cells. I’m not saying it was all sketched out, but those doing these things were indoctrinated and Hamas people were involved. … This wave seems to have been prepared quite well.”
stewart@jewishweek.orgNew York
From Brooklyn To Broadway, And Back Again
“Wonderama” star Sonny Fox returns to his Flatbush school to raise money for a new generation of performers.
Rivka Hia
Editorial Intern
Sonny Fox with some members of P.S. 217’s next generation of performers at “From Brooklyn To Broadway.” Steve Friedman
During my interview with Sonny Fox, he broke out into song. While reminiscing about his Brooklyn childhood, he described Friday night dinners, which he remembers as frenzied and warm.
“Grandpa would come home late from the synagogue with other old men with nicotine stained teeth. We would sing and the tables would bounce — we would pound on the table. This is what the young Jews grew up with,” Fox said, and proceeded to break into a traditional Jewish niggun, a wordless melody.
On Oct. 24, the former “Wonderama” host, war correspondent and German prisoner of war, returned to his old neighborhood to raise money for P.S. 217, his alma mater.
During the evening, called “From Brooklyn to Broadway,” Fox shared personal stories from his work with some of Broadway’s most famous songwriters and screened excerpts from The Songwriters, the series he produced for CBS featuring such Broadway icons as Alan J. Lerner, John Kander, Fred Ebb and Sheldon Harnick —who pioneered the uniquely American art form of musical theater.
Irwin “Sonny” Fox is best known for the award-winning children’s program “Wonderama,” which he hosted from 1959-1967. Last year, after the publication of his book “But You Made the Front Page: Wonderama, War, and a Whole Bunch of Life,” the 90-year-old Los Angeles grandpa made what he called “His Farewell Tour,” visiting childhood haunts.
It was during that trip that he hopped the Q-train to Flatbush and stopped by P.S. 217, where he hadn’t stepped foot since 1938. But some teachers remembered him from their own “Wonderama” years, and soon they were introducing him to students and showing him around the school. Not long after the visit, Fox offered to do a performance to help the school raise money.
In a wide-ranging interview with The Jewish Week, Fox reminisced about his Depression-era childhood, his professional life and highlights of Saturday’s show. He also explained why the show focused on Broadway songwriters, rather than his “Wonderama” years.
“I want to make people appreciate the potent power the creative people had,” Fox said.
Writing lyrics for a musical is harder than it may seem, he said. “When you write a score every song has to have a purpose. It has to introduce you to a character, deepen the emotional impact of what’s going on. It has to fit in context of the developing plot,” he said. Shows also have to be true to the time period in which they are set, meaning songwriters have to become experts in multiple historical eras. Take, for example, Lerner and Loewe, who shifted from the American Gold Rush (“Paint Your Wagon”) to 19th-century London (“My Fair Lady”) to Medieval Europe (“Camelot”).
“If you want to write “Gigi” in turn-of-the-century France, you have to write anew,” he said.
Through storytelling, Fox said he hoped to impart to the audience “a deeper sense of what opera is to the Italians” — a feeling of pride in America’s homegrown theatrical form.
Fox spent his childhood on East 9th Street between Foster Avenue and Avenue H. He celebrated his bar mitzvah at Young Israel of Flatbush and graduated from P.S. 217 in 1938.
During last year’s “Farewell Tour,” Fox was saddened to see the site of his old home turned into a parking lot. In his mind, the street still echoes with memories of playing hockey and stickball, pausing for cars and — and horse-drawn wagons — to pass through.
A lot has changed in the eight decades since. “The most striking difference is that when I went to P.S. 217 the neighborhood was half Irish and half Jewish,” he said. Fox’s old neighborhood, now called Kensington, hosts large populations of immigrants from South Asia and the Former Soviet Union as well as a growing contingent of charedi Jews moving over from nearby Borough Park. At P.S. 217, notices are printed in English, Spanish, Urdu, Bengali, Tajiki and Uzbek; more than 30 languages are spoken in the students’ homes.
“That’s what’s so wonderful about New York. I was a child of immigrants, these are new children of immigrants in the same situation. I think of schools as laundromats taking them through the cycles of education and making them American. It keeps regenerating,” he said.
During the Q&A portion of “Broadway Comes to Brooklyn,” one of the audience members noted that all of the lyricists and composers featured are Jewish. Fox says that the musical inclinations of so many children of Ashkenazi immigrants is due to “the religious fervor of that time — the fervent music that was part of the joy of Eastern Europe.”
Fox added that music was one sector not closed to Jews, unlike many professions and Ivy League schools, which had caps on how many Jews they would take. “This was a time where Harvard had a Jewish admissions quota. This brought us Richard Rodgers, Hammerstein, and Alan Jay Lerner, all those wondrous people were Jews,” he said.
Fox’s grandparents immigrated from Austria and Hungary, bringing their traditions — and recipes — to Brooklyn.
“I can remember going to my grandma’s house for Friday night dinner. She was one of the worst cooks in the world,” he said, noting that “everything was fried.” But he remembers fondly the challah, and the Shabbat candles.
“Zeyde [grandpa] always wanted to be the president of the synagogue. If they didn’t make him president he would make a new storefront synagogue,” he said. Fox remembers carrying the Torah around the synagogues with his grandfather.
Fox said he didn’t expect to write so much in his memoir about his childhood. “When I started writing, I didn’t think I would write so much about my life in Brooklyn. Brooklyn was so bloody vivid, I wanted to recreate what it was like to grow up there, lower middle class, in that part of the world,” he said.
After graduating from Madison High School, Fox said he had no ambition or self-confidence and was planning to go to North Carolina State University.
But, he said, “Because I had a pushy Jewish mother, when the teachers said I wasn’t doing the work I was capable of, she said I was bored.” Fox said that he skipped three grades, graduating high school in January instead of June. Since he couldn’t start at North Carolina State until the fall, Fox decided to earn some credits at NYU. Fox ended up shaping his career from that one semester of radio classes at NYU.
After becoming a reporter, including a stint as a war correspondent in Korea, Fox eventually landed the gig hosting “Wonderama,” which he described as “a four-hour show with no real production budget.” While he felt that other people on the channel were good performers who “did characters and threw pies,” Fox does not consider himself a performer.
“It took me a while to discover what my asset was. I realized the kids were my asset,” he said. Fox began to engage with children.
“They have a great interior life you don’t know anything about,” he said. “If you ask kids about God [Fox noted that it would make a great column for this writer], kids don’t speak in abstracts,” he said. Fox remembers asking one child, “How tall is God?” “One kid said 5’8, one said 5’11. I remember saying to a 10 year-old boy: “You keep saying he, what if God is a girl?”
“You can see something flicker over his face as he deals with that question,” he said. Fox said that the thing he learned from kids is you have to be able to get them to feel you respect them. He said, “You have to let the silences hang in the air. If you stop and stay with him or her and let the silence go for [a while] they will go again and give you more great stuff.” Fox said these were conversations he “bets they don’t have with their parents,” and noted that by talking to children, “you will discover how fervent their lives are.”
editor@jewishweek.orgOpinion
Orthodox Rabbis Confront Intermarriage
Rabbi Kerry M. Olitzky And Rabbi Asher Lopatin
Special To The Jewish Week
Rabbi Kerry M. Olitzky and Rabbi Asher Lopatin
Some people might think that facing the challenging reality of intermarriage and being fully committed to Orthodox Judaism is an oxymoron. Yet, two weeks ago, 20 Orthodox rabbis accepted an invitation by Big Tent Judaism and the Lindenbaum Center for Halachic Studies at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah to join together for a behind-closed-doors, daylong symposium focused on the nexus of the two issues.
We promised no media coverage out of respect for the rabbis’ willingness to participate. Sponsored by the Marion and Norman Tanzman Charitable Foundation, this was a historic meeting for Orthodox rabbis — the first of its kind — since the focus was not on so-called prevention. Rather, it was about understanding intermarried couples and their families. The conversation was frank. There were no pulled punches. Yet the pervasive question taken up by these rabbis was: How do I connect with people whose life choice I disagree with — and keep them engaged in the Jewish community?
While it is common wisdom that intermarriage does not impact the Orthodox community, these rabbinic leaders know that this is not the case, even if the incidence of intermarriage in the Orthodox community is far lower than among other population segments in the community. Thus, all those in attendance took a bold step forward into American Jewish life by attending the symposium and digging deeply into the issues, knowing full well that they could help shape the future landscape of American Jewish life by how they respond to intermarriage in their communities and beyond.
It is unfortunate that the Jewish community has become, like much of American society, quite polarized, using a black-and-white lens to look at the culture that surrounds us with little opportunity to see the grey areas in which most of us live. You’re either in or you are out. And if you intermarry, many would say, “You are out.” This approach limits our options.
While historical Jewish tradition established boundaries, even dedicated an entire tractate of Talmud to the notion of boundaries, the dynamics of Jewish civilization reflected the nuances of life, especially as religious leaders confronted the reality of the evolving world around us. The rabbis in attendance openly and sensitively came to grapple with these nuances, though most were schooled in a culture of black and white with little room for grey when it comes to any issue related to intermarriage. Thus, much of what was presented to them was eye-opening and counterintuitive, information and observations based on many years of work with intermarried couples and their families by Big Tent Judaism. The emphasis was on people, not numbers. These families, like their in-married counterparts, are not monolithic. They, too, fall along a continuum of practice and identity.
What most captured the attention of the group were the various nuances in the religious lives of these intermarried families. For example, it was the first time that these rabbis were asked to consider that those who raised their children in what might be called “American civil religion” with a smattering of Chanukah and Christmas — and even Passover and Easter — were not raising their children in two faiths. These families probably reflected the majority of intermarried families and were a primary target population for outreach and connection. It was difficult for the rabbis to imagine people born into other faiths — perhaps still committed to those faiths — yet able to create Jewish homes and families and raise Jewish children, even sending them to Orthodox day schools and participating in Jewish community life. But they were open to this new understanding of the complexities of Jewish life.
The rabbis also struggled with issues of patrilineal descent and the idea that the children of intermarriage (when the father is Jewish and the other partner is not) could be considered Jewish, even if not Jewish according to halacha. This topic also emerged while debating the validity of conversions by non-Orthodox rabbis.
We also discussed the trends in Jewish demographics that show an increase in the number of Muslim-Jewish intermarriages, perhaps the most complicated of them all. Finally, participants were asked to consider the idea of second marriages and blended families in which children might be brought up in different faiths than their half or steps-siblings and how to work with these families who are a growing population segment among those who have intermarried.
This symposium showed that Orthodoxy could maintain its fidelity to halacha and tradition while being sensitive to the complexities and realities of the diverse Jewish community. In fact, the Orthodox community might be critical in enabling intermarriage to not be “the end of the line,” but, rather, a challenge leading to a deeper relationship to Judaism and the Jewish community.
Rabbi Kerry Olitzky is executive director of Big Tent Judaism. Rabbi Asher Lopatin is president of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah. Film
Punch And Counterpunch
At this year’s Other Israel Film Festival, Zionism and coexistence collide in the spotlight.
