Now that the Israel-Palestinian talks have failed, what will Plan B look like for Netanyahu? Israel Correspondent Josh Mitnick reports that pressure is coming from the right (urging annexation) and the left (settlement evacuation).
ISRAEL NEWS
Fear Of Status Quo Fueling Talk Of Unilateral Steps
As Netanyahu ponders his next move, pressure from right, and left, to act.
Joshua Mitnick
Israel Correspondent
Netanyahu, center, at Sunday’s cabinet meeting. Getty Images
Tel Aviv — Israeli Finance Minister Yair Lapid thin
Netanyahu, center, at Sunday’s cabinet meeting. Getty Images
Netanyahu, center, at Sunday’s cabinet meeting. Getty Images
Tel Aviv — Israeli Finance Minister Yair Lapid thinks Israel should unilaterally declare a border and evacuate settlements.
The economic minister, Naftali Bennett, thinks Israel should do the opposite and annex parts of the West Bank.
And Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman thinks Israel should reach out to Arab states to negotiate a regional peace deal that would eventually produce a treaty with the Palestinians.
Confused? The grab bag of proposals represents an attempt in Israel to grasp at a “Plan B” in the wake of the collapse of peace talks in late April and the establishment of a Palestinian unity government.
With the U.S. blaming Israel for the breakdown in talks and deciding to work with the Palestinian Authority — over the objection of Prime Minister Benjamin — Israelis are worried about diplomatic stagnation while the Palestinians take the offensive. Even Lieberman, whose political party ran with Netanyahu in the most recent election, criticized government reaction to the negotiations deadlock.
“The interior minister is talking about continuing the status quo, and that’s just not something that’s going to work,” Lieberman said this week, referring to comments by Gideon Saar. “That’s like in soccer: if you don’t go take the initiative, eventually you give up a goal.”
Lieberman is hoping that long-secret contacts between Israel and Gulf countries over their joint opposition to Iran will shift into peace talks, though that would require those countries to abandon long-held resistance in the Arab world to normalizing ties before finding a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Lieberman’s diplomatic plan and the proposals of others from his cabinet colleagues are filling an Israeli diplomatic vacuum, while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has said he’s mulling alternatives to the talks, has yet to chart a way forward.
“[The plans] are filling a vacuum because the prime minister doesn’t have anything,” said Mitchell Barak, an Israeli-American public opinion expert. “He doesn’t have a plan, and he doesn’t have a direction. [Palestinians] are showing movement and Netanyahu is Dr. No.”
Barak continued: “Netanyahu is leading from behind, and not driving. He’s being led by the Palestinians and the Americans and he’s just letting the waves determine the way the way it goes for him.”
Barak believes that status quo of continued settlement expansion throughout the West Bank is dangerous, and that Israel is going to face increased isolation abroad.
“You have to ask yourself: Are we going over the settlement cliff?”
Many around the prime minister from his own Likud party don’t think so, and they are challenging the conventional wisdom that holds that the status quo is a bad thing. Saar, the interior minister, told the annual Herzliya Conference, the global meeting on national security, that because the Israeli-Palestinian conflict doesn’t look resolvable in the foreseeable future, “the status quo is a better alternative than changing the status quo.”
According to Ofer Zalzburg, an analyst at the International Crisis Group, Netanyahu is afraid neither of the status quo, nor Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ campaign for international recognition, nor threats of isolation.
“The Palestinians at least for a year have had a diplomatic initiative, and Israel was mainly reacting. Netanyahu will continue this tactic,” Zalzburg said. “As long as there’s a Palestinian leadership that isn’t going to rock the boat, Netanyahu will muddle through, and focus on other things.”
Zalzburg said that Netanyahu’s advisers aren’t worried about isolation either. While they expect an erosion of support in Europe over the diplomatic impasse, they know Israel enjoys strong support in U.S. public opinion and want to leverage Israeli technology exports as a bridge to forge new trade relations with Asia and South America.
Despite this, Netanyahu is now facing calls from the dovish and hawkish wings of his cabinet to take unilateral steps that would take Israel in two opposite directions.
The opposing proposals reflect an Israeli unease that the government has failed to dictate the course of relations with the Palestinians, and instead allowed Abbas to get upper hand on international recognition for a Palestinian state.
“There’s an anomaly with the continued unclear situation with Judea and Samaria, and the feeling that it’s creeping under us, and that we need to do something,” said Dan Meridor, a former minister in Netanyahu’s government, using the biblical terms that refer to the West Bank.
Lapid, speaking Sunday at the Herzliya Conference, became the first Israeli cabinet member to revisit the concept of unilateral withdrawal, saying that Israel should prepare itself to carry out partial military pullbacks and razing isolated settlements in the West Bank. Only afterward would Israel conduct negotiations on core issues with the Palestinians, the finance minister said.
“It’s about time that Israel should decide what its borders are,” Lapid said. “There’s no reason to continue avoiding the need to draw the future borders of the State of Israel.”
Netanyahu swiftly dismissed the Lapid’s plan as a recipe for the kind of response that occurred following the withdrawal from Gaza, namely more rocket fire.
Bennett, whose Jewish Home party represents Israelis settlers, has been pushing annexation for several years, but with the collapse of U.S.-backed peace talks in April, the provocative proposal is being taken more seriously for the first time since Israel and the Palestinians signed the Oslo peace agreement in 1993.
Netanyahu is not likely to back that plan either: he opposes annexation because he fears Israel will become a binational state with 2.5 million more Palestinians, and unilateral withdrawal would likely bring down the coalition.
Shlomo Brom, a fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Studies, a Tel Aviv University think tank, said the push for unilateral solutions is a logical outcome after the failure of a negotiated resolution.
Brom said Israelis worry that about rising costs of the status quo: friction with allies in U.S. and Europe over continued Jewish settlement expansion in the West Bank, vulnerability to international boycotts and a Palestinian diplomatic offensive at the United Nations.
“Many people think that status quo isn’t acceptable,” Brom said. “Our government says an agreement is not feasible, so the only conclusion is unilateral steps.”
Israelis are still waiting to hear about Netanyahu’s next move.
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After 15 years at the helm of UJA-Federation, John Ruskay, the acknowledged leader in the field, steps down at the end of the month. I spoke with him about his successes and disappointments.
Gary Rosenblatt
Ruskay Looks Back, And AheadLeader takes pride in 15 years at helm of UJA-Fed NY while noting community's 'uncertain future.'
In a rare quiet moment, John Ruskay, who is stepping down at the end of the month after 15 years as CEO and executive vice president of UJA-Federation of New York, sat in his office on East 59th Street and described his feelings these days as “running in a relay race, trying to hand the baton” to his successor, Eric Goldstein, as seamlessly as possible.
That baton, in effect, is the world’s largest local charity, a complex organization with a staff of 475 people, which raises more than $140 million a year for a wide range of local, national and international causes. More than that, it is the central symbol of a Jewish federation system that champions the notion of collective giving and caring, based on the deep-rooted but increasingly challenged belief that all Jews are responsible for one another.
For Ruskay, 67, who served in senior positions at UJA-Federation for more than seven years before taking over the top professional spot, it has been quite a race. There have been wars and crises in the Mideast, natural and financial disasters at home, and the steady erosion of his donor base as a younger generation distances itself from the communal affiliations of its parents and grandparents.
