Dear Reader,
A week after the horrific murders at a synagogue in Jerusalem, fear is palpable in the city, reports our Israel Correspondent Josh Mitnick.
In wake of shul murders, fear is palpable in Jerusalem.
Joshua Mitnick
Israel Correspondent
Yahrtzeit candles in the beit midrash of Congregation Kehilat Bnei Torah. Joshua Mitnick/JW/Getty Images
Jerusalem — Mourning notices for the “four martyrs” and posters urging tzedakah for their families adorned the hallway of the ultra-Orthodox Kehilat Bnei Torah synagogue in the Har Hof neighborhood here.
Synagogue regulars pointed to a seemingly innocuous chip in the lacquered wood inside the doorway of the synagogue’s chapel and study room — a scar from the massacre last week when two Palestinians burst into the Shaharit morning prayer service with weapons that included a machine gun and a meat cleaver. A bullet hole was also visible in the glass of the entryway, while smashed-in doors signaled where the Israeli police had searched for more terrorists.
People in the synagogue were accustomed to such attacks happening in the West Bank, but not in Har Nof, a charedi neighborhood with a high number of English-speaking immigrants safely tucked into the western outskirts of Jerusalem. They were used to attacks on soldiers, not on synagogues.
“You can imagine what is going on — people are having a hard time,” said Binyamin Cohen, a synagogue gabbai (ritual assistant) who said he was seconds away from arriving at the shul when the Nov. 18 attack began. “Of all the terror attacks we’ve had before, there’s been nothing like this.”
That seemed to reflect the predominant sentiment as Israelis struggled to adjust to the images of worshippers wrapped in tallit and tefillin lying in a pool of blood. It was as if the anti-Jewish pogroms of 19th century Europe and pre-state Palestine had been resurrected in heart of Israel’s modern-day capital.
The sharp escalation of what many consider an intifada among Jerusalem’s Palestinians has ratcheted up pressure on Israel’s government for a response. There is a sense of fright among the general public, as well as a rise in anti-Arab sentiment criticized by pols and social commentators as racist.
Parents have appealed for stepped-up security at kindergartens while security forces have set up roadblocks at the exits of Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem and extra police have been deployed to central Jerusalem. Gun retailers note a spike in sales as the government eases regulations to make it easier for people to purchase firearms.
“I was afraid to come to work today,” said Oshrat Shriki, who works at a souvenir shop in the recently renovated train terminal near the Germany Colony. “After 5 in the afternoon, I don’t leave my house.”
Shriki said that droves of Israeli groups have cancelled Segway tours of the city organized through his shop. Yuval Statman, a tour guide who finds himself with no work, said that the fear in the city is palpable on the streets.
“Do you know how much tension there is in the city?” he said. “I was out with a group on Jaffa Street — suddenly, the police drove by and the entire street froze.”
Indeed, shop owners on Jaffa Street reported ramped-up police patrols. The same could be said at the old train station. The city had already beefed up security at light rail stations, the site of several terrorist attacks by Palestinians ramming cars into Israelis.
At Kehilat Bnei Torah in Har Nof, there was no trace of increased security. And unlike many other Jerusalemites, the regulars at the synagogue say they aren’t clamoring for more police officers.
“Nobody assumed that this place was dangerous. Everybody can’t take their own security guards. That’s no way to live,” said Cohen, the gabbai. The members of the synagogue believe there was some Divine hand behind who fell victim to the terrorists and who escaped. “We don’t know why. God was there. He said this one and that one. It was clear cut he wanted to take certain people for an offering; to atone for the entire Jewish community.”
On the day after the attack, many Palestinian employees claimed they had been dismissed from jobs in Jerusalem by Jewish employers because of the fear. Despite the gaps between Palestinian and Israeli neighborhoods, Arabs are the backbone of the local workforce as drivers, restaurant and construction workers and doctors. Some Israelis fear that a strike or a ban on Palestinian employees would interrupt services throughout the city.
“The two sides need each other,” said Eliezer Yaari, a retired Israeli journalist and former leader of the dovish New Israel Fund who has spent the last two years compiling narratives of Palestinians who live in the Sur Baher neighborhood. Yaari said that despite the disparity in living conditions, Israelis and Palestinians in the city have a symbiotic relationship. He believes that ties could ultimately be leveraged for peace, but that’s not the way things are moving.
“In the last few days the border has been closed,” he said in a television interview. “It’s amazing how quickly they’ve divided the city.”
The sense of panic has spread beyond Jerusalem and has inspired anti-Arab actions followed by criticism that the moves are racist and prejudiced. Political figures such as the mayor of Ashkelon have tried to impose bans on Arab workers employed at public kindergartens, triggering a howl of condemnation by Israeli cabinet ministers both from the left and right. But many residents of Ashkelon expressed hearty support; a poll of Israelis found that 58 percent there support such a ban, according to Israel’s Channel 10.
This week, Israeli pop singer Amir Benayoun stirred a controversy when he posted a song on Sunday to his Facebook page about the smiling university student “Ahmed” from Jerusalem who secretly fantasizes about stabbing Jews; and a second version of “Ahmed” who works near kindergartens. Benayoun told the Israel Army radio station that the song had been inspired by terrorist attacks committed by Palestinians who work in Jewish neighborhoods. The song, which got 64,000 views and nearly 3,000 likes, prompted Israeli President Reuven Rivlin to cancel a scheduled performance by Benayoun at the presidential residence. Hebrew University law professor Mordechai Kremitzer, a deputy president of the Israel Democracy Institute, called the song a disgraceful piece of incitement.
Many Jerusalemites are comparing the sense of insecurity to the peak of the second intifada in 2002, when attacks were common.
Despite the fact that the current wave of violence is much less fatal, and perhaps less organized, than the second intifada, the prevalence of “lone wolf” attacks by individuals is stirring just as much anxiety.