George Robinson
Special To The Jewish Week
“Censored Voices,” based on Amos Oz’s interviews with soldiers after the Six-Day War. Courtesy Music Box Films
This has been an autumn in which all the news from the Middle East suggests that the entire population of the region has gone quite mad. Whether it has been Jews burning babies, 12-year-old Palestinians stabbing Israeli kids of the same age, or the prime minister shifting the blame for the Shoah away from Hitler, the past several months have been a nightmare for anyone who cares about Israelis or Palestinians.
It may sound unlikely, but this year’s Other Israel Film Festival, which begins next week, may provide a few flashes of light amidst the gloom of the daily reports. Now in its ninth year, the festival has evolved from a showcase for films by and about the region’s minorities to a sturdy fixture on the fall film circuit that examines the ever-complicated realities of the Jewish state from a multiplicity of viewpoints.
It appears that this year’s event is focusing on two disparate but not unrelated themes: the need for and fruits of intercultural cooperation, and the tendency of Zionist thought to return inevitably to self-definition and self-criticism.
The two most prominent films on the schedule, both of which will open theatrically not long after the festival, are rather painful documentary efforts in the latter vein. “Censored Voices,” by Mor Loushy, has already stirred considerable ire among American neoconservatives and their Israeli counterparts. I suspect that “Colliding Dreams,” the first directorial collaboration for two of the most reliable local Jewish filmmakers, Joseph Dorman and Oren Rudavsky, may have the same result.
In the month that followed the Six-Day War, a young writer and soldier named Amos Oz went around the kibbutzim with a tape recorder, soliciting the recollections of fellow combat survivors. Those tapes would be the basis of a book, “The Seventh Day,” edited by Avram Shapira. At the time, only 30 percent of the transcripts were used, in large part due to military censorship. Nearly 50 years later, those tapes, no longer embargoed, serve as the spine for Loushy’s film.
The memories — and the wounds, physical and psychical — were fresh. The young men were articulate and understandably devastated by what they had seen. For nearly all of them, the elation that the rest of Israel felt was short-lived. Loushy matches the voices on her soundtrack with footage from the period, much of it unseen since the war itself, and shots of the same witnesses as they are today, sitting silently and listening to their younger selves.
As Oz drily observes at the outset, “people did not come back happy from [the] war.” One of the witnesses is asked if he thought about “the homeland” during combat and he retorts, “Not for a second.” Others dismiss the recovery of the Kotel as meaningless to them. These emotions coming from young Jewish soldiers of the IDF seem as unfamiliar as the images that accompany them, although we have heard much worse as the succession of wars has continued.
Even the atrocity stories, the source of much of the rage since “Censored Voices” played Israel and the festival circuit, are a preview of worse to come from generations to follow. However, it is during a recollection of action in the Sinai theater, with the brutal killing of newly seized prisoners, that Loushy makes what I feel is a single serious misstep, cutting from footage of a battle winding down and Egyptian soldiers surrendering to post-battle footage of corpse-and-wreckage strewn desertscapes, with the implication that what we are seeing is what was being described in the 1967 recordings. The film ends with a disclaimer that says that the images are not to be construed as depicting what the taped testimony recalls, but that bell rang a half-hour earlier.
More troubling, and a depressing preview of worse to come, are the reminiscences of the men who fought in the heavily populated Jerusalem area. As one of them bluntly states, “When you come in contact with civilians, it’s horrible.” Although this was no guerrilla war, the involvement of the civilian population was unavoidable and occasionally tragic. Evacuating non-combatants was a nightmare and, as one of them says, “That’s not why I went to war.”
Were these young men the victims of their own naïveté? In wartime, combat soldiers do awful things. Civilians suffer needlessly. Popular culture had ignored (or severely downplayed) those truths, except when the crimes were committed by our enemies and the civilians were our own. In the aftermath of filmed and televised atrocities, from Vietnam to this morning’s front pages, we are now vastly more sophisticated, jaded or inured to such events.
And that, sadly, is what one finally takes away from “Censored Voices.”
Amos Oz is nearly the only famous Israeli opinion-maker who doesn’t turn up in “Colliding Dreams,” a 149-minute documentary that attempts to squeeze the history of Zionism and the state of Israel into a too-small package. Among the familiar names and faces that run through the film are A.B. Yehoshua, Yoram Kaniuk, Hillel Halkin, Yossi Klein Halevi, Hanan Ashrawi, Sari Nussibeih, Moshe Halbertal, several founders of Peace Now and a couple of prominent members of the settler movement. The directors possess admirable track records. Dorman is responsible for “Arguing the World” and “Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness,” Rudavsky for “A Life Apart: Hasidism in America” and “Hiding and Seeking.”
In truth, many of the speakers in the film are highly effective, particularly Halkin and Mordecai Bar-On, who have the most screen time and the best lines, so to speak. The story they all tell is, of course, a compelling one, and with its dominant focus on the intellectual conflicts within the Zionist movement, the film has a tone of slightly cool detachment that is both effective and appropriate. The problem is that at two-and-a-half hours, it is both too long and too short. Essentially, “Dreams” would work better as a four- or five-hour miniseries or a Marcel Ophuls-style megafilm.
By far the greater problem, though, is the sheer familiarity of the subject matter, which is not helped by the chronological structure. After many programs on PBS and the like, we have heard these arguments and seen a lot of this footage. For most of its length, “Colliding Dreams” is better crafted and more subtle and thoughtful than its predecessors (although the last half-hour seems painfully attenuated), and its parade of highly articulate observers offers some intelligent and witty commentary; but very little that feels new.
By comparison, “Jerusalem Boxing Club” by Helen Yanovsky and “Arab Movie” by Eyal Sagui Bizawe and Sara Tsifroni seem delightfully fresh and, with each about an hour long, concise. Each focuses on a phenomenon that is at once uniquely Israeli — the proliferation of amateur boxing clubs, the Friday afternoon broadcasts of Egyptian musicals and melodramas on the Israel Broadcasting Authority — and yet somehow universal. There have been many portraits of inspirational coaches like Gershon Luxemburg, who runs the eponymous gym in Jerusalem, of men and women who give selflessly to their young charges, and an equal number of affectionate, nostalgic recollections of the impact of pop culture on previous eras.
Both these films go about their tasks with a cheerful countenance, and the settings of their subject within the turbulent bouillabaisse of contemporary Israel makes their messages of cooperation and enjoyment across class and cultures all the more effective. “Jerusalem Boxing Club,” in particular, could be profitably extended by another half-hour or so, but each of these films is pretty nearly perfect as is.
The Other Israel Film Festival, now in its ninth year, will run Nov. 5-12. It is presented by the Israel Film Center at JCC Manhattan (76th Street and Amsterdam Avenue), which hosts many of the events. In addition to the films, there will be sessions with many of the filmmakers, including a panel discussion on Israeli film censorship, moderated by Jewish Week’s George Robinson. For complete listings and information, go to www.otherisrael.org.
An interview with noted Hadassah oncologist Dr. Tamar Peretz. New breast cancer stats: What’s an Ashkenazi woman to do? High anxiety over Israel’s medical marijuana laws.
Tuesday, October 27, 2015
Click To Flip
Inside This Special Section
Breaking The Mold On Breast Cancer
Inside The New Breast Cancer Stats
When Batman’s Batcave Was A Children’s Cancer Ward
Partnering For Foods That Heal
High Anxiety Over Israel’s Pot Laws
Going Raw, And Getting Healthy
Hebrew U-Cleveland Clinic In Nanomedicine Alliance
Breaking The Mold On Breast Cancer ›
Read more at http://www.thejewishweek.com/special-sections/healthcare/healthcare-october-2015#cpLxXCIuk74zBo9x.99Enjoy the read,
Gary Rosenblatt
P.S. Remember that our website is always there for you with breaking news and exclusive videos, blogs, opinion pieces, advice columns, and more. Check it out.http://www.thejewishweek.com/?utm_source=October+28%2C+2015+WEDNESDAY+newsletter&utm_campaign=JWMG+10%2F30+newsletter&utm_medium=email
GARY ROSENBLATT
Gary Rosenblatt
BETWEEN THE LINES Gary Rosenblatt
Remembering Rabin: The Man And The Promise
Gary Rosenblatt
I interviewed Yitzhak Rabin on the last evening he spent in America.
Our meeting took place around the dining-room table in his suite at the Waldorf Astoria on a Saturday night in October 1995. The prime minister, wearing an open white shirt and with a cigarette never far from his mouth, spoke with three Jewish journalists in his usual taciturn style, though he seemed to me more shy than cold in nature.
He talked about his just-completed meetings in the U.S. and his plans to convince his countrymen, upon his return, to trust him that making peace with the Palestinians would increase, rather than diminish, security in Israel. He had credibility because he was a military hero with a tough, sober approach to Israel’s needs, a pragmatist who based his policies on strategic analysis. “No longer is it true that the whole world is against us,” he told his countrymen on his election in 1992, seeking to counter a widespread Israeli sense of victimhood. His goal, he said, was for Jews and Arabs “to live together on the same soil in the same land.”
What I remember most vividly about that night was the surreal scene outside the Waldorf after our interview, as the Rabin motorcade was about to leave directly for JFK Airport and the flight home to Tel Aviv. I marveled at the amount of security in the area, with streets closed to traffic all around the hotel and dozens and dozens of police cars, lights flashing, at the ready.
I remember thinking how extraordinary the level of precaution was to protect this one man.
Exactly two weeks later, on leaving a huge peace rally in Tel Aviv, Rabin, who refused to wear a bullet-proof vest in his own country, was shot at point-blank range by Yigal Amir, a 25-year-old Israeli Jew and law student who believed he was fulfilling the mitzvah of rodef, the obligation to pursue someone who seeks to bring harm or death to others.
In this case, Amir symbolized those who believed Rabin’s concessions to the Palestinians would result in national suicide for Israel. Critics of the Oslo Accords, initiated two years earlier, had asserted in increasingly large and angry public demonstrations and media statements, that the prime minister had to be stopped, at all costs.
Looking back at The Jewish Week’s reporting on the political climate in Israel and among American Jews in the months leading up to the assassination, I recall how ugly the debates were within our own community at the time. With the stakes so high — Israel’s continued existence at stake — some on the hard right characterized Rabin in the harshest of terms. Likud Party leader Benjamin Netanyahu, the former and future prime minister, was criticized for speaking at a large rally where some demonstrators shouted that Rabin was a traitor, a murderer; there were posters depicting the Israeli leader as a Nazi.
A number of Orthodox rabbis here and in Israel spoke out against the peace agreement in religious terms and some called on Israeli soldiers to defy any army orders that would cede Jewish land.
In an instant, the deep religious and political tensions within world Jewry spilled over from hateful words to a deadly deed.
It’s difficult to convey the degree of shock, anger and shame prompted by the murder of the prime minister at the hands of a fellow Jew. There was an overwhelming outpouring of grief, and a sense of respect and affection from world leaders as well as the world Jewish community for the soldier-turned-peacemaker. I wrote at the time of the feelings of remorse and responsibility many of us felt for words not spoken and actions not taken as the bitter factionalism grew. Neither the proponents nor the critics of the Oslo peace process were blameless.