But in a wide-ranging interview in advance of a major June 18 tribute dinner to him at the Waldorf Astoria, he reflected on the high and low points of his tenure, and looked to the future. Ruskay asserted his conviction that “creating inspired and caring communities” — his mantra — will produce “engaged Jews who will respond creatively and boldly to the challenges of the Jewish community.
“There has been both erosion and renewal,” he said, “and the question is whether we can reverse the contraction” in the percentage of those who identify Jewishly. “The outcome is uncertain,” he acknowledged. “Can we seize the moment of extraordinary Jewish opportunity? Can we make our work sufficiently inspiring so that Jews will choose to join us because of the meaning, purpose and community we provide?”
Through his own work and personality, Ruskay has been an inspiration to many. His successor, attorney and longtime UJA-Federation lay leader Goldstein, praised him for “his vision, passion, creativity and enthusiasm” for people and for the mission at hand.
As he nears the finish line, Ruskay is viewed by colleagues, peers and close observers of Jewish communal life as the leader in his field. During his tenure he has helped UJA-Federation raise more than $3 billion, and he has helped grow its endowment fund from $330 million to close to $1 billion. Beyond the dollars, though, he is admired for his combination of wisdom, warmth and wit, and his ability to raise money and spirits through a clear vision and strong guidance, all of it infused with a deeply Jewish soul.
I am less than an objective observer here. Ruskay and I go back more than 36 years, having met at the annual General Assembly of the federation movement in Dallas in 1977. He worked at the time for CLAL, the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, under Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, and I was editor of the Baltimore Jewish Times. In the ensuing years we served for a time together on the board of a fund for Jewish investigative journalism. Our mutual respect, trust and collegial friendship has stood us in good stead during the last two decades when, in our respective positions at UJA-Federation and The Jewish Week, we have endured some difficult times in the ongoing and inevitable love-hate relationship between a community’s federation and its independent newspaper. Through it all he has acted with integrity, thoughtfulness and compassion.
During our recent discussions on his stepping down, Ruskay displayed those same qualities, and one sensed a feeling in him of satisfaction, tinged with nostalgia, for what he has accomplished.
So Different From 1999
He had originally planned to retire in 2011, but was asked by his lay leadership to stay on another three years to ride out the financial crisis set off by the Madoff scandal in late 2008. He feels that both professionally and personally, “the time is right to step back” now, with UJA-Federation “strong,” and with his wife, Robin Bernstein, having recently retired after 15 years as CEO and president of the Educational Alliance, one of about 100 agencies that receive funding from UJA-Federation.
He cited the fact that both his first wife, Shira, and his father, Everett Ruskay, died at the age of 52, and he wants to have time for “a next chapter” — possibly writing, teaching, enrolling in courses and spending more time with family — while also taking on several strategic consulting projects and serving in his emeritus position at UJA-Federation.
Ruskay noted that when he became CEO of the charity in 1999, the zeitgeist was very different from today on two key fronts.
One was in regards to Israel. At the outset of his tenure he spoke out about the need to envision the challenges of a Jewish community in a post-crisis Middle East. The Oslo peace process was at a high point at the time, and the new leader contemplated a federation campaign to help Israel at peace, create new industries at home and focus on resolving social tensions.
“I was prematurely luxuriating on the notion of ‘peace at hand,’” he recalled, adding that the ensuing intifada and failure of Oslo was “a great disappointment” that has led to “entrenched views and deeper divides” within the Jewish community. He said he regrets the “promiscuous name-calling on both sides” of the dove-hawk debate, adding that we as a community lack the ability “to hear different voices” with respect, though our sages tell us that “a verse of Torah can be interpreted in many ways.”
The other major change from 15 years ago was that the federation system of centralized communal giving became viewed as old-school, passé and waning, with the alternative — direct, hands-on giving — on the ascendancy.
“Our 1998 campaign was in decline, and every pundit said that the federations’ best days were behind them,” he remembered. Today, that holds true in many communities, as younger Jews have shown a preference for smaller organizations and more direct involvement. But with Ruskay, an outspoken and sometimes lonely defender of the traditional system, New York has not only held the line but advanced the cause.
“I was a voice countering the concept of ‘boutique giving,’ even in this building,” he said. “I argued that donors don’t need us to just pass the money along.” Federation’s role, he said, was to “move the agenda” in caring for Jews anywhere they are in need. That was done in part through partnership with the government of Israel, the Jewish Agency for Israel and the Joint Distribution Committee, which address overseas needs.
UJA-Federation’s mobilization in response to crises — from Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans to Hurricane Sandy in New York, and from Israeli military engagements with Hamas, to launching Connect To Care programs, an elaborate social service program launched in response to the recession — highlighted the speed and depth that only a major federation could accomplish.
‘It’s Hard To Love A Federation’
Among the other achievements during his tenure that Ruskay noted were transforming federation’s relationship with synagogues from competition for donors to true partnership in strengthening Jewish identity; creating a Jewish hospice system in New York; providing seed money to a wide range of start-up projects here and in Israel; and warming up the culture within “59th Street,” as the building is known, by improving work conditions and morale.
But he acknowledged disappointments as well.
He said it has been “very difficult to move the philanthropic needle in areas like Jewish education and identity. It remains far easier to raise funds in response to poverty and crisis.”
Similarly, Ruskay said that he is “not sure we moved the needle on heart-share,” suggesting that while the federation is committed to “chesed [charitable acts], chinuch [Jewish learning] and Clal Yisrael [Jewish peoplehood], it’s hard to love a federation,” whose image is often one of a sprawling bureaucracy more focused on big dollars than good deeds.
He compared the situation to Americans loving beautiful sites like Yosemite and Yellowstone, but feeling little passion for the Department of Interior — even though the department manages the national parks.
“What keeps me up at night,” Ruskay said, “is the status quo in the Middle East,” which he sees as a dangerous proposition for Jerusalem; the level of “poverty among the affluence in our community;" and the findings of surveys like the Pew Research Center and the federation’s own New York population study that indicate a growth among the extremes on the left and right — namely ‘no affiliation’ and fundamentalist Orthodox — and a decline within the center, the core constituency of federation.
But in the end Ruskay remains an optimist. He is convinced that caring communities will attract caring Jews, and feels blessed to have been in his post, which he describes as “energizing, mostly inspiring, and only limited by hours, and at times, exhaustion.” As for his time spent soliciting donors, he says: “I may be delusional but I have viewed” that aspect as “less about asking people for funds than enabling them to do mitzvot.”
It’s what he believes, and is no doubt a key to his success.
Gary@jewishweek.org
Gary Rosenblatt has been the editor and publisher of The Jewish Week for 20 years and has written more than 1,000 "Between The Lines" columns since 1993. Now a collection of 80 of those columns, ranging from Mideast analysis to childhood remembrances as "the Jewish rabbi's son" in Annapolis, Md., is available.
Associate Editor Jonathan Mark reflects on a new exhibit here on what the town of Auschwitz was like before it became synonymous with Nazi horrors.
INTERNATIONAL
Before Auschwitz Was Auschwitz
Exhibit examines the shtetl that was prelude.
