Wednesday, November 25, 2015
Dear Reader,
The tragic terror attack that took the life of Ezra Schwartz, an 18-year-old New Englander studying at an Israeli yeshiva, hit very close to home for American Jews, especially those in the Modern Orthodox community, with its emphasis on gap-year study.National
Obama Calls Ezra Schwartz’s Family To Offer Condolences
JTA
Ezra Schwartz. JTA
Washington — President Barack Obama called the parents of Ezra Schwartz, the 18-year-old American student murdered last week in a Palestinian terror attack in the West Bank, to offer his condolences.
In the telephone call Monday, the president said that Schwartz’s Israel studies had strengthened U.S.-Israel ties.
“The president offered his profound condolences and condemned in the strongest terms the terrorist attack that took his life,” a senior administration official told JTA. “The president also underscored that Ezra’s studies in Israel strengthened the bonds between Israel and the United States and, as we mourn his death, those bonds only grow stronger.”
Schwartz, from Sharon, Massachusetts, was on a gap year studying at a yeshiva in Israel. He was to start business school at Rutgers University in New Jersey in the fall.
The Obama administration condemned the attack on Nov. 20, a day after it occurred, but a number of Jewish groups and commentators complained that the condemnation had not come quickly enough and was from the State Department spokesman rather than the White House.
There were further complaints when Obama, in remarks during a news conference in Malaysia on Sunday, singled out for mention two other Americans killed in recent terrorist attacks, in Mali and Paris, but did not mention Schwartz.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry also spoke with Schwartz’s parents, Ari and Ruth Schwartz.
“Just yesterday, I talked to the family of Ezra Schwartz from Massachusetts, a young man who came here out of high school ready to go to college, excited about his future,” Kerry said Tuesday at a meeting in Jerusalem with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “And yesterday, his family was sitting at shiva and I talked to them and heard their feelings, the feelings of any parent who lost their child.”
editor@jewishweek.org
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In our lead story Staff Writer Hannah Dreyfus talks to gap-year students in Israel about their resolve and reservations. Also, our Israel correspondent Josh Mitnick reports on an inquiry into the delicate issue of security precautions for trips into West Bank communities. And my column reflects on parents who put faith over fear in sending their children for gap-year study in Israel.Israel News
Security Measures Questioned In Teen’s Murder
Masa inquiry underway over yeshiva trip to Gush Etzion junction.
Joshua Mitnick
Contributing Editor
Protesters this week in Gush Etzion holding a poster of Israelis killed in terrorist attacks. Ben Sales/JTA
Tel Aviv — The murder of Massachusetts native Ezra Schwartz in a terrorist shooting last week has shaken Israel’s overseas educational programs as they scramble to handle worried parents, upset participants, and review security precautions for trips to high-risk locations in the country.
An inquiry is currently underway into what safety measures were taken last Thursday before Schwartz, 18, and a group of other gap-year students at Yeshivat Ashreinu visited the Gush Etzion junction in the West Bank, said an official for the government agency that subsidizes the yeshiva’s gap-year program.
Critics complained that youths without sufficient protection were allowed to visit a location frequently targeted by Palestinian terrorists. Others contend that there is no true safe place in Israel amid a wave of terrorist stabbings and shootings and that the yeshiva did its best to protect its students.
“There is a lot to sort through, and all of the questions are now being asked; it is too early to draw any conclusions at this stage,” said Sara Eisen, communications director at Masa Israel Journey, an umbrella organization run jointly by the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office and the Jewish Agency that subsidizes and oversees hundreds of gap-year program affiliates like Yeshivat Ashreinu.
“We are working through the facts of the situation and have no answers yet to the many understandable concerns.”
Potentially at risk from the fallout from Schwartz’s death are participation levels in programs that bring thousands of Jewish youths to Israel each year, as well as international tourism, a major Israeli industry. The killing also highlights the challenges faced by overseas programs that want to allow participants to see the country but must balance the freedom with security precautions.
Michael Jankelowitz, a former Jewish Agency spokesperson, worried the killing would have a “major” effect on participation for all educational travel to Israel, and complained that the teens should have been traveling in an armored, bulletproof vehicle, given the danger at the Gush Etzion junction.
Laura Kam, a public relations consultant who lives in Jerusalem and whose son is doing army service on guard in the West Bank, wondered why “a group of completely unprotected teens” was in “an area so unsafe.” She told The Jewish Week, “I know folks will say that two people were killed in Tel Aviv the same day. But in fact, the road where Ezra died is highly problematic and everyone knows it. Let’s keep our young visitors safe.” (Despite published reports, the yeshiva denies the trip included food delivery to soldiers, a common practice to bolster the spirits among the IDF.)
Located on the heavily traveled Highway 60, the Gush Etzion junction is a busy intersection south of Jerusalem that connects the capital city to the affluent bloc of suburban settlements that include Efrat and Alon Shvut, and also settlements around Hebron. A tunnel road bypass around Bethlehem was built in the late 1990s to link Gush Etzion (known simply as the Gush) to Jerusalem, and it was reinforced with walls to protect Israeli drivers. Highway 60 is also used as a shortcut to Jerusalem for those living inside of Israel. A supermarket at the junction serves both Israelis and Palestinians shoppers and employs both as well.
In recent days, however, the government has been discussing ways to separate Israelis and Palestinians and boost security. Hundreds of Gush-area residents held a demonstration at the junction on Monday to demand tighter protection.
Before the attack on Schwartz, the intersection had been targeted seven times by Palestinian attackers since the beginning of October, leaving four civilians injured and one soldier wounded. Like many road junctions around the West Bank, in recent weeks the Israeli army has deployed groups of soldiers at Gush Etzion junction that stand behind concrete barriers to protect pedestrian commuters.
In the attack, which killed Schwartz and two others, a Palestinian terrorist with a machine gun sprayed bullets into a line of cars at the intersection. Since the Thursday afternoon attack, another Israeli was killed at the junction.
Jankelowitz pointed out that “all the public transportation that goes to Gush Etzion goes in armored buses.” He added that Jewish Agency guidelines require Board of Governors members to use armored vehicles when making site visits in the West Bank. “I think there needs to be an inquiry, by the Jewish Agency and the government.”
Yigal Palmor, a spokesman for the Jewish Agency, said that Schwartz and the other teens weren’t involved in high-risk activities. “He wasn’t hitch-hiking and he wasn’t waiting. He didn’t go to the road junction to stand and see what happens. ... The junction itself is a dangerous place because it’s been targeted.”
Tragically, Schwartz had been visiting the Gush Etzion junction to do landscaping at a roadside memorial — dubbed “Oz v’Gaon” or “bravery and genuis” (or honorable scholars) — to three Israeli teenagers who were kidnapped and murdered by Palestinian terrorists at a spot just a few hundred feet away in June 2014.
Rabbi Akiva Naiman, who oversees the community service programs at Yeshivat Ashreinu, said Schwartz was also spending time coaching underprivileged kids in basketball and raising money for the Israel Cancer Association. He was drawn to work at the memorial site because “it felt like you are really building the land. He was so inspired by that.”
Rabbi Naiman said that Ezra and a group of other boys were visiting the site weekly in a van hired by a local taxi company in Beit Shemesh, where the yeshiva is located. He said there was no accompanying guard. In the days after the murder, the yeshiva has been caught up in making the funeral arrangements and looking after the needs of the remaining participants.
The yeshiva will return to its normal study schedule later this week and hasn’t made any decisions about trip security or locations, the rabbi said. He did say that the yeshiva is receiving donations to pay for an armored van.
Echoing other officials handling youth programs, Rabbi Naiman noted that on the same day Schwartz was killed at the Gush Etzion junction, two people were stabbed to death in south Tel Aviv.
“All the safety precautions were met,” he said.
Officials at overseas programs said that security measures for group trips throughout Israel are coordinated through a special hotline overseen by the Education Ministry and the Society for the Protection of Nature that gives out daily updates on the situation in any given location.
A statement from the Education Ministry said that groups on trips in the West Bank must ride in an armored vehicle on the roadways designated by the IDF, and travel with one guard for every 50 students. It also said that for trips on foot in the West Bank, groups must be accompanied by an armed guard with a “long weapon.”
Eisen, the Masa official, said that the umbrella group seeks to set an “industry standard” for strict security guidelines among its affiliate programs, including daily coordination with Israel’s security authorities, as well as security chiefs at Masa and the Jewish Agency. She said it is up to the individual affiliated organizations to implement the guidelines with the support of Masa.
It is believed that costly armored vans are a rarity among Jewish institutions in the region.
The shock of the murder has rippled to other overseas programs. At the Jerusalem-based Young Judea Year Course, trauma counselors were brought in to discuss participants’ reactions.
“It’s been a hard one for everyone,” said Kate Brody Nachman, director of the Young Judea Year Course. She noted that some of the Young Judea youngsters knew Ezra and went to Camp Yavne [in New England] with him. “They felt more connected, and it feels more real. There’s a greater sense that ‘it could have been me.’”
After an emotional weekend of singing, prayer, memory, and grief counseling, students at Yeshivat Ashreinu spent part of this week on a trip to the Dead Sea. Rabbis at the yeshiva are trying to focus on easing the participants back into a routine of study later in the week.
Despite the tragedy, Rabbi Yechiel Weisz, who is in charge of morning studies at the yeshiva, said that the majority of the 31 participants had elected to continue on. “The boys are shocked; it was devastating. But we came out very strong. Unfortunately, if there is anything that makes people come together, it’s a tragedy,” he said. “We’re trying to get back on schedule. Some of the boys are not ready.”
It was too early, yeshiva officials said, to say whether or not the program would continue at the memorial site.
Students at Ashreinu created a website this week to raise charity in memory of Ezra. More than $24,000 from 475 people was donated in the first four days. The URL is gofundme.com/ezrafund.
---------------------
Also this issue, a Nazi art case that pivots on when the Holocaust actually started; yeshiva parents and graduates sue New York State for `willful blindness' over lack of secular education; and the latest Broadway revival of "Fiddler On The Roof" takes on new relevance in the age of Pew reports and Syrian immigration.International
Nazi Art Case Tests Start Date Of Shoah
Germany’s new claim in Guelph Treasure suit shocks Holocaust historians as ‘revisionist history.’
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
A 12th-century domed reliquary in the shape of a church, made of silver and gold. Wikimedia Commons
The German government has laws on the books that will get you thrown in jail for denying the existence of the Holocaust. It mandates that all schoolchildren, starting at age 12 and for years after that, learn about what happened to the Jews under Nazi rule. It has paid out an estimated $90 billion in reparations to Holocaust survivors and their heirs over the last 60 years.
And on the fast-moving story of the return of Nazi-looted artwork to its rightful Jewish owners — one that has landed in Hollywood with the hit film “Woman in Gold” — Germany has pledged greater transparency.
But in a federal courtroom in Washington, D.C., the German government is showing another, arguably darker, side.
In seeking to dismiss a lawsuit over a long-contested trove of medieval ecclesiastical relics known as the Guelph Treasure that Germany bought from three Jewish art dealers in 1935, the government has now dropped a legal bombshell, one that actually seems to challenge the historical record.
The sale could not have been forced, the German government argued in court papers submitted earlier this month in U.S. District Court, because “the sale predated the Holocaust by several years.”
Holocaust scholars are shocked by Germany’s line of argument, calling it “cynical” and saying that it amounts to “revisionist history.”
“It’s ridiculous,” said Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of modern Jewish history and Holocaust studies at Emory University in Atlanta and a former consultant to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.
“If you define the Holocaust as the killing of Jews, it began in the summer of 1941,” she said. “But to ignore the terrible persecution and prejudice and limitations placed on the lives of Jews that started in 1933 is ludicrous. … It is a cheap shot. It was a forced sale because Jews were forced to sell things because they were denied the right to make a living.”
Marion Kaplan, a professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University who has taught 19th and 20th century German history, said she was “shocked” by the German claim.
“The idea that the ‘Holocaust’ started with the war is wrong,” she said. “Social death started in 1933 and physical death followed. Indeed, many Jewish men died in concentration camps directly after Kristallnacht [November 1938] — well before the war.”
Assigning a start date for the Holocaust — in a legal if not a moral sense — is admittedly an imprecise exercise. Did it begin when the National Socialists took power in 1933? When the Nuremberg Laws were signed in 1935? When the state-sponsored rampage against Jewish businesses — Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass — terrorized the Jewish population in 1938? When the Nazis signed off on the Final Solution in 1941? When mass killings with stationary gas chambers began widely in 1942?
The case of the Guelph Treasure, in which heirs of the Jewish art dealers are seeking its return, may throw a light on this complicated legal question.
The treasure is a collection, primarily of precious gem-encrusted Christian devotional masterpieces, such as reliquaries and crosses, that is valued at about $250 million. The most valuable piece is a 12th-century domed reliquary shaped like a church and made of gold, copper and silver. Biblical figures carved from walrus tusk encircle the work.
Had the heirs sought the collection’s return years ago, the legal fight over its ownership might not have been questioned. In 1943, the Allied governments recognized that the Nazis either confiscated or compelled victims of religious, racial and political persecution to sell their businesses, houses and other property under duress. They then issued the London Declaration that said the allies would no longer recognize the transfer of property in occupied countries even if it appeared legal — a doctrine codified into law after the war that was adopted by the new German Federal Republic in 1949, according to an attorney for the heirs, Markus Stotzel.
He said Germany rescinded it in the 1960s in the belief all restitution claims had been resolved. But in the last decade or so, the heirs of several Jewish art collectors have come forward to assert claims to looted art, some of it hanging in German museums. The heirs to the Guelph Treasure began their efforts seven years ago.
In response to the new claims, Germany promised to be transparent and efficient in restituting works of art. In 2003 it created an eight-member commission headed by Jutta Limbach, former head of Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court, to mediate all disputes regarding cultural property — including art — seized by the state as a result of Nazi persecution.
The commission heard the Guelph case shortly after the issue of German art restitution made headlines worldwide late in 2013 with the admission by the Bavarian state that it had quietly recovered 1,400 pieces of art — much of it looted by the Nazis — that had been secretly hidden by the son of a man who had been an art dealer for Hitler.
In its Guelph case decision, issued in March 2014, the commission noted that the collectors had bought the artifacts in 1929 for 7.5 million reichsmarks. They later sold about half of them and in 1934 began negotiations with the Dresdner Bank for the rest. The bank was secretly acting in behalf of the Prussian state government headed by its prime minister, Hermann Goering, the second most powerful man in Germany after Adolf Hitler rose to power in 1933.
Negotiations over the price concluded in July 1935, and the Limbach commission said there were “no indications that the art dealers and their business partners were placed under pressure in the negotiations … [and thus were not forced to sell] as a result of Nazi persecution.”
A spokesman for the German Embassy in Washington said his government agrees with that opinion and is “committed to the fair and just resolution of legitimate claims to Nazi-confiscated art, consistent with the universally accepted guidelines of the Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art.”
“The federal government,” he added, “therefore believes that the civil case stemming from a 1935 sale of medieval relics by a group of German art dealers has no merit and should not be heard in [a] U.S. court.”
The art dealers were paid only 4.2 million reichsmarks, which was “one-third or less than its market value,” according to Mel Urbach, Stotzel’s co-counsel. He said they sold it to Goering — who later presented it to Hitler as a gift — believing they would be killed if they did not.
Urbach said he and Stotzel represent relatives of another art dealer who was imprisoned and tortured by the Nazis before he would sell to them. And he said they have a number of other cases in which the German government is refusing to recognize legitimate claims of Jewish heirs to works of art, buildings and property.
“We see a pattern here where Germany is revising the Holocaust and using technicalities [defenses such as the statute of limitations] to disrespect the suffering of so many people during the early years of the Nazi regime,” he said.
The lawyers submitted several expert opinions from Holocaust historians to support their claims.
One was from Wolf Gruner, chair of Jewish studies and a professor of history at the University of Southern California, who is a specialist in the persecution of the Jews in Germany. He wrote that within weeks of Hitler being appointed chancellor on Jan. 30, 1933, he “subjected political dissidents and Jewish Germans to extreme persecution. Jewish people were mistreated in many towns in the first months of 1933, put into concentration camps, their stores were attacked and boycotted, and they were pushed out of professional and economic life by many different means.”
Gruner noted also that officials in Frankfurt am Maim, home of the three Jewish art collectors, “made a common practice of preventing the transfer of the coveted art assets of the Jews to overseas by having these entered on the list of nationally valuable assets.”
He pointed out also that one of the three art collectors, Saemy Rosenbaum, concluded the negotiations in Berlin and could not have failed to notice daily demonstrations in front of Jewish-owned stores.
“Spoken choruses of ‘Don’t buy from Jews’ were intended to prevent customers visiting,” he wrote. “Shop windows were scrawled and painted with anti-Jewish slogans. The police had to intervene repeatedly and restore order. … In such circumstances, there can be no question of any kind of normal sale transaction, unaffected by the daily and ubiquitous active discrimination and persecution …
“This transaction is therefore tainted by the stain of `persecution conditionality’ … because the sale took place under conditions that were not equitable and market value appropriate.”
Although Rosenbaum later left Germany and started his business anew in New York, his associates were not so fortunate. Julius Goldschmidt escaped to London but is said to have lived an impoverished life. And Z. M. Hackenbroch was reportedly dragged to his death through the streets of Frankfurt by a Nazi mob in 1937.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, said the German government’s claim that the 1935 sale “predated the Holocaust by several years” is “simply disgusting and dangerous.”
“I understand the tactic of what they are trying to do — saying that the sale was normal,” he told The Jewish Week. “But for a Jew in Germany in 1935, life in Germany was anything but normal. … The fact that it was sold in 1935 — you would have to prove to me there was no linkage.”