“It’s more terrorizing for the average Israeli. … We are talking about a different kind of threat. It’s people walking off the street,” said Yohanan Plesner, the president of the Israel Democracy Institute. “In a society under attack,” he said, “it’s not trivial to maintain liberal values.”
Unlike Israelis on the right or left who have focused on the killing to press the government for a particular remedy — whether through a return to peace talks or a crackdown — the synagogue members in Har Hof say they don’t want to wade into politics or national security.
“There’s no discussion of that whatsoever. … People here are not used to giving advice to security experts,” said Yonatan Shperling, a yeshiva student who commutes daily from a neighborhood near Palestinian districts in northern Jerusalem — despite the rising violence that’s spread deep into Jerusalem’s Jewish neighborhoods.
“The more the level of beastliness rises, the more people are strengthened because they understand God is pushing us into a corner more than before. Before there is redemption,” Shperling concluded, “the belief is that God has a period of settling accounts to speed it up.”
editor@jewishweek.org
A Swiss museum has accepted parts of a collection from an art dealer for the Nazis, and some say the works should be displayed in Israel. Staff Writer Stewart Ain has the story.
Advocates for survivors want Gurlitt collection to be shown in Israel, urge more transparency.
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
The announcement Monday that a Swiss museum would accept parts of a collection from an art dealer for the Nazis has been decried by some who believe suspected Nazi-looted art should be housed in Israel until their rightful owners are determined.
And an overlooked provision of the agreement calls for the publication of the art dealer’s business records, which could provide a rare glimpse into how Nazis acquired the artwork.
Mel Urbach, one of several restitution lawyers working on behalf of Jews whose family art collections were looted by the Nazis, said he was distressed to learn that part of those records would be withheld from the public.
“He kept a record of all of the transactions dating back to the ’30s and it will give us an historic window into how [the Nazis] acquired those paintings,” Urbach said of the art dealer's son, Cornelius Gurlitt. “It will tell us the policies and strategies used to rob Jews of all their valuables starting in 1933 when Hitler came to power. It will provide a firsthand case study that we can use to uncover the machinery used to destroy these Jewish collections — how they were able to get Jews to sell at a fraction of the price.”
Until now, he said, the taskforce leaders had refused his requests for those records. But the agreement signed by the Republic of Germany, Bavaria and the museum provides for transparency in dealing with Gurlitt’s papers.
“Mr. Gurlitt’s business ledgers will be made public, while respecting the privacy rights of third parties,” the agreement said, adding that they would be posted on the website www.lostart.de.
“Mr. Gurlitt’s business correspondence will also be published there, where not in conflict with the rights of third parties,” it continued. “For this purpose, the papers will first be examined by experts” and kept in the possession of the German government.
Urbach said he would like to see all of the records, not the excised versions, and he questioned why the agreement calls for Germany to own them.
“I don’t know what third parties would be relevant [to protect] after all these years,” he said. “I would say that a collection like this, built on the suffering of Jewish victims in Nazi Germany, does not belong in Europe but rather should be placed in the hands of Jews and used for education. Yad Vashem or the Wiesenthal Center would be perfect locations. There should be no connection to European museums.”
Urbach argued also that the entire Gurlitt collection is suspect because even the paintings Gurlitt's father bought himself were purchased with money he received through forced sales from Jews.
But Rabbi Andrew Baker, director of international Jewish affairs at the American Jewish Committee, welcomed the agreement and said “there is plenty to address in this collection without having to broaden the definition.”
Bobby Brown, director of a now-defunct Israeli group that had worked in behalf of Holocaust victims and their heirs, said he believes the suspect art should be “exhibited in Israel for two reasons — as a moral statement and, if labeled properly, it would increase the chances that legitimate heirs would turn up. … Moving looted art once again will only make it harder for the legitimate owners to make a claim.”
He questioned why Germany was respecting the wishes of Cornelius Gurlitt, “the son of the chief fence of looted art” for the Nazis.
Gurlitt had named the Kunstmuseum Bern as his sole heir before his death in May. The collection, valued at about $1.26 billion, was inherited from his father, Hildebrand, who died in a car crash in 1956. It includes works by Picasso, Matisse, Renoir, Touklouse-Lautrec, Beckman and Durer.
Bavarian authorities confiscated 1,280 works of art from Gurlitt’s Munich home in 2012 during the course of a tax fraud investigation. Another 200 works were subsequently found and seized from Gurlitt’s second home in Salzburg.
News that such a collection and Hildebrand Gurlitt’s papers existed — the elder Gurlitt had claimed after the war that all his business records were destroyed in the bombing of Dresden in 1945 — caused Germany to establish an international task force of art experts to search for the rightful owners of each work.
Greg Schneider, executive vice president of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, said the fact that the agreement calls for the publication of the business journals and ledgers is an accomplishment that his organization had also urged.
“If they do everything they say they will do, it will be very good for claimants because it provides an opportunity for provenance research and publication of all relevant information — full transparency — as well as a claims process,” he said.
He noted that although Bavarian authorities seized Gurlitt’s Munich art collection in 2012, it was more than a year before it was revealed in a news article. In addition, it was another several months before an international task force was assembled to investigate the provenance.
The agreement says the task force will present a status report on its provenance research sometime next year. Any artwork proven to have been looted by the Nazis — “or very likely to be Nazi-looted art” — will be posted on the website www.lostart.de. Germany will incur the expense of returning the art to its rightful owner, and if none has been identified, “the work will be exhibited in Germany with an explanation of its origins so that rightful owners will have the opportunity to submit their claims.”
The Bern museum will be offered the opportunity of exhibiting artwork the task force is unable to say for certain was looted by the Nazis. Should it decline, it would remain in Germany and the provenance research published at www.lostart.de. Germany would return those works later deemed to have been stolen by the Nazis.
The Bern museum will receive all work deemed not Nazi-looted as well as what the Nazis termed “degenerate art” that was removed from publicly owned museums and collections. It may loan these works to other museums, giving priority to the museums from which they were stolen.
