The big news this week: the financial failure of FEGS, one of the city's most important social services organizations. Reporter Stewart Ain reveals an additional wrinkle. FEGS was an agency of the Federation, which was trying to provide closer oversight to its agencies, and the collapse still came out of the blue.
NEW YORK
New Fiscal Guidelines Failed To Sound Alarm
UJA-Fed’s accountability document, drawn up after Met Council scandal, didn’t provide ‘early warning’ of FEGS or NYLAG financial troubles.
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
In the wake of financial scandals at two of its most prominent agencies, the board of UJA-Federation adopted new accountability guidelines for its beneficiary agency boards and senior management.
The November 2013 guidelines stressed that “as a major funder of its network agencies,” UJA-Federation “has a vital role in ensuring the strength of this partnership,” and that the goal of the new guidelines was to “ensure that agency boards have the tools needed to meet their responsibilities and to provide UJA-Federation with early warning of potential financial challenges at agencies.”
It went on to detail UJA-Federation’s “minimum” expectations of each agency and said its “evaluation of how well an agency meets these expectations will be an integral part of UJA-Federation’s grant-making decisions beginning with FY15 grants that are awarded next spring.” It added that each agency would be required to certify compliance, and that those receiving a core operating grant of at least $200,000 would be required to provide material proof of their compliance. For fiscal year 2015, FEGS, one of its major beneficiary agencies, received a UJA-Federation grant of $5.13 million.
But just over a year after those new guidelines were adopted, FEGS announced that it was forced to close because of a major deficit that it put at $19.4 million, though at least two sources said the losses were more than double that figure. Although officials of UJA-Federation chose not to discuss the closing or when they learned of FEGS’ financial collapse, one source said the gravity of FEGS’ financial situation came as a shock to UJA-Federation officials and board members.
“They did not see it until they were told in December — just one week before it became public,” said the source, who asked for anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
He said FEGS’ senior officials and board members did not realize “until late in the game, the late fall” — that they were in dire trouble. They then hired a turnaround company and a public relations firm.
“The turnaround company had no experience with nonprofits or the Jewish community,” the source said. “My sense is that it did not have the skills to make the right moves and so it said close it down.” (FEGS would not say which company the agency worked with.)
Historically, UJA-Federation would step in to help save such a major agency by having it merge with another organization.
Such actions in the past “saved the services and the reputation of the Jewish community,” said the source.
But FEGS had reportedly been borrowing money for at least a year in order to meet expenses. Sources said money from the city and state programs FEGS was contracted to operate was insufficient to pay expenses and that FEGS had too many failed performance-based contracts.
A spokeswoman for FEGS (Federation Employment and Guidance Service) said in astatement that the financial losses stemmed from many factors, “including poorfinancial performance on certain contracts, contracts that did not cover their full costs, investments in unsuccessful mission-related ventures, write-offs of accrued program revenue, and costs resulting from excess real estate.”
The statement added that “FEGS reached this decision after rigorous evaluation to ensure the best possible outcome for FEGS’ clients and staff, working with outside financial and restructuring experts, and consulting with all of its government funders and other partners. This analysis showed that the financial situation which FEGS confronts was too deep to be resolved by continuing to run its programs.”
Not only did the new accountability guidelines fail to provide UJA-Federation with warning signs of a financial collapse at FEGS, they failed to reveal financial improprieties at another UJA-Federation agency, New York Legal Assistance Group, or NYLAG.
A founder of the organization, Yisroel Schulman, 51, abruptly resigned last week after learning that a federal grand jury was investigating financial irregularities at his agency.
A spokeswoman for the organization at first insisted that Schulman, who co-foundedNYLAG in 1990, was not available for comment and had simply retired to pursue other interests.
But after the New York Law Journal reported that Schulman had actually resigned because a Manhattan federal grand jury was investigating “accounting irregularities” at NYLAG, sources confirmed the probe and revealed that Schulman was the focus of the grand jury investigation.
A spokeswoman for NYLAG issued a statement saying: “We are confident the matter involving our former CEO will not interfere with the important legal services our dedicated team provides New Yorkers on a daily basis.”
A source insisted that the organization “is not out any money and its endowment is intact. … There is no question about the integrity of the current management.”
Beth Goldman, a former New York City commissioner of finance, is slated to replace Schulman next week.
The federal investigation of NYLAG comes as Allison Sesso, executive director of the Human Services Council, said “an autopsy on their [FEGS’] autopsy is being conducted by government and private funders” to learn what caused FEGS to decide to shut down.
The Daily News reported that the government probes were launched by both the office of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance. Both offices declined to comment.
A spokeswoman for FEGS said that to date, the forensic analysis has not found evidence of “fraud or malfeasance.”
The probes of these two agencies follows scandals at two other UJA-Federation agencies: the 92nd Street Y, in which an alleged kickback scheme led to the firing of the executive director and two other employees; and the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, in which the former CEO and other top executives were convicted and imprisoned for running an insurance kickback scheme.
“It is certainly clear that the Jewish community is going to have to do a certain amount of soul searching given the significant number of scandals and mismanagement that we have seen in recent years,” said Jonathan Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University.