Holocaust historian Timothy Snyder, author of the critically acclaimed new book, “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning,” told The Jewish Week that although the “mass murder of Jews began in the summer of 1941, the discrimination [against them] began in 1933.”
“The reasons why people would want to get out of Germany and be compelled to sell things begins in 1933,” he said. “Their [the German government’s] argument is shameful. It means that unless there was mass murder, nobody was discriminated against. The fact that they killed many of the people later does not mean it was alright to discriminate against them earlier. Nobody would say that. All of the historians who work on the Holocaust focus on the discrimination that began in the 1930s.”
Atina Grossmann, a teacher of modern European and German history at Cooper Union, said in an email to The Jewish Week that the German government’s claim is “a rather specious argument in terms of compensation for expropriated Jewish property in Germany since we clearly have anti-Jewish policies and actions in place from 1933 on — all before the beginning of the war and well before the implementation of the Final Solution and the enactment of any plans for the extermination of European Jewry.”
About Germany’s claim in the Guelph Treasure case, Grossmann added: “So yes, technically correct, but in this case certainly an irrelevant and specious cynical argument. The Germans know better.” ----------------------------
DanceSecurity Measures Questioned In Teen’s Murder
Masa inquiry underway over yeshiva trip to Gush Etzion junction.
Joshua Mitnick
Contributing Editor
Protesters this week in Gush Etzion holding a poster of Israelis killed in terrorist attacks. Ben Sales/JTA
Tel Aviv — The murder of Massachusetts native Ezra Schwartz in a terrorist shooting last week has shaken Israel’s overseas educational programs as they scramble to handle worried parents, upset participants, and review security precautions for trips to high-risk locations in the country.
An inquiry is currently underway into what safety measures were taken last Thursday before Schwartz, 18, and a group of other gap-year students at Yeshivat Ashreinu visited the Gush Etzion junction in the West Bank, said an official for the government agency that subsidizes the yeshiva’s gap-year program.
Critics complained that youths without sufficient protection were allowed to visit a location frequently targeted by Palestinian terrorists. Others contend that there is no true safe place in Israel amid a wave of terrorist stabbings and shootings and that the yeshiva did its best to protect its students.
“There is a lot to sort through, and all of the questions are now being asked; it is too early to draw any conclusions at this stage,” said Sara Eisen, communications director at Masa Israel Journey, an umbrella organization run jointly by the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office and the Jewish Agency that subsidizes and oversees hundreds of gap-year program affiliates like Yeshivat Ashreinu.
“We are working through the facts of the situation and have no answers yet to the many understandable concerns.”
Potentially at risk from the fallout from Schwartz’s death are participation levels in programs that bring thousands of Jewish youths to Israel each year, as well as international tourism, a major Israeli industry. The killing also highlights the challenges faced by overseas programs that want to allow participants to see the country but must balance the freedom with security precautions.
Michael Jankelowitz, a former Jewish Agency spokesperson, worried the killing would have a “major” effect on participation for all educational travel to Israel, and complained that the teens should have been traveling in an armored, bulletproof vehicle, given the danger at the Gush Etzion junction.
Laura Kam, a public relations consultant who lives in Jerusalem and whose son is doing army service on guard in the West Bank, wondered why “a group of completely unprotected teens” was in “an area so unsafe.” She told The Jewish Week, “I know folks will say that two people were killed in Tel Aviv the same day. But in fact, the road where Ezra died is highly problematic and everyone knows it. Let’s keep our young visitors safe.” (Despite published reports, the yeshiva denies the trip included food delivery to soldiers, a common practice to bolster the spirits among the IDF.)
Located on the heavily traveled Highway 60, the Gush Etzion junction is a busy intersection south of Jerusalem that connects the capital city to the affluent bloc of suburban settlements that include Efrat and Alon Shvut, and also settlements around Hebron. A tunnel road bypass around Bethlehem was built in the late 1990s to link Gush Etzion (known simply as the Gush) to Jerusalem, and it was reinforced with walls to protect Israeli drivers. Highway 60 is also used as a shortcut to Jerusalem for those living inside of Israel. A supermarket at the junction serves both Israelis and Palestinians shoppers and employs both as well.
In recent days, however, the government has been discussing ways to separate Israelis and Palestinians and boost security. Hundreds of Gush-area residents held a demonstration at the junction on Monday to demand tighter protection.
Before the attack on Schwartz, the intersection had been targeted seven times by Palestinian attackers since the beginning of October, leaving four civilians injured and one soldier wounded. Like many road junctions around the West Bank, in recent weeks the Israeli army has deployed groups of soldiers at Gush Etzion junction that stand behind concrete barriers to protect pedestrian commuters.
In the attack, which killed Schwartz and two others, a Palestinian terrorist with a machine gun sprayed bullets into a line of cars at the intersection. Since the Thursday afternoon attack, another Israeli was killed at the junction.
Jankelowitz pointed out that “all the public transportation that goes to Gush Etzion goes in armored buses.” He added that Jewish Agency guidelines require Board of Governors members to use armored vehicles when making site visits in the West Bank. “I think there needs to be an inquiry, by the Jewish Agency and the government.”
Yigal Palmor, a spokesman for the Jewish Agency, said that Schwartz and the other teens weren’t involved in high-risk activities. “He wasn’t hitch-hiking and he wasn’t waiting. He didn’t go to the road junction to stand and see what happens. ... The junction itself is a dangerous place because it’s been targeted.”
Tragically, Schwartz had been visiting the Gush Etzion junction to do landscaping at a roadside memorial — dubbed “Oz v’Gaon” or “bravery and genuis” (or honorable scholars) — to three Israeli teenagers who were kidnapped and murdered by Palestinian terrorists at a spot just a few hundred feet away in June 2014.
Rabbi Akiva Naiman, who oversees the community service programs at Yeshivat Ashreinu, said Schwartz was also spending time coaching underprivileged kids in basketball and raising money for the Israel Cancer Association. He was drawn to work at the memorial site because “it felt like you are really building the land. He was so inspired by that.”
Rabbi Naiman said that Ezra and a group of other boys were visiting the site weekly in a van hired by a local taxi company in Beit Shemesh, where the yeshiva is located. He said there was no accompanying guard. In the days after the murder, the yeshiva has been caught up in making the funeral arrangements and looking after the needs of the remaining participants.
The yeshiva will return to its normal study schedule later this week and hasn’t made any decisions about trip security or locations, the rabbi said. He did say that the yeshiva is receiving donations to pay for an armored van.
Echoing other officials handling youth programs, Rabbi Naiman noted that on the same day Schwartz was killed at the Gush Etzion junction, two people were stabbed to death in south Tel Aviv.
“All the safety precautions were met,” he said.
Officials at overseas programs said that security measures for group trips throughout Israel are coordinated through a special hotline overseen by the Education Ministry and the Society for the Protection of Nature that gives out daily updates on the situation in any given location.
A statement from the Education Ministry said that groups on trips in the West Bank must ride in an armored vehicle on the roadways designated by the IDF, and travel with one guard for every 50 students. It also said that for trips on foot in the West Bank, groups must be accompanied by an armed guard with a “long weapon.”
Eisen, the Masa official, said that the umbrella group seeks to set an “industry standard” for strict security guidelines among its affiliate programs, including daily coordination with Israel’s security authorities, as well as security chiefs at Masa and the Jewish Agency. She said it is up to the individual affiliated organizations to implement the guidelines with the support of Masa.
It is believed that costly armored vans are a rarity among Jewish institutions in the region.
The shock of the murder has rippled to other overseas programs. At the Jerusalem-based Young Judea Year Course, trauma counselors were brought in to discuss participants’ reactions.
“It’s been a hard one for everyone,” said Kate Brody Nachman, director of the Young Judea Year Course. She noted that some of the Young Judea youngsters knew Ezra and went to Camp Yavne [in New England] with him. “They felt more connected, and it feels more real. There’s a greater sense that ‘it could have been me.’”
After an emotional weekend of singing, prayer, memory, and grief counseling, students at Yeshivat Ashreinu spent part of this week on a trip to the Dead Sea. Rabbis at the yeshiva are trying to focus on easing the participants back into a routine of study later in the week.
Despite the tragedy, Rabbi Yechiel Weisz, who is in charge of morning studies at the yeshiva, said that the majority of the 31 participants had elected to continue on. “The boys are shocked; it was devastating. But we came out very strong. Unfortunately, if there is anything that makes people come together, it’s a tragedy,” he said. “We’re trying to get back on schedule. Some of the boys are not ready.”
It was too early, yeshiva officials said, to say whether or not the program would continue at the memorial site.
Students at Ashreinu created a website this week to raise charity in memory of Ezra. More than $24,000 from 475 people was donated in the first four days. The URL is gofundme.com/ezrafund.
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Also this issue, a Nazi art case that pivots on when the Holocaust actually started; yeshiva parents and graduates sue New York State for `willful blindness' over lack of secular education; and the latest Broadway revival of "Fiddler On The Roof" takes on new relevance in the age of Pew reports and Syrian immigration.International
Nazi Art Case Tests Start Date Of Shoah
Germany’s new claim in Guelph Treasure suit shocks Holocaust historians as ‘revisionist history.’
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
A 12th-century domed reliquary in the shape of a church, made of silver and gold. Wikimedia Commons
The German government has laws on the books that will get you thrown in jail for denying the existence of the Holocaust. It mandates that all schoolchildren, starting at age 12 and for years after that, learn about what happened to the Jews under Nazi rule. It has paid out an estimated $90 billion in reparations to Holocaust survivors and their heirs over the last 60 years.
And on the fast-moving story of the return of Nazi-looted artwork to its rightful Jewish owners — one that has landed in Hollywood with the hit film “Woman in Gold” — Germany has pledged greater transparency.
But in a federal courtroom in Washington, D.C., the German government is showing another, arguably darker, side.
In seeking to dismiss a lawsuit over a long-contested trove of medieval ecclesiastical relics known as the Guelph Treasure that Germany bought from three Jewish art dealers in 1935, the government has now dropped a legal bombshell, one that actually seems to challenge the historical record.
The sale could not have been forced, the German government argued in court papers submitted earlier this month in U.S. District Court, because “the sale predated the Holocaust by several years.”
Holocaust scholars are shocked by Germany’s line of argument, calling it “cynical” and saying that it amounts to “revisionist history.”
“It’s ridiculous,” said Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of modern Jewish history and Holocaust studies at Emory University in Atlanta and a former consultant to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.
“If you define the Holocaust as the killing of Jews, it began in the summer of 1941,” she said. “But to ignore the terrible persecution and prejudice and limitations placed on the lives of Jews that started in 1933 is ludicrous. … It is a cheap shot. It was a forced sale because Jews were forced to sell things because they were denied the right to make a living.”
Marion Kaplan, a professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University who has taught 19th and 20th century German history, said she was “shocked” by the German claim.
“The idea that the ‘Holocaust’ started with the war is wrong,” she said. “Social death started in 1933 and physical death followed. Indeed, many Jewish men died in concentration camps directly after Kristallnacht [November 1938] — well before the war.”
Assigning a start date for the Holocaust — in a legal if not a moral sense — is admittedly an imprecise exercise. Did it begin when the National Socialists took power in 1933? When the Nuremberg Laws were signed in 1935? When the state-sponsored rampage against Jewish businesses — Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass — terrorized the Jewish population in 1938? When the Nazis signed off on the Final Solution in 1941? When mass killings with stationary gas chambers began widely in 1942?
The case of the Guelph Treasure, in which heirs of the Jewish art dealers are seeking its return, may throw a light on this complicated legal question.
The treasure is a collection, primarily of precious gem-encrusted Christian devotional masterpieces, such as reliquaries and crosses, that is valued at about $250 million. The most valuable piece is a 12th-century domed reliquary shaped like a church and made of gold, copper and silver. Biblical figures carved from walrus tusk encircle the work.
Had the heirs sought the collection’s return years ago, the legal fight over its ownership might not have been questioned. In 1943, the Allied governments recognized that the Nazis either confiscated or compelled victims of religious, racial and political persecution to sell their businesses, houses and other property under duress. They then issued the London Declaration that said the allies would no longer recognize the transfer of property in occupied countries even if it appeared legal — a doctrine codified into law after the war that was adopted by the new German Federal Republic in 1949, according to an attorney for the heirs, Markus Stotzel.
He said Germany rescinded it in the 1960s in the belief all restitution claims had been resolved. But in the last decade or so, the heirs of several Jewish art collectors have come forward to assert claims to looted art, some of it hanging in German museums. The heirs to the Guelph Treasure began their efforts seven years ago.
In response to the new claims, Germany promised to be transparent and efficient in restituting works of art. In 2003 it created an eight-member commission headed by Jutta Limbach, former head of Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court, to mediate all disputes regarding cultural property — including art — seized by the state as a result of Nazi persecution.
The commission heard the Guelph case shortly after the issue of German art restitution made headlines worldwide late in 2013 with the admission by the Bavarian state that it had quietly recovered 1,400 pieces of art — much of it looted by the Nazis — that had been secretly hidden by the son of a man who had been an art dealer for Hitler.
In its Guelph case decision, issued in March 2014, the commission noted that the collectors had bought the artifacts in 1929 for 7.5 million reichsmarks. They later sold about half of them and in 1934 began negotiations with the Dresdner Bank for the rest. The bank was secretly acting in behalf of the Prussian state government headed by its prime minister, Hermann Goering, the second most powerful man in Germany after Adolf Hitler rose to power in 1933.
Negotiations over the price concluded in July 1935, and the Limbach commission said there were “no indications that the art dealers and their business partners were placed under pressure in the negotiations … [and thus were not forced to sell] as a result of Nazi persecution.”
A spokesman for the German Embassy in Washington said his government agrees with that opinion and is “committed to the fair and just resolution of legitimate claims to Nazi-confiscated art, consistent with the universally accepted guidelines of the Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art.”
“The federal government,” he added, “therefore believes that the civil case stemming from a 1935 sale of medieval relics by a group of German art dealers has no merit and should not be heard in [a] U.S. court.”
The art dealers were paid only 4.2 million reichsmarks, which was “one-third or less than its market value,” according to Mel Urbach, Stotzel’s co-counsel. He said they sold it to Goering — who later presented it to Hitler as a gift — believing they would be killed if they did not.
Urbach said he and Stotzel represent relatives of another art dealer who was imprisoned and tortured by the Nazis before he would sell to them. And he said they have a number of other cases in which the German government is refusing to recognize legitimate claims of Jewish heirs to works of art, buildings and property.
“We see a pattern here where Germany is revising the Holocaust and using technicalities [defenses such as the statute of limitations] to disrespect the suffering of so many people during the early years of the Nazi regime,” he said.
The lawyers submitted several expert opinions from Holocaust historians to support their claims.
One was from Wolf Gruner, chair of Jewish studies and a professor of history at the University of Southern California, who is a specialist in the persecution of the Jews in Germany. He wrote that within weeks of Hitler being appointed chancellor on Jan. 30, 1933, he “subjected political dissidents and Jewish Germans to extreme persecution. Jewish people were mistreated in many towns in the first months of 1933, put into concentration camps, their stores were attacked and boycotted, and they were pushed out of professional and economic life by many different means.”
Gruner noted also that officials in Frankfurt am Maim, home of the three Jewish art collectors, “made a common practice of preventing the transfer of the coveted art assets of the Jews to overseas by having these entered on the list of nationally valuable assets.”
He pointed out also that one of the three art collectors, Saemy Rosenbaum, concluded the negotiations in Berlin and could not have failed to notice daily demonstrations in front of Jewish-owned stores.
“Spoken choruses of ‘Don’t buy from Jews’ were intended to prevent customers visiting,” he wrote. “Shop windows were scrawled and painted with anti-Jewish slogans. The police had to intervene repeatedly and restore order. … In such circumstances, there can be no question of any kind of normal sale transaction, unaffected by the daily and ubiquitous active discrimination and persecution …
“This transaction is therefore tainted by the stain of `persecution conditionality’ … because the sale took place under conditions that were not equitable and market value appropriate.”
Although Rosenbaum later left Germany and started his business anew in New York, his associates were not so fortunate. Julius Goldschmidt escaped to London but is said to have lived an impoverished life. And Z. M. Hackenbroch was reportedly dragged to his death through the streets of Frankfurt by a Nazi mob in 1937.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, said the German government’s claim that the 1935 sale “predated the Holocaust by several years” is “simply disgusting and dangerous.”
“I understand the tactic of what they are trying to do — saying that the sale was normal,” he told The Jewish Week. “But for a Jew in Germany in 1935, life in Germany was anything but normal. … The fact that it was sold in 1935 — you would have to prove to me there was no linkage.”
Holocaust historian Timothy Snyder, author of the critically acclaimed new book, “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning,” told The Jewish Week that although the “mass murder of Jews began in the summer of 1941, the discrimination [against them] began in 1933.”
“The reasons why people would want to get out of Germany and be compelled to sell things begins in 1933,” he said. “Their [the German government’s] argument is shameful. It means that unless there was mass murder, nobody was discriminated against. The fact that they killed many of the people later does not mean it was alright to discriminate against them earlier. Nobody would say that. All of the historians who work on the Holocaust focus on the discrimination that began in the 1930s.”
Atina Grossmann, a teacher of modern European and German history at Cooper Union, said in an email to The Jewish Week that the German government’s claim is “a rather specious argument in terms of compensation for expropriated Jewish property in Germany since we clearly have anti-Jewish policies and actions in place from 1933 on — all before the beginning of the war and well before the implementation of the Final Solution and the enactment of any plans for the extermination of European Jewry.”
About Germany’s claim in the Guelph Treasure case, Grossmann added: “So yes, technically correct, but in this case certainly an irrelevant and specious cynical argument. The Germans know better.” ----------------------------
‘Fiddler’ In The Age Of Pew And Syria
‘Tradition,’ immigration take on new relevance in fifth Broadway revival.
