The New York Jewish Week - Connecting the World with Jewish News, Culture, Features, and Opinions for Wednesday, 4 February 2015 "FEGS fallout; Fighting sexual assault on campus; big data comes to Israeli politics.

The New York Jewish Week - Connecting the World with Jewish News, Culture, Features, and Opinions for Wednesday, 4 February 2015 "FEGS fallout; Fighting sexual assault on campus; big data comes to Israeli politics.

The Jewish Week Newsletter

Dear Reader,
Two prominent Jewish organizations took hits in recent days. FEGS, the eight-decade-old social services agency, announced that it was closing its doors in the coming months due in part to a $19.4 million loss last year. Staff writer Amy Sara Clark reports on the possible fallout as agencies scramble to pick up the slack. And the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, the denomination's congregational arm, announced its latest belt-tightening move; four executives are being laid off, a sign of continued tough times for what once was the biggest branch of Judaism. Staff writer Steve Lipman reports.New York

Questions Loom In Wake Of FEGS’ Fall
Amid calls for greater oversight, what agencies in the UJA-Federation network will pick up the slack?
Amy Sara Clark
Staff Writer

FEGS’ headquarters on Hudson Street. The agency lost nearly $20 million last year. Michael Datikash/JW

In the teeth of the Great Recession, UJA-Federation of New York launched a program that offered a life raft of sorts for those who had lost their jobs and whose debts were mounting.
In the five years that followed, Connect to Care helped more than 80,000 New Yorkers with career counseling, financial advice, legal services and emotional and spiritual support.
With the sudden announcement this week that FEGS, the organization that provided many Connect to Care services and one of the largest social-service agencies in the federation network, would shutter its doors in the coming months, the charity is figuring out how to continue these services and others that the Federation Employment and Guidance Service provides.
Federation officials said they’re committed to working out a smooth transition.
“We are in regular communications with FEGS to help support uninterrupted service delivery and are exploring the right place for Connect to Care, and other programs we support in the UJA-Federation network of agencies,” a statement from the organization said.
UJA-Federation of New York is not the only organization scrambling to find new providers to continue the services provided by FEGS, cited by Crain’s as one of the largest social-service agencies in the country. The 80-year-old organization serves about 135,000 New Yorkers each year, including about 20,000 Jewish clients, some of them poor or near poor. And the number of Jews in poverty is rising, according to a 2011 population survey by the UJA-Federation of New York.
With an operating budget of some $220 million, from charities and government contracts, FEGS runs some 300 locations across the New York metropolitan area, serving about 12,000 every day.
The organization confirmed Friday that it would be shutting down after unexpectedly losing $19.4 million last year.
FEGS provides services in such areas as health/disabilities, home care, job training and immigrant services.
The group made its announcement just days after another New York Jewish social service agency, the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, announced that it was looking to merge or partner with other organizations to improve efficiency.
FEGS officials have remained mum about the reason for the organization’s financial distress, but in a statement to The Jewish Week said that it decided to close “after rigorous evaluation ... 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,” the statement said.
Amish Mehta, a partner specializing in not-for-profits at the accounting firm Friedman LLP, said FEGS’s leadership should have taken steps to reduce the agency’s overhead long ago.
“I don’t think it happened overnight. There must have been a recurring trend or a pattern,” he said. “I don’t know why the board and management weren’t more proactive earlier on to try to reduce some of these issues.
“It would seem that someone really didn’t carry on their responsibilities, because if the board members and management had actively taken measures earlier on they may have been able to prevent this" he added. "Why this was allowed to fester and get to the place it did we don’t know.”
Jeffrey Solomon, president of the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies, said nonprofits need to invest more in tracking the financial health of individual services.
"You need to have good financial reporting systems to know whether you’re making money program by program," he said. "If they had known, they could go back to the city to say: 'We aren’t making enough money on these programs,'" he said.
"I think what this underscores is the underinvestment of financial systems and legal support in nonprofits," he added.
FEGS said it will “transfer over the next several months of all of FEGS’ programs and services to other providers and is working closely with its City and State government partners, and other stakeholders, to effect those transitions.”
Both FEGS and the UJA-Federation of New York promise a smooth transition that will ensure continuity of services for clients and supports FEGS’ staff.” But Borough Park Councilman David Greenfield said there are bound to be people who will lose services.
“It’s really a one-two punch for desperately needed social services for the Jewish community,” he said, referring both to FEGS and the Met Council, which is struggling to bounce back from a corruption scandal that rocked the agency last year. “It definitely speaks to the need for more oversight for nonprofit organizations and perhaps more independent auditing.”
The organization’s sudden closure, Greenfield said, “speaks to the need for more oversight for nonprofit organizations and perhaps more independent auditing,” he said.
Two of the agencies expected to pick up the slack are the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services and the Jewish Child Care Association. But it’s unlikely they’ll be able to pick up all the slack.
One communal insider suggested moving some of the mental health services provided by FEGS to JCCA, which would free up JBFCS, which is considered one of the strongest agencies in the UJA-Federation network, to pick up more of FEGS’ functions.
“I am absolutely shocked, astounded,” said Borough Park Assemblyman Dov Hikind. “It’s a bad dream, almost, to be honest with you. FEGS is an organization I’m familiar with for the 32 years I’ve been an elected official and even before that. The people they serve, the work they do ... they’re not the only [social service agency] having trouble. There are other organizations, too.”
Hikind wondered how such a big social service agency — he called it “too big to fail” — was allowed to fall so suddenly, right under the eyes of the Jewish community. “These things do not happen overnight,” he said of an organization with a budget of more than $200 million. “Someone’s got to find a way to save FEGS.”
Hikind said that he was going to reach out “tomorrow” to people at UJA-Federation,” to see if the charity had some answers. “Every problem has a solution.”
Web director Helen Chernikoff contributed reporting to this story.
In related news, the Conservative movement's Jewish Theological Seminary will sell two of its Morningside Heights apartment buildings and some air rights for other campus buildings to finance an expansion of the school's campus. Staff writer Hannah Dreyfus has the story.
New York

New Round Of Layoffs At United Synagogue
Four executives fired in latest belt-tightening at Conservative congregational arm.
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer

Rabbi Steven Wernick: United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism is making cuts to concentrate on its “core functions.”

In the latest belt-tightening move made by a financially strapped Conservative movement, the United Synagogue for Conservative Judaism last week laid off four executives, among them some high-level USCJ employees.
But the layoffs, following several similar moves in the last few years, are the last planned ones for the foreseeable future, according to the executive vice president of the movement’s congregational arm, Rabbi Steven Wernick.
The layoffs follow the recent announcement that USCJ will sell its Manhattan headquarters, and that the Conservative movement’s flagship institution, the Jewish Theological Seminary, will sell two dormitories, as well as some of its air rights on campus in order to finance a redevelopment project at its Morningside Heights campus.
Rabbi Wernick confirmed that USCJ last week laid off more employees, “some … for reasons other than financial,” but he declined to give an exact number or the names of the staff members.
The list includes a USCJ director of special projects, the director of the Fuchsberg Center in Jerusalem, the director of major gifts and an assistant information technology director, according to an observer with close ties to the Conservative movement, who spoke to The Jewish Week on condition of anonymity in order to maintain those connections.
Rabbi Wernick, who was read a list of the names of those reportedly let go, would not confirm or deny them, saying he would not comment.
Rabbi Wernick said there are no more layoffs “that we are contemplating at this moment.” He said the most-recent cost-cutting measures, part of a long-term “reorganization,” will enable USCJ, which had run up a cumulative deficit of several millions dollars, to reach its goal of eliminating the deficit within the next few years, and will enable the organization to better “focus on our core functions” by outsourcing some services and streamlining other programs.
While published reports in 2013 put the organization’s cumulative deficit over the previous two years at more than $5 million, Rabbi Wernick said the figure last year was less — about $3.1 million. He said the deficit last year was reduced by more than $500,000.
The layoffs and other cost-cutting measures — in 2013 it shut down its college outreach program — are designed to produce annual savings of $350,000-400,000, the rabbi said.
Asked if the new executive-level layoffs harm the ability of USCJ to operate efficiently, Rabbi Wernick said, “Not if you have an understanding of what our core job is,” working with member congregations and kehillot [communities], Rabbi Wernick said.
But the observer who asked for anonymity called the latest USCJ layoffs “just the latest … public acknowledgement that they’re barely making it,” that the economic measures instituted by Rabbi Wernick since he became chief executive of the organization in 2009 are not succeeding in bringing USCJ out of the red.
The financial worries apply to the movement overall as studies show that Conservative Jewry is an aging and shrinking population.
While the number of Conservative congregations in the United States has fallen in the last few decades from 850 on 1985 to around 650 today, partly because of synagogue mergers, Rabbi Wernick maintained that “they’re not dropping out now … some [congregations] are joining [USCJ],” Rabbi Wernick said. He declined to give numbers of member congregations.
editor@jewishweek.org

Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, who built Lincoln Square Synagogue into an Upper West Side institution before making aliyah three decades ago, has appointed a successor for his network of Ohr Torah Stone educational educational institutions in Israel: Rabbi David Stav, a gadfly Modern Orthodox rabbi who ran an unsuccessful race to become the country's Ashkenazic chief rabbi last year. Story by Steve Lipman.
ISRAEL NEWS
Riskin Chooses Successor For His Educational Network
The American-born rabbi taps Rabbi David Stav of Tzohar to co-lead Ohr Torah Stone in Israel.
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer

Rabbi David Stav will share Rabbi Shlomo Riskin’s teaching, administrative work and money raising at Ohr Torah Stone. Wikimedia

Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, who has built an educational empire within Modern Orthodoxy over the last three decades in Israel, has designated a potential successor, The Jewish Week has learned.
Rabbi Riskin, 74, who first achieved fame as the spiritual leader of Lincoln Square Congregation on Manhattan’s West Side in the early 1960s and oversaw its growth until his aliyah two decades later, has appointed Rabbi David Stav, the founder ofIsrael’s Tzohar Rabbinical Organization, as co-chancellor of the Ohr Torah Stonenetwork of educational institutions.
Rabbi Stav, 55, a native Israeli who ran a vigorous though ultimately unsuccessful campaign last year for Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel, will share Rabbi Riskin’s administrative, teaching and fundraising duties at Ohr Torah Stone, Rabbi Riskin said in a telephone interview. He will be considered Rabbi Riskin’s successor as head of the educational network for both women and men that he established in 1983.
“It’s mutually understood,” he said.
Rabbi Riskin said he has no plans to retire from his work at Ohr Torah Stone, which has grown from 12 students to some 3,000 at 19 schools in 11 locations. He is considered a premier fundraiser and visits the U.S. frequently as a speaker.
“I needed help,” said the Brooklyn native and Yeshiva University graduate, who is also chief rabbi of the West Bank community of Efrat. “It’s a great deal for one individual. This will strengthen Modern Orthodoxy and religious Zionism,” he added.
Both rabbis have attracted devoted followers in religious Zionist and progressive circles for positions championing the role of women in Orthodox Judaism and criticizing the fundamentalist nature of the country’s Orthodox religious establishment, drawing heavy criticism from charedi leaders.
A respected scholar and teacher, Rabbi Stav is more soft-spoken than the charismatic Rabbi Riskin, but he has helped Tzohar grow in numbers and influence with its goal of making Orthodox rabbis seen as warm and welcoming, particularly to prospective brides and grooms in Israel, where marriages must be performed by Orthodox clergy.
While Ohr Torah Stone and Tzohar will not formally merge, they will work together on issues of joint concern and make Modern Orthodoxy a more visible presence in Israel, Rabbi Riskin said, declining to name specific goals.
“Like Rabbi Riskin, [Rabbi Stav] is an outspoken advocate for an accessible, compassionate and embracing Judaism which will repair the rifts in Israeli society and alleviate the alienation many Israelis feel in crucial areas such as conversion, marriages and divorces,” according to the Ohr Torah Stone announcement of Rabbi Stav’s appointment. “He has devoted his life to promoting an ethical, inclusive and inspiring approach to Zionistic, Jewish life in Israel.”
Rabbi Stav, who also serves as chief rabbi of the city of Shoham and heads a hesder yeshiva in Petach Tikva that combines Torah study with army service, said he will curtail his teaching duties at Bar-Ilan University in order “to help [Rabbi Riskin] carry out his mission.”
With many observers of Jewish life in the United States describing a “move to the right” in the Modern Orthodox movement in recent decades, Rabbi Riskin’s action, in partnering with Rabbi Stav, is a clear sign that he is resisting such a move toward a charedi orientation.
“He seem to be pointing towards the Dati Leumi (National Religious, as Modern Orthodox are known in Israel),” said Judy Baumel-Schwartz, a professor of modern Jewish history at Bar-Ilan University. “I don’t think anyone can think that Riskin ever wanted his institutions to really move to the right — he wants Ohr Torah Stone to remain vibrant, and I guess he sees this as the best way to do it.”
While she felt the alliance would have limited impact on Israel society beyond the Anglo community, Steven Bayme, director of the American Jewish Committee’scontemporary Jewish life department, observed that it “is a trade that benefits both sides, in baseball terminology.” He said the partnership provides Rabbi Riskin, viewed as liberal Orthodox in Israel, “more credibility and greater standing” in that society while it “beefs up” the “modern credentials” of Rabbi Stav, who “came under great criticism during the [Chief Rabbinate] campaign “for not being sufficiently pluralistic.”
The Ohr Torah Stone network of schools includes separate gap-year yeshiva programs for young men and women from the U.S. and elsewhere in the diaspora. It also has a rabbinical school for men and programs offering advanced degrees for women.
Tzohar, which Rabbi Stav founded 20 years ago, is the largest Modern Orthodox rabbinical organization in Israel. According to Rabbi Riskin, about 660 rabbis in Israel are members of Tzohar.
It sponsors training sessions for rabbis, stressing, according to the organization’s website, a “professional, tolerant and inclusive” rabbinate.
“My vision” at Ohr Torah Stone “is to take [Rabbi Riskin’s] academic institutions and make them,” in working with Tzohar, “as one big movement that will inspire Israeli society,” Rabbi Stav said. “It gives us more opportunities,” leveraging the influence of both organizations, he said.
Rabbi Stav said that Rabbi Riskin, who has often challenged the positions of Israel’s charedi-dominated religious establishment, is seen in some circles as revolutionary, while he prefers to work within the system to effect change — hence his race for the Chief Rabbinate.
“I don’t see myself as revolutionary,” Rabbi Stav said. “Changes in religious life should be made by evolution and not revolution.”
He said his candidacy for chief rabbi, during which he accused the haredi establishment of corruption within the Chief Rabbinate and of efforts to exclude rather than include potential converts, increased his visibility among many American Jews.
Rabbi Stav will be a scholar-in-residence in Englewood, N.J., on the Shabbat of Feb. 13-14, sponsored by Congregation Ahavath Torah.
steve@jewishweek.org
In the wake of reports of a growing number of rapes of women on college campuses, Jewish groups are taking steps to combat sexual assault. Amy Sara Clark reports.
NATIONAL
On Campus, An Assault On The Status Quo
Jewish groups moving quickly to combat sexual assault with an array of tactics.
Amy Sara Clark
Staff Writer

Amalia Bob-Waksberg, in a photo from Speak Out Brandeis, a blog where survivors post their stories. Courtesy of A. Bob-Waksberg

The last shuttle bus from Cambridge back to Brandeis had long gone. A cab to Waltham would have cost a fortune. The extra bed she’d been promised in a friend of a friend’s dorm room never materialized.
It was 3 a.m. on an unfamiliar college campus, and, after a low-key party, Amalia Bob-Waksberg, a 19-year-old freshman, was stuck.
Her only option, in the end, was the room of a guy who had pursued her — aggressively, despite multiple rejections — at the party. No worries, he said. He’d sleep on the floor. She didn’t want to make a fuss.
Before she knew it, though, the nice Jewish boy from Harvard had slipped into bed with her, and Bob-Waksberg froze. “I never said no when it was happening, but I gave a lot of signals,” she said. “When it was happening I was crying, but I didn’t say no.”
The next morning, she fell apart. “I was curled up in a ball on the floor of the shuttle crying. I couldn’t even see anything around me. I’ve never felt so dissociated from the world around me,” she said. She couldn’t even walk straight; a friend helped her back to her dorm. She couldn’t do anything for days.
Finding few resources for survivors of sexual assault at Brandeis, she worked to create them, founding Brandeis Students Against Sexual Violence and helping to start a blogwhere students could anonymously post their own stories. She and other student activists met with student leaders and administrators, gathered signatures, and successfully pressured the school into making significant changes.
Today, new student orientation incudes 2.5 hours of sexual assault prevention training; the ethics code and disciplinary procedures for sexual assault have been improved and students can file a sexual assault complaint online instead of going to campus police. The administration hired more staff dedicated to the issue, instituted a rape hotline, and just last month, five years after Bob-Waksberg’s assault, a rape crisis center opened on campus.
Bob-Waksberg is part of a growing movement on college campuses to end the culture that tolerates sexual assault by encouraging survivors to speak out and bystanders to step in. Jewish organizations — including the San Francisco-based Shalom Bayit, a nonprofit addressing violence against women, where Bob-Waksberg now works — are at the forefront of this movement. Jewish organizations are training Hillel staff to help survivors and training students to lead workshops on bystander intervention. They’re screening documentaries, holding discussion sessions and working through fraternities and sororities to change the culture from within.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1 in 5 women in collegeexperience sexual assault or attempted sexual assault as undergraduates. There are fewer studies on men, but a 2007 exploratory study by the Department of Justice estimates that 1 in 16 men experience attempted or completed sexual assault while in college.
Although questions about the recent controversial Rolling Stone article about a women’s story of being gang raped at the University of Virginia has increased concerns about false reporting, a meta-analysis of studies on the topic by the National Center for the Prosecution of Violence Against Women puts the percentage of false sexual assault reports between 2 and 8 percent.

