BREAKING NEWS
ISRAEL NEWS
Ceasefire Ruptured, Israeli Soldier Captured
Fire-fight in Rafah and capture took place 1.5 hours after supposed 72-hour ceasefire began.
Just 1.5 hours after ceasefire declared, Hamas militant opened fire on IDF Troops. Getty Images.An Israeli soldier is feared captured near Rafah, Israeli media reported, and a cease-fire collapsed in its first hours.
The army spokesman said the soldier there is a suspicion that the soldier was captured during exchanges of fire between Hamas militants and Israeli troops on Friday in the southern Gaza Strip. His family has been informed, the spokesman’s office said.
Multiple Israeli media also reported that Israeli officials have told U.N. officials that Israel considers the cease-fire ruptured.
The suspected abduction occurred when gunmen opened fire on IDF troops in the southern Gaza Strip city. The army is conducting extensive searches and efforts to resolve the situation, army sources told the Ynet news site.
Israel Radio quoted Moussa Abu Marzouk, a Hamas official based in Cairo, as saying that the group was holding a an officer and that he was captured before the cease-fire’s 8 a.m. start.
Israeli army officials said the fire-fight in Rafah and the capture took place 1.5 hours after the start of what was supposed to be a 72-hour U.S.-U.N.-brokered cease-fire in the Gaza Strip.
U.N. special envoy Robert Serry said Friday in a statement that he was informed by Israel of “a serious incident this morning” during the truce involving “a tunnel behind IDF lines in the Rafah area of the Gaza Strip,” in which two soldiers and multiple Palestinians were killed.
“The United Nations is not in a position to independently confirm these reports,” Serry says. If confirmed, however, “this would constitute a serious violation of the humanitarian ceasefire in place since 8 a.m. this morning by Gazan militant factions, which should be condemned in the strongest terms.”
editor@jewishweek.org
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Dear Reader,
Just 90 minutes after the start of what was supposed to be a three-day cease-fire, hopes were dashed when a firefight broke out in Rafah and an Israeli soldier captured.
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ISRAEL NEWS
Ceasefire Ruptured, Israeli Soldier Captured
Fire-fight in Rafah and capture took place 1.5 hours after supposed 72-hour ceasefire began.
Just 1.5 hours after ceasefire declared, Hamas militant opened fire on IDF Troops. Getty Images.
An Israeli soldier is feared captured near Rafah, Israeli media reported, and a cease-fire collapsed in its first hours.
The army spokesman said the soldier there is a suspicion that the soldier was captured during exchanges of fire between Hamas militants and Israeli troops on Friday in the southern Gaza Strip. His family has been informed, the spokesman’s office said.
Multiple Israeli media also reported that Israeli officials have told U.N. officials that Israel considers the cease-fire ruptured.
The suspected abduction occurred when gunmen opened fire on IDF troops in the southern Gaza Strip city. The army is conducting extensive searches and efforts to resolve the situation, army sources told the Ynet news site.
Israel Radio quoted Moussa Abu Marzouk, a Hamas official based in Cairo, as saying that the group was holding a an officer and that he was captured before the cease-fire’s 8 a.m. start.
Israeli army officials said the fire-fight in Rafah and the capture took place 1.5 hours after the start of what was supposed to be a 72-hour U.S.-U.N.-brokered cease-fire in the Gaza Strip.
U.N. special envoy Robert Serry said Friday in a statement that he was informed by Israel of “a serious incident this morning” during the truce involving “a tunnel behind IDF lines in the Rafah area of the Gaza Strip,” in which two soldiers and multiple Palestinians were killed.
“The United Nations is not in a position to independently confirm these reports,” Serry says. If confirmed, however, “this would constitute a serious violation of the humanitarian ceasefire in place since 8 a.m. this morning by Gazan militant factions, which should be condemned in the strongest terms.”
editor@jewishweek.org
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As the war continues, Jewish-Muslim tensions are rising over here as well, with two anti-Muslim hate crimes reported in Brooklyn. But at a Sheepshead Bay YM-YWHA, Jewish and Muslim counselors responded to the growing vitriol by organizing a Shabbat/Iftar dinner that drew hundreds.
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NEW YORK
Breaking Bread As Gaza Looms
As Jewish-Muslim tensions rise in Brooklyn, two communities try dinner, and tolerance.