He said the mismanagement at FEGS is “particularly unfortunate because it is clear that so many of our most neediest” may suffer because of the closure. Efforts to move FEGS’ many state and city programs to other agencies are now taking place. Sesso said it is up to the state and city governments to announce such moves because “they are not FEGS’ contracts anymore.”
Sarna said the scandals and mismanagement at these UJA-Federation-funded agencies “highlight the growing importance of transparency — and there are more and more donors who are demanding transparency precisely because of these kinds of situations. The fear is that they are not getting what they expect. If these concerns are not addressed, it will have a bad impact on philanthropy in general and Jewish philanthropy in particular.”
Asked to make someone available to address the possible impact the agency scandals and mismanagement might have on fundraising, a spokeswoman for UJA-Federation sent the following email:
“We are ahead in both the dollars raised and the number of donors to our annual campaign over last year. We’re grateful for the generosity of our donors who come to us because they want to have an impact on a broad range of issues and because they understand that the strength of our network allows us to leverage the collective expertise and services of leading agencies throughout the city so that clients are best served today and every day.”
It is believed that FEGS officlals asked UJA-Federation staff not to comment on the situation, and that the request was honored. A spokeswoman at FEGS declined to make anyone available to the press to discuss the decision to close. She emailed a statement similar to one issued a week ago that spoke of FEGS’ efforts to transfer programs and services to other providers.
“FEGS is committed to ensuring that this process is undertaken in a sensitive, constructive, and orderly manner that ensures continuity of services for clients and supports FEGS’ staff. Wherever possible, FEGS will work to facilitate transfers of staff to other organizations, or where that is not possible support them in identifying other opportunities,” the statement said.
An examination of FEGS’ 2012 990 financial statement — the latest one available — revealed that the organization was having financial difficulties that year; its annual fundraising dinner, for instance, actually lost money — at a time when the organization’s 17 top salaried employees were earning a total of $4.2 million. Fifteen of them earned between $200,000 and $482,436, the top salary going to former CEO Gail Magaliff, who also was receiving more than $156,000 in benefits. Her top assistant, Ira Machowsky, earned a salary of $454,739.
The Daily News reported that internal documents revealed that, even as FEGS’ bosses borrowed money to keep the 80-year-old organization alive, none of its employees took a pay cut — including 81 of them who earned at least $100,000 last year. It said also that some senior employees actually received pay hikes, including the organization’s comptroller, Michael Kirshner, whose salary jumped from $190,000 in fiscal year 2013 to a budgeted $215,000 this year.
Both Magaliff and Machowsky left FEGS just as the extent of its financial difficulties were becoming clear. The FEGS spokeswoman declined to reply when asked how much of a pension they would receive.
Sesso, of the Human Services Council, a membership association of non-profit human service providers of which UJA-Federation and FEGS are members, insisted that although “mismanagement caused the problem [at FEGS], the level of the salaries for the size of the agency” was not a factor. FEGS had an annual budget of about $250 million, employed about 3,000 people, and served 135,000 New Yorkers annually — among them about 20,000 Jews — in such areas as health and disabilities, home care, job training and immigrant services
“If you look at the for-profits, they have much larger salaries for managing the same level of business,” she said.
But Sarna, the Brandeis professor, said the high salaries paid at FEGS “raises anew questions about compensation in the nonprofit sector and the hidden costs of those very high salaries — which in some cases endanger the very mission of the organization and in other cases are unseemly given the charitable nature of the work.”
stewart@jewishweek.org
In more pleasant news, that is to say, food news, a kosher sausage cart is hitting the NYC streets.
NEW YORK
First Kosher Sausage Cart Hits NYC
The Jewish links, if you will.
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
In the mood for a kosher sausage? Today's your day.
A food cart called “Holy Rollers,” at the corner of 48th Street and Sixth Avenue, a block from the heart of the Diamond District, bills itself as New York City’s “first Glatt kosher meat cart” and “the first kosher sausage cart,” according to theyeahthatskosher.com web site.
Holy Rollers, under the kashrut supervision of the Orthodox Union, offers such varieties as Polish, Cajun and Sweet Italian, with other items like Double Dogs and Pulled Brisket also on the menu, all served inside “fesh hoagies.”
Hours are 10:30 a.m. – 5/6 p.m., “but be prepared to find the cart at other locationsaround the city at night,” yeahthatskosher.com states.
editor@jewishweek.org
As Shabbat approaches, take a moment to read the opinion piece we're running aboutoverscheduled children. Don't they deserve a day off, too?
OPINION
‘Mommy, I Want A Day Off’
The director of an alternative Hebrew School asks how much programming is too much, for kids.
Rabbi Lori Forman-Jacobi
Special To The Jewish Week
How will I fit it all in? Fotolia
Our children are exhausted and confused. How can they know what is truly important when they spend six mandated hours in school studying up to seven subjects followed by play rehearsal on Monday, soccer on Tuesday, OT sessions on Wednesday, Hebrew school on Thursday, piano on Friday, and soccer practice on both Saturday and Sunday mornings followed by a Sunday afternoon game? It tires me just to list this packed schedule, one that dictates the lives of many 8- to 13-year-olds.A 1967 classic romantic comedy called “If It’s Tuesday It Must Be Belgium” relates an unrelenting 18-day Euro-trip where tourists visit a new city every other day. The itinerary doesn’t allow time for the unique nature of each city to make a lasting impression, nor to spark one’s interest to learn more about its peoples and cultures. Rather, the tired traveler drifts from city to city with waning enthusiasm as they board the bus each morning. Why are we crafting similar itineraries for our children?