Through a Jewish Lens

Hillel is taking part in campus efforts to combat sexual violence with a collection of programs addressing the issue. Two of the most prominent are a workshop on sexual assault as part of its Ask Big Questions program, and a partnership with Shalom Bayit that focuses on healthy relationship education and sexual violence through the lens of Judaism. Since 2011, Shalom Bayit has trained staff at more than 50 Hillels across the country about how to recognize and support survivors.
“Rape doesn’t discriminate based on religion, and many of our students are impacted personally every single year,” said Sheila Katz, vice president for social entrepreneurship at Hillel International. “This is happening and we must respond.”
Zephira Derblich-Milea, Shalom Bayit’s youth program coordinator, oversees the workshops for Hillel staff. During one workshop, she posts six quotes from the Torah and discusses them in the context of both healthy relationships and sexual assault. Two of her favorites are: “To humiliate a person is as powerful as shedding blood,” and “You’re not expected to complete the task, but neither are you free to avoid it.”
Katz, who used to be an assistant director at North Carolina Hillel, said, “Students come to Hillel professionals to try to understand their assault through a Jewish lens. I’ve heard questions like: How can there be a God when this happened to me? Did this happen to anyone in the Torah, and what does it [the Torah] say about rape?”
But, she added, “While it’s clearly Hillel’s responsibility to support the work of Jewish students who are survivors of assault, it’s equally as important to have conversations about healthy relationships and rape culture, because we want to do our part in making sure that all the students and staff we work with are not part of the problem.”
Raising Awareness
One avenue Hillels and other Jewish organizations have found to begin those conversations is the screening of “Brave Miss World,” a documentary about former Miss Israel Linor Abargil, who was raped six weeks before being crowned Miss World. The film intersperses snippets of women across Israel and the U.S. telling their own rape stories, with Abargil’s own post-rape journey to Orthodox Judaism and law school.
Since the film was first released in 2013, more than two dozen Hillels, including the Columbia-Barnard Hillel, have shown it. Barnard student Dana Kukin organized the screening in 2013 after having seen the film herself the previous year.
“I was very, very moved by it. It really stayed with me, and I wanted to screen the film again,” she said.
Columbia University is where student Emma Sulkowicz brought widespread attention to the issue of campus sexual assault by lugging a mattress with her to symbolize, she says, the weight that is always with her as a result of an assault. (She says she will stop carrying the mattress when man she says attacked her leaves Columbia.) Hillel was one of 28 student groups that took part in the Carry That Weight National Day of Action in October, during which participants on campuses worldwide carried mattresses in solidarity with sexual assault survivors.
Julia Snyder, president of Columbia-Barnard Hillel, said her organization took part to show that they care about what’s happening on campus and to recognize that sexual violence is a problem even in Hillel’s “tight-knit community.”
“We have students who are vocal about being survivors,” she said. “Just because we’re Jewish doesn’t mean this doesn’t affect us.”
Not Our Issue
Indeed, the “this doesn’t happen to us” mentality is a continuing problem in Jewish communities, though less so as time goes on, said Derblich-Milea. “I sort of make a joke about it, especially when I first started doing this work: You walk into the Reform community and they say: ‘Oh well, I’m sure this is happening in the Orthodox community but not here.’ And then you walk into the Orthodox community and they say: ‘I’m sure this is happening in the Reform community but not here.”
“It’s hard to acknowledge when this stuff is happening within our own community — it’s scary,” Derblich-Milea added. “And I also believe that once we acknowledge it we have to do something about it.”
Bob-Waksberg also grew up with that kind of mentality. Once a teacher told her that what happened to Elizabeth Smart “could never happen to Jewish girls, because Jewish girls are too smart for that.”

“I don’t think I took that so literally to heart, but this idea that Jewish women are so strong and outspoken, that this could never happen to them. ... And then also just this idea that these nice Jewish boys are harmless. ... I think that’s an image that needs to be really questioned and unpacked,” she said.

Rivka Hia was the lone student to participate in Carry That Weight’s National Day of Action at Yeshiva University’s Stern College for women. She hopes Orthodox leaders will push for sexual assault prevention programs for unmarried students.
“Because it’s encouraged to not touch before marriage, and because that’s the assumption, nobody is talking about the facts on the ground,” she said, adding that this expectation also increases the likelihood of blaming the victim.
Often, she said, “I think that there’s a misconception that women who don’t adhere to rabbinic guidelines in general deserve any unfortunate things that happen to them.”
Among non-Orthodox communities, Jewish Women International has also been addressing the issue head on. They’ve been working with two Jewish organizations, the fraternity Zeta Beta Tau and the sorority Sigma Delta Tau, to offer “Safe Smart Dating.” The program uses discussions, scenarios, news stories and videos to learn how to identify dating abuse and sexual assault, and how to intervene safely and effectively.
“Young men need to understand how to not only confront situations they know are wrong, but also to prevent such situations from arising in the first place,” said Laurence Bolotin, executive director Zeta Beta Tau’s national organization, in a written statement.
Changing Campus Culture
Training bystanders to intervene is an increasingly significant part of sexual assault prevention programs.
“The idea is that each of us as individuals has a role to play in preventing this from happening,” said Ted Merwin, who directs the Hillel at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., (and also covers theater for The Jewish Week). “A lot of times a guy meets a girl at a party and a lot of the times there’s alcohol involved. And he kind of takes her up to his room ... so there are opportunities for other students to intervene, to say, ‘She’s drunk, don’t take her upstairs.’
“It’s about depending on other people to not let it happen,” he said.
Dickinson’s Hillel organized an interfaith service for survivors of sexual assault on Yom Kippur, modeled on the Yizkor service.
“So much of Yom Kippur is about not confessing individual sin but about confessing communal sin,” Merwin said. “We did that whole Al Chet focused on sexual immorality — but from a college student’s point of view, in the sense of the kinds of things that happen on college campuses.”
Merwin continued: “A lot of it has to do with changing the campus so that men don’t feel like they have the right to women’s bodies ... [and] that this is a really serious thing that women can be terribly, even permanently damaged by. And I don’t think a lot of men get that. I don’t think a lot of men want to get that, or want to think about it.”
'Yes Means Yes'
Indeed, a major component of changing campus culture is changing the entire idea of what consent means: from “no means no,” to “yes means yes.” That is to say, that a woman doesn’t have to say no. It’s an assault if she hasn’t said yes, not just once, but at each stage of an encounter. (For example, saying yes to kissing doesn’t give the green light for intercourse.)
This higher bar for approval for sexual contact, also known as affirmative consent, is increasingly becoming the standard in college ethic codes across the country. Since September, all state-funded schools in New York and California have adopted the policy.
Affirmative consent is the centerpiece of “Consent is So Frat,” a nonprofit launched by recent Wesleyan University graduate Matthew Leibowitz, a former member of the Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi. The organization’s goal, summed up on its website, is “making consent and healthy relationships part of what it means to be a fraternity brother or sorority sister.”
Had yes means yes been the standard back in 2010, when Bob-Waksberg found herself in bed with the not-nice-after-all Jewish Harvard boy, the assault might never have taken place. Or if it had, she might have spared herself a lot of self-blame.
As it was, Bob-Waksberg — who started Brandeis Students Against Sexual Violence, revived the school’s feminist club and majored in women’s studies — blamed herself for what happened for a very long time.
It was only after interning at Shalom Bayit the summer after her assault, and taking a course on domestic violence back at Brandeis the next fall, that she came to understand why she was unable to say no, and why the fact that she didn’t does not mean that what happened was her fault.
“I was reading a theory piece about responses to sexual assault and ... [it] was talking about someone being assaulted and feeling like they were not in their body and they just kind of froze. And it’s kind of the way that a lot of people respond to that shock,” she said. “And for the first time I was like, ‘OK, that’s normal. ... It doesn’t mean that I was weak, or I was asking for it. That just was a normal response to trauma.”
At a Tipping Point
In the five years since Bob-Waksberg’s assault, the issue has moved to the front burner on campuses across the country. This is thanks to student activists including a wave who complaints to the U.S. Department of Education saying their schools’ sexually hostile environment violates the Title IX anti-discrimination law. Currently, 94 colleges are being investigated for Title IX sexual violence complaints, including, locally, Barnard, Hunter, SUNY Stony Brook, SUNY New Paltz, St. Thomas Aquinas and Sarah Lawrence colleges as well as Pace University. And, yes, Brandeis University, too.
As schools scramble to revise policies to comply with Title IX law, they’re making changes at a pace no one would have imagined five years ago.
“When I was a freshman, there was not really a conversation [about sexual assault],” said Victoria Jonas, a Brandeis senior and one of three student coordinators at the school’s new Rape Crisis Center. “I’ve sensed a huge social shift on campus.”
Brandeis’ Rape Crisis Center’s Sheila McMahon sees campus culture at “a tipping point.”
“In 2007, when I was implementing a bystander-training program, people thought I was a little nutty,” she said. A year later, schools across Boston were implementing them. Then came a steady stream of governmental changes, she said — the 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter from the U.S. Department of Education telling colleges it was their responsibility to address sexual assault; the 2013 Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act that mandated more transparent sexual assault reporting and mandated expanded survivor rights and prevention programs and one year ago, the creation of a White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault.
“I think we’re in a very special moment in the history of addressing sexual violence prevention in our country,” McMahon said. “It’s unprecedented.”
amyclark@jewishweek.org
Photos:
Top: Amalia Bob-Waksberg in a photo she posted on Speak Out Brandeis, a blog she helped start that allows survivors of sexual assault to share their stories annonymously. Courtesy of Amalia Bob-Waksberg
Middle: Zephira Derblich-Milea of Shalom Bayit uses quotes from Jewish texts in her workshops addressing sexual assault. Courtesy of Shalom Bayit
Bottom: Hillel was one of 28 student groups to participate in the Carry That Weight National Day of Action on Oct. 29. Photo by Julia SnyderAnd in the run-up to the Israeli elections, Joshua Mitnick reports on the controversyover a U.S.-funded, numbers-crunching get-out-the-vote effort aimed at toppling Bibi Netanyahu.
Have a good week.
The Editors.