Ted Merwin
Special To The Jewish Week
Hofesh Shechter, left, rehearsing with cast members at the New 42nd Street Studios. Lindsay Hoffman/Jeffrey Richards Associates
There may be no more rousing and infectious song than “Tradition,” the opening number in “Fiddler on the Roof,” the iconic musical about one man’s quixotic, ultimately doomed battle to keep the winds of political and social change from blowing away his beloved shtetl.
Nevertheless, when the cast of the upcoming fifth Broadway revival of “Fiddler,” directed by the Tony Award-winning Bartlett Sher and starring Danny Burstein as Tevye, takes the stage to sing “Tradition,” it will do so at a time when the very meaning of Jewish tradition is being re-evaluated. Large numbers of American Jews, especially those who were born toward the end of the 20th century, have reported (in recent Pew Research Center surveys, for example) that they feel disconnected from Jewish religion altogether, even as the liberal movements in Judaism are becoming increasingly accepting of intermarriage as a valid lifestyle choice.
Then again, at a time when refugees are flooding out of Syria and immigration is a red-hot topic in our political discourse, “Fiddler,” with its final scene of expulsion, seems startlingly contemporary.
How will the musical resonate for Jewish audiences today?
As the new production began previews last weekend, Burstein (a five-time Tony nominee for his performances as the enterprising Luther Billis in “South Pacific,” “Follies” and other shows) took a moment to reflect about his own Jewish roots, as he told The Jewish Week in an email. Raised by a Jewish stepfather, Burstein was also the biological son of Jewish parents; he learned recently that his mother’s relatives were Sephardic Jews who emigrated from Spain to Costa Rica. His stepfather, he said, instilled in him “strong moral values — to work hard and to always give back. If that’s not Jewish, I don’t know what is.”
And Burstein’s co-star, Jessica Hecht (Gretchen Schwartz on “Breaking Bad”), who plays Golde, is also Jewish.
While Teyve may be perceived as conservative, if not reactionary, in his attitude toward his daughters decisions to be guided by their own hearts rather than their parents’ agenda, Burstein views his character as “actually quite progressive for his time. He respects his wife and daughter and is a person that people in his community look up to.”
Burstein sees the musical as having profound 21st-century relevance. “What happens in ‘Fiddler’ isn’t stuff of the past,” he noted. “It’s happening today. People are being forced from their homes, people are being persecuted because of their religions, children are breaking away from their parents and breaking traditions.”
While Sher (who also directs the current revival of “The King and I”) was unavailable for an interview, he can be seen in a YouTube video speaking to the cast. He discusses the refugee crisis in Europe and how “our exploration of the piece is … trying to find ways in which ‘Fiddler’ feels profound and important to do today, in a world that is exploding in all kinds of directions, with people on the move, being driven out of their homes by civil war and oppression.”
After the rehearsal, Sher talks in the video about how he feels “personally close” to the material because of his own Jewish background; he was raised Catholic but discovered as a teenager that his father, who was born in Lithuania, was a Jew.
Alisa Solomon, author of the 2013 “Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’” (Metropolitan Books), told The Jewish Week that the show “captures the wrenching, inevitable nature of change.” Every production of the musical, she pointed out, takes place at its own historical moment, but “right now is particularly apt. I can’t look at the images of Syrian refugees with their bundles and babushkas without thinking of the final moment of ‘Fiddler,’ a moment that is so imprinted in our collective consciousness.”
When “Fiddler” debuted in 1964, Solomon noted, American Jewish periodicals like Commentary were “anxious about a lot of the same things that Jews are anxious about today” — issues of intermarriage, Jewish continuity, and the like. Solomon, who teaches journalism at Columbia University, cited the current example of the Conservative movement’s debating its stance on intermarriage and trying to “define itself for a younger generation in a way that both honors tradition and is contemporary.”
The overarching question for 21st-century American Jews is, Solomon said, the same as it was for Tevye and his kin: Jewish customs may seem almost infinitely flexible, capable of all kinds of creative reinterpretations. “But when,” Solomon asked, echoing many other current observers of the American Jewish scene, “do you bend so far that you break?”
Rabbi Ed Feinstein’s latest book, “The Chutzpah Imperative: Empowering Today’s Jews for a Life That Matters” (Jewish Lights), centers on “Fiddler” as paradigmatic of both the blessings and curses of modernity.
As Rabbi Feinstein, spiritual leader of Valley Beth Shalom, a flagship Conservative congregation in Encino, Calif., told The Jewish Week in an interview, “We’re living multicultural lives, but there’s a loss of the sacred in our culture. Tevye’s relationship to God is charming, but it’s what we’re all in quest of, which is someone or something to believe in.”
Or, as he put it in his book, “Fiddler” is nothing less than “the story of our origins as modern Jews and the birth of the complicated identities we inhabit.”
“Fiddler on the Roof” is in previews and opens on Dec. 20 at the Broadway Theatre, 1681 Broadway (between West 52nd and West 53rd Streets). Performances are Tuesdays-Saturdays at 8 p.m., Wednesdays and Saturdays at 2 p.m. and Sundays at 3 p.m. For tickets, $35-$167, call Telecharge at (212) 239-6200 or visit telecharge.com.
---------------------
Wishing each of you and your families a Happy Thanksgiving,
Gary Rosenblatt
P.S. Be sure to check our website anytime for breaking news and exclusive videos, blogs, opinion essays, features and more.
http://www.thejewishweek.com/
---------------------
BETWEEN THE LINES
Gary Rosenblatt
What Ezra Schwartz Means To UsGary Rosenblatt
What Ezra Schwartz Means To Us
Emulating Israelis, families like his allow faith to trump fear in their calculations about what’s best for their children.
Gary Rosenblatt
Editor And Publisher
gary rosenblatt
The tragic death of Ezra Schwartz, the 18-year-old native of Sharon, Mass., who was spending his gap year at a yeshiva in Israel, hit about as close to home as possible in the Modern Orthodox community in the U.S.
Described as warm, witty and caring, he was all of our sons and daughters — the children we send off to Israel with a mix of great pride and profound anxiety.
Over the last several decades the post-high school year in Israel, with its emphasis on religious study for boys and girls, has become the norm for many in the Orthodox community.
As parents, our greatest hope is that the youngsters will not only increase their Torah knowledge but come to love and appreciate the land and people of Israel, find lasting mentors and friends and reach a higher level of maturity and responsibility.
Our darkest nightmare is that the violence that has pursued Israeli society for more than six decades will touch the lives of our children personally.
Why do we do it — send our children to live for a school year in one of the world’s most volatile regions? For many, it is a mixture of faith, love of Israel, commitment to Zionist ideals, a rationalization that harm can come to us anywhere, and an element of denial.
As a parent whose three children each spent a gap year at a yeshiva in Israel, I can still recall the tearful goodbyes at the airport, the efforts to keep in touch across the months and miles, and the pleasure in visiting and welcoming home a more mature teenager.
My older son was a classmate and friend at Brandeis University of Alisa Flatow, who was killed by a suicide bomber in April 1995 when she and two friends studying in Israel took a bus to the beach in Gush Katif. She was 20 years old.
My daughter was in Israel at that time and during a number of other suicide bombings.
My younger son, like Ezra Schwartz, studied at a yeshiva in Gush Etzion, a West Bank community, in 2000. A few days before Yom Kippur he urged me to join him for the holiest day of the year, eager for me to experience the joyous, spirited davening (prayer services) at the yeshiva. I arrived just as the second intifada was breaking out in force. Over the four days of my visit I felt the highs and lows of life in Israel, from the transcendental moments of the community’s passionate prayer to the dreaded awareness that a new wave of Palestinian violence was gaining momentum, aimed at breaking the resolve of the Jewish nation.
No doubt there will be questions among American parents about why Israeli yeshivas permit or encourage their children to travel in harm’s way, and there is talk of encouraging yeshivas catering to gap-year students to be based in relatively safe cities rather than Jerusalem or the West Bank.
The agonizing decisions every family makes about whether or not to send a son or daughter to Israel for an academic year at the tender age of 17 or 18 will be even more fraught with concern in the coming months.
For now, though, the outpouring of grief and the efforts to bring comfort to the Schwartz family are inspiring. Though Ezra attended day school and summer camps in New England, the Modern Orthodox community is a tight-knit group with few degrees of separation. Many people I have spoken to tell me of their connections to Ezra through their friends, their children or their friends’ children. Local area day schools and synagogues have arranged trips to Boston for a shiva visit to the Schwartz family, as did a woman in Teaneck who put out the word on social media that she had arranged for a 57-seat bus to make the trip this week. She encouraged others to join her “to show the Schwartz family our sympathy and support and to let them know that they are not alone.”
Such acts of chesed (kindness) are all the more impressive when they come from people who never met the Schwartzes but feel such a strong affinity with them.
It is no secret that there is an increasing divide between the Orthodox and liberal streams of our community, with the Orthodox dramatically more conservative politically and far less threatened by disaffiliation among the young. But perhaps the biggest gap is in attitudes toward Israel. While most American Jews are either opposed to or deeply ambivalent about Israeli settlements, for instance, the issue is rarely debated in Orthodox circles, where so many people have friends and family living in Jewish communities in the West Bank.
Similarly, it is the Orthodox community that has led the way in sending their children to Israel for extended stays, like the gap-year programs. Emulating the Israelis themselves, these families have allowed faith to trump fear in their calculations about what’s best for their children. While we all pray that calm will be restored to Israel and that parents need no longer make potential life-and-death decisions on a daily basis about their families — which shops to avoid, which street to walk on — we pay tribute to all those who refuse to let terror dictate their lives, even as they appreciate the need for caution. That delicate balancing act is the Israeli condition, the miracle of building a thriving, vibrant and dynamic society in the midst of constant threats from enemies who hate.
May the brief but vital life of Ezra Schwartz, who by all accounts thrived during his time in Israel, be remembered with tenderness, and may his family — and the family of Israel — know no more sadness.
gary@jewishweek.orgRead More
---------------------
MUSINGS
Rabbi David Wolpe
A Time To DanceMusings
A Time To Dance
Rabbi David Wolpe
Rabbi David Wolpe
After the Israelites cross the sea, Miriam and the women dance. Moses leads the people with song, but Miriam leads them with dance.
The movement of the human body is an overflow of the human spirit. Joy breaks out in motion. When you watch Jews praying, their swaying is the ebb and flow of inner tides, reflecting the force of what is felt and said. When King David recovered the ark and led it in procession back to Jerusalem, he did not merely dance — he danced with all his might [2 Samuel 6:14].
The moments of greatest joy in the Jewish calendar — weddings, Simchat Torah, bar and bat mitzvah celebrations — are accompanied by dance. According to the Mishnah, in ancient times Yom Kippur was a day for matchmaking, and the maidens of Jerusalem would dress in white and dance [Ta’anit 4:8].
The human body is a sacred creation, and its workings are something to celebrate and to elevate. Judaism embraces all the human expressions of gratitude and of joy. There is enough sadness in life, and we should not shun or slight celebration. As Ecclesiastes reminded us thousands of years ago, there is a time to mourn and a time to dance.
Rabbi David Wolpe is spiritual leader of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter: @RabbiWolpe. His latest book is “David: The Divided Heart” (Yale University Press). Read More
P.S. Be sure to check our website anytime for breaking news and exclusive videos, blogs, opinion essays, features and more.
http://www.thejewishweek.com/
---------------------
BETWEEN THE LINES
Gary Rosenblatt
What Ezra Schwartz Means To UsGary Rosenblatt
What Ezra Schwartz Means To Us
Emulating Israelis, families like his allow faith to trump fear in their calculations about what’s best for their children.
Gary Rosenblatt
Editor And Publisher
gary rosenblatt
The tragic death of Ezra Schwartz, the 18-year-old native of Sharon, Mass., who was spending his gap year at a yeshiva in Israel, hit about as close to home as possible in the Modern Orthodox community in the U.S.
Described as warm, witty and caring, he was all of our sons and daughters — the children we send off to Israel with a mix of great pride and profound anxiety.
Over the last several decades the post-high school year in Israel, with its emphasis on religious study for boys and girls, has become the norm for many in the Orthodox community.
As parents, our greatest hope is that the youngsters will not only increase their Torah knowledge but come to love and appreciate the land and people of Israel, find lasting mentors and friends and reach a higher level of maturity and responsibility.
Our darkest nightmare is that the violence that has pursued Israeli society for more than six decades will touch the lives of our children personally.
Why do we do it — send our children to live for a school year in one of the world’s most volatile regions? For many, it is a mixture of faith, love of Israel, commitment to Zionist ideals, a rationalization that harm can come to us anywhere, and an element of denial.
As a parent whose three children each spent a gap year at a yeshiva in Israel, I can still recall the tearful goodbyes at the airport, the efforts to keep in touch across the months and miles, and the pleasure in visiting and welcoming home a more mature teenager.
My older son was a classmate and friend at Brandeis University of Alisa Flatow, who was killed by a suicide bomber in April 1995 when she and two friends studying in Israel took a bus to the beach in Gush Katif. She was 20 years old.
My daughter was in Israel at that time and during a number of other suicide bombings.
My younger son, like Ezra Schwartz, studied at a yeshiva in Gush Etzion, a West Bank community, in 2000. A few days before Yom Kippur he urged me to join him for the holiest day of the year, eager for me to experience the joyous, spirited davening (prayer services) at the yeshiva. I arrived just as the second intifada was breaking out in force. Over the four days of my visit I felt the highs and lows of life in Israel, from the transcendental moments of the community’s passionate prayer to the dreaded awareness that a new wave of Palestinian violence was gaining momentum, aimed at breaking the resolve of the Jewish nation.
No doubt there will be questions among American parents about why Israeli yeshivas permit or encourage their children to travel in harm’s way, and there is talk of encouraging yeshivas catering to gap-year students to be based in relatively safe cities rather than Jerusalem or the West Bank.
The agonizing decisions every family makes about whether or not to send a son or daughter to Israel for an academic year at the tender age of 17 or 18 will be even more fraught with concern in the coming months.
For now, though, the outpouring of grief and the efforts to bring comfort to the Schwartz family are inspiring. Though Ezra attended day school and summer camps in New England, the Modern Orthodox community is a tight-knit group with few degrees of separation. Many people I have spoken to tell me of their connections to Ezra through their friends, their children or their friends’ children. Local area day schools and synagogues have arranged trips to Boston for a shiva visit to the Schwartz family, as did a woman in Teaneck who put out the word on social media that she had arranged for a 57-seat bus to make the trip this week. She encouraged others to join her “to show the Schwartz family our sympathy and support and to let them know that they are not alone.”
Such acts of chesed (kindness) are all the more impressive when they come from people who never met the Schwartzes but feel such a strong affinity with them.
It is no secret that there is an increasing divide between the Orthodox and liberal streams of our community, with the Orthodox dramatically more conservative politically and far less threatened by disaffiliation among the young. But perhaps the biggest gap is in attitudes toward Israel. While most American Jews are either opposed to or deeply ambivalent about Israeli settlements, for instance, the issue is rarely debated in Orthodox circles, where so many people have friends and family living in Jewish communities in the West Bank.
Similarly, it is the Orthodox community that has led the way in sending their children to Israel for extended stays, like the gap-year programs. Emulating the Israelis themselves, these families have allowed faith to trump fear in their calculations about what’s best for their children. While we all pray that calm will be restored to Israel and that parents need no longer make potential life-and-death decisions on a daily basis about their families — which shops to avoid, which street to walk on — we pay tribute to all those who refuse to let terror dictate their lives, even as they appreciate the need for caution. That delicate balancing act is the Israeli condition, the miracle of building a thriving, vibrant and dynamic society in the midst of constant threats from enemies who hate.
May the brief but vital life of Ezra Schwartz, who by all accounts thrived during his time in Israel, be remembered with tenderness, and may his family — and the family of Israel — know no more sadness.
gary@jewishweek.orgRead More
---------------------
MUSINGS
Rabbi David Wolpe
A Time To DanceMusings
A Time To Dance
Rabbi David Wolpe
Rabbi David Wolpe
After the Israelites cross the sea, Miriam and the women dance. Moses leads the people with song, but Miriam leads them with dance.
The movement of the human body is an overflow of the human spirit. Joy breaks out in motion. When you watch Jews praying, their swaying is the ebb and flow of inner tides, reflecting the force of what is felt and said. When King David recovered the ark and led it in procession back to Jerusalem, he did not merely dance — he danced with all his might [2 Samuel 6:14].
The moments of greatest joy in the Jewish calendar — weddings, Simchat Torah, bar and bat mitzvah celebrations — are accompanied by dance. According to the Mishnah, in ancient times Yom Kippur was a day for matchmaking, and the maidens of Jerusalem would dress in white and dance [Ta’anit 4:8].
The human body is a sacred creation, and its workings are something to celebrate and to elevate. Judaism embraces all the human expressions of gratitude and of joy. There is enough sadness in life, and we should not shun or slight celebration. As Ecclesiastes reminded us thousands of years ago, there is a time to mourn and a time to dance.
Rabbi David Wolpe is spiritual leader of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter: @RabbiWolpe. His latest book is “David: The Divided Heart” (Yale University Press). Read More
---------------------
Google Images
Featured on Fresh Ink For Teens
The Art Of Making Conversation
The Art Of Making Conversation by: Doria Leibowitz
Or a simple plan to avoid the dreaded discussions about colleges this Thanksgiving.
flickr.com
As a senior in high school, I’m on the last lap of my college application race. Most of my applications are submitted; I’ve finished begging my teachers for recommendations and bombarding advisors with questions (Where exactly on the application did they put the send button? was my favorite email request).