Many of the most vocal and angry critics of the deal were observant Jews living in communities in the West Bank who believed the ground was holy and feared their homes and land would be displaced. They, in turn, were marginalized by many Israelis as less worthy of protection than their fellow Jews. Rabin himself referred to them as “crybabies” and an obstacle to peace.
One tragic lesson was that there was no longer a distinction between character assassination and assassination.
“It is now our burden to make Rabin’s death the tragedy that opens Jewish eyes and hearts to our self-destructive nature,” a woman from Kings Point, N.Y., wrote in a letter published in The Jewish Week a few days after Rabin’s state funeral. “His death must be the catalyst that enables us all to accept our fellow Jews, one to another, and recognize with dignity the differences that divide us.”
Describing a feeling shared by many, she wrote: “Rabin’s greatest legacy may not only be peace between Jew and Arab but peace between Jew and Jew.”
But her heartfelt words ring hollow two decades later. For a short time Oslo brought hope, but it turned out to be a false hope. The dream of conciliation has become a nightmare of unresolved conflict. Arab frustration with the status quo has led to murderous attacks on Jews, confirming Jewish fears that many Palestinians want Jewish victims, not Jewish neighbors.
Peace between Palestinians and Israel is now but a distant dream as yet another wave of terror threatens Jewish lives — and Jewish life — in Israel. Sadly, too, we Jews have not learned to treat each other with respect, to appreciate that our differences are grounded in a common concern for the Jewish future. Rather, our internal debates, whether on Mideast peace or, most recently, the Iran nuclear agreement, have grown increasingly hostile, each side convinced the other’s policies would bring disaster.
In death Yitzchak Rabin was able to accomplish what he could not in life — to unite us as Jews, if only for a brief moment. But that moment of sadness and soul searching soon evaporated like the tears shed at his funeral. And the man who hoped to lead the way from resistance to reconciliation is mourned for who he was and the promise he stood for. Today he is remembered as the one who might have made a difference had he lived. But we will never know.
Gary@jewishweek.orgRead More
MUSINGS
Rabbi David Wolpe
MUSINGS
Rabbi David Wolpe
The World's Alarm Clock
The enemy of the Jew becomes the enemy of the world. That simple, albeit mysterious, historical rule has been repeatedly demonstrated. Regimes and ideologies that target Jews never stop there; they are imperialistic by nature, and begin by identifying the “other” — and Jews have been the quintessential other — and move on to target ever-larger circles.
So why is there not more sympathy for the Jewish people? Among the thousand theories perhaps there is no improving on Maurice Samuel’s simple declaration: “No one loves their alarm clock.” Jews have been the disturbers of the world’s sleep. Long before the Western world knew it was fighting a battle with radical Islam, Jews knew. That realization brought them more indifference or contempt than affection.
“The nations of the world will be blessed through you,” God says to Abraham. Pointedly, God does not add, “and they will love you for it.” For most of history, and in much of the world today, there is little love for the Jewish people and their mission. So we should celebrate the reality that in America, as the Pew study demonstrates, Jews have the highest esteem in the eyes of others of all religious groups. Eighty-five percent of Americans say they have a great deal of respect for the Jewish people. Many of our fellow citizens, it seems, trust their alarm clocks.
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.
Dinner at Danny Meyer_s Union Square Cafe. The restaurateur_s new no-tipping policy raises a host of ethical and social issues. Courtesy of Union Square Hospitality Group
TRAVEL
Tipping, Ethics And Travel
Hilary Danailova
This week, like everybody else, we’re talking about tipping.
Tipping is an essential part of travel — whether parking the car in a Midtown garage or dining out in Milan. From spas to bars, hotels to guided tours, trips are full of moments that call for some kind of gratuity.
But how much? What do others leave? What if you don’t have any singles on you?
That’s the kind of awkwardness that Danny Meyer — perhaps the best-known New York Jewish restaurateur — plans to eliminate at the dining establishments run by his Union Square Hospitality Group. Meyer’s recent announcement that he will abolish gratuities in favor of a service charge makes him the latest in a wave of high-end proprietors bucking American tip culture. (See story on page 3.)
Menu prices will rise, but the stated goal is both practical and ethical: reducing the growing income inequality between “front-of-house” workers — the servers, bartenders, and bussers who earn cash tips — and the cooks and dishwashers whose low hourly wages make recruitment difficult.
Many diners have reacted with joy, relieved to be free of that post-prandial moment of mathematical reckoning. Allusions to the European service-charge system abound; Meyer’s website bio features a quote about how travel has influenced him, and indeed, the cultural particularity of tipping features prominently in conversations around this issue.
Who hasn’t wondered how much to hand the foreign taxi driver? Or been surprised by a waiter pressing the change into our hands, insisting we must have forgotten it? Here in the U.S., tipping is a gesture fraught with powerful, unspoken motives — from one-upmanship to generosity to the desire to impress.
These impulses translate clumsily. While it’s unfathomable to many Americans that a worker wouldn’t want more money, many foreigners look askance at our lavish gratuities, which they see as flashy and uncouth. But it’s worth noting that European salaries overall are far more standardized, with less disparity between professions, and a less nebulous “living” wage.
Then there’s the issue of hospitality — the personalized service that many Americans cherish, and that may suffer if the tip incentive is withdrawn.
I have European friends who grouse that rather than encouraging good service, American tippers upset the economic equilibrium by making locals look cheap. Overseas, I’ve often found myself in a kind of moral quandary: Which is nobler — rewarding good service by an employee who may be scraping by, or respecting local frugality?
The anti-tipping fervor of some Americans seems imbued with a similar moral murkiness; Meyer’s move strikes many as a questionable redistribution of income, with cooks potentially making more at the expense of servers.
“From an ethical point of view, people should be paying the wages they feel are fair,” opined Dean Moses Pava at Yeshiva University’s Sy Syms School of Business, where he holds the Alvin Einbender Chair in Business Ethics. Pava took a jaundiced view of the anti-tip initiative, arguing that if owners think cooks are underpaid, they should simply pay them more.
“From a Jewish point of view, one of the biggest problems we face is income distribution,” Pava told me. “But this is Robin Hood, taking from the middle and giving to the bottom!” Acknowledging the issue’s complexity, Pava noted that tipping gives rise to its own ethical problem — the incentive for tax fraud in the form of undeclared cash — and concluded that strictly on its own merits, a better wage for underpaid cooks is “a step in the right direction.”
Meyer was too busy to comment this week, but I spoke to a handful of well-traveled Jewish restaurateurs about this complex matrix of ethics, finance and culture. Some warned of a decline in service, unsupportable price hikes and diminished server pay when salaries replace tips. Others alluded to Jewish social values and the broader movement toward higher minimum wages.
“Ultimately, it’s a progressive direction,” said Joel Teitolman, co-owner of the Mile End Montreal-style Jewish delis in Brooklyn and Manhattan. “In a higher-price-point restaurant, it makes a lot of sense; it does kind of create a level playing field.”
Steve Cook, a partner in the Philadelphia-based CookNSolo restaurant group — the team behind the white-hot Israeli restaurant Zahav — called the no-tip trend “a correction,” adding, “I think it’s a good thing for the industry.”
But it wouldn’t work at Mile End, Teitolman said, nor at many lower-priced eateries, where margins are thinner. CookNSolo came to the same conclusion — that it was impossible to maintain existing pay levels for servers while balancing wages and prices.
Cook’s father was a rabbi, and “social justice issues were always prominent discussions in our house,” he recalled. Both Cook and his partner, Michael Solomonov, feel strongly about Jewish values of generosity: “It just makes sense that everyone should do well.”
Teitolman shared a similar sentiment. “Our company is our family, and that is something that I think stems from our Jewish values,” he said. “Noah” — partner Noah Bernamoff — “and I make decisions sometimes that are not the best financial decisions for our business, but are the best decisions for our family that we’ve created here.”
If there’s any consensus, it’s that generosity and fairness are Jewish values — but not exclusively so. And that regardless of where we are in the world, the transactions we make have an impact.
editor@jewishweek.org
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ISRAEL NEWSTwo Decades Later, What If Rabin Had Lived?
Michele Chabin
Contributing Editor
Amid current terror spate, left struggles to make ‘peace with security’ not sound naïve.
A young woman mourns Yitzchak Rabin days after his assassination. Getty Images
Jerusalem — Twenty years after Yigal Amir, a far-right-wing religious nationalist and law student, gunned down Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin at a Tel Aviv peace rally, members of Israel’s peace camp still wonder what might have been.
This week, Hadag Nahash, the popular Israeli hip-hop band, released a new song to commemorate the assassination, which Israelis are marking this week with memorials, lectures and a Saturday night rally in the Tel Aviv square named in his memory.
The song, “What Would Have Been If,” released in collaboration with the Yitzhak Rabin Center during the latest wave of Palestinian terror, addresses the nation’s collective exhaustion and unfulfilled yearning for peace.
“But you should know,” the group sings, as if addressing the slain leader directly in a song with a mournful yet soulful, almost gospel feeling, “that there are moments / When I see high above the Cypress trees / And above the heads of my exhausted people / A bubble floats and inside three words: ‘What would have been if.’” (In Hebrew, the phrase is said in three words.)
Yariv Oppenheimer, director general of Peace Now, told The Jewish Week he often asks himself “What if?” It’s a question, of course, that has been
asked about Presidents Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy.
“I wonder, first of all, about Israel’s character had this horrible event not taken place,” Oppenheimer said. “I think we would be a much less violent, more democratic society. I believe there would be a feeling of unity. I honestly believe there would have been a good chance to conclude the peace process and achieve peace with our neighbors. I would hope Israel would be the place we all dreamed it could be.”
The assassination, Oppenheimer said, had a “chilling effect” on the peace camp so strong that, to this day, leftists are less vocal than they used to be.
“The political climate is much less tolerant and people, including decision-makers, have the feeling that if you say something others don’t like, you could be killed for it. Rabin’s murder crossed a societal line we never thought would be crossed.”
Oppenheimer believes that, if Rabin had lived, he would have beaten Netanyahu during the 1996 election.
“If Shimon Peres was nearly able to beat Netanyahu, Rabin, who was at the height of his career, could have. He’s still remembered as a general, the man people thought could bring peace with security.”
Yet, notes Seth Frantzman this week in the Jerusalem Post, surveys in Israel continually show that Israelis are losing touch with Rabin’s legacy. A recent Maariv poll revealed that only 65 percent of respondents thought Yigal Amir killed Rabin. Other data shows large segments of the population pay no heed to Rabin. Former Knesset member and commentator Yossi Sarid claims that this is part of the “second assassination” of Rabin, his being forgotten.
But Oppenheimer, the Peace Now activist, insisted Israel’s political left wing “isn’t dead.”
“It isn’t effective enough, but it’s not dead,” he said. “It’s still fighting.” But he acknowledged that it has yet to find a leader with the military and diplomatic credentials “who can make ‘Peace with Security’ not sound naïve.”