But Ron Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, said such loans should be conditioned on the museums making a “firm commitment to the Washington Principles” they signed in 1998 promising to look for Nazi-looted art in their own collections.
Lauder said rather than exhibiting unclaimed Nazi-looted art, it “should be sold at auction for the benefit of Holocaust victims.” In addition, he said, all decisions of the task force must be made public “without hiding behind data-protection considerations.”
At a press conference Monday, Christoph Schaeublin, president of the museum’s board of trustees, said the decision to accept the Gurlitt collection was not an easy one and that it took persuading by German Culture Minister Monika Gruetters for the museum to agree.
“Any works of art deemed to be looted art or even considered likely to have been looted art will never darken the doorstep of the [museum]” and, in fact, will “not even touch Swiss territory,” he said. “We will do everything in our powers to return art looted by the Nazis to the descendants of the Nazi regime’s victims as quickly as possible.”
Asked whether he was disturbed that the unclaimed artwork would be displayed in Germany and Switzerland rather than Israel, Schneider said: “I’m not sure the physical location of any particular piece is as important as the fact that it is published and made public. I’m not against the exhibit traveling to Israel, but it is not a key to the restitution process, particularly since we know that not all heirs live in Israel.”
Sam Dubbin, counsel to The Holocaust Survivors Foundations USA, said the leadership of the organization believes Cornelius Gurlitt was complicit with his father in hiding the business papers and artwork and questions “the justification for handing it all over to Gurlitt’s museum of choice.”
“The artwork should be published and displayed in a neutral museum in Israel — not in Germany or Switzerland,” he said. “Everything should be put out in the open immediately. The potential owners of the property should have the information right away.”
stewart@jewishweek.org
Closer to home, the Café Edison in Times Square, rich in Jewish theater history, may soon be closing its doors. George Robinson paid a visit.
Rich in Jewish theater history, it’s almost curtains for the Café Edison.
George Robinson
Special To The Jewish Week
Counter culture: The scene this week at the Café Edison. Michael Datikash/JW
On the surface it was a typical weekday evening at the Café Edison. The evening rush was thinning out but there was still a steady flow of matzah ball soup, blintzes, borscht, kasha varnishkes and rice pudding making its way to diners, with an equally steady flow of empty plates and bowls returning to the kitchen.
The restaurant’s manager and his wife, Conrad and Harriet Strohl, were bustling around the surprisingly spacious and labyrinthine interior of the coffee shop, schmoozing with the regulars, chatting with newcomers and staff.
It looked like a Thursday night from any of the past 34 years of the eatery’s existence on West 47th Street, except for the presence of a documentary filmmaker and the abrupt but delightfully raucous addition of a trio of top New York-based klezmorim. Opposite the cashier’s station, across from the interior doorway that leads to the lobby of the adjoining Hotel Edison, drummer Eve Sicular counted, and suddenly Michael Winogrand’s clarinet and Art Bailey’s accordion erupted into a frailach, to the immense amusement of the Strohls and their customers.
Sicular and Winograd could be playing a dirge pretty soon. The coffee shop is owned by the Triumph Hotel Group, the proprietor of the Hotel Edison, and the company has declined to offer the Strohls a new lease.
Spokespersons for the hotel have been unavailable for comment. The Edison’s general manager issued a statement earlier in the month that said, “We can confirm that the café is closing as the hotel prepares for a multimillion-dollar investment to upgrade and restore the space.”
The Café Edison may be the next victim of the ongoing transformation of Midtown Manhattan into a tourist-friendly theme park.
What is at stake is not just another coffee shop. One of the last affordable independent eating places in the theater district, its clientele has traditionally run the gamut from local working folks to show business types, with a heavy preponderance of Jewish entertainment figures including the likes of Jackie Mason, Emmanuel Azenberg and Neil Simon (whose play, “45 Seconds from Broadway” is based on the restaurant and its denizens). The Pulitzer-winning playwright August Wilson wrote dialogue for his dramas on the café’s paper napkins, and more deals were done here than in a more famous high-end restaurant ten blocks away, giving the Edison its nickname, “The Polish Tea Room.”
The coffee shop’s roots were, indeed, in Poland. Harry and Frances Edelstein, who managed the place from its inception in 1980, had survived the Nazi occupation by hiding in the woods for the duration of the war. They had seen their families murdered by German troops, narrowly missed the same fate themsleves, and eventually came to the United States, settling in Brooklyn.
Another Jewish survivor of the Shoah, Ulu Barad, a hotelier whose holdings included the Edison, invited them to run a café adjacent to his hostelry. Set in a converted ballroom, the café’s décor would be a singular cross between the hotel’s snazzy art deco furnishings and a typical formica-and-plastic neighborhood coffee shop. The Edelsteins were happy to join their former neighbor.
The original lease only ran through 1984 but their handshake agreement with Barad lasted beyond Harry’s death in 2009 at age 91 and Barad’s death at 88 last year. Barad’s son Gerard, head of Triumph Hotel Group, is the current owner. Frances is still alive at 88 and occasionally visits the restaurant, where her old-world recipes remain the basis for the East European Jewish items on the modestly priced menu.
As the Hotel Edison’s website proclaims without a hint of irony, “Hidden amid the obligatorily encyclopedic offerings are [SIC] homemade Eastern European Jewish cooking that have [SIC] delighted Broadway producers, playwrights, performers, and tourists, for over 30 years. At timelessly affordable prices the Café Edison is a delicious taste of old New York.”
The Edelstein’s daughter, Harriet, and her husband, Conrad Strohl, have managed the restaurant since the beginning, and inherited Harry’s interest.
But there was no lease. Ulu had insisted that none was necessary among “family,” a tradition that Harriet says Gerard maintained until the decision to shut down the restaurant.
