Dear Reader,
Our extensive coverage of the Gaza war includes a report by Josh Mitnick, near the Gaza border, and Stewart Ain in New York, on Israel's endgame plan for the conflict; coverage of the pro-Israel rally at the UN, the largest of its kind in years; a first-person account by former Jewish Week staff writer Sharon Udasin on dealing with life under fire in Rehovot; Rabbi Shmuley Boteach on "Who's Afraid Of Hamas?"; UJA-Federation's new CEO Eric Goldstein on the group's emergency mission to Israel; Christian clergy split on response to Gaza conflict; and our Editorial, "Give War A Chance."
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ISRAEL NEWS
Amid Tunnel Threat, Ideas For End Emerge
As Israel-U.S. tensions simmer, calls to have Abbas rule Gaza arise.
Joshua Mitnick and Stewart Ain
Patrol road of Kibbutz Nir Am, located near the northeast tip of Gaza.
‘See that forest? The clash happened on the other side.”Micha Ben Hillel of Kibbutz Nir Am near the Gaza Strip pointed to a line of trees on a hill separated from the kibbutz’s perimeter fence by several hundred feet of parched thistle and overgrown grass.
Kibbutz members used to play soccer and picnic beyond the perimeter. But that all changed last week after Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel through what Israel calls one of Hamas’ terror tunnels. The tunnel ended about a mile from the kibbutz.
The terrorists, wearing Israeli Defense Forces uniforms, emerged from the tunnel July 21. They were detected by an IDF lookout. Although an Israeli air strike killed the first wave of terrorists, a second squad surfaced and managed to fire an antitank missile at an IDF jeep — killing four Israeli soldiers — before being killed by the IDF.
Now, walking even inside the IDF-patrolled road is a risk.
For 14 years, this border farming collective has accustomed itself to frequent barrages of terrorist rockets. According to members’ tallies, Nir Am ranks ahead of Sderot, which has received the lion’s share of publicity as the most-targeted southern city. Residents here said they were aware of the threat from border tunnels, but didn’t give it much consideration until last week’s attack.
In fact, when they heard the sounds of gunfight in the pre-dawn hours July 21, kibbutz members said they thought they were hearing the sounds of war from inside of Gaza Strip. That has become something of the norm here; they never suspected it was from Hamas terrorists almost on their doorstep.
“This is a new threat,” said Betty Gavri, a member of the kibbutz emergency response team. “We knew it existed in theory, but until you experience it, you don’t really know.”
In the last week, eliminating the threat from those tunnels has been elevated to Israel’s main goal in its assault on Hamas’ military infrastructure in Gaza. Israel reported uncovering at least 32 such tunnels, many with dozens of entryways.
The tunnel operation became fodder for the newest spat between Israel and the United States over a cease-fire proposal by Secretary of State John Kerry. In a very public move, Israel’s cabinet rejected the Kerry plan last Friday night, alleging that it would force the Israeli army to halt destroying the tunnels mid-way. It insisted that had it been accepted, the cease-fire proposal — brokered with the help of Qatar and Turkey — would have been a victory for Hamas. (The Obama administration said cease-fire talks with the two countries were preliminary and the proposal was not a final one.)
The Kerry proposal was never given a real chance of success. Even before the cabinet discussion began, Israeli Justice Minister Tzippi Livni, considered one of the most sympathetic members in the Israeli cabinet to the U.S. position on Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, informed Kerry that she objected.
“There were ideas that were totally unacceptable,” she told Israel Radio. “The bottom line was a boost to extremist forces in the area. It was bringing Qatar and Turkey into the issue, when they are part of the broader world view of the Muslim Brotherhood.”
For Israeli officials, it was yet another example of a chasm of world views between the Netanyahu and Obama administrations.
A senior Israeli official familiar with the cabinet deliberations faulted the U.S. for not better utilizing what the official characterized as a “unique unity” of interests between Israel and the so-called moderate Arab governments in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority — all of which want to see Hamas weakened by the conflict. From Israel’s perspective, Egypt’s original cease-fire proposal, which ignored all Hamas’ demands, was preferable — and Israel believed Cairo had enough leverage of its own to force Hamas to accept it.
The Israeli official said also that Israel found it “strange” Kerry left Egypt and the Arab League out of the cease-fire talks.
“Egypt is the only country that has leverage on Hamas — Egypt can’t be ignored,” he said.
Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. under Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, faulted Kerry for his remarks in Cairo, in which Kerry said the world was “wondering when the sides come to their senses.” Oren said equating Israel and Hamas came across as “detached” to Israeli ears.
“That was an extraordinary statement in my eyes, because it means that a democratic country, an ally of the United States that has been hit by 2,600 rockets and was the target of tunnels designed to kill and maim and kidnap, is somehow acting irrationally in trying to defend ourselves. Like lost we our senses.”
The issue now is whether the Israeli cabinet will decide to launch a major offensive into the heart of the Gaza Strip where Hamas leaders and its military wing are hiding and adopt a different approach.
Gilead Sher, former chief of staff to Prime Minister Ehud Barak who co-chairs Blue White Future, a non-partisan group supporting a two-state solution, said what is needed now is a fresh look at the entire situation once the Hamas military structure is dismantled with an eventual goal of demilitarizing Gaza.
“If the U.S., Egypt and other regional actors are part of the international community working on a scheme to demilitarize Gaza in a way that is acceptable to Israel, there will be a timeline and benchmarks,” he told The Jewish Week in an interview Monday. “And simultaneously we will see the restoration of civilian life in Gaza. What kind of timeline, guarantees and security we get remains to be seen.”
He said Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas should continue to speak for the Palestinian people, both in the West Bank and Gaza.
“It is high time we consider reintroducing Abbas and the Palestinian Authority into Gaza, first at crossing points and then with a broader presence in Gaza,” Sher continued. “This is an opportunity to restore the Palestinian Authority over Gaza, little by little. This will also pay dividends because the international community will be able to channel money, investments and donations for the rehabilitation of Gaza through the PA.”
Asked about an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, Sher suggested that the U.S. “recalibrate its expectations and allow two states for two people to emerge even in the absence of a full-fledged final agreement. We need to incorporate transitional agreements, partial agreements and even unilateral independent constructive moves to make two states a reality. Then we can resolve the core issues gradually.”
Sher said the previous round of Israeli-Palestinian talks should “serve as an anchor” or a reference for new talks and that agreements on each issue should be implemented immediately.
“Create a reality on the ground,” Sher said. “It makes sense politically and allows for a development that is positive traction on the ground.”
Netanyahu said Monday that he favors international help to demilitarize the Gaza Strip. In that way, the entry of people and goods into Gaza could be monitored to ensure that money and supplies are not used for terror activities.
“Dismantling the tunnels is a first and necessary step toward demilitarizing the Strip,” he said in a statement. “A mechanism for preventing the rearmament of terror organizations and a demilitarization of Gaza has to be part of any solution. The international community should forcefully insist on this.”
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz said Netanyahu doesn’t believe Hamas will agree to disarm and hand over its thousands of rockets, anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles, so he wants the international community to deal with the issue. The European Union’s call last week for the disarmament of Hamas and other terror groups in Gaza is seen as a first step. And the paper said Netanyahu wants Gaza’s borders supervised to prevent Hamas from rearming.
Back on Kibbutz Nir Am, residents are still getting used to the idea that they might one day again find terrorists on the kibbutz’s doorstep and they want the offensive to continue so that won’t become a reality.
Like many of the other kibbutzim around the Gaza border, families with small children here have evacuated. Instead, there are Israeli soldiers in full combat gear who sweep the entire kibbutz to ensure that no terrorists slipped into the kibbutz and are hiding here.
Security around the kibbutz has also been beefed up. Infantry in bulletproof vests patrolled the kibbutz fence looking out to the forest where the gunfight took place. A sniper checked his rifle magazine, and a soldier behind a cement cube embankment cocked his gun.
In the distance toward the Gaza border, the hills thundered with the Israeli army’s assault on Hamas terrorists inside the Gaza Strip.
“You’re not scared being out here?” one of the soldiers asked a reporter. “Just now there was a penetration close by. There’s no guarantee it couldn’t happen a second time.”
Joshua Mitnick is Israel correspondent; Stewart Ain is a staff writer.
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NEW YORK
Major Rally For Israel At UN Urges Hamas Defeat
At odds with White House, Democratic officials say no cease-fire until tunnels destroyed.
