The Jewish Week Connecting the World with Jewish News, Culture, Features, and Opinions - The Jewish Week Newsletter for Wednesday, 20 May 2015 "Pushing outreach to Muslim Americans; more rigorous road to conversion; `Peeping Tom' rabbi sentenced; Jewish roots to rock `n roll."
Dear Reader,
Jewish outreach to Muslim Americans is now "the great challenge of the 21st century" in terms of communal relations, according to an AJC leader. Staff Writer Steve Lipman reports on the new push, in light of the rapid growth of the Muslim American population.
Interfaith Push To Muslims Could Face Headwinds
In wake of Pew study, outreach effort seen as ‘the great challenge of the 21st century.’
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
The Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom brings together Muslim and Jewish women. Courtesy of Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom
With the Muslim population of America more than doubling in the last seven years, according to the recently released Pew Research Center survey, “America’s Changing Religious Landscape,” the Jewish community appears poised to ramp up its outreach to Muslims.
According to one prominent Jewish leader of interfaith activities, relations with Muslims Americans are now “the great challenge of the 21st century.”
Rabbi Noam Marans, director of interreligious and intergroup relations at the American Jewish Committee, said the AJC, recognizing this demographic fact, is just one of several Jewish organizations that have increased their outreach to the Muslim community in recent years and usually found members of the Muslim faith to be willing partners.
“The overwhelming majority of U.S. Muslims are people of goodwill who want to contribute to the positive American mosaic and see interreligious relations as the key to the American ethos,” Rabbi Marans said.
Deeper ties with Muslims would constitute something of a pivot point for the Jewish community, as Jewish-Christian relations have long been the focus of the interfaith effort. But relations with mainline Protestants — once key partners with Jews in the struggle over civil rights two generations ago — have been severely strained in recent years over Israel. The Presbyterians, Methodists and the United Church of Christ have led the effort to impose economic sanctions on Israel for its perceived policies on the West Bank. (In what could be a good sign for some in the Jewish community, the percentage of mainline Protestants fell by 3.4 points since 2007, according to the Pew study.)
The percentage of Americans who identify as Muslims, 0.9 percent, is still far less than the figure for Jewish Americans — 1.9 percent, according to Pew. But the growing number of Muslims — they represented 0.4 percent of the U.S. population in 2007 — reinforces predictions demographers have made for a generation that they will equal or surpass the Jewish population in the U.S. in a matter of decades.
“With demographic changes, [Muslims] become an important factor in the lives of many cities” and in that of the cities’ Jewish residents, said Ethan Felson, senior vice president of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs.
But a visible push for Jewish outreach to Muslims could run into some strong headwinds. Many members of the Jewish community tend to join other non-Muslims in this country in asking, “Where are the moderate Muslims?” and questioning what the fidelity of Muslims who take part in dialogue activities will be if the Middle East heats up again and public sentiment turns against Israel.
Representatives of Jewish organizations that coordinate joint activities with the Muslim community agreed that what they described as “the elephant in the room,” the often deteriorating political and military conditions in the Middle East peace process, presents a challenge that all the Jewish and Muslim participants circumvent by an agreeing-to-disagree approach. And then there is the increasing prominence of confrontational activist Pamela Geller. Her American Freedom Defense Initiative has sponsored bus posters that many people see as anti-Muslim and incendiary, and the AFDI sponsored this month’s Muhammad cartoon contest in Garland, Texas, where two jihadists were killed in a shootout with police. All of that, observers say, further complicates the work of Muslim-Jewish “dialogue” groups.
The Jews and Muslims in interfaith organizations either accept that they hold divergent points of view on the Israeli-Palestinian impasse, without allowing that disagreement to poison the relationship on issues on which they agree — or they intentionally postpone any discussions of the Middle East at all until both sides have established positions of mutual trust.
The latter is the policy of chapters of the Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom, an independent, all-women organization founded a few years ago by Sheryl Olitzky, a marketing consultant in central New Jersey who has a background in social activism. She established the Sisterhood with Atiya Aftab, a Muslim attorney who serves as a leader of her mosque in the same area of New Jersey.
The Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom brings together Jews and Muslims to pray and travel together and break each other’s mutual stereotypes. While it has maintained a low profile in much of the Jewish community, it has grown to more than a dozen chapters across the United States, including several in the greater New York area, each co-led by a Jewish and a Muslim woman.
The participants do not introduce discussions of the Middle East situation into their meetings for the first year and a half, Olitzky said. Participants agree that “it’s OK to be pro-Israel, it’s OK to be pro-Palestinian.”
The Sisterhood represents the new face — and the new faces — of Jewish dialogue and know-your-neighbor activities in this country.
“There is a recognition that the American Muslim community is growing exponentially,” said Rabbi Marc Schneier, founder of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, which coordinates leadership-level activities with a variety of ethnic and religious groups – especially, in the last decade (in addition to such emerging groups as Hispanics and Asians) with Muslims.
Such dialogue and joint activities are supplanting the type of Jewish-Christian dialogue work that dominated interfaith activities for much of the last century, and the black-Jewish community-building activities that were common in recent decades, Rabbi Schneier and other experts contacted by The Jewish Week said.
The last few years have seen a growth in organizations dedicated to the Muslim-Jewish relationship. Most of them, like the Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom, are formed at the grassroots level, and centered around hands-on social action work.
Some chapters have done such social action work as preparing sandwiches for homeless shelters, said Faria Abedin, a Bangladesh native and Princeton resident who serves as the Sisterhood’s national co-president. “Both of our religions are deeply rooted in charitable work. It’s a natural commonality.
Abedin said the Jewish women she has met through the Sisterhood “have become part of my life. It breaks down barriers to know people as human beings.”
“Sometimes talk isn’t enough,” said Daniel Zeltser, associate executive director of the Kings Bay Y, a founder of the Young Peace Builders, whose teenage participants work together in local soup kitchens and do other volunteer work for the homeless. The teens, Zeltser said, “want something that’s local. It’s your neighbor.”
Many of these new Muslim-Jewish encounters take place in members’ home, instead of synagogues and mosques or community centers.
These activities tend to attract like-minded, open-minded members of both faiths who accept dealing with individuals whom other members of their own groups fear or do not know well. They tend to be successful in building “intense” relationships because of the “contact theory” of sociology, Olitzky said – you’re unlikely to hate someone you have come to know well.
Other examples of the recent increase in grassroots/hands-on efforts are New York University’s Of Many Institute, founded by Rabbi Yehuda Sarna and Imam Kahlid Latif; the Young Peace Builders in southern Brooklyn, under the auspices of the Kings Bay Y, Turkish Cultural Center and heavily Turkish Amity School; informal interfaith work coordinated by Raysh Weiss, a rabbinical student at the Jewish Theological Seminary, including a break-fast event last year at the Malcolm Shabbaz Mosque in Harlem; and the Jewish Community Relations Council’s Center for Community Leadership, JCRC’s coalition-building arm.
A major part of the JCRC’s outreach activities is devoted to the Muslim community.
“We don’t do Muslim-Jewish ‘dialogue,’” said Rabbi Robert Kaplan, the Center’s director. Instead, he said, participants work together on such issues as services for aging immigrants, renovations of houses of worship, and education about each other’s religious requirements.
“More and more grassroots initiatives have grabbed hold of a similar set of methods – small-scale encounters, home hospitality, joint community service, visiting each other’s house of worship,” Rabbi Sarna said in an email interview. “We are seeing much less ‘sage on the stage’ dialogues between two religious leaders. People have come to recognize that this format does not really affect ‘the street.’ The most important discussions between Muslims and Jews are not about theology, but about lived experience.”
Olitzky said she intentionally limited the membership of her new organization, which she called the only such interfaith group in the country dedicated to Jewish and Islamic women, to one gender. The women “would pull in the men,” she said. “It’s really difficult to be Muslim or Jewish in the Christian world we live in. We find we share much more in common with each other than we do with Christian women.”
Next year the Sisterhood will sponsor a joint trip to Albania and Kosovo, to see living examples of Jews and Muslims who have protected each other.
Olitzky and Aftab will participate in a panel discussion after a one-woman play, “Unveiled,” about post-9/11 Islamophobia, performed by actress Rohina Malik at the 4th Street Theatre in Manhattan on June 4. The pair will discuss their respective religion’s perspective on issues raised in the play.
“One of the objectives … is to foster a dialogue between Muslim and non-Muslim theatergoers,” Olitzky said.
She said the rhetoric of Pamela Geller “just reinforces” the commitment of the participants of the Sisterhood. Muslim and Jewish women continue to meet each other and learn about each other, she said. “This is the way we change the world. We are changing the world, one Jewish and one Muslim woman at a time.”
While many Reform congregations offer programs that result in conversions in a year or less, a Manhattan synagogue is finding success in adding requirements and making its courses more rigorous. Staff Writer Amy Sara Clark explains why.
A Tougher Reform Road To Conversion
Stephen Wise’s revamped program signals new rigor for ‘transformative’ step.
Amy Sara Clark
Staff Writer
Conversion student Melissa Hume and Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch discuss prayers for Shabbat in Stephen Wise Free Synagogue’s sanctuary.
When Johanna Rauth began looking for a synagogue where she could go through the process of converting to Judaism, one program stood out. Instead of taking about 12 months to complete, the program took 18. Instead of requiring an average of 16 weeks of classes, the program required 30. She signed up.
“I liked the way that they took it seriously. I felt that I would really learn there as much as I can learn,” said Rauth, a 31-year-old internist who is currently earning a master’s in public health.
The program is at Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, an 800-family Reform synagogue on the Upper West Side. When its leaders decided to increase the requirements of its program a year and a half ago — a move that puts it at odds with much of the rest of the liberal movement — they weren’t sure how potential students would react.