Rightists say the political left may be alive but it’s hardly kicking. The “peace” rallies it has held around the country over the past couple of weeks, often in conjunction with moderate Israeli Arabs to denounce both terror and xenophobia, have attracted perhaps 20,000 people in total.
Knesset member Stav Shaffir, an outspoken member of the Zionist Union Party, believes the low turnout doesn’t reflect the real status of the left and center-left. What it does reflect, she said, is a woeful lack of coordination.
“If you add up all the left and center-left parties, from Meretz to Kulanu, you’ll see we have more support than the right-wing parties,” Shaffir told The Jewish Week. “The problem is that the two-state camp supporters aren’t united. If we really want a solution to the conflict, we have to replace the government with a government that is both pragmatic and pro-solution and not one full of fear and despair. I believe we can do that.”
Gerald Steinberg, a Bar-Ilan University political scientist, believes the center-right is on the rise for the first time in a long time.
“This was the best showing they’ve had in an election in years,” he said of the March 2015 election the Likud Party won, but not by a landslide. “The center-left is growing and it wouldn’t surprise me if there was a Herzog-Netanyahu government in the next few months,” Steinberg said, referring to opposition leader Isaac Herzog and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Steinberg said Herzog, who heads the Zionist Union, sees himself as a centrist pragmatist much like Rabin. Many Israelis see him that way as well, he added.
“Herzog and other centrist leaders are seen as a realistic alternative to the more fringe right wing dominating the Likud,” he said. “Herzog and the left realize they can’t force a peace plan that most Israelis consider unrealistic.”
Steinberg insisted Herzog and Netanyahu aren’t as far apart politically as most people think.
“Netanyahu has taken steps among his constituency considered moderate and influenced by the left. Declaring there can be no Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount is just one example. The differences between him and Herzog on Iran are related to style, not substance.”
The challenge for Herzog, Steinberg said, is to resist calls from the “radical left” to push for a Palestinian state.
“At the moment the majority of Israelis fear a return of Oslo and other failures,” he said. “If being left is seen as promoting an unrealistic peace it won’t succeed.”
Oppenheimer from Peace Now acknowledged that when Rabin and the left were supporting the Oslo Accords 20 years ago, they failed to recognize the genuine fear many Israelis felt over the prospect of arming Palestinian police and relinquishing land to the Palestinians.
Should the peace camp once again have the chance to push for a viable peace process, “I would respect much more the needs of the public to feel secure,” he said.
That chance, say most Israelis, seems like a distant one. As if to sum up the country’s somber mood as it struggles through the latest spate of terror attacks, Hadag Nahash sings, “The present is known with no need to expand / How it drains and shakes how it pressures with no quiet ... / And our untrustworthy future what does it have in store / What more can it bury.”
And yet a hope, however distant, survives. The band concludes …
“And to think that you had the courage to change / And to think you knew how to plant hopes / And to think that you raised up to fly and went far enough to see / And to think that you managed to understand: What would be if …”
editor@jewishweek.orgRead More
NEW YORKThe Tricks Of The Trade Shuls
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
Established in a bygone era, three Midtown congregations stitching together a path forward.
The Garment Center Congregation now attracts worshipers who are largely professionals. Michael Datikash/JW
Two small nail holes on one of the plaster walls at the front door of a building on West 29th Street are the only hints of the site’s rich Jewish past.
The building, 230 W. 29th, was from 1965 to 1995 the home of the Fur Center Synagogue, one of a handful of small but thriving congregations in Midtown that were established in the middle of the last century to serve the spiritual needs of specific trades; the holes, at shoulder height, likely helped hold a mezuzah in place.
A victim of shifting Jewish demographics and the economic forces of globalization, the old synagogue today houses the Chelsea Subud Center, headquarters of the non-denominational spiritual movement based on the “experience which arises from within.” Scaffolding stands on the street for repairs on the building’s brick façade.
Besides the small holes, no Magen David or Hebrew letters are visible outside. Joan Rosenfelt, a member of the congregation for a decade in its final years who now lives in Sullivan County, remembers the synagogue’s halcyon days. “It was a lovely place,” headed by a young charismatic rabbi, she said. “It was a beehive of activity.”
That is the past.
Here is the present.
On the sidewalk outside the Millinery Center Synagogue, on Sixth Avenue at West 38th Street, pedestrians browse through piles of sheet sets and towels stacked on small tables. The items, bought wholesale, sometimes at closeout sales, are sold for a profit, bringing some much-needed funds into the congregation, whose original membership base of men and women in the hat-making industry is largely gone.
On the sidewalk outside the Actors’ Temple, a half-mile northwest on West 47th Street between Eighth and Ninth avenues, theatergoers line up several nights a week to attend the plays staged in the synagogue’s sanctuary. The temple has rented its space to Off-Broadway shows since 2006 to supplement the congregation’s limited income, which decreased once the performers in vaudeville and television, who gave the congregation its name and character, disappeared, dying or moving to Los Angeles.
And outside the Garment Center Congregation … actually, there is no outside now. The congregation, based for a half-century in a building on West 40th Street around the corner from Seventh Avenue, has been meeting since the summer in a second-floor office suite two blocks away on Broadway. The congregation will meet in its temporary home for the next three or four years while its site is torn down, to be rebuilt in expanded quarters, part of a 20-story hotel complex. The synagogue’s move drew attention because the developer, Sharif El-Gamal, is a Muslim and better known as one of the backers of the scaled-back plan to build an Islamic community center two blocks from the World Trade Center.
The three surviving synagogues, and the now-defunct Fur Center Synagogue, represent a small slice of 20th-century Jewish history, a phenomenon that has roots in the Jewish communities of Europe but that has a uniquely New York flavor.
“Once upon a time,” said Jonathan Sarna, professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University, “many synagogues brought together people of similar trades.” The butchers’ synagogue, the bakers’ synagogue, the tailors’ synagogue. Particularly in the Old Country.
“In the U.S., it’s very uncommon,” Sarna said. “It was more usual in this country to bring together people based on where they came from [landsmen].”
Only New York City had the critical mass of Jews who dominated certain professions to be able to form such congregations, Sarna says. “To my knowledge, outsiders were not kept out, but they did often feel like outsiders.
“Of course, today,” he said, “when most Jews live far from their place of occupation, these synagogues are less needed. There are certainly synagogues known for having large numbers of doctors, or large numbers of folks in high-tech, but the synagogue is not named for them and does not cater to them on that basis. Most Jews today are not exclusively interested in interacting just with people in their own business — or part of their business culture.”
Which makes the survival of Midtown’s few trade-based congregations, and their efforts to stay afloat, all the more remarkable.
The Midtown congregations were formed for the sake of Jewish furriers, hat makers and garment workers — the Actors’ Temple began as a standard neighborhood house of worship, before it began its outreach to members of the entertainment profession — who typically worked within a mile or two of their fellow tradesmen. Most lived on the Lower East Side or the outer boroughs, taking the subway to work. Many wanted a place where they could say memorial prayers during the day or on Jewish holidays; others, somewhere where they could pray on Shabbat or Jewish holidays before heading off to their jobs.
Typical is Marc Abramson, executive vice president of the Garment Center Congregation, who said, “Basically we get members who come to say Kaddish.
“We’re the second shul” for most members, who belong to a first congregation where they live, said Abramson. Which means the trade synagogues can’t charge much for membership — typically $75 to $150 a year, far under the four-figure range of most area congregations.
For all the extant trade synagogues, membership is a fluid concept; the congregations count as members men and women who show up regularly, or occasionally, making a token donation or none at all.
The synagogues, all facing diminished membership numbers (the original members’ children went into more prestigious, better-paying fields), buildings in various degrees of disrepair (leaky roofs are a common complaint), and shaky budgets (overhead is kept to a minimum), are a study in survival; all have reached out to a new profile of members and worshippers, while trying, with varying degrees of success, to hold onto the remaining members of their founding professions.
CPAs and IT experts and attorneys have largely replaced the manual laborers.
The Actors’ Temple has the best record of maintaining its ties to the type of people who gave the congregation its fame. “We do have actors and performers,” said Jill Hausman, the synagogue’s rabbi and cantor. But they’re a minority of the membership. “We don’t have the big names.”
Rabbi Hausman is a veteran singer who previously served as part-time spiritual leader of the Boro Park Progressive Synagogue in Brooklyn and as an environmental biologist. She has made an effort to stress the building’s unique past and to make entertainers feel at home, by inviting members to perform or speak at the synagogue, and by posting on the walls biographies of the boldface personalities (like E.G. Robinson, Sophie Tucker and some of the Three Stooges) whose names appear on the synagogue’s stained-glass windows and memorial plaques.
“I felt accepted there,” said Steve Greenstein, an actor-writer who lives in northern New Jersey and has belonged to the Actors’ Temple since he moved back to the Northeast from Los Angeles in 1999. “I needed a place to worship,” where he would not be “harangued” by people unfamiliar with life in the entertainment industry, he said. At the Temple, he said, he hears no silly questions.
The congregation’s finances are shaky, said Rabbi Hausman, “a fulltime rabbi on a part-time salary”; membership was down to a dozen people when she came in 2006; now it’s up to 200. A few dozen show up on Friday nights, fewer on Saturday mornings.
To pay for repairs, the Temple holds occasional fundraising events, conducts a High Holidays appeal, and rents out its sanctuary to Off-Broadway, non-union theatrical productions. “We don’t always have access to our space,” the rabbi says.
“Not Your Grandfather’s Temple!” a flyer declares.
Worship services there take place on Shabbat, “a Reform-style service with a Conservative prayer book.” The Temple, which was at first Orthodox then became Conservative, is unaffiliated — “post-denominational,” Rabbi Hausman said.
Of the three still-surviving trade synagogues, the Millinery Center Synagogue has the most distinctive approach to fundraising.
Tuvia Yamnik, a part-time cantor and handler, peddles sheets and towels outside several afternoons a week, shouting “100 percent Egyptian cotton!” and splitting the profits with the shul.
The money helps, says Rabbi Hayim Wahrman, who has served there since 1992. The congregation “was wealthy in the ’50s and ’60s,” he says nostalgically.
The rabbi leads services, teaches Kabbalah classes, recruits members, books concerts there and orchestrates the building’s repair.
Inside, it is musty, the wooden walls peeling and the bookshelves collapsing, the result of recent flooding.
Mendy Mittelman, from Flatbush, a frequent davener at the Synagogue, shows a visitor the damage after a recent Mincha service. “The floor,” he said, pointing down. “The roof,” he said, pointing up. He keeps pointing around the sanctuary.
Does the disarray bother him? No. “It’s convenient” – the Synagogue is near his midtown office.
Compared to the Actor’s Temple and the Millinery Center Synagogue, the Garment Center Congregation is in the best financial condition.
“We have a [full-time] rabbi and a 99-year lease for a dollar” — a dollar a year rent, arranged about 50 years ago by Albert List, a wealthy industrialist and backer of the congregation who bought the land and arranged the favorable terms, said Arnold Brown, a retired garment manufacturer who has been an active member for a few decades. The synagogue runs no activities besides services every day. “If you have very little overhead,” Brown said, “you can maintain a shul.”
