Samach Vov: Vayikach Korach, Part 5
The Mashal of Koach HaSechel for Ohr Penimi
By Yaakov Brawer
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Sunday, February 07, 2016 at 10:30am ET
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The Maamar continues the description of how the specific constituency of the brain determines the quality of the manifestation of the Koach Hasechel (intellect) invested therein.
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The Jewish Week Connecting the World to Jewish News, Culture, Features, and Opinions "Tastiest chicken soon to be kosher" for Friday, 22 January 2016
Friday, January 22, 2016
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Day School Groups Merge In Big Educational Shakeup
Steve Lipman
The Jewish view on the zodiac
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Airs Tuesday, February 9 at 7pm ET
Click here to browse our full programming schedule.
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The Jewish Week Connecting the World to Jewish News, Culture, Features, and Opinions "Tastiest chicken soon to be kosher" for Friday, 22 January 2016
Friday, January 22, 2016
-------------------
Day School Groups Merge In Big Educational Shakeup
Steve Lipman
New York
Five groups representing different streams agree to fold into single new entity.
New York
Day School Groups Merge In Big Educational Shakeup
Five groups representing different streams agree to fold into single new entity.
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
A scene in a local Jewish day school. Courtesy of Amy Sara Clark/JWIn a major restructuring of the Jewish day school organizational world, five national groups that run a range of educational and programming activities for day schools have agreed to merge into a new, and potentially more effective, entity, The Jewish Week has learned.
The merger, estimated to be completed this summer, could result in a cost savings of $1 million (as well as some job losses). It consolidates the work of PARDES (Day Schools of Reform Judaism), PEJE (the Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education), RAVSAK (The Jewish Community Day School Network), the Conservative movement’s Schechter Day School Network, and the Yeshiva University School Partnership (YUSP). Collectively, the organizations serve about 40 percent of the day school students nationwide.
According to sources close to the deal, the reorganization comes, in part, at the urging of major philanthropists who are said to be tired of funding the denominationally driven groups individually and are seeking a more streamlined way of offering support.
In addition, there is a sense that community day schools and those operated by the liberal denominations are facing a difficult future in terms of enrollment around the country. (Torah Umesorah, a major network of Orthodox schools, is not part of the merger, presumably for its ideological stand against interdenominational partnerships.) A single and central entity is seen as having a greater presence in the community in serving and advocating for day schools.
The deal has been in the works for more than a year, sources say. Much of the negotiations among the five groups have focused on how to offer a more unified vision and presence to the community while allowing each organization to continue to work on its own areas of expertise. That includes serving schools from the different religious streams.
“This decision recognizes that a combined day school organization … will more effectively meet the diverse needs of the local schools by pooling the talent, expertise and resources originally dispersed among its founding agencies,” according to a statement issued on Tuesday on behalf of the still nameless organization, which is being temporarily identified as NewOrg (newjdsorg.org).
“The new organization will offer an expanded set of programs, services and networking opportunities to benefit the more than 275 schools and close to 100,000 students currently served by these separate groups,” a press release stated. Those numbers have declined somewhat in recent years.
“They are not putting themselves out of business; rather they are merging their core work,” said Yossi Prager, executive director of the North America section of Avi Chai, a strong advocate and supporter of day schools that served a key role in brokering the deal. Over the last year Avi Chai has funded extensive focus groups and a feasibility study of the new organization and has begun a search for a CEO to head it.
The initial board of directors will be composed of representatives of the five organizations and Avi Chai, plus several outside members.
‘A Model For The Community’
While some observers no doubt will see the planned move as an act of desperation by the national day school organizations, the key players say it is more a mix of idealism and realism. There was initial concern among the groups about working together and losing their separate status, but leaders of the five groups felt the potential outweighed the concerns. They expressed optimism about the imminent merger.
It will “help elevate the field of Jewish day schools to the center of national Jewish conversation,” said Jon Mitzmacher, executive director of Schechter Day School Network, who called NewOrg “a huge win-win for Schechter and the field.”
Jane Taubenfeld Cohen, executive director of the Yeshiva University Institute for University-School Partnership, said, “Our schools can be served even better through this new model” through shared resources.
Idana Goldberg, co-executive director of RAVSAK, said one the major points of discussion was how to become a transdenominatonal body while assuring that everyone's unique needs continue to be met. "There is trepidation but we are looking forward, thinking of the future." She expressed pride that RAVSAK's leadership acted with "integrity and seriousness" in opting to "put the work" of fostering excellence in education "above us."
According to Michael Bohnen, board co-chair of PEJE, “This effort should serve as a model for the Jewish community, showing that one strong organization can be more effective than the sum of its parts and that various segments and streams can work together in common cause.
“Whereas schools today are limited to what they are offered as members or affiliates of one or two organizations, they will soon have access to comprehensive, leading-edge offerings,” Bohnen continued.
The heads of a cross-section of affected day schools reacted positively to news of the pending merger.
“I’m thrilled,” said Rabbi Ari Segal, head of school at Shalhevet High School in Los Angeles. “There’s just too much redundancy” among education organizations serving the Jewish community, he said. “There’s not only the cost-savings” involved, “but this will increase the quality of the education.
“I don’t see any downside,” Rabbi Segal said.
Nora Anderson, head of school at the Carmel Academy in Greenwich, Conn., said the merger would help participating day schools, “regardless of affiliation. In Jewish education we have a common mission. … To be able to offer the services, and sharing resources that a united organization can offer, is extraordinarily exciting.”
Anderson did say, though, that she worries she may lose the personal contacts at RAVSAK that she has built up during more than a dozen years in the field.
Marvin Schick, an expert in the area of day school education, had mixed feelings about the move. “I think it’s a good idea — because you eliminate duplication and overlap and competition,” said the senior advisor to Avi Chai. “Every time you reduce the number of Jewish organizations, it’s a good thing.”
But Schick, who was not involved in the brokering process, doubted that the merger would result in immediate benefits. “I don’t know if it can be translated into greater enrollment or greater financial strength.”
‘To Better Serve The Field’
Scott Cotenoff, senior manager of La Piana Consulting, which has coordinated NewOrg’s self-study for the last year, said in an email interview that, “unlike most mergers in the for-profit sector — for which the ability to create efficiencies that result in cost savings is the central success metric — nonprofit mergers are successful first and foremost when the work of the merged organization enables greater impact, and when the ability to sustain that impact over time is strengthened, for example through a stronger and more diversified funding model.”
The reorganization “is not a cost-saving enterprise only,” Avi Chai’s Prager said. “The idea was not to have a pared-down organization. The idea was to better serve the field.”
The total number of people now employed full-time by the five organizations is 38, and the projected figure at the new organization will be “roughly comparable,” according to Prager, though there may be terminations and hires.
The CEOs of the five organizations will continue working for the next six months, as consultants. After that it will be up to the new CEO and board to determine their status.
And while the “last cumulative budget” of the five organizations before the self-study process began last year was $10 million, the “estimated budget” of the new organization will be $9 million, Prager said.
Some programs offered by the new organization will be likely to appeal to the range of participating schools, which range from Reform to Orthodox, while others may be of interest to a small number of schools. “The new organization will identify those activities that can be provided across religious affiliations,” according to the press release, “and in other cases, deliver programs and services that may be denomination or affiliation-specific.”
The new organization “is committed to … supporting a vibrant, visible and connected Jewish day school field,” the press release stated. “It will work directly with schools, cohorts of schools, and individual professional and lay leaders to strengthen skills and build capacity in areas of teaching and learning, leadership, governance, affordability, recruitment, retention, fund development and endowment building.”
Prager said he did not know of a precedent in the Jewish community where several organizations in effect closed down at the same time to emerge as a single organization. And he acknowledged that the five organizations are taking a calculated but serious risk in joining up.
As for measuring success down the road, observers say they will look for: increases in total enrollment of participating day schools in a few years, a perception that the schools are better serving the needs of their students and making a better case for financial support from the local communities. Equally important, a test will be to see if the schools learn from one another, across denominational lines.
steve@jewishweek.org---------------------
Preparing For Our Son's Bar Mitzvah Is A Coming-Of-Age Moment For Us, Too
Gabrielle Kaplan-Mayer
Five groups representing different streams agree to fold into single new entity.
New York
Day School Groups Merge In Big Educational Shakeup
Five groups representing different streams agree to fold into single new entity.
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
A scene in a local Jewish day school. Courtesy of Amy Sara Clark/JWIn a major restructuring of the Jewish day school organizational world, five national groups that run a range of educational and programming activities for day schools have agreed to merge into a new, and potentially more effective, entity, The Jewish Week has learned.
The merger, estimated to be completed this summer, could result in a cost savings of $1 million (as well as some job losses). It consolidates the work of PARDES (Day Schools of Reform Judaism), PEJE (the Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education), RAVSAK (The Jewish Community Day School Network), the Conservative movement’s Schechter Day School Network, and the Yeshiva University School Partnership (YUSP). Collectively, the organizations serve about 40 percent of the day school students nationwide.
According to sources close to the deal, the reorganization comes, in part, at the urging of major philanthropists who are said to be tired of funding the denominationally driven groups individually and are seeking a more streamlined way of offering support.
In addition, there is a sense that community day schools and those operated by the liberal denominations are facing a difficult future in terms of enrollment around the country. (Torah Umesorah, a major network of Orthodox schools, is not part of the merger, presumably for its ideological stand against interdenominational partnerships.) A single and central entity is seen as having a greater presence in the community in serving and advocating for day schools.
The deal has been in the works for more than a year, sources say. Much of the negotiations among the five groups have focused on how to offer a more unified vision and presence to the community while allowing each organization to continue to work on its own areas of expertise. That includes serving schools from the different religious streams.
“This decision recognizes that a combined day school organization … will more effectively meet the diverse needs of the local schools by pooling the talent, expertise and resources originally dispersed among its founding agencies,” according to a statement issued on Tuesday on behalf of the still nameless organization, which is being temporarily identified as NewOrg (newjdsorg.org).
“The new organization will offer an expanded set of programs, services and networking opportunities to benefit the more than 275 schools and close to 100,000 students currently served by these separate groups,” a press release stated. Those numbers have declined somewhat in recent years.
“They are not putting themselves out of business; rather they are merging their core work,” said Yossi Prager, executive director of the North America section of Avi Chai, a strong advocate and supporter of day schools that served a key role in brokering the deal. Over the last year Avi Chai has funded extensive focus groups and a feasibility study of the new organization and has begun a search for a CEO to head it.
The initial board of directors will be composed of representatives of the five organizations and Avi Chai, plus several outside members.
‘A Model For The Community’
While some observers no doubt will see the planned move as an act of desperation by the national day school organizations, the key players say it is more a mix of idealism and realism. There was initial concern among the groups about working together and losing their separate status, but leaders of the five groups felt the potential outweighed the concerns. They expressed optimism about the imminent merger.
It will “help elevate the field of Jewish day schools to the center of national Jewish conversation,” said Jon Mitzmacher, executive director of Schechter Day School Network, who called NewOrg “a huge win-win for Schechter and the field.”
Jane Taubenfeld Cohen, executive director of the Yeshiva University Institute for University-School Partnership, said, “Our schools can be served even better through this new model” through shared resources.
Idana Goldberg, co-executive director of RAVSAK, said one the major points of discussion was how to become a transdenominatonal body while assuring that everyone's unique needs continue to be met. "There is trepidation but we are looking forward, thinking of the future." She expressed pride that RAVSAK's leadership acted with "integrity and seriousness" in opting to "put the work" of fostering excellence in education "above us."
According to Michael Bohnen, board co-chair of PEJE, “This effort should serve as a model for the Jewish community, showing that one strong organization can be more effective than the sum of its parts and that various segments and streams can work together in common cause.
“Whereas schools today are limited to what they are offered as members or affiliates of one or two organizations, they will soon have access to comprehensive, leading-edge offerings,” Bohnen continued.