“We assumed that most people would want to go to other programs in the city that expected less of them,” said the synagogue’s senior rabbi, Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch.
They were pleasantly surprised. Fourteen students are currently in the program, and two, including Rauth, have completed it. Another five are in conversation with the synagogue about joining the program.
“I think there is a group of people who are exploring Judaism who really take it very, very seriously and they don’t want it to be less than an optimally fulfilling experience,” said Rabbi Hirsch. “They want it to be challenging. ... They realize they’re undergoing a really transformative transition and they’re honored that people want to give them so much attention.”
Melissa Hume, 27, who teaches preschool at Stephen Wise Free Synagogue and is in the process of converting, was attracted to the substantive nature of Stephen Wise’s program.
“It really resonated with my personal experience and my interest in learning,” she said. “I just felt like there was so much history and tradition that I didn’t know about, so I knew going in that this was what was going to get me to a place of understanding.”
Stephen Wise Free Synagogue’s decision to revamp its conversion program comes at a time when religious identity has become increasingly fluid.
A study by the Pew Research Center, “America’s Changing Religious Landscape,” released last week, reported that 34 percent of Americans have a religious identity different from the one in which they were raised, up from 28 percent in 2007. If people switching from one Protestant denomination to another are included, the percentage rises to 42. The study also found that 17 percent of Jews were raised in a different religion.
While some Reform congregations have increased the requirements of their conversion programs, Stephen Wise Free Synagogue’s program has “unusually substantial requirements,” said Rabbi Howard Jaffe, who co-chairs the Reform movement’s Joint Commission on Outreach.
“This is more stringent and a more significant commitment than we’ve seen in almost any community ... not only in the Reform movement but outside of the Reform movement,” he said.
“It’s very easy for rabbis to feel pressured into making this happen more quickly then is appropriate ... especially when someone comes forward because they are getting married,” he added. “I am pleased to see an expectation of an 18-month process with such significant requirements because we want to be certain that everyone is as sincere as possible and as committed as possible about becoming Jewish.”
In most Reform congregations, students are first sent off to take an introduction to Judaism class of between 12 and 20 weeks with students from other synagogues. Then they work with a rabbi at their own synagogue for several months, said Jaffe.
Some programs are even shorter. At Judaism by Choice in Los Angeles, students have the option of taking the classes, which run three hours and 15 minutes, twice a week,allowing students to complete the program’s 58.5 hours of conversion coursework in as little as three months.
Rabbi Neal Weinberg, the program’s rabbinic director, said the appropriate length of time for conversion entirely depends on the student’s background. Eighteen months, he said, “could be good for some people who come in not knowing anything.” But, he said, “A lot of people, when they make the decision to convert to Judaism, it’s something they’ve been thinking about for a long time. ... If they know Hebrew already, if they’ve lived in Israel,” a shorter length of study makes sense, he said.
In Stephen Wise Free Synagogue’s revamped program, students attend a weekly two-hour class for 30 weeks taught by Stephen Wise clergy, then spend the summer doing an independent project. They finish the program with a course of individual study with a member of the synagogue’s clergy.
“We wanted to be able to ensure the very high standards that we wanted,” Rabbi Hirsch said. The goal, he said, is to make each student “into a terrific, knowledgeable and articulate Jew. Somebody who would be able to, on their own, live a full Jewish life.”
He added that with the American Jewish community shrinking, “it is very important for all of the congregations to put a lot of attention on embracing people who want to explore becoming a Jew.”
Stephen Wise’s program strongly encourages students’ Jewish partners to participate in the class, to strengthen Judaism for the entire family.
Rauth said her participation in the program got her husband, a secular Israeli, more interested in Judaism. The couple even began watching videos on Jewish topics together in the evening. “It connected my husband again to his Jewish roots,” she said.
In addition to the academic portion of Stephen Wise’s program, students are also required to begin practicing Judaism. “Right from day one ... irrespective of what they feel, they get into the habit of observing Shabbat, of lighting candles, saying blessings over the wine and challah and having people over for Shabbat dinner,” Rabbi Hirsch said.
They are also encouraged to take part in services and other synagogue programs such as Torah study and volunteer work.
“Something that’s very important to us is that our students are fully immersed into the culture of the synagogue right away,” said Associate Rabbi Diana Fersko. “We’ve seen engagement really flourish.”
Rabbi Hirsch agreed. “From the moment they start studying, they come to services on a regular basis, they interact with our clergy on a regular basis, they observe on a weekly basis and they support each other academically as well as emotionally.”
The emotional support is a key aspect of the program. Because the students not only see each other in class but also at services and other synagogue events, they quickly form a cohesive community.
“Because we were all in a similar situation, they [the other students] could really relate to the thoughts I had and the process I went though. We could help each other and encourage each other. It was very, very helpful,” said Rauth, who grew up in Germany and moved to New York with her Israeli husband 18 months ago.
“Judaism is all about community, and being in a class with a lot of people and to go through the process with them is a very good step towards this community feeling,” she added.
Hume, who, in addition to teaching preschool is earning a master’s degree in psychology at Hunter College, also finds the support of the other students helpful.
“It’s nice to have that feeling of not doing it by yourself,” she said. “Everyone who is part of the group is coming to Judaism through totally different paths, but we’re all sharing that transitional moment of really this identity shift, of becoming part of this community that none of us were a part of before.”
Asked if holding a full-time job while attending grad school ever makes her wish the program were less demanding, Hume said that sometimes it does.
“Every once in awhile I think, I wish I could get to the mikvah, I wish we could formalize this, that I could just be Jewish already,” she said. “But I’m always reminded that it’s not just about you becoming Jewish. It’s about you becoming part of the Jewish community and that just takes time and it takes effort. And I have to say I really appreciate that approach.”
My column looks at two creative new programs designed to engage young Jews, helping to fill the void left by Birthright Next, the follow-up program that ended recently.
After Birthright Next, What's Next?
Follow-up programs to engage returnees from Israel have been problematic; several are seeking to fill the vacuum.
Gary Rosenblatt
Editor and Publisher
Gary Rosenblatt
As successful as Birthright Israel has been, providing free, guided trips to Israel to more than 400,000 young adult Jews from across the diaspora, the follow-up efforts with its alumni have been problematic.
But that shouldn’t come as a surprise.
Consider: Birthright offers an intense, exciting and somewhat exotic experience, 10 days and nights shared in a foreign land with many other 18-to-26-year-olds who bond like crazy on the trip. But according to tour providers, that intense emotional high lasts about two weeks. Once home, reality and routine set in, whether it’s campus life for college students or the workweek for the older set.
What’s more, while the genius of Birthright is its laser-sharp focus to experience the history, people and land of Israel — the follow-up agenda for alums is vague and overly ambitious.
Those are two reasons why Birthright Next, the division of the Birthright Israel Foundation created to translate the participants’ enthusiasm for Israel into involvement in Jewish life back home, is now officially over. Critics felt it underperformed; it certainly never garnered praise for dramatic accomplishments. But in its shift over the last several years from direct programming for Birthrighters to providing communal consulting, training local engagers, and working with other organizations that seek to reach young adults, it had successes under the radar.
From the outset, though, Birthright Next had issues: Who, for instance, was calling the shots? Should it create new programs or support existing ones? How best to evaluate its effectiveness? Were unaffiliated young people expected to suddenly attend synagogue, join Jewish organizations, or enroll in Jewish study courses? What, in truth, did they really sign up for by going on Birthright?
“Birthright is finite — 10 days,” noted one communal expert on the subject who asked to remain anonymous because of his involvement in the program. “But when do you stop being considered an alum? These young people signed up for the free trip, not to become active in Jewish life. We were envisioning a follow-up to a product they never bought.”
One Table
While the Birthright Israel Foundation is assessing its role regarding follow-up to the Israel trip, and coming up with reasonable expectations, at least a couple of creative projects are stepping up their efforts to fill the vacuum left by the closure of Birthright Next.
The newest project, called One Table, is based on the success Birthright Next had for several years in helping to sponsor Friday night Shabbat meals for Birthright alumni. Many thousands attended these evenings around the country. One Table now has been launched in New York, with funding from the Paul Singer Foundation and philanthropist and Birthright founder Michael Steinhardt. (The group is projecting a budget of $1.7 million for 2015.) It is not affiliated with Birthright directly, but about half of its participants are Birthrighters. Aliza Kline, founding executive director, told me that the idea is very simple: “So many good things come from sharing a Friday night meal with friends and friends of friends,” she said. A goal is to help young people — the target age is 20s and 30s — “develop a habitual practice of celebrating Friday night dinner together so that it becomes an intrinsic part of their week.
“It’s really about happiness,” she said, “and all good things that stem from this ritual.”
That may include forms of Shabbat observance, but the planners, who have spent more than a year analyzing its methodology, have learned from focus groups and interviews that potential attendees have a good deal of anxiety about being asked to take part in an evening with a religious ritual component.
“‘What will be expected of me? What’s the catch?’ they ask,” said Kline, who formerly was founding executive director of Mayyim Hayyim, the inclusive, all-service mikvah in Boston, and a seasoned pro in interpreting and adapting ancient rituals for 21st century, largely unaffiliated Jews.
She acknowledged that young people are wary of what she called “the bait and switch,” like being invited to take part in an organized Shabbat program that has an ulterior motive, encouraging at least some form of observance.
One Table goes easy on the ritual. Challah and wine are popular components, as are candles. But when it comes to reciting the appropriate blessings associated with each, that depends on the hosts, the guests, and their being at ease with each other. Hosts and guests are recruited, and apply online. Hosts are screened in advance and coached to create a welcoming environment by the One Table team. That may include tips on how to mix drinks, set an appealing dinner table — ideally for eight to 10 guests — and calibrate the level of Shabbat customs.