Amy Sara Clark
Staff Writer
“There are too many walls between people … between Jews, too,” said Charlie Ulrich, right, at the dinner. Amy Sara Clark/JW
Within days of the June 12 abduction of the three Israeli yeshiva students, Nourhan Elbassiony’s Facebook feed began to change. By the time the boys’ bodies were discovered two weeks later and a Palestinian was burned alive in an apparent revenge attack, the Sheepshead Bay college student’s social media feed had become a battlefield of its own.
Elbassiony, a particularly gregarious Egyptian-American 20-year-old, has a wide circle of both Jewish and Muslim friends. As tensions rose overseas, she saw the vitriol boil over on both sides.
“People were posting hateful remarks — it was just very negative, and I took it really personally,” said the 20-year-old Adelphi University exercise science major.
To stress to her friends on both sides that the people they were bashing are, well, people, she decided to organize a dinner for South Brooklyn’s Jewish and Muslim communities, and last Friday night more than 240 Jews and Muslims took part in the “Fast for Peace” Shabbat/Iftar dinner at the Kings Bay Y's Sheepshead Bay community center.
Nineteen-year-old Eman Elkomy came to the dinner to support Elbassiony, a cousin, but also to take a stand. Most of her friends are Palestinian and many have had cousins die in Gaza. Every day, on Arabic news channels and in person, she hears hatred directed against the Jewish community.
“All the Muslims, they really dislike all the Jews. They’re blaming them and they shouldn’t,” said Elkomy, who is studying to be a surgical technician at Kingsborough Community College.
“You see how people blame Muslims for what happened in 9/11, But they didn’t do anything. … That’s how I feel about Jews — they didn’t do anything, they’re here,” she said.
Elbassiony teamed up with Kilash Persad an Orthodox, Israeli-army-bound, 18-year-old who works with her at the Kings Bay Y’s summer camp.
He jumped at the chance to help organize the event. “I see people’s Facebook profiles changing to say: ‘Hate the Muslims, Hate the Jews,’ but at the end of the day we’re all people … we all have to coexist,” he said.
Then the Y’s teen program took up the cause, with about 15 Muslim and 12 Jewish teens pulling the event together.
The dinner took place as tensions between Jews and Muslims in Brooklyn climbed. Just days earlier, Muslims were harassed outside two Brooklyn mosques.
On July 18, a Friday evening, a 46-year-old man was pelted with eggs thrown from a car in front of the Thayba Islamic Center in Midwood. Someone in the car also shouted, “This is for your Allah,” before driving away, according to police.
Two days later, at about 4 a.m. on July 20, a car drove back and forth in front of the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge blaring makeshift sirens and lights and waving an Israeli flag. Then a worshipper in his 20s threw a broken bottle at the car, grabbed the flag and ran. The bottle hit one occupant in the head and cut his face and a piece of glass cut another person on the wrist, police said. The NYPD’s hate crime unit is investigating both crimes, which police don’t think are related. As of Monday, no arrests had been made, police said.
But the tensions in Gaza and on the streets of Brooklyn were avoided during the dinner, which was aimed at introducing the two communities to each other’s customs. About two-dozen guests, equally split between Jews and Muslims, took up the offer to light Shabbat candles, and local Jewish and Muslim leaders led prayers. There was a video about Ramadan and later an impromptu singing of the Hebrew-Arabic peace song “Od Yavo Shalom Aleinu,” during which Jewish and Muslim teens and children joined arms and swayed (see video on our Facebook page).
The crowd was about two-thirds Muslim and one-third Jewish. Although about a dozen people from Elbassiony’s extended family came, including her restaurateur parents who cooked the meal, she recruited most of the Muslim attendees by speaking at several South Brooklyn mosques. Rabbi Shlomo Segal, whose congregation, Kehilat Moshe, uses the Y for services, sent out announcements on listservs and Facebook. And while organizers feared not enough people would come to an event held on a summer Friday evening, in the end, the room was so packed that extra chairs and tables had to be brought in and the hosts nearly ran out of food.
Charlie Ulrich, 61, a federal claims representative who lives in Midwood, found out about the event through Kehilat Moshe’s Facebook posts.
“With all the negativity going on in both sides it’s very important for people to communicate,” said Ulrich. He’s Orthodox, but attends synagogues ranging from the Conservative Park Slope Jewish Center to a “shtiebel” in Midwood to Chabad. “There are too many walls between people … between Jews, too,” he said.