“We never miss a minyan” — the required ten men in an Orthodox service, he said.
The rabbi is Norman Listokin, a raconteur who greets — and alternately berates — both first-time visitors and old-time members, establishing an atmosphere of familiarity.
Rabbi Listokin declined to be interviewed for this article, but Brown and Abramson said the number of men and women attending the synagogue’s daily services has remained constant since the move to the temporary quarters.
The Garment Center Congregation’s future?
Brown and Abramson said they are optimistic and looking forward to returning to the congregation’s old site; the new building will feature a refurbished sanctuary and two floors below for social events. The area that was home to the garment workers who founded the congregation still attracts a large number of Jewish visitors and Jews working in nearby office buildings, Abramson said. “Midtown is exploding.”
steve@jewishweek.org
Read more at http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/new-york/tricks-trade-shuls#meDmTSR6kQuu73YH.99
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NEW YORKDressed To Thrill, And Coexist
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
Israeli couture bridal designers hit high mark in NYC, despite some global pushback.
Designer Merav Solo with model Lara Vosburgh after a recent show. Hannah Dreyfus/JW
Merav Solo spends her working life at the seam — the delicate one between pieces of a wedding gown, and the even more delicate one between pieces of the patchwork quilt that is Israel society.
“It doesn’t matter if a bride is Arab, secular Israeli, charedi or Druze — they want the same thing when they visit me,” the Haifa-based couture Israeli bridal gown designer said. While a Druze bride might request no transparent lace and sleeves that reach the wrists, a secular Israeli bride might want a plunging neckline or backless number. In spite of the complicated cultural mores, differences Solo must negotiate sensitively but stylishly, she said, “Every woman wants to feel beautiful and sexy on her wedding day.”
Solo was speaking at a reception recently following an event during New York International Bridal Week, an annual gathering of more than 250 bridal gown designers from around the world. She had just watched as models paraded her seductive gowns down a runway at Pier 94 on the Hudson River. As designers, buyers and models in sleek white gowns mingled and sipped flutes of Champagne, Solo, dressed in a short black dress, was beaming. In a career spanning more than 20 years, this was the first time her creations were being shown in New York.
The Oct. 11 show, which exclusively featured Israeli designers, was also a first. According to noted Israeli bridal designer Pnina Tournay, known for her risqué designs, the show marked a “historic moment” for Israeli designers.
Inside the Pier 94 hangar, with sweeping views of the Hudson, eight emerging Israeli designers sent their lines down the runway to a medley of upbeat Middle Eastern tunes, including a remix of “Hava Nagila.” Organized in part by the Israeli Foreign and Tourism ministries, the show highlighted Israeli designers’ influence in the world of bridal fashion.
According to Susan Glick, vice president of women’s apparel at Merchandise Mart Properties, the corporation that hosts New York bridal fashion week, the last three [shows] have shown an “influx of couture Israeli bridal designers.
“At first you just saw a couple [Israeli designers], and now buyers are asking for Israeli bridal couture,” said Glick. This year, more than 20 Israeli designers showed their collections, a high for the market, said a representative from the Israeli trade ministry.
Samantha Kane, a brand management executive at Brides, the bridal fashion magazine of Condé Nast, said that editors are showing an increasing interest in Israeli designers, particularly Inbal Dror, a leading designer from Tel Aviv who completed her fashion studies in Israel. While it is difficult to quantify the influence of Israeli fashion designers, Kane said, their collective name recognition has gone up drastically.
To be sure, Israeli designers are no strangers to international acclaim. In the wake of Lea Gottlieb, who made a splash with her swimsuit designs going back to the 1960s, a handful of well-known Israelis already are established in the fashion world; they include Alber Elbaz from the Parisian house of Lanvin and Yigal Azrouel, who has a boutique in the meatpacking district.
At New York’s bridal fashion week, this year a total of 22 Israeli designers, including the eight participating in the show with Solo, had booths.
The weeklong fashion affair is considered one of the leading commercial events in the American wedding market, which generates revenue estimated at more than $54 billion a year. Seven percent of this amount is spent on bridal gowns. Six runway shows over the course of three days introduced more than 450 different collections, said Glick. Though bridal tradeshows are held in cities around the world, including London, Barcelona, and Chicago, New York’s show is among the largest, she said.
There was also a significant increase in buyer and press attendance, according to a fashion week sales representative.
Since Tournay burst onto the scene in the early 2000s, Israelis have developed a special niche in bridal fashion, said Israel’s economic minister to North America, Nili Shalev. Tournay, whose curve-hugging collection is housed at Kleinfeld, one of New York’s most well-known bridal salons, is known for introducing sexy, revealing dresses to the mainstream, and for her role as lead designer on the reality TV hit, “Say Yes to the Dress,” which airs on the American network TLC.
“Israeli designers are willing to be adventurous, even in the most conventional settings,” said Shalev.
On the runway, the designers’ bold choices were evident. Sequins, crystals and plunging necklines seemed favorites among buyers, and several looks were completed with impressive silver tiaras and crowns. Many of the gowns had a vintage feel, with one fringed number inspired by the 1920s.
Still, despite their sense of creativity, Israeli designers often struggle to sell their products in European and Eastern markets, said Yoav Davis, a branding consultant for one of the featured designers. He recalled being curtly turned away by a boutique in Dubai after he mentioned that his client was Israeli.
“The Israeli fashion industry is sadly not immune to boycotts,” said Davis, referring to the global movement (known by the acronym BDS — Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) to boycott Israeli goods and servies. He added that in Arab countries, many of which have thriving bridal industries, it is “impossible” to market gowns by Israeli designers.
“It’s good to be in New York, where the creativity and raw talent of these designers is appreciated,” Davis added.
Tournay, who attended the show and stayed for the reception, told The Jewish Week that she will never “shy away from my Israeli identity,” despite global challenges. “I am proud of who I am and where I’m from,” she said, long blonde hair styled to perfection.
Yoav Rish, another Israeli designer who sent wedding gowns down the runway, grew up in a charedi family in the city of Petah Tikvah, east of Tel Aviv. From a young age, he loved experimenting with different types of fabric. His parents, though surprised by their son’s unconventional passion, were very supportive.
Today, Rish lives in Tel Aviv with his male partner and their two daughters.
“I learned to sew on my grandmother’s sewing machine,” said Rish, minutes before the show was about to begin. He wore black skinny jeans and short hair shaved on one side. When asked about further training in fashion, Rish clarified that he is completely self-taught. His designs, which include two-piece wedding dresses with skirt and top, are known for being comfortable and relatively affordable. (His gowns typically range from $7,000-8,000.)
“Hope you enjoy!” he said, before rushing off to perfect the models’ looks backstage.
After the runway show, designers returned to their booths to meet with buyers and brides. At her booth, Solo reflected on fashion as a bridge between cultures. When she designs for Druze and charedi brides, she makes sure to cover more. A secular Israeli bride often wants to push the envelope regarding what to reveal, or not reveal. Still, a desire to look “unique” is shared by all.
“When you speak with brides, you realize we are all the same person,” Solo said. Though her English was broken, she seemed to be grasping at a more philosophical point. “It’s not just about dresses, it’s about beginnings,” she said, using the Hebrew word for beginning, techila. “Every woman wants a beautiful beginning.” Oslo And The Politics Of Meaning
Jonathan Mark
Associate Editor
About the broken shards of Oslo, Lerner says, “You have to speak with compassion to everyone involved in this.” Michael Lerner
The Oslo years now seem as improbable as a dream, outside of time, headlines from messianic to murder, answered prayers turning to screams. But when Michael Lerner, founder and editor of Tikkun, the leading Jewish leftist journal, sat on the sun-drenched White House lawn, Sept. 13, 1993, invited by the president to witness the signing of the Oslo Accords and the epic handshake between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin and Yasir Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization – it was vindication, not just for Lerner but for all the peaceniks who for years were mocked for their naiveté.
Before there was J Street, before Peter Beinart, back in the days before there was any serious Jewish “pro-peace” lobby, at a time when Jewish peace groups rose and fell like colts finding their legs, there was Tikkun, founded in 1986, critical of the right and what Lerner calls “the religio-phobic” secular left. In 1988, then-Gov. Bill Clinton wrote a complimentary letter to Lerner about Tikkun. In 1993, the Washington Post described Lerner as Hillary Clinton’s “guru.” The first lady gave a speech invoking the “politics of meaning,” Lerner’s creed that statecraft had to be soulcraft, addressing “ethical and spiritual needs.”
That Lerner, a grizzled Berkeley-San Francisco veteran of the radical SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and Free Speech Movement of the 1960s, should find himself sitting on the White House lawn … well, what wasn’t possible on a day when Rabin and Arafat were shaking hands as if the previous 50 years were a game of tennis?
Lerner, frequently aligned with Israel’s own left-wingers, had declared that Israel’s response to the first intifada was “morally incorrect,” underlined by then-defense minister Rabin’s famous order to Israeli soldiers to “break their bones.” Lerner, ordained as a Jewish Renewal rabbi by Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and leading a Renewal synagogue “without walls” in Berkeley, says that several congregants once told him, “We Jews have become Pharaoh to the Palestinian people — so we would be hypocrites to sit around our Passover table celebrating our own freedom, rejoicing at the way the Egyptians were stricken… while ignoring what Israel is doing today in the name of the Jewish people.” Lerner told them, “This is precisely the kind of discussion that is appropriate for the seder table.”
After the Rabin-Arafat handshake, Lerner found himself shmoozing with Rabin in the Israeli embassy. Lerner, now 73, recalls telling Rabin, “If you want to make this peace a real peace, go back and tell our brothers and sisters to learn Arabic; embrace the Palestinians with warmth; see them as created in the image of God…”
Lerner remembers, “When I said ‘God’ he rolled his eyes,” and Lerner laughs at the memory. Rabin was ultra-secular, perhaps the most secular leader Israel ever had.
“I urged him to make it a warm peace, not a cold peace,” says Lerner. “He went back to Israel and did exactly the opposite. Instead of saying, ‘Here is a chance for a new reality,’ he said, ‘I don’t trust them, I’m not going to implement this too quickly.’ He didn’t challenge the fear, he played to it. The peace movement in Israel was very critical of him.”
What could Rabin have done? “He should have stopped the building of any settlements,” says Lerner, “offering significant benefits and incentives for settlers moving back from the West Bank.”
But the Oslo Accords didn’t say one word about settlements being illegal, or settlers having to leave. According to Oslo, the matter of settlements was to be negotiated down an unmapped, unpaved road. “That’s right,” says Lerner, “Oslo didn’t deal with it. Of course, settlers should be able to stay. No country in the world should have a policy of ‘no Jews allowed.’ Arabs live in Israel according to the laws of Israel, so Jews should have every right to live on the West Bank, by the laws of Palestine.” It can work “if both sides really want peace.”
In the early 1990s, Lerner was commuting between the United States and Israel, where his son was in the army, with Lerner’s blessing, “a manifestation of my love for Israel. I was in Israel at least twice a month because I wanted to give my son a place to go on Shabbos, if he had leave. I washed his clothes on Friday afternoons, and made Shabbos meals for him.”