However, as I said there is one lap left, a lap that involves skillful and witty banter and a bob and weave style usually seen in a boxing ring. That is, the answer to everyone’s favorite holiday question: “So where are you applying to college?” There are only so many ways to avoid the topic. Everyone wants to know what colleges you are considering, and it eventually becomes an inevitable discussion, especially when holidays roll around. There’s no better time than Rosh Hashanah, Sukkot, Thanksgiving or Chanukah to start asking. By the time Passover rolls around the question evolves into “So where are you going to college?” Holidays are the only times families gather together to catch up and enjoy each other’s company which is why everyone seems to think it’s the perfect time to begin bombarding the only high school senior at the table with questions about college. I hear my brain alerting me of what’s to come and prepare a tactful way to escape the questions.
As Thanksgiving is approaching this is my plan: the go-to topic changer is always the food. There’s no better way to distract your great-aunt than complementing her on the delicious stuffing she made (yes, seriously). The rest of the table always joins in to be polite and then decides to dig into their food to show how much they are enjoying it (still not kidding). That gives me just enough time to move on to Plan B, because once they finish that first serving, they will be satisfied enough to take a break and continue on their quest to find out as much personal information about me as possible.
That next step easily could start with, “How ‘bout them Mets?” But that’s often tricky depending on the audience and truthfully, I know nothing about the Mets besides, "How ‘bout those Mets?" This year I’m going with asking my brother about his girlfriend — regardless of whether he has one or not. The people at the table who had no idea he was dating someone will immediately become curious and excited and start bombarding him with questions instead. They’ll want to know everything about her, if she’s Jewish, smart, pretty, tall, short — you name it, they’ll ask it. If I’m really lucky, this conversation can even lead to them asking my cousin, is he dating anyone? That should keep them busy for a while. And yes, I’ll have to deal with the wrath of my brother for the next several days afterwards, but at least I will have survived Thanksgiving. Now let the Chanukah planning begin.Read More
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Christopher Columbus used this mansion in Las Palmas as a base for his Atlantic voyages. Wikimedia Commons
TRAVEL
The Prettiest Spanish City
You've Never Heard Of
Hilary Danailova
Travel Writer
Read More
---------------------
JWMG
Featured on NYBLUEPRINT
Ten Thanksgiving Commandments
Google Images
Featured on Fresh Ink For Teens
The Art Of Making Conversation
The Art Of Making Conversation by: Doria Leibowitz
Or a simple plan to avoid the dreaded discussions about colleges this Thanksgiving.
flickr.com
As a senior in high school, I’m on the last lap of my college application race. Most of my applications are submitted; I’ve finished begging my teachers for recommendations and bombarding advisors with questions (Where exactly on the application did they put the send button? was my favorite email request).
However, as I said there is one lap left, a lap that involves skillful and witty banter and a bob and weave style usually seen in a boxing ring. That is, the answer to everyone’s favorite holiday question: “So where are you applying to college?” There are only so many ways to avoid the topic. Everyone wants to know what colleges you are considering, and it eventually becomes an inevitable discussion, especially when holidays roll around. There’s no better time than Rosh Hashanah, Sukkot, Thanksgiving or Chanukah to start asking. By the time Passover rolls around the question evolves into “So where are you going to college?” Holidays are the only times families gather together to catch up and enjoy each other’s company which is why everyone seems to think it’s the perfect time to begin bombarding the only high school senior at the table with questions about college. I hear my brain alerting me of what’s to come and prepare a tactful way to escape the questions.
As Thanksgiving is approaching this is my plan: the go-to topic changer is always the food. There’s no better way to distract your great-aunt than complementing her on the delicious stuffing she made (yes, seriously). The rest of the table always joins in to be polite and then decides to dig into their food to show how much they are enjoying it (still not kidding). That gives me just enough time to move on to Plan B, because once they finish that first serving, they will be satisfied enough to take a break and continue on their quest to find out as much personal information about me as possible.
That next step easily could start with, “How ‘bout them Mets?” But that’s often tricky depending on the audience and truthfully, I know nothing about the Mets besides, "How ‘bout those Mets?" This year I’m going with asking my brother about his girlfriend — regardless of whether he has one or not. The people at the table who had no idea he was dating someone will immediately become curious and excited and start bombarding him with questions instead. They’ll want to know everything about her, if she’s Jewish, smart, pretty, tall, short — you name it, they’ll ask it. If I’m really lucky, this conversation can even lead to them asking my cousin, is he dating anyone? That should keep them busy for a while. And yes, I’ll have to deal with the wrath of my brother for the next several days afterwards, but at least I will have survived Thanksgiving. Now let the Chanukah planning begin.Read More
---------------------
Christopher Columbus used this mansion in Las Palmas as a base for his Atlantic voyages. Wikimedia Commons
TRAVEL
The Prettiest Spanish City
You've Never Heard Of
Hilary Danailova
Travel Writer
Given the violence rattling the world today, escape is certainly in order. And few escapes are quite so ideal as Las Palmas, a pastel Spanish city in the far-flung Canary Islands.
Way out in the blue Atlantic, with a sunny latitude off the southern Moroccan coast, Spain’s Canaries are more than an escape from winter (contrary to popular belief, mainland Iberia gets winter-coat cold by November). The volcanic archipelago feels like an escape from Europe itself — from the Continent of thousand-year history, of ever-tightening security restrictions and the tensions of modern urban life.
Las Palmas is the prettiest Spanish city you’ve never heard of. But British holidaymakers and well-to-do Madrileños have long flocked to this lively metropolis of roughly 750,000, where tourists, sun-seeking retirees and transient expats all converge. On the island of Gran Canaria, Las Palmas enjoys winter daytime highs around 70; though the climate is more California than Caribbean, the waters are still warm enough for swimming along wide, sandy beaches.
Less flashy than Ibiza, yet considerably urbane, Las Palmas offers a heady mix of palm-fringed boardwalks, historic colonial lanes, high-energy Spanish nightlife, and surprisingly worthwhile cultural venues. Las Palmas is also a popular cruise destination and something of a world crossroads, with a strategic commercial port that has attracted considerable industry in recent decades. At the café or on the sand, you’re likely to strike up a conversation with an accented resident who hails from Australia, India, Venezuela, or Israel.
This diversity is reflected in Las Palmas’ Sephardic Jewish community, which dates to the 1492 expulsion from mainland Iberia, and coalesced in the mid-1900s with arrivals from North Africa. Today it benefits from a continuous flux of diaspora professionals and business people, and boasts a congregation of roughly 30 families that gather for prayer and holidays.
Around the island, you hear about historic Jewish quarters in the older neighborhoods — but there is little tangible evidence of Jewish life amid the palms. As on islands everywhere, locals fret that their children go abroad for study and tend not to return.
Even so, given the myriad cultures that have left their imprint here, Las Palmas has more to explore than you might expect from a vacation spot. The Canaries owe their relevance to a strategic position for Spanish maritime explorers — which is why on one of the city’s grandest plazas, next to the cathedral and flanked by fountains, you’ll find the House Museum of Christopher Columbus.
This landmark is worth a look if only for the building, a stunning 15th-century mansion; Columbus didn’t really live here, but he did use Las Palmas as a base for his Atlantic voyages. This enjoyable museum illustrates not only these sojourns, but also America before the Spanish conquest, Spain’s Golden Age of Discovery, and the maritime history of the city.
On a more cultural note, Las Palmas is also the birthplace of the actor Javier Bardem — and a century earlier, of the great Romantic writer Benito Pérez Galdós, whose house-museum is worth a detour to the vintage Triana neighborhood. Tucked behind a peacock-blue façade on a narrow street by a bingo parlor, Galdós’s dwelling is an oasis of patios and well-preserved 19th-century interiors.
Pérez Galdós’ more lavish namesake, however, is the theater that bears his name, an imposing Romantic-style edifice near the waterfront. Much of the ornate interior was rebuilt after a fire in 1928, but the 1860s façade — designed by a famous architect of the era — remains one of the most distinctive features of downtown Las Palmas. With a reputation as Spain’s finest theater off the mainland, the Teatro Pérez Galdós is home to the Alfredo Kraus Opera Festival of Las Palmas (February through May), and presents concerts and spectacles that can be enjoyed by non-Spanish-speakers.
For a sweeping look at Hispanic cultural currents, head to the most ambitious art museum in the Canaries — the Atlantic Centre of Modern Art, which opened 25 years ago and was recently expanded with new, airy galleries.
The Atlantic Centre was founded with the very modern idea of “tri-continentality,” a kind of aesthetic and cultural dialogue between the three continents that have shaped modern Canarian culture: the Americas, Africa and Europe. To that end, the intriguing collection — which, alongside rotating exhibits, is full of art you have never seen before — showcases artists from North Africa, Latin America, and the distinct regions of contemporary Spain.
Of course, you could easily spend an entire week lounging on the crescent-shaped beaches, or sipping sangria at outdoor cafés. Las Palmas has just enough culture to feel lively, but not so much that it pressures the vacationer — the very definition of a winter escape.
editor@jewishweek.org
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U.S. Teen's Murder Posing Dilemma For Modern Orthodox
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff WriterInternational
U.S. Teen’s Murder Posing Dilemma For Modern Orthodox
Sense of resolve mixed with reservations about West Bank in wake of terror attack.
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
“Ezra loved Israel,” a classmate said of slain 18-year-old Ezra Schwartz, above. Twitter via JTA
For Modern Orthodox Jews this week, an irresistible force — their passionate love of the Jewish state — is running headlong into an immoveable object — their deep concern for the safety of their children pursuing Torah studies in an increasingly dangerous Israel.
In the wake of the brazen murder last week of an 18-year-old Massachusetts gap-year yeshiva student at a notorious West Bank junction, it appears too soon to tell which would budge.
The death of Ezra Schwartz, a graduate of the Maimonides Academy in Boston who was studying for the year at Yeshivat Ashreinu in Jerusalem, was a tragedy all lovers of Israel mourned. But it poses a particularly excruciating dilemma for a segment of the community whose post-high school one- and two-year programs of religious study have become increasingly popular. To scuttle them would be seen as akin to the community’s turning its back on Israel. But questions are being raised about security concerns when it comes to both schools in the West Bank and school-sponsored trips there.
The director of Israel programs at the Ma’ayanot Yeshiva High School for girls in Teaneck, N.J., Leah Herzog, stands at the pivot point of the dilemma, between students and parents here and the gap-year yeshivas in Israel.
“Parents are nervous and heartbroken, but we’re going to keep sending our children,” said Herzog, who is also the parent of two children who have or will be spending a gap year in Israel. Nearly all of Ma’ayanot’s students spend a gap year in Israel.
Herzog and her co-Israel guidance counselor Suzanne Cohen told The Jewish Week that while parents are still supporting gap-year programs, there is some reservation now about sending students to schools in the Gush Etzion bloc in the West Bank. (Schwartz was killed at a junction in the Gush by a Palestinian terrorist after a school trip to the area.) Cohen described one parent who expressed serious reservations about sending her daughter to Migdal Oz, a prominent Orthodox girls seminary in Gush Etzion, despite her daughter’s fierce desire to attend.
“The parent was more nervous than the student,” said Cohen.
In response to the level of concern, the S. Daniel Abraham Israel program, Yeshiva University’s Israel branch, is organizing a special conference call and online conversation next week for parents of children currently taking their gap-year in Israel. According to a Y.U. representative, the webinar will focus on methods of dealing with anxiety. Parents of 2,000-plus American gap-year students currently studying at YU-affiliated institutions will be able to text in questions and concerns.
For Nati Faber, a 17-year-old day school student from Detroit on the brink of his gap year, security has become a major factor in selecting a school — at least for his mother.
“I really like [one yeshiva in the West Bank], but with the murders outside of Alon Shvut, my parents don’t know how they feel about it,” wrote Faber in a Facebook message, preferring to keep the name of the school anonymous as he’s still in the decision process. In his high school grade of 17 students, 14 are planning to spend a gap year in Israel after graduation.
“For sure with a lot of my friends, although they are scared, the situation has motivated us to look even more forward to going to a gap year. And in a sense I believe that holds true with their parents as well,” he wrote.
While there have been other American students who have been killed in terrorist attacks in Israel — including Alisa Flatow, a Jewish American student killed in a bus bombing in 1995 — the reaction to Schwartz’s murder, fueled by the immediacy of social media, seemed different. In Israel, American gap-year students said the proximately of the attack — and the likeness of Schwartz to themselves — made it different.
“When Ezra was killed, it made me rethink everything,” wrote Gavi Shleifer, a 19-year-old American student originally from Atlanta, in a Facebook message. “He is my circle, he was a gap year student who just wanted to do good, and was killed while doing good.” Despite the strained security situation and her parents worrying, Shleifer, currently in her second year abroad at a seminary in Jerusalem, plans on making aliyah and remaining in Israel. “I’m not coming back to the states and will fight my parents if they want me to,” she wrote.
Aaron Eckstein, a 19-year-old gap year student from Passaic, N.J., told The Jewish Week that “helicopter parenting” — something he sees quite often among his peers — won’t work during the Israel trip abroad.
“A lot of yeshivas are asking parents to confirm that their kids can go to the Gush — in my opinion, these type of hard-stop rules are a big joke,” said Eckstein, who plans to join a combat unit in the Israel Defense Forces after completing his yeshiva study. The weekend after Schwartz was killed, Eckstein traveled to Efrat, a large settlement in the Gush, to visit friends.
“Parents need to realize that saying their kids can’t go here and can’t go there won’t change the situation.”
No doubt that adolescent attitude adds to parental worries, feeling less able to direct their children’s comings and goings from 6,000 miles away.
Maya Silver, an American student spending her gap year at a seminary in Jerusalem, wrote a letter to her worried parents back home describing her reaction to Schwartz’s murder.
“This attack is like a punch in the stomach,” she wrote, describing her subsequent confusion, anger, and numbness. “It was so tragic walking through the Rova [the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem] and knowing that every person you saw under a certain age was feeling a deep, indescribable pain… One of us has died.” She ended the letter by telling her parents not to worry about her “too much”… “I’m not in the Gush!”
Rabbi Seth Linfield, executive director of Yeshiva of Flatbush, a large Modern Orthodox high school in Brooklyn, said that while parents are “anxious,” the school expects to send a similar or slightly higher number of students to Israel for a gap-year this coming fall. In an average graduating class of 180 students, about 40 students go to Israel for the year, several attending yeshivot and seminaries in the West Bank.
“The gap year has always been a complicated topic, but there’s been no spike in the conversation after last week’s attacks,” he told The Jewish Week. The parent of a graduating high school senior who is considering spending her gap year at Migdal Oz, Rabbi Linfield said that “depriving” his daughter and other graduating seniors of the gap-year experience would be “giving terrorists a victory without firing a shot.”
Rabbi Linfield declined to comment on whether or not Schwartz’s death resulted partially from a lapse of sound security practices on the part of his yeshiva. He said he has not yet heard those concerns voiced by parents.
“When we, as a school and as parents, send our children to institutions in Israel, we sent them with confidence that the institutions will invoke the highest standards of safety and security,” he said.
Young Judea, a pluralistic Zionist youth group best known for its post-high school year course, specifies on its website that its participants are not allowed to enter the West Bank without permission of the director of the course and parental consent communicated to the director within 48 hours of expected travel. The Jewish Week was unable to speak with a Young Judea representative directly.
Peninah Kaplansky, co-founder and director of Here Next Year, a nonprofit that helps American gap-year students extend their stay in Israel by joining the army or enrolling in an Israeli university, said that in the days directly after Schwartz’s death she saw an uptick in the number of students inquiring about staying in Israel next year.
“In the past few days we’ve received dozens of e-mails asking about our programming and resources,” said Kaplansky, 24, originally from West Hempstead and currently studying at Bar-Ilan University in Jerusalem. “On one hand, students are saying ‘that could have been me’— on the other hand, it’s emboldening for them. We’ve been hurt, but we’re going to respond by asking how can we have the greatest impact on Israel.”
For Schwartz’s fellow students at Yeshivat Ashreinu, the question of how to move forward is still raw.
“As the days continue to pass by, and the death of one of my best friends continues to become more real, all I can think about is what would Ezra want,” Aryeh Sunshine, 18, a classmate of Schwartz’s, told The Jewish Week in a Facebook message. Originally from Cleveland and with plans to attend Ohio State University next year, he has no intention to cut his gap year short, despite the blow.
“Ezra loved Israel and enjoyed every second that he spent in this beautiful country. Although there continues to be attacks on innocent Israeli and Jewish civilians, instead of being scared and tempted to leave Israel, Ezra would want the complete opposite. …The best thing we, the Jewish people can do right now, is stick together.”
editor@jewishweek.orgRead More
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French Expats Here: ‘We Saw This Coming’
‘Sense of fear’ but not surprise about carnage in Paris; ‘too early to tell’ about aliyah.
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
Interfaith leaders gather for a memorial service Sunday outside the Bataclan theater in Paris. Getty Images
They, perhaps more than others, saw it coming.
When the 60 or so French Jews who attend services at the West Side Sephardic Synagogue gathered to pray last Friday night, the scope of the carnage in Paris was still unfolding.
Rabbi Eitan Bendavid, spiritual leader of the congregation, said he noticed “a pervasive sense of fear” among his French-born congregants, most of whom still have relatives back in France, and often go home for family visits.
But, he said, he did not hear a sense of surprise among his congregants. “People in my community have been saying for a long time that they saw stuff like this coming.”
By “stuff like this,” he meant the wide-scale terrorist attacks against French targets.
In Paris itself, where word of the suspected ISIS-coordinated attacks at six venues quickly spread in the French capital, Simone Rodan-Benzaquen, director of the American Jewish Committee’s office in the capital, heard similar sentiments in the Jewish community. Last week’s attacks in Paris “were confirmation of everything we feared,” she said.