“We want everyone to feel authentic and be themselves,” said Kline. “If you normally wear a kipa, wear one. The issue is to be open and minimize awkward moments.”
One Table has a resident rabbi, Jessica Minnen, who trains hosts in the evening’s ritual aspects they may choose to observe, based on their comfort level; she may explain the washing of the hands before breaking bread, or the direction the person making kiddush, if the ritual is being observed, should be looking while reciting the blessing.
But Kline emphasizes inclusivity as a guiding principle. “We welcome Jews and non-Jews, and the food need not be kosher. What it should be is delicious and memorable.”
To that end One Table takes advantage of the rise of social dining programs (planned group dinners centered around a theme) and quick food delivery. In dealing with those who may be reluctant to host a Friday night meal because they don’t cook or can’t afford it, the organization offers financial as well as social and Judaic support. Besides hosting a dinner at home, options include eating out at a restaurant.
Cara Akselrad, an actor in New York, explained in a One Table video that though she rarely cooks, One Table made it possible for her to order online and serve a Friday night dinner. “I like when all my friends are together,” she said, and appreciated that the experience “allowed me to be me” and to host the event at home.
Though it began last summer in experimental form, One Table is now ramping up its programming here, with about 300 dinners under its belt, and plans to expand to other cities, starting with Chicago.
“It’s all about making Friday night special,” Kline says, with the hope that the project, and the habit, will grow and lead to other forms of Jewish engagement.
The 100 Point Challenge
Another innovative program, Bring Israel Home, is geared specifically to Birthright participants, starting with a challenge to them on the bus while they are still in Israel. It’s based on a glaring statistic and an insightful observation.
The statistic, from a 2009 Brandeis University study of Birthright’s impact, is that only 4 percent of its alumni participated in five or more “Jewish activities” after the trip. “Activities” could mean simply visiting a Jewish museum, reading an Israeli news article or cooking an Israeli meal.
Rabbi Yitz Greenman, executive director of Aish Hatorah New York, an Orthodox educational outreach program, says he was shocked by that finding. “We felt we had to address that figure,” he told me.
In researching how best to motivate Birthright participants, his staff, in consultation with Birthright Next and other Birthright trip providers, determined that top-down programs and incentives often meet resistance. What the young people wanted most was to stay in touch with each other after their return from Israel.
“We wanted to take their experience and turn it into action,” Rabbi Greenman explained. So Aish came up with he calls “the carrot”: a weekend retreat with fellow Birthrighters from their group of 40 bus mates, plus the Israeli participants — IDF soldiers who accompanied them for part of the Israel visit — flown in for the reunion.
To earn the reward, at least 30 of the 40 participants have to complete “100 points of Jewish activity in the three months following their trip.” Points are awarded based on the nature of the activity in the categories of Jewish education, Jewish experiences, Shabbat and holidays, and Israel, so the young people can choose for themselves. Options include 20 points for attending a weekend Hillel retreat, 15 points for hosting a Shabbat meal (with One Table, by the way), down to under 10 points for cooking an Israeli food, taking a Hebrew class or interviewing a Holocaust survivor. The participants go online and log in proof of their activities.
Adam Yormack, 29, raised as a Reform Jew and married to a devout Catholic in Miami Beach, Fla. is one of several participants who catalogued their 100 points in a booklet published by Aish. He described his sense of accomplishment in hosting a family seder for the first time and interacting with a rabbi. “Sounds silly,” he wrote, “but I hadn’t spoken to a rabbi about my faith, my lack of attendance, my life, since I was a child.”
An upcoming mega-retreat, the project’s most ambitious to date, will host 11 different Birthright groups, with 60 IDF soldiers being flown in to participate at a camp site in rural Pennsylvania.
The program, funded in part by the Paul Singer Foundation, has generated enthusiasm among those seeking ways to engage young Jews. Perhaps the most unusual pairing was having the Union for Reform Judaism sign up with Aish. Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the URJ, acknowledges it is “an unlikely partnership,” but said “it’s having a positive impact and we want to collaborate in all kinds of ways that will strengthen Jewish life.”
He noted that the Birthright Israel trip creates “a spark,” but the community hasn’t generated a lasting connection to keep it lit.
Efforts like One Table and Bring Israel Home underscore the appeal of empowering young people to engage their peers in ways that fit their lifestyle, utilizing social media and technology trends. The Birthright Israel Foundation no doubt is taking these successes into account as it decides what comes next after Birthright Next.
What’s clear is that no one organization can or should be expected to take on this major challenge of engaging a generation of young people in Jewish life. And there is no one formula that appeals to all. Meanwhile, tens of millions of dollars, and the future direction of the Jewish community, are riding on the outcome.
Also this week, an Editorial on the relevance of Shavuot (celebrated May 24-25); a new law will allow Holocaust survivors to receive monthly payments from Polish government; remembering Orthodox feminist Belda Lindenbaum, who died at 76 last week; victims respond to jail sentence for `Peeping Tom' Rabbi Barry Freundel; an ambitious exhibit traces Jewish roots in rock `n roll; and a new Israeli film here, "The Farewell Party," deals with the indignities of Alzheimer's.
Up All Night
It is as intimate as any hour in the Jewish year, the half-light of Shavuot near dawn, after the all-night learning when it is time for early prayer and then rising for the reading of the Ten Commandments. Yes, most of the world is still asleep, but most of the world was “sleeping” at Sinai, too. Legend has it that every other nation on the planet was offered the Torah first, but declined, politely and otherwise. Only theIsraelites said yes, and even then with a threatening mountain held above them, and the skies a wild concoction of a desert storm, thunder, lightening and a rain, say the mystics, that was reminiscent of Noah’s.
Whether at Sinai or in cities, accepting and studying Torah was never the majority’s choice but the cultivated practice of the few and the brave. It was always so. Rabbi Gordon Tucker, senior rabbi of Temple Israel Center in White Plains, and former dean of the JTS Rabbinical School, recalls the late Conservative leader, Rabbi Gerson Cohen, saying, “You know about that Golden Age of Spanish Jewry? It was eight families.” Eight clans, actually, but his point was that a Golden Age, then or now, was never about numbers but the glow of its generational soul.
Shavuot, of course, is a time when we read the Book of Ruth, that romantic and bittersweet tale of the quintessential convert who was to become the grandmother of King David and, eventually, the Messiah. Not only is Ruth’s circumstance at the time of her conversion modest, but the Messiah’s lineage is traced not to Joseph the Tzaddik (another messianic candidate), famous for his perfection and resistance to temptation, but to Joseph’s brother, Judah, who was less than perfect and succumbed to temptation. Clearly, our messianic lesson is less concerned with earthly and obvious majesty than with the power of transcendence, for that is what Ruth did, showing that the convert can transcend her Moabite past to the point of mothering the Moshiach.
This week, our news pages spotlight Ruth’s “grandchildren,” those studying for conversion at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, a Reform congregation on the Upper West Side. Ruth would be fascinated to see that the programs are getting more rigorous, taking 18 months to complete, rather than the 12 often required; with 30 weeks of classes, rather than the average of 16. The tradition doesn’t specify months, classes or curriculum but tradition does require integrity and intensity of experience. Melissa Hume, in the process of converting, told The Jewish Week, “There was so much history and tradition that I didn’t know about, so I knew going in that this was what was going to get me to a place of understanding.”
So much history. So much tradition. We live in a time when the Pew Research Center finds Americans in religious upheaval, with more people saying they are unaffiliated and switching from one group to another. The Jewish community is relatively stable, but it will be harder to live in an environment in which the percentage of Americans who are atheists, agnostics or “nothing in particular” (the “nones”) has risen to 56 million, 23 percent of the population. Almost 1 in 4 Jews say they have no religion. Our children will increasingly be exposed in schools and in the media to secularists and cynics who are usually less pro-Israel than church-going Americans, as well as less caring about the concerns of organized religion.
Does the future look easy? It never has. And yet it looks better than it has for more than two millennia. K’tonton (the Jewish Tom Thumb) would stay up past bedtime on Shavuot to see Heaven open at midnight. And after the all-night learning, Heaven is in your mind.
New Rules Pave Way For Polish Expat Pensions
Move marks first time U.S. Holocaust survivors can apply formonthly payments from Polish government.
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
Lusia Eimer. Courtesy of Lusia Eimer.
Thousands of Holocaust survivors originally from Poland — more than 3,000 in New York alone — will for the first time be receiving applications to apply for $130-a-month pension payments from Poland, thanks to a law that took effect last month, The Jewish Week has learned.
The law is expected to benefit nearly 20,000 survivors worldwide.
Gideon Taylor, chair of operations at the World Jewish Restitution Organization, said his organization has been negotiating with Poland for the past six months to ensure that theapplication process is as easy as possible. He said arrangements were finalized after he flew to Warsaw last Thursday.
“There was a strong case made that it would be an important step for Poland to recognize these former Polish citizens,” he said, noting that most Jewish survivors of the Holocaust who live in Poland have been receiving the same pension since at least 1991.
But Holocaust survivor Lusia Eimer, 86, of Forest Hills, remains skeptical. “I can’t believe Poland will pay anything,” she said. “I’ll believe it when I see it because Poland is not so ready to give out money.”
In fact, Poland is the only country in Eastern Europe that has refused to create a claims process to permit the restitution of private property owned by Jews before the Holocaust, according to Greg Schneider, executive vice president of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
He said his office is sending out 12,500 applications to those believed eligible worldwide. The forms have been translated into English. The government of Israel is expected to send applications to another 7,000 of its citizens.