The heads of a cross-section of affected day schools reacted positively to news of the pending merger.
“I’m thrilled,” said Rabbi Ari Segal, head of school at Shalhevet High School in Los Angeles. “There’s just too much redundancy” among education organizations serving the Jewish community, he said. “There’s not only the cost-savings” involved, “but this will increase the quality of the education.
“I don’t see any downside,” Rabbi Segal said.
Nora Anderson, head of school at the Carmel Academy in Greenwich, Conn., said the merger would help participating day schools, “regardless of affiliation. In Jewish education we have a common mission. … To be able to offer the services, and sharing resources that a united organization can offer, is extraordinarily exciting.”
Anderson did say, though, that she worries she may lose the personal contacts at RAVSAK that she has built up during more than a dozen years in the field.
Marvin Schick, an expert in the area of day school education, had mixed feelings about the move. “I think it’s a good idea — because you eliminate duplication and overlap and competition,” said the senior advisor to Avi Chai. “Every time you reduce the number of Jewish organizations, it’s a good thing.”
But Schick, who was not involved in the brokering process, doubted that the merger would result in immediate benefits. “I don’t know if it can be translated into greater enrollment or greater financial strength.”
‘To Better Serve The Field’
Scott Cotenoff, senior manager of La Piana Consulting, which has coordinated NewOrg’s self-study for the last year, said in an email interview that, “unlike most mergers in the for-profit sector — for which the ability to create efficiencies that result in cost savings is the central success metric — nonprofit mergers are successful first and foremost when the work of the merged organization enables greater impact, and when the ability to sustain that impact over time is strengthened, for example through a stronger and more diversified funding model.”
The reorganization “is not a cost-saving enterprise only,” Avi Chai’s Prager said. “The idea was not to have a pared-down organization. The idea was to better serve the field.”
The total number of people now employed full-time by the five organizations is 38, and the projected figure at the new organization will be “roughly comparable,” according to Prager, though there may be terminations and hires.
The CEOs of the five organizations will continue working for the next six months, as consultants. After that it will be up to the new CEO and board to determine their status.
And while the “last cumulative budget” of the five organizations before the self-study process began last year was $10 million, the “estimated budget” of the new organization will be $9 million, Prager said.
Some programs offered by the new organization will be likely to appeal to the range of participating schools, which range from Reform to Orthodox, while others may be of interest to a small number of schools. “The new organization will identify those activities that can be provided across religious affiliations,” according to the press release, “and in other cases, deliver programs and services that may be denomination or affiliation-specific.”
The new organization “is committed to … supporting a vibrant, visible and connected Jewish day school field,” the press release stated. “It will work directly with schools, cohorts of schools, and individual professional and lay leaders to strengthen skills and build capacity in areas of teaching and learning, leadership, governance, affordability, recruitment, retention, fund development and endowment building.”
Prager said he did not know of a precedent in the Jewish community where several organizations in effect closed down at the same time to emerge as a single organization. And he acknowledged that the five organizations are taking a calculated but serious risk in joining up.
As for measuring success down the road, observers say they will look for: increases in total enrollment of participating day schools in a few years, a perception that the schools are better serving the needs of their students and making a better case for financial support from the local communities. Equally important, a test will be to see if the schools learn from one another, across denominational lines.
steve@jewishweek.org---------------------
Preparing For Our Son's Bar Mitzvah Is A Coming-Of-Age Moment For Us, Too
Gabrielle Kaplan-Mayer
The New Normal
The New Normal
Preparing For Our Son's Bar Mitzvah Is A Coming-Of-Age Moment For Us, Too
Gabrielle Kaplan-Mayer
The author with her son, George. Courtesy of Gabrielle Kaplan-MayerEditor's Note: This blog originally appeared on newsworks.
In less than a week, my son, George, will turn 13, and like generations of Jewish boys before him, he will become a bar mitzvah.
For George, who is non-verbal and on the more severe end of the autism spectrum, his bar mitzvah service will be carefully modified. We've taught him how to select his Torah verses from an app on his iPad that he uses to communicate. Rather than a speech about his Torah portion, he is painting a collage about it. He will deliver prayers from his front row seat, as standing before the congregation would cause him sensory overwhelm.
As we've prepared for his service, I've questioned my choices.
Should we have planned a smaller service for just the immediate family? Or flown to Israel for a bar mitzvah service there, as many families do who are not especially tied to a community?
But then I return to this reality: George is at home in our synagogue, Mishkan Shalom. He doesn't have the attention to sit through a regular length service, he loves the music, joy and energy of being in the sanctuary — and so it is right that he will become bar mitzvah there.
For my husband and me, planning George's bar mitzvah has been an opportunity for us to tell our community of family and friends more about George's needs — and our needs. It hasn't always been easy to ask for help and people don't always know how best to support us. So, for this occasion, we wrote out what we need and shared it with our guests:
Join us in visualizing a beautiful, peaceful morning for George in which he is surrounded by love and the power of Jewish tradition.
George is highly distractible and people entering the sanctuary late will cause him to lose focus. Please arrive and take your seat by 9:45 a.m. We will begin the ceremony at 10 a.m.
When his bar mitzvah is over, he may need to go to a quiet place to decompress. Please give him space and offer good wishes after he's had time to chill out a bit.
Know that life with autism is, in a word, unpredictable. It could be that George's bar mitzvah day is an off day for him. If that's the case, we will adapt and support him to the best of our ability. It will be what it will be. Just inviting our guests and loved ones into understanding that this is our reality is helpful and healing for us.
It feels like a coming of age moment for us, his parents, to be able to clearly articulate George's needs and know that we have built a community of people to join us in a joyous celebration of George.
I am always available to help other parents on the autism and faith journey — be in touch!
Gabrielle Kaplan-Mayer directs Jewish Learning Venture's Whole Community Inclusion and loves writing/editing for "The New Normal." Check out her children's cookbook The Kitchen Classroom, written with supports for all kids.---------------------
Jewish Activist Lori Berenson Returning To US After 20-Year Ordeal In Peru
JTA
The New Normal
Preparing For Our Son's Bar Mitzvah Is A Coming-Of-Age Moment For Us, Too
Gabrielle Kaplan-Mayer
The author with her son, George. Courtesy of Gabrielle Kaplan-MayerEditor's Note: This blog originally appeared on newsworks.
In less than a week, my son, George, will turn 13, and like generations of Jewish boys before him, he will become a bar mitzvah.
For George, who is non-verbal and on the more severe end of the autism spectrum, his bar mitzvah service will be carefully modified. We've taught him how to select his Torah verses from an app on his iPad that he uses to communicate. Rather than a speech about his Torah portion, he is painting a collage about it. He will deliver prayers from his front row seat, as standing before the congregation would cause him sensory overwhelm.
As we've prepared for his service, I've questioned my choices.
Should we have planned a smaller service for just the immediate family? Or flown to Israel for a bar mitzvah service there, as many families do who are not especially tied to a community?
But then I return to this reality: George is at home in our synagogue, Mishkan Shalom. He doesn't have the attention to sit through a regular length service, he loves the music, joy and energy of being in the sanctuary — and so it is right that he will become bar mitzvah there.
For my husband and me, planning George's bar mitzvah has been an opportunity for us to tell our community of family and friends more about George's needs — and our needs. It hasn't always been easy to ask for help and people don't always know how best to support us. So, for this occasion, we wrote out what we need and shared it with our guests:
Join us in visualizing a beautiful, peaceful morning for George in which he is surrounded by love and the power of Jewish tradition.
George is highly distractible and people entering the sanctuary late will cause him to lose focus. Please arrive and take your seat by 9:45 a.m. We will begin the ceremony at 10 a.m.
When his bar mitzvah is over, he may need to go to a quiet place to decompress. Please give him space and offer good wishes after he's had time to chill out a bit.
Know that life with autism is, in a word, unpredictable. It could be that George's bar mitzvah day is an off day for him. If that's the case, we will adapt and support him to the best of our ability. It will be what it will be. Just inviting our guests and loved ones into understanding that this is our reality is helpful and healing for us.
It feels like a coming of age moment for us, his parents, to be able to clearly articulate George's needs and know that we have built a community of people to join us in a joyous celebration of George.
I am always available to help other parents on the autism and faith journey — be in touch!
Gabrielle Kaplan-Mayer directs Jewish Learning Venture's Whole Community Inclusion and loves writing/editing for "The New Normal." Check out her children's cookbook The Kitchen Classroom, written with supports for all kids.---------------------
Jewish Activist Lori Berenson Returning To US After 20-Year Ordeal In Peru
JTA
International
International
Jewish Activist Lori Berenson Returning To US After 20-Year Ordeal In Peru
JTA
Jewish activist Lori Berenson returning to US after 20-year ordeal in Peru. JTALori Berenson, the Jewish New Yorker whose imprisonment in Peru for aiding leftist rebels became a cause celebre, is returning to the United States after 20 years.
Police escorted Berenson, 46, through the Lima airport on her way back to the U.S. on Wednesday night. She was carrying her 6-year-old son, Salvador, from her marriage to her attorney, Anibal Apari. The couple has divorced.
In 1995, Berenson was convicted of treason by a panel of military judges for aiding leftist rebels in a plot to overthrow the Peruvian Congress. She spent 15 years in prison and the rest of her 20-year term on parole in Lima, the capital city.
Berenson has denied belonging to the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement or engaging in violent acts. In 2010, she apologized to Peruvians in a letter for any hurt she may have caused as a condition of her parole.
She admitted to being a member of the movement, but not to participating in the violent plot for which she was accused. Berenson said she never saw any weapons during her involvement with the group. Apari was a member of the movement; the two met while Berenson was in prison.
Thousands of human rights activists campaigned for years for Berenson’s release. Her parents, Mark and Rhoda, left their jobs as university professors to advocate for their daughter. Berenson plans to live with her parents in New York, The New York Times reported, but said she eventually will move to another state to start anew.
editor@jewishweek.org---------------------
Douglas Taking Jewish Pride On The Road
Gary Rosenblatt
Gary Rosenblatt
Douglas Taking Jewish Pride On The Road
With rekindled identity, Genesis Prize-winner embarks on college tour; urges community to be welcoming.
Gary Rosenblatt
Editor And Publisher
Speaking out: Actor Michael Douglas in front of his Manhattan apartment with editor Gary Rosenblatt.Last January, Michael Douglas was “blindsided,” in his words, when he was asked to accept the Genesis Prize, a $1 million award known as the “Jewish Nobel Prize.”
The initial response from the Oscar-winning film star and producer was, “This is a mistake, I’m not Jewish,” he recalled the other day. He noted that from early childhood, “I knew my dad [actor Kirk Douglas, born Issur Danielovitch] was Jewish but was told that I wasn’t.”
His mother, Diana Dill, who died last year, was Anglican.
He says he was emotionally moved when officials of the prize, which was founded and is largely supported by wealthy, Russian-speaking Jews seeking to sustain and deepen Jewish identity among young people, explained to Douglas that the judges selected him, in part, because he has chosen to identify as a Jew at a time of increasing assimilation.
“When they told me I am a Jew” in the eyes of the Reform movement, which welcomes those born of a Jewish father, “I had a cathartic moment,” a feeling of finally being acknowledged, he explained the other day as we sat in his spacious apartment overlooking Central Park.
“I was more resentful than I’d realized over the years, feeling I’d been excluded. … There was nothing welcoming about the faith. But I feel much more accepted now.”
Douglas was the second annual award winner of the prize; the first was former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and the latest is violin virtuoso Itzhak Perlman, who will be honored in Israel in June.
A gracious, relaxed host, Douglas, 71, still seems a bit in awe of his sudden and highly public ascendance in Jewish life after decades far removed from it. About to embark on a cross-country speaking tour at three college campuses (co-sponsored by the Jewish Agency for Israel, the Genesis Prize Foundation and Hillel) with Natan Sharansky, the iconic symbol of the Soviet Jewry movement, Douglas reflected on his unlikely, controversial and personally meaningful Jewish journey over the last several years.