In the 10 months since the terrorist attacks on the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket and the offices of the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine, which took a total of 19 lives, French Jews foresaw that while the Jewish community was an early target of fatal Islamist terror attacks, French society in general would be next, Rodan-Benzaquen said in a telephone interview. “It was not a question of if, it was a question of when and where.”
The Bataclan concert hall, where 89 people were killed on Friday night, was Jewish-owned for some four decades until earlier this year, and frequently hosted Jewish events. Like the restaurant and sports stadium where attacks also took place last Friday, it was not a specifically Jewish target in what French President Francois Hollande called “an act of war by ISIS.”
Rodan-Benzaquen and Rabbi Bendavid and other Jews with roots in France reacted in like ways this week, even as France mourned its losses — some 130 people killed and more than 300 injured — and pledged more security protection for Jewish institutions, and declared war on the ISIS terrorists who took responsibility for Friday’s attacks.
People familiar with the French Jewish community said French Jews saw the latest acts of terrorism coming, expect the next terrorism there to be aimed at specifically Jewish targets, are concerned but are not rushing to make aliyah or to move immediately to the United States or other Western countries, and feel that non-Jewish French citizens finally share their worries about the threat of Islamist terrorism. Now, said Rodan-Benzaquen, more people in France have “the knowledge that the cancer is spreading. There is the perception that the entire nation understands … what the Jewish community is going through. We feel less solitude.”
“French citizens now understand that they, and not just Jews, are terror targets,” the Times of Israel website quoted David Khalfa, a political consultant in Paris, as saying this week. “It was an illusion [of safety for most people in France]; we lived in this illusion and now we are waking up — and it’s a nightmare.
“Now everyone is a target,” Khalfa said. “This time it’s not only about symbolic targets … it has changed the whole perspective of fighting terror.”
“Whether attacks are against policemen or soldiers, against freedom of expression, or against Jews, what is being systematically, violently attacked are French democratic and republican values,” Rodan-Benzaquen wrote in an op-ed essay this week. “The goal of Islamic fundamentalism is to divide society, create a clash of civilizations, strengthen extremists that pretend to fight against them, and turn Muslims of every democratic country that they target against the rest of the population.”
“The Jewish community feels that France is under attack; it’s no longer a uniquely Jewish problem,” said Brigitte Dayan, a journalist with Jewish-Moroccan roots who moved to Manhattan from Chicago a dozen years ago and is knowledgeable about the French Jewish community. She added, “One friend [in France] said she is thankful to have bought an apartment in Tel Aviv last year.
“There have been so many attacks, so many threats [on French Jews] over the past months and years, that … the only ones not surprised” that ISIS has painted a bigger bull’s-eye over France “were the French Jewish community. I don’t think this is the end of it,” Rodan-Benzaquen continued.
She believes that while “the fear very much remains” among French Jews, “the next attacks may be [against] another Jewish target” outside France. She said she did not hear the increased level of discussion about leaving France as she did in the aftermath of the Hyper Cacher attack. “It’s a constant talk for the past year; people ask themselves if they should be leaving.”
Rabbi Bendavid said his congregants told him that it’s too early for their relatives in France to immediately reassess their aliyah or emigration options.
Avi Mayer, a spokesman for the Jewish Agency, which coordinates Israel’s aliyah activities, agreed that a spike in French aliyah following the latest attacks in Paris is not likely.
“In the immediate aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher attacks in January, we saw a surge in the number of calls and inquiries from French Jews, and the number of new aliyah files opened in France tripled. We have not seen a similarly dramatic increase in aliyah-related inquiries in the wake of Friday’s attacks,” Mayer said.
The number of French Jews who made aliyah has steadily increased over the last few years, Mayer said, from 1,917 in 2012, to 3,293 in 2013, and 7,238 in 2014. “Aliyah numbers for this year are up by approximately 11 percent compared to this point last year,” indicating a 2015 figure of about 8,000, “and we expect the numbers to continue growing steadily for the foreseeable future,” he said. (Mayer’s figures, however, are contradicted by aliyah totals reported earlier this year, which indicated that French aliyah had slowed after an immediate increase in the months after the January terrorism in Paris, and that a decrease of nearly 20 percent this year was likely.)
El Al Israel Airlines announced that it would assist Israelis in France who wish to return home, offering a “special” $350 one-way fare and suspending revision charges for passengers who wish to change tickets bought for dates up to Nov. 29; Arkia Airlines announced a similar move.
The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, an independent organization that promotes aliyah and supports Jewish life in many countries, announced this week that it is stepping up its work in France, is providing “emergency security aid to French-Jewish communal institutions,” and will bring “a special flight” of French Jews to Israel at the end of November.
“The first French Jews to move to Israel since Friday’s ISIS terrorist attacks arrived today [Monday]” with the support of IFCJ, the organization stated in a press release. “Two families landed at Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion Airport … met by IFCJ representatives.”
Meanwhile, Jewish communities here and in France took part in memorial and commemoration activities.
On Shabbat, Rabbi Bendavid led his West Side congregation in reciting two chapters of Psalms, one “to pray for the healing of all the people who have been affected by this devastating attack,” and one “to pray that our leaders will see the current situation with absolute clarity.” He said his congregation also said a prayer in French for the protection of France.
Many congregants, he said, added the French flag to their Facebook pages as a sign of solidarity.
In Paris, a Chabad-Lubavitch synagogue near the Bataclan theater said Psalms “for the departed and for the safety of all French citizens,” the chabad.org website reported.
The Grand Synagogue of Paris held a prayer service-rally Sunday night, sponsored by the country’s chief rabbi and the Conference of European Rabbis that included political officials and rabbis. “We pray for all the injured to recover quickly. Our hearts are with them and their families,” the Grand Synagogue’s Rabbi Moshe Sebbag said.
Members of the Jewish and Islamic clergy took part Sunday in a memorial service outside the Bataclan concert hall, many of them laying bouquets of white roses at the site.
“Anyone who uses hate speech has no place in France and those places that preach hate are not places of prayer but are those of a sect,” Hassen Chalghoumi, president of Imams of France, said at the memorial service. “1.5 million people are hostages of Daesh [an Arabic acronym for ISIS], 1.5 million people are hostages of these barbarians who are sullying the name of Islam and Muslims. It’s time to say no to this barbarity.”
The memorial was the idea of Polish-Jewish author Marek Halter, who writes frequently about his family, which escaped the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II.
Representatives of prominent U.S. Jewish organizations also condemned Friday’s terrorism. “One of the most sickening forms of human violence one can imagine,” said Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress. “An outrageous, cowardly and premeditated assault not just on the people of France, but on all freedom loving people around the world,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League.
“It’s high time to drop the evasive language too often used to describe the perpetrators of these heinous crimes and get specific,” David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee, said in a statement. “They are not just ‘violent extremists,’ though of course they are. They are not just ‘terrorists,’ though, of course, they are that as well. They are radical Islamists inspired by their interpretation of religion, however perverted it may be.
“Hoping the problem will one day go away is not a strategy, nor is tying the hands of, or eviscerating the budgets of, law enforcement, intelligence, and the military, nor is defending privacy rights at all costs, as some policy purists would do, even if it means endangering national security and personal safety,” Harris said. “Some judicious accommodations must be made in today’s democratic societies, or else the consequences could be profound. It won’t be easy, nor will it be quick. Yesterday’s tragic events in Paris should be another urgent wake-up call that, whether we live in France or elsewhere, our world needs, and is worth, defending.”
editor@jewishweek.org
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Security Measures Questioned In Teen's Murder
Joshua Mitnick
Contributing Editor
Israel News
Security Measures Questioned In Teen’s Murder
Masa inquiry underway over yeshiva trip to Gush Etzion junction.
Joshua Mitnick
Contributing Editor
Protesters this week in Gush Etzion holding a poster of Israelis killed in terrorist attacks. Ben Sales/JTA
Tel Aviv — The murder of Massachusetts native Ezra Schwartz in a terrorist shooting last week has shaken Israel’s overseas educational programs as they scramble to handle worried parents, upset participants, and review security precautions for trips to high-risk locations in the country.
An inquiry is currently underway into what safety measures were taken last Thursday before Schwartz, 18, and a group of other gap-year students at Yeshivat Ashreinu visited the Gush Etzion junction in the West Bank, said an official for the government agency that subsidizes the yeshiva’s gap-year program.
Critics complained that youths without sufficient protection were allowed to visit a location frequently targeted by Palestinian terrorists. Others contend that there is no true safe place in Israel amid a wave of terrorist stabbings and shootings and that the yeshiva did its best to protect its students.
“There is a lot to sort through, and all of the questions are now being asked; it is too early to draw any conclusions at this stage,” said Sara Eisen, communications director at Masa Israel Journey, an umbrella organization run jointly by the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office and the Jewish Agency that subsidizes and oversees hundreds of gap-year program affiliates like Yeshivat Ashreinu.
“We are working through the facts of the situation and have no answers yet to the many understandable concerns.”
Potentially at risk from the fallout from Schwartz’s death are participation levels in programs that bring thousands of Jewish youths to Israel each year, as well as international tourism, a major Israeli industry. The killing also highlights the challenges faced by overseas programs that want to allow participants to see the country but must balance the freedom with security precautions.
Michael Jankelowitz, a former Jewish Agency spokesperson, worried the killing would have a “major” effect on participation for all educational travel to Israel, and complained that the teens should have been traveling in an armored, bulletproof vehicle, given the danger at the Gush Etzion junction.
Laura Kam, a public relations consultant who lives in Jerusalem and whose son is doing army service on guard in the West Bank, wondered why “a group of completely unprotected teens” was in “an area so unsafe.” She told The Jewish Week, “I know folks will say that two people were killed in Tel Aviv the same day. But in fact, the road where Ezra died is highly problematic and everyone knows it. Let’s keep our young visitors safe.” (Despite published reports, the yeshiva denies the trip included food delivery to soldiers, a common practice to bolster the spirits among the IDF.)
Located on the heavily traveled Highway 60, the Gush Etzion junction is a busy intersection south of Jerusalem that connects the capital city to the affluent bloc of suburban settlements that include Efrat and Alon Shvut, and also settlements around Hebron. A tunnel road bypass around Bethlehem was built in the late 1990s to link Gush Etzion (known simply as the Gush) to Jerusalem, and it was reinforced with walls to protect Israeli drivers. Highway 60 is also used as a shortcut to Jerusalem for those living inside of Israel. A supermarket at the junction serves both Israelis and Palestinians shoppers and employs both as well.
In recent days, however, the government has been discussing ways to separate Israelis and Palestinians and boost security. Hundreds of Gush-area residents held a demonstration at the junction on Monday to demand tighter protection.
Before the attack on Schwartz, the intersection had been targeted seven times by Palestinian attackers since the beginning of October, leaving four civilians injured and one soldier wounded. Like many road junctions around the West Bank, in recent weeks the Israeli army has deployed groups of soldiers at Gush Etzion junction that stand behind concrete barriers to protect pedestrian commuters.
In the attack, which killed Schwartz and two others, a Palestinian terrorist with a machine gun sprayed bullets into a line of cars at the intersection. Since the Thursday afternoon attack, another Israeli was killed at the junction.
Jankelowitz pointed out that “all the public transportation that goes to Gush Etzion goes in armored buses.” He added that Jewish Agency guidelines require Board of Governors members to use armored vehicles when making site visits in the West Bank. “I think there needs to be an inquiry, by the Jewish Agency and the government.”
Yigal Palmor, a spokesman for the Jewish Agency, said that Schwartz and the other teens weren’t involved in high-risk activities. “He wasn’t hitch-hiking and he wasn’t waiting. He didn’t go to the road junction to stand and see what happens. ... The junction itself is a dangerous place because it’s been targeted.”
Tragically, Schwartz had been visiting the Gush Etzion junction to do landscaping at a roadside memorial — dubbed “Oz v’Gaon” or “bravery and genuis” (or honorable scholars) — to three Israeli teenagers who were kidnapped and murdered by Palestinian terrorists at a spot just a few hundred feet away in June 2014.
Rabbi Akiva Naiman, who oversees the community service programs at Yeshivat Ashreinu, said Schwartz was also spending time coaching underprivileged kids in basketball and raising money for the Israel Cancer Association. He was drawn to work at the memorial site because “it felt like you are really building the land. He was so inspired by that.”
Rabbi Naiman said that Ezra and a group of other boys were visiting the site weekly in a van hired by a local taxi company in Beit Shemesh, where the yeshiva is located. He said there was no accompanying guard. In the days after the murder, the yeshiva has been caught up in making the funeral arrangements and looking after the needs of the remaining participants.
The yeshiva will return to its normal study schedule later this week and hasn’t made any decisions about trip security or locations, the rabbi said. He did say that the yeshiva is receiving donations to pay for an armored van.
Echoing other officials handling youth programs, Rabbi Naiman noted that on the same day Schwartz was killed at the Gush Etzion junction, two people were stabbed to death in south Tel Aviv.
“All the safety precautions were met,” he said.
Officials at overseas programs said that security measures for group trips throughout Israel are coordinated through a special hotline overseen by the Education Ministry and the Society for the Protection of Nature that gives out daily updates on the situation in any given location.
A statement from the Education Ministry said that groups on trips in the West Bank must ride in an armored vehicle on the roadways designated by the IDF, and travel with one guard for every 50 students. It also said that for trips on foot in the West Bank, groups must be accompanied by an armed guard with a “long weapon.”
Eisen, the Masa official, said that the umbrella group seeks to set an “industry standard” for strict security guidelines among its affiliate programs, including daily coordination with Israel’s security authorities, as well as security chiefs at Masa and the Jewish Agency. She said it is up to the individual affiliated organizations to implement the guidelines with the support of Masa.
It is believed that costly armored vans are a rarity among Jewish institutions in the region.
The shock of the murder has rippled to other overseas programs. At the Jerusalem-based Young Judea Year Course, trauma counselors were brought in to discuss participants’ reactions.
“It’s been a hard one for everyone,” said Kate Brody Nachman, director of the Young Judea Year Course. She noted that some of the Young Judea youngsters knew Ezra and went to Camp Yavne [in New England] with him. “They felt more connected, and it feels more real. There’s a greater sense that ‘it could have been me.’”
After an emotional weekend of singing, prayer, memory, and grief counseling, students at Yeshivat Ashreinu spent part of this week on a trip to the Dead Sea. Rabbis at the yeshiva are trying to focus on easing the participants back into a routine of study later in the week.
Despite the tragedy, Rabbi Yechiel Weisz, who is in charge of morning studies at the yeshiva, said that the majority of the 31 participants had elected to continue on. “The boys are shocked; it was devastating. But we came out very strong. Unfortunately, if there is anything that makes people come together, it’s a tragedy,” he said. “We’re trying to get back on schedule. Some of the boys are not ready.”
It was too early, yeshiva officials said, to say whether or not the program would continue at the memorial site.
Students at Ashreinu created a website this week to raise charity in memory of Ezra. More than $24,000 from 475 people was donated in the first four days. The URL is gofundme.com/ezrafund.Read More
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Suit Claims 'Willful Blindness' Over Yeshiva Secular Ed
Amy Sara Clark
Deputy Managing Editor
New York
Suit Claims ‘Willful Blindness’ Over Yeshiva Secular Ed
Class-action lawsuit vs. state by chasidic parents, yeshiva grads focuses on Rockland schools; DOE mum on NYC probe.
Amy Sara Clark
Deputy Managing Editor
Yeshiva parents and graduates are suing the state for turning a blind eye to chasidic yeshivas that fail to provide boys with an adequate secular education.
Citing the precedent-setting 1954 U.S. Supreme Court’s opinion in Brown v. Board of Education that “education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments” and that “it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education,” the suit argues that “despite being aware of their individual and collective responsibilities to provide plaintiffs with a substantially equivalent education, defendants have knowingly, willfully, and consistently failed to comply with the law.”
Although most boys begin school at the age of 3, many don’t begin learning English or studying secular subjects until fourth grade. Between the ages of 8 and 13, boys get roughly 90 minutes of math and English a day — and no science, history or other secular subjects at all. At 13 they begin studying religious subjects full-time, the lawsuit says.
Advocates for Justice, a public-interest law firm, filed the class-action lawsuit Friday morning in U.S. District Court in Manhattan on behalf of five yeshiva graduates and two sets of parents who currently send their children to chasidic yeshivas. All of the schools connected to the plaintiffs are either in Spring Valley, Monsey or New Square in the East Ramapo Central District Board of Education, located about 25 miles north of New York City in Rockland County.
“Defendants have acted with deliberate indifference to the consequential harm they have caused and are causing by their willful blindness and deliberate refusal to acknowledge that yeshiva students need, require, and are legally entitled to, at the very least, a minimally adequate secular education,” the complaint says.
The suit asks that the court require the yeshivas to slowly introduce more secular subjects into the curricula — taught by qualified teachers who are given the resources and support necessary to gain the respect of the students — until the schools are teaching a minimum of three hours of secular education per day.
It also asks the court to require New York State to develop a mechanism to enforce the required changes to develop a “program for former student plaintiffs to remediate the ongoing harm that has been inflicted upon them by the failure to properly educate them.”
Advocates for Justice attorney Laura Barbieri says the specifics of such remediation would be worked out if the suit prevails, but she could imagine it taking the form of the yeshivas funding a GED program for its graduates at a local community college.
She compares the process to constructing a building. “I can build the house, but the rooms have to be decorated by the parties in an agreement,” she said. “I think what we’re doing here is beginning the process.”
The lawsuit was spearheaded by the nonprofit Young Advocates for Fair Education, or Yaffed, which was started by Naftuli Moster, who found that his Borough Park chasidic yeshiva left him woefully unprepared for college. At 18, Moster did not know how to do long division or write an essay. He’d never heard of a molecule, a cell, or the U.S. system of checks and balances.