“We know him, everybody ate together in that room,” she says shakily, gesturing towards one of the cozy precincts at the front of the restaurant. “I saw him as recently as five months ago and it’s always a big hug and a kiss. Now all of a sudden we’re not ‘family’ anymore.”
At this point, there is nothing left to negotiate, but the Café Edison’s fans chose to fight back in a very 21st-century campaign that involves everything from a Facebook-based petition that has collected over 8,600 signatures including celebrities like Sean Connery and Martha Plimpton, to flash-mob lunches on Saturdays at the restaurant and, most recently, the almost-impromptu klezmer jam session.
Conrad Strohl is moved, but, he admits, a little baffled. A tall, gray-haired man who bears a resemblance to Elliott Gould, he is a bit nonplussed by the attention, and not just from the media.
“They’ve come from as far away as Australia and China,” he says incredulously. “How they know us I don’t know. It’s very humbling that all these people are supporting us.”
A round-faced middle-aged woman comes over to wish him well.
“I came three thousand miles to be here,” she says animatedly. “I’m from San Francisco, but I try to stop here every time I’m in New York.”
A young mounted cop from the NYPD stops where Strohl is standing, telling him, “I was sorry to hear the news,” then cheerfully engages in ritual flirting with the cashier, who is probably about his mother’s age.
Strohl turns back to the reporter interviewing him and sighs.
“I get here every morning at 4:30 a.m.,” he says. “For 34 years. That’s half my life.”
What would be the best-case scenario for the future of the Café Edison?
He shrugs, then says, “I don’t know, hopefully they’ll rethink it and we’ll stay.”
He is not optimistic, and the media silence from his antagonists is an ominous sign.
When Harry Edelstein died in 2009, he received a singular honor, a tribute that went well with the honorary Tony Award he had been presented in 2004. Although the ritual is usually reserved for people who have worked in the theater, after Edelstein’s death, the lights in the theater district were dimmed in his memory. Now the lights in his restaurant may be going out permanently.
Although the keys must be returned to the hotel owner on Dec. 27 and the lease expires on Dec. 31, Conrad Strohl admits that with the necessary cleaning and storage involved in winding up the business, the Café Edison could close its doors as early as “the second or third week of December.”
He adds, somberly, “That doesn’t leave us much time.”
editor@jewishweek.org
Also this issue, challenging teens to 'slam' poverty; Teaneck rabbi calls for war on Arabs, and his synagogue appears unfazed; Sen. Ted Cruz and Pastor John Hagee blast Obama at ZOA dinner; Itzhak Perlman is back as a soloist; and our Fall Literary Preview focuses on The Next Wave of Russian-Jewish Literature.
BRIEFS
N.J. Rabbi: Arabs In Israel ‘Must Be Vanquished’
JTA
The rabbi of a major modern Orthodox synagogue in New Jersey has written a blog post that calls for Israel to collectively punish Arab Israelis and Palestinians until they realize “they have no future in the land of Israel.”
In the post, written Friday and titled “Dealing with Savages,” Rabbi Steven Pruzansky of Congregation Bnai Yeshurun in Teaneck offers suggestions that range from destroying whole Palestinian towns to uprooting the Dome of the Rock.
“There is a war for the land of Israel that is being waged, and the Arabs who dwell in the land of Israel are the enemy in that war and must be vanquished,” Pruzansky writes.The post has since been deleted, but it’s cached here.
Pruzansky refers to “the Arab-Muslim animals that span the globe chopping, hacking and merrily decapitating,” and then writes, “At a certain point, the unrestrained behavior of unruly animals becomes the fault of the zookeeper, not the animals.”
So what should Israel do? According to Pruzansky, essentially end civil and human rights for many Arab Israelis and Palestinians. Beyond killing all terrorists and demolishing their extended families’ homes, Pruzansky says Israel should destroy entire Arab villages if more than one terrorist comes from them. All the residents of those villages, he writes, should be expelled.
He also writes that rioters and stone-throwers should be shot with live ammunition, and that reporters should be barred from these scenes and have their cameras confiscated.
Pruzansky says Arabs should be barred from the Temple Mount for at least six months, and muses that “perhaps the day will come in the near future when the mosque and the dome can be uplifted intact and reset in Saudi Arabia, Syria or wherever it is wanted.”
Pruzansky writes that Palestinians and Arab Israelis as a whole are Israel’s enemy — “and that enemy rides our buses, shops in our malls, drives on our roads and lives just two miles from us.” (“Us” apparently doesn’t include Pruzansky himself, who leads a congregation 5,000 miles from Jerusalem.)
This isn’t the first time Pruzansky has made the news for his views. Earlier this month, he compared The New York Jewish Week to Der Sturmer, a Nazi newspaper. Pruzansky’s congregation, Bnai Yeshurun, has about 800 member families, according to its website, and has been led by Pruzansky for more than 20 years.
Near the end of his post, Pruzansky wonders why Israelis haven’t come to the same conclusions he has. It’s an “enduring enigma,” he says.
Israelis across the political spectrum support safeguarding the state’s democratic character. Most have consistently backed a Palestinian state. But it bears noting that almost all of those who oppose Palestinian statehood still don’t speak anything close to Pruzansky’s language.
A telling example: Naftali Bennett, who leads the furthest-right party in Knesset and strongly opposes a Palestinian state, came out quickly and vehemently last week against an Israeli city’s ban on Arab construction workers. “Ninety-nine-point-nine percent” are nonviolent, he said, and Israel should not discriminate based on race or religion.
editor@jewishweek.org
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Perlman’s Back, Solo That Is
After a seven-year absence, the acclaimed violinist is out front in a recital.
George Robinson
Special To The Jewish Week
When Itzhak Perlman takes the stage at Avery Fisher Hall next week, it will mark his first solo recital in New York City in seven years.
What’s wrong, Mr. P? Don’t you love us anymore?
Perlman’s bass-baritone laugh rings across the phone lines when he hears the question.
