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As all eyes were focused on the Iran talks in Switzerland, Democratic leaders in Congress have been encouraging the Obama administration to "dial down" its ugly rift with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. Staff Writer Stew Ain reports.
INTERNATIONAL
Congressional Push To Get U.S., Israel To ‘Dial It Down’
Dems Nita Lowey and Steve Israel encourage quiet dialogue.
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
Before flying to Israel this week, House Speaker John Boehner said the “animosity” exhibited by the Obama administration towards Israeli Prime MinisterBenjamin Netanyahu is “reprehensible.”
The next day, the National Jewish Democratic Council issued a statement calling upon Boehner to stop politicizing the U.S.-Israeli alliance, having invited Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress without White House knowledge.
Now, two leading Jewish members of the House, both Democrats, Nita Lowey (D-Westchester-Rockland) and Steve Israel (D-L.I.), are calling on both Washington and Jerusalem to “cool it.”
“The level of frustration that both sides have towards the other peaked with that Wall Street Journal story,” observed Israel, referring to a story last week that quoted senior White House officials as complaining that the Jewish state has been spying on the talks between Iran and six world powers.
“I now believe that both sides recognize it would be more constructive to work things out quietly than on the pages of the Wall Street Journal or [the Israeli newspaper] Haaretz,” he told The Jewish Week.
Lowey said the spying story “was one of the reasons I have said to the White House that it is time to cool it and dial back.”
“Our relationship is strong and must remain strong,” she told The Jewish Week. “I have been in Congress 26 years and … there have been ups and downs in the relationship between the U.S. and Israel over the years. The important thing is to dial it back because the relationship is key to the U.S. and Israel and the region.”
She said she and several of her colleagues “have conveyed to the administration that they must repair the relationship,” Lowey added.
Regarding the U.S. release on Feb. 12 of once sensitive information about Israel’s nuclear weapons program — which has never been officially confirmed — Lowey said she has asked the administration about it and is still awaiting a response. Asked if the timing of the material’s release — which the U.S. had withheld for three years despite a Freedom of Information request — related to the U.S.-Israel rift, Lowey replied: “If true, it would be very disturbing.”
But there has apparently been progress regarding efforts to renew a 40-year-old agreement in which the U.S. promised to provide Israel with fuel in an emergency. It was allowed to lapse late last year, but Lowey’s office said the State Department informed it that a new arrangement has now been agreed to in principle and is soon to be signed.
The Obama administration has suggested in recent weeks that the U.S. might no longer have Israel’s back should there be an attempt to impose a peace deal with the Palestinians.
That suggestion arose after Netanyahu said during the final hours of his re-election campaign last month that he no longer supported a Palestinian state. After winning, he issued a clarification, saying that although he still believed in a two-state solution,current conditions did not permit it.
The Obama administration declined to accept the clarification and announced it was reassessing its approach to Israeli-Palestinian peace in light of Netanyahu’s original comment.
“What has now changed is that our ally in those conversations, Israel, has indicated that they are not committed to that approach anymore,” explained White House spokesman Josh Earnest.
That might be put to the test following last Friday’s announcement by French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius that France would be proposing a U.N. Security Council resolution to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It would reportedly call for the creation of a Palestinian state based on Israel’s pre-1967 border — with land swaps — and Jerusalem as its capital.
“There is no other solution,” Fabius explained just one day after outgoing U.N. Middle East envoy Robert Serry said such a move “may be the only way to preserve the goal of a two-state solution.”
Fabius told reporters at the U.N. that he believed this approach is needed to “avoid a complete crash” in the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, but he added that he first planned to discuss it with other members of the Security Council.
‘Foursquare Behind Israel’
The U.S. has not indicated whether it would support the resolution, but Lowey said she has told “senior officials” in the White House that “the U.S. must stand squarely behind Israel. The U.N. and the world have to understand that the U.S. and Israel are strong allies and there is no question in my mind that the Congress of the United States will stand foursquare behind Israel. ... I have made it very, very clear.”
“This relationship — where the U.S. has Israel’s back — goes back to [the] Oslo [Accords] that said any agreement with Israel and the Palestinians has to be through negotiations,” Lowey added. “This must not change, and I regret that this kind of information [suggesting otherwise] is circulating.”
Lowey said she spoke in recent days with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about the U.S.-Israel relationship “and she understands how important the relationship is.” She said she called Clinton, a possible Democratic presidential contender next year, “to give her an idea of the temperature in Congress and say it is time to cool the rhetoric. I said we need to repair the relationship and she agreed.”
That sentiment was reiterated by Clinton in a phone call she had with Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Hoenlein said he called Clinton to discuss U.S.-Israeli tensions and that she told him the two-state solution must be “pursued through direct negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians,” and that Israel must “never becomes a partisan issue.”
Clinton will be watched closely for reaction should an agreement with Iran be reached. As a former secretary of state under Obama, she would be expected to show support. But as potential candidate seeking strong Jewish backing, she may be wary of such a stand.
Lowey told The Jewish Week that it is not necessary for Obama to reassess the U.S. approach to Israeli-Palestinian peace because Netanyahu “walked back” his comments regarding a Palestinian state and “apologized” for comments the Obama administration and others understood as racist towards Arab Israelis.
“We need to move forward,” she argued. “Israel is our indispensable ally and we must stand firm.”
Both Lowey and Rep. Israel said that despite the rift between Obama and Netanyahu, military and intelligence sharing between the two nations continues uninterrupted. Lowey, the ranking Democrat on the powerful House Appropriations Committee, said Israel would continue receiving $3.1 billion in aid annually and “all the shared trainingthat goes between Israel and the U.S. military.”
Rep. Israel said that, speaking as a member of the House Defense Subcommittee on Appropriations, “the U.S. has never been more supportive of Israel and the relationship between the two countries has never been better.”
Regarding anti-missile systems, Israel said Congress would be increasing funding for Iron Dome, will increase cooperation on David Sling, and “you will see more U.S. investment in Arrow 2 and 3, and increased U.S. cooperation with Israel on tunnel detection” to spot Hamas tunnels being dug into Israel from the Gaza Strip.
“This is what is so frustrating to me,” Israel said. “The optics of the relationship between President Obama and Netanyahu has supplanted the reality of the military and intelligence cooperation going on between the two countries.”
Dinner With Dermer
Israel said he arranged for four other Democratic House leaders to join him last week for a dinner at the Washington home of Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., Ron Dermer, “for a candid exchange and to learn more about the relationship between the U.S. and Israel.”
Israel said he “routinely” arranges such dinners, but that this was the first since Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress last month.
“It was one of the more productive dinners we have had because we were able to get away from the headlines and drama and really focus on what needs to be done and to move forward both in Washington and Jerusalem,” he said. “Seventy-five percent of the time we spent on the negotiations with Iran. I have been an outspoken critic of doing a deal with Iran. I’m deeply skeptical that we can get the right deal with Iran — and the primarily issue for me is verification. It is extremely difficult to achieve the transparency necessary to trust that they are freezing their [nuclear military] program.
“The other issue for me is that in any deal we are relieving the sanctions imposed and enriching their economy. And at the end of a set period of years, Iran gets to go back to enriching uranium” and can build a nuclear bomb in a year.
The rest of their discussion focused on Israeli-U.S. tensions, according to Israel, who said Dermer provided a “very detailed history tour of every American president who had crises with Israel — everyone since [Harry] Truman had moments of crises with Israel — and the tensions were always self corrected. They always did and they always will.
“And he said if there is no deal with Iran, the current tensions will end very quickly. If there is a deal, we will have to manage the discourse because Prime Minister Netanyahu will go full throttle against the deal and President Obama will go full throttle for the deal. The most important thing, he said, is that it would be a disservice to Israel if any political party uses it in order to score partisan points.”
Netanyahu has argued that any deal with Iran must not only keep it from developing nuclear weapons, but must also reign in its proxy terrorist groups, including Hamas and Hezbollah. The Jerusalem Post quoted a senior Israeli Defense Ministry official Tuesday as saying that Iran is now placing guided warheads on its rockets and smuggling them to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
The official, Col. Aviram Hasson, was quoted as saying that Iran is converting Zilzal unguided rockets into accurate, guided M-6000 projectiles by upgrading their warheads.
“It is turning unguided rockets that had an accuracy range of kilometers into weapons that are accurate to within meters,” he said, adding that as a result Hezbollah “is in a very different place compared to the Second Lebanon War in 2006.”
stewart@jewishweek.org
Associate Editor Jonathan Mark ventured out to a Crown Heights bakery to witness the baking of shmurah matzah, the hand-made, high-priced variety, wondering why it's so expensive to produce a product made only of flour and water.NEW YORK
Shmurah’s Back-Alley Road To Seders
Hand-made matzah and the high price of freedom.
Jonathan Mark
Associate Editor
Shmurah matzah is seen as a "higher brand." Michael Datikash/ JW
Pieces of wood are pitched into a brick oven, licked by other-worldly orange flames. Some 30 workers, faces aged and weathered, keep kneading and rolling dough in the matzah bakery on Albany Avenue in Crown Heights, as narrow and long as a two-room railroad flat, its painted walls as faded and colorless as fog. As the matzah is made, each batch in less than 18 minutes, one hears, “L’shem matzot mitzvah” (“We are doing this for the sake of the mitzvah of matzah.”) There is nothing modern here, even the water for the dough is drawn not from a tap but from rainwater or fresh water. It is like a speakeasy, no one enters who doesn’t know where he’s going. There’s no sign on the door, no name, and a metal sheet covers the window facing the street.
Trying to figure the business of shmurah matzah is like watching Elijah’s cup for his sip; now you see it, now you don’t. Shmurah matzah, as with its autumnal cousin, the esrog, is spiritually exquisite, yet its pricing is as inexplicable as a Middle Eastern bazaar or voodoo economics. People in the know tell us that the matzah is too often made by non-unionized workers, transients and migrants. Even experts in the kosher business have no idea what the workers are paid. The ingredients are nothing but flour and water. The only real yet limited expense are the rabbis who watch (shmurah means watching, or guarding) the matzah from the time of the harvest. (Machine matzah is usually watched from the time of milling). It is hard to imagine a product with cheaper ingredients or cheaper labor. And yet, Chabad’s most affordable shmurah exports, which come from Kfar Chabad in Israel and in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, sell here for $12.99 and $14 for one-pound boxes. But on the shelves of several Brooklyn kosher supermarkets this week, non-Chabad shmurah matzah sells for $19, $23, $32, even $40, sometimes $50 a pound. A five-pound non-shmurah machine-made package of Streit’s is $11, or $2.20 per pound.
In recent years there have been many complaints in the Orthodox community about “price gouging,” and the “highway robbery” of shmurah prices. There have been calls for boycotts, a return for charedim to the cheaper but equally kosher machine-made matzah (between $2 and $3), and for the rabbinate to assert its authority and imposeprice controls on ritual items necessary for the Jewish community.
As for the higher costs, Menachem Lubinsky, the executive of Lubicom, themarketing firm specializing in kosher foods, said that for all the complaints on price, “Hand-[made] shmurah, to people, is sort of a higher brand, and they’re paying for it, and they want to pay for it.”
As for the low cost for Chabad matzahs from Israel and Ukraine, he said, “First of all, the cost of labor and hasgacha [supervision] in some of these markets is cheaper than it is here. One of the complaints of even the domestic machine bakeries is that the Israelis were [sending] matzah here at much cheaper prices, and that it wasn’t a level playing field because the Israelis were able to produce the matzah for less than the American matzahs are produced.”
Nevertheless, Lubinsky admitted that American shmurah were often produced with non-union labor, which would negate the Israeli advantage in labor costs. Also, people were buying the Israeli imports not just for price but because the Israeli matzahs “are quality and people like them. Some people even feel a sense of reward that they are buying Israeli products.”
There is no central address, and no major companies, like Streit’s or Manischewitz, in the shmurah business, and unlike the machine matzah companies that go year-round, shmurah bakeries appear with the first snow and disappear with the thaw, basically from Chanukah to the seder. They seem fly-by-night. Lubinsky says of shmurah, “It’s a seasonal business.” They seem back-alley. Yes, he agrees, “That would describe them pretty well.”
And yet, says Lubinsky, 25 percent of American matzahs are now shmurah, a market growing “by leaps and bounds. Stores that never used to carry shmurah now do: Costco, Shop-Rite, Target, it’s even on Amazon. I hear a Wal-Mart in Chicago is selling shmurah matzah.” Once a mostly chasidic preserve, there are now “some non-chasidic bakeries. Baltimore has one. Los Angeles has one managed by Modern Orthodox Jews.”
Chabad.org reports that the business manager who handles kosher products for Bi-Lo Holdings, which operates supermarkets including the Winn-Dixie chain, says 50 of their stores now carry shmurah. In the Midwest, Jewel-Osco supermarkets report that 100 of their 185 stores now carry shmurah.
In New York, says Lubinsky, “There’s a natural growth in the Orthodox market; you’re feeding a lot more mouths. But what I’m hearing from a lot of retailers is that a lot of non-traditional [Jews] are buying the hand-shmurah, too.”
What is known about the shmurah business, says Lubinsky, is that “there are four or five major bakeries,” primarily in Borough Park, Williamsburg, Lakewood, N.J., and we have a pretty good indication of what their numbers are. They might do anywhere from $2 million to $5 million in sales.”
Shmurah versus machine has been the Hatfield-McCoys of the business. Some of the dispute was halachic (who was more prone to chametz-related error, a machine or a human?), but Gil Marks, author of the “Encyclopedia of Jewish Food,” wrote that a real concern was “the loss of jobs by poor women and widows who relied on the yearly work of dough rolling, no small matter in the impoverished and restricted climate of eastern Europe.” In general, adds Marks, “Lithuanian rabbis were much less critical of the new technology than their chasidic brethren.”
Shmurah was almost nonexistent in the United States, as were chasidim, until mid-century, but in 1954, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, began a campaign to have Lubavitchers start giving out shmurah matzah at a time when it simply couldn’t be found, and often wasn’t even heard of by American Jews. The rebbe said, “For various reasons, the custom has been discontinued [but] I would ask that the custom of distributing matzah be instituted and that rabbis give shmurah matzah to their congregants.”
The rebbe didn't just ask this of Chabad rabbis but he sent public and personal letters to rabbis around the world to facilitate the rabbanic distribution of shmurah matzah.
The rebbe didn’t have as many shluchim, or emissaries, in 1954 as there are now, but by train and truck from Crown Heights, Jews began getting free shmurah, supplies permitting, along with an education in the spiritual virtues of hand-made shmurah. The custom continues, and this year, for example, some 500 pounds of shmurah are being distributed in Oregon, personally handed out by shluchim and their families. One Chabad rabbi’s son had his bar mitzvah before Passover and more than 60 boxes of shmurah were given out as “party favors.”
In the 1950s, for all that Chabad was doing, the demand was still quite limited. But the demand grew steadily until it rocketed “in the last decade,” said Lubinsky. If not mainstream, shmurah became almost universally used in Orthodox circles, and recognized far beyond that. In 2013, the official White House seder featured shmurah matzah. As recently as the 1970s, most Catskill hotels served machine matzah as their “default” matzah. The Catskill hotels are gone, but in 2015, said Lubinsky, “We counted, in the U.S. alone, around 125 resorts or [Passover] programs, and they are ordering a tremendous amount of shmurah matzah. Prime Group, for example, has several hotels, and about 80 percent of their matzah orders are shmurah.”
Hand-made shmurah seems authentic in its imperfection, all the more authentic precisely for its imperfection. It just looks and tastes, people say, exactly as in the leaving of Egypt.
And yet, the food historian Marks told us (in several conversations before his death in December), that for all the virtues of shmurah, authenticity is not one of them.
Although Passover’s biblical name is Chag HaMatzot (Festival of Matzah), the Torah tells us nothing about what it looked like. There is no halachic prohibition against “authentic” soft matzah, and Marks says that the original matzah was most likely soft. According to softmatza.com, “Soft matzah is the same shmurah matzah that you buy at your local matzah bakery. The only difference is that it is rolled out to be a little thicker and when baked ends up soft instead of crunchy.”
Soft matzah, said Marks, explains the kabbalistic custom of placing the relatively heavy seder plate on top of the matzot, a weight that soft matzah could absorb but would break modern matzah.
Cracker-like matzah, wrote Marks, “was actually a relatively late development, emerging perhaps around the 15th century in Ashkenazic communities,” a change driven by various halachic concerns, such as the problem of baking matzah on Passover, as soft matzah requires because it easily goes stale, while cracker-style could be baked before Passover and easily last the week. Matzah was baked in the home, for most of history, but in the 1700s, writes Marks, the commercial matzah bakery emerged, as the skills and exactitude of matzah baking became more elusive for the general popultion.