Jonathan Mark
Associate Editor
The Hotel Schmiedler in 1912, when many believed Auschwitz was a holy place to die, and better for resurrection. Miroslaw Ganobi
Once upon a time, so long ago, the Jews of Central Europe would take trains to Auschwitz for the privilege of dying in its mystical terrain. In “Sefer Oshpitzin,” the town’s yizkor book, compiled by residents of the now extinct shtetl, one man recalled those “whose entire lives revolved around the desire that, after their demise, they should be interred in Oshpitzin,” as the town was known in Yiddish. Some “lived for many years in wealth and dignity in Vienna. Yet in their declining years they moved to Oshpitzin.” They said, according to the book, “It is really good to live in Vienna, but one ought to die in Oshpitzin.” So many saintly and scholarly people were buried in the Auschwitz earth that it was thought to be transformed into holy ground. “Anyone who merited to be buried there,” said an old Auschwitz legend, “would not suffer travails at the time of resurrection.”
We know what happened, of course, when old army barracks on the edge of town were turned into the most notorious concentration camp of all, but the end of the story is hardly all of it. Like an orphan going through a parent’s old photos, delighted by the revelations, a visitor encounters the years of prelude that are gloriously displayed in “A Town Known As Auschwitz: The Life and Death of a Jewish Community,” a new exhibit at the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. The exhibit is nothing less than a resurrection, a walk down streets and through the marketplace where we meet the wise men and the wise guys; the young moms of the public high school parents association; the young Zionists preparing for kibbutz life; and chasidic rebbes, artists, whiskey makers, lawyers, tailors, children — and ghosts.
As Gertrude Stein might have said, before there were Jews in Auschwitz there were Jews in Auschwitz. Before this became our most horrific chapter, it was our most beautiful chapter: all that was energetic, soulful, passionate and lovely about pre-war Yiddishkeit. Sic transit gloria.
Over the centuries, the village, once near the Prussian border, was called Auschwitz by Germans and Austrians; Oswiecim by Poles; and Oshpitzin by Jews, a word-play on Oswiecim and Ushpizin (the welcoming of biblical guests to one’s sukkah), for this village was famous for its hospitality. Every Avrum, Yitz and Yankev seemed to know that if you were detained at the border while passports or merchandise awaited approval, you could find a good shul, a good bed and a good meal here, as if you were as special as Ushpizin’s Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Before Auschwitz was haunted it was famous for hearth and home.
Now, however, as the poet Eugene Field writes, “The fire upon the hearth is low, and there is stillness everywhere...” Szymon Kluger, the last surviving Jew who returned after the war and remained in Oswiecim, died 14 years ago. The pre-war town of 14,000, with 8,000 Jews, is now a growing city of 40,000, but with no Jews for the first time in centuries.
A visitor enters the exhibit as a visitor would enter the town. To the right, we pass a wall-sized photo of the landmark bridge over the Sola River, flowing eternally into the Vistula. To the left, a wall-sized photo of the Oswiecim train station. We are told that Oswiecim was located at the nexus of several European rail lines, allowing for the efficient transportation of freight and people. Yes, of course. But the station we see is not Josef Mengele’s Auschwitz station in Birkenau, but, around a mile away, the Polish Oswiecim station, elegant and Victorian, with its handsome Roman numeral clock, arched doors and windows, topped by a large “Oswiecim” sign.
We see the centuries-old Castle of Oswiecim, the oldest building in town. The Yizkor book speaks of legends, demons that roamed through the city at night: “They looked like Germans, whom it was extremely dangerous to encounter.” In time, the castle became Nazi headquarters. Even innocent photos and captions of a castle curl like smoke back to the war.
We see a document by which an Oswiecim nobleman donated a plot of land in 1588 for a shul and Jewish cemetery. Then, for the Jews, came blood libels and high taxes, prohibitions against this and restrictions against that. In 1656 an invading army — not from Germany but from Sweden — burnt Oswiecim to the ground. In 1723, there were 23 tax-paying Jewish residents. By the 1900s, Jews owned the majority of the Oswiecim’s businesses and built 30 shuls for the 8,000 Jews, including the 2,000-seat Great Synagogue (the only shul that davened Ashkenaz). The town had a mikveh, yeshivas, Jewish athletic organizations, a slaughterhouse; and enough communal organizations to service a metropolis.
As in so many European towns, the Jews and their Christian neighbors lived in peace, until they didn’t. In the pre-war years, they shared the rivers and picnicked among the birch trees, before the birch trees gave their name to Birkenau (the camp known as Auschwitz II, where most of the Jews were killed). The exhibit features a pre-war photo of little Jewish children from Oswiecim, both with yarmulkes and bare-headed, spending a sunny day in the shadows of the birches.
We meet Belzer, Bobover and Sanzer chasidim; the Marxist-Zionists of HeHalutz group, planning the kibbutz they hoped to build; members of Poalei Agudas Yisroel, a religious labor organization, dressed for a Purim masquerade; Kadimah gymnasts, beautiful young faces and athletic bodies, posing in acrobatics. We see glass liquor bottles, long emptied, with the name “Oswiecim” blown into the glass. We see girls from Hashomer Hatzair, socialist Zionists, and look — the Bobover Rebbe is visiting town: Rabbi Ben-Zion Halberstam is riding in an open-air sedan, for the opening of the third Bobover shul in Oswiecim.
We can peek into a photo from a Jewish 1925 New Year’s Eve party at Oswiecim’s Herz Hotel, a grand hotel known for hosting parties, lectures, theater, political rallies, Zionist meetings. Ushpizin, indeed; this was a town in which no one was lonely, or at least a town with such a multitude of Jewish organizations that just about no one with any Jewish inclination could possibly have been unaffiliated or bored.
We are there when the Nazis march into town, the Jews are uprooted, and the glory ends mid-sentence. Aside from photos, four ipads offer additional video testimony and wartime history from five Oswiecim families that lived there for generations.
The town’s yizkor book tells of a legend once popular in this extinct town. How long ago, the dead from the nearby fields would arise and daven in a favorite Oshpitzin shul. One Simchas Torah, after midnight, the shul filled with light, the doors were flung open, and invisible voices were heard singing the Ato Hareisa; dancing the Hakofes dance. The living — those who dared to enter — and the dead were called up to the Simchas Torah reading by name. The living were informed that the worshippers around them were the purified souls of Auschwitz Jews who had long been in Heaven.
You don’t have to believe that, of course, but maybe you do. After all, what do we really know about Auschwitz?
“A Town Known As Auschwitz” runs through the summer of 2015 at The Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, 36 Battery Place, www.mjhnyc.org.
Jonathan@jewishweek.org
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Also this issue, UJA-Federation launches $50 million fund to aid local day schools; unease greets Israel's new president; a preview of the Israeli and German film festivals playing in New York; and recalling the fascinating life of the world's oldest man, who died here last week at 111.
NEW YORK
UJA-Fed. Makes Big Day School Push
Charity pumps $50 million into matching grant initiative to help alleviate tuition crunch, shore up schools.
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
UJA’s Challenge Fund will encourage schools, such as Solomon Schechter School of Manhattan.Solomon Schechter School
School of Manhattan.Solomon Schechter School
In a move that thrusts UJA-Federation of New York more directly than ever into the effort to bolster day school education, the charity announced this week that it is has raised $50 million for a matching grant initiative that will launch in September.
The new Day School Challenge Fund has a goal of eventually raising $200 million. It has been in the works for several years and is designed to strengthen schools’ long-term financial health by establishing endowment accounts, which are the lifeblood of many private schools and universities.
According to the rules of the Fund, UJA-Federation will match on a 1:3 basis the money raised by schools that meet the initiative’s eligibility requirements. Participating schools can first contribute to their accounts in September; for every $3 contributed, UJA-Federation will add $1; the schools can start drawing 5 percent interest on the total a year afterwards.