He said he and Sharansky plan to discuss their opposition to BDS (the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel) and, presumably, will share their very different stories of how they came from no religious background to publicly express their Jewish identity and love of Israel.
Sharansky, now head of the Jewish Agency, defied the Kremlin and served almost a decade in the Gulag for seeking to make aliyah. Douglas said he now thinks of his own Jewish identity as being passed down by his father’s genes and passed up from his teenage son Dylan, whose deep interest in and embrace of Judaism, leading to a bar mitzvah two years ago, brought the family a new sense of spirituality.
Kirk Douglas, now 99, was born to observant immigrants from Belarus, but he focused on his Hollywood career, with little interest in Judaism, until he survived a fatal helicopter accident when he was 70. It was then that he began studying Jewish texts and spirituality, his son recalled, “and this hard-working, driven man changed dramatically. In the third chapter of his life he became kinder and gentler, and I was happy for him.”
Douglas noted that he, too, had a spiritual awakening around the age of 70. “It wasn’t as dramatic, but I began searching and thinking [about Jewish traditions and values], thanks to my son.”
In accepting the Genesis Prize in June at a lavish ceremony in Israel, where he was publicly praised by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other dignitaries, Douglas declared: “I am a Jew; those are four words of pride.” He went on to assert that with assimilation on the rise, and the Jewish community faced with “the fundamental choice to exclude or welcome” non-Jewish spouses, “the answer to me is clear.” He urged the community to emulate the hospitality, inclusion and tolerance that the biblical Abraham, the first Jew, displayed in his open tent.
‘The Non-Denoms’
It’s been a long road for Douglas. When he was a teenager playing intramural volleyball at an elite New England prep school, his team was made up of students who called themselves “The Non-Denoms.”
“We wore T-shirts featuring a Star of David with a cross in the middle,” he said.
For many years religion was not a major factor in his life. True, he took offense when a classmate casually mentioned that “all Jews cheat in business,” but his motivation to speak out came from his own liberal leanings, he said. As an adult he sometimes filled in for his famous father in speaking at Jewish fundraising events. And ever since he spent six weeks in Israel, accompanying his father, who was filming “Cast A Giant Shadow” 50 years ago, Douglas has felt a strong affinity for the people, land and state of Israel. Indeed, he considers Col. Mickey Marcus, the American who was the subject of the film for coming to Israel’s aid in the 1948 war, his first Jewish hero.
Marcus, who tragically was killed by friendly fire, became modern Israel’s first general.
“It was a phenomenal experience for me being in Israel, seeing such a vibrant democracy, this mix of races, color, ethnicity,” Douglas said.
But when it came to religious belief or practice, Douglas identified with the non-denoms.
All of that changed several years ago when his son, Dylan, started visiting Jewish friends from school for Shabbat and spoke warmly of the experience at home. He asked his parents — Douglas is married to actress Catherine Zeta-Jones — to light Shabbat candles. Douglas said the act of lighting candles warmed his soul, evoking memories of his doing so during his brief time in the 1960s studying with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Indian guru who influenced the Beatles.
Dylan started attending Hebrew school with his friends and soon asked his parents for a bar mitzvah. When Douglas saw that it was “not just about wanting a party,” he readily agreed. He expressed pride in his son’s commitment in preparing for the ceremony, learning to read Hebrew and leading part of the service.
He noted that his daughter, Carys, is now preparing for her bat mitzvah in May, and that the family enjoys going to synagogue on occasion near their primary home in a small community about 50 miles north of Manhattan.
Still, Douglas is well aware that his limited Jewish observance and the fact that he is not considered Jewish according to halacha, or religious law, made his choice as recipient of the Genesis Prize last year a point of contention for many.
On hearing the news, Forward editor Jane Eisner wrote that Douglas “makes [former New York Mayor Michael] Bloomberg [the inaugural winner of the prize] look like a combination of Golda Meir, Louis Brandeis and, hell, even Moses in his public devotion to the Jewish people.
“Michael Douglas. Really?”
‘Welcoming Rather Than Alienating’
Douglas says he understands the seriousness of the debate, though “many people are too polite” to raise it with him directly. He pointed out that the prize is awarded in conjunction with the Office of the Prime Minister of Israel and the Jewish Agency, and that a number of judges are prominent Jewish figures.
The intention in citing him was “to support the vision of an inclusive global Jewish community,” according to a statement by prize officials, taking into account increasing assimilation here and in much of the diaspora. In effect, their objective in Douglas’ case was less about recognizing Jewish accomplishment than to view him as a role model, an internationally admired professional in his field who chose to embrace his heritage and culture.
“They understand that some of the traditions are going by the wayside,” Douglas said of the prize officials, and that “it’s in the faith’s best interest to be welcoming rather than alienating.”
He says he embraces Jewish values like tikkun olam, some of which he has learned from and discussed with his close friend, George Blumenthal, a New York businessman and philanthropist he’s known for more than 40 years.
Blumenthal has high praise for Douglas as a serious, thoughtful and caring man who harbored resentment about his ambivalent religious status for many years. Dylan’s interest in Judaism was “the tipping point for Michael,” Blumenthal said. “He was always respectful of his heritage and now he has sought it out for himself.”
Last March, Douglas recounted a painful lesson about the reach and depth of anti-Semitism. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, he described how upset Dylan was when, during a family holiday in Southern Europe, a man at the hotel swimming pool insulted the boy on seeing the Star of David around his neck. “While some Jews believe that not having a Jewish mother makes me not Jewish,” Douglas wrote, “I have learned the hard way that those who hate do not make such fine distinctions.” He said it was “a lesson that I wish I didn’t have to teach [Dylan], a lesson I hope he will never have to teach his children.”
Douglas waived the prize money and an initial grant went was given to Hillel to engage young people from intermarried families. In addition, the Jewish Funders Network is managing a matching grant for “big tent” interfaith outreach efforts, like those of the Reform movement. Thanks to another matching grant from an unnamed Russian oligarch, the pot has grown to $4 million.
“The people at Genesis clearly knew what they were doing, bringing me in from the outside,” Douglas mused. The result has been to not only present him as an inspiration to a new generation of intermarried Jews but to rekindle his own Jewish spark.
“I want to be part of this tribe,” he said.
Gary@jewishweek.org---------------------
Secret LGBTQ Chabad Group Fills Void
Hannah Dreyfus
International
Jewish Activist Lori Berenson Returning To US After 20-Year Ordeal In Peru
JTA
Jewish activist Lori Berenson returning to US after 20-year ordeal in Peru. JTALori Berenson, the Jewish New Yorker whose imprisonment in Peru for aiding leftist rebels became a cause celebre, is returning to the United States after 20 years.
Police escorted Berenson, 46, through the Lima airport on her way back to the U.S. on Wednesday night. She was carrying her 6-year-old son, Salvador, from her marriage to her attorney, Anibal Apari. The couple has divorced.
In 1995, Berenson was convicted of treason by a panel of military judges for aiding leftist rebels in a plot to overthrow the Peruvian Congress. She spent 15 years in prison and the rest of her 20-year term on parole in Lima, the capital city.
Berenson has denied belonging to the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement or engaging in violent acts. In 2010, she apologized to Peruvians in a letter for any hurt she may have caused as a condition of her parole.
She admitted to being a member of the movement, but not to participating in the violent plot for which she was accused. Berenson said she never saw any weapons during her involvement with the group. Apari was a member of the movement; the two met while Berenson was in prison.
Thousands of human rights activists campaigned for years for Berenson’s release. Her parents, Mark and Rhoda, left their jobs as university professors to advocate for their daughter. Berenson plans to live with her parents in New York, The New York Times reported, but said she eventually will move to another state to start anew.
editor@jewishweek.org---------------------
Douglas Taking Jewish Pride On The Road
Gary Rosenblatt
Gary Rosenblatt
Douglas Taking Jewish Pride On The Road
With rekindled identity, Genesis Prize-winner embarks on college tour; urges community to be welcoming.
Gary Rosenblatt
Editor And Publisher
Speaking out: Actor Michael Douglas in front of his Manhattan apartment with editor Gary Rosenblatt.Last January, Michael Douglas was “blindsided,” in his words, when he was asked to accept the Genesis Prize, a $1 million award known as the “Jewish Nobel Prize.”
The initial response from the Oscar-winning film star and producer was, “This is a mistake, I’m not Jewish,” he recalled the other day. He noted that from early childhood, “I knew my dad [actor Kirk Douglas, born Issur Danielovitch] was Jewish but was told that I wasn’t.”
His mother, Diana Dill, who died last year, was Anglican.
He says he was emotionally moved when officials of the prize, which was founded and is largely supported by wealthy, Russian-speaking Jews seeking to sustain and deepen Jewish identity among young people, explained to Douglas that the judges selected him, in part, because he has chosen to identify as a Jew at a time of increasing assimilation.
“When they told me I am a Jew” in the eyes of the Reform movement, which welcomes those born of a Jewish father, “I had a cathartic moment,” a feeling of finally being acknowledged, he explained the other day as we sat in his spacious apartment overlooking Central Park.
“I was more resentful than I’d realized over the years, feeling I’d been excluded. … There was nothing welcoming about the faith. But I feel much more accepted now.”
Douglas was the second annual award winner of the prize; the first was former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and the latest is violin virtuoso Itzhak Perlman, who will be honored in Israel in June.
A gracious, relaxed host, Douglas, 71, still seems a bit in awe of his sudden and highly public ascendance in Jewish life after decades far removed from it. About to embark on a cross-country speaking tour at three college campuses (co-sponsored by the Jewish Agency for Israel, the Genesis Prize Foundation and Hillel) with Natan Sharansky, the iconic symbol of the Soviet Jewry movement, Douglas reflected on his unlikely, controversial and personally meaningful Jewish journey over the last several years.
He said he and Sharansky plan to discuss their opposition to BDS (the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel) and, presumably, will share their very different stories of how they came from no religious background to publicly express their Jewish identity and love of Israel.
Sharansky, now head of the Jewish Agency, defied the Kremlin and served almost a decade in the Gulag for seeking to make aliyah. Douglas said he now thinks of his own Jewish identity as being passed down by his father’s genes and passed up from his teenage son Dylan, whose deep interest in and embrace of Judaism, leading to a bar mitzvah two years ago, brought the family a new sense of spirituality.
Kirk Douglas, now 99, was born to observant immigrants from Belarus, but he focused on his Hollywood career, with little interest in Judaism, until he survived a fatal helicopter accident when he was 70. It was then that he began studying Jewish texts and spirituality, his son recalled, “and this hard-working, driven man changed dramatically. In the third chapter of his life he became kinder and gentler, and I was happy for him.”
Douglas noted that he, too, had a spiritual awakening around the age of 70. “It wasn’t as dramatic, but I began searching and thinking [about Jewish traditions and values], thanks to my son.”
In accepting the Genesis Prize in June at a lavish ceremony in Israel, where he was publicly praised by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other dignitaries, Douglas declared: “I am a Jew; those are four words of pride.” He went on to assert that with assimilation on the rise, and the Jewish community faced with “the fundamental choice to exclude or welcome” non-Jewish spouses, “the answer to me is clear.” He urged the community to emulate the hospitality, inclusion and tolerance that the biblical Abraham, the first Jew, displayed in his open tent.
‘The Non-Denoms’
It’s been a long road for Douglas. When he was a teenager playing intramural volleyball at an elite New England prep school, his team was made up of students who called themselves “The Non-Denoms.”
“We wore T-shirts featuring a Star of David with a cross in the middle,” he said.
For many years religion was not a major factor in his life. True, he took offense when a classmate casually mentioned that “all Jews cheat in business,” but his motivation to speak out came from his own liberal leanings, he said. As an adult he sometimes filled in for his famous father in speaking at Jewish fundraising events. And ever since he spent six weeks in Israel, accompanying his father, who was filming “Cast A Giant Shadow” 50 years ago, Douglas has felt a strong affinity for the people, land and state of Israel. Indeed, he considers Col. Mickey Marcus, the American who was the subject of the film for coming to Israel’s aid in the 1948 war, his first Jewish hero.