Between The Lines
Gary Rosenblatt
A New Generation Of Seekers In Jewish L.A.

Los Angeles — The 3-year-old boy stood on a chair in his backyard, and as about three dozen family members and friends gathered around, he led the assembled in a rousing, one-word-at-a-time call-and-response of the biblical verse: “Torah. Tziva. Lanu. Moshe. Morasha. Kehilat. Yakov.” (Moshe commanded the Torah to us, an eternal heritage for the congregation of Jacob.)

While his 10-day-old sister slept peacefully inside their house, the little boy — my grandson — then led us in the first six words of the Shema, followed by each of us taking turns snipping off a few locks of his long blonde tresses that, when not tied up in a bun, reached well past his shoulders. Seemingly oblivious to the scissor-action taking place behind him, the boy held a cupful of coins for tzedakah and carefully distributed one to each of us who approached.

Those were the key moments of his upsherin, or first haircut, in keeping with a tradition of letting a boy’s hair grow until he is 3, the age when he begins to wear a kipa and tzitzit and to learn Hebrew. The actual significance of the ceremony, which dates back to the 17th century, is a bit vague and appears to be more cultural than an actual mitzvah. It is commonly observed among chasidim but has become popular among others as well.

This particular event, which featured a rented Moon Bounce for the kids (and a few brave adults) as well as pizza and sweets, was a low-key ceremony, consistent with my impressions of much of Los Angeles Jewish life — creative, casual, relaxed — particularly compared to New York.

“New York is more bookish, more organically Jewish,” David Wolpe, author and rabbi of Los Angeles’ Sinai Temple, one of the largest and most successful Conservative congregations in the country, observed over coffee one morning. (Rabbi Wolpe writes the weekly “Musings” column for this paper.) “Jews came out here to succeed, not necessarily to make a Jewish life. But now you can do both.”

The rabbi has lived on both coasts and notes that L.A. “generates creativity,” with fewer boundaries of tradition than New York. In addition to Sinai Temple, with its Friday Night Live musical celebration of Shabbat, there are a number of trendy congregations and minyanim that emphasize ingenuity and feature rabbis with strong followings and national reputations. Several of the congregations are flourishing without permanent edifices. They include Sharon Brous of Ikar and Naomi Levy (who is married to L.A. Jewish Journal editor Rob Eshman) of Neshuva, two congregations that have drawn hundreds of unaffiliated Jews.

Rabbi Wolpe believes geography plays a key role in L.A.’s Jewish community, with Jews spread out all over the vast city; this results in vibrant but separate communities, often centered around the synagogue. “There’s not enough interaction among the various communities for us to have fights,” the rabbi mused.

Walking on Shabbat along Pico Boulevard between Robertson Boulevard and Beverly Drive — L.A.’s equivalent of the Miracle Jewish Mile, with its many ethnic synagogues, kosher eateries and supermarkets — one feels the pulse of traditional Jewish life. In most other areas of the city, though, there are few pedestrians altogether, a far cry from Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where one can hardly avoid running into Jewish contemporaries, which often leads to spirited, on-the-spot discussions.

Eshman stressed that transportation, or lack thereof, is not to be underestimated as a factor in L.A.’s communal dynamic. Since traffic is heavy and public transportation is minimal, people are wary of driving out of their neighborhoods to attend a Jewish event, he said. “Jewish L.A. is fragmented but vibrant. More people are finding new ways to express their Jewish identity” and seeking new forms of Jewish expression.

In the last several decades there has been significant growth among the Persian, Israeli and Russian communities of Los Angeles. No one seems to know their collective numbers — there hasn’t been a major Jewish population study of Los Angeles in many years — but it’s clear that those communities are growing in size, wealth and influence. Much of their generosity is directed toward Israel, and many of their members prefer to maintain their own infrastructures rather than take leadership roles in establishment groups like the local federation.

One dramatic change in L.A. Jewish life is the emergence of Hollywood Jews — those in the film and television industry — from the shadows. It is especially significant since their work influences the image of Jews around the world.

Danielle Berrin, who covers Hollywood for the Jewish Journal, told me that while Jews once sought to hide their identities and secularize their names, “there is a pride in being openly Jewish now. And writers are not afraid” to present scripts with strong Jewish characters and themes.

“Jewishness is everywhere,” she said. “It’s like a big coming-out party.”

On a personal level I wonder what it will be like for my two youngest grandchildren to grow up far from the East Coast, where our family has lived for the last century. The future holds endless possibilities. For now I pray that little Malka Nava Rosenblatt will embody the words her big brother, Moshe Kol, sang out the other day: “Morasha kehilat Yakov,” taking their place in the eternal heritage of Jacob.

gary@jewishweek.org

Musings
Rabbi David Wolpe
Choosing And Being Chosen

Perhaps no concept in Judaism has been more misused and misunderstood than chosenness. It is not a doctrine of racial superiority, though some have interpreted it as such. The first statement in the Torah about human beings is that all are created in the image of God and all have a common ancestry. The choice is one of service, not of being served. And it does not preclude the notion that other nations too are chosen for other tasks.

As Louis Jacobs writes, “Jewish particularism is never exclusive: Anyone can become a Jew by embracing the Jewish faith.” Some of our greatest teachers and scholars were themselves converts or descended from converts. It is a choosing as well as a being chosen. And the responsibility is to live according to the Torah and so bring a model of God’s will into the world, however imperfectly realized.

The world does indeed owe to the Jewish people the notion of one God and the ethical demands that God makes on human beings. Unlike other traditions, Judaism does not ask that one be Jewish to attain salvation. Chosenness is a blessing and a burden, a call to sanctity and a summons to goodness.

Rabbi David Wolpe is spiritual leader of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter: @RabbiWolpe. His latest book, “David: The Divided Heart” (Yale University Press), has recently been published.

Hanna Arie-Graifman: “Richness” in Israeli classical scene. Joshua Bright

A N.Y. Minute
N.Y. Phil Puts Israeli Classical In The Spotlight

The program displays the richness of the contemporary creative scene of Israel as well as Israeli composers living abroad, says Hanna Arie-Gaifman of the 92Y.

Robert Goldblum

Managing Editor

In what is being described as a first, the New York Philharmonic will present a program of contemporary Israeli classical music by some of that country’s leading composers. The “New Music From Israel Program,” which takes place Monday, Feb. 9 (7 p.m.), is a co-presentation with the 92nd Street Y and is part of the N.Y. Phil’s CONTACT! series. The composers on the program are Josef Bardanashvili, Yotam Haber, Shulamit Ran and Avner Dorfman. The Jewish Week discussed the program with its brainchild, Hanna Arie-Gaifman, director of the 92Y’s Tisch Center for the Arts. The interview was conducted via email.

Q: Can you explain a little about the collaboration between the N.Y. Phil and the 92Y on this effort to spotlight modern Israeli composers? 