No one would be shocked to hear 9-year-old Sara say, “If it’s Wednesday, it must be gymnastics.” I don’t want to suggest that our children don’t get any enjoyment from their after-school activities. Of course they do. These activities allow them to make friends, use their physical energies in expansive ways, and be and think in new environments. I’m all for that.
But how much is too much? And how do we prioritize?
For the sake of transparency, I must confess that I am the director of an innovative Jewish educational project called The Jewish Journey Project, an initiative of the JCC in Manhattan. In a radical departure from traditional Hebrew school settings, one pillar of this project is flexibility. Realizing that parents and students lead complex and busy lives, we offer classes during weekday afternoon hours, on Saturday afternoons, Sunday mornings, afternoons and early evenings. We offer monthly Sunday Intensives and school vacation “camps.” Our curriculum is not top down: We do not set requirements for what or how many classes students must take, because we believe that a wide variety of classes and experiences can lead to an engaged Jewish life. The journey does not have to look the same for each child. We encourage our students to choose classes that blend activities that they love and want to explore — such as drama, animation or cooking — with Jewish content and experience.
Despite this intentional and radical redesign of religious education, I hear parents say over and over that their children are so scheduled they just don’t have time. Often it is expressed in the twice-annual advising sessions we have with our families, a time to reflect on courses and a family’s goals for their child’s Jewish education. Despite a diverse catalog of 40-plus courses, parents often open with the sentence, “Sammy has Tuesdays from 3:30-5:00 p.m. available. What are you offering then?” And Sammy will chime in, “Mommy, I want a day off.” As a rabbi and an educator, I yearn for our students to have meaningful Jewish experiences throughout the week. As a parent, my heart just aches.
There is nothing new in pointing out that we live in a world saturated with choices, and that part of our jobs as parents is to think hard about how to craft meaningful and productive schedules for our families. Just as children understand monetary value by watching how adults spend money, how to eat healthily by noticing their parents’ food choices, so too do they learn what’s important by seeing how their parents schedule their time.
Yes, sports are important because they develop collaborative skills, resilience, and stamina; music cultivates an ethic of practice, experimentation and new brain connections; learning a new language ripens concentration and memory, while fostering connections to other cultures.
But to what extent does the pursuit of each of these qualities in isolation help our children make meaning of the world around them? How are these skills contributing to a bigger picture of who our children are, and will become?
Across the country Jewish educators are shaking up their programs and experimenting with new forms and content. For sure, this project was in part designed to accommodate the busy schedules of contemporary Jewish families. Yet the flexibility and innovation of our program are not an effort to adjust to the status quo, but to challenge it. The Jewish Journey Project seeks to build a moral architecture for our children by sculpting a community that helps them make meaning of and from their everyday interactions. We endeavor to be the foundation for children to understand the world around them — the parts that are “obviously” Jewish, and the parts that are not. By combining Jewish teachings with fantastically diverse modalities, our kids learn that Judaism is with us wherever we go — not only in Hebrew school, or at services, or during the holidays.
Atonement and resolution are traditions with both Jewish and secular roots. As Jewish families of the 21st century, many of us regularly resolve to diet, exercise and save more. How many of us resolve to slow down? To lead more meaningful lives? To consider personal development not as a catchall of isolated skill sets, but in connection to our moral philosophy?
If we really want our children to understand the richness of Jewish life in terms of values, ethics, culture and history, we must create a paradigm that sees Jewish education and practice as a moral architecture — not as just another activity in our child’s schedule, on the same plane as basketball or violin. As parents, we must take a breath to rethink the value of our children’s hectic lives, and prioritize Jewish identity-building as the context for making meaning of our world.
Rabbi Lori Forman-Jacobi is the director of The Jewish Journey Project, an initiative of JCC in Manhattan in partnership with Ansche Chesed, B’nai Jeshurun, Congregation Habonim, Society for the Advancement of Judaism and West End Synagogue. For more information, go to jewishjourneyproject.org
Enjoy the time, everybody,
Helen Chernikoff
Web Director
Hannah Dreyfus
Jewish Week Staff WriterReally, Urban Outfitters? More Holocaust garb?
A gray and white striped tapestry featuring a pink triangle is causing the latest stir. The Anti-Defamation League, an organization committed to battling anti-Semitism, released a statement last night urging the retail giant to pull the item, which is “eerily reminiscent” of the Holocaust garb that gay male prisoners were forced to wear in Nazi concentration camps.
ADL sent a letter to Urban Outfitters President and CEO Richard A. Hayne expressing concern over the “insensitive design.”
“Whether intentional or not, this gray and white stripped pattern and pink triangle combination is deeply offensive and should not be mainstreamed into popular culture,” said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director and a Holocaust survivor. “We urge Urban Outfitters to immediately remove the product eerily reminiscent of clothing forced upon the victims of the Holocaust from their stores and online.”
Though Urban Outfitters removed the item, designer Wood Wood claimed that the graphic was not the Star of David and was “no way a reference to Judaism, Nazism or the Holocaust.”