Then, as today, Jews imagined themselves as having left Egypt, and imagined their shmurah matzah to have been there, too.
All these years later, in the Albany Street afternoon, wood is fed to the fire and shmurah matzah emerges from the flames. Young chasidic children come in with their father to buy matzah; perhaps that piece, over there, will become the afikomen. Erev Pesach, wrote Sholom Aleichem, “is there a greater pleasure than that?” May it be a pleasure for the lonely and the migrants who bake our matzah as it is for the children who hide it.
Jonathan@jewishweek.org
Ted Merwin offers an intriguing mystery about how the beautiful stained glass windows from a synagogue in a Pennsylvania mining town ended up in a West Hempstead shul.NATIONAL
The Mystery Of The MissingStained Glass Windows
They once adorned a synagogue in the heart of coal country. How they ended up in West Hempstead is raising troubling questions.
Ted Merwin
Special To The Jewish Week
Beth Israel, an Orthodox synagogue in Mahanoy, Pa. Ted Merwin/JW
Gazing out over the congregation assembled in the dark wooden pews to celebrate his bar mitzvah in the summer of 1950, Melvyn Freid’s eyes were drawn to the two dozen spectacular stained glass windows that filled every wall of his synagogue, Beth Israel, an Orthodox congregation in the Pennsylvania coal mining town of Mahanoy City. Little could Freid have known that six decades later, those windows would become an obsession for him after they vanished and ended up adorning the walls of Eitz Chayim of Dogwood Park, an Orthodox synagogue on Long Island’s South Shore.
While the synagogue ceased functioning two decades ago, Freid is seeking the return of the windows, which feature colorful images of Tablets of the Law, menorahs, and Lions of Judah. The windows — or their cash equivalent — are required in order to care for the graves of Freid’s parents and other members of Beth Israel who are buried in the Sons of Jacob Cemetery, located 10 miles away in the neighboring village of Hometown. But ever since the windows disappeared in 2010, Freid said that he has gone through a “traumatic, very frustrating experience” in trying to regain them.
An hour north of Hershey, Mahanoy City was settled by English, Welsh, Irish and German immigrants in the mid-19th century; it joined a cluster of similar towns like Shamokin and Shenandoah that grew up in northern Schuylkill County around the booming anthracite coal mining industry. At the turn of the 20th century, these burgeoning communities drew Jewish merchants and tradesmen, who launched businesses to provide food, clothing, furniture, and other necessities to the miners, most of whom were Irish; the violent clashes between the “Molly Maguires” and the mine owners are a staple of American folklore and popular culture.
By the early 1920s, a number of these towns boasted beautiful brick synagogues with mahogany woodwork and ornate ceilings; the 45 Jewish families in Mahanoy City — whose Jewish population, according to historian Lee Shai Weissbach in his book, “Jews in Small-Town America,” peaked at about 250 in 1918 — collected $45,000 to build Beth Israel in 1923. (A twin of the synagogue, built in the same year by the same builder, still stands in Lehighton, half an hour north of Allentown.)
Arnold Oberson, who grew up a few blocks from Beth Israel, lives now in Margate, N.J. His parents, who owned a children’s clothing store, donated one of the stained glass windows; his grandfather, Charles Oberson, who was a wholesale beef producer, is the oldest person buried in the congregation’s cemetery. “The older generation kept the synagogue very neat and clean,” Oberson recalled. “The rugs were shampooed and the benches were varnished.”
The town’s economic prospects were encouraging; an appliance store owner named John Watson, whose television sets were not selling because of poor reception caused by the mountains, hit in 1948 on the idea of installing an antenna on top of a nearby peak, which ultimately made Mahanoy City the birthplace of cable TV. But the precipitous decline of the mining industry over the postwar decades left the region in a severe economic slump, and the sons and daughters of the town’s Jewish residents, like their non-Jewish counterparts, almost all departed for better educational and economic opportunities elsewhere. (The entire town has a total of only four thousand residents today, barely a quarter of its pre-WWI population.)
By the late 1980s, as the Philadelphia Inquirer reported, the once proud Beth Israel Congregation was fading out, the fewer than two dozen elderly Jews in the town barely able to sustain a daily minyan, even with help from surrounding Jewish communities. While the building’s paint was peeling and the plaster crumbling, the reporter, Russell E. Eshleman, Jr., marveled that the “synagogue retains much of its former majesty. Colorful stained glass windows, donated by families and businesses during the town’s glory years, are in perfect condition…” Rumor had it that the round window that hung over the synagogue’s entrance, and which featured a Star of David, had been manufactured by famous glassmaker Louis Comfort Tiffany and donated by the local high school’s alumni association.
Freid, whose parents owned a furniture store, had left the town for good in the mid-1950s, at around the time that Beth Israel switched to the Conservative movement. Freid went on to Penn State and the Peirce School of Business before joining the army and then becoming an auditor for the Internal Revenue Service. Now retired after almost four decades working for the IRS, Freid, who lives near Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, has made the return of the windows into a personal crusade.
Edna Janowitch is the sole remaining Jewish resident of Mahanoy City; her family owned a shirt-making factory that employed many of the town’s residents. Janowitch, who lives just a few doors down from the shuttered synagogue, told The Jewish Week that she saw a moving company taking them down. But Janowitch, who challenged the movers, was informed that they had permission to remove them.
“It was such a shock when they were taken,” said Freid, who did not learn of their disappearance until he heard about it nine months later.
nThe idea that the windows would be sold off was not unlikely, though, given that the Beth Israel Congregation was just then in the process of disposing of its assets and looking for a way to maintain the cemetery. A cousin of Freid’s, who visited the cemetery in 2008, “called me crying,” he recalled, “saying that the grass is too high.” Fried paid out of pocket for the grass to be mowed.
At around the same time, Eitz Chayim, the Long Island congregation, was building a new sanctuary to accommodate its growing membership, swelled by the Modern Orthodox population moving to the border of West Hempstead and Franklin Square. They had sent representatives, including one of their officers, Philip Brill, to Mahanoy City in 2006, where they were given a key to the sanctuary by the congregation’s long-time attorney, Robert N. Bohorad, and permission to take pews, prayer books and other items. (The Torah scrolls had already been sold off to other congregations.) But there is no record of anyone connected to Beth Israel giving permission to take the stained glass windows.
However they obtained the windows, Eitz Chayim installed just eight of them (representing fewer than half of the total) in August of 2012, just in time for High Holy Day Services. That the windows came from Mahanoy City is evident from photos that accompanied a celebratory article about the new sanctuary by the congregation’s then-president, Kenneth J. Glassman, that ran that September in a local paper, the West Hempstead Jewish Times.
By that time, the loss of the windows was already the focus of a police investigation. In February of 2010, a month after the windows were taken, Harrisburg attorney Edmund “Tad” Berger, whose uncle, Maurice Vogel, had been Beth Israel’s treasurer, reported them as stolen to the Schuylkill County District Attorney and to the Mahanoy City Police Department. Officer John Powis, who took the report and interviewed officers of Eitz Chayim, told The Jewish Week only that the case is “still an active criminal investigation” and that “details will be forthcoming when an arrest is made.”
Freid also tried to pursue the matter with officials of Eitz Chayim officials, but “every time we tried to talk to them, they stonewalled us.”
That such decorative windows would be taken from an inactive congregation is “not surprising at all,” to Sam Gruber, an architectural historian and cultural heritage consultant who heads the International Survey of Jewish Monuments, an organization that seeks to preserve Jewish sites worldwide. “American congregations have plundered underused and closed synagogues in North Africa,” he said. “They can be quite acquisitive and aggressive.” But he pointed out that it “happens less frequently these days, because people are more sensitive to the artistic value of items, rather than thinking that synagogues are just sitting there” and their assets are up for grabs.
When the windows were installed in 2012, little was said publicly about how they were acquired. Rabbi Art Vernon of Congregation Shaaray Shalom, a Conservative synagogue that is just around the corner from Eitz Chayim (and which is fronted by 30-foot high Belgian stained glass windows by the Jewish architect Percival Goodman that are the envy of the neighborhood), recalled that all that he had heard was that Eitz Chayim’s windows “came from a synagogue in Pennsylvania that was going out of business.”
nCorrespondence obtained by The Jewish Week shows a volley of letters back and forth over the last five years between Thomas Campion, Jr., the attorney for Beth Israel (Bohorad passed away from cancer last June), who is based in nearby Pottsville, and Glassman, the former president of Eitz Chayim, who practices law in Manhattan. Representatives for the congregation have insisted that they had permission to take the windows but have never supplied the name of the person who purportedly gave them this authorization, or furnished any receipt or other written documentation of the transfer of ownership. In addition, Glassman has contended that Beth Israel “has ceased being a functioning entity for many years” and that no one has legal standing to demand the return of the windows.
Freid emphatically disagrees. In order to recover funds that had been deposited over the years in area banks, Beth Israel reorganized itself two years ago, with Freid elected (by the few descendants of the founding families who could be found) as president. “A corporation cannot die,” Freid insisted. “We aren’t defunct. We still have a cemetery that we need to take care of.” Freid has since paid a Philadelphia contractor $35,000 to take ownership of the building, which has been assessed real estate taxes since it stopped functioning as a religious organization. He also noted that the value of the building was significantly reduced when the windows were removed.
The current value of the windows is also an issue. Alyssa Loney, a Pennsylvania appraiser recently hired by Freid, has, using photographs of all of the windows, assessed their fair market value at $192,500; she found no evidence, however, that any of the windows were made by Tiffany. Then again, Eitz Chayim may have spent a considerable amount of money in repurposing them; Freid recalled a telephone conversation with Glassman in 2011, in which Glassman calculated that transporting, releading and installing them would cost Eitz Chayim in excess of $150,000.
Leonard Berman chairs the cemetery committee of the Harrisburg Jewish Foundation, which was requested a decade ago to take over the responsibility for five Jewish cemeteries in the anthracite coal mining region. “We don’t have the funds to provide for perpetual care,” he lamented. “We need endowment monies from each of these former congregations.”
In order to assume responsibility for the Sons of Jacob Cemetery, the foundation has demanded a $150,000 endowment, to cover annual costs of several thousand dollars that include grass cutting, snow removal, liability insurance, and the adjustment of slanting gravestones. The foundation recently retained its own attorney to seek compensation for the windows, although there is a question about whether or not too much time has passed for the relevant statutes of limitation to apply. If so, the Beth Din of America, the Orthodox Jewish court that adjudicates matters of Jewish law, could be asked to step in; the Talmud is replete with regulations about how lost, stolen, misappropriated, and abandoned objects should be handled.
Eitz Chayim’s part-time rabbi, Efrem Schwalb, told The Jewish Week only that the windows came “a long time ago” from a congregation in Pennsylvania and that he “highly doubts” that they were taken without permission. Neither Brill nor Glassman consented to an interview; when asked to help shed light on the situation, Glassman sent a terse email, “Nothing to clarify.”
But Natan Hecht, a West Hempstead tax attorney who became Eitz Chayim’s president last summer, was eager to discuss the situation, and he suggested that his congregation did a mitzvah in “rescuing” the windows. While he conceded that he has no direct knowledge of the case, Hecht noted that he is “very confident that there is no injustice.” From what he had been told, “The synagogue building was rotting; it had standing water. The windows were going to be lost. The windows were taken only when the officers of Eitz Chayim were convinced that it was an abandoned building and that everyone who had a tangential connection to the congregation had expressed no interest in it. There were conversations at the time with local authorities, who agreed that the building was abandoned.”
The windows that were not used by Eitz Chayim were not restored, but are, Hecht divulged, in the sanctuary’s basement, where, he speculated, they are “probably in better condition than they would have been if they had been left behind” in the dilapidated synagogue in Mahanoy City.
Furthermore, Hecht is indignant about the claim that his congregation owes money for the windows. The idea, he said, that “people who weren’t there to come forward now and insinuate that we did something wrong — that there are real needs now and that there was a resource at the time that could be monetized — is ridiculous. It was no one’s intention to take something that other people had a claim on, either legally or ethically. And nothing was done as a secret.”
While Hecht conceded that it may be “tragic that resources weren’t left for perpetual care of their cemetery,” he insisted that “the windows wouldn’t necessarily have been a panacea.” Nevertheless, he pointed out that the windows have given the two congregations a “shared history and legacy,” and he offered to facilitate a meeting of leaders of both synagogues to discuss the matter.
For his part, Melvyn Freid had some choice words for the leaders of Eitz Chayim. He called them “opportunists who took advantage of our congregation. They saw something that was ripe for the taking. It’s true that our synagogue was inactive at the time; I hadn’t even been in the building for 20 or 30 years. Nevertheless, I feel that our shul was a victim.”
But however the situation is ultimately resolved, Freid, who has purchased his own plot in the Sons of Jacob Cemetery, just wants to know that the graves will be taken care of. If he could only procure the funds for the cemetery, he said, “I would feel that all of my efforts have not been in vain.”
Ted Merwin, who teaches religion at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., writes about culture for the paper. His website is tedmerwin.com.
Also this week, Israelis are wary of an Iran deal; a potential merger for The Folksbiene Theater and the Museum of Jewish Heritage; an Egyptologist on the veracity of the Exodus story; Moishe Houses for young people are flourishing in New York; a preview of Thane Rosenbaum's new novel, set in early 1970s Miami Beach; and Erica Brown, on why we need more and better storytellers to do justice to the Seder.ISRAEL NEWS
In Rare Consensus, Israelis Wary Of Iran Deal
Emboldened Tehran would be more aggressive in the region.
Joshua Mitnick
Israel Correspondent
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, second from left, and other negotiators during a recent Iran talks session in Switzerland.
Tel Aviv — It’s rare to hear a consensus in Israel on a foreign policy debate, but on the question of a new nuclear deal with Iran, most politicians and analysts seem to be of a similar opinion: The deal is likely to turn out to be quite problematic from Israel’s perspective.
A pact between world powers and Iran that leaves a big part of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure intact, goes the consensus, will formalize international recognition of the country as a nuclear threshold state, and leave Tehran months away from building a nuclear weapon if it chooses.
As negotiators worked against the deadline this week for an interim deal, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, that he remained adamant in opposing the pact. He said it would “pave the way” for Iran to assemble a nuclear weapon and leave a considerable nuclear infrastructure at the country’s disposal.
“There are so many empty spaces over there [at the talks in Switzerland] that indicate this agreement is going to be extremely dangerous, that there is no way for Israel not to be worried,” said Yossi Kuperwasser, a former Director General of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs.
Netanyahu and some Israeli experts have also warned that a new nuclear deal is likely to enhance Iran’s standing in the Middle East by removing economic sanctions and ending its diplomatic isolation; the outcome, they say, would free Iran to deepen its support for allied groups from Gaza to Lebanon to Yemen.
“The day that the Americans and the Iranians shake hands, Iran will have crossed a very significant line,” wrote Alex Fishman in the daily newspaper Yediot Aharonoth. “It might not come to possess a nuclear bomb in the next few years, but it [Iran] will be emerging from these negotiations politically strengthened relative to all the other countries in the region.”
“A post-agreement Iran will not only enjoy economic prosperity, but will also be more brazen, confident in its own strength and more daring in its actions across the Middle East,” Fishman continued. “After all, the people who shook their hands in the morning aren’t going to bomb them in [the] evening. Iran will feel that the threat of military action against it has essentially been lifted.”
And yet, some Israeli’s analysts note that despite the prime minister’s insistence that a nuclear Iran poses an existential threat to Israel, the sky will not fall on the day after a deal. With neither Israel nor the U.S. willing to opt for a military attack at this stage, a deal with Iran might be the best of bad options for Israel.
“It’s not great for us, but I don’t think it’s an existential threat; Iran is very busy with the Sunni-Shiite divide,” said Ehud Eiran, a defense expert at Haifa University. “Their support is mainly for non-state actors on our border. It’s not like when Israel feared an eastern front and Iraqi tanks rolling across Jordan.”
Instead, Israel will need to figure out a way to do damage control and ensure a deal is closely monitored.
“If there’s an agreement signed by the P5 +1, there’s not much that Israel can do with it more than fiddle with it at the margins, and hope that it can affect implementation over the next few years,” said Jonathan Rhynhold, a political science professor at Bar Ilan University. (The countries involved in the talks are the United States, England, France, Germany, Russia and China.) “I’m sure that Israel will work hard to improve it, but the likelihood of doing that is small. It would take a blatant violation by the Iranians” to roll back the agreement.