“It’s not like I haven’t played in New York in all that time,” he replies. “I’ve played with orchestras, I just haven’t done a solo recital. I think it has something to do with the seven fat cows and seven lean cows of Pharaoh’s dream.”
He laughs again, then adds, “It doesn’t really have any significance. Time goes fast, though.”
On Dec. 3, Perlman won’t be alone on that vast stage. His frequent collaborator Rohan De Silva will be at the piano. The two have been playing together since the death of Samuel Sanders, another long-time musical partner of Perlman’s, in 1999.
“When Samuel Sanders passed away, I was looking for someone to play with, and I knew about Rohan because he worked with my violin teacher, Dorothy DeLay,” Perlman recalls. “The thing about working with a collaborative pianist is that you have to be on the same page musically, but you have to get along as well.”
When touring, a soloist will probably spend as much time with his accompanist as he would with a spouse.
“You fly together, you check into a hotel together, you rehearse, you perform; it’s got to click on many levels,” Perlman says.
The musical requirements are no less rigorous but easier to define.
“You look for somebody that can perform the pieces that you’re interested in,” the famed violinist says. “They have to be flexible performing the repertoire, and they have to be on a musical level where you can actually discuss things you want to do. Of course, they have to be technically proficient, but they have to have a certain amount of musical flexibility. Not everyone likes a particular way of performing a Beethoven sonata.”
For that matter, not everyone likes the same Beethoven sonatas, and that is a consideration when you are putting together a recital program.
“I like to play the pieces I like to hear,” Perlman says emphatically. “I’m not going to say, ‘I’ll play that because the audience likes it.’ I have to be convinced that I will enjoy it and do it justice. I believe the audience will enjoy hearing what you have to say now. For me planning a recital is like creating a menu for a dinner party. What shall we have for an appetizer? Soup? Main course? Dessert?”
Perlman usually likes to start with an earlier piece from his large repertoire. “Something Baroque or Classical, then move on to something Romantic,” he says.
For this recital, however, he says he’s “doing it upside down, based on the way I felt the pieces played out and their lengths.”
He has a pretty infallible gauge for measuring whether the sequencing works.
“I’ve tried it and I’m having a good time,” Perlman says. “If I’m convinced, the audience will be convinced.”
However, on stage he does something a little different for dessert.
“I like to finish with encores of the sort that violinists played long ago — something by Fritz Kreisler or a [Jascha] Heifetz transcription,” he says. “I think of them like bonbons.”
He and De Silva approach the encores with a deliberate insouciance. They don’t choose the piece until it’s time to play it.
“Rohan brings a stack of music on stage with him,” Perlman says. “We’ll go through them, ‘How about this?’ ‘No, what about that?’ It makes the experience a bit more interesting for us and the audience. It enables us to be more spontaneous.”
Spontaneity is a quality that Perlman believes is key to playing the nearly endless global circuit of recitals.
“If a piece is getting tired for me, as far as my interest in playing it is concerned, I put it aside,” he says. “Great pieces will always have great longevity. I may play something for a season and decide afterwards to put it aside and go to something else for the next season. Sometimes I may change [the program] in the middle of the season. It depends on how I feel. The important thing is for me to be convincing to the audience, and that only happens if I’m convinced myself. Once it starts to be an effort to play something...”
Perlman is one of those fortunate musicians whose musical interests are wide enough that he has no trouble finding other ways to amuse himself — and an audience — with a change of gears. Over the years he has recorded with jazz pianist Oscar Peterson and done film music with John Williams. He’s even played bluegrass with John Denver.
But two projects outside the classical music umbrella are particularly close to his heart, and he keeps returning to them. In the past year he has recorded and performed with Cantor Yitzhak Meir Helfgot in a program that blends hazanut and a bit of klezmer; they were backed a band led by Hankus Netsky that included several young string players from the Perelman Music Project, the music camp run by Perlman’s wife Toby. And the 20th anniversary of his best-selling klezmer project, “In the Fiddler’s House,” is approaching, which means a new round of live performances of that material as well.
“The music [from those two programs] is in my DNA as a Jew,” he says. “These are things I’ve lived and experienced since I was a boy in Israel. I hadn’t played much of this music when I was growing up, but when the opportunity presented itself it came very naturally to me. It’s something I was brought up listening to.”
Even more important, he adds gleefully, “I like the stuff! It happens to be that I’m Jewish and I love it, so it’s a win-win situation for me. But you don’t have to be Jewish to like this music. When we recorded with Cantor Helfgot we had members of the orchestra from the Perlman Music Project, a lot of whom were not Jewish, and they went crazy listening to it. The music is just so accessible.”
As he has gotten older, besides performing and teaching, Perlman has begun conducting more. (His four-year stint at the helm of the Westchester Philharmonic ended in 2011 when he abruptly resigned; the orchestra was reportedly facing financial problems.) He turns 70 next August.
“Getting older has affected my music in a totally positive way,” he asserts. “What keeps an artist going is their ability to keep the freshness and spontaneity of what they’re doing. Right now I’m playing better than ever. A lot has to do with my ability to hear and listen in a clearer way, and that has to do with my experiences as a teacher and conductor. Both of those jobs involve listening.”
Is retirement visible on the horizon?
“I have no idea,” he says. “I don’t like to plan. As long as I’m happy with what I’m doing I’ll keep playing.”
And we’ll keep listening. Happily.
Itzhak Perlman will perform a solo violin recital with Rohan De Silva at the piano on Wednesday, Dec. 3 at 7:30 p.m. at Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center. The program will include works by Vivaldi, Schumann, Beethoven and Ravel. For information call (212) 721-6500 or go to http://lc.lincolncenter.org.
Gary Rosenblatt
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Between the Lines - Gary RosenblattMy Dinner With The Rebbe
I had dinner Sunday evening with a group of Chabad rabbis in Brooklyn.