The retail chain has not yet responded to the Jewish Week’s request for comment regarding the tapestry.
hannah@jewishweek.org
JTAOne of the top agenda items these days for Rachel Timoner, associate rabbi at theLeo Baeck Temple in Los Angeles, is trying to get a train built along the I-405 freeway stretching from the North San Fernando Valley to the city’s international airport.
It’s the community project her Reform congregation has chosen to prioritize — as a vehicle, Timoner says, for creating 140,000 jobs and removing 80,000 cars from the road each day.
When Timoner takes up her new post this summer as senior rabbi at Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn, she may find herself far from concerns about L.A. traffic, but close to that same spirit of community organizing and social action.
Beth Elohim has earned a national reputation in recent years for social action — and for the successes that its departing rabbi, Andy Bachman, has had at bringing disaffected Jewish young professionals into synagogue life.
After Hurricane Sandy in 2012, Beth Elohim launched a massive meal-delivery program for down-and-out New Yorkers. After the massacre of 26 children and teachers at a school in Newtown, Conn., there was Bachman protesting outside a firm with investments in military-style assault weapons. When the Park Slope Food Coop threatened to boycott Israeli goods, Bachman led the progressive charge against the boycott.
All the while, Bachman managed to make Beth Elohim a hub for young Jews. The synagogue hosts brand-name speaker programs and a vibrant traditional-style egalitarian minyan called Altshul. Membership doubled to almost 1,000 households over Bachman’s nearly nine years at the helm.
So when Bachman announced last summer that he would be leaving his pulpit to focus on work helping New York’s poor, many in his stunned congregation wondered who could take his place.
On Jan. 28, the search committee announced that Timoner was its unanimous choice for senior rabbi. The decision has been approved by the board but must be voted on by the congregation — likely on March 2.
“We really see ourselves as a model for a synagogue that’s broader than just our congregation,” Beth Elohim’s president, Jonathan Fried, told JTA. “Rabbi Timoner has both a strong track record in her current congregation of really engaging people, and she has a previous background before she went to rabbinical school of working withcommunity organizations and other nonprofits.”
Timoner’s hire, if approved, also would mark the third large congregation in Brooklyn’s stroller-filled Park Slope to be led by a lesbian. The other two are the unaffiliated Kolot Chayeinu, which has long been led by Rabbi Ellen Lippman, and thePark Slope Jewish Center, a Conservative congregation under Rabbi Carie Carter’s stewardship.
A Florida native, Timoner, 44, spent nearly 14 years in the nonprofit sector before enrolling in rabbinical school. After graduating from Yale, she helped rebuild a community center for low-income women in San Francisco, launched or led four programs for LGBT youth, researched the impact of welfare reform on poor people in California, and spent six years as an organizational development consultant working with such clients as the Pro-Choice Resource Center, the Coalition on Homelessness and a group for abused women.
Timoner is married to Felicia Park-Rogers, the former executive director of Beth Chayim Chadashim, an LGBT congregation in Los Angeles. The couple has two sons.
By all accounts, Timoner’s decision to go into the rabbinate was an extension of herearlier work. (Timoner declined to be interviewed for this story, citing the congregation’s pending vote on her hire.)
“Repairing injustice has been central to Rachel’s rabbinate,” said Rabbi Stephanie Kolin, co-director of the Union for Reform Judaism’s Just Congregations initiative, which helps congregations mobilize for social action.
“As opposed to talking about issues from the bima, Rachel has surrounded herself with congregants to allow them to do their work in the public square through a Jewish lens,” said Kolin, who also will be moving from Los Angeles to New York this summer to take a job as associate rabbi at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue.
Timoner, who wrote a 2011 book “Breath of Life: God as Spirit in Judaism,” also has been an outstanding spiritual leader, according to Kenneth Chasen, the senior rabbi at Leo Baeck Temple.
“She has a contagious spirit, and it brings depth and meaning to every corner of the world,” Chasen said.
David Myers, the chairman of UCLA’s history department and a professor of Jewish history, said Timoner is a worthy successor to Bachman.
“She is poised to assume a position of leadership,” he said, “not just in one synagogue but on the American Jewish stage more generally.”
editor@jewishweek.org
David Sable
Special To The Jewish Week
Never let the competition define you. Never peg your own identity to a rival. Never allow the other side to dictate your character and never abdicate your own individuality and uniqueness.
What I have articulated above are key marketing principles that I share with clients who start to lose confidence in their own distinctiveness. It happens. They feel inauthentic, old, tired maybe … their self-esteem drops and they peg their existence to others and hope that it rubs off.
The bankruptcy files are full of once powerful entities, public and private, that just couldn’t maintain their own distinctiveness and became homogenized in a category. Often, they were taken over and disappeared.
Seems to me we are facing that same issue in the so-called Orthodox world as the pendulum of identity swings ever further to the right.
The problem, in my estimation, is that at a point in time Modern Orthodox defined a particular world view that was represented by rabbis well known in New York like Haskel Lookstein, Yitz Greenberg, my late father, Jack Sable, Shlomo Riskin, Arthur Schneier, and others. They were traditional in their observance while valuing the benefits of Western culture.
Today, Modern Orthodox has become neo-charedi, and charedi has become ultra-Orthodox. Sadly, the institutions that once represented the vibrancy of post-war traditional Judaism are drifting further and further to the religious right.