The dinner is part of the Y’s long-term effort to build relationships with Brooklyn’s Muslim communities. Three years ago, the organization’s teen program joined with youth from the Turkish Cultural Center of Brooklyn to create “Peace Builders,” a volunteer organization that meets biweekly, volunteering at soup kitchens and food pantries and with Hurricane Sandy relief efforts.
Adults joined the bridge-building effort as well, with leaders from both institutions traveling together to Turkey and then later to Israel. (Relations between Turkey and Israel have been strained since the Mavi Marmara incident in 2010, in which 10 Turks were killed when their boat, which was trying to run the blockade of Gaza as part of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, was boarded by members of the Israeli navy.) Officials from both centers have each other over for dinner several times a year and they’ve held two annual community friendship dinners. The second, cohosted by Congregation Mount Sinai in Brooklyn Heights and the Universal Foundation, was held July 24, the day before Elbassiony and Persad’s dinner.
“It’s not the one-time, single events that are important,” said Daniel Zeltser, the Y’s assistant executive director. “We’re hoping to really make this a continuous building of relationships.”
Zeltser goes to dinner at the homes of friends from the Turkish community “every couple of months, as you do with any friend. We meet for coffee. … We can call each other when we need help,” he said.
“When it’s real, it’s different,” he added.
Elbassiony and Persad’s dinner adds Brooklyn’s Egyptian and Palestinian communities into the mix — and shows how much community building still needs to be done. With few exceptions, Jews sat on one side of the Y’s meeting room and Muslims on the other — until Elbassiony, eternally the camp counselor, led a get-to-know-you exercise that forced the crowds to briefly mix.
But despite the hesitancy to mingle, goodwill pervaded the event. At the end of the nearly-three-hour evening, person after person approached the Y’s Zeltser, suggesting ways to build on the evening, such as a Jewish-Muslim moms group and a cross-cultural cooking group.
“It took me 20 minutes to cross the room,” he said, not unhappily. “I was approached by six separate people.”
Kehilat Moshe’s Rabbi Segal, who brought his wife and two young daughters to the event, also felt it was a good start.
“It’s nice to hear some moderate voices,” he said. “It’s nice not to be just talking about tolerance but to actually break bread and learn about each other’s communities."
“I find that when you come together to learn about each other," he added, "we see each other in a new light. It’s a real relationship.”
amyclark@jewishweek.org
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Also this week, we got news that Joe Lieberman will be teaching at YU this year.
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NEW YORK
Joe At YU: Steer Students Toward ‘Public Service’
Lieberman hoping to ‘convince more students to get involved.’
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
Joe Lieberman at a Homeland Security Department event honoring him in 2012, shortly before leaving the Senate. Getty Images
Two years after he ended four decades as an elected official, and a year after he co-taught a course at the Columbia University Law School about the role of Congress in American foreign policy, Joseph Lieberman is adding another entry to his post-Senate resume.
Lieberman, who represented Connecticut in the Senate from 1989 to 2013, will lecture at Yeshiva University during the 2014-15 academic year as holder of the Joseph Lieberman Chair in Public Policy and Public Service, the school announced last week.
He will co-teach, with a yet-unnamed colleague, one undergraduate course and give three public lectures, on topics ranging from Judaism and public service to the Middle East, at schools throughout YU.
“I hope that I can combine the academic study of international relations with the personal experiences that I had,” Lieberman said. “I hope that I can convince more students to get involved in public service.”
Lieberman, 72, who moved with his wife Hadassah from Connecticut to Riverdale after leaving the Senate to live closer to their children, serves as senior counsel of law firm of Kasowitz Benson Torres & Friedman in Manhattan.
While he does not have so-called Potomac Fever — many men and women from across the country who leave public life in the capital stay there in their retirement years — “I do have Stamford fever,” he told The Jewish Week in a phone interview on Tuesday, referring to his longtime home. “I miss Connecticut terribly.”
“I retired from the Senate, but I didn’t retire [altogether],” Lieberman said. “You can always be productive.”
The ex-senator said he co-chairs a project on international leadership sponsored by the D.C.-based American Enterprise Institute, and serves on the advisory board of two other think tanks.
Lieberman, who represented Connecticut in the U.S. Senate from 1989 to 2013, was the first Orthodox Jew to serve in the Senate and became the first Jewish American to be named to a major political party ticket when Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore selected him as his running mate in 2000.