Several thousand of them, actually. Wearing their traditional black suits, black hats and long beards they filled the cavernous Brooklyn Marine Terminal with their ebullient enthusiasm. It was said to be the largest dinner of the year in New York, and I don’t doubt it.
For the sheer magnitude of the event you can look to the numbers: more than 4,000 rabbis representing Chabad in 80 countries and 1,200 additional guests, all male. The roll call of those countries, one at a time, from Angola to Ukraine, was one of the highlights of the dinner, along with the passionate speeches and spirited chasidic singing and dancing at evening’s end.
But that’s not the real story to me on my first visit to what must be one of the Seven Wonders of the Jewish World. What I took away from the annual international conference of Chabad-Lubavitch shluchim (emissaries) was the passion, commitment and joy of these men: for their beloved Rebbe, Menachem M. Schneerson, even 20 years after his death; for each other, bound together in service; and for their fellow Jews, to whom they dedicate their lives in the hope of bringing them closer to Yiddishkeit.
Journalists are known to be skeptics, if not cynics. Our attitude tends to be “we’ve seen it all,” and if you show us a good deal of kindness, it tends to get our antennae up. But what I saw the other night, and what has helped make Chabad such an international success story, in reach, in depth and in resources, is a genuine love of one’s fellow Jew. Period.
The happy buzz in the great hall was palpable as the shluchim greeted each other with smiles, hugs and L’chaims. They listened respectfully to the speeches, a few of which went on way too long. They seemed most impressed with the keynote address by Speaker of the Knesset Yuli Edelstein — not because of his title in the Israeli government but because of his very personal story. He spoke of how he found Judaism through Chabad in his native Communist Russia and how it sustained him during the dark years he spent in a Siberian hard labor camp after being arrested for teaching Hebrew and seeking to emigrate to Israel.
He recalled putting on a pair of tefillin that had been smuggled into the prison and secretly praying in them for several weeks until they were discovered and destroyed by guards. His punishment was 15 days in solitary confinement.
“I am here today because of a debt I can never pay back,” Edelstein said. “A debt I owe to the Rebbe and to the shluchim,” past and present, he said. “You are the best Torah ambassadors in the world.”
The challenge today is very different from that of 30 years ago under Communism, he asserted. No longer are Jews forbidden to pray, but there is much disinterest and ignorance regarding Jewish history, rituals and traditions among Jews, even in Israel. He called on the shluchim to continue their holy work, “lighting the candle” of Judaism and spreading its warmth.
Several shluchim from various parts of the world spoke on the conference theme, “The Rebbe Is With Us,” testifying that even when they felt alone in remote corners of the world, they sensed the presence of the Rebbe and were strengthened and inspired.
Their spiritual leader’s presence was evident throughout the evening, with several large photos of the Rebbe smiling down from posts high above the slowly revolving podium (so that the speakers could be seen throughout the room) and in film footage. In one eerie sequence, the thousands of rabbis were asked to join in and sing a well-known Chabad melody, and as they raised their voices, the large screens around the room showed a clip from a decades-old farbrengen, a joyous chasidic gathering, of the Rebbe clapping his hands and smiling. It was as if he were participating in real time.
To his chasidim, of course, he was. And is.
There was no talk about the Rebbe as Moshiach on this night. Instead there was satisfaction in his continued influence as a source of faith, energy and inspiration. Two decades after its leader’s death, Chabad calculates that the movement has grown 236 percent. It now operates in 49 states as well as throughout the world. And at a time when anti-Semitism is on the rise, Israel is increasingly embattled and what’s left of Jewish unity seems frighteningly frayed, the Rebbe’s army is on the march, seeking to instill traditional practice and pride, one Jew at a time.
gary@jewishweek.org
New York News
Orthodox Feminists Address 'Power Imbalance'
RCA leader at JOFA conference predicts 'shifting structure' of the rabbinate.
Yael Brodsky Levine had been interested in going to a JOFA conference for a while, but when she saw that this year’s keynote panel was on “Conversion, Rabbinic Authority and Power Imbalance in Orthodoxy,” it sealed the deal.
“The topic of this year’s keynote panel was particularly compelling. It touched on the broader, meta-issues at the root of people’s concerns,” said the 25-year-old. She was on duty monitoring the lunch buzz at the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance event Sunday.
Concern about unchecked rabbinic authority has spiked since the scandal last month involving Rabbi Barry Freundel, the Georgetown rabbi accused of planting video cameras in the community mikvah to watch women bathe naked.
Since the scandal, there have been widespread calls to increase female authority over the mikvah, which is used both for conversions and ritual practice. In advance of the conference, JOFA released a document of “Mikvah Best Practices” on its website last week, providing women with mikvah safety tips and recommending as little male involvement as possible.
“We want to familiarize women with the best practices, so that when and if things deviate, they can feel confident in speaking up,” said Pamela Scheininger, director of the best practices initiative.
JOFA’s conference, called the “UnConference” to highlight the event’s informal feel, attracted a diverse crowd of about 225, 20 percent of whom were male, according to a JOFA representative. Many came specifically to engage in conversations about rabbinic authority and conversion practices.
“There are so many questions still left unanswered,” said Rachel Levine of Merrick, L.I., who attended the conference with her husband, Jan Levine. “The community still wants answers.”
The keynote panel featured Rabbi Asher Lopatin, president of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, the leading “open” Orthodox rabbinical school; Elana Stein Hain, former clergy member at Lincoln Square Synagogue on the Upper West Side; and Rabbi Mark Dratch, executive vice president of the Rabbinical Council of America, the leading council of Orthodox rabbis.
“I used to be the left-winger in the room before coming to the RCA,” joked Rabbi Dratch, a former pulpit rabbi in Stamford, Conn., who on Sunday represented the most conservative voice on the panel.
When challenged with a question about the inherent power imbalance in an Orthodox rabbinate that still excludes women from “full participation and access to halachic authority,” Rabbi Dratch said that he “predicts a different structure of religious leadership down the road,” though he wasn’t specific about its contours.