One needn’t look further for proof than the synagogues that once proudly accepted only Yeshiva University-ordained rabbis to lead their communities because those rabbis represented an accessible and democratized Judaism. Many of those synagogues now have extended their search for religious leaders to Lakewood and other more fundamentalist yeshivas, refusing even to interview rabbinic candidates from Chovevei Torah (which represents the ordination of Rabbi Avi Weiss).
Back to definitions. The real problem is that those who are still in the center, and left of the center, are at a loss. They desperately want to be seen as Orthodox. They continue to peg their legitimacy to others and go so far as to demand continued access to a club that doesn’t want them, has no use for them, mocks them and in the end will not accept them. They are rejected as individuals and as representing a valid expression of authentic Judaism.
Let me be clear: I love davening in a shteibel. I am comfortable in chasidic company. Further, I enjoy it, having seen the great chesed of the Satamar Bikur Cholim and the amazing grace of Chai Lifeline and Ohel.
Yet as much as I respect and appreciate their world, as much as I can move back and forth, it’s not my world. And just as I don’t try to impose on them, I resent the growing sense of religious coercion. Even worse is the sad need for some of those who represent a different expression of halachic Judaism to peg their legitimacy on the very system they are supposedly rejecting.
The question is: What is represented by what was once the center of Orthodoxy and is now perceived as the left?
One label being used is Open Orthodox. I reject it, wondering if it means that all others are closed. Or does it mean that we can be loose in our religious observance? Both are inaccurate.
I think it’s time to seek a new classification, not for the sake of controversy but rather for the sake of clarity.
The new niche is already carved out. It is dynamic, accessible and democratic. It values Jewish ethics and morality as an integral expression of religiosity and doesn’t denigrate them to a place below ritual observance. It welcomes the participation of women. It encourages questions and questioning. It rejects the entire notion of Dat Torah, the papal-like infallibility of some rabbinic leaders. It is steeped in and based on halacha, but its view of Jewish law is that it is an evolving system that needs to be sensitive to time and place. (Many would insist that has always been how halacha is defined.) It is the Orthodoxy I grew up with and sadly have a hard time finding today.
We need a clear and transparent articulation so that we can go our way and others can go theirs, without acrimony and the need to compare.
Frankly we need clarity so that our children don’t get confused by so-called Modern Orthodox rabbis who don’t represent a world view that is consistent with the values that we believe in. I want clarity so that our children will stay inspired and involved without the need to “flip,” embracing a fundamentalist religious lifestyle.
Bottom line, it’s time to leave the term Orthodox to others and coalesce around what I believe is real “Jewdaism,” a religion about individual Jews that in its day was big enough to accommodate all but has somehow grown smaller.
So start working on a word …
David Sable is a leader in the field of global marketing strategy and a member of the board of The Jewish Week.
editor@jewishweek.org
Ronit Elkabetz as Viviane Amsalem in "Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem". Music Box Films
THE ARTSIsraeli Films, Front And Center
George Robinson
Special To The Jewish Week
Note: This is the second of three articles on this year’s New York Jewish Film Festival.
In the first of three articles on this year’s New York Jewish Film Festival, now underway at Lincoln Center, the continuing growth of the event was attributed in part to the splendid creative effulgence of the Israeli film industry during the nearly quarter-century of the festival’s existence. This year’s festival, the 24th annual, is an excellent example, with the final film in a splendid trilogy and a debut feature of consummate art and feeling contributed by Israeli filmmakers.
Ronit Elkabetz is one of the most gifted Israeli actresses and the closest thing to Anna Magnani in the world today. With her brother Shlomi she has been working for a decade on a three-film series tracing the marriage and divorce of Viviane Amsalem, a character originally based loosely on the filmmakers’ mother, a Jew of Moroccan heritage who marries a fellow Moroccan, Elisha (Simon Abkarian), endures a rocky relationship with her husband and both their families and finally, unable to withstand any more marital tensions, seeks a divorce.
The Elkabetz siblings co-wrote and -directed “To Take a Wife” (2004), “7 Days” (2008) and “Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem,” the trilogy’s final installment, nominated for an Oscar for best foreign-language film and part of this year’s NYJFF before it opens theatrically in February. The three films represent a rising curve of accomplishment and ambition, with the first two gaining in self-assurance and an increasingly canny blend of comedy and drama. But seeing those two earlier films could not prepare a viewer for the quantum leap represented by “Gett.” Quite simply, it is a brilliant film, a rare mixture of laughter, rage and helplessness, such as any woman would face in the religious courts of Israel.
Like a well-constructed comedy routine, “Gett” (a variation on the spelling of a Jewish divorce) is a slow-burn device that builds from restrained absurdities like the judges asking Viviane’s attorney (Menashe Noy) to put on a kipa, to extended perorations from opposing counsel (Sasson Gabbai) so over the top that Perry Mason would blush. Viviane’s ordeal will go on for five years, although the film is so elegantly paced that its 115-minute running time passes swiftly. The Elkabetzes structure the film around long takes in close two- and three-shots, moving into close-ups frequently. Where “7 Days” used a similar reliance on long takes but with the camera set back a bit more to create a sense of the imploding community, “Gett” is about the increasing emotional isolation of its two lead characters and their supporters. It is also about the gradual flow of emotional states over the uninterrupted screen time. In the hands of a trusting director there is nothing more eloquent than the human face, and “Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem” is a vivid reminder of that principle.