The matching funds will be available to schools that raise a minimum of $100,000 in new endowment funds; there will be a cap on the amount of matching funds contributed by UJA-Federation, depending on a school’s size.
“The Jewish community has long invested in strengthening the Jewish identity of our young by providing support for Hillels, Jewish summer camps, Israel trips and a broad range of Jewish educational programs,” said John Ruskay, UJA-Federation’s CEO and executive vice president. “The Day School Challenge Fund will elevate such communal support for day school education.”
The move, welcomed enthusiastically by a range of day school officials, comes amid fears that the issue of day school affordability, exacerbated by the lingering recession, has reached the crisis stage. Observers cite the lack of extensive scholarship aid for families of modest means and inadequate teachers’ salaries in many schools.
Eric Goldstein, who succeeds Ruskay on July 1 as CEO and executive vice president of UJA-Federation, is among the initial funders of the initiative, which he chaired in his lay capacity. He is part of a group that worked for several years to bring the challenge grant to fruition. It was originally envisioned as a $100 million fund with a more ambitious 1:2 matching ratio. But fundraising for the project was slow.
“It’s very hard to get people to give to endowments,” said Deborah Joselow, managing director of UJA-Federation’s Commission on Jewish Identity and Renewal.
“If you have $50 million, you want to get it out there. This is about supporting a sustainable system of day schools,” she noted. “We have a sacred responsibility to these schools.”
So the federation decided to begin now, with money raised from a wide range of contributors, including the Avi Chai Foundation, the Jim Joseph Foundation and several individual philanthropists, including Goldstein and his wife, Tamar, and UJA-Federation president Alisa Doctoroff and her husband Dan.
The hope is that the 1:3 ratio of the Challenge Fund will eventually establish a total of $200 million that will “provide a predictable revenue stream for schools to subsidize tuition and invest in educational excellence,” according to a UJA-Federation statement.
The contribution phase of the Fund will last three years, but the participating schools will be able to receive the interest from the accounts “in perpetuity,” according to Joselow.
The funds raised in the endowment program can “be a game changer for the schools,” she said, adding, “it’s not a silver bullet. It’s a statement about the communal responsibility to Jewish education.”
About 60 percent of day school students in the United States attend some 250 Jewish day schools and yeshivas in the Greater New York area.
In recent years, school administrators have cited mounting expenses, parents have complained about escalating tuition that force many to seek lower-cost alternatives such as charter and public schools and several local day schools have closed their doors.
Money raised in the endowment program can be used for scholarships or teachers’ salaries — anything but “bricks and mortar” capital expenses, Joselow said.
She called the new program an incentive for schools to plan for their long-term financial future, under the guidance of the philanthropy’s veteran experts on investing and financial management, a sentiment seconded by leaders of area day schools.
“The grant program is a wonderful initiative, probably the most important step that UJA-Federation has taken to support day schools in my lifetime,” said Rabbi Steven Lorch, head of school of the Solomon Schechter School of Manhattan, which is Conservative. “It encourages schools to think about their finances in the long term — 25 years out and longer — whereas nearly every other significant influence on the thinking of day school leaders pushes them to think about their schools’ financial here-and-now, seldom more than five years out.”
Jerry Katz, head of school at the Reform day school in Manhattan, also stressed the importance of the Fund. “Access and affordability are major concerns at Rodeph Sholom School,” he said. “In New York City, we are competing with schools that offer tremendous amounts of financial aid through well-established endowments.”
Rabbi Paul Shaviv, head of school of the Modern Orthodox Ramaz School in Manhattan, said the fund would “increase revenue, keep tuition down, and keep our school more accessible. … It is helping the issue of the cost of Jewish education by supplying extra funds. From an educator’s viewpoint, this enables us in maintaining quality and services, rather than insisting that we cut costs.”
Shaviv is awaiting detailed eligibility information. “If we are eligible, I am certain we will do everything we can to participate,” he said.
According to a statement released this week by UJA-Federation, schools wishing to take part in the Challenge Fund program must:
n be located in New York City, Westchester or Long Island, or have a student body of whom “a significant portion” lives in those places.
n have been in operation for at least three years.
n have at least $500,000 in endowment and/or savings accounts.
n employ a professional whose responsibilities include fundraising and development.
n have a full-time principal and a Board of Directors “that exercises fiduciary oversight.”
n fulfill “all federal, state and city educational requirements,” including certification and ongoing professional training “for all teachers.”
n comply with Fund for Jewish Education regulations about health insurance for employees.
n “Publicly recognize and support the State of Israel through the adoption of an official statement.”
n support “the goals of the UJA-Federation annual campaign.”
n “recognize” UJA-Federation and the Challenge Fund “in its printed and electronic materials.”
The criteria would seem to rule out the participation of many small, haredi schools that lack substantial resources and are neither pro-Zionistic nor part of the UJA-Federation network.
UJA-Federation has in past years supported day schools in a variety of ways providing millions of dollars through the Jewish Education Project, teacher benefits via the Gruss Life Monuments Fund and lobbying in Albany for government benefits.
The new initiative is a larger version of a program that began under the aegis of the Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest in New Jersey, with a “leading gift” of $9 million from philanthropists Paula and Jerry Gottesman, and the participation of three schools.
Details about the Challenge Fund will be available in early September at ujafedny.org/day-school-challenge.
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EDITORIAL
Israel’s New President, Playing Catch-Up
The office of the president of the State of Israel is largely symbolic, intended to unify the country and bring it enhanced stature. But from the outset the definition of the role, to “stand at the head of the state,” has been vague, leading critics to call for its abolishment on the grounds that it is unnecessary and costly.
Whatever one’s views of Shimon Peres during the course of his long political career, his term as president these last seven years made him one of the most popular and well known statesmen in the world. Now, with the campaign that led up to the election of Reuven “Ruby” Rivlin of Likud on Tuesday as Israel’s ninth president, the number of critics of the position may well increase, particularly in this country.
Israelis have tried to keep the election process for president removed from politics, but nothing in Israel is apolitical. And this year’s campaign was particularly nasty, with one candidate, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, pulling out at the last minute after press reports of financial improprieties, and several others accused of a variety of misdeeds. Rivlin, who was elected by the Knesset in a second round of voting — Meir Sheetrit of Hatunah came in second — acknowledged in his first address as president the need to restore confidence in the office. “I must rehabilitate that trust,” he said, pledging to “serve the public faithfully.”
Rivlin served twice as speaker of the Knesset and was considered fair and respectful of others. But as a self-proclaimed follower of Revisionist founder Zeev Jabotinsky, he “opposes territorial concessions to the Palestinians and wants Israel to retain the West Bank,” according to JTA. Of particular concern to liberal Jews, Rivlin, a secular Jew, has equated Reform Judaism with “idol worship” and has refused to refer to Reform rabbis by their rabbinic title.
Perhaps aware of the criticism in this country when such statements came to light again in recent days, he noted in his inaugural talk that he is leaving Likud to serve all Israelis, “Jews, Arabs, Druse, rich, poor, those who are more observant and those who are less.”
Even critics of his politics speak of him as a kind person. But even those who like him acknowledge that his opposition to a two-state solution will be a marked and difficult contrast to Peres, who was an effective spokesman for Israel on the international scene, presenting an image of a peace-seeker.