Lerner would sometimes find himself in the Knesset dining room, visiting political friends. He’d see Rabin there. “I knew him before he was prime minister. Rabin was always alone. Everybody else was sitting with other people. Nobody came to talk to him. Why? Because he was impossible to talk to. He was arrogant to everyone. We had several conversations but he had a commander’s perspective. Rabin was a general with a military consciousness. He thought if had a plan, people should follow.”
Lerner says, “When I tried to speak to him about the spiritual needs of the people, Rabin was just deaf to that. He didn’t know what I was talking about. He had very little capacity to communicate in a caring way to those who disagreed with him, whether on the left or the right.”
Few politicians were as contemptuous of a constituency as Rabin was of the settlers. As far back as 1979, Rabin in his memoirs, “Pinkas Sherut,” called settlers “a cancer in the body of Israeli democracy.” In the agreement known as Oslo II, Rabin placed Rachel’s Tomb (the second most visited holy site) under complete Palestinian civil and military control.
Two Orthodox Knesset members pleaded with him, would Rabin give away Ben-Gurion’s grave? MK Menachem Porush reportedly stood up and embraced Rabin, saying through tears, “Reb Yitzchak … You are planning to give away Mama Ruchl’s grave. The Jewish people will never forgive you if you abandon Mama’s kever [tomb].’”
Rabin relented. Nevertheless, Dan Ephron, author of “Killing A King” (Norton), a new book about the assassination, writes, “By late 1993,” Rabin already “had enough of the settlers. ... Rabin had virtually no skills in diplomacy — he couldn’t hide his contempt. … Rabin had no religious sentiment at all.”
Are all settlers guilty? Yigal Amir wasn’t a settler but a Modern Orthodox law student from Herzliya.
“Not all settlers,” says Lerner, “but I would assume it was at least 10,000-20,000,” out of more than 100,000 settlers. “A minority that was very articulate and active in attempting to prevent the implementation of the policy of the State of Israel. Like other criminals they should have been arrested, tried and put into prison — like I was!” Lerner laughs, admitting that he was arrested for anti-Vietnam war activity that, like settler protests, shut the roads, demeaned the president, and tried preventing the implementation of American policy.
Twenty years later, the dream has faded, if it hasn’t died. Mahmoud Abbas told the U.N. that the Palestinians were no longer bound by Oslo. In fact, wrote Scott Anderson in The New York Times, “The Palestinians, seeing themselves as the aggrieved party, have never taken the initiative in offering up peace terms, and whatever the Israelis have offered has never been enough.”
As for the broken shards of Oslo, Lerner suggests, “the only way to speak about this conflict is to speak in a compassionate tone to both peoples. You have to speak with compassion to everyone involved in this,” from the settlers to Shuafat, a Palestinian village. Both peoples are still in the image of God. “That’s why I feel a lot of compassion to the settlers,” first one makes peace with his own, “not the violent among them but the overwhelming majority of the settlers are good and decent people.”
Does he ever hear from Hillary anymore? “All I can tell you is that in the last conversation we had I promised I would never answer that question.”
editor@Jewishweek.orgRead More
The Jewish Week
Comedy, Film & Television, The Schmear Chronicles
The Star Wars franchise itself is an ever-expanding galaxy of perennial sequels, prequels, and in-between-quels. Now with Star Wars: Episode VII The Force Awakens set to come out on December 18, the legacy continues.
With all of the wisdom, spiritual forces, debates of good vs. bad, examination of body and soul, philosophical rhetoric and of course, shidduchs, floating through space, thematic Jewish parallels run rampant in the Galactic Empire.
Yoda is the resident rabbi offering spiritual guidance; Obi-Wan Kenobi is the masterful mentor who trains young Jewish boys to become men before entering the real world (#bar/bat-mitzvahs); Han Solo is a rebellious loner who later learns the importance of community and striving for a greater good (aka tikkun olam); Luke Skywalker is the young but promising apprentice who has lofty career aspirations and Princess Leia ... There is no way to prove she didn’t change the spelling.
Because we can’t help ourselves, here are 10 quotes from the original Star Wars trilogy that could also be applied to Jewish scenarios.
Watch the official The Force Awakens trailer here:
The Star Wars franchise itself is an ever-expanding galaxy of perennial sequels, prequels, and in-between-quels. Now with Star Wars: Episode VII The Force Awakens set to come out on December 18, the legacy continues.
With all of the wisdom, spiritual forces, debates of good vs. bad, examination of body and soul, philosophical rhetoric and of course, shidduchs, floating through space, thematic Jewish parallels run rampant in the Galactic Empire.
Yoda is the resident rabbi offering spiritual guidance; Obi-Wan Kenobi is the masterful mentor who trains young Jewish boys to become men before entering the real world (#bar/bat-mitzvahs); Han Solo is a rebellious loner who later learns the importance of community and striving for a greater good (aka tikkun olam); Luke Skywalker is the young but promising apprentice who has lofty career aspirations and Princess Leia ... There is no way to prove she didn’t change the spelling.
Because we can’t help ourselves, here are 10 quotes from the original Star Wars trilogy that could also be applied to Jewish scenarios.
Watch the official The Force Awakens trailer here:
TOP STORIES
ISRAEL NEWSTwo Decades Later, What If Rabin Had Lived?
Michele Chabin
Contributing Editor
Amid current terror spate, left struggles to make ‘peace with security’ not sound naïve.
A young woman mourns Yitzchak Rabin days after his assassination. Getty Images
Jerusalem — Twenty years after Yigal Amir, a far-right-wing religious nationalist and law student, gunned down Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin at a Tel Aviv peace rally, members of Israel’s peace camp still wonder what might have been.
This week, Hadag Nahash, the popular Israeli hip-hop band, released a new song to commemorate the assassination, which Israelis are marking this week with memorials, lectures and a Saturday night rally in the Tel Aviv square named in his memory.
The song, “What Would Have Been If,” released in collaboration with the Yitzhak Rabin Center during the latest wave of Palestinian terror, addresses the nation’s collective exhaustion and unfulfilled yearning for peace.
“But you should know,” the group sings, as if addressing the slain leader directly in a song with a mournful yet soulful, almost gospel feeling, “that there are moments / When I see high above the Cypress trees / And above the heads of my exhausted people / A bubble floats and inside three words: ‘What would have been if.’” (In Hebrew, the phrase is said in three words.)
Yariv Oppenheimer, director general of Peace Now, told The Jewish Week he often asks himself “What if?” It’s a question, of course, that has been
asked about Presidents Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy.
“I wonder, first of all, about Israel’s character had this horrible event not taken place,” Oppenheimer said. “I think we would be a much less violent, more democratic society. I believe there would be a feeling of unity. I honestly believe there would have been a good chance to conclude the peace process and achieve peace with our neighbors. I would hope Israel would be the place we all dreamed it could be.”
The assassination, Oppenheimer said, had a “chilling effect” on the peace camp so strong that, to this day, leftists are less vocal than they used to be.
“The political climate is much less tolerant and people, including decision-makers, have the feeling that if you say something others don’t like, you could be killed for it. Rabin’s murder crossed a societal line we never thought would be crossed.”
Oppenheimer believes that, if Rabin had lived, he would have beaten Netanyahu during the 1996 election.
“If Shimon Peres was nearly able to beat Netanyahu, Rabin, who was at the height of his career, could have. He’s still remembered as a general, the man people thought could bring peace with security.”
Yet, notes Seth Frantzman this week in the Jerusalem Post, surveys in Israel continually show that Israelis are losing touch with Rabin’s legacy. A recent Maariv poll revealed that only 65 percent of respondents thought Yigal Amir killed Rabin. Other data shows large segments of the population pay no heed to Rabin. Former Knesset member and commentator Yossi Sarid claims that this is part of the “second assassination” of Rabin, his being forgotten.
But Oppenheimer, the Peace Now activist, insisted Israel’s political left wing “isn’t dead.”
“It isn’t effective enough, but it’s not dead,” he said. “It’s still fighting.” But he acknowledged that it has yet to find a leader with the military and diplomatic credentials “who can make ‘Peace with Security’ not sound naïve.”
Rightists say the political left may be alive but it’s hardly kicking. The “peace” rallies it has held around the country over the past couple of weeks, often in conjunction with moderate Israeli Arabs to denounce both terror and xenophobia, have attracted perhaps 20,000 people in total.
Knesset member Stav Shaffir, an outspoken member of the Zionist Union Party, believes the low turnout doesn’t reflect the real status of the left and center-left. What it does reflect, she said, is a woeful lack of coordination.
“If you add up all the left and center-left parties, from Meretz to Kulanu, you’ll see we have more support than the right-wing parties,” Shaffir told The Jewish Week. “The problem is that the two-state camp supporters aren’t united. If we really want a solution to the conflict, we have to replace the government with a government that is both pragmatic and pro-solution and not one full of fear and despair. I believe we can do that.”
Gerald Steinberg, a Bar-Ilan University political scientist, believes the center-right is on the rise for the first time in a long time.
“This was the best showing they’ve had in an election in years,” he said of the March 2015 election the Likud Party won, but not by a landslide. “The center-left is growing and it wouldn’t surprise me if there was a Herzog-Netanyahu government in the next few months,” Steinberg said, referring to opposition leader Isaac Herzog and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Steinberg said Herzog, who heads the Zionist Union, sees himself as a centrist pragmatist much like Rabin. Many Israelis see him that way as well, he added.
“Herzog and other centrist leaders are seen as a realistic alternative to the more fringe right wing dominating the Likud,” he said. “Herzog and the left realize they can’t force a peace plan that most Israelis consider unrealistic.”
Steinberg insisted Herzog and Netanyahu aren’t as far apart politically as most people think.
“Netanyahu has taken steps among his constituency considered moderate and influenced by the left. Declaring there can be no Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount is just one example. The differences between him and Herzog on Iran are related to style, not substance.”
The challenge for Herzog, Steinberg said, is to resist calls from the “radical left” to push for a Palestinian state.
“At the moment the majority of Israelis fear a return of Oslo and other failures,” he said. “If being left is seen as promoting an unrealistic peace it won’t succeed.”
Oppenheimer from Peace Now acknowledged that when Rabin and the left were supporting the Oslo Accords 20 years ago, they failed to recognize the genuine fear many Israelis felt over the prospect of arming Palestinian police and relinquishing land to the Palestinians.
Should the peace camp once again have the chance to push for a viable peace process, “I would respect much more the needs of the public to feel secure,” he said.
That chance, say most Israelis, seems like a distant one. As if to sum up the country’s somber mood as it struggles through the latest spate of terror attacks, Hadag Nahash sings, “The present is known with no need to expand / How it drains and shakes how it pressures with no quiet ... / And our untrustworthy future what does it have in store / What more can it bury.”
And yet a hope, however distant, survives. The band concludes …
“And to think that you had the courage to change / And to think you knew how to plant hopes / And to think that you raised up to fly and went far enough to see / And to think that you managed to understand: What would be if …”
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NEW YORKThe Tricks Of The Trade Shuls
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
Established in a bygone era, three Midtown congregations stitching together a path forward.
