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"FBI Raids Rockland Firms As Part Of Yeshiva Fraud Probe Following Jewish Week 2013 Report" The Jewish Week Connecting the World to Jewish News, Culture, Features, and Opinions for Thursday, 17 March 2016
FBI Raids Rockland Firms As Part Of Yeshiva Fraud Probe Following Jewish Week 2013 Report
FBI Raids Rockland Firms As Part Of Yeshiva Fraud Probe
Feds demanding for proof that ultra-Orthodox schools used federal technology funds for intended purpose. by Jeremy Uliss
New York
FBI Raids Rockland Firms As Part Of Yeshiva Fraud Probe
Feds demanding for proof that ultra-Orthodox schools used federal technology funds for intended purpose.
Jeremy Uliss
Editorial Intern
Students at a chasidic yeshiva in Brooklyn. Michael Datikash/JW
FBI agents and police raided four Rockland County vendors to investigate allegations that charedi yeshivas had misused federal E-Rate funds meant for computer and phone equipment, The Journal News reported.
The investigators issued search warrants to the vendors before seizing boxes of records capable of proving whether the millions of dollars in grant money issued to the yeshivas over the past several years was used for its intended purpose: the purchase of educational telecommunications technology.
The apparent misallocation of funds was first uncovered by The Jewish Week in 2013. The four-month investigation by reporters Julie Wiener and Hella Winston uncovered signs of possible misuse such as that Yeshivat Avir Yakov in Brooklyn accepted $3.3 million in E-Rate funding while the building remained devoid of computers.
Both the U.S. Attorney and Rockland’s District Attorney have yet to comment on the raid as well as the status of the investigation.
Read The Jewish Week's 3-part, investigation here:
Part 1: Haredi Schools Reap Millions In Federal Tech Funds
Part 2: How Do Haredi Schools Get All That Money?
Part 3: E-Rate Program Dogged By Concerns
RELATED COVERAGE:
Part I: Haredi Schools Reap Millions In Federal Tech Funds Read
How Do Haredi Schools Get All That Money?
National
How Do Haredi Schools Get All That Money?
Service providers haul in millions in tech funds for schools and libraries, but some don’t even have websites.
Julie Wiener And Hella Winston
Students at a charedi yeshiva in Brooklyn. Michael Datikash/JW
Editor's Note: This is second in a three-part series. The first article is here, and the third is here.
From the outside, Computer Corner does not look like a technology business handling million-dollar technology contracts.
On a recent Tuesday afternoon, a graffiti-marred metal gate covers the window, and the doorway, in need of a paint job, has no sign.
The only indication that a computer store lies inside this four-story red-brick building with rusty fire escapes on a modest residential block of Brooklyn’s South Williamsburg is a discarded Dell computer carton lying next to the garbage cans.
Nonetheless, the company recently sought $1.2 million from E-rate, a federal program subsidizing technology costs for schools and libraries, to equip its neighbor, Bais Ruchel D’Satmar, with “internal connections” and provide “internal connections maintenance.”
Universal Service Administration Company (USAC), the nonprofit that runs E-rate and other programs for the Federal Communications Commission, appears to have denied that particular request. However, it did pay Computer Corner more than $500,000 in 2011 for services provided to the Satmar girls’ school, a school that 12 years earlier was implicated for colluding with the local community school district. The 1999 scheme involved placing dozens of chasidic women on the public schools’ payroll in no-show teaching jobs in order to funnel more than $6 million to the school and its parent organization, United Talmudical Academy.
How did Computer Corner — along with numerous other little-known companies, most of them located in fervently Orthodox neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Rockland County — get to be among the largest service providers in the E-rate program, earning millions of dollars providing Internet and other tech services to yeshivas whose leaders publicly rail against what they call the “evils” of the Internet?
Some of these companies, many of which, like Computer Corner, don’t have a website, have even appeared on E-rate’s top 10 list of funding approvals and funding denials nationwide.
E-rate, which disbursed $2.2 billion nationally in 2011, was created under President Bill Clinton, part of the
sweeping Telecommunications Act of 1996. That legislation established the Universal Service Fund, a pool of money collected through a fee on long-distance phone service and then used to “help communities across the country secure access to affordable telecommunications services,” according to the USAC website.
But the E-rate money is not distributed evenly. In 2011, 285 Jewish schools in New York State, which enroll approximately 4 percent of the state’s K-12 students, were approved for more than $30 million, more than 20 percent of the state’s total E-rate allocations.
In a four-month investigation, The Jewish Week reviewed E-rate data along with numerous filings submitted by Jewish schools and their service providers. The paper conducted an extensive analysis of 2011 E-rate awards, reviewed the funding history of the Jewish schools and service providers receiving the largest sums of money, examined “470” forms detailing schools’ technology requests, and looked at various audit reports and FCC rulings. With the exception of the 470s, all of this information is publicly available on the website of E-rate Central, a Long Island-based E-rate consulting firm.
The Jewish Week also made repeated attempts to interview administrators at several of the yeshivas receiving the largest sums of money, as well as officials at companies that have billed E-rate for services reportedly provided to these schools. With the exception of an E-rate consultant, whom one school suggested The Jewish Week contact, none of these people returned calls or agreed to be interviewed.
It is not hard to become an E-rate service provider.
More than 4,000 companies nationwide collect payments through E-rate; becoming an official provider simply requires calling USAC to obtain a Service Provider Identification Number (SPIN) and providing basic information, like the company’s name and street address. Beyond that, USAC and the FCC do not vet service providers, requiring them only to submit an annual certification form containing basic company contact information and certifying that they will abide by the rules of the program. (Companies that provide telecommunications services responsible for contributing to the Universal Services Fund, which funds E-rate, must register with the FCC, however).
Many of the providers that haredi schools rely on for the bulk of their E-rate-subsidized purchases seem, like Computer Corner, to be small businesses that appear to serve an exclusively Jewish clientele.
These businesses include:
Williamsburg-based Discount Cellular Plus (DCP), which became an E-rate service provider only in 2010, has been allotted about $1.5 million through E-rate in New York between 2010 and 2012. It appears to provide E-rate services exclusively to fervently Orthodox schools, and has so far requested more than $500,000 in E-rate reimbursements for fiscal year 2013.
DCP is currently being sued in federal court by Sprint/Nextel. The suit alleges that DCP, along with its owner Yoel Stossel and two other men, Chaim Weiss and Yanky Katz, targeted yeshivas to steal their special discounts and rate plans and that the defendants then fraudulently acquired large quantities of “new high-end Sprint phones,” including iPhones, which they illegally unlocked and resold for a substantial profit. When a Jewish Week reporter called DCP to talk about E-rate and the Sprint case, she was referred to the company’s attorney. A message left with the attorney was not returned by press time.
Mekach Tov Enterprises, Inc. has done about $850,000 worth of E-rate business in the three years it has participated in the program. The company, which has an address in Brooklyn and is sometimes listed as Tov Mekach, is categorized in Manta, an online database, as a “Burglar and Security Systems store.” However, a company by the same name at the same Borough Park address (which appears to be a storefront mailbox rental establishment) appears previously to have been an importer of religious books and articles. A call to the phone number listed for the company was answered by a fax machine.
Not all of the providers serving haredi schools are exclusively local or small, however and several, it seems, are run by the same or related people.
Dynalink and Birns are both located in the same building on West 17th Street in Manhattan and both list Mendel Birnbaum as the contact person on E-rate forms. Birns, a large telecom company that was established in 1973 and has participated in E-rate since 1998, has received over $9 million serving Orthodox schools in New York through the program. It landed at No. 7 on a list of E-rate’s top 10 funding commitments nationally in 2011.
Dynalink, which appears in New York State to serve almost exclusively haredi or chasidic E-rate clients (it also does E-rate business in other states, including New Jersey, Florida, Texas and Tennessee) got into the E-rate business in 2006. But it has already been awarded over $6 million in New York alone, the majority of that for telecom services followed by internet access.
In 2009, XO Holdings — a Delaware-based company with revenues of $1.4 billion in 2007 and whose subsidiary, XO Communications, has participated in the E-rate program with all types of schools nationwide (it has been awarded close to $90 million since 2005) — filed a federal lawsuit against Lawrence Fishelson, a former XO employee, and Solomon Birnbaum (who co-founded Birns), Mendel Birnbaum, Dynalink and Voice Data Technology Consultants. Upon Fishelson’s termination from XO in 2005, he formed Dynalink with the Birnbaums. The complaint alleges that together they conspired to intentionally interfere with XO’s business relationships with yet another company, Choice Tel Communications, which Birnbaum acquired from his father-in-law, Moshe Birnbaum and daughter, Chaya Freund.
Other big E-rate providers in the Jewish community include: Communications Data & Security, Inc., in Rockland County ($10.2 million); Hashomer Alarm Systems in Rockland County ($8.9 million); Smart Telecom in Far Rockaway ($8.2 million); ID-Tech, which has offices in Borough Park and in Lakewood, N.J. ($7.5 million); and LightHouse Equity, Inc., a Borough Park company that, according to state records became inactive 2010 but still seems to be operating ($4 million).
Given the amount of E-rate business it has done over the years, one would expect there would be more public information available about LightHouse (which found its way onto a top 10 list of both funding commitments and denials in 2011). The contact address for the company, in care of an entity called My Advisor LLC., appears to be a residential building in Borough Park, the back of which practically abuts Bnai Zion, a Bobover yeshiva on 15th Avenue (to which the company has provided service, among other Bobover yeshivas and other haredi schools). The contact for LightHouse’s E-rate program is Thomas Monahan, however a call to the number listed for him on E-rate forms was answered by a woman who indicated that she was not at the company’s physical location but worked for an answering service. A message left for Monahan was not returned by press time.
In 2011, Hashomer and Birns Telecommunications each collected more E-rate money for services provided to Jewish schools than did Verizon, Sprint or Nextel. In fact, Hashomer, which received close to $3.5 million in E-rate work for Jewish schools in 2011, did more E-rate business in the Jewish sector that year than Verizon, Sprint and Nextel combined.
The Jewish Week called Hashomer, which has addresses in both Spring Valley and Monsey, but was told by the man who answered the phone — who did not give his name but said he was with the “Security Division”— that nobody was in the office as they were all out in the schools, making estimates for upcoming E-rate application deadlines; he told The Jewish Week to call back “in a few weeks.”
Reached by phone at Dynalink, Hirsch Birnbaum (this name also appears on Birns’ documents as vice president of sales for that company) told The Jewish Week that he didn’t have time to talk about E-rate unless the reporter wanted to buy a contract or was willing to pay him $200 an hour. A call to Birns was answered by someone who told The Jewish Week he was in “service” and didn’t even know “what an E-rate is” and had “no idea” what the reporter seeking information was talking about.
When The Jewish Week called Communications Data & Security, the reporter was put on hold by the woman who answered and then put through to a number that rang more than 20 times, with no answer and no voicemail.
In 2007, Bais Ruchel D’Satmar — the school that was the top Jewish E-rate recipient in 2011 and has been awarded about $3 million since E-rate’s inception — is also identified in public data as a service provider, with two service-provider identification numbers associated with its name. One is the same number Hashomer has today, while the other now belongs to All Care Communications Inc. Asked why this may have been the case, an E-rate consultant who requested anonymity so as not to jeopardize client relationships, told The Jewish Week that it could have been some kind of typo. However, the consultant added that schools registered as service providers should raise red flags because of the possibility of self-dealing.
Between 2007-2010, All Care was approved for close to $1 million in E-rate funds. Since 2009, it has been registered with the FCC as headquartered at 320 Roebling St., a low-rise apartment building with a mailbox rental establishment on the first floor. Several calls to the listed contact person, Joel Polatsek, were answered by the sound of a beep. A call to a Brooklyn-based company called All Care Management yielded a message that the number had been disconnected.
Asked if he finds it odd that the yeshivas rely largely on small businesses that serve only other Orthodox institutions, Richard Bernstein, a Woodmere, L.I., E-rate consultant whose clients include Jewish and non-Jewish schools, said no.
“That’s the way [they] do business in general, with people they know,” he said. “Other groups are the same, they want to work with someone who knows and understands them. … It comes down to service. You want to know if there’s a problem you can make a call and someone will come fix it. You don’t want to call Dell and get someone in India. Schools can’t afford to [have their computer system go] down or to not have their phones work.”
Julie Wiener is associate editor; Hella Winston is special correspondent.
Julie.inthemix@gmail.com; @Julie_Wiener
E-Rate Program Dogged By Concerns I Understand Israel's Harsh Reality
National
E-Rate Program Dogged By Concerns
Government regulators see ‘non-compliance’ among some Jewish schools but no fraud charges.
Julie Wiener And Hella Winston
Computer Corner in Williamsburg is one of the largest E-rate service providers to hareidi schools. Michael Datikash/JW
Editor's Note: This is the third in a three-part series. For the other articles go here and here.
Nine years ago, Thomas Cline traveled from Washington, D.C., to Brooklyn to tour seven buildings occupied by the United Talmudical Academy.
As the assistant inspector general for audit at the Federal Communications Commission’s Office of Inspector General, Cline — whose Southern drawl must have stood out amid the Yiddish accents of Williamsburg — was there to look at the large Satmar school system’s more than $1 million in technology purchases, in 1999, subsidized by the FCC’s E-rate program.
His team found a number of major violations and ultimately recommended that the FCC make UTA return over $900,000. But in the end, the school — which did not return calls from The Jewish Week seeking an interview — paid nothing. In the years that have followed, it and the numerous institutions within its sprawling system of boys and girls’ schools in Brooklyn and Rockland County, each of which now files separately for E-rate, have been awarded tens of millions of E-rate dollars. In 2012, one of UTA’s service providers billed the program $81,600, just on Internet access for the Williamsburg boys’ divisions.
That is despite the fact that UTA students are not allowed access to the Internet.
E-rate, created as part of the sweeping Telecommunications Act of 1996, enables schools and libraries to get telecommunications and other tech infrastructure at a discount — as much as 90 percent for schools, like UTA, in which at least 75 percent of the students are eligible for reduced or free lunches.
Drawing from funds collected through a fee on long-distance phone service, the E-rate program, administered by the nonprofit Universal Service Administration Company (USAC), disburses $2.25 billion a year to more than 4,000 service providers working in over 100,000 schools.
But the money is not distributed evenly, as The Jewish Week learned in a four-month investigation. In 2011, 285 Jewish schools in New York State, which enroll approximately 4 percent of the state’s K-12 students, were approved for over $30 million, more than 20 percent of the state’s total E-rate allocations. The largest of these Jewish institutional recipients are, like UTA and Avir Yakov, a yeshiva in Rockland County, haredi (or, fervently Orthodox and/or chasidic) — the same community that, last May, filled Citi Field and Arthur Ashe Stadium for a rally denouncing the evils of the Internet. Meanwhile, the program, citing a scarcity of funds, has in recent years annually denied over $2 billion in requests from other schools nationwide.
Haredi schools are not the only Jewish ones participating in the E-rate program. A number of Modern Orthodox and liberal schools, including Ramaz, Solomon Schechter of Westchester and the Abraham Joshua Heschel School also benefit from E-rate, but, in part because their student bodies are more affluent, the amounts they have received pale in comparison to the money lavished on the haredi schools. In addition, the Modern Orthodox and liberal day schools routinely make computers and the Internet accessible to their students.
History Of Problems
E-rate has long been criticized for inadequate safeguards against fraud and waste, and there have been several high-profile cases over the years involving service providers, E-rate consultants and schools filing millions of dollars in claims for services and equipment that were never provided.
Just a few years after E-rate began, Puerto Rico’s secretary of education was caught mismanaging over $100 million in E-rate funds. High-profile fraud cases, some involving big-name companies like IBM and NEC and entailing tens of millions of dollars, have been exposed in Texas and California, with the FCC maintaining a list of people and companies that have been “debarred” from participating in the program. Two General Accounting Office reports (most recently in 2010) have cited problems with USAC’s “internal controls,” and in 2005, the program was the subject of a congressional investigation.
Yet, despite some red flags raised in audits, like the one in 2004 of UTA, no Jewish schools or their service providers appear to have been barred from E-rate or deemed guilty of anything more serious than “noncompliance.”
Nonetheless, the program’s reputation for being susceptible to fraud is the reason why staff at the Jewish Education Project, formerly the Board of Jewish Education of Greater New York, say they have steered clear of E-rate in recent years, even as they help Jewish schools access a wide array of other government funds and services.
And, while few people are willing to accuse the Jewish schools of outright deception, their large E-rate awards are raising some eyebrows.
One E-rate expert who asked not to be identified said the large sums for schools that use minimal technology do look suspicious.
The question, he said, is, “Are you dealing with unsophisticated consumers being taken advantage of or are they in on it. … Who knows if this is legitimate of if it’s illegitimate and who’s at fault?”
Asked if it is currently investigating any potential improprieties in E-rate use among haredi institutions, Cline, the FCC auditor involved in the 2004 visit to UTA, declined to share specifics but said, “It’s come to our attention, and we are looking into it.”
In response to a follow-up e-mail from The Jewish Week, sent after the first two installments of an investigative series were published and seeking comment on some of the institutions the articles addressed, Cline said, via e-mail: “I can’t confirm, deny or discuss any investigative activity currently in progress by our staff.”
However, he added, his staff has “found the articles very interesting.”
Steve White, a Rockland County community activist who in 2011 successfully appealed to New York State to block the East Ramapo Central School District’s below-market-price sale of a school building to Avir Yakov, told The Jewish Week that it looks like Avir Yakov, if not others, has been deceptive in its dealings with E-rate.
“To me, it seems obvious that they’re trying to game the system,” he said. “If they expressly forbid their students from using the Internet, then what do they need Internet connections for?”
He noted that the blocked real estate deal between Avir Yakov and the school district, whose board is composed mostly of fervently Orthodox Jews and is currently being sued, involved “appraisal fraud. The exact same place that’s in trouble over real estate fraud is also listed as strangely getting all these monies. There is a pattern.”
`We Pulled Back’
Interviewed in December, Sara Seligson, associate director of the Jewish Education Project’s day schools and yeshivot department, told The Jewish Week that while her department was initially involved with E-rate, “it is a very complex application, and there were some challenges in terms of what the schools were using it for and what they were allowed to use it for. Not just our schools, but schools all over the country were cited for using it inappropriately, and we kind of just pulled back.
She said her department has not had any involvement with the program “for many years.”
In particular, Seligson said she had heard of vendors cutting deals with schools, permitting them to skip paying their 10 percent share.
While acknowledging that E-rate Central and the New York State Department of Education occasionally contact her office when there is a problem processing an E-rate application, she said: “We’re relatively hands-off.”
Rabbi Marty Schloss, the department’s director of government relations and general studies, commented: “[E-rate] had a lot of problems in past, and the last thing we need to do is get stuck in the middle of that. That would destroy our own credibility and ability to work with schools. We in general try to steer clear of questionable practices or practices that could lead us all into trouble.”
Despite its problems in the past, Eric Iversen, USAC’s director of external relations, insisted to The Jewish Week that USAC has “zero tolerance” for fraud and has “a pretty robust audit program.”
In a follow-up e-mail, he wrote that USAC has conducted over 800 audits of E-rate beneficiaries since 2006. “None of these audits has revealed fraud in the program,” he wrote.
The Department of Justice and the FCC’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) also audit E-rate. Thomas Cline, who audited UTA in 2004 and is now deputy inspector general in the OIG, told The Jewish Week that his department has closed about 30 investigations of E-rate recipients and service providers since 2002, and has a number of ongoing ones.
Asked during last week’s interview if he agrees with Iversen’s assessment that E-rate audits rarely find evidence of fraud, Cline said audits more commonly uncover “inconsistencies and noncompliance with certain requirements.
“Overpayments are many times the result of an honest error, rather than an attempt to defraud the federal government,” he said. “The end result of audits is more frequently to catch noncompliance and tell participants how to clean up procedures.”
He emphasized that “the need to recover funds is not in itself necessarily evidence of fraud.”
No Deadline For Payment
In his 2004 audit of UTA, Cline’s team discovered a number of problems:
UTA had not paid its required 10 percent portion of the bill;
Communications Data and Security, Inc. (still an approved E-rate service provider) had billed and received payment for services it had not provided;
There was no evidence of a competitive bidding process;
When auditors attempted to visit various UTA locations to determine the physical existence of the E-rate equipment, they found the school had, without obtaining approval, made numerous equipment substitutions, did not maintain asset records and lacked proof that all E-rate funded services had been received and installed.
Cline’s team recommended that USAC recover $934,300 from the school. UTA appealed the audit decision and in 2008, Jennifer K. McKee, the acting chief of Wireline Competition Bureau’s Telecommunications Access Policy Division, the FCC division responsible for E-rate, granted the appeal.
“Based on the record before us, it appears that this matter can be resolved through USAC’s review of additional documentation UTA provided to the Commission in its appeal, which it had not previously provided to USAC,” she wrote. In other words, the bureau determined that it was acceptable for UTA and its service provider, who had been unable to provide appropriate documentation when they were audited, to submit receipts years after the fact.
Interviewed last week about the overruling of his audit recommendations concerning UTA, Cline said the UTA audit, like many audits of that time, revealed that “in the early years of the program there were significant problems with weaknesses in the rules designed to protect the program. As a result, FCC has issued orders doing away with the loopholes and tightening the rules.”
Asked if was not suspicious for a company to produce a receipt after the audit was complete, and for the FCC to accept it, Cline noted that “the issue was there was no requirement of time in which you had to pay. That was the problem. So if you pay years later, there was nothing in the rules saying that was a problem.”
Rules specifying deadlines for payment have been implemented.
As for the UTA’s other findings, Cline said he no longer recalls the details. “We do the audits and make recommendations, but we’re not the administrators,” he said. “We have things we can do if we’re not satisfied, but how far you elevate things like that depends on the circumstance.”
Various Jewish schools have been cited for noncompliance in USAC-commissioned audits, yet, like UTA, they seem not to have been penalized.
In 2009, KPMG carried out an audit of Bais Ruchel D’Satmar, which in the early years of the program filed for E-rate together with UTA, and found “material noncompliance with technology plan certification and service substitution requirements” during the fiscal year 2008. Notably, the functionality of the requested services on the original application was for T-1 services, while the functionality of the substituted services was for wireless phone services. While USAC decided to seek recovery for the monetary effect of this finding, nowhere in the audit, however, were the reasons for this substitution questioned or made clear.
Meanwhile other FCC rulings of Jewish schools — and other schools’ — appeals seem to have been similarly lenient. In May 2006, FCC Secretary Marlene Dortch granted 30 appeals on behalf of 96 participants, many of them haredi Jewish schools, accused of violating competitive bidding rules. USAC had flagged the schools because the language on their technology plans was very similar; however Dortch argued that considerably more evidence was needed before making the schools and their service providers return their funding.
Julie.inthemix@gmail.com, @Julie_Wiener
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"Now on Jewish.TV: Esther’s Bizarre Response: The Megillah in Depth, Chapter 4, Part 2 - Mendel Kaplan" Jewish.TV - Chabad Video for Wednesday, 16 March 2016
Esther’s Bizarre Response
The Megillah in Depth, Chapter 4, Part 2
By Mendel Kaplan
Watch Now
About this webcast:
Discover what happened behind the scenes as the Queen of Persia, (a clandestine Jewess originally called Hadassah, who now goes by the name Esther) goes into a bizarre “toxic shock” after hearing about Mordechai’s – the Chief Rabbi – seeming nervous breakdown. Discover the details of her shocking response to the “public rabbinic disrobement” that caused a huge kerfuffle amidst the Jewish population.
Recent and Upcoming Jewish.tv Webcasts:
Learn the History, Connection & Meaningful Observances
By Shneur Wilhelm
Airs Tuesday, March 22 at 8pm ET
---------------------
"FBI Raids Rockland Firms As Part Of Yeshiva Fraud Probe Following Jewish Week 2013 Report" The Jewish Week Connecting the World to Jewish News, Culture, Features, and Opinions for Thursday, 17 March 2016
FBI Raids Rockland Firms As Part Of Yeshiva Fraud Probe Following Jewish Week 2013 Report
FBI Raids Rockland Firms As Part Of Yeshiva Fraud Probe
Feds demanding for proof that ultra-Orthodox schools used federal technology funds for intended purpose. by Jeremy Uliss
New York
FBI Raids Rockland Firms As Part Of Yeshiva Fraud Probe
Feds demanding for proof that ultra-Orthodox schools used federal technology funds for intended purpose.
Jeremy Uliss
Editorial Intern
Students at a chasidic yeshiva in Brooklyn. Michael Datikash/JW
FBI agents and police raided four Rockland County vendors to investigate allegations that charedi yeshivas had misused federal E-Rate funds meant for computer and phone equipment, The Journal News reported.
The investigators issued search warrants to the vendors before seizing boxes of records capable of proving whether the millions of dollars in grant money issued to the yeshivas over the past several years was used for its intended purpose: the purchase of educational telecommunications technology.
The apparent misallocation of funds was first uncovered by The Jewish Week in 2013. The four-month investigation by reporters Julie Wiener and Hella Winston uncovered signs of possible misuse such as that Yeshivat Avir Yakov in Brooklyn accepted $3.3 million in E-Rate funding while the building remained devoid of computers.
Both the U.S. Attorney and Rockland’s District Attorney have yet to comment on the raid as well as the status of the investigation.
Read The Jewish Week's 3-part, investigation here:
Part 1: Haredi Schools Reap Millions In Federal Tech Funds
Part 2: How Do Haredi Schools Get All That Money?
Part 3: E-Rate Program Dogged By Concerns
RELATED COVERAGE:
Part I: Haredi Schools Reap Millions In Federal Tech Funds Read
How Do Haredi Schools Get All That Money?
National
How Do Haredi Schools Get All That Money?
Service providers haul in millions in tech funds for schools and libraries, but some don’t even have websites.
Julie Wiener And Hella Winston
Students at a charedi yeshiva in Brooklyn. Michael Datikash/JW
Editor's Note: This is second in a three-part series. The first article is here, and the third is here.
From the outside, Computer Corner does not look like a technology business handling million-dollar technology contracts.
On a recent Tuesday afternoon, a graffiti-marred metal gate covers the window, and the doorway, in need of a paint job, has no sign.
The only indication that a computer store lies inside this four-story red-brick building with rusty fire escapes on a modest residential block of Brooklyn’s South Williamsburg is a discarded Dell computer carton lying next to the garbage cans.
Nonetheless, the company recently sought $1.2 million from E-rate, a federal program subsidizing technology costs for schools and libraries, to equip its neighbor, Bais Ruchel D’Satmar, with “internal connections” and provide “internal connections maintenance.”
Universal Service Administration Company (USAC), the nonprofit that runs E-rate and other programs for the Federal Communications Commission, appears to have denied that particular request. However, it did pay Computer Corner more than $500,000 in 2011 for services provided to the Satmar girls’ school, a school that 12 years earlier was implicated for colluding with the local community school district. The 1999 scheme involved placing dozens of chasidic women on the public schools’ payroll in no-show teaching jobs in order to funnel more than $6 million to the school and its parent organization, United Talmudical Academy.
How did Computer Corner — along with numerous other little-known companies, most of them located in fervently Orthodox neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Rockland County — get to be among the largest service providers in the E-rate program, earning millions of dollars providing Internet and other tech services to yeshivas whose leaders publicly rail against what they call the “evils” of the Internet?
Some of these companies, many of which, like Computer Corner, don’t have a website, have even appeared on E-rate’s top 10 list of funding approvals and funding denials nationwide.
E-rate, which disbursed $2.2 billion nationally in 2011, was created under President Bill Clinton, part of the
sweeping Telecommunications Act of 1996. That legislation established the Universal Service Fund, a pool of money collected through a fee on long-distance phone service and then used to “help communities across the country secure access to affordable telecommunications services,” according to the USAC website.
But the E-rate money is not distributed evenly. In 2011, 285 Jewish schools in New York State, which enroll approximately 4 percent of the state’s K-12 students, were approved for more than $30 million, more than 20 percent of the state’s total E-rate allocations.
In a four-month investigation, The Jewish Week reviewed E-rate data along with numerous filings submitted by Jewish schools and their service providers. The paper conducted an extensive analysis of 2011 E-rate awards, reviewed the funding history of the Jewish schools and service providers receiving the largest sums of money, examined “470” forms detailing schools’ technology requests, and looked at various audit reports and FCC rulings. With the exception of the 470s, all of this information is publicly available on the website of E-rate Central, a Long Island-based E-rate consulting firm.
The Jewish Week also made repeated attempts to interview administrators at several of the yeshivas receiving the largest sums of money, as well as officials at companies that have billed E-rate for services reportedly provided to these schools. With the exception of an E-rate consultant, whom one school suggested The Jewish Week contact, none of these people returned calls or agreed to be interviewed.
It is not hard to become an E-rate service provider.
More than 4,000 companies nationwide collect payments through E-rate; becoming an official provider simply requires calling USAC to obtain a Service Provider Identification Number (SPIN) and providing basic information, like the company’s name and street address. Beyond that, USAC and the FCC do not vet service providers, requiring them only to submit an annual certification form containing basic company contact information and certifying that they will abide by the rules of the program. (Companies that provide telecommunications services responsible for contributing to the Universal Services Fund, which funds E-rate, must register with the FCC, however).
Many of the providers that haredi schools rely on for the bulk of their E-rate-subsidized purchases seem, like Computer Corner, to be small businesses that appear to serve an exclusively Jewish clientele.
These businesses include:
Williamsburg-based Discount Cellular Plus (DCP), which became an E-rate service provider only in 2010, has been allotted about $1.5 million through E-rate in New York between 2010 and 2012. It appears to provide E-rate services exclusively to fervently Orthodox schools, and has so far requested more than $500,000 in E-rate reimbursements for fiscal year 2013.
DCP is currently being sued in federal court by Sprint/Nextel. The suit alleges that DCP, along with its owner Yoel Stossel and two other men, Chaim Weiss and Yanky Katz, targeted yeshivas to steal their special discounts and rate plans and that the defendants then fraudulently acquired large quantities of “new high-end Sprint phones,” including iPhones, which they illegally unlocked and resold for a substantial profit. When a Jewish Week reporter called DCP to talk about E-rate and the Sprint case, she was referred to the company’s attorney. A message left with the attorney was not returned by press time.
Mekach Tov Enterprises, Inc. has done about $850,000 worth of E-rate business in the three years it has participated in the program. The company, which has an address in Brooklyn and is sometimes listed as Tov Mekach, is categorized in Manta, an online database, as a “Burglar and Security Systems store.” However, a company by the same name at the same Borough Park address (which appears to be a storefront mailbox rental establishment) appears previously to have been an importer of religious books and articles. A call to the phone number listed for the company was answered by a fax machine.
Not all of the providers serving haredi schools are exclusively local or small, however and several, it seems, are run by the same or related people.
Dynalink and Birns are both located in the same building on West 17th Street in Manhattan and both list Mendel Birnbaum as the contact person on E-rate forms. Birns, a large telecom company that was established in 1973 and has participated in E-rate since 1998, has received over $9 million serving Orthodox schools in New York through the program. It landed at No. 7 on a list of E-rate’s top 10 funding commitments nationally in 2011.
Dynalink, which appears in New York State to serve almost exclusively haredi or chasidic E-rate clients (it also does E-rate business in other states, including New Jersey, Florida, Texas and Tennessee) got into the E-rate business in 2006. But it has already been awarded over $6 million in New York alone, the majority of that for telecom services followed by internet access.
In 2009, XO Holdings — a Delaware-based company with revenues of $1.4 billion in 2007 and whose subsidiary, XO Communications, has participated in the E-rate program with all types of schools nationwide (it has been awarded close to $90 million since 2005) — filed a federal lawsuit against Lawrence Fishelson, a former XO employee, and Solomon Birnbaum (who co-founded Birns), Mendel Birnbaum, Dynalink and Voice Data Technology Consultants. Upon Fishelson’s termination from XO in 2005, he formed Dynalink with the Birnbaums. The complaint alleges that together they conspired to intentionally interfere with XO’s business relationships with yet another company, Choice Tel Communications, which Birnbaum acquired from his father-in-law, Moshe Birnbaum and daughter, Chaya Freund.
Other big E-rate providers in the Jewish community include: Communications Data & Security, Inc., in Rockland County ($10.2 million); Hashomer Alarm Systems in Rockland County ($8.9 million); Smart Telecom in Far Rockaway ($8.2 million); ID-Tech, which has offices in Borough Park and in Lakewood, N.J. ($7.5 million); and LightHouse Equity, Inc., a Borough Park company that, according to state records became inactive 2010 but still seems to be operating ($4 million).
Given the amount of E-rate business it has done over the years, one would expect there would be more public information available about LightHouse (which found its way onto a top 10 list of both funding commitments and denials in 2011). The contact address for the company, in care of an entity called My Advisor LLC., appears to be a residential building in Borough Park, the back of which practically abuts Bnai Zion, a Bobover yeshiva on 15th Avenue (to which the company has provided service, among other Bobover yeshivas and other haredi schools). The contact for LightHouse’s E-rate program is Thomas Monahan, however a call to the number listed for him on E-rate forms was answered by a woman who indicated that she was not at the company’s physical location but worked for an answering service. A message left for Monahan was not returned by press time.
In 2011, Hashomer and Birns Telecommunications each collected more E-rate money for services provided to Jewish schools than did Verizon, Sprint or Nextel. In fact, Hashomer, which received close to $3.5 million in E-rate work for Jewish schools in 2011, did more E-rate business in the Jewish sector that year than Verizon, Sprint and Nextel combined.
The Jewish Week called Hashomer, which has addresses in both Spring Valley and Monsey, but was told by the man who answered the phone — who did not give his name but said he was with the “Security Division”— that nobody was in the office as they were all out in the schools, making estimates for upcoming E-rate application deadlines; he told The Jewish Week to call back “in a few weeks.”
Reached by phone at Dynalink, Hirsch Birnbaum (this name also appears on Birns’ documents as vice president of sales for that company) told The Jewish Week that he didn’t have time to talk about E-rate unless the reporter wanted to buy a contract or was willing to pay him $200 an hour. A call to Birns was answered by someone who told The Jewish Week he was in “service” and didn’t even know “what an E-rate is” and had “no idea” what the reporter seeking information was talking about.
When The Jewish Week called Communications Data & Security, the reporter was put on hold by the woman who answered and then put through to a number that rang more than 20 times, with no answer and no voicemail.
In 2007, Bais Ruchel D’Satmar — the school that was the top Jewish E-rate recipient in 2011 and has been awarded about $3 million since E-rate’s inception — is also identified in public data as a service provider, with two service-provider identification numbers associated with its name. One is the same number Hashomer has today, while the other now belongs to All Care Communications Inc. Asked why this may have been the case, an E-rate consultant who requested anonymity so as not to jeopardize client relationships, told The Jewish Week that it could have been some kind of typo. However, the consultant added that schools registered as service providers should raise red flags because of the possibility of self-dealing.
Between 2007-2010, All Care was approved for close to $1 million in E-rate funds. Since 2009, it has been registered with the FCC as headquartered at 320 Roebling St., a low-rise apartment building with a mailbox rental establishment on the first floor. Several calls to the listed contact person, Joel Polatsek, were answered by the sound of a beep. A call to a Brooklyn-based company called All Care Management yielded a message that the number had been disconnected.
Asked if he finds it odd that the yeshivas rely largely on small businesses that serve only other Orthodox institutions, Richard Bernstein, a Woodmere, L.I., E-rate consultant whose clients include Jewish and non-Jewish schools, said no.
“That’s the way [they] do business in general, with people they know,” he said. “Other groups are the same, they want to work with someone who knows and understands them. … It comes down to service. You want to know if there’s a problem you can make a call and someone will come fix it. You don’t want to call Dell and get someone in India. Schools can’t afford to [have their computer system go] down or to not have their phones work.”
Julie Wiener is associate editor; Hella Winston is special correspondent.
Julie.inthemix@gmail.com; @Julie_Wiener
E-Rate Program Dogged By Concerns I Understand Israel's Harsh Reality
National
E-Rate Program Dogged By Concerns
Government regulators see ‘non-compliance’ among some Jewish schools but no fraud charges.
Julie Wiener And Hella Winston
Computer Corner in Williamsburg is one of the largest E-rate service providers to hareidi schools. Michael Datikash/JW
Editor's Note: This is the third in a three-part series. For the other articles go here and here.
Nine years ago, Thomas Cline traveled from Washington, D.C., to Brooklyn to tour seven buildings occupied by the United Talmudical Academy.
As the assistant inspector general for audit at the Federal Communications Commission’s Office of Inspector General, Cline — whose Southern drawl must have stood out amid the Yiddish accents of Williamsburg — was there to look at the large Satmar school system’s more than $1 million in technology purchases, in 1999, subsidized by the FCC’s E-rate program.
His team found a number of major violations and ultimately recommended that the FCC make UTA return over $900,000. But in the end, the school — which did not return calls from The Jewish Week seeking an interview — paid nothing. In the years that have followed, it and the numerous institutions within its sprawling system of boys and girls’ schools in Brooklyn and Rockland County, each of which now files separately for E-rate, have been awarded tens of millions of E-rate dollars. In 2012, one of UTA’s service providers billed the program $81,600, just on Internet access for the Williamsburg boys’ divisions.
That is despite the fact that UTA students are not allowed access to the Internet.
E-rate, created as part of the sweeping Telecommunications Act of 1996, enables schools and libraries to get telecommunications and other tech infrastructure at a discount — as much as 90 percent for schools, like UTA, in which at least 75 percent of the students are eligible for reduced or free lunches.
Drawing from funds collected through a fee on long-distance phone service, the E-rate program, administered by the nonprofit Universal Service Administration Company (USAC), disburses $2.25 billion a year to more than 4,000 service providers working in over 100,000 schools.
But the money is not distributed evenly, as The Jewish Week learned in a four-month investigation. In 2011, 285 Jewish schools in New York State, which enroll approximately 4 percent of the state’s K-12 students, were approved for over $30 million, more than 20 percent of the state’s total E-rate allocations. The largest of these Jewish institutional recipients are, like UTA and Avir Yakov, a yeshiva in Rockland County, haredi (or, fervently Orthodox and/or chasidic) — the same community that, last May, filled Citi Field and Arthur Ashe Stadium for a rally denouncing the evils of the Internet. Meanwhile, the program, citing a scarcity of funds, has in recent years annually denied over $2 billion in requests from other schools nationwide.
Haredi schools are not the only Jewish ones participating in the E-rate program. A number of Modern Orthodox and liberal schools, including Ramaz, Solomon Schechter of Westchester and the Abraham Joshua Heschel School also benefit from E-rate, but, in part because their student bodies are more affluent, the amounts they have received pale in comparison to the money lavished on the haredi schools. In addition, the Modern Orthodox and liberal day schools routinely make computers and the Internet accessible to their students.
History Of Problems
E-rate has long been criticized for inadequate safeguards against fraud and waste, and there have been several high-profile cases over the years involving service providers, E-rate consultants and schools filing millions of dollars in claims for services and equipment that were never provided.
Just a few years after E-rate began, Puerto Rico’s secretary of education was caught mismanaging over $100 million in E-rate funds. High-profile fraud cases, some involving big-name companies like IBM and NEC and entailing tens of millions of dollars, have been exposed in Texas and California, with the FCC maintaining a list of people and companies that have been “debarred” from participating in the program. Two General Accounting Office reports (most recently in 2010) have cited problems with USAC’s “internal controls,” and in 2005, the program was the subject of a congressional investigation.
Yet, despite some red flags raised in audits, like the one in 2004 of UTA, no Jewish schools or their service providers appear to have been barred from E-rate or deemed guilty of anything more serious than “noncompliance.”
Nonetheless, the program’s reputation for being susceptible to fraud is the reason why staff at the Jewish Education Project, formerly the Board of Jewish Education of Greater New York, say they have steered clear of E-rate in recent years, even as they help Jewish schools access a wide array of other government funds and services.
And, while few people are willing to accuse the Jewish schools of outright deception, their large E-rate awards are raising some eyebrows.
One E-rate expert who asked not to be identified said the large sums for schools that use minimal technology do look suspicious.
The question, he said, is, “Are you dealing with unsophisticated consumers being taken advantage of or are they in on it. … Who knows if this is legitimate of if it’s illegitimate and who’s at fault?”
Asked if it is currently investigating any potential improprieties in E-rate use among haredi institutions, Cline, the FCC auditor involved in the 2004 visit to UTA, declined to share specifics but said, “It’s come to our attention, and we are looking into it.”
In response to a follow-up e-mail from The Jewish Week, sent after the first two installments of an investigative series were published and seeking comment on some of the institutions the articles addressed, Cline said, via e-mail: “I can’t confirm, deny or discuss any investigative activity currently in progress by our staff.”
However, he added, his staff has “found the articles very interesting.”
Steve White, a Rockland County community activist who in 2011 successfully appealed to New York State to block the East Ramapo Central School District’s below-market-price sale of a school building to Avir Yakov, told The Jewish Week that it looks like Avir Yakov, if not others, has been deceptive in its dealings with E-rate.
“To me, it seems obvious that they’re trying to game the system,” he said. “If they expressly forbid their students from using the Internet, then what do they need Internet connections for?”
He noted that the blocked real estate deal between Avir Yakov and the school district, whose board is composed mostly of fervently Orthodox Jews and is currently being sued, involved “appraisal fraud. The exact same place that’s in trouble over real estate fraud is also listed as strangely getting all these monies. There is a pattern.”
`We Pulled Back’
Interviewed in December, Sara Seligson, associate director of the Jewish Education Project’s day schools and yeshivot department, told The Jewish Week that while her department was initially involved with E-rate, “it is a very complex application, and there were some challenges in terms of what the schools were using it for and what they were allowed to use it for. Not just our schools, but schools all over the country were cited for using it inappropriately, and we kind of just pulled back.
She said her department has not had any involvement with the program “for many years.”
In particular, Seligson said she had heard of vendors cutting deals with schools, permitting them to skip paying their 10 percent share.
While acknowledging that E-rate Central and the New York State Department of Education occasionally contact her office when there is a problem processing an E-rate application, she said: “We’re relatively hands-off.”
Rabbi Marty Schloss, the department’s director of government relations and general studies, commented: “[E-rate] had a lot of problems in past, and the last thing we need to do is get stuck in the middle of that. That would destroy our own credibility and ability to work with schools. We in general try to steer clear of questionable practices or practices that could lead us all into trouble.”
Despite its problems in the past, Eric Iversen, USAC’s director of external relations, insisted to The Jewish Week that USAC has “zero tolerance” for fraud and has “a pretty robust audit program.”
In a follow-up e-mail, he wrote that USAC has conducted over 800 audits of E-rate beneficiaries since 2006. “None of these audits has revealed fraud in the program,” he wrote.
The Department of Justice and the FCC’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) also audit E-rate. Thomas Cline, who audited UTA in 2004 and is now deputy inspector general in the OIG, told The Jewish Week that his department has closed about 30 investigations of E-rate recipients and service providers since 2002, and has a number of ongoing ones.
Asked during last week’s interview if he agrees with Iversen’s assessment that E-rate audits rarely find evidence of fraud, Cline said audits more commonly uncover “inconsistencies and noncompliance with certain requirements.
“Overpayments are many times the result of an honest error, rather than an attempt to defraud the federal government,” he said. “The end result of audits is more frequently to catch noncompliance and tell participants how to clean up procedures.”
He emphasized that “the need to recover funds is not in itself necessarily evidence of fraud.”
No Deadline For Payment
In his 2004 audit of UTA, Cline’s team discovered a number of problems:
UTA had not paid its required 10 percent portion of the bill;
Communications Data and Security, Inc. (still an approved E-rate service provider) had billed and received payment for services it had not provided;
There was no evidence of a competitive bidding process;
When auditors attempted to visit various UTA locations to determine the physical existence of the E-rate equipment, they found the school had, without obtaining approval, made numerous equipment substitutions, did not maintain asset records and lacked proof that all E-rate funded services had been received and installed.
Cline’s team recommended that USAC recover $934,300 from the school. UTA appealed the audit decision and in 2008, Jennifer K. McKee, the acting chief of Wireline Competition Bureau’s Telecommunications Access Policy Division, the FCC division responsible for E-rate, granted the appeal.
“Based on the record before us, it appears that this matter can be resolved through USAC’s review of additional documentation UTA provided to the Commission in its appeal, which it had not previously provided to USAC,” she wrote. In other words, the bureau determined that it was acceptable for UTA and its service provider, who had been unable to provide appropriate documentation when they were audited, to submit receipts years after the fact.
Interviewed last week about the overruling of his audit recommendations concerning UTA, Cline said the UTA audit, like many audits of that time, revealed that “in the early years of the program there were significant problems with weaknesses in the rules designed to protect the program. As a result, FCC has issued orders doing away with the loopholes and tightening the rules.”
Asked if was not suspicious for a company to produce a receipt after the audit was complete, and for the FCC to accept it, Cline noted that “the issue was there was no requirement of time in which you had to pay. That was the problem. So if you pay years later, there was nothing in the rules saying that was a problem.”
Rules specifying deadlines for payment have been implemented.
As for the UTA’s other findings, Cline said he no longer recalls the details. “We do the audits and make recommendations, but we’re not the administrators,” he said. “We have things we can do if we’re not satisfied, but how far you elevate things like that depends on the circumstance.”
Various Jewish schools have been cited for noncompliance in USAC-commissioned audits, yet, like UTA, they seem not to have been penalized.
In 2009, KPMG carried out an audit of Bais Ruchel D’Satmar, which in the early years of the program filed for E-rate together with UTA, and found “material noncompliance with technology plan certification and service substitution requirements” during the fiscal year 2008. Notably, the functionality of the requested services on the original application was for T-1 services, while the functionality of the substituted services was for wireless phone services. While USAC decided to seek recovery for the monetary effect of this finding, nowhere in the audit, however, were the reasons for this substitution questioned or made clear.
Meanwhile other FCC rulings of Jewish schools — and other schools’ — appeals seem to have been similarly lenient. In May 2006, FCC Secretary Marlene Dortch granted 30 appeals on behalf of 96 participants, many of them haredi Jewish schools, accused of violating competitive bidding rules. USAC had flagged the schools because the language on their technology plans was very similar; however Dortch argued that considerably more evidence was needed before making the schools and their service providers return their funding.
Julie.inthemix@gmail.com, @Julie_Wiener
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"Now on Jewish.TV: Esther’s Bizarre Response: The Megillah in Depth, Chapter 4, Part 2 - Mendel Kaplan" Jewish.TV - Chabad Video for Wednesday, 16 March 2016Esther’s Bizarre Response
The Megillah in Depth, Chapter 4, Part 2
By Mendel Kaplan
Watch Now
About this webcast:
Discover what happened behind the scenes as the Queen of Persia, (a clandestine Jewess originally called Hadassah, who now goes by the name Esther) goes into a bizarre “toxic shock” after hearing about Mordechai’s – the Chief Rabbi – seeming nervous breakdown. Discover the details of her shocking response to the “public rabbinic disrobement” that caused a huge kerfuffle amidst the Jewish population.
Recent and Upcoming Jewish.tv Webcasts:
Dress-Code for Divine Dining
The priestly service of removing the ash from the altar
By Moishe New
Airs Wednesday, March 16 at 8pm ET
The priestly service of removing the ash from the altar
By Moishe New
Airs Wednesday, March 16 at 8pm ET
Shulchan Aruch, Birchas Asher Yatzar Kol Hayom 7:6-7
Laws Relating to the Recitation of the Blessing Asher Yatzar throughout the Course of the Day, Part 4
By Avraham Meyer Zajac
Airs Thursday, March 17 at 6am ET
Laws Relating to the Recitation of the Blessing Asher Yatzar throughout the Course of the Day, Part 4
By Avraham Meyer Zajac
Airs Thursday, March 17 at 6am ET
How Your Birthday Affects Your Character
The Jewish Zodiac
By Shifra Sharfstein
Airs Thursday, March 17 at 11am ET
The Jewish Zodiac
By Shifra Sharfstein
Airs Thursday, March 17 at 11am ET
Negative Thoughts Are Good News
What you see is not what you get (Tanya Ch. 27-28)
By Aron Moss
Airs Monday, March 21 at 7pm ET
Click here to browse our full programming schedule.
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"Spring Forward With $15 Off The Grand Wine Tasting Event" The Jewish Week Connecting the World to Jewish News, Culture, Features, and Opinions of New York, New York, United States for Wednesday, 16 March 2016
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"9 Life Lessons From Queen Esther" Chabad Magazine of New York, New York, United States for Wednesday, Adar II 6, 5776 · March 16, 2016
Editor's Note:
Dear Friend
I recently read a fascinating study on body language. Upright posture equals confidence, open hands equals interest, folded arms equals resistance, etc. But the author took it one step further. What happens when people posture, assuming external positions they don’t really feel?
Surprisingly, observers could not distinguish between genuine and fake confidence. Not only that, but the fakers themselves started to feel the way they looked. A change in body language apparently causes a change of heart.
We will soon celebrate Purim—that holiday when we are to be deliriously happy. But what if you’re not up to it? Your cantankerous boss, the dirty dishes in the sink, the needy kids or the lack thereof . . . we all have good reasons why it’s difficult to be happy right now.
But we can fake it. When all you want to do is go to sleep, pour your last energies into a springy step and an easy laugh. Go ahead and fake it till you make it.
The truth is, you're not faking. Deep down, we each have a G‑dly soul—a piece of G‑d himself. Is that not reason to jump for joy?
Rabbi Mendy Kaminker
on behalf of the Chabad.org Editorial Team
The Trial of Love
Those times when a parent stands back as the child decides,
watching the consequences from afar, yet always there with the child
—they are the greatest trial of a parent’s love, the ultimate act of parenting.
They are not always possible, often too perilous to risk. But they provide the turning point for a child to become a person all her own.
So, too, when G‑d hides His face, that is when He shows His most awesome might, His deepest love.
This Week's Features:
What you see is not what you get (Tanya Ch. 27-28)
By Aron Moss
Airs Monday, March 21 at 7pm ET
Click here to browse our full programming schedule.
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"Spring Forward With $15 Off The Grand Wine Tasting Event" The Jewish Week Connecting the World to Jewish News, Culture, Features, and Opinions of New York, New York, United States for Wednesday, 16 March 2016
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"9 Life Lessons From Queen Esther" Chabad Magazine of New York, New York, United States for Wednesday, Adar II 6, 5776 · March 16, 2016
Editor's Note:
Dear Friend
I recently read a fascinating study on body language. Upright posture equals confidence, open hands equals interest, folded arms equals resistance, etc. But the author took it one step further. What happens when people posture, assuming external positions they don’t really feel?
Surprisingly, observers could not distinguish between genuine and fake confidence. Not only that, but the fakers themselves started to feel the way they looked. A change in body language apparently causes a change of heart.
We will soon celebrate Purim—that holiday when we are to be deliriously happy. But what if you’re not up to it? Your cantankerous boss, the dirty dishes in the sink, the needy kids or the lack thereof . . . we all have good reasons why it’s difficult to be happy right now.
But we can fake it. When all you want to do is go to sleep, pour your last energies into a springy step and an easy laugh. Go ahead and fake it till you make it.
The truth is, you're not faking. Deep down, we each have a G‑dly soul—a piece of G‑d himself. Is that not reason to jump for joy?
Rabbi Mendy Kaminker
on behalf of the Chabad.org Editorial Team
The Trial of Love
Those times when a parent stands back as the child decides,
watching the consequences from afar, yet always there with the child
—they are the greatest trial of a parent’s love, the ultimate act of parenting.
They are not always possible, often too perilous to risk. But they provide the turning point for a child to become a person all her own.
So, too, when G‑d hides His face, that is when He shows His most awesome might, His deepest love.
This Week's Features:
Printable Magazine
A Constant Lover
Is G-d Our Father or Is He Our King? Jewish Prayers Seem to Infer That Both Are the Case. G-d Is Called Both "Our Father," and "Our King." by Mendel Kalmenson
“We’re sorry, comrades . . .” crackled the voice being broadcast from military headquarters, “there’s nothing we can do at this point . . . Prepare for the worst.”
The Egyptian army was advancing quickly on their isolated brigade. The backup they so desperately needed would not be coming.
Within the hour they would all die. How to spend their last moments?
One soldier asked for permission to speak.
“Have faith in G‑d,” he cried with his entire being, as only one who stares death in the eye can.
“Even if a sharp sword presses on your neck, don’t despair of G‑d’s mercy!”1
His words penetrated their hearts. “There are no atheists in a foxhole,” goes the saying. And they were deep in a foxhole.How could G‑d take the very arm with which he had hoped to bind himself to Him?
One of the soldiers, experiencing faith for the first time in his life, made a silent vow to G‑d.
“Master of the world, if we make it out of this hellhole alive, I promise to lay tefillin each day!”
All too soon it was over. By a miracle, the Egyptians were rebuffed. After they had fled, the damage was assessed, and it was found that all but one soldier had escaped injury: the soldier who had made a vow to G‑d.
He had lost an arm.
His left arm.
The arm upon which tefillin are wrapped . . .
He was broken. This was too much to bear. Could G‑d be mocking him?
The faith he had recently discovered threatened to disappear.
He visited many rabbis with his question. How could G‑d take the very arm with which he had hoped to bind himself to Him?
The answers he was given didn’t satisfy him, and he sank into despair.
All of that changed at a late-night meeting with the Rebbe.
The soldier told the Rebbe his story. Together, they cried.
The Rebbe then gently said, “Perhaps this was G‑d’s way of telling you that His relationship with you is unconditional. He loves you not for what you may or may not do, but as you are. Like a parent loves his child . . .”