Much will depend on how Rivlin acts in his new post. We hope he takes to heart the notion that he now leaves politics behind and stands “at the head of the state,” with a mandate to bring Israelis closer together and bring honor to his country, and his people.
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FILM
When Personal And Global History Collide
Common threads in Israel Film Center Festival and annual German series.
George Robinson
Special To The Jewish Week
Scene from Nadiv Lapid’s “Policeman,” part of Israel Film Center Festival. Courtesy of Israel Film Center
At first glance the second annual Israel Film Center Festival and the newest version of Kino! Festival of New German Films would seem an unlikely pairing of events. Even granting the long and complicated history of Jews and Germans, there have been years in which these two events have had little, if anything, in common. But this year, they not only overlap one another thematically and on the calendar, with both running June 12-19, they even share a film.
“Hanna’s Journey,” directed by Julia von Heinz, focuses its attention on Hanna Eggert (Karoline Schuch), an attractive but utterly self-involved business student who gets herself sent to do good works in Israel as a way of enhancing her resume. She works with mentally disabled adults, becoming intrigued by her good-looking Israeli colleague Itay (Doron Amit), and also regularly visits a Holocaust survivor, Dr. Nussbaum (Lia Koenig), a shrewd old party who turns out to have a strong connection to Hanna’s mother.
Therein lies the real thematic link between these two festivals: the intergenerational tensions spawned by collision of personal and global history, mostly relating to the Shoah. In von Heinz’s hands, the story plays itself out in ways that threaten to become predictable — will Hanna and Itay get together, will she reconcile with her mom — but the director’s approach is subtly muted and she underplays the material’s inherent potential for easy sentimentality. Her characters, locked into a visual scheme in which they are frequently separated by strong vertical graphic elements that break the image into discrete spatial units, refuse to make the easy emotional connections; the result is a film of some charm that moves guardedly from the past awful to the future possible. The presence of “Hanna’s Journey” on both festival schedules is entirely apt.
It wouldn’t have been that great a stretch for the Israel Center to be showing “Anywhere Else,” directed by Ester Amrani. Amrani is an Israeli-born filmmaker based in Berlin, whose feature debut, which is on the Kino! Program, is sort of an inversion of “Hanna’s Journey.” This time the protagonist Noa (Neta Riskin), like Amrani herself, is an Israeli woman studying in Berlin who responds to a series of personal setbacks by running back to her parents’ home. Her German boyfriend (Golo Euler), a musician on the cusp of career success, follows her, which leads to some amusingly awkward moments at the dinner table. He arrives on Yom HaZikaron, and Noa’s dad ingenuously asks him if Germany has a memorial day for “your soldiers.”
Noa’s family is classically dysfunctional. She and her brother apparently live on anti-depressants. She and her sister snipe at one another relentlessly. Her mother (the estimable Hana Laszlo) is meddlesome and her grandmother is dying. As for Noa herself, her relationship is on the rocks, her graduate work is being rejected and her fellowship withdrawn. The film opens with a beautiful, nearly indecipherable image of amber-colored crystals, which Amrani gradually reveals are nothing more than an extreme close-up of frosted glass. It’s a lovely visual metaphor for the complexity and even beauty that underlies the seeming chaos of Noa’s family life.
The Israel Center slate also includes another film about a woman exploring the strange generational dramas wrought in the wake of the Shoah, but “Farewell, Herr Schwarz” by Yael Reuveny is a documentary, and quite an elegant one at that. Reuveny’s maternal grandmother survived the camps, and after the war tried desperately to find her favorite brother, Feivush, who had also disappeared into the inferno of occupied Poland. They almost found one another in the Lodz railroad station, today an abandoned Victorian hulk, but for unknown reasons they missed one another that day. After the war, Feivush, who had been a prisoner in Buchenwald, returned to the town of Schlieben, where the camp had been located, settled down there, married a non-Jewish German woman and raised a family. Living as Peter Schwarz he was a modestly successful businessman who played on the local soccer team and fit into his new life in East Germany with dismaying ease.
Reuveny divides her film into three sections, one for each of the generations since the Shoah. She interviews Peter’s German in-laws, particularly the endlessly affable Helga. (“Call me Aunt Helga,” she insists.) At one point the pair are looking through a family photo album in which some of Helga’s brothers are depicted in German uniforms. Reuveny shudders and explains to Helga, “In my family album we don’t have pictures of the Wehrmacht.” The second generation juxtaposes the filmmaker’s mother, a woman who has heretofore refused for five years to visit her Berlin-based daughter, and Uwe, Peter’s son, who has sought out the Reuvenys seeking to forge a family link across the historical schism. Finally, Reuveny herself meets up with Stefan, Uwe’s son, who is a curator at the Great Synagogue of Berlin and a dedicated Judeophile. He tells his cousin, “I want to live in the center of the world.” She replies, “New York?” and he disarmingly responds, “No, Jerusalem.”
Reuveny is a highly polished filmmaker and “Farewell Herr Schwarz” is a remarkably poised and unsettling film. She anchors the uncertainties of her investigation in the casual realities of quotidian detail. Consequently, “Farewell” is a film that never forgets that although history has its big-picture imperatives, for the overwhelming majority of us its force is felt obliquely.
The Israel Center event closes with another rumination on the generational trails of the Shoah and the difficulties of returning to Europe, whether old or new. Co-directed by Guy Nattiv and Erez Tadmor, “Magic Men” continues the duo’s exploration of uneasy alliances in public events begun in “Strangers” (and approached more obliquely in “The Flood,” a solo effort for Nattiv, and “A Matter of Size,” which Tadmor co-directed with Sharon Maymon, the third writer on “Magic Men”).
Avraham (Makram J. Khoury) is an aging survivor, a Greek Jew who lived through the round-ups in Thessaloniki thanks to a street magician who took him under his wing. He eventually made his way to Israel. Now the regional council is sending him back to Greece for a “twin cities” ceremony, but has assigned his son Yehuda (Zohar Straus), a chasidic rapper-singer, to keep an eye on him. As in their previous works together and apart, the directors use their wry wit to keep the material from being cloying. They also bring a sweeping pictorialism to the Greek seascapes that infuses the film with a certain unexpected grandeur and poignancy.
The great photographer Nan Goldin has long made her art out of the unexpected grandeur and poignancy of a generation of young men and women who tore through the ’70s and ’80s on a tidal wave of intimate violence, superheated sexuality and heroin. Sabine Lidl’s documentary portrait of Goldin, “Nan Goldin: I Remember Your Face” (which will be shown twice daily as part of the Kino! Program) is a generous and engaging portrait of the lioness at 60, mourning her constellation of friends decimated by the AIDS epidemic and her difficult relationship with her elderly Jewish parents. Perhaps infused with her father’s memories of pre-WWII Harvard with its Jewish quotas, Goldin says of the subcultures her photos document, “It was never about marginalization. We had our own world and we cared about each other.”
If you are looking for still more Israeli film — albeit this time with no references to the Shoah or Europe — Nadav Lapid’s startling feature debut “Policeman” is opening for a one-week run on June 13. The film, which played the New York Film Festival three years ago, is a dark and ominous one, with most of its violence happening off-screen but with palpably brutal results.