Marcus, who tragically was killed by friendly fire, became modern Israel’s first general.
“It was a phenomenal experience for me being in Israel, seeing such a vibrant democracy, this mix of races, color, ethnicity,” Douglas said.
But when it came to religious belief or practice, Douglas identified with the non-denoms.
All of that changed several years ago when his son, Dylan, started visiting Jewish friends from school for Shabbat and spoke warmly of the experience at home. He asked his parents — Douglas is married to actress Catherine Zeta-Jones — to light Shabbat candles. Douglas said the act of lighting candles warmed his soul, evoking memories of his doing so during his brief time in the 1960s studying with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Indian guru who influenced the Beatles.
Dylan started attending Hebrew school with his friends and soon asked his parents for a bar mitzvah. When Douglas saw that it was “not just about wanting a party,” he readily agreed. He expressed pride in his son’s commitment in preparing for the ceremony, learning to read Hebrew and leading part of the service.
He noted that his daughter, Carys, is now preparing for her bat mitzvah in May, and that the family enjoys going to synagogue on occasion near their primary home in a small community about 50 miles north of Manhattan.
Still, Douglas is well aware that his limited Jewish observance and the fact that he is not considered Jewish according to halacha, or religious law, made his choice as recipient of the Genesis Prize last year a point of contention for many.
On hearing the news, Forward editor Jane Eisner wrote that Douglas “makes [former New York Mayor Michael] Bloomberg [the inaugural winner of the prize] look like a combination of Golda Meir, Louis Brandeis and, hell, even Moses in his public devotion to the Jewish people.
“Michael Douglas. Really?”
‘Welcoming Rather Than Alienating’
Douglas says he understands the seriousness of the debate, though “many people are too polite” to raise it with him directly. He pointed out that the prize is awarded in conjunction with the Office of the Prime Minister of Israel and the Jewish Agency, and that a number of judges are prominent Jewish figures.
The intention in citing him was “to support the vision of an inclusive global Jewish community,” according to a statement by prize officials, taking into account increasing assimilation here and in much of the diaspora. In effect, their objective in Douglas’ case was less about recognizing Jewish accomplishment than to view him as a role model, an internationally admired professional in his field who chose to embrace his heritage and culture.
“They understand that some of the traditions are going by the wayside,” Douglas said of the prize officials, and that “it’s in the faith’s best interest to be welcoming rather than alienating.”
He says he embraces Jewish values like tikkun olam, some of which he has learned from and discussed with his close friend, George Blumenthal, a New York businessman and philanthropist he’s known for more than 40 years.
Blumenthal has high praise for Douglas as a serious, thoughtful and caring man who harbored resentment about his ambivalent religious status for many years. Dylan’s interest in Judaism was “the tipping point for Michael,” Blumenthal said. “He was always respectful of his heritage and now he has sought it out for himself.”
Last March, Douglas recounted a painful lesson about the reach and depth of anti-Semitism. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, he described how upset Dylan was when, during a family holiday in Southern Europe, a man at the hotel swimming pool insulted the boy on seeing the Star of David around his neck. “While some Jews believe that not having a Jewish mother makes me not Jewish,” Douglas wrote, “I have learned the hard way that those who hate do not make such fine distinctions.” He said it was “a lesson that I wish I didn’t have to teach [Dylan], a lesson I hope he will never have to teach his children.”
Douglas waived the prize money and an initial grant went was given to Hillel to engage young people from intermarried families. In addition, the Jewish Funders Network is managing a matching grant for “big tent” interfaith outreach efforts, like those of the Reform movement. Thanks to another matching grant from an unnamed Russian oligarch, the pot has grown to $4 million.
“The people at Genesis clearly knew what they were doing, bringing me in from the outside,” Douglas mused. The result has been to not only present him as an inspiration to a new generation of intermarried Jews but to rekindle his own Jewish spark.
“I want to be part of this tribe,” he said.
Gary@jewishweek.org---------------------
Secret LGBTQ Chabad Group Fills Void
Hannah Dreyfus
New York
Facebook group offering sanctuary and support to former - and current - members of the Crown Heights fold.
New York
Secret LGBTQ Chabad Group Fills Void
Facebook group offering sanctuary and support to former — and current — members of the Crown Heights fold.
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
In many ways, Rivkah Procaccia appears much the same as other young Orthodox women in Crown Heights. Living in the heart of the Chabad Lubavitch chasidic enclave, the 26-year-old observes a modest code of dress, only dines at kosher restaurants and strictly observes the Sabbath.
But from a young age she felt different from her Chabad peers. Procaccia identifies as queer.
“I struggled growing up in a community that doesn’t acknowledge queer people,” Procaccia said. “Still, I’m here: observant, religious and queer.”
Now, a new underground movement is seeking to unite individuals like Procaccia who grew up in the Chabad community and identity as LGBTQ — lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer — and give them sanctuary.
Chaim Levin (who recently made headlines for testifying against the Orthodox “reparative” organization JONAH in a lawsuit that resulted in its closure) started the group last month as a “secret” Facebook group, which is more private than a “closed” group in that the public cannot see its members and the group doesn’t come up in online searches.
Since launching on Dec. 23, Levin has seen the Facebook group grow to nearly 100 members and has added a public “LGBTQ Chabad and Allies” group where individuals outside the group can show support.Members differ widely in age, orientation and religious observance; while some remain in the community, others are no longer religious. Still, all members grew up Chabad, and many still feel deeply connected to their religious upbringing. The group, which receives partial funding from JQY, aka Jewish Queer Youth, a nonprofit that supports LGBTQ Jews from Orthodox homes, held its first in-person meet-and-greet last Saturday night in Crown Heights at the home of a group member. About 20 members attended; according to Levin, the gathering will be the first of many.
“Like every Chabad house, we have an open door policy, and that includes closet doors,” reads one post on the LGBTQ Allies Facebook page.
“The group is growing more quickly than I ever imagined,” said Levin, 26, who said he grew up in a “heimishe” Chabad family in Crown Heights and still feels strongly connected to his Chabad roots, though he no longer practices Orthodoxy. “If our community didn’t need this, the group wouldn’t be progressing at this pace.”
Over the past several years, LGBTQ awareness within the Orthodox community has been increasing, though slowly, given the stance of Jewish law toward homosexuality. JQY, founded in 2001 to promote understanding for young gay Jews, today serves over 600 LGBTQ Orthodox young adults across New York. Language sensitivity training and “safe space” seminars for Orthodox gay students and allies are spreading on college campuses, guided by Eshel, a nonprofit founded in 2013 to support gay Orthodox adults and their families.
Dr. Jack Drescher, a psychiatrist in private practice here who has written extensively on LGBTQ issues, said that similar underground groups are bound to emerge in other chasidic communities.
“The members of this group believe they have no choice,” said Drescher, an expert in “closet psychology.” “The message from the larger community is that they are unacceptable. As part of a marginalized minority, they will eventually seek out others for support. There is no putting this genie back in the bottle.”
Even conservative Christian groups can no longer evade the issue. In November, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints received harsh backlash from Mormons upset about a new policy barring children of same-sex couples from being baptized.
Still, in chasidic circles the topic is still largely taboo, and homophobia remains rampant, Levin said.
“There’s tons of intolerance toward gay people in Chabad circles,” said Levin, who said he was relentlessly bullied while a 15-year-old student at a prominent Chabad yeshiva in France. After coming out to one of his close friends, he was rapidly shunned by his classmates and teachers and eventually kicked out of the yeshiva. “I was humiliated, rejected, and blacklisted,” he said, and called such names as a “faggot, sick, ill, a danger and a pedophile.”
Creating a system of support for individuals struggling against homophobia in the Chabad community is essential, he said.
“I really don’t think we can expect it to get better if we remain invisible.”
Though no Chabad rabbis have taken action against his group, pushback online has been aggressive and persistent, Levin said. In order to monitor the public allies page for hateful and offensive posts, the group has five moderators. Still, hate has slipped through. One user compared the group to a “mechalel Shabbos” group, or desecration of the Sabbath.
A Chabad spokesman declined to comment.
In the private group, keeping identities secure is of the utmost concern and Levin admitted that he is very scared of “potential infiltrators.” Many members of the group have not come out to their families or communities and have taken a significant risk by joining the group, he said.
One such member is a student at a Chabad yeshiva in Florida. At 15, he chose to stop learning secular studies so he could focus exclusively on Talmud and chasidic texts. Today, in his early twenties, he sports a black hat, black pants and a white button-down shirt, and, as is traditional among Chabad young men, he has never shaved or clipped his beard.
At age 13, he found himself attracted to one of his classmates in yeshiva.
“I didn’t realize what I was feeling at first, partially because I didn’t want to accept the truth,” he said.
Speaking by phone to The Jewish Week, his voice was jittery and he was careful with his words, often backtracking to convey just the right meaning. Still, he felt it was important for others to know that one can remain fully within the Chabad fold and be gay, as long as one doesn’t act on it.
“Even though being this way has forced me to struggle with my beliefs, I’ve ended up in the same place as everyone else — I’m still a 100 percent believer,” he said.
His “very conservative views” have sparked controversy within the secret group itself, he said. In one post, he expressed that being gay was “not normal, and clearly not the ideal.” Other members of the group requested the post be removed; instead, Levin added a qualifier saying that opinions voiced by members of the group did not reflect any official stance.
“If I could take a pill that would make me straight, I’d take it without a question,” the yeshiva student said.
Still, despite his unwavering dedication to an observant Chabad lifestyle, the 21-year-old admitted that it does “hurt” when his peers and even rabbis express homophobic views or use offensive language, like faggot.
“I hope people in my same situation — gay people in the Chabad community — don’t feel like misfits or freaks. They should know there are others like them,” he said.
For many in the group, the recent ex-chasidic memoir “Uncovered,” written by Leah Lax, who is a lesbian, was a turning point in the conversation. Lax describes her journey out of the community’s insular fold as she learns to accept her lesbian identity.
“For me personally, the national recognition of ‘Uncovered’ is nice, but this evolving story in Crown Heights is what has my heart,” Lax wrote to The Jewish Week in an email.
Lax, 59, has become an active member of the online group. She described the range of the group members this way: “frum and not frum, young and old, and [of] every orientation imaginable that is not heterosexual.” While some members “left the fold years ago but felt forever cut off from ‘family,’” others in the group are “current bachurim in yeshivas, or girls living at home struggling with the pressure for shidduchim,” referring to beginning the matchmaking process. The group’s diversity, combined with the shared Chabad roots, makes the dynamic “electrifying,” Lax said.
Goldie Goldbloom, a professor of creative writing at the University of Chicago and a successful novelist, is also a member of the secret online group. Today, the 51-year-old, divorced mother of eight and former Chabad shlucha (emissary) identifies as Lubavitch, observant, and queer (an umbrella term for people in the LGBTQ community).
“I chose to be involved because this is what I’ve been doing for the past 10 years, but under the radar — working with mostly Chabad people who are mostly not out as LGBTQ in the Midwest area,” Goldbloom wrote to The Jewish Week in an email. “I’m really glad that Chaim set up the page because it offers a place where we can all see that we aren’t alone, that there are hundreds of other Chabadniks in similar circumstances.”
Goldbloom described a particular dynamic within the Chabad community, where there exist two “internal groups”: one faction of the community is focused on outreach and tends to be far more accepting, while the other faction, which in large part is made up of people whose families have been in the Chabad fold for generations, is “focused inwards.” The latter group is “far less open to outside influences and — in particular — to LGBTQ individuals,” she wrote. Most members of the online community belong to this second group.