It is highly unusual for a young filmmaker to have two feature films in a single festival — one fiction, one non-fiction — but on the basis of “The Dune,” Yossi Aviram is an unusual director. “The Dune” opens with a 13-minute long pre-credit sequence set in Israel, establishing Hanoch (Lior Ashkenazi) as a slumping bicycle repair specialist whose relationship with his girlfriend unravels when he asks her to get an abortion. Suddenly we are in France, where Reuven Avari (Niels Arestrup) is drawing to the end of his career as a police detective specializing in missing-persons cases. His most recent case has ended badly, and his lover (Guy Marchand) is eager for him to retire. Then Hanoch is found on a sand dune on a French beach, without identification and unwilling to speak; the case intrigues Reuven and he begins to investigate.
Aviram, a cinematographer whose previous work has been on documentaries, brings a strong visual sense to this story, using the relationship between character and environment cunningly to peel back the layers of emotional deception. As a writer he is no less deft, artfully planting evidence for the audience, gently suggesting possible solutions to the film’s riddles and setting up at least one significant narrative point that turns out to be a red herring. The film is visually graceful, emotionally sensitive and effective and beautifully acted, in short a sterling debut.
If I say that Aviram’s other film in this year’s festival, a documentary called “The Polgar Variant,” is merely intelligent and workmanlike, you will get some idea of how impressive “The Dune” is. Intriguingly, what links the two films is a fascination with chess. Although the chess connection between the characters in “The Dune” turns out to be of secondary importance, Aviram invests it with much resonance and, looking at “Polgar” one can easily see why. The non-fiction film recounts the unusual story of the three Polgar sisters, Zsuzsa, Sofi and Judit, the daughters of two Jewish-Hungarian schoolteachers, who were the extraordinarily successful result of their father’s experiment in home schooling during the dark days of the post-1956 Communist regime in Hungary. Each of the three sisters hurled herself against the massive edifice of world chess, utterly dominated by men for its entire history. Each was a commanding figure in the women’s game, but only Judit was fortunate enough to win a men’s tournament at the highest level, although Zsuzsa came close. Aviram was fortunate that almost all of the participants in the story are alive and many of the major players — including all of the Polgars — were willing to talk on-camera about their lives. The film is brisk and frequently quite funny. It’s not “The Dune,” but it is intelligent and entertaining.
With the future of Israeli film seeming exceptionally bright, we turn to one of the mainstays of the industry, Amos Gitai; he is represented in this year’s festival by one of his rare literary adaptations, from the work Aharon Appelfeld, the acclaimed Israeli novelist and a survivor of the Shoah. Rereading Appelfeld’s 1983 novel “Tzili: The Story of a Life,” it’s not hard to see why he hasn’t attracted much interest from filmmakers. The prose of this dark picaresque novel, indeed of most of his work, has a brute simplicity and the hypnotic rhythm of someone chiseling the writer’s words onto hard stone, at a great cost to the artisan. If a reader imagines the scenes Appelfeld describes, it is probably as a snarling medieval woodcut. Film images would only aestheticize what should be primitive, haunting and ominous.
Amos Gitai would seem an unlikely candidate to film “Tzili” as the film is now titled. He is capable of moments of great, daunting violence, tinged with a sense of the absurd. His penchant for long takes with dizzying camera movement would seem a paradoxically apt choice for a novel in which the central character is constantly in motion yet never seems to get anywhere.
Gitai is a cerebral filmmaker, even cold, and the detachment with which he approaches his characters should serve as a guarantee against the Disneyfication of the Shoah, which Appelfeld has always rebuffed with his own brand of adamantine disengagement. Gitai defuses the most emotionally fraught material from the book by rendering it as voice-over narration in a late scene in a makeshift field hospital, almost without context, or by using it as dialogue spoken in extreme long-shot by a character we barely know. The only concession to comventional psychology and emotion is a long-take close-up of Tzili (played as a young adult by Sarah Adler), with tears welling up and rolling down her cheeks.
Sequence by sequence, “Tzili” is thoughtfully and intelligently directed. Taken as a whole, the film is a cryptic, ahistorical conundrum with none of the impact of Appelfeld’s novel and little of the resonance. Stripping away the connecting tissue of the book, removing characters’ motivations and eliding important plot elements, Gitai and co-scriptwriter Mari-José Sanselme have universalized a highly specific tale to no purpose. The result, sadly, is like Beckett without humor or Appelfeld without the underpinning reality of the Nazi rampage.
The 24th New York Jewish Film Festival, produced by The Jewish Museum and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, runs through Jan. 29. Screenings will take place at the Walter Reade Theater and Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, both located on West 65th Street in Lincoln Center. For more information, go to www.filmlinc.com.
Jon Stewart Steps Down From
"The Daily Show"
Maya Klausner
Blueprint Editor
When Jon Stewart announced that he would be retiring from "The Daily Show" during Tuesday's live taping, audience members and later on the millions of viewers watching could only hope it was just another joke. However, those waiting for a punch line should get comfortable.
After a 17-year reign as the host of the heralded satirical nightly news program, Jon Stewart has said, "I don't have any specific plans. Got a lot of ideas. I got a lot of things in my head. I'm going to have dinner on a school night with my family, who I have heard from multiple sources are lovely people."