It was then that his wound began to heal.
A Fatherly King
Is G‑d our father, or is He our King?
Jewish prayers seem to imply that both are the case. G‑d is called both avinu, “our Father,” and malkeinu, “our King.”
But how can He be both? One relationship is unconditional, while the other seems not to be. A parent loves his child whether or not he performs,2 while the relationship between ruler and subject is based on loyalty and rules.3
The answer is: There’s who G‑d is, and there’s what G‑d does. And reciprocally, there’s who we are and there’s what we do.
The The parent-child relationship describes our essence; the king-subject association shows us how to express that essenceparent-child relationship4describes our essence; the king-subject association shows us how to express that essence.
Open up a prayerbook, and your heart will be warmed as you note that avinu always comes before malkeinu.
This fundamental idea is captured in the opening verse—and word—ofLeviticus.
“He called to Moses, and G‑d spoke to him from the Tent of Meeting, saying . . .”
Why doesn’t the first verse identify who it is that is speaking to Moses? Why is the caller ID blocked?
Also, what is the difference between “calling” and “speaking,” and why did G‑d choose to do both?
Rashi explains: “Every time G‑d communicated with Moses, it was always preceded by G‑d calling to Moses by name, for calling is an expression of affection.”
In the first words of the verse, G‑d declares His love for the Jew. Only then does He express the desire for something to be done.
In G‑d’s books, it turns out, pleasure comes before business.
Therefore, in the first words, which describe G‑d as He is, as a father in love with His children, G‑d is nameless, for a name limits and is external to the essence. Only subsequently is He called G‑d, which describes what it is that He does.
The Fine Print
This idea sheds light on a literary peculiarity in the first word of Leviticus:vayikra, “He called.” The word’s last letter, an aleph, is written in small print.
This is far from a typo. The message is profound.5 “The small aleph is an allusion to the custom that small children traditionally begin their studies with the book of Leviticus.”6
But shouldn’t Genesis be the genesis of education? Why not start at the beginning of the story?
Because “He called to Moses,” which highlights G‑d’s unconditional love for the Jew, is the beginning of the story!
The Bridge to Infinity
Which raises the question: what is the basis for this unconditional love? From whence this intrinsic bond between the finite Jew and the infinite Creator?
Where does the Torah fit into this family relationship?Said Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi in his Tanya7: “Every Jew has a piece of G‑d in them, literally!”
The word “literally” at the end of this revolutionary statement wasn’t added for dramatic effect,8 but was meant to be taken literally!
As such, one can even say that we are not connected to G‑d as a subject is connected to his king, and we are not even attached to G‑d as a child is attached to her parent, for we are one with G‑d as a person is one with himself!
Bookkeepers
But where does the Torah fit into this family relationship?
Shouldn’t our connection to the Master of the World hinge on the level of our devotion to His service? Does not the observance of the Torah’s commandments define the relationship between its giver and taker?
Are we not known as the “people of the book,” and rightfully so—are we not a people only because of the Book?9
But consider a child who was forcibly taken from its parents at birth, having never met its father or mother. Both the child and the parents possess a storehouse of love for each other, but do not know how or where to direct it. An entire lifetime can go by this way, with their love unexpressed.
The Torah helps facilitate that expression.
Through connecting our will and behavior with G‑d’s Will, the intrinsic love which is our birthright comes to the fore.
In other words, there’s being in love with G‑d, and then there’s telling Him that.
How appropriate that the mystics, in a fit of Divine romance, reinterpreted the word mitzvah, adding to the conventional meaning—“commandment”—the unconventional but deeper meaning “connection.”
No Way Out
This might explain a core Jewish principle I have long puzzled over.
“A Jew, even if he sins [by converting to another religion10], remains a Jew.”11
During the early 1960s, Daniel Rufeisen, a Jewish convert to Catholicism who became a monk, decided to test the outer limits of this religious principle. Rufeisen, or “Brother Daniel” as he is commonly known, immigrated to Israeland applied for citizenship under the Law of Return, which guarantees any Jew the right to become an Israeli citizen upon request. Rufeisen argued that although he was a Catholic by religion, he was still a member of the Jewish people. Ironically, while the Israeli Supreme Court rejected his application, the Rabbinate ruled that the priest should be given citizenship as a Jew, based on the above Talmudic principle. As he was born to Jewish parents, his fate was with his people, regardless of any decisions he had made along the way.
Am I missing something?
According As he was born to Jewish parents, his fate was with his people, regardless of any decisions he had made along the wayto Wikipedia, “religion” can be defined as follows: “A system of human thought which usually includes a set of narratives, symbols, beliefs, and practices that give meaning to the practitioner’s experiences of life through reference to a higher power, deity or deities, or ultimate truth.”
And wouldn’t that be subject to every individual’s discretion? How can I possibly be tied to a set of values and ideals I choose to reject? How can one remain a part of Judaism even if one wants out?
That’s because Judaism is not the name of a religion, but the name of a family.
On a lighter note: American banker Otto Kahn, who was Jewish by birth, converted to Christianity. He was once walking with a hunchbacked friend when they passed a synagogue.
“You know I used to be a Jew,” Kahn said.
“And I used to be a hunchback,” his companion replied.12
What’s in It for Me?
Imagine there was someone in the world who loved and supported you every single moment of your life, whenever and however?
Stop imagining.
G‑d does.
FOOTNOTES
1.Talmud, Berachot 10a.
2.This relates to the following Midrash (Tanna d’Vei Eliyahu Rabbah, chapter 14): “Two things preceded G‑d’s creation of the world: Torah and Israel. Still, I do not know which preceded which. But when Torah states, ‘Speak to the children of Israel . . . ,’ ‘Command the children of Israel . . . ,’ and so on, I know that Israel preceded all.”
3.See, however, Sefer ha-Sichot 5750, pp. 378–388, where the Rebbe explains that even within the king-subject relationship there are two dimensions, one essential and the other performance-based. The idea is based on the Mechilta and Yalkut Shimoni, Yitro 20:3, “Accept My kingship, and afterwards I will give you decrees.” Apparently, accepting G‑d’s kingship has inherent value even before any talk of decrees.
4.Scripture refers to the Jewish people as G‑d’s children numerous times. See, for example, Exodus 4:22 and Hosea 11:1. See also Likkutei Sichot, vol. 21, pp. 20–26.
5.See Kli Yakar ad loc.
6.See also the Midrash (Vayikra Rabbah 7:3), which states, “Why do we initiate young children with the Torah portion that speaks of sacrifices? Because just like the sacrifices are pure, so too are the young children.” The deeper meaning behind the Midrash is that both children and sacrifices illustrate G‑d’s unconditional love for His people. In the case of children this is obvious, since they have no qualities and spiritual/religious accomplishments yet by which to earn G‑d’s love. This proves that the nature of G‑d’s love is unconditional. Sacrifices which are brought to atone for sin communicate the same message. For what can connect G‑d to an adult sinner, who is old enough to know right from wrong, if not His unconditional love which embraces and accepts the Jew as he is?
Incidentally, the latter point regarding sacrifices, that they underscore the essential connection of a Jew to G‑d, reveals the thread which runs throughout this week’s Torah reading, from its beginning to its end. Namely, that G‑d’s relationship with the Jew is not dependent on observance.
7.Chapter 2.
8.That would be out character for Rabbi Schneur Zalman, whose every word was exact and calculated. Indeed, it is said that he once spent six weeks deliberating regarding the insertion of a single letter!
9.As R. Saadiah Gaon said, “Our nation is only a nation because of the Torah.”
10.See Teshuvot Rashi.
11.Talmud, Sanhedrin 44a.
12.Based on the Rebbe’s talks, Likkutei Sichot vol. 7, pp. 24–26; vol. 22, pp. 1–6.
EDITOR'S PICKS
The Problems of Intergalactic Travel and Jewish Continuity
If a group of people are confined together for 830 years, how can you make them get along? The history of mankind tells you that there’s never been a 40-year period without one group of people deciding to eliminate another. by Velvl GreeneIn the 1960s and ’70s, those working in the NASA program were preparing to launch the first rocket that would land on the planet Mars. In 1976 we landed two manmade objects on Mars—Vikings I and II. Never before in history had mankind penetrated that far into space. I was one of the principal investigators on the Viking program, having designed two major research projects.
The timing of these programs is unique: We were the microbiologists, and we were required to have our projects designed and ready six or seven years before launch. The engineers needed adequate time to design the spacecraft to hold it all. So several years before launch, we had essentially finished our work. But since we were still getting paid by NASA, they felt compelled to find something useful for us to do.They felt compelled to find something useful for us to do
One of the program managers called a meeting for the 30 or so of us involved. He began talking about the real challenges of space flight, predicting that after we explored our own solar system, we’d move into interstellar space—go to the stars. This was the topic we were to explore.
The nearest star is Alpha Centauri. It’s 4.1 light-years away from earth, which means that a beam of light traveling at a speed of 186,000 miles per secondwould take 4.1 years to reach Alpha Centauri.
Needless to say, we were a long way from traveling at that speed. I did the calculations, and even if we managed to build a rocket that would travel 100 times faster than anything we’d ever designed, it would still take 830 years to get there and another 830 to come home again, of course!
As someone said, “No more coffee breaks—we’d better get going!”
Obviously, sending an astronaut wouldn’t work; no one could live that long. There have been movies made about suspended animation—putting humans into some kind of deep sleep, where they don’t age—but we don’t know much about that. What we do know is that humans live 60–80 years, and then we die.
The only real solution is to put men and women together on a spaceship, and then advise them to follow the first commandment: Be fruitful and multiply. They would have children, who would marry other children, on and on and on, for many generations.
But it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that this plan presents sociological problems, as well as an engineering issue. How would successive generations of people survive for the 830 years out and the 830 years back?
Food is an obvious problem: What will they eat? Remember, there is nothingout there. Absolutely every scrap of everything they will need to live must be taken along or grown. There are no resources in space. Nothing.
Pondering this problem occupied a lot of NASA time. One possible solution is the extensive use of algae. There’s sunlight in most of outer space, so algae could be grown on the collected sweat and urine from the humans. But people don’t like to eat algae. Russian scientists at one time considered feeding the algae to chickens, and then the people could eat the chickens. But that leaves you with a feather problem. Feathers can’t be recycled. What can you do with the feathers?
Of course, it didn’t take long to realize that the problems of space travel are almost the same as the problems of planet Earth: feeding a growing world population, supplying clean water, dealing with wastes of all kinds. This NASA project had many useful applications.
Waste was a big issue. What to do with it? Throw it out, or jettison it, like the spent fuel containers? But one of Newton’s theories is that if you throw something out of a capsule traveling that fast, it will just go along with you. You can’t get rid of it—but neither can you afford to waste it, whatever it is.
Other problems abound: If a group of people are confined together for 830 years, how can you make them get along? The history of mankind tells you that there’s never been a 40-year period without one group of people deciding to eliminate another. In Jewish history, 40 years of peace is a very long time indeed.
Leisure is another issue: What will the people do? Once the spaceship is en route, only a few minutes a day will be required to run it. What will everyone do with all that leisure? Unless we can design projects to successfully occupy time, problems will result.
As our seminar progressed, we discussed all these issues. Then another one popped up that fascinated me: How would the adults teach their children about themselves and their mission?
Think about it: For 830 years, all they have is the one instruction manual they started out with. But we know how we feel about old instructions—if an appliance handbook were written in Elizabethan English, we’d ignore it. Junk it! It’s too old to be practical. Even maps—we don’t follow old maps, we correct them!
But here’s this spaceship full of people. If they junk the old instruction manual, what will happen? If they start fiddling around, tinkering with the maps and the navigational system, one thing is guaranteed: They’ll get lost. And then how will they land the thing? And get back? Would that happen?
At the NASA meeting, a professor then made an interesting suggestion. “There are very few precedents for this kind of situation,” he said. “How does a society pass down its mission and beliefs to succeeding generations? I think we need to study the Jewish system. So far as I know, they’re the only group of people who, for thousands of years, have managed to hand down their traditions intact to each new generation. We should study the Jews, and see how they did it.”
Now that was interesting, more than enough to set my own mind to work, long after the session ended. I came to some additional considerations myself.
As Jews, we do indeed have a continuous debate going on. Every day, wherever there are Jews, they still debate and discuss what exactly Mosesheard from G‑d, and how that applies to the problems we face this afternoon.
For several thousand years, our concept of our mission has remained real. It’s not a hypothetical. You can’t study the Talmud without gaining the sense of the continuity. I can look and see what was added. I may know that this did—or that did not—come down from Sinai, but the message we received at Sinai is undiluted. It’s as clear and precise today as it was when the Torah was given. The people who are guiding Jewish destiny know exactly what they’re doing. They’re successfully transmitting it to their children.
But the truth is, there’s a bigger problem for How does a society pass down its mission and beliefs?multi-generational space travel than just retaining a sense of mission. The real problem is that after the first two hours, after the ship leaves the gravitational pull of the earth, from that moment on, everyone, for all generations, will live in a weightless environment. Don’t get me wrong: I love weightlessness. Leaping from place to place, dropping things that don’t fall. It’s great.
The point is, for 830 years, they all will live in a world with no gravity. The very memory of gravity will become so distant that it won’t be more than a legend, something that existed far in the past. But assigning the concept of gravity to the ancient bin of legends—along with trolls and angels and talking snakes—means that when they need to deal with it again, when 830 years later they come within the gravitational pull of Alpha Centauri, they won’t have the vaguest notion of what gravity is, or how it works.
It’s not even something as basic as figuring out how to land the ship. It’s more fundamental: In a weightless environment, there is no up or down or front or back. There is no direction. So how do you know how to orient the spaceship when you want to land? And if you tore up that part of the instruction manual 800 years ago, you’ve got a problem. Even if you saved the manual, you have to learn—from scratch—what gravity is.
How can you teach the concept of gravity? It’s different than transmitting a common mission. It’s much harder: you have to transmit a concept that’s not real, something that no one present ever experienced. The concept of reality that the spaceship people lived with for 830 years is not the model they can live with once they land.
So I thought about it. If I were a principal investigator on that mission, I’d do it this way: I’d choose one man in the entire group. Make it a trustworthy guy, maybe someone who’s a little naïve, but someone I could trust.
Then I’d say to him, “Abe?”—and yes, I’d call him Abe—I’d say, “Abe? In addition to all that other stuff you’re worrying about—where the food will come from, how to get rid of waste, how to keep wars from breaking out—there’s something else you have to consider. You have to learn which way is up.”
I’d tell him, “Abe, learn which way is up, which way is down. Learn the difference between transient and permanent. Learn to distinguish between ephemeral and real. And Abe, you have to teach that to your children, and have them teach it to their children, and on and on and on. Because if you miss even one generation, you’re all lost. It will all disappear. People will not like the message; they will ridicule you, beat you, shoot you, gas you. But you must do it, or the whole mission was a waste.”
When you think about it, the fact that you are reading this essay is pretty good evidence that when Someone tried this experiment once before, it must have worked. Not perfectly, of course. But well enough.
Happiness: The Ultimate Revenge
I’m a nice person. But for my nemesis I have reserved the ultimate revenge: a smile. by Tzvi Freeman
Most people know me as an amiable kind of guy, not too good at holding a grudge, eager to get along with everybody. Smiles, handshakes, and even warm, real hugs go easy for me.
But there’s one guy for whom I have no niceness, no pleasant words, certainly no hug, not even a handshake. Look, I’m not hiding anything here—plenty of times I’ve returned his greetings with a blunt “get lost.” Or just ignored him entirely as though he does not exist.
Okay, that’s nasty. But considering the damage this guy has done to me and to my family over many years of my life—deliberately and maliciously wrecking everything I ever built up, backstabbing, ridiculing, lying and cheating—I feel my attitude is justified.
I’m not ready to forgive, either.I’m not ready to forgive. I would be putting myself at serious risk. As long he does not relent—and that seems a very distant likelihood—I would be putting myself at serious risk by doing so.
Instead, I’ve searched for years to find ways to take revenge, to hurt him as much as he has hurt me.
Just recently I found such a strategy. Something that causes him to shudder in distress and agony, to writhe in pain and anguish. And just watching that—look, I’m not proud to say this, but it’s true—that brings me great delight. And it’s so simple.
All I have to do is look him straight in the face and smile. Yes, smile, look happy—even if I’m not really feeling that way inside. Even if I’m in the throes of recovery from his latest antics and bullying. Even at those times I feel the least like smiling—look, if the actors in Hollywood can put on a show, I can do the same.
And it’s worth it. It becomes so much easier when I see how much that smile disturbs my nemesis, how paled he is by it, how much it turns his stomach to see me happy, unperturbed and calm.
Which all makes sense. After all, what’s his motive in everything he’s done to me? Nothing more than his screwy pleasure in seeing me down. Down, under his thumb, hurting through his conniving. Once I’m down, I become an easier target for more of his ploys. He can trap me, blame me, make me feel like a piece of dirt and pull me into any sort of inanity he wants.
So when he sees I’m smiling, enjoying life and celebrating it, boy, does that pain him. I can see it in his eyes, as though I’m one of those Japanese monster wasps squirting acid into the eyes of their victims. Stunned and recoiling in shock, he runs to hide back in the filth of his lair. And whaddayaknow, I hear less of him.
I’m telling this to you because this character is still at large.I’m telling you because this character is still at large. He’s a danger to all of us. Keep yourself away from him, your children away, and especially your teens. He should not be admitted to any place of worship or community event. I’m even going to reveal his identity, for the protection of the community. He goes under several names. Sometimes Yetzer Hara, sometimes Big Dark Thing, or Depression, or Sadness; or Inadequacy or Addiction; or the Beasties or the Hormones.
Whatever name he comes under, if he pops up in your life, whatever dumb excuse he gives you—and believe me, he’s a genius at dumb excuses—you gotta know that he’s only there for one reason: To clip the wings of your soul, brutally crush any motivation to move forward, strangle any inspiration you have left, and smear your guts against the pavement, leaving you to rot in the worms and maggots of self-pity and despair.
So just do as I do: Smile back. Savor the sweet taste of the ultimate revenge.
Will it solve all your problems? No. There’s still work to do—to change, to lift yourself higher. But it’s a heck of a lot easier to climb those mountains without a 500-pound schlemiel clinging to your neck. For one thing, you can start breathing again.
Sure, he may return and scream, “Idiot! Why are you smiling! Don’t you realize how stupid you look with that dumb smile? Don’t you realize how badly I’ve messed you up?”
But then you can just answer him, “I’m a Jew and I don’t serve you. I serve the One Above, in an act of love. He runs the whole wide world, and even though I have nothing to rhyme with that, I’ll smile as much as I want. Too bad, you lose.”
PREP UP FOR PURIM
9 Life Lessons From Queen Esther
Queen Esther, the heroine of the Purim story and one of the greatest Jewish women in history. by Yehuda L. Ceitlin
Queen Esther, the heroine of the Purim story, is widely regarded as one of the greatest Jewish women in history. Her amazing life story contains lessons that apply to all of us.
Here are nine practical life lessons we can learn from Queen Esther:
1. Believe in your hidden powers.
Esther’s name means “hidden” in Hebrew. First, she kept hidden her identity as a Jew in the palace of the Persian king. She also didn’t lose hope when it seemed that G‑d’s protection of the Jewish people was in hiding. Even when she was sequestered in darkness, she called upon her strengths and courage to have an impact, and her actions ultimately saved the Jewish people. We too can tap into our own hidden powers and utterly transform events.1
2. Embrace your destiny.
At first Esther tried hiding from King Ahasuerus’s guards to avoid marrying him, but ultimately she couldn’t avoid the inevitable. When she was made queen, Mordechai, the leader of the Jews at the time, understood that “such a thing would not have happened to such a righteous woman unless she was destined to rescue her people [through it].” G‑d places us where we need to be in order to fulfill our mission in life.2
3. Let your inner beauty shine.
When contestants vying to be Ahasuerus’s new queen were brought to the palace, they were given a lengthy beauty regimen involving physical pampering and cosmetic treatments, but Esther declined those luxuries. Instead, it was her natural beauty that immediately captured the king’s attention above all the others. You are the best version of yourself.3
4. Be principled.
Even in the palace, Esther ate only kosher food. And when the king went out of his way to persuade her to tell him her national origin (he threw a party in her honor, gave tax breaks to citizens and considered marrying another), she held her ground. Let your principles guide you.4
5. We’re stronger together.
One of Haman’s complaints against the Jews was that they “a dispersed and disunited people.” In response, Esther told Mordechai to gather all the Jews. The best answer to hatred is unity.5
6. When in trouble, turn to G‑d.
Esther understood that the salvation of her people hinged on their special relationship with G‑d. Pleading at the feet of a mortal king was merely a facade behind which to disguise the Divine miracle. The true vehicle of their salvation would be repentance and prayer. First get in line with the Creator, then with His creations.6
7. Take the lead in action.
Esther set forth a plan for action, and Mordechai dutifully obeyed. “The act is the main thing,” says the Talmud. Because of her leadership, Esther saved her people, and the Megillah was named after her.7
8. Prepare to make sacrifices.
As queen, Esther would personally have been spared from the decree of annihilation, but she stood with her people. To make her case, she needed to approach the king without being summoned—a capital offense. And she did so, saying, “If I perish, I perish.”8
9. Never lose hope.
After the ordeal was over, Esther requested that her story be documented. What was Esther trying to accomplish in telling the Purim story? And what is her message to us? According to one commentary, the basic message of Esther’s story is this: No matter how hopeless your situation may seem, never lose hope.9
FOOTNOTES
1.Likkutei Sichot, vol. 17, p. 360.
2.Rashi, Esther 2:11.
3.Esther 2:15.
4.Mishnah Berurah 695:12.
5.Iturei Torah.
6.Likkutei Sichot, vol. 6, p. 191.
7.Avot 1:17.
8.Esther 4:16.
9.Siftei Chachamim, introduction to Tractate Megillah.
A Constant Lover
Is G-d Our Father or Is He Our King? Jewish Prayers Seem to Infer That Both Are the Case. G-d Is Called Both "Our Father," and "Our King." by Mendel Kalmenson
“We’re sorry, comrades . . .” crackled the voice being broadcast from military headquarters, “there’s nothing we can do at this point . . . Prepare for the worst.”
The Egyptian army was advancing quickly on their isolated brigade. The backup they so desperately needed would not be coming.
Within the hour they would all die. How to spend their last moments?
One soldier asked for permission to speak.
“Have faith in G‑d,” he cried with his entire being, as only one who stares death in the eye can.
“Even if a sharp sword presses on your neck, don’t despair of G‑d’s mercy!”1
His words penetrated their hearts. “There are no atheists in a foxhole,” goes the saying. And they were deep in a foxhole.How could G‑d take the very arm with which he had hoped to bind himself to Him?
One of the soldiers, experiencing faith for the first time in his life, made a silent vow to G‑d.
“Master of the world, if we make it out of this hellhole alive, I promise to lay tefillin each day!”
All too soon it was over. By a miracle, the Egyptians were rebuffed. After they had fled, the damage was assessed, and it was found that all but one soldier had escaped injury: the soldier who had made a vow to G‑d.
He had lost an arm.
His left arm.
The arm upon which tefillin are wrapped . . .
He was broken. This was too much to bear. Could G‑d be mocking him?
The faith he had recently discovered threatened to disappear.
He visited many rabbis with his question. How could G‑d take the very arm with which he had hoped to bind himself to Him?
The answers he was given didn’t satisfy him, and he sank into despair.
All of that changed at a late-night meeting with the Rebbe.
The soldier told the Rebbe his story. Together, they cried.
The Rebbe then gently said, “Perhaps this was G‑d’s way of telling you that His relationship with you is unconditional. He loves you not for what you may or may not do, but as you are. Like a parent loves his child . . .”
It was then that his wound began to heal.
A Fatherly King
Is G‑d our father, or is He our King?
Jewish prayers seem to imply that both are the case. G‑d is called both avinu, “our Father,” and malkeinu, “our King.”
But how can He be both? One relationship is unconditional, while the other seems not to be. A parent loves his child whether or not he performs,2 while the relationship between ruler and subject is based on loyalty and rules.3
The answer is: There’s who G‑d is, and there’s what G‑d does. And reciprocally, there’s who we are and there’s what we do.
The The parent-child relationship describes our essence; the king-subject association shows us how to express that essenceparent-child relationship4describes our essence; the king-subject association shows us how to express that essence.
Open up a prayerbook, and your heart will be warmed as you note that avinu always comes before malkeinu.
This fundamental idea is captured in the opening verse—and word—ofLeviticus.
“He called to Moses, and G‑d spoke to him from the Tent of Meeting, saying . . .”
Why doesn’t the first verse identify who it is that is speaking to Moses? Why is the caller ID blocked?
Also, what is the difference between “calling” and “speaking,” and why did G‑d choose to do both?
Rashi explains: “Every time G‑d communicated with Moses, it was always preceded by G‑d calling to Moses by name, for calling is an expression of affection.”
In the first words of the verse, G‑d declares His love for the Jew. Only then does He express the desire for something to be done.
In G‑d’s books, it turns out, pleasure comes before business.
Therefore, in the first words, which describe G‑d as He is, as a father in love with His children, G‑d is nameless, for a name limits and is external to the essence. Only subsequently is He called G‑d, which describes what it is that He does.
The Fine Print
This idea sheds light on a literary peculiarity in the first word of Leviticus:vayikra, “He called.” The word’s last letter, an aleph, is written in small print.
This is far from a typo. The message is profound.5 “The small aleph is an allusion to the custom that small children traditionally begin their studies with the book of Leviticus.”6
But shouldn’t Genesis be the genesis of education? Why not start at the beginning of the story?
Because “He called to Moses,” which highlights G‑d’s unconditional love for the Jew, is the beginning of the story!
The Bridge to Infinity
Which raises the question: what is the basis for this unconditional love? From whence this intrinsic bond between the finite Jew and the infinite Creator?
Where does the Torah fit into this family relationship?Said Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi in his Tanya7: “Every Jew has a piece of G‑d in them, literally!”
The word “literally” at the end of this revolutionary statement wasn’t added for dramatic effect,8 but was meant to be taken literally!
As such, one can even say that we are not connected to G‑d as a subject is connected to his king, and we are not even attached to G‑d as a child is attached to her parent, for we are one with G‑d as a person is one with himself!
Bookkeepers
But where does the Torah fit into this family relationship?
Shouldn’t our connection to the Master of the World hinge on the level of our devotion to His service? Does not the observance of the Torah’s commandments define the relationship between its giver and taker?
Are we not known as the “people of the book,” and rightfully so—are we not a people only because of the Book?9
But consider a child who was forcibly taken from its parents at birth, having never met its father or mother. Both the child and the parents possess a storehouse of love for each other, but do not know how or where to direct it. An entire lifetime can go by this way, with their love unexpressed.
The Torah helps facilitate that expression.
Through connecting our will and behavior with G‑d’s Will, the intrinsic love which is our birthright comes to the fore.
In other words, there’s being in love with G‑d, and then there’s telling Him that.
How appropriate that the mystics, in a fit of Divine romance, reinterpreted the word mitzvah, adding to the conventional meaning—“commandment”—the unconventional but deeper meaning “connection.”
No Way Out
This might explain a core Jewish principle I have long puzzled over.
“A Jew, even if he sins [by converting to another religion10], remains a Jew.”11
During the early 1960s, Daniel Rufeisen, a Jewish convert to Catholicism who became a monk, decided to test the outer limits of this religious principle. Rufeisen, or “Brother Daniel” as he is commonly known, immigrated to Israeland applied for citizenship under the Law of Return, which guarantees any Jew the right to become an Israeli citizen upon request. Rufeisen argued that although he was a Catholic by religion, he was still a member of the Jewish people. Ironically, while the Israeli Supreme Court rejected his application, the Rabbinate ruled that the priest should be given citizenship as a Jew, based on the above Talmudic principle. As he was born to Jewish parents, his fate was with his people, regardless of any decisions he had made along the way.
Am I missing something?
According As he was born to Jewish parents, his fate was with his people, regardless of any decisions he had made along the wayto Wikipedia, “religion” can be defined as follows: “A system of human thought which usually includes a set of narratives, symbols, beliefs, and practices that give meaning to the practitioner’s experiences of life through reference to a higher power, deity or deities, or ultimate truth.”
And wouldn’t that be subject to every individual’s discretion? How can I possibly be tied to a set of values and ideals I choose to reject? How can one remain a part of Judaism even if one wants out?
That’s because Judaism is not the name of a religion, but the name of a family.
On a lighter note: American banker Otto Kahn, who was Jewish by birth, converted to Christianity. He was once walking with a hunchbacked friend when they passed a synagogue.
“You know I used to be a Jew,” Kahn said.
“And I used to be a hunchback,” his companion replied.12
What’s in It for Me?
Imagine there was someone in the world who loved and supported you every single moment of your life, whenever and however?
Stop imagining.
G‑d does.
FOOTNOTES
1.Talmud, Berachot 10a.
2.This relates to the following Midrash (Tanna d’Vei Eliyahu Rabbah, chapter 14): “Two things preceded G‑d’s creation of the world: Torah and Israel. Still, I do not know which preceded which. But when Torah states, ‘Speak to the children of Israel . . . ,’ ‘Command the children of Israel . . . ,’ and so on, I know that Israel preceded all.”
3.See, however, Sefer ha-Sichot 5750, pp. 378–388, where the Rebbe explains that even within the king-subject relationship there are two dimensions, one essential and the other performance-based. The idea is based on the Mechilta and Yalkut Shimoni, Yitro 20:3, “Accept My kingship, and afterwards I will give you decrees.” Apparently, accepting G‑d’s kingship has inherent value even before any talk of decrees.
4.Scripture refers to the Jewish people as G‑d’s children numerous times. See, for example, Exodus 4:22 and Hosea 11:1. See also Likkutei Sichot, vol. 21, pp. 20–26.
5.See Kli Yakar ad loc.
6.See also the Midrash (Vayikra Rabbah 7:3), which states, “Why do we initiate young children with the Torah portion that speaks of sacrifices? Because just like the sacrifices are pure, so too are the young children.” The deeper meaning behind the Midrash is that both children and sacrifices illustrate G‑d’s unconditional love for His people. In the case of children this is obvious, since they have no qualities and spiritual/religious accomplishments yet by which to earn G‑d’s love. This proves that the nature of G‑d’s love is unconditional. Sacrifices which are brought to atone for sin communicate the same message. For what can connect G‑d to an adult sinner, who is old enough to know right from wrong, if not His unconditional love which embraces and accepts the Jew as he is?
Incidentally, the latter point regarding sacrifices, that they underscore the essential connection of a Jew to G‑d, reveals the thread which runs throughout this week’s Torah reading, from its beginning to its end. Namely, that G‑d’s relationship with the Jew is not dependent on observance.
7.Chapter 2.
8.That would be out character for Rabbi Schneur Zalman, whose every word was exact and calculated. Indeed, it is said that he once spent six weeks deliberating regarding the insertion of a single letter!
9.As R. Saadiah Gaon said, “Our nation is only a nation because of the Torah.”
10.See Teshuvot Rashi.
11.Talmud, Sanhedrin 44a.
12.Based on the Rebbe’s talks, Likkutei Sichot vol. 7, pp. 24–26; vol. 22, pp. 1–6.
EDITOR'S PICKS
The Problems of Intergalactic Travel and Jewish Continuity
If a group of people are confined together for 830 years, how can you make them get along? The history of mankind tells you that there’s never been a 40-year period without one group of people deciding to eliminate another. by Velvl GreeneIn the 1960s and ’70s, those working in the NASA program were preparing to launch the first rocket that would land on the planet Mars. In 1976 we landed two manmade objects on Mars—Vikings I and II. Never before in history had mankind penetrated that far into space. I was one of the principal investigators on the Viking program, having designed two major research projects.
The timing of these programs is unique: We were the microbiologists, and we were required to have our projects designed and ready six or seven years before launch. The engineers needed adequate time to design the spacecraft to hold it all. So several years before launch, we had essentially finished our work. But since we were still getting paid by NASA, they felt compelled to find something useful for us to do.They felt compelled to find something useful for us to do
One of the program managers called a meeting for the 30 or so of us involved. He began talking about the real challenges of space flight, predicting that after we explored our own solar system, we’d move into interstellar space—go to the stars. This was the topic we were to explore.
The nearest star is Alpha Centauri. It’s 4.1 light-years away from earth, which means that a beam of light traveling at a speed of 186,000 miles per secondwould take 4.1 years to reach Alpha Centauri.
Needless to say, we were a long way from traveling at that speed. I did the calculations, and even if we managed to build a rocket that would travel 100 times faster than anything we’d ever designed, it would still take 830 years to get there and another 830 to come home again, of course!
As someone said, “No more coffee breaks—we’d better get going!”
Obviously, sending an astronaut wouldn’t work; no one could live that long. There have been movies made about suspended animation—putting humans into some kind of deep sleep, where they don’t age—but we don’t know much about that. What we do know is that humans live 60–80 years, and then we die.
The only real solution is to put men and women together on a spaceship, and then advise them to follow the first commandment: Be fruitful and multiply. They would have children, who would marry other children, on and on and on, for many generations.
But it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that this plan presents sociological problems, as well as an engineering issue. How would successive generations of people survive for the 830 years out and the 830 years back?
Food is an obvious problem: What will they eat? Remember, there is nothingout there. Absolutely every scrap of everything they will need to live must be taken along or grown. There are no resources in space. Nothing.
Pondering this problem occupied a lot of NASA time. One possible solution is the extensive use of algae. There’s sunlight in most of outer space, so algae could be grown on the collected sweat and urine from the humans. But people don’t like to eat algae. Russian scientists at one time considered feeding the algae to chickens, and then the people could eat the chickens. But that leaves you with a feather problem. Feathers can’t be recycled. What can you do with the feathers?
Of course, it didn’t take long to realize that the problems of space travel are almost the same as the problems of planet Earth: feeding a growing world population, supplying clean water, dealing with wastes of all kinds. This NASA project had many useful applications.
Waste was a big issue. What to do with it? Throw it out, or jettison it, like the spent fuel containers? But one of Newton’s theories is that if you throw something out of a capsule traveling that fast, it will just go along with you. You can’t get rid of it—but neither can you afford to waste it, whatever it is.
Other problems abound: If a group of people are confined together for 830 years, how can you make them get along? The history of mankind tells you that there’s never been a 40-year period without one group of people deciding to eliminate another. In Jewish history, 40 years of peace is a very long time indeed.
Leisure is another issue: What will the people do? Once the spaceship is en route, only a few minutes a day will be required to run it. What will everyone do with all that leisure? Unless we can design projects to successfully occupy time, problems will result.
As our seminar progressed, we discussed all these issues. Then another one popped up that fascinated me: How would the adults teach their children about themselves and their mission?
Think about it: For 830 years, all they have is the one instruction manual they started out with. But we know how we feel about old instructions—if an appliance handbook were written in Elizabethan English, we’d ignore it. Junk it! It’s too old to be practical. Even maps—we don’t follow old maps, we correct them!
But here’s this spaceship full of people. If they junk the old instruction manual, what will happen? If they start fiddling around, tinkering with the maps and the navigational system, one thing is guaranteed: They’ll get lost. And then how will they land the thing? And get back? Would that happen?
At the NASA meeting, a professor then made an interesting suggestion. “There are very few precedents for this kind of situation,” he said. “How does a society pass down its mission and beliefs to succeeding generations? I think we need to study the Jewish system. So far as I know, they’re the only group of people who, for thousands of years, have managed to hand down their traditions intact to each new generation. We should study the Jews, and see how they did it.”
Now that was interesting, more than enough to set my own mind to work, long after the session ended. I came to some additional considerations myself.
As Jews, we do indeed have a continuous debate going on. Every day, wherever there are Jews, they still debate and discuss what exactly Mosesheard from G‑d, and how that applies to the problems we face this afternoon.
For several thousand years, our concept of our mission has remained real. It’s not a hypothetical. You can’t study the Talmud without gaining the sense of the continuity. I can look and see what was added. I may know that this did—or that did not—come down from Sinai, but the message we received at Sinai is undiluted. It’s as clear and precise today as it was when the Torah was given. The people who are guiding Jewish destiny know exactly what they’re doing. They’re successfully transmitting it to their children.
But the truth is, there’s a bigger problem for How does a society pass down its mission and beliefs?multi-generational space travel than just retaining a sense of mission. The real problem is that after the first two hours, after the ship leaves the gravitational pull of the earth, from that moment on, everyone, for all generations, will live in a weightless environment. Don’t get me wrong: I love weightlessness. Leaping from place to place, dropping things that don’t fall. It’s great.
The point is, for 830 years, they all will live in a world with no gravity. The very memory of gravity will become so distant that it won’t be more than a legend, something that existed far in the past. But assigning the concept of gravity to the ancient bin of legends—along with trolls and angels and talking snakes—means that when they need to deal with it again, when 830 years later they come within the gravitational pull of Alpha Centauri, they won’t have the vaguest notion of what gravity is, or how it works.
It’s not even something as basic as figuring out how to land the ship. It’s more fundamental: In a weightless environment, there is no up or down or front or back. There is no direction. So how do you know how to orient the spaceship when you want to land? And if you tore up that part of the instruction manual 800 years ago, you’ve got a problem. Even if you saved the manual, you have to learn—from scratch—what gravity is.
How can you teach the concept of gravity? It’s different than transmitting a common mission. It’s much harder: you have to transmit a concept that’s not real, something that no one present ever experienced. The concept of reality that the spaceship people lived with for 830 years is not the model they can live with once they land.
So I thought about it. If I were a principal investigator on that mission, I’d do it this way: I’d choose one man in the entire group. Make it a trustworthy guy, maybe someone who’s a little naïve, but someone I could trust.
Then I’d say to him, “Abe?”—and yes, I’d call him Abe—I’d say, “Abe? In addition to all that other stuff you’re worrying about—where the food will come from, how to get rid of waste, how to keep wars from breaking out—there’s something else you have to consider. You have to learn which way is up.”
I’d tell him, “Abe, learn which way is up, which way is down. Learn the difference between transient and permanent. Learn to distinguish between ephemeral and real. And Abe, you have to teach that to your children, and have them teach it to their children, and on and on and on. Because if you miss even one generation, you’re all lost. It will all disappear. People will not like the message; they will ridicule you, beat you, shoot you, gas you. But you must do it, or the whole mission was a waste.”
When you think about it, the fact that you are reading this essay is pretty good evidence that when Someone tried this experiment once before, it must have worked. Not perfectly, of course. But well enough.
Happiness: The Ultimate Revenge
I’m a nice person. But for my nemesis I have reserved the ultimate revenge: a smile. by Tzvi Freeman
Most people know me as an amiable kind of guy, not too good at holding a grudge, eager to get along with everybody. Smiles, handshakes, and even warm, real hugs go easy for me.
But there’s one guy for whom I have no niceness, no pleasant words, certainly no hug, not even a handshake. Look, I’m not hiding anything here—plenty of times I’ve returned his greetings with a blunt “get lost.” Or just ignored him entirely as though he does not exist.
Okay, that’s nasty. But considering the damage this guy has done to me and to my family over many years of my life—deliberately and maliciously wrecking everything I ever built up, backstabbing, ridiculing, lying and cheating—I feel my attitude is justified.
I’m not ready to forgive, either.I’m not ready to forgive. I would be putting myself at serious risk. As long he does not relent—and that seems a very distant likelihood—I would be putting myself at serious risk by doing so.
Instead, I’ve searched for years to find ways to take revenge, to hurt him as much as he has hurt me.
Just recently I found such a strategy. Something that causes him to shudder in distress and agony, to writhe in pain and anguish. And just watching that—look, I’m not proud to say this, but it’s true—that brings me great delight. And it’s so simple.
All I have to do is look him straight in the face and smile. Yes, smile, look happy—even if I’m not really feeling that way inside. Even if I’m in the throes of recovery from his latest antics and bullying. Even at those times I feel the least like smiling—look, if the actors in Hollywood can put on a show, I can do the same.
And it’s worth it. It becomes so much easier when I see how much that smile disturbs my nemesis, how paled he is by it, how much it turns his stomach to see me happy, unperturbed and calm.
Which all makes sense. After all, what’s his motive in everything he’s done to me? Nothing more than his screwy pleasure in seeing me down. Down, under his thumb, hurting through his conniving. Once I’m down, I become an easier target for more of his ploys. He can trap me, blame me, make me feel like a piece of dirt and pull me into any sort of inanity he wants.
So when he sees I’m smiling, enjoying life and celebrating it, boy, does that pain him. I can see it in his eyes, as though I’m one of those Japanese monster wasps squirting acid into the eyes of their victims. Stunned and recoiling in shock, he runs to hide back in the filth of his lair. And whaddayaknow, I hear less of him.
I’m telling this to you because this character is still at large.I’m telling you because this character is still at large. He’s a danger to all of us. Keep yourself away from him, your children away, and especially your teens. He should not be admitted to any place of worship or community event. I’m even going to reveal his identity, for the protection of the community. He goes under several names. Sometimes Yetzer Hara, sometimes Big Dark Thing, or Depression, or Sadness; or Inadequacy or Addiction; or the Beasties or the Hormones.
Whatever name he comes under, if he pops up in your life, whatever dumb excuse he gives you—and believe me, he’s a genius at dumb excuses—you gotta know that he’s only there for one reason: To clip the wings of your soul, brutally crush any motivation to move forward, strangle any inspiration you have left, and smear your guts against the pavement, leaving you to rot in the worms and maggots of self-pity and despair.
So just do as I do: Smile back. Savor the sweet taste of the ultimate revenge.
Will it solve all your problems? No. There’s still work to do—to change, to lift yourself higher. But it’s a heck of a lot easier to climb those mountains without a 500-pound schlemiel clinging to your neck. For one thing, you can start breathing again.
Sure, he may return and scream, “Idiot! Why are you smiling! Don’t you realize how stupid you look with that dumb smile? Don’t you realize how badly I’ve messed you up?”
But then you can just answer him, “I’m a Jew and I don’t serve you. I serve the One Above, in an act of love. He runs the whole wide world, and even though I have nothing to rhyme with that, I’ll smile as much as I want. Too bad, you lose.”
PREP UP FOR PURIM
9 Life Lessons From Queen Esther
Queen Esther, the heroine of the Purim story and one of the greatest Jewish women in history. by Yehuda L. Ceitlin
Queen Esther, the heroine of the Purim story, is widely regarded as one of the greatest Jewish women in history. Her amazing life story contains lessons that apply to all of us.
Here are nine practical life lessons we can learn from Queen Esther:
1. Believe in your hidden powers.
Esther’s name means “hidden” in Hebrew. First, she kept hidden her identity as a Jew in the palace of the Persian king. She also didn’t lose hope when it seemed that G‑d’s protection of the Jewish people was in hiding. Even when she was sequestered in darkness, she called upon her strengths and courage to have an impact, and her actions ultimately saved the Jewish people. We too can tap into our own hidden powers and utterly transform events.1
2. Embrace your destiny.
At first Esther tried hiding from King Ahasuerus’s guards to avoid marrying him, but ultimately she couldn’t avoid the inevitable. When she was made queen, Mordechai, the leader of the Jews at the time, understood that “such a thing would not have happened to such a righteous woman unless she was destined to rescue her people [through it].” G‑d places us where we need to be in order to fulfill our mission in life.2
3. Let your inner beauty shine.
When contestants vying to be Ahasuerus’s new queen were brought to the palace, they were given a lengthy beauty regimen involving physical pampering and cosmetic treatments, but Esther declined those luxuries. Instead, it was her natural beauty that immediately captured the king’s attention above all the others. You are the best version of yourself.3
4. Be principled.
Even in the palace, Esther ate only kosher food. And when the king went out of his way to persuade her to tell him her national origin (he threw a party in her honor, gave tax breaks to citizens and considered marrying another), she held her ground. Let your principles guide you.4
5. We’re stronger together.
One of Haman’s complaints against the Jews was that they “a dispersed and disunited people.” In response, Esther told Mordechai to gather all the Jews. The best answer to hatred is unity.5
6. When in trouble, turn to G‑d.
Esther understood that the salvation of her people hinged on their special relationship with G‑d. Pleading at the feet of a mortal king was merely a facade behind which to disguise the Divine miracle. The true vehicle of their salvation would be repentance and prayer. First get in line with the Creator, then with His creations.6
7. Take the lead in action.
Esther set forth a plan for action, and Mordechai dutifully obeyed. “The act is the main thing,” says the Talmud. Because of her leadership, Esther saved her people, and the Megillah was named after her.7
8. Prepare to make sacrifices.
As queen, Esther would personally have been spared from the decree of annihilation, but she stood with her people. To make her case, she needed to approach the king without being summoned—a capital offense. And she did so, saying, “If I perish, I perish.”8
9. Never lose hope.
After the ordeal was over, Esther requested that her story be documented. What was Esther trying to accomplish in telling the Purim story? And what is her message to us? According to one commentary, the basic message of Esther’s story is this: No matter how hopeless your situation may seem, never lose hope.9
FOOTNOTES
1.Likkutei Sichot, vol. 17, p. 360.
2.Rashi, Esther 2:11.
3.Esther 2:15.
4.Mishnah Berurah 695:12.
5.Iturei Torah.
6.Likkutei Sichot, vol. 6, p. 191.
7.Avot 1:17.
8.Esther 4:16.
9.Siftei Chachamim, introduction to Tractate Megillah.
Why Is Work Permitted on Purim?
I have been told that you’re allowed to work on the holidays of Purim and Chanukah. Why are those holidays different than Passover, Sukkot and Shavuot, when most work is prohibited, almost like Shabbat? by Yehuda Shurpin
Question:
I have been told that you’re allowed to work on the holidays of Purim andChanukah. Why are those holidays different than Passover, Sukkot andShavuot, when most work is prohibited, almost like Shabbat? What is the underlying distinction?
Answer
Let’s start at the beginning.
There are six days of the year that are known as Yomim Tovim (holidays), on which we are prohibited from working: The first and last days of Passover and Sukkot, and one day of Shavuot and Rosh Hashanah1 (in the diaspora, additional days are celebrated2).
While these days are not as strict as Shabbat and Yom Kippur, nonetheless the Torah says regarding these days, “No work may be done on these [days]. The only [work] that you may do is that which is needed so that everyone will be able to eat.”3 4
Since Purim and Chanukah are not on this list—in fact, they are not mentioned in the Five Books of Moses at all, since these holidays commemorate events that happened later in history—one might assume that work is permitted on these days. After all, there is no verse that prohibits it.
But it’s not that simple . . .
Wait! Purim Is a Yom Tov!
We read in the book of Esther that Purim was declared “a day of joy and feasting and Yom Tov . . .”5
What is the meaning of these three expressions of celebration?
The Talmud expounds that they reveal three unique Purim laws:6
“Joy” teaches us that it is forbidden to mourn.
“‘Feasting”’ adds that it is forbidden to fast.
“Yom Tov” ’ indicates that it is forbidden to work.
But wait! If work is prohibited on Purim, ask the sages of the Talmud, why was Rabbi Judah the Prince spotted planting on Purim day?
Two explanations are offered:
A few verses later in the Megillah,7 the Purim celebration is mentioned again. This time, it is simply called a time of “feasting and joy,” with no mention of “Yom Tov.”
What changed?
The Talmud explains that at first the sages of that era had planned on establishing Purim as a full holiday on which work (i.e., strenuous physical labor such as agricultural work, or toiling for financial gain) would be forbidden. However, in the end this was never accepted as binding. Thus, Rabbi Judah was technically permitted to plant, although, the Talmud qualifies, certain communities may have had the custom not to work on Purim.
Alternatively, it may actually have been the custom in Rabbi Judah’s community to abstain from working on Purim. However, Rabbi Judah’s gardening was “festive” in nature, since the tree he was planting would be used for the purpose of shading festive banquets.
We therefore learn an important distinction from this story. The “work” we abstain from on Purim is not the melachot, the acts that are normally forbidden on Shabbat and Yom Tov, such as building a fire and writing. (After all, as we explained, there is no actual verse stating that such work is prohibited.) Rather, it is “work” in the conventional sense—strenuous physical labor such as agricultural work, or toiling for financial gain. But since Rabbi Judah was planting in honor of the festivities, this work was perfectly permissible.
Let’s Get Practical
On Chanukah, according to all, one is permitted to work. With regard to Purim, things get a bit more complicated.
On Purim, strictly speaking, unless the community’s custom is to the contrary—in which case one is required to follow the custom of his community—it is permitted to work. However, nowadays, the prevailing practice is to refrain from working on Purim. As the sages stated, “Whoever works on Purim won’t see a blessing from the profits earned."8
The purpose of refraining from work is to spend the day immersed in the four unique mitzvahs of Purim and in the joyous, festive mood of the day. With that in mind, here are some guidelines for the “no-work” custom:
Unlike Shabbat and Yom Tov, there is no problem with having your business operated on Purim by non-Jewish employees.9
If your work is not difficult and you enjoy it, it is technically permitted,10 although still not recommended.11
If taking a day off from work will cause you financial hardship, it is permitted to work.12
Any work that is necessary to facilitate a mitzvah or Purim-related activities is permitted.13 So, for example, a grocery store can remain open to allow people to do their last-minute Purim shopping.14
As mentioned earlier, it is permitted to perform acts that are considered “work” on Shabbat and Yom Tov, such as driving or turning on lights.
According to some, the discussion about working on Purim applies only to the daytime.15 Nevertheless, on Purim evening, one should refrain from working (or even eating or napping) until after the Megillah reading.16 In case of necessity, a rabbi should be consulted.
Purim is the most joyous day on the Jewish calendar, as it is a day “that was reversed from grief to joy and from mourning to Yom Tov.”17 And that joy will surely be compounded with the coming of Moshiach. May it be speedily in our days!
FOOTNOTES
1.In actuality, even in Israel Rosh Hashanah is celebrated for two days. For more on that, see The Two Days of Rosh Hashanah.
2.For more on this, see Why Do We Still Celebrate Holidays for Two Days in the Diaspora?
3.Exodus 12:16, see also Leviticus 23:7.
4.For more on which actions are forbidden on Yom Tov, see Laws of Yom Tov.
5.Esther 9:19.
6.Talmud, Megillah 5b.
7.Esther 9:22.
8.Shulchan Aruch, Orach Chaim 696:1.
9.Mishnah Berurah, Orach Chaim 696:2.
10.Mishnah Berurah, Orach Chaim 696:3.
11.Kaf Hachaim, Orach Chaim 696:5.
12.Shaar Tziyon (from Mishna Berurah) on Orach Chaim 696:2.
13.Shulchan Aruch, Orach Chaim 696:2.
14.See Mishnah Berurah, Orach Chaim 696:3 and Piskei Teshuvot ad loc.
15.See Rambam, Hilchot Megillah 2:14 and Pri Megadim Mitzbetzot Zehav 696:1.
16.Mishnah Berurah, Orach Chaim 692:15.
17.Esther 9:22.
PARSHAH
When Small Sacrifices Are Huge
My work was stunted. My ideas were disjointed. I felt ill at ease with my life and with my accomplishments. by Chana Weisberg
Dear Reader,
This week I had a great week.
The sun was shining outside just as brilliantly as my inner sun.
I was productive. I wrote essays; the ideas flowed from my pen. I taught extensively, returning from each class exhausted but exhilarated. I was flying high, exuberant. I was meeting people, connecting and touching them deeply just as I was being touched by them. Instead of becoming tired or depleted, the more I did, the more energized I became.
Life was smiling at me. Hey, I even got an unexpected check in the mail that I had given up on. The week flew by in a dizzying haze of contentment.
How different this week was from last week.
Last week my work was stunted. My ideas were disjointed. I felt ill at ease with my life and with my accomplishments. There seemed to be a perpetual cloud over my home.
No matter what I was doing, I felt restless, uninspired. I couldn’t find my equilibrium, no matter how much I relaxed or how much I worked. I couldn’t find solutions to my inner confusion.
In the supermarket or on the streets, people seemed impatient; my friends and family sounded annoyed. The news I read reported tragedy and sadness, and the bills on my desk were unsettling.
Isn’t life like that? Some days we’re riding high. Other days we’re in the pits.
Some days it’s natural for us to do good things; the more we do, the higher we climb on an upward ascent to even more positivity. Other times we get stuck on a downward spiral of circumstances that rob us of opportunity, and before we know it we’re in a rut, depleted of energy and initiative.
This week’s Torah portion begins with G‑d calling Moses:
G‑d called to Moses; and G‑d spoke to him out of the Tent of Meeting, saying:
Speak to the children of Israel, and say to them: A man who shall bring of you an offering to G‑d . . .
The book of Leviticus teaches the laws of sacrifices. Interestingly, the last letter of the first word in this book—Vayikra, G‑d’s call to Moses—is written with an unusually small aleph. A scribal abnormality; what does it tell us?
There are all kinds of “offerings” we can give to G‑d: our energy and talents, our dispositions and thoughts, our words and deeds. These all create a kinder home for G‑d in this world.
When the world is smiling at us, when we are feeling “big” and productive, it can be easier to feel connected to G‑d. But what about during the drudgery or smallness of life, when we are feeling unfulfilled and uninspired?
Maintaining our connection—finding our “offering”—in times of dullness and restlessness remains our greatest challenge.
And perhaps that’s when we most need to remember: Vayikra, G‑d is calling to us, even in these moments of smallness and loneliness, inviting us to bring our offering and to come close.
Chana Weisberg,
Editor, TJW
Remember: The Answer to Terrorism
When we understand the root and essence of terrorism, we also understand how despite its awful power we can fight it, each and every one of us, until it is absolutely destroyed. by Sara Esther Crispe
Suicide bombings. Hijackings. Beheadings. Shootings. Stabbings.