Stewart Ain and Gary Rosenblatt
Michael Miller, CEO of the JCRC, which co-sponsored the rally with UJA-Federation. Michael Datikash/JW
Dolores Berkowsky of Livingston, N.J., held her cell phone above her head Monday, snapped a photo of the thousands of other pro-Israel supporters around her, and quickly e-mailed it.“I just sent the photo of the rally to my son Jesse in Israel, who until last August was a lone soldier there,” she said.
Organizers said the hurriedly assembled pro-Israel rally near the United Nations drew more than 10,000 flag-waving supporters — the largest local gathering of its kind in recent memory. Sponsored by the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, UJA-Federation and a range of other Jewish organizations, it featured remarks by public officials and community leaders asserting Jerusalem’s right to defend itself against Hamas, whose charter calls for Israel’s destruction.
Ironically, several members of Congress spoke of Washington’s unwavering support for the Jewish state even as the diplomatic divide between the Obama administration and the Netanyahu government widened and grew nasty.
Rep. Elliot Engel, a Democrat and ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, assured the crowd that congressional support for Israel was strong and nonpartisan. He drew cheers when he said the Emergency Iron Dome Replacement Act, to bolster the Israel Defense Forces, will be approved soon, and that the bond between Washington and Jerusalem is “unshakeable and unbreakable.”
But there was no mention among the speakers of President Barack Obama or Secretary of State John Kerry, whose names may well have been booed — given the makeup and reactions of the crowd — in light of reports in the Israeli press that a U.S.-proposed cease-fire declaration was more sympathetic to the position of Hamas, a declared terror organization, than to Israel, a close U.S. ally.
It was later repudiated by the Obama administration, which said that what the Israeli press had leaked was not a formal proposal.
Engel also criticized the mainstream media for lack of “fairness and accuracy.”
Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, contradicting the position of his fellow Democrats in the administration, asserted that there could be no cease-fire “until Israel gets rid of Hamas.”
“We must send a message to that building over there,” he said in a disdainful reference to the United Nations, which, along with the White House, has called for an immediate cease-fire. The message, Schumer said, was that there would be no peace until Hamas is dismantled of weapons and its tunnels destroyed.
“Why,” he asked, “is Israel judged differently than every other nation?”
Ido Aharoni, Israel’s consul general to New York, spoke briefly, saying he was there to express “profound gratitude” from the people of Israel for what he called “the world’s largest show of support” for the current Israel campaign in Gaza. He called the event “a celebration” of Israeli “perseverance.”
Rep. Steve Israel, a Long Island Democrat, won wide applause when he said he has 100 congressional signatures on a letter to the UN urging that the world body investigate Hamas, not Jerusalem, for war crimes.
Other speakers included Alisa Doctoroff, president of UJA-Federation of New York; JCRC president Ronald Weiner; Israeli UN Ambassador Ron Prossor; Richard Joel, president of Yeshiva University (Orthodox); Chancellor Arnold Eisen of the Jewish Theological Seminary (Conservative); and Rabbi Aaron Pankin, president of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (Reform).
Michael Miller, executive vice president and CEO of the JCRC, served as emcee, introducing the speakers and welcoming the crowd, which later sang Hebrew songs in support of Israel with the Maccabeats a cappella group.
Communal officials were anxious about the turnout for the hastily arranged rally, especially since efforts in recent years in opposition to UN visits by former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad drew sparse crowds. But Monday’s participation was clearly different. Despite only announcing the rally last week, the space on 47th Street between First and Second Avenues was tightly packed with a wide spectrum of participants.
It was the first major rally here on Israel’s behalf since the war with Hamas began nearly a month ago. And it was among the largest pro-Israel rallies held here in recent years, attracting teens bused in from camps, adults on their lunch hours, and others who came to the city specifically for the rally.
Organizers had planned for about 5,000 people and did not set up loudspeakers close to Second Avenue. But attendees seemed to neither mind the fact they could not hear the speakers nor see the podium.
“I haven’t been able to hear a thing, but it doesn’t make any difference,” said Eli Helfgott of Cedarhurst, L.I. “I think this rally is very well attended, especially given the short notice.”
One woman from Great Neck, L.I., Karen Mazurek, said the rally was reminiscent of the Soviet Jewry rallies of the 1970s and ’80s in the sense that the Jewish community had come together “to stand as one.”
“We are here to support Israel in its time of trouble,” she said. “We have to remain strong and resolute ...”
Numerous people held signs reading, “We are all Israel” and “I stand with Israel,” which were distributed by the sponsors. Among the handmade signs were, “Dismantle Gaza for Peace,” “Kick Hamas Ass,” and “Less Hamas, More Hummas.”
One person said he saw participants grab and tear-up pro-Palestinian signs held aloft by two people. But the crowd’s anger was directed at the signs, not those holding them. In fact, despite the large number of people and a hot noonday sun — the temperature was above 85 degrees and about two dozen attendees were treated for heat exhaustion — rally organizers described the crowd as “very peaceful, enthusiastic and responsive to the speakers.”
Alicia Zahn, 46, said she took a bus from Allentown, Pa., to be at the demonstration.
“I thought it was right to come and show my solidarity,” she said, an Israeli flag draped around her shoulders. “We have to do something — it’s hard to know what else we can do.”
Ayelet Frankel, 24, drove to the rally from Kew Gardens Hills, Queens, with her 3-month-old son and her sister, Eliana Watson, 23, who brought her 5-month-old daughter.
“We thought it was very important to come and show our support,” Watson said as she and her sister each fed their infants in baby carriages amid the crowd.
Their mother, Mandy Brecher of Lawrence, said: “We knew it would not be easy having two babies here, but it was right to be here to support Israel — young and old alike. We’re thrilled to be here.”
Charlie Schulberg and his wife, Phyllis, came on one of the two buses sent by the Riverdale YM-YWHA.
“I’ve been going to rallies for Israel since it was founded,” said Schulberg, 80. “I remember taking a ‘pushka’ for JNF during Israel’s War of Independence in 1948 and collecting money on the subway from Tremont Avenue and 125th Street. Everybody contributed. I filled it up in one night.”
“It’s distressing,” he added, “that 66 years later, I’m still going to rallies for Israel.”
editor@jewishweek.org
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OPINION
Life Under Fire
Sharon Udasin
Special To The Jewish Week
Rehovot — As an American-born, 29-year-old journalist living in this central Israeli city, I’ve encountered the same existential dilemma each night for several weeks now: Is it safe to take a shower now?
A siren blares through my living room windows a few times a day, a warning of rockets fired from Gaza during the ongoing hostilities between Hamas and the Israeli army.
The sound means that I have 90 seconds to scramble down two flights of stairs to our building’s basement safe room.
Which means that before I decide to step inside the shower, I double-check my iPhone apps and Twitter feeds to see when and where the last rocket fire episode occurred.
For me, and for most Israelis, everyday parts of life like walking outside and driving have presented similar quandaries as the country has come under attack. We try to maintain a normal routine and remain strong in the face of terror, but familiar routines are no longer routine. As I drive, I constantly glance from side to side, to identify a suitable place to seek shelter should the air raid siren begin to blare.
Finding a place to be under rocket fire is not always a possibility, though. Pictures of cars pulled over alongside Tel Aviv’s Ayalon Highway during an air raid siren show drivers crouched down in the open, in between their cars and a road barrier until the threat is over.
Even my treadmill runs at the gym are a source of stress. As I mount the machine, I look up at the building’s arched tin roof and ceiling fans dangling from what already seems to be pliable material. I know that there is no safe room at the facility, and I strategize the dash I would take to the bathroom, where the walls are at least concrete, should a siren sound.
Like me, my friends are still heading to the gym, attending work meetings and going to doctor’s appointments, but doing so with open eyes and attuned ears all the while.
Everyone has a story.
At a pool in our city, a child who refused to run to shelter without his flip-flops — and the lifeguard who would not leave him alone — were miraculously unscathed when shrapnel landed about three yards away, less than 60 seconds after a siren sounded.
Rehovot is about 18 miles south of Tel Aviv; 32 miles north of Gaza. For Israelis, living in the south or center of the country, and even northward to the outskirts of Haifa, this has meant a perpetual threat of rocket attacks. Thankfully, due to the Iron Dome anti-missile defense system, casualties have been kept to a minimum.