“Joe Lieberman was the first Jewish candidate on a national [political] ticket and has become an iconic figure — that’s important for history,” said YU President Richard M. Joel. “But Joe Lieberman is much more than that. He’s a passionate Jew, a statesman and a man of integrity. And to be able to build on who he is and what he represents is critical to the multifaceted dimensionality that must be Yeshiva.”
Approached last year by Joel to be the first occupant of the academic chair that bears his name, Lieberman said he is aware of the university’s growing financial problems, which led YU earlier this summer to hand daily management of its Albert Einstein College of Medicine to the nonprofit, Bronx-based Montefiore Health System.
“It did not affect me negatively,” Lieberman said. “I have confidence that YU is dealing with its economic problems.”
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And, in even more good news for New Yorkers, the kosher culinary world has gained another high-end restaurant. Japanese restaurant Butterfish is going kosher.
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Traditional Japanese Restaurant Goes Kosher
Restaurant Emperor Joey Allaham Now Casting for Fish
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
Joey Allaham, owner and founder of the iconic kosher restaurant Prime Grill, has conceded that there are only two ways to cook a steak: broiled or grilled.With fish, that’s not the case. Allaham’s latest food venture travels far beyond the world of beef to a yet unexplored terrain: kosher Japanese cuisine. Last month, Prime Grill’s parent corporation, Prime Hospitality Group, purchased Butterfish, a traditional Japanese omakase restaurant that opened in the spring, and the restaurant’s new kosher iteration opened at the end of the month with certification from the Orthodox Union.
“I know meat, but I fell in love with fish,” said Allaham, who described buying the restaurant as a “dream for a restaurateur.”
Butterfish, Allaham said, is the first non-kosher restaurant he has purchased and turned kosher. While its management has changed, six traditionally trained Japanese chefs continue to run the restaurant’s kitchen.
Led by Chef Hitoshi, the Japanese chefs have not altered their cooking techniques since the switch. Allaham himself has accompanied the chefs on several fishing trips to ensure the freshest catch.
“We go fishing in Montauk together about once a month,” said Allaham. In their most recent trip, the focus was on tuna and striped bass, both in season.
“Fish is a much more delicate art than meat, and it was essential that we maintain chefs who know the art,” said Allaham.
Aside from holding onto the existing kitchen staff, the hardest part of buying a pre-existing restaurant is maintaining old customers, said Allaham. “We have to make sure to cater to previous expectations, while forging even higher ones,” he said.
Thus far, the clientele is evenly split between kosher clients and non-kosher ones. The restaurant’s previous patrons continue to come, due in large part to their loyalty to the Japanese chefs. “If you’re not kosher, the only thing you’ll be missing is shrimp,” said Allaham.
Still, the entire menu had to be overhauled in order to accommodate the demands of kashrut. Though the restaurant’s original menu offered very “limited” options, the current menu has expanded to include nearly 10 entrees, not including the sushi bar. The menu features Yuzu Miso Cod, Wild Salmon Poelé and Grilled Bronzini in Sudachi Caper Sauce in addition to several chicken and meat options.
“Jews like a lot of options on the menu — they wouldn’t be happy selecting from just one or two choices,” said Allaham. “Even in the specific niche of Japanese cuisine, variety is important to our success.”
Expanding the palette for kosher clients is one of Allaham’s main goals. “Kosher doesn’t need to mean compromise,” he said. “I want to give kosher customers the same taste and experience they get in non-kosher restaurants.”
But the new move has its risks.
“Few ventures in the past have focused so heavily on fish,” said Elan Kornblum, publisher of Great Kosher Restaurants Magazine. He noted the city’s kosher fish restaurant, Turquoise, which had a branch in Manhattan that has recently closed (a Queens branch is still open). “Fish first is a risky experiment in the kosher world,” he said.
Of his many trademark kosher eateries, Butterfish is the one Allaham wants to take on the road. He mentioned Teaneck, N.J., as a possible location.
“This is something different, something new, something fresh,” he said. “This is not just hamburgers, and it’s not just fries. Butterfish will bring a new food experience to kosher observers.”
Allaham was careful to dedicate the opening of Butterfish to the Israeli soldiers in combat. "We are with them in spirit," he said.
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This weekend, our hearts will be with the people of Israel as we pray for peace.