Planes. Trains. Subways. Buses. Light-rail stops.
Convention Centers. Hotels. Supermarkets. Stadiums.
Jihad. The PLO. Al Qaeda. Osama Bin Laden. Yasser Arafat. Saddam Hussein. The Abu Nidal Organization. Hamas. Hezbollah. Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade. The Taliban. ISIS . . .
Terrorism.
You can call it any name you want. You can pick virtually any location, anywhere in the world. The details change, but the basic facts remain the same. Throughout history, there have been those who have sought to destroy humanity. There have been those who have killed for the sake of killing, whose goal has been to eradicate freedom, peace and harmony. These enemies may span the religious spectrum. They may span the cultural and geographical and racial spectrum. But ultimately, they are one and the same.
When a terrorist attack strikes our country, our community, our home, fear sets in. Why? What is so traumatic about a terror attack? What differentiates terrorism from every other form of death? Why has the U.S. government dedicated billions of dollars and resources to search for and eliminate terror cells throughout the world?
If we look at statistics, a little more than 18,000 people throughout the world were murdered at the hands of terrorists in 2013. That same year, more than 32,000 peple—nearly twice as many—were killed in the United States from car accidents alone.
Logically, if terrorism scares us so much, we should be that much more afraid to get behind the wheel of a car. And yet the majority of us do it, day after day, without a second thought. How many people stop and wonder if perhaps they should take public transportation instead? How many people ensure that their family members never travel together in the same car, lest they be in a crash?
And yet terrorists have instilled fear in our hearts, even though they have not caused the mass fatalities they would like to claim are possible. However, they have succeeded in one very important thing. They have accomplished something perhaps even more destructive than the killing of our bodies. They have managed to erode our sense of security, our hope and our faith.
Terrorism is not new. And it apparently isn’t going away. But there is something we can do about it. When we understand the root and essence of terrorism, we also understand how, despite its awful power, we can fight it, each and every one of us, until it is absolutely destroyed.
The negative force of terror has been with us since the dawn of human history. The names and faces and national identities of the terrorists change from place to place and from era to era, but the primordial force that drives them has a single name: Amalek.
The Torah teaches us that “G‑d is at war with Amalek for all generations” (Exodus 17:16). “In every generation,” say our sages, “Amalek rises to destroy us, and each time he clothes himself in a different nation” (Me’am Loez, Devarim, vol. 3, p. 977).
Our Amalek doesn’t just kill us; Amalek makes us doubtfirst encounter was long ago. Since that time, there have been many others. Yet our mission and commandment remain the same:
“Remember what Amalek did to you on the road, on your way out of Egypt. That he encountered you on the way and cut off those lagging to your rear, when you were tired and exhausted; he did not fear G‑d. Therefore . . . you must obliterate the memory of Amalek from under the heavens. Do not forget.”(Deuteronomy 25:17–19)
Amalek’s danger is not in their ability to kill. Cars kill more. Amalek doesn’t just kill us; Amalek makes us doubt.
Cars do not seek to destroy us. Amalek plans and plots and aims to hurt us, to maim us and to murder us. And every time they do, they make us doubt more.
They make us doubt if we are safe, if we are secure, if we are taken care of. They try to paralyze us and make us think twice before continuing on with our daily lives. They try to show us how vulnerable we are, and how nothing is as it appears. They make us doubt the very reality of ourselves, our lives, our G‑d.
As the Torah commentaries point out, the numerical value of the Hebrew word Amalek equals that of the word safek, “doubt.”
How can we defeat modern-day Amaleks? We have many weapons with which to fight them. And one crucial defense against the debilitating doubt they sow in our souls.
The Torah gives us three commandments in regards to Amalek. First, we must wage war against the seed of Amalek; we must do everything in our power to destroy them. Second, we must not forget what Amalek has done to us. And third, we are commanded to remember.
It would appear that the second and third are virtually the same thing. Why would the Torah trouble to command us both to remember and not to forget?
The Torah is telling us that on the one hand, we must never forget the suffering that we endured, never forget what Amalek has done—and can do—to us. This is important, so that we never relax our efforts to do everything in our power to fight them.
But that alone is not enough. We must also remember—actively focus our minds on the source of our power to defeat Amalek. We must remember that we survived. We must remember that we were not destroyed; that we lived, we continued, and we flourished.
Amalek is what brings doubt to our minds. It seeks to deprive us of trust in ourselves, in our fellow man, and ultimately in our Creator. When we lose our faith, we lose everything. It is then that Amalek is able to attack us.
Yet we have something infinitely more powerful than doubt. We have the power to remember, to unearth the indestructible faith that resides in the core of our souls: our faith in our G‑d, the G‑d of goodness and life.
It is a sad irony that it often takes tragedy to bring us together. American patriotism flourished following the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as did French resolve after the attacks in Paris this past November.
But that’s not enough. We are commanded to rememberIt’s not enough to suffer such tragedy and then move on. Because after we are struck, we do not continue in the same way. The doubt sets in and eats away, slowly but surely. We continue, but with a little less courage, a little less security, a little less faith.
So we must remember. We must take the strength and unity that rose to the surface under such terrible circumstances, and draw on them to build faith, trust and the ability to rebuild. We must remember how we united and cared for one another. We must remember the well of faith that burst forth in the midst of tragedy. We must remember that no matter how hard it was, Amalek did not win. For we survived.
We have the ability and the power to destroy Amalek. There is the Amalek within each and every one of us that seeks to weaken us individually, and there is the Amalek that seeks universally to bring us down. Both must be eradicated. And when they are, it is then that we can be redeemed. For we are taught that in order for Moshiach to come, we must first rid the world of Amalek, of the evil that seeks to destroy us.
There is a famous story that beautifully illustrates the power of faith. The Previous Lubavitcher Rebbe—Rabbi Yosef Yitzchok Schneersohn, of righteous memory—was imprisoned in Soviet Russia for his religious leadership. At one point when he was interrogated, those questioning him were bothered by his utter lack of fear. They were used to their victims trembling, weeping and begging for mercy. But this rabbi calmly sat and answered their questions. Hoping to jolt him into submission, an interrogator waved a gun in his face. The rebbe merely smiled and said, “That toy may instill fear in one who has many gods and one world. I have One G‑d and two worlds. So your toy doesn’t frighten me.”
Today, the wounds and pain terror brings are all too real. The grief is palpable. We cannot change what has happened, but we can help change what will happen. Fearing Amalek will not help. Running away from Amalek will not help. Rather, we must not forget that they are our enemy. We must face them and destroy them. And we are able to. We have the power.
But only if we remember to remember.
When Small Sacrifices Are Huge
My work was stunted. My ideas were disjointed. I felt ill at ease with my life and with my accomplishments. by Chana Weisberg
Dear Reader,
This week I had a great week.
The sun was shining outside just as brilliantly as my inner sun.
I was productive. I wrote essays; the ideas flowed from my pen. I taught extensively, returning from each class exhausted but exhilarated. I was flying high, exuberant. I was meeting people, connecting and touching them deeply just as I was being touched by them. Instead of becoming tired or depleted, the more I did, the more energized I became.
Life was smiling at me. Hey, I even got an unexpected check in the mail that I had given up on. The week flew by in a dizzying haze of contentment.
How different this week was from last week.
Last week my work was stunted. My ideas were disjointed. I felt ill at ease with my life and with my accomplishments. There seemed to be a perpetual cloud over my home.
No matter what I was doing, I felt restless, uninspired. I couldn’t find my equilibrium, no matter how much I relaxed or how much I worked. I couldn’t find solutions to my inner confusion.
In the supermarket or on the streets, people seemed impatient; my friends and family sounded annoyed. The news I read reported tragedy and sadness, and the bills on my desk were unsettling.
Isn’t life like that? Some days we’re riding high. Other days we’re in the pits.
Some days it’s natural for us to do good things; the more we do, the higher we climb on an upward ascent to even more positivity. Other times we get stuck on a downward spiral of circumstances that rob us of opportunity, and before we know it we’re in a rut, depleted of energy and initiative.
This week’s Torah portion begins with G‑d calling Moses:
G‑d called to Moses; and G‑d spoke to him out of the Tent of Meeting, saying:
Speak to the children of Israel, and say to them: A man who shall bring of you an offering to G‑d . . .
The book of Leviticus teaches the laws of sacrifices. Interestingly, the last letter of the first word in this book—Vayikra, G‑d’s call to Moses—is written with an unusually small aleph. A scribal abnormality; what does it tell us?
There are all kinds of “offerings” we can give to G‑d: our energy and talents, our dispositions and thoughts, our words and deeds. These all create a kinder home for G‑d in this world.
When the world is smiling at us, when we are feeling “big” and productive, it can be easier to feel connected to G‑d. But what about during the drudgery or smallness of life, when we are feeling unfulfilled and uninspired?
Maintaining our connection—finding our “offering”—in times of dullness and restlessness remains our greatest challenge.
And perhaps that’s when we most need to remember: Vayikra, G‑d is calling to us, even in these moments of smallness and loneliness, inviting us to bring our offering and to come close.
Chana Weisberg,
Editor, TJW
Remember: The Answer to Terrorism
When we understand the root and essence of terrorism, we also understand how despite its awful power we can fight it, each and every one of us, until it is absolutely destroyed. by Sara Esther Crispe
Suicide bombings. Hijackings. Beheadings. Shootings. Stabbings.
Planes. Trains. Subways. Buses. Light-rail stops.
Convention Centers. Hotels. Supermarkets. Stadiums.
Jihad. The PLO. Al Qaeda. Osama Bin Laden. Yasser Arafat. Saddam Hussein. The Abu Nidal Organization. Hamas. Hezbollah. Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade. The Taliban. ISIS . . .
Terrorism.
You can call it any name you want. You can pick virtually any location, anywhere in the world. The details change, but the basic facts remain the same. Throughout history, there have been those who have sought to destroy humanity. There have been those who have killed for the sake of killing, whose goal has been to eradicate freedom, peace and harmony. These enemies may span the religious spectrum. They may span the cultural and geographical and racial spectrum. But ultimately, they are one and the same.
When a terrorist attack strikes our country, our community, our home, fear sets in. Why? What is so traumatic about a terror attack? What differentiates terrorism from every other form of death? Why has the U.S. government dedicated billions of dollars and resources to search for and eliminate terror cells throughout the world?
If we look at statistics, a little more than 18,000 people throughout the world were murdered at the hands of terrorists in 2013. That same year, more than 32,000 peple—nearly twice as many—were killed in the United States from car accidents alone.
Logically, if terrorism scares us so much, we should be that much more afraid to get behind the wheel of a car. And yet the majority of us do it, day after day, without a second thought. How many people stop and wonder if perhaps they should take public transportation instead? How many people ensure that their family members never travel together in the same car, lest they be in a crash?
And yet terrorists have instilled fear in our hearts, even though they have not caused the mass fatalities they would like to claim are possible. However, they have succeeded in one very important thing. They have accomplished something perhaps even more destructive than the killing of our bodies. They have managed to erode our sense of security, our hope and our faith.
Terrorism is not new. And it apparently isn’t going away. But there is something we can do about it. When we understand the root and essence of terrorism, we also understand how, despite its awful power, we can fight it, each and every one of us, until it is absolutely destroyed.
The negative force of terror has been with us since the dawn of human history. The names and faces and national identities of the terrorists change from place to place and from era to era, but the primordial force that drives them has a single name: Amalek.
The Torah teaches us that “G‑d is at war with Amalek for all generations” (Exodus 17:16). “In every generation,” say our sages, “Amalek rises to destroy us, and each time he clothes himself in a different nation” (Me’am Loez, Devarim, vol. 3, p. 977).
Our Amalek doesn’t just kill us; Amalek makes us doubtfirst encounter was long ago. Since that time, there have been many others. Yet our mission and commandment remain the same:
“Remember what Amalek did to you on the road, on your way out of Egypt. That he encountered you on the way and cut off those lagging to your rear, when you were tired and exhausted; he did not fear G‑d. Therefore . . . you must obliterate the memory of Amalek from under the heavens. Do not forget.”(Deuteronomy 25:17–19)
Amalek’s danger is not in their ability to kill. Cars kill more. Amalek doesn’t just kill us; Amalek makes us doubt.
Cars do not seek to destroy us. Amalek plans and plots and aims to hurt us, to maim us and to murder us. And every time they do, they make us doubt more.
They make us doubt if we are safe, if we are secure, if we are taken care of. They try to paralyze us and make us think twice before continuing on with our daily lives. They try to show us how vulnerable we are, and how nothing is as it appears. They make us doubt the very reality of ourselves, our lives, our G‑d.
As the Torah commentaries point out, the numerical value of the Hebrew word Amalek equals that of the word safek, “doubt.”
How can we defeat modern-day Amaleks? We have many weapons with which to fight them. And one crucial defense against the debilitating doubt they sow in our souls.
The Torah gives us three commandments in regards to Amalek. First, we must wage war against the seed of Amalek; we must do everything in our power to destroy them. Second, we must not forget what Amalek has done to us. And third, we are commanded to remember.
It would appear that the second and third are virtually the same thing. Why would the Torah trouble to command us both to remember and not to forget?
The Torah is telling us that on the one hand, we must never forget the suffering that we endured, never forget what Amalek has done—and can do—to us. This is important, so that we never relax our efforts to do everything in our power to fight them.
But that alone is not enough. We must also remember—actively focus our minds on the source of our power to defeat Amalek. We must remember that we survived. We must remember that we were not destroyed; that we lived, we continued, and we flourished.
Amalek is what brings doubt to our minds. It seeks to deprive us of trust in ourselves, in our fellow man, and ultimately in our Creator. When we lose our faith, we lose everything. It is then that Amalek is able to attack us.
Yet we have something infinitely more powerful than doubt. We have the power to remember, to unearth the indestructible faith that resides in the core of our souls: our faith in our G‑d, the G‑d of goodness and life.
It is a sad irony that it often takes tragedy to bring us together. American patriotism flourished following the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as did French resolve after the attacks in Paris this past November.
But that’s not enough. We are commanded to rememberIt’s not enough to suffer such tragedy and then move on. Because after we are struck, we do not continue in the same way. The doubt sets in and eats away, slowly but surely. We continue, but with a little less courage, a little less security, a little less faith.
So we must remember. We must take the strength and unity that rose to the surface under such terrible circumstances, and draw on them to build faith, trust and the ability to rebuild. We must remember how we united and cared for one another. We must remember the well of faith that burst forth in the midst of tragedy. We must remember that no matter how hard it was, Amalek did not win. For we survived.
We have the ability and the power to destroy Amalek. There is the Amalek within each and every one of us that seeks to weaken us individually, and there is the Amalek that seeks universally to bring us down. Both must be eradicated. And when they are, it is then that we can be redeemed. For we are taught that in order for Moshiach to come, we must first rid the world of Amalek, of the evil that seeks to destroy us.
There is a famous story that beautifully illustrates the power of faith. The Previous Lubavitcher Rebbe—Rabbi Yosef Yitzchok Schneersohn, of righteous memory—was imprisoned in Soviet Russia for his religious leadership. At one point when he was interrogated, those questioning him were bothered by his utter lack of fear. They were used to their victims trembling, weeping and begging for mercy. But this rabbi calmly sat and answered their questions. Hoping to jolt him into submission, an interrogator waved a gun in his face. The rebbe merely smiled and said, “That toy may instill fear in one who has many gods and one world. I have One G‑d and two worlds. So your toy doesn’t frighten me.”
Today, the wounds and pain terror brings are all too real. The grief is palpable. We cannot change what has happened, but we can help change what will happen. Fearing Amalek will not help. Running away from Amalek will not help. Rather, we must not forget that they are our enemy. We must face them and destroy them. And we are able to. We have the power.
But only if we remember to remember.
Learn Vayikra in Depth
A condensation of the weekly Torah portion alongside select commentaries culled from the Midrash, Talmud, Chassidic masters, and the broad corpus of Jewish scholarship.
Parshat Vayikra In-Depth
Leviticus 1:1-5:26
Parshah Summary
The second half of the Book of Exodus--whose reading we concluded last week--was taken up primarily with the details of the Sanctuary's construction; in Exodus' concluding verses, we read how the Sanctuary was erected and the Divine Presence came to dwell in it. Thus the Sanctuary commenced its function as the "Tent of Meeting" between G‑d and man: the place that is the focus of man's endeavor to serve his Creator, and where G‑d communicated to man and made His presence felt within a humanly-constructed abode.
In the Parshah of Vayikra, which opens the book of Leviticus, G‑d speaks to Moses from the Tent of Meeting and begins His communication of the laws governing the bringing of the korbanot, the animal and meal offerings that are the central feature of the service performed in the Sanctuary.
The olah can also be a male sheep or goat, in which case the same procedure is followed.
A turtledove or young pigeon can also be brought as an "ascending offering." Instead of being slaughtered through shechitah (cutting of the throat), the bird is killed by melikah--nipping off the head from the back of the neck. The blood is applied to the wall of the Altar, and the bird's crop and its adjoining feathers are removed and discarded; then the bird's body is burnedupon the Altar.
There are five types of donated meal offerings: 1) the standard "meal offering" whose kometz is removed before it is baked; 2) the "baked meal offering," which came in two forms: loaves or 3) flat matzot; 4) the "pan-fried" meal offering; 5) the minchat marcheshet, deep-fried in a pot.
The following rule applies to all the meal offerings (including the "loaves"):
Another meal offering mentioned here is the minchat bikkurim (also called the "omer") brought on the second day of Passover from the year's very first barley harvest. In this minchah, the kernels are roasted by fire before they are ground into flour.
(In addition, a meal offering accompanied all animal offerings.)
Like the olah, its blood was sprinkled upon the Altar; but unlike the olah, which "ascended" in its entirety upon the Altar, the meat of the shelamim was eaten by the "owner"--the one who brought the offering (two portions of the animal, the breast and the right thigh, were eaten by the priests). Only certain parts of the animal were burned on the fire atop the Altar:
Different offerings are prescribed depending on thestature of the transgressor.
A similar offering is also brought in the case that the entire community commits a transgression as a result of an erroneous ruling by the Sanhedrin (High Court).
Both the High Priest's sin offering and that of the congregation was distinguished in that it had to be a male bullock (the ordinary sin-offering was a female sheep or goat); it had to be offered by the High Priest; its blood was sprinkled "indoors"--inside the Sanctuary on the Golden Altar and opposite the Parochet; after the chalabim were burned on the Altar, the rest of the animal was not eaten by the priests (as was the case with ordinary sin-offerings) but rather "the skin of the bullock, and all its flesh, with its head, its legs, its inwards and its dung, even the whole bullock shall he carry forth outside the camp to a clean place... and burn it on the wood with fire."
A nassi (king) who commits an inadvertent transgression brings an offering similar to the standard sin-offering, except that it must be a male goat.
Anyone else who sins inadvertently, brings
With certain transgressions (such as failure to fulfill an oath to bear witness, or entering the Sanctuary in a state of ritual impurity), the sin-offering brought depended on the financial ability of the transgressor. One who could not afford a female sheep or goat, brought two turtledoves or two young pigeons--one bird to be brought as an "ascending offering" and the second bird as a sin offering. A person of even lesser means, who could not even afford two birds, brought a meal offering, on which "he shall put no oil upon it, neither shall he put any frankincense upon it, for it is a sin offering."
Three types of asham are described in our Parshah. The first is brought by one who unintentionally made unauthorized use of property belonging to the Sanctuary--a crime called me'illah ("betrayal"). He must pay back what he had expropriated and add to that an additional one-fifth of its value, and also bring an asham to obtain atonement for his unintentional trespass.
A second type of "guilt offering" is the asham talu, brought by one who thinks he may have unwittingly committed a transgression, but is not sure (for example, he had two pieces of meat before him and ate one of them; later, he discovers that one of them was cheilev--forbidden fat--a trespass which would obligate him to bring a sin offering if he would know with certainty that he committed it).
The third and last asham of our Parshah is the one brought in atonement by one who swears falsely in the process of defrauding his fellow man:
In the Parshah of Vayikra, which opens the book of Leviticus, G‑d speaks to Moses from the Tent of Meeting and begins His communication of the laws governing the bringing of the korbanot, the animal and meal offerings that are the central feature of the service performed in the Sanctuary.
And He called to Moses; and G‑d spoke to him out of the Tent of Meeting, saying:
Speak to the children of Israel, and say to them: Aman who shall bring near of you an offering to G‑d; of the cattle, of the herd and of the flock, shall you bring near your offering...
The first korban to be described is the olah, the "ascending" offering (commonly referred to as the "burnt offering"), whose distinguishing feature is that it is raised to G‑d, in its entirety, by the fire atop the Altar.Speak to the children of Israel, and say to them: Aman who shall bring near of you an offering to G‑d; of the cattle, of the herd and of the flock, shall you bring near your offering...
If his offering be an Ascending Offering of the herd, let him offer a male without blemish; to the entrance of the Tent of Meeting shall he bring it near, that he may be accepted in goodwill before G‑d.
And he shall lean his hand upon the head of the offering; and it shall be accepted for him to make atonement for him.
And he shall slaughter the bullock before G‑d; and the priests, Aaron's sons, shall bring near the blood, and sprinkle the blood round about upon the Altar that is by the entrance of the Tent of Meeting.
And he shall skin the offering, and cut it into its pieces
And the sons of Aaron the priest shall put fire upon the Altar, and arrange the wood upon the fire. And the priests, Aaron's sons, shall arrange the parts, the head, and the fat upon the wood that is on the fire which is upon the Altar. Its inwards and its legs shall he wash in water.
And the priest shall burn all on the Altar, an ascending offering, a fire-offering of a sweet savorto G‑d.A turtledove or young pigeon can also be brought as an "ascending offering." Instead of being slaughtered through shechitah (cutting of the throat), the bird is killed by melikah--nipping off the head from the back of the neck. The blood is applied to the wall of the Altar, and the bird's crop and its adjoining feathers are removed and discarded; then the bird's body is burnedupon the Altar.
Meal Offerings
And a soul who shall offer a meal offering to G‑d...
Meal offerings, called menachot ("gifts"), are prepared of fine flour, with olive oil and frankincense. The priest removes a kometz ("handful"--actually the amount grasped by his three middle fingers), to be burned on the Altar; the remainder is eaten by the priests.There are five types of donated meal offerings: 1) the standard "meal offering" whose kometz is removed before it is baked; 2) the "baked meal offering," which came in two forms: loaves or 3) flat matzot; 4) the "pan-fried" meal offering; 5) the minchat marcheshet, deep-fried in a pot.
The following rule applies to all the meal offerings (including the "loaves"):
No meal offering, which you shall bring to G‑d, shall be made leavened; for you shall burn no leaven, nor any honey, in any offering of G‑d made by fire...
Another rule is that,
Your every meal offering shall you season with salt; never shall you suspend the salt covenant of your G‑d.
This latter rule applies to all korbanot: "With all your offerings you shall offer salt."Another meal offering mentioned here is the minchat bikkurim (also called the "omer") brought on the second day of Passover from the year's very first barley harvest. In this minchah, the kernels are roasted by fire before they are ground into flour.
(In addition, a meal offering accompanied all animal offerings.)
The Peace OfferingThe shelamim, or "peace offering," could be either male or female, and either from "the herd" (i.e., an ox or a cow), a sheep or a goat.
Like the olah, its blood was sprinkled upon the Altar; but unlike the olah, which "ascended" in its entirety upon the Altar, the meat of the shelamim was eaten by the "owner"--the one who brought the offering (two portions of the animal, the breast and the right thigh, were eaten by the priests). Only certain parts of the animal were burned on the fire atop the Altar:
The fat that covers the inwards, and all the fat that is upon the inwards, and the two kidneys and the fat that is on them, which is by the flanks, and the appendage of the liver which he shall remove with the kidneys.
If the peace offering is a sheep, "the whole fat tail, up to the backbone" was added to these.
And the priest shall burn it on the Altar; it is [divine]food, a fire-offering, a sweet savor to G‑d.
Because they are offered to G‑d on the Altar, these specified veins of fat, which the Torah calls cheilev, are forbidden for consumption in all animals: "It shall be a perpetual statute for your generations throughout all your habitations: all cheilev and all blood, you shall not eat."The Sin OfferingsThe korbanot discussed up to this point are "donations"--offerings pledged out of a desire to give to G‑d. Now the Torah moves on to discuss obligatory offerings, such as the chatat, the "sin-offering" brought to atone for an inadvertent transgression of the divine will.
And G‑d spoke to Moses, saying:
... If a soul shall sin through ignorance against any of the commandments of G‑d, and shall do one of the things that must not be done...
If the anointed priest does sin to the guilt of the people, he shall bring... a young bullock without blemish to G‑d.
If the entire congregation of Israel shall sin through ignorance, and the thing be hid from the eyes of the community, and they have done something against any of the commandments of G‑d concerning things which should not be done...
When the sin which they have sinned is known, then the congregation shall offer a young bullock for the sin, and bring it before the Tent of Meeting. And the elders of the congregation shall lean their hands on the head of the bullock before G‑d..
A nassi (king) who commits an inadvertent transgression brings an offering similar to the standard sin-offering, except that it must be a male goat.
Anyone else who sins inadvertently, brings
a kid of the goats... [or] a lamb... a female without blemish.
And he shall lean his hand upon the head of the sin offering, and slaughter it for a sin offering in the place where they slaughter the burnt offering.
And the priest shall take of the blood of the sin offering with his finger, and put it upon the horns of the Altar of Burnt Offering; and all the [remaining] blood he shall pour into the foundation of the Altar.
And he shall remove its fat, as the fat is removed from... the peace offering; and the priest shall burn these upon the Altar, upon the pyres of G‑d.
And the priest shall make atonement for his sin that he has committed, and it shall be forgiven him.
Guilt OfferingsFor certain transgressions, the offering brought in atonement is not a "sin offering" but an asham ("guilt offering"). An asham is distinguished from the standard sin offering in that it was a male sheep, and that it had to be worth at least "two shekels of silver of the shekel of the Sanctuary."
Three types of asham are described in our Parshah. The first is brought by one who unintentionally made unauthorized use of property belonging to the Sanctuary--a crime called me'illah ("betrayal"). He must pay back what he had expropriated and add to that an additional one-fifth of its value, and also bring an asham to obtain atonement for his unintentional trespass.
A second type of "guilt offering" is the asham talu, brought by one who thinks he may have unwittingly committed a transgression, but is not sure (for example, he had two pieces of meat before him and ate one of them; later, he discovers that one of them was cheilev--forbidden fat--a trespass which would obligate him to bring a sin offering if he would know with certainty that he committed it).
The third and last asham of our Parshah is the one brought in atonement by one who swears falsely in the process of defrauding his fellow man:
If a person sin, and commit a betrayal against G‑d, and lie to his fellow regarding that which was delivered him to keep, or in a loan, or in a thing taken away by violence, or withholding payment; or he found a lost object and has lied concerning it; if he swears falsely in any of all these that a man does, sinning in that...
He shall restore it in the principal, and shall add the fifth part more to it, and give it to him to whom it belongs, in the day of his [atonement of his] guilt.
And he shall bring his guilt offering to G‑d, a ram without blemish out of the flock, according to the value of a guilt offering, to the priest.
And the priest shall make atonement for him before G‑d: and it shall be forgiven him for anything of all that he has done wherein to incur guilt.
From Our Sages
Vayikra (Leviticus 1:1)
Said Rav Assi: Why do young children begin [the study of Torah] with the book of Leviticus, and not with Genesis? Surely it is because young children are pure, and the korbanot are pure; so let the pure come and engage in the study of the pure.
(Midrash Rabbah)
Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Lubavitch (who later became the third Rebbe of Chabad) enteredcheder on the day after Yom Kippur of the year 1792, eleven days after his third birthday. The child's grandfather, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, instructed Reb Avraham the melamed to begin the first lesson with the opening verses of Vayikra.Following the lesson, the child asked: "Why is the word vayikra written with a little aleph?"
For a long while Rabbi Schneur Zalman sat in a deep meditative trance. Then he explained:
"The first man, Adam, was 'the handiwork of G‑d,' and G‑d attested that his wisdom was greater than that of the angels. Adam was aware of his own greatness, and this awareness caused him to overestimate himself and led to his downfall in the sin of the Tree of Knowledge.
"Moses, who possessed a soul deriving fromchochmah of atzilut (the highest manifestation of the divine wisdom), was also aware of his own greatness. But this did not lead him toward self-aggrandizement. On the contrary, it evoked in him a broken and anguished heart, and made him extremely humble in his own eyes, thinking to himself that if someone else had been blessed with the gifts with which he, Moses, had been blessed, that other person would surely have achieved far more than himself. Thus G‑d testifies in the Torah that 'Moses was the most humble man upon the face of the earth.'
"In the letters of the Torah, which G‑d gave at Sinai, there are three sizes: intermediate letters, oversized letters, and miniature letters. As a rule, the Torah is written with intermediate letters, signifying that a person should strive for the level of "the intermediate man" (a concept that Rabbi Schneur Zalman puts forth in his Tanya). Adam's name is spelled with an oversize aleph (inChronicles 1:1), because his self-awareness led to his downfall. On the other hand, Moses, through his sense of insufficiency, attained the highest level of humility, expressed by the miniature aleph of Vayikra.
(From the talks of the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson)
Said Rabbi Tanchum ben Chanilai: Normally, a burden which is heavy for one is light for two, or one heavy for two is light for four; but can a burden too heavy for 600,000 be bearable for one? Now all Israel were standing before Mount Sinai, and saying: "If we hear the voice of G‑d... any more, we shall die" (Deuteronomy 5:22), whilst Moses heard the voice by himself and remained alive.
(Midrash Rabbah)
The verse does not say, "a man of you who shall bring near an offering," but, "a man who shall bring near of you an offering"--the offering must come from within the person. It is the animal within man that must be "brought near" and elevated by the divine fire upon the Altar.
Why does G‑d use the word adam for "man" (instead of the more common synonym ish)? To teach us that a person cannot offer to G‑d what has not been honestly obtained by him. G‑d is saying: " When you bring an offering to Me, be like Adam the first man, who could not have stolen from anyone, since he was alone in the world."
(Midrash Tanchuma; Rashi)
When we speak of Adam as one who "was alone in the world," we are speaking of the very first hours of his life. Thus we are speaking of Adam before he partook of the Tree of Knowledge--of man still unsullied by sin.This is the deeper significance of the Torah's reference to the bearer of a korban--which has the power to obtain atonement for a transgression--as an "Adam." Every man, the Torah is saying, harbors in the pith of his soul a pristine "Adam," a primordial man untouched by sin. Even at the very moment his external self was transgressing the divine will, his inner essence remained loyal to G‑d; it was only silenced and suppressed by his baser instincts. It is by accessing this core of purity, by unearthing that part of himself that did not sin in the first place and restoring it to its rightful place as the sovereign of his life, that man attains the state of teshuvah--return to his original state of perfection.
(The Lubavitcher Rebbe)
It is pleasurable to Me that I have spoken and My will was done.
(Sifri; Rashi)
[Regarding the offerings,] it is said: "This is an ordinance for ever to Israel" (II Chronicles 2:3). Rabbi Giddal said in the name of Rav: This refers to the Altar built in heaven where Michael, the great Prince, stands and offers up thereon an offering.Rabbi Yochanan said: It refers to the scholars who are occupied with the laws of Temple service--The Torah regards it as though the Temple were built in their days.
(Talmud, Menachot 110a)
The bird flies about and swoops throughout the world, and eats indiscriminately; it eats food obtained by robbery and by violence. Said G‑d: Since this crop is filled with the proceeds of robbery and violence, let it not be offered on the altar... On the other hand, the domestic animal is reared on the crib of its master and eats neither indiscriminately nor of that obtained by robbery or by violence; for this reason the whole of it is offered up.
(Midrash Rabbah; Rashi)
The wings, with the feathers, were burned with it. An ordinary being, should he smell the odor of burning feathers, is nauseated thereby... Why then all this? Just in order that the Altar may be sated and glorified by the sacrifice of a pauper.
(Midrash Rabbah; Rashi)
Why is the meal-offering distinguished in that the expression "soul" is used? Because G‑d says: "Who is it that usually brings a meal-offering? It is the poor man. I account it as though he had offered his own soul to Me."
Why is the meal-offering distinguished in that five kinds of oil dishes are stated in connection with it? This can be likened to the case of a human king for whom his friend had prepared a feast. The king knew that his friend was poor [and had only one food to offer him], so he said to him: "Prepare it for me in five kinds of dishes so that I will derive pleasure from you."
(Talmud, Menachot 104b)
It is said of a large ox, "A fire-offering, a sweet savor"; of a small bird, "A fire-offering, a sweet savor"; and of a meal-offering, "A fire-offering, a sweet savor." This is to teach you that it is the same whether a person offers much or little, so long as he directs his heart to heaven.
(Talmud, Menachot 110a)
An ox was once being led to sacrifice, but would not budge. A poor man came along with a bundle of endive in his hand. He held it out towards the ox, which ate it... and then allowed itself to be led to sacrifice. In a dream it was revealed to the owner of the ox: "The poor man's sacrifice superseded yours."Once a woman brought a handful of fine flour, and the priest despised her, saying: "See what she offers! What is there in this to eat? What is there in this to offer up?" It was shown to him in a dream: "Do not despise her! It is regarded as if she had sacrificed her own life."
(Midrash Rabbah)
Leaven, which is dough that has fermented and risen, represents self-inflation and pride, and there is nothing more abhorrent to G‑d. In the words of the Talmud, "G‑d says of the prideful one, 'He and I cannot dwell together in the world.'"
(The Chassidic Masters)
Ultra-sweet honey and ultra-sour leaven, are opposite extremes; G‑d does not like extremes.
(The Rebbe of Kotzk)
Never shall you suspend the salt covenant of your G‑d... with all your offerings you shall offer salt (2:13)
When G‑d separated the supernal waters from the lower waters (see Genesis 1:6-8), He made a covenant with the lower waters that their salt will be offered on the Altar.
(Rashi)
The world is one part wilderness, one part settled land, and one part sea. Said the sea to G‑d: "Master of the Universe! The Torah will be given in the wilderness; the Holy Temple will be built on settled land; and what about me?" Said G‑d: "The people of Israel will offer your salt upon the Altar."
(Yalkut HaReuveni)
The korban, which was the vehicle of the elevationof the world to G‑d, had to include "representatives" of all four sectors of the creation: the inanimate world, the vegetable world, the animal world, and the human world. Thus the korban was offered by a human being, and consisted of an animal, grain, and salt.
(Rabbi Isaac Luria)
Why is it called a "peace offering"? Because everyone partakes of it. The blood and fat go to the Altar, the breast and thigh to the priest, and the hide and flesh, to the owner.
(Torat Kohanim)
Do you think that He needs to eat? Does not the verse (Psalms 50:12-13) proclaim, "Should I hunger, I would not tell you, for the world, and all it contains, is Mine... Do I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats?" But it is not for My desire that you are offering, [says G‑d,] but for your own, as it is written (Leviticus 19:5), "For your own desire, you should offer it."
(Talmud, Menachot 110a)
When the Torah refers to the korbanot as "G‑d's bread," this is obviously a metaphor; but what is its significance? In what sense are we "feeding" G‑d when we offer up to Him ourselves and our material resources in the quest to serve Him?Our sages have said that "G‑d fills the world as a soul fills a body." On the human level, food is what sustains "life," which is the assertion of the soul's powers via its physical vessel, the body. And so it is with the divine life-force that suffuses the created existence: "G‑d's food" is what we would call whatever it is that asserts the divine reality as a manifest presence in our physical world.
With our every act of serving G‑d, we fulfill the divine purpose of creation--that "there be for Him a dwelling in the physical realms." We thus breathe life into the world-body, asserting and manifesting its quintessence and soul.
(The Chasssidic Masters)
Everything that is for the sake of G‑d should be of the best and most beautiful. When one builds a house of prayer, it should be more beautiful than his own dwelling. When one feeds the hungry, he should feed him of the best and sweetest of his table. When one clothes the naked, he should clothe him with the finest of his clothes. Whenever one designates something for a holy purpose, he should sanctify the finest of his possessions; as it is written, "All the fat is to G‑d."
(Maimonides)
When a leader sins, this becomes the excuse for everyone else's wrongdoings.
(The Gaon of Lissa)
The Torah employs the uncommon usage asher("that a...") to say: Fortunate (ashrei) is the generation whose leader applies himself to atone for his errors.
(Talmud; Rashi)
If a person sin, and hear the voice of adjuration, and is a witness, whether he has seen or known of it; if he does not testify, then he shall hear his iniquity (5:1)
There was once a governor who used to put to death the purchasers of stolen goods and release the thieves, and all used to find fault with him, saying that he was not acting correctly. What did he do? He issued a proclamation throughout the province, saying: "Let all the people go out to the campus!" What did he do then? He brought some weasels and placed before them portions of food. The weasels took the portions, and carried them to their holes. The next day he again issued a proclamation, saying: "Let all the people go out to the campus!" Again he brought weasels and placed portions of food before them, but stopped up all holes. The weasels took the portions, and carried them to their holes, but finding these stopped up, they brought their portions back to their places. Thus he demonstrated that all the trouble is due to receivers.This then we learn from the governor; how can we illustrate our texts by an example? Reuben stole from Simeon, and Levi knew of it. Said Reuben to Levi: "Do not testify against me, and I will give you half." The following day people enter the synagogue, and hear the overseer announce: "Who has stolen from Simeon?" and Levi is present there. Surely The Torah has decreed: "If he does not testify, then he shall hear his iniquity."
(Midrash Rabbah)
If a person witnesses a wrongdoing of his fellow, this is a message to him that he, too, is guilty of a similar failing.
(Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov)
moreThe addition should be a fifth of the addition and the principle together (i.e., he must add 25% of the principle); this is the opinion of Rabbi Yoshiah. Rabbi Jonathan says: a fifth of the principle.
(Talmud, Bava Metzia 54a)
One who knows for certain that he transgressed, brings a sin offering; one who doubts if he transgressed, must atone with a guilt offering. Why does the one who has perhaps not transgressed require the more valuable offering? Because his regret is not as complete.
(Raavad)
Said Rabbi Akiva: Why does the Torah consider him to have committed "a betrayal against G‑d"? ... Because in defrauding his fellow, he is also defrauding the Third Party to their dealings.
(Rashi)
How is the offender also defrauding G‑d? On the most basic level, he is defying the Supernal Author of the command, "You shall not steal." Another explanation is that although it may be that not a single earthly soul knows what really happened between the litigants, G‑d is the omnipresent witness to their dealings; so in addition to lying to his fellow, he is lying in face of the all-knowing "Third Party to their dealings."A deeper understanding of the defrauder's crime against G‑d can be derived from another saying by Rabbi Akiva, in which he speaks of how G‑d "acquired and bequeathed His world" to man (Talmud, Rosh Hashanah 31a). Chassidic teaching explains this to mean that the concept of human "property rights" over the resources of G‑d's the world is divinely ordained, and is integral to the divine purpose in creation: in order for man to be able develop his environment into a "home for G‑d," thereby making the world a true divine "acquisition," each individual's proprietorship over the portion of creation he is charged to develop must be defined and safeguarded. Hence G‑d's "bequest of His world" to man is at the very heart of His own ownership--this is the manner in which the Creator Himself desired that His "acquisition" of creation be realized.
Thus the Torah says: "If a person... commit a betrayal against G‑d, and lie to his fellow." You have not only lied to your fellow--you have betrayed the "Third Partner", depriving Him of His ownership of His world as He Himself defines it.
(The Lubavitcher Rebbe)
Mishloach Manot for Howard the Hermit
This year we’re not going to allow even one mishloach manot (food gift) in the house,” Shira announced as Purim approached. by Mendy Kaminker
“This year we’re not going to allow even one mishloach manot (food gift) in the house,” Shira announced as Purim approached. “All that candy is bad for the children’s teeth, and Passover is coming! How can we clean the house if there are pretzels under the couch and cookie crumbs in the playroom?”
Stan sighed. He could never understand what was so bad about the children enjoying a little candy. It was true that Passover was coming, but his wife had been talking about it since Rosh Hashanah. Actually, the minute Passover was over she had started saying, “Don’t go into that room with chametz(leavened food)!”
But Shira was determined, and when Purim arrived, she was ready.
“Happy Purim!” the neighbor called as she knocked on the door and entered holding mishloach manot. Shira was standing in the kitchen surrounded by themishloach manot she had packed. On the table, there was cellophane for wrapping more mishloach manot, and cards decorated with colorful clowns.
When the neighbor left, Shira took the candies out of the mishloach manot and repackaged them, so they could be sent to other neighbors.
Late in the afternoon, Shira was finally able to relax and smile. There wasn’t a trace of candy to be found in the house. She had checked off every name on the list of people to whom mishloach manot had to be sent. Every mishloach manot that came into the house had been repackaged and sent to someone else. Only two handfuls of chocolates remained, one for the children and one for their parents.
The festive Purim meal was cooking, and a wonderful smell filled the house, when there was another knock at the door. Who could it be?
“Hello! Happy Purim! How nice! Thank you for coming. Just one minute. I have something to give you!” Shira ran to the kitchen and said goodbye to the chocolates. The Feinbergs! Who knew they’d be coming? She was sure they had gone to visit their grandparents. Apparently not! And now Shira was left with an enormous mishloach manot full of the foods she so feared: crumbly cookies, a whole package of toffees, crackers. Oy! What was she going to do now?
“Stan, could you come here?”
“I’m sorry, I’m busy.”
“It’s urgent! Really urgent. Please come to the kitchen.”
Stan came in. One glance told him all.
“An extra mishloach manot, huh?”
“Yes. We have to get it out of the house.”
“It’s just one mishloach manot . . .” he began, but Shira cut him off.
“One? There’s enough here for thirty families. We can’t keep this in the house. Do you have any idea what we can do with it?”
“Let’s think. We’ve already given to all the neighbors, all the teachers and your cousin. Who else is left? No one.”
“Then let’s give it to someone we didn’t plan on giving to. Someone we don’t usually give to. Someone like . . .”
“Like?”
“Nu. Think.”
“Someone, someone . . . I have a great idea! Howard the Hermit! I’m sure the Feinbergs didn’t give him mishloach manot. I’ll give him the whole package. Just take their card out and stick in one of ours.”
“You’re a genius! I hope he’s home.”
Howard the Hermit lived across the street. No one knew who had given him the name “Howard the Hermit,” but everyone agreed that it suited him to a T. He almost never spoke, and he was always a little disheveled. Nobody ever visited him. The children didn’t like him, and he didn’t relate to the children. He came and went without attracting any attention. Sometime he muttered under his breath. Even Stan didn’t really know him. Sometimes they’d pass each other in the street, but that was all.
Stan made sure that the Feinbergs were nowhere in sight, took the mishloach manot and made his way to Howard’s house. He was a little apprehensive about meeting him. Who knew how he’d react? Would he yell? Smile? Or would he mutter under his breath?
Stan knocked.
A voice called out from the other side of the door. “I’m sorry. I have no money for you!”
“Howard . . . uh . . . I don’t want money,” Stan stuttered. “It’s me, Stan, from across the road.”
“One minute.”
Stan sensed that there was an eye at the peephole studying him. After a quiet moment, the door opened wide.
“Good afternoon! Happy Purim! I’ve come to give you mishloach manot.”
“Me?”
Stan blushed and nodded.
“You’re the first one to bring me mishloach manot this year.” Howard nodded his head as if he were trying to remember something. “In fact, I don’t think I’ve received any mishloach manot for at least five years.”
Stan wanted to say that he was sorry. He wanted to apologize for the neighbors, to say that they were just embarrassed to come because they didn’t really know Howard, and that from now on he would try to be a little nicer, and maybe invite him over for a Shabbat meal, and . . .
But Stan didn’t say anything.
“This is very nice of you,” said Howard, who suddenly didn’t seem so odd. “I really appreciate it. Could you wait here one moment?”
A minute later Howard appeared with a beautiful package of tropical fruits and a bottle of good wine. “This is for you. I prepared it last night in case someone came with mishloach manot, so that I’d have something to give in return.”
Stan wanted to cry, but he didn’t let himself. “This is beautiful. You have good taste.”
“Thank you. Have a happy Purim.” Howard smiled widely and closed the door.
VIDEO
The Incredible Jewish Renaissance in Russia
Precious little is known of the tremendous devotion and self-sacrifice of Chabad activists in upholding Judaism against the oppressive Communists’ ruthless stamping out of religion. Rabbi Dovid Eliezrie shares fascinating insights and anecdotes to illustrate the clandestine and heroic activities of the Chabad underground that ultimately laid the foundation for the phenomenal rebirth of Jewish life in Russia today.
By David Eliezrie
Watch (51:26)<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="http://embed.chabad.org/multimedia/mediaplayer/embedded/embed.js.asp?aid=3240323&width=auto&height=auto"></script><span style="clear:both;" class="lb" id="lbdiv">Visit <a href="http://www.chabad.org/multimedia/default_cdo/aid/591213/jewish/Video.htm">Jewish.TV</a> for more <a href="http://www.chabad.org/multimedia/default_cdo/aid/591213/jewish/Video.htm">Jewish videos</a>.</span>
The Secret to a Healthy Self-Image
How many times today did you send yourself self-directed criticism telling yourself that you “are not enough”? Here's how to balance a positive sense of self while still striving to be better.
By Chana Weisberg
Watch (2:48)<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="http://embed.chabad.org/multimedia/mediaplayer/embedded/embed.js.asp?aid=3249017&width=auto&height=auto"></script><span style="clear:both;" class="lb" id="lbdiv">Visit <a href="http://www.chabad.org/multimedia/default_cdo/aid/591213/jewish/Video.htm">Jewish.TV</a> for more <a href="http://www.chabad.org/multimedia/default_cdo/aid/591213/jewish/Video.htm">Jewish videos</a>.</span>
The Previous Rebbe’s Dangerous Speech in Moscow, 1927
He spoke about the imperative to provide Jewish children with an authentic Torah education, even under communist rule.
Watch (7:46)http://www.chabad.org/therebbe/livingtorah/player_cdo/aid/2489366/jewish/The-Previous-Rebbes-Dangerous-Speech-in-Moscow-1927.htm
http://www.chabad.org/2489366
LIFESTYLE
Pulled Beef Hamantaschen with Creamy Coleslaw and Pickles
I was so pleased with how my savory dairy hamantaschen came out, I decided to have a go at these meat ones. I used the same pulled beef recipe that I used for the sandwiches and tacos a few weeks ago, so if you have leftover meat filling, you can try one of those.
I served the hamantaschen with a sweet, creamy coleslaw and a slice of pickle on top, but you can tailor them to your taste. A slice of tomato and some shredded lettuce would also taste good and be aesthetically pleasing, for example.
Once you've prepared the meat mixture, here's how to assemble and bake the hamantaschen:
If you're making these ahead of time, the best way to reheat them is in the oven, uncovered, on a baking sheet. That way, the pastry will flake up again, instead of becoming soggy.
Ingredients:
20 (non-dairy) puff pastry squares (4x4 inches each)
1 egg
5 pickles
coleslaw (recipe below)
pulled beef (recipe below)
Pulled Beef Ingredients:
2 onions, sliced in half rounds
¼ cup oil
1 tsp. kosher salt
2.5 lb. short ribs (bone in)
1 cup BBQ sauce
¼ cup soy sauce
¼ cup rice vinegar or apple cider vinegar
¼ cup pure maple syrup
½ cup water
1½ tsp. garlic powder
1½ tsp. ginger powder
Directions:
In medium-sized pot, fry the onions with the oil and salt until golden. Remove the onions and set aside. Return pot to the heat.
Cut the ribs between the bones (but do not remove the bones) and brown on each side, in the same pot. Brown the meat in small batches. If the pot is overcrowded, the meat will steam instead of browning.
When all the meat has browned, add the onions back into the pot.
Pour in all the sauce ingredients over the meat and mix to combine. Cover the pot and bring to a boil. Reduce to a simmer and cook over a very low flame for 3 hours.
Remove the meat from the sauce and shred. (If the meat does not fall apart easily, you need to cook it for longer.) Discard the bones and any lumps of fat.
Return the meat to the sauce and refrigerate until ready to assemble the hamantaschen. Meat keeps well in the freezer, too, if you want to prepare it in advance.
Coleslaw Ingredients:
3 cups coleslaw mix (shredded cabbage and carrot
¼ cup mayonnaise
2 tbsp. sugar
½ tsp. kosher salt
sprinkle of garlic powder
sprinkle of black pepper
juice of ½ a lemon
Directions:
Mix the mayonnaise, sugar, salt and garlic powder together. Add the lemon juice and mix in one direction until incorporated. (Mixing in one direction helps prevent lumps from forming.)
Pour the dressing over the cabbage and mix. Let the coleslaw marinate for 30 minutes or so before serving.
To Assemble:
Cut each puff pastry square in half diagonally.
Cut a triangular smaller triangular hole in half of the pieces.
Place a couple of tablespoons of the filling on the base triangle and cover with the “window” triangle.
Use a fork to press down the edges, making sure they are sealed well.
Beat the egg and brush over the top of the puff pastry. Place the triangles on a baking sheet lined with the parchment paper.
Bake at 400° F for 25–30 minutes.
Serve warm, and top each hamantasch with a heaping tablespoon of coleslaw and slice of pickle.
Yields: 20 hamantaschen
Will you be getting creative with hamantaschen this year? Let us know what you'll be making.
Art of the Week: Holy Offerings by Yoram RaananThe descendants of Aaron the kohen (priest) shall place fire on the altar, and arrange wood on the fire. Aaron’s descendants, the kohanim, shall then arrange the pieces, the head and the fat, on top of the wood which is on the fire that is on the altar. . . . Then the kohen shall offer up all [of the animal], and cause it to [go up in] smoke on the altar. It is a burnt offering, a fire offering [with] a pleasing fragrance to the L‑rd. (Leviticus 1:7–8, 13)
In the center of the painting, almost hidden by the flames, is the abstruse figure of the kohen (priest) as he tends the fire. Bringing the daily sacrifice involved both sprinkling its blood on the altar and offering its fats on the burning fire. In the painting, the deep dark reds, the life force of the animal, seem to be elevated upwards into the celestial blue sky. The altar appears red-hot with fire; sparks are released, ascending heavenward with vibrant hues. This “ascending” offering is to be completely burnt as a “fiery pleasure to G‑d.”
Blood is an analogy for vitality and energy, while fat is as an analogy for satisfaction. When we devote our energy to the altar, i.e., to holy matters, this will be a source of satisfaction to both man and G‑d. (Likkutei Sichot, Vayikra)
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"NY in play in April primary; Prime Grill's Joey Allaham v. Lincoln Square Synagogue; Merrick Garland as SC Nominee; 'Tevye's son in 'Fiddler' revival; more" The Jewish Week Connecting the World to Jewish News, Culture, Features, and Opinions of New York, New York, United States for Wednesday, 16 March 2016 - This week on TheJewishWeek.com
Wednesday, March 16, 2016
Dear Reader,
One of the many surprises in this presidential campaign is that the New York primary, April 19, actually counts for something this year. Staff Writer Stewart Ain reports that two key issues will be Israel and Donald Trump's campaign.
National
With N.Y. Votes In Play, Jews’ Concerns Seen At Fore
Area residents hone questions on Israel, Iran deal and tenor of Trump’s campaign.
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
Donald Trump’s controversial views will get a full hearing in New York. Getty Images
Following Tuesday’s five so-called Super-Duper primaries, New York’s April 19 primary with its 95 Republican delegates (the fourth largest) and 291 Democratic delegates (the second largest) looms as the next big hurdle — the first time in decades New Yorkers’ votes will matter.
There are only three other state primaries in the next five weeks; the last is April 5. Between then and April 19, when New York will be the only state voting, New Yorkers and the media will have a chance to zero in on issues yet to be fleshed out.
Among the issues candidates will be asked to detail will be those about foreign affairs — particularly Israel, which has received scant attention from the two Democratic candidates, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
New York businessman Donald Trump will undoubtedly be pressed to name his foreign policy team, as well as other advisers.
In addition, the New York Jewish community will want to know about Trump’s equivocal statements about former Ku Klux Klan Wizard David Duke and other white supremacists who support his candidacy; his perceived racist and bigoted comments about Mexicans, Muslims and others; and his failure to renounce a supporter who yelled “go to Auschwitz” at protestors outside his recent Cleveland rally.
In addition, Trump is sure to be asked about the comments of televangelist Mark Burns, who said in a speech at a Trump rally in North Carolina Monday: “Bernie Sanders, who doesn’t believe in God, how in the world we gonna let Bernie — I mean really? Listen, Bernie got to get saved, he got to meet Jesus, he got to have a ‘coming to Jesus’ meeting.” And Burns, who is African American, insisted that Trump is “no racist bigot.”
Rabbi Jack Moline, president of the Interfaith Alliance, issued a statement later in the day condemning Burns’ “anti-Semitic and hateful” rhetoric and called on Trump to reject it.
“It is profoundly un-American to use a campaign platform to denigrate and demean the faith of a candidate for president,” he said. “It is unbecoming of a member of the clergy to do so when these rallies have increasingly resulted in violence toward religious and racial minorities.”
Both Trump and Clinton are scheduled to speak at the annual policy conference of the American Israel Affairs Committee that begins Sunday in Washington. As of Tuesday, Sanders had not accepted AIPAC’s invitation to speak.
In the past, speakers at the conference delivered their remarks and left without taking questions from the audience. But the Union for Reform Judaism issued a statement Monday suggesting that may change when Trump speaks. It said he has run a campaign “replete with naked appeals to bigotry, especially against Hispanics and Muslims.