A: When the programming teams of N.Y. Phil and 92Y decided to program CONTACT! with living Israeli composers, we looked at works that would represent some of the richness of the contemporary creative scene of Israel as well as Israeli composers living abroad. The choices made are quite representative although of course far from exhaustive.

We’ve heard so much about Israeli jazz musicians and modern dancers in New York. Israeli classical composers seem to be under the radar. What is it about Israeli classical music that made you approach the N.Y. Phil about spotlighting the country’s composers?

Israeli composers, like Israeli artists, are both very deeply rooted in the cultural mixture of the Eastern European, the Middle Eastern North African or South American musical heritage. They are so typical of Israel, and at the same time very much part of the international musical scene. ‬

There are two generations of very active composers on the program: Josef Bardanashvili and Shulamit Ran, both in their 60s, and Avner Dorman and Yotam Haber, not yet 40. In fact, Dorman studied with Bardanashvili in Israel before coming to New York to study with John Corigliano.

What ties these composers together is their personal way of referring to their roots, whether cultural or religious. Bardanashvili refers in his works to Georgian musical elements (the country of his origin), as well as Latin hymns, tango and jazz rhythms which are very meaningful to him, while Dorman finds his inspirations in the sounds, melodies, smells and tastes of Jerusalem.

Shulamit Ran’s “Mirage” awakens in me the sensation of the Negev desert during a hamsin [hot, dry wind]. Haber’s reference to Benedetto Marcello’s settings of the Psalms ties the worlds of the Western Jewish tradition and the Italian music together. All that said, each of the composers brings his or her own mixture of Jewish and Israeli culture, their very own voice and distinct artistic identity.

Is there such a thing as an “Israeli” classical sound, in the way Aaron Copland is seen as having an “American” sound?

I would have hard time pinpointing the Israeli equivalent to Aaron Copland, although various composers — among them Stephan Volpe, in the 1930s — attempted to create music of the land of Israel that would be rooted more in the Sephardic and Middle Eastern musical tradition than the European one. It is actually now that these varied kinds of sounds and melodies meet in works by composers like Avner Dorman or Betty Olivero.

More broadly, we keep hearing that classical music in America is suffering. True?

The declarations of classical music in America is suffering seem to me self-defeating and actually not true. The creative scene is so live and so vibrant, and there is certainly a lot of interest among the young people that I see, and I see many.

robert@jewishweek.org 

On the boardwalk in Santa Cruz. Amy Larson

TRAVEL
A Shore Thing
Hilary Larson
Travel Writer

Some people come to Santa Cruz to surf; others come to stroll the boardwalk and ogle the sea lions. There are thrill rides for children, redwood forests for nature lovers and sunsets for everyone.

San Franciscans, and those of us visiting family in the Bay Area, come for a weekend getaway to this resort city of about 60,000, an easy drive south through the Santa Cruz Mountains.

At the drive’s most scenic point, those rounded peaks give way to an expanse of Pacific Ocean just off Monterey Bay. Here in the heart of New Age California, stressed-out tech workers check into an array of holistic spas and yoga retreats.

And on any given weekend, Bay Area Jews come to Santa Cruz for Kolaynu, a progressive, community-led group whose style — incorporating gender-neutral language and welcoming all orientations — epitomizes West Coast worship.

Despite all this apparent activity, everyone really comes to Santa Cruz to relax. No town embodies the laid-back California spirit quite like Santa Cruz, where the pace is as languorous as the sea lions sunning themselves along the pier.

Santa Cruz has been a favored resort town for well over a hundred years. Most of the original 19th-century buildings were destroyed by earthquakes (notably the 1989 Loma Prieta quake), but a vintage feel persists; the city was formally established in the wake of the Gold Rush. In fact, Santa Cruz is home to what may be the oldest continuously operated Jewish gravesite west of the Mississippi River: Home of Peace, whose earliest tombs date to 1877.

But today’s scene along Pacific Avenue, the main drag, is decidedly modern. Much of that energy comes from the University of California at Santa Cruz, which opened in the 1960s and was a catalyst for an influx of Jewish professionals. Many Jews live in Aptos, a pretty suburb that is home to both the 500-member Temple Beth El — a nexus for the area’s Jewish community — and one of California’s largest farmers’ markets.

The university also ensures a steady influx of youthful activity — and a captive audience for the profusion of artisanal coffee roasters that has sprouted up downtown.

Buskers strum guitars, wail and break out dance moves along the shady boulevards, where sidewalk cafés stay open late for the college set. Yes, there are chain stores like Gap and American Apparel. But local color remains intact with dusty shops selling vinyl records and used books, quirky vintage boutiques, and foodie cookware emporia.

The coast is the real draw in Santa Cruz, though. Numerous parks offer sanctuary for birds and hikers, and the ocean beach boasts some of California’s best waves. But since the city lies at the lip of half-moon-shaped Monterey Bay, its main beach has gentle surf that laps at a wide expanse of sand. If you are Russian, Norwegian or wearing a wetsuit, you may be tempted to jump in for a swim. That Pacific water is too cold for the rest of us — but the volleyball nets hum with activity from dawn to dusk.

Families flock to the old-timey amusements at the Coney Island-style boardwalk park. There’s a vintage carousel, a loud casino arcade, mini golf, a roller coaster and various gentle rides, all wedged into a strip of brightly colored buildings steps up from the sand. The predictable smattering of soft-serve outlets, fried-fish restaurants and tchotchke shops rounds out the waterfront.

Like so many California attractions, it all manages to be both kitschy and entirely authentic — and with scenic views across Monterey Bay to the mountains beyond, it’s also romantic.

That is, until the mood is broken by the very silly barking of Santa Cruz sea lions. These floppy, ungainly Pacific denizens don’t look particularly agile until they hoist themselves onto the scaffolding and flip under the pier, lounging in the sun and posing for tourists snapping sea-lion selfies.

Sunset is a nightly entertainment on the boardwalk. As the moon rises over hazy mountains, crowds gather along the pier, picnicking amid the cries of seagulls and waiting for that moment when the hot-orange sun dips into the silvery horizon.

As the evening throngs ebb, some head downtown for a jolt at Verve Coffee Roasters, a hipster’s mecca for meticulously sourced brews served in a spacious, industrial-chic lounge. Others while away the evening in a hot tub, sinking into the bubbling jets to the sound of waves crashing just beyond.

Either way, here on the shores of Monterey Bay, relaxation is always on the agenda. 

editor@jewishweek.org

Digitizing The Jewish Past
Steve LipmanStaff Writer

Getty Images

In 1941 the Nazis destroyed the headquarters of the YIVO Yiddish research institute in Vilna, Lithuania, ransacking the library and archives. Some material was sent to Frankfurt, Germany, to serve as the basis for the Third Reich’s Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question, and some was hidden in Vilna.
After World War II U.S. soldiers discovered the seized artifacts in a train depot in Offenbach, Germany; a Lithuanian librarian in Vilna saved documents under her care from the communist government, hidden in a church basement.
In 1989, after communism fell, all the items returned to YIVO hands. Today they’re being preserved in digital form.
As part of seven-year project, YIVO is digitizing some 10,000 rare or unique publications as well as some 1.5 million assorted literary works, memoirs, theater posters, photographs, newspapers, political tracts and pamphlets.
An archivist at the Lithuanian Central State Archive in Vilna, above, prepares some YIVO documents for digitizing.
The $5.25 million project is funded by a combination of public and private foundations and government grants.
“It will transform the historiography of Eastern European and Russian Jewish history by giving scholars and the general public access to little-known and often completely unknown documents and books,” said Jonathan Brent, YIVO’s executive director. “I am grateful to our Lithuanian partners and the Lithuanian government for enabling us to have access to materials that have been hidden from public view for almost 75 years.”steve@jewishweek.org

Nominations are now being accepted for our annual

"36 Under 36" issue.

This issue will announce on June 5, the thirty-six young visionaries, thinkers, social justice advocates, educators, philanthropists and artists who are reinventing, and broadening, the Jewish community.

To nominate a candidate click here.

Deadline for nominations is March 2.

Big Data Comes To Israeli Polotics
Joshua Mitnick
Israel CorrespondentControversy over a U.S.-funded get-out-the-vote group on the left shaking up campaign.
Joshua Mitnick
Israel Correspondent

Billionaire American progressive Danny Abraham is helping to fund the “V15” group.