Based on Rehovot’s distance from the Gazan border, Home Front Command estimates that we have 90 seconds to seek shelter when the siren blares — a luxury compared to the 15 seconds of Gazan perimeter communities like Sderot.
Whatever the allotted time frame, we have programmed ourselves to react automatically and immediately. Pairs of sandals are lined up next to an apartment’s entrance, and keys stuck in the lock of the door.
When “the Hamas alarm clock” — as many tired residents have dubbed the unwelcome wakeup calls on social media — rings, I grab my keys, cell phone and husband and dart for the apartment door. On my first and second tries, I learned that it would be impossible to bring our cat to the shelter, as the sheer sound of the alarm sent him darting in fright under our bed.
While my city has not faced the nearly constant barrage of rocket fire that areas like Sderot, Beersheba, Ashkelon and Ashdod have received, we have experienced many sprints to shelter — in my building’s case, a cockroach-infested communal space.
Iron Dome missile interceptions are often audible, even when attacks are not close enough to necessitate a siren.
This is my second encounter with warfare since my move here from New Jersey in September 2010. During the last conflict, the November 2012 Operation Pillar of Defense, air raid sirens and accompanying missile fire narrowly skipped over my town.
Jogging down the stairs of our building, my fingers admittedly trembling each time, I encounter three populations — those running with us to the basement shelter, those amassing in the stairwell with their dogs on leash, and those altogether ignoring the alarm and remaining inside their apartments. When I leave my apartment, I hear my next-door-neighbor still watching television.
Those in the stairwell tell me they feel safer taking cover there, but I choose to heed the official instructions.
In the shelter — a cement cavern with one stray light bulb dangling from the ceiling, crowded with mountains of discarded junk like a bubblegum pink dollhouse and a boxy PC screen from the late 1990s — I take a seat on a plastic garden chair.
Joined by two or five or eight neighbors, and any passersby from the street who needs refuge, we sit for the next few minutes and engage in small talk. We intermittently count the booms aloud — thus far anywhere between two and about 15 — and report them in real-time to our friends and family members on Whatsapp.
Home Front Command recommends remaining in the shelter for 10 minutes, unless otherwise indicated by additional sirens. But most of my building’s occupants make their way to the door just a couple minutes after counting the thunderous interceptions.
This combination of stalwart adherence to security mixed with fatalistic nonchalance has come to define the Israeli character. Embracing the situation with quintessential Israeli dark humor, Tel Avivians have taken to complaining on Facebook when the terrorist group rouses them before their morning coffee or interrupts the World Cup semifinals.
On a recent night, while my husband was at a conference abroad, I accepted my mother-in-law’s repeated invitation to stay overnight in her home, which is located in a much newer high-rise building on the other side of town. Her apartment boasts its own protected room, which also happens to be my husband’s childhood bedroom. When the sirens blared at 8 a.m. Friday morning, I was able to stay comfortably in bed, a convenience not available to most Israelis.
Four years ago this summer, I sat in my Jewish Week cubicle, packing up my desk for my 6,000-mile move to Israel. While uncertain what my future would bring me there, it was the most life-changing decision I had ever made.
During the last weeks I received an insensitive Facebook comment from an old friend suggesting I “move back to New Jersey,” and death wishes from Gazan Twitter activists whom I’ve never met.
Despite these comments, I am staying here, proud to have made this place — including its musty underground shelters — my home.
Sharon Udasin is the environment, energy, agriculture and transportation reporter for The Jerusalem Post. She was a staff writer at The Jewish Week in 2008-2010.
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OPINION
Who’s Afraid Of Hamas?
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach
Special To The Jewish Week
My children spent the day recently on the Gaza border giving out popsicles to the soldiers going into battle. Of course, to cover all the religious bases, and because we are a Chabad family, they also put on tefillin with the soldiers.
This was their idea completely. They rented a car, bought the popsicles, and off they went. I’m very proud of them for what they did. Not just because they care about soldiers who are risking their lives for Israel, although that’s wonderful. And not just because they demonstrated selflessness by caring about others who are taking such huge risks for their freedom, although that’s admirable.
The main reason I’m proud is because they weren’t afraid.
We currently have four children in Israel, thank God, and by next week it will be five. My children’s love for Israel, and their willingness to overcome fear in serving the soldiers of an embattled democracy, gives me pride as an American, as a father, and as a Jew.
As an American because this great country was the first to tell the tyrants of Europe, “We’re not afraid.” Every single signatory to the Declaration of Independence knew he could be hung from a gallows for his act. Kings used fear for millennia to rob their people of freedom. But the single greatest characteristic of the Founding Fathers was their contempt for fear. “Give me liberty or give me death,” said Patrick Henry in 1775.
We’re losing some of that in America today. We raise our kids to be afraid to walk home from school by themselves. And our freedom is farmed out to 2 percent of the population: the courageous and incomparable soldiers of the American military.
As a father, my kids make me proud because fear is the most limiting emotion there is, especially for children. Of course Hamas is dangerous. They are heartless murderers, as dangerous as they come, believing that murdering Jews is the highest virtue and will get them into heaven. False bravado in the face of Hamas means being contemptuous of life.
But in my book, “Face Your Fear,” I distinguish between fear and caution. Fear is a hysterical reaction to an imagined threat while caution is a calculated response to a real danger. There is a world of difference between them. Fear is imprisoning, locking your potential on the inside.
How many Jews are afraid to go to Israel right now? How many are watching this war from afar, grateful that there is an ocean separating them from the murderous rockets of Palestinian terrorists?
I don’t blame them, and I personally have never served in any military. So who am I to speak?
But to be afraid is to suffer. Fear constitutes the most intense form of human oppression. Unless the world vanquishes fear, it will lead to the rise of more terrorists like Hamas who will exploit fear in order to gain power. It is time for the Jewish people to fight back, to declare that we are not at the mercy of our fears.
For thousands of years to be a Jew meant being afraid. Afraid of anti-Semites, afraid of pogroms, afraid of the Church, afraid of Islam.
Israel was a collective statement on the part of an oppressed and persecuted people that they were tired of being afraid, that fear could no longer be a Jewish birthright.
In the modern world, there are tremendous forces bearing down upon us, from financial pressures to familial responsibilities to random acts of senseless violence. In a world that is increasingly empty of God and bereft of soul, we feel hollow on the inside, causing us to succumb to the pressures of the outside.
But the greatest guarantee of a mediocre life is a life lived in fear. Human greatness begins where submission to fear ends. You cannot become wealthy like Bill Gates without first casting aside the fear that you will fail. You cannot become a Winston Churchill if you are intimidated by the evil power you must fight. You cannot marry your soul mate unless you overcome your fear of commitment.
It is courage rather than caution that leads to real achievement and a fulfilling life. And while Hamas, Iran, Islamic Jihad and countless other Islamist radicals are dedicated to the annihilation of the Jewish people, this ancient people has decided that, as Franklin Roosevelt expressed it so eloquently in his State of the Union address January 1941, every human being is endowed with the right to be free of fear.
“Freedom from fear,” he said, “translated into world terms, means a worldwide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor, anywhere in the world.”
This is why Israel is fighting Hamas: to rid this genocidal group of terrorists of the rockets and arms they employ in their hell-bent desire to perpetrate a second holocaust.
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is the author of 30 books, including “Face Your Fear: Finding Courage in an Age of Caution.” His Twitter address is @RabbiShmuley.
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THE JW Q&A
New UJA-Fed. Exec Feeling Israelis’ Pain
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
Eric Goldstein, who became CEO of UJA-Federation of New York on July 1, flew to Israel Saturday night with 20 other New Yorkers on the organization’s first solidarity mission since the start of Israel’s war with Hamas. Goldstein, 54, who had been a leading partner at the New York law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, has a long record of Jewish communal service. Most recently he served as UJA-Federation’s vice chair, president of the Beth Din of America, and as a board member of the Ramaz School. He spoke by phone Tuesday from the southern Israeli city of Beersheva.
Q: On Monday, some 10,000 to 15,000 New Yorkers staged a pro-Israel demonstration near the United Nations. Did Israelis hear about it?
A: We were instrumental in putting it together with the Jewish Community Relations Council. I saw several Israeli newspapers today and they all wrote about the massive rally, so the word did get out to Israelis.
What is the mood in Israel?
This is a very, very difficult time here. Israelis went through a war with Hamas in 2012, but this is even worse. These are dark, difficult times, but there is a real national consensus that this is something they need to do. A poll showed 87 percent of Israelis support the government’s efforts here.