“Previous comments he has made — and not disavowed — have been offensive to women, people of color, and other groups,” it continued. “In recent days, increasingly, he appears to have gone out of his way to encourage violence at his campaign events. At every turn, Mr. Trump has chosen to take the low road, sowing seeds of hatred and division in our body politic.”
However, some Jews have voiced support for Trump. Fred Zeidman, a major Republican Jewish donor who has not settled on another candidate after initially backing Jeb Bush, said the violence at Trump’s rallies are not his fault, but rather the fault of protestors who are attending for the sole purpose of disrupting the proceedings “for their own political benefit.”
Rabbi Jonah Dov Pesner, director of the URJ’s Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, told The Jewish Week that the thousands of Reform Jews who will be in attendance “want to be supportive of the AIPAC agenda” and at the same time “be clear to Mr. Trump that this kind of atmosphere of bigotry, racism and Islamophobia are not acceptable.”
Asked how they planned to communicate that to Trump, Rabbi Pesner said, “I don’t know — we’ll see. … We’re trying to balance living out our values and making them clear in a respectful environment to advance the U.S.-Israel relationship.”
Does he expect to be arrested?
“We don’t know,” the rabbi answered.
As for Sanders, among the reasons Jewish leaders are interested in learning more about his position on Israel is that many are troubled by the little that is known:
n A local Vermont newspaper reported that while mayor of Burlington in 1988 Sanders said the U.S. should refrain from selling weapons to Israel.
n In 1991, he said the U.S. should cut off Israel’s $80 million in aid if it did not stop settlement activity, according to the Israeli newspaper Maariv.
n He said Israel should lift its blockade of the Gaza Strip, according to the Arab American News.
Last week, he discussed the prospects for a peace deal, maintaining that there are people of good will in both “Israel and the Arab communities” with whom he as president could negotiate a treaty.
“For decades now there has been hatred and warfare in the Middle East, everybody knows it,” he said. “I will make every single effort to bring rational people on both sides together so that hopefully we can have a level playing field — the United States treating everybody in that region equally.”
That position would be a dramatic departure for the U.S., which has unequivocally stood with Israel in the conflict.
Several of Sanders’ Jewish supporters told The Jewish Week they did not know about his position on Israel, and that Israel is not paramount in their thinking.
“The main issue for me is campaign finance reform,” said Ken Dolitsky, 23, of Wantagh, L.I. “Israel is an issue I care about, but the most important thing to me is America, and I feel he is the candidate who has policies that can make a change.”
Jon Cohen, 25, of Oceanside, said he traveled to New Hampshire to help Sanders win the primary.
“He is the voice of the people — the only honest politician out there,” he said. “I haven’t read much about his views on Israel.”
Asked if there was anything about Sanders’ views on Israel that could change his mind about supporting him, Cohen replied: “Probably not.”
Andy Mager, 55, a spokesman for Syracuse for Sanders, a locally funded campaign office, said he is Jewish and “would like to hear him [Sanders] address foreign policy positions more.”
He said he supports Sanders because he is “consistent in advocating for social justice and economic policies that benefit the poor.”
He also said that Sanders’ general likability makes him a stronger candidate.
“Bernie has spent a lot more time in Congress than Hillary and he does not bring a tremendous amount of baggage with him. Unfortunately, there are many in Congress and in the general public who have what I call an irrational hatred of Hillary Clinton, and that will be an impediment for her moving forward.”
But when it comes to Israel, Clinton is “less critical than Bernie and more supportive than Trump,” said Aaron David Miller, a Middle East analyst and vice president at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
“She knows when to have productive and non-productive fights with Israelis,” he said. “She may share Obama’s views, but she has a different temperament. She has said that if elected she would invite Bibi [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] in the first month to the White House.”
Peter Joseph, a New Yorker active in Democratic politics, said he never really considered supporting Sanders because of Clinton’s “experience and knowledge of the issues, her past work and [the strength of] those who are advising her.”
Seymour Reich, a former chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, said Clinton could be expected to espouse positions “closer to Bill’s than Obama’s.” And he said he does not like Sanders’ “level playing field” position.
Reich added that he is upset by the “missteps” Clinton has made in recent days, such as when she misrepresented Nancy Reagan’s stance on AIDS and for failing to remember that Sanders literally stood right behind her during her proposed health care overhaul in the 1990s.
Trump, too, has said he would remain “neutral” on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in order to better negotiate a settlement once he is president, but he has said also that he is “totally pro-Israel.” He touts the fact he once served as grand marshal of the Israel Day Parade, that he has “many” Israeli friends, and has “won so many awards from Israel.”
Both Clinton and Sanders advocate a two-state solution to resolve the conflict. As the junior senator from New York, Clinton supported Israel’s separation barrier between Israel and some Palestinian areas, calling it a barrier against “terrorists.” After leaving the State Department, she criticized the Obama administration’s 2009 settlement freeze imposed on Israel, saying peace talks cannot have preconditions.
All of the Republican candidates said they oppose the Iranian nuclear agreement. Both Clinton and Sanders support it, a fact that disqualifies them from being president, according to Helen Freedman, executive director of Americans for a Safe Israel.
Although she and all of the representatives of groups interviewed for this article said they do not endorse candidates, Freedman said, “Anyone who supports the Iranian deal has proven himself [or herself] to be an enemy of Israel because Iran says the rockets it is now testing will cause Israel’s destruction.”
Ori Nir, a spokesperson for Americans for Peace Now, said the Iranian nuclear agreement is now “irrelevant” because it has been codified as an international agreement.
Asked about presidential candidates who say they will be “neutral” on the Israel-Palestinian conflict, Nir said: “An American president cannot be neutral because of the historic alliance between the U.S. and Israel. That does not mean he can’t be fair if he takes the role of a broker. ... We strongly believe there is a way to do that and to support a two-state solution.”
But it is unlikely the issue of Israel will be key for most Jewish voters, according to Daniel Kalik, J Street’s chief of staff. He cited an American Jewish Committee poll from last August that found only 7 to 9 percent of American Jews listed U.S.-Israel relations as their prime concern in choosing a presidential candidate.
He noted also that Jews have a long history of voting for Democrats “because the party’s views are more aligned with the values of American Jews.”
stewart@jewishweek.orgKosher restaurant entrepreneur Joey Allaham of Prime Grill fame and the leaders of Lincoln Square Synagogue are engaged in a religious court case with powerful communal and commercial interests. Staff Writer Hannah Dreyfus has a detailed report that raises questions about kosher practices.
New York
‘Prime’ Battle Over Kosher Practices
Powerful communal and commercial interests collide in the case of Prime Grill’s Joey Allaham v. Lincoln Square Synagogue.
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
Joey Allaham: Transformed world of kosher cuisine. Courtesy of John Uher Photography
A significant trial is set to begin this week in a religious court here pitting a leading kosher restaurant entrepreneur, Joey Allaham of Prime Grill fame, against a venerable Modern Orthodox synagogue, Lincoln Square Synagogue, from Manhattan’s West Side.
The stakes are high, not only in dollars but in reputation. And rather than a three-man bet din, as is the custom, the case will be heard by only one rabbi — Hershel Schachter, a prominent Orthodox authority.
The synagogue claims Allaham, who is its exclusive caterer, owes $1.8 million in unpaid rental fees. Allaham maintains that long delays in the construction of Lincoln Square, completed in 2013, cost him vital business.
Another interested party in this case is the Orthodox Union, the largest and most trusted kosher certifier in the world, which gives its hechsher (stamp of approval) to Allaham’s posh restaurants. It grants him that coveted seal even as critics claim that he owes money all over town, operates unethically and has been involved in a numerous lawsuits. Allaham denies any unethical behavior and claims his conduct, in each instance, was justified.
And then there is the shadow of the Beth Din of America — the gold standard of religious courts in this country — hanging over the case after Allaham rejected its adjudicating the matter and called for a little-known Brooklyn beit din in his legal fight with Lincoln Square. Taken together, the parties in the dispute — both direct and indirect — represent a confluence of powerful communal and commercial interests. And the case brings into sharp relief the delicate dance — a little pressure here, a little leverage there — that takes place when those interests collide.
Allaham insists he will retain OU certification regardless of the outcome. Rabbi Menachem Genack, who heads the OU’s kashrut division, makes the point that trustworthiness is the key ingredient to kashrut supervision. “The credibility of the people we’re dealing with” is “part of what every supervision is about.”
The Prime Grill restaurant in the atrium of the Sony building on East 57th Street. Michael Datikash/JW
In fact, the OU has set a precedent for withdrawing certification for matters that do not deal solely with kashrut. Sources close to the organization confirmed that it has decertified business owners in the past for crimes involving theft and fraud. In a case that garnered national headlines, the OU stripped its certification from Sholom Rubashkin, former CEO of Agriprocessors, the now-bankrupt kosher slaughterhouse and meat packing plant in Postville, Iowa, in 2008, after the company was charged with thousands of counts of child labor violations, according to multiple press reports. Other cases, from enforcing a modest dress code for waitresses to stipulating that dance music not be played while wine is served, have given major kashrut organizations reason to threaten to pull their approval.
In the case of Allaham and Lincoln Square, it is most likely, say observers, that Rabbi Schachter will seek a compromise. But if he rules against Allaham, would the OU pull its certification? Such a move would potentially be a serious blow to Allaham’s fortunes. It would represent a fall from grace for the golden-boy restaurateur who came here from Syria in the 1990s knowing almost no English and with few connections, and within a few short years transformed the world of kosher cuisine.
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On the ground floor of the towering Sony building in Midtown Manhattan, men in well-tailored suits begin to cluster around noontime, checking their watches and waiting for their parties to arrive. Some wear kippot, others do not. There is no exterior indication that the restaurant is Glatt kosher — those who know don’t have to ask. Lunch over a Chimichurri-marinated hanger steak, made from kosher-certified Angus Beef, or miso-glazed Chilean sea bass, could be the perfect thing to ease a business deal or cement a new contact.
Though the quality of elegant ambiance can be hard to come by in kosher dining, Allaham changed the game when he opened The Prime Grill restaurant in the boom year of 2000. Here was an upscale kosher steakhouse — and the cuts of aged beef were succulent. The salting and soaking requirements of Jewish law that render meat kosher are generally hell on a cut of prime beef, but Allaham found a way to do it beautifully, in a classy setting, many agreed. Allaham hails from a family of kosher butchers from Syria; even his name means butcher in Arabic.
“I have a passion for meat,” said Allaham, who described learning the trade from his grandfather in Syria. As a boy, he would help his grandfather pick out live cattle from the marketplace. “It’s not something you can learn in school. You learn from watching.”
(Allaham agreed to a sit-down interview after first canceling a scheduled in-person meeting for this story, saying he would answer questions only by email. In the end, the interview, which had been scheduled to take place at The Jewish Week, took place at the Midtown office of his lawyer, who was present.)
Shortly after arriving in America in 1994 with his mother, Allaham landed a job as a stock boy at a mini-mart in Brooklyn. From there, he worked his way up to head butcher, and eventually raised funds from investors and opened his own restaurant, the first Prime Grill, on East 49th Street. He was still in his 20s.
Soon after Prime Grill opened, word got out. New Yorkers of a certain status like their steakhouses. A-list celebs from Bono to Madonna began frequenting the restaurant. Bill de Blasio and Bill Clinton stopped in for a bite. Allaham’s star was soaring. He followed up Prime Grill with Prime KO (now Prime West), Prime at the Bentley and Pizza da Solo; Prime West, located on the Upper West Side, serves French cuisine, including lamb ribs braised for 48 hours. Solo, in the cavernous Sony atrium, serves up handmade pies and authentic Italian fare. Then, in a move that garnered publicity, he opened a sleek, high-end butcher shop in the East 80s just two blocks from the long-standing Park East Kosher Butchers.
But Allaham’s rise to culinary stardom hasn’t been without pitfalls. In the past, Allaham has faced a number of lawsuits, charging everything from stolen tips to defaulting on investor payments. The OU has been made aware of some of the allegations, sources close to the organization’s kashrut bureau confirm, and for now it is standing by Allaham, who denies all allegations against him.
“I cannot comment on unsubstantiated allegations,” Allaham wrote in an e-mail on Tuesday. “As a businessman and an observant Jew, I pride myself on conducting all of my operations in a professional manner. As with any business, there have been times when certain payments have been made late due to circumstances beyond my control. And as with any business I have come across various disputes and disagreements from time to time.
“However,” he continued, “to my knowledge all my accounts are current.” Noting that he has more than 500 employees, he encouraged anyone with claims against him to deal with him directly.
“If the OU leaves because it considers a restaurant unreliable, most other reputable certifiers will be wary,” said Timothy Lytton, a kashrut-industry expert, author and law professor. “The weaker the reliability of the certification, the weaker the customer base.”
“Neemanut,” the Hebrew term for trustworthiness, lies at the core of the kashrut industry’s business model, he said. “When the OU supervises a restaurant, it has to be thinking about the trustworthiness of the person in charge. From a religious ethical point of view, that’s because it’s their job to protect the public. From a business point of view, an unreliable restaurateur will reflect poorly on the reliability of the supervision.”
While the OU has pulled certification from a handful of business owners due to fraudulent activities, the mainstream kashrut industry still has a major problem when it comes to enforcing ethical standards, according to Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz, founder of Uri L’Tzedek, the Orthodox social justice movement.
“Kashrut authorities in America today make it clear that they have no interest in policing the ethical dimension of the industry,” said Rabbi Yanklowitz, who has spoken on behalf of workers’ rights and unjust treatment of animals. He maintains that ethical practices and the kosher status of food are “completely intertwined,” despite attempts by major certifiers to separate the two, “for the sake of business.”
The Last Tenant Standing
Currently, Allaham is in a turf battle with the Sony Building, where Prime Grill moved in the summer of 2015 from 25 W. 56th St. Pizza da Solo, Allaham’s kosher pizzeria, moved into the building several years earlier; the two restaurants now split the space.
Pizza da Solo is Joey Allaham's fancy pizza eatery adjacent to the Prime Grill. Michael Datikash/JW
Troubles began shortly after Sony sold the tower for $1.1 billion to Joseph Chetrit and business partner David Bistricer in March 2013. Now, the new owners want Allaham out, presumably to use the space for other interests, but Allaham wants to keep his lease, which he says lasts until at least 2029. Sony, Allaham’s landlord, filed suit against him in 2013 for alleged lease violations, including generating too much garbage in the atrium, where the two restaurants are housed. The slow-grinding court battle is ongoing; Allaham has denied the allegations and claims Sony is fronting for Chetrit.
Come spring, Prime Grill and Pizza da Solo will be the only tenants left standing in the table-lined atrium of the building connecting East 55th and East 56th streets, said Valentino-Puiu Lulea, general manager at Prime Grill.
The move to the Sony building is Prime Grill’s third relocation since launching in 2000. Allaham was involved in a lawsuit over Prime Grill leaving the E. 49th Street location, resulting in a settlement that alleged he had owed more than $850,000 in unpaid rent. Prime Grill was evicted from the second location, on W. 56th Street, in August 2015.
According to Allaham, he tried unsuccessfully to surrender the keys and the lease to the landlord of 25 W. 56th before the eviction notice was posted. He decided to surrender the lease because the Sony building, where he had opened Pizza da Solo, did not want him to operate a competing restaurant within a two-block radius.
A source close to Allaham said the restaurateur is “desperate” to receive a big payout from Chetrit in exchange for abandoning the Sony lease, though the source said such a payout is not likely. Though Allaham did not directly address this claim, he maintains that his financial position is solid.
“Chetrit will build up around Joey if he has to,” the source said, speaking to The Jewish Week anonymously for fear of retribution. The source claims Allaham still owes him a significant amount of money.
Chetrit has not responded to requests for comment.
Passover Fiasco
Landlords aren’t the only ones pushing for payback. Allaham, who ran three luxury Passover programs in Aspen, Colo., Puerto Rico and Dana Point, Calif., last spring, is still battling legal fallout from the experience. American Express Centurion Bank filed a $1.3 million suit in state Supreme Court here against Allaham on Dec. 23. Though the case was dismissed on Feb. 4, an examination of Allaham’s credit card bill, filed by American Express as an exhibit to its complaint, shows that Allaham accrued several hundred thousand dollars in debt over the course of three days to pay for the 2015 Passover programs. When he tried to pay off that debt, American Express alleged, his checks bounced several times.
The lawyer representing American Express did not return requests for comment.
According to Allaham, the American Express suit was caused by 400 dissatisfied Passover guests who abruptly reversed their charges after the holiday getaway failed to live up to guests’ expectations and its contractual obligations. He blames the high-price hotel and its employees, whom he says sabotaged his operation. Several incidents, including bread being served at Passover meals — an infringement of the highest order according to Orthodox law -- left customers enraged.
Allaham is currently suing Vieques Hotel Partners, owner of the W Retreat and Spa in Puerto Rico, which he claims is responsible for the Passover fiasco. According to his complaint, the hotel staff carried out “numerous repugnant and indefensible acts of hostility, bias, malice, discrimination, anti-Semitism … vandalism and theft” towards his staff and guests.
The W Retreat and Spa did not respond to request for comment.
This year Allaham has downscaled his Pesach programming somewhat. None of the three hotels from 2015 was renewed. This year, Allaham’s “Prime Pesach” is set to take place at the Fairmont in Santa Monica, Calif. All 302 rooms in the hotel’s three towers (10 floors per tower) have been booked in advance for the week of Passover. Allaham is charging up to $9,500 per person, according to the program’s website; last year prices reached $11,000 per person, according to online price listings for the program.
Similar to his past Passover programs, a star-studded cast of rabbis, lecturers and Jewish entertainers are expected to fill the schedule this year. But some former employees of those Passover programs describe less than satisfactory experiences dealing with Allaham.
Rabbi Mendel Mintz, executive director of the Chabad Community Center in Aspen Valley, said he was recruited by Allaham to help with the kosher certification, or hashgacha, of his 2015 Passover program in Aspen. Rabbi Mintz said he spent “months” answering questions from hotel staff and guests, and personally recruiting eight mashgichim to oversee kashrut operations at the hotel. They were to be paid a total of $16,000, or $2,000 a person.
The rabbi’s first “red flag” was when Allaham asked him to pay out of pocket for the plane tickets of the eight mashgichim. “It was strange that Joey would ask me — his employee — to lay out the money when he hadn’t even paid me yet,” Rabbi Mintz told The Jewish Week in a phone interview. “But I decided not to make much of it at the time.”
A week before Passover, Rabbi Mintz asked Allaham about the money. Allaham assured him the check was in the mail. No check ever arrived, according to the rabbi.
What followed was a months-long email and phone exchange in which Rabbi Mintz continued to request the money and Allaham promised the money would be sent, to no avail. When the check for $8,000 finally arrived, it bounced — twice. “More emails, more checks — checks bounced, repeat,” said Rabbi Mintz. The money has since been paid in full, according to the rabbi.
Allaham denied allegations of non-payment. He said he paid the rabbi shorty after the Passover holiday.
Mendel Zirkind, a private chef and mashgiach hired by Allaham to help prepare food for the 2015 Passover programs, said he was never paid for his six weeks of work, during which he averaged 70 hours a week.
“The way Joey runs his operations is he makes you come and beg for the money. If you don’t run after your money, you won’t get it,” he said. Zirkind described the work-intensive cooking methods he used to prepare the meat, including sous-vide, a method in which food is sealed in a plastic bag and submerged in temperature-controlled water for long periods of time — 24 hours or more, in some cases. According to Zirkind, Allaham still owes him $7,500 for the work. To date, he has received two checks from Allaham — both bounced, he said.
According to Allaham, Zirkind was caught on camera stealing large amounts of meat from the kitchen in Lincoln Square, where preparations for the program were underway. Allaham produced what he said was photo evidence taken from security cameras showing a bearded man, allegedly Zirkind, moving large boxes in and out of the building.
Zirkind denies the claims. “I’m a single guy, I live alone,” he said. “What exactly would I do with $20,000 worth of meat?”
Allaham asserts that Zirkind sold the meat for personal gain.
A number of vendors, suppliers and former employees of Allaham interviewed for this article claim Allaham still owes him or her money, in amounts ranging from a few thousand to $80,000. Many have requested to remain anonymous in the hopes that Allaham will still pay them back.
“I’ve waited to be paid back for so many years, I just can’t risk losing everything now,” said one independent contractor, after describing his “troubles” with Allaham over the past several years. According to the contractor, the restaurateur owes him up to $80,000. After months of calling and many bounced checks, Allaham has finally set up a functional, albeit dilatory, payment plan, he said. (A source with knowledge of the disputes says Allaham has sought to settle old financial scores in advance of the publication of this article.)
Trouble At The Airport
In October 2014, caterer and restaurateur David Pearlman, 34, says he spent six weeks creating an intricate menu for a Sukkot hotel program that would take place that year in Orlando, Fla. The program was one of Allaham’s first forays into the world of luxury, all-inclusive kosher holiday retreats.
Pearlman said his long days of preparation for the program entailed ordering everything from salt to tuna tartar, arranging truck deliveries, and making sure the destination kitchen was prepared for a strictly kosher clientele. After six weeks, he headed down to Orlando three days before the program’s start date to set up shop; his wife and three young children planned to join him there for the holiday.
At the airport, he met with Allaham and his crew. According to Pearlman and another former employee of Allaham’s who witnessed the scene, Allaham, who had just experienced a baggage mishap, screamed at Pearlman to get on a flight and go back home. Pearlman tried to protest but quickly realized it was futile.
“They were all so terrified of him [Allaham] that they just turned their heads and looked away,” he told The Jewish Week in a phone interview. “No one questioned him. No one stood up for me. No one said anything.”
Shaken by the experience, he booked a flight home and scrambled together last-minute holiday plans.
Shortly thereafter, Pearlman sent Allaham an invoice for $5,000. He received no response. He e-mailed Allaham’s director of operations (this individual no longer works for Allaham). “I don’t think he plans on paying you,” the director emailed back, claimed Pearlman.
“I started to hear from people who used to work for Joey. They all said the same thing. ‘This is his M.O. — don’t expect to get paid,’” said Pearlman.
His next step was to reach out to the Orthodox Union, which he knew certified Allaham’s operations. Pearlman said he contacted a kashrut representative at the OU, who advised him to take his case to the Beit Din of America. Rabbi Genack, the CEO of OU’s kashrut division, confirmed that Pearlman reached out to the organization and was advised to bring his case before the Orthodox high court.
“He [Genack] told me anything the Beit Din of America decided, the OU would uphold,” said Pearlman. He described the threat of removing Allaham’s valuable kosher seal of approval as his only “leverage.”
In June 2015, Pearlman brought Allaham before a religious court of three judges at the BDA religious court. The BDA ruled in favor of Pearlman. In November, the court sent a letter documenting the decision to Pearlman and Allaham, demanding Allaham pay the $5,000 in full.
Allaham told The Jewish Week he mailed the payment in full to Pearlman during the first week of March. He said he told Pearlman to cancel his flight to Orlando while he was still in New York. He also claimed Pearlman intentionally canceled the flights of 20 other employees, causing Allaham significant financial losses.
A Synagogue Caught In Middle
In 2012, Lincoln Square Synagogue, a fixture on the Upper West Side since the 1960s, began seeking a high-quality kosher caterer to take up operations in its newly constructed social hall. The Modern Orthodox synagogue was nearing the end of its $50 million construction project, a new, state-of-the-art 50,000-square-foot facility at 180 Amsterdam Ave. Though originally the project was expected to take only two years, financial setbacks, exacerbated by the market collapse in 2008, set the project back four years and left the synagogue scrambling for funds.
Lincoln Square Synagogue. The shul's catering hall, operated by Allaham, is under dispute. Michael Datikash/JW
In an effort to raise revenue, the synagogue struck up a deal with Allaham in November of 2012. Prime Grill would be the exclusive caterer for all events that took place in the new building, and Allaham would pay a monthly fee of $20,883, all utility fees, and be responsible for renovating the new ballroom, according to court papers — an undertaking projected to cost $1.5 million. The agreement also provided that any dispute between Prime Grill and the synagogue would be arbitrated before the Beit Din of America. According to the synagogue, Allaham defaulted on every one of these agreements. Allaham claims that construction delays cost him business.
Lincoln Square wants the case resolved quickly because it cannot rent the ballroom to other vendors until the contract with Allaham is legally terminated, said a synagogue representative. Currently, if another party wants to use the ballroom for an event, Prime Grill is paid for the time, said the representative.
The synagogue decided to take the case before the Beit Din of America in August 2015. According to court documents, Allaham agreed to have the case arbitrated before the religious court, and his lawyer sent several emails to arrange a date. During the case proceedings, the OU reinforced the BDA’s court summons, and threatened to remove Allaham’s certification if he did not comply, according to a source close to the situation.
Unlike many ad hoc beit dins that operate around New York City, the BDA is committed to regulations, rules and procedures, said Rabbi Shlomo Weissmann, its director. “We are committed to the highest standards of transparency and protocol,” said the rabbi, who is a licensed attorney.
But after agreeing to bring the case before the BDA, Allaham reneged, claiming that Rabbi Shaul Robinson, Lincoln Square’s rabbi, presents a conflict of interest because he is a member of the Rabbinical Council of America, an organization that is affiliated with the BDA. The synagogue alleges that this action was “a blatant attempt at forum shopping.”
Though he declined to comment on the Lincoln Square case, Rabbi Weissmann said that the court has a specific mechanism for objecting to an arbitrator who has any conflict of interest. “We are careful to staff a case only with individuals who have no prior relationship to either party,” he said. In the case that the judges do have some prior relationship, the information is disclosed at the start of the hearing. “Our goal is complete transparency,” he said.
According to Lincoln Square, Allaham said he wanted to appear before a different bit din, the Beth Din of the Central Rabbinical Congress in Brooklyn. (In a Google search, no information about this alternative beit din comes up.) When Lincoln Square resisted, Allaham took his case to civil court instead.
The OU’s Rabbi Genack confirmed that Allaham’s refusal to appear before the BDA, or another approved arbiter, could compromise his supervision. However, the current agreement to appear before Rabbi Schachter protects Allaham from this possibility. The rabbi’s ruling, which will likely inform OU’s actions about Prime Grill’s kosher seal of approval, will be legally binding in civil court, according to Rabbi Genack.
For his part, Joey Allaham insists his ties with the OU are unshakable. And he denies any unethical conduct that would put his certification in jeopardy. The OU’s seal is not an endorsement he is willing to lose. “We’ve always had OU certification,” he said. “We won’t lose the certification, whatever the outcome in beit din.”
This article was made possible with funding from The Jewish Week Investigative Journalism Fund.The late actor Herschel Bernardi made his mark as Tevye in "Fiddler On The Roof" decades ago. His son, Michael, tells Culture Editor Sandee Brawarsky what it means to him to have a role in the latest Broadway revival.
Theater
‘Fiddler’ In His Veins
Wearing his father’s well-worn boots, Michael Bernardi carries on a family tradition that stretches back years.
Sandee Brawarsky
Culture Editor
Michael Bernardi as Tevye. Courtesy of Michael Bernardi
Over in Anatevka, on Broadway, Michael Bernardi is pouring vodka for customers at the village inn, keeping the peace among rivals and occasionally breaking out into song and dance.
He’s dancing in the high boots worn by his father, the late Herschel Bernardi, who made his mark as Tevye on Broadway in the 1960s and then again in the 1980s. This production of “Fiddler on the Roof” is Michael’s Broadway debut. Aside from playing Mordcha the innkeeper, he is an understudy for the rabbi and also for Tevye. While he has rehearsed as Tevye, he hasn’t yet been called on to substitute for Danny Burstein.
To say that Michael was born into performing in this show is something of an understatement. In an interview near the Broadway Theatre, he says that his mother tells him that when she was in labor, Herschel sang the entire score of “Fiddler on the Roof” to calm her down. So Michael entered the world hearing “Sabbath Prayer” and “If I Were a Rich Man.”
Now, backstage before the curtain goes up, Michael practices an exercise his father would do before every performance: Looking into a mirror, breathing in, then closing his eyes, breathing out, and entering the world of Anatevka.
Herschel Bernardi was the third Broadway Tevye, after Zero Mostel pioneered the role, and Luther Adler followed briefly. When Herschel died suddenly of a heart attack in 1986, he was 62, and his son Michael was one year and a half.
The 31-year-old actor’s theater pedigree goes back further. His grandparents, Berel and Helen (Laina) Bernardi met in Berlin in 1899, when he (then known as Berl Topf) visited as an actor with a Yiddish troupe; she then joined him on stage and they moved to America in 1901. They married and performed in the Yiddish theater in New York, Canada and traveling productions across the U.S. When they played on Second Avenue in the 1920s, their son Hershel appeared onstage, in his mother’s arms, at 3 months old.
Herschel went on to perform in the Yiddish theater and in Yiddish films, such as the 1937 production of Peretz Hirschbein’s “Grine Felder” (Green Fields), directed by Edgar G. Ulmer and Jacob Ben-Ami. He made the transition to films, television and stage in English, playing the title role of “Zorba” on Broadway, as the star of his own television series “Arnie,” and in films including “The Front.” He knew the subject of that film well, as he had been blacklisted. He also did voiceovers, and for 25 years was the voice of Charley the Tuna for StarKist.
Michael is too young to have memories of his father, but he does remember his smell, in a pleasant way, and he’d experience it when he’d find some item of clothing that belonged to his father.
He wore his father’s full Tevye costume — sent to him by his mother — when he played the role for the first time in a production at the historic Priscilla Beach Theater in Plymouth, Mass., last year. When he tried on the garments, he says, he could sense his father’s presence in the room, along with his permission to wear them.
“It felt like a hug, an incredible hug I had been waiting for for over 30 years.”
Michael grew up in Los Angeles, on the edge of Beverly Hills, and attended Beverly Hills High School. His interests were football and theater, and he ultimately chose the stage. When he was younger and spent a lot of time with adults, family friends who enjoyed his humor around the table encouraged his mother to have him try out at the Comedy Store. By the time he was 8, he was a regular, getting the time slots usually reserved for veteran comedians. He was called Wonderboy (and later learned that his father was called Wunderkind, or Wonderboy, when he was a child in the Yiddish theater). After a couple of years of performing, he told his mother that he just wanted to quit and be a kid.
He studied acting at SUNY Purchase, where he did a one-man show, “My Father the Actor.” After graduating, he went back to Los Angeles, as there still were a few Bernardi relatives (including his father’s brother) who were active in the industry and could help him. But he arrived just as the Writers’ Strike was beginning in 2007. He returned to New York, did some acting and some odd jobs, and then returned to Los Angeles, determined to act. He took on some roles and grew disillusioned but kept at it, enrolling in graduate school at USC. After a couple of years in the program, he realized that he was “focusing on becoming a better actor, not on becoming a working actor” and set out to find work.
At the same time, he learned that his mother had breast cancer. “I had two thoughts. I would do everything in my power to take care of my mother. And I cannot have my mother leave this earth without her witnessing some form of success. She had been so much of a supporter.”
As he would soon be singing, “Life has a way of confusing us, blessing and bruising us.”
To his surprise, he got a call from an old friend about playing Tevye in Massachusetts. At first, he was terrified, but was able to “let go of any idea of being compared to my father. I was able to allow myself to feel his love and support.”
During his first performance, in the final scene when the townspeople are leaving Anatevka, “I got lost in the show. I realized that the connection is beyond my father, beyond my grandfather, that this play is bigger than all of us. It contains the spirit of survival, and it is about joy.”
While in Massachusetts, he heard that “Fiddler on the Roof” was going to be opening on Broadway, auditioned and got a part.
As for the boots, his mother brought them out before he went to Plymouth, and they were too small. Michael found a Los Angeles cobbler to fix them, and when he picked them up he was overwhelmed. When the cobbler asked what was wrong, Michael explained that these were the boots his father wore on Broadway. The shoemaker then said that his father used to have a business on Broadway before moving to Los Angeles and did the boots for “Fiddler” and other shows. The walls of the shop were lined with theater posters and photographs.
His mother, who has returned to good health, has been to New York several times to see the show. For Bernardi, it’s a dream come true, all around. For now, he lives in Midtown, and walks to the theater. As the bearded Mordcha, he likes to hang out at the Russian Vodka Room on West 52nd Street, where he can study the bartender for insight into his character. Toward the end of the play, as the shtetl dwellers are forced to leave Anatevka, Mordcha wonders out loud what he will do with 100 bottles of vodka.
When he plays the rabbi, his final line echoes: As the townspeople are ordered to leave and someone asks, “Rabbi, we’ve been waiting for the Messiah all our lives. Wouldn’t now be a good time for him to come?” The rabbi replies, “I guess we’ll have to wait someplace else.”
When he’s on stage as Tevye, he’ll get the last word.
The actor’s own spiritual life is in the theater. “My faith is something I actively strive for daily. Like Tevye, I ask questions to a vast unseen, unheard presence that only makes itself known in the most secret of ways. I find strength from the survival of Jewish culture, which teaches me that the nature of art is to defy all odds and continue to live. In short, I’ll share a quote shared from my father, shared with me by my mother: ‘Be a person.’”
Before we leave, I ask him to demonstrate his shimmy, the classic Tevye “biddy-biddy-biddy-biddy-biddy-biddy-biddy-bom,” and he obliges, with a quiet melody. Raising his arms, he takes small steps and shakes his lean torso, with a laughter-through-the-tears smile. There’s poetry and history in these movements. Also this week, a new job in New York for Abraham Foxman; the "six-minute rabbi" offers Torah lessons on the fly; Israel in line for medical marijuana research; Rabbi Donniel Hartman'snew book calls for "Putting God Second" to ethical behavior; and Hillel International is courting young techies.
New York
City To Get New Center For Anti-Semitism
Steve Lipman
Abraham Foxman: Will direct new anti-Semitism study center at the Museum of Jewish Heritage.
Sometime in the next few years, the third floor of the Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in Battery Park City, which focuses on Israel and other post-Shoah facets of Jewish life, will include artifacts on such unsavory topics as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Leo Frank lynching, and the Alfred Dreyfus trial.
They will be part of the permanent exhibition at a new Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism that the museum announced this week.
Abraham Foxman, who retired last year as national director of the Anti-Defamation League, will serve as director of the center, which has started a fund-raising campaign and an effort to collect artifacts.
The center, which sometime this spring will start to offer lectures and workshops on anti-Semitism, will work with existing institutions like the ADL, the Simon Wiesenthal Center and Charles Small’s Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, which deal will facets of anti-Semitism, Foxman told The Jewish Week.
“We’re not going to reinvent the wheel,” he said — the center will concentrate on explaining the roots of anti-Semitism, “starting with the Crucifixion.” That’s a reference to the two-millennia-old deicide charge that has fueled religious anti-Semitism through the centuries. “Hatred has long roots.”
While the museum hosts thousands of students every year, the center’s focus will be on adults, Foxman said.
Other Jewish institutions, including Jewish museums around the world, “tell the world what happened” to Jews at the hands of non-Jews, Foxman said. “They don’t tell why it happened.” Some museums bring out items related to anti-Semitism for display in temporary exhibits. “We want to give them a permanent home.”
The center is a response to the worldwide increase in anti-Semitism over the last few decades, said Bruce Ratner, chair of the Museum.
“Twenty years ago, most of us thought anti-Semitism was on the downswing. To our shock and amazement, we see that it’s on the upswing. The scourge is still with us,” Ratner said, pointing to anti-Semitism in Europe, the Middle East, and college campuses in the United States.
He and Foxman said it is too early to discuss details about the center’s size or contents.
News of the anti-Semitism center comes as the museum faces struggles over its balance sheet and attendance.
Foxman said the center was not prompted by any specific event, such as recent incidents of Muslim-supported anti-Semitism, or the intolerance of many supporters of Donald Trump during this year’s race for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. Trump’s campaign, which has not included any specifically anti-Semitic elements, has earned the support of people like neo-Nazi David Duke, prompting fears of growing intolerance in this country, which historically has threatened Jews and other minorities.
While plans for the center began “way before Trump,” Foxman said, “Trump adds some resonance. We’re finding a breakdown in civility.”
Foxman said his work at the center, unlike at the ADL, will remain at the scholarly and historical level. “We’ll leave advocacy to the others.”
steve@jewishweek.orgNew York
Like Speed Dating, But With Torah
‘Six-Minute Rabbi’ brings serious, albeit abbreviated, learning to those who can’t get out of the office.
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
Rabbi Hanoch Hecht, who lives in upstate Dutchess County, bikes around Manhattan during his daylong jaunts. MICHAEL DATIKASH/JW
Rabbi Hanoch Hecht’s six minutes of Torah in Manhattan one recent day lasted seven and a half hours.
Earlier this month, the rabbi, an emissary of the Chabad-Lubavitch chasidic movement in upstate Rhinebeck, arrived at 8:34 a.m. on the Amtrak Empire Service, walked to a nearby Shacharit minyan, then began a daylong series of one-on-one learning sessions in offices around the borough. His last class ended at 5 p.m., followed by a personal counseling session. He got back to Rhinebeck at 8:30 p.m.
Another day in the life of the “6-Minute Rabbi.”
That’s the trademarked name that Rabbi Hecht, a 31-year-old Canarsie native, gave himself when he began his short-length, long-lived educational program eight years ago.
Every Thursday, no matter the weather, he meets with doctors, attorneys, real estate developers and other professionals, sharing an insight into the week’s Torah portion, an inspirational story and some words of spiritual encouragement, all in the time it takes to get a cup of coffee.
Most days he rides from lesson to lesson on Citi Bikes he picks up at stations around Manhattan, parking them when he arrives at each venue, hopping on another bike after a class, covering some 15 miles a day.
To stay light, he carries no books, no texts on his jaunts around Gotham; lunch is a Power Bar he picks up along the way.
For many of his students, the 360 seconds with him are usually the only Torah learning they can squeeze into their schedule each week. “I want to get the high-powered people, the busy people,” Rabbi Hecht said.
Sheldon Lobel, a zoning and land use attorney who lives in upstate Millbrook, has hosted Rabbi Hecht’s six-minute class for five years after the two encountered each other at a menorah-lighting ceremony.
“I’m always anxious to meet up with him. I learn something every time,” said Lobel, a member of a Conservative synagogue in Poughkeepsie. “I’m not that learned in Jewish law or Jewish history. This brings me closer. It’s made me more knowledgeable in the beauty of the religion and of the history.”
A member of the prominent Chabad family of Hecht rabbis, on this recent Thursday, Hanoch Hecht sports a distinctive maroon velvet kipa, a light-blue striped suit and an open-collared white shirt. Despite the cold, he left his coat at home, opting instead for a light brown plaid scarf.
The rabbi has lived in Dutchess County with his wife, Tzivie, and children for nine years. He began his six-minute gig when someone he knew in Manhattan indicated an interest in incorporating some regular Torah learning into his schedule, but couldn’t find the time.
Rabbi Hecht did some online research and found a study that reported that the average person’s attention span is about six and a half minutes.
The “6-minute Rabbi” (6minuterabbi.com) was born.
“Everyone has six minutes,” the rabbi said. “This is not just a gimmick.” It’s serious, albeit abbreviated, learning. For people too busy to travel to a class, he brings his classes to them. It’s a bit like the popular lunch and learn programs, but in far less time, and without the lunch.
No homework, no tuition, no pitch to put on tefillin or commit to doing any specific mitzvah. “I don’t come with any hidden agenda,” he said.
He compares his program to Speed Dating (which was invented by another, albeit much larger, Jewish educational organization, Aish HaTorah).
“The concept is very similar,” Rabbi Hecht said. “In a short period you can accomplish a lot.”
He spends up to an hour or two each week deciding on that Thursday’s topic and boiling all the material down. “It’s hard work – but it works,” he said. “The hardest thing is juggling the schedules.” Midtown, downtown, then midtown again. Sometimes, students cancel at the last minute.
With Purim approaching, Rabbi Hecht recently touched on some features of the holiday that celebrates Jewish survival in ancient Persia.
“Which is the holiest day on the Jewish calendar?” he would typically ask.
“Yom Kippur,” most students would answer.
Incorrect – at least at this time of year. “Purim is on a very higher level than Yom Kippur, spiritually speaking,” he said. Yom Kippur centers on the man-and-God relationship; Purim’s emphasis is man-to-man, a day of giving charity and distributing mishloach manot food packages and sharing festive meals with friends. “Our relationship between man and man is more important than our relationship between man and God.”
At first, Rabbi Hecht was not sure if the idea would work in practice. But, he said, “I stuck with it. The self-doubt went away.”
From a single student, Rabbi Hecht’s weekly day in Manhattan has grown to about two dozen, by word of mouth and offers to people he meets. “I never spent a dollar on advertising.” Most of his students are from non-Orthodox or unaffiliated backgrounds.
“I don’t study with every person every week,” he said – their time doesn’t always allow it. Usually he arranges a dozen in-and-out sessions; sometimes, up to 18. On his recent visit: 14.
The rabbi typically meets with a single student; sometimes, a few at a time. Sometimes in a private office, sometimes in a conference room, sometimes in a boiler room – wherever space is available. At the office of architect Marc Kushner last week, Rabbi Hecht spoke to 14 employees, Jews and non-Jews, seated at bleacher-type benches built into an office wall. Sometimes the crowd is closer to 30.
“It’s growing,” said Kushner, who has studied with Rabbi Hecht for a year. “I was worried that it would be super ‘Jewy,’” making it hard for the non-Orthodox to relate. But, he said, “the rabbi makes it very accessible,” speaking in terms of general ethical principles.
First, Rabbi Hecht asks about each student’s family. Then, quickly, down to holy business. He scrupulously keeps to his promised time.
“If you spend 10 minutes you’ve messed up the entire point,” he said. “I’m in and out.”
While he doesn’t know of any Manhattan rabbis doing what he is doing, about a half dozen rabbis, all Orthodox so far, including two in his extended family, have started teaching their own “6-Minute Rabbi” classes in the New York area — and beyond.
Rabbi Hecht’s brother, Rabbi J.J. Hecht, offered the classes in Hong Kong during a two-year stint there. The short time frame “worked unbelievably” in the Chinese city’s high-pressure community of foreign Jewish businessmen, he said. “It caught on like crazy … it became a ‘cool thing.’”
Since Rabbi Hecht’s cousin, Rabbi Moshe Hecht, added the mini-classes to his teaching schedule at the Chabad of Windsor Terrace five years ago, he said he’s seen an impact. “I’ve seen changes in people’s lives,” he said.
Dean Palin, who works in real estate, started studying with Rabbi Hanoch Hecht about four years ago and has kept it up. “It motivates me in many ways. I make time for it,” he said, noting that he shares the lessons with his children over Shabbat. “It helps the whole family.”
At the end of each class on a recent Thursday, Rabbi Hecht and his students exchanged Shabbat greetings.
“Hopefully, I’ll see you next week,” one student said.
“Yes, please God,” the rabbi answered.
steve@jewishweek.orgIsrael News
High On Israel
At CannaTech conference, the Jewish state is seen ‘at the forefront’ of medical marijuana research.
Michele Chabin
Contributing Editor
The scene at the 2nd CannaTech conference last week in Tel Aviv. Courtesy of CannaTech
Jerusalem — Six months of Palestinian terror attacks didn’t discourage scores of medical cannabis experts and investors from flocking to Israel last week for a medical cannabis (marijuana) conference.
Israel’s 2nd CannaTech conference, which focused on “accelerating cannabis innovation,” attracted participants from dozens of countries eager to capitalize on the country’s research and know-how, as well as Israeli growers, researchers and entrepreneurs eager to collaborate.
Though much better known for its high-tech and military expertise, “Israel is at the forefront of cannabis-related research and how it interacts with our bodies,” said John Kagia, director of industry analytics for New Frontier, a U.S.-based cannabis industry data collection company. “Israeli researchers have been instrumental in helping shape our understanding of cannabis’ therapeutic applications.”
Few people outside the industry know that Rafael Mechoulam, an Israeli pioneer in medical cannabis research, isolated THC, the main psychoactive chemical in cannabis, in 1964 at the Weizmann Institute, or that the ground-breaking clinical trial based on his discovery demonstrated — 35 years ago — that cannabis can alleviate epileptic seizures.
“Unfortunately, no one was interested then,” Mechoulam, now in his 80s and conducting research at the Hebrew University, told The Jewish Week. “Till this day children continue to have epileptic attacks” that could be alleviated with cannabis.
It took nearly another three decades for GW Pharmaceuticals, a British company, to build on Mechoulam’s research (with his active participation) and develop the experimental Epidolex, which The New York Times this week hailed as the first cannabis-based medication to reduce convulsive seizures in clinical trials.
In the years since Mechoulam’s breakthrough, Israeli researchers have conducted clinical trials to determine cannabis’ ability to ameliorate the side effects of chemotherapy and bone marrow transplants. Other trials have focused on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and gastrointestinal diseases.
Meanwhile, Israeli start-ups have developed medical marijuana that doesn’t lead to a high, and the world’s first metered dose cannabis inhaler. Hebrew University, it was announced during the conference, plans to establish Israel’s first academic cannabis research center. And Israeli agricultural researchers are growing a variety of cannabis strains they hope will ease a number of ailments.
These innovations and human trials have been facilitated by an Israeli policy that permits researchers to obtain cannabis plants, despite the fact that cannabis possession for “entertainment” purposes is strictly illegal.
Tamir Gedo, CEO of B.O.L Pharma, which calls itself Israel’s leading medical cannabis producer and drug development facility, said he and other Israeli cannabis entrepreneurs and researchers, “want to build Israel as a hub to conduct clinical trial research” for researchers and companies that can’t conduct trials at home due to their governments’ regulations.
“There are more than 280 [cannabis-related] pre-clinical trials [including animal testing] being conducted in the U.S. and a similar number being conducted in other Western countries,” Gedo said, referring to non-human trials that test for feasibility and drug safety.
But U.S. researchers can rarely carry out the next level.
“While the FDA “highly supports” conducting medical trials using the cannabis plant, Gedo said, the Drug Enforcement Administration “is suppressing them.”
The DEA has authorized just one institution to distribute cannabis plants to researchers, he said, but the supply is grossly inadequate.
To date, only one major cannabis-based clinical trial — for Epidiolex — has been completed in a U.S. hospital, and only after Stage I and II trials held elsewhere were proved safe and effective.
“In Israel you can conduct clinical trials,” Gedo noted. “The regulations are more liberal. The Ministry of Health will examine [any] protocol if your research makes sense. In the last quarter of 2015 there were more than 30 clinical trial applications and I believe half were approved. This is a huge number when talking about a country like Israel.”
The need for overseas clinical trials is greater than ever before, the entrepreneur said, because the FDA has recently cracked down on companies that make unsubstantiated medical claims.
“In the past two months, the FDA issued eight warning letters to companies that market cannabis products using medical claims. Some of those products were taken off the shelves. The only way to make a medical claim is by conducting a clinical trial,” Gedo said.
Clinical trials performed in Israel are recognized by the FDA, and U.S-based trials are recognized by Israel’s Ministry of Health.
Asked how Israel can benefit financially, Gedo said that foreigners conducting trials in Israel would hold all the rights to the “intellectual property” garnered in Israel and that in return, “we will ask them to produce their product in Israel” using Israeli-grown cannabis.
Kagia believes medical cannabis is finally on the public’s radar.
“Just in the last year The New York Times, Financial Times, USA Today and many other papers have done in-depth stories on the industry. It’s part of a broader social awakening that the stigma so long related to the plant is unfounded.”
Kagia believes Hebrew University, will add to the field’s credibility and “further cement Israel’s position as a world leader in cannabis research.”
Jeffrey Friedland, CEO of Intiva, which is based in Colorado, said he has invested in two Israeli cannabis-focused companies.
“The real money is based on real science,” he said. While 23 or 24 states now allow medical marijuana, Friedland said, “physicians are frustrated. They don’t feel right telling patients, ‘Take two tokes and call me in the morning.’ There’s no dosage information, no data. There’s not enough science to back it up.”
While cannabis research is still in its early stage, Friedland said, “Israel is light years ahead of the rest of the world.” Books
What’s Wrong, And Right, With Religion
Rabbi Donniel Hartman on the necessity of seeing the ‘Other’ as having a moral voice.
Jeffrey Salkin
Special To The Jewish Week
Rabbi Donniel Hartman’s book faults religious followers who put God second to their own interpretations of religious priorities.
There is a bookshelf in my study that I have nicknamed “Amsterdam.”
On that shelf, you can find the following books: “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” by the late Christopher Hitchens; “The God Delusion,” by Richard Dawkins; “Letter To a Christian Nation,” by Sam Harris; and “Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon,” by Daniel Dennett.
“Amsterdam” refers, of course, to the hometown of the quintessential Jewish freethinker, Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza. Those authors have earned a place on the “Amsterdam” shelf because they fall under the rubric of “popular atheism,” which was, for several years, a minor literary cottage industry.
I mention these authors because they provide some of the intellectual backdrop to “Putting God Second: How To Save Religion From Itself” (Beacon Press), the new book by Rabbi Donniel Hartman.
Rabbi Hartman is one of Judaism’s great educators and public intellectuals. He is the president of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, founded by his late father, the Modern Orthodox theologian and intellectual activist Rabbi David Hartman. (Full disclosure: For many years, I have participated in Hartman Institute programs).
In this book, Donniel Hartman poses a big question: If religion is so great, why does it so often fail to do its job of forming good people?
And why is this topic so important, precisely now? Because religion has come back — some would say, with a vengeance. Religion is at the center of regional and world conflicts. Rabbi Hartman examines contemporary religion as he would examine a medical patient. And he discovers that religion has an autoimmune disease.
What is the nature of this autoimmune disease?
First, God intoxication. As Rabbi Hartman sees it, too many people are so enraptured by God’s presence that they forget everything else — including other people and the ethical demands that are part of religious life.
God intoxication is God-induced indifference to anything that is not God. For Rabbi Hartman, the classic example of this is the binding of Isaac (Genesis 22). Abraham is so blinded by his devotion to God that he is willing to sacrifice his own son, and therefore his own future.
Rabbi Hartman tells the story of the chasidic master who criticizes a student so caught up in prayer at home that he fails to attend to his crying baby.
“If praying makes one deaf to the cries of a child, there is something flawed in the prayer,” the rebbe tells the young man.
Implicit in citing this story is a reference to charedim, those ultra-Orthodox Jews who have retreated into their own physical, intellectual, and spiritual ghettos, and who have essentially ignored the “crying baby” of contemporary Israel and modernity.
He could also be talking about devotees of ISIS, who will sacrifice children in the name of their murderous ideology.
Religion’s second critical flaw is God manipulation, which is what is happening when we force God “to serve the self-interests of the anointed, to the exclusion of all others, by using God in the service of our own interests, while simultaneously waving the banner of divine approval.”
This is God-sanctioned indifference — this time, to anyone who is not “us.”
Rabbi Hartman relates the Talmudic story of Rabbi Shimon ben Shetah (Jerusalem Talmud, Baba Metzia 2:5), who returned a lost jewel to an idolatrous gentile. In fact, biblical law requires that an Israelite return the property of only a fellow Israelite. This gesture, therefore, went above and beyond the strict limits of the law.
By returning the jewel to the gentile, Shimon ben Shetah acknowledged that non-Jews possess inalienable human dignity.
Here again, it appears Rabbi Hartman is making an implicit point. In this case that the State of Israel must also affirm the dignity of the “Other,”and must go beyond the mere demands of the law in doing so.
How does Donniel Hartman recommend that we overcome the twin temptations of God intoxication and God manipulation?
Remember the real role of religion, he writes, “[to be a] moral mentor, reminding, cajoling, exhorting, and at times threatening its adherents to check their self-interest and become people who see others, who cannot remain indifferent, and who define their religious identities as agents of moral good.”
This means that Jewish ethical behavior must be able to stand up to, and endure, external critique.
To illustrate this, Hartman reflects on the biblical teaching that if an Israelite owns an animal, and the animal does damage to the animal of a gentile, the Jew is not liable for that damage.
Outrageous, yes? That’s what a passage in the Talmud would have us believe, as well.
The Talmud (Baba Kama 38a) tells the following story: The Roman government once sent two commissioners to the Sages of Israel with a request to teach them Torah. The Sages complied, and the commissioners studied the Torah in its entirety.
Before returning to Rome, however, the commissioners left their Jewish teachers with a sharp comment and critique. “We have gone carefully through your Torah, and found it correct, with the exception of this point: why are Jews exempt from paying damages they cause idolaters, while the latter have maximum responsibility for any damage to Jewish property?”
Consider: The Romans serve as outside “auditors” of the Jewish tradition. They have a notion of the good and the ethical that does not derive from Judaism. The inclusion of this story in the Talmud shows that there were at least some ancient sages who thought that the Torah teaching was unethical.
What else, though, is Hartman saying?
He is speaking about the role of Israel in the world. He writes, “Do not cast all external critics as hostile enemies. If you do, you will lose a profound resource for moral self-renewal. To the contrary, actively cultivate the voices, and embrace the judgments, of outsiders who articulate an independent moral standard.”
Donniel Hartman does not shy away from the most difficult and mature questions of faith. His reasoned, yet passionate, discourse is exactly what many young Jews are seeking — a way to engage with Judaism, and not be forced to leave their critical faculties at the door of that engagement.
Jeffrey K. Salkin is the senior rabbi of Temple Solel in Hollywood, Fla., and the author or editor of ten books on Judaism and culture, published by Jewish Lights Publishing and the Jewish Publication Society. He blogs at jeffreysalkin.religionnews.com.New York
Hillel International Courts Young Techies
Hannah Dreyfus
Hillel’s Mimi Kravetz: “We need to stay relevant to a new generation of Jews.”