One of the things preventing Polish Jews who live outside of Poland from receiving the same pension as Polish residents was the requirement that the pension be automatically deposited in a bank in Poland. The new rules permit direct deposit into foreign bank accounts. The change was approved a year ago by the Polish parliament and President Bronisław Komorowski, and took effect last October for residents of the European Union and last month for those in the rest of the world.
Sebastian Rejak, the Polish foreign minister’s special envoy for relations with the Jewish diaspora, told The Times of Israel last year that the change was made because the old procedure was “cumbersome for many potential claimants.” The change means the Polish government will bear the cost of wiring money to claimants abroad.
The Polish government, Rejak was quoted as saying, has a special sympathy for Holocaust survivors and wishes to do “justice to those who suffered during the war — that’s how we see our responsibility to care for these people. … Ethnic criteria are irrelevant, but we acted with a special sensitivity for the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. …”
Schneider noted that Polish law “insists that the form be filled out in Polish. Most of the form asks for names, places and dates, but there is one part in which the applicant must describe what happened to him, so we are enclosing in the mailing a list of agencies” whose staffs have been trained to help complete the application.
In New York, the Selfhelp Community Services — Holocaust Survivor Program and several JCCs are among the organizations prepared to help survivors. Officials stress there is no need to hire a lawyer.
The WJRO put the latest information on the program online, including all the information mailed to survivors and a list of organizations prepared to help survivorsfill out the application at www.polishrestitution.com/pensions.
The pension program, known as the Legislation on War Veterans and Victims of War and Post-War Oppression, offers the monthly payments to both Jews and non-Jews who were detained by the Nazis in ghettos, prisons, concentration camps, extermination camps, or similar places of detention; forcibly deported to the Soviet Union; served in the Polish military, the Polish units of the Allied militaries, or in the Polish underground during World War II; or is otherwise considered a veteran or a victim of oppression.
Because the new law requires also that a Polish veterans group vouch for the legitimacy of each claim, Schneider said the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants and the World Federation of Child Holocaust Survivors have both agreed to provide letters of endorsement.
In addition, because the Polish law requires applicants to have a Polish address, the WJRO arranged for the Auschwitz Jewish Center, under the aegis of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, to use its address for free for those who need it.
“The Polish government will send letters to survivors there, and the center will forward them to the survivors,” Schneider said.
“We’re trying to make it easy for survivors to comply,” he added.
Eimer said she knows of fellow Polish survivors living here who could use the pension. And she said she is pleasantly surprised that Poland has agreed to make the payments. Poland has long claimed it could not afford to make restitution to Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
Julius Berman, president of the Claims Conference, said in a statement, “The payments can make a real difference helping elderly survivors meet their daily needs and provides them a long-delayed measure of justice.”
Eimer said her survival in Poland during the Holocaust was nothing short of “a miracle.” She was born and raised in Kalisz near the German border, believed to be the oldest Jewish community in Poland. On the eve of World War II it was reportedly home to 20,000 Jews.
On Sept. 1, 1939, just days before Eimer’s 11th birthday, the Nazis invaded Poland. She said she, her parents and her older sister fled briefly before being caught. She was sent to the Lodz ghetto while her parents and sister were murdered in the Chelmno extermination camp.
“I was chosen by the president of the ghetto to be his foster child,” she recalled. “He had 10 boys and 10 girls in his home and kept us safe until they liquidated the ghetto in 1944. I was sent to Auschwitz and after two weeks … I volunteered to go to Hamburg to help rebuild homes that had been bombed by the Allies. I was there 10 months until they sent us all to Bergen-Belsen [concentration camp]. I was there for one week — starving — before the English liberated us” in April 1945.
Knowing that she had no family left in Kalisz, Eimer said she went to Sweden and wrote a letter — without an address — to her mother’s brother in Brooklyn. He got it with the help of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and arranged for her to get a student visa to the United States. She arrived in 1947 and two years later met and married an American, Leo Eimer. They had three children.
“Everyone of us who survived, survived by a miracle,” Eimer said. “There are 120,000 people in Kalisz now and I don’t think any of them are Jews.”
Pioneer Among Orthodox Feminists Succumbs
Belda Lindenbaum, 76, remembered as ‘revolutionary’ leader.
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
Belda Lindenbaum was a founding board member of JOFA. Courtesy of JOFA
Belda Lindenbaum, who described herself as “a late bloomer” in respect to feminism but who went on to make her mark in helping to found several institutions that advanced the role of Orthodox women, died May 12 in her Manhattan home. She was 76.
A vice president and founding board member of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance (JOFA), Lindenbaum, a New York native, was instrumental in founding, along with her husband Marcel, Midreshet Lindenbaum, an institute in Israel for advanced Jewish women’s studies. It includes service in the Israeli Defense Forces, similar to men’s hesder yeshiva programs.
She was president of American Friends of Bar-Ilan University, president of Drisha Institute in Manhattan, and a board member of Ramaz Day School.
Many last week recalled her zeal in furthering the causes she held dear, as well as her warmth in her relationships with family and friends.
“Belda was a revolutionary leader, passionate advocate, and staunch feminist,” JOFA wrote in a statement this week. “It is with sorrow that we remember and honor her transformational impact on the Jewish community and the deep friendships formed along the way.
Sharon Weiss-Greenberg, JOFA executive directed, described Lindenbaum as “fierce and tenacious. She brought out the best in people,” encouraging many women to develop their potential as Torah scholars and Jewish leaders. “She saw no reason to be satisfied with an inadequate status quo.”
Weiss-Greenberg recalled a story she heard of a time when Lindenbaum was traveling, needed to say Kaddish, and found herself in the women’s balcony of a synagogue where the men did not stop to allow her to say the mourner’s prayer. Instead of remaining silent or saying Kaddish quietly to herself, “she yelled, ‘Kaddish.’ And there was Kaddish. She made it happen.”
Rabbi Shlomo Riskin of Efrat, whose educational network in Israel includes Midreshet Lindenbaum, wrote of her leadership role in advocating for women’s right to divorcein Jewish law: “She was deeply religious and insisted that her God of love and compassion would not and could not allow women to be held captive to their husbands, or aspire to be less than worthy scholars in the classical literature of our tradition. She was courageous and powerful in her righteous demands but gentle and loving in every one of her personal relationships.”
The Lindenbaums also funded a program of lectures at the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem on the role of women in Judaism.
“I was a late bloomer with respect to feminism, Jewish or otherwise,” Lindenbaum told the Jewish Women’s Archive. “At the age of 29, my personal bio would have read: married, three sons, a newborn daughter, frum (religious; literally, “pious”) from birth, modern Orthodox, and the product of a co-ed Jewish day school.
“Despite my history, my religious life was all ritual with little meaning, and I had stopped attending synagogue. I felt invisible and superfluous there, and filled with an unease I couldn’t name,” she said. “It was my husband who provided my wake-up call when he prodded me by asking, ‘What will you teach your daughter? What will you show her?’”
She said she renewed her synagogue attendance “with a new sense of purpose. I was determined to work for change in the status of women in all areas of Jewish life.”
That is what she did, said Blu Greenberg, founding president of JOFA, who was a friend of and fellow advocate with Lindenbaum for more than four decades. “Belda was a life force, a passionate person who was driven by a Jewish sense of justice and was not afraid of anyone,” Greenberg told The Jewish Week. “Yet she was a kind, giving person, beloved by so many people. She was Jewish nobility.”
Rabba Sara Hurwitz, dean of Yeshivat Maharat in Riverdale, where Lindenbaum was a founding board member, noted in in a memorial message this week, that Belda and Marcel Lindenbaum “changed the course of the Modern Orthodox community by building Jewish institutions where women’s Torah scholarship, authority and leadership have become part of the fabric of the Jewish communal landscape.”
In addition to her husband, Lindenbaum is survived by five children, Nathan, Matthew, Bennett, Victoria Feder and Abigail Lindenbaum Tambor, and their spouses, 21 grandchildren, and two siblings, Carol Kaufman Newman and Gerald Kaufman.
‘Peeping Rabbi’ Victims Weigh In On Sentence
Emotional court sentencing leaves victims and synagogue members satisfied.
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
A court sketch of Rabbi Barry Freundel at last week’s sentencing. YouTube via JTA
At Rabbi Barry Freundel’s sentencing last Friday in a Washington, D.C., courtroom, 28-year-old Kate Bailey wore an orange cardigan to symbolize the prison uniform she hoped he would soon wear.
Along with about 15 other victims, she stood next to the rabbi and read a prepared statement detailing his abuses.
“I was nervous [that] I’d become emotional, but I was just angry,” said Bailey, who converted under Rabbi Freundel in 2008. She spent three to four hours a week doing clerical work for him at his home office without pay, where she was often alone with him in the house. In 2009, Rabbi Freundel called her to say she needed to go in the mikvah, or ritual bath, again to complete her conversion ritual because there was a problem with her first visit. She later found out that she had been recorded.
In the courtroom, she refused to look at the rabbi, though other victims addressed their comments directly to him. “I didn’t look down at him once,” she said. “I had nothing left to say to him.”
Bailey was among the 70 victims who crowded into the main courtroom along with family members. An additional 30 or so were in an overflow courtroom. Orange blouses, scarves and sweaters signaled their solidarity in advocating prison time for Rabbi Freundel.
Rabbi Freundel was sentenced to six-and-a-half years in prison for videotaping dozens of nude women at the ritual bath that is part of his former congregation, Kesher Israel. The rabbi, now 64, was arrested last October and charged with six counts of voyeurism.
“You repeatedly and secretly violated the trust your victims had in you and you abused your power,” Senior Judge Geoffrey Alprin of D.C. Superior Court said at the sentencing, the Washington Post reported. Alprin also fined Freundel more than $13,000.
Prosecutors were seeking a 17-year prison sentence for the rabbi.