How close to the Gaza Strip did you get?
We were in Sderot, which is as close as you can get. It was relatively quiet when we were there. … We went also to the cemetery in [the central Israeli city of] Modi’in and met with the parents of Gilad Sha’ar, one of the three murdered Israeli boys [whose abduction and murder by Hamas terrorists June 12 while hitchhiking near Hebron ignited the current conflict]. They were so touched to see us. And as we were leaving, we learned that there had been significant Israeli IDF casualties in Nahal Oz.
I don’t think we can fully integrate what living here is like, but yesterday we went from a feeling of calm when we thought there was a cease-fire to a feeling of real despair when we heard of the significant casualties. We got a small taste in a day of the psychological ups and downs Israeli’s endure everyday during this conflict.
What was it like meeting Sha’ar’s parents, Ofir and Bat-Galim?
They wanted to meet with us. Gilad’s father spoke about how they had enormous comfort in knowing that this tragedy has resulted in Jewish unity in Israel and around the world.
About 10 representatives from the Greek Jewish community, who were also on a solidarity mission, joined us. I spoke to the head of that delegation, who said they came because when Greece went through economic problems, the Jewish community globally supported them and they felt a reciprocal desire to show support to Israel during its time of need.
None of the boys [murdered] were from Modi’in, but they all lived near there and the boys were buried next to each other. I spoke on behalf of UJA-Federation of New York and said we can’t remotely imagine the horror of this. But it is personal to me as well because my two sons attended a yeshiva in the same area where the boys had [gone to school], and they hitchhiked from the exact spot where they did. It is heartbreaking; you feel it deeply.
We hear a great deal about Israeli anxiety over the terror tunnels dug by Hamas to enter Israel and kill and abduct Israeli men and women, children and soldiers.
We met with a teenager yesterday who lives in a kibbutz down south who said the children are unwilling to go to the bathroom and take showers because they don’t want to be in a situation in which they can’t get to a shelter in time. … We heard about people [concerned about the tunnels] calling to say they hear noises. There is a [UJA-Federation-funded] trauma hotline that is getting 1,500 calls a day. There are acute trauma needs in the south.
Have Israelis spoken of the death and destruction happening in Gaza?
Yes, we spoke to many Israelis who despaired at the loss of innocent life in Gaza as well. They recognize that the Hamas leaders are putting their people in harm’s way by making them shields for missiles. … Israelis are not callous; they mourn the innocent loss of life on both sides.
stewart@jewishweek.org
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NEW YORK
Christian Clergy Split On Gaza War
While one coalition asks congress to end Israel aid, another defends the country in passionate press conference.
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
As diplomats in the Middle East worked to finalize a cease-fire proposal between Israel and Hamas, Christian clergy here joined Israeli Ambassador Ido Aharoni to denounce Hamas’ continued rocket attacks on Israel.
“This conflict between Hamas and Israel could not reveal a starker contrast,” Rev. Paul de Vries, president of the New York Divinity School, said in prepared remarks ahead of the press conference last Friday at the Faith Exchange near Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan.
“Israel does all it can to protect the lives of all people in Israel and Gaza, while Hamas intentionally terrorizes men, women, and children in both Gaza and Israel,” he said. “Hamas has malignant morals.”
A total of 32 Christian clergy attended the press conference, along with several rabbis, including Joseph Potasnik, executive vice president of the New York Board of Rabbis.
The press conference came after several other Christian denominations sent a letter to the White House and members of Congress calling for an “investigation” into the security assistance Israel receives from the United States.
Among the groups signing the letter were the United Church of Christ, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), Pax Christi and the United Methodist Church. These same groups made a similar request in 2012 that was rebuffed.
B’nai B’rith International issued a statement decrying the letters and saying the letters make plain the fundamental misapprehensions of its signatories, who see the “underlying causes” of the conflict as Israeli “occupation” and the “siege” of Gaza, as well as the failure to reach a two-state solution.
“Are the denominations who signed this letter aware that Israel completely withdrew from Gaza nine years ago?” B’nai B’rith International President Allan J. Jacobs said. “It even uprooted every single Jewish settlement community there, yet was rewarded with relentless terrorist attacks.”
B’nai B’rith also rejected the letters’ calls for Israel to lift “the Gaza siege.”
“This, however, is clearly not the solution to ending recurring bloodshed because unconditionally ending blockade measures would allow the further, unfettered mobility of armaments and Palestinian terrorists,” the statement said.
“Why would these denominations pin the cause of the conflict on Israel, America’s key democratic ally, yet ignore those complicit in the atrocities carried out by Palestinian terrorists?” asked B’nai B’rith International Executive Vice President Daniel Mariaschin in the statement. “Repeatedly over the past week, rockets have been uncovered at UN schools in Gaza and cross-border infiltration tunnels were revealed to have been constructed with imported materials, not to mention the indiscriminate firing of rockets putting innocent civilians constantly at risk. Those civilians also include a Christian community that, unlike elsewhere in the region, is free and continuously growing.”
At Friday’s press conference, Rev. Robert Stearns, executive director of Eagles’ Wings, an evangelical pro-Israel group, said in written remarks: “Israel is defending its civilians from over 2,000 rockets that have fallen in the last several weeks, while Hamas specifically directs innocent civilians into harm’s way by launching attacks from, and storing weapons in hospitals, schools, and homes. Clear thinking requires that we not stay silent on this issue of the value of human life.”
Rev. de Vries later told The Jewish Week that the “consensus [among the Christian clergy] is that Gaza needs to be demilitarized completely and that any cease-fire has to have that as a condition.”
Several of the clergy at the press conference called the Palestinian leaders, “Leaders from hell.”
“Our hearts go out to the Palestinian civilians, who are being told by their leaders not to leave their homes despite Israeli warnings to do so,” Rev. de Vries added. “Nobody volunteers to be cannon fodder. … The Palestinian leaders are abusers of the Palestinian people and their abuse stinks to high heaven. Israeli leaders care for the Palestinian people and for their own people.”
editor@Jewishweek.org
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Also this week, singer Peter Himmelman's new song defending Israel echoes his father-in-law Bob Dylan's "Neighborhood Bully"; columnist Erica Brown on observing The Three Weeks of mourning; and warm remembrances of Alan "Ace" Greenberg, a major figure in Jewish philanthropy, and famed author Bel Kaufman, who died this past week. He was 86; she was 103.
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SHORT TAKES
Gaza: With God On Our Side
Jonathan Mark
Associate Editor
Peter Himmelman’s “Maximum Restraint” is reminiscent of his father-in-law Bob Dylan’s “Neighborhood Bully.” Peter Himmelman via
Israel has had some terrific war songs, going back to 1948’s Palmach march, and 1967’s “Jerusalem of Gold,” performed for the first time as an elegy in May of that year, but transformed into a celebratory psalm three weeks later after the Six-Day War. The greatest English song supporting an embattled Israel is Bob Dylan’s blistering, sarcastic and yet poetic “Neighborhood Bully” of 1983, written in the wake of Israel’s leveling of an Iraqi nuclear reactor and of the 1982 Lebanon war.This week, Dylan’s son-in-law, Peter Himmelman, delivers his own sly and sarcastic rocker, “Maximum Restraint,” defending Israel in its war with Hamas.
Himmelman, 54, who in a relatively quiet but acclaimed career has been nominated for a Grammy and an Emmy, explained in a Huffington Post blog (July 24), if Israel has the right to exist then Israel has the right, and is even “required,” to mount “a legitimate defense against a regime that is focused on the murder of Jews.” He says “false moral relativism” between Israel and the Palestinians — equating Hamas’ deliberate targeting of innocent civilians with Israel’s retaliatory strikes against the terror group’s infrastructure — “creates [the] vacuum in which Jewish people die — with the seeming full consent of the world” — a world that taunts Israel to use “maximum restraint.”
In “Maximum Restraint,” Himmelman sings, “They’re shooting grads and quassams, from hospitals, mosques and schools./ When they photograph their dead and dying, Hamas just sits and drools./ Another photo-op to take, take straight to CNN./ They paint Israel as the aggressor — and then it all begins again.”