Talented young tech professionals rarely find their calling in the world of Jewish philanthropy.
But Hillel International, the worldwide network of college-based Jewish organizations, is bent on changing that.
Last week, the organization launched the Springboard Fellowship program aimed at recruiting and retaining top-level talent among Jewish college grads. Fellows, who will receive a $40,000 stipend and placement at a college campus Hillel, will be trained in design thinking, innovation, and digital strategy — many of the skills that traditional Jewish professionals are sorely lacking, said Mimi Kravetz, chief talent officer at Hillel International.
“Today’s most competitive graduates are excited about pursuing careers in entrepreneurship, social media and digital marketing,” said Kravetz, who left her post as an executive at Google to work for Hillel. “They’re not considering taking jobs in the Jewish nonprofit sector because that does not seem like a place where they can develop these skills. We need to work together to shift that perception.”
The fellowship will begin in the fall of 2016 with a pilot, or “Aleph,” year with 20 fellows, she said. Participants will use their 21st-century skillset to spearhead campus Hillels’ outreach efforts and to build inclusive and diverse communities. For example, fellows might be challenged with creating innovative Shabbat programming that speaks to broad student interests, said Kravetz.
“We need to stay relevant to a new generation of Jews,” she said. “That means continuing to innovate from a place of knowledge.”
The first cohort will have the choice of specializing in either innovation or social media. New areas of focus will be added as the program grows, she said. Applications for the fellowship are now open.
“We need to rebuild the young talent pipeline — that’s what ensures future leadership,” said Kravetz, who served as a Steinhardt Jewish Campus Service Corps Fellow after graduating college. The experience led her to rejoin the Jewish nonprofit world last year, even as her career in the high tech sector was on the rise. Kravetz said the new fellowship program is a reimagining of Hillel’s Service Corps Fellowship, which ran from 1994 to 2008.
“I am so proud of the hundreds of young leaders trained by the Steinhardt Jewish Campus Service Corps, many of whom continue to serve the Jewish community in so many ways today,” said Michael Steinhardt, chair of the Steinhardt Foundation for Jewish Life, in a statement. “The Springboard Fellowship is an innovative way to build on the JCSC legacy, engaging a new generation of young Jews at this critical moment for the Jewish community.”
For Kravetz, the new fellowship is personal. Her experiences in the high-tech world of Silicon Valley impressed upon her the necessity of keeping up a competitive edge, even when it comes to community-building.
“Generally speaking, these skills are desired and lacking at Hillels and across the Jewish world. While there are pockets of people doing them well, they aren’t skills that have been fully integrated into our practice as Jewish professionals — yet.”Enjoy the read, and if you are in New York on March 28, come and imbibe at our 8th annual Grand Wine Tasting at City Winery. Info and tickets here.
http://www.thejewishweek.com/2016-kosher-wine-events?utm_source=March+16%2C+2016+Wednesday+JW+newsletter&utm_campaign=Wed+3%2F16+Newsletter&utm_medium=email
Gary Rosenblatt
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Obama To Nominate Jewish Judge, Merrick Garland, To Supreme Court
National
Obama To Nominate Jewish Judge, Merrick Garland, To Supreme Court
JTA
Merrick Garland, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, will be nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court. JTA
President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee is a Jewish judge, Merrick Garland, who is currently the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
Garland, 63, a Chicago native, has worked in Washington since the 1970s, first as a Supreme Court clerk, then a private lawyer, an assistant U.S. attorney and, since 1997, a federal judge.
Born to a Jewish mother and a Protestant father, Garland was raised as a Jew.
The White House said Obama would make the announcement on Wednesday morning about his pick to fill the Supreme Court seat held by Antonin Scalia until his death last month. Republicans have vowed to block any Obama nominee, saying the vacancy on the nation’s highest court should be filled by the next president. The U.S. Senate, which is controlled by a Republican majority, must confirm any Supreme Court pick.
“As President, it is both my constitutional duty to nominate a Justice and one of the most important decisions that I — or any president — will make,” Obama said in an email message sent Wednesday saying the announcement would be made at 11 a.m. “I’ve devoted a considerable amount of time and deliberation to this decision. I’ve consulted with legal experts and people across the political spectrum, both inside and outside government. And we’ve reached out to every member of the Senate, who each have a responsibility to do their job and take this nomination just as seriously.”
Garland was named to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia circuit by President Bill Clinton in 1997 and became chief judge in 2013. He reportedly was on Obama’s short list for a place on the Supreme Court when a seat opened up in 2009, but Obama ultimately nominated Sonia Sotomayor.
Garland is a graduate of Harvard Law School and clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr. In 1987, he married fellow Harvard graduate Lynn Rosenman in a Jewish ceremony at the Harvard Club in New York. Rosenman’s grandfather, Samuel Rosenman of New York, was a state Supreme Court justice and a special counsel to two presidents, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman.
If confirmed, Garland would be the fourth Jewish justice on the nation’s highest court, which is comprised entirely of Jews and Catholics. The three current Jewish members of the Supreme Court are Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elana Kagan and Stephen Breyer.
After finishing his Supreme Court clerkship in 1979, Garland became a special assistant to the U.S. attorney general before joining the Washington law firm Arnold & Porter. He later served as an assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia and a deputy assistant attorney general until his appointment as U.S. circuit court judge. Clinton first nominated him in 1995, but the Republican-controlled Senate dragged its feet on confirming him. After Clinton won reelection in 1996 he renominated Garland, and the judge was confirmed in March 1997 by a 76-23 vote in the Senate.
'Prime' Battle Over Kosher Practices
Powerful communal and commercial interests collide in the case of Prime Grill's Joey Allaham v. Lincoln Square Synagogue.
Like Speed Dating, But With Torah
'Six-Minute Rabbi' brings serious, albeit abbreviated, learning to those who can't get out of the office.
New York
Like Speed Dating, But With Torah
‘Six-Minute Rabbi’ brings serious, albeit abbreviated, learning to those who can’t get out of the office.
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
Rabbi Hanoch Hecht, who lives in upstate Dutchess County, bikes around Manhattan during his daylong jaunts. MICHAEL DATIKASH/JW
Rabbi Hanoch Hecht’s six minutes of Torah in Manhattan one recent day lasted seven and a half hours.
Earlier this month, the rabbi, an emissary of the Chabad-Lubavitch chasidic movement in upstate Rhinebeck, arrived at 8:34 a.m. on the Amtrak Empire Service, walked to a nearby Shacharit minyan, then began a daylong series of one-on-one learning sessions in offices around the borough. His last class ended at 5 p.m., followed by a personal counseling session. He got back to Rhinebeck at 8:30 p.m.
Another day in the life of the “6-Minute Rabbi.”
That’s the trademarked name that Rabbi Hecht, a 31-year-old Canarsie native, gave himself when he began his short-length, long-lived educational program eight years ago.
Every Thursday, no matter the weather, he meets with doctors, attorneys, real estate developers and other professionals, sharing an insight into the week’s Torah portion, an inspirational story and some words of spiritual encouragement, all in the time it takes to get a cup of coffee.
Most days he rides from lesson to lesson on Citi Bikes he picks up at stations around Manhattan, parking them when he arrives at each venue, hopping on another bike after a class, covering some 15 miles a day.
To stay light, he carries no books, no texts on his jaunts around Gotham; lunch is a Power Bar he picks up along the way.
For many of his students, the 360 seconds with him are usually the only Torah learning they can squeeze into their schedule each week. “I want to get the high-powered people, the busy people,” Rabbi Hecht said.
Sheldon Lobel, a zoning and land use attorney who lives in upstate Millbrook, has hosted Rabbi Hecht’s six-minute class for five years after the two encountered each other at a menorah-lighting ceremony.
“I’m always anxious to meet up with him. I learn something every time,” said Lobel, a member of a Conservative synagogue in Poughkeepsie. “I’m not that learned in Jewish law or Jewish history. This brings me closer. It’s made me more knowledgeable in the beauty of the religion and of the history.”
A member of the prominent Chabad family of Hecht rabbis, on this recent Thursday, Hanoch Hecht sports a distinctive maroon velvet kipa, a light-blue striped suit and an open-collared white shirt. Despite the cold, he left his coat at home, opting instead for a light brown plaid scarf.
The rabbi has lived in Dutchess County with his wife, Tzivie, and children for nine years. He began his six-minute gig when someone he knew in Manhattan indicated an interest in incorporating some regular Torah learning into his schedule, but couldn’t find the time.
Rabbi Hecht did some online research and found a study that reported that the average person’s attention span is about six and a half minutes.
The “6-minute Rabbi” (6minuterabbi.com) was born.
“Everyone has six minutes,” the rabbi said. “This is not just a gimmick.” It’s serious, albeit abbreviated, learning. For people too busy to travel to a class, he brings his classes to them. It’s a bit like the popular lunch and learn programs, but in far less time, and without the lunch.
No homework, no tuition, no pitch to put on tefillin or commit to doing any specific mitzvah. “I don’t come with any hidden agenda,” he said.
He compares his program to Speed Dating (which was invented by another, albeit much larger, Jewish educational organization, Aish HaTorah).
“The concept is very similar,” Rabbi Hecht said. “In a short period you can accomplish a lot.”
He spends up to an hour or two each week deciding on that Thursday’s topic and boiling all the material down. “It’s hard work – but it works,” he said. “The hardest thing is juggling the schedules.” Midtown, downtown, then midtown again. Sometimes, students cancel at the last minute.
With Purim approaching, Rabbi Hecht recently touched on some features of the holiday that celebrates Jewish survival in ancient Persia.
“Which is the holiest day on the Jewish calendar?” he would typically ask.
“Yom Kippur,” most students would answer.
Incorrect – at least at this time of year. “Purim is on a very higher level than Yom Kippur, spiritually speaking,” he said. Yom Kippur centers on the man-and-God relationship; Purim’s emphasis is man-to-man, a day of giving charity and distributing mishloach manot food packages and sharing festive meals with friends. “Our relationship between man and man is more important than our relationship between man and God.”
At first, Rabbi Hecht was not sure if the idea would work in practice. But, he said, “I stuck with it. The self-doubt went away.”
From a single student, Rabbi Hecht’s weekly day in Manhattan has grown to about two dozen, by word of mouth and offers to people he meets. “I never spent a dollar on advertising.” Most of his students are from non-Orthodox or unaffiliated backgrounds.
“I don’t study with every person every week,” he said – their time doesn’t always allow it. Usually he arranges a dozen in-and-out sessions; sometimes, up to 18. On his recent visit: 14.
The rabbi typically meets with a single student; sometimes, a few at a time. Sometimes in a private office, sometimes in a conference room, sometimes in a boiler room – wherever space is available. At the office of architect Marc Kushner last week, Rabbi Hecht spoke to 14 employees, Jews and non-Jews, seated at bleacher-type benches built into an office wall. Sometimes the crowd is closer to 30.
“It’s growing,” said Kushner, who has studied with Rabbi Hecht for a year. “I was worried that it would be super ‘Jewy,’” making it hard for the non-Orthodox to relate. But, he said, “the rabbi makes it very accessible,” speaking in terms of general ethical principles.
First, Rabbi Hecht asks about each student’s family. Then, quickly, down to holy business. He scrupulously keeps to his promised time.
“If you spend 10 minutes you’ve messed up the entire point,” he said. “I’m in and out.”
While he doesn’t know of any Manhattan rabbis doing what he is doing, about a half dozen rabbis, all Orthodox so far, including two in his extended family, have started teaching their own “6-Minute Rabbi” classes in the New York area — and beyond.
Rabbi Hecht’s brother, Rabbi J.J. Hecht, offered the classes in Hong Kong during a two-year stint there. The short time frame “worked unbelievably” in the Chinese city’s high-pressure community of foreign Jewish businessmen, he said. “It caught on like crazy … it became a ‘cool thing.’”
Since Rabbi Hecht’s cousin, Rabbi Moshe Hecht, added the mini-classes to his teaching schedule at the Chabad of Windsor Terrace five years ago, he said he’s seen an impact. “I’ve seen changes in people’s lives,” he said.
Dean Palin, who works in real estate, started studying with Rabbi Hanoch Hecht about four years ago and has kept it up. “It motivates me in many ways. I make time for it,” he said, noting that he shares the lessons with his children over Shabbat. “It helps the whole family.”
At the end of each class on a recent Thursday, Rabbi Hecht and his students exchanged Shabbat greetings.
“Hopefully, I’ll see you next week,” one student said.
“Yes, please God,” the rabbi answered.
steve@jewishweek.org
Students Charged With Painting Swastikas, 'Trump' In Chapel
Northwestern freshmen also suspended after anti-Semitic, racist and homophobic graffiti discovered on campus.
National
Students Charged With Painting Swastikas, ‘Trump’ In Chapel
Northwestern freshmen also suspended after anti-Semitic, racist and homophobic graffiti discovered on campus.
Jeremy Uliss
Editorial Intern
Alice Miller Chapel. Paradoxsociety, Wikimedia Commons
But U.S. researchers can rarely carry out the next level.
“While the FDA “highly supports” conducting medical trials using the cannabis plant, Gedo said, the Drug Enforcement Administration “is suppressing them.”
The DEA has authorized just one institution to distribute cannabis plants to researchers, he said, but the supply is grossly inadequate.
To date, only one major cannabis-based clinical trial — for Epidiolex — has been completed in a U.S. hospital, and only after Stage I and II trials held elsewhere were proved safe and effective.
“In Israel you can conduct clinical trials,” Gedo noted. “The regulations are more liberal. The Ministry of Health will examine [any] protocol if your research makes sense. In the last quarter of 2015 there were more than 30 clinical trial applications and I believe half were approved. This is a huge number when talking about a country like Israel.”
The need for overseas clinical trials is greater than ever before, the entrepreneur said, because the FDA has recently cracked down on companies that make unsubstantiated medical claims.
“In the past two months, the FDA issued eight warning letters to companies that market cannabis products using medical claims. Some of those products were taken off the shelves. The only way to make a medical claim is by conducting a clinical trial,” Gedo said.
Clinical trials performed in Israel are recognized by the FDA, and U.S-based trials are recognized by Israel’s Ministry of Health.
Asked how Israel can benefit financially, Gedo said that foreigners conducting trials in Israel would hold all the rights to the “intellectual property” garnered in Israel and that in return, “we will ask them to produce their product in Israel” using Israeli-grown cannabis.
Kagia believes medical cannabis is finally on the public’s radar.
“Just in the last year The New York Times, Financial Times, USA Today and many other papers have done in-depth stories on the industry. It’s part of a broader social awakening that the stigma so long related to the plant is unfounded.”
Kagia believes Hebrew University, will add to the field’s credibility and “further cement Israel’s position as a world leader in cannabis research.”
Jeffrey Friedland, CEO of Intiva, which is based in Colorado, said he has invested in two Israeli cannabis-focused companies.
“The real money is based on real science,” he said. While 23 or 24 states now allow medical marijuana, Friedland said, “physicians are frustrated. They don’t feel right telling patients, ‘Take two tokes and call me in the morning.’ There’s no dosage information, no data. There’s not enough science to back it up.”
While cannabis research is still in its early stage, Friedland said, “Israel is light years ahead of the rest of the world.” Books
What’s Wrong, And Right, With Religion
Rabbi Donniel Hartman on the necessity of seeing the ‘Other’ as having a moral voice.
Jeffrey Salkin
Special To The Jewish Week
Rabbi Donniel Hartman’s book faults religious followers who put God second to their own interpretations of religious priorities.
There is a bookshelf in my study that I have nicknamed “Amsterdam.”
On that shelf, you can find the following books: “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” by the late Christopher Hitchens; “The God Delusion,” by Richard Dawkins; “Letter To a Christian Nation,” by Sam Harris; and “Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon,” by Daniel Dennett.
“Amsterdam” refers, of course, to the hometown of the quintessential Jewish freethinker, Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza. Those authors have earned a place on the “Amsterdam” shelf because they fall under the rubric of “popular atheism,” which was, for several years, a minor literary cottage industry.
I mention these authors because they provide some of the intellectual backdrop to “Putting God Second: How To Save Religion From Itself” (Beacon Press), the new book by Rabbi Donniel Hartman.
Rabbi Hartman is one of Judaism’s great educators and public intellectuals. He is the president of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, founded by his late father, the Modern Orthodox theologian and intellectual activist Rabbi David Hartman. (Full disclosure: For many years, I have participated in Hartman Institute programs).
In this book, Donniel Hartman poses a big question: If religion is so great, why does it so often fail to do its job of forming good people?
And why is this topic so important, precisely now? Because religion has come back — some would say, with a vengeance. Religion is at the center of regional and world conflicts. Rabbi Hartman examines contemporary religion as he would examine a medical patient. And he discovers that religion has an autoimmune disease.
What is the nature of this autoimmune disease?
First, God intoxication. As Rabbi Hartman sees it, too many people are so enraptured by God’s presence that they forget everything else — including other people and the ethical demands that are part of religious life.
God intoxication is God-induced indifference to anything that is not God. For Rabbi Hartman, the classic example of this is the binding of Isaac (Genesis 22). Abraham is so blinded by his devotion to God that he is willing to sacrifice his own son, and therefore his own future.
Rabbi Hartman tells the story of the chasidic master who criticizes a student so caught up in prayer at home that he fails to attend to his crying baby.
“If praying makes one deaf to the cries of a child, there is something flawed in the prayer,” the rebbe tells the young man.
Implicit in citing this story is a reference to charedim, those ultra-Orthodox Jews who have retreated into their own physical, intellectual, and spiritual ghettos, and who have essentially ignored the “crying baby” of contemporary Israel and modernity.
He could also be talking about devotees of ISIS, who will sacrifice children in the name of their murderous ideology.
Religion’s second critical flaw is God manipulation, which is what is happening when we force God “to serve the self-interests of the anointed, to the exclusion of all others, by using God in the service of our own interests, while simultaneously waving the banner of divine approval.”
This is God-sanctioned indifference — this time, to anyone who is not “us.”
Rabbi Hartman relates the Talmudic story of Rabbi Shimon ben Shetah (Jerusalem Talmud, Baba Metzia 2:5), who returned a lost jewel to an idolatrous gentile. In fact, biblical law requires that an Israelite return the property of only a fellow Israelite. This gesture, therefore, went above and beyond the strict limits of the law.
By returning the jewel to the gentile, Shimon ben Shetah acknowledged that non-Jews possess inalienable human dignity.
Here again, it appears Rabbi Hartman is making an implicit point. In this case that the State of Israel must also affirm the dignity of the “Other,”and must go beyond the mere demands of the law in doing so.
How does Donniel Hartman recommend that we overcome the twin temptations of God intoxication and God manipulation?
Remember the real role of religion, he writes, “[to be a] moral mentor, reminding, cajoling, exhorting, and at times threatening its adherents to check their self-interest and become people who see others, who cannot remain indifferent, and who define their religious identities as agents of moral good.”
This means that Jewish ethical behavior must be able to stand up to, and endure, external critique.
To illustrate this, Hartman reflects on the biblical teaching that if an Israelite owns an animal, and the animal does damage to the animal of a gentile, the Jew is not liable for that damage.
Outrageous, yes? That’s what a passage in the Talmud would have us believe, as well.
The Talmud (Baba Kama 38a) tells the following story: The Roman government once sent two commissioners to the Sages of Israel with a request to teach them Torah. The Sages complied, and the commissioners studied the Torah in its entirety.
Before returning to Rome, however, the commissioners left their Jewish teachers with a sharp comment and critique. “We have gone carefully through your Torah, and found it correct, with the exception of this point: why are Jews exempt from paying damages they cause idolaters, while the latter have maximum responsibility for any damage to Jewish property?”
Consider: The Romans serve as outside “auditors” of the Jewish tradition. They have a notion of the good and the ethical that does not derive from Judaism. The inclusion of this story in the Talmud shows that there were at least some ancient sages who thought that the Torah teaching was unethical.
What else, though, is Hartman saying?
He is speaking about the role of Israel in the world. He writes, “Do not cast all external critics as hostile enemies. If you do, you will lose a profound resource for moral self-renewal. To the contrary, actively cultivate the voices, and embrace the judgments, of outsiders who articulate an independent moral standard.”
Donniel Hartman does not shy away from the most difficult and mature questions of faith. His reasoned, yet passionate, discourse is exactly what many young Jews are seeking — a way to engage with Judaism, and not be forced to leave their critical faculties at the door of that engagement.
Jeffrey K. Salkin is the senior rabbi of Temple Solel in Hollywood, Fla., and the author or editor of ten books on Judaism and culture, published by Jewish Lights Publishing and the Jewish Publication Society. He blogs at jeffreysalkin.religionnews.com.New York
Hillel International Courts Young Techies
Hannah Dreyfus
Hillel’s Mimi Kravetz: “We need to stay relevant to a new generation of Jews.”
Talented young tech professionals rarely find their calling in the world of Jewish philanthropy.
But Hillel International, the worldwide network of college-based Jewish organizations, is bent on changing that.
Last week, the organization launched the Springboard Fellowship program aimed at recruiting and retaining top-level talent among Jewish college grads. Fellows, who will receive a $40,000 stipend and placement at a college campus Hillel, will be trained in design thinking, innovation, and digital strategy — many of the skills that traditional Jewish professionals are sorely lacking, said Mimi Kravetz, chief talent officer at Hillel International.
“Today’s most competitive graduates are excited about pursuing careers in entrepreneurship, social media and digital marketing,” said Kravetz, who left her post as an executive at Google to work for Hillel. “They’re not considering taking jobs in the Jewish nonprofit sector because that does not seem like a place where they can develop these skills. We need to work together to shift that perception.”
The fellowship will begin in the fall of 2016 with a pilot, or “Aleph,” year with 20 fellows, she said. Participants will use their 21st-century skillset to spearhead campus Hillels’ outreach efforts and to build inclusive and diverse communities. For example, fellows might be challenged with creating innovative Shabbat programming that speaks to broad student interests, said Kravetz.
“We need to stay relevant to a new generation of Jews,” she said. “That means continuing to innovate from a place of knowledge.”
The first cohort will have the choice of specializing in either innovation or social media. New areas of focus will be added as the program grows, she said. Applications for the fellowship are now open.
“We need to rebuild the young talent pipeline — that’s what ensures future leadership,” said Kravetz, who served as a Steinhardt Jewish Campus Service Corps Fellow after graduating college. The experience led her to rejoin the Jewish nonprofit world last year, even as her career in the high tech sector was on the rise. Kravetz said the new fellowship program is a reimagining of Hillel’s Service Corps Fellowship, which ran from 1994 to 2008.
“I am so proud of the hundreds of young leaders trained by the Steinhardt Jewish Campus Service Corps, many of whom continue to serve the Jewish community in so many ways today,” said Michael Steinhardt, chair of the Steinhardt Foundation for Jewish Life, in a statement. “The Springboard Fellowship is an innovative way to build on the JCSC legacy, engaging a new generation of young Jews at this critical moment for the Jewish community.”
For Kravetz, the new fellowship is personal. Her experiences in the high-tech world of Silicon Valley impressed upon her the necessity of keeping up a competitive edge, even when it comes to community-building.
“Generally speaking, these skills are desired and lacking at Hillels and across the Jewish world. While there are pockets of people doing them well, they aren’t skills that have been fully integrated into our practice as Jewish professionals — yet.”Enjoy the read, and if you are in New York on March 28, come and imbibe at our 8th annual Grand Wine Tasting at City Winery. Info and tickets here.
http://www.thejewishweek.com/2016-kosher-wine-events?utm_source=March+16%2C+2016+Wednesday+JW+newsletter&utm_campaign=Wed+3%2F16+Newsletter&utm_medium=email
Gary Rosenblatt
P.S. Our website and app are always there for you with breaking news, blogs, op-eds, features and advice columns.
Obama To Nominate Jewish Judge, Merrick Garland, To Supreme Court
National
Obama To Nominate Jewish Judge, Merrick Garland, To Supreme Court
JTA
Merrick Garland, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, will be nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court. JTA
President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee is a Jewish judge, Merrick Garland, who is currently the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
Garland, 63, a Chicago native, has worked in Washington since the 1970s, first as a Supreme Court clerk, then a private lawyer, an assistant U.S. attorney and, since 1997, a federal judge.
Born to a Jewish mother and a Protestant father, Garland was raised as a Jew.
The White House said Obama would make the announcement on Wednesday morning about his pick to fill the Supreme Court seat held by Antonin Scalia until his death last month. Republicans have vowed to block any Obama nominee, saying the vacancy on the nation’s highest court should be filled by the next president. The U.S. Senate, which is controlled by a Republican majority, must confirm any Supreme Court pick.
“As President, it is both my constitutional duty to nominate a Justice and one of the most important decisions that I — or any president — will make,” Obama said in an email message sent Wednesday saying the announcement would be made at 11 a.m. “I’ve devoted a considerable amount of time and deliberation to this decision. I’ve consulted with legal experts and people across the political spectrum, both inside and outside government. And we’ve reached out to every member of the Senate, who each have a responsibility to do their job and take this nomination just as seriously.”
Garland was named to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia circuit by President Bill Clinton in 1997 and became chief judge in 2013. He reportedly was on Obama’s short list for a place on the Supreme Court when a seat opened up in 2009, but Obama ultimately nominated Sonia Sotomayor.
Garland is a graduate of Harvard Law School and clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr. In 1987, he married fellow Harvard graduate Lynn Rosenman in a Jewish ceremony at the Harvard Club in New York. Rosenman’s grandfather, Samuel Rosenman of New York, was a state Supreme Court justice and a special counsel to two presidents, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman.
If confirmed, Garland would be the fourth Jewish justice on the nation’s highest court, which is comprised entirely of Jews and Catholics. The three current Jewish members of the Supreme Court are Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elana Kagan and Stephen Breyer.
After finishing his Supreme Court clerkship in 1979, Garland became a special assistant to the U.S. attorney general before joining the Washington law firm Arnold & Porter. He later served as an assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia and a deputy assistant attorney general until his appointment as U.S. circuit court judge. Clinton first nominated him in 1995, but the Republican-controlled Senate dragged its feet on confirming him. After Clinton won reelection in 1996 he renominated Garland, and the judge was confirmed in March 1997 by a 76-23 vote in the Senate.
'Prime' Battle Over Kosher Practices
Powerful communal and commercial interests collide in the case of Prime Grill's Joey Allaham v. Lincoln Square Synagogue.
Like Speed Dating, But With Torah
'Six-Minute Rabbi' brings serious, albeit abbreviated, learning to those who can't get out of the office.
New York
Like Speed Dating, But With Torah
‘Six-Minute Rabbi’ brings serious, albeit abbreviated, learning to those who can’t get out of the office.
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
Rabbi Hanoch Hecht, who lives in upstate Dutchess County, bikes around Manhattan during his daylong jaunts. MICHAEL DATIKASH/JW
Rabbi Hanoch Hecht’s six minutes of Torah in Manhattan one recent day lasted seven and a half hours.
Earlier this month, the rabbi, an emissary of the Chabad-Lubavitch chasidic movement in upstate Rhinebeck, arrived at 8:34 a.m. on the Amtrak Empire Service, walked to a nearby Shacharit minyan, then began a daylong series of one-on-one learning sessions in offices around the borough. His last class ended at 5 p.m., followed by a personal counseling session. He got back to Rhinebeck at 8:30 p.m.
Another day in the life of the “6-Minute Rabbi.”
That’s the trademarked name that Rabbi Hecht, a 31-year-old Canarsie native, gave himself when he began his short-length, long-lived educational program eight years ago.
Every Thursday, no matter the weather, he meets with doctors, attorneys, real estate developers and other professionals, sharing an insight into the week’s Torah portion, an inspirational story and some words of spiritual encouragement, all in the time it takes to get a cup of coffee.
Most days he rides from lesson to lesson on Citi Bikes he picks up at stations around Manhattan, parking them when he arrives at each venue, hopping on another bike after a class, covering some 15 miles a day.
To stay light, he carries no books, no texts on his jaunts around Gotham; lunch is a Power Bar he picks up along the way.
For many of his students, the 360 seconds with him are usually the only Torah learning they can squeeze into their schedule each week. “I want to get the high-powered people, the busy people,” Rabbi Hecht said.
Sheldon Lobel, a zoning and land use attorney who lives in upstate Millbrook, has hosted Rabbi Hecht’s six-minute class for five years after the two encountered each other at a menorah-lighting ceremony.
“I’m always anxious to meet up with him. I learn something every time,” said Lobel, a member of a Conservative synagogue in Poughkeepsie. “I’m not that learned in Jewish law or Jewish history. This brings me closer. It’s made me more knowledgeable in the beauty of the religion and of the history.”
A member of the prominent Chabad family of Hecht rabbis, on this recent Thursday, Hanoch Hecht sports a distinctive maroon velvet kipa, a light-blue striped suit and an open-collared white shirt. Despite the cold, he left his coat at home, opting instead for a light brown plaid scarf.
The rabbi has lived in Dutchess County with his wife, Tzivie, and children for nine years. He began his six-minute gig when someone he knew in Manhattan indicated an interest in incorporating some regular Torah learning into his schedule, but couldn’t find the time.
Rabbi Hecht did some online research and found a study that reported that the average person’s attention span is about six and a half minutes.
The “6-minute Rabbi” (6minuterabbi.com) was born.
“Everyone has six minutes,” the rabbi said. “This is not just a gimmick.” It’s serious, albeit abbreviated, learning. For people too busy to travel to a class, he brings his classes to them. It’s a bit like the popular lunch and learn programs, but in far less time, and without the lunch.
No homework, no tuition, no pitch to put on tefillin or commit to doing any specific mitzvah. “I don’t come with any hidden agenda,” he said.
He compares his program to Speed Dating (which was invented by another, albeit much larger, Jewish educational organization, Aish HaTorah).
“The concept is very similar,” Rabbi Hecht said. “In a short period you can accomplish a lot.”
He spends up to an hour or two each week deciding on that Thursday’s topic and boiling all the material down. “It’s hard work – but it works,” he said. “The hardest thing is juggling the schedules.” Midtown, downtown, then midtown again. Sometimes, students cancel at the last minute.
With Purim approaching, Rabbi Hecht recently touched on some features of the holiday that celebrates Jewish survival in ancient Persia.
“Which is the holiest day on the Jewish calendar?” he would typically ask.
“Yom Kippur,” most students would answer.
Incorrect – at least at this time of year. “Purim is on a very higher level than Yom Kippur, spiritually speaking,” he said. Yom Kippur centers on the man-and-God relationship; Purim’s emphasis is man-to-man, a day of giving charity and distributing mishloach manot food packages and sharing festive meals with friends. “Our relationship between man and man is more important than our relationship between man and God.”
At first, Rabbi Hecht was not sure if the idea would work in practice. But, he said, “I stuck with it. The self-doubt went away.”
From a single student, Rabbi Hecht’s weekly day in Manhattan has grown to about two dozen, by word of mouth and offers to people he meets. “I never spent a dollar on advertising.” Most of his students are from non-Orthodox or unaffiliated backgrounds.
“I don’t study with every person every week,” he said – their time doesn’t always allow it. Usually he arranges a dozen in-and-out sessions; sometimes, up to 18. On his recent visit: 14.
The rabbi typically meets with a single student; sometimes, a few at a time. Sometimes in a private office, sometimes in a conference room, sometimes in a boiler room – wherever space is available. At the office of architect Marc Kushner last week, Rabbi Hecht spoke to 14 employees, Jews and non-Jews, seated at bleacher-type benches built into an office wall. Sometimes the crowd is closer to 30.
“It’s growing,” said Kushner, who has studied with Rabbi Hecht for a year. “I was worried that it would be super ‘Jewy,’” making it hard for the non-Orthodox to relate. But, he said, “the rabbi makes it very accessible,” speaking in terms of general ethical principles.
First, Rabbi Hecht asks about each student’s family. Then, quickly, down to holy business. He scrupulously keeps to his promised time.
“If you spend 10 minutes you’ve messed up the entire point,” he said. “I’m in and out.”
While he doesn’t know of any Manhattan rabbis doing what he is doing, about a half dozen rabbis, all Orthodox so far, including two in his extended family, have started teaching their own “6-Minute Rabbi” classes in the New York area — and beyond.
Rabbi Hecht’s brother, Rabbi J.J. Hecht, offered the classes in Hong Kong during a two-year stint there. The short time frame “worked unbelievably” in the Chinese city’s high-pressure community of foreign Jewish businessmen, he said. “It caught on like crazy … it became a ‘cool thing.’”
Since Rabbi Hecht’s cousin, Rabbi Moshe Hecht, added the mini-classes to his teaching schedule at the Chabad of Windsor Terrace five years ago, he said he’s seen an impact. “I’ve seen changes in people’s lives,” he said.
Dean Palin, who works in real estate, started studying with Rabbi Hanoch Hecht about four years ago and has kept it up. “It motivates me in many ways. I make time for it,” he said, noting that he shares the lessons with his children over Shabbat. “It helps the whole family.”
At the end of each class on a recent Thursday, Rabbi Hecht and his students exchanged Shabbat greetings.
“Hopefully, I’ll see you next week,” one student said.
“Yes, please God,” the rabbi answered.
steve@jewishweek.org
Students Charged With Painting Swastikas, 'Trump' In Chapel
Northwestern freshmen also suspended after anti-Semitic, racist and homophobic graffiti discovered on campus.
National
Students Charged With Painting Swastikas, ‘Trump’ In Chapel
Northwestern freshmen also suspended after anti-Semitic, racist and homophobic graffiti discovered on campus.
Jeremy Uliss
Editorial Intern
Alice Miller Chapel. Paradoxsociety, Wikimedia Commons
Two Northwestern University freshmen were charged on Saturday with hate crimes and vandalism after admitting to spray-painting offensive symbols on the walls of a nondenominational campus chapel, the Chicago Tribune reported.
Anthony Morales, 19 (at left), and Matthew Kafker (at right), 18, spent Saturday in jail and court, where they were reprimanded by Cook County Judge Peggy Chiampas. “These allegations are disgusting to me,” she said during their bond hearing. “I don't know if any of you know how lucky you are to be at Northwestern University.”
Their bail was set at $50,000.
Anthony Morales, 19 (at left), and Matthew Kafker (at right), 18, spent Saturday in jail and court, where they were reprimanded by Cook County Judge Peggy Chiampas. “These allegations are disgusting to me,” she said during their bond hearing. “I don't know if any of you know how lucky you are to be at Northwestern University.”
Their bail was set at $50,000.
Police said the students were filmed by security cameras breaking into the chapel on Friday night. The next day after which they appear to have spray-painted swastikas, pictures of genitals, racist slurs against African Americans and Muslims, homophobic slurs, and the word “Trump,” according to the Tribune.
Both students admitted the vandalism in statements given to university police, the Tribune reported.
A university spokesman told the Daily Northwestern that the students have been placed on interim suspension, which bans them from campus, for what the University president denounced in an email to students on Friday evening as a “disgusting act of hatred.”
Photos:
Top: Northwestern's Alice Miller Chapel. Paradoxsociety/Wikimedia Commons
Left: Anthony Morales. Courtesy of the Cook County Sheriff's Office
Right: Matthew Kafker. Courtesy of the Cook County Sheriff's Office
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On Israel Apartheid Week, Some Pro-Israel Students Find Silence Is Best Response
New York
On Israel Apartheid Week, Some Pro-Israel Students Find Silence Is Best Response
Uriel Heilman
JTA
Anti-Israel students at Columbia University erected a mock “apartheid wall” in front of the iconic Low Library steps. JTA
When Israel Apartheid Week came to Columbia University in early March, there was potential for great agitation at the heavily Jewish campus.
The local chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, the nation’s leading campus proponent of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, set up a mock “Israeli apartheid wall” in front of the steps leading up to the iconic Low Library. Across the way, a handful of students affiliated with Jewish Voice for Peace manned a table promoting boycotts of the Jewish state.
A few pro-Israel counterprotesters mounted a 12-foot-tall inflatable Pinocchio doll one day that week to call out what they said were lies being propagated by anti-Israel students. But the doll had not explicitly been permitted by Columbia’s student government, and after an hour or so the students were told to take it down.
“We switched the conversation to talking about the Pinocchio,” said Rudy Rochman, the Columbia junior who is president of the local chapter of Students Supporting Israel, which organized the Pinocchio display. “That was really the goal of putting it up. We wanted our messaging to be louder than theirs and to destroy their message.”
For the most part, however, pro-Israel students at the Ivy League school seemed to be laying low, and the week passed largely uneventfully. The anti-Israel groups hosted lectures, screened films and staged dance performances, while Columbia’s largest pro-Israel student group, Aryeh, hosted a lecture by anti-divestment law professor Eugene Kontorovich of Northwestern University that attracted about 80 people. The pro-Palestinian groups drew their loyalists, the pro-Israel students spoke to their constituents and the vast majority of Columbia students paid little attention to either.
That, say many pro-Israel activists on campus, is what success looks like when it comes to Israel Apartheid Week. As the annual event has become a fixture on college campuses, many pro-Israel activists say their most successful strategy is simply to ignore it.
“Being out there devolves this into color war; it makes both sides look crazy,” said Daniella Greenbaum, a Barnard junior and president of Aryeh: Columbia Students Association for Israel. “We want to have elevated discourse on Israel. That’s why we’re not out there this year.”
Dozens of university campuses around the world now mark Israel Apartheid Week. Usually scheduled anytime from late February through early April, the weeklong series of student-organized events is meant to highlight alleged Israeli misdeeds and promote the BDS campaign. Anti-Israel speakers deliver lectures, students mount public demonstrations and guest columnists publish pro-BDS Op-Eds in campus newspapers.
At some campuses, the events prompt open conflict between anti- and pro-Israel students, and students on both sides have complained of being harassed.
“Our biggest fear and concern is that you have so much conflict that Jewish students don’t want to do anything Jewish because this becomes a conflict space,” said one Northeast Hillel director, who asked that his university not be named so as not to fuel anti-Israel agitation on campus. “Most college students are conflict averse. College is such a fun place. When you make a space a conflict space, our fear is that people won’t want to come in.”
The Hillel director says one of his main strategies to avoid being drawn into the conflict with the pro-Palestinian groups is to ignore them. Instead, he focuses on staging positive Israel events.
“It’s kind of a big nothing,” he said of Israel Apartheid Week.
At Columbia, Aryeh polled about 200 students a couple of years ago and found that Israel was very low on the list of issues that interested them. That’s why the group was against the decision by Students Supporting Israel to mount a counterdemonstration opposite the mock apartheid wall, Greenbaum said.
“We have found the days we’re not there people either don’t stop by the wall or don’t notice,” Greenbaum told JTA. “It’s best to avoid calling attention to the whole thing.”
At some campuses, conflict has become unavoidable, some Jewish students say. At the City University of New York, Jewish students at four campuses — Brooklyn College, Hunter College, the College of Staten Island and John Jay College — have complained of being harassed, slurred and silenced by hostile pro-Palestinian students.
On Feb. 16, students at Brooklyn College disrupted a faculty meeting to demand that “Zionists” leave campus and called one professor a “Zionist pig.”
Last week, at a panel discussion at Hunter held as part of Israel Apartheid Week and International Women’s Day, Students for Justice in Palestine student leader Nerdeen Kiswani accused Israel of using “mass rapes of Palestinian women” as part of a campaign to “perpetrate genocide” on the Palestinian people.
“Israel is a state that is built on murder and mass rape of Palestinian women,” said Kiswani, who also has called for an intifada, or Palestinian uprising, against Israel.
The panel was moderated Saadia Toor, an associate professor of sociology at CUNY. The accusation went unanswered and Kiswani was applauded for her remarks. About 65 people were present for the event.
On Feb. 24, the Zionist Organization of America sent CUNY Chancellor James Milliken a long letter detailing Jewish students’ complaints of anti-Semitism and warning that they violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which requires that federally funded universities ensure that Jewish students and others suffer no discrimination on campus.
CUNY launched an investigation into the allegations and the university says it is assembling a task force to promote a more respectful environment on campus.
The Anti-Defamation League also has highlighted alleged anti-Semitism at CUNY while applauding Milliken for his response. New York City Council members reportedly are drafting a bill that would require CUNY to report all campus bias incidents to the City Council.
For their part, SJP and pro-BDS activists say they are not anti-Semitic, and that pro-Israel groups are trying to muzzle them through efforts that amount to witch hunts that risk violating their free speech rights.
“Rather than protect students from bigotry,” a Jewish Voice for Peace spokeswoman said of the proposed New York City Council law, it “is intended to silence advocacy for Palestinian human rights, often by falsely conflating criticism of Israeli policy with anti-Semitism.”
Though news headlines often make it seem like U.S. college campuses have become the sites of pitched battles between anti-Israel and pro-Israel students, many campus professionals – including at colleges where anti-Semitic incidents allegedly have occurred — say that’s simply not the case.
Nadya Drukker, the executive director of the Hillel chapter at Brooklyn College, said more than 30 student leaders on her campus are focused on organizing pro-Israel events. One of the events that took place this semester was even co-sponsored with the local chapter of the Muslim Students Association, which largely steers clear of the Israel-Arab conflict.
The event, which was also co-sponsored by a Christian student club, was a trivia game called “Getting to know each other’s religion.”
Jewish Trans Woman Named Senior White House LGBT Liaison
National
Jewish Trans Woman Named Senior White House LGBT Liaison
JTA
Raffi Freedman-Gurspan. JTA
Less than a year after becoming the first openly transgender person to serve in the White House, a Jewish woman been promoted to serve as its senior liaison to the LGBT community.
Raffi Freedman-Gurspan, a Honduras native who was raised in Brookline, Massachusetts, by Jewish parents, will serve as the White House’s “lead point of contact” for LGBT groups, BuzzFeed News reported Monday.
Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, Freedman-Gurspan’s former employer, praised the appointment.
“Raffi’s skills and personality make her the exact right person for this important job,” Keislin told BuzzFeed.
Freedman-Gurspan, who is in her late 20s, was “a powerful leader for trans inclusion” in her Brookline synagogue, Temple Beth Zion, according to the Jewish LGBT advocacy group Keshet. She also was active in the Jewish Student Union as an undergraduate at St. Olaf College in Minneapolis.
Although Freedman-Gurspan was the first transgender White House staffer, another Jewish woman, Amanda Simpson, was the first transgender individual to hold a position in the U.S. executive branch. President Barack Obama appointed Simpson in 2010 to senior technical adviser in the Bureau of Industry and Security at the Department of Commerce.
Charedi Hubris In Flight
Opinion
Charedi Hubris In Flight
When did it become OK to put religious preference before common courtesy?
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
Illustration by Charles Rosenthal/JW. All rights reserved
The middle-aged chasidic man, sitting in a window seat, on an El Al flight from Tel Aviv to JFK, didn’t say a word to me when I took my aisle seat in the same row. The seat between us remained empty for a few minutes, and then the occupant appeared – a member of a Birthright Israel group returning to the States.
She was college-aged, attractive; and dressed very immodestly, by my – or the chasid’s – Orthodox standards. Shorts, halter-top.
The chasid said his first words to me: “Yesh baya,” there is a problem. More correctly, he had a problem.
By his accent, I judged him to be Israeli. The problem was the young woman’s garb, the little that she was wearing. You have to move, the chasid said to me, not introducing himself or elaborating, or speaking to the woman, simply pointing to the seat where the college student was about to sit for the next 11 hours. His problem had become my problem.
I had specifically requested, as always, an aisle seat; with long legs, I want to be able to stretch into the aisle when possible. For a pragmatic reason, and a matter of principle for the chasid’s lack of Derech Eretz (common courtesy), I was not about to move.
I didn’t know if the chasid spoke English, but I told the woman, in a voice intentionally loud enough for him to hear, “If he doesn’t want to sit next to you, that’s his problem. You don’t have to move. I am not moving. He can ask the stewardess [I am of the generation that has not accepted the unisex ‘flight attendant’ appellation] to find him another seat.”
Before the confrontation escalated, a male college student in the row behind us offered to exchange his middle seat with the young woman’s. She accepted; for the flight back to the States, our row was all male. The college kid was good company; the chasid never looked at me again or said another word to me.
It was an acceptable solution; as an Orthodox male who finds women attractive, I also did not wish to sit in such close quarters with the young woman. Who needs such temptations?
It would be chutzpah for me to tell the young woman, who was dressed as most of her contemporaries do, to move to accommodate my religious preference, or to tell another passenger to move.
I’m not usually so adamant, but the chasid’s attitude bothered me: I should move, I should sit next to the immodestly dressed woman? Since I am clean-shaven and outfitted in cargo pants when I travel, he apparently figured that I was “Modern,” at a lower spiritual level than he: I could sin with my eyes.
I think about this with the latest example of an “ultra-Orthodox” man offending a woman traveler now in the news — because he was offended by her clothing, or by her very gender. An 81-year-old woman, a Holocaust survivor, an attorney, a grandmother, “impeccably groomed” according to The New York Times, has filed a $75 million discrimination lawsuit against El Al because she was forced to move for the sake of a charedi man who refused sit next to a woman.
Such outrages keep happening. An Orthodox man who refused to sit next to a woman on a Delta flight. The result: at best, a delayed flight; at worst, upset passengers. Ditto on a Porter Airlines flight. Ditto, frequently, on El Al, which flies the largest number of charedim. Ditto, too many times to mention. As well as women bumped to the back of buses that serve the Orthodox community in this country and Israel.
Charedi hubris, to my distress, is on the rise.
It’s admittedly a minority of charedi men who commit such outrages, but a vocal one that pounces on an extreme interpretation of Jewish law and gives the wider Orthodox community a black eye, a reputation for being intolerant bigots.
I’ve heard of charedi men in Israel who paint over most of their eyeglasses, with only narrow slits remaining, to reduce the likelihood of seeing, on the streets, sights they don’t want to see. Extreme behavior, but they’re not hurting anyone’s feelings or telling anyone how to behave.
Having non-Orthodox female relatives who do not share my religious sensibilities, I realize that they do not accept my halachic concerns and are blissfully unaware of how unsettling their minimally covered appearance can be for heterosexual male eyes.
Like any male, I can simply avert my gaze.
Congregation Shearith Israel’s Rabbi Marc Angel, in a recent blog post, wrote about this topic in terms of the difference between a “rabbi” and a “hakham.” (A chacham, the Hebrew word’s usual spelling, is a scholar; in Sephardic nomenclature, it’s a spiritual leader, what Ashkenazim call a rabbi.)
“The ‘Hakham’ is not less devoted to the Torah” than the “rabbi,” “and not less religious in any way,” Rabbi Angel wrote. “Yet, the Hakham is part of a tradition that promotes a natural, courteous and congenial way of life. He would consider it a terrible sin to embarrass a woman by asking her to move away, as though she were an impure or contaminated being. He would feel comfortable sitting next to any decent person, male or female.”
I have learned in my yeshiva studies a fundamental principle of Jewish behavior: Derech Eretz kodma l’Torah. Common courtesy comes before [performance of fastidious acts of] Torah.
This principle, unfortunately, is increasingly ignored in many parts of my Orthodox community.
There is no easy solution.
El Al is not at fault. El Al is not Mea Shearim. An airline, even an Israeli one, cannot set or enforce a dress code. It cannot tell women how to act or men how to react. Its priority is getting flights off the ground on schedule.
El Al can begin its own charedi-men-only section on each flight. In the back of the plane. It would be called the Rosa Parks Section.
My suggestion: make it clear that the airline’s seats are open to the general flying public, however he or she – barring outright nudity or other clearly, agreed-upon inappropriate garb – is dressed. Someone offended by a fellow passenger’s clothing choices can pay for a seat in business class or first class, where the seats are not touching each other. Or buy two adjoining seats for himself.
Or, if that is not possible, deplane … and rebook on a future flight, at his expense.
This is what I would have told the chasid on my flight last year, had he been willing to discuss instead of demand.
Someone with heightened religious sensibilities has choices.
He can stay home.
He can bury his head in a book.
Or he can act like a mensch.
Charedi men, El Al Airlines, non-orthodox women
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Henry Winkler's Symbol Of Holocaust Survival Lives On In Hollywood
National
Henry Winkler’s Symbol Of Holocaust Survival Lives On In Hollywood
Most of his relatives died in Nazi Germany, but a smuggled-out plant and its cuttings flourish across Tinseltown.
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
Henry Winkler passes a leather jacket to actor Ben Freeman in 2014 to launch the London musical "Happy Days." Getty Images
Henry Winkler, the Jewish actor best known as tough-talking Arthur Fonzarelli — aka, “The Fonz” — on the 1970s-80s TV show “Happy Days,” is earning a new reputation. As a protector of a unique Holocaust legacy.
Now 70 and a graying grandfather, the son of refugees from Nazi Germany, he keeps in his Hollywood home a spider plant with a unique history. It grew from cuttings from the original plant that was in the coffin in which a friend of his family, known as “Tante Erma” was smuggled out of Germany in the 1930s.
Most of the actor’s extended family perished in the Holocaust.
A symbol of perseverance and survival, Winkler's green-and-white plant has flourished in his home and in the home of many of his friends.
“Everybody got a cutting,” he told The Washington Post.
Jill Soloway, creator of “Transparent,” the transgender comedy starring Jeffrey Tambor, keeps one of Winkler’s gift plants in her writer’s room as a source of inspiration, The Post reported. “It’s a beautiful story.”
In his post-Happy Days days, Winkler had served as a TV series producer and as an actor in episodes of several programs.
Winkler during career has supported many causes, including research on dyslexia (a condition he struggled with as a kid), and many Jewish organizations, including Congregation Habonim in Manhattan (his parents were among the founders of the synagogue).
“I think that being Jewish equates with being empathetic,” he told the Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia in a recent interview. “The humanness of being Jewish makes me so proud.” “I would imagine that I’m the actor I am because of the life that I have lived, the childhood I had.”
Winkler is writing the 31st novel in his series of Hank Zipzer children’s books series, whose main character has dyslexia. His work to remove the stigma of being dyslexic has earned him many awards; England’s Queen Elizabeth II honored him in 2011 for his work with children’s literacy.
To Winkler, keeping his plant, and its meaning, alive, has become an obligation.
“I grew up with it, I heard the story, and I thought maybe it’s my responsibility to make sure it lives.”
Pew Findings Not Surprising, But Also Not Irreversible
Opinion
Pew Findings Not Surprising, But Also Not Irreversible
Daniel Sokatch
Daniel Sokatch
The Pew Research Center poll released this week surveying attitudes among Israeli citizens confirms what many of us who work on Israeli issues already knew: Israel is a deeply divided society, first and foremost between its Jewish and Arab citizens, but also among its Jewish sectors.
Ethnicity, religiosity, family origin and political beliefs have created an Israel of “camps” that don’t much like or have much to do with each other. The Pew research director described these divisions as “jaw-dropping.”
As in-depth as the survey is, however, what it does not tell us is why Israel has become so fractured. Israel’s Jewish and Arab citizens have been living together for generations, and its Jews belong to a people that survived millennia of persecution with cohesion and unity. Why, then, is it so difficult for Israelis to share their society and arrive at some concept of Israeli-ness that would downplay sectarian differences? And how can a nation so deeply divided offer a sense of community to all its citizens?
Some factors are familiar to Americans experienced with the red-blue state divide. Many Israelis of all three faiths are profoundly religious. With religious practice frequently comes a more conservative and insular stance on social issues ranging from the rights of women to the role religion should play in the identity of the state. Most important, the Pew survey found that the four descriptions used for being Jewish in Israel – secular, traditional, religious Zionist and ultra-Orthodox – strongly correlate with views on social and political issues, on questions as basic as the prospects for peace or the importance of democratic values.
And then there is the attitude toward the “other.” There is profound disagreement over the significance of Israel as a Jewish state. Nearly 80 percent of Jews believe that Jews deserve (some unspecified) preferential treatment in Israel. No wonder most Arab respondents do not think Israel can be a Jewish state and a democracy at the same time. The two groups can’t come close to agreement on whether Israeli Arabs face discrimination or the prospects for peace.
That 48 percent of Jewish respondents actually want to expel their Arab neighbors is a terrible headline, one that underlines the need to reinforce the value of minority rights within Israeli society. Commentators warn that this question cannot be taken in isolation, especially because it did not refer to a real policy proposal. But to those of us working against the growing wave of racism and incitement, this response is a red flag that reflects the reality of what we see on the ground.
It must also be said that these deep divisions serve the purposes of many Israeli leaders, who amplify the idea that Israeli society is a zero-sum game in which one sector can only advance at the expense of others. A prime minister who mustered his base on Election Day with the threat that “Arabs are being bused to the polls in droves” and who conditions Arab civil rights on his standard of good behavior is not, to put it mildly, unifying his country.
Charedi leaders who viciously attack not only non-Jews but their Reform and Conservative counterparts do their part in exacerbating intolerance. Separatist Arab leaders who publicly identify with Israel’s enemies don’t help matters, nor do settler politicians whose only public policy is demonizing anyone who opposes the occupation as an obstacle to peace and dangerous to Israeli democracy.
There are no easy remedies for these deep divides. We must also keep in mind, after a day where more Israelis fell victim to terrorists in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, that the Jewish-Arab divide, and for that matter some divisions among Jewish sectors, cannot be separated from the pain and trauma of all sides in Israel’s existential conflicts. But we also must understand that the Pew poll represents a snapshot in time and is not an irreversible prediction of Israel’s future.
From President Reuven Rivlin on down, there are strong voices speaking out against racism and division in Israel. There is a coalition of more than 50 organizations that speaks out at public events against extremist Jewish violence against non-Jews — and it is led by religious Zionists. There is a Coalition Against Racism with an array of participants from Reform Jews to Palestinian grassroots activists, and there are local Jewish-Arab coalitions dedicated to building shared spaces in which ordinary people interact in their daily lives.