“It’s not as long as we asked for, but I’m satisfied,” said Bailey. “I’m happy his crimes are being taken seriously.”
Bethany Mandel, another of Rabbi Freundel’s victims who testified at the sentencing, said she thought the sentence was fair.
“A lot of us worried that he would only be given a year,” she said. “We wanted this crime to be taken seriously, not for our own sake, but because if sexual crimes of this nature go largely unpunished, people will be more hesitant to press similar charges in the future.”
Congregation Kesher Israel, where Rabbi Freundel served for 25 years before being fired in December, released a statement on Friday pronouncing the sentence a turning point.
“Today’s decision turns a page in this dark chapter for our community,” the statement read. “Despite our pain, our community is moving forward."
Elanit Rothschild Jakabovics, president of the Kesher Israel board, told the Jewish Week in an email correspondence that social services and support groups are still being offered at the synagogue. “We still have a long road ahead and the wound still hurts, but I’m confident we can continue down this path of healing, unity, and communal growth,” she said.
The congregation is in the process of hiring an interim rabbi, she said.
Rabbi Freundel will appeal the sentence he received for 52 counts of misdemeanor voyeurism, according to his lawyer, Jeffery Harris, who said the sentence was “illegal.”
“I think the sentence is harsh but more importantly is illegal in that consecutive sentences are not permissible based on the law and the facts,” he wrote to the Jewish Week in an email correspondence. Rabbi Freundel was sentenced to 45 days on each of 52 counts of voyeurism to be served consecutively, which comes to 2,340 days in prison, just under than six-and-a-half years.
According to the guidelines on concurrent and consecutive sentences in the District of Columbia Sentencing and Criminal Code, convictions arising out of the same act or course of conduct are considered one conviction for the purpose of sentencing. However, separate and distinct events can be sentenced consecutively. According to the code, offenses that take place at different times or in different places are considered distinct events.
“I would be surprised if the court imposed a consecutive sentence when it was impermissible,” said Patrice Sultan, a Washington, D.C., defense attorney. Though she noted that there is a “gray area” when it comes to consecutive sentencing, deference is left to the court. “If multiple crimes were committed on multiple different dates, the court has discretion to run the sentences consecutively,” she said.
In addition to the 52 women Rabbi Freundel filmed while they were completely naked between March 4, 2012 and Sept. 19, 2014, he recorded an additional 100 women since April 2009 who were not part of the criminal complaint due to the statute of limitations.
Harris’ argument that all 52 counts should be considered one offense “could potentially undermine the argument that the other 100 victims fall outside the statute,” she added in an email following the interview.
At the mikvah, the rabbi used between one and three cameras, hiding the devices in a digital clock radio, a tissue box holder and a small tabletop fan, and aiming them at the toilet and shower in the mikvah dressing room, according to the prosecution’s memo explaining its sentencing recommendations.
According to Mandel, there was a smattering of applause in the courtroom after the sentence was read.
“It was more a collective exhale of relief,” she said.
In addition to his crimes, Rabbi Freundel videotaped himself engaged in “sexual situations” with “several women” who may not have consented to being recorded, according to the memo.
The prosecution’s memo also notes that Rabbi Freundel surreptitiously videotaped a domestic violence abuse victim in the bathroom and bedroom of a safe house that he had established for her.
“I thought I saw a holy man of God, a man whom I could trust to protect me from outside evils, but I have come to see the blackness which hid beneath the garments,” the victim said in a court document. “The dreadful symptoms I once banished have returned. … I dare not look at myself unclothed in a mirror, for it is a glaring reminder of what was taken and stolen.”
When this victim’s statement was read out loud in court on Friday, the judge visibly shook his head in dismay, said Mandel. She said it was the only time during the sentencing that the judge showed emotion.
During the sentencing, victims shared how Rabbi Freundel had taped them after advising them to seek refuge in the mikvah after traumatic life events. Karin Bleeg, 32, told the judge that the rabbi encouraged her to use the mikvah when her grandmother died and then recorded her, according to the Washington Post.
“This wasn’t just a camera in the mikvah,” said Mandel, who said she has since counseled several victims who have turned to her for support. “He violated women when they were most vulnerable. Six-and-a-half years does not seem like a lot if you really knew everything he did.”
In the statement Mandel read before the court, she called Rabbi Freundel a “sociopath” who “won’t stop” until he is “forced to.”
Though executive vice president of the Rabbinical Council of America Mark Dratch declined to comment on Freundel’s sentence, he said that the new conversion committee, created to prevent future abuses, will publish its findings at the end of June. Rabbi Freundel used to be in charge of the Council’s conversion policies.
Though the sentencing afforded closure to some, Bailey said the “ordeal” has caused her to question her place in Orthodoxy.
“It wasn’t just about voyeurism — this whole experience highlighted vulnerabilities in the Orthodox system. The way women are treated, the way converts are treated — so much work is needed,” she said. “Maybe it’s just not for me anymore.”
Jews And Rock: Taking It On The Road
Sandee Brawarsky and Robert Goldblum
From here to Hibbing: Bob Dylan’s journey will be part of new traveling exhibition.
Like Bob Dylan’s “Duquesne Whistle” train (“I’m gonna stop in Carbondale, and keep on going”), Michael Dorf has an idea for a museum that banks on rock and roll’s penchant for the open road (or track).
The founder of the Knitting Factory and City Winery (and a Jewish Week board member), Dorf plans to create a traveling pop-up exhibition showing the influences of Jewish history in American popular culture and to open a conversation. “Jews, Rock & Roll,” the road show is called, and Dorf says it’s “a really big idea” (5,000-square-feet big) designed to reach and inspire American Jews.
Dorf, who serves as executive producer and co-founding curator, and David Franklin, curator and co-creator, are launching the project with a benefit event at City Winery on May 26, honoring Mike Stoller of the songwriting team Lieber and Stoller. The 82-year-old music legend will be lending a signed score of “Hound Dog,” the song Elvis Presley recorded in 1956 that topped the charts.
That evening, Ben Sidran will present a musical show about the history of Jews in rock and roll. Sidran, author of “There Was a Fire: Jews, Music and the American Dream,” and an exhibition consultant, says, “For me rock and roll starts at the turn of the century with Irving Berlin, and it has been going on for more than a century.”
The exhibit points to five interconnected historical shifts, the “rise of” five elements: the American dream, the American teenager, the counter-culture, the record industry, and post-modern, post-ethnic America. A sampling will be on display at City Winery, with photographs, memorabilia, interviews with music-makers and machers, and, of course, music.
The plan is to tell stories, like how Jorma Kaukonen, the bluesy guitarist of Jefferson Airplane, bought his first guitar with money he made from cashing in an Israel Bond; how Tommy Ramone, the son of Hungarian Holocaust survivors, and Joey Ramone, also Jewish, and their band developed an enduring aesthetic of punk cool; and how Mike Gordon, the bassist of the jam band Pfish has been improvising on Naomi Shemer’s “Jerusalem of Gold.” And, there’ll be stories of Bob Dylan and his many transformations.
The exhibit will tell of those who made great music, and also those who made the deals and made the records.
It’s more than naming names, as Franklin, a Jewish communal professional, explains. “That someone is Jewish isn’t really relevant to us,” he says. “By looking at Jewish artists, producers, record people, we explore many different ways that Jews have connected with Judaism. It is how these music-makers embraced or rejected their Judaism, found voice through Jewish text or not, were products of immigrant experience or first-generation entrepreneurs that makes them an interesting reflection of the American Jewish experience.
“It’s really about how Jews, both onstage and backstage have contributed to the creation of popular music, and how those on the margins of the culture helped define the mainstream in ways that are totally surprising.”
The curators plan to tour the exhibition to about 15 cities, opening in New York in spring 2016. “This hasn’t been explained in a compelling way before,” Dorf says. “We can use the rock and roll touring concept and the pop-up museum concept — and do things in a way that’s quite dramatic and effective — and reach a lot of people.”
And maybe the show will even pull into Graceland in Memphis, where, the Jewish Paul Simon sings, “I've a reason to believe/ We all will be received.”
The “Jews, Rock & Roll” launch benefit is on May 26th, 7-9 p.m., at City Winery, 155 Varick St. Tickets begin at $250, jewsrockandroll.com.
A Measure Of Mercy
‘The Farewell Party’ casts a compassionate and respectful eye on the indignities of Alzheimer’s.
George Robinson
Special To The Jewish Week
Aliza Rozen as Yana, Levana Finkelshtein as Levana, Ze’ev Revah as Yehezkel, Ilan Dar as Dr. Daniel and Rafael Tabor as Raffi .
The Disease-of-the-Week movie tends to be a cheap and easy way for artists to assert their virtues. Who could possibly take offense at a film, or for that matter a charity fundraising pitch, that denounces cancer or heart disease? As long as no one raises questions about the environmental, economic or socio-political bases of diseases, as long as we all agree to talk only about “innocent” victims of illness, nobody will complain.
Sometimes the issues involved in a disease are just a bit too thorny for this approach, and filmmakers who call our attention to the messy complexities presented by those issues are entering a minefield. Consider “The Farewell Party,” a new Israeli film written and directed by Sharon Maymon and Tal Granit that opens May 22.
“The Farewell Party” is the latest example of a growing subgenre, the family melodrama with Alzheimer’s disease as its narrative catalyst. (Julianne Moore recently won an Academy Award for best actress for her portrayal of a linguistics professor suffering from early onset Alzheimer’s in “Still Alice.”) As the population of major filmmaking countries continues to gray, the subject will be examined more frequently. Anyone who has experienced the irreversible effects of the disease on a family member will probably want to give such films a wide berth. For the tiny number of us who watch movies for a living, there is no choice, but if I have to see films on this subject, I hope they will all be as compassionate and respectful as “The Farewell Party.”