“The rabbinate as we know it today is not the same as it was in Eastern Europe,” he said. “The rabbinate is still a work in progress.”
He later pointed out that his statements “do not represent the opinions of other RCA members” and that issues of power and gender would still exist “even if we plug women into the rabbinate.”
Laura Shaw-Frank, a founding board member of JOFA and the panel’s moderator, later commented on Rabbi Dratch’s response.
“He went as far as he could,” she said, qualifying that “we’re not going to get an answer that’s an answer” when it comes to the question of women joining the rabbinate as equals.
“There are two reasons people are here,” she said. “The first is the most obvious: feminists came to talk about issues they care about, and be around others who care about the same conversations. The second is the panel on rabbinic authority. This continues to be the burning question on people’s minds.”
Panelists also spoke of the importance of having a “watchdog” organization, a body outside of the rabbinic leadership that would check the rabbinate’s power.
“Any discipline that consults only with itself needs a system of checks and balances,” said Stein Hain. Such an organization would serve as a “watchdog and a whistleblower,” she said.
When it came to monitoring conversion, a topic of particular sensitivity since many of Rabbi Freundel’s alleged victims were converts, Rabbi Lopatin called for an “anti-Chofetz Chaim revolution,” referring to Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan, a mid-19th century rabbi who popularized the prohibitions against lashon hara, or gossip.
“It’s time to say yes to speaking out,” said Rabbi Lopatin.
“I hope, post-Freundel, the question has changed,” said Rabbi Lopatin in response to the question about power imbalance in the Orthodox rabbinate. “The question used to be how can we include women in our organization. The question now: Why don’t you have women in your organization?” he said to applause and cheering from the crowd.
“Can you really justify having an all-men’s club anymore?” he continued. “The burden of proof is now on those excluding women, not those including them.”
Rabbi Lopatin is also a board member of the International Rabbinic Fellowship, a council of Orthodox rabbis that began accepting female clergy as full members two years ago.
Adina Goldberger, a medical student at Northwestern University, traveled from Chicago with a few friends to attend the conference. Like many others, the keynote panel particularly attracted her interest.
“It’s rare to have a panel on rabbinic authority,” said Goldberger, who has attended several JOFA conferences. “They’re really addressing the core problems here as opposed to the symptoms.”
In the past, conferences have revolved more around ritual practice, she said.
“The question of how to practically make a women feel at home in the synagogue is very different from discussing gender role on a meta level,” she said.
Lauren Grunsfeld, 35, and Aimee Bailey, 31, two members of the Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn, attended the conference in order to address a running debate between the two of them.
“By pushing to become part of the rabbinate, it seems women are just fighting to be part of a male paradigm,” said Bailey. “Why should women fight to have more power in the system that was built from day one to cater to men?”
Grunsfeld disagreed. She said women joining the rabbinate would advance the feminist cause. “We’ve seen how much power can be abused when there are only men at the table,” she said. “If women could join the conversation, problems would get better, even if they weren’t completely solved.”
Rabba Sara Hurwitz, a spiritual leader of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale and the first women to receive ordination from Rabbi Avi Weiss, is eager for the conversation to progress.
“Women are already serving in rabbinic roles,” said Rabba Hurwitz, who is also the dean of Yeshivat Maharat, a program that trains women to be spiritual leaders in the Orthodox community. “I’m eager for the conversation to move past gender role and onto larger communal issues, like spirituality, education — how do we inspire our children?” she said. “A balanced leadership is a means to an end, not the end unto itself.”
hannah@jewishweek.org
Food and WineSweet vocation: Teaneck's Melissa Alt delights in crafting cakes in creative shapes, including members of the animal kingdom.
Melissa Alt has both a lion head and a gorilla head on display in her family’s dining room. No, she’s not an avid hunter, but a budding cake decorator displaying the remnants of her most prized works of art.
“I specialize in really high-detailed, elaborate, artistic cakes,” said the 22-year-old native of Teaneck, N.J., who is studying painting at the Pratt Institute. “I always say it’s more of an art for me than cake decorating.”
Alt has shown an interest in cakes since a young age. “Ever since elementary school I’d make Duncan Hines cakes and decorate them as Elmo or Sponge Bob for my friends,” she told The Jewish Week in a phone interview.
But at 18, right after she graduated from high school, Alt decided to give cake decorating a serious shot, landing a summer internship at the famed Hoboken bakery Carlo’s Bake Shop, best known from the TLC TV show “Cake Boss.”
“I learned how to properly ice a cake, properly roll out fondant, a few tips here and there,” she said. But Alt was yearning to experiment on her own, with more creative freedom. “I feel like I learned what I needed to learn there and I didn’t go back because I wasn’t doing what I wanted, which is art.”
After spending a year at seminary in Israel, Alt returned to the U.S. determined to jumpstart her cake-decorating career, and devoted the summer to the craft.
“I didn’t realize this was something I really wanted to do until I was in Israel and I kept thinking about cakes; I just wanted to do cakes,” she said. So she started creating confections for friends’ birthdays and weddings, “still really just learning the basics,” and studying online videos for tips.
By the next summer, Alt was ready to tackle what she’d been dreaming of: large, sculpted cakes that need a wooden frame for support.
With help from her dad in his workshop, Alt set out to create cake “sculptures” even though “I had no idea what I was doing,” she said. First she made an Iron Man cake for a neighbor’s birthday, then was commissioned to create a life-like lion cake for her friend’s mom’s surprise party. What followed was more than 10 days of work — and several all-nighters — to create a three-foot-tall, 150-plus-pound lion, covered in fondant and airbrushed to look life-like. The rest of the summer Alt churned out cakes of all shapes and sizes: delicate tiered cakes with stained-glass patterns or covered in flowers, cakes shaped like sandwiches, pickle barrels and more.