There are waiting lists for leadership training for shared-society activists and new resources for teachers seeking to educate children to think civically and communally about being an Israeli. Even in Jerusalem, the epicenter of conflict, there are efforts to break down the walls between the charedi, secular Jewish and Palestinian populations.
These efforts are not about some kumbaya veneer of superficial goodwill. What Israel needs is the toughest thing of all to build — a truly shared society, with each sector feeling it is a valued and irreplaceable part of the whole. “Tolerance” of minorities or other kinds of Jews is not enough. Israel needs an ethos of sharing its small space among its many different kinds of people because they are all entitled to be there.
From the Tel Aviv entrepreneur drinking coffee on the beach to the student arguing Talmud in Bnei Brak, from the Russian artist to the Ethiopian activist to every Palestinian-Israeli whose family is deeply rooted in the land, there is no other place for them to go.
The Pew study validates, once again, those of us who warn of dangerous fissures in a nation that cannot afford the continued breakdown of cohesion and amity. But we who warn, we who are dedicated to repairing those fissures and building some solid foundations above them, we also know that Israelis are miraculously good at inventing new realities.
Now they need to reinvent their own society — for their own sake, and for all of us who love and support their efforts.
Daniel Sokatch is CEO of the New Israel Fund. This op-ed appeared first on the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s website, jta.org.
These Orthodox Jews Use Karate To Defend The Faith
New York
These Orthodox Jews Use Karate To Defend The Faith
Lucy Cohen Blatter
JTA
Mordechai Genut, founder of Frum Karate, instructing some beginners’ students. JTA
On a recent Sunday evening at a Jewish center in Brooklyn’s Midwood section, dozens of boys and men — ages 5 to 40-something — practice their kicks, strikes and jabs. They are clad in the usual all-white uniform, tied at their middles with cloth belts — mostly white, but some yellows and greens, too.
As is traditional martial-arts fashion, their feet are bare. But their heads are not — most are covered with black velvet yarmulkes. Some have curly payes hanging underneath.
At the head of the class is Mordechai Genut, a third-degree black belt and founder of Frum Karate, a class geared toward Orthodox, even Hasidic, Jews.
While “regular” karate classes often include rituals like bowing in honor of ancestors or burning incense as a gift to the gods, Genut removes any and all “avodah zarah” — foreign worship — aspects from the practice.
His goal: To help members of his community train their minds, bodies and spirits.
“We try and focus on physical exercise and relaxation, and we use martial arts as a vehicle to connect to God,” Genut says. “And we remove anything that’s contradictory to the Torah.”
Genut is a karate master in the Tora Dojo system (the name is a play on tora, the Japanese word for tiger, and the Torah; a dojo is a school of martial arts). The system was founded in 1967 with a mission to teach martial arts to the Jewish community.
Though his class is geared to religious Jews, Genut recognizes that some who lean more conservative may be turned off initially, try as they might to live strictly according to the Torah and stay away from secular society.
“The word karate can be a big no-no because it’s associated with fighting,” he says. “I understand that. But the truth is we see in the Torah many places where God says that you should protect yourself.”
In addition to running Frum Karate, Genut is also a licensed acupuncturist and expert on Qi Gong meditative breathing.
And though often associated with Eastern religions, meditation doesn’t contradict Judaism, says Genut, pointing in particular to the works of Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan, a 20th-century rabbi and kabbalist who wrote extensively on meditation.
Genut has learned much from Eastern practices, but is able to sift through them to borrow aspects with which he feels comfortable as an Orthodox Jew.
“Everybody has the same body and same internal energy,” he says. “The only thing that’s different is the philosophy. I don’t need to be able to believe in Buddha to do these things.”
Genut began practicing martial arts as a teen in Brooklyn after some near-violent, anti-Semitic-tinged incidents in his neighborhood. Upon earning his black belt, Genut was given a Japanese name, as is standard: Jian Guo, meaning “to invigorate a nation.”
Through his role as a teacher, Genut is trying to do just that — though to his students he’s now known as Sifu Mordechai, which translates into “master.”
And though it may sound counterintuitive, Genut stresses the importance of avoiding violence to his pupils.
“If, Chas Ve’shalom [God forbid], someone is coming after you, you run away,” Genut told the younger of his two classes, which are split between 5- to 11-year-olds and 12 and up. He also teaches safety tips, like not having yarmulkes embroidered with their names, lest strangers fake familiarity with kids. (It’s a classic police tip, though usually applied to backpacks.)
“Jews value life, we don’t glorify violence,” Genut says. “And we don’t encourage fighting.”
“I have no shame in running away from a situation,” chimes in Jack Newman, a fifth-degree black belt who has been involved in Tora Dojo since the early 1980s and came to help Genut with his classes that Sunday night.
“But sometimes you can’t run away. In that case, you have the knowledge you get from your sensei,” says Newman, using the Japanese word for martial arts teacher. Newman credits his karate practice for helping him stay sane during his 30-plus years on Wall Street.
The recent rash of stabbings in Israel, along with hate crimes around the world targeting Jewish people, have made it even more important for members of the religious community to have knowledge of self defense, Genut and Newman add.
“The problem in religious communities is that there’s not enough education on self-defense,” Newman says. “Because of what’s happening now, in Israel and here, the yeshivas on every level should have some sort of program to show people the essence of how to protect themselves.”
A woman named Orlit is among several wig-wearing mothers who have brought their sons to the Sunday-night class. One of her sons has ADHD, “and for him it’s about fitness and focus,” she says. Another son, who is in the older class, gets nervous on the streets in their Flatbush neighborhood.
“I want him to be more confident,” she says.
Moishe Blumenthal, who is waiting for his son to finish class, says he appreciates the activity — mostly for the exercise, but also for the discipline. While he describes his son’s school as “yeshivish,” he says he suspects some Hasidic people might not be interested in the class for fear that it’s too far away from the world of religious learning.
“Though the fact that girls and boys are separate definitely helps,” he adds.
Earlier this month, Genut launched the first separate — but concurrent — class for women and girls in the same location, which is run by Sensei Ellen, a female first-degree black belt. (Orlit says she’ll consider sending her girls there, too).
While religious women often take female-only exercise classes like Zumba or kickboxing, Genut wanted women to have an opportunity to hone karate’s concentration and focus, he says.
And as someone who also organizes self-defense seminars for women, he also sees the importance in teaching frum women — and all women for that matter — how to protect themselves and avoid becoming victimized.
One Hasidic man, typing at his laptop while his 9-year-old son practices his kicks, jabs and bows, says Frum Karate has become a regular routine for them.
“We have a lot going on on Sundays,” the man says, “but my son won’t let me out of it. He loves it.”
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Both students admitted the vandalism in statements given to university police, the Tribune reported.
A university spokesman told the Daily Northwestern that the students have been placed on interim suspension, which bans them from campus, for what the University president denounced in an email to students on Friday evening as a “disgusting act of hatred.”
Photos:
Top: Northwestern's Alice Miller Chapel. Paradoxsociety/Wikimedia Commons
Left: Anthony Morales. Courtesy of the Cook County Sheriff's Office
Right: Matthew Kafker. Courtesy of the Cook County Sheriff's Office
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On Israel Apartheid Week, Some Pro-Israel Students Find Silence Is Best Response
New York
On Israel Apartheid Week, Some Pro-Israel Students Find Silence Is Best Response
Uriel Heilman
JTA
Anti-Israel students at Columbia University erected a mock “apartheid wall” in front of the iconic Low Library steps. JTA
When Israel Apartheid Week came to Columbia University in early March, there was potential for great agitation at the heavily Jewish campus.
The local chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, the nation’s leading campus proponent of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, set up a mock “Israeli apartheid wall” in front of the steps leading up to the iconic Low Library. Across the way, a handful of students affiliated with Jewish Voice for Peace manned a table promoting boycotts of the Jewish state.
A few pro-Israel counterprotesters mounted a 12-foot-tall inflatable Pinocchio doll one day that week to call out what they said were lies being propagated by anti-Israel students. But the doll had not explicitly been permitted by Columbia’s student government, and after an hour or so the students were told to take it down.
“We switched the conversation to talking about the Pinocchio,” said Rudy Rochman, the Columbia junior who is president of the local chapter of Students Supporting Israel, which organized the Pinocchio display. “That was really the goal of putting it up. We wanted our messaging to be louder than theirs and to destroy their message.”
For the most part, however, pro-Israel students at the Ivy League school seemed to be laying low, and the week passed largely uneventfully. The anti-Israel groups hosted lectures, screened films and staged dance performances, while Columbia’s largest pro-Israel student group, Aryeh, hosted a lecture by anti-divestment law professor Eugene Kontorovich of Northwestern University that attracted about 80 people. The pro-Palestinian groups drew their loyalists, the pro-Israel students spoke to their constituents and the vast majority of Columbia students paid little attention to either.
That, say many pro-Israel activists on campus, is what success looks like when it comes to Israel Apartheid Week. As the annual event has become a fixture on college campuses, many pro-Israel activists say their most successful strategy is simply to ignore it.
“Being out there devolves this into color war; it makes both sides look crazy,” said Daniella Greenbaum, a Barnard junior and president of Aryeh: Columbia Students Association for Israel. “We want to have elevated discourse on Israel. That’s why we’re not out there this year.”
Dozens of university campuses around the world now mark Israel Apartheid Week. Usually scheduled anytime from late February through early April, the weeklong series of student-organized events is meant to highlight alleged Israeli misdeeds and promote the BDS campaign. Anti-Israel speakers deliver lectures, students mount public demonstrations and guest columnists publish pro-BDS Op-Eds in campus newspapers.
At some campuses, the events prompt open conflict between anti- and pro-Israel students, and students on both sides have complained of being harassed.
“Our biggest fear and concern is that you have so much conflict that Jewish students don’t want to do anything Jewish because this becomes a conflict space,” said one Northeast Hillel director, who asked that his university not be named so as not to fuel anti-Israel agitation on campus. “Most college students are conflict averse. College is such a fun place. When you make a space a conflict space, our fear is that people won’t want to come in.”
The Hillel director says one of his main strategies to avoid being drawn into the conflict with the pro-Palestinian groups is to ignore them. Instead, he focuses on staging positive Israel events.
“It’s kind of a big nothing,” he said of Israel Apartheid Week.
At Columbia, Aryeh polled about 200 students a couple of years ago and found that Israel was very low on the list of issues that interested them. That’s why the group was against the decision by Students Supporting Israel to mount a counterdemonstration opposite the mock apartheid wall, Greenbaum said.
“We have found the days we’re not there people either don’t stop by the wall or don’t notice,” Greenbaum told JTA. “It’s best to avoid calling attention to the whole thing.”
At some campuses, conflict has become unavoidable, some Jewish students say. At the City University of New York, Jewish students at four campuses — Brooklyn College, Hunter College, the College of Staten Island and John Jay College — have complained of being harassed, slurred and silenced by hostile pro-Palestinian students.
On Feb. 16, students at Brooklyn College disrupted a faculty meeting to demand that “Zionists” leave campus and called one professor a “Zionist pig.”
Last week, at a panel discussion at Hunter held as part of Israel Apartheid Week and International Women’s Day, Students for Justice in Palestine student leader Nerdeen Kiswani accused Israel of using “mass rapes of Palestinian women” as part of a campaign to “perpetrate genocide” on the Palestinian people.
“Israel is a state that is built on murder and mass rape of Palestinian women,” said Kiswani, who also has called for an intifada, or Palestinian uprising, against Israel.
The panel was moderated Saadia Toor, an associate professor of sociology at CUNY. The accusation went unanswered and Kiswani was applauded for her remarks. About 65 people were present for the event.
On Feb. 24, the Zionist Organization of America sent CUNY Chancellor James Milliken a long letter detailing Jewish students’ complaints of anti-Semitism and warning that they violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which requires that federally funded universities ensure that Jewish students and others suffer no discrimination on campus.
CUNY launched an investigation into the allegations and the university says it is assembling a task force to promote a more respectful environment on campus.
The Anti-Defamation League also has highlighted alleged anti-Semitism at CUNY while applauding Milliken for his response. New York City Council members reportedly are drafting a bill that would require CUNY to report all campus bias incidents to the City Council.
For their part, SJP and pro-BDS activists say they are not anti-Semitic, and that pro-Israel groups are trying to muzzle them through efforts that amount to witch hunts that risk violating their free speech rights.
“Rather than protect students from bigotry,” a Jewish Voice for Peace spokeswoman said of the proposed New York City Council law, it “is intended to silence advocacy for Palestinian human rights, often by falsely conflating criticism of Israeli policy with anti-Semitism.”
Though news headlines often make it seem like U.S. college campuses have become the sites of pitched battles between anti-Israel and pro-Israel students, many campus professionals – including at colleges where anti-Semitic incidents allegedly have occurred — say that’s simply not the case.
Nadya Drukker, the executive director of the Hillel chapter at Brooklyn College, said more than 30 student leaders on her campus are focused on organizing pro-Israel events. One of the events that took place this semester was even co-sponsored with the local chapter of the Muslim Students Association, which largely steers clear of the Israel-Arab conflict.
The event, which was also co-sponsored by a Christian student club, was a trivia game called “Getting to know each other’s religion.”
Jewish Trans Woman Named Senior White House LGBT Liaison
National
Jewish Trans Woman Named Senior White House LGBT Liaison
JTA
Raffi Freedman-Gurspan. JTA
Less than a year after becoming the first openly transgender person to serve in the White House, a Jewish woman been promoted to serve as its senior liaison to the LGBT community.
Raffi Freedman-Gurspan, a Honduras native who was raised in Brookline, Massachusetts, by Jewish parents, will serve as the White House’s “lead point of contact” for LGBT groups, BuzzFeed News reported Monday.
Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, Freedman-Gurspan’s former employer, praised the appointment.
“Raffi’s skills and personality make her the exact right person for this important job,” Keislin told BuzzFeed.
Freedman-Gurspan, who is in her late 20s, was “a powerful leader for trans inclusion” in her Brookline synagogue, Temple Beth Zion, according to the Jewish LGBT advocacy group Keshet. She also was active in the Jewish Student Union as an undergraduate at St. Olaf College in Minneapolis.
Although Freedman-Gurspan was the first transgender White House staffer, another Jewish woman, Amanda Simpson, was the first transgender individual to hold a position in the U.S. executive branch. President Barack Obama appointed Simpson in 2010 to senior technical adviser in the Bureau of Industry and Security at the Department of Commerce.
Charedi Hubris In Flight
Opinion
Charedi Hubris In Flight
When did it become OK to put religious preference before common courtesy?
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
Illustration by Charles Rosenthal/JW. All rights reserved
The middle-aged chasidic man, sitting in a window seat, on an El Al flight from Tel Aviv to JFK, didn’t say a word to me when I took my aisle seat in the same row. The seat between us remained empty for a few minutes, and then the occupant appeared – a member of a Birthright Israel group returning to the States.
She was college-aged, attractive; and dressed very immodestly, by my – or the chasid’s – Orthodox standards. Shorts, halter-top.
The chasid said his first words to me: “Yesh baya,” there is a problem. More correctly, he had a problem.
By his accent, I judged him to be Israeli. The problem was the young woman’s garb, the little that she was wearing. You have to move, the chasid said to me, not introducing himself or elaborating, or speaking to the woman, simply pointing to the seat where the college student was about to sit for the next 11 hours. His problem had become my problem.
I had specifically requested, as always, an aisle seat; with long legs, I want to be able to stretch into the aisle when possible. For a pragmatic reason, and a matter of principle for the chasid’s lack of Derech Eretz (common courtesy), I was not about to move.
I didn’t know if the chasid spoke English, but I told the woman, in a voice intentionally loud enough for him to hear, “If he doesn’t want to sit next to you, that’s his problem. You don’t have to move. I am not moving. He can ask the stewardess [I am of the generation that has not accepted the unisex ‘flight attendant’ appellation] to find him another seat.”
Before the confrontation escalated, a male college student in the row behind us offered to exchange his middle seat with the young woman’s. She accepted; for the flight back to the States, our row was all male. The college kid was good company; the chasid never looked at me again or said another word to me.
It was an acceptable solution; as an Orthodox male who finds women attractive, I also did not wish to sit in such close quarters with the young woman. Who needs such temptations?
It would be chutzpah for me to tell the young woman, who was dressed as most of her contemporaries do, to move to accommodate my religious preference, or to tell another passenger to move.
I’m not usually so adamant, but the chasid’s attitude bothered me: I should move, I should sit next to the immodestly dressed woman? Since I am clean-shaven and outfitted in cargo pants when I travel, he apparently figured that I was “Modern,” at a lower spiritual level than he: I could sin with my eyes.
I think about this with the latest example of an “ultra-Orthodox” man offending a woman traveler now in the news — because he was offended by her clothing, or by her very gender. An 81-year-old woman, a Holocaust survivor, an attorney, a grandmother, “impeccably groomed” according to The New York Times, has filed a $75 million discrimination lawsuit against El Al because she was forced to move for the sake of a charedi man who refused sit next to a woman.
Such outrages keep happening. An Orthodox man who refused to sit next to a woman on a Delta flight. The result: at best, a delayed flight; at worst, upset passengers. Ditto on a Porter Airlines flight. Ditto, frequently, on El Al, which flies the largest number of charedim. Ditto, too many times to mention. As well as women bumped to the back of buses that serve the Orthodox community in this country and Israel.
Charedi hubris, to my distress, is on the rise.
It’s admittedly a minority of charedi men who commit such outrages, but a vocal one that pounces on an extreme interpretation of Jewish law and gives the wider Orthodox community a black eye, a reputation for being intolerant bigots.
I’ve heard of charedi men in Israel who paint over most of their eyeglasses, with only narrow slits remaining, to reduce the likelihood of seeing, on the streets, sights they don’t want to see. Extreme behavior, but they’re not hurting anyone’s feelings or telling anyone how to behave.
Having non-Orthodox female relatives who do not share my religious sensibilities, I realize that they do not accept my halachic concerns and are blissfully unaware of how unsettling their minimally covered appearance can be for heterosexual male eyes.
Like any male, I can simply avert my gaze.
Congregation Shearith Israel’s Rabbi Marc Angel, in a recent blog post, wrote about this topic in terms of the difference between a “rabbi” and a “hakham.” (A chacham, the Hebrew word’s usual spelling, is a scholar; in Sephardic nomenclature, it’s a spiritual leader, what Ashkenazim call a rabbi.)
“The ‘Hakham’ is not less devoted to the Torah” than the “rabbi,” “and not less religious in any way,” Rabbi Angel wrote. “Yet, the Hakham is part of a tradition that promotes a natural, courteous and congenial way of life. He would consider it a terrible sin to embarrass a woman by asking her to move away, as though she were an impure or contaminated being. He would feel comfortable sitting next to any decent person, male or female.”
I have learned in my yeshiva studies a fundamental principle of Jewish behavior: Derech Eretz kodma l’Torah. Common courtesy comes before [performance of fastidious acts of] Torah.
This principle, unfortunately, is increasingly ignored in many parts of my Orthodox community.
There is no easy solution.
El Al is not at fault. El Al is not Mea Shearim. An airline, even an Israeli one, cannot set or enforce a dress code. It cannot tell women how to act or men how to react. Its priority is getting flights off the ground on schedule.
El Al can begin its own charedi-men-only section on each flight. In the back of the plane. It would be called the Rosa Parks Section.
My suggestion: make it clear that the airline’s seats are open to the general flying public, however he or she – barring outright nudity or other clearly, agreed-upon inappropriate garb – is dressed. Someone offended by a fellow passenger’s clothing choices can pay for a seat in business class or first class, where the seats are not touching each other. Or buy two adjoining seats for himself.
Or, if that is not possible, deplane … and rebook on a future flight, at his expense.
This is what I would have told the chasid on my flight last year, had he been willing to discuss instead of demand.
Someone with heightened religious sensibilities has choices.
He can stay home.
He can bury his head in a book.
Or he can act like a mensch.
Charedi men, El Al Airlines, non-orthodox women
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Henry Winkler's Symbol Of Holocaust Survival Lives On In Hollywood
National
Henry Winkler’s Symbol Of Holocaust Survival Lives On In Hollywood
Most of his relatives died in Nazi Germany, but a smuggled-out plant and its cuttings flourish across Tinseltown.
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
Henry Winkler passes a leather jacket to actor Ben Freeman in 2014 to launch the London musical "Happy Days." Getty Images
Henry Winkler, the Jewish actor best known as tough-talking Arthur Fonzarelli — aka, “The Fonz” — on the 1970s-80s TV show “Happy Days,” is earning a new reputation. As a protector of a unique Holocaust legacy.
Now 70 and a graying grandfather, the son of refugees from Nazi Germany, he keeps in his Hollywood home a spider plant with a unique history. It grew from cuttings from the original plant that was in the coffin in which a friend of his family, known as “Tante Erma” was smuggled out of Germany in the 1930s.
Most of the actor’s extended family perished in the Holocaust.
A symbol of perseverance and survival, Winkler's green-and-white plant has flourished in his home and in the home of many of his friends.
“Everybody got a cutting,” he told The Washington Post.
Jill Soloway, creator of “Transparent,” the transgender comedy starring Jeffrey Tambor, keeps one of Winkler’s gift plants in her writer’s room as a source of inspiration, The Post reported. “It’s a beautiful story.”
In his post-Happy Days days, Winkler had served as a TV series producer and as an actor in episodes of several programs.
Winkler during career has supported many causes, including research on dyslexia (a condition he struggled with as a kid), and many Jewish organizations, including Congregation Habonim in Manhattan (his parents were among the founders of the synagogue).
“I think that being Jewish equates with being empathetic,” he told the Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia in a recent interview. “The humanness of being Jewish makes me so proud.” “I would imagine that I’m the actor I am because of the life that I have lived, the childhood I had.”
Winkler is writing the 31st novel in his series of Hank Zipzer children’s books series, whose main character has dyslexia. His work to remove the stigma of being dyslexic has earned him many awards; England’s Queen Elizabeth II honored him in 2011 for his work with children’s literacy.
To Winkler, keeping his plant, and its meaning, alive, has become an obligation.
“I grew up with it, I heard the story, and I thought maybe it’s my responsibility to make sure it lives.”
Pew Findings Not Surprising, But Also Not Irreversible
Opinion
Pew Findings Not Surprising, But Also Not Irreversible
Daniel Sokatch
Daniel Sokatch
The Pew Research Center poll released this week surveying attitudes among Israeli citizens confirms what many of us who work on Israeli issues already knew: Israel is a deeply divided society, first and foremost between its Jewish and Arab citizens, but also among its Jewish sectors.
Ethnicity, religiosity, family origin and political beliefs have created an Israel of “camps” that don’t much like or have much to do with each other. The Pew research director described these divisions as “jaw-dropping.”
As in-depth as the survey is, however, what it does not tell us is why Israel has become so fractured. Israel’s Jewish and Arab citizens have been living together for generations, and its Jews belong to a people that survived millennia of persecution with cohesion and unity. Why, then, is it so difficult for Israelis to share their society and arrive at some concept of Israeli-ness that would downplay sectarian differences? And how can a nation so deeply divided offer a sense of community to all its citizens?
Some factors are familiar to Americans experienced with the red-blue state divide. Many Israelis of all three faiths are profoundly religious. With religious practice frequently comes a more conservative and insular stance on social issues ranging from the rights of women to the role religion should play in the identity of the state. Most important, the Pew survey found that the four descriptions used for being Jewish in Israel – secular, traditional, religious Zionist and ultra-Orthodox – strongly correlate with views on social and political issues, on questions as basic as the prospects for peace or the importance of democratic values.
And then there is the attitude toward the “other.” There is profound disagreement over the significance of Israel as a Jewish state. Nearly 80 percent of Jews believe that Jews deserve (some unspecified) preferential treatment in Israel. No wonder most Arab respondents do not think Israel can be a Jewish state and a democracy at the same time. The two groups can’t come close to agreement on whether Israeli Arabs face discrimination or the prospects for peace.
That 48 percent of Jewish respondents actually want to expel their Arab neighbors is a terrible headline, one that underlines the need to reinforce the value of minority rights within Israeli society. Commentators warn that this question cannot be taken in isolation, especially because it did not refer to a real policy proposal. But to those of us working against the growing wave of racism and incitement, this response is a red flag that reflects the reality of what we see on the ground.
It must also be said that these deep divisions serve the purposes of many Israeli leaders, who amplify the idea that Israeli society is a zero-sum game in which one sector can only advance at the expense of others. A prime minister who mustered his base on Election Day with the threat that “Arabs are being bused to the polls in droves” and who conditions Arab civil rights on his standard of good behavior is not, to put it mildly, unifying his country.
Charedi leaders who viciously attack not only non-Jews but their Reform and Conservative counterparts do their part in exacerbating intolerance. Separatist Arab leaders who publicly identify with Israel’s enemies don’t help matters, nor do settler politicians whose only public policy is demonizing anyone who opposes the occupation as an obstacle to peace and dangerous to Israeli democracy.
There are no easy remedies for these deep divides. We must also keep in mind, after a day where more Israelis fell victim to terrorists in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, that the Jewish-Arab divide, and for that matter some divisions among Jewish sectors, cannot be separated from the pain and trauma of all sides in Israel’s existential conflicts. But we also must understand that the Pew poll represents a snapshot in time and is not an irreversible prediction of Israel’s future.
From President Reuven Rivlin on down, there are strong voices speaking out against racism and division in Israel. There is a coalition of more than 50 organizations that speaks out at public events against extremist Jewish violence against non-Jews — and it is led by religious Zionists. There is a Coalition Against Racism with an array of participants from Reform Jews to Palestinian grassroots activists, and there are local Jewish-Arab coalitions dedicated to building shared spaces in which ordinary people interact in their daily lives.
There are waiting lists for leadership training for shared-society activists and new resources for teachers seeking to educate children to think civically and communally about being an Israeli. Even in Jerusalem, the epicenter of conflict, there are efforts to break down the walls between the charedi, secular Jewish and Palestinian populations.
These efforts are not about some kumbaya veneer of superficial goodwill. What Israel needs is the toughest thing of all to build — a truly shared society, with each sector feeling it is a valued and irreplaceable part of the whole. “Tolerance” of minorities or other kinds of Jews is not enough. Israel needs an ethos of sharing its small space among its many different kinds of people because they are all entitled to be there.
From the Tel Aviv entrepreneur drinking coffee on the beach to the student arguing Talmud in Bnei Brak, from the Russian artist to the Ethiopian activist to every Palestinian-Israeli whose family is deeply rooted in the land, there is no other place for them to go.
The Pew study validates, once again, those of us who warn of dangerous fissures in a nation that cannot afford the continued breakdown of cohesion and amity. But we who warn, we who are dedicated to repairing those fissures and building some solid foundations above them, we also know that Israelis are miraculously good at inventing new realities.
Now they need to reinvent their own society — for their own sake, and for all of us who love and support their efforts.
Daniel Sokatch is CEO of the New Israel Fund. This op-ed appeared first on the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s website, jta.org.
These Orthodox Jews Use Karate To Defend The Faith
New York
These Orthodox Jews Use Karate To Defend The Faith
Lucy Cohen Blatter
JTA
Mordechai Genut, founder of Frum Karate, instructing some beginners’ students. JTA
On a recent Sunday evening at a Jewish center in Brooklyn’s Midwood section, dozens of boys and men — ages 5 to 40-something — practice their kicks, strikes and jabs. They are clad in the usual all-white uniform, tied at their middles with cloth belts — mostly white, but some yellows and greens, too.
As is traditional martial-arts fashion, their feet are bare. But their heads are not — most are covered with black velvet yarmulkes. Some have curly payes hanging underneath.
At the head of the class is Mordechai Genut, a third-degree black belt and founder of Frum Karate, a class geared toward Orthodox, even Hasidic, Jews.
While “regular” karate classes often include rituals like bowing in honor of ancestors or burning incense as a gift to the gods, Genut removes any and all “avodah zarah” — foreign worship — aspects from the practice.
His goal: To help members of his community train their minds, bodies and spirits.
“We try and focus on physical exercise and relaxation, and we use martial arts as a vehicle to connect to God,” Genut says. “And we remove anything that’s contradictory to the Torah.”
Genut is a karate master in the Tora Dojo system (the name is a play on tora, the Japanese word for tiger, and the Torah; a dojo is a school of martial arts). The system was founded in 1967 with a mission to teach martial arts to the Jewish community.
Though his class is geared to religious Jews, Genut recognizes that some who lean more conservative may be turned off initially, try as they might to live strictly according to the Torah and stay away from secular society.
“The word karate can be a big no-no because it’s associated with fighting,” he says. “I understand that. But the truth is we see in the Torah many places where God says that you should protect yourself.”
In addition to running Frum Karate, Genut is also a licensed acupuncturist and expert on Qi Gong meditative breathing.
And though often associated with Eastern religions, meditation doesn’t contradict Judaism, says Genut, pointing in particular to the works of Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan, a 20th-century rabbi and kabbalist who wrote extensively on meditation.
Genut has learned much from Eastern practices, but is able to sift through them to borrow aspects with which he feels comfortable as an Orthodox Jew.
“Everybody has the same body and same internal energy,” he says. “The only thing that’s different is the philosophy. I don’t need to be able to believe in Buddha to do these things.”
Genut began practicing martial arts as a teen in Brooklyn after some near-violent, anti-Semitic-tinged incidents in his neighborhood. Upon earning his black belt, Genut was given a Japanese name, as is standard: Jian Guo, meaning “to invigorate a nation.”
Through his role as a teacher, Genut is trying to do just that — though to his students he’s now known as Sifu Mordechai, which translates into “master.”
And though it may sound counterintuitive, Genut stresses the importance of avoiding violence to his pupils.
“If, Chas Ve’shalom [God forbid], someone is coming after you, you run away,” Genut told the younger of his two classes, which are split between 5- to 11-year-olds and 12 and up. He also teaches safety tips, like not having yarmulkes embroidered with their names, lest strangers fake familiarity with kids. (It’s a classic police tip, though usually applied to backpacks.)
“Jews value life, we don’t glorify violence,” Genut says. “And we don’t encourage fighting.”
“I have no shame in running away from a situation,” chimes in Jack Newman, a fifth-degree black belt who has been involved in Tora Dojo since the early 1980s and came to help Genut with his classes that Sunday night.
“But sometimes you can’t run away. In that case, you have the knowledge you get from your sensei,” says Newman, using the Japanese word for martial arts teacher. Newman credits his karate practice for helping him stay sane during his 30-plus years on Wall Street.
The recent rash of stabbings in Israel, along with hate crimes around the world targeting Jewish people, have made it even more important for members of the religious community to have knowledge of self defense, Genut and Newman add.
“The problem in religious communities is that there’s not enough education on self-defense,” Newman says. “Because of what’s happening now, in Israel and here, the yeshivas on every level should have some sort of program to show people the essence of how to protect themselves.”
A woman named Orlit is among several wig-wearing mothers who have brought their sons to the Sunday-night class. One of her sons has ADHD, “and for him it’s about fitness and focus,” she says. Another son, who is in the older class, gets nervous on the streets in their Flatbush neighborhood.
“I want him to be more confident,” she says.
Moishe Blumenthal, who is waiting for his son to finish class, says he appreciates the activity — mostly for the exercise, but also for the discipline. While he describes his son’s school as “yeshivish,” he says he suspects some Hasidic people might not be interested in the class for fear that it’s too far away from the world of religious learning.
“Though the fact that girls and boys are separate definitely helps,” he adds.
Earlier this month, Genut launched the first separate — but concurrent — class for women and girls in the same location, which is run by Sensei Ellen, a female first-degree black belt. (Orlit says she’ll consider sending her girls there, too).
While religious women often take female-only exercise classes like Zumba or kickboxing, Genut wanted women to have an opportunity to hone karate’s concentration and focus, he says.
And as someone who also organizes self-defense seminars for women, he also sees the importance in teaching frum women — and all women for that matter — how to protect themselves and avoid becoming victimized.
One Hasidic man, typing at his laptop while his 9-year-old son practices his kicks, jabs and bows, says Frum Karate has become a regular routine for them.
“We have a lot going on on Sundays,” the man says, “but my son won’t let me out of it. He loves it.”
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"Now on Jewish.TV: How Your Birthday Affects Your Character: The Jewish Zodiac - Shifra Sharfstein" Jewish.TV - Chabad Video for
Thursday, 17 March 2016
How Your Birthday Affects Your Character
The Jewish Zodiac
By Shifra Sharfstein
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About this webcast:
In which month were you born? Learn about the history of the 12 months of the year--from Nissan till Tishrei--and how the "character" of the month that you were born in may affect your own personality traits.
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How Your Birthday Affects Your Character
The Jewish Zodiac
By Shifra Sharfstein
Watch Now
About this webcast:
In which month were you born? Learn about the history of the 12 months of the year--from Nissan till Tishrei--and how the "character" of the month that you were born in may affect your own personality traits.
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"Prime' Battle Over Kosher Practices" Gary Rosenblatt - The Jewish Week Connecting the World to Jewish News, Culture, Features, and Opinions of New York, New York, United States for Thursday, 17 March 2016 - `Prime' Battle Over Kosher Practices
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"Prime' Battle Over Kosher Practices" Gary Rosenblatt - The Jewish Week Connecting the World to Jewish News, Culture, Features, and Opinions of New York, New York, United States for Thursday, 17 March 2016 - `Prime' Battle Over Kosher Practices
Thursday, March 17, 2016
An exclusive Jewish Week investigative report takes a deep look at how powerful communal and commercial interests collide in the case of Prime Grill's Joey Allaham v. Lincoln Square Synagogue being heard in a religious court.
The synagogue claims Allaham owes $1.8 million in unpaid rental fees for his exclusive catering arrangement with Lincoln Square. Allaham says long construction delays cost him business. The Orthodox Union, the largest kashrut agency, certifies Allaham's restaurants, but could that change?
Read the full report by Staff Writer Hannah Dreyfus here in an article made possible through The Jewish Week Investigative Journalism Fund.
Gary Rosenblatt
Editor and Publisher
New York
‘Prime’ Battle Over Kosher Practices
Powerful communal and commercial interests collide in the case of Prime Grill’s Joey Allaham v. Lincoln Square Synagogue.
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
Joey Allaham: Transformed world of kosher cuisine. Courtesy of John Uher Photography
A significant trial is set to begin this week in a religious court here pitting a leading kosher restaurant entrepreneur, Joey Allaham of Prime Grill fame, against a venerable Modern Orthodox synagogue, Lincoln Square Synagogue, from Manhattan’s West Side.
The stakes are high, not only in dollars but in reputation. And rather than a three-man bet din, as is the custom, the case will be heard by only one rabbi — Hershel Schachter, a prominent Orthodox authority.
The synagogue claims Allaham, who is its exclusive caterer, owes $1.8 million in unpaid rental fees. Allaham maintains that long delays in the construction of Lincoln Square, completed in 2013, cost him vital business.
Another interested party in this case is the Orthodox Union, the largest and most trusted kosher certifier in the world, which gives its hechsher (stamp of approval) to Allaham’s posh restaurants. It grants him that coveted seal even as critics claim that he owes money all over town, operates unethically and has been involved in a numerous lawsuits. Allaham denies any unethical behavior and claims his conduct, in each instance, was justified.
And then there is the shadow of the Beth Din of America — the gold standard of religious courts in this country — hanging over the case after Allaham rejected its adjudicating the matter and called for a little-known Brooklyn beit din in his legal fight with Lincoln Square. Taken together, the parties in the dispute — both direct and indirect — represent a confluence of powerful communal and commercial interests. And the case brings into sharp relief the delicate dance — a little pressure here, a little leverage there — that takes place when those interests collide.
Allaham insists he will retain OU certification regardless of the outcome. Rabbi Menachem Genack, who heads the OU’s kashrut division, makes the point that trustworthiness is the key ingredient to kashrut supervision. “The credibility of the people we’re dealing with” is “part of what every supervision is about.”
The Prime Grill restaurant in the atrium of the Sony building on East 57th Street. Michael Datikash/JW
In fact, the OU has set a precedent for withdrawing certification for matters that do not deal solely with kashrut. Sources close to the organization confirmed that it has decertified business owners in the past for crimes involving theft and fraud. In a case that garnered national headlines, the OU stripped its certification from Sholom Rubashkin, former CEO of Agriprocessors, the now-bankrupt kosher slaughterhouse and meat packing plant in Postville, Iowa, in 2008, after the company was charged with thousands of counts of child labor violations, according to multiple press reports. Other cases, from enforcing a modest dress code for waitresses to stipulating that dance music not be played while wine is served, have given major kashrut organizations reason to threaten to pull their approval.
In the case of Allaham and Lincoln Square, it is most likely, say observers, that Rabbi Schachter will seek a compromise. But if he rules against Allaham, would the OU pull its certification? Such a move would potentially be a serious blow to Allaham’s fortunes. It would represent a fall from grace for the golden-boy restaurateur who came here from Syria in the 1990s knowing almost no English and with few connections, and within a few short years transformed the world of kosher cuisine.
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On the ground floor of the towering Sony building in Midtown Manhattan, men in well-tailored suits begin to cluster around noontime, checking their watches and waiting for their parties to arrive. Some wear kippot, others do not. There is no exterior indication that the restaurant is Glatt kosher — those who know don’t have to ask. Lunch over a Chimichurri-marinated hanger steak, made from kosher-certified Angus Beef, or miso-glazed Chilean sea bass, could be the perfect thing to ease a business deal or cement a new contact.
Though the quality of elegant ambiance can be hard to come by in kosher dining, Allaham changed the game when he opened The Prime Grill restaurant in the boom year of 2000. Here was an upscale kosher steakhouse — and the cuts of aged beef were succulent. The salting and soaking requirements of Jewish law that render meat kosher are generally hell on a cut of prime beef, but Allaham found a way to do it beautifully, in a classy setting, many agreed. Allaham hails from a family of kosher butchers from Syria; even his name means butcher in Arabic.
“I have a passion for meat,” said Allaham, who described learning the trade from his grandfather in Syria. As a boy, he would help his grandfather pick out live cattle from the marketplace. “It’s not something you can learn in school. You learn from watching.”
(Allaham agreed to a sit-down interview after first canceling a scheduled in-person meeting for this story, saying he would answer questions only by email. In the end, the interview, which had been scheduled to take place at The Jewish Week, took place at the Midtown office of his lawyer, who was present.)
Shortly after arriving in America in 1994 with his mother, Allaham landed a job as a stock boy at a mini-mart in Brooklyn. From there, he worked his way up to head butcher, and eventually raised funds from investors and opened his own restaurant, the first Prime Grill, on East 49th Street. He was still in his 20s.
Soon after Prime Grill opened, word got out. New Yorkers of a certain status like their steakhouses. A-list celebs from Bono to Madonna began frequenting the restaurant. Bill de Blasio and Bill Clinton stopped in for a bite. Allaham’s star was soaring. He followed up Prime Grill with Prime KO (now Prime West), Prime at the Bentley and Pizza da Solo; Prime West, located on the Upper West Side, serves French cuisine, including lamb ribs braised for 48 hours. Solo, in the cavernous Sony atrium, serves up handmade pies and authentic Italian fare. Then, in a move that garnered publicity, he opened a sleek, high-end butcher shop in the East 80s just two blocks from the long-standing Park East Kosher Butchers.
But Allaham’s rise to culinary stardom hasn’t been without pitfalls. In the past, Allaham has faced a number of lawsuits, charging everything from stolen tips to defaulting on investor payments. The OU has been made aware of some of the allegations, sources close to the organization’s kashrut bureau confirm, and for now it is standing by Allaham, who denies all allegations against him.
“I cannot comment on unsubstantiated allegations,” Allaham wrote in an e-mail on Tuesday. “As a businessman and an observant Jew, I pride myself on conducting all of my operations in a professional manner. As with any business, there have been times when certain payments have been made late due to circumstances beyond my control. And as with any business I have come across various disputes and disagreements from time to time.
“However,” he continued, “to my knowledge all my accounts are current.” Noting that he has more than 500 employees, he encouraged anyone with claims against him to deal with him directly.
“If the OU leaves because it considers a restaurant unreliable, most other reputable certifiers will be wary,” said Timothy Lytton, a kashrut-industry expert, author and law professor. “The weaker the reliability of the certification, the weaker the customer base.”
“Neemanut,” the Hebrew term for trustworthiness, lies at the core of the kashrut industry’s business model, he said. “When the OU supervises a restaurant, it has to be thinking about the trustworthiness of the person in charge. From a religious ethical point of view, that’s because it’s their job to protect the public. From a business point of view, an unreliable restaurateur will reflect poorly on the reliability of the supervision.”
While the OU has pulled certification from a handful of business owners due to fraudulent activities, the mainstream kashrut industry still has a major problem when it comes to enforcing ethical standards, according to Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz, founder of Uri L’Tzedek, the Orthodox social justice movement.
“Kashrut authorities in America today make it clear that they have no interest in policing the ethical dimension of the industry,” said Rabbi Yanklowitz, who has spoken on behalf of workers’ rights and unjust treatment of animals. He maintains that ethical practices and the kosher status of food are “completely intertwined,” despite attempts by major certifiers to separate the two, “for the sake of business.”
The Last Tenant Standing
Currently, Allaham is in a turf battle with the Sony Building, where Prime Grill moved in the summer of 2015 from 25 W. 56th St. Pizza da Solo, Allaham’s kosher pizzeria, moved into the building several years earlier; the two restaurants now split the space.
Pizza da Solo is Joey Allaham's fancy pizza eatery adjacent to the Prime Grill. Michael Datikash/JW
Troubles began shortly after Sony sold the tower for $1.1 billion to Joseph Chetrit and business partner David Bistricer in March 2013. Now, the new owners want Allaham out, presumably to use the space for other interests, but Allaham wants to keep his lease, which he says lasts until at least 2029. Sony, Allaham’s landlord, filed suit against him in 2013 for alleged lease violations, including generating too much garbage in the atrium, where the two restaurants are housed. The slow-grinding court battle is ongoing; Allaham has denied the allegations and claims Sony is fronting for Chetrit.
Come spring, Prime Grill and Pizza da Solo will be the only tenants left standing in the table-lined atrium of the building connecting East 55th and East 56th streets, said Valentino-Puiu Lulea, general manager at Prime Grill.
The move to the Sony building is Prime Grill’s third relocation since launching in 2000. Allaham was involved in a lawsuit over Prime Grill leaving the E. 49th Street location, resulting in a settlement that alleged he had owed more than $850,000 in unpaid rent. Prime Grill was evicted from the second location, on W. 56th Street, in August 2015.
According to Allaham, he tried unsuccessfully to surrender the keys and the lease to the landlord of 25 W. 56th before the eviction notice was posted. He decided to surrender the lease because the Sony building, where he had opened Pizza da Solo, did not want him to operate a competing restaurant within a two-block radius.
A source close to Allaham said the restaurateur is “desperate” to receive a big payout from Chetrit in exchange for abandoning the Sony lease, though the source said such a payout is not likely. Though Allaham did not directly address this claim, he maintains that his financial position is solid.
“Chetrit will build up around Joey if he has to,” the source said, speaking to The Jewish Week anonymously for fear of retribution. The source claims Allaham still owes him a significant amount of money.
Chetrit has not responded to requests for comment.
Passover Fiasco
Landlords aren’t the only ones pushing for payback. Allaham, who ran three luxury Passover programs in Aspen, Colo., Puerto Rico and Dana Point, Calif., last spring, is still battling legal fallout from the experience. American Express Centurion Bank filed a $1.3 million suit in state Supreme Court here against Allaham on Dec. 23. Though the case was dismissed on Feb. 4, an examination of Allaham’s credit card bill, filed by American Express as an exhibit to its complaint, shows that Allaham accrued several hundred thousand dollars in debt over the course of three days to pay for the 2015 Passover programs. When he tried to pay off that debt, American Express alleged, his checks bounced several times.
The lawyer representing American Express did not return requests for comment.
According to Allaham, the American Express suit was caused by 400 dissatisfied Passover guests who abruptly reversed their charges after the holiday getaway failed to live up to guests’ expectations and its contractual obligations. He blames the high-price hotel and its employees, whom he says sabotaged his operation. Several incidents, including bread being served at Passover meals — an infringement of the highest order according to Orthodox law -- left customers enraged.
Allaham is currently suing Vieques Hotel Partners, owner of the W Retreat and Spa in Puerto Rico, which he claims is responsible for the Passover fiasco. According to his complaint, the hotel staff carried out “numerous repugnant and indefensible acts of hostility, bias, malice, discrimination, anti-Semitism … vandalism and theft” towards his staff and guests.
The W Retreat and Spa did not respond to request for comment.
This year Allaham has downscaled his Pesach programming somewhat. None of the three hotels from 2015 was renewed. This year, Allaham’s “Prime Pesach” is set to take place at the Fairmont in Santa Monica, Calif. All 302 rooms in the hotel’s three towers (10 floors per tower) have been booked in advance for the week of Passover. Allaham is charging up to $9,500 per person, according to the program’s website; last year prices reached $11,000 per person, according to online price listings for the program.
Similar to his past Passover programs, a star-studded cast of rabbis, lecturers and Jewish entertainers are expected to fill the schedule this year. But some former employees of those Passover programs describe less than satisfactory experiences dealing with Allaham.
Rabbi Mendel Mintz, executive director of the Chabad Community Center in Aspen Valley, said he was recruited by Allaham to help with the kosher certification, or hashgacha, of his 2015 Passover program in Aspen. Rabbi Mintz said he spent “months” answering questions from hotel staff and guests, and personally recruiting eight mashgichim to oversee kashrut operations at the hotel. They were to be paid a total of $16,000, or $2,000 a person.
The rabbi’s first “red flag” was when Allaham asked him to pay out of pocket for the plane tickets of the eight mashgichim. “It was strange that Joey would ask me — his employee — to lay out the money when he hadn’t even paid me yet,” Rabbi Mintz told The Jewish Week in a phone interview. “But I decided not to make much of it at the time.”
A week before Passover, Rabbi Mintz asked Allaham about the money. Allaham assured him the check was in the mail. No check ever arrived, according to the rabbi.
What followed was a months-long email and phone exchange in which Rabbi Mintz continued to request the money and Allaham promised the money would be sent, to no avail. When the check for $8,000 finally arrived, it bounced — twice. “More emails, more checks — checks bounced, repeat,” said Rabbi Mintz. The money has since been paid in full, according to the rabbi.
Allaham denied allegations of non-payment. He said he paid the rabbi shorty after the Passover holiday.
Mendel Zirkind, a private chef and mashgiach hired by Allaham to help prepare food for the 2015 Passover programs, said he was never paid for his six weeks of work, during which he averaged 70 hours a week.
“The way Joey runs his operations is he makes you come and beg for the money. If you don’t run after your money, you won’t get it,” he said. Zirkind described the work-intensive cooking methods he used to prepare the meat, including sous-vide, a method in which food is sealed in a plastic bag and submerged in temperature-controlled water for long periods of time — 24 hours or more, in some cases. According to Zirkind, Allaham still owes him $7,500 for the work. To date, he has received two checks from Allaham — both bounced, he said.
According to Allaham, Zirkind was caught on camera stealing large amounts of meat from the kitchen in Lincoln Square, where preparations for the program were underway. Allaham produced what he said was photo evidence taken from security cameras showing a bearded man, allegedly Zirkind, moving large boxes in and out of the building.
Zirkind denies the claims. “I’m a single guy, I live alone,” he said. “What exactly would I do with $20,000 worth of meat?”
Allaham asserts that Zirkind sold the meat for personal gain.
A number of vendors, suppliers and former employees of Allaham interviewed for this article claim Allaham still owes him or her money, in amounts ranging from a few thousand to $80,000. Many have requested to remain anonymous in the hopes that Allaham will still pay them back.
“I’ve waited to be paid back for so many years, I just can’t risk losing everything now,” said one independent contractor, after describing his “troubles” with Allaham over the past several years. According to the contractor, the restaurateur owes him up to $80,000. After months of calling and many bounced checks, Allaham has finally set up a functional, albeit dilatory, payment plan, he said. (A source with knowledge of the disputes says Allaham has sought to settle old financial scores in advance of the publication of this article.)
Trouble At The Airport
In October 2014, caterer and restaurateur David Pearlman, 34, says he spent six weeks creating an intricate menu for a Sukkot hotel program that would take place that year in Orlando, Fla. The program was one of Allaham’s first forays into the world of luxury, all-inclusive kosher holiday retreats.
Pearlman said his long days of preparation for the program entailed ordering everything from salt to tuna tartar, arranging truck deliveries, and making sure the destination kitchen was prepared for a strictly kosher clientele. After six weeks, he headed down to Orlando three days before the program’s start date to set up shop; his wife and three young children planned to join him there for the holiday.
At the airport, he met with Allaham and his crew. According to Pearlman and another former employee of Allaham’s who witnessed the scene, Allaham, who had just experienced a baggage mishap, screamed at Pearlman to get on a flight and go back home. Pearlman tried to protest but quickly realized it was futile.
“They were all so terrified of him [Allaham] that they just turned their heads and looked away,” he told The Jewish Week in a phone interview. “No one questioned him. No one stood up for me. No one said anything.”
Shaken by the experience, he booked a flight home and scrambled together last-minute holiday plans.
Shortly thereafter, Pearlman sent Allaham an invoice for $5,000. He received no response. He e-mailed Allaham’s director of operations (this individual no longer works for Allaham). “I don’t think he plans on paying you,” the director emailed back, claimed Pearlman.
“I started to hear from people who used to work for Joey. They all said the same thing. ‘This is his M.O. — don’t expect to get paid,’” said Pearlman.
His next step was to reach out to the Orthodox Union, which he knew certified Allaham’s operations. Pearlman said he contacted a kashrut representative at the OU, who advised him to take his case to the Beit Din of America. Rabbi Genack, the CEO of OU’s kashrut division, confirmed that Pearlman reached out to the organization and was advised to bring his case before the Orthodox high court.
“He [Genack] told me anything the Beit Din of America decided, the OU would uphold,” said Pearlman. He described the threat of removing Allaham’s valuable kosher seal of approval as his only “leverage.”
In June 2015, Pearlman brought Allaham before a religious court of three judges at the BDA religious court. The BDA ruled in favor of Pearlman. In November, the court sent a letter documenting the decision to Pearlman and Allaham, demanding Allaham pay the $5,000 in full.
Allaham told The Jewish Week he mailed the payment in full to Pearlman during the first week of March. He said he told Pearlman to cancel his flight to Orlando while he was still in New York. He also claimed Pearlman intentionally canceled the flights of 20 other employees, causing Allaham significant financial losses.
A Synagogue Caught In Middle
In 2012, Lincoln Square Synagogue, a fixture on the Upper West Side since the 1960s, began seeking a high-quality kosher caterer to take up operations in its newly constructed social hall. The Modern Orthodox synagogue was nearing the end of its $50 million construction project, a new, state-of-the-art 50,000-square-foot facility at 180 Amsterdam Ave. Though originally the project was expected to take only two years, financial setbacks, exacerbated by the market collapse in 2008, set the project back four years and left the synagogue scrambling for funds.
Lincoln Square Synagogue. The shul's catering hall, operated by Allaham, is under dispute. Michael Datikash/JW
In an effort to raise revenue, the synagogue struck up a deal with Allaham in November of 2012. Prime Grill would be the exclusive caterer for all events that took place in the new building, and Allaham would pay a monthly fee of $20,883, all utility fees, and be responsible for renovating the new ballroom, according to court papers — an undertaking projected to cost $1.5 million. The agreement also provided that any dispute between Prime Grill and the synagogue would be arbitrated before the Beit Din of America. According to the synagogue, Allaham defaulted on every one of these agreements. Allaham claims that construction delays cost him business.
Lincoln Square wants the case resolved quickly because it cannot rent the ballroom to other vendors until the contract with Allaham is legally terminated, said a synagogue representative. Currently, if another party wants to use the ballroom for an event, Prime Grill is paid for the time, said the representative.
The synagogue decided to take the case before the Beit Din of America in August 2015. According to court documents, Allaham agreed to have the case arbitrated before the religious court, and his lawyer sent several emails to arrange a date. During the case proceedings, the OU reinforced the BDA’s court summons, and threatened to remove Allaham’s certification if he did not comply, according to a source close to the situation.
Unlike many ad hoc beit dins that operate around New York City, the BDA is committed to regulations, rules and procedures, said Rabbi Shlomo Weissmann, its director. “We are committed to the highest standards of transparency and protocol,” said the rabbi, who is a licensed attorney.
But after agreeing to bring the case before the BDA, Allaham reneged, claiming that Rabbi Shaul Robinson, Lincoln Square’s rabbi, presents a conflict of interest because he is a member of the Rabbinical Council of America, an organization that is affiliated with the BDA. The synagogue alleges that this action was “a blatant attempt at forum shopping.”
Though he declined to comment on the Lincoln Square case, Rabbi Weissmann said that the court has a specific mechanism for objecting to an arbitrator who has any conflict of interest. “We are careful to staff a case only with individuals who have no prior relationship to either party,” he said. In the case that the judges do have some prior relationship, the information is disclosed at the start of the hearing. “Our goal is complete transparency,” he said.
According to Lincoln Square, Allaham said he wanted to appear before a different bit din, the Beth Din of the Central Rabbinical Congress in Brooklyn. (In a Google search, no information about this alternative beit din comes up.) When Lincoln Square resisted, Allaham took his case to civil court instead.