Tel Aviv — The twenty-something volunteer soliciting café goers on a Tel Aviv street introduces herself as Ilanit and wears a T-shirt that says “Just Switch” in Hebrew.
She explains that people should make sure to vote for a new government because Israel needs to change. No, she says, her nonprofit isn’t an initiative of the opposition Labor Party. It’s a grassroots group that wants to send Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu packing. Ilanit takes some details from a few people, writes them down and moves on.
The street campaign organization, dubbed “V15” — “Victory 2015” — became a talking point this week for the Likud Party, as its Knesset members charged that the nonprofit’s activities violate election laws by collecting foreign donations from American Jewish peaceniks — billionaire Danny Abraham and healthy snacks entrepreneur Daniel Lubetzky — on behalf of left-wing parties, and engaging in illegal campaign propaganda.
Netanyahu’s lawyer David Shimron called it “criminal activity aimed at buying the election through money.” One Power Point slide showed a terrorist in a keffiyeh flashing a “V” sign with the number 15 alongside it. QUESTION INTO JOSH ON THIS.
V15 representatives have rejected the criticism as Netanyahu spin and smear tactics. They argue that the organization is an initiative of a politically minded group of Israeli young media professionals that wants to do grassroots work to support the parliamentary system.
It all started, explained Nimrod Dweck, a V15 founder, with the Facebook post of a friend who once organized for the Israeli chapter of the environmental group Greenpeace. “He said, ‘Let’s do something cool in the elections. Let’s do some [statistical] analysis of some cities, and then mobilize some voters for the center and the left [parties],” he said.
Dweck said that V15 got help from Yuval Diskin, a former Shin Bet chief, and that Lubetsky’s pro-peace nonprofit One Voice offered legal advice and helped build the social network group into a proper campaign organization. One Voice helped to link V15 to 270 Strategies, a U.S. strategic consultancy run by Barack Obama get-out-the-vote alum Jeremy Bird, which was able to successfully use data analysis to boost turnout through field organizing.
U.S. Republican allies of Likud seized on the link to allege that President Obama is intervening in Israel’s election against the prime minister, and also attacked One Voice. Labor’s chairman, Isaac Herzog, who heads the opposition “Zionist Camp” parliament list, denied a link between the campaign and V15.
The allegations against V15 come as multiple corruption scandals swirled around Prime Minister Netanyahu. Late Monday, Israel’s State Comptroller’s office announced that it forwarded to the state’s attorney the results of an inquiry into the expenditures at the prime minister’s residence; the inquiry alleged the pocketing of recycling proceeds by his wife Sara, and raised the question of possible criminal activity.
Israel’s media also alleged that Netanyahu sought to have publication of the inquiries delayed until after the election, and that his office tried to bury a state comptroller report about Netanyahu’s acceptance of outside funding to pay for trips abroad for his family when he was finance minister.
The V15 attacks “are a diversionary tactic of Netanyahu because he’s grappling with comptroller reports on his personal dealings,” said Mitchell Barak, an Israeli-American pollster. “It rallies his supporters around the fact that the [left-leaning] media is out to get him, and he makes it look like Obama is behind this.”
Soon after the attacks on V15, the Israeli press reported that Likud had hired Vincent Harris, a Republican new media strategist who has worked with Sen. Rand Paul. Bloomberg News describes Harris as the inventor of the “Republican Internet.” Harris, who is currently in Israel, confirmed the reports, but declined to comment further.
Eyal Arad, an Israeli campaign strategist, said the Likud focus on V15 “is a risky campaign tactic because it’s focused on process and not a real issue. And Likud also uses American advisers.”
That said, Likud’s polling numbers appear to have been rising in recent weeks. A poll by the Haaretz newspaper gave the ruling party a two-seat advantage over the opposition Labor Party, 25 seats to 23. According to a compilation of recent polls by Project 61, an Israeli survey data cruncher, right-wing parties are projected to get 41 seats, while left-wing parties would get 29 seats and centrist parties 21 seats.
The V15 headquarters are on the second floor of a building in a Tel Aviv commercial district that is home to technology start-ups and financial companies. Amid posters showing Netanyahu’s face whited out with the words “Just Switch,” the cramped office space buzzed this week with youthful energy.
Dweck declined to give a tour of the data operation for fear of divulging campaign secrets. He did say that the organization has signed up 7,000 volunteers to do grassroots recruitment like knocking on doors and arranging parlor meetings.
The V15 team also includes a team of 40 statistical analysts that has volunteered to crunch demographic figures cross-referenced by neighborhood voting patterns. Dweck says the analysis has given the organization a street-level profile of where they should be focusing their efforts.
Contrary to the conventional wisdom about reaching out to potential swing voters or areas that are Likud strongholds, the strategy of V15 is to focus raising voter turnout in the centrist liberal strongholds. As a result, the organization is focusing on some 15 central Israeli cities, and their suburban areas, with a total population of about 1.5 million people.
“I’m a true believer of strengthening the periphery and that the country is too focused in the center. But politically you have to work in the center of Israel,” Dweck said.
With less than two months to go before the March 17 election, “There’s no sense of an election going on — you don’t see signs in the streets,” said Arad. “An action like V15 can energize the base, because it can create a bandwagon effect.”
Dweck said that the goal of the campaign is to raise voter turnout in those strongholds by 3 to 5 percent. That could shift two seats in the Israeli parliament from the right-wing bloc to the center-left bloc, potentially tipping the balance between the parties.
Israel’s campaign has relied heavily on messaging through social media so far, but that could be a mistake, said Barak, the Israeli American pollster.
“Parties have gotten lazy,” said Barak. “They think that fighting their campaigns in YouTube or Facebook is going to get them votes.
V15 brought in Jeremy Bird and 270 Strategies to add professionalism and know-how. They helped streamline the campaign by training field volunteers and calculating the number of hours needed for the outreach.
Israel has thin experience with American-style outreach campaign, said Dweck and other analysts. Though the country has relied on U.S. advisers for strategic messaging, political parties lack the experience in organizing a professional ground game and have usually relied on street-corner activists and salaried party operatives at local branches.
“You don’t need to do big media campaign; you don’t need to buy a lot of adds,” he said. “All you have to do is go door-to-door, and ask people who are you going to support.” editor@jewishweek.org
Questions Loom In Wake Of FEGS' Fall
Amy Sara Clark
Staff Writer

Amid calls for greater oversight, what agencies in the UJA-Federation network will pick up the slack?

FEGS’ headquarters on Hudson Street. The agency lost nearly $20 million last year. Michael Datikash/JW

In the teeth of the Great Recession, UJA-Federation of New York launched a program that offered a life raft of sorts for those who had lost their jobs and whose debts were mounting.
In the five years that followed, Connect to Care helped more than 80,000 New Yorkers with career counseling, financial advice, legal services and emotional and spiritual support.
With the sudden announcement this week that FEGS, the organization that provided many Connect to Care services and one of the largest social-service agencies in the federation network, would shutter its doors in the coming months, the charity is figuring out how to continue these services and others that the Federation Employment and Guidance Service provides.
Federation officials said they’re committed to working out a smooth transition.
“We are in regular communications with FEGS to help support uninterrupted service delivery and are exploring the right place for Connect to Care, and other programs we support in the UJA-Federation network of agencies,” a statement from the organization said.
UJA-Federation of New York is not the only organization scrambling to find new providers to continue the services provided by FEGS, cited by Crain’s as one of the largest social-service agencies in the country. The 80-year-old organization serves about 135,000 New Yorkers each year, including about 20,000 Jewish clients, some of them poor or near poor. And the number of Jews in poverty is rising, according to a 2011 population survey by the UJA-Federation of New York.
With an operating budget of some $220 million, from charities and government contracts, FEGS runs some 300 locations across the New York metropolitan area, serving about 12,000 every day.
The organization confirmed Friday that it would be shutting down after unexpectedly losing $19.4 million last year.
FEGS provides services in such areas as health/disabilities, home care, job training and immigrant services.
The group made its announcement just days after another New York Jewish social service agency, the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, announced that it was looking to merge or partner with other organizations to improve efficiency.
FEGS officials have remained mum about the reason for the organization’s financial distress, but in a statement to The Jewish Week said that it decided to close “after rigorous evaluation ... 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,” the statement said.
Amish Mehta, a partner specializing in not-for-profits at the accounting firm Friedman LLP, said FEGS’s leadership should have taken steps to reduce the agency’s overhead long ago.
“I don’t think it happened overnight. There must have been a recurring trend or a pattern,” he said. “I don’t know why the board and management weren’t more proactive earlier on to try to reduce some of these issues.
“It would seem that someone really didn’t carry on their responsibilities, because if the board members and management had actively taken measures earlier on they may have been able to prevent this" he added. "Why this was allowed to fester and get to the place it did we don’t know.”
Jeffrey Solomon, president of the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies, said nonprofits need to invest more in tracking the financial health of individual services.
"You need to have good financial reporting systems to know whether you’re making money program by program," he said. "If they had known, they could go back to the city to say: 'We aren’t making enough money on these programs,'" he said.
"I think what this underscores is the underinvestment of financial systems and legal support in nonprofits," he added.
FEGS said it will “transfer over the next several months of all of FEGS’ programs and services to other providers and is working closely with its City and State government partners, and other stakeholders, to effect those transitions.”
Both FEGS and the UJA-Federation of New York promise a smooth transition that will ensure continuity of services for clients and supports FEGS’ staff.” But Borough Park Councilman David Greenfield said there are bound to be people who will lose services.
“It’s really a one-two punch for desperately needed social services for the Jewish community,” he said, referring both to FEGS and the Met Council, which is struggling to bounce back from a corruption scandal that rocked the agency last year. “It definitely speaks to the need for more oversight for nonprofit organizations and perhaps more independent auditing.”
The organization’s sudden closure, Greenfield said, “speaks to the need for more oversight for nonprofit organizations and perhaps more independent auditing,” he said.
Two of the agencies expected to pick up the slack are the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services and the Jewish Child Care Association. But it’s unlikely they’ll be able to pick up all the slack.
One communal insider suggested moving some of the mental health services provided by FEGS to JCCA, which would free up JBFCS, which is considered one of the strongest agencies in the UJA-Federation network, to pick up more of FEGS’ functions.
“I am absolutely shocked, astounded,” said Borough Park Assemblyman Dov Hikind. “It’s a bad dream, almost, to be honest with you. FEGS is an organization I’m familiar with for the 32 years I’ve been an elected official and even before that. The people they serve, the work they do ... they’re not the only [social service agency] having trouble. There are other organizations, too.”
Hikind wondered how such a big social service agency — he called it “too big to fail” — was allowed to fall so suddenly, right under the eyes of the Jewish community. “These things do not happen overnight,” he said of an organization with a budget of more than $200 million. “Someone’s got to find a way to save FEGS.”
Hikind said that he was going to reach out “tomorrow” to people at UJA-Federation,” to see if the charity had some answers. “Every problem has a solution.”
Web director Helen Chernikoff contributed reporting to this story.