The Garment Center Congregation now attracts worshipers who are largely professionals. Michael Datikash/JW
Two small nail holes on one of the plaster walls at the front door of a building on West 29th Street are the only hints of the site’s rich Jewish past.
The building, 230 W. 29th, was from 1965 to 1995 the home of the Fur Center Synagogue, one of a handful of small but thriving congregations in Midtown that were established in the middle of the last century to serve the spiritual needs of specific trades; the holes, at shoulder height, likely helped hold a mezuzah in place.
A victim of shifting Jewish demographics and the economic forces of globalization, the old synagogue today houses the Chelsea Subud Center, headquarters of the non-denominational spiritual movement based on the “experience which arises from within.” Scaffolding stands on the street for repairs on the building’s brick façade.
Besides the small holes, no Magen David or Hebrew letters are visible outside. Joan Rosenfelt, a member of the congregation for a decade in its final years who now lives in Sullivan County, remembers the synagogue’s halcyon days. “It was a lovely place,” headed by a young charismatic rabbi, she said. “It was a beehive of activity.”
That is the past.
Here is the present.
On the sidewalk outside the Millinery Center Synagogue, on Sixth Avenue at West 38th Street, pedestrians browse through piles of sheet sets and towels stacked on small tables. The items, bought wholesale, sometimes at closeout sales, are sold for a profit, bringing some much-needed funds into the congregation, whose original membership base of men and women in the hat-making industry is largely gone.
On the sidewalk outside the Actors’ Temple, a half-mile northwest on West 47th Street between Eighth and Ninth avenues, theatergoers line up several nights a week to attend the plays staged in the synagogue’s sanctuary. The temple has rented its space to Off-Broadway shows since 2006 to supplement the congregation’s limited income, which decreased once the performers in vaudeville and television, who gave the congregation its name and character, disappeared, dying or moving to Los Angeles.
And outside the Garment Center Congregation … actually, there is no outside now. The congregation, based for a half-century in a building on West 40th Street around the corner from Seventh Avenue, has been meeting since the summer in a second-floor office suite two blocks away on Broadway. The congregation will meet in its temporary home for the next three or four years while its site is torn down, to be rebuilt in expanded quarters, part of a 20-story hotel complex. The synagogue’s move drew attention because the developer, Sharif El-Gamal, is a Muslim and better known as one of the backers of the scaled-back plan to build an Islamic community center two blocks from the World Trade Center.
The three surviving synagogues, and the now-defunct Fur Center Synagogue, represent a small slice of 20th-century Jewish history, a phenomenon that has roots in the Jewish communities of Europe but that has a uniquely New York flavor.
“Once upon a time,” said Jonathan Sarna, professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University, “many synagogues brought together people of similar trades.” The butchers’ synagogue, the bakers’ synagogue, the tailors’ synagogue. Particularly in the Old Country.
“In the U.S., it’s very uncommon,” Sarna said. “It was more usual in this country to bring together people based on where they came from [landsmen].”
Only New York City had the critical mass of Jews who dominated certain professions to be able to form such congregations, Sarna says. “To my knowledge, outsiders were not kept out, but they did often feel like outsiders.
“Of course, today,” he said, “when most Jews live far from their place of occupation, these synagogues are less needed. There are certainly synagogues known for having large numbers of doctors, or large numbers of folks in high-tech, but the synagogue is not named for them and does not cater to them on that basis. Most Jews today are not exclusively interested in interacting just with people in their own business — or part of their business culture.”
Which makes the survival of Midtown’s few trade-based congregations, and their efforts to stay afloat, all the more remarkable.
The Midtown congregations were formed for the sake of Jewish furriers, hat makers and garment workers — the Actors’ Temple began as a standard neighborhood house of worship, before it began its outreach to members of the entertainment profession — who typically worked within a mile or two of their fellow tradesmen. Most lived on the Lower East Side or the outer boroughs, taking the subway to work. Many wanted a place where they could say memorial prayers during the day or on Jewish holidays; others, somewhere where they could pray on Shabbat or Jewish holidays before heading off to their jobs.
Typical is Marc Abramson, executive vice president of the Garment Center Congregation, who said, “Basically we get members who come to say Kaddish.
“We’re the second shul” for most members, who belong to a first congregation where they live, said Abramson. Which means the trade synagogues can’t charge much for membership — typically $75 to $150 a year, far under the four-figure range of most area congregations.
For all the extant trade synagogues, membership is a fluid concept; the congregations count as members men and women who show up regularly, or occasionally, making a token donation or none at all.
The synagogues, all facing diminished membership numbers (the original members’ children went into more prestigious, better-paying fields), buildings in various degrees of disrepair (leaky roofs are a common complaint), and shaky budgets (overhead is kept to a minimum), are a study in survival; all have reached out to a new profile of members and worshippers, while trying, with varying degrees of success, to hold onto the remaining members of their founding professions.
CPAs and IT experts and attorneys have largely replaced the manual laborers.
The Actors’ Temple has the best record of maintaining its ties to the type of people who gave the congregation its fame. “We do have actors and performers,” said Jill Hausman, the synagogue’s rabbi and cantor. But they’re a minority of the membership. “We don’t have the big names.”
Rabbi Hausman is a veteran singer who previously served as part-time spiritual leader of the Boro Park Progressive Synagogue in Brooklyn and as an environmental biologist. She has made an effort to stress the building’s unique past and to make entertainers feel at home, by inviting members to perform or speak at the synagogue, and by posting on the walls biographies of the boldface personalities (like E.G. Robinson, Sophie Tucker and some of the Three Stooges) whose names appear on the synagogue’s stained-glass windows and memorial plaques.
“I felt accepted there,” said Steve Greenstein, an actor-writer who lives in northern New Jersey and has belonged to the Actors’ Temple since he moved back to the Northeast from Los Angeles in 1999. “I needed a place to worship,” where he would not be “harangued” by people unfamiliar with life in the entertainment industry, he said. At the Temple, he said, he hears no silly questions.
The congregation’s finances are shaky, said Rabbi Hausman, “a fulltime rabbi on a part-time salary”; membership was down to a dozen people when she came in 2006; now it’s up to 200. A few dozen show up on Friday nights, fewer on Saturday mornings.
To pay for repairs, the Temple holds occasional fundraising events, conducts a High Holidays appeal, and rents out its sanctuary to Off-Broadway, non-union theatrical productions. “We don’t always have access to our space,” the rabbi says.
“Not Your Grandfather’s Temple!” a flyer declares.
Worship services there take place on Shabbat, “a Reform-style service with a Conservative prayer book.” The Temple, which was at first Orthodox then became Conservative, is unaffiliated — “post-denominational,” Rabbi Hausman said.
Of the three still-surviving trade synagogues, the Millinery Center Synagogue has the most distinctive approach to fundraising.
Tuvia Yamnik, a part-time cantor and handler, peddles sheets and towels outside several afternoons a week, shouting “100 percent Egyptian cotton!” and splitting the profits with the shul.
The money helps, says Rabbi Hayim Wahrman, who has served there since 1992. The congregation “was wealthy in the ’50s and ’60s,” he says nostalgically.
The rabbi leads services, teaches Kabbalah classes, recruits members, books concerts there and orchestrates the building’s repair.
Inside, it is musty, the wooden walls peeling and the bookshelves collapsing, the result of recent flooding.
Mendy Mittelman, from Flatbush, a frequent davener at the Synagogue, shows a visitor the damage after a recent Mincha service. “The floor,” he said, pointing down. “The roof,” he said, pointing up. He keeps pointing around the sanctuary.
Does the disarray bother him? No. “It’s convenient” – the Synagogue is near his midtown office.
Compared to the Actor’s Temple and the Millinery Center Synagogue, the Garment Center Congregation is in the best financial condition.
“We have a [full-time] rabbi and a 99-year lease for a dollar” — a dollar a year rent, arranged about 50 years ago by Albert List, a wealthy industrialist and backer of the congregation who bought the land and arranged the favorable terms, said Arnold Brown, a retired garment manufacturer who has been an active member for a few decades. The synagogue runs no activities besides services every day. “If you have very little overhead,” Brown said, “you can maintain a shul.”
“We never miss a minyan” — the required ten men in an Orthodox service, he said.
The rabbi is Norman Listokin, a raconteur who greets — and alternately berates — both first-time visitors and old-time members, establishing an atmosphere of familiarity.
Rabbi Listokin declined to be interviewed for this article, but Brown and Abramson said the number of men and women attending the synagogue’s daily services has remained constant since the move to the temporary quarters.
The Garment Center Congregation’s future?
Brown and Abramson said they are optimistic and looking forward to returning to the congregation’s old site; the new building will feature a refurbished sanctuary and two floors below for social events. The area that was home to the garment workers who founded the congregation still attracts a large number of Jewish visitors and Jews working in nearby office buildings, Abramson said. “Midtown is exploding.”
steve@jewishweek.org
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NEW YORKDressed To Thrill, And Coexist
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
Israeli couture bridal designers hit high mark in NYC, despite some global pushback.
Designer Merav Solo with model Lara Vosburgh after a recent show. Hannah Dreyfus/JW
Merav Solo spends her working life at the seam — the delicate one between pieces of a wedding gown, and the even more delicate one between pieces of the patchwork quilt that is Israel society.
“It doesn’t matter if a bride is Arab, secular Israeli, charedi or Druze — they want the same thing when they visit me,” the Haifa-based couture Israeli bridal gown designer said. While a Druze bride might request no transparent lace and sleeves that reach the wrists, a secular Israeli bride might want a plunging neckline or backless number. In spite of the complicated cultural mores, differences Solo must negotiate sensitively but stylishly, she said, “Every woman wants to feel beautiful and sexy on her wedding day.”
Solo was speaking at a reception recently following an event during New York International Bridal Week, an annual gathering of more than 250 bridal gown designers from around the world. She had just watched as models paraded her seductive gowns down a runway at Pier 94 on the Hudson River. As designers, buyers and models in sleek white gowns mingled and sipped flutes of Champagne, Solo, dressed in a short black dress, was beaming. In a career spanning more than 20 years, this was the first time her creations were being shown in New York.
The Oct. 11 show, which exclusively featured Israeli designers, was also a first. According to noted Israeli bridal designer Pnina Tournay, known for her risqué designs, the show marked a “historic moment” for Israeli designers.
Inside the Pier 94 hangar, with sweeping views of the Hudson, eight emerging Israeli designers sent their lines down the runway to a medley of upbeat Middle Eastern tunes, including a remix of “Hava Nagila.” Organized in part by the Israeli Foreign and Tourism ministries, the show highlighted Israeli designers’ influence in the world of bridal fashion.
According to Susan Glick, vice president of women’s apparel at Merchandise Mart Properties, the corporation that hosts New York bridal fashion week, the last three [shows] have shown an “influx of couture Israeli bridal designers.
“At first you just saw a couple [Israeli designers], and now buyers are asking for Israeli bridal couture,” said Glick. This year, more than 20 Israeli designers showed their collections, a high for the market, said a representative from the Israeli trade ministry.