“When they came out, they were met with fierce rejection from their families and communities and most often, left Chabad and everything they had grown up with,” she wrote. “Those people struggled with depression, alienation, isolation.” Others choose to stay in the fold and “live closeted within the community, afraid to come out ... these people also have difficult, fear-filled lives that impact their families, without their families knowing what is wrong.”
Another member of the group, Samantha Katz, originally from Phoenix, also finds the group ethos invigorating. Though Katz, 26, is no longer religious, she became deeply involved in Chabad while an undergraduate student at Arizona State University. At 19, she got engaged to a Chabad yeshiva student whom she met through mutual friends. After suppressing fears about the match for two years, she broke it off — just three months before the wedding.
Today, she and her wife of several months are seeking a way to re-engage with Judaism. The Chabad community is where she feels most at home; still, the community’s unwavering coldness toward her “life choices” and a staunch “unwillingness to acknowledge that LGBTQ people exist” leave her unsure of where to turn.
“It’s painful to see other couples celebrated as they start their lives together, and to realize that my choices and my future family will never be celebrated in this community,” she said, a heavy note of sadness in her voice.
Still, the new online community has given her fresh hope. One of the original members, she gains strength from the constant online chatter and the exposure to “others just like me.”
“For many, I think the group is finally a chance to be openly gay. It’s funny, for me, it feels almost like the opposite,” she said, with a quick laugh. “For me, this group is finally a place where I can be Chabad again. It feels right.” ---------------------
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Science Ed Picking Up STEAM In Unlikely Setting >
New York
Science Ed Picking Up STEAM In Unlikely Setting
Riding a national wave, Teaneck girls’ yeshiva incorporating robotics and other new technologies into curriculum.
Rivka Hia
Special To The Jewish Week
Ma’ayanot students at recent tech program. Courtesy of Ma’ayanotThe picture is hard to square with expectations: Yeshiva girls, many of them in long skirts, controlling mini-robots, or Ozobots, some of which they had programmed, as the high-tech gadgets snake around the multipurpose room following pathways drawn with markers. Welcome to the brave new world of the STEM curriculum.
In a bid to ride the science, technology, engineering and math wave sweeping through schools of all kinds in a fast-changing educational landscape, the Ma’ayanot Yeshiva High School for girls in Teaneck, N.J., recently launched a curriculum it hopes will equip students for the 21st century.
The school, best known for its rigorous education, including promoting girls’ Talmud study, has recently started a program integrating technology into its curriculum and encouraging students to pursue careers in STEM. The program, called STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts and Mathematics), will weave mandatory computer science and engineering courses into the existing curriculum, and provide students with the opportunity to continue with these courses at an advanced level. (The added arts component doesn’t have to do with literature or poetry, but rather computer-based graphic arts.)
Ma’ayanot has also begun a school-wide initiative to introduce its students to successful women in these fields, and provide them with hands-on exposure to practical elements they may encounter working in them.
“In the past, the interest [for STEAM classes] was there but not at the level we wanted,” Orly Nadler, director of Ma’ayanot’s technology department, told The Jewish Week in a phone interview. The program’s kickoff event last month, she said, “has really taken us to new heights.”
At the event, held at the school, Ma’ayanot administrators passed out glow sticks as the students came into the multipurpose room. They hired a DJ with lighting, and gave out programs with candy attached. A slideshow projected images of inspirational quotes and the faces of technology personalities like Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer. After the slideshow, six women in STEM fields spoke to the students, with music interludes in between.
After the talks, the students enjoyed a dairy lunch and were ushered into a “maker fair.” The fair had LED lighting and hosted members of The Maker Depot, designers who create different pieces of technology. “We had paper circuitry, robots, drones, LED buttons … we showed how algebra could create textile design, and we printed out geometric shapes and ironed them on to T-shirts,” Nadler said.
“Girls were hovering over their teachers’ shoulders to create their own designs,” she said.
The fair had booths with an arduino board, an object that lets any object be a controller for a computer. In this case, the students used Play-Doh as video game controllers, and activated different circuits using their hands.
And there were those tiny wandering Ozobots moving about the room. “There were various different robots, programmable robots, iPad-controlled robots. We wanted to get them [the girls] excited about robotics,” Nadler said. At one point, the students were all over the floor searching for a runaway robot that seemed lost.
Nadler said the goal for the event was “to take them from consumers to creators. There’s this abyss in the middle between the two. At our event, we showed the crossover. They can create, they can innovate. We showed them women just a few years older than they are who are successful and that they too can be successful.”
Ma’ayanot’s changes come at a time of increased initiatives to help get girls and young women interested in STEM fields, specifically technology. While women outnumber men in American colleges, according to a 2011 U.S. Department of Commerce study, they are represented in less than a quarter of STEM jobs. The study reported that women in STEM jobs earned 33 percent more than women in non-STEM jobs, and that women with STEM degrees are less likely than their male counterparts to work in a STEM field and are more likely to work in education. The gender gap between men and women in these fields is often attributed to a lack of female role models, gender stereotyping, and less family-friendly flexibility.
Organizations like Girls Who Code have summer computer coding programs for high school girls. Additionally, many organizations and colleges offer scholarships to girls and young women pursuing STEM subjects.
The chair of Ma’ayanot’s science department, Gila Stein, said, “The main goal of our curriculum is to encourage students interested in science; both for those who already have an interest and for those who don’t yet have an interest.”
Stein said of Ma’ayanot’s education that, “We want our students to be competitive and be prepared for the job market. We want to inspire our students by innovation and inspire them to major in STEAM fields.”
Currently, Ma’ayanot’s course offerings include a computer science class in Java programming, an algebra class with coding, AP Calculus AB and BC, AP Statistics, AP Biology, AP Chemistry and AP Physics, and a forensics elective, in addition to introductory level classes. Next year, the school is hoping to offer an AP Computer Science class, and a mandatory STEAM class for ninth and tenth grade students that will include computer science, robotics, engineering, big data analysis, and algorithms.
“In our electives we encourage them to do research projects and enter competitions,” Stein said. “We have students who have placed nicely in the Gildor competition, SIEMENS, and Intel.” Ma’ayanot faculty members help interested students find labs that guide them in conducting research.
“Our entire professional development this year has been technology integration, specifically using iPads,” Nadler said. “We spend a good amount of time every month on technology integration and have begun using apps that target specific skills,” she said.
The head of Ma’ayanot’s mathematics department, Randy Bernstein, is hopeful about the new STEAM program. “We’re hoping to do more mathematical modeling, and use computers for simulations. We want to do some more coding in our classes even at the lower level,” she said. Bernstein said students could even practice coding on their calculators and write programs. “[You can] write a program to use the quadratic formula, to find a derivative; of course they don’t want you to use that on the AP exam, but it shows you the concept of coding.”
Ma’ayanot principal Rivka Kahan described the changes at the school this year as an, “explosion of programming within different areas of the school. STEAM has really been integral.”
Kahan said the most successful aspect of the inaugural STEAM event was that “Over the course of the program the energy grew and grew.” The school, she said, was exposing students to opportunities they wouldn’t have been exposed to otherwise. Seniors were contemplating new careers and younger students contacted us about new course offerings,” she said.
When asked if Ma’ayanot saw an increase in applications this year, Kahan responded, “We’re having a strong recruitment year though not a dramatic increase. … We’re not just following what other schools are doing, we’re really at the forefront of that movement.”
“An important part of preparing our students for careers in technology,” she said, “is having an excellent math background. We have an excellent math program, and offer AP Calculus AB, BC and AP Statistics. It’s important to us to always offer those courses even if there’s a particularly small group interested ... strong backgrounds in science [also] prepare them well.”
Bernstein said that “some of the students might not have recognized that these are careers they could go into. As high school students you don’t know what’s out there, and we’re showing them what’s out there and what they may be interested in.”
Facebook group offering sanctuary and support to former - and current - members of the Crown Heights fold.
New York
Secret LGBTQ Chabad Group Fills Void
Facebook group offering sanctuary and support to former — and current — members of the Crown Heights fold.
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
In many ways, Rivkah Procaccia appears much the same as other young Orthodox women in Crown Heights. Living in the heart of the Chabad Lubavitch chasidic enclave, the 26-year-old observes a modest code of dress, only dines at kosher restaurants and strictly observes the Sabbath.
But from a young age she felt different from her Chabad peers. Procaccia identifies as queer.
“I struggled growing up in a community that doesn’t acknowledge queer people,” Procaccia said. “Still, I’m here: observant, religious and queer.”
Now, a new underground movement is seeking to unite individuals like Procaccia who grew up in the Chabad community and identity as LGBTQ — lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer — and give them sanctuary.
Chaim Levin (who recently made headlines for testifying against the Orthodox “reparative” organization JONAH in a lawsuit that resulted in its closure) started the group last month as a “secret” Facebook group, which is more private than a “closed” group in that the public cannot see its members and the group doesn’t come up in online searches.
Since launching on Dec. 23, Levin has seen the Facebook group grow to nearly 100 members and has added a public “LGBTQ Chabad and Allies” group where individuals outside the group can show support.Members differ widely in age, orientation and religious observance; while some remain in the community, others are no longer religious. Still, all members grew up Chabad, and many still feel deeply connected to their religious upbringing. The group, which receives partial funding from JQY, aka Jewish Queer Youth, a nonprofit that supports LGBTQ Jews from Orthodox homes, held its first in-person meet-and-greet last Saturday night in Crown Heights at the home of a group member. About 20 members attended; according to Levin, the gathering will be the first of many.
“Like every Chabad house, we have an open door policy, and that includes closet doors,” reads one post on the LGBTQ Allies Facebook page.
“The group is growing more quickly than I ever imagined,” said Levin, 26, who said he grew up in a “heimishe” Chabad family in Crown Heights and still feels strongly connected to his Chabad roots, though he no longer practices Orthodoxy. “If our community didn’t need this, the group wouldn’t be progressing at this pace.”
Over the past several years, LGBTQ awareness within the Orthodox community has been increasing, though slowly, given the stance of Jewish law toward homosexuality. JQY, founded in 2001 to promote understanding for young gay Jews, today serves over 600 LGBTQ Orthodox young adults across New York. Language sensitivity training and “safe space” seminars for Orthodox gay students and allies are spreading on college campuses, guided by Eshel, a nonprofit founded in 2013 to support gay Orthodox adults and their families.
Dr. Jack Drescher, a psychiatrist in private practice here who has written extensively on LGBTQ issues, said that similar underground groups are bound to emerge in other chasidic communities.
“The members of this group believe they have no choice,” said Drescher, an expert in “closet psychology.” “The message from the larger community is that they are unacceptable. As part of a marginalized minority, they will eventually seek out others for support. There is no putting this genie back in the bottle.”
Even conservative Christian groups can no longer evade the issue. In November, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints received harsh backlash from Mormons upset about a new policy barring children of same-sex couples from being baptized.
Still, in chasidic circles the topic is still largely taboo, and homophobia remains rampant, Levin said.
“There’s tons of intolerance toward gay people in Chabad circles,” said Levin, who said he was relentlessly bullied while a 15-year-old student at a prominent Chabad yeshiva in France. After coming out to one of his close friends, he was rapidly shunned by his classmates and teachers and eventually kicked out of the yeshiva. “I was humiliated, rejected, and blacklisted,” he said, and called such names as a “faggot, sick, ill, a danger and a pedophile.”
Creating a system of support for individuals struggling against homophobia in the Chabad community is essential, he said.
“I really don’t think we can expect it to get better if we remain invisible.”
Though no Chabad rabbis have taken action against his group, pushback online has been aggressive and persistent, Levin said. In order to monitor the public allies page for hateful and offensive posts, the group has five moderators. Still, hate has slipped through. One user compared the group to a “mechalel Shabbos” group, or desecration of the Sabbath.
A Chabad spokesman declined to comment.
In the private group, keeping identities secure is of the utmost concern and Levin admitted that he is very scared of “potential infiltrators.” Many members of the group have not come out to their families or communities and have taken a significant risk by joining the group, he said.