Known for its absurd interpretation of international news, the show quickly became a daily roast, which served up politician kebobs every night on Comedy Central.
The network released a statement today confirming Stewart's impending departure. Part of the statement read, " ... His comedic brilliance is second to none. Jon has been at the heart of Comedy Central, championing and nurturing the best talent in the industry, in front of and behind the camera .... "
Stewart, who has earned and kept the trust of a loyal fan base with his acerbic humor and irreverent take on the political landscape around the world for the better part of two decades, has helped to launch the careers of many comedians including Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert and John Oliver.
You may have heard of them. One went on to star in the major hit NBC sitcom, "The Office," the other has run a wildly successful late night show called "The Colbert Report" and will be soon taking over "The Late Show With David Letterman" and the third is embarking on his second year as the host of the HBO news satire program, "Last Week Tonight."
These three men are all immensely talented, hard working comedic forces. But the other thing they share is an alma mater. They are all graduates of The Jon Stewart Comedy School. Although not an official university, much to the chagrin of many burgeoning, young comics who would probably steal medicine from sick, old ladies for tuition money, the halls of "The Daily Show" have served as a kind of breeding ground for comedic talent.
Stewart was not shy about his Judaism on the show: he hosted guests like Borat Sagdiyev, offered sarcastic commentary on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and joked about President Barack Obama's "scaled down Channukah party." Born Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz, Stewart showed many times that he had no qualms teasing his own tribe. He adopted a stage name, he's said, because his given one was "too Hollywood."
Equal parts clown and concerned civilian, Stewart elevated the genre of late night talk shows by bringing late night entertainment to the forefront of media news. Starting out as a stand up comic with a wry sensibility for political commentary, Stewart did not just poke fun at the news, he delivered it.
Stewart's propensity for parody did not hinder his ability to convey information in an astute and often enlightening way. As a native New Yorker who was raised by a couple of Jews with moderate to right leaning views (no they do not watch FOX, let them live), it was soothing for me to have a worldly, erudite, ceaselessly hilarious voice that leaned more than a whiff to the left to tune into every night. Oh yeah, I happen to be a comedian.
Stewart's had an unparalleled ability to feed both sides of the brain, the one that longed to laugh, and the one that longed to think. People began to turn to "The Daily Show" as a venerable news source. For some, Stewart's salty, incisive political rhetoric served as their sole dose of current events.
And he did not just spew ire and castigate from the safety of his comedy pulpit. He faced the subjects of his jokes. Appearing on news stations like CNN, The O'Reilly Factor, CNBC and engaging in fiery, incensed debates with news anchors and politicians, often on their own turf, Stewart did not balk at confrontation, he chased it down.
Though equipped with a barbed tongue, Stewart has also revealed a softer side on the show, including his open display of sorrow after 9/11 and a tearful moment when he announced he would be retiring from the show yesterday.
Through this delicate balance of parody and poignancy, Stewart built an empire for late night entertainment news. The big question is who will take over the kingdom Stewart has molded?
I for one would like to see a queen take the throne.
"I'm not going anywhere tomorrow, but this show doesn't deserve an even slightly restless host, and neither do you" Stewart said when addressing the audience yesterday.
While sad to seem him go, Stewart fans are no doubt eager for what will come next.
From the first time he stepped onto the Bar-Ilan University (BIU) campus almost 50 years ago as part of his Bar Mitzvah celebration in Israel, Ronnie Stern knew that Bar-Ilan and its American Friends would always play an important part of his life and that of his family. When he was recently elected as the new President of the American Friends of Bar-Ilan University at its Board Meeting in New York, it was yet another seminal moment in the Stern Family's multi-generational support and leadership of a University that is near and dear to its heart.
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THE NEW NORMAL
In Israel: Taking Inclusion
To A Larger Level
IDF Soldiers. Courtesy of Howard Blas
On a recent visit to a Pikud HaOref, Home Front Command base in Ramle, 14 miles southeast of Tel Aviv, a soldier tells me a very animated story about his role in Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s military operation in Gaza: “My job was to copy the papers for our soldiers to drop from planes over Gaza this summer!” The soldier, in uniform with his bright orange beret on his shoulder, happens to have Down Syndrome. He is very excited about his job in the base print shop. Another soldier with a visible disability proudly recounts the visit to the base the previous day by IDF Chief of Staff, Benny Ganz. “We saluted him and gave him a present — olive oil that we made on the base!”
Twenty five other soldiers with disabilities perform similarly important jobs each day on the base. If Tiran Attia and other visionaries have their way, Tzahal, or the IDF (Israel Defense Forces), may become a “game changer” in Israel for inclusion and for shaping attitudes about people with disabilities.
Tiran Attia, who served for 30 years in the IDF and was a commander of Sar-El, the IDF National Project for Volunteers, serves as head manager of Yad Layeled HaMyeuchad(“Lend a Hand to a Special Child”), an amuta (non-profit organization) which consists of two programs, “Magshimim Chalom—Fulfilling a Dream” and “Shaveh b’Madim-Equal in Uniform.”