For better or for worse, Israel’s role in the negotiations has been that of a spectator and — despite Netanyahu’s March 3 speech in Congress — there’s been precious little ability to influence the deal shouting from the sidelines, analysts say.
“The prime minister’s warnings have not had much of an impact on the agreement,” said Ari Kacowicz, a political science professor at Hebrew University who suggested that Netanyahu took unrealistic positions in trying to block a deal at all costs.
“I am not saying this is going to be a perfect agreement, and I’m not going to say this is a disastrous agreement — or even that it’s Munich 1938,” he said. “The problem from Israel’s perspective is that the agreement will recognize and institutionalize Iran as a threshold power.”
Instead of open clashes with the Obama administration, Israel should have sought to influence the emerging deal through a discrete dialogue with the White House, said Amos Yadlin, a former Israeli military intelligence chief who was elected to parliament on the ticket of the opposition Zionist Union Party.
Yadlin said that if the Iranians were allowed to keep most of their enriched uranium — including some eight tons of low-enriched material — the deal would be a bad one. He added that if the Iranians were allowed to continue research and development on their nuclear program, it would be another red flag. At the same time, Israel should have reached an understanding with the U.S. about potential punishment in case of a violation of the agreement.
“In contrast to Prime Minister Netanyahu, who defined any agreement as a bad deal, we needed to sit with the Americans and discuss with them: What are the parameters involved when they say one-year break out time? What do they mean by no agreement is better than a bad agreement?” said Yadlin in an interview with Israel Radio on Tuesday. “These things were not done.”
One upside to emerge from the Iran talks has been a spotlight on the growing common interests between Israel and neighboring pro-Western Arab states such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt, analysts say. The decision by the Arab League to form a united Arab military force is seen in Israel as a direct response to Iran’s expected boost from the deal and what is seen as growing reach in places like Yemen. Saudi Arabia also is emphatically opposed to a deal.
The joint Arab force “is a very positive development. .. It’s like saying ‘America, you do your thing, we are united,’” said Daniel Nisman, a security expert and president of Levantine Group consulting. “It means that Netanyahu’s voice in Congress, whether you agree with it or not, is shared by many of America’s allies in the region.”
That said, relations with Israel’s most important ally — the U.S. — remain a question mark going forward after the agreement, said Rhynhold. In addition to the spat over Iran, the Obama administration has been unforgiving over Netanyahu’s about-face on a Palestinian state and his Election Day warning about Arab voters. Leaks about alleged Israel spying were also a bad sign for the strategic ties. The question is whether that reflects temporary post-election friction enhanced by the Iran dispute, or whether Israel is facing a downgrade in its ties with Washington.
“In the short term, we’re looking at a confrontation between Israel and the administration which the administration will win,’’ Rhynhold said. “The question is how much damage control Israel can do.’’
Despite the tension with the U.S. over the Iran talks, the potential regional boost for Iran, and the lifting of sanctions, Haifa University’s Eiran said that the very fact of a deal represents an achievement for Israel, which for years felt alone on the international stage warning about Iran’s nuclear program.
“We don’t like what the deal is, but this is good: the world coming down on Iran and trying to curb its program,” he said. “This is what Israel hoped for historically. We got the world engaged but not in the way that we wanted. We have to be careful [what] we wish for.”
editor@jewishweek.org
NEW YORK
Folksbiene, MJH Get Hitched
Potential merger of Yiddish theater company and Museum of Jewish Heritage seen as ‘win-win.’
Sandee Brawarsky
Special To The Jewish Week
Zalmen Mlotek, left, Bryna Wasserman, Jeff Wiesenfeld, Bruce Ratner and David Marwell at the Museum of Jewish Heritage’s Safra H
Engaged at 100.
The National Yiddish Theater-Folksbiene marks its 100th birthday tonight with a gala concert at Carnegie Hall featuring Itzhak Perlman and a major announcement: The NYTF and the Museum of Jewish Heritage-A Living Memorial to the Holocaust are joining in a strategic partnership. On Tuesday morning, officials of both organizations signed a memorandum of understanding that will give the groups two years to explore a potential merger. According to the plan, the NYTF will become the resident theater company at the museum, and the two organizations will work together to showcase performances, integrated programming and educational opportunities.
In conversations, leaders of the two cultural organizations offered marriage metaphors, speaking of an engagement followed by courtship or a period of living together to see if they are compatible. Several used the work beshert, Yiddish for fate or destiny, or meant to be.
“This makes huge sense in every way,” says Bruce Ratner, executive chairman of Forest City Ratner Companies, chairman of the MJH and gala chair, who will make the announcement to an expected sellout audience of 2,800 people. “These are two organizations with a similar mission — to encourage and promote our Jewish heritage in every way possible.”
Each group will have a key need met: After years of performing in different locales around the city, the NYTF will get its own home, which includes the 375-seat Edmond J. Safra Hall, and the museum will get thousands of new visitors to its downtownlocation. From the waterfront building designed by architect Kevin Roche in the shape of a six-pointed star, visitors have a clear view of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island — sites at the heart of both institutions.
“The museum tells stories through artifacts and photographs; we tell stories through the performing arts,” managing director Bryna Wasserman says. These days, the NYTF presents their shows in Yiddish with English and Russian supertitles, and some performances are in English.
“We’re all about partnering,” David Marwell, museum director and CEO says, noting that they already have initiatives with Jewish Gen (the genealogy website) and the Auschwitz Jewish Center. He explains that they’ll need to do improvements to Safra Hall for theatrical performances and create another space for lectures, and they will have to raise about $1.2 million. But they have temporary solutions in the interim.
“There’s no limit to what we’ll be able to do.” Marwell says.
For Zalmen Mlotek, artistic director of NYTF, having a home of their own has long been a dream. “I see it as a center of performing arts, a place where young children of all ages can come and learn about their heritage, whether through workshops with educators or performances they come to see.”
“Here, as we enter our 100th year, we have this opportunity to have space, to haveclasses, to bring in young people. It’s really a sign for all the naysayers who are worried about the demise of Yiddish. Here we are about to start on a new page.”
Chris Massimine, executive producer of NYTF, speaks of multi-platforms, with events that look different from anything happening in the city.
Ratner, whose parents spoke Yiddish, previously met with the Folksbiene about helping to find a permanent home, and when he took on the chairmanship of MJH about a year ago, they picked up the conversation.
In June, MJH serves as home base for KulturefestNYC, a weeklong citywide celebration of Jewish culture, presented by NYTF in collaboration with UJA-Federation of New York. In the fall, the NYTF will launch its 101st season at MJH.
“This is win-win,” says Jerome Chanes, a writer, scholar, former executive of the National Foundation for Jewish culture and a culture watcher.
“Here’s a way to develop a program that’s unusually broad and unusually deep, that’s entirely consistent with the agenda and mission of both institutions.”
Stephen J. Whitfield, a historian at Brandeis University who holds the Max Richter chair in American Civilization and is the author of “In Search of American Jewish Culture,” tells The Jewish Week, “The proposed merger demonstrates the truism of cultural historians that their subject is never static, that Jewish culture is something both dynamic and energetic, as circumstances dictate. In the long course of Jewish history, of course, these institutions are of very recent vintage, which only proves how much Jewish culture is a story of innovation as continuity.”
editor@jewishweek.org
THE JW Q&A
Digging Into The Exodus Story
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
Galit Dayan: At family seder, the Israeli Egyptologist tells the Egyptian side of the Exodus story.
Galit Dayan, who teaches at IDC Herzliya in Israel, has a Ph.D. in Egyptology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is a frequent writer and lecturer on anthropological proof that Israelite slaves lived and worked in ancient Egypt — a relevant topic with the approach of Passover. The Jewish Week interviewed her by email. This is an edited transcript.
Q: The biblical story of the Exodus from Egypt dates back some 3,300 years. What new archeological findings are still adding to our understanding?
A: Pete Windahl from [Minnesota-based] Mahoney Media and historian David Rohl have been working for more than 10 years to find archeological evidence for the story of Exodus. They took all the evidence and managed to arrange it in chronological order, which for the first time matches the biblical and Assyriology chronology. Their documentary, “Patterns of Evidence,” reveals new findings from Egypt, especially the Delta Area and the ancient city of Avaris (Tel El Dabba), a city that is being excavated by the scholar Manfred Bietak and has been identified as the [ancient Hebrew city] of Goshen.
Is there any proof that the events described in the Torah did or did not take place as described?
When you study the Egyptian texts and culture you can easily find correlation between the stories of the Bible and the ones that are written in Egyptian. As for the story of Exodus, you can locate the geographical places that are mentioned, Pitom and Ramesses, the Egyptian names of the king and Moses and the Yam Suf [Red Sea] area written in Egyptian. The 10 plagues are written in Egyptian in the same order as in our story — it’s all there. Unfortunately, for many years, scholars interested in looking for proof adapted a view ... that in order to prove that the story is real, we need to find the same story written in Egyptian ... in one text — an assumption that was and still is wrong.
Should archeology affect the theological lessons of the Exodus story?
Archeological evidence can support historical events but can’t deny them. In other words, if there is archeological evidence that matches an historical event, it can prove its occurrence, but lacking it can’t prove that it didn’t happen. The written material is the evidence that should lead our ability to decide which events are considered as historical.
Unfortunately, we live in times when the Jewish people are questioning their identity, their roots their role and status among the nations, and also their past.
You can’t explain your existence and your legitimization to live in Israel without accepting the fact that the Exodus story was an historical event. Without it you don’t have any strong reasoning as to why you have the right to live here.
Jewish leaders such as Rabbi David Wolpe (a Jewish Week columnist) question the historical veracity of the Passover story. Are a growing number of Jews skeptical of the story?
I have a lot of respect for Rabbi Wolpe, but I disagree with his conclusions. Wolpe, too, accepted the archaeological assumption that you should have archaeological findings to prove the story, which I explained earlier is wrong. I believe that when he sees the new documentary movie he will reconsider his statement.
You’ve said that Egyptian authorities have tried to prevent you from working there. Why?
The Egyptian authorities don’t let anyone from Israel or who was born there to participate in the excavations. Their biggest fear is that the Jewish people will be able to prove their roots, and though doing so will be considered the most ancient peopleon earth.
How does your knowledge of ancient Egypt affect your enjoyment of participation in your family’s seder?
At the seder, I always take the role of an ancient Egyptian who is invited to a seder and explain to the host his side of the story.
My favorite question is: What lesson do you think we can draw from this event? Usually we tend to focus on the victim aspect and the fact that everybody hates us, but I believe there is so much more. … It’s very important to understand that for many years Egypt was our home and that we were treated as Egyptians, and that some of us even reached royal positions.
steve@Jewishweek.org
NEW YORK
Moishe House: New Kids On The Block
Just three years after coming to New York City, pluralistic movement expands to seven locations.
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff writer
Jessica Levenson, left, Hanna Friedman, Ellie Epstein at the newly opened Upper East Side Moishe House. Hannah Dreyfus/JW
When Gabi Levin isn’t teaching student science modules or instructing pole-dancingclasses, she’s brainstorming what to prepare for her communal Friday-night Shabbat meal.
“Fitting Judaism into my life post-college was a big challenge,” said the 24-year-old dancer, “mad scientist” and aspiring actress. Though her day jobs are far from the norm (pole-dancing still raises eyebrows, she says), Levin, a Reform Jew, feels passionately about creating a non-judgmental space for young Jews. “When there’s no campus Hillel and you’re far away from home, where do you go for a Shabbat meal?” she said.
Enter Moishe House, one of the fastest-growing outreach initiative for Jews in their 20s. Founded in 2006 to help young Jews create communities, the movement has been rapidly expanding — last year, 16 new houses opened in cities worldwide, including Paris, Prague and Cape Town. The global network includes 75 houses in 17 countries, up from 29 outposts in 2010.
The movement initially struggled to gain a foothold in New York, given the city’s plethora of hip cultural programming for young unaffiliated Jews in their 20s from such groups as 92YTribeca, Brooklyn Jews, Heeb Magazine and the Soho Synagogue.
But they appear to have found their niche. In the past three months, three new Moishe Houses have opened in New York City, adding to the four houses already here since 2012. New York now has the most houses of any city worldwide with locations in Murray Hill, Park Slope, the West Village, the Upper East Side, the Upper West Side and Williamsburg.
“We’re like the new Chabad,” joked Levin, referring to the widespread Chasidic movement known for outreach. Levin is one of three residents manning the newly opened Moishe House in the West Village. But, unlike many Chabad Moishe House is exclusively for millennials — “we’re for young people who don’t just want to sing Hebrew prayers the whole time,” she said.
As synagogues across the U.S. struggle to keep up engagement among young adults, innovative models are in high demand. A recent study by UJA-Federation of New York on voluntary dues in synagogues indicated that younger adults seem less interested in affiliating with Jewish institutions than older age groups.
Moishe House provides an alternative. The model is simple: residents, young Jewish professionals, are responsible for organizing events for other Jewish 20-somethings in exchange for subsidized rent. The level of subsidy depends on how many events residents agree to host; houses that host seven or more programs each month receive a rent subsidy of 75 percent of their total rent or a monthly payment of between $2,750 and $3,000, depending on their location. In New York, all seven Moishe Houses host the maximum of seven or more events per month.
In New York, most of the “houses” are spacious apartments. The Upper East Side Moishe House is a three-story apartment, where each resident has her own room. The cheerful living room is equipped with multiple couches, a flat-screen TV, funky lamps and ample dining space. The space is welcoming and deeply personalized, with artwork and photographs decorating the walls and candles and a vase of tulips in the living room.
“This place became home for us quickly,” said Ellie Epstein, 23, one of the Upper East Side residents.
Moishe House’s CEO, David Cygielman, co-founded the organization in Oakland, Calif., in 2006 with artist and philanthropist Morris Bear Squire (whose Yiddish name is Moishe). Initially fully funded by Squire’s Forest Foundation, it became an independent nonprofit in 2009.
Fueled by word-of-mouth, social media and the support of some of America’s largest Jewish foundations, including the Paul E. Singer Foundation, the pluralistic Moishe House has grown rapidly since its Oakland launch. It is partnering with UJA-Federation of New York to expand in New York.
“I definitely think young Jews are coming here as an alternative to synagogue or JCCs,” said Orly Michaeli, a resident at the Upper West Side Moishe House that opened in late 2014. Michaeli is the only woman in the house — her three Moishe House roommates are men. “The four of us are so different that people are able to find their niche,” she said. She added that the house does also host prayer services. “When we have a minyan here, people make it their own,” she said.
Though Michaeli defines herself as “traditional,” her housemates range in terms of affiliation, including one roommate who is an Orthodox rabbinical student. “There are no labels when you come here, just people,” she said.
Still, some have expressed skepticism towards the movement’s strong focus on social engagement, at the expense of religious content.
“Getting people to hang out at bar together is nice, but it’s not all that Jewish,” said one event attendee who asked for anonymity. She mentioned the West Village Moishe House’s “Torah on Tap,” a monthly event to discuss the weekly Torah portion while out for drinks. “It’s nice, but something is sacrificed.” She said the event felt more like an excuse to go to bar than an opportunity to engage with Judaism.
Rebecca Bar, the senior regional director for Moishe House on the East Coast and Midwest, said the concern has been addressed by increasing the number of Jewish-content related events houses must host. Though she describes the movement as “more of a cultural center,” she said Jewish learning programs do happen. Residents of the houses are responsible for supplying their own content.
On the Upper East Side, three Modern Orthodox women run the newly opened Moishe House, an anomaly for the pluralistic organization. All three attended Jewish day schools through high school, and unlike several of the other houses, the Upper East Side residence keeps a strict level of kashrut.
“There’s a lot of diversity among the New York houses,” said Jessica Levenson, 24, of the Upper East Side house. She explained how the nature of each Moishe House is deeply affected by its constituents. “We’re not recruiting people for something, we’re not here to do kiruv,” she said, using the Hebrew word for outreach. “We’re just giving people an easy way to connect to their Judaism, and with others.”
The absence of singular authority is particularly attractive to young Jews, said Hannah Friedman, 23, another resident in the Upper East Side house.
“We’re for the people, by the people,” said Friedman, a kindergarten teacher. “People keep coming back because everyone can be involved, and everyone can be themselves. That’s what young Jews want.”
Identifying what young Jews want remains the priority for Bar.
“When you empower young people, they will get stuff done,” she said, describing opening in New York City as a “splash.” “Residents are creating Jewish communities from the bottom up, and that’s why people stay.”
At the West Village House, the most popular events are those that integrate popular culture with Judaism, Levin said. She said the house’s Halloween Shabbat, which included a Twizzler challah and Laffy Taffy matzah balls, was the house’s most popular event so far. While an average Shabbat dinner attracts about 20 guests, over 40 showed up the holiday-themed evening.