On Campus, An Assault On The Status Quo
Amy Sara Clark
Staff WriterJewish groups moving quickly to combat sexual assault with an array of tactics.

Amalia Bob-Waksberg, in a photo from Speak Out Brandeis, a blog where survivors post their stories. Courtesy of A. Bob-Waksberg

The last shuttle bus from Cambridge back to Brandeis had long gone. A cab to Waltham would have cost a fortune. The extra bed she’d been promised in a friend of a friend’s dorm room never materialized.
It was 3 a.m. on an unfamiliar college campus, and, after a low-key party, Amalia Bob-Waksberg, a 19-year-old freshman, was stuck.
Her only option, in the end, was the room of a guy who had pursued her — aggressively, despite multiple rejections — at the party. No worries, he said. He’d sleep on the floor. She didn’t want to make a fuss.
Before she knew it, though, the nice Jewish boy from Harvard had slipped into bed with her, and Bob-Waksberg froze. “I never said no when it was happening, but I gave a lot of signals,” she said. “When it was happening I was crying, but I didn’t say no.”
The next morning, she fell apart. “I was curled up in a ball on the floor of the shuttle crying. I couldn’t even see anything around me. I’ve never felt so dissociated from the world around me,” she said. She couldn’t even walk straight; a friend helped her back to her dorm. She couldn’t do anything for days.
Finding few resources for survivors of sexual assault at Brandeis, she worked to create them, founding Brandeis Students Against Sexual Violence and helping to start a blogwhere students could anonymously post their own stories. She and other student activists met with student leaders and administrators, gathered signatures, and successfully pressured the school into making significant changes.
Today, new student orientation incudes 2.5 hours of sexual assault prevention training; the ethics code and disciplinary procedures for sexual assault have been improved and students can file a sexual assault complaint online instead of going to campus police. The administration hired more staff dedicated to the issue, instituted a rape hotline, and just last month, five years after Bob-Waksberg’s assault, a rape crisis center opened on campus.
Bob-Waksberg is part of a growing movement on college campuses to end the culture that tolerates sexual assault by encouraging survivors to speak out and bystanders to step in. Jewish organizations — including the San Francisco-based Shalom Bayit, a nonprofit addressing violence against women, where Bob-Waksberg now works — are at the forefront of this movement. Jewish organizations are training Hillel staff to help survivors and training students to lead workshops on bystander intervention. They’re screening documentaries, holding discussion sessions and working through fraternities and sororities to change the culture from within.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1 in 5 women in collegeexperience sexual assault or attempted sexual assault as undergraduates. There are fewer studies on men, but a 2007 exploratory study by the Department of Justice estimates that 1 in 16 men experience attempted or completed sexual assault while in college.
Although questions about the recent controversial Rolling Stone article about a women’s story of being gang raped at the University of Virginia has increased concerns about false reporting, a meta-analysis of studies on the topic by the National Center for the Prosecution of Violence Against Women puts the percentage of false sexual assault reports between 2 and 8 percent.

Through a Jewish Lens

Hillel is taking part in campus efforts to combat sexual violence with a collection of programs addressing the issue. Two of the most prominent are a workshop on sexual assault as part of its Ask Big Questions program, and a partnership with Shalom Bayit that focuses on healthy relationship education and sexual violence through the lens of Judaism. Since 2011, Shalom Bayit has trained staff at more than 50 Hillels across the country about how to recognize and support survivors.
“Rape doesn’t discriminate based on religion, and many of our students are impacted personally every single year,” said Sheila Katz, vice president for social entrepreneurship at Hillel International. “This is happening and we must respond.”
Zephira Derblich-Milea, Shalom Bayit’s youth program coordinator, oversees the workshops for Hillel staff. During one workshop, she posts six quotes from the Torah and discusses them in the context of both healthy relationships and sexual assault. Two of her favorites are: “To humiliate a person is as powerful as shedding blood,” and “You’re not expected to complete the task, but neither are you free to avoid it.”
Katz, who used to be an assistant director at North Carolina Hillel, said, “Students come to Hillel professionals to try to understand their assault through a Jewish lens. I’ve heard questions like: How can there be a God when this happened to me? Did this happen to anyone in the Torah, and what does it [the Torah] say about rape?”
But, she added, “While it’s clearly Hillel’s responsibility to support the work of Jewish students who are survivors of assault, it’s equally as important to have conversations about healthy relationships and rape culture, because we want to do our part in making sure that all the students and staff we work with are not part of the problem.”
Raising Awareness
One avenue Hillels and other Jewish organizations have found to begin those conversations is the screening of “Brave Miss World,” a documentary about former Miss Israel Linor Abargil, who was raped six weeks before being crowned Miss World. The film intersperses snippets of women across Israel and the U.S. telling their own rape stories, with Abargil’s own post-rape journey to Orthodox Judaism and law school.
Since the film was first released in 2013, more than two dozen Hillels, including the Columbia-Barnard Hillel, have shown it. Barnard student Dana Kukin organized the screening in 2013 after having seen the film herself the previous year.
“I was very, very moved by it. It really stayed with me, and I wanted to screen the film again,” she said.
Columbia University is where student Emma Sulkowicz brought widespread attention to the issue of campus sexual assault by lugging a mattress with her to symbolize, she says, the weight that is always with her as a result of an assault. (She says she will stop carrying the mattress when man she says attacked her leaves Columbia.) Hillel was one of 28 student groups that took part in the Carry That Weight National Day of Action in October, during which participants on campuses worldwide carried mattresses in solidarity with sexual assault survivors.
Julia Snyder, president of Columbia-Barnard Hillel, said her organization took part to show that they care about what’s happening on campus and to recognize that sexual violence is a problem even in Hillel’s “tight-knit community.”
“We have students who are vocal about being survivors,” she said. “Just because we’re Jewish doesn’t mean this doesn’t affect us.”
Not Our Issue
Indeed, the “this doesn’t happen to us” mentality is a continuing problem in Jewish communities, though less so as time goes on, said Derblich-Milea. “I sort of make a joke about it, especially when I first started doing this work: You walk into the Reform community and they say: ‘Oh well, I’m sure this is happening in the Orthodox community but not here.’ And then you walk into the Orthodox community and they say: ‘I’m sure this is happening in the Reform community but not here.”
“It’s hard to acknowledge when this stuff is happening within our own community — it’s scary,” Derblich-Milea added. “And I also believe that once we acknowledge it we have to do something about it.”
Bob-Waksberg also grew up with that kind of mentality. Once a teacher told her that what happened to Elizabeth Smart “could never happen to Jewish girls, because Jewish girls are too smart for that.”

“I don’t think I took that so literally to heart, but this idea that Jewish women are so strong and outspoken, that this could never happen to them. ... And then also just this idea that these nice Jewish boys are harmless. ... I think that’s an image that needs to be really questioned and unpacked,” she said.