I have had the privilege of visiting two such army bases during recent trips to Israel — the home front command base in Ramle, and a logistics base near Kiryat Malachi. During our tour, Attia takes me to visit soldiers from the program at various jobsites including the supply room, dining room and print shop. Attia emphasizes several times during our visit, “It should be noted that in Israel, army service is the gateway to successful integration into society and the work force. The nearby Chevrat Chashmal (electric company) already employs 260 workers with special needs."
The program is already impacting the other soldiers through what Attia describes as “the ripple effect. Other soldiers on the base think less of their own problems, they think of the soldiers with disabilities as role models, and discipline problems on the base have gone down.”
Arianna Goldsmith, an American olah (immigrant to Israel) works with the soldiers with disabilities as her army service: “The other soldiers see these soldiers come to work and it teaches them, it changes their attitudes.”
Tiran, who admits to being skeptical of the program at first, notes, “One mother of a soldier in our program told me, “You have made a miracle!” Tiran was injured during the Second Lebanon War and was visited in the hospital by people with disabilities. “I saw the love and sympathy they gave to the injured soldiers and I realized they have so much to give — so I started to advocate for them to join the program.”
The program was founded to enable youth with disabilities to realize their dream and serve in the IDF like most young Israelis, for whom service in the IDF is a normal part of life in the years between high school and college. At the same time, the program promotes a more inclusive society and fosters the attitude that people with disabilities can more fully participate in and contribute to society.
I share with Attia our 45 years of experience successfully including campers with disabilities in our eight Ramah overnight camps and three day camps in the United States and Canada. And I stress how both anecdotally and through research, we know that inclusion benefits everyone. For example, a 2013 study, “The Impact of Ramah Programs for Children, Teens, and Young Adults with Disabilities: A Strategic PlanningSurvey of Special Needs Education Professionals, Ramah Special Needs Staff, Staff Alumni and Parents,” conducted by Dr. Ezra Kopelowitz, shows quite clearly that “Staff and camper alumni who had contact with a Ramah special needs program report major impact on their personal and professional lives. At Ramah, this happens on a massive scale, as each summer, 7,500 campers-some in each camp with both visible and invisible disabilities--and over 2,500 university aged staff members, populate our camps.
Attia and his colleagues don’t need to be convinced—and they see the potential for inclusion and shaping of attitudes on a massive scale. Yossi Kahana, Director of Development for Aleh Negev-USA and co-founder of the program, believes strongly that “If every soldier in the IDF has the opportunity to work side by side with people with disabilities, the potential to change attitudes in Israeli society is tremendous.” Kahana now has a personal as well as a professional connection to disabilities. “I'm the father of a child with special needs. My older son is serving in the army and my younger son, Gershon, who is nine years old, is autistic. My dream is that my younger son will one day join his brother in the army.”
As the IDF continues to include soldiers with disabilities on an even larger scale, they will no doubt shape the attitudes of an entire society!
Howard Blas is the director of the Tikvah Program at Camp Ramah in New England and of the National Ramah Tikvah Network. Howard also serves as a teacher of Jewish Studies and bar/bat mitzvah to students with a range of disabilities and “special circumstances.” He holds masters degrees in both social work (Columbia University) and special education (Bank Street College of Education). Howard received the S’fatai Tiftakh Award from Boston Hebrew College’s Center for Jewish Special Education in 2012 and the 2013 Covenant Award for Excellence in Jewish Education. He writes regularly for many Jewish publications.
WELL VERSED
Can These Bones Live?
Can They Dance?
From “Dry Bones: Resurrection of the Living." Courtesy Sydney Schiff
“Dry Bones Resurrection of the Living,” Sydney Schiff’shour-long piece, performed recently at the Judson Church, sees dance as a spiritual quest.Schiff was inspired by her difficulty with Orthodox men’s resistance to seeing women dance. She does not attempt to divorce dance from the female body but she has worked very seriously for a number of years to show that women dancing can be about more than the arousal of desire.
The piece features three women in intricate contrapuntal duos, solos and threesomes. They dance at different speeds on different levels – one reaching out, while the other crumples to the floor and the third sits down on a pew-like bench. The movement is alternatively lyrical, celebratory and staccato; they use their whole bodies and then emphasize isolating parts.
The composition is about self-renewal. Schiff tells The Jewish Week that she intentionally uses dancers of different faiths and has them go off and then move in unison, in order “ to emphasize religious diversity while, at the same time communicating that underneath we are all made of the same stuff.” What’s more, she has her dancers finely attune to one another so that they can improvise responsively. This, Schiff explains in an unexpected association, “becomes a metaphor for the spontaneous exchanges in a Beit Midrash”.
Schiff’s process is a complex one, having to do with translating sacred letters and texts into movement. She opens the piece by showing the audience how dance can translate words, by pointing out which gestures are derived from the letters contained in the word "resurrection.”
The musical score is a highlight of the evening, a special arrangement of themes from Dvorak’s Symphony of the New World, interspersed with an amalgam of Ezekiel’s vision of dry bones and the old folksong called “Dem Bones.” Schiff explains, “There is an old world tradition, but we take ownership of it in a new world.”
She admits to not persuading certain male members of the community that what she does is worthy, but true to the artist’s path, she will keep on exploring.
Susan Reimer-Torn is author of the recently published memoir, “Maybe Not Such a Nice Girl: Reflections on Rupture and Return.”
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