“When we do things that bridge the gap between people’s social interests and Judaism, people come,” she said. “At the end of the day, young Jews feel strongly Jewish, but they also feel strongly American. We’re in the same place. We get it.”
hannah@jewishweek.org
BOOKS
The Sun And Fun Capital Of The World?
Miami Beach in 1972 is the backdrop for Thane Rosenbaum’s antic new Holocaust novel.
Diane Cole
Special To The Jewish Week
In Rosenbaum’s fiction, Jackie Gleason, Meyer Lansky and I.B. Singer collide with a family haunted by the Shoah.
In his new novel, “How Sweet It Is!” (Mandel Vilar Press), Thane Rosenbaum rolls back the clock to 1972 and transports us to the less-than-sweet, unglamorous side of Miami Beach. Here, as in his previous works of fiction, Rosenbaum strives to balance moral seriousness with outrageous antic humor as he tries to make sense of what can never make sense: the Holocaust.
As in the musical “Cabaret,” there is a gregarious master of ceremonies at the center of the passing show. Here it is the entertainer Jackie Gleason, serving as our guide to the quirky characters who populate the town he highlighted on his weekly variety show in the 1960s. But by the time we meet him, he’s already in decline, a depressed and lonely clown bemoaning the loss of his former prestige. Instead of hosting a must-watch television variety show, he holds court as a patient at Mt. Sinai Hospital.
Gleason subtitled his TV show, “The American Scene Magazine,” but the Miami Beach scene is one of refugees and displaced persons from around the world. Rosenbaum describes the city’s street life this way: “Castro’s rejects and Hitler’s survivors united in Miami Beach like a parade of the persecuted, sharing notes on tribal anxieties, and trading recipes for kreplach and empanadas. Survival, however, was the special sauce.”
Survival is also on the minds of at least two other historical characters who frequented Miami Beach and who appear here. The Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky is back in Miami Beach after having been deported from Israel, where he had fled in an attempt to avoid being tried for income tax evasion. (Interestingly, the gangster also appears as a character in another recent novel, “Pity the Poor Immigrant” by Zachary Lazar.)
The Nobel Prize-winning author I.B. Singer is also a frequent visitor, seen here speaking to aging Holocaust survivors ,whose stories he would mine for material.
But these celebrities (and the 1972 Democratic and Republican National Conventions, both held in Miami) are nonetheless secondary to the dysfunctional fictional family at the center of the book, the Holocaust survivors Jacob and Sophie Posner and their 12-year-old son Adam. They are as mismatched as a family can be. Haunted by his experiences in hiding and as a partisan, the untalkative Jacob walks endlessly through the streets like a shell-shocked ghost. By contrast, the manic Sophie proudly displays the concentration camp numbers on her arm as a sign of her indestructibility — and fearlessly works her way up the ranks of Lansky’s gang until she becomes the first female consigliere in mobster history. And then there is adolescent Adam, a sensitive jock who tries to shrug off his parents’ neglect by excelling on the baseball mound, and going on long-distance runs to escape going home.
As in Rosenbaum’s earlier novel, “The Golems of Gotham,” real-life personages mix with fictional characters to such a degree that sometimes it’s hard to discern the real from the made-up. But that’s his point: in life, as in fiction, the absurd is commonplace. And Rosenbaum is at his best in scenes that feature quirky conceits and bitter satire.
As Adam approaches his 13th birthday, for instance, it’s his parents and their rabbi — survivors, all — who are indifferent to his having a bar mitzvah. In a generational turnabout, Adam insists on the importance of learning to read Torah. With his bar mitzvah set for September, Adam spends August studying trope and basking in Jewish pride at the athletic exploits of swimmer Mark Spitz, winner of seven gold medals at the Munich Olympics. Then September arrives — and the horrific terrorist massacre of nine Israelis at the Games. And yet the Olympic Games went on. In protest, the rabbi calls off Shabbat services — and Adam’s bar mitzvah — and instead organizes a congregational day of track and field events at the local Miami Beach stadium. And instead of being called to the bima, Adam sprints his way to several medals of his own.
In another bit of whimsy, Adam is on the verge of losing his nerve as he pitches the final inning of the Little League championship game between one team made up mostly of Jews and the other mostly of Cuban émigrés. Suddenly, out to the mound to settle him down comes the umpire — the well-known baseball fan Fidel Castro, in disguise. “The superpowers fought their battles through surrogates around the world. And now a Little League game was its own theater of war,” Rosenbaum writes. No wonder Fidel calls the game in favor of Adam’s team; it’s a lesson to the Cubans who turned their backs on the revolution. No matter. As Sophie sees it, “right here, in Miami Beach, after Auschwitz, we are all Olympians.”
And, in a final poignant twist, Gleason and Sophie meet and bond, as patients in adjacent rooms on the top floor of the Mount Sinai Hospital.
Having grown up in Miami Beach as the child of Holocaust survivors, Rosenbaum clearly knows well the dual territory of Miami Beach and survivorship.
His character portraits are full of verve and bite. But too many passages sound like essays rather than fiction. Yet despite this flaw, many readers will enjoy his take on Miami Beach back in the day. How sweet it all was — in memory, anyway.
Diane Cole, the author of the memoir “After Great Pain: A New Life Emerges” writes for The Wall Street Journal, among other publications.
JEW BY VOICE
Telling The Story Of Freedom
Erica Brown
Special To The Jewish Week
Erica Brown
The Passover table is a place of joy. It takes a lot of work to get there. And when the table is set with ritual food and tableware, it seems like an excellent platform for a great story and conversation to unfold. We’re all ready. We’re equipped with texts that share the majesty and miracles of our ancient days. We powered our way to freedom as an underdog against a large and tyrannical force that sought to destroy us. We know the plot lines all too well. It’s not hard to say, “In every generation a person is obligated to tell the story of the exodus from Egypt…” It seems that sadly and happily, it is always a relevant theme, either for our people or for someone else under the hand of oppression, on the brink of liberation.
There’s only one thing we have a shortage of, and it’s not matzah. We’ve got loads of it. They’re even selling shmura matzah — a matzah made with even more vigilant oversight — at Costco these days. It’s not wine, because there’ll be four cups of that as well. And when it comes to the main course, we’re on brisketoverload. Arteries beware. In Exodus we read that the first evening of Passover is a night of watchfulness, but don’t be careless. Make sure the Lipitor is ready and on hand (is Lipitor kosher for Passover?).
Here’s what we’re missing: great storytellers.
Great stories keep us on the edge of our seats. They are told by masters of detail with voices that modulate and inspire. They have a cast of interesting characters. There’s almost always a villain and a hero. There’s a fabulous plot brimming with twists and turns, unexpected conflicts and satisfying endings. There are usually a few important life lessons discreetly tucked into its pages that lodge inside of us and don’t let us go.
Do we have that kind of story? Of course we do. Do we tell it like a great story? Not really. Not usually. For many people, the worst part of Passover is the mumbling of the Haggadah, the tedium of its language. We can’t wait to get to “Dayenu” because it offers a moment of collective song, tradition and relief. I remember reading the complaint of a young woman about the family gathering that is every Passover in her home: “Why is this night more boring than any other night?”
For years, I’ve struggled to make sense of what kind of document the Haggadah really is. Logically speaking, if our task is to share the story of the Exodus, the most natural way to do that is to take out a Hebrew Bible, a Tanach, and recite the first 15 chapters, from Pharaoh’s enforced slavery to the Song of the Sea, when we finally left and broke out in exaltation. I’ve always wondered why that’s not the case. Granted, it will take up more book space than a Maxwell House Haggadah at the table, but it will get the job done with more clarity and efficiency.
One day it dawned on me. The Haggadah is not the story of the exodus from Egypt. Far from it. It’s a rabbinic collage of odd, disconnected passages — snippets of biblical verses with rabbinic interpretation, a few breaks for performance art (the four questions, the four sons, the door opening) and exceptionally weird math. Nothing about the Haggadah is linear. Nothing about it is chronologically smooth. So if you had to explain the Haggadah to an absolute stranger, what would you say?
Here’s what I’d say. The Haggadah is an ancient book that shares how our ancient sages told the story of leaving Egypt with passion and enthusiasm, without telling the story itself. They stayed up all night telling it, in hiding when it wasn’t safe to tell it. They were so enraptured by it they had no idea it was morning. They told it even though they were all-wise and knew it already. They prompted themselves with questions and ritual food, numbers and narrative. They sang songs to stir memories. The Haggadah models what an active storyteller does to keep listeners engaged, assuming its readers knew the story’s content.
It’s not an assumption we can make today. In demographic research, the No. 1 ritual still observed by American Jews is the Passover seder. What happens at the table, however, is usually an extended family dinner rather than history relived. Some millennials told me their families don’t even bother with the Haggadah anymore. They just eat. Rabbi A. J. Heschel once said that we don’t need textbooks but text-people. We have a great story. Now we need great storytellers.
Erica Brown, whose column appears the first week of the month, is the author of “Seder Talk: A Conversational Haggada.”
Enjoy the read, and Happy Passover and Shabbat shalom,Gary Rosenblatt
P.S. Remember that our website is the place to go for breaking news and exclusive videos, blogs, features, op-eds, advice columns, and more. Check it out.
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Between the Lines
GARY ROSENBLATT
‘Next Year In Jerusalem’
It is that Holy City, and its fate — next year and going forward — that weigh so heavily on our minds this Passover.
Gary Rosenblatt
Editor and Publisher
Gary Rosenblatt
Delve into the Haggadah and you understand why there are more editions and variations of it than any other Jewish text. Its story is timeless, its themes are eternal, its message is as current as the day’s headlines.
“In every generation,” we read at the seder, there are new Pharaohs, those who rise up against us and seek our destruction. Even today in the 21st century we are all too aware that anti-Semitism is still with us and flourishing to a frightening degree, particularly in the Middle East and Europe. It is a toxic mix of the old fear and hatred of the Jew as The Other and the new intolerance of Israel, ostensibly for its policies but in truth for its very existence as a Jewish state.
But there is, as well, a distinctly uplifting element to the eminently pliable Passover story, a tale of freedom over slavery, good over evil, and faith over despair. It can be interpreted in countless ways. And it has been.
In his roundup of new editions last week staff writer Steve Lipman noted we can choose from, for example, “The Unorthodox Haggadah: A Dogma-free Passover for Jews and Other Chosen People,” written by a convert to Judaism with a background in comedy; an “Open Orthodox Haggadah,” with readings on agunot, “fertility challenges” and the Women of the Wall debate; and “The Baseball Haggadah: A Festival of Freedom in 15 Innings,” composed by a rabbi at the request of her Little Leaguer sons.
What struck me in preparing for the seder and the task of engaging three generations of family members is that the key passages of the Haggadah speak, in turn, to universal aspirations (“let all who are hungry come and eat”), the uniqueness of being Jewish (why God chose us to be God’s people, and our responsibility to be a light unto the nations) and the chance to reflect on our most personal behavioral traits (which of the Four Children are we?).
No doubt we are a communal combination of the Good and the Wicked sons or daughters, trying to do our best but given to human frailties, and we are at times the Simple Child, overwhelmed by the world around us. And there is the One Who Does Not Know To Ask, more recently seen as the increasing segment of young people so removed from their history and tradition that they feel no connection to the ancestors described in the Haggadah.
Of course the primary point of the seder, and the reason it has survived for so many centuries, is that it is more than a text. It is an experience, and we are told to make it come alive, particularly for the children at the table. Each of us should feel we were present thousands of years ago, tasting the bitter herbs of slavery as well as the wine of freedom and celebration. It’s as if we ourselves were brought out of slavery, free to serve God.
The seder touches on the full range of our emotions. Directly after the meal we vent our frustration over centuries of persecution, calling on God to punish those who have oppressed us. The rabbis say this passage was added to the Haggadah after the period of the murderous Crusades, whose participants often struck at Passover, which coincides with Easter.
In a more positive spirit, scholar and Jewish Week contributor Erica Brown pointed out last week that some have replaced or added to the “Pour Out Your Wrath” passage by beseeching God: “Pour out your love” on those who have sheltered and defended Jews from their enemies throughout history, most recently the Righteous Gentiles who saved Jews during the Holocaust. Immediately after the “wrath” passage, we welcome the Prophet Elijah, the harbinger of the Messiah, who will usher in a time when peace will be complete throughout the world and all will know the Lord.
We have gone, then, in the span of an evening, from recalling the depths of suffering of our forefathers in Egypt to the sublime faith in a perfect future, if not for us, perhaps for our grandchildren or great-grandchildren, or theirs.
After the prayer of Hallel, with its Psalms of gratitude, and the singing of the end-of-seder traditional songs, culminating in Chad Gadya, we close with the prayerful affirmation, “Next Year in Jerusalem.”
It is that Holy City, and its fate — next year and going forward — that weigh so heavily on our minds this Passover. The capital of a Jewish state that has come to embody our hopes and fears, Jerusalem today seems both fortified and vulnerable in a world veering toward chaos. In the new topsy-turvy reality that is the Middle East, Egypt, our ancient enemy and persecutor, and Saudi Arabia, a primary source of virulent anti-Semitism, are now aligned with Israel in key ways, sharing a military and strategic outlook. And it is Washington, Israel’s great defender for more than a half century, that seems bent on pursuing a new and worrisome course for the region.
Is the Obama administration more trusting of the United Nations, with its horrific record of bias toward Israel, to deal with Iran and Mideast peace negotiations than the U.S. Congress, a consistently bipartisan defender of Zion? Will younger American Jews steer clear of an Israel increasingly seen as most responsible for the lack of a solution to the Palestinian problem? Will the youngest at our seder table grow up in a world where Israel is viewed as a pariah state, diminished in its ability to provide security for its citizens?
Those worries are all too real at this critical moment in history. But the festival of Passover, the seder and the Haggadah remind us that ours is an eternal story, that our people have struggled and survived against all odds for thousands of years, and that the Jerusalem we yearn for is not only a Promised Land on a map but a place in our hearts where prayers can be answered.
Chag sameach.
Gary@jewishweek.org
MUSINGSIt’s A Classic
David Wolpe
Special To The Jewish Week
Rabbi David Wolpe
In high school I approached a well-known rabbi and told him that I hadread one of his books and liked it very much. “Ah, have you read my other book?” he asked. No, I had not. “You should,” he told me, “it’s a classic.”
He said this with a straight face. At the time I just thought it was funny, in a disturbing way, but the story has stayed with me for many years. Humility is an essential but increasingly elusive quality. I think about this each time I post on Facebook or Twitter something about what I have written, or said, or done. I am eager to do it, but also feel as though it is not really appropriate, and even something self-deprecating can feel like a “humblebrag.”
C.S. Lewis said that humility is not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less. In an age of social media, that worthy goal is remote. We display ourselves, talk of our vacations, dogs, friends, dreams and opinions. Our sages teach that the Torah is compared to water for just as water only runs downhill, the word of God can only be heard in a humble heart. The statement is in Ta’anit (7a) in the Talmud. Read it. It’s a classic.
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.
SABBATH WEEKOpening Doors For The Rebel
Shlomo Riskin
Special to The Jewish Week
Shlomo Riskin
Candlelighting, Readings:
Candles: 7:04 p.m. (Fri.); 8:04 p.m. (Sat.)
Torah: Ex. 12:21-51 (Sat.); Lev. 22:26-23:44 (Sun.); Num. 28:16-25 (both)
Haftorah: Joshua 3:5-7; 5:2-6:1; 6:27 (Sat.);
II Kings 23:1-9; 21-25 (Sun.)
Last Chametz: Friday10:51 a.m. (eating);
11:55 a.m. (burning)
Havdalah: 8:06 p.m. (Sun.)
The seder is an evening dedicated to the generations, to parents communicating to their children the agony and the ecstasy of Egyptian enslavement and Exodus. Indeed, the masterful booklet that tells the tale and structures the entire evening (“seder” means “order”) is called the Haggadah (literally, “telling”), from the verse “And you shall tell your children (vehigadeta) on that day” [Exodus 13:3].
But what if your children are not interested in hearing? How are we, the parents, teachers and communicators, supposed to respond in such a case?
The Haggadah is a masterful guide to the art of parenting and communicating our mesora. We can only successfully impart a value that we ourselves believe in and act out. Children will learn not by what we say but how we perform.
Our children-students must feel that they are the prime focus of the evening, and our message must be molded in such a way as to respond to their questions and concerns. Each individual must be given the opportunity to ask his/her questions and to receive appropriate answers (as per the Magadha’s “Four Children”). The atmosphere around the table must be experiential, punctuated by family stories, games (hiding the Afikoman), and warmed by wine, food and love.