Her parents’ home in New Jersey turned into cake central:
“I definitely get in people’s way all the time in the kitchen,” said Alt. Her four siblings and her grandmother also live with her parents. She has drawers in the living room filled with supplies and strict instructions on cleanup from her mom: “I’ve gotten a lot better at cleaning up as I go!”
Though she’s had many successes — from a detailed drum set for a bar mitzvah to a helicopter and a life-like suitcase adorned with postcards — she’s had a few setbacks too. From cakes that fell apart to those that got damaged in transport, Alt has learned that the world of cake decorating is not without its challenges.
In fact, transporting the finished cake is often one of the toughest tasks. Though she is majoring in painting at Pratt, Alt took a sculpture class and made cakes for two of her final projects — a 3D standing gorilla and a tall man made of chocolate. Getting them to Brooklyn was a challenge.
“I had to hire three guys to come to my house and lift it,” she recalls. “I built a box to go around it and then I bungee corded it to the car so it wouldn’t move.”
Her favorite subjects are always animal sculptures — this past summer she made a turtle and she’s currently working on a hippo cake.
But when it’s all said and done, can Alt tolerate people cutting into — and eating! — her beloved art?
“This is what I made it for — it’s meant to be cut!” she says. “People always say, how can you cut that, but I’m happy when they do. I’m usually the one who does the cutting; other people can’t bear to.” ✦
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TravelOn (And Off) The Jewish Heritage Route
‘You can’t tell Americans how to pronounce Kosice,” my husband, Oggi warned me.
We were planning an excursion to Slovakia’s second-largest city, a former European Capital of Culture with a stunning historic center and a well-preserved trove of Jewish heritage sites. But Kosice has the misfortune to be graced with a name whose middle syllable, for English speakers, is the kind of vulgarity that elicits titters from my inner 8-year-old.
Perhaps that explains why Kosice (koh-shih-tsa) is virtually unknown to American travelers, for whom Slovakia itself remains a bit of a cipher. From a tourist’s point of view, that’s good news — as was Kosice’s status as a 2013 Capital of Culture. All the concerts, special exhibitions and other events notwithstanding, I always enjoy a city in the year or two after the hype has faded. You get the renovated transit and refurbished attractions without the crowds and high prices.
Despite a postwar plague of Soviet-industrial construction, central Kosice retains that cobblestoned, red-roofed quaintness associated with Central European cities like Prague and Budapest. But with just a quarter of a million inhabitants, it’s smaller, quirkier and more provincial — making it an ideal stopover on an itinerary that might include those larger cities, Vienna or Bratislava (all of which have convenient air and rail connections).
The recuperation of Jewish heritage sites was a major part of the Capital of Culture celebrations — and of the Slovakian Jewish Heritage Route, a network that highlights the dozens of antique synagogues, Jewish quarters and other vestiges of what was once a region rich with Jewish life.
According to official figures, Kosice was home to nearly 12,000 Jews in 1930, more than 16 percent of the population. In a city with the ethnic variety typical of Hapsburg Europe — a mix of Slavic, Hungarian and Roma — the Jewish community was itself diverse, representing distinct modes of worship and cultural affiliations. And it was vanquished nearly overnight: in just one month in 1944, Kosice’s Jews were shipped off to Auschwitz, most of them never to return.
But several prewar synagogues survive in some form, their proud, lavish façades a testament to mournful memory. Several have been repurposed: one is a concert hall, another a book repository. The Orthodox synagogue on Pushkinova Street, a mauve Art Deco masterpiece, is considered one of Kosice’s loveliest buildings, while the domed former Neolog shul — known postwar as the House of Arts — has been refashioned as the home of the State Philharmonic.
Both are on a Jewish-heritage walking tour put together by city officials (a full itinerary is at the website visitkosice.eu), along with the center of Kosice’s modern Jewish life — the Kehila Kosice on Zvonarska Street. A restored 1880s synagogue facade welcomes Jews to a historic complex that includes the community center, a small chapel with regular services, a 19th-century mikvah, a kosher cafeteria with a daily menu of Central European favorites, Jewish educational facilities and more.
With just under 300 members, this community — while a shadow of its prewar self — is healthy and active. The Kehila hosts regular exhibitions on Israeli and European-Jewish arts and history, as well as concerts of Jewish music, lectures and other cultural events.
The Jewish cemetery is also still in use — a symbol of the degree to which prewar Kosice has stubbornly survived. Numerous buildings in the city center date to medieval times, including a picturesque bell tower and the Cathedral of St. Elizabeth, a stern Gothic edifice from the 14th century that is the country’s largest church.
But Kosice’s buzz has less to do with its past and more to do with its burgeoning presence as a young, lively town. Unburdened by the weighty historical import that defines tourism in Prague or Vienna, Kosice is free to reinvent itself — to reassess its history, including the influence of its Jewish history, and to forge a new, modern culture.
That explains the profusion of beer gardens packed day and night throughout the city center; the throbbing beat of nightclubs that have sprung up in post-industrial lofts; and the crowds strolling up and down Hlavna Street, Kosice’s lovely main thoroughfare. It also explains the surprisingly appealing menus at cafés where young chefs are enlivening Central Europe’s traditionally stodgy, heavy fare with lighter, more contemporary cuisine.
Alongside the goulash, you might find a salad of winter oranges and kale with fennel and pears, for example. And the university crowd is as likely to munch hummus with its beer as pretzels. But coffeehouses — social staples of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire — are still ubiquitous, ensuring that in this corner of Old Europe, tradition survives alongside the new.
To walk the length of Hlavna Street, in fact, is to stroll through history. From the gargoyles of St. Elizabeth to baroque-era facades to lacey Art Nouveau institutions like the State Theater, which fronts a popular park with a lighted, musical fountain, Kosice wears its past proudly. And if some parts of that past — particularly the Holocaust — are rather dark, then Kosice’s rebirth as a forward-looking city is all the more welcome.
editor@jewishweek.org
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