The film focuses on Yaron (Yiftach Klein), one of five members of an elite counter-terrorism unit within the police force who are facing possible legal action in the wake of an attack that went horribly wrong. These guys live for one another, and as we see them in the first third of the film, little else. They have wives and even kids but, as becomes quickly clear from Yaron’s conduct with his very pregnant wife, family life exists mainly as an adornment that testifies yet again to their masculinity. Yaron is much more attuned to the needs of Ariel, a colleague who is suffering from a tumor that may be cancerous. When we see him with a friend’s baby, he is hefting the little guy while looking into a mirror, as if he is trying on the image for size.
That shot is echoed in the middle section of the film when Shira (Yaara Pelzig), a would-be radical leftist, briefly watches herself handling a pistol in a mirror in her parents’ sumptuous apartment. The shift from Yaron, his wife and his buddies to Shira and her terrorist wannabes is abrupt and total, until their paths cross in the final movement of the film. It’s an eccentric and gutsy choice, made all the more effective by the fact that — much as Shira’s play-acting for the mirror is an echo of Yaron’s — the two groups are grotesque parodies of one another, two quintets prepared to kill for no apparent reason.
The Israel Film Center Festival opens Thursday, June 12 and runs through June 19, with screenings at several venues; most take place at the JCC in Manhattan (76th Street and Amsterdam Avenue); for information, go to www.israelfilmcenter.org/festival2014_events. Kino! Festival of New German Film runs June 12-19 at the Quad Cinema (34 West 13th Street); for information, go to www.kinofestivalnyc.com. “Policeman” will be showing at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center June 13-19 with the director present at the 6:45 showings on Friday and Saturday evenings for information go to www.filmlinc.com.
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NEW YORK
The Curiosity That Fueled A Long Life
Remembering Alex Imich, the world’s oldest man.
Peter Eisner
Special To The Jewish Week
Alexander Imich, seen here with Rabbi Pinny Marozov in April, just before Passover, died this week. Courtesy of Chabad.org
During a visit in 2011 with Alexander Imich, just after his 108th birthday, a mutual friend asked whether he was hoping to set a record. According to official records at the time, he was the third oldest man in the world.
“Would you like to be the oldest man?” I asked.
He thought about that for a moment, smiled, and with a twinkle in his blue eyes, answered, “It could happen, why not?”
Imich lived long enough to hold the title. He was 111 years and 127 days old when he died at home on Sunday. He had fallen ill two weeks earlier at his apartment on West End Avenue in New York City.
When told earlier in 2014 that he was in fact the oldest verified man in the world, he joked, “Well, it isn’t the Nobel Prize.” The previous oldest man was an Italian, some months older than Imich, who died in April. The oldest living person, however, is a Japanese woman, Misao Okawa, who is more than 116 years old, born March 5, 1898.
Imich had lived to see major world events firsthand; he was too young to serve in World War I, but was sentenced to a Soviet labor camp in eastern Russia at the start of World War II. He returned to Czestochowa, in Poland, after the war and learned that most of his family had been wiped out in the Holocaust.
He lived not only a long time, but also a varied, active life. Imich was remarkably vibrant, even in his final years. Well into his 100s, he maintained his lifestyle on his own and went out to do his own food shopping. He was proud to say that his apartment at the Esplanade Manhattan was the only private residence left after it became an assisted living facility. Forced to slow down after receiving a pacemaker in 2011, he was outraged by the notion. “Sometimes my back hurts and I take an aspirin, but there’s never been anything wrong with my heart.”
Still, he maintained constant email contact with friends and associates and scanned the Internet for stories related to parapsychology. He said he became interested in paranormal activity as a young man in Poland in the 1930s and wrote and spoke about such subjects and often about the work of Israeli “mystifier” Uri Geller. Imich edited a book, “Incredible Tales of the Paranormal,” in 1995 and was president of The Anomalous Phenomena Research Center of New York. A visit to his apartment usually turned to that subject. He told stories of spirits, asked visitors about UFOs and displayed his collection of bent spoons — a Geller specialty — though acknowledging he’d never bent one himself.
Imich often jumped up from his comfortable chair and embraced friends with the dexterity of a younger person. He would also move excitedly from chair to bookshelf to search for a piece of information that might add to the conversation. Along with his enthusiasm and drive for knowledge, he questioned visitors vigorously about their own lives with great interest down to the smallest detail. He was prepared for new visitors when they stopped by, already answering the first likely question before most newcomers began speaking.
“You’re probably wondering why I’m so old, and I don’t have an answer,” he said. “It must have something to do with the genes, maybe vitamin supplements. I also practice appetite reduction and don’t eat too much,” he said, adding he was inspired by Indian yogis who seem to live on air. When he lost his savings because of an unscrupulous financial adviser in 2007, he depended on support from New York Times Neediest contributions and food shipments from a UJA-Federation support organization. “I never eat even half of what they give me,” he said with pride. “People eat too much.” He often said only half-joking that perhaps he had added some years by never having children with his wife, Wela, who died in 1986.
Alexander Imich was born on Feb., 4, 1903 in Russian-occupied Czestochowa, Poland, to an affluent Jewish family. His father was a decorator and designer and once built an airstrip in Czestochowa, the famed site of the Shrine of the Black Madonna.
He had vivid memories of his early life in a home with kerosene lamps and chamber pots. “There was no manufacturing, no mass production,” he recalled. “The shoemaker came, took measurements and made the shoes.”
Imich came of age some years after the pogroms that set off a major emigration of Jews from Poland and other Russian territories in the first decade of the 20th century. By the time he attended school, he said, he and other Jewish children mixed freely with Catholic children. But he said anti-Semitism prevented him from joining the Polish Navy or from completing his studies zoology, a life-long passion.
He finally attended the Jagiellonian University in Krakow and received a Ph.D. in chemistry in 1929. He became a manager of a series of chemical facilities in Russian cities, but ran afoul of the Soviet government in the 1930s when he refused to join the Communist Party. He and his wife were sent to Stalin labor camps in Soviet Asia, enduring extreme cold and hardship. When he returned to Czestochowa, he learned his parents and most of the family had died in the Holocaust.
Alex and Wela migrated to New York in 1952. He held a series of jobs as a chemist in the United States before retiring to devote his time to paranormal studies. After his wife’s death he said he never felt alone, surrounded by spirits, including hers, and he never wanted to remarry. “It would have been disloyal,” he said.
There was something else, then, that he thought defined his long life. “I wake up every day with excitement and curiosity. There are so many things to do, so many things to think about. That will never stop.”
Photo courtesy of Chabad.org.
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All that and much more, enjoy the read,
Gary Rosenblatt
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Between the Lines - Gary Rosenblatt
Ruskay Looks Back, And AheadLeader takes pride in 15 years at helm of UJA-Fed NY while noting community's 'uncertain future.'
In a rare quiet moment, John Ruskay, who is stepping down at the end of the month after 15 years as CEO and executive vice president of UJA-Federation of New York, sat in his office on East 59th Street and described his feelings these days as “running in a relay race, trying to hand the baton” to his successor, Eric Goldstein, as seamlessly as possible.
That baton, in effect, is the world’s largest local charity, a complex organization with a staff of 475 people, which raises more than $140 million a year for a wide range of local, national and international causes. More than that, it is the central symbol of a Jewish federation system that champions the notion of collective giving and caring, based on the deep-rooted but increasingly challenged belief that all Jews are responsible for one another.
For Ruskay, 67, who served in senior positions at UJA-Federation for more than seven years before taking over the top professional spot, it has been quite a race. There have been wars and crises in the Mideast, natural and financial disasters at home, and the steady erosion of his donor base as a younger generation distances itself from the communal affiliations of its parents and grandparents.