But what of the apathetic, uninterested child? One of the “Four Children” is the “Wicked Child,” so designated because of the biblical question ascribed to him: “What is this service (avoda) to you?” [Ex. 12:26]. Why does the Haggadah assume a negative attitude on the part of this child, who is merely seeking an explanation for a ritual he doesn’t understand? The Haggadah’s answer seems unduly harsh: “‘What is this service to you’ — and not to him. Because he took himself out of the historic Jewish community, he denied the basic principle. And so you must set his teeth on edge (hak’heh), and tell him, ‘It is because of this (ritual) that God did for me (so many wonders) in taking me out of Egypt’ [Ex. 13:8]. ‘God did for me’ and not for him! Had he been there, he would not have been redeemed.”
The Haggadah’s abrasive response seems to be the very opposite of everything we’ve been positing: “Set his teeth on edge!” Does this mean (God forbid) rap him in the mouth? And why switch from second person to third person in the middle of the dialogue? First the Haggadah reads, “And you tell him,” and then concludes (as if you aren’t even speaking to him), “Had he been there, he would not have been redeemed.”
Has he been closed out of the family seder? The most fundamental message of the seder is to make everyone feel wanted and accepted rather than rejected or merely tolerated.
Indeed, it is in the context of the response to the Wicked Child that the Haggadah teaches to include oneself — as well as everyone who can possibly be included — within the historical community of Israel, to be part of the eternal chain, a member of the family. Therefore, the problem with this child’s question is not his search for relevance; that is to be applauded and deserves a proper response. The problem is that he has excluded himself from the rituals, service and celebration. He says it applies to “you,” not to “him.”
The Haggadah tells us, when confronted by a child who excludes himself from the family ritual, to “hak’heh” his teeth; not the familiar Hebrew form hakeh (to strike or hit), but rather the more unusual form hak’heh, which means to blunt or remove the sharpness by means of the warmth of fire [Ecclesiastes 10:10; Yevamot 110b]. Tell him, says the Haggadah, that although we are living thousands of years after the fact, God took me — and him/her as my child — out of Egypt, because we are all one historic family, united by our celebrations and traditions. Tell him that the most important principle of our tradition is to feel oneself an integral part of a family, and to relive the slavery and freedom.
And don’t tell it to him matter-of-factly, by rote or animus. Tell it to him with the flame and passion of fire that blunts iron, with the warmth and love of a family that is claiming and welcoming its own as one who belongs.
And why the switch from second person to third person? Perhaps the child asked this question and left the table, leaving you to address him in/as a “third-person” no longer in your presence. Perhaps when we open the door for Elijah it is not to let him in I believe that we open the door in the spirit of Elijah, the herald of Redemption, who will restore the hearts of children to parents, and parents to children, for us to go out, to find the “Wicked Child” and lovingly restore him to the family seder. This is the greatest challenge of seder night.
Rabbi Shlomo Riskin is chancellor of Ohr Torah Stone and chief rabbi of Efrat.
A scene of America with a German twist: Main Street, Fredericksburg, in Texas' Hill Country. Hilary Larson/JW
TRAVEL
Wine, Wildflowers And Kolache, Texas Style
Hilary Larson
Travel WriterTexas isn’t an especially popular vacation destination for New Yorkers. (Many Democrats, you may recall, viewed President George W. Bush’s choice of hot, arid Midland for summer vacations as proof of his poor judgment.)
A notable exception is the Texas Hill Country — the very mention of which prompts people who have been there to gush, reminisce and otherwise wax nostalgic about this verdant landscape out of a fairy tale.
Like everything in Texas, the Hill Country is bigger than you expect it to be. That was our conclusion as my husband, Oggi, and I consulted maps in advance, wanting to make sure our cross-country driving route would take us through at least a swath of this fabled region. We needn’t have worried, though: if you’re driving anywhere south of Dallas, near Austin or San Antonio, the Hill Country is hard to avoid.
Sprawling over 25 counties in south-central Texas, the Hill Country owes its beauty to a topography of grass-covered limestone hills, lush groves of Southern oaks and the odd yucca or prickly pear. In mid-March, bright blue and yellow flowers greeted us along the roadsides and along the creeks that trickle between hills, each marked with an evocative name: Live Oak Creek, Honey Creek, Walnut Creek.
Amid all this natural beauty exists a culture that is both unique to this corner of Texas and surprisingly sophisticated for rural parts. Evidence of the latter is found in the region’s burgeoning wine scene: the Texas Hill Country AVA (American Viticultural Area) is arguably the biggest recent story in American viticulture.
Every time Oggi and I exited Interstate 10 — our route from Los Angeles across the American South — we found ourselves on twisting, scenic byways peppered with local wineries. And every time we stopped at a tasting room, we were sampling among other city folk on wine country getaways —– including more than a few Jewish couples from Houston, San Antonio and Austin, all within an afternoon’s drive.
So I was a little surprised that with all this oenophilia, there doesn’t yet appear to be a kosher winery. This is definitely Bible country: modest churches of every denomination, steepled and storefront, constitute the major landmarks in every tiny town, and the motel guides to local houses of worship offer dozens of options — all of them Christian.
But we passed more than one wall painted with some variation on “We Stand With Israel.” And a little research turned up the Jewish Community of the Hill Country in picturesque town of Kerrville — a permanent congregation that gathers at the Unitarian Universalist church for weekly Shabbat services with potluck suppers.
The Jewish community believes that its antique Torah is of Czech origin, which would be fitting, since the Hill Country has a decidedly Central European flavor. Towns like Fredericksburg and New Braunfels were largely settled by immigrants from Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Poland and Czechoslovakia. “Wilkommen!” is the greeting on signposts; wood-frame eateries feature schnitzel, strudel and kolache, the fruit-, poppy seed- or cheese-filled pastry that’s been in Texas for decades, and has become increasingly popular in hipster hot spots in Brooklyn and D.C. When I walked into the Pioneer Memorial Library, set back against a lawn on Fredericksburg’s Main Street, I was greeted by dusty stacks of clothbound German-language books.
But you would never mistake Fredericksburg for Heidelberg. Despite the overlay of Teutonic kitsch, Main Street Fredericksburg looks every bit the Western prairie town. And on the afternoon we stopped by, the most popular joints were the upscale, low-lit winery tasting rooms — not the oompah beer gardens.
At the Fredericksburg outpost of Grape Creek Winery, a Hill Country pioneer established three decades ago, tasting room manager Patrick Goodman told me that most Hill Country wineries import their grapes from slightly further north, in the area surrounding Lubbock. To make really good wine, he explained, you need the kind of reliably cold nights rare in the Hill Country.
That still felt pretty local. And so did the speed limits on our way out of town, which were easily double what they would have been back home. “It says 65,” pointed out my normally very cautious husband, as we rounded yet another curve on what felt like two wheels, and I struggled to snap photos out the window.
Oggi and I got lost trying to find our way back to the 10. And the GPS on my phone, instead of backtracking, sent us on an incredibly picturesque route through the back country — on white-sand farm roads that wound past fields of grazing sheep and goats, bridges that arched over burbling creeks, and vistas over velvety green hills.
Were we making good time? Google said yes, though we had our doubts. But one thing was certain: as we wended our way through the hills of South Texas, with nary a McDonald’s or a Mobil in sight, we were thoroughly seduced by the charms of the Hill Country. editor@jewishweek.org
Cover of a Maxwell House Haggadah, circa 1940's.Courtesy of 92Y
IN THE BEGINNING
Passover Goes Retro With Maxwell House Haggadah
Amy Sara Clark
Staff Writer
If Maxwell House makes you think of matzah and Manischewitz rather than a cup of Joe, you’re not alone. And it’s with this demographic in mind that the 92nd Street Y is launching its “Manischewitz, Maxwell House and Memories” seder this year.
“We were appealing for a sort of nostalgia feel. We wanted people to get a retro vibe,” said Rabbi Dan Ain, director of tradition and innovation at the 92nd Street Y, who will be leading the second-night seder at The Invisible Dog Center in Brooklyn’s trendy Boerum Hill.
Harkening back to the Jewish culture of our grandparents is a growing trend for the 20- and 30-something crowd, with artisanal gefilte fish and house-made chopped liver popping up in gourmet food shops, Yiddish classes on the rise and klezmer a nearly ubiquitous presence in some circles. The Idelsohn Society, in a bid to create that “retro vibe,” reissued mid-20th century Jewish music of other types, such as Irving Fields’ “Bagels and Bongos” and “Songs for the Jewish-American Jet Set: The Tikva Records Story, 1950-1973” showcasing the record label’s “Jewish Motown” sound.
But it’s not just nostalgia that led Rabbi Ain to gravitate to the Maxwell House Haggadah for the seder; it’s also what’s inside the book’s iconic blue-and-white covers.
“I think one of the reasons that the Maxwell House Haggadah has been around for about 90 years now is not only because of the ad campaign but also because it is pretty inclusive and pretty well laid out in terms of what should be in a traditional Passover seder,” he said.
Maxwell House began giving out the Haggadah free with a can of coffee in 1923, just four years after the brand was launched. They did it to clear up the commonly held belief that coffee beans were not kosher for Passover. (Beans is a misnomer, they’re actually the coffee plant’s seeds.) The advertising campaign has continued ever since, in most supermarkets that cater to Jews — supermarkets “where you might find a large kosher-for-Passover section," said Elie Rosenfeld, owner of Joseph Jacobs Advertising, which has run the promotion since the year it started.
“It gets recognition, it’s brand building, and at this point it’s a cherished part of the tradition and the heritage of the brand,” he said. “And it’s something that still resonates with the consumers.”
The company now distributes about a million Haggadahs a year — well over 60 million since the campaign started. It’s used in military seder kits for troops overseas, and President Obama used it for a private White House seder, Rosenfeld said.
Those who haven’t seen it since their childhood might be surprised — Maxwell House modernized the text in 2011, taking out the anachronistic wording and making it gender neutral, according to Rosenfeld.
But it’s still a traditional Haggadah, which is just what Rabbi Ain was after for the April 4 event.
“I think often there’s a tendency to try to shoot for relevance,” he said, “and in an effort of shooting for relevance we end up pandering. And I think that that’s a real problem.”
But, he said, “When you can present the tradition as the tradition. When you can read the Torah as the Torah was written or do the Haggadah, even including the parts of it that have been controversial over the years, and say, ‘OK, this is the tradition. This is where we come from, how do we make sense of this?’ people will respond. And they have been responding.”editor@jewishweek.org
“We were appealing for a sort of nostalgia feel. We wanted people to get a retro vibe,” said Rabbi Dan Ain, director of tradition and innovation at the 92nd Street Y, who will be leading the second-night seder at The Invisible Dog Center in Brooklyn’s trendy Boerum Hill.
Harkening back to the Jewish culture of our grandparents is a growing trend for the 20- and 30-something crowd, with artisanal gefilte fish and house-made chopped liver popping up in gourmet food shops, Yiddish classes on the rise and klezmer a nearly ubiquitous presence in some circles. The Idelsohn Society, in a bid to create that “retro vibe,” reissued mid-20th century Jewish music of other types, such as Irving Fields’ “Bagels and Bongos” and “Songs for the Jewish-American Jet Set: The Tikva Records Story, 1950-1973” showcasing the record label’s “Jewish Motown” sound.
But it’s not just nostalgia that led Rabbi Ain to gravitate to the Maxwell House Haggadah for the seder; it’s also what’s inside the book’s iconic blue-and-white covers.
“I think one of the reasons that the Maxwell House Haggadah has been around for about 90 years now is not only because of the ad campaign but also because it is pretty inclusive and pretty well laid out in terms of what should be in a traditional Passover seder,” he said.
Maxwell House began giving out the Haggadah free with a can of coffee in 1923, just four years after the brand was launched. They did it to clear up the commonly held belief that coffee beans were not kosher for Passover. (Beans is a misnomer, they’re actually the coffee plant’s seeds.) The advertising campaign has continued ever since, in most supermarkets that cater to Jews — supermarkets “where you might find a large kosher-for-Passover section," said Elie Rosenfeld, owner of Joseph Jacobs Advertising, which has run the promotion since the year it started.
“It gets recognition, it’s brand building, and at this point it’s a cherished part of the tradition and the heritage of the brand,” he said. “And it’s something that still resonates with the consumers.”
The company now distributes about a million Haggadahs a year — well over 60 million since the campaign started. It’s used in military seder kits for troops overseas, and President Obama used it for a private White House seder, Rosenfeld said.
Those who haven’t seen it since their childhood might be surprised — Maxwell House modernized the text in 2011, taking out the anachronistic wording and making it gender neutral, according to Rosenfeld.
But it’s still a traditional Haggadah, which is just what Rabbi Ain was after for the April 4 event.
“I think often there’s a tendency to try to shoot for relevance,” he said, “and in an effort of shooting for relevance we end up pandering. And I think that that’s a real problem.”
But, he said, “When you can present the tradition as the tradition. When you can read the Torah as the Torah was written or do the Haggadah, even including the parts of it that have been controversial over the years, and say, ‘OK, this is the tradition. This is where we come from, how do we make sense of this?’ people will respond. And they have been responding.”editor@jewishweek.org
INTERNATIONAL
Congressional Push To Get U.S., Israel To ‘Dial It Down’
Dems Nita Lowey and Steve Israel encourage quiet dialogue.
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
Before flying to Israel this week, House Speaker John Boehner said the “animosity” exhibited by the Obama administration towards Israeli Prime MinisterBenjamin Netanyahu is “reprehensible.”
The next day, the National Jewish Democratic Council issued a statement calling upon Boehner to stop politicizing the U.S.-Israeli alliance, having invited Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress without White House knowledge.
Now, two leading Jewish members of the House, both Democrats, Nita Lowey (D-Westchester-Rockland) and Steve Israel (D-L.I.), are calling on both Washington and Jerusalem to “cool it.”
“The level of frustration that both sides have towards the other peaked with that Wall Street Journal story,” observed Israel, referring to a story last week that quoted senior White House officials as complaining that the Jewish state has been spying on the talks between Iran and six world powers.
“I now believe that both sides recognize it would be more constructive to work things out quietly than on the pages of the Wall Street Journal or [the Israeli newspaper] Haaretz,” he told The Jewish Week.
Lowey said the spying story “was one of the reasons I have said to the White House that it is time to cool it and dial back.”
“Our relationship is strong and must remain strong,” she told The Jewish Week. “I have been in Congress 26 years and … there have been ups and downs in the relationship between the U.S. and Israel over the years. The important thing is to dial it back because the relationship is key to the U.S. and Israel and the region.”
She said she and several of her colleagues “have conveyed to the administration that they must repair the relationship,” Lowey added.
Regarding the U.S. release on Feb. 12 of once sensitive information about Israel’s nuclear weapons program — which has never been officially confirmed — Lowey said she has asked the administration about it and is still awaiting a response. Asked if the timing of the material’s release — which the U.S. had withheld for three years despite a Freedom of Information request — related to the U.S.-Israel rift, Lowey replied: “If true, it would be very disturbing.”
But there has apparently been progress regarding efforts to renew a 40-year-old agreement in which the U.S. promised to provide Israel with fuel in an emergency. It was allowed to lapse late last year, but Lowey’s office said the State Department informed it that a new arrangement has now been agreed to in principle and is soon to be signed.
The Obama administration has suggested in recent weeks that the U.S. might no longer have Israel’s back should there be an attempt to impose a peace deal with the Palestinians.
That suggestion arose after Netanyahu said during the final hours of his re-election campaign last month that he no longer supported a Palestinian state. After winning, he issued a clarification, saying that although he still believed in a two-state solution,current conditions did not permit it.
The Obama administration declined to accept the clarification and announced it was reassessing its approach to Israeli-Palestinian peace in light of Netanyahu’s original comment.
“What has now changed is that our ally in those conversations, Israel, has indicated that they are not committed to that approach anymore,” explained White House spokesman Josh Earnest.
That might be put to the test following last Friday’s announcement by French ForeignMinister Laurent Fabius that France would be proposing a U.N. Security Council resolution to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It would reportedly call for the creation of a Palestinian state based on Israel’s pre-1967 border — with land swaps — and Jerusalem as its capital.
“There is no other solution,” Fabius explained just one day after outgoing U.N. Middle East envoy Robert Serry said such a move “may be the only way to preserve the goal of a two-state solution.”
Fabius told reporters at the U.N. that he believed this approach is needed to “avoid a complete crash” in the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, but he added that he first planned to discuss it with other members of the Security Council.