Hopefully, the filmmakers will be as allergic to easy answers and cheap emotional ploys as Maymon and Granit, and as willing to take small but very real risks in terms of gallows humor and the creation of fully rounded characters who are not ennobled by the mere fact of suffering. The half-dozen elderly residents of the Jerusalemretirement community in which their film mainly is set are quietly cantankerous, self-absorbed, greedy, vain, jealous and, therefore, normal human beings.
When her husband Max can no longer bear the suffering caused by his terminal illness, Yana (Aliza Rosen) turns to her oldest and closest friends, Yehezkel (Ze’ev Revah) and Levana (Levana Finkelshtein), for help. Yehezkel is a talented amateur inventor and she wants him to invent “a mercy-killing machine” to bring an end Max’s pain. Levana disapproves, but with the help of Dr. Daniel (Ilan Dar), a retired veterinarian, and Raffi (Rafael Tabor), a retired doctor with his own agenda, they perform the act.
As the film constantly reminds us, in a community as small as theirs in a nation as small as Israel, there are no secrets, and things rapidly spiral out of control. When Levana begins to exhibit clear signs of the onset of dementia, the moral issues become even more complicated as Yehezkel’s alternatives begin to narrow down.
Maymon’s previous work includes “A Matter of Size” (about sumo wrestlers), which she wrote and co-directed with Erez Tadmor; her screenplay for “Magic Men” (about a Holocaust survivor who travels to Greece with his chasidic rapper son), was co-authored with Tadmor and his co-director Guy Nattiv. Her previous work with Granit included several shorts and a telefilm. There are two elements that all these films share and that are at the heart of “The Farewell Party”: they have a collective protagonist with all the tensions that creates, and their multiple heroes redeem one another by the end of each movie, albeit at considerable emotional cost. They’re also frequently quite funny, despite plot lines that look unflinchingly into the emotional open wounds of those characters.
What makes “The Farewell Party” work particularly well is the cooling effects of a rigorous visual scheme. The vast majority of the film’s interiors are filled with blank white walls and the strange blue half-light of public institutions. And Maymon and Granit choose to maintain a certain distance between the camera and their characters, using close-ups sparingly and presenting scenes in rigidly balanced compositions that create a stylized world of acceptable gesture belying the chaotic emotions under these bland surfaces. The only significant exceptions are the videofootage of the “confessions” of the dying recipients of the protagonists’ ministrations.
As a result “The Farewell Party” never descends into bathos. By its careful distancing, the film allows its characters to maintain their dignity and their humanity, and the emotional climaxes are, if anything, even more devastating to watch.
“The Farewell Party,” written and directed by Sharon Maymon and Tal Granit, opens Friday, May 22 at the Angelika Film Center (W. Houston St. and Broadway; [212] 995-2570) and the City Cinemas 1, 2, 3 (Third Avenue and 59th Street; [212] 777-FILM, #635).
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BETWEEN THE LINES
Gary Rosenblatt
Gary Rosenblatt
Editor and Publisher
Gary Rosenblatt
As successful as Birthright Israel has been, providing free, guided trips to Israel to more than 400,000 young adult Jews from across the diaspora, the follow-up efforts with its alumni have been problematic.
But that shouldn’t come as a surprise.
Consider: Birthright offers an intense, exciting and somewhat exotic experience, 10 days and nights shared in a foreign land with many other 18-to-26-year-olds who bond like crazy on the trip. But according to tour providers, that intense emotional high lasts about two weeks. Once home, reality and routine set in, whether it’s campus life for college students or the workweek for the older set.
What’s more, while the genius of Birthright is its laser-sharp focus to experience the history, people and land of Israel — the follow-up agenda for alums is vague and overly ambitious.
Those are two reasons why Birthright Next, the division of the Birthright Israel Foundation created to translate the participants’ enthusiasm for Israel into involvement in Jewish life back home, is now officially over. Critics felt it underperformed; it certainly never garnered praise for dramatic accomplishments. But in its shift over the last several years from direct programming for Birthrighters to providing communal consulting, training local engagers, and working with other organizations that seek to reach young adults, it had successes under the radar.
From the outset, though, Birthright Next had issues: Who, for instance, was calling the shots? Should it create new programs or support existing ones? How best to evaluate its effectiveness? Were unaffiliated young people expected to suddenly attend synagogue, join Jewish organizations, or enroll in Jewish study courses? What, in truth, did they really sign up for by going on Birthright?
“Birthright is finite — 10 days,” noted one communal expert on the subject who asked to remain anonymous because of his involvement in the program. “But when do you stop being considered an alum? These young people signed up for the free trip, not to become active in Jewish life. We were envisioning a follow-up to a product they never bought.”
One Table
While the Birthright Israel Foundation is assessing its role regarding follow-up to the Israel trip, and coming up with reasonable expectations, at least a couple of creative projects are stepping up their efforts to fill the vacuum left by the closure of Birthright Next.
The newest project, called One Table, is based on the success Birthright Next had for several years in helping to sponsor Friday night Shabbat meals for Birthright alumni. Many thousands attended these evenings around the country. One Table now has been launched in New York, with funding from the Paul Singer Foundation and philanthropist and Birthright founder Michael Steinhardt. (The group is projecting a budget of $1.7 million for 2015.) It is not affiliated with Birthright directly, but about half of its participants are Birthrighters. Aliza Kline, founding executive director, told me that the idea is very simple: “So many good things come from sharing a Friday night meal with friends and friends of friends,” she said. A goal is to help young people — the target age is 20s and 30s — “develop a habitual practice of celebrating Friday night dinner together so that it becomes an intrinsic part of their week.
“It’s really about happiness,” she said, “and all good things that stem from this ritual.”
That may include forms of Shabbat observance, but the planners, who have spent more than a year analyzing its methodology, have learned from focus groups and interviews that potential attendees have a good deal of anxiety about being asked to take part in an evening with a religious ritual component.
“‘What will be expected of me? What’s the catch?’ they ask,” said Kline, who formerly was founding executive director of Mayyim Hayyim, the inclusive, all-service mikvah in Boston, and a seasoned pro in interpreting and adapting ancient rituals for 21st century, largely unaffiliated Jews.
She acknowledged that young people are wary of what she called “the bait and switch,” like being invited to take part in an organized Shabbat program that has an ulterior motive, encouraging at least some form of observance.
One Table goes easy on the ritual. Challah and wine are popular components, as are candles. But when it comes to reciting the appropriate blessings associated with each, that depends on the hosts, the guests, and their being at ease with each other. Hosts and guests are recruited, and apply online. Hosts are screened in advance and coached to create a welcoming environment by the One Table team. That may include tips on how to mix drinks, set an appealing dinner table — ideally for eight to 10 guests — and calibrate the level of Shabbat customs.
“We want everyone to feel authentic and be themselves,” said Kline. “If you normally wear a kipa, wear one. The issue is to be open and minimize awkward moments.”
One Table has a resident rabbi, Jessica Minnen, who trains hosts in the evening’s ritual aspects they may choose to observe, based on their comfort level; she may explain the washing of the hands before breaking bread, or the direction the person making kiddush, if the ritual is being observed, should be looking while reciting the blessing.
But Kline emphasizes inclusivity as a guiding principle. “We welcome Jews and non-Jews, and the food need not be kosher. What it should be is delicious and memorable.”
To that end One Table takes advantage of the rise of social dining programs (planned group dinners centered around a theme) and quick food delivery. In dealing with those who may be reluctant to host a Friday night meal because they don’t cook or can’t afford it, the organization offers financial as well as social and Judaic support. Besides hosting a dinner at home, options include eating out at a restaurant.
Cara Akselrad, an actor in New York, explained in a One Table video that though she rarely cooks, One Table made it possible for her to order online and serve a Friday night dinner. “I like when all my friends are together,” she said, and appreciated that the experience “allowed me to be me” and to host the event at home.
Though it began last summer in experimental form, One Table is now ramping up its programming here, with about 300 dinners under its belt, and plans to expand to other cities, starting with Chicago.
“It’s all about making Friday night special,” Kline says, with the hope that the project, and the habit, will grow and lead to other forms of Jewish engagement.
The 100 Point Challenge
Another innovative program, Bring Israel Home, is geared specifically to Birthright participants, starting with a challenge to them on the bus while they are still in Israel. It’s based on a glaring statistic and an insightful observation.
The statistic, from a 2009 Brandeis University study of Birthright’s impact, is that only 4 percent of its alumni participated in five or more “Jewish activities” after the trip. “Activities” could mean simply visiting a Jewish museum, reading an Israeli news article or cooking an Israeli meal.
Rabbi Yitz Greenman, executive director of Aish Hatorah New York, an Orthodox educational outreach program, says he was shocked by that finding. “We felt we had to address that figure,” he told me.
In researching how best to motivate Birthright participants, his staff, in consultation with Birthright Next and other Birthright trip providers, determined that top-down programs and incentives often meet resistance. What the young people wanted most was to stay in touch with each other after their return from Israel.
“We wanted to take their experience and turn it into action,” Rabbi Greenman explained. So Aish came up with he calls “the carrot”: a weekend retreat with fellow Birthrighters from their group of 40 bus mates, plus the Israeli participants — IDF soldiers who accompanied them for part of the Israel visit — flown in for the reunion.
To earn the reward, at least 30 of the 40 participants have to complete “100 points of Jewish activity in the three months following their trip.” Points are awarded based on the nature of the activity in the categories of Jewish education, Jewish experiences, Shabbat and holidays, and Israel, so the young people can choose for themselves. Options include 20 points for attending a weekend Hillel retreat, 15 points for hosting a Shabbat meal (with One Table, by the way), down to under 10 points for cooking an Israeli food, taking a Hebrew class or interviewing a Holocaust survivor. The participants go online and log in proof of their activities.