Warmly,
Amy Sara Clark
Jewish Week Staff Writer
The Arts---BOOKS
"A Replacement Life" centers on a Claims Conference-like Holocaust restitution scam in Brooklyn's Russian community.Boris Fishman Stakes His Claim
With an eye and an ear for Malamud, he tells a modern (and Holocaust-tinged) immigrant tale in his debut novel.
Sandee Brawarsky - Culture Editor
Slava Gelman had the kind of grandmother who would have walked under a tank for him.
Boris Fishman’s impressive debut novel, “A Replacement Life,” (Harper) opens on an early summer morning in 2006 when Slava picks up the phone to learn from his mother that his beloved grandmother Sofia “isn’t.” In Russian, as the narrator explains, “you didn’t need the adjective to complete the sentence, but in English you did.”
The novel is bracketed with loss, beginning with Sofia’s death after a long illness, and ending three months later when Slava visits her grave. In between, the scenes are alive with humor, and crowded with Russian immigrants and their families extending across generations, as Fishman unfolds the story of how Slava gets involved in forging Holocaust-restitution documents for these elderly Russian Jews. In pitch-perfect sentences full of word play, Fishman raises questions about family honor and empathy, as well as legal and moral issues.
The 25-year-old Slava moved out of Brooklyn into Manhattan. A junior staffer for the legendary Century magazine, Slava is pushed into fabricating claims by his grandfather Yevgeny. For the elder Gelman, who learned to exploit the system in order to survive in the Soviet Union, truth is highly overrated. When a letter arrives for Slava’s grandmother soon after her death inviting her to apply for restitution — she is eligible as a survivor of the Minsk ghetto — Yevgeny wants to substitute his own claim.
After Slava tries to explain the approved categories and why his experience doesn’t fit, Yevgeny replies, “What are you, Lenin’s grandson? Maybe I didn’t suffer in the exact way I need to have suffered but they made sure to kill all the people who did. We had our whole world taken out from under us.”
So Slava skillfully twists her story into his. The process of inventing his grandmother’s history in its details keeps her alive for him, and for that he is grateful. In one story, he has her savoring dark bread with sunflower oil.
In Brooklyn, the memorable Yevgeny keeps up an underground economy of his own making, hustling salmon and flounder from truckers and selling at a discount to a neighbor, procuring prescription medicine (his own oversupply) for another neighbor in exchange for cognac, and giving haircuts to the Mexicans in the illegal basement apartments. Although Yevgeny is told not to breathe a word about the application, Slava begins getting calls from other elderly Russians asking for help with their stories.
“Slava wasn’t a judge: He was a middleman, a loan shark, an alchemist — he turned lives into facts, words in to money, silence into knowledge at last, “ Fishman writes.
In a recent interview, Fishman explains that the novel was inspired by his own experience in preparing his grandmother’s application for restitution. Born in Belarus, Fishman moved to the United States — first to Brooklyn and then New Jersey — when he was nine. As the best English speaker in his immediate family (his parents and maternal grandparents), he was the administrator of official paperwork. As the application asked for little documentation, he realized that it was more about telling a persuasive story than historical record.
“I bet someone was going to have a field day with these applications and start making up well-told stories,” he says. “That felt provocative in the way you want fiction to be — you want it to explore touchy questions like whether there are any Jews who would abuse memory of the Holocaust for profit.” First he wrote a short story on the subject, and then wanted to write a novel.
“I ran with it, and it ran with me,” Fishman says.
And while writing, his hunch proved true. In 2010, more than a dozen employees of German restitution funds — all Russian speakers — were indicted for fraud and embezzlement of more than $50 million by using invented tales of suffering.
Along with Slava’s grandmother and mother, who “held the world record for fastest trip from tender to brutal,” Fishman writes of two women in Slava’s romantic life, the American Arianna, the fact-checker in the cubicle next to his at work, and the Russian Vera, the daughter of family friends with whom he spent hours as a child, as all of them waited to leave Rome for America.
Fishman captures New York as a city of immigrants, in particular South Brooklyn, “a foreign city, if you were coming from Manhattan.” Yevgeny’s neighbors are Russians, Belarussians, Ukrainians, Moldovans, Georgians, Uzbeks and Mexicans. In some corners of the neighborhood, the “average time since arrival was under twelve months. These American toddlers were only beginning to crawl. Some, however, has already found the big thumb of American largesse.”