One such member is a student at a Chabad yeshiva in Florida. At 15, he chose to stop learning secular studies so he could focus exclusively on Talmud and chasidic texts. Today, in his early twenties, he sports a black hat, black pants and a white button-down shirt, and, as is traditional among Chabad young men, he has never shaved or clipped his beard.
At age 13, he found himself attracted to one of his classmates in yeshiva.
“I didn’t realize what I was feeling at first, partially because I didn’t want to accept the truth,” he said.
Speaking by phone to The Jewish Week, his voice was jittery and he was careful with his words, often backtracking to convey just the right meaning. Still, he felt it was important for others to know that one can remain fully within the Chabad fold and be gay, as long as one doesn’t act on it.
“Even though being this way has forced me to struggle with my beliefs, I’ve ended up in the same place as everyone else — I’m still a 100 percent believer,” he said.
His “very conservative views” have sparked controversy within the secret group itself, he said. In one post, he expressed that being gay was “not normal, and clearly not the ideal.” Other members of the group requested the post be removed; instead, Levin added a qualifier saying that opinions voiced by members of the group did not reflect any official stance.
“If I could take a pill that would make me straight, I’d take it without a question,” the yeshiva student said.
Still, despite his unwavering dedication to an observant Chabad lifestyle, the 21-year-old admitted that it does “hurt” when his peers and even rabbis express homophobic views or use offensive language, like faggot.
“I hope people in my same situation — gay people in the Chabad community — don’t feel like misfits or freaks. They should know there are others like them,” he said.
For many in the group, the recent ex-chasidic memoir “Uncovered,” written by Leah Lax, who is a lesbian, was a turning point in the conversation. Lax describes her journey out of the community’s insular fold as she learns to accept her lesbian identity.
“For me personally, the national recognition of ‘Uncovered’ is nice, but this evolving story in Crown Heights is what has my heart,” Lax wrote to The Jewish Week in an email.
Lax, 59, has become an active member of the online group. She described the range of the group members this way: “frum and not frum, young and old, and [of] every orientation imaginable that is not heterosexual.” While some members “left the fold years ago but felt forever cut off from ‘family,’” others in the group are “current bachurim in yeshivas, or girls living at home struggling with the pressure for shidduchim,” referring to beginning the matchmaking process. The group’s diversity, combined with the shared Chabad roots, makes the dynamic “electrifying,” Lax said.
Goldie Goldbloom, a professor of creative writing at the University of Chicago and a successful novelist, is also a member of the secret online group. Today, the 51-year-old, divorced mother of eight and former Chabad shlucha (emissary) identifies as Lubavitch, observant, and queer (an umbrella term for people in the LGBTQ community).
“I chose to be involved because this is what I’ve been doing for the past 10 years, but under the radar — working with mostly Chabad people who are mostly not out as LGBTQ in the Midwest area,” Goldbloom wrote to The Jewish Week in an email. “I’m really glad that Chaim set up the page because it offers a place where we can all see that we aren’t alone, that there are hundreds of other Chabadniks in similar circumstances.”
Goldbloom described a particular dynamic within the Chabad community, where there exist two “internal groups”: one faction of the community is focused on outreach and tends to be far more accepting, while the other faction, which in large part is made up of people whose families have been in the Chabad fold for generations, is “focused inwards.” The latter group is “far less open to outside influences and — in particular — to LGBTQ individuals,” she wrote. Most members of the online community belong to this second group.
“When they came out, they were met with fierce rejection from their families and communities and most often, left Chabad and everything they had grown up with,” she wrote. “Those people struggled with depression, alienation, isolation.” Others choose to stay in the fold and “live closeted within the community, afraid to come out ... these people also have difficult, fear-filled lives that impact their families, without their families knowing what is wrong.”
Another member of the group, Samantha Katz, originally from Phoenix, also finds the group ethos invigorating. Though Katz, 26, is no longer religious, she became deeply involved in Chabad while an undergraduate student at Arizona State University. At 19, she got engaged to a Chabad yeshiva student whom she met through mutual friends. After suppressing fears about the match for two years, she broke it off — just three months before the wedding.
Today, she and her wife of several months are seeking a way to re-engage with Judaism. The Chabad community is where she feels most at home; still, the community’s unwavering coldness toward her “life choices” and a staunch “unwillingness to acknowledge that LGBTQ people exist” leave her unsure of where to turn.
“It’s painful to see other couples celebrated as they start their lives together, and to realize that my choices and my future family will never be celebrated in this community,” she said, a heavy note of sadness in her voice.
Still, the new online community has given her fresh hope. One of the original members, she gains strength from the constant online chatter and the exposure to “others just like me.”
“For many, I think the group is finally a chance to be openly gay. It’s funny, for me, it feels almost like the opposite,” she said, with a quick laugh. “For me, this group is finally a place where I can be Chabad again. It feels right.” ---------------------
MORE HEADLINES:
Science Ed Picking Up STEAM In Unlikely Setting >
New York
Science Ed Picking Up STEAM In Unlikely Setting
Riding a national wave, Teaneck girls’ yeshiva incorporating robotics and other new technologies into curriculum.
Rivka Hia
Special To The Jewish Week
Ma’ayanot students at recent tech program. Courtesy of Ma’ayanotThe picture is hard to square with expectations: Yeshiva girls, many of them in long skirts, controlling mini-robots, or Ozobots, some of which they had programmed, as the high-tech gadgets snake around the multipurpose room following pathways drawn with markers. Welcome to the brave new world of the STEM curriculum.
In a bid to ride the science, technology, engineering and math wave sweeping through schools of all kinds in a fast-changing educational landscape, the Ma’ayanot Yeshiva High School for girls in Teaneck, N.J., recently launched a curriculum it hopes will equip students for the 21st century.
The school, best known for its rigorous education, including promoting girls’ Talmud study, has recently started a program integrating technology into its curriculum and encouraging students to pursue careers in STEM. The program, called STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts and Mathematics), will weave mandatory computer science and engineering courses into the existing curriculum, and provide students with the opportunity to continue with these courses at an advanced level. (The added arts component doesn’t have to do with literature or poetry, but rather computer-based graphic arts.)
Ma’ayanot has also begun a school-wide initiative to introduce its students to successful women in these fields, and provide them with hands-on exposure to practical elements they may encounter working in them.
“In the past, the interest [for STEAM classes] was there but not at the level we wanted,” Orly Nadler, director of Ma’ayanot’s technology department, told The Jewish Week in a phone interview. The program’s kickoff event last month, she said, “has really taken us to new heights.”
At the event, held at the school, Ma’ayanot administrators passed out glow sticks as the students came into the multipurpose room. They hired a DJ with lighting, and gave out programs with candy attached. A slideshow projected images of inspirational quotes and the faces of technology personalities like Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer. After the slideshow, six women in STEM fields spoke to the students, with music interludes in between.
After the talks, the students enjoyed a dairy lunch and were ushered into a “maker fair.” The fair had LED lighting and hosted members of The Maker Depot, designers who create different pieces of technology. “We had paper circuitry, robots, drones, LED buttons … we showed how algebra could create textile design, and we printed out geometric shapes and ironed them on to T-shirts,” Nadler said.
“Girls were hovering over their teachers’ shoulders to create their own designs,” she said.
The fair had booths with an arduino board, an object that lets any object be a controller for a computer. In this case, the students used Play-Doh as video game controllers, and activated different circuits using their hands.
And there were those tiny wandering Ozobots moving about the room. “There were various different robots, programmable robots, iPad-controlled robots. We wanted to get them [the girls] excited about robotics,” Nadler said. At one point, the students were all over the floor searching for a runaway robot that seemed lost.
Nadler said the goal for the event was “to take them from consumers to creators. There’s this abyss in the middle between the two. At our event, we showed the crossover. They can create, they can innovate. We showed them women just a few years older than they are who are successful and that they too can be successful.”
Ma’ayanot’s changes come at a time of increased initiatives to help get girls and young women interested in STEM fields, specifically technology. While women outnumber men in American colleges, according to a 2011 U.S. Department of Commerce study, they are represented in less than a quarter of STEM jobs. The study reported that women in STEM jobs earned 33 percent more than women in non-STEM jobs, and that women with STEM degrees are less likely than their male counterparts to work in a STEM field and are more likely to work in education. The gender gap between men and women in these fields is often attributed to a lack of female role models, gender stereotyping, and less family-friendly flexibility.
Organizations like Girls Who Code have summer computer coding programs for high school girls. Additionally, many organizations and colleges offer scholarships to girls and young women pursuing STEM subjects.
The chair of Ma’ayanot’s science department, Gila Stein, said, “The main goal of our curriculum is to encourage students interested in science; both for those who already have an interest and for those who don’t yet have an interest.”
Stein said of Ma’ayanot’s education that, “We want our students to be competitive and be prepared for the job market. We want to inspire our students by innovation and inspire them to major in STEAM fields.”
Currently, Ma’ayanot’s course offerings include a computer science class in Java programming, an algebra class with coding, AP Calculus AB and BC, AP Statistics, AP Biology, AP Chemistry and AP Physics, and a forensics elective, in addition to introductory level classes. Next year, the school is hoping to offer an AP Computer Science class, and a mandatory STEAM class for ninth and tenth grade students that will include computer science, robotics, engineering, big data analysis, and algorithms.
“In our electives we encourage them to do research projects and enter competitions,” Stein said. “We have students who have placed nicely in the Gildor competition, SIEMENS, and Intel.” Ma’ayanot faculty members help interested students find labs that guide them in conducting research.
“Our entire professional development this year has been technology integration, specifically using iPads,” Nadler said. “We spend a good amount of time every month on technology integration and have begun using apps that target specific skills,” she said.
The head of Ma’ayanot’s mathematics department, Randy Bernstein, is hopeful about the new STEAM program. “We’re hoping to do more mathematical modeling, and use computers for simulations. We want to do some more coding in our classes even at the lower level,” she said. Bernstein said students could even practice coding on their calculators and write programs. “[You can] write a program to use the quadratic formula, to find a derivative; of course they don’t want you to use that on the AP exam, but it shows you the concept of coding.”
Ma’ayanot principal Rivka Kahan described the changes at the school this year as an, “explosion of programming within different areas of the school. STEAM has really been integral.”
Kahan said the most successful aspect of the inaugural STEAM event was that “Over the course of the program the energy grew and grew.” The school, she said, was exposing students to opportunities they wouldn’t have been exposed to otherwise. Seniors were contemplating new careers and younger students contacted us about new course offerings,” she said.
When asked if Ma’ayanot saw an increase in applications this year, Kahan responded, “We’re having a strong recruitment year though not a dramatic increase. … We’re not just following what other schools are doing, we’re really at the forefront of that movement.”
“An important part of preparing our students for careers in technology,” she said, “is having an excellent math background. We have an excellent math program, and offer AP Calculus AB, BC and AP Statistics. It’s important to us to always offer those courses even if there’s a particularly small group interested ... strong backgrounds in science [also] prepare them well.”
Bernstein said that “some of the students might not have recognized that these are careers they could go into. As high school students you don’t know what’s out there, and we’re showing them what’s out there and what they may be interested in.”
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"I Don't Remember Him Ever Saying No." >
New York
“I Don’t Remember Him Ever Saying No.”
Rabbi Ronnie Greenwald passed away on Jan. 20 at the age of 82. He is remembered for his community activism.
"He was involved in everything that mattered to the Jewish community, anywhere.” Wikimedia CommonsRabbi Ronald Greenwald, a Monsey businessman and Jewish community activist who dealt with world leaders as the mediator of clandestine spy exchanges, and the founder of an Orthodox summer camp in the Catskills, died on Jan. 20 of a sudden heart attack while on vacation in Florida. He was 82. He was buried in Israel.
Rabbi Greenwald (he was popularly known as Ronnie), a native of the Lower East Side and the son of immigrants from Hungary, grew up in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn and later lived in the Borough Park neighborhood.