‘Foursquare Behind Israel’
The U.S. has not indicated whether it would support the resolution, but Lowey said she has told “senior officials” in the White House that “the U.S. must stand squarely behind Israel. The U.N. and the world have to understand that the U.S. and Israel are strong allies and there is no question in my mind that the Congress of the United States will stand foursquare behind Israel. ... I have made it very, very clear.”
“This relationship — where the U.S. has Israel’s back — goes back to [the] Oslo [Accords] that said any agreement with Israel and the Palestinians has to be through negotiations,” Lowey added. “This must not change, and I regret that this kind of information [suggesting otherwise] is circulating.”
Lowey said she spoke in recent days with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about the U.S.-Israel relationship “and she understands how important the relationship is.” She said she called Clinton, a possible Democratic presidential contender next year, “to give her an idea of the temperature in Congress and say it is time to cool the rhetoric. I said we need to repair the relationship and she agreed.”
That sentiment was reiterated by Clinton in a phone call she had with Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Hoenlein said he called Clinton to discuss U.S.-Israeli tensions and that she told him the two-state solution must be “pursued through direct negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians,” and that Israel must “never becomes a partisan issue.”
Clinton will be watched closely for reaction should an agreement with Iran be reached. As a former secretary of state under Obama, she would be expected to show support. But as potential candidate seeking strong Jewish backing, she may be wary of such a stand.
Lowey told The Jewish Week that it is not necessary for Obama to reassess the U.S. approach to Israeli-Palestinian peace because Netanyahu “walked back” his comments regarding a Palestinian state and “apologized” for comments the Obama administration and others understood as racist towards Arab Israelis.
“We need to move forward,” she argued. “Israel is our indispensable ally and we must stand firm.”
Both Lowey and Rep. Israel said that despite the rift between Obama and Netanyahu, military and intelligence sharing between the two nations continues uninterrupted. Lowey, the ranking Democrat on the powerful House Appropriations Committee, said Israel would continue receiving $3.1 billion in aid annually and “all the shared trainingthat goes between Israel and the U.S. military.”
Rep. Israel said that, speaking as a member of the House Defense Subcommittee on Appropriations, “the U.S. has never been more supportive of Israel and the relationship between the two countries has never been better.”
Regarding anti-missile systems, Israel said Congress would be increasing funding for Iron Dome, will increase cooperation on David Sling, and “you will see more U.S. investment in Arrow 2 and 3, and increased U.S. cooperation with Israel on tunnel detection” to spot Hamas tunnels being dug into Israel from the Gaza Strip.
“This is what is so frustrating to me,” Israel said. “The optics of the relationship between President Obama and Netanyahu has supplanted the reality of the military and intelligence cooperation going on between the two countries.”
Dinner With Dermer
Israel said he arranged for four other Democratic House leaders to join him last week for a dinner at the Washington home of Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., Ron Dermer, “for a candid exchange and to learn more about the relationship between the U.S. and Israel.”
Israel said he “routinely” arranges such dinners, but that this was the first since Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress last month.
“It was one of the more productive dinners we have had because we were able to get away from the headlines and drama and really focus on what needs to be done and to move forward both in Washington and Jerusalem,” he said. “Seventy-five percent of the time we spent on the negotiations with Iran. I have been an outspoken critic of doing a deal with Iran. I’m deeply skeptical that we can get the right deal with Iran — and the primarily issue for me is verification. It is extremely difficult to achieve the transparency necessary to trust that they are freezing their [nuclear military] program.
“The other issue for me is that in any deal we are relieving the sanctions imposed and enriching their economy. And at the end of a set period of years, Iran gets to go back to enriching uranium” and can build a nuclear bomb in a year.
The rest of their discussion focused on Israeli-U.S. tensions, according to Israel, who said Dermer provided a “very detailed history tour of every American president who had crises with Israel — everyone since [Harry] Truman had moments of crises with Israel — and the tensions were always self corrected. They always did and they always will.
“And he said if there is no deal with Iran, the current tensions will end very quickly. If there is a deal, we will have to manage the discourse because Prime Minister Netanyahu will go full throttle against the deal and President Obama will go full throttle for the deal. The most important thing, he said, is that it would be a disservice to Israel if any political party uses it in order to score partisan points.”
Netanyahu has argued that any deal with Iran must not only keep it from developing nuclear weapons, but must also reign in its proxy terrorist groups, including Hamas and Hezbollah. The Jerusalem Post quoted a senior Israeli Defense Ministry official Tuesday as saying that Iran is now placing guided warheads on its rockets and smuggling them to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
The official, Col. Aviram Hasson, was quoted as saying that Iran is converting Zilzal unguided rockets into accurate, guided M-6000 projectiles by upgrading their warheads.
“It is turning unguided rockets that had an accuracy range of kilometers into weapons that are accurate to within meters,” he said, adding that as a result Hezbollah “is in a very different place compared to the Second Lebanon War in 2006.” stewart@jewishweek.org NATIONAL
The Mystery Of The MissingStained Glass Windows
They once adorned a synagogue in the heart of coal country. How they ended up in West Hempstead is raising troubling questions.
Ted Merwin
Special To The Jewish Week
Beth Israel, an Orthodox synagogue in Mahanoy, Pa. Ted Merwin/JW
Gazing out over the congregation assembled in the dark wooden pews to celebrate his bar mitzvah in the summer of 1950, Melvyn Freid’s eyes were drawn to the two dozen spectacular stained glass windows that filled every wall of his synagogue, Beth Israel, an Orthodox congregation in the Pennsylvania coal mining town of Mahanoy City. Little could Freid have known that six decades later, those windows would become an obsession for him after they vanished and ended up adorning the walls of Eitz Chayim of Dogwood Park, an Orthodox synagogue on Long Island’s South Shore.
While the synagogue ceased functioning two decades ago, Freid is seeking the return of the windows, which feature colorful images of Tablets of the Law, menorahs, and Lions of Judah. The windows — or their cash equivalent — are required in order to care for the graves of Freid’s parents and other members of Beth Israel who are buried in the Sons of Jacob Cemetery, located 10 miles away in the neighboring village of Hometown. But ever since the windows disappeared in 2010, Freid said that he has gone through a “traumatic, very frustrating experience” in trying to regain them.
An hour north of Hershey, Mahanoy City was settled by English, Welsh, Irish and German immigrants in the mid-19th century; it joined a cluster of similar towns like Shamokin and Shenandoah that grew up in northern Schuylkill County around the booming anthracite coal mining industry. At the turn of the 20th century, these burgeoning communities drew Jewish merchants and tradesmen, who launched businesses to provide food, clothing, furniture, and other necessities to the miners, most of whom were Irish; the violent clashes between the “Molly Maguires” and the mine owners are a staple of American folklore and popular culture.
By the early 1920s, a number of these towns boasted beautiful brick synagogues with mahogany woodwork and ornate ceilings; the 45 Jewish families in Mahanoy City — whose Jewish population, according to historian Lee Shai Weissbach in his book, “Jews in Small-Town America,” peaked at about 250 in 1918 — collected $45,000 to build Beth Israel in 1923. (A twin of the synagogue, built in the same year by the same builder, still stands in Lehighton, half an hour north of Allentown.)
Arnold Oberson, who grew up a few blocks from Beth Israel, lives now in Margate, N.J. His parents, who owned a children’s clothing store, donated one of the stained glass windows; his grandfather, Charles Oberson, who was a wholesale beef producer, is the oldest person buried in the congregation’s cemetery. “The older generation kept the synagogue very neat and clean,” Oberson recalled. “The rugs were shampooed and the benches were varnished.”
The town’s economic prospects were encouraging; an appliance store owner named John Watson, whose television sets were not selling because of poor reception caused by the mountains, hit in 1948 on the idea of installing an antenna on top of a nearby peak, which ultimately made Mahanoy City the birthplace of cable TV. But the precipitous decline of the mining industry over the postwar decades left the region in a severe economic slump, and the sons and daughters of the town’s Jewish residents, like their non-Jewish counterparts, almost all departed for better educational and economic opportunities elsewhere. (The entire town has a total of only four thousand residents today, barely a quarter of its pre-WWI population.)
By the late 1980s, as the Philadelphia Inquirer reported, the once proud Beth Israel Congregation was fading out, the fewer than two dozen elderly Jews in the town barely able to sustain a daily minyan, even with help from surrounding Jewish communities. While the building’s paint was peeling and the plaster crumbling, the reporter, Russell E. Eshleman, Jr., marveled that the “synagogue retains much of its former majesty. Colorful stained glass windows, donated by families and businesses during the town’s glory years, are in perfect condition…” Rumor had it that the round window that hung over the synagogue’s entrance, and which featured a Star of David, had been manufactured by famous glassmaker Louis Comfort Tiffany and donated by the local high school’s alumni association.
Freid, whose parents owned a furniture store, had left the town for good in the mid-1950s, at around the time that Beth Israel switched to the Conservative movement. Freid went on to Penn State and the Peirce School of Business before joining the army and then becoming an auditor for the Internal Revenue Service. Now retired after almost four decades working for the IRS, Freid, who lives near Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, has made the return of the windows into a personal crusade.
Edna Janowitch is the sole remaining Jewish resident of Mahanoy City; her family owned a shirt-making factory that employed many of the town’s residents. Janowitch, who lives just a few doors down from the shuttered synagogue, told The Jewish Week that she saw a moving company taking them down. But Janowitch, who challenged the movers, was informed that they had permission to remove them.
“It was such a shock when they were taken,” said Freid, who did not learn of their disappearance until he heard about it nine months later.
nThe idea that the windows would be sold off was not unlikely, though, given that the Beth Israel Congregation was just then in the process of disposing of its assets and looking for a way to maintain the cemetery. A cousin of Freid’s, who visited the cemetery in 2008, “called me crying,” he recalled, “saying that the grass is too high.” Fried paid out of pocket for the grass to be mowed.
At around the same time, Eitz Chayim, the Long Island congregation, was building a new sanctuary to accommodate its growing membership, swelled by the Modern Orthodox population moving to the border of West Hempstead and Franklin Square. They had sent representatives, including one of their officers, Philip Brill, to Mahanoy City in 2006, where they were given a key to the sanctuary by the congregation’s long-time attorney, Robert N. Bohorad, and permission to take pews, prayer books and other items. (The Torah scrolls had already been sold off to other congregations.) But there is no record of anyone connected to Beth Israel giving permission to take the stained glass windows.
However they obtained the windows, Eitz Chayim installed just eight of them (representing fewer than half of the total) in August of 2012, just in time for High Holy Day Services. That the windows came from Mahanoy City is evident from photos that accompanied a celebratory article about the new sanctuary by the congregation’s then-president, Kenneth J. Glassman, that ran that September in a local paper, the West Hempstead Jewish Times.
By that time, the loss of the windows was already the focus of a police investigation. In February of 2010, a month after the windows were taken, Harrisburg attorney Edmund “Tad” Berger, whose uncle, Maurice Vogel, had been Beth Israel’s treasurer, reported them as stolen to the Schuylkill County District Attorney and to the Mahanoy City Police Department. Officer John Powis, who took the report and interviewed officers of Eitz Chayim, told The Jewish Week only that the case is “still an active criminal investigation” and that “details will be forthcoming when an arrest is made.”
Freid also tried to pursue the matter with officials of Eitz Chayim officials, but “every time we tried to talk to them, they stonewalled us.”
That such decorative windows would be taken from an inactive congregation is “not surprising at all,” to Sam Gruber, an architectural historian and cultural heritage consultant who heads the International Survey of Jewish Monuments, an organization that seeks to preserve Jewish sites worldwide. “American congregations have plundered underused and closed synagogues in North Africa,” he said. “They can be quite acquisitive and aggressive.” But he pointed out that it “happens less frequently these days, because people are more sensitive to the artistic value of items, rather than thinking that synagogues are just sitting there” and their assets are up for grabs.
When the windows were installed in 2012, little was said publicly about how they were acquired. Rabbi Art Vernon of Congregation Shaaray Shalom, a Conservative synagogue that is just around the corner from Eitz Chayim (and which is fronted by 30-foot high Belgian stained glass windows by the Jewish architect Percival Goodman that are the envy of the neighborhood), recalled that all that he had heard was that Eitz Chayim’s windows “came from a synagogue in Pennsylvania that was going out of business.”
nCorrespondence obtained by The Jewish Week shows a volley of letters back and forth over the last five years between Thomas Campion, Jr., the attorney for Beth Israel (Bohorad passed away from cancer last June), who is based in nearby Pottsville, and Glassman, the former president of Eitz Chayim, who practices law in Manhattan. Representatives for the congregation have insisted that they had permission to take the windows but have never supplied the name of the person who purportedly gave them this authorization, or furnished any receipt or other written documentation of the transfer of ownership. In addition, Glassman has contended that Beth Israel “has ceased being a functioning entity for many years” and that no one has legal standing to demand the return of the windows.
Freid emphatically disagrees. In order to recover funds that had been deposited over the years in area banks, Beth Israel reorganized itself two years ago, with Freid elected (by the few descendants of the founding families who could be found) as president. “A corporation cannot die,” Freid insisted. “We aren’t defunct. We still have a cemetery that we need to take care of.” Freid has since paid a Philadelphia contractor $35,000 to take ownership of the building, which has been assessed real estate taxes since it stopped functioning as a religious organization. He also noted that the value of the building was significantly reduced when the windows were removed.
The current value of the windows is also an issue. Alyssa Loney, a Pennsylvania appraiser recently hired by Freid, has, using photographs of all of the windows, assessed their fair market value at $192,500; she found no evidence, however, that any of the windows were made by Tiffany. Then again, Eitz Chayim may have spent a considerable amount of money in repurposing them; Freid recalled a telephone conversation with Glassman in 2011, in which Glassman calculated that transporting, releading and installing them would cost Eitz Chayim in excess of $150,000.
Leonard Berman chairs the cemetery committee of the Harrisburg Jewish Foundation, which was requested a decade ago to take over the responsibility for five Jewish cemeteries in the anthracite coal mining region. “We don’t have the funds to provide for perpetual care,” he lamented. “We need endowment monies from each of these former congregations.”
In order to assume responsibility for the Sons of Jacob Cemetery, the foundation has demanded a $150,000 endowment, to cover annual costs of several thousand dollars that include grass cutting, snow removal, liability insurance, and the adjustment of slanting gravestones. The foundation recently retained its own attorney to seek compensation for the windows, although there is a question about whether or not too much time has passed for the relevant statutes of limitation to apply. If so, the Beth Din of America, the Orthodox Jewish court that adjudicates matters of Jewish law, could be asked to step in; the Talmud is replete with regulations about how lost, stolen, misappropriated, and abandoned objects should be handled.
Eitz Chayim’s part-time rabbi, Efrem Schwalb, told The Jewish Week only that the windows came “a long time ago” from a congregation in Pennsylvania and that he “highly doubts” that they were taken without permission. Neither Brill nor Glassman consented to an interview; when asked to help shed light on the situation, Glassman sent a terse email, “Nothing to clarify.”
But Natan Hecht, a West Hempstead tax attorney who became Eitz Chayim’s president last summer, was eager to discuss the situation, and he suggested that his congregation did a mitzvah in “rescuing” the windows. While he conceded that he has no direct knowledge of the case, Hecht noted that he is “very confident that there is no injustice.” From what he had been told, “The synagogue building was rotting; it had standing water. The windows were going to be lost. The windows were taken only when the officers of Eitz Chayim were convinced that it was an abandoned building and that everyone who had a tangential connection to the congregation had expressed no interest in it. There were conversations at the time with local authorities, who agreed that the building was abandoned.”
The windows that were not used by Eitz Chayim were not restored, but are, Hecht divulged, in the sanctuary’s basement, where, he speculated, they are “probably in better condition than they would have been if they had been left behind” in the dilapidated synagogue in Mahanoy City.
Furthermore, Hecht is indignant about the claim that his congregation owes money for the windows. The idea, he said, that “people who weren’t there to come forward now and insinuate that we did something wrong — that there are real needs now and that there was a resource at the time that could be monetized — is ridiculous. It was no one’s intention to take something that other people had a claim on, either legally or ethically. And nothing was done as a secret.”
While Hecht conceded that it may be “tragic that resources weren’t left for perpetual care of their cemetery,” he insisted that “the windows wouldn’t necessarily have been a panacea.” Nevertheless, he pointed out that the windows have given the two congregations a “shared history and legacy,” and he offered to facilitate a meeting of leaders of both synagogues to discuss the matter.
For his part, Melvyn Freid had some choice words for the leaders of Eitz Chayim. He called them “opportunists who took advantage of our congregation. They saw something that was ripe for the taking. It’s true that our synagogue was inactive at the time; I hadn’t even been in the building for 20 or 30 years. Nevertheless, I feel that our shul was a victim.”