Adam Yormack, 29, raised as a Reform Jew and married to a devout Catholic in Miami Beach, Fla. is one of several participants who catalogued their 100 points in a booklet published by Aish. He described his sense of accomplishment in hosting a family seder for the first time and interacting with a rabbi. “Sounds silly,” he wrote, “but I hadn’t spoken to a rabbi about my faith, my lack of attendance, my life, since I was a child.”
An upcoming mega-retreat, the project’s most ambitious to date, will host 11 different Birthright groups, with 60 IDF soldiers being flown in to participate at a camp site in rural Pennsylvania.
The program, funded in part by the Paul Singer Foundation, has generated enthusiasm among those seeking ways to engage young Jews. Perhaps the most unusual pairing was having the Union for Reform Judaism sign up with Aish. Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the URJ, acknowledges it is “an unlikely partnership,” but said “it’s having a positive impact and we want to collaborate in all kinds of ways that will strengthen Jewish life.”
He noted that the Birthright Israel trip creates “a spark,” but the community hasn’t generated a lasting connection to keep it lit.
Efforts like One Table and Bring Israel Home underscore the appeal of empowering young people to engage their peers in ways that fit their lifestyle, utilizing social media and technology trends. The Birthright Israel Foundation no doubt is taking these successes into account as it decides what comes next after Birthright Next.
What’s clear is that no one organization can or should be expected to take on this major challenge of engaging a generation of young people in Jewish life. And there is no one formula that appeals to all. Meanwhile, tens of millions of dollars, and the future direction of the Jewish community, are riding on the outcome.
MUSINGS
Rabbi David Wolpe
Rabbi David Wolpe
Music Hath Charms
The Psalmist tells us that he will solve a riddle with his harp (Psalm 49:5). What sort of riddle can be solved with a harp?
We are accustomed to thinking of problems as puzzles requiring a single analyzable solution. Can my car fit into this parking space and should I marry this person seem to us in some essential way similar — there is a right and wrong answer, and we need to weigh the factors and arrive at the proper response. The Psalmist is reminding us that some problems are not answered, but dissolved or transcended.
When we feel sad or puzzled or hurt, the harp may be the answer. Music has the power to move beyond words. It offers us access to a realm that can be felt better than it can be understood. I could describe a song to you all day long, but a moment’s listening will tell you far more than any description.
King David played a harp (or its ancient equivalent, the lyre) and found in its notes the answers to some of the urgent questions of his life. Sometimes when the music begins, our questioning grows quiet and the air swells with a meaning far beyond words.
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.
A street scene in Greece. Hilary Danailova
TRAVEL
Immigration Then And Now
Hilary Danailova
Travel Writer
At a seaside café near the Greek-Albanian border, during halftime of last week’s European Champions League soccer match between Barcelona and Munich, I got an unexpected lesson in the European perspective on immigration, minorities and diaspora.
As Barcelona scored again and again, my husband commented to the genial Greek bartender that he’d heard a lot of Albanian spoken on the streets of the Epirus region; having studied social sciences, he was curious about the local Albanian minority. That was the word he used — minority — which many people understand to be a group distinct in some way from the majority population.
But according to the bartender, those Albanians were not a minority. An ethnic minority in European terms, he explained, is a group of people who historically lived someplace before borders shifted, rendering them a minority in another people’s land — a kind of pre-existing condition, if you will.
After the wars of the 1940s uprooted long-established Albanian and Slavic communities of Northern Greece, virtually no Albanians lived among the Epirus Greeks until an influx of economic migrants began in the post-Cold War years. By this logic, the Albanian residents of Epirus are new immigrants — and not the official ethnic minorities accorded special status by European Union governments. The bartender was friendly and his tone was thoughtful, not strident, but the subtext of ethnic tension was clear.
It was an eye-opening conversation for this American — revealing the way travel can reshape perspective, especially in a time of social unrest. And it took place during my first trip to Europe since the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris, which ignited an already-simmering debate over anti-Semitism, immigrant anxieties and the prospects for Europe’s Jewish minorities.
On the surface, Europe’s bars, boulevards and beaches seemed tranquil, humming with the slow rhythm of the not-quite-summer crowds. But on the news each night, large groups of dark-skinned migrants from across Africa and the Middle East were shuffling off boats at the Continent’s southern fringe. Thousands were dying in the choppy Mediterranean; thousands more waited in border zones as already-overwhelmed European countries, struggling to cope with underemployed populations, mulled what to do about this new tsunami of desperation.
As I flipped through a New York Times Magazine article about British-raised jihadists, I reflected on the ironies of immigration. Those British-raised South Asians and Arabs lured into ISIS had parents who themselves had followed the hopeful, desperate course of the migrants now splashing across the Mediterranean. They resettled entire families in the West, but the tensions — and stigmas — of minority life and immigrant culture remain complex challenges.
Across Europe, there is also an invisible layer of immigration that outsiders might not notice. Bosnians, Bulgarians and Albanians don’t stand out visually in Oslo or Athens the way Sudanese might. But their languages, cultures and — especially — religions are not those of the surrounding majorities in their chosen lands, and the locals aren’t always welcoming. Secular Jews can be similarly invisible, but again, not standing out doesn’t mean you always fit in.
Jews have a particularly tortuous and tortured history as European minorities. From Dublin to Donetsk, Jews have migrated repeatedly throughout the diaspora — assimilating for centuries before being uprooted again, often rising to elite levels in politics, the arts and scholarship, and resettling as circumstances shift. The debate over whether a Jewish religious minority has a home in contemporary Europe comes in the context of a Continent that is rapidly changing, diversifying ineluctably against a backdrop of global inequities.
When American Jews travel in Europe, we frequently do so on two levels of cultural inquiry. We seek to explore both the historic society of the places we visit — in this case, Northern Greece — and the local Jewish culture, past or present. In Epirus, where only a handful of Jews remain from a once-vibrant Romaniote community, it can be instructive to observe the way Albanians, Italians and other recent arrivals are subtly reshaping the cultural geography.
Proud of their foundational role in Western culture, Greeks are understandably anxious about the changes that are transforming their country. A good deal of this anxiety comes not from the influx of settlers, but from the outflow of Greek-born émigrés — a generation of well-educated youth, disillusioned by a dysfunctional economy at home, that is itself becoming a minority in the wealthier corners of Western Europe.
To drive across northern Greece is to traverse a landscape that is startling in its emptiness. Hundreds of miles of mountains and fields are completely devoid of human civilization, with no cars on the highways, no gas stations or cafés along the route, and only thick forests where villages might once have thrived.
All of which makes the lively, ethnically diverse towns of the Epirus coast such a relief. We spent evenings in cafés listening to the chatter of multiple languages, while the crowd strolling at dusk was heterogeneous in every way: age, ethnicity, race. As I savored the pleasures I expect from Greece — fresh fish; sunsets over the Mediterranean — I reflected that while our observations may be uncomfortable, travel is all the more meaningful for the discoveries we don’t expect.
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Jeremy Piven Pens New Book As Entourage Agent Ari Gold
Alan Zeitlin
Contributing Writer
If you’re going to use shtick, you’d better lay it on thick. Jeremy Piven does exactly that, making appearances as Ari Gold, the Jewish super-agent on HBO’s Entourage, in promotion of his new book, The Gold Standard: Rules To Rule By.
At an event at Barnes & Noble in Union Square, Tuesday night, hundreds gathered to hear the agent speak. He was asked what advice he would give Tom Brady.
“He makes anywhere between 20 and let’s say $50 million dollars a year, he’s married to Giselle, he has three super bowl rings,” he said. “I think he’s doing just fine. Let’s be honest. There's so many other things in the NFL to worry about besides, you know, the size of Tom Brady’s balls.”
The agent also spoke about the actor.
“I don’t think Piven’s winning right now,” he said to laughter. “I think Piven’s losing. I don’t know who is on his team or what they were smoking when they advised him to go do London Season Four of Mr. Selfridge.”
As for next month’s hotly anticipated Entourage film, which will definitely be the crowd’s cup of tea, Piven stayed in Gold character saying, “I don’t know what that is,” before adding that Vincent Chase will be starring in a movie coming out next month. On the show, Chase is Gold’s main client, whom he finds time to help get roles while he spends much of his time being a wheeler-dealer in Hollywood.
While the authorship is made purposefully ambiguous (perhaps penned by HBO writers with Piven) the book flies by. It is a jolting and Jewlicious juggernaut, replete with enough knee-slappers to make you need a cane after reading. There’s so much motivational power here, it could leave Tony Robbins toothless and Abraham Lincoln Booth-less. Surprisingly, there are not as many references to Entourage as you’d expect which means you can enjoy the book if you haven’t seen the show.
There are references to methods of manipulation, as well as the idea that looking back on the past doesn’t help. Piven cites examples like the biblical story of Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt and his grandparents building a tunnel to escape the Nazis.
Aside from a few lines about Charlie Sheen that don’t quite hit the mark, the book sticks to incisive rhetoric and delivers substance. Among his 18 rules (Chai anyone?), he explains that controversy is valuable and having enemies is necessary. Gold mentions his conservative Jewish mother and the catalyst for his success (getting insulted by a hotshot named Chaim Roth), which fueled his fire.
Some guidelines to live by: a meeting shouldn’t last more than 20 minutes, a phone call shouldn’t last more than two minutes, lunch should be a sandwich eaten at your desk and you should tell the most important part of the truth to people.
As for holidays, Chanukah was invented by Jewish toymakers and Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are a time when Hollywood “shuts down for a couple of days and the handful of Catholics out there get a crack at trying to make something happen,” he writes.