In his blog, Himmelman reminds readers of Israel’s pullout from Gaza nine years ago, how Israel left Gaza with “$14 million worth of hydroponic flower factories, tens of buildings and schools left intact, plans for parks, a railroad, a seaport, an airport, even a zoo ... all these plans were laid for the Gazans to begin the construction of their own state. As you well know, none of it happened and not because of anything Israel did to prevent it from happening.” He adds, “Just so we’re all clear about history: [Israel’s] ‘blockade’ of Gaza didn’t begin until the flower gardens were razed and turned into launching sites, until tunnels were dug and munitions brought in from Iran and Sudan and until the rockets started raining on the Jews in southern Israel.”
Himmelman sings, “We gave them back Gaza and they started their missile attacks./Then they went cryin’ to the UN when Israel hit them back./ Too few Jews have died, there must be something wrong./ Israel must be cheating, it’s not fair that they’re so strong.” Verses like that echo “Neighborhood Bully,” when Dylan sings, “He’s not supposed to fight back, he’s supposed to have thick skin./ He’s supposed to lay down and die when his door is kicked in.”
Himmelman writes that his 20-something son Isaac tried to console him by comparing the Jewish situation to that time before Israel’s founding when Jews were powerless. Today, he writes, the challenge is how much power to wield. For supporters of Israel, says Himmelman, “that is consolation indeed.”
jonathan@jewishweek.org
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JEW BY VOICE
When In Rome
Erica Brown
Special To The Jewish Week
As we approach Tisha b’Av, I feel compelled to share a few thoughts from an early June trip to Italy. It’s a magical place by all accounts, but the hours we spent at the Coliseum and Forum were unexpectedly hard. Suddenly, the Three Weeks of mourning over the Temple’s destruction, and the loss of Jerusalem and our ancient political autonomy jumped off the pages of Lamentations. To see the Arch of Titus up close, with its chiseled menorah and Jewish exiles frozen in stone, was painful. To see public signage explaining that the Coliseum was paid for in part by the sacred vessels of our Temple brought anguish. We were forced to contribute to the brutality of 50,00-70,000 spectators watching humans and animals ripped apart for public entertainment, an anathema to our own tradition and values.
I had another thought at the odd nexus of the Talmud and Monty Python. The Talmud acknowledges the gifts of the Romans despite their attempts to diminish our religious identity. In “Life of Brian,” a group of disenfranchised citizens complains, “What have the Romans ever done for us?” Just aqueducts, sanitation, roads, irrigation, medicine, education, health, wine … the list goes on. The Romans gave us many of the underpinnings of Western civilization as we know it: the myths that grace literature and art, the architecture that made buildings more efficient and aesthetically pleasing, the inventions that are still in use today. How were they so ahead of their time?
Then I came across a small fact in Alberto Angela’s “A Day in the Life of Ancient Rome,” culled mostly from research done on Pompeii and its environs. The Roman workday was about six hours long and started at dawn. By early in the afternoon most men and women were already in public bathhouses — slaves and free men, plebeians and senators. The baths were terribly crowded, and people spent hours in them, often on a daily basis. While these were different experiences for those with money and those without, the intermingling of economic classes and professions meant that people had hours of leisure time in a comfortable spot — in the heat or frigidarium — surrounded by diverse voices and ideas.
Interdisciplinary research on innovation has yielded the interesting find that creativity peaks when hyper-stimulation is combined with deep relaxation. It helps explain why we have so many good ideas while in the shower (or why it may be hard for some people to leave a shower). Research on creative collaboration shows what happens when people with diverse backgrounds spend time with each other in a spirit of openness. Put lots of different people in a public bathhouse every afternoon, and good ideas breed.
Let me be clear. I am not suggesting that our federations, JCCs, synagogues and day schools build public bathhouses to get us to think more innovatively. Keep your clothes on. I am suggesting that the organizational walls we proudly build may have kept us in and others out too often for real innovation to take place. Where is our forum, literally? Where can Jews of different ages, spiritual orientations and socioeconomic strata come together regularly to brainstorm while they relax? We used to have the shvitz. I know of no such place today.
Romans in bathhouses have been replaced by tourists with iPhones. Yet beyond columns and statuary, the Romans left the legacy of relaxing every day with friends and strangers and creating a place where ideas can live. The Jews gave the world a set of ideas and values intangible enough to outlive bricks and mortar, but you cannot “visit” monotheism or intellectual and spiritual achievements as a tourist.
In the ruins of the Forum, feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of the Romans’ contribution, I thought about the moment when we first approached the Coliseum. A man dressed in a red satin gladiator costume for photo ops looked up at us and said “Ma Nishma.” How absurd to see an Israeli dressed as a Roman gladiator. Latin has long fallen out of common use, but there’s hardly a place in the world where you cannot hear Hebrew.
Rabbi Yossi bar Hanina in the Talmud imagined that “one day in the theaters and circuses of Rome, the officers of Judah are one day destined to teach Torah in public” [BT Ta’anit 6a]. The ancient rabbis pitted Rome against Jerusalem, warning us of the evils of too much power, beauty or sport — all temporal values. Standing humbly at the floor level of this sprawling 20 plus-acre complex, I was awed by one thought I will treasure when I sit on the floor reading Lamentations on Tisha b’Av. And I hold on to it now while so much conflict afflicts our Jewish homeland.
We are still here.
Erica Brown’s most recent book is “Happier Endings: A Meditation on Life and Death” (Simon and Schuster). Subscribe to her weekly Internet essays at ericabrown.com.
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NEW YORK
Federation’s ‘Ace’ Giver Remembered
Remembering Alan ‘Ace’ Greenberg, ‘philanthropic giant,’ ‘role model’ and ‘mensch.’
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
Alan “Ace” Greenberg, a native of Oklahoma City who made his fortune here, was a generous contributor to UJA-Federation.
For more than two recent decades, the top contributors to the UJA-Federation of New York’s annual campaign would gather one evening every fall at a handsome Upper East Side apartment for the drive’s kickoff. Alan “Ace” Greenberg and his wife Kathryn would stand at their door, welcoming guests to what came to be known as “the Greenberg event,” a combination cocktail party and fundraiser that every year raised tens of millions of dollars and set the tone for the next months of solicitations for the philanthropy.Greenberg, who died of complications from cancer at 86 on July 25 “was a known quantity,” whose success in business, as chairman of the Bear Stearns investment banking firm, and his philanthropic commitment to a wide variety of Jewish and civic causes inspired other people to give, said Jeffrey Solomon, president of the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies.
“His generosity was very known,” said Solomon, who earlier served as chief operating officer of UJA-Federation. “His legacy is all the people who saw him as a role model for what it meant to be a mensch.”
Greenberg was described by friends this week as a cigar-chomping, risk-taking iconoclast who helped build Bear Stearns into a major brokerage and headed the firm when it collapsed in 2008 at the height of the Great Recession; as a hands-on manager who would wander around the office for 45 minutes every morning talking to employees of all stripes; as a master, self-taught magician who kept a deck of cards on his desk; as a champion bridge player who played with the likes of Warren Buffet and Malcolm Forbes; as a fisherman and archer and hunter and pool player and dog trainer; as a gruff, no-nonsense boss who eschewed long conversations with colleagues but gave $360,000 to some of his firm’s lowest-paid employees who were likely to lose their jobs when Bear Stearns merged with JPMorgan Chase. As a big giver who eschewed public honors. And as a proud Jew who every year led his family seder and never forgot his roots in Oklahoma City, son of a clothing-store owner.
He told PBS talk show host Charlie Rose that he always gave half of his considerable charitable donations to Jewish causes — in addition to UJA-Federation, recipients included the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and several projects sponsored by The Jerusalem Foundation.
Greenberg was a friend of the late Teddy Kollek, the long-time mayor of Jerusalem, who established the Foundation to support projects that the municipal budget did not cover.
“He was from a generation who knew what it was not to have a State of Israel,” said Moshe Fogel, executive director of The Jerusalem Foundation, “a generation that appreciates the challenges facing Israel.”
Non-Jewish recipients of Greenberg’s largess included the Hospital for Special Surgery in Manhattan (to provide Viagra for men who could not afford it), and a dwarfism program at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.
But Greenberg, who also presided over UJA-Federation’s annual Wall Street dinner, was best known in Jewish circles for the “Greenberg event,” which he and his wife hosted from 1988 to 2011.
Sitting on a big stuffed chair, in a room decorated with the mounted heads of stuffed animals, Greenberg would hold court as his several dozen guests would mingle before getting down to business. A high-profile guest like Barbara Walters would speak. Greenberg would tell a story, then announce his pace-setting gift — then he would call cards, asking each guest how much he or she would contribute to the campaign.