But however the situation is ultimately resolved, Freid, who has purchased his own plot in the Sons of Jacob Cemetery, just wants to know that the graves will be taken care of. If he could only procure the funds for the cemetery, he said, “I would feel that all of my efforts have not been in vain.”
Ted Merwin, who teaches religion at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., writes about culture for the paper. His website is tedmerwin.com.
NEW YORKCongressional Push To Get U.S., Israel To ‘Dial It Down’
Dems Nita Lowey and Steve Israel encourage quiet dialogue.
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
Before flying to Israel this week, House Speaker John Boehner said the “animosity” exhibited by the Obama administration towards Israeli Prime MinisterBenjamin Netanyahu is “reprehensible.”
The next day, the National Jewish Democratic Council issued a statement calling upon Boehner to stop politicizing the U.S.-Israeli alliance, having invited Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress without White House knowledge.
Now, two leading Jewish members of the House, both Democrats, Nita Lowey (D-Westchester-Rockland) and Steve Israel (D-L.I.), are calling on both Washington and Jerusalem to “cool it.”
“The level of frustration that both sides have towards the other peaked with that Wall Street Journal story,” observed Israel, referring to a story last week that quoted senior White House officials as complaining that the Jewish state has been spying on the talks between Iran and six world powers.
“I now believe that both sides recognize it would be more constructive to work things out quietly than on the pages of the Wall Street Journal or [the Israeli newspaper] Haaretz,” he told The Jewish Week.
Lowey said the spying story “was one of the reasons I have said to the White House that it is time to cool it and dial back.”
“Our relationship is strong and must remain strong,” she told The Jewish Week. “I have been in Congress 26 years and … there have been ups and downs in the relationship between the U.S. and Israel over the years. The important thing is to dial it back because the relationship is key to the U.S. and Israel and the region.”
She said she and several of her colleagues “have conveyed to the administration that they must repair the relationship,” Lowey added.
Regarding the U.S. release on Feb. 12 of once sensitive information about Israel’s nuclear weapons program — which has never been officially confirmed — Lowey said she has asked the administration about it and is still awaiting a response. Asked if the timing of the material’s release — which the U.S. had withheld for three years despite a Freedom of Information request — related to the U.S.-Israel rift, Lowey replied: “If true, it would be very disturbing.”
But there has apparently been progress regarding efforts to renew a 40-year-old agreement in which the U.S. promised to provide Israel with fuel in an emergency. It was allowed to lapse late last year, but Lowey’s office said the State Department informed it that a new arrangement has now been agreed to in principle and is soon to be signed.
The Obama administration has suggested in recent weeks that the U.S. might no longer have Israel’s back should there be an attempt to impose a peace deal with the Palestinians.
That suggestion arose after Netanyahu said during the final hours of his re-election campaign last month that he no longer supported a Palestinian state. After winning, he issued a clarification, saying that although he still believed in a two-state solution,current conditions did not permit it.
The Obama administration declined to accept the clarification and announced it was reassessing its approach to Israeli-Palestinian peace in light of Netanyahu’s original comment.
“What has now changed is that our ally in those conversations, Israel, has indicated that they are not committed to that approach anymore,” explained White House spokesman Josh Earnest.
That might be put to the test following last Friday’s announcement by French ForeignMinister Laurent Fabius that France would be proposing a U.N. Security Council resolution to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It would reportedly call for the creation of a Palestinian state based on Israel’s pre-1967 border — with land swaps — and Jerusalem as its capital.
“There is no other solution,” Fabius explained just one day after outgoing U.N. Middle East envoy Robert Serry said such a move “may be the only way to preserve the goal of a two-state solution.”
Fabius told reporters at the U.N. that he believed this approach is needed to “avoid a complete crash” in the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, but he added that he first planned to discuss it with other members of the Security Council.
‘Foursquare Behind Israel’
The U.S. has not indicated whether it would support the resolution, but Lowey said she has told “senior officials” in the White House that “the U.S. must stand squarely behind Israel. The U.N. and the world have to understand that the U.S. and Israel are strong allies and there is no question in my mind that the Congress of the United States will stand foursquare behind Israel. ... I have made it very, very clear.”
“This relationship — where the U.S. has Israel’s back — goes back to [the] Oslo [Accords] that said any agreement with Israel and the Palestinians has to be through negotiations,” Lowey added. “This must not change, and I regret that this kind of information [suggesting otherwise] is circulating.”
Lowey said she spoke in recent days with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about the U.S.-Israel relationship “and she understands how important the relationship is.” She said she called Clinton, a possible Democratic presidential contender next year, “to give her an idea of the temperature in Congress and say it is time to cool the rhetoric. I said we need to repair the relationship and she agreed.”
That sentiment was reiterated by Clinton in a phone call she had with Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Hoenlein said he called Clinton to discuss U.S.-Israeli tensions and that she told him the two-state solution must be “pursued through direct negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians,” and that Israel must “never becomes a partisan issue.”
Clinton will be watched closely for reaction should an agreement with Iran be reached. As a former secretary of state under Obama, she would be expected to show support. But as potential candidate seeking strong Jewish backing, she may be wary of such a stand.
Lowey told The Jewish Week that it is not necessary for Obama to reassess the U.S. approach to Israeli-Palestinian peace because Netanyahu “walked back” his comments regarding a Palestinian state and “apologized” for comments the Obama administration and others understood as racist towards Arab Israelis.
“We need to move forward,” she argued. “Israel is our indispensable ally and we must stand firm.”
Both Lowey and Rep. Israel said that despite the rift between Obama and Netanyahu, military and intelligence sharing between the two nations continues uninterrupted. Lowey, the ranking Democrat on the powerful House Appropriations Committee, said Israel would continue receiving $3.1 billion in aid annually and “all the shared trainingthat goes between Israel and the U.S. military.”
Rep. Israel said that, speaking as a member of the House Defense Subcommittee on Appropriations, “the U.S. has never been more supportive of Israel and the relationship between the two countries has never been better.”
Regarding anti-missile systems, Israel said Congress would be increasing funding for Iron Dome, will increase cooperation on David Sling, and “you will see more U.S. investment in Arrow 2 and 3, and increased U.S. cooperation with Israel on tunnel detection” to spot Hamas tunnels being dug into Israel from the Gaza Strip.
“This is what is so frustrating to me,” Israel said. “The optics of the relationship between President Obama and Netanyahu has supplanted the reality of the military and intelligence cooperation going on between the two countries.”
Dinner With Dermer
Israel said he arranged for four other Democratic House leaders to join him last week for a dinner at the Washington home of Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., Ron Dermer, “for a candid exchange and to learn more about the relationship between the U.S. and Israel.”
Israel said he “routinely” arranges such dinners, but that this was the first since Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress last month.
“It was one of the more productive dinners we have had because we were able to get away from the headlines and drama and really focus on what needs to be done and to move forward both in Washington and Jerusalem,” he said. “Seventy-five percent of the time we spent on the negotiations with Iran. I have been an outspoken critic of doing a deal with Iran. I’m deeply skeptical that we can get the right deal with Iran — and the primarily issue for me is verification. It is extremely difficult to achieve the transparency necessary to trust that they are freezing their [nuclear military] program.
“The other issue for me is that in any deal we are relieving the sanctions imposed and enriching their economy. And at the end of a set period of years, Iran gets to go back to enriching uranium” and can build a nuclear bomb in a year.
The rest of their discussion focused on Israeli-U.S. tensions, according to Israel, who said Dermer provided a “very detailed history tour of every American president who had crises with Israel — everyone since [Harry] Truman had moments of crises with Israel — and the tensions were always self corrected. They always did and they always will.
“And he said if there is no deal with Iran, the current tensions will end very quickly. If there is a deal, we will have to manage the discourse because Prime Minister Netanyahu will go full throttle against the deal and President Obama will go full throttle for the deal. The most important thing, he said, is that it would be a disservice to Israel if any political party uses it in order to score partisan points.”
Netanyahu has argued that any deal with Iran must not only keep it from developing nuclear weapons, but must also reign in its proxy terrorist groups, including Hamas and Hezbollah. The Jerusalem Post quoted a senior Israeli Defense Ministry official Tuesday as saying that Iran is now placing guided warheads on its rockets and smuggling them to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
The official, Col. Aviram Hasson, was quoted as saying that Iran is converting Zilzal unguided rockets into accurate, guided M-6000 projectiles by upgrading their warheads.
“It is turning unguided rockets that had an accuracy range of kilometers into weapons that are accurate to within meters,” he said, adding that as a result Hezbollah “is in a very different place compared to the Second Lebanon War in 2006.” stewart@jewishweek.org NATIONAL
The Mystery Of The MissingStained Glass Windows
They once adorned a synagogue in the heart of coal country. How they ended up in West Hempstead is raising troubling questions.
Ted Merwin
Special To The Jewish Week
Beth Israel, an Orthodox synagogue in Mahanoy, Pa. Ted Merwin/JW
Gazing out over the congregation assembled in the dark wooden pews to celebrate his bar mitzvah in the summer of 1950, Melvyn Freid’s eyes were drawn to the two dozen spectacular stained glass windows that filled every wall of his synagogue, Beth Israel, an Orthodox congregation in the Pennsylvania coal mining town of Mahanoy City. Little could Freid have known that six decades later, those windows would become an obsession for him after they vanished and ended up adorning the walls of Eitz Chayim of Dogwood Park, an Orthodox synagogue on Long Island’s South Shore.
While the synagogue ceased functioning two decades ago, Freid is seeking the return of the windows, which feature colorful images of Tablets of the Law, menorahs, and Lions of Judah. The windows — or their cash equivalent — are required in order to care for the graves of Freid’s parents and other members of Beth Israel who are buried in the Sons of Jacob Cemetery, located 10 miles away in the neighboring village of Hometown. But ever since the windows disappeared in 2010, Freid said that he has gone through a “traumatic, very frustrating experience” in trying to regain them.
An hour north of Hershey, Mahanoy City was settled by English, Welsh, Irish and German immigrants in the mid-19th century; it joined a cluster of similar towns like Shamokin and Shenandoah that grew up in northern Schuylkill County around the booming anthracite coal mining industry. At the turn of the 20th century, these burgeoning communities drew Jewish merchants and tradesmen, who launched businesses to provide food, clothing, furniture, and other necessities to the miners, most of whom were Irish; the violent clashes between the “Molly Maguires” and the mine owners are a staple of American folklore and popular culture.
By the early 1920s, a number of these towns boasted beautiful brick synagogues with mahogany woodwork and ornate ceilings; the 45 Jewish families in Mahanoy City — whose Jewish population, according to historian Lee Shai Weissbach in his book, “Jews in Small-Town America,” peaked at about 250 in 1918 — collected $45,000 to build Beth Israel in 1923. (A twin of the synagogue, built in the same year by the same builder, still stands in Lehighton, half an hour north of Allentown.)
Arnold Oberson, who grew up a few blocks from Beth Israel, lives now in Margate, N.J. His parents, who owned a children’s clothing store, donated one of the stained glass windows; his grandfather, Charles Oberson, who was a wholesale beef producer, is the oldest person buried in the congregation’s cemetery. “The older generation kept the synagogue very neat and clean,” Oberson recalled. “The rugs were shampooed and the benches were varnished.”
The town’s economic prospects were encouraging; an appliance store owner named John Watson, whose television sets were not selling because of poor reception caused by the mountains, hit in 1948 on the idea of installing an antenna on top of a nearby peak, which ultimately made Mahanoy City the birthplace of cable TV. But the precipitous decline of the mining industry over the postwar decades left the region in a severe economic slump, and the sons and daughters of the town’s Jewish residents, like their non-Jewish counterparts, almost all departed for better educational and economic opportunities elsewhere. (The entire town has a total of only four thousand residents today, barely a quarter of its pre-WWI population.)
By the late 1980s, as the Philadelphia Inquirer reported, the once proud Beth Israel Congregation was fading out, the fewer than two dozen elderly Jews in the town barely able to sustain a daily minyan, even with help from surrounding Jewish communities. While the building’s paint was peeling and the plaster crumbling, the reporter, Russell E. Eshleman, Jr., marveled that the “synagogue retains much of its former majesty. Colorful stained glass windows, donated by families and businesses during the town’s glory years, are in perfect condition…” Rumor had it that the round window that hung over the synagogue’s entrance, and which featured a Star of David, had been manufactured by famous glassmaker Louis Comfort Tiffany and donated by the local high school’s alumni association.
Freid, whose parents owned a furniture store, had left the town for good in the mid-1950s, at around the time that Beth Israel switched to the Conservative movement. Freid went on to Penn State and the Peirce School of Business before joining the army and then becoming an auditor for the Internal Revenue Service. Now retired after almost four decades working for the IRS, Freid, who lives near Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, has made the return of the windows into a personal crusade.
Edna Janowitch is the sole remaining Jewish resident of Mahanoy City; her family owned a shirt-making factory that employed many of the town’s residents. Janowitch, who lives just a few doors down from the shuttered synagogue, told The Jewish Week that she saw a moving company taking them down. But Janowitch, who challenged the movers, was informed that they had permission to remove them.
“It was such a shock when they were taken,” said Freid, who did not learn of their disappearance until he heard about it nine months later.
nThe idea that the windows would be sold off was not unlikely, though, given that the Beth Israel Congregation was just then in the process of disposing of its assets and looking for a way to maintain the cemetery. A cousin of Freid’s, who visited the cemetery in 2008, “called me crying,” he recalled, “saying that the grass is too high.” Fried paid out of pocket for the grass to be mowed.
At around the same time, Eitz Chayim, the Long Island congregation, was building a new sanctuary to accommodate its growing membership, swelled by the Modern Orthodox population moving to the border of West Hempstead and Franklin Square. They had sent representatives, including one of their officers, Philip Brill, to Mahanoy City in 2006, where they were given a key to the sanctuary by the congregation’s long-time attorney, Robert N. Bohorad, and permission to take pews, prayer books and other items. (The Torah scrolls had already been sold off to other congregations.) But there is no record of anyone connected to Beth Israel giving permission to take the stained glass windows.
However they obtained the windows, Eitz Chayim installed just eight of them (representing fewer than half of the total) in August of 2012, just in time for High Holy Day Services. That the windows came from Mahanoy City is evident from photos that accompanied a celebratory article about the new sanctuary by the congregation’s then-president, Kenneth J. Glassman, that ran that September in a local paper, the West Hempstead Jewish Times.
By that time, the loss of the windows was already the focus of a police investigation. In February of 2010, a month after the windows were taken, Harrisburg attorney Edmund “Tad” Berger, whose uncle, Maurice Vogel, had been Beth Israel’s treasurer, reported them as stolen to the Schuylkill County District Attorney and to the Mahanoy City Police Department. Officer John Powis, who took the report and interviewed officers of Eitz Chayim, told The Jewish Week only that the case is “still an active criminal investigation” and that “details will be forthcoming when an arrest is made.”
Freid also tried to pursue the matter with officials of Eitz Chayim officials, but “every time we tried to talk to them, they stonewalled us.”
That such decorative windows would be taken from an inactive congregation is “not surprising at all,” to Sam Gruber, an architectural historian and cultural heritage consultant who heads the International Survey of Jewish Monuments, an organization that seeks to preserve Jewish sites worldwide. “American congregations have plundered underused and closed synagogues in North Africa,” he said. “They can be quite acquisitive and aggressive.” But he pointed out that it “happens less frequently these days, because people are more sensitive to the artistic value of items, rather than thinking that synagogues are just sitting there” and their assets are up for grabs.
When the windows were installed in 2012, little was said publicly about how they were acquired. Rabbi Art Vernon of Congregation Shaaray Shalom, a Conservative synagogue that is just around the corner from Eitz Chayim (and which is fronted by 30-foot high Belgian stained glass windows by the Jewish architect Percival Goodman that are the envy of the neighborhood), recalled that all that he had heard was that Eitz Chayim’s windows “came from a synagogue in Pennsylvania that was going out of business.”
nCorrespondence obtained by The Jewish Week shows a volley of letters back and forth over the last five years between Thomas Campion, Jr., the attorney for Beth Israel (Bohorad passed away from cancer last June), who is based in nearby Pottsville, and Glassman, the former president of Eitz Chayim, who practices law in Manhattan. Representatives for the congregation have insisted that they had permission to take the windows but have never supplied the name of the person who purportedly gave them this authorization, or furnished any receipt or other written documentation of the transfer of ownership. In addition, Glassman has contended that Beth Israel “has ceased being a functioning entity for many years” and that no one has legal standing to demand the return of the windows.