But in a wide-ranging interview in advance of a major June 18 tribute dinner to him at the Waldorf Astoria, he reflected on the high and low points of his tenure, and looked to the future. Ruskay asserted his conviction that “creating inspired and caring communities” — his mantra — will produce “engaged Jews who will respond creatively and boldly to the challenges of the Jewish community.
“There has been both erosion and renewal,” he said, “and the question is whether we can reverse the contraction” in the percentage of those who identify Jewishly. “The outcome is uncertain,” he acknowledged. “Can we seize the moment of extraordinary Jewish opportunity? Can we make our work sufficiently inspiring so that Jews will choose to join us because of the meaning, purpose and community we provide?”
Through his own work and personality, Ruskay has been an inspiration to many. His successor, attorney and longtime UJA-Federation lay leader Goldstein, praised him for “his vision, passion, creativity and enthusiasm” for people and for the mission at hand.
As he nears the finish line, Ruskay is viewed by colleagues, peers and close observers of Jewish communal life as the leader in his field. During his tenure he has helped UJA-Federation raise more than $3 billion, and he has helped grow its endowment fund from $330 million to close to $1 billion. Beyond the dollars, though, he is admired for his combination of wisdom, warmth and wit, and his ability to raise money and spirits through a clear vision and strong guidance, all of it infused with a deeply Jewish soul.
I am less than an objective observer here. Ruskay and I go back more than 36 years, having met at the annual General Assembly of the federation movement in Dallas in 1977. He worked at the time for CLAL, the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, under Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, and I was editor of the Baltimore Jewish Times. In the ensuing years we served for a time together on the board of a fund for Jewish investigative journalism. Our mutual respect, trust and collegial friendship has stood us in good stead during the last two decades when, in our respective positions at UJA-Federation and The Jewish Week, we have endured some difficult times in the ongoing and inevitable love-hate relationship between a community’s federation and its independent newspaper. Through it all he has acted with integrity, thoughtfulness and compassion.
During our recent discussions on his stepping down, Ruskay displayed those same qualities, and one sensed a feeling in him of satisfaction, tinged with nostalgia, for what he has accomplished.
So Different From 1999
He had originally planned to retire in 2011, but was asked by his lay leadership to stay on another three years to ride out the financial crisis set off by the Madoff scandal in late 2008. He feels that both professionally and personally, “the time is right to step back” now, with UJA-Federation “strong,” and with his wife, Robin Bernstein, having recently retired after 15 years as CEO and president of the Educational Alliance, one of about 100 agencies that receive funding from UJA-Federation.
He cited the fact that both his first wife, Shira, and his father, Everett Ruskay, died at the age of 52, and he wants to have time for “a next chapter” — possibly writing, teaching, enrolling in courses and spending more time with family — while also taking on several strategic consulting projects and serving in his emeritus position at UJA-Federation.
Ruskay noted that when he became CEO of the charity in 1999, the zeitgeist was very different from today on two key fronts.
One was in regards to Israel. At the outset of his tenure he spoke out about the need to envision the challenges of a Jewish community in a post-crisis Middle East. The Oslo peace process was at a high point at the time, and the new leader contemplated a federation campaign to help Israel at peace, create new industries at home and focus on resolving social tensions.
“I was prematurely luxuriating on the notion of ‘peace at hand,’” he recalled, adding that the ensuing intifada and failure of Oslo was “a great disappointment” that has led to “entrenched views and deeper divides” within the Jewish community. He said he regrets the “promiscuous name-calling on both sides” of the dove-hawk debate, adding that we as a community lack the ability “to hear different voices” with respect, though our sages tell us that “a verse of Torah can be interpreted in many ways.”
The other major change from 15 years ago was that the federation system of centralized communal giving became viewed as old-school, passé and waning, with the alternative — direct, hands-on giving — on the ascendancy.
“Our 1998 campaign was in decline, and every pundit said that the federations’ best days were behind them,” he remembered. Today, that holds true in many communities, as younger Jews have shown a preference for smaller organizations and more direct involvement. But with Ruskay, an outspoken and sometimes lonely defender of the traditional system, New York has not only held the line but advanced the cause.
“I was a voice countering the concept of ‘boutique giving,’ even in this building,” he said. “I argued that donors don’t need us to just pass the money along.” Federation’s role, he said, was to “move the agenda” in caring for Jews anywhere they are in need. That was done in part through partnership with the government of Israel, the Jewish Agency for Israel and the Joint Distribution Committee, which address overseas needs.
UJA-Federation’s mobilization in response to crises — from Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans to Hurricane Sandy in New York, and from Israeli military engagements with Hamas, to launching Connect To Care programs, an elaborate social service program launched in response to the recession — highlighted the speed and depth that only a major federation could accomplish.
‘It’s Hard To Love A Federation’
Among the other achievements during his tenure that Ruskay noted were transforming federation’s relationship with synagogues from competition for donors to true partnership in strengthening Jewish identity; creating a Jewish hospice system in New York; providing seed money to a wide range of start-up projects here and in Israel; and warming up the culture within “59th Street,” as the building is known, by improving work conditions and morale.
But he acknowledged disappointments as well.
He said it has been “very difficult to move the philanthropic needle in areas like Jewish education and identity. It remains far easier to raise funds in response to poverty and crisis.”
Similarly, Ruskay said that he is “not sure we moved the needle on heart-share,” suggesting that while the federation is committed to “chesed [charitable acts], chinuch [Jewish learning] and Clal Yisrael [Jewish peoplehood], it’s hard to love a federation,” whose image is often one of a sprawling bureaucracy more focused on big dollars than good deeds.
He compared the situation to Americans loving beautiful sites like Yosemite and Yellowstone, but feeling little passion for the Department of Interior — even though the department manages the national parks.
“What keeps me up at night,” Ruskay said, “is the status quo in the Middle East,” which he sees as a dangerous proposition for Jerusalem; the level of “poverty among the affluence in our community;" and the findings of surveys like the Pew Research Center and the federation’s own New York population study that indicate a growth among the extremes on the left and right — namely ‘no affiliation’ and fundamentalist Orthodox — and a decline within the center, the core constituency of federation.
But in the end Ruskay remains an optimist. He is convinced that caring communities will attract caring Jews, and feels blessed to have been in his post, which he describes as “energizing, mostly inspiring, and only limited by hours, and at times, exhaustion.” As for his time spent soliciting donors, he says: “I may be delusional but I have viewed” that aspect as “less about asking people for funds than enabling them to do mitzvot.”
It’s what he believes, and is no doubt a key to his success.
Gary@jewishweek.org
Gary Rosenblatt has been the editor and publisher of The Jewish Week for 20 years and has written more than 1,000 "Between The Lines" columns since 1993. Now a collection of 80 of those columns, ranging from Mideast analysis to childhood remembrances as "the Jewish rabbi's son" in Annapolis, Md., is available. Click here for details.
36 UNDER 36
Now online -The Jewish Week's 2014 "36 Under 36" issue profiling up-and-coming
Jewish leaders.
Read about the amazing initiatives these individuals are involved with from pediatric medicine and AIDS eradication to musical healing, Israel advocacy, the arts and
much more.
These are caring, involved people that give back to the Jewish people and the world.
Peter Shelsky in his new Cobble Hill shop. Lauren Rothman/JWNo More Schlepping
Shelsky's of Brooklyn offers a full range of fun and funky Jewish appetizing - no trip to Manhattan required.