He also portrays the immigrants’ emotional lives. There are many widowers like Yevgeny — the women seemed to die first. As Fishman writes, “The homes of Soviet Brooklyn were filled with men who had been left to themselves by the last people to know how much looking after they needed. These men were terrified of being alone. An old Russian friend is “stooped as a branch being reclaimed by the ground.” The image of two elderly men, shuffling along the sidewalk as they take their evening walk dressed in their house slippers, supporting each other’s arm, stays with the reader.
When asked about his powers of description, Fishman admits, “I observe everyone. Too much so.” He also attributes his highly attuned observation skills to being Jewish in the Soviet Union, where one had to be vigilant always, and to being an immigrant. Cast in the role of outsider, he honed his abilities as a storyteller.
“As immigrants, all we’ve got is stories. We gave up the soil,” he adds.
His humor is dark, but not mean-spirited. He identifies with one of his favorite writers, Bernard Malamud.
“Malamud is melancholy. Ultimately, he has a grim view of the world as a place of suffering, but with blasts of magic and light. That’s how I see the world. It’s a very old-world view. You do your best, but things don’t often go your way. I connect to that sensibility,” he says. “And his prose is so whittled, like a rock. There’s not one extra word. He achieves a quality of myth, it’s so elemental. I worship him. Even his failures.”
As if to keep the reader still wondering about the nature of borrowed truths, Fishman includes an author’s note at the back of the book, attributing certain phrases to his own previous work and to other writers including Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” and Malamud’s “The Fixer.” (“The tea was bitter and he blamed existence” is a variation on Malamud.)
Fishman has several projects in the works, among them a new novel about a New Jersey couple that adopts a boy from Montana who turns out to be wild, “Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo,” and a memoir about his father and grandfather. He’s also thinking about a cookbook of Ukrainian delicacies like the spread prepared by Yevgeny’s home aide Berta in the novel that is piled onto plates rimmed in gold filigree; it includes chicken steaks in egg batter, herring under potatoes, salmon soup, marinated peppers with buckwheat honey, sour cabbage with beef and pickled cabbage.
He says that when he’s blessed to have children, he wants them to know Russian language and literature, his family’s history (he tricked his own grandmother into telling him what happened to her during the war, by saying that he needed the information for a school project — he knew she wouldn’t hold back to help him get a better grade), as well as Jewish history and culture. He describes himself as “not observant and a very proud Jew culturally.”
As his book tour shapes up around the country this fall, Fishman is hoping for the opportunity to speak in Jewish venues. “I really want to start the conversation about the relationship of American Jews to Russian Jews. It feels overdue. There’s a lot of expectation and hope, but a real divide.”
He explains that for American Jews, religion is a lot more central to their identity and understanding, and for Russian Jews, it’s World War II and being second-class citizens. “American Jews talk about the holidays. Russian Jews talk about the war.”
editor@jewishweek.org
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Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem: Caring for Patients and Preparing for EmergenciesWhen rockets from Gaza target the Jerusalem region, Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem and its Weinstock Family Department of Emergency Medicine on the Fanya Gottesfeld Heller Floor immediately go on high alert.
All of Shaare Zedek's medical departments and public areas are outfitted with quick access to shelters or safe rooms and much of the Hospital is built with reinforced protection, allowing activities to continue unabated even under threat of attack. When the Code Red siren sounds, maternity nurses in the new Next Generation Building calmly help women out of their beds and instruct all patients and guests to go to the baby nursery, which is a “safe room.”Similarly, the entire Huberfeld Neonatal Intensive Care Unit is a “safe room,” providing protection for the babies requiring the most intensive care without needing to move them. There are also signs throughout the Hospital directing visitors and staff to “protected space.”
Shaare Zedek has the most annual patient admissions of any Jerusalem hospital and treated 837,000 patients in 2013. With more than 20,000 births last year, it is the largest delivery room in the western world. The new 230,000 square foot Next Generation Building, housing the Wilf Children’s Hospital on the Friedman Family 6th Floor, Nagel Family 7th Floor, Jean and Eugen Gluck Department of General Pediatrics, Huberfeld Neonatal Intensive Care Unit and additional maternity and delivery suites, began opening in late 2013 and will be completed in 2014.
For more information, go to www.acsz.org.