Freid emphatically disagrees. In order to recover funds that had been deposited over the years in area banks, Beth Israel reorganized itself two years ago, with Freid elected (by the few descendants of the founding families who could be found) as president. “A corporation cannot die,” Freid insisted. “We aren’t defunct. We still have a cemetery that we need to take care of.” Freid has since paid a Philadelphia contractor $35,000 to take ownership of the building, which has been assessed real estate taxes since it stopped functioning as a religious organization. He also noted that the value of the building was significantly reduced when the windows were removed.
The current value of the windows is also an issue. Alyssa Loney, a Pennsylvania appraiser recently hired by Freid, has, using photographs of all of the windows, assessed their fair market value at $192,500; she found no evidence, however, that any of the windows were made by Tiffany. Then again, Eitz Chayim may have spent a considerable amount of money in repurposing them; Freid recalled a telephone conversation with Glassman in 2011, in which Glassman calculated that transporting, releading and installing them would cost Eitz Chayim in excess of $150,000.
Leonard Berman chairs the cemetery committee of the Harrisburg Jewish Foundation, which was requested a decade ago to take over the responsibility for five Jewish cemeteries in the anthracite coal mining region. “We don’t have the funds to provide for perpetual care,” he lamented. “We need endowment monies from each of these former congregations.”
In order to assume responsibility for the Sons of Jacob Cemetery, the foundation has demanded a $150,000 endowment, to cover annual costs of several thousand dollars that include grass cutting, snow removal, liability insurance, and the adjustment of slanting gravestones. The foundation recently retained its own attorney to seek compensation for the windows, although there is a question about whether or not too much time has passed for the relevant statutes of limitation to apply. If so, the Beth Din of America, the Orthodox Jewish court that adjudicates matters of Jewish law, could be asked to step in; the Talmud is replete with regulations about how lost, stolen, misappropriated, and abandoned objects should be handled.
Eitz Chayim’s part-time rabbi, Efrem Schwalb, told The Jewish Week only that the windows came “a long time ago” from a congregation in Pennsylvania and that he “highly doubts” that they were taken without permission. Neither Brill nor Glassman consented to an interview; when asked to help shed light on the situation, Glassman sent a terse email, “Nothing to clarify.”
But Natan Hecht, a West Hempstead tax attorney who became Eitz Chayim’s president last summer, was eager to discuss the situation, and he suggested that his congregation did a mitzvah in “rescuing” the windows. While he conceded that he has no direct knowledge of the case, Hecht noted that he is “very confident that there is no injustice.” From what he had been told, “The synagogue building was rotting; it had standing water. The windows were going to be lost. The windows were taken only when the officers of Eitz Chayim were convinced that it was an abandoned building and that everyone who had a tangential connection to the congregation had expressed no interest in it. There were conversations at the time with local authorities, who agreed that the building was abandoned.”
The windows that were not used by Eitz Chayim were not restored, but are, Hecht divulged, in the sanctuary’s basement, where, he speculated, they are “probably in better condition than they would have been if they had been left behind” in the dilapidated synagogue in Mahanoy City.
Furthermore, Hecht is indignant about the claim that his congregation owes money for the windows. The idea, he said, that “people who weren’t there to come forward now and insinuate that we did something wrong — that there are real needs now and that there was a resource at the time that could be monetized — is ridiculous. It was no one’s intention to take something that other people had a claim on, either legally or ethically. And nothing was done as a secret.”
While Hecht conceded that it may be “tragic that resources weren’t left for perpetual care of their cemetery,” he insisted that “the windows wouldn’t necessarily have been a panacea.” Nevertheless, he pointed out that the windows have given the two congregations a “shared history and legacy,” and he offered to facilitate a meeting of leaders of both synagogues to discuss the matter.
For his part, Melvyn Freid had some choice words for the leaders of Eitz Chayim. He called them “opportunists who took advantage of our congregation. They saw something that was ripe for the taking. It’s true that our synagogue was inactive at the time; I hadn’t even been in the building for 20 or 30 years. Nevertheless, I feel that our shul was a victim.”
But however the situation is ultimately resolved, Freid, who has purchased his own plot in the Sons of Jacob Cemetery, just wants to know that the graves will be taken care of. If he could only procure the funds for the cemetery, he said, “I would feel that all of my efforts have not been in vain.”
Ted Merwin, who teaches religion at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., writes about culture for the paper. His website is tedmerwin.com.
Shmurah’s Back-Alley Road To Seders
Hand-made matzah and the high price of freedom.
Jonathan Mark
Associate Editor
Shmurah matzah is seen as a "higher brand." Michael Datikash/ JW
Pieces of wood are pitched into a brick oven, licked by other-worldly orange flames. Some 30 workers, faces aged and weathered, keep kneading and rolling dough in the matzah bakery on Albany Avenue in Crown Heights, as narrow and long as a two-room railroad flat, its painted walls as faded and colorless as fog. As the matzah is made, each batch in less than 18 minutes, one hears, “L’shem matzot mitzvah” (“We are doing this for the sake of the mitzvah of matzah.”) There is nothing modern here, even the water for the dough is drawn not from a tap but from rainwater or fresh water. It is like a speakeasy, no one enters who doesn’t know where he’s going. There’s no sign on the door, no name, and a metal sheet covers the window facing the street.
Trying to figure the business of shmurah matzah is like watching Elijah’s cup for his sip; now you see it, now you don’t. Shmurah matzah, as with its autumnal cousin, the esrog, is spiritually exquisite, yet its pricing is as inexplicable as a Middle Eastern bazaar or voodoo economics. People in the know tell us that the matzah is too often made by non-unionized workers, transients and migrants. Even experts in the kosher business have no idea what the workers are paid. The ingredients are nothing but flour and water. The only real yet limited expense are the rabbis who watch (shmurah means watching, or guarding) the matzah from the time of the harvest. (Machine matzah is usually watched from the time of milling). It is hard to imagine a product with cheaper ingredients or cheaper labor. And yet, Chabad’s most affordable shmurah exports, which come from Kfar Chabad in Israel and in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, sell here for $12.99 and $14 for one-pound boxes. But on the shelves of several Brooklyn kosher supermarkets this week, non-Chabad shmurah matzah sells for $19, $23, $32, even $40, sometimes $50 a pound. A five-pound non-shmurah machine-made package of Streit’s is $11, or $2.20 per pound.
In recent years there have been many complaints in the Orthodox community about “price gouging,” and the “highway robbery” of shmurah prices. There have been calls for boycotts, a return for charedim to the cheaper but equally kosher machine-made matzah (between $2 and $3), and for the rabbinate to assert its authority and imposeprice controls on ritual items necessary for the Jewish community.
As for the higher costs, Menachem Lubinsky, the executive of Lubicom, themarketing firm specializing in kosher foods, said that for all the complaints on price, “Hand-[made] shmurah, to people, is sort of a higher brand, and they’re paying for it, and they want to pay for it.”
As for the low cost for Chabad matzahs from Israel and Ukraine, he said, “First of all, the cost of labor and hasgacha [supervision] in some of these markets is cheaper than it is here. One of the complaints of even the domestic machine bakeries is that the Israelis were [sending] matzah here at much cheaper prices, and that it wasn’t a level playing field because the Israelis were able to produce the matzah for less than the American matzahs are produced.”
Nevertheless, Lubinsky admitted that American shmurah were often produced with non-union labor, which would negate the Israeli advantage in labor costs. Also, people were buying the Israeli imports not just for price but because the Israeli matzahs “are quality and people like them. Some people even feel a sense of reward that they are buying Israeli products.”
There is no central address, and no major companies, like Streit’s or Manischewitz, in the shmurah business, and unlike the machine matzah companies that go year-round, shmurah bakeries appear with the first snow and disappear with the thaw, basically from Chanukah to the seder. They seem fly-by-night. Lubinsky says of shmurah, “It’s a seasonal business.” They seem back-alley. Yes, he agrees, “That would describe them pretty well.”
And yet, says Lubinsky, 25 percent of American matzahs are now shmurah, a market growing “by leaps and bounds. Stores that never used to carry shmurah now do: Costco, Shop-Rite, Target, it’s even on Amazon. I hear a Wal-Mart in Chicago is selling shmurah matzah.” Once a mostly chasidic preserve, there are now “some non-chasidic bakeries. Baltimore has one. Los Angeles has one managed by Modern Orthodox Jews.”
Chabad.org reports that the business manager who handles kosher products for Bi-Lo Holdings, which operates supermarkets including the Winn-Dixie chain, says 50 of their stores now carry shmurah. In the Midwest, Jewel-Osco supermarkets report that 100 of their 185 stores now carry shmurah.
In New York, says Lubinsky, “There’s a natural growth in the Orthodox market; you’re feeding a lot more mouths. But what I’m hearing from a lot of retailers is that a lot of non-traditional [Jews] are buying the hand-shmurah, too.”
What is known about the shmurah business, says Lubinsky, is that “there are four or five major bakeries,” primarily in Borough Park, Williamsburg, Lakewood, N.J., and we have a pretty good indication of what their numbers are. They might do anywhere from $2 million to $5 million in sales.”
Shmurah versus machine has been the Hatfield-McCoys of the business. Some of the dispute was halachic (who was more prone to chametz-related error, a machine or a human?), but Gil Marks, author of the “Encyclopedia of Jewish Food,” wrote that a real concern was “the loss of jobs by poor women and widows who relied on the yearly work of dough rolling, no small matter in the impoverished and restricted climate of eastern Europe.” In general, adds Marks, “Lithuanian rabbis were much less critical of the new technology than their chasidic brethren.”
Shmurah was almost nonexistent in the United States, as were chasidim, until mid-century, but in 1954, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, began a campaign to have Lubavitchers start giving out shmurah matzah at a time when it simply couldn’t be found, and often wasn’t even heard of by American Jews. The rebbe said, “For various reasons, the custom has been discontinued [but] I would ask that the custom of distributing matzah be instituted and that rabbis give shmurah matzah to their congregants.”
The rebbe didn't just ask this of Chabad rabbis but he sent public and personal letters to rabbis around the world to facilitate the rabbanic distribution of shmurah matzah.
The rebbe didn’t have as many shluchim, or emissaries, in 1954 as there are now, but by train and truck from Crown Heights, Jews began getting free shmurah, supplies permitting, along with an education in the spiritual virtues of hand-made shmurah. The custom continues, and this year, for example, some 500 pounds of shmurah are being distributed in Oregon, personally handed out by shluchim and their families. One Chabad rabbi’s son had his bar mitzvah before Passover and more than 60 boxes of shmurah were given out as “party favors.”
In the 1950s, for all that Chabad was doing, the demand was still quite limited. But the demand grew steadily until it rocketed “in the last decade,” said Lubinsky. If not mainstream, shmurah became almost universally used in Orthodox circles, and recognized far beyond that. In 2013, the official White House seder featured shmurah matzah. As recently as the 1970s, most Catskill hotels served machine matzah as their “default” matzah. The Catskill hotels are gone, but in 2015, said Lubinsky, “We counted, in the U.S. alone, around 125 resorts or [Passover] programs, and they are ordering a tremendous amount of shmurah matzah. Prime Group, for example, has several hotels, and about 80 percent of their matzah orders are shmurah.”
Hand-made shmurah seems authentic in its imperfection, all the more authentic precisely for its imperfection. It just looks and tastes, people say, exactly as in the leaving of Egypt.
And yet, the food historian Marks told us (in several conversations before his death in December), that for all the virtues of shmurah, authenticity is not one of them.
Although Passover’s biblical name is Chag HaMatzot (Festival of Matzah), the Torah tells us nothing about what it looked like. There is no halachic prohibition against “authentic” soft matzah, and Marks says that the original matzah was most likely soft. According to softmatza.com, “Soft matzah is the same shmurah matzah that you buy at your local matzah bakery. The only difference is that it is rolled out to be a little thicker and when baked ends up soft instead of crunchy.”
Soft matzah, said Marks, explains the kabbalistic custom of placing the relatively heavy seder plate on top of the matzot, a weight that soft matzah could absorb but would break modern matzah.
Cracker-like matzah, wrote Marks, “was actually a relatively late development, emerging perhaps around the 15th century in Ashkenazic communities,” a change driven by various halachic concerns, such as the problem of baking matzah on Passover, as soft matzah requires because it easily goes stale, while cracker-style could be baked before Passover and easily last the week. Matzah was baked in the home, for most of history, but in the 1700s, writes Marks, the commercial matzah bakery emerged, as the skills and exactitude of matzah baking became more elusive for the general popultion.
Then, as today, Jews imagined themselves as having left Egypt, and imagined their shmurah matzah to have been there, too.
All these years later, in the Albany Street afternoon, wood is fed to the fire and shmurah matzah emerges from the flames. Young chasidic children come in with their father to buy matzah; perhaps that piece, over there, will become the afikomen. Erev Pesach, wrote Sholom Aleichem, “is there a greater pleasure than that?” May it be a pleasure for the lonely and the migrants who bake our matzah as it is for the children who hide it.
Jonathan@jewishweek.org
JEW BY VOICE
Telling The Story Of Freedom
Erica Brown
Special To The Jewish Week
Erica Brown
The Passover table is a place of joy. It takes a lot of work to get there. And when the table is set with ritual food and tableware, it seems like an excellent platform for a great story and conversation to unfold. We’re all ready. We’re equipped with texts that share the majesty and miracles of our ancient days. We powered our way to freedom as an underdog against a large and tyrannical force that sought to destroy us. We know the plot lines all too well. It’s not hard to say, “In every generation a person is obligated to tell the story of the exodus from Egypt…” It seems that sadly and happily, it is always a relevant theme, either for our people or for someone else under the hand of oppression, on the brink of liberation.
There’s only one thing we have a shortage of, and it’s not matzah. We’ve got loads of it. They’re even selling shmura matzah — a matzah made with even more vigilant oversight — at Costco these days. It’s not wine, because there’ll be four cups of that as well. And when it comes to the main course, we’re on brisketoverload. Arteries beware. In Exodus we read that the first evening of Passover is a night of watchfulness, but don’t be careless. Make sure the Lipitor is ready and on hand (is Lipitor kosher for Passover?).
Here’s what we’re missing: great storytellers.
Great stories keep us on the edge of our seats. They are told by masters of detail with voices that modulate and inspire. They have a cast of interesting characters. There’s almost always a villain and a hero. There’s a fabulous plot brimming with twists and turns, unexpected conflicts and satisfying endings. There are usually a few important life lessons discreetly tucked into its pages that lodge inside of us and don’t let us go.
Do we have that kind of story? Of course we do. Do we tell it like a great story? Not really. Not usually. For many people, the worst part of Passover is the mumbling of the Haggadah, the tedium of its language. We can’t wait to get to “Dayenu” because it offers a moment of collective song, tradition and relief. I remember reading the complaint of a young woman about the family gathering that is every Passover in her home: “Why is this night more boring than any other night?”
For years, I’ve struggled to make sense of what kind of document the Haggadah really is. Logically speaking, if our task is to share the story of the Exodus, the most natural way to do that is to take out a Hebrew Bible, a Tanach, and recite the first 15 chapters, from Pharaoh’s enforced slavery to the Song of the Sea, when we finally left and broke out in exaltation. I’ve always wondered why that’s not the case. Granted, it will take up more book space than a Maxwell House Haggadah at the table, but it will get the job done with more clarity and efficiency.
One day it dawned on me. The Haggadah is not the story of the exodus from Egypt. Far from it. It’s a rabbinic collage of odd, disconnected passages — snippets of biblical verses with rabbinic interpretation, a few breaks for performance art (the four questions, the four sons, the door opening) and exceptionally weird math. Nothing about the Haggadah is linear. Nothing about it is chronologically smooth. So if you had to explain the Haggadah to an absolute stranger, what would you say?
Here’s what I’d say. The Haggadah is an ancient book that shares how our ancient sages told the story of leaving Egypt with passion and enthusiasm, without telling the story itself. They stayed up all night telling it, in hiding when it wasn’t safe to tell it. They were so enraptured by it they had no idea it was morning. They told it even though they were all-wise and knew it already. They prompted themselves with questions and ritual food, numbers and narrative. They sang songs to stir memories. The Haggadah models what an active storyteller does to keep listeners engaged, assuming its readers knew the story’s content.
It’s not an assumption we can make today. In demographic research, the No. 1 ritual still observed by American Jews is the Passover seder. What happens at the table, however, is usually an extended family dinner rather than history relived. Some millennials told me their families don’t even bother with the Haggadah anymore. They just eat. Rabbi A. J. Heschel once said that we don’t need textbooks but text-people. We have a great story. Now we need great storytellers.
Erica Brown, whose column appears the first week of the month, is the author of “Seder Talk: A Conversational Haggada.”
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