Moster said that even the 90 minutes of secular studies he did receive each day were of poor quality. Yeshiva administrators considered secular education as a waste of time, he noted, since Judaic studies were paramount, and students treated the classes — held at the end of the day after eight hours of religious study — as a time to goof off.
Advocates for Justice is working on the issue pro bono on behalf of Yaffed in East Ramapo while civil rights attorney Norman Siegel is working with Yaffed (also pro bono) on a potential lawsuit against the city’s Department of Education’s lack of oversight of chasidic yeshivas that are primarily in Williamsburg and Borough Park.
The East Ramapo complaint asserts that the schools themselves broke the law by hiring uncertified teachers incapable of teaching secular subjects, creating a public burden by failing to prepare their students to earn a living, misusing federal education funds and, most strikingly, discriminating against boys by giving them significantly less secular education than girls (who get more because they don’t study Talmud).
“By their individual and collective acts and omissions, Defendants have contributed to if not created a culture of ignorance that results in the certitude that generations of yeshiva students, once adults, become financially impoverished, have no alternative but to be sustained principally by public benefits, fail to obtain meaningful employment, and fail to become productive civic participants in our society,” the complaint says.
The lawsuit does not name the plaintiffs because they are afraid their communities will retaliate. “They and their families risk being shunned or expelled from the community, having their businesses boycotted and ruined, suffering verbal threats and abuses, physical assault, and property damage,” the complaint says.
Examples of the price people pay for not following the rules in places like New Square and Spring Valley abound. Four years ago, a New Square man who prayed with nursing home residents instead of at the shul of the town’s grand rebbe, David Twersky, was badly injured after a Skerver follower tried to set fire to his home. Although Shaul Spitzer pleaded guilty and received a sentence of seven years, he was widely supported by community members at his sentencing. And in his memoir, “All Who Go Do Not Return,” Shulem Deen writes of being declared a heretic, forced to move out of New Square and eventually shunned by his wife and five children after he began questioning his belief in God and exploring the secular world.
Yaffed’s claim against East Ramapo’s school board and New York State comes several years after Moster started Yaffed. First the group tried to bring the issue to the attention of city and state officials and the yeshivas themselves. After being rebuffed for years, Yaffed finally got some traction over the summer when it submitted to the New York City Department of Education a complaint signed by 52 yeshiva parents, teachers and former students. At the end of July, the DOE promised to investigate and Daniel Dromm, the chair of the city council’s education committee, also promised to take up the cause.
In the months since, the DOE has not released any information about the investigation, except to say they were approaching the task as “partners” to the schools rather than as investigators.
In addition to the state, the parents and graduates are also suing the New York State Board of Regents and its chancellor, Merryl Tisch; the New York State Department of Education and Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia; the East Ramapo Central District Board of Education and its superintendent, Deborah Wortham and the schools (and their principals) that the current students attended: Yeshiva Avir Yakov in New Square, United Talmudical Academy and Yeshiva Darkei Emunah in Monsey and Yeshiva Tzion Yosef in Spring Valley.
All of the defendants named in the suit either did not respond to requests for comment or declined to be interviewed. The NYC DOE did not respond to requests for an update on the DOE investigation. Read More
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Nazi Art Case Tests Start Date Of Shoah
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
International
Nazi Art Case Tests Start Date Of Shoah
Germany’s new claim in Guelph Treasure suit shocks Holocaust historians as ‘revisionist history.’
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
A 12th-century domed reliquary in the shape of a church, made of silver and gold. Wikimedia Commons
The German government has laws on the books that will get you thrown in jail for denying the existence of the Holocaust. It mandates that all schoolchildren, starting at age 12 and for years after that, learn about what happened to the Jews under Nazi rule. It has paid out an estimated $90 billion in reparations to Holocaust survivors and their heirs over the last 60 years.
And on the fast-moving story of the return of Nazi-looted artwork to its rightful Jewish owners — one that has landed in Hollywood with the hit film “Woman in Gold” — Germany has pledged greater transparency.
But in a federal courtroom in Washington, D.C., the German government is showing another, arguably darker, side.
In seeking to dismiss a lawsuit over a long-contested trove of medieval ecclesiastical relics known as the Guelph Treasure that Germany bought from three Jewish art dealers in 1935, the government has now dropped a legal bombshell, one that actually seems to challenge the historical record.
The sale could not have been forced, the German government argued in court papers submitted earlier this month in U.S. District Court, because “the sale predated the Holocaust by several years.”
Holocaust scholars are shocked by Germany’s line of argument, calling it “cynical” and saying that it amounts to “revisionist history.”
“It’s ridiculous,” said Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of modern Jewish history and Holocaust studies at Emory University in Atlanta and a former consultant to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.
“If you define the Holocaust as the killing of Jews, it began in the summer of 1941,” she said. “But to ignore the terrible persecution and prejudice and limitations placed on the lives of Jews that started in 1933 is ludicrous. … It is a cheap shot. It was a forced sale because Jews were forced to sell things because they were denied the right to make a living.”
Marion Kaplan, a professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University who has taught 19th and 20th century German history, said she was “shocked” by the German claim.
“The idea that the ‘Holocaust’ started with the war is wrong,” she said. “Social death started in 1933 and physical death followed. Indeed, many Jewish men died in concentration camps directly after Kristallnacht [November 1938] — well before the war.”
Assigning a start date for the Holocaust — in a legal if not a moral sense — is admittedly an imprecise exercise. Did it begin when the National Socialists took power in 1933? When the Nuremberg Laws were signed in 1935? When the state-sponsored rampage against Jewish businesses — Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass — terrorized the Jewish population in 1938? When the Nazis signed off on the Final Solution in 1941? When mass killings with stationary gas chambers began widely in 1942?
The case of the Guelph Treasure, in which heirs of the Jewish art dealers are seeking its return, may throw a light on this complicated legal question.
The treasure is a collection, primarily of precious gem-encrusted Christian devotional masterpieces, such as reliquaries and crosses, that is valued at about $250 million. The most valuable piece is a 12th-century domed reliquary shaped like a church and made of gold, copper and silver. Biblical figures carved from walrus tusk encircle the work.
Had the heirs sought the collection’s return years ago, the legal fight over its ownership might not have been questioned. In 1943, the Allied governments recognized that the Nazis either confiscated or compelled victims of religious, racial and political persecution to sell their businesses, houses and other property under duress. They then issued the London Declaration that said the allies would no longer recognize the transfer of property in occupied countries even if it appeared legal — a doctrine codified into law after the war that was adopted by the new German Federal Republic in 1949, according to an attorney for the heirs, Markus Stotzel.
He said Germany rescinded it in the 1960s in the belief all restitution claims had been resolved. But in the last decade or so, the heirs of several Jewish art collectors have come forward to assert claims to looted art, some of it hanging in German museums. The heirs to the Guelph Treasure began their efforts seven years ago.
In response to the new claims, Germany promised to be transparent and efficient in restituting works of art. In 2003 it created an eight-member commission headed by Jutta Limbach, former head of Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court, to mediate all disputes regarding cultural property — including art — seized by the state as a result of Nazi persecution.
The commission heard the Guelph case shortly after the issue of German art restitution made headlines worldwide late in 2013 with the admission by the Bavarian state that it had quietly recovered 1,400 pieces of art — much of it looted by the Nazis — that had been secretly hidden by the son of a man who had been an art dealer for Hitler.
In its Guelph case decision, issued in March 2014, the commission noted that the collectors had bought the artifacts in 1929 for 7.5 million reichsmarks. They later sold about half of them and in 1934 began negotiations with the Dresdner Bank for the rest. The bank was secretly acting in behalf of the Prussian state government headed by its prime minister, Hermann Goering, the second most powerful man in Germany after Adolf Hitler rose to power in 1933.
Negotiations over the price concluded in July 1935, and the Limbach commission said there were “no indications that the art dealers and their business partners were placed under pressure in the negotiations … [and thus were not forced to sell] as a result of Nazi persecution.”
A spokesman for the German Embassy in Washington said his government agrees with that opinion and is “committed to the fair and just resolution of legitimate claims to Nazi-confiscated art, consistent with the universally accepted guidelines of the Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art.”
“The federal government,” he added, “therefore believes that the civil case stemming from a 1935 sale of medieval relics by a group of German art dealers has no merit and should not be heard in [a] U.S. court.”
The art dealers were paid only 4.2 million reichsmarks, which was “one-third or less than its market value,” according to Mel Urbach, Stotzel’s co-counsel. He said they sold it to Goering — who later presented it to Hitler as a gift — believing they would be killed if they did not.
Urbach said he and Stotzel represent relatives of another art dealer who was imprisoned and tortured by the Nazis before he would sell to them. And he said they have a number of other cases in which the German government is refusing to recognize legitimate claims of Jewish heirs to works of art, buildings and property.
“We see a pattern here where Germany is revising the Holocaust and using technicalities [defenses such as the statute of limitations] to disrespect the suffering of so many people during the early years of the Nazi regime,” he said.
The lawyers submitted several expert opinions from Holocaust historians to support their claims.
One was from Wolf Gruner, chair of Jewish studies and a professor of history at the University of Southern California, who is a specialist in the persecution of the Jews in Germany. He wrote that within weeks of Hitler being appointed chancellor on Jan. 30, 1933, he “subjected political dissidents and Jewish Germans to extreme persecution. Jewish people were mistreated in many towns in the first months of 1933, put into concentration camps, their stores were attacked and boycotted, and they were pushed out of professional and economic life by many different means.”
Gruner noted also that officials in Frankfurt am Maim, home of the three Jewish art collectors, “made a common practice of preventing the transfer of the coveted art assets of the Jews to overseas by having these entered on the list of nationally valuable assets.”
He pointed out also that one of the three art collectors, Saemy Rosenbaum, concluded the negotiations in Berlin and could not have failed to notice daily demonstrations in front of Jewish-owned stores.
“Spoken choruses of ‘Don’t buy from Jews’ were intended to prevent customers visiting,” he wrote. “Shop windows were scrawled and painted with anti-Jewish slogans. The police had to intervene repeatedly and restore order. … In such circumstances, there can be no question of any kind of normal sale transaction, unaffected by the daily and ubiquitous active discrimination and persecution …
“This transaction is therefore tainted by the stain of `persecution conditionality’ … because the sale took place under conditions that were not equitable and market value appropriate.”
Although Rosenbaum later left Germany and started his business anew in New York, his associates were not so fortunate. Julius Goldschmidt escaped to London but is said to have lived an impoverished life. And Z. M. Hackenbroch was reportedly dragged to his death through the streets of Frankfurt by a Nazi mob in 1937.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, said the German government’s claim that the 1935 sale “predated the Holocaust by several years” is “simply disgusting and dangerous.”
“I understand the tactic of what they are trying to do — saying that the sale was normal,” he told The Jewish Week. “But for a Jew in Germany in 1935, life in Germany was anything but normal. … The fact that it was sold in 1935 — you would have to prove to me there was no linkage.”
Holocaust historian Timothy Snyder, author of the critically acclaimed new book, “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning,” told The Jewish Week that although the “mass murder of Jews began in the summer of 1941, the discrimination [against them] began in 1933.”
“The reasons why people would want to get out of Germany and be compelled to sell things begins in 1933,” he said. “Their [the German government’s] argument is shameful. It means that unless there was mass murder, nobody was discriminated against. The fact that they killed many of the people later does not mean it was alright to discriminate against them earlier. Nobody would say that. All of the historians who work on the Holocaust focus on the discrimination that began in the 1930s.”
Atina Grossmann, a teacher of modern European and German history at Cooper Union, said in an email to The Jewish Week that the German government’s claim is “a rather specious argument in terms of compensation for expropriated Jewish property in Germany since we clearly have anti-Jewish policies and actions in place from 1933 on — all before the beginning of the war and well before the implementation of the Final Solution and the enactment of any plans for the extermination of European Jewry.”
About Germany’s claim in the Guelph Treasure case, Grossmann added: “So yes, technically correct, but in this case certainly an irrelevant and specious cynical argument. The Germans know better.” Read More
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The Jewish Week
Maya Klausner
Editor
With Thanksgiving just around the bend, turkeys, stuffing and parades are on the mind. (Though depending on where your passions lie, that list may not be November-specific.) Along with the festive feelings that swirl about like fallen leaves in the crisp autumnal air, there are also some hard and fast rules that should be followed to guarantee a successful Turkey Day.
To help guide your Thanksgiving celebrations, here are ten commandments that will make the day as easy as (pumpkin) pie.
1. Thou Shalt Fast on Thanksgiving Eve. When you are facing a plethora of potato-centric dishes, bowls of thick soup and a giant stuffed bird before even getting to the mountain of pies, chocolate turkeys and cakes, you will begin to wonder if you are hazing yourself ... and you will be happy you skipped the beef burrito the night before.
2. Thou Shalt Acknowledge Football’s Existence in Some Form. You need not be a fan of the sport to complete this commandment, but it must be obeyed. We are not sure how this became a national law, but it is non-negotiable it seems. Coerce some pals into an impromptu game of touch in the park or have a sports channel playing in the background or simply say the word “football.”
3. Thou Shalt Consume an Unreasonable Amount of Pie. This is crucial. When you find yourself on the precipice of blacking out due to the inordinate intake of pie, that is your body’s way of telling you to eat more pie.
4. Thou Shalt be Prepared to Nap at Any Moment. Keep a couch, or at least a blanket and pillow nearby for inevitable, spontaneous napping.
5. Thou Shalt Show Thanks. Being grateful should probably occur more often than once a year, but if it doesn’t at least make sure to recognize the glory of cheese and “Seinfeld” in between scoops of stuffing.
6. Thou Shalt Not Participate in Black Friday. Regardless of whatever compelling arguments or enchanting speeches your so-called “friends” orate on the magic of Black Friday, do not listen. You will end up in the fetal position in the dusty corner of a department store as ruthless shoppers wheel their carts over your shivering form.
7. Thou Shalt Wear Elastic Pants. Thanksgiving dinner should be treated like getting on airplane for a long flight; loose fitted clothing only and nothing with buttons or zippers.
8. Thou Shalt Pretend to Attend the Parade. The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade is a wonderful New York City tradition. It is also crowded, stressful and often anti-climactic. We get it, giant Snoopy, we get it. Better than wading through hordes of tourists and dodging strollers, we recommend watching from the safety and comfort of your television, or rubbing elbows with a person who has a prime view and somehow scoring an invite.
9. Thou Shalt Travel with Tums. Whether you are hosting or traveling to a friend or loved one for the holiday, you mustn’t depend on your table comrades to help you battle the inevitable sweet agony brought on by that nineteenth serving of yams.
10. Thou Shalt Not Kill. In order to guarantee obediance of this last one, we recommend taking commandment six seriously.
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U.S. Teen's Murder Posing Dilemma For Modern Orthodox
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff WriterInternational
U.S. Teen’s Murder Posing Dilemma For Modern Orthodox
Sense of resolve mixed with reservations about West Bank in wake of terror attack.
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
“Ezra loved Israel,” a classmate said of slain 18-year-old Ezra Schwartz, above. Twitter via JTA
For Modern Orthodox Jews this week, an irresistible force — their passionate love of the Jewish state — is running headlong into an immoveable object — their deep concern for the safety of their children pursuing Torah studies in an increasingly dangerous Israel.
In the wake of the brazen murder last week of an 18-year-old Massachusetts gap-year yeshiva student at a notorious West Bank junction, it appears too soon to tell which would budge.
The death of Ezra Schwartz, a graduate of the Maimonides Academy in Boston who was studying for the year at Yeshivat Ashreinu in Jerusalem, was a tragedy all lovers of Israel mourned. But it poses a particularly excruciating dilemma for a segment of the community whose post-high school one- and two-year programs of religious study have become increasingly popular. To scuttle them would be seen as akin to the community’s turning its back on Israel. But questions are being raised about security concerns when it comes to both schools in the West Bank and school-sponsored trips there.
The director of Israel programs at the Ma’ayanot Yeshiva High School for girls in Teaneck, N.J., Leah Herzog, stands at the pivot point of the dilemma, between students and parents here and the gap-year yeshivas in Israel.
“Parents are nervous and heartbroken, but we’re going to keep sending our children,” said Herzog, who is also the parent of two children who have or will be spending a gap year in Israel. Nearly all of Ma’ayanot’s students spend a gap year in Israel.
Herzog and her co-Israel guidance counselor Suzanne Cohen told The Jewish Week that while parents are still supporting gap-year programs, there is some reservation now about sending students to schools in the Gush Etzion bloc in the West Bank. (Schwartz was killed at a junction in the Gush by a Palestinian terrorist after a school trip to the area.) Cohen described one parent who expressed serious reservations about sending her daughter to Migdal Oz, a prominent Orthodox girls seminary in Gush Etzion, despite her daughter’s fierce desire to attend.
“The parent was more nervous than the student,” said Cohen.
In response to the level of concern, the S. Daniel Abraham Israel program, Yeshiva University’s Israel branch, is organizing a special conference call and online conversation next week for parents of children currently taking their gap-year in Israel. According to a Y.U. representative, the webinar will focus on methods of dealing with anxiety. Parents of 2,000-plus American gap-year students currently studying at YU-affiliated institutions will be able to text in questions and concerns.
For Nati Faber, a 17-year-old day school student from Detroit on the brink of his gap year, security has become a major factor in selecting a school — at least for his mother.
“I really like [one yeshiva in the West Bank], but with the murders outside of Alon Shvut, my parents don’t know how they feel about it,” wrote Faber in a Facebook message, preferring to keep the name of the school anonymous as he’s still in the decision process. In his high school grade of 17 students, 14 are planning to spend a gap year in Israel after graduation.
“For sure with a lot of my friends, although they are scared, the situation has motivated us to look even more forward to going to a gap year. And in a sense I believe that holds true with their parents as well,” he wrote.