The OU’s Rabbi Genack confirmed that Allaham’s refusal to appear before the BDA, or another approved arbiter, could compromise his supervision. However, the current agreement to appear before Rabbi Schachter protects Allaham from this possibility. The rabbi’s ruling, which will likely inform OU’s actions about Prime Grill’s kosher seal of approval, will be legally binding in civil court, according to Rabbi Genack.
For his part, Joey Allaham insists his ties with the OU are unshakable. And he denies any unethical conduct that would put his certification in jeopardy. The OU’s seal is not an endorsement he is willing to lose. “We’ve always had OU certification,” he said. “We won’t lose the certification, whatever the outcome in beit din.”
This article was made possible with funding from The Jewish Week Investigative Journalism Fund.
'Prime' Battle Over Kosher Practices
Powerful communal and commercial interests collide in the case of Prime Grill's Joey Allaham v. Lincoln Square Synagogue.
Hannah Dreyfus
New York
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Inside the battle to improve chasidic education.
Hella Winston And Amy Sara Clark
Visit any chasidic preschool in Brooklyn and you probably won't hear a single child speaking English. The Jewish Week
When Moshe graduated from his chasidic yeshiva in Borough Park two decades ago, he thought getting a job would be easy. After all, growing up, he was always told by his teachers that chasidic people are the most “desirable to hire.”
But with a secular education that ended when he was 13, he quickly found out how wrong they were. Unable to read English, and with only a rudimentary knowledge of math, Moshe discovered that the only work he could get was in a Jewish bakery. The hours were long and the pay low. And as a married man, he knew kids were on the way. He had to make more money.
So Moshe — who asked to use a pseudonym for fear of backlash from his community — decided to enroll in a computer programming course. But with his limited English, he just couldn’t keep up. He was advised to take an ESL class, but his 60-plus-hour work week got in the way; after a year, he dropped out.
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Visit any chasidic preschool in Brooklyn and you probably won't hear a single child speaking English. The Jewish Week
When Moshe graduated from his chasidic yeshiva in Borough Park two decades ago, he thought getting a job would be easy. After all, growing up, he was always told by his teachers that chasidic people are the most “desirable to hire.”
But with a secular education that ended when he was 13, he quickly found out how wrong they were. Unable to read English, and with only a rudimentary knowledge of math, Moshe discovered that the only work he could get was in a Jewish bakery. The hours were long and the pay low. And as a married man, he knew kids were on the way. He had to make more money.
So Moshe — who asked to use a pseudonym for fear of backlash from his community — decided to enroll in a computer programming course. But with his limited English, he just couldn’t keep up. He was advised to take an ESL class, but his 60-plus-hour work week got in the way; after a year, he dropped out.
“I tried to do them both, I tried to skip the class but it failed. Every way I tried it failed,” said Moshe, who is now 38. “I had no time to study, I was always busy working. I took the class for a year, a year and a half, I didn’t get anywhere.”
Moshe eventually found his way, making ends meet by driving a taxi. But he feels the deficiencies of his education keenly.
"The most important times in my life, when I was supposed to get an education, I was busy studying their own things,” he said, referring to the six to eight hours a day his school spent on religious studies. “Never got a GED, never graduated high school and stopped English completely. And so I feel that the community failed us.”
Moshe is not alone.
The fact that yeshivas like the one he went to are neglecting to teach their students basic English and math — or any other secular subjects — is hardly a secret. However, the situation — highlighted over the last decade in a spate of books, articles and blogs about chasidic life — has only now captured the attention of public officials.
Hear our companion series on WNYC: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3 and Day 4.
This summer, for the first time, the New York City Department of Education has launched an investigation into whether these yeshivas are meeting state requirements to provide an education that is “substantially equivalent” to what public schools offer. And on the heels of the DOE move, The Jewish Week and WNYC have learned, Daniel Dromm, the influential chair of the city council’s education committee, is pledging to hold the schools more accountable.
But reformers, led by a chasidic yeshiva graduate, face an uphill battle, hindered by the same forces that have caused government officials to turn a blind eye for decades. Their fight for better secular education turns on a number of thorny issues, including the separation of church and state, the cozy relationship between local politicians and powerful chasidic leaders thought to control significant voting blocs and questions about whether, in fact, those leaders are purposely neglecting secular education as a way to keep their followers in the fold.
'Not a Single Word of English'
“At 13 kids get cut off completely from secular education and I mean completely. They start yeshiva at 6:45 or 6 and it goes all the way to the evening — 8 or 9 — and they don’t learn a single word of English, or science or math,” said Naftuli Moster.
Moshe eventually found his way, making ends meet by driving a taxi. But he feels the deficiencies of his education keenly.
"The most important times in my life, when I was supposed to get an education, I was busy studying their own things,” he said, referring to the six to eight hours a day his school spent on religious studies. “Never got a GED, never graduated high school and stopped English completely. And so I feel that the community failed us.”
Moshe is not alone.
The fact that yeshivas like the one he went to are neglecting to teach their students basic English and math — or any other secular subjects — is hardly a secret. However, the situation — highlighted over the last decade in a spate of books, articles and blogs about chasidic life — has only now captured the attention of public officials.
Hear our companion series on WNYC: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3 and Day 4.
This summer, for the first time, the New York City Department of Education has launched an investigation into whether these yeshivas are meeting state requirements to provide an education that is “substantially equivalent” to what public schools offer. And on the heels of the DOE move, The Jewish Week and WNYC have learned, Daniel Dromm, the influential chair of the city council’s education committee, is pledging to hold the schools more accountable.
But reformers, led by a chasidic yeshiva graduate, face an uphill battle, hindered by the same forces that have caused government officials to turn a blind eye for decades. Their fight for better secular education turns on a number of thorny issues, including the separation of church and state, the cozy relationship between local politicians and powerful chasidic leaders thought to control significant voting blocs and questions about whether, in fact, those leaders are purposely neglecting secular education as a way to keep their followers in the fold.
'Not a Single Word of English'
“At 13 kids get cut off completely from secular education and I mean completely. They start yeshiva at 6:45 or 6 and it goes all the way to the evening — 8 or 9 — and they don’t learn a single word of English, or science or math,” said Naftuli Moster.
Moster, 29, who grew up in the Belzer chasidic community in Borough Park in a family of 17 children, has become the face of the movement for yeshiva reform. He started the advocacy group Young Advocates for Fair Education, or Yaffed, after realizing how ill prepared his own yeshiva education left him when he tried to go to college. He described his educational trajectory during an interview at Hunter College, where he recently completed a master’s in social work.
“Imagine a boy coming out of the system. How are they going to know how to do a math problem? Or fill out an application?” he said. “I thought, It shouldn’t be like this. People should be given the basic knowledge to make their way in life.”
That so many of these young men find themselves so hindered in the job market is ironic because, with a 10-to-14-hour school day, chasidic teenage boys in neighborhoods like Williamsburg, Crown Heights and Borough Park, spend more time in school than perhaps any other students in the city.
But nearly all of that time is spent on religious subjects; classes are taught in Yiddish and students study texts written in Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic.
After graduating from yeshiva, some chasidic men elect to continue their religious studies for a year or longer. They are typically supported by a modest stipend from the school, grants through the federal Tuition Assistance Program, or, if married, possibly by their wives or their in-laws.
It wasn’t always this way.
Growing Up, And Apart
Chasidim first began arriving in America en masse after World War II. Led by a few charismatic rebbes who had survived the Holocaust, they set about rebuilding the world they had lost in Europe. Men were encouraged to go to work so they could support their families (unlike their non-chasidic, ultra-Orthodox counterparts, chasidim did not have a tradition of full-time religious study for men). And even though post-war chasidic parents raised their children to speak Yiddish, they also got a solid secular education.
“Imagine a boy coming out of the system. How are they going to know how to do a math problem? Or fill out an application?” he said. “I thought, It shouldn’t be like this. People should be given the basic knowledge to make their way in life.”
That so many of these young men find themselves so hindered in the job market is ironic because, with a 10-to-14-hour school day, chasidic teenage boys in neighborhoods like Williamsburg, Crown Heights and Borough Park, spend more time in school than perhaps any other students in the city.
But nearly all of that time is spent on religious subjects; classes are taught in Yiddish and students study texts written in Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic.
After graduating from yeshiva, some chasidic men elect to continue their religious studies for a year or longer. They are typically supported by a modest stipend from the school, grants through the federal Tuition Assistance Program, or, if married, possibly by their wives or their in-laws.
It wasn’t always this way.
Growing Up, And Apart
Chasidim first began arriving in America en masse after World War II. Led by a few charismatic rebbes who had survived the Holocaust, they set about rebuilding the world they had lost in Europe. Men were encouraged to go to work so they could support their families (unlike their non-chasidic, ultra-Orthodox counterparts, chasidim did not have a tradition of full-time religious study for men). And even though post-war chasidic parents raised their children to speak Yiddish, they also got a solid secular education.
Indeed, a 1959 profile of Williamsburg’s fledgling Satmar community, published in Commentary magazine, noted that “Despite the Hasidic belief that Torah and Talmud teach all necessary astronomy, physics, and mathematics, the children appear to be getting a secular education beyond that required by the state Board of Regents.” And unlike today, playing ball was not yet considered too “goyish”: The Commentary writer observed a 15-year-old with a yarmulke and peyes “sinking hoops with two non-Hasidic fellow players.”
Over the next five and a half decades, Brooklyn’s chasidic population exploded, growing from what scholars estimate was roughly 50,000 in the mid-1960s to, according to the UJA-Federation of New York’s 2011 Jewish population study, 225,000 in 2011.
During that time, chasidic communities (with the exception of the Lubavitchers, who are known for their outreach to unaffiliated Jews) have also become increasingly insular and self-contained. Using a combination of communal charity and government benefits, they have built businesses, yeshivas and other institutions that, together, meet almost all of their needs. In 2013, the Avi Chai Foundation counted just over 100 chasidic yeshivas in the five boroughs with roughly 58,000 students — making it larger than the public school systems of Philadelphia, Boston and Detroit.
“You don’t have to go to the outside world,” explained a chasidic great-grandmother in a busy Borough Park shop. Like many chasidim, she values the strong boundaries her community has erected to keep outside influences at bay.
“You asked me what do we learn and, well basically, for the most part, No. 1 is to be a mensch, treat people nicely, be honest,” she said. “It teaches you, in my opinion, everything you need to know in life.”
Asked about Yaffed’s effort to bring more secular instruction into yeshivas, she said: “I know there are people out there making a bit of noise, but the majority is so terrific. And we’re so thankful for our insular world here because there is everything that we need here, it offers everything for the person.”
Over the next five and a half decades, Brooklyn’s chasidic population exploded, growing from what scholars estimate was roughly 50,000 in the mid-1960s to, according to the UJA-Federation of New York’s 2011 Jewish population study, 225,000 in 2011.
During that time, chasidic communities (with the exception of the Lubavitchers, who are known for their outreach to unaffiliated Jews) have also become increasingly insular and self-contained. Using a combination of communal charity and government benefits, they have built businesses, yeshivas and other institutions that, together, meet almost all of their needs. In 2013, the Avi Chai Foundation counted just over 100 chasidic yeshivas in the five boroughs with roughly 58,000 students — making it larger than the public school systems of Philadelphia, Boston and Detroit.
“You don’t have to go to the outside world,” explained a chasidic great-grandmother in a busy Borough Park shop. Like many chasidim, she values the strong boundaries her community has erected to keep outside influences at bay.
“You asked me what do we learn and, well basically, for the most part, No. 1 is to be a mensch, treat people nicely, be honest,” she said. “It teaches you, in my opinion, everything you need to know in life.”
Asked about Yaffed’s effort to bring more secular instruction into yeshivas, she said: “I know there are people out there making a bit of noise, but the majority is so terrific. And we’re so thankful for our insular world here because there is everything that we need here, it offers everything for the person.”
But one thing it no longer offers — with a very few exceptions — is a solid secular education for boys. (Girls are not obligated to study Talmud and, as a result, end up getting a better secular education than boys.)
'Below Grade Level'
According to former students and teachers, chasidic boys get the message that the secular classes — 90 minutes at the end of the day, referred to generally as "English," even though it also includes math — are not to be taken seriously.
“Kids try to get away with trouble,” said Moshe, the cab driver. “They never try to take anything serious unless it gets seriously, strictly enforced.”
He described one June afternoon from his youth: “We really felt like the year was almost over, so we tore the books apart and we threw it at the teacher. We would never dare do something like that in Hebrew,” he explained, “because Hebrew we took it very serious … we studied the Torah and the Chumash until the last day of school. But English was more like, we did it just because we had to do it, you know? We didn’t gain much from all these years learning.”
'Below Grade Level'
According to former students and teachers, chasidic boys get the message that the secular classes — 90 minutes at the end of the day, referred to generally as "English," even though it also includes math — are not to be taken seriously.
“Kids try to get away with trouble,” said Moshe, the cab driver. “They never try to take anything serious unless it gets seriously, strictly enforced.”
He described one June afternoon from his youth: “We really felt like the year was almost over, so we tore the books apart and we threw it at the teacher. We would never dare do something like that in Hebrew,” he explained, “because Hebrew we took it very serious … we studied the Torah and the Chumash until the last day of school. But English was more like, we did it just because we had to do it, you know? We didn’t gain much from all these years learning.”
Moshe’s memories sound a lot like those of former secular studies teachers.
“[On my first day, all] of the kids were at the closet where I was told the books would be,” said Greig Roselli, a writer and educator originally from Louisiana, who taught 4th, 5th and 6th graders English and math at Williamsburg’s United Talmudical Academy (UTA) back in 2010-11.
“But somehow they had opened the closet and taken all the books out and they were strewn all over the place. And I remember this little bitty kid was actually tucked into the top closet and he poked his head out [and yelled]‘Teacha!’ That was my first encounter. I was horrified. I had no idea what was going on.”
Roselli said that the students’ English language proficiency was well below grade level.
“For example, if I gave them a picture of a balloon and said I want you to write a story about this balloon...there might be two or three words that were readable.”
Roselli said that while the parents treated him with respect, it was clear that most had little interest in their children’s progress in secular subjects.
“Every year there was a parent- teacher meeting and only the fathers were there, and we were told to dress nicely and show up and that they would give us money. And they would always be like, ‘thank you so much for teaching my son, we really appreciate what you’re doing.’ But if I tried to talk to them about what their son needed work on” they tuned out.
Steve, who taught at UTA for five years but asked that his last name not be used so as not to jeopardize his work relationships, recalled an atmosphere where secular learning was considered of little, if any, value — something to be endured by the students until they reached bar mitzvah age and, in the eyes of the community, became men.
“They have a curriculum we fill out and certain times we give tests. And we give them the tests but it doesn't really matter anyway because it gets thrown on some administrator’s desk,” he said.
He added that the kids performed "below grade level. It was many grades below level."
Many chasidim, however, see this disregard for secular subjects as a mark of the community’s success.
“People talk about secular education as something [that was] necessary [in the founding years], but now that the community is able to thrive without it, it’s no longer necessary,” said Baruch, a young father from Borough Park who asked that only his first name be used because publicly criticizing the community can result in ostracism, or having one’s children expelled from school.
“[On my first day, all] of the kids were at the closet where I was told the books would be,” said Greig Roselli, a writer and educator originally from Louisiana, who taught 4th, 5th and 6th graders English and math at Williamsburg’s United Talmudical Academy (UTA) back in 2010-11.
“But somehow they had opened the closet and taken all the books out and they were strewn all over the place. And I remember this little bitty kid was actually tucked into the top closet and he poked his head out [and yelled]‘Teacha!’ That was my first encounter. I was horrified. I had no idea what was going on.”
Roselli said that the students’ English language proficiency was well below grade level.
“For example, if I gave them a picture of a balloon and said I want you to write a story about this balloon...there might be two or three words that were readable.”
Roselli said that while the parents treated him with respect, it was clear that most had little interest in their children’s progress in secular subjects.
“Every year there was a parent- teacher meeting and only the fathers were there, and we were told to dress nicely and show up and that they would give us money. And they would always be like, ‘thank you so much for teaching my son, we really appreciate what you’re doing.’ But if I tried to talk to them about what their son needed work on” they tuned out.
Steve, who taught at UTA for five years but asked that his last name not be used so as not to jeopardize his work relationships, recalled an atmosphere where secular learning was considered of little, if any, value — something to be endured by the students until they reached bar mitzvah age and, in the eyes of the community, became men.
“They have a curriculum we fill out and certain times we give tests. And we give them the tests but it doesn't really matter anyway because it gets thrown on some administrator’s desk,” he said.
He added that the kids performed "below grade level. It was many grades below level."
Many chasidim, however, see this disregard for secular subjects as a mark of the community’s success.
“People talk about secular education as something [that was] necessary [in the founding years], but now that the community is able to thrive without it, it’s no longer necessary,” said Baruch, a young father from Borough Park who asked that only his first name be used because publicly criticizing the community can result in ostracism, or having one’s children expelled from school.
Baruch believes that the lack of secular education has little to do with religion, but is instead a way for chasidic leaders to keep their followers dependent.
“There are many, many religious reasons why one needs secular education. I mean you can go through the Gemara all day and find examples of the use of secular science and secular ideas within the community and the importance of learning a trade and learning these things. Today, learning a trade means learning how to get Section 8 [federal housing subsidies] and get benefits.”
In fact, Baruch thinks that chasidic leaders would rather see their followers take government benefits and community charity than provide them with a good secular education.
“People in the outside of the community love to talk about how many charitable organizations we have,” he said, noting that such charity comes attached to some very tight strings.
“The chasidic community itself is causing people to not be able to work … and then they are providing them with this organization that comes in and says: we’ll solve your problem. … So they are like the mafia. … The same people who are running this organization are the same people who are keeping the yeshivas from offering better alternatives for people who want to have English studies.”
'We Want Things To Stay The Way They Are'
“There are many, many religious reasons why one needs secular education. I mean you can go through the Gemara all day and find examples of the use of secular science and secular ideas within the community and the importance of learning a trade and learning these things. Today, learning a trade means learning how to get Section 8 [federal housing subsidies] and get benefits.”
In fact, Baruch thinks that chasidic leaders would rather see their followers take government benefits and community charity than provide them with a good secular education.
“People in the outside of the community love to talk about how many charitable organizations we have,” he said, noting that such charity comes attached to some very tight strings.
“The chasidic community itself is causing people to not be able to work … and then they are providing them with this organization that comes in and says: we’ll solve your problem. … So they are like the mafia. … The same people who are running this organization are the same people who are keeping the yeshivas from offering better alternatives for people who want to have English studies.”
'We Want Things To Stay The Way They Are'
Not everyone sees it that way. Yeshiva University education professor Moshe Krakowski concedes that some chasidic leaders may want to limit secular education in order to maintain control but believes “that’s not what’s making things tick.”
Instead, Krakowski argues, the neglect of secular education is primarily about maintaining the chasidic way of life.
“[They would say], ‘We believe very strongly that this is the way things ought to be, and that it is good. And that our value, overridingly, is the religious tradition we have and we want things to stay the way they are,’” Krakowski said.
Many, like Yaakov German, a property manager and father of 12, agree and argue that knowing a lot of math or English is not necessary to be successful.
“I have five brothers. Each and every one of them opened businesses without going to any college, without anything,” he said on a bustling Borough Park street this summer.
“If you look at the real numbers,” he continued, “all the people that went to college and wasted 14 years, 16 years to get the grades and more scores, are not even making $50,000 a year. They wasted most of the years already where they were able to have already three homes.” (German is a local hero in the chasidic community for using footage from dozens of security cameras to help solve the murder of 8-year-old Leiby Kletzky in 2011.)
Others are quick to note that if someone wants more job training, there are numerous ways to get it within the community. They point to programs like those offered by Machon L'Parnasa--a division of Touro College in Borough Park that holds classes leading to a certificate and/or associate's degree in fields like accounting, desktop publishing and medical coding and billing--and the charedi umbrella organization Agudath Israel of America’s COPE Institute, which runs a highly regarded accounting course and provides free job placement assistance upon its completion.
Instead, Krakowski argues, the neglect of secular education is primarily about maintaining the chasidic way of life.
“[They would say], ‘We believe very strongly that this is the way things ought to be, and that it is good. And that our value, overridingly, is the religious tradition we have and we want things to stay the way they are,’” Krakowski said.
Many, like Yaakov German, a property manager and father of 12, agree and argue that knowing a lot of math or English is not necessary to be successful.
“I have five brothers. Each and every one of them opened businesses without going to any college, without anything,” he said on a bustling Borough Park street this summer.
“If you look at the real numbers,” he continued, “all the people that went to college and wasted 14 years, 16 years to get the grades and more scores, are not even making $50,000 a year. They wasted most of the years already where they were able to have already three homes.” (German is a local hero in the chasidic community for using footage from dozens of security cameras to help solve the murder of 8-year-old Leiby Kletzky in 2011.)
Others are quick to note that if someone wants more job training, there are numerous ways to get it within the community. They point to programs like those offered by Machon L'Parnasa--a division of Touro College in Borough Park that holds classes leading to a certificate and/or associate's degree in fields like accounting, desktop publishing and medical coding and billing--and the charedi umbrella organization Agudath Israel of America’s COPE Institute, which runs a highly regarded accounting course and provides free job placement assistance upon its completion.
But for people like Moshe, whose basic skills are so lacking, even these programs can be difficult to make use of.
Ezra Friedlander, a chasidic PR consultant and lobbyist who works with Agudath Israel of America, agrees that secular education — especially vocational — should be improved, but not if that means sacrificing the sheltered life his community has created for its children.
“Look, it’s a balancing act,” he said during an interview in his sun-drenched Borough Park apartment filled with Judaica and drawings by his three young children.
“As a father I’m concerned with the secular influence of society. I think secular society has failed us. And this is coming from someone that interacts and engages the secular world 24/7, almost, so no one can accuse me of being insular,” he said.
“Still, it’s a legitimate fear out there. And sometimes it comes at a price. And sometimes the price is less of a secular education,” he added. “I’m willing to pay the price.”
Change in Numbers
Whatever their motive, yeshivas that do not offer an education equivalent to that of the public schools — which includes teaching secular subjects until the age of 16 — are violating the law. Plenty of officials know this. But until this summer, none has taken any action.
The government response did not come as a result of the growing number of books and memoirs describing life in chasidic communities, nor the four years of letters, phone calls and meetings Yaffed’s Moster had with education and elected officials. Even the Yiddish-language billboards Yaffed put up in chasidic neighborhoods to raise awareness of the problem failed to elicit a reaction from officials.
What made the difference was numbers. This summer, Yaffed and its lawyer, civil rights attorney Norman Siegel, got the signatures of 52 former students, teachers and parents who asked for an investigation into claims of substandard secular instruction in 39 yeshivas.
Ezra Friedlander, a chasidic PR consultant and lobbyist who works with Agudath Israel of America, agrees that secular education — especially vocational — should be improved, but not if that means sacrificing the sheltered life his community has created for its children.
“Look, it’s a balancing act,” he said during an interview in his sun-drenched Borough Park apartment filled with Judaica and drawings by his three young children.
“As a father I’m concerned with the secular influence of society. I think secular society has failed us. And this is coming from someone that interacts and engages the secular world 24/7, almost, so no one can accuse me of being insular,” he said.
“Still, it’s a legitimate fear out there. And sometimes it comes at a price. And sometimes the price is less of a secular education,” he added. “I’m willing to pay the price.”
Change in Numbers
Whatever their motive, yeshivas that do not offer an education equivalent to that of the public schools — which includes teaching secular subjects until the age of 16 — are violating the law. Plenty of officials know this. But until this summer, none has taken any action.
The government response did not come as a result of the growing number of books and memoirs describing life in chasidic communities, nor the four years of letters, phone calls and meetings Yaffed’s Moster had with education and elected officials. Even the Yiddish-language billboards Yaffed put up in chasidic neighborhoods to raise awareness of the problem failed to elicit a reaction from officials.
What made the difference was numbers. This summer, Yaffed and its lawyer, civil rights attorney Norman Siegel, got the signatures of 52 former students, teachers and parents who asked for an investigation into claims of substandard secular instruction in 39 yeshivas.
And that got a response: the city's education officials have launched an investigation, requesting documents from the yeshivas. But they have no plans to visit any of the schools in person and will not say what criteria they will be judged on.
No yeshiva administrators or chasidic community leaders contacted would comment for the story; The Jewish Week and WNYC, working together on this story, contacted representatives from the Satmar and Lubavitch school systems, the charedi umbrella organization Agudath Israel, the national yeshiva association Torah Umesorah as well as numerous chasidic yeshivas, including two of the largest: Williamsburg’s UTA, where Steve and Roselli taught, and Yeshiva Machzikei Hadas Belz in Borough Park, Moster’s alma mater.
But some individuals have spoken out publicly against Moster, who, because he no longer lives in the chasidic community, is viewed by many within it as a disgruntled troublemaker.
Friedlander, the PR consultant, says he believes secular education needs to be improved, but that it has to happen from inside the community, not by an outsider like Moster.
No yeshiva administrators or chasidic community leaders contacted would comment for the story; The Jewish Week and WNYC, working together on this story, contacted representatives from the Satmar and Lubavitch school systems, the charedi umbrella organization Agudath Israel, the national yeshiva association Torah Umesorah as well as numerous chasidic yeshivas, including two of the largest: Williamsburg’s UTA, where Steve and Roselli taught, and Yeshiva Machzikei Hadas Belz in Borough Park, Moster’s alma mater.
But some individuals have spoken out publicly against Moster, who, because he no longer lives in the chasidic community, is viewed by many within it as a disgruntled troublemaker.
Friedlander, the PR consultant, says he believes secular education needs to be improved, but that it has to happen from inside the community, not by an outsider like Moster.
“When someone leaves the community, then threatens the community with an investigation ... that is probably the most counterproductive action that one could take. And that tells me that this person is bent on vengeance as opposed to enhancing the system,” he said.
Moster says personal attacks like these, and the threat of being ostracized, are exactly what keep people quiet, and make change from within an unrealistic goal.
He believes the only way change will happen is through government enforcement. But he — and many others — thinks politicians are afraid, too.
Don't Ask, Don't Care
Baruch, the young Borough Park father, thinks it’s pretty clear why elected officials have looked the other way: Votes.
“The voting bloc is so strong. It means a lot to a lot of elected officials. ... And the community really stresses that it’s very important for us to vote in a bloc because that's where our power is,” he said.
Just after Yaffed hired Siegel last fall, the former ACLU director sent a letter to the mayor, the governor and city and state education officials asking to meet about the issue. He never heard back.
“What was remarkable is that in all the years that I’ve been doing what I do, when you write a letter to elected officials and appointed officials of that stature, you get a response,” he said. “The only thing that I can conclude at this point, and maybe I’m wrong, is that the fear is a political fear, that [the chasidic community] is politically powerful to the point that elected officials, including the governor, the attorney general and the mayor of the city of New York are not prepared to confront this issue.”
Yaffed and Siegel tried again in February, this time sending the superintendents overseeing the districts with chasidic schools a list of 27 specific yeshivas that should be investigated. Again, they heard nothing.
It was not until July, after Yaffed sent its letter boasting 52 signatures and citing 39 yeshivas, that the Department of Education finally promised to investigate, a story first reported by The Jewish Week and WNYC.
The Councilman Stands Alone
But the city’s decision to rely only on documents provided by the schools has concerned education advocates, like Queens Councilman Daniel Dromm, who chairs the council’s education committee.
Moster says personal attacks like these, and the threat of being ostracized, are exactly what keep people quiet, and make change from within an unrealistic goal.
He believes the only way change will happen is through government enforcement. But he — and many others — thinks politicians are afraid, too.
Don't Ask, Don't Care
Baruch, the young Borough Park father, thinks it’s pretty clear why elected officials have looked the other way: Votes.
“The voting bloc is so strong. It means a lot to a lot of elected officials. ... And the community really stresses that it’s very important for us to vote in a bloc because that's where our power is,” he said.
Just after Yaffed hired Siegel last fall, the former ACLU director sent a letter to the mayor, the governor and city and state education officials asking to meet about the issue. He never heard back.
“What was remarkable is that in all the years that I’ve been doing what I do, when you write a letter to elected officials and appointed officials of that stature, you get a response,” he said. “The only thing that I can conclude at this point, and maybe I’m wrong, is that the fear is a political fear, that [the chasidic community] is politically powerful to the point that elected officials, including the governor, the attorney general and the mayor of the city of New York are not prepared to confront this issue.”
Yaffed and Siegel tried again in February, this time sending the superintendents overseeing the districts with chasidic schools a list of 27 specific yeshivas that should be investigated. Again, they heard nothing.
It was not until July, after Yaffed sent its letter boasting 52 signatures and citing 39 yeshivas, that the Department of Education finally promised to investigate, a story first reported by The Jewish Week and WNYC.
The Councilman Stands Alone
But the city’s decision to rely only on documents provided by the schools has concerned education advocates, like Queens Councilman Daniel Dromm, who chairs the council’s education committee.
“I would expect that they would have high standards in this. That they would go to the schools. That they would visit. That they would interview students and that they would do a thorough investigation of what exactly is happening or not happening in these schools,” he said during an interview in his Jackson Heights district office.
“We can’t have students leaving schools in New York City that can’t speak English, that have no idea of science or history or social studies,” he continued. “That is not allowed by the state and we cannot continue to allow that to happen anywhere in the state.”
He said that if the DOE probe doesn’t expand past documents, he will use his authority as the education committee chair to conduct his own investigation — with site visits, student interviews and possibly a public hearing.
No other city or state education official would speak on the record, but Mayor Bill de Blasio sent The Jewish Week a statement vowing “zero tolerance” for subpar secular education at chasidic yeshivas. Three weeks later, Williamsburg Councilman Stephen Levin issued his own statement defending them by saying he’s “visited yeshivas in Williamsburg and [has] seen secular education taking place first-hand.”
The more than a dozen other politicians The Jewish Week and WNYC contacted either did not respond to multiple requests for comment or declined to comment. They include Gov. Andrew Cuomo, state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, New York City Public Advocate Letitia James and Midwood Councilman Chaim Deutsch, who chairs the education subcommittee on non-public schools. The list also includes the six city and state officials representing Williamsburg and Borough Park.
Dromm said he’s not surprised.
“I think a lot of people are afraid of the vote, particularly as it relates to chasidic and Orthodox communities. And I understand the politics of that,” he said. “However as an educator, a New York City public school teacher for 25 years before I got elected to the council, I feel that we cannot allow a situation that ultimately would amount to abuse, or neglect, of students."
Because Kids Don't Vote
Cardozo law professor Marci Hamilton, an expert on church-state issues, agrees that this kind of political pandering harms children.
“We can’t have students leaving schools in New York City that can’t speak English, that have no idea of science or history or social studies,” he continued. “That is not allowed by the state and we cannot continue to allow that to happen anywhere in the state.”
He said that if the DOE probe doesn’t expand past documents, he will use his authority as the education committee chair to conduct his own investigation — with site visits, student interviews and possibly a public hearing.
No other city or state education official would speak on the record, but Mayor Bill de Blasio sent The Jewish Week a statement vowing “zero tolerance” for subpar secular education at chasidic yeshivas. Three weeks later, Williamsburg Councilman Stephen Levin issued his own statement defending them by saying he’s “visited yeshivas in Williamsburg and [has] seen secular education taking place first-hand.”
The more than a dozen other politicians The Jewish Week and WNYC contacted either did not respond to multiple requests for comment or declined to comment. They include Gov. Andrew Cuomo, state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, New York City Public Advocate Letitia James and Midwood Councilman Chaim Deutsch, who chairs the education subcommittee on non-public schools. The list also includes the six city and state officials representing Williamsburg and Borough Park.
Dromm said he’s not surprised.
“I think a lot of people are afraid of the vote, particularly as it relates to chasidic and Orthodox communities. And I understand the politics of that,” he said. “However as an educator, a New York City public school teacher for 25 years before I got elected to the council, I feel that we cannot allow a situation that ultimately would amount to abuse, or neglect, of students."
Because Kids Don't Vote
Cardozo law professor Marci Hamilton, an expert on church-state issues, agrees that this kind of political pandering harms children.
“If your only concern as an elected official is re-election, without any concern about all of the children in one community, you have utterly abandoned your obligations under the U.S. and the New York constitutions,” she said.
“What this tells you,” she added, “is that children don't vote and these politicians don't care.”
Indeed, advocates for reform have expressed concern over Mayor de Blasio’s close ties to the chasidic community, pointing to the mayor’s fulfillment of a campaign promise to drop the unpopular parental consent forms for the controversial circumcision ritual known as metzitzah b’peh. In the ritual, a mohel sucks on a newborn’s penis to draw out the flow of blood, a practice that has been linked to the deaths of two infants from the herpes virus. He also streamlined the reimbursement process for special education, something Orthodox groups have been strenuously lobbying for.
At a campaign stop in Williamsburg a few days before the 2013 mayoral primary, a Satmar leader described de Blasio as having “a proven record of sensitivity to the Jewish community.”
“We have no doubt that Bill de Blasio will continue to prove himself loyal to our community when he is in City Hall,” he said. “He's an honest man, a true and trusted friend who will make a great mayor.”
Some people think that loyalty — and a desire to be re-elected — may be the reason the city isn’t making school visits or student interviews a part of its probe.
One possible sign they may be right is the DOE’s stonewalling of the The Jewish Week’s Freedom of Information (FOIL) request for public documents relating to past complaints about chasidic yeshivas. It has delayed its response for five months, citing the “volume and complexity” of the “requests we receive and process.”
“What this tells you,” she added, “is that children don't vote and these politicians don't care.”
Indeed, advocates for reform have expressed concern over Mayor de Blasio’s close ties to the chasidic community, pointing to the mayor’s fulfillment of a campaign promise to drop the unpopular parental consent forms for the controversial circumcision ritual known as metzitzah b’peh. In the ritual, a mohel sucks on a newborn’s penis to draw out the flow of blood, a practice that has been linked to the deaths of two infants from the herpes virus. He also streamlined the reimbursement process for special education, something Orthodox groups have been strenuously lobbying for.
At a campaign stop in Williamsburg a few days before the 2013 mayoral primary, a Satmar leader described de Blasio as having “a proven record of sensitivity to the Jewish community.”
“We have no doubt that Bill de Blasio will continue to prove himself loyal to our community when he is in City Hall,” he said. “He's an honest man, a true and trusted friend who will make a great mayor.”
Some people think that loyalty — and a desire to be re-elected — may be the reason the city isn’t making school visits or student interviews a part of its probe.
One possible sign they may be right is the DOE’s stonewalling of the The Jewish Week’s Freedom of Information (FOIL) request for public documents relating to past complaints about chasidic yeshivas. It has delayed its response for five months, citing the “volume and complexity” of the “requests we receive and process.”
The department outright denied a FOIL request for the names of the 39 schools cited by Yaffed, which the nonprofit refused to make public to demonstrate that its fight is with the government, not the yeshivas. In that instance, the DOE said releasing the documents would interfere with an law-enforcement investigation (a spokesman clarified that this referred to its own probe into whether education laws are being enforced with respect to these yeshivas).
De Blasio spokesman Wiley Novell said the mayor’s relationship with the chasidic community has no influence over the DOE’s decisions regarding the yeshiva probe. "The state law is very clear,” he said, that when the DOE gets a complaint, it must investigate and, if necessary, “and enforce corrective actions to ensure students are receiving a strong and equivalent education,” he told The Jewish Week via email. “And the Department has followed those rules to the letter. No one is above the law, and everyone is held to the same standard."
De Blasio spokesman Wiley Novell said the mayor’s relationship with the chasidic community has no influence over the DOE’s decisions regarding the yeshiva probe. "The state law is very clear,” he said, that when the DOE gets a complaint, it must investigate and, if necessary, “and enforce corrective actions to ensure students are receiving a strong and equivalent education,” he told The Jewish Week via email. “And the Department has followed those rules to the letter. No one is above the law, and everyone is held to the same standard."
Gov. Cuomo has an even longer connection with the chasidic community than de Blasio, reaching back to when his father was governor.
At a campaign stop in the upstate Satmar enclave of Kiryas Joel during the run-up to his first gubernatorial election in 2010, a Satmar leader introduced the soon-to-be governor by saying, “You didn’t come over here for an endorsement, because this community would have endorsed you regardless. … We wanted to let you know that we are family.”
In his first year in office, Cuomo pushed through a bill making millions in tuition aid available to rabbinical college students. This was part of the same budget that cut funding to public colleges and universities by 10 percent.
On the eve of the 2014 election, Cuomo received $90,000 in donations from Orthodox realtors in Brooklyn and this May, days after he vetoed a bill aimed at stopping the expansion of Kiryas Joel, he received $250,000 from a network of companies linked to a developer from the upstate village.
Cuomo’s press office did not return messages requesting comment.
'But We Need More Money'
Some fear that these close political relationships will lead to a push by yeshivas to secure more government funds, something some members of the community have already begun to argue is necessary to improve the quality of secular education. And indeed funding was a topic of discussion on a recent broadcast of Talkine, the popular Orthodox radio show hosted by Zev Brenner.
At a campaign stop in the upstate Satmar enclave of Kiryas Joel during the run-up to his first gubernatorial election in 2010, a Satmar leader introduced the soon-to-be governor by saying, “You didn’t come over here for an endorsement, because this community would have endorsed you regardless. … We wanted to let you know that we are family.”
In his first year in office, Cuomo pushed through a bill making millions in tuition aid available to rabbinical college students. This was part of the same budget that cut funding to public colleges and universities by 10 percent.
On the eve of the 2014 election, Cuomo received $90,000 in donations from Orthodox realtors in Brooklyn and this May, days after he vetoed a bill aimed at stopping the expansion of Kiryas Joel, he received $250,000 from a network of companies linked to a developer from the upstate village.
Cuomo’s press office did not return messages requesting comment.
'But We Need More Money'
Some fear that these close political relationships will lead to a push by yeshivas to secure more government funds, something some members of the community have already begun to argue is necessary to improve the quality of secular education. And indeed funding was a topic of discussion on a recent broadcast of Talkine, the popular Orthodox radio show hosted by Zev Brenner.
That evening, a woman going by the name of Henya called into the show, saying that, “I pay taxes and I’m double-dipped. I have to pay double, twice, for the kids and for somebody else who just got off the boat to go to school.”
Henya’s comment reflects the concerns of many private and parochial school parents who feel strapped because they not only pay taxes for public schools they don’t use, but private school tuition for their own children.
But there are those who argue that more funding would not necessarily address the problem, and that it would also raise serious constitutional issues.
“As a general rule, the government cannot fund religious institutions and that applies not just to the yeshivas, but the parochial Catholic schools and any Muslim schools” as well, said Norman Siegel.
Henya’s comment reflects the concerns of many private and parochial school parents who feel strapped because they not only pay taxes for public schools they don’t use, but private school tuition for their own children.
But there are those who argue that more funding would not necessarily address the problem, and that it would also raise serious constitutional issues.
“As a general rule, the government cannot fund religious institutions and that applies not just to the yeshivas, but the parochial Catholic schools and any Muslim schools” as well, said Norman Siegel.
However, Siegel said that in the last 25 years the Supreme Court “has carved out some limited exceptions to that general principle”--exceptions that have basically been followed by the New York state legislature and court of appeals.
In practice, this means that yeshivas in New York get millions of dollars from the city and state, including funds for things like school nurses, textbooks, busing, lunch programs, special and remedial education and universal pre-K.
In fact, according to state education department documents, New York City’s Jewish schools received just over $51 million this year in state funding, or .18 percent of the Department of Education’s total budget of $27.6 billion. In addition, they have an estimated $57 million due to them for state-mandated programs in past years.
Chasidic yeshivas also get tens of millions in federal dollars, including Title I funding for schools in low-income districts, Title III funding for English-language learners and even funds for computer and Internet technology.
However, Marc Stern, an attorney for the American Jewish Committee who specializes in church-state issues, says the scant secular education offered by so many chasidic yeshivas has little to do with money.
“The objections to extensive secular education are primarily ideological. They are not primarily financial,” he said.
“If the question was, were the science classes taught in up-to-date labs with microscopes and fancy DNA sifting equipment and so on, then money is the answer,” he added. “If nothing is taught where a history course can be taught for the price of a textbook and the state subsidizes it, if that course isn’t offered at all, that has very little to do with money.”
Stern added that, “If somebody were to offer Satmar a million dollars a kid you’re still not going to see arts and humanities courses.”
In practice, this means that yeshivas in New York get millions of dollars from the city and state, including funds for things like school nurses, textbooks, busing, lunch programs, special and remedial education and universal pre-K.
In fact, according to state education department documents, New York City’s Jewish schools received just over $51 million this year in state funding, or .18 percent of the Department of Education’s total budget of $27.6 billion. In addition, they have an estimated $57 million due to them for state-mandated programs in past years.
Chasidic yeshivas also get tens of millions in federal dollars, including Title I funding for schools in low-income districts, Title III funding for English-language learners and even funds for computer and Internet technology.
However, Marc Stern, an attorney for the American Jewish Committee who specializes in church-state issues, says the scant secular education offered by so many chasidic yeshivas has little to do with money.
“The objections to extensive secular education are primarily ideological. They are not primarily financial,” he said.
“If the question was, were the science classes taught in up-to-date labs with microscopes and fancy DNA sifting equipment and so on, then money is the answer,” he added. “If nothing is taught where a history course can be taught for the price of a textbook and the state subsidizes it, if that course isn’t offered at all, that has very little to do with money.”
Stern added that, “If somebody were to offer Satmar a million dollars a kid you’re still not going to see arts and humanities courses.”
Indeed, according to government records, Satmar, one of the largest chasidic groups, got about $20 million — about $1,800 per student — in federal aid last year for its Brooklyn schools alone (Satmar also has schools in upstate communities). And that’s compared to the entire Archdiocese of New York, which got $9 million, or $112 per student.
Over the years, there has been little oversight of all this money going to the chasidic community. And there have been cases of fraud.
In 1993, the federal government disqualified 20 chasidic schools associated with the Satmar and Lubavitch groups from receiving Pell grants because of “widespread” fraud, including providing the names, high school diplomas and Social Security numbers of students who didn't go to the schools, according to the New York Times.
The city’s Department of Education “acknowledged that its own staff had for years ignored reports from an educational accreditation council that the schools were ‘avocational’ instead of ‘vocational.'"
In 1997, six chasidic men were indicted on charges of using fraud to steal tens of millions of dollars in student loans, business assistance and housing subsidies.
Two years later, a group of chasidim was convicted of funneling millions in federal aid to religious institutions and private bank accounts. That was the same year a Williamsburg principal pleaded guilty to giving dozens of chasidic women no-show teaching jobs.
And in 2013, The Jewish Week discovered more than a dozen chasidic yeshivas were reaping tens of millions to fund non-existent computer and Internet technology.
Cardozo’s Marci Hamilton says misuse of government funds is not unique to one community and that, “The problem with every government funding program is that there are those who will take advantage of it and expand the categories well beyond what the government intended.”
Over the years, there has been little oversight of all this money going to the chasidic community. And there have been cases of fraud.
In 1993, the federal government disqualified 20 chasidic schools associated with the Satmar and Lubavitch groups from receiving Pell grants because of “widespread” fraud, including providing the names, high school diplomas and Social Security numbers of students who didn't go to the schools, according to the New York Times.
The city’s Department of Education “acknowledged that its own staff had for years ignored reports from an educational accreditation council that the schools were ‘avocational’ instead of ‘vocational.'"
In 1997, six chasidic men were indicted on charges of using fraud to steal tens of millions of dollars in student loans, business assistance and housing subsidies.
Two years later, a group of chasidim was convicted of funneling millions in federal aid to religious institutions and private bank accounts. That was the same year a Williamsburg principal pleaded guilty to giving dozens of chasidic women no-show teaching jobs.
And in 2013, The Jewish Week discovered more than a dozen chasidic yeshivas were reaping tens of millions to fund non-existent computer and Internet technology.
Cardozo’s Marci Hamilton says misuse of government funds is not unique to one community and that, “The problem with every government funding program is that there are those who will take advantage of it and expand the categories well beyond what the government intended.”
She says that this is “probably as much a problem of government accountability as it is of schools taking advantage of the government not really paying attention.”
None of these issues — the power of the chasidic voting bloc, the misuse of funds or the challenges of governmental oversight — is lost on Yaffed’s lawyer, Norman Siegel. And he is well aware that politics could derail the effort to ensure that chasidic children are getting the kind of education mandated by law.
“This is a hot political issue. It’s radioactive,” he said.
But Siegel also believes that depriving these students of a secular education is a violation of their rights. And that ensuring that the law is enforced is the right thing to do.
“When it comes time for elections, this should be an issue that people should be aware of. And for elected officials in high positions who ignore the violation of civil rights, history says that sooner or later, they’re held politically accountable.”
Williamsburg and Borough Park photos by The Jewish Week (see captions below). All rights reserved.
Hella Winston is special correspondent; Amy Sara Clark is deputy managing editor. The story was made possible by The Jewish Week Investigative Fund. This story is the result of a joint investigation between The Jewish Week and WNYC.
Photo Captions (in order):
1. Borough Park. Michael Datikash/JW 2 & 3. Williamsburg. Michael Datikash/JW; 4. Holiday wear in Borough Park. Amy Sara Clark/JW; 5. Yiddish and Hebrew children's books in Williamsburg. Michael Datikash/JW; 6. The UTA school where Steve and Greig Roselli taught in Williamsburg. Michael Datikash/JW; 7. After school in Williamsburg. The Jewish Week; 8. In Williamsburg, it's common for chasidic children to wear matching outfits. Michael Datikash/JW; 9. PR consultant and lobbyist Ezra Friedlander points to Hamodia's weekly supplement for kids as an example of English educational materials available to them. Amy Sara Clark/JW; 10. Yaffed founder Naftuli Moster. Michael Datikash/JW; 11. Yaffed's latest billboard, in which the children tell their father that they want to study secular subjects. Courtesy of Yaffed; 12. Councilman Daniel Dromm. William Alatriste/NYC Council; 13. Crown Heights. Michael Datikash/JW. 14. Williamsburg. Michael Datikash/JW; 15. Williamsburg. Michael Datikash/JW 16. Borough Park. Amy Sara Clark/JW; 17. Williamsburg. Michael Datikash/JW; 18. Pre-holiday shopping in Williamsburg. Michael Datikash/JW.
None of these issues — the power of the chasidic voting bloc, the misuse of funds or the challenges of governmental oversight — is lost on Yaffed’s lawyer, Norman Siegel. And he is well aware that politics could derail the effort to ensure that chasidic children are getting the kind of education mandated by law.
“This is a hot political issue. It’s radioactive,” he said.
But Siegel also believes that depriving these students of a secular education is a violation of their rights. And that ensuring that the law is enforced is the right thing to do.
“When it comes time for elections, this should be an issue that people should be aware of. And for elected officials in high positions who ignore the violation of civil rights, history says that sooner or later, they’re held politically accountable.”
Williamsburg and Borough Park photos by The Jewish Week (see captions below). All rights reserved.
Hella Winston is special correspondent; Amy Sara Clark is deputy managing editor. The story was made possible by The Jewish Week Investigative Fund. This story is the result of a joint investigation between The Jewish Week and WNYC.
Photo Captions (in order):
1. Borough Park. Michael Datikash/JW 2 & 3. Williamsburg. Michael Datikash/JW; 4. Holiday wear in Borough Park. Amy Sara Clark/JW; 5. Yiddish and Hebrew children's books in Williamsburg. Michael Datikash/JW; 6. The UTA school where Steve and Greig Roselli taught in Williamsburg. Michael Datikash/JW; 7. After school in Williamsburg. The Jewish Week; 8. In Williamsburg, it's common for chasidic children to wear matching outfits. Michael Datikash/JW; 9. PR consultant and lobbyist Ezra Friedlander points to Hamodia's weekly supplement for kids as an example of English educational materials available to them. Amy Sara Clark/JW; 10. Yaffed founder Naftuli Moster. Michael Datikash/JW; 11. Yaffed's latest billboard, in which the children tell their father that they want to study secular subjects. Courtesy of Yaffed; 12. Councilman Daniel Dromm. William Alatriste/NYC Council; 13. Crown Heights. Michael Datikash/JW. 14. Williamsburg. Michael Datikash/JW; 15. Williamsburg. Michael Datikash/JW 16. Borough Park. Amy Sara Clark/JW; 17. Williamsburg. Michael Datikash/JW; 18. Pre-holiday shopping in Williamsburg. Michael Datikash/JW.
A Leap Of Faith Or A Step Too Far?
National
A Leap Of Faith Or A Step Too Far?
Ordaining intermarried rabbis could push the Reconstructionist movement to the fringes, or forge a model for the future.
Lisa Hostein
Special To The Jewish Week
Reconstructionist Rabbinical College student, Sandra Lawson, under the chuppah at her wedding. Tabitha Smith
Philadelphia — When Sandra Lawson stood under the chuppah last Saturday, she was doing more than making a lifetime commitment to her partner. She also was setting herself up to test the boundaries of what it means to be a rabbi in America today.
Lawson, an African-American lesbian and a Jew by choice, is a rabbinical student at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in suburban Philadelphia. Her brand-new spouse, Susan Hurrey, is not Jewish.
Unless Hurrey decides to convert before her graduation, Lawson could become one of the first rabbis in the United States to be ordained while openly involved in an interfaith relationship. Her graduating with that status, however, is contingent on whether the RRC faculty decides to change its current policy that bans the admission and graduation of students involved in an interfaith relationship.
“Given the world we live in, with Jewish communities claiming to be welcoming to interfaith families, it’s unfair to expect rabbis to be any different,” said the 45-year-old former military police officer and personal trainer.
The seminary’s faculty is expected to vote to abandon — or amend — the policy sometime after the new academic year begins Aug. 31. As that time nears, the issue is stirring strong debate within the Reconstructionist ranks and in the wider Jewish world.
Some see the move as an inevitable response to a changing Jewish landscape by a denomination that has long paved the way for groundbreaking changes. Critics both within and outside the movement see it as going too far, a divisive step that could splinter the stream and further alienate it from the broader Jewish community.
RRC is “trying in their way to do something proactive in response to the sea changes in American life,” said Rabbi Lester Bronstein, the spiritual leader of Bet Am Shalom Synagogue, a Reconstructionist congregation in White Plains, N.Y., who has been outspoken in his opposition to abandoning the policy altogether. “But this isn’t the way to do it.”
Indeed, the negative feedback, particularly from many Reconstructionist rabbis already in the field, has been so intense that the faculty is now considering several compromise positions.
Rabbi Nina Mandel, the president of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association, succinctly laid out the issue in describing the views percolating among her group’s some 350 members. They range, she said, “from people who feel this is a change that is long overdue and really reflects their understanding of Reconstructionist values and a Reconstructionist lens on Judaism, to rabbis who feel really strongly that the Jewish value of fostering marriage between two Jews is essential to the continuity of the Jewish people and that rabbis who choose to partner have the responsibility to reflect that.”
The discussion comes at a critical time for the movement. More than 90 years after it was founded by Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, a Conservative-ordained rabbi who defined Judaism as the “evolving religious civilization of the Jewish people,” the Reconstructionist stream remains small and financially strapped.
With just over 100 congregations scattered throughout North America, the movement’s new president, Rabbi Deborah Waxman, who sees herself as the “lead evangelist” for “cutting-edge Judaism,” is seeking to articulate a new vision and a raison d’etre for Reconstructionist Judaism.
She describes it as a “small, passionate community of communities,” people who care “deeply about the Jewish present and the Jewish future” and who take an “activist approach” to finding new and experimental ways to “building the Jewish community we want to live in and building the Jewish community we want the next generation to be attracted to and where they can thrive.”
“I am making the case not just for Reconstructionism, but for Judaism,” Rabbi Waxman said in a recent interview in her office at the college, an old mansion set on a wooded estate in Wyncote, Pa. “Everything is open for negotiations.”
Though she declined to explicitly share her position on what internally is being referred to as NJP, the non-Jewish partner issue — she says she doesn’t want to prejudice the outcome — she hints at her view in expressing her philosophy about the need to adapt to a changing Jewish environment.
“I don’t think that visceral responses that are solely grounded in the past and solely grounded in the gut are appropriate to the opportunities and the challenges going forward,” she said.
At a time when identity is increasingly being shaped by choice rather than biology, Rabbi Waxman posited, the key question is: “Can rabbinic leadership emerge out of the 40-plus percent who are in interfaith relations and are creating Jewish homes and Jewish families? We’ve already seen such lay leadership emerge.”
The issue, which was first raised at the college several years ago, is coming to the fore now as a response to both pragmatic and philosophical concerns, according to interviews with RRC officials, Reconstructionist rabbis and students.
Pragmatic because the seminary’s enrollment and applicant pool has been shrinking — just eight students graduated this year, the same number of the incoming class — and the low numbers are threatening the school’s financial well-being and possibly even its accreditation. Opening the doors wider, the thinking goes, would bring in more applicants.
Philosophical because the movement leaders are continually “reconstructing” who and what it means to be Jewish in the 21st century.
Financial woes led to a merger in 2012 between the seminary and the congregational arm to form the Jewish Reconstructionist Communities. The movement’s restructuring was “the result of the concern for the future; it was clear we had to be wise and strategic about our use of resources,” said Rabbi Waxman, who took over as president of the merged entity in January 2014.
“How can we most effectively advance the Reconstructionist progressive perspective in the wider world and how can we develop a sustainable model?” she said. “It’s an open question.”
Being open to intermarried rabbis, proponents of the change in policy say, is a natural extension for a movement that sees itself as increasingly diverse and inclusive.