Rivka Hia was the lone student to participate in Carry That Weight’s National Day of Action at Yeshiva University’s Stern College for women. She hopes Orthodox leaders will push for sexual assault prevention programs for unmarried students.
“Because it’s encouraged to not touch before marriage, and because that’s the assumption, nobody is talking about the facts on the ground,” she said, adding that this expectation also increases the likelihood of blaming the victim.
Often, she said, “I think that there’s a misconception that women who don’t adhere to rabbinic guidelines in general deserve any unfortunate things that happen to them.”
Among non-Orthodox communities, Jewish Women International has also been addressing the issue head on. They’ve been working with two Jewish organizations, the fraternity Zeta Beta Tau and the sorority Sigma Delta Tau, to offer “Safe Smart Dating.” The program uses discussions, scenarios, news stories and videos to learn how to identify dating abuse and sexual assault, and how to intervene safely and effectively.
“Young men need to understand how to not only confront situations they know are wrong, but also to prevent such situations from arising in the first place,” said Laurence Bolotin, executive director Zeta Beta Tau’s national organization, in a written statement.
Changing Campus Culture
Training bystanders to intervene is an increasingly significant part of sexual assault prevention programs.
“The idea is that each of us as individuals has a role to play in preventing this from happening,” said Ted Merwin, who directs the Hillel at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., (and also covers theater for The Jewish Week). “A lot of times a guy meets a girl at a party and a lot of the times there’s alcohol involved. And he kind of takes her up to his room ... so there are opportunities for other students to intervene, to say, ‘She’s drunk, don’t take her upstairs.’
“It’s about depending on other people to not let it happen,” he said.
Dickinson’s Hillel organized an interfaith service for survivors of sexual assault on Yom Kippur, modeled on the Yizkor service.
“So much of Yom Kippur is about not confessing individual sin but about confessing communal sin,” Merwin said. “We did that whole Al Chet focused on sexual immorality — but from a college student’s point of view, in the sense of the kinds of things that happen on college campuses.”
Merwin continued: “A lot of it has to do with changing the campus so that men don’t feel like they have the right to women’s bodies ... [and] that this is a really serious thing that women can be terribly, even permanently damaged by. And I don’t think a lot of men get that. I don’t think a lot of men want to get that, or want to think about it.”
'Yes Means Yes'
Indeed, a major component of changing campus culture is changing the entire idea of what consent means: from “no means no,” to “yes means yes.” That is to say, that a woman doesn’t have to say no. It’s an assault if she hasn’t said yes, not just once, but at each stage of an encounter. (For example, saying yes to kissing doesn’t give the green light for intercourse.)
This higher bar for approval for sexual contact, also known as affirmative consent, is increasingly becoming the standard in college ethic codes across the country. Since September, all state-funded schools in New York and California have adopted the policy.
Affirmative consent is the centerpiece of “Consent is So Frat,” a nonprofit launched by recent Wesleyan University graduate Matthew Leibowitz, a former member of the Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi. The organization’s goal, summed up on its website, is “making consent and healthy relationships part of what it means to be a fraternity brother or sorority sister.”
Had yes means yes been the standard back in 2010, when Bob-Waksberg found herself in bed with the not-nice-after-all Jewish Harvard boy, the assault might never have taken place. Or if it had, she might have spared herself a lot of self-blame.
As it was, Bob-Waksberg — who started Brandeis Students Against Sexual Violence, revived the school’s feminist club and majored in women’s studies — blamed herself for what happened for a very long time.
It was only after interning at Shalom Bayit the summer after her assault, and taking a course on domestic violence back at Brandeis the next fall, that she came to understand why she was unable to say no, and why the fact that she didn’t does not mean that what happened was her fault.
“I was reading a theory piece about responses to sexual assault and ... [it] was talking about someone being assaulted and feeling like they were not in their body and they just kind of froze. And it’s kind of the way that a lot of people respond to that shock,” she said. “And for the first time I was like, ‘OK, that’s normal. ... It doesn’t mean that I was weak, or I was asking for it. That just was a normal response to trauma.”
At a Tipping Point
In the five years since Bob-Waksberg’s assault, the issue has moved to the front burner on campuses across the country. This is thanks to student activists including a wave who complaints to the U.S. Department of Education saying their schools’ sexually hostile environment violates the Title IX anti-discrimination law. Currently, 94 colleges are being investigated for Title IX sexual violence complaints, including, locally, Barnard, Hunter, SUNY Stony Brook, SUNY New Paltz, St. Thomas Aquinas and Sarah Lawrence colleges as well as Pace University. And, yes, Brandeis University, too.
As schools scramble to revise policies to comply with Title IX law, they’re making changes at a pace no one would have imagined five years ago.
“When I was a freshman, there was not really a conversation [about sexual assault],” said Victoria Jonas, a Brandeis senior and one of three student coordinators at the school’s new Rape Crisis Center. “I’ve sensed a huge social shift on campus.”
Brandeis’ Rape Crisis Center’s Sheila McMahon sees campus culture at “a tipping point.”
“In 2007, when I was implementing a bystander-training program, people thought I was a little nutty,” she said. A year later, schools across Boston were implementing them. Then came a steady stream of governmental changes, she said — the 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter from the U.S. Department of Education telling colleges it was their responsibility to address sexual assault; the 2013 Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act that mandated more transparent sexual assault reporting and mandated expanded survivor rights and prevention programs and one year ago, the creation of a White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault.
“I think we’re in a very special moment in the history of addressing sexual violence prevention in our country,” McMahon said. “It’s unprecedented.”
amyclark@jewishweek.org
Photos:
Top: Amalia Bob-Waksberg in a photo she posted on Speak Out Brandeis, a blog she helped start that allows survivors of sexual assault to share their stories annonymously. Courtesy of Amalia Bob-Waksberg
Middle: Zephira Derblich-Milea of Shalom Bayit uses quotes from Jewish texts in her workshops addressing sexual assault. Courtesy of Shalom BayitBottom: Hillel was one of 28 student groups to participate in the Carry That Weight National Day of Action on Oct. 29. Photo by Julia Snyder
New Round Of Layoffs At United Synagogue
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer

Four executives fired in latest belt-tightening at Conservative congregational arm.

Rabbi Steven Wernick: United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism is making cuts to concentrate on its “core functions.”

In the latest belt-tightening move made by a financially strapped Conservative movement, the United Synagogue for Conservative Judaism last week laid off four executives, among them some high-level USCJ employees.
But the layoffs, following several similar moves in the last few years, are the last planned ones for the foreseeable future, according to the executive vice president of the movement’s congregational arm, Rabbi Steven Wernick.
The layoffs follow the recent announcement that USCJ will sell its Manhattan headquarters, and that the Conservative movement’s flagship institution, the Jewish Theological Seminary, will sell two dormitories, as well as some of its air rights on campus in order to finance a redevelopment project at its Morningside Heights campus.
Rabbi Wernick confirmed that USCJ last week laid off more employees, “some … for reasons other than financial,” but he declined to give an exact number or the names of the staff members.
The list includes a USCJ director of special projects, the director of the Fuchsberg Center in Jerusalem, the director of major gifts and an assistant information technology director, according to an observer with close ties to the Conservative movement, who spoke to The Jewish Week on condition of anonymity in order to maintain those connections.
Rabbi Wernick, who was read a list of the names of those reportedly let go, would not confirm or deny them, saying he would not comment.
Rabbi Wernick said there are no more layoffs “that we are contemplating at this moment.” He said the most-recent cost-cutting measures, part of a long-term “reorganization,” will enable USCJ, which had run up a cumulative deficit of several millions dollars, to reach its goal of eliminating the deficit within the next few years, and will enable the organization to better “focus on our core functions” by outsourcing some services and streamlining other programs.
While published reports in 2013 put the organization’s cumulative deficit over the previous two years at more than $5 million, Rabbi Wernick said the figure last year was less — about $3.1 million. He said the deficit last year was reduced by more than $500,000.
The layoffs and other cost-cutting measures — in 2013 it shut down its college outreach program — are designed to produce annual savings of $350,000-400,000, the rabbi said.
Asked if the new executive-level layoffs harm the ability of USCJ to operate efficiently, Rabbi Wernick said, “Not if you have an understanding of what our core job is,” working with member congregations and kehillot [communities], Rabbi Wernick said.
But the observer who asked for anonymity called the latest USCJ layoffs “just the latest … public acknowledgement that they’re barely making it,” that the economic measures instituted by Rabbi Wernick since he became chief executive of the organization in 2009 are not succeeding in bringing USCJ out of the red.
The financial worries apply to the movement overall as studies show that Conservative Jewry is an aging and shrinking population.
While the number of Conservative congregations in the United States has fallen in the last few decades from 850 on 1985 to around 650 today, partly because of synagogue mergers, Rabbi Wernick maintained that “they’re not dropping out now … some [congregations] are joining [USCJ],” Rabbi Wernick said. He declined to give numbers of member congregations.editor@jewishweek.org

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