American Committee for Shaare Zedek Medical Center (ACSZ) raises funds to support the work of Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem. For 112 years the Hospital has played an essential role in the life of the city and its uniquely diverse population, providing an exceptional blend of advanced medicine, modern innovation and compassion to all who enter its doors. Shaare Zedek serves as a teaching hospital, fully academically affiliated with the Faculty of Medicine of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem.
Michael R. Bloomberg (at right), Mayor of New York City from 2002-2013, walks into the synagogue at the MDA Jerusalem station holding the new torah scroll he helped dedicate in memory of his parents, William and Charlotte. Bloomberg was joined by several high-profile guests, including Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat (at left).MICHAEL R. BLOOMBERG DEDICATES NEW TORAH SCROLL IN HONOR OF HIS PARENTS AT JERUSALEM MDA STATIONJerusalem, Israel (May 29, 2014) – Michael R. Bloomberg, Mayor of New York City from 2002-2013, continued his longtime support of Magen David Adom (MDA) when he helped dedicate a new torah scroll in memory of his parents, William and Charlotte at a May 23 ceremony. The scroll will reside at MDA’s William H. Bloomberg Emergency Medical Station in Jerusalem.
The intimate ceremony took place in the newly built synagogue inside the Jerusalem MDA station. The station, whose construction Bloomberg helped finance, is named after his father. Bloomberg dedicated the new torah scroll with his sister, Marjorie Tiven. Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat, Chief Rabbi of Israel Yitzchak Yosef, Meir Blisko (the torah scroll donor), MDA Director General Eli Bin, and Chairman of American Friends of MDA (AFMDA) Mark Lebow were among the attendees.
Bloomberg was in Israel to accept the first-ever Genesis Prize. Dubbed as the Jewish Nobel, the Genesis Prize is given annually to an individual who has achieved international renown and is a role model for the next generation of Jews worldwide. The ceremony at MDA’s Jerusalem station, meanwhile, provided a moment of personal introspection and an opportunity to acknowledge the hard work of MDA, an organization dear to his father’s heart.
Michael R. Bloomberg, Mayor of New York City from 2002-2013, and his sister, Marjorie Tiven, dedicated a new torah scroll in memory of their parents William and Charlotte at the MDA Jerusalem station's new synagogue.Michael R. Bloomberg, Mayor of New York City from 2002-2013, and his sister, Marjorie Tiven, dedicated a new torah scroll in memory of their parents William and Charlotte at the MDA Jerusalem station's new synagogue.“He grew up in a world where he never dreamed he would go to Israel,” Bloomberg said of his father. “For most of his life, Israel didn’t exist. But I’m sure he’s looking down now with a big smile on his face, mainly because this is an organization that saves lives and that’s what it’s all about.”
The Jerusalem MDA station is Israel’s largest and most active, fielding more than 39,000 emergency calls annually. Its 82 ambulances serve a population of more than 780,000 residents. Bloomberg, the keynote speaker at AFMDA’s annual New York benefit dinner last December, was quick to thank MDA’s first-responders for their tireless efforts to save any and all lives in Israel.
“You’re the real heroes, those of you who go out in the ambulances and motorscooters and get there when people are in need,” Bloomberg said. “I can only hope that if I’m here and I have a medical emergency, that you show. I’ll call and remind you whose name’s on the building.”
ABOUT: MDA provides a rapid and skilled emergency medical response, including disaster, ambulance, and blood services, to Israel’s 8 million people. MDA is the only organization mandated by the Israeli government to serve in this role, but is not a government agency, instead relying on funding from donors around the world. AFMDA is MDA’s U.S.-based fundraising affiliate, raising more than 80 percent of the charitable dollars MDA receives annually. www.afmda.org.
Contact: Erik Levis, Email: elevis@afmda.org, O: 212.757.1627 • C: 646.808.6314
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Blogs
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THE NEW NORMAL
Mindfulness Practice Reduces Stress And Depression For Special Needs Parents by Gabrielle Kaplan-Mayer
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At "The New Normal," we are always interested in research that may help our readers. For parents of children with special needs, have you tried any type of mindfulness-based stress reduction? If so, what was the effect? If not, would you be interested in participating in a six-week training?
Please share your comments at email "New Normal" editor Gabrielle Kaplan-Mayer at gabby.newnormal@gmail.com.
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WELL VERSED
Picturing Anne Frank by Elizabeth Denlinger
The Anne Frank Center in New York is a tiny space, smaller than the secret apartment in Amsterdam where the Frank family spent much of the war in hiding.