Samantha Kane, a brand management executive at Brides, the bridal fashion magazine of Condé Nast, said that editors are showing an increasing interest in Israeli designers, particularly Inbal Dror, a leading designer from Tel Aviv who completed her fashion studies in Israel. While it is difficult to quantify the influence of Israeli fashion designers, Kane said, their collective name recognition has gone up drastically.
To be sure, Israeli designers are no strangers to international acclaim. In the wake of Lea Gottlieb, who made a splash with her swimsuit designs going back to the 1960s, a handful of well-known Israelis already are established in the fashion world; they include Alber Elbaz from the Parisian house of Lanvin and Yigal Azrouel, who has a boutique in the meatpacking district.
At New York’s bridal fashion week, this year a total of 22 Israeli designers, including the eight participating in the show with Solo, had booths.
The weeklong fashion affair is considered one of the leading commercial events in the American wedding market, which generates revenue estimated at more than $54 billion a year. Seven percent of this amount is spent on bridal gowns. Six runway shows over the course of three days introduced more than 450 different collections, said Glick. Though bridal tradeshows are held in cities around the world, including London, Barcelona, and Chicago, New York’s show is among the largest, she said.
There was also a significant increase in buyer and press attendance, according to a fashion week sales representative.
Since Tournay burst onto the scene in the early 2000s, Israelis have developed a special niche in bridal fashion, said Israel’s economic minister to North America, Nili Shalev. Tournay, whose curve-hugging collection is housed at Kleinfeld, one of New York’s most well-known bridal salons, is known for introducing sexy, revealing dresses to the mainstream, and for her role as lead designer on the reality TV hit, “Say Yes to the Dress,” which airs on the American network TLC.
“Israeli designers are willing to be adventurous, even in the most conventional settings,” said Shalev.
On the runway, the designers’ bold choices were evident. Sequins, crystals and plunging necklines seemed favorites among buyers, and several looks were completed with impressive silver tiaras and crowns. Many of the gowns had a vintage feel, with one fringed number inspired by the 1920s.
Still, despite their sense of creativity, Israeli designers often struggle to sell their products in European and Eastern markets, said Yoav Davis, a branding consultant for one of the featured designers. He recalled being curtly turned away by a boutique in Dubai after he mentioned that his client was Israeli.
“The Israeli fashion industry is sadly not immune to boycotts,” said Davis, referring to the global movement (known by the acronym BDS — Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) to boycott Israeli goods and servies. He added that in Arab countries, many of which have thriving bridal industries, it is “impossible” to market gowns by Israeli designers.
“It’s good to be in New York, where the creativity and raw talent of these designers is appreciated,” Davis added.
Tournay, who attended the show and stayed for the reception, told The Jewish Week that she will never “shy away from my Israeli identity,” despite global challenges. “I am proud of who I am and where I’m from,” she said, long blonde hair styled to perfection.
Yoav Rish, another Israeli designer who sent wedding gowns down the runway, grew up in a charedi family in the city of Petah Tikvah, east of Tel Aviv. From a young age, he loved experimenting with different types of fabric. His parents, though surprised by their son’s unconventional passion, were very supportive.
Today, Rish lives in Tel Aviv with his male partner and their two daughters.
“I learned to sew on my grandmother’s sewing machine,” said Rish, minutes before the show was about to begin. He wore black skinny jeans and short hair shaved on one side. When asked about further training in fashion, Rish clarified that he is completely self-taught. His designs, which include two-piece wedding dresses with skirt and top, are known for being comfortable and relatively affordable. (His gowns typically range from $7,000-8,000.)
“Hope you enjoy!” he said, before rushing off to perfect the models’ looks backstage.
After the runway show, designers returned to their booths to meet with buyers and brides. At her booth, Solo reflected on fashion as a bridge between cultures. When she designs for Druze and charedi brides, she makes sure to cover more. A secular Israeli bride often wants to push the envelope regarding what to reveal, or not reveal. Still, a desire to look “unique” is shared by all.
“When you speak with brides, you realize we are all the same person,” Solo said. Though her English was broken, she seemed to be grasping at a more philosophical point. “It’s not just about dresses, it’s about beginnings,” she said, using the Hebrew word for beginning, techila. “Every woman wants a beautiful beginning.” Oslo And The Politics Of Meaning
Jonathan Mark
Associate Editor
About the broken shards of Oslo, Lerner says, “You have to speak with compassion to everyone involved in this.” Michael Lerner
The Oslo years now seem as improbable as a dream, outside of time, headlines from messianic to murder, answered prayers turning to screams. But when Michael Lerner, founder and editor of Tikkun, the leading Jewish leftist journal, sat on the sun-drenched White House lawn, Sept. 13, 1993, invited by the president to witness the signing of the Oslo Accords and the epic handshake between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin and Yasir Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization – it was vindication, not just for Lerner but for all the peaceniks who for years were mocked for their naiveté.
Before there was J Street, before Peter Beinart, back in the days before there was any serious Jewish “pro-peace” lobby, at a time when Jewish peace groups rose and fell like colts finding their legs, there was Tikkun, founded in 1986, critical of the right and what Lerner calls “the religio-phobic” secular left. In 1988, then-Gov. Bill Clinton wrote a complimentary letter to Lerner about Tikkun. In 1993, the Washington Post described Lerner as Hillary Clinton’s “guru.” The first lady gave a speech invoking the “politics of meaning,” Lerner’s creed that statecraft had to be soulcraft, addressing “ethical and spiritual needs.”
That Lerner, a grizzled Berkeley-San Francisco veteran of the radical SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and Free Speech Movement of the 1960s, should find himself sitting on the White House lawn … well, what wasn’t possible on a day when Rabin and Arafat were shaking hands as if the previous 50 years were a game of tennis?
Lerner, frequently aligned with Israel’s own left-wingers, had declared that Israel’s response to the first intifada was “morally incorrect,” underlined by then-defense minister Rabin’s famous order to Israeli soldiers to “break their bones.” Lerner, ordained as a Jewish Renewal rabbi by Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and leading a Renewal synagogue “without walls” in Berkeley, says that several congregants once told him, “We Jews have become Pharaoh to the Palestinian people — so we would be hypocrites to sit around our Passover table celebrating our own freedom, rejoicing at the way the Egyptians were stricken… while ignoring what Israel is doing today in the name of the Jewish people.” Lerner told them, “This is precisely the kind of discussion that is appropriate for the seder table.”
After the Rabin-Arafat handshake, Lerner found himself shmoozing with Rabin in the Israeli embassy. Lerner, now 73, recalls telling Rabin, “If you want to make this peace a real peace, go back and tell our brothers and sisters to learn Arabic; embrace the Palestinians with warmth; see them as created in the image of God…”
Lerner remembers, “When I said ‘God’ he rolled his eyes,” and Lerner laughs at the memory. Rabin was ultra-secular, perhaps the most secular leader Israel ever had.
“I urged him to make it a warm peace, not a cold peace,” says Lerner. “He went back to Israel and did exactly the opposite. Instead of saying, ‘Here is a chance for a new reality,’ he said, ‘I don’t trust them, I’m not going to implement this too quickly.’ He didn’t challenge the fear, he played to it. The peace movement in Israel was very critical of him.”
What could Rabin have done? “He should have stopped the building of any settlements,” says Lerner, “offering significant benefits and incentives for settlers moving back from the West Bank.”
But the Oslo Accords didn’t say one word about settlements being illegal, or settlers having to leave. According to Oslo, the matter of settlements was to be negotiated down an unmapped, unpaved road. “That’s right,” says Lerner, “Oslo didn’t deal with it. Of course, settlers should be able to stay. No country in the world should have a policy of ‘no Jews allowed.’ Arabs live in Israel according to the laws of Israel, so Jews should have every right to live on the West Bank, by the laws of Palestine.” It can work “if both sides really want peace.”
In the early 1990s, Lerner was commuting between the United States and Israel, where his son was in the army, with Lerner’s blessing, “a manifestation of my love for Israel. I was in Israel at least twice a month because I wanted to give my son a place to go on Shabbos, if he had leave. I washed his clothes on Friday afternoons, and made Shabbos meals for him.”
Lerner would sometimes find himself in the Knesset dining room, visiting political friends. He’d see Rabin there. “I knew him before he was prime minister. Rabin was always alone. Everybody else was sitting with other people. Nobody came to talk to him. Why? Because he was impossible to talk to. He was arrogant to everyone. We had several conversations but he had a commander’s perspective. Rabin was a general with a military consciousness. He thought if had a plan, people should follow.”
Lerner says, “When I tried to speak to him about the spiritual needs of the people, Rabin was just deaf to that. He didn’t know what I was talking about. He had very little capacity to communicate in a caring way to those who disagreed with him, whether on the left or the right.”
Few politicians were as contemptuous of a constituency as Rabin was of the settlers. As far back as 1979, Rabin in his memoirs, “Pinkas Sherut,” called settlers “a cancer in the body of Israeli democracy.” In the agreement known as Oslo II, Rabin placed Rachel’s Tomb (the second most visited holy site) under complete Palestinian civil and military control.
Two Orthodox Knesset members pleaded with him, would Rabin give away Ben-Gurion’s grave? MK Menachem Porush reportedly stood up and embraced Rabin, saying through tears, “Reb Yitzchak … You are planning to give away Mama Ruchl’s grave. The Jewish people will never forgive you if you abandon Mama’s kever [tomb].’”
Rabin relented. Nevertheless, Dan Ephron, author of “Killing A King” (Norton), a new book about the assassination, writes, “By late 1993,” Rabin already “had enough of the settlers. ... Rabin had virtually no skills in diplomacy — he couldn’t hide his contempt. … Rabin had no religious sentiment at all.”
Are all settlers guilty? Yigal Amir wasn’t a settler but a Modern Orthodox law student from Herzliya.
“Not all settlers,” says Lerner, “but I would assume it was at least 10,000-20,000,” out of more than 100,000 settlers. “A minority that was very articulate and active in attempting to prevent the implementation of the policy of the State of Israel. Like other criminals they should have been arrested, tried and put into prison — like I was!” Lerner laughs, admitting that he was arrested for anti-Vietnam war activity that, like settler protests, shut the roads, demeaned the president, and tried preventing the implementation of American policy.
Twenty years later, the dream has faded, if it hasn’t died. Mahmoud Abbas told the U.N. that the Palestinians were no longer bound by Oslo. In fact, wrote Scott Anderson in The New York Times, “The Palestinians, seeing themselves as the aggrieved party, have never taken the initiative in offering up peace terms, and whatever the Israelis have offered has never been enough.”
As for the broken shards of Oslo, Lerner suggests, “the only way to speak about this conflict is to speak in a compassionate tone to both peoples. You have to speak with compassion to everyone involved in this,” from the settlers to Shuafat, a Palestinian village. Both peoples are still in the image of God. “That’s why I feel a lot of compassion to the settlers,” first one makes peace with his own, “not the violent among them but the overwhelming majority of the settlers are good and decent people.”
Does he ever hear from Hillary anymore? “All I can tell you is that in the last conversation we had I promised I would never answer that question.”
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