Lauren Rothman - Food and Wine Editor
There was a time, in the dark ages of the past, when Brooklynites craving a quality whitefish salad or a heaping plate of kippered salmon had to delay the gratification, hopping the subway or piling into the car for a too-long trip to the Lower East Side. But since 2011, all that’s changed.
It was in that year that Peter Shelsky, an Upper East Side native transplanted to Carroll Gardens, opened Shelsky’s of Brooklyn, his eponymous appetizing shop offering a full range of expertly-sourced smoked fish and house-cured salmon. The shop’s motto? “No more schlepping.” Finally, a Brooklyn establishment with bagels, bialys, rye, pumpernickel, fish and schmears — all under one roof.
Shelsky’s tiny Smith Street storefront quickly became too small for Peter’s outsized culinary ambitions — he is a former restaurant chef and owner of a catering business — and for the increasing enthusiasm of the shop’s customers. So he packed up and moved to a much larger Cobble Hill location, which opened on Court Street two weeks ago. The restaurant is not kosher.
“It took too long to get here, but the move has been great for us,” Shelsky said on a recent weekday morning spent in the white-tiled store. “Now we have room to play.”
Playfulness, indeed, forms a large part of the Shelsky’s ethos. Much of the shop’s success can be attributed its wildly popular, zanily-named sandwiches: fully-loaded combinations of up to three types of fish plus multiple spreads and vegetable toppings with names such as “The Great Gatsby” (pastrami-cured salmon, honey mustard, horseradish cream cheese and red onion served on caraway rye) and “The Fancy Pants” (lake sturgeon, house-cured gravlax, Ben’s cream cheese, tomato and red onion served on a bagel or bialy). Shelsky began thinking up the crazy creations when he was just a kid who a spent most Sundays on the Lower East Side eating Kossar’s bialys and Russ & Daughters pickled herring with his grandmother.
“I used to take a bagel or bialy, load it up with lox, sable and herring, schmear the whole thing with scallion cream cheese and serve it open-faced,” he recalled. “My family was mortified. But you know what? It was delicious. We serve that sandwich here today and of course it’s called ‘The Peter Shelsky.’”
Like its new neighbor Mile End — chef Noah Bernamoff’s popular Montreal-style smoked meat shop located just a few blocks away — Shelsky’s has helped make traditional, Eastern European-style Jewish eating trendy by applying cheffy techniques to established classics and by not being afraid to mix the old with the new. There is whitefish salad here, but it’s sustainably sourced directly from fishermen in Wisconsin. There’s house-made pickled herring, as well as Jamaican jerk herring and herring smoked over French oak staves. House-cured gravlax aplenty for the traditionalists among us, and a Szechuan kung pao version for the daring, too.
This willingness to tweak tradition is what has enabled a new wave of chefs and restaurateurs to establish Jewish food as a bonafide trend, Shelsky said.
“There are a few of us out there now — I’m thinking of people like Noah and the Russ & Daughters folks and the Gefilteria people — who are doing really cool things with this food,” he said. “We’re taking the old school and revitalizing it —sometimes by using chef tricks, but just as often by restoring the recipes to the way they used to be made.”
Plus, Shelsky jokes, his own efforts on social media have a played a large role in getting Jewish food into the limelight.
“I go crazy with the hashtag #JewFoodRenaissance,” he laughed. “I’m sure that’s really what has set this trend in motion.”
Shelsky’s of Brooklyn
141 Court Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
718-855-8817
shelskys.com
Travel
The hills overlooking Florence, where the author and her mother traveled together. Wikimedia CommonsTraveling Companions
Hilary Larson, Travel Writer
Fiesole, Italy, is a gloriously romantic spot. High on the hazy hills overlooking Florence, it’s the sort of over-the-top setting you associate with Merchant-Ivory movies about British girls falling in love under the Tuscan sun. Everything and everyone seems beautiful, bathed in golden light.
“This is so romantic,” I sighed with a shiver of pleasure. Next to me, my mother nodded.
It was one of many occasions when I’ve found myself in a fabulously romantic location, with everything in place for a lovers’ getaway ... together with my mom. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because we are both partial to Spain and Italy, two countries with more than their share of sexy sites.
But here’s the thing: I’m quite certain my mom has a better time with me in Italy than she would with my father, even though they still hold hands and gaze into each other’s eyes after 40 years together. They’re a very romantic couple. But my father does not like Italy. In fact, he does not like Europe, or really, any place that involves sleeping in a bed not his own. And the expression of long-suffering, patient martyrdom he adopts when forced out of his comfort zone is — believe me — not romantic in the least.
I, on the other hand, like everything my mother likes about Italy, so it’s great fun to savor it together: the gelato, the tiramisu, 20 pasta meals in a row, entire days spent shopping when we could have been in museums. … Did I mention the gelato?
All of which proves that on vacation, your companion matters. Mutual interests, availability and a desire to share time together are obvious things to consider, but here — based on my experience — are other significant factors:
Preferred level of exertion. Do you plan on doing a lot of walking? How about climbing hundreds of stairs up towers or scrambling along hillsides? Are you planning to rent a bike? Not everyone is up for these exertions.
My friend Melissa and her mom and sister were contemplating a trip to Paris, where she envisioned strolling the boulevards by day and hopping through wine bars by night. Given her mother’s bad knees and her sister’s likely pregnancy, however, this seemed like an imperfect setup.
Closely related to how much energy a person can exert is how much he or she is willing to exert while ostensibly at leisure. For some people, the once-in-a-lifetime trip to Thailand means getting up early each day to explore as many villages, temples or beaches as possible. For others, it means the freedom to sleep until noon, drink coffee in bed and sprawl on the beach all afternoon. I’m famously a culture-vulture, but there are years when all I want is a seaside terrace and absolutely no schedule.
Eating habits. I’m not just talking about kashrut here, though it goes without saying that dietary restrictions ought to be negotiated up front. Some countries are easy places to go vegetarian or order the fish baked separately in foil; others are decidedly not. Then you have the picky eaters, who gratefully fall back on pizza wherever they go, versus the ones who will order the waiter’s recommendation without knowing exactly what it is.
Also, some people eat their way through a country — and don’t mind spending their souvenir dollars on memorable Michelin stars — while others keep it simple, and cheap, with cheese sandwiches and bottled water. Those two people also shouldn’t do Paris together.
The spontaneity factor. I know people who make reservations for every meal and every hotel months before they leave. I am not one of them, and such people would likely find my pull-into-town-and-improvise style too much for their nerves. The former may not experience as many serendipitous joys as the latter, but they almost definitely get a better deal on their airfare.
When you’re thinking about which friends or relatives to travel with, consider whether they — and you — schedule your weekends six months in advance, or whether they call you up on Sunday morning to see what you’re doing for brunch.
Sometimes, the companions are the entire point of the trip — and that’s where a little flexibility, and a generous spirit, are called for. A Passover cruise may not be your thing, but if it’s your grandmother’s thing and she’s paying for everyone to be together, be thankful for the family time, and stock up on Dramamine.
And sometimes, the ideal companion is yourself and no one else. One of my favorite escapes was a week alone in London many years ago; I spent six hours inside the Tate Modern without anyone complaining about sore feet or boredom, made new friends at the hotel (and more later in the pub). Best of all, I took no pictures.
What remain to this day are the memories — which are, in the end, the best companions of all.
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