While there have been other American students who have been killed in terrorist attacks in Israel — including Alisa Flatow, a Jewish American student killed in a bus bombing in 1995 — the reaction to Schwartz’s murder, fueled by the immediacy of social media, seemed different. In Israel, American gap-year students said the proximately of the attack — and the likeness of Schwartz to themselves — made it different.
“When Ezra was killed, it made me rethink everything,” wrote Gavi Shleifer, a 19-year-old American student originally from Atlanta, in a Facebook message. “He is my circle, he was a gap year student who just wanted to do good, and was killed while doing good.” Despite the strained security situation and her parents worrying, Shleifer, currently in her second year abroad at a seminary in Jerusalem, plans on making aliyah and remaining in Israel. “I’m not coming back to the states and will fight my parents if they want me to,” she wrote.
Aaron Eckstein, a 19-year-old gap year student from Passaic, N.J., told The Jewish Week that “helicopter parenting” — something he sees quite often among his peers — won’t work during the Israel trip abroad.
“A lot of yeshivas are asking parents to confirm that their kids can go to the Gush — in my opinion, these type of hard-stop rules are a big joke,” said Eckstein, who plans to join a combat unit in the Israel Defense Forces after completing his yeshiva study. The weekend after Schwartz was killed, Eckstein traveled to Efrat, a large settlement in the Gush, to visit friends.
“Parents need to realize that saying their kids can’t go here and can’t go there won’t change the situation.”
No doubt that adolescent attitude adds to parental worries, feeling less able to direct their children’s comings and goings from 6,000 miles away.
Maya Silver, an American student spending her gap year at a seminary in Jerusalem, wrote a letter to her worried parents back home describing her reaction to Schwartz’s murder.
“This attack is like a punch in the stomach,” she wrote, describing her subsequent confusion, anger, and numbness. “It was so tragic walking through the Rova [the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem] and knowing that every person you saw under a certain age was feeling a deep, indescribable pain… One of us has died.” She ended the letter by telling her parents not to worry about her “too much”… “I’m not in the Gush!”
Rabbi Seth Linfield, executive director of Yeshiva of Flatbush, a large Modern Orthodox high school in Brooklyn, said that while parents are “anxious,” the school expects to send a similar or slightly higher number of students to Israel for a gap-year this coming fall. In an average graduating class of 180 students, about 40 students go to Israel for the year, several attending yeshivot and seminaries in the West Bank.
“The gap year has always been a complicated topic, but there’s been no spike in the conversation after last week’s attacks,” he told The Jewish Week. The parent of a graduating high school senior who is considering spending her gap year at Migdal Oz, Rabbi Linfield said that “depriving” his daughter and other graduating seniors of the gap-year experience would be “giving terrorists a victory without firing a shot.”
Rabbi Linfield declined to comment on whether or not Schwartz’s death resulted partially from a lapse of sound security practices on the part of his yeshiva. He said he has not yet heard those concerns voiced by parents.
“When we, as a school and as parents, send our children to institutions in Israel, we sent them with confidence that the institutions will invoke the highest standards of safety and security,” he said.
Young Judea, a pluralistic Zionist youth group best known for its post-high school year course, specifies on its website that its participants are not allowed to enter the West Bank without permission of the director of the course and parental consent communicated to the director within 48 hours of expected travel. The Jewish Week was unable to speak with a Young Judea representative directly.
Peninah Kaplansky, co-founder and director of Here Next Year, a nonprofit that helps American gap-year students extend their stay in Israel by joining the army or enrolling in an Israeli university, said that in the days directly after Schwartz’s death she saw an uptick in the number of students inquiring about staying in Israel next year.
“In the past few days we’ve received dozens of e-mails asking about our programming and resources,” said Kaplansky, 24, originally from West Hempstead and currently studying at Bar-Ilan University in Jerusalem. “On one hand, students are saying ‘that could have been me’— on the other hand, it’s emboldening for them. We’ve been hurt, but we’re going to respond by asking how can we have the greatest impact on Israel.”
For Schwartz’s fellow students at Yeshivat Ashreinu, the question of how to move forward is still raw.
“As the days continue to pass by, and the death of one of my best friends continues to become more real, all I can think about is what would Ezra want,” Aryeh Sunshine, 18, a classmate of Schwartz’s, told The Jewish Week in a Facebook message. Originally from Cleveland and with plans to attend Ohio State University next year, he has no intention to cut his gap year short, despite the blow.
“Ezra loved Israel and enjoyed every second that he spent in this beautiful country. Although there continues to be attacks on innocent Israeli and Jewish civilians, instead of being scared and tempted to leave Israel, Ezra would want the complete opposite. …The best thing we, the Jewish people can do right now, is stick together.”
editor@jewishweek.orgRead More
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French Expats Here: ‘We Saw This Coming’
‘Sense of fear’ but not surprise about carnage in Paris; ‘too early to tell’ about aliyah.
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
Interfaith leaders gather for a memorial service Sunday outside the Bataclan theater in Paris. Getty Images
They, perhaps more than others, saw it coming.
When the 60 or so French Jews who attend services at the West Side Sephardic Synagogue gathered to pray last Friday night, the scope of the carnage in Paris was still unfolding.
Rabbi Eitan Bendavid, spiritual leader of the congregation, said he noticed “a pervasive sense of fear” among his French-born congregants, most of whom still have relatives back in France, and often go home for family visits.
But, he said, he did not hear a sense of surprise among his congregants. “People in my community have been saying for a long time that they saw stuff like this coming.”
By “stuff like this,” he meant the wide-scale terrorist attacks against French targets.
In Paris itself, where word of the suspected ISIS-coordinated attacks at six venues quickly spread in the French capital, Simone Rodan-Benzaquen, director of the American Jewish Committee’s office in the capital, heard similar sentiments in the Jewish community. Last week’s attacks in Paris “were confirmation of everything we feared,” she said.
In the 10 months since the terrorist attacks on the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket and the offices of the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine, which took a total of 19 lives, French Jews foresaw that while the Jewish community was an early target of fatal Islamist terror attacks, French society in general would be next, Rodan-Benzaquen said in a telephone interview. “It was not a question of if, it was a question of when and where.”
The Bataclan concert hall, where 89 people were killed on Friday night, was Jewish-owned for some four decades until earlier this year, and frequently hosted Jewish events. Like the restaurant and sports stadium where attacks also took place last Friday, it was not a specifically Jewish target in what French President Francois Hollande called “an act of war by ISIS.”
Rodan-Benzaquen and Rabbi Bendavid and other Jews with roots in France reacted in like ways this week, even as France mourned its losses — some 130 people killed and more than 300 injured — and pledged more security protection for Jewish institutions, and declared war on the ISIS terrorists who took responsibility for Friday’s attacks.
People familiar with the French Jewish community said French Jews saw the latest acts of terrorism coming, expect the next terrorism there to be aimed at specifically Jewish targets, are concerned but are not rushing to make aliyah or to move immediately to the United States or other Western countries, and feel that non-Jewish French citizens finally share their worries about the threat of Islamist terrorism. Now, said Rodan-Benzaquen, more people in France have “the knowledge that the cancer is spreading. There is the perception that the entire nation understands … what the Jewish community is going through. We feel less solitude.”
“French citizens now understand that they, and not just Jews, are terror targets,” the Times of Israel website quoted David Khalfa, a political consultant in Paris, as saying this week. “It was an illusion [of safety for most people in France]; we lived in this illusion and now we are waking up — and it’s a nightmare.
“Now everyone is a target,” Khalfa said. “This time it’s not only about symbolic targets … it has changed the whole perspective of fighting terror.”
“Whether attacks are against policemen or soldiers, against freedom of expression, or against Jews, what is being systematically, violently attacked are French democratic and republican values,” Rodan-Benzaquen wrote in an op-ed essay this week. “The goal of Islamic fundamentalism is to divide society, create a clash of civilizations, strengthen extremists that pretend to fight against them, and turn Muslims of every democratic country that they target against the rest of the population.”
“The Jewish community feels that France is under attack; it’s no longer a uniquely Jewish problem,” said Brigitte Dayan, a journalist with Jewish-Moroccan roots who moved to Manhattan from Chicago a dozen years ago and is knowledgeable about the French Jewish community. She added, “One friend [in France] said she is thankful to have bought an apartment in Tel Aviv last year.
“There have been so many attacks, so many threats [on French Jews] over the past months and years, that … the only ones not surprised” that ISIS has painted a bigger bull’s-eye over France “were the French Jewish community. I don’t think this is the end of it,” Rodan-Benzaquen continued.
She believes that while “the fear very much remains” among French Jews, “the next attacks may be [against] another Jewish target” outside France. She said she did not hear the increased level of discussion about leaving France as she did in the aftermath of the Hyper Cacher attack. “It’s a constant talk for the past year; people ask themselves if they should be leaving.”
Rabbi Bendavid said his congregants told him that it’s too early for their relatives in France to immediately reassess their aliyah or emigration options.
Avi Mayer, a spokesman for the Jewish Agency, which coordinates Israel’s aliyah activities, agreed that a spike in French aliyah following the latest attacks in Paris is not likely.
“In the immediate aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher attacks in January, we saw a surge in the number of calls and inquiries from French Jews, and the number of new aliyah files opened in France tripled. We have not seen a similarly dramatic increase in aliyah-related inquiries in the wake of Friday’s attacks,” Mayer said.
The number of French Jews who made aliyah has steadily increased over the last few years, Mayer said, from 1,917 in 2012, to 3,293 in 2013, and 7,238 in 2014. “Aliyah numbers for this year are up by approximately 11 percent compared to this point last year,” indicating a 2015 figure of about 8,000, “and we expect the numbers to continue growing steadily for the foreseeable future,” he said. (Mayer’s figures, however, are contradicted by aliyah totals reported earlier this year, which indicated that French aliyah had slowed after an immediate increase in the months after the January terrorism in Paris, and that a decrease of nearly 20 percent this year was likely.)
El Al Israel Airlines announced that it would assist Israelis in France who wish to return home, offering a “special” $350 one-way fare and suspending revision charges for passengers who wish to change tickets bought for dates up to Nov. 29; Arkia Airlines announced a similar move.
The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, an independent organization that promotes aliyah and supports Jewish life in many countries, announced this week that it is stepping up its work in France, is providing “emergency security aid to French-Jewish communal institutions,” and will bring “a special flight” of French Jews to Israel at the end of November.
“The first French Jews to move to Israel since Friday’s ISIS terrorist attacks arrived today [Monday]” with the support of IFCJ, the organization stated in a press release. “Two families landed at Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion Airport … met by IFCJ representatives.”
Meanwhile, Jewish communities here and in France took part in memorial and commemoration activities.
On Shabbat, Rabbi Bendavid led his West Side congregation in reciting two chapters of Psalms, one “to pray for the healing of all the people who have been affected by this devastating attack,” and one “to pray that our leaders will see the current situation with absolute clarity.” He said his congregation also said a prayer in French for the protection of France.
Many congregants, he said, added the French flag to their Facebook pages as a sign of solidarity.
In Paris, a Chabad-Lubavitch synagogue near the Bataclan theater said Psalms “for the departed and for the safety of all French citizens,” the chabad.org website reported.
The Grand Synagogue of Paris held a prayer service-rally Sunday night, sponsored by the country’s chief rabbi and the Conference of European Rabbis that included political officials and rabbis. “We pray for all the injured to recover quickly. Our hearts are with them and their families,” the Grand Synagogue’s Rabbi Moshe Sebbag said.
Members of the Jewish and Islamic clergy took part Sunday in a memorial service outside the Bataclan concert hall, many of them laying bouquets of white roses at the site.
“Anyone who uses hate speech has no place in France and those places that preach hate are not places of prayer but are those of a sect,” Hassen Chalghoumi, president of Imams of France, said at the memorial service. “1.5 million people are hostages of Daesh [an Arabic acronym for ISIS], 1.5 million people are hostages of these barbarians who are sullying the name of Islam and Muslims. It’s time to say no to this barbarity.”
The memorial was the idea of Polish-Jewish author Marek Halter, who writes frequently about his family, which escaped the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II.
Representatives of prominent U.S. Jewish organizations also condemned Friday’s terrorism. “One of the most sickening forms of human violence one can imagine,” said Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress. “An outrageous, cowardly and premeditated assault not just on the people of France, but on all freedom loving people around the world,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League.
“It’s high time to drop the evasive language too often used to describe the perpetrators of these heinous crimes and get specific,” David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee, said in a statement. “They are not just ‘violent extremists,’ though of course they are. They are not just ‘terrorists,’ though, of course, they are that as well. They are radical Islamists inspired by their interpretation of religion, however perverted it may be.
“Hoping the problem will one day go away is not a strategy, nor is tying the hands of, or eviscerating the budgets of, law enforcement, intelligence, and the military, nor is defending privacy rights at all costs, as some policy purists would do, even if it means endangering national security and personal safety,” Harris said. “Some judicious accommodations must be made in today’s democratic societies, or else the consequences could be profound. It won’t be easy, nor will it be quick. Yesterday’s tragic events in Paris should be another urgent wake-up call that, whether we live in France or elsewhere, our world needs, and is worth, defending.”
editor@jewishweek.org
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Security Measures Questioned In Teen's Murder
Joshua Mitnick
Contributing Editor
Israel News
Security Measures Questioned In Teen’s Murder
Masa inquiry underway over yeshiva trip to Gush Etzion junction.
Joshua Mitnick
Contributing Editor
Protesters this week in Gush Etzion holding a poster of Israelis killed in terrorist attacks. Ben Sales/JTA
Tel Aviv — The murder of Massachusetts native Ezra Schwartz in a terrorist shooting last week has shaken Israel’s overseas educational programs as they scramble to handle worried parents, upset participants, and review security precautions for trips to high-risk locations in the country.
An inquiry is currently underway into what safety measures were taken last Thursday before Schwartz, 18, and a group of other gap-year students at Yeshivat Ashreinu visited the Gush Etzion junction in the West Bank, said an official for the government agency that subsidizes the yeshiva’s gap-year program.
Critics complained that youths without sufficient protection were allowed to visit a location frequently targeted by Palestinian terrorists. Others contend that there is no true safe place in Israel amid a wave of terrorist stabbings and shootings and that the yeshiva did its best to protect its students.
“There is a lot to sort through, and all of the questions are now being asked; it is too early to draw any conclusions at this stage,” said Sara Eisen, communications director at Masa Israel Journey, an umbrella organization run jointly by the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office and the Jewish Agency that subsidizes and oversees hundreds of gap-year program affiliates like Yeshivat Ashreinu.
“We are working through the facts of the situation and have no answers yet to the many understandable concerns.”
Potentially at risk from the fallout from Schwartz’s death are participation levels in programs that bring thousands of Jewish youths to Israel each year, as well as international tourism, a major Israeli industry. The killing also highlights the challenges faced by overseas programs that want to allow participants to see the country but must balance the freedom with security precautions.
Michael Jankelowitz, a former Jewish Agency spokesperson, worried the killing would have a “major” effect on participation for all educational travel to Israel, and complained that the teens should have been traveling in an armored, bulletproof vehicle, given the danger at the Gush Etzion junction.
Laura Kam, a public relations consultant who lives in Jerusalem and whose son is doing army service on guard in the West Bank, wondered why “a group of completely unprotected teens” was in “an area so unsafe.” She told The Jewish Week, “I know folks will say that two people were killed in Tel Aviv the same day. But in fact, the road where Ezra died is highly problematic and everyone knows it. Let’s keep our young visitors safe.” (Despite published reports, the yeshiva denies the trip included food delivery to soldiers, a common practice to bolster the spirits among the IDF.)
Located on the heavily traveled Highway 60, the Gush Etzion junction is a busy intersection south of Jerusalem that connects the capital city to the affluent bloc of suburban settlements that include Efrat and Alon Shvut, and also settlements around Hebron. A tunnel road bypass around Bethlehem was built in the late 1990s to link Gush Etzion (known simply as the Gush) to Jerusalem, and it was reinforced with walls to protect Israeli drivers. Highway 60 is also used as a shortcut to Jerusalem for those living inside of Israel. A supermarket at the junction serves both Israelis and Palestinians shoppers and employs both as well.
In recent days, however, the government has been discussing ways to separate Israelis and Palestinians and boost security. Hundreds of Gush-area residents held a demonstration at the junction on Monday to demand tighter protection.
Before the attack on Schwartz, the intersection had been targeted seven times by Palestinian attackers since the beginning of October, leaving four civilians injured and one soldier wounded. Like many road junctions around the West Bank, in recent weeks the Israeli army has deployed groups of soldiers at Gush Etzion junction that stand behind concrete barriers to protect pedestrian commuters.
In the attack, which killed Schwartz and two others, a Palestinian terrorist with a machine gun sprayed bullets into a line of cars at the intersection. Since the Thursday afternoon attack, another Israeli was killed at the junction.
Jankelowitz pointed out that “all the public transportation that goes to Gush Etzion goes in armored buses.” He added that Jewish Agency guidelines require Board of Governors members to use armored vehicles when making site visits in the West Bank. “I think there needs to be an inquiry, by the Jewish Agency and the government.”
Yigal Palmor, a spokesman for the Jewish Agency, said that Schwartz and the other teens weren’t involved in high-risk activities. “He wasn’t hitch-hiking and he wasn’t waiting. He didn’t go to the road junction to stand and see what happens. ... The junction itself is a dangerous place because it’s been targeted.”
Tragically, Schwartz had been visiting the Gush Etzion junction to do landscaping at a roadside memorial — dubbed “Oz v’Gaon” or “bravery and genuis” (or honorable scholars) — to three Israeli teenagers who were kidnapped and murdered by Palestinian terrorists at a spot just a few hundred feet away in June 2014.