Indeed, the current roster of students — with this year’s incoming class, there will be a total of 46 students, along with 21 full-time, part-time and adjunct faculty on campus —reflects — some would say magnifies — the changing face of American Jewry.
RRC has long been known as a welcoming institution for gay and lesbian students. It was the first movement to accept openly gay students in the mid-1980s, with the Reform seminary following soon after and the Conservative movement doing so only in the past several years. But RRC now is extending that outreach to other non-traditional populations.
“One of the big changes in the Jewish world is the incredible diversity of people who come in and say, ‘I am also Jewish,’ said Rabbi Mandel, the RRA head who serves a small congregation in rural Selinsgrove, Pa. She cited people of color, people who are transgender or are of different sexual orientation and different ethnic backgrounds as groups that seeking entry into Jewish life. These folks, along with many who were raised in interfaith families, are among those looking for a place at RRC, she said.
The 2015 graduating class is emblematic of that shift. Of the eight students ordained as rabbis in early June, one is lesbian, one is transgender and two are Jews by choice.
Sandra Lawson clearly reflects this new face of RRC. As the first African-American student at the seminary, she sees a connection between the increasingly diverse makeup of the student body and the question of rabbis with non-Jewish partners.
“I think it’s an unrealistic burden to ask queer people and Jews of color to find Jewish partners and then not deal with the racism and the homophobia that exists in the Jewish community,” she said, citing instances of people questioning her credentials or harassing her when she is praying.
Lawson, who is expected to graduate in 2018, was involved in the internal RRC process of soliciting student views about changing the policy on non-Jewish partners. While her own partner has said she would convert if necessary in order for Lawson to graduate, Lawson said there are several other students also involved in interfaith relationships, only some of whose partners are on the track toward conversion. (They all presumably met their partners after gaining admission or else their partners were already in the process of converting. College officials would not comment on other students, saying it was private information.)
Lawson said it was clear that both the students and faculty are “overwhelmingly” in favor of changing the policy, with some exceptions in both groups.
When the faculty first voted to eliminate the ban in December 2013, few Reconstructionists outside the college even knew it was happening. The backlash was swift, especially among rabbis and congregations, who argued that such a dramatic change in policy would affect the whole movement. They said that especially in light of the recent merger, the issue merited a wider discussion, even with recognition that a change in admissions policy was the ultimate purview of the RRC faculty.
At that point, RRC officials began to open up the process in advance of a second faculty vote, which is required of all policy changes. They sought input from — and dialogue with — the RRA membership and asked their 100-plus congregations to engage their communities in a discussion and present a consensus position.
In the end, only about 30-plus congregations responded to the call, with the majority of those who did respond expressing support for eliminating the policy, only four opposed and several others saying they could not come to a consensus.
Among the last group was Congregation Or Hadash in Fort Washington, Pa., a congregation with a longstanding special relationship with RRC. Housed at the college for its first several years after it was founded in 1983, Or Hadash served as a “laboratory” congregation for students at the rabbinical school.
Shelley Kapnek Rosenberg, a former president and founding member of Or Hadash whose daughter Jessica is a current rabbinical student at RRC, said she supports a change of policy. “It shows an openness on the part of the college and a realistic notion as to what’s going on in the Jewish world. I don’t think rabbis should be judged by who their partner is.”
At the same time, she said, she recognized that other people in her congregation of 150 families had strong feelings against it, including the concern about adversely affecting relations with the other movements. “We’re already considered a tad out there, and this just might put us more out there with respect to other movements.”
The current president of her synagogue, Jay Cohen, said that after several discussions at the executive committee, board and congregational level, he reported back to RRC that although his congregation was generally in favor of doing away with the policy, there was strong dissent among some congregants who want to keep or modify it. “I wasn’t comfortable writing a majority view,” he said. “I wanted them to know there was a strong minority opinion.”
Helping to shape the debate beyond the college are two rabbis who graduated from RRC a few decades apart and live at opposite ends of the country.
For Lester Bronstein, the rabbi in White Plains, the issue has been painful.
“We are talking about a precedent that fundamentally alters what it means to be the Jewish Reconstructionist movement and to create religious peoplehood,” he wrote in one of two “con” position papers that were circulated among movement leaders.
“It encourages the wrong behaviors without sufficiently encouraging things that would be constructive — like improving Jewish literacy or Jewish modeling for people trying to create a Jewish home,” Rabbi Bronstein said in an interview.
The rabbi, 67, said he understands the argument RRC officials have made that they are turning away potentially good candidates. “I want to welcome these outliers too, but I think the boundaries we have are welcoming enough” without sacrificing the commitment to in-marriage as the model appropriate for rabbinic leadership.
He applauded RRC officials for opening up the process — his congregation was one that engaged in the discussion and was among the handful that reported opposition to lifting the ban — but he still worries about the outcome of the faculty vote.
“I really don’t want to leave the movement and hope they can do something that will keep me in,” he said, hinting that a compromise being discussed that would allow for some flexibility in the ban would be acceptable.
On the other side of the spectrum is Rabbi Mychal Copeland, who sees her personal experience as a living example of why a change is needed.
Rabbi Copeland, 44, graduated from RRC in 2000. She spent her rabbinical school years in a relationship with a woman who wasn’t Jewish but who converted just a few months before her graduation.
She and her partner, Kirsti, whom she has since married, were somewhat “closeted” about their relationship even as they came out as lesbians during her time there, she said. “We didn’t want my partner’s decision concerning conversion to be controlled by others or part of a public debate, so we tried to keep a low profile throughout my five years at the college,” she wrote in a piece supporting a change in policy that was widely circulated.
Now the director of Interfaith Family in San Francisco, a group that helps engage interfaith families in Jewish life, Copeland said that ordaining rabbis involved in interfaith relationships would provide an important model that is currently missing.
“We don’t have models for the vast majority of people who are interfaith families and what that looks like — people coming from different backgrounds, engaged in deeply Jewish conversations, values and practice in their homes,” she said in an interview.
Beyond the confines of the Reconstructionist movement, the wider Jewish world is taking notice of — and, in some cases, reacting strongly to — the debate.
Until recently, such a move “would have been unthinkable,” said Jonathan Sarna, a professor at Brandeis University and a renowned historian of American Jewish life.
“Endogamy was still a value that was broadly accepted in the liberal movements; the big change now is that intermarriage has become normative,” he said. If it’s considered normative behavior, then “it’s not a great surprise that people say that rabbis ought to be allowed to be intermarried, too.”
The discussion also reflects the changing perspective on what intermarriage represents, he said. If intermarriage was once seen as a statement that you are leaving Judaism and that your children won’t be Jewish, now it’s seen merely as a result of someone falling in love with someone who is not Jewish. “Now you can be intermarried and still feel strongly about being Jewish — and even want to be a rabbi.”
He predicted that the Reform movement would follow the path of the Reconstructionist movement at some point.
As the new academic year at RRC approaches — and with it a likely vote on the matter — several compromise positions are being considered, according to documents being circulated in the movement. Rather than a straight decision to keep or eliminate the current policy to ban the admission and ordination of students with non-Jewish partners, the faculty could decide to remove the prohibition on partnering with non-Jews but add language that makes clear that all students and applicants “be committed to maintaining Jewish homes and raising Jewish children.”
Or they could decide to apply more robustly the term “ordinarily,” which is already in the current policy prohibiting admission or graduation for those in interfaith relationships but generally has been used only in cases where the partner is in the process of converting. In other words, strengthening the caveat “ordinarily” could open the door to others under certain conditions. A third compromise position suggests applying the biblical “category of ger toshav for non-Jews who commit themselves to the Jewish community,” meaning they would be accepted as “resident aliens,” given status within the community if they commit to certain precepts without actually converting.
Underlying the debate are the potential repercussions for the movement as a whole and for rabbinical students in particular should a change in policy occur: Some congregations might decide to disaffiliate, the RRA would have to assess its policy of automatically accepting as members all graduates of the rabbinical seminary and some graduates might encounter obstacles finding jobs.
Even some congregations that conveyed support for a policy change made clear they would not necessarily hire a rabbi who is intermarried.
Waxman said that while she understands all the concerns swirling around the issue, she is impressed by the vitality of the discussion it has engendered. In this, like other contemporary issues the Reconstructionist movement has tackled, Waxman asserted, there is a pattern:
“Where we have led, the Jewish community has almost always followed; when we start to lead there is usually much controversy; and when a particular policy change is widely adopted,” she said, “there is usually very little recognition” that it came from the Reconstructionist movement.
editor@jewishweek.org
National
A Leap Of Faith Or A Step Too Far?
Ordaining intermarried rabbis could push the Reconstructionist movement to the fringes, or forge a model for the future.
Lisa Hostein
Special To The Jewish Week
Reconstructionist Rabbinical College student, Sandra Lawson, under the chuppah at her wedding. Tabitha Smith
Philadelphia — When Sandra Lawson stood under the chuppah last Saturday, she was doing more than making a lifetime commitment to her partner. She also was setting herself up to test the boundaries of what it means to be a rabbi in America today.
Lawson, an African-American lesbian and a Jew by choice, is a rabbinical student at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in suburban Philadelphia. Her brand-new spouse, Susan Hurrey, is not Jewish.
Unless Hurrey decides to convert before her graduation, Lawson could become one of the first rabbis in the United States to be ordained while openly involved in an interfaith relationship. Her graduating with that status, however, is contingent on whether the RRC faculty decides to change its current policy that bans the admission and graduation of students involved in an interfaith relationship.
“Given the world we live in, with Jewish communities claiming to be welcoming to interfaith families, it’s unfair to expect rabbis to be any different,” said the 45-year-old former military police officer and personal trainer.
The seminary’s faculty is expected to vote to abandon — or amend — the policy sometime after the new academic year begins Aug. 31. As that time nears, the issue is stirring strong debate within the Reconstructionist ranks and in the wider Jewish world.
Some see the move as an inevitable response to a changing Jewish landscape by a denomination that has long paved the way for groundbreaking changes. Critics both within and outside the movement see it as going too far, a divisive step that could splinter the stream and further alienate it from the broader Jewish community.
RRC is “trying in their way to do something proactive in response to the sea changes in American life,” said Rabbi Lester Bronstein, the spiritual leader of Bet Am Shalom Synagogue, a Reconstructionist congregation in White Plains, N.Y., who has been outspoken in his opposition to abandoning the policy altogether. “But this isn’t the way to do it.”
Indeed, the negative feedback, particularly from many Reconstructionist rabbis already in the field, has been so intense that the faculty is now considering several compromise positions.
Rabbi Nina Mandel, the president of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association, succinctly laid out the issue in describing the views percolating among her group’s some 350 members. They range, she said, “from people who feel this is a change that is long overdue and really reflects their understanding of Reconstructionist values and a Reconstructionist lens on Judaism, to rabbis who feel really strongly that the Jewish value of fostering marriage between two Jews is essential to the continuity of the Jewish people and that rabbis who choose to partner have the responsibility to reflect that.”
The discussion comes at a critical time for the movement. More than 90 years after it was founded by Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, a Conservative-ordained rabbi who defined Judaism as the “evolving religious civilization of the Jewish people,” the Reconstructionist stream remains small and financially strapped.
With just over 100 congregations scattered throughout North America, the movement’s new president, Rabbi Deborah Waxman, who sees herself as the “lead evangelist” for “cutting-edge Judaism,” is seeking to articulate a new vision and a raison d’etre for Reconstructionist Judaism.
She describes it as a “small, passionate community of communities,” people who care “deeply about the Jewish present and the Jewish future” and who take an “activist approach” to finding new and experimental ways to “building the Jewish community we want to live in and building the Jewish community we want the next generation to be attracted to and where they can thrive.”
“I am making the case not just for Reconstructionism, but for Judaism,” Rabbi Waxman said in a recent interview in her office at the college, an old mansion set on a wooded estate in Wyncote, Pa. “Everything is open for negotiations.”
Though she declined to explicitly share her position on what internally is being referred to as NJP, the non-Jewish partner issue — she says she doesn’t want to prejudice the outcome — she hints at her view in expressing her philosophy about the need to adapt to a changing Jewish environment.
“I don’t think that visceral responses that are solely grounded in the past and solely grounded in the gut are appropriate to the opportunities and the challenges going forward,” she said.
At a time when identity is increasingly being shaped by choice rather than biology, Rabbi Waxman posited, the key question is: “Can rabbinic leadership emerge out of the 40-plus percent who are in interfaith relations and are creating Jewish homes and Jewish families? We’ve already seen such lay leadership emerge.”
The issue, which was first raised at the college several years ago, is coming to the fore now as a response to both pragmatic and philosophical concerns, according to interviews with RRC officials, Reconstructionist rabbis and students.
Pragmatic because the seminary’s enrollment and applicant pool has been shrinking — just eight students graduated this year, the same number of the incoming class — and the low numbers are threatening the school’s financial well-being and possibly even its accreditation. Opening the doors wider, the thinking goes, would bring in more applicants.
Philosophical because the movement leaders are continually “reconstructing” who and what it means to be Jewish in the 21st century.
Financial woes led to a merger in 2012 between the seminary and the congregational arm to form the Jewish Reconstructionist Communities. The movement’s restructuring was “the result of the concern for the future; it was clear we had to be wise and strategic about our use of resources,” said Rabbi Waxman, who took over as president of the merged entity in January 2014.
“How can we most effectively advance the Reconstructionist progressive perspective in the wider world and how can we develop a sustainable model?” she said. “It’s an open question.”
Being open to intermarried rabbis, proponents of the change in policy say, is a natural extension for a movement that sees itself as increasingly diverse and inclusive.
Indeed, the current roster of students — with this year’s incoming class, there will be a total of 46 students, along with 21 full-time, part-time and adjunct faculty on campus —reflects — some would say magnifies — the changing face of American Jewry.
RRC has long been known as a welcoming institution for gay and lesbian students. It was the first movement to accept openly gay students in the mid-1980s, with the Reform seminary following soon after and the Conservative movement doing so only in the past several years. But RRC now is extending that outreach to other non-traditional populations.
“One of the big changes in the Jewish world is the incredible diversity of people who come in and say, ‘I am also Jewish,’ said Rabbi Mandel, the RRA head who serves a small congregation in rural Selinsgrove, Pa. She cited people of color, people who are transgender or are of different sexual orientation and different ethnic backgrounds as groups that seeking entry into Jewish life. These folks, along with many who were raised in interfaith families, are among those looking for a place at RRC, she said.
The 2015 graduating class is emblematic of that shift. Of the eight students ordained as rabbis in early June, one is lesbian, one is transgender and two are Jews by choice.
Sandra Lawson clearly reflects this new face of RRC. As the first African-American student at the seminary, she sees a connection between the increasingly diverse makeup of the student body and the question of rabbis with non-Jewish partners.
“I think it’s an unrealistic burden to ask queer people and Jews of color to find Jewish partners and then not deal with the racism and the homophobia that exists in the Jewish community,” she said, citing instances of people questioning her credentials or harassing her when she is praying.
Lawson, who is expected to graduate in 2018, was involved in the internal RRC process of soliciting student views about changing the policy on non-Jewish partners. While her own partner has said she would convert if necessary in order for Lawson to graduate, Lawson said there are several other students also involved in interfaith relationships, only some of whose partners are on the track toward conversion. (They all presumably met their partners after gaining admission or else their partners were already in the process of converting. College officials would not comment on other students, saying it was private information.)
Lawson said it was clear that both the students and faculty are “overwhelmingly” in favor of changing the policy, with some exceptions in both groups.
When the faculty first voted to eliminate the ban in December 2013, few Reconstructionists outside the college even knew it was happening. The backlash was swift, especially among rabbis and congregations, who argued that such a dramatic change in policy would affect the whole movement. They said that especially in light of the recent merger, the issue merited a wider discussion, even with recognition that a change in admissions policy was the ultimate purview of the RRC faculty.
At that point, RRC officials began to open up the process in advance of a second faculty vote, which is required of all policy changes. They sought input from — and dialogue with — the RRA membership and asked their 100-plus congregations to engage their communities in a discussion and present a consensus position.
In the end, only about 30-plus congregations responded to the call, with the majority of those who did respond expressing support for eliminating the policy, only four opposed and several others saying they could not come to a consensus.
Among the last group was Congregation Or Hadash in Fort Washington, Pa., a congregation with a longstanding special relationship with RRC. Housed at the college for its first several years after it was founded in 1983, Or Hadash served as a “laboratory” congregation for students at the rabbinical school.
Shelley Kapnek Rosenberg, a former president and founding member of Or Hadash whose daughter Jessica is a current rabbinical student at RRC, said she supports a change of policy. “It shows an openness on the part of the college and a realistic notion as to what’s going on in the Jewish world. I don’t think rabbis should be judged by who their partner is.”
At the same time, she said, she recognized that other people in her congregation of 150 families had strong feelings against it, including the concern about adversely affecting relations with the other movements. “We’re already considered a tad out there, and this just might put us more out there with respect to other movements.”
The current president of her synagogue, Jay Cohen, said that after several discussions at the executive committee, board and congregational level, he reported back to RRC that although his congregation was generally in favor of doing away with the policy, there was strong dissent among some congregants who want to keep or modify it. “I wasn’t comfortable writing a majority view,” he said. “I wanted them to know there was a strong minority opinion.”
Helping to shape the debate beyond the college are two rabbis who graduated from RRC a few decades apart and live at opposite ends of the country.
For Lester Bronstein, the rabbi in White Plains, the issue has been painful.
“We are talking about a precedent that fundamentally alters what it means to be the Jewish Reconstructionist movement and to create religious peoplehood,” he wrote in one of two “con” position papers that were circulated among movement leaders.
“It encourages the wrong behaviors without sufficiently encouraging things that would be constructive — like improving Jewish literacy or Jewish modeling for people trying to create a Jewish home,” Rabbi Bronstein said in an interview.
The rabbi, 67, said he understands the argument RRC officials have made that they are turning away potentially good candidates. “I want to welcome these outliers too, but I think the boundaries we have are welcoming enough” without sacrificing the commitment to in-marriage as the model appropriate for rabbinic leadership.
He applauded RRC officials for opening up the process — his congregation was one that engaged in the discussion and was among the handful that reported opposition to lifting the ban — but he still worries about the outcome of the faculty vote.
“I really don’t want to leave the movement and hope they can do something that will keep me in,” he said, hinting that a compromise being discussed that would allow for some flexibility in the ban would be acceptable.
On the other side of the spectrum is Rabbi Mychal Copeland, who sees her personal experience as a living example of why a change is needed.
Rabbi Copeland, 44, graduated from RRC in 2000. She spent her rabbinical school years in a relationship with a woman who wasn’t Jewish but who converted just a few months before her graduation.
She and her partner, Kirsti, whom she has since married, were somewhat “closeted” about their relationship even as they came out as lesbians during her time there, she said. “We didn’t want my partner’s decision concerning conversion to be controlled by others or part of a public debate, so we tried to keep a low profile throughout my five years at the college,” she wrote in a piece supporting a change in policy that was widely circulated.
Now the director of Interfaith Family in San Francisco, a group that helps engage interfaith families in Jewish life, Copeland said that ordaining rabbis involved in interfaith relationships would provide an important model that is currently missing.
“We don’t have models for the vast majority of people who are interfaith families and what that looks like — people coming from different backgrounds, engaged in deeply Jewish conversations, values and practice in their homes,” she said in an interview.
Beyond the confines of the Reconstructionist movement, the wider Jewish world is taking notice of — and, in some cases, reacting strongly to — the debate.
Until recently, such a move “would have been unthinkable,” said Jonathan Sarna, a professor at Brandeis University and a renowned historian of American Jewish life.
“Endogamy was still a value that was broadly accepted in the liberal movements; the big change now is that intermarriage has become normative,” he said. If it’s considered normative behavior, then “it’s not a great surprise that people say that rabbis ought to be allowed to be intermarried, too.”
The discussion also reflects the changing perspective on what intermarriage represents, he said. If intermarriage was once seen as a statement that you are leaving Judaism and that your children won’t be Jewish, now it’s seen merely as a result of someone falling in love with someone who is not Jewish. “Now you can be intermarried and still feel strongly about being Jewish — and even want to be a rabbi.”
He predicted that the Reform movement would follow the path of the Reconstructionist movement at some point.
As the new academic year at RRC approaches — and with it a likely vote on the matter — several compromise positions are being considered, according to documents being circulated in the movement. Rather than a straight decision to keep or eliminate the current policy to ban the admission and ordination of students with non-Jewish partners, the faculty could decide to remove the prohibition on partnering with non-Jews but add language that makes clear that all students and applicants “be committed to maintaining Jewish homes and raising Jewish children.”
Or they could decide to apply more robustly the term “ordinarily,” which is already in the current policy prohibiting admission or graduation for those in interfaith relationships but generally has been used only in cases where the partner is in the process of converting. In other words, strengthening the caveat “ordinarily” could open the door to others under certain conditions. A third compromise position suggests applying the biblical “category of ger toshav for non-Jews who commit themselves to the Jewish community,” meaning they would be accepted as “resident aliens,” given status within the community if they commit to certain precepts without actually converting.
Underlying the debate are the potential repercussions for the movement as a whole and for rabbinical students in particular should a change in policy occur: Some congregations might decide to disaffiliate, the RRA would have to assess its policy of automatically accepting as members all graduates of the rabbinical seminary and some graduates might encounter obstacles finding jobs.
Even some congregations that conveyed support for a policy change made clear they would not necessarily hire a rabbi who is intermarried.
Waxman said that while she understands all the concerns swirling around the issue, she is impressed by the vitality of the discussion it has engendered. In this, like other contemporary issues the Reconstructionist movement has tackled, Waxman asserted, there is a pattern:
“Where we have led, the Jewish community has almost always followed; when we start to lead there is usually much controversy; and when a particular policy change is widely adopted,” she said, “there is usually very little recognition” that it came from the Reconstructionist movement.
editor@jewishweek.org
BDS Money Trail Suggests Opaque Funding Network
New York
BDS Money Trail Suggests Opaque Funding Network
Campus groups press anti-Israel message with seemingly little money, but gain leverage with allies. A Special Report.
Mitchell Bard
Special To The Jewish Week
A wall, mocking Israel’s security barrier, erected at Columbia University to mark Israel Apartheid Week. Hannah Dreyfus/JW
The arts district along Mamaroneck Avenue in downtown White Plains is something of a cultural hub in Westchester County. Special blue street signs — Arts Ave., they read — and colorful flags give the area the feel of a historic district, anchored by ArtsWestchester’s handsome brick headquarters.
There, on the fourth floor of 31 Mamaroneck Ave., is the office of a group that is far more interested in politics than arts. And controversial politics, at that.
Suite 403 houses the nonprofit group WESPAC Foundation, and its location in an arts-rich area belies its role as one of the key conduits in a mysterious network that helps to fuel the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement.
That movement, with arms reaching from the Palestinian territories to the major cities of Europe to the college quad near you, is roiling American college campuses, tormenting Jewish students and rapidly becoming a focus of attention, and money, in the Jewish community. The Jewish National Fund, one of the Jewish community’s largest organizations, recently announced $100 million for an Israel advocacy center to help students fight BDS. And billionaire casino mogul Sheldon Adelson — in a lavish rollout in June in his hometown of Las Vegas — recently pledged $50 million to combat BDS activities on campuses around the country.
Despite the communal money being thrown at the BDS problem, and despite the headlines it has garnered around the world, little is known about how the movement gets its domestic funding. A month-long investigation by The Jewish Week reveals an opaque funding picture complicated by the fact that the main campus BDS group — Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) — is not a registered charity and does not have to report its funding to the Internal Revenue Service, and that university money flowing to BDS campus groups through student fees is anything but transparent.
“Funding sources for campus groups are not subject to any disclosure requirements” (unless they are imposed by the individual universities at which the groups are operating), noted Benjamin Ryberg of the Lawfare Project, which tracks what it calls “the politicization of human rights.” Most of the identifiable resources for student groups such as SJP and MSA [Muslim Student Association] come from student funds distributed by the student government or another campus agency. Typically, they need only present a request with a budget reflecting their needs; they do not have to document any additional expenses or revenues.
But WESPAC, nestled in Westchester’s arts district, provides a window into how the BDS movement gets funded. It is one of a handful of groups that helps fund SJP, which carries out the wider BDS movement’s goal of criticizing Israeli policy in the West Bank, delegitimizing Israel through economic and academic boycotts and attacking its assertion that it is committed to democratic values. SJP and its supporters specialize in attention-grabbing guerrilla theater tactics that include “die-ins” (depicting civilian deaths in most recent war in Gaza), creating mock checkpoints (akin to those between Israel and the West Bank) and distributing “eviction” in dormitories (to highlight those Israeli officials place on Palestinian homes in east Jerusalem).
All of it — including Israel Apartheid Week, anti-Israel resolutions and SJP’s annual national conference, which has attracted such Israel detractors as Noam Chomsky and Anna Baltzer — has served to unnerve Jewish students on campuses around the country, though BDS forces have had few tangible victories and the movement has sparked a fierce backlash in Congress and in a number of state legislatures. BDS supporters say their actions constitute legitimate criticism of Israel; many Jewish leaders say the movement is an anti-Semitic front for those who deny the right of Israel to exist.
Officials at one Israel-advocacy group, StandWithUs, estimate that between student fees and other outside funding, money flowing into BDS efforts on campus amounts to “many millions of dollars.” But such a tally is hard to pin down with any specificity, and the available data suggests such estimates are vastly inflated.
One reason it is difficult to track funding to the BDS campaign is that there is no central coordinating organization. The “national” SJP is not a 501(c)(3) and exists solely on paper and the Internet. It raises money through WESPAC, which accepts donations on the national SJP’s behalf.
According to its Facebook page, “WESPAC has been a leading force for progressive social change in Westchester County, New York, since 1974. We have been educating, agitating and organizing for a more just and peaceful world, an end to militarism and racism and a more fair economy that works for all. Our members are currently involved with food justice work, anti-fracking/anti-nuclear and pro-safe energy, solidarity with Indigenous Peoples, an end to militarism and drone warfare and a just resolution to the Israel/Palestine conflict.”
WESPAC organizes and participates in activities that are unrelated to the conflict, but Israel is nevertheless often dragged into the discussion. For example, on Dec. 22, 2014, WESPAC urged people to join a protest against police brutality where speakers “will make connections of how everything is connected such as farm lands being converted into prisons or the connection of Gaza and Ferguson or the abuses endured by immigrants at the borders.”
Several days later WESPAC participated in another march protesting the 2014 Ferguson incident, in which an unarmed African-American teenager was killed by police. People were invited to come early to join WESPAC members calling for a boycott of Soda Stream, the popular soda-machine maker that is poised to move its plant out of the West Bank, and demand an end to “the Occupation of Palestinian land.” (In a recent interview with the Associated Press, the company’s CEO, Daniel Birnbaum, blasted the BDS movement, saying, “SodaStream should have been encouraged in the West Bank if [the BDS movement] truly cared about the Palestinian people.”) WESPAC has also sponsored anti-Israel advertisements in New York City subways, such as one calling for a cutoff of military aid to the Jewish state.
Nada Khader, a Palestinian and formerly a consultant for the UN Development Program in the Gaza Strip, has been the executive director of WESPAC since 2001. Under her leadership, WESPAC has shown a great interest in Palestinian issues and aligned itself with like-minded groups such as SJP and Adalah-NY. Khader has also spoken at their events.
Financial reports do not disclose how much money WESPAC collects and distributes for SJP. Donations are designated for SJP so they should be recorded as restricted funds in their accounts; however, their tax filing only lists general categories of expenses. For example, in 2013, WESPAC spent $54,000 on conferences, donated $7,500 and provided $16,000 for honoraria, but none of this is identified as being spent for SJP activities.
WESPAC also collects money for The Palestine Freedom Project, which sponsors workshops, provides a list of companies for BDSers to target for “profiting from the Occupation,” publishes activist handbooks and coordinates a speakers bureau featuring anti-Israel all-stars such as Ali Abunimah, Baltzer, Max Blumenthal, Richard Falk and Jeff Halper.
WESPAC has also received money from the Cultures of Resistance Network Foundation run by Iara Lee. She is probably best known for some of the only footage captured while trying to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza on the Mavi Marmara ship. In 2011, her foundation gave $2,000 to WESPAC earmarked for funding that year’s SJP conference. In 2012, WESPAC received $3,000 for the “BDS-National Coalition.” Its most recent tax filing (2013) reports an unspecified $8,000 grant to WESPAC, at least some of which is likely BDS related based on the prior two years’ grants. The foundation also directly supports BDS proponents such as Al-Adwa and CodePink.
A soft-spoken woman, Khader told The Jewish Week in a phone interview that there are different understandings of BDS and that she sees it as a peaceful way to pressure Israel to end the occupation. Asked to respond to a quote from As’ad AbuKhalil, a professor at California State University Stanislaus, in which he said, “The real aim of BDS is to bring down the state of Israel. ... Justice and freedom for the Palestinians are incompatible with the existence of the state of Israel,” Khader insisted that no one at WESPAC held that point of view.
WESPAC, she says, “tries to serve as a bridge for civil discussion” of the issues of Israel/Palestine and, for example, works with local synagogues that are committed to a civil discussion of the issues. Khader also said that WESPAC has members who support BDS and others who do not. When asked if the latter object to WESPAC’s support of SJP, she said, “They understand the organization’s historical support for radical organizing.”
In addition to WESPAC, another domestic nonprofit that supports pro-BDS organizations is the San Francisco-based Tides Foundation, which says it “actively promotes change toward a healthy society, one which is founded on principles of social justice, broadly shared economic opportunity, a robust democratic process, and sustainable environmental practices.”
Tides administers donor-advised funds. Several of its funders (who are not identified in tax records) supported the following organizations directly or indirectly involved in promoting BDS in 2013-14: Jewish Voice for Peace ($13,421); Palestinian Legal Solidarity Support ($20,000); Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice ($5,000); Code Pink for Women for Peace ($5,000); and American Friends Service Committee ($12,500).
Tides is peculiar because a number of its donor-advised funds also support pro-Israel groups such as the University of Washington Hillel, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and the National Council of Young Israel. AJC’s Executive Director David Harris explained, “one donor to AJC in 2015 has recommended a grant to AJC through their donor-advised fund at the Tides Foundation. AJC has no control over the grant recommendations of individual donors and family foundations who choose to give through this Foundation.”
According to the Israel on Campus Coalition (ICC), one of Tides’ beneficiaries, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), is involved in promoting Israel denial through BDS summer camps and the employment of a full-time professional dedicated to campus issues such as advocating BDS. Quakers have been one of the most virulently anti-Israel denominations for decades, and this hostility is trickling down to their colleges as Guilford College and Earlham College have become “hotbeds of anti-Israel activity.” This year, for example, Earlham adopted a divestment resolution.
SJP also gets free assistance, according to the ICC, from the National Campus BDS Support Team, which it describes as “a group of professionals from various anti-Israel organizations tasked with aiding campus BDS campaigns.” This allows several groups to “pool” their campus resources in one place.
In addition to WESPAC and Tides, a variety of organizations have sponsored SJP events and support BDS campus activities. American Muslims for Peace (AMP), for instance, is described by the Anti-Defamation League as “the leading organization providing anti-Zionist training to students and Muslim community organizations in the U.S.”
For those in the Jewish community fighting the BDS movement, many see as most problematic the fast-growing Jewish Voice For Peace (JVP), which agitates against the Israeli government and supports the BDS movement.
JVP allows BDS to claim it has Jewish support, when in fact members of JVP are seen on the fringe of the Jewish community and their position conflicts with that of 61 international Jewish organizations from across the religious and political spectrum that signed a statement opposing BDS. For instance, the group’s leader, Rebecca Vilkomerson, has stated on numerous occasions that the group is “agnostic” on the idea of a two-state solution. That is taken by most Jewish leaders as code for a binational state, one that would essentially rob Israel of its Jewish character.
While JVP is clearly outside the pro-Israel tent, as it is defined by the organized Jewish community, the group’s budget has been growing rapidly. According to its tax filings, contributions have increased from about $280,000 in 2008 to $1.5 million in 2012. In 2012, their program expenses were only $170,000, most of which went to their own programming. The group claimed victory recently when the Presbyterian Church (USA) narrowly passed an Israel divestment resolution at its 2014 annual convention, a position for which JVP members had lobbied. (That vote came into question this month when a group of Presbyterians claimed that it was essentially rigged by pro-divestment forces.)
Money, from JVP and others, is flowing to the campus for BDS activities, but the amounts, at least those that are visible, appear relatively trivial; this is especially true when compared to the investments of the pro-Israel community, which are growing following the announcement of plans by the Israeli government and American philanthropists to spend tens of millions of dollars to preempt, deter and defeat BDS campaigns.
Here is a sample of the student funds provided to SJP in the 2014-15 school year from some of the more challenging campuses:
University of California, San Diego: $1,479
University of California, Berkeley: $600
University of California, Los Angeles: $267
University of New Mexico: $1,151
University of California, Riverside: $1,093
San Diego State University: $800
University of California, Irvine: $600
University of Michigan: $900
The main activity of the national SJP is to organize national conferences, starting with Columbia in 2011, followed by Michigan, Stanford and Tufts. To give a sense of the budget for the SJP conference, in 2012, the fundraising goal was $25,000 and, as of the day before the meeting, they had raised $20,000. The endorsements for these conferences reads like a “Who’s Who” of Israel’s detractors, including Ilan Pappe, Hatem Bazian, Omar Barghouti, Ali Abunimah, Cornell West and Norman Finkelstein. (The Jewish Week reached out to a member of the National SJP Conference Organizing Committee, Hanna Alshaikh, but did not receive a response.)
It does not appear that the national SJP has the resources to fund SJP chapters, and there is no evidence that it coordinates them; what it can offer at the conferences is training and guidance for chapter leaders on BDS activities. At Tufts, for example, sessions were held on the history and tactics of the BDS movement, “Best Practices: How to Do Divestment and Deal with Backlash,” and “Bursting the Campus Bubble: Learning From BDS Campaigns Beyond Campus Divestment Resolutions.” Attendance at these meetings has reportedly ranged between 150-450 students. By comparison, AIPAC attracts more than 1,000 students to its annual conference.
Yet, to a far greater degree than pro-Israel groups, SJP has succeeded in magnifying its support by developing allies. According to Max Samarov and Brett Cohen of StandWithUs, the Israel advocacy group’s senior researcher and executive director of campus affairs, respectively, “SJP’s calls to action offer their audience an opportunity for emotional gratification and allows the group to effectively connect with important minority and political organizations. By aligning with other popular liberal causes, SJP has succeeded in building coalitions with ‘progressive’ organizations to push the BDS campaign.”
Stanford is a good case study. Earlier this year, BDS advocates marshaled a coalition of 19 student groups including the Black Student Union, MEChA (the Hispanic organization), and Stanford Students for Queer Liberation. In addition, nine Jewish students signed a separate statement of support. The BDS vote, which took place in February, was defeated by one vote, but the Senate chair, Ana Ordoñez, told the Stanford Daily she called for a re-vote because “she was unable to focus because much of her energy was spent on trying to maintain [order in] the room.” Other senators complained about the hostile environment during the debate. When Ordoñez made her closing remarks, she was in tears. “Now that the noise has subsided, I know that I voted incorrectly,” Ordoñez said.
The motion was then reconsidered; the two senators who had originally abstained and voted no, changed their votes to a “yes” and “abstain,” allowing the measure to pass 10-4 with one abstention. The person who changed their vote from no to abstain was Jewish.
According to the Anti-Defamation League, SJP has created regional coalitions that work together on specific projects. SJP West has probably been the most active, mobilizing students from different campuses, for example, to support the divestment vote at UCLA in 2014. Midwest chapters have organized a regional conference in Chicago.
The mere presence of an SJP chapter does not mean a given campus has an atmosphere that feels hostile to Israel. For example, the University of Georgia SJP did not have a single anti-Israel-event last year; they were all cultural. Out of approximately 150 SJP chapters, less than 1 in 5 sponsored a divestment resolution. This is not surprising when you consider that most have little money and few members.
While claiming a number of “victories,” such as student government resolutions and academic association calls for boycotts, Taher Herzallah, national campus coordinator of American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), shares the view of most BDS supporters that even when they lose they win because they are focusing the agenda on Israel’s alleged failings. “Even if resolutions don’t pass,” Herzallah said, “the general campus population is learning a great deal about the realities on the ground.”
What concerns the pro-Israel community is that the SJP version of “realities on the ground” is biasing students against Israel. Without an effective response, they fear the American public and its future leaders will question whether Israel is a democracy that respects human rights, and a reliable ally of the United States.
That battle for the hearts and minds of college students when it comes to Israel, and what kind of country it is, plays out on campuses large and small. Melanie Goldberg was on the front lines of that battle for four years at Brooklyn College, a hotbed of pro-Palestinian activity. The fight took its toll on her.
“I didn’t mind being a face for Israel on campus, but I was continually harassed,” said Goldberg, currently a student at Cardozo Law School. She said she would receive threatening Facebook messages, emails, texts and phone calls from SJP members with such messages as “watch your back” and “we know what you’re doing” and advising her not to go to certain places on campus.
Today, SJP at Brooklyn College, like many such chapters, receives funding from the student government and often runs events with several hundred attendees. Whether or not the chapter receives additional external funding, Goldberg isn’t sure. But in a sign that she’s still in the fight, and one that will likely please pro-Israel leaders, she says she has begun researching the topic.
Staff writer Hannah Dreyfus contributed reporting.
Mitchell Bard is the executive director of the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise and the director of the Jewish Virtual Library. The former editor of AIPAC’s weekly newsletter, the Near East Report, Bard is the author of 23 books, including, most recently, “Death to the Infidels: Radical Islam’s War Against the Jews,” (St. Martin’s Press, 2014). This story was made possible by The Jewish Week investigative fund.
New York
BDS Money Trail Suggests Opaque Funding Network
Campus groups press anti-Israel message with seemingly little money, but gain leverage with allies. A Special Report.
Mitchell Bard
Special To The Jewish Week
A wall, mocking Israel’s security barrier, erected at Columbia University to mark Israel Apartheid Week. Hannah Dreyfus/JW
The arts district along Mamaroneck Avenue in downtown White Plains is something of a cultural hub in Westchester County. Special blue street signs — Arts Ave., they read — and colorful flags give the area the feel of a historic district, anchored by ArtsWestchester’s handsome brick headquarters.
There, on the fourth floor of 31 Mamaroneck Ave., is the office of a group that is far more interested in politics than arts. And controversial politics, at that.
Suite 403 houses the nonprofit group WESPAC Foundation, and its location in an arts-rich area belies its role as one of the key conduits in a mysterious network that helps to fuel the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement.
That movement, with arms reaching from the Palestinian territories to the major cities of Europe to the college quad near you, is roiling American college campuses, tormenting Jewish students and rapidly becoming a focus of attention, and money, in the Jewish community. The Jewish National Fund, one of the Jewish community’s largest organizations, recently announced $100 million for an Israel advocacy center to help students fight BDS. And billionaire casino mogul Sheldon Adelson — in a lavish rollout in June in his hometown of Las Vegas — recently pledged $50 million to combat BDS activities on campuses around the country.
Despite the communal money being thrown at the BDS problem, and despite the headlines it has garnered around the world, little is known about how the movement gets its domestic funding. A month-long investigation by The Jewish Week reveals an opaque funding picture complicated by the fact that the main campus BDS group — Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) — is not a registered charity and does not have to report its funding to the Internal Revenue Service, and that university money flowing to BDS campus groups through student fees is anything but transparent.
“Funding sources for campus groups are not subject to any disclosure requirements” (unless they are imposed by the individual universities at which the groups are operating), noted Benjamin Ryberg of the Lawfare Project, which tracks what it calls “the politicization of human rights.” Most of the identifiable resources for student groups such as SJP and MSA [Muslim Student Association] come from student funds distributed by the student government or another campus agency. Typically, they need only present a request with a budget reflecting their needs; they do not have to document any additional expenses or revenues.
But WESPAC, nestled in Westchester’s arts district, provides a window into how the BDS movement gets funded. It is one of a handful of groups that helps fund SJP, which carries out the wider BDS movement’s goal of criticizing Israeli policy in the West Bank, delegitimizing Israel through economic and academic boycotts and attacking its assertion that it is committed to democratic values. SJP and its supporters specialize in attention-grabbing guerrilla theater tactics that include “die-ins” (depicting civilian deaths in most recent war in Gaza), creating mock checkpoints (akin to those between Israel and the West Bank) and distributing “eviction” in dormitories (to highlight those Israeli officials place on Palestinian homes in east Jerusalem).
All of it — including Israel Apartheid Week, anti-Israel resolutions and SJP’s annual national conference, which has attracted such Israel detractors as Noam Chomsky and Anna Baltzer — has served to unnerve Jewish students on campuses around the country, though BDS forces have had few tangible victories and the movement has sparked a fierce backlash in Congress and in a number of state legislatures. BDS supporters say their actions constitute legitimate criticism of Israel; many Jewish leaders say the movement is an anti-Semitic front for those who deny the right of Israel to exist.
Officials at one Israel-advocacy group, StandWithUs, estimate that between student fees and other outside funding, money flowing into BDS efforts on campus amounts to “many millions of dollars.” But such a tally is hard to pin down with any specificity, and the available data suggests such estimates are vastly inflated.
One reason it is difficult to track funding to the BDS campaign is that there is no central coordinating organization. The “national” SJP is not a 501(c)(3) and exists solely on paper and the Internet. It raises money through WESPAC, which accepts donations on the national SJP’s behalf.
According to its Facebook page, “WESPAC has been a leading force for progressive social change in Westchester County, New York, since 1974. We have been educating, agitating and organizing for a more just and peaceful world, an end to militarism and racism and a more fair economy that works for all. Our members are currently involved with food justice work, anti-fracking/anti-nuclear and pro-safe energy, solidarity with Indigenous Peoples, an end to militarism and drone warfare and a just resolution to the Israel/Palestine conflict.”
WESPAC organizes and participates in activities that are unrelated to the conflict, but Israel is nevertheless often dragged into the discussion. For example, on Dec. 22, 2014, WESPAC urged people to join a protest against police brutality where speakers “will make connections of how everything is connected such as farm lands being converted into prisons or the connection of Gaza and Ferguson or the abuses endured by immigrants at the borders.”
Several days later WESPAC participated in another march protesting the 2014 Ferguson incident, in which an unarmed African-American teenager was killed by police. People were invited to come early to join WESPAC members calling for a boycott of Soda Stream, the popular soda-machine maker that is poised to move its plant out of the West Bank, and demand an end to “the Occupation of Palestinian land.” (In a recent interview with the Associated Press, the company’s CEO, Daniel Birnbaum, blasted the BDS movement, saying, “SodaStream should have been encouraged in the West Bank if [the BDS movement] truly cared about the Palestinian people.”) WESPAC has also sponsored anti-Israel advertisements in New York City subways, such as one calling for a cutoff of military aid to the Jewish state.
Nada Khader, a Palestinian and formerly a consultant for the UN Development Program in the Gaza Strip, has been the executive director of WESPAC since 2001. Under her leadership, WESPAC has shown a great interest in Palestinian issues and aligned itself with like-minded groups such as SJP and Adalah-NY. Khader has also spoken at their events.
Financial reports do not disclose how much money WESPAC collects and distributes for SJP. Donations are designated for SJP so they should be recorded as restricted funds in their accounts; however, their tax filing only lists general categories of expenses. For example, in 2013, WESPAC spent $54,000 on conferences, donated $7,500 and provided $16,000 for honoraria, but none of this is identified as being spent for SJP activities.
WESPAC also collects money for The Palestine Freedom Project, which sponsors workshops, provides a list of companies for BDSers to target for “profiting from the Occupation,” publishes activist handbooks and coordinates a speakers bureau featuring anti-Israel all-stars such as Ali Abunimah, Baltzer, Max Blumenthal, Richard Falk and Jeff Halper.
WESPAC has also received money from the Cultures of Resistance Network Foundation run by Iara Lee. She is probably best known for some of the only footage captured while trying to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza on the Mavi Marmara ship. In 2011, her foundation gave $2,000 to WESPAC earmarked for funding that year’s SJP conference. In 2012, WESPAC received $3,000 for the “BDS-National Coalition.” Its most recent tax filing (2013) reports an unspecified $8,000 grant to WESPAC, at least some of which is likely BDS related based on the prior two years’ grants. The foundation also directly supports BDS proponents such as Al-Adwa and CodePink.
A soft-spoken woman, Khader told The Jewish Week in a phone interview that there are different understandings of BDS and that she sees it as a peaceful way to pressure Israel to end the occupation. Asked to respond to a quote from As’ad AbuKhalil, a professor at California State University Stanislaus, in which he said, “The real aim of BDS is to bring down the state of Israel. ... Justice and freedom for the Palestinians are incompatible with the existence of the state of Israel,” Khader insisted that no one at WESPAC held that point of view.
WESPAC, she says, “tries to serve as a bridge for civil discussion” of the issues of Israel/Palestine and, for example, works with local synagogues that are committed to a civil discussion of the issues. Khader also said that WESPAC has members who support BDS and others who do not. When asked if the latter object to WESPAC’s support of SJP, she said, “They understand the organization’s historical support for radical organizing.”
In addition to WESPAC, another domestic nonprofit that supports pro-BDS organizations is the San Francisco-based Tides Foundation, which says it “actively promotes change toward a healthy society, one which is founded on principles of social justice, broadly shared economic opportunity, a robust democratic process, and sustainable environmental practices.”
Tides administers donor-advised funds. Several of its funders (who are not identified in tax records) supported the following organizations directly or indirectly involved in promoting BDS in 2013-14: Jewish Voice for Peace ($13,421); Palestinian Legal Solidarity Support ($20,000); Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice ($5,000); Code Pink for Women for Peace ($5,000); and American Friends Service Committee ($12,500).
Tides is peculiar because a number of its donor-advised funds also support pro-Israel groups such as the University of Washington Hillel, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and the National Council of Young Israel. AJC’s Executive Director David Harris explained, “one donor to AJC in 2015 has recommended a grant to AJC through their donor-advised fund at the Tides Foundation. AJC has no control over the grant recommendations of individual donors and family foundations who choose to give through this Foundation.”
According to the Israel on Campus Coalition (ICC), one of Tides’ beneficiaries, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), is involved in promoting Israel denial through BDS summer camps and the employment of a full-time professional dedicated to campus issues such as advocating BDS. Quakers have been one of the most virulently anti-Israel denominations for decades, and this hostility is trickling down to their colleges as Guilford College and Earlham College have become “hotbeds of anti-Israel activity.” This year, for example, Earlham adopted a divestment resolution.
SJP also gets free assistance, according to the ICC, from the National Campus BDS Support Team, which it describes as “a group of professionals from various anti-Israel organizations tasked with aiding campus BDS campaigns.” This allows several groups to “pool” their campus resources in one place.
In addition to WESPAC and Tides, a variety of organizations have sponsored SJP events and support BDS campus activities. American Muslims for Peace (AMP), for instance, is described by the Anti-Defamation League as “the leading organization providing anti-Zionist training to students and Muslim community organizations in the U.S.”
For those in the Jewish community fighting the BDS movement, many see as most problematic the fast-growing Jewish Voice For Peace (JVP), which agitates against the Israeli government and supports the BDS movement.
JVP allows BDS to claim it has Jewish support, when in fact members of JVP are seen on the fringe of the Jewish community and their position conflicts with that of 61 international Jewish organizations from across the religious and political spectrum that signed a statement opposing BDS. For instance, the group’s leader, Rebecca Vilkomerson, has stated on numerous occasions that the group is “agnostic” on the idea of a two-state solution. That is taken by most Jewish leaders as code for a binational state, one that would essentially rob Israel of its Jewish character.
While JVP is clearly outside the pro-Israel tent, as it is defined by the organized Jewish community, the group’s budget has been growing rapidly. According to its tax filings, contributions have increased from about $280,000 in 2008 to $1.5 million in 2012. In 2012, their program expenses were only $170,000, most of which went to their own programming. The group claimed victory recently when the Presbyterian Church (USA) narrowly passed an Israel divestment resolution at its 2014 annual convention, a position for which JVP members had lobbied. (That vote came into question this month when a group of Presbyterians claimed that it was essentially rigged by pro-divestment forces.)
Money, from JVP and others, is flowing to the campus for BDS activities, but the amounts, at least those that are visible, appear relatively trivial; this is especially true when compared to the investments of the pro-Israel community, which are growing following the announcement of plans by the Israeli government and American philanthropists to spend tens of millions of dollars to preempt, deter and defeat BDS campaigns.
Here is a sample of the student funds provided to SJP in the 2014-15 school year from some of the more challenging campuses:
University of California, San Diego: $1,479
University of California, Berkeley: $600
University of California, Los Angeles: $267
University of New Mexico: $1,151
University of California, Riverside: $1,093
San Diego State University: $800
University of California, Irvine: $600
University of Michigan: $900
The main activity of the national SJP is to organize national conferences, starting with Columbia in 2011, followed by Michigan, Stanford and Tufts. To give a sense of the budget for the SJP conference, in 2012, the fundraising goal was $25,000 and, as of the day before the meeting, they had raised $20,000. The endorsements for these conferences reads like a “Who’s Who” of Israel’s detractors, including Ilan Pappe, Hatem Bazian, Omar Barghouti, Ali Abunimah, Cornell West and Norman Finkelstein. (The Jewish Week reached out to a member of the National SJP Conference Organizing Committee, Hanna Alshaikh, but did not receive a response.)
It does not appear that the national SJP has the resources to fund SJP chapters, and there is no evidence that it coordinates them; what it can offer at the conferences is training and guidance for chapter leaders on BDS activities. At Tufts, for example, sessions were held on the history and tactics of the BDS movement, “Best Practices: How to Do Divestment and Deal with Backlash,” and “Bursting the Campus Bubble: Learning From BDS Campaigns Beyond Campus Divestment Resolutions.” Attendance at these meetings has reportedly ranged between 150-450 students. By comparison, AIPAC attracts more than 1,000 students to its annual conference.
Yet, to a far greater degree than pro-Israel groups, SJP has succeeded in magnifying its support by developing allies. According to Max Samarov and Brett Cohen of StandWithUs, the Israel advocacy group’s senior researcher and executive director of campus affairs, respectively, “SJP’s calls to action offer their audience an opportunity for emotional gratification and allows the group to effectively connect with important minority and political organizations. By aligning with other popular liberal causes, SJP has succeeded in building coalitions with ‘progressive’ organizations to push the BDS campaign.”
Stanford is a good case study. Earlier this year, BDS advocates marshaled a coalition of 19 student groups including the Black Student Union, MEChA (the Hispanic organization), and Stanford Students for Queer Liberation. In addition, nine Jewish students signed a separate statement of support. The BDS vote, which took place in February, was defeated by one vote, but the Senate chair, Ana Ordoñez, told the Stanford Daily she called for a re-vote because “she was unable to focus because much of her energy was spent on trying to maintain [order in] the room.” Other senators complained about the hostile environment during the debate. When Ordoñez made her closing remarks, she was in tears. “Now that the noise has subsided, I know that I voted incorrectly,” Ordoñez said.
The motion was then reconsidered; the two senators who had originally abstained and voted no, changed their votes to a “yes” and “abstain,” allowing the measure to pass 10-4 with one abstention. The person who changed their vote from no to abstain was Jewish.
According to the Anti-Defamation League, SJP has created regional coalitions that work together on specific projects. SJP West has probably been the most active, mobilizing students from different campuses, for example, to support the divestment vote at UCLA in 2014. Midwest chapters have organized a regional conference in Chicago.
The mere presence of an SJP chapter does not mean a given campus has an atmosphere that feels hostile to Israel. For example, the University of Georgia SJP did not have a single anti-Israel-event last year; they were all cultural. Out of approximately 150 SJP chapters, less than 1 in 5 sponsored a divestment resolution. This is not surprising when you consider that most have little money and few members.
While claiming a number of “victories,” such as student government resolutions and academic association calls for boycotts, Taher Herzallah, national campus coordinator of American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), shares the view of most BDS supporters that even when they lose they win because they are focusing the agenda on Israel’s alleged failings. “Even if resolutions don’t pass,” Herzallah said, “the general campus population is learning a great deal about the realities on the ground.”
What concerns the pro-Israel community is that the SJP version of “realities on the ground” is biasing students against Israel. Without an effective response, they fear the American public and its future leaders will question whether Israel is a democracy that respects human rights, and a reliable ally of the United States.
That battle for the hearts and minds of college students when it comes to Israel, and what kind of country it is, plays out on campuses large and small. Melanie Goldberg was on the front lines of that battle for four years at Brooklyn College, a hotbed of pro-Palestinian activity. The fight took its toll on her.
“I didn’t mind being a face for Israel on campus, but I was continually harassed,” said Goldberg, currently a student at Cardozo Law School. She said she would receive threatening Facebook messages, emails, texts and phone calls from SJP members with such messages as “watch your back” and “we know what you’re doing” and advising her not to go to certain places on campus.
Today, SJP at Brooklyn College, like many such chapters, receives funding from the student government and often runs events with several hundred attendees. Whether or not the chapter receives additional external funding, Goldberg isn’t sure. But in a sign that she’s still in the fight, and one that will likely please pro-Israel leaders, she says she has begun researching the topic.
Staff writer Hannah Dreyfus contributed reporting.
Mitchell Bard is the executive director of the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise and the director of the Jewish Virtual Library. The former editor of AIPAC’s weekly newsletter, the Near East Report, Bard is the author of 23 books, including, most recently, “Death to the Infidels: Radical Islam’s War Against the Jews,” (St. Martin’s Press, 2014). This story was made possible by The Jewish Week investigative fund.
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