“People felt at home,” Solomon said. “He built a sense of community.”
In later months, Solomon said, Greenberg would call or meet with other prospective donors. “He covered more cards than anyone else in the campaign — he raised money for the cause with no fanfare.” Many of the people whom Greenberg contacted were Bear Stearns clients. “It was difficult to say no to him. He made a lot of people a lot of money.”
Daniel Forman, a philanthropic advisor to Yeshiva University who, when raising funds for UJA-Federation worked closely with Greenberg, wrote this week that “there was no wasting time with Ace.” He said his face-to-face fundraising sessions with business and corporate leaders “usually lasted no longer than 20 minutes (including breakfast) and our batting average was 1.000.”
In Abigail Pogrebin’s 2007 “Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish” (Broadway Books), Greenberg said he considered tzedakah mandatory, “a Jewish tax.”
“Everyone knows I’m a Jew,” he told Pogrebin. “There isn’t anybody I do business with who doesn’t know. If my name was O’Reilly, I might be embarrassed by somebody saying something against Jews, but it doesn’t happen with a name like Greenberg. They might think it, but they don’t say it.”
When he headed Bear Stearns, he insisted that all executives give four percent of their after-tax compensation to some philanthropic cause.
“He had this deep conviction that if you became very successful you had an absolute obligation to pay it back,” said Eric Goldstein, a longtime UJA-Federation lay leader who attended several Greenberg events and became CEO of the philanthropy July 1. “He was a philanthropic giant.”
Goldstein said he met with Greenberg, at Greenberg’s invitation, a few weeks ago to discuss UJA-Federation business. “He remained very committed.”
“For him, there was no [financial] gain” in his philanthropic activities,” Solomon said. “At a very basic level, there was a decency about him,” said Solomon, who added that Greenberg a few decades ago offered, unsolicited, to have the firm hire disabled individuals from a UJA-Federation agency that Solomon then headed.
Solomon told the story of bringing his soon-to-become-bar-mitzvah son to Bear Stearns about 30 years ago to open an account with the bar mitzvah gifts the youth was sure to receive. A broker took the Solomons down to the trading floor.
Greenberg, who spotted the visitors, stopped his official business and started doing magic tricks. For minutes on end. “For this 13-year-old kid,” Solomon said.
When Bear Stearns staffers would bring him business-related questions, he’d bark, “I’m busy,” Solomon said.
“He was a really good magician,” said his daughter, Lynne Koeppel. She said her father would often invite magician friends to the Greenberg home for dinner, and years later would entertain her family’s birthday parties with magic tricks.
He liked magic — and hobbies like fishing and bridge — because “he didn’t like hobbies where the richest person won,” Koeppel said.
Greenberg is survived by his wife; his daughter; a son, Ted; a sister, DiAnne Hirsch; a brother, Maynard; and five grandchildren.
Greenberg attended Oklahoma University on a football scholarship; after suffering a back injury, he transferred to the University of Missouri, where he studied business. He started as a $32.50-a-week clerk at Bear Stearns in 1949; by 1958, he was a full partner; he worked up to CEO in 1978 and chairman in 1993.
His philosophy, he wrote in “Memos From the Chairman” (Workman Publishing Company, 1996,) was, “The time to stop stupidity and be tough is when times are good. Any schlemiel and most schlamozels try to cut costs when times are bad.”
steve@jewishweek.org
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BOOKS
Keeper Of Her Grandfather’s Memory
Remembering Bel Kaufman, author of influential city schools novel and diplomat-at-large for the iconic Sholem Aleichem.
Sandee Brawarsky
Culture Editor
Bel Kaufman, who died last week at 103, at her home in recent years, and with Sholem Aleichem. RECENT PHOTO CREDIT: M DadikashBel Bel Kaufman published her first poem, a paean to spring, as a 7-year-old in Odessa. It was four lines long, signed Belochka Koifman, in a Russian children’s magazine. When she was 11, she began a drama, and wrote 60 pages describing the characters in a notebook that she carried with her when the family moved to New York later that year, and which she kept through her life. Everyone in her family wrote: her mother Lyalya published stories; her father, a physician, was a poet and translator; and her grandfather, who wrote many letters to her, was the great Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem.
When Kaufman died last week at age 103, she was praised for her long and celebrated literary career, as the author of a major bestseller, “Up the Down Staircase,” about life in an urban high school, and also for her public role as the keeper of her grandfather’s memory. She was an indefatigable diplomat-at-large for the writer, considered one of the giants of modern Yiddish literature; his stories became the basis for “Fiddler on the Roof.”
Just over two months ago, Kaufman spoke at the annual yahrtzeit gathering for her grandfather. In his will, Sholem Aleichem requested that on his yahrtzeit friends and family members gather to read his most humorous stories — he wanted to be remembered with laughter, or not at all. Each year, the family invites actors to read stories, some in Yiddish and, increasingly, in English translation. At the conclusion, Kaufman — the last living person to have known Sholem Aleichem — reminisced.
That was the last public appearance of a woman who loved going out and was highly visible in the city’s Jewish cultural life. She had the gift of presence, with a deep voice, precise diction in her second language of English and the innate ability to tell a story and engage her audience, whether an individual or a crowd of thousands. In fact, after publishing “Up the Down Staircase,” she became a speaker-in-demand on subjects of education and personal motivation, and later on Jewish culture and humor. With her oversize jewelry, curls piled on top of her head and erect posture even in the four-inch heels she still favored in her 11th decade, she had the bearing of a Russian baroness.
Kaufman came to America from Odessa in 1922, six years after her grandfather’s death. Knowing no English, she was placed with much younger first graders, and recalls the kindness of her first teacher, which inspired her own desire to teach. After attending Hunter College, she taught in the city schools for more than 30 years before writing the short story that would become her 1965 semi-autobiographical novel about an idealistic young teacher. Even the funniest parts, Kaufman explained, were written through tears: She was divorced, and her mother was dying of cancer.
Over the years, she was very generous with writers and researchers. Alisa Solomon, who spoke with Kaufman for her recent book, “Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof,” recounted that Kaufman was really pleased when some reviewers said that that she “wears the mantle well” and compared her use of humor to her grandfather’s. Kaufman also told Solomon that she loved “Fiddler” and thought that her grandfather would have loved it too.”
Sometimes people would confuse her grandfather’s fiction with his life, and ask Bel questions like, which one of Tevye’s daughters was her mother.
“She was an indomitable soul,” filmmaker Joseph Dorman recalled. When his film “Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness” — in which she appears — came out, she was approaching 100 years old, and spoke at many screenings, never rattled by a single question.
“It remained very important to her to carry on and promote Sholem Aleichem’s legacy,” he said, adding, “She was a grand dame, and also very humble, with the earthy Jewish qualities of her grandfather. It made for an interesting mix.”
Jeffrey Shandler, chair of the Jewish Studies department at Rutgers University, recalled attending the memorial gathering when it was held in Bel’s Park Avenue apartment. She’d joke that it was “the hottest ticket in town” because her crowded apartment got toasty in May.
“It was an event like no other, and an invitation to attend was highly prized,” he said. The stories were “wildly hilarious — not only the texts themselves, but the readers, who included stars of both the Yiddish and English-language stage who knew how to make the most of the material, which was written to be realized in live performance — something Sholem Aleichem himself had done throughout Europe and the United States in the last years of his life. These were magical evenings, bringing a particular kind of Yiddish histrionic storytelling into full flower.”
Many point out that for her deep involvement in Yiddish culture, Kaufman didn’t know Yiddish.
Throughout their lives, Bel and her brother Sherwin, nine years her junior, spoke Russian to each other. Even in these last months, when she couldn’t speak on the phone, they would email each other in phonetic Russian, so that a non-Russian speaker could read the notes to her and then draft replies.
In 1999, Bel and Sherwin, a retired physician who is a musician, songwriter and poet, and other family members traveled back to Odessa, invited by the government of Ukraine, for a Sholem Aleichem festival on the 140th anniversary of his birth. Kenneth Kaufman, an entertainment lawyer in Washington, D.C., and Sherwin’s son, said that they attended productions of Sholem Aleichem’s work, and that Bel was treated like a celebrity, interviewed on television and followed everywhere by cameras.