After attending Mesivta Torah Vodaat in Brooklyn and Telshe Yeshiva in Cleveland, he taught Jewish and secular subjects in several Brooklyn yeshivot before becoming active in politics, lobbying on behalf of Torah Umesorah to promote the creation of Jewish day schools.
Work on a gubernatorial campaign of Nelson Rockefeller led to a position in the re-election campaign of President Richard Nixon in 1972, whom Rabbi Greenwald later served as Jewish liaison.
With his connections at the high level of the political and diplomatic world, the rabbi began working behind-the-scenes on the release of political prisoners around the world, most notably Natan Sharansky (then Anatoly Scharansky), an inmate in the Soviet gulag system. Rabbi Greenwald also arranged the release from captivity of Israelis, Americans and Germans, traveling extensively around the world.
“When he was called upon to take action, he said yes,” said State Assembly member Dov Hikind (D-48th District), who worked with Rabbi Greenwald for more than three decades. “I don’t remember him ever saying no.”
Rabbi Greenwald was the founder of Camp Sternberg, in Narrowsburg, N.Y., and served as national chairman of NCSY, vice president of the Orthodox Union, and dean of the Monsey Academy for Girls.
He also negotiated with the government of Lithuania to allow the burial of several desecrated Torah scrolls that had been damaged during World War II.
“He was involved in everything that mattered to the Jewish community, anywhere,” Hikind said. “He was a religious, erlich [honorable] Jew. He was a fun guy, a fun-loving guy. His face told you this was a guy you could approach. People felt comfortable speaking with him.”
Rabbi Greenwald is survived by his wife Miriam, six sons and daughters, and many grandchildren.
Rabbi Greenwald made a special effort to reach out to young “at-risk” members of the Jewish community, Hikind said. “He could talk to the president, to the secretary-of-state, and could speak with the little girl no one wanted to deal with.”
steve@jewishweek.org---------------------
Oregon Militia Members Blow 'Battle Trumpet' Shofars >
National
Oregon Militia Members Blow ‘Battle Trumpet’ Shofars
Gabe Friedman
JTA
Militants blowing shofars in the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Burn, Oregon, in a Facebook video posted on Jan. 17. JTAHold onto your 10-gallon hats — and your shofars — the standoff in Burns, Oregon, just got a little bit Jewish.
For more than two weeks, several dozen armed men have occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in protest of the prison sentences given to Dwight and Steven Hammond for committing arson. The militants, many of whom belong to various unofficial citizen militias, also want to bring attention to the “tyrannical” management of federal land.
On Sunday, Blaine Cooper — one of the leaders of the standoff with the federal government and the head of an informal citizen militia in Arizona — uploaded a video to Facebook showing two of the militants blowing what any Jew would recognize as serious shofars.
“CHRISTIANS THE BATTLE TRUMPET HAS BEEN SOUNDED TIME TO RISE!” Cooper wrote in the caption. “CALL TO ACTION SEND IN THE TROOPS TO STAND WITH US IN BURNS OREGON!”
The guys in the video don’t nail the tekiah gedolah blasts heard in synagogues on Rosh Hashanah. But they get an A for anarchistic effort.
The militia is led by Ammon Bundy, whose father Cliven Bundy led a similar month-long standoff of his own against the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.---------------------
The Country's Tastiest Chicken Will Soon Be
Kosher >
The Country's Tastiest Chicken Will Soon Be Kosher
Frank Reese owns the Good Shepherd Poultry Ranch, which raises only heritage birds. Victor Wishna
The chicken will be shipped from the farm to a kosher slaughterhouse.
Lindsborg, Kan. – Thousands of birds strutted around like rambunctious kids at recess — six varieties of turkey and nearly 40 breeds of chicken, duck and geese.
As soon as a stranger stepped into their dominion, a dozen of the largest toms surrounded the visitor. “They’re just making sure you’re not here to take over the flock,” fourth-generation farmer Frank Reese Jr. explained.
Out on the open Kansas prairie, about 80 miles north of Wichita, Reese’s Good Shepherd Poultry Ranch has become an oasis of what’s known as heritage poultry — healthy and genetically pure breeds of fowl that meet the American Poultry Association’s Standard of Perfection, first codified in 1874.
In a poultry trade dominated by industrial farms brimming with birds that have been genetically engineered for size and growth — to the point where they can’t walk, let alone fly — Reese has become something of a trailblazer. He’s done it by sticking to methods that are responsible, humane and, as it happens, not the least bit innovative.
“I’m not doing a thing new,” Reese, 67, told JTA. “This is the way all turkeys and chickens were raised 60 years ago — and for generations before.”
Still, there’s something novel about the batch of chickens that’s about to hatch. When the multi-breed mix of approximately 1,500 reaches market-ready maturity in May, the chickens will head east to a rabbinically supervised slaughterhouse in upstate New York — and become the first kosher heritage poultry commercially available since the rise of factory farming more than a half-century ago.
How a Catholic farmer with pre-Civil War Kansas roots became the source of kosher cuisine’s latest leap has to do with a new venture by Farm Forward, a nonprofit advocacy group working toward alternatives to factory farming. Reese is a board member.
The Jewish Initiative for Animals, or JIFA, officially launches Monday with the aim of educating the Jewish community on the ethical issues of industrial farming and encouraging Jewish institutions to create food policies showcasing animal welfare as a Jewish value. The initiative is being jumpstarted by Washington, D.C.’s Emanuel J. Friedman Philanthropies and the Leichtag Foundation in Encinitas, California.
“The Torah and the Talmud give many examples of how humans are responsible for protecting animals,” said Brooklyn-based JIFA head Sarah Chandler. “Not only are Jews required to provide animals with a good life, there are even prescriptions for providing a good death.”
JIFA aims to encourage institutions to take whatever simple steps they deem appropriate to promote animal welfare, whether that’s dedicating a percentage of an organization’s food budget to vegan products or no longer serving challah made with caged-chicken eggs.
For such a mission, she said, Reese’s poultry is a natural fit.
“What’s more Jewish than chicken?” asked Chandler, whose official title is chief compassion officer. “I know so many people who stopped keeping kosher because they wanted local, organic, free-range and higher-welfare. And now we’re saying you don’t have to stop.”
Reese — who shares his 160-acre property with three dogs and, depending on the season, somewhere between 7,000 and 10,000 birds — concurred that the conscientious kosher consumer is his ideal customer.
“I love the idea that these animals are going to people who respect their food, and who realize that what they choose to eat affects creation for the next generation and that nothing should be wasted,” he said, sitting in the dining room of his 107-year-old farmhouse. The room overflowed with turkey-themed keepsakes, Catholic statuettes and family heirlooms.
Across the table sat Yadidya Greenberg, JIFA’s program coordinator, who’d stopped by to check in on the kosher chicks-to-be. He was last at Good Shepherd in December, when he "U-Hauled" a small batch of chickens to the Pelleh Poultry plant in Swan Lake, New York — essentially, a test run — so they could be butchered and served at the recent Hazon Food Conference in Connecticut.
“When we brought Frank’s chickens to the slaughterhouse, the head rabbi said, ‘Oh, these are the chickens I ate when I was a kid!’” Greenberg recalled. “He was just ecstatic.”
As for Reese, he was always fascinated by birds. At age 11, his Jersey Black Giant chickens qualified for the Kansas State Fair. There, he saw his first Standard Bronze turkeys — the kind featured in Thanksgiving decorations — and met Norman Kardosh, the “Turkey Man” of the poultry world, who became a friend and mentor.
After college, a stint in the army, a career as a nurse-anesthetist (which he still pursues part-time to supplement his poultry habit) and a year at a monastery in Texas, Reese returned to Kansas in 1989 and bought his ranch. At first, his goal was merely to preserve the breeds and techniques that were dying out around him.
His quiet passion made headlines in 2001, when the venerable food writer Marian Burros named Reese’s turkeys the best in the country in The New York Times. It wasn’t long before Martha Stewart came calling, followed by Mario Batali and Alice Waters, who have hosted farm dinners showcasing Good Shepherd birds.
Reese’s ranch is featured prominently in the 2009 book "Eating Animals" by bestselling author Jonathan Safran Foer — now also a Farm Forward board member — and it will be featured in a documentary based on the book, produced by Natalie Portman, that's scheduled for release later this year.
Poultry distributors took notice. Reese boosted his turkey production from 500 to more than 5,000 annually, and added chickens to the mix. Heritage Foods USA and Emmer & Co., the primary online retailers of Reese’s birds, sell them for $10 per pound or more, with the largest turkeys costing upwards of $200.
Yet the challenge of building a market is daunting, not only because of the expense, Reese said, but because most people don’t understand what “heritage” really means — it isn’t just how you treat animals, but how you treat their DNA. Under the definition of the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, birds must show a specific set of genetic traits, like natural mating and long lifespan, to be labeled heritage. (Reese actually dislikes the term, as it’s easily misappropriated, like “natural.”)
By contrast, according to Farm Forward, 99 percent of poultry raised in the U.S. now comes from corporate hatcheries that produce a single genetic line, crossbred dozens of times to produce the most meat or eggs as quickly as possible. Reese compares it to packing 400 pounds onto the underdeveloped body of a 5-year-old child.
“All the modern broiler chickens today, including the so-called freedom-rangers, suffer from cardio-vascular problems, diabetes, everything you expect in morbid obesity,” he said.
Plus, whereas the factory chickens are “a blank slate,” birds of various breeds and ages offer tastes and textures as diverse as cuts of beef, Reese said. “Old hens, old roosters, spring chickens, broiler chickens, fryers — all those distinctions actually meant something.”
“Old chickens are my favorite,” Greenberg chimed in. “You just can’t beat the flavor.” They have the highly prized, deep yellow fat that went into your bubbie’s best schmaltz, he added.
But don’t let the fat fool you; heritage poultry is healthy, too. Preliminary findings in a Kansas State University study have shown that one of Reese’s chickens contains six times the Omega-3s of an industrially raised bird, and significantly more protein and less cholesterol than even the higher-end Smart Chicken brand sold in grocery stores.
Kosher pasture-raised poultry is available, “but they still have the factory farm genetics and problems,” said Greenberg. “That’s why we’re working with Frank, to get these birds on the kosher market and get them to these consumers and help fight factory farming.”
Chandler agreed: “Everybody [else] who is fighting factory farming is saying, ‘Well, all you can do is stop eating animals.’ But there are good farmers out there.”
She said JIFA will have a distributor in place by the time Reese’s chickens are processed this spring, with plans for more chickens — and those prize-winning turkeys — to follow. The details are being worked out, Chandler said, but the distributor will likely ship frozen poultry directly to individuals and consumers.
JIFA will also transport some of Reese’s eggs to Jewish farms such as Isabella Freedman in Connecticut and Coastal Roots in California, which will raise the heritage birds as part of their educational programming. There is also a trip planned to bring some of those groups’ farmers to Good Shepherd to learn from Reese, with a longer-term goal of becoming heritage breeders themselves.
That’s encouraging to the only farmer in America recognized by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as a producer of heritage poultry, who fears the extinction not only of his breeds, but of an approach that is no longer taught. Reese hopes to start a hands-on institute on his ranch to train the next generation.
“I feel that I am keeping a promise I made to my teachers,” he said. “I’m keeping their legacy alive.”
And through JIFA, Reese will carry on another recently discovered heritage of his own: Last year, a DNA sample sent to Ancestry.com revealed some Jewish lineage on his mother’s side.
“That was fun to find out,” he said, laughing. “Now I know why I’ve always had a tremendous interest in the Jewish faith.”
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The Jewish Week
New York
“I Don’t Remember Him Ever Saying No.”
Rabbi Ronnie Greenwald passed away on Jan. 20 at the age of 82. He is remembered for his community activism.
"He was involved in everything that mattered to the Jewish community, anywhere.” Wikimedia CommonsRabbi Ronald Greenwald, a Monsey businessman and Jewish community activist who dealt with world leaders as the mediator of clandestine spy exchanges, and the founder of an Orthodox summer camp in the Catskills, died on Jan. 20 of a sudden heart attack while on vacation in Florida. He was 82. He was buried in Israel.