Rabbi Akiva Naiman, who oversees the community service programs at Yeshivat Ashreinu, said Schwartz was also spending time coaching underprivileged kids in basketball and raising money for the Israel Cancer Association. He was drawn to work at the memorial site because “it felt like you are really building the land. He was so inspired by that.”
Rabbi Naiman said that Ezra and a group of other boys were visiting the site weekly in a van hired by a local taxi company in Beit Shemesh, where the yeshiva is located. He said there was no accompanying guard. In the days after the murder, the yeshiva has been caught up in making the funeral arrangements and looking after the needs of the remaining participants.
The yeshiva will return to its normal study schedule later this week and hasn’t made any decisions about trip security or locations, the rabbi said. He did say that the yeshiva is receiving donations to pay for an armored van.
Echoing other officials handling youth programs, Rabbi Naiman noted that on the same day Schwartz was killed at the Gush Etzion junction, two people were stabbed to death in south Tel Aviv.
“All the safety precautions were met,” he said.
Officials at overseas programs said that security measures for group trips throughout Israel are coordinated through a special hotline overseen by the Education Ministry and the Society for the Protection of Nature that gives out daily updates on the situation in any given location.
A statement from the Education Ministry said that groups on trips in the West Bank must ride in an armored vehicle on the roadways designated by the IDF, and travel with one guard for every 50 students. It also said that for trips on foot in the West Bank, groups must be accompanied by an armed guard with a “long weapon.”
Eisen, the Masa official, said that the umbrella group seeks to set an “industry standard” for strict security guidelines among its affiliate programs, including daily coordination with Israel’s security authorities, as well as security chiefs at Masa and the Jewish Agency. She said it is up to the individual affiliated organizations to implement the guidelines with the support of Masa.
It is believed that costly armored vans are a rarity among Jewish institutions in the region.
The shock of the murder has rippled to other overseas programs. At the Jerusalem-based Young Judea Year Course, trauma counselors were brought in to discuss participants’ reactions.
“It’s been a hard one for everyone,” said Kate Brody Nachman, director of the Young Judea Year Course. She noted that some of the Young Judea youngsters knew Ezra and went to Camp Yavne [in New England] with him. “They felt more connected, and it feels more real. There’s a greater sense that ‘it could have been me.’”
After an emotional weekend of singing, prayer, memory, and grief counseling, students at Yeshivat Ashreinu spent part of this week on a trip to the Dead Sea. Rabbis at the yeshiva are trying to focus on easing the participants back into a routine of study later in the week.
Despite the tragedy, Rabbi Yechiel Weisz, who is in charge of morning studies at the yeshiva, said that the majority of the 31 participants had elected to continue on. “The boys are shocked; it was devastating. But we came out very strong. Unfortunately, if there is anything that makes people come together, it’s a tragedy,” he said. “We’re trying to get back on schedule. Some of the boys are not ready.”
It was too early, yeshiva officials said, to say whether or not the program would continue at the memorial site.
Students at Ashreinu created a website this week to raise charity in memory of Ezra. More than $24,000 from 475 people was donated in the first four days. The URL is gofundme.com/ezrafund.Read More
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Suit Claims 'Willful Blindness' Over Yeshiva Secular Ed
Amy Sara Clark
Deputy Managing Editor
New York
Suit Claims ‘Willful Blindness’ Over Yeshiva Secular Ed
Class-action lawsuit vs. state by chasidic parents, yeshiva grads focuses on Rockland schools; DOE mum on NYC probe.
Amy Sara Clark
Deputy Managing Editor
Yeshiva parents and graduates are suing the state for turning a blind eye to chasidic yeshivas that fail to provide boys with an adequate secular education.
Citing the precedent-setting 1954 U.S. Supreme Court’s opinion in Brown v. Board of Education that “education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments” and that “it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education,” the suit argues that “despite being aware of their individual and collective responsibilities to provide plaintiffs with a substantially equivalent education, defendants have knowingly, willfully, and consistently failed to comply with the law.”
Although most boys begin school at the age of 3, many don’t begin learning English or studying secular subjects until fourth grade. Between the ages of 8 and 13, boys get roughly 90 minutes of math and English a day — and no science, history or other secular subjects at all. At 13 they begin studying religious subjects full-time, the lawsuit says.
Advocates for Justice, a public-interest law firm, filed the class-action lawsuit Friday morning in U.S. District Court in Manhattan on behalf of five yeshiva graduates and two sets of parents who currently send their children to chasidic yeshivas. All of the schools connected to the plaintiffs are either in Spring Valley, Monsey or New Square in the East Ramapo Central District Board of Education, located about 25 miles north of New York City in Rockland County.
“Defendants have acted with deliberate indifference to the consequential harm they have caused and are causing by their willful blindness and deliberate refusal to acknowledge that yeshiva students need, require, and are legally entitled to, at the very least, a minimally adequate secular education,” the complaint says.
The suit asks that the court require the yeshivas to slowly introduce more secular subjects into the curricula — taught by qualified teachers who are given the resources and support necessary to gain the respect of the students — until the schools are teaching a minimum of three hours of secular education per day.
It also asks the court to require New York State to develop a mechanism to enforce the required changes to develop a “program for former student plaintiffs to remediate the ongoing harm that has been inflicted upon them by the failure to properly educate them.”
Advocates for Justice attorney Laura Barbieri says the specifics of such remediation would be worked out if the suit prevails, but she could imagine it taking the form of the yeshivas funding a GED program for its graduates at a local community college.
She compares the process to constructing a building. “I can build the house, but the rooms have to be decorated by the parties in an agreement,” she said. “I think what we’re doing here is beginning the process.”
The lawsuit was spearheaded by the nonprofit Young Advocates for Fair Education, or Yaffed, which was started by Naftuli Moster, who found that his Borough Park chasidic yeshiva left him woefully unprepared for college. At 18, Moster did not know how to do long division or write an essay. He’d never heard of a molecule, a cell, or the U.S. system of checks and balances.
Moster said that even the 90 minutes of secular studies he did receive each day were of poor quality. Yeshiva administrators considered secular education as a waste of time, he noted, since Judaic studies were paramount, and students treated the classes — held at the end of the day after eight hours of religious study — as a time to goof off.
Advocates for Justice is working on the issue pro bono on behalf of Yaffed in East Ramapo while civil rights attorney Norman Siegel is working with Yaffed (also pro bono) on a potential lawsuit against the city’s Department of Education’s lack of oversight of chasidic yeshivas that are primarily in Williamsburg and Borough Park.
The East Ramapo complaint asserts that the schools themselves broke the law by hiring uncertified teachers incapable of teaching secular subjects, creating a public burden by failing to prepare their students to earn a living, misusing federal education funds and, most strikingly, discriminating against boys by giving them significantly less secular education than girls (who get more because they don’t study Talmud).
“By their individual and collective acts and omissions, Defendants have contributed to if not created a culture of ignorance that results in the certitude that generations of yeshiva students, once adults, become financially impoverished, have no alternative but to be sustained principally by public benefits, fail to obtain meaningful employment, and fail to become productive civic participants in our society,” the complaint says.
The lawsuit does not name the plaintiffs because they are afraid their communities will retaliate. “They and their families risk being shunned or expelled from the community, having their businesses boycotted and ruined, suffering verbal threats and abuses, physical assault, and property damage,” the complaint says.
Examples of the price people pay for not following the rules in places like New Square and Spring Valley abound. Four years ago, a New Square man who prayed with nursing home residents instead of at the shul of the town’s grand rebbe, David Twersky, was badly injured after a Skerver follower tried to set fire to his home. Although Shaul Spitzer pleaded guilty and received a sentence of seven years, he was widely supported by community members at his sentencing. And in his memoir, “All Who Go Do Not Return,” Shulem Deen writes of being declared a heretic, forced to move out of New Square and eventually shunned by his wife and five children after he began questioning his belief in God and exploring the secular world.
Yaffed’s claim against East Ramapo’s school board and New York State comes several years after Moster started Yaffed. First the group tried to bring the issue to the attention of city and state officials and the yeshivas themselves. After being rebuffed for years, Yaffed finally got some traction over the summer when it submitted to the New York City Department of Education a complaint signed by 52 yeshiva parents, teachers and former students. At the end of July, the DOE promised to investigate and Daniel Dromm, the chair of the city council’s education committee, also promised to take up the cause.
In the months since, the DOE has not released any information about the investigation, except to say they were approaching the task as “partners” to the schools rather than as investigators.
In addition to the state, the parents and graduates are also suing the New York State Board of Regents and its chancellor, Merryl Tisch; the New York State Department of Education and Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia; the East Ramapo Central District Board of Education and its superintendent, Deborah Wortham and the schools (and their principals) that the current students attended: Yeshiva Avir Yakov in New Square, United Talmudical Academy and Yeshiva Darkei Emunah in Monsey and Yeshiva Tzion Yosef in Spring Valley.
All of the defendants named in the suit either did not respond to requests for comment or declined to be interviewed. The NYC DOE did not respond to requests for an update on the DOE investigation. Read More
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Nazi Art Case Tests Start Date Of Shoah
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
International
Nazi Art Case Tests Start Date Of Shoah
Germany’s new claim in Guelph Treasure suit shocks Holocaust historians as ‘revisionist history.’
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
A 12th-century domed reliquary in the shape of a church, made of silver and gold. Wikimedia Commons
The German government has laws on the books that will get you thrown in jail for denying the existence of the Holocaust. It mandates that all schoolchildren, starting at age 12 and for years after that, learn about what happened to the Jews under Nazi rule. It has paid out an estimated $90 billion in reparations to Holocaust survivors and their heirs over the last 60 years.
And on the fast-moving story of the return of Nazi-looted artwork to its rightful Jewish owners — one that has landed in Hollywood with the hit film “Woman in Gold” — Germany has pledged greater transparency.
But in a federal courtroom in Washington, D.C., the German government is showing another, arguably darker, side.
In seeking to dismiss a lawsuit over a long-contested trove of medieval ecclesiastical relics known as the Guelph Treasure that Germany bought from three Jewish art dealers in 1935, the government has now dropped a legal bombshell, one that actually seems to challenge the historical record.
The sale could not have been forced, the German government argued in court papers submitted earlier this month in U.S. District Court, because “the sale predated the Holocaust by several years.”
Holocaust scholars are shocked by Germany’s line of argument, calling it “cynical” and saying that it amounts to “revisionist history.”
“It’s ridiculous,” said Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of modern Jewish history and Holocaust studies at Emory University in Atlanta and a former consultant to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.
“If you define the Holocaust as the killing of Jews, it began in the summer of 1941,” she said. “But to ignore the terrible persecution and prejudice and limitations placed on the lives of Jews that started in 1933 is ludicrous. … It is a cheap shot. It was a forced sale because Jews were forced to sell things because they were denied the right to make a living.”
Marion Kaplan, a professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University who has taught 19th and 20th century German history, said she was “shocked” by the German claim.
“The idea that the ‘Holocaust’ started with the war is wrong,” she said. “Social death started in 1933 and physical death followed. Indeed, many Jewish men died in concentration camps directly after Kristallnacht [November 1938] — well before the war.”
Assigning a start date for the Holocaust — in a legal if not a moral sense — is admittedly an imprecise exercise. Did it begin when the National Socialists took power in 1933? When the Nuremberg Laws were signed in 1935? When the state-sponsored rampage against Jewish businesses — Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass — terrorized the Jewish population in 1938? When the Nazis signed off on the Final Solution in 1941? When mass killings with stationary gas chambers began widely in 1942?
The case of the Guelph Treasure, in which heirs of the Jewish art dealers are seeking its return, may throw a light on this complicated legal question.
The treasure is a collection, primarily of precious gem-encrusted Christian devotional masterpieces, such as reliquaries and crosses, that is valued at about $250 million. The most valuable piece is a 12th-century domed reliquary shaped like a church and made of gold, copper and silver. Biblical figures carved from walrus tusk encircle the work.
Had the heirs sought the collection’s return years ago, the legal fight over its ownership might not have been questioned. In 1943, the Allied governments recognized that the Nazis either confiscated or compelled victims of religious, racial and political persecution to sell their businesses, houses and other property under duress. They then issued the London Declaration that said the allies would no longer recognize the transfer of property in occupied countries even if it appeared legal — a doctrine codified into law after the war that was adopted by the new German Federal Republic in 1949, according to an attorney for the heirs, Markus Stotzel.
He said Germany rescinded it in the 1960s in the belief all restitution claims had been resolved. But in the last decade or so, the heirs of several Jewish art collectors have come forward to assert claims to looted art, some of it hanging in German museums. The heirs to the Guelph Treasure began their efforts seven years ago.
In response to the new claims, Germany promised to be transparent and efficient in restituting works of art. In 2003 it created an eight-member commission headed by Jutta Limbach, former head of Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court, to mediate all disputes regarding cultural property — including art — seized by the state as a result of Nazi persecution.
The commission heard the Guelph case shortly after the issue of German art restitution made headlines worldwide late in 2013 with the admission by the Bavarian state that it had quietly recovered 1,400 pieces of art — much of it looted by the Nazis — that had been secretly hidden by the son of a man who had been an art dealer for Hitler.
In its Guelph case decision, issued in March 2014, the commission noted that the collectors had bought the artifacts in 1929 for 7.5 million reichsmarks. They later sold about half of them and in 1934 began negotiations with the Dresdner Bank for the rest. The bank was secretly acting in behalf of the Prussian state government headed by its prime minister, Hermann Goering, the second most powerful man in Germany after Adolf Hitler rose to power in 1933.
Negotiations over the price concluded in July 1935, and the Limbach commission said there were “no indications that the art dealers and their business partners were placed under pressure in the negotiations … [and thus were not forced to sell] as a result of Nazi persecution.”
A spokesman for the German Embassy in Washington said his government agrees with that opinion and is “committed to the fair and just resolution of legitimate claims to Nazi-confiscated art, consistent with the universally accepted guidelines of the Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art.”
“The federal government,” he added, “therefore believes that the civil case stemming from a 1935 sale of medieval relics by a group of German art dealers has no merit and should not be heard in [a] U.S. court.”
The art dealers were paid only 4.2 million reichsmarks, which was “one-third or less than its market value,” according to Mel Urbach, Stotzel’s co-counsel. He said they sold it to Goering — who later presented it to Hitler as a gift — believing they would be killed if they did not.
Urbach said he and Stotzel represent relatives of another art dealer who was imprisoned and tortured by the Nazis before he would sell to them. And he said they have a number of other cases in which the German government is refusing to recognize legitimate claims of Jewish heirs to works of art, buildings and property.
“We see a pattern here where Germany is revising the Holocaust and using technicalities [defenses such as the statute of limitations] to disrespect the suffering of so many people during the early years of the Nazi regime,” he said.
The lawyers submitted several expert opinions from Holocaust historians to support their claims.
One was from Wolf Gruner, chair of Jewish studies and a professor of history at the University of Southern California, who is a specialist in the persecution of the Jews in Germany. He wrote that within weeks of Hitler being appointed chancellor on Jan. 30, 1933, he “subjected political dissidents and Jewish Germans to extreme persecution. Jewish people were mistreated in many towns in the first months of 1933, put into concentration camps, their stores were attacked and boycotted, and they were pushed out of professional and economic life by many different means.”
Gruner noted also that officials in Frankfurt am Maim, home of the three Jewish art collectors, “made a common practice of preventing the transfer of the coveted art assets of the Jews to overseas by having these entered on the list of nationally valuable assets.”
He pointed out also that one of the three art collectors, Saemy Rosenbaum, concluded the negotiations in Berlin and could not have failed to notice daily demonstrations in front of Jewish-owned stores.
“Spoken choruses of ‘Don’t buy from Jews’ were intended to prevent customers visiting,” he wrote. “Shop windows were scrawled and painted with anti-Jewish slogans. The police had to intervene repeatedly and restore order. … In such circumstances, there can be no question of any kind of normal sale transaction, unaffected by the daily and ubiquitous active discrimination and persecution …
“This transaction is therefore tainted by the stain of `persecution conditionality’ … because the sale took place under conditions that were not equitable and market value appropriate.”
Although Rosenbaum later left Germany and started his business anew in New York, his associates were not so fortunate. Julius Goldschmidt escaped to London but is said to have lived an impoverished life. And Z. M. Hackenbroch was reportedly dragged to his death through the streets of Frankfurt by a Nazi mob in 1937.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, said the German government’s claim that the 1935 sale “predated the Holocaust by several years” is “simply disgusting and dangerous.”
“I understand the tactic of what they are trying to do — saying that the sale was normal,” he told The Jewish Week. “But for a Jew in Germany in 1935, life in Germany was anything but normal. … The fact that it was sold in 1935 — you would have to prove to me there was no linkage.”
Holocaust historian Timothy Snyder, author of the critically acclaimed new book, “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning,” told The Jewish Week that although the “mass murder of Jews began in the summer of 1941, the discrimination [against them] began in 1933.”
“The reasons why people would want to get out of Germany and be compelled to sell things begins in 1933,” he said. “Their [the German government’s] argument is shameful. It means that unless there was mass murder, nobody was discriminated against. The fact that they killed many of the people later does not mean it was alright to discriminate against them earlier. Nobody would say that. All of the historians who work on the Holocaust focus on the discrimination that began in the 1930s.”
Atina Grossmann, a teacher of modern European and German history at Cooper Union, said in an email to The Jewish Week that the German government’s claim is “a rather specious argument in terms of compensation for expropriated Jewish property in Germany since we clearly have anti-Jewish policies and actions in place from 1933 on — all before the beginning of the war and well before the implementation of the Final Solution and the enactment of any plans for the extermination of European Jewry.”
About Germany’s claim in the Guelph Treasure case, Grossmann added: “So yes, technically correct, but in this case certainly an irrelevant and specious cynical argument. The Germans know better.” Read More
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