In a reminiscence of that trip, Bel wrote that all who were left of old Odessa Jewry gathered to meet her, with questions, speeches and even a copy of her first-published poem. “They poured out their love for Sholem Aleichem, and it spilled over on me,” she wrote. To her surprise, many had read “Up the Down Staircase” in Ukrainian translation and many non-Jews were familiar with her grandfather’s work. Earlier, Bel had made other trips at the invitation of the Soviet Writer’s Union in 1968 and of Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev in 1987.
Through her 90s, Kaufman kept up a routine of ballroom dancing twice a week. She danced with grace and more than a little dramatic flair, and she and Sidney, her husband of 40 years, especially liked to tango. She chalked up her high energy and good health to good luck.
Many people who live as long as she did would have outlived their friends, but Bel’s circle of friends were of mixed ages, many decades younger. Three days after her death, a small group of friends and family gathered in New York City. Margo Berdeshevsky traveled the furthest, flying in from Paris.
Kaufman was Berdeshevsky’s teacher at the High School for Performing Arts and also a friend of her mother’s. She remembers Kaufman sitting on the edge of her desk, with her legs crossed, and that she was very sexy. “She never lost that.”
“One day she told me that she had a dream, that she had written Emily Dickinson’s poem, ‘Because I could not stop for Death.’ I asked, ‘Are you afraid of dying?’ and she grabbed my hand and said, ‘No, not really.’ What she was trying to say was that she was afraid of not having her full faculties. As long as she had that, she was in her full power and magnificence.
“My personal heart’s farewell was to visualize her dipping in the tango, and doing a high back kick all the way through the tunnels of light.”
As per her wishes, Bel Kaufman’s ashes were to be sprinkled around her grandfather’s grave, in Mount Carmel cemetery in Queens. Along with her daughter and brother, she is survived by a son, her husband, and granddaughter. The woman who made grand entrances and exits will be remembered at a memorial service in the fall. At that time, the words of her grandfather will echo. “When the heart is full,” Sholem Aleichem wrote in “Das Groise Gevins” (1895), “the eyes overflow.”
editor@jewishweek.org
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Our prayers are with Israel and an end to the suffering on all sides.
Sincerely,
Gary Rosenblatt
P.S. Please check out the newest version of our website ¬ faster and easier to navigate and read ¬ for breaking stories, videos and exclusive blogs, op-eds and features.
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http://www.thejewishweek.com/
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Between the Lines - Gary Rosenblatt
IDF Deaths Shine Light On Fate Of Lone SoldiersDiaspora army volunteers have a home away from home at Lone Soldier Center.
In the end, Israel’s lone soldiers who fell in battle in recent days were not alone. Far from it.
The funerals for Max Steinberg, 23, of Los Angeles, Nissim Sean Carmelli, 21, of South Padre Island, Texas, and Jordan Bensemhoun, 22, of Lyon, France, were attended by huge throngs of Israelis — more than 30,000 for Steinberg and 20,000 for Carmelli. In the midst of rocket attacks from Gaza, ordinary citizens came out to the cemeteries to show solidarity with and appreciation for the 6,000 young diaspora Jews who are voluntarily serving in the Israel Defense Forces without parents in Israel.
In the poignant eulogies given last week by dignitaries and family members at the three funerals there were references to Staff Sgt. Michael Levin as a role model for those who feel a calling to leave the safety of their homes and connect their fate to the State of Israel.
Levin, one of five lone soldiers who died in the 2006 war in Lebanon, was a young man whose love of Zion and perseverance in joining a fighting unit despite his small size (5-foot-6 and 118 pounds) captured the hearts of Israelis and Jews everywhere. He was 22 when he was killed by a Hezbollah sniper on Aug. 1, 2006.
His parents, Mark and Harriet Levin, leave for Israel this week for their annual visit to observe his yahrtzeit (the seventh of Av) at the Mount Herzl Military Cemetery. They may take some measure of comfort in knowing that, according to grounds keepers, their son’s grave is likely the most visited of all the thousands of burial places of war heroes at the serene Jerusalem setting. But the anniversary of Levin’s death and the current conflict in Gaza, with Israel losing dozens of IDF soldiers, make this a particularly hard time for the Levins.
“It has been a difficult couple of weeks, reliving it all over again,” acknowledged Mark Levin. “The tragedy can’t be changed. And we had hoped Michael, who was the only American and first paratrooper killed in that war, would be the last.”
We at The Jewish Week feel a special connection to the Levins. Michael’s twin sister, Dara Goldstein, is a Jewish Week sales assistant, and Rich Waloff, our associate publisher and chief revenue officer, and his wife, Eileen, are close friends and neighbors of Michael’s parents.
I never had the privilege of meeting Michael, but from the stories told, the articles written and the poignant documentary, “A Hero In Heaven,” made about his life, a portrait emerges of a young man who seemed to represent the very spirit of Israel, an underdog succeeding beyond all expectations.
In the 2009 book, “Lone Soldiers: Israel’s Defenders From Around The World,” Michael was one of 14 volunteers profiled by Jerusalem Post diplomatic correspondent Herb Keinon. He wrote that Michael’s story has had such resonance “because of the choices he made while he was alive.” Keinon cited Michael’s “decision to move to Israel right after high school without any family; his decision to press to get into a front-line combat unit; his decision to cut short his vacation to Philadelphia in July 2006 to fight in the Second Lebanon War; his decision to ceaselessly nudge his commanders to make sure that he would not be left out of the fighting in Lebanon.”
Mark Levin is often asked about what sparked his son’s love of Zionism. “It’s hard to explain,” he said, “but we believe he was born that way. Hashem gave him a Zionist neshama [soul] at birth and we watched it grow.”
In their grief following Michael’s death his parents decided to make good on a goal their son had expressed during his two and a half year service in the army.
“He had gone to see a friend who helped lone soldiers,” Mark Levin recalled, “and Michael told him, ‘after I finish my service we are going to start a center for lone soldiers.’”
So the Levins channeled their sadness into creating the Lone Soldier Center in memory of Michael Levin, now established in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Beersheba and Haifa, and serving up to 3,000 men and women a year in creating a home away from home for soldiers on their own.
Josh Flaster, a 29-year-old native of Phoenix, has been affiliated with the center since its founding, the first five years as a volunteer and now as national director. He was one of two Jews in his high school class of 600, he said, and left home a decade ago to serve in the IDF and settle in Israel. A brother and sister followed him. He said the number of lone soldiers has continued to increase from year to year. These days he spends much of his time visiting them in hospitals and at their army bases, encouraging them, bringing them food and clothing, and coordinating visits from family members.
Flaster knew Michael Levin, and said that he was, for both Israeli and diaspora Jews, “the embodiment of the lone soldier — someone who came to help unselfishly, not for his own glory or benefit.
“Israelis in the army see the lone soldiers as the last frontier of Zionism,” he continued, “committed to doing anything possible to help this country.”
The center serves as a support group for the soldiers, providing housing, furniture, food and basic needs. More than that the volunteers, who include about 350 former lone soldiers, are a source of warmth, guidance and inspiration.
“The family of the lone soldier here in Israel is other lone soldiers,” said Flaster. “We sponsor social events to bring them together and make them feel part of a bigger community.”
A key aspect of his job is meeting with potential lone soldiers, often young diaspora Jews in Israel for gap-year programs at universities or yeshivas. He offers advice and counseling, stressing that joining the IDF is “not like summer camp or an adventure. I tell them it can either be very boring or very dangerous.”
Flaster estimated that about one-third of the IDF lone soldiers are from North America, and noted that the fastest growing contingent is made up of Israeli haredim who feel a responsibility to serve in the army. For their patriotism they are shunned by their families and rabbinic leaders, with no place to go home to for Shabbat or holidays, according to Flaster.
“We look out for each other, for our own,” he noted, regardless of background or country of origin. “That’s what families are for.”
Mark and Harriet Levin will take part in the dedication of a new and expanded lone center facility in Jerusalem during their 12-day stay. A number of dignitaries are expected to attend, including Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat and former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren.
Another highlight for the Levins will be emotional visits with large numbers of Michael’s friends who have become his parents’ friends as well. It was through Michael’s fellow soldiers that the Levins learned a small Israeli flag was found folded up in his pocket when he died — a poignant lesson in Zionism for so many, in Israel and around the world, who take Israel’s existence for granted.
They say they have no regrets about allowing Michael to serve in the IDF, seeing that it was his passion and calling, or about honoring his wish that if he were to die in battle, he be buried at Mount Herzl.