In its center is a circular structure with a permanent installation detailing the Franks’ life in hiding. On one wall is a handsomely designed, detailed time line of the Franks’ experience of the war and the story of the famous diary. Placed throughout are square pillars on which are mounted enlarged reproductions of the photographs from the Frank family albums, comprising the exhibition “Picturing the Frank Family."
There are pictures of Anne as a baby, her toddler sister Margot powdering her bottom; the two sisters at the beach, Anne’s shoulder blades so skinny they seem about to sprout wings; Margot playing with a black baby doll; Anne in 1941, sprawling in a garden chair, sullen because she can’t go sunbathing – because she’s a Jew. This is the only photograph in which we see the direct effect of the Nazis on her life.
Because the space is so small and because the pillars are placed in clumps rather like trees, there is (apart from the timeline) little sense of narrative. This itself enforces the feeling of precious evanescence that all snapshots have, but these especially, since we know that only Otto Frank will survive the war. (He spent the rest of his long life working to preserve his daughter’s memory.) The albums themselves, their tiny pictures labeled in neat European handwriting, are in a case on the wall opposite the timeline. It also contains facsimiles – extremely good ones – of Margot Frank’s baby album and the diary itself, covered in plaid fabric. Anne’s own hand is rather messy, urgent but legible.
Anne Frank has become so iconic in our culture that you might think only something like Shalom Auslander’s “Hope: a Tragedy,” in which she is imagined in her eighties, grumpy and still writing in the attic of a house in upstate New York, could make us see her anew. But “Picturing the Frank Family” succeeds by the opposite method: these images of a happy, comfortable family make one feel sharply not so much the horror of the Nazi era (the phrase itself is inescapably trite), but how weird, how undeserved and random that horror must have felt to children like Anne and Margot.
Part of Anne Frank’s iconicity derives from what a good looking child she was. It’s easy to love someone with such a winning and intelligent face. But it’s the individuality of the whole family that makes this exhibition worth seeing, an individuality that we are miraculously able to share. By far the most moving photograph in the exhibition does not show Anne Frank; it’s a picture of Otto Frank in 1945, soon after he has learned that he is the sole survivor, alone in the attic of the secret annex, looking at the empty room where his family used to be.
“Picturing the Frank Family” is on view at the Anne Frank Center, 44 Park Place, until August 29.
Elizabeth Denlinger curates a collection of rare books and manuscripts at the New York Public Library and is at work on a novel about a boarding school in 1955.
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Food & Wine
A Light Pasta Dinner
Leek and mushrooms add a punch of flavor to a quick meal for the Nine Days - or year-round.
Amy Spiro - Jewish Week Online Columnist
Some people have a hard time coming up with meal ideas for the Nine Days - the first nine days of the month of Av, when Jewish law says meat or wine should not be consumed. Me? I don't eat much meat year-round, so a majority of my recipes are perfect for this period. Which is exactly where this recipe came from - just a typical dinner for me at any point, so I thought I'd share it now.
Leeks, a member of the onion family, pack so much flavor and are one of my favorite vegetables. The way they are grown often leads to trapped dirt between the layers, so they need a good washing. I've taken to cutting the leek into half moons first, throwing them into a colander and rinsing before patting them dry. Drying them is important before adding them to the oil, both to avoid spitting oil and also to allow them to cook properly.
Hide Servings & Times
Yield:
Serves 2
Active Time:
15 min
Total Time:
15 min
Hide Ingredients
2 tablespoons canola oil
1 large leek, washed and chopped
8 ounces mushrooms, chopped
8 ounces spaghetti
2 tablespoons soy sauce
salt and pepper, to taste
Hide Steps
Heat the oil in a large pot. At the same time, bring a pot of salted water to a boil for the pasta.
To the oil, add the leek and stir to coat. Cook, stirring regularly, 10-15 minutes until browned. Meanwhile, when the water boils, add the spaghetti and cook according to package directions. Drain and set aside.
To the onion, add the mushroomsand stir to coat. Continue to cook stirring regularly, another 10-15 minutes.
Add the cooked pasta and the soy sauce to the pot and stir to coat. Add 1-2 tablespoons of water if desired to form a "sauce" (the starchy pasta water works well for this). Season with salt and pepper (and any other spices) to taste.
Serve immediately.
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