Rabbi Greenwald (he was popularly known as Ronnie), a native of the Lower East Side and the son of immigrants from Hungary, grew up in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn and later lived in the Borough Park neighborhood.
After attending Mesivta Torah Vodaat in Brooklyn and Telshe Yeshiva in Cleveland, he taught Jewish and secular subjects in several Brooklyn yeshivot before becoming active in politics, lobbying on behalf of Torah Umesorah to promote the creation of Jewish day schools.
Work on a gubernatorial campaign of Nelson Rockefeller led to a position in the re-election campaign of President Richard Nixon in 1972, whom Rabbi Greenwald later served as Jewish liaison.
With his connections at the high level of the political and diplomatic world, the rabbi began working behind-the-scenes on the release of political prisoners around the world, most notably Natan Sharansky (then Anatoly Scharansky), an inmate in the Soviet gulag system. Rabbi Greenwald also arranged the release from captivity of Israelis, Americans and Germans, traveling extensively around the world.
“When he was called upon to take action, he said yes,” said State Assembly member Dov Hikind (D-48th District), who worked with Rabbi Greenwald for more than three decades. “I don’t remember him ever saying no.”
Rabbi Greenwald was the founder of Camp Sternberg, in Narrowsburg, N.Y., and served as national chairman of NCSY, vice president of the Orthodox Union, and dean of the Monsey Academy for Girls.
He also negotiated with the government of Lithuania to allow the burial of several desecrated Torah scrolls that had been damaged during World War II.
“He was involved in everything that mattered to the Jewish community, anywhere,” Hikind said. “He was a religious, erlich [honorable] Jew. He was a fun guy, a fun-loving guy. His face told you this was a guy you could approach. People felt comfortable speaking with him.”
Rabbi Greenwald is survived by his wife Miriam, six sons and daughters, and many grandchildren.
Rabbi Greenwald made a special effort to reach out to young “at-risk” members of the Jewish community, Hikind said. “He could talk to the president, to the secretary-of-state, and could speak with the little girl no one wanted to deal with.”
steve@jewishweek.org---------------------
Oregon Militia Members Blow 'Battle Trumpet' Shofars >
National
Oregon Militia Members Blow ‘Battle Trumpet’ Shofars
Gabe Friedman
JTA
Militants blowing shofars in the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Burn, Oregon, in a Facebook video posted on Jan. 17. JTAHold onto your 10-gallon hats — and your shofars — the standoff in Burns, Oregon, just got a little bit Jewish.
For more than two weeks, several dozen armed men have occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in protest of the prison sentences given to Dwight and Steven Hammond for committing arson. The militants, many of whom belong to various unofficial citizen militias, also want to bring attention to the “tyrannical” management of federal land.
On Sunday, Blaine Cooper — one of the leaders of the standoff with the federal government and the head of an informal citizen militia in Arizona — uploaded a video to Facebook showing two of the militants blowing what any Jew would recognize as serious shofars.
“CHRISTIANS THE BATTLE TRUMPET HAS BEEN SOUNDED TIME TO RISE!” Cooper wrote in the caption. “CALL TO ACTION SEND IN THE TROOPS TO STAND WITH US IN BURNS OREGON!”
The guys in the video don’t nail the tekiah gedolah blasts heard in synagogues on Rosh Hashanah. But they get an A for anarchistic effort.
The militia is led by Ammon Bundy, whose father Cliven Bundy led a similar month-long standoff of his own against the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.---------------------
The Country's Tastiest Chicken Will Soon Be
Kosher >
The Country's Tastiest Chicken Will Soon Be Kosher
Frank Reese owns the Good Shepherd Poultry Ranch, which raises only heritage birds. Victor Wishna
The chicken will be shipped from the farm to a kosher slaughterhouse.
Lindsborg, Kan. – Thousands of birds strutted around like rambunctious kids at recess — six varieties of turkey and nearly 40 breeds of chicken, duck and geese.
As soon as a stranger stepped into their dominion, a dozen of the largest toms surrounded the visitor. “They’re just making sure you’re not here to take over the flock,” fourth-generation farmer Frank Reese Jr. explained.
Out on the open Kansas prairie, about 80 miles north of Wichita, Reese’s Good Shepherd Poultry Ranch has become an oasis of what’s known as heritage poultry — healthy and genetically pure breeds of fowl that meet the American Poultry Association’s Standard of Perfection, first codified in 1874.
In a poultry trade dominated by industrial farms brimming with birds that have been genetically engineered for size and growth — to the point where they can’t walk, let alone fly — Reese has become something of a trailblazer. He’s done it by sticking to methods that are responsible, humane and, as it happens, not the least bit innovative.
“I’m not doing a thing new,” Reese, 67, told JTA. “This is the way all turkeys and chickens were raised 60 years ago — and for generations before.”
Still, there’s something novel about the batch of chickens that’s about to hatch. When the multi-breed mix of approximately 1,500 reaches market-ready maturity in May, the chickens will head east to a rabbinically supervised slaughterhouse in upstate New York — and become the first kosher heritage poultry commercially available since the rise of factory farming more than a half-century ago.
How a Catholic farmer with pre-Civil War Kansas roots became the source of kosher cuisine’s latest leap has to do with a new venture by Farm Forward, a nonprofit advocacy group working toward alternatives to factory farming. Reese is a board member.
The Jewish Initiative for Animals, or JIFA, officially launches Monday with the aim of educating the Jewish community on the ethical issues of industrial farming and encouraging Jewish institutions to create food policies showcasing animal welfare as a Jewish value. The initiative is being jumpstarted by Washington, D.C.’s Emanuel J. Friedman Philanthropies and the Leichtag Foundation in Encinitas, California.
“The Torah and the Talmud give many examples of how humans are responsible for protecting animals,” said Brooklyn-based JIFA head Sarah Chandler. “Not only are Jews required to provide animals with a good life, there are even prescriptions for providing a good death.”
JIFA aims to encourage institutions to take whatever simple steps they deem appropriate to promote animal welfare, whether that’s dedicating a percentage of an organization’s food budget to vegan products or no longer serving challah made with caged-chicken eggs.
For such a mission, she said, Reese’s poultry is a natural fit.
“What’s more Jewish than chicken?” asked Chandler, whose official title is chief compassion officer. “I know so many people who stopped keeping kosher because they wanted local, organic, free-range and higher-welfare. And now we’re saying you don’t have to stop.”
Reese — who shares his 160-acre property with three dogs and, depending on the season, somewhere between 7,000 and 10,000 birds — concurred that the conscientious kosher consumer is his ideal customer.
“I love the idea that these animals are going to people who respect their food, and who realize that what they choose to eat affects creation for the next generation and that nothing should be wasted,” he said, sitting in the dining room of his 107-year-old farmhouse. The room overflowed with turkey-themed keepsakes, Catholic statuettes and family heirlooms.
Across the table sat Yadidya Greenberg, JIFA’s program coordinator, who’d stopped by to check in on the kosher chicks-to-be. He was last at Good Shepherd in December, when he "U-Hauled" a small batch of chickens to the Pelleh Poultry plant in Swan Lake, New York — essentially, a test run — so they could be butchered and served at the recent Hazon Food Conference in Connecticut.
“When we brought Frank’s chickens to the slaughterhouse, the head rabbi said, ‘Oh, these are the chickens I ate when I was a kid!’” Greenberg recalled. “He was just ecstatic.”
As for Reese, he was always fascinated by birds. At age 11, his Jersey Black Giant chickens qualified for the Kansas State Fair. There, he saw his first Standard Bronze turkeys — the kind featured in Thanksgiving decorations — and met Norman Kardosh, the “Turkey Man” of the poultry world, who became a friend and mentor.
After college, a stint in the army, a career as a nurse-anesthetist (which he still pursues part-time to supplement his poultry habit) and a year at a monastery in Texas, Reese returned to Kansas in 1989 and bought his ranch. At first, his goal was merely to preserve the breeds and techniques that were dying out around him.
His quiet passion made headlines in 2001, when the venerable food writer Marian Burros named Reese’s turkeys the best in the country in The New York Times. It wasn’t long before Martha Stewart came calling, followed by Mario Batali and Alice Waters, who have hosted farm dinners showcasing Good Shepherd birds.
Reese’s ranch is featured prominently in the 2009 book "Eating Animals" by bestselling author Jonathan Safran Foer — now also a Farm Forward board member — and it will be featured in a documentary based on the book, produced by Natalie Portman, that's scheduled for release later this year.
Poultry distributors took notice. Reese boosted his turkey production from 500 to more than 5,000 annually, and added chickens to the mix. Heritage Foods USA and Emmer & Co., the primary online retailers of Reese’s birds, sell them for $10 per pound or more, with the largest turkeys costing upwards of $200.
Yet the challenge of building a market is daunting, not only because of the expense, Reese said, but because most people don’t understand what “heritage” really means — it isn’t just how you treat animals, but how you treat their DNA. Under the definition of the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, birds must show a specific set of genetic traits, like natural mating and long lifespan, to be labeled heritage. (Reese actually dislikes the term, as it’s easily misappropriated, like “natural.”)
By contrast, according to Farm Forward, 99 percent of poultry raised in the U.S. now comes from corporate hatcheries that produce a single genetic line, crossbred dozens of times to produce the most meat or eggs as quickly as possible. Reese compares it to packing 400 pounds onto the underdeveloped body of a 5-year-old child.
“All the modern broiler chickens today, including the so-called freedom-rangers, suffer from cardio-vascular problems, diabetes, everything you expect in morbid obesity,” he said.
Plus, whereas the factory chickens are “a blank slate,” birds of various breeds and ages offer tastes and textures as diverse as cuts of beef, Reese said. “Old hens, old roosters, spring chickens, broiler chickens, fryers — all those distinctions actually meant something.”
“Old chickens are my favorite,” Greenberg chimed in. “You just can’t beat the flavor.” They have the highly prized, deep yellow fat that went into your bubbie’s best schmaltz, he added.
But don’t let the fat fool you; heritage poultry is healthy, too. Preliminary findings in a Kansas State University study have shown that one of Reese’s chickens contains six times the Omega-3s of an industrially raised bird, and significantly more protein and less cholesterol than even the higher-end Smart Chicken brand sold in grocery stores.
Kosher pasture-raised poultry is available, “but they still have the factory farm genetics and problems,” said Greenberg. “That’s why we’re working with Frank, to get these birds on the kosher market and get them to these consumers and help fight factory farming.”
Chandler agreed: “Everybody [else] who is fighting factory farming is saying, ‘Well, all you can do is stop eating animals.’ But there are good farmers out there.”
She said JIFA will have a distributor in place by the time Reese’s chickens are processed this spring, with plans for more chickens — and those prize-winning turkeys — to follow. The details are being worked out, Chandler said, but the distributor will likely ship frozen poultry directly to individuals and consumers.
JIFA will also transport some of Reese’s eggs to Jewish farms such as Isabella Freedman in Connecticut and Coastal Roots in California, which will raise the heritage birds as part of their educational programming. There is also a trip planned to bring some of those groups’ farmers to Good Shepherd to learn from Reese, with a longer-term goal of becoming heritage breeders themselves.
That’s encouraging to the only farmer in America recognized by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as a producer of heritage poultry, who fears the extinction not only of his breeds, but of an approach that is no longer taught. Reese hopes to start a hands-on institute on his ranch to train the next generation.
“I feel that I am keeping a promise I made to my teachers,” he said. “I’m keeping their legacy alive.”
And through JIFA, Reese will carry on another recently discovered heritage of his own: Last year, a DNA sample sent to Ancestry.com revealed some Jewish lineage on his mother’s side.
“That was fun to find out,” he said, laughing. “Now I know why I’ve always had a tremendous interest in the Jewish faith.”
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