Harriet Levin said that if he had been buried back in the U.S., few would visit his grave. “In Israel,” she said, “he stands for so much more.”
As his eighth yahrtzeit is observed this week, may his memory be a blessing — and may there no more fresh graves dug in Israel for those who serve in the IDF.
Gary@jewishweek.org.
For more information on the The Lone Soldier Center in memory of Michael Levin, go to www.lonesoldiercenter.com
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.
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Food and Wine
Summer's Favorite FruitAtaulfo mangoes make for a scrumptious dessert carpaccio.
Ronnie Fein - Special To The Jewish Week
If you’ve never eaten an Ataulfo mango, stop what you’re doing and buy one because you’ve missed something very special. Its sweet, incredibly luscious flesh is something to celebrate.
It comes with health benefits too: a good source of vitamins A, B and C and fiber, even though this variety isn’t as stringy and fibrous as the more common (Tommy Atkins) one.
Ataulfos are small, a serving for one, like a ripe and ready plum you might nosh on a sunny summer day.
They’re right there in the bin, waiting for you. But you have to act fast because these precious, succulent fruits will only be around until about mid-August.
Ataulfo mangoes are flattish and oblong, with a tiny, curvy soft point at the end. They’re yellow when ripe, sometimes with a bit of green, and like all soft fruit, there should be a little “give” when you press the skin.
When I tasted my first Ataulfo I immediately recalled a scene in “Indochine.” In that movie, Catherine Deneuve plays a plantation owner in 1930s Indochina; she’s French and has adopted a Vietnamese daughter. At one point she’s nibbling a mango and explains that although she may look like a westerner -- an “apple” – in her heart and soul she is Asian – a “mango.”
Yes, mangoes are eastern at heart. They originated in Southeast Asia. And they may have seemed exotic to westerners in the 1930s and to Americans even as late as 1992, when Indochine hit the theaters.
But no more. Every supermarket sells them, and mangoes are now among the most popular of fruits.
But it’s the Ataulfo having its heyday now. You can use it like any other mango variety: for salsa, ice cream, smoothies, chutney, pie and so on. But this particular variety is so sweet and juicy it’s best to treat it like a good summer peach: eat it out of hand or place slices on top of a cheesecake, fruit tart or use it in a fresh mesclun or roasted beet salad.
I like to keep recipes simple with fruit this tasty. But it’s easy to dress Ataulfos up a bit to make a festive dessert without overwhelming it with too many other flavors or overdosing it with sugar.
Recently I made Ataulfo Mango Carpaccio by placing slices of the fruit on dessert plates, sprinkling them with honey and lime juice and scattering some fresh chopped mint and crystallized ginger on top. It took less than 10 minutes to make dessert for four people and the plates looked beautiful.
If you don’t like ginger, you can make this dish using crushed pistachio nuts or cashews instead. Mangoes are related to both, so they’re naturals together.
Ronnie Fein is a cookbook author and cooking teacher in Stamford. Her latest book is Hip Kosher. Visit her food blog, Kitchen Vignettes, at www.ronniefein.com and follow on Twitter at @RonnieVFein.
Hide Servings & Times
Yield:
4 servings
Active Time:
15 min
Total Time:
15 min
Hide Ingredients
3 Ataulfo mangoes
1-1/2 tablespoons lime juice
1 tablespoon honey
1 tablespoon chopped crystallized ginger or 2 tablespoons chopped pistachios or cashews
2 teaspoons chopped fresh mint
Hide Steps
Peel the mangoes and cut the flesh into slices; arrange them attractively on dessert plates. Sprinkle with the lime juice and drizzle with honey. Sprinkle with crystallized ginger or nuts and with fresh mint. Let rest about 10 minutes before serving. Makes 4 servings
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Travel - Cedar Rapids, IA
The National Czech and Slovak Museum and Library lies on the banks of the Cedar River across Lion's Bridge. Cedar Rapids Convention & visitors BureauBohemia On The Prairie
Hilary Larson - Travel Writer
Few New Jersey commuters think of Interstate 80 as the conduit to grand adventure. And for those who do contemplate the transcontinental journey on I-80 — its western terminus is San Francisco — the long Midwestern slog through days of corn fields may seem less exciting than the southerly route through deserts and canyons.
But for those making the trip in October, I-80 offers a pleasure largely unsuspected by Northeastern travelers: Iowa’s fall foliage, whose brilliant hues light up a pastoral landscape as distinctive as any in New England. And the ideal spot for a leaf-peeping detour is Cedar Rapids, a short jog north on I-380, where a lively Bohemian heritage brings fall beer and harvest festivals.
Toward the turn of the last century, Jewish merchants were among the Central European settlers of this small Midwestern city about 100 miles east of Des Moines. Today, the Jewish presence is minimal — though Temple Judah, a Reform synagogue, has a close-knit congregation — but fans of Mittel-European pastry will find plenty to kindle nostalgia in the bakeries and Old World markets of Czech Village-New Bohemia Main Street District, a historic neighborhood on the banks of the Cedar River.
Those banks overflowed in biblical fashion in June of 2008, submerging much of downtown Cedar Rapids in eight or more feet of water. Historic structures and collections were inundated; already-struggling merchants feared the worst. But like the plucky immigrants before them, locals rebuilt and reopened, and today the area offers a funky blend of vintage charm and modern artisanal fare.
Czech Village is centered on and around 16th Avenue S.W. near the 16th Avenue Bridge; its spiritual heart is the National Czech and Slovak Museum and Library. The original museum campus on the riverbanks was so badly damaged in the flood that its exhibitions moved to temporary space, while the historic main building was relocated to a new, higher-elevation lot nearby. It formally reopened to great fanfare in 2012, with expanded galleries and lovingly restored phonograph recordings of Bohemian songs.
Even for those without Central-European ties, the museum aims to engage patrons with multimedia recreations of the European immigrant experience — one common to many American families — and with updated historical exhibits that dramatize Czechoslovakia’s Communist struggles and Velvet Revolution. There are replicas of the steerage section of a trans-Atlantic steamship; a watchtower from the Communist era; and a Secret Police car.
There is no more fitting symbol of Cedar Rapids’ post-flood renaissance than NewBo City Market, which opened in the fall of 2012 as part of the Czech Village downtown reconstruction effort.
Filling an entire square block, the market — whose name is a contraction of “new Bohemian” — brings together the city’s Czech-Slovak roots with an effort to synthesize the region’s agricultural identity and modern foodie culture.
In addition to local merchants selling everything from corn to cupcakes, the market features rotating seasonal stalls, a hands-on kitchen for cooking classes, seasonal fairs and farmer’s markets in the sprawling front yard, children’s entertainers and concerts by area musicians.
Throughout Czech Village, an Old World spirit is tangible amid a contemporary mix of hair salons, pubs and boutiques that keep the district from feeling like a theme park. It’s fun to browse through the crystal, garnet and ceramic handicrafts at mom-and-pop shops like Czech Cottage. And you might even hear Czech spoken at Sykora Bakery, where nostalgists and noshers line up for dark Bohemian rye bread, yeasty houska rolls, and pastries filled with poppy seeds and raisins.
Even Brucemore, a grand estate that is Iowa’s only National Trust Historic Site, is a place to immerse in Czech culture — despite the fact that none of the three prominent families who occupied it between the 1880s and the 1980s was Czech.
On 26 landscaped acres just east of downtown, the Queen Anne-style brick mansion hosts a lineup of concerts that feature Janacek, Dvorak and other Bohemian masters alongside Shakespeare, cabaret, art shows and Bach on a 1929 Skinner pipe organ. In October, when Iowa foliage hits its colorful peak, Brucemore’s formal gardens, pond and orchard are an ideal spot to enjoy a heartland autumn.
It’s also the time of year to engage in that most Czech of pastimes — raising a mug of frothy, golden beer. The Czechs, as I have observed from Prague to Peoria, are among the most enthusiastic of imbibers, with families filling whole tables at beer halls from morning till night.
In any season, Czech Village is home to rollicking old-time pubs like the Red Baron and modern craft spots like Lion Bridge Brewery. The Czech Fall Festival brings Czechtoberfest, filling the streets with oompah and embroidery.
Meanwhile, over at the National Czech and Slovak Museum, the BrewNost! International Beer Tasting Festival draws thousands of merrymakers to its music-filled tents. There may be a more authentic way to experience Iowa culture in autumn — but I doubt it.
editor@jewishweek.org
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