Piven is proud of his Judaism and he once hosted a Fashion Rocks show at Radio City Musical Hall where he boastfully showed a bar mitzvah picture of himself. As Gold, he claimed that WWE’s The Rock came to his daughter’s bat mitzvah.
It was a happy moment but he believes that emotion is only fleeting. “Happiness is a booty call--available and satisfying, but after a few hours you’re ready to call an Uber and get back to your real commitments,” he writes, adding that people who are bubbly all the time might be on drugs.
Gold is one of the most exalted (and abhorred) Jewish characters in television history. His zingers land with hilarious punches, though some deride his focus on money and crude language and the way he berates his assistant, Lloyd. But his character cares about his family, his friends and at the end of a profanity pocked day, he has a good heart.
He also explained a rule that’s not in the book. He doesn’t do social media. “If I was doing selfies and taking pictures of radicchio you’d be sick of me you wouldn’t want to buy this book.”
TOP STORIES
A Tougher Reform Road To Conversion
Stephen Wise’s revamped program signals new rigor for ‘transformative’ step.
Amy Sara Clark
Staff Writer
Conversion student Melissa Hume and Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch discuss prayers for Shabbat in Stephen Wise Free Synagogue’s sanctuary.
When Johanna Rauth began looking for a synagogue where she could go through the process of converting to Judaism, one program stood out. Instead of taking about 12 months to complete, the program took 18. Instead of requiring an average of 16 weeks of classes, the program required 30. She signed up.
“I liked the way that they took it seriously. I felt that I would really learn there as much as I can learn,” said Rauth, a 31-year-old internist who is currently earning a master’s in public health.
The program is at Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, an 800-family Reform synagogue on the Upper West Side. When its leaders decided to increase the requirements of its program a year and a half ago — a move that puts it at odds with much of the rest of the liberal movement — they weren’t sure how potential students would react.
“We assumed that most people would want to go to other programs in the city that expected less of them,” said the synagogue’s senior rabbi, Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch.
They were pleasantly surprised. Fourteen students are currently in the program, and two, including Rauth, have completed it. Another five are in conversation with the synagogue about joining the program.
“I think there is a group of people who are exploring Judaism who really take it very, very seriously and they don’t want it to be less than an optimally fulfilling experience,” said Rabbi Hirsch. “They want it to be challenging. ... They realize they’re undergoing a really transformative transition and they’re honored that people want to give them so much attention.”
Melissa Hume, 27, who teaches preschool at Stephen Wise Free Synagogue and is in the process of converting, was attracted to the substantive nature of Stephen Wise’s program.
“It really resonated with my personal experience and my interest in learning,” she said. “I just felt like there was so much history and tradition that I didn’t know about, so I knew going in that this was what was going to get me to a place of understanding.”
Stephen Wise Free Synagogue’s decision to revamp its conversion program comes at a time when religious identity has become increasingly fluid.
A study by the Pew Research Center, “America’s Changing Religious Landscape,” released last week, reported that 34 percent of Americans have a religious identity different from the one in which they were raised, up from 28 percent in 2007. If people switching from one Protestant denomination to another are included, the percentage rises to 42. The study also found that 17 percent of Jews were raised in a different religion.
While some Reform congregations have increased the requirements of their conversion programs, Stephen Wise Free Synagogue’s program has “unusually substantial requirements,” said Rabbi Howard Jaffe, who co-chairs the Reform movement’s Joint Commission on Outreach.
“This is more stringent and a more significant commitment than we’ve seen in almost any community ... not only in the Reform movement but outside of the Reform movement,” he said.
“It’s very easy for rabbis to feel pressured into making this happen more quickly then is appropriate ... especially when someone comes forward because they are getting married,” he added. “I am pleased to see an expectation of an 18-month process with such significant requirements because we want to be certain that everyone is as sincere as possible and as committed as possible about becoming Jewish.”
In most Reform congregations, students are first sent off to take an introduction to Judaism class of between 12 and 20 weeks with students from other synagogues. Then they work with a rabbi at their own synagogue for several months, said Jaffe.
Some programs are even shorter. At Judaism by Choice in Los Angeles, students have the option of taking the classes, which run three hours and 15 minutes, twice a week, allowing students to complete the program’s 58.5 hours of conversion coursework in as little as three months.
Rabbi Neal Weinberg, the program’s rabbinic director, said the appropriate length of time for conversion entirely depends on the student’s background. Eighteen months, he said, “could be good for some people who come in not knowing anything.” But, he said, “A lot of people, when they make the decision to convert to Judaism, it’s something they’ve been thinking about for a long time. ... If they know Hebrew already, if they’ve lived in Israel,” a shorter length of study makes sense, he said.
In Stephen Wise Free Synagogue’s revamped program, students attend a weekly two-hour class for 30 weeks taught by Stephen Wise clergy, then spend the summer doing an independent project. They finish the program with a course of individual study with a member of the synagogue’s clergy.
“We wanted to be able to ensure the very high standards that we wanted,” Rabbi Hirsch said. The goal, he said, is to make each student “into a terrific, knowledgeable and articulate Jew. Somebody who would be able to, on their own, live a full Jewish life.”
He added that with the American Jewish community shrinking, “it is very important for all of the congregations to put a lot of attention on embracing people who want to explore becoming a Jew.”
Stephen Wise’s program strongly encourages students’ Jewish partners to participate in the class, to strengthen Judaism for the entire family.
Rauth said her participation in the program got her husband, a secular Israeli, more interested in Judaism. The couple even began watching videos on Jewish topics together in the evening. “It connected my husband again to his Jewish roots,” she said.
In addition to the academic portion of Stephen Wise’s program, students are also required to begin practicing Judaism. “Right from day one ... irrespective of what they feel, they get into the habit of observing Shabbat, of lighting candles, saying blessings over the wine and challah and having people over for Shabbat dinner,” Rabbi Hirsch said.
They are also encouraged to take part in services and other synagogue programs such as Torah study and volunteer work.
“Something that’s very important to us is that our students are fully immersed into the culture of the synagogue right away,” said Associate Rabbi Diana Fersko. “We’ve seen engagement really flourish.”
Rabbi Hirsch agreed. “From the moment they start studying, they come to services on a regular basis, they interact with our clergy on a regular basis, they observe on a weekly basis and they support each other academically as well as emotionally.”
The emotional support is a key aspect of the program. Because the students not only see each other in class but also at services and other synagogue events, they quickly form a cohesive community.
“Because we were all in a similar situation, they [the other students] could really relate to the thoughts I had and the process I went though. We could help each other and encourage each other. It was very, very helpful,” said Rauth, who grew up in Germany and moved to New York with her Israeli husband 18 months ago.
“Judaism is all about community, and being in a class with a lot of people and to go through the process with them is a very good step towards this community feeling,” she added.
Hume, who, in addition to teaching preschool is earning a master’s degree in psychology at Hunter College, also finds the support of the other students helpful.
“It’s nice to have that feeling of not doing it by yourself,” she said. “Everyone who is part of the group is coming to Judaism through totally different paths, but we’re all sharing that transitional moment of really this identity shift, of becoming part of this community that none of us were a part of before.”
Asked if holding a full-time job while attending grad school ever makes her wish the program were less demanding, Hume said that sometimes it does.
“Every once in awhile I think, I wish I could get to the mikvah, I wish we could formalize this, that I could just be Jewish already,” she said. “But I’m always reminded that it’s not just about you becoming Jewish. It’s about you becoming part of the Jewish community and that just takes time and it takes effort. And I have to say I really appreciate that approach.”
Interfaith Push To Muslims Could Face Headwinds
In wake of Pew study, outreach effort seen as ‘the great challenge of the 21st century.’
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
The Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom brings together Muslim and Jewish women. Courtesy of Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom
With the Muslim population of America more than doubling in the last seven years, according to the recently released Pew Research Center survey, “America’s Changing Religious Landscape,” the Jewish community appears poised to ramp up its outreach to Muslims.
According to one prominent Jewish leader of interfaith activities, relations with Muslims Americans are now “the great challenge of the 21st century.”
Rabbi Noam Marans, director of interreligious and intergroup relations at the American Jewish Committee, said the AJC, recognizing this demographic fact, is just one of several Jewish organizations that have increased their outreach to the Muslim community in recent years and usually found members of the Muslim faith to be willing partners.
“The overwhelming majority of U.S. Muslims are people of goodwill who want to contribute to the positive American mosaic and see interreligious relations as the key to the American ethos,” Rabbi Marans said.
Deeper ties with Muslims would constitute something of a pivot point for the Jewish community, as Jewish-Christian relations have long been the focus of the interfaith effort. But relations with mainline Protestants — once key partners with Jews in the struggle over civil rights two generations ago — have been severely strained in recent years over Israel. The Presbyterians, Methodists and the United Church of Christ have led the effort to impose economic sanctions on Israel for its perceived policies on the West Bank. (In what could be a good sign for some in the Jewish community, the percentage of mainline Protestants fell by 3.4 points since 2007, according to the Pew study.)
The percentage of Americans who identify as Muslims, 0.9 percent, is still far less than the figure for Jewish Americans — 1.9 percent, according to Pew. But the growing number of Muslims — they represented 0.4 percent of the U.S. population in 2007 — reinforces predictions demographers have made for a generation that they will equal or surpass the Jewish population in the U.S. in a matter of decades.
“With demographic changes, [Muslims] become an important factor in the lives of many cities” and in that of the cities’ Jewish residents, said Ethan Felson, senior vice president of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs.
But a visible push for Jewish outreach to Muslims could run into some strong headwinds. Many members of the Jewish community tend to join other non-Muslims in this country in asking, “Where are the moderate Muslims?” and questioning what the fidelity of Muslims who take part in dialogue activities will be if the Middle East heats up again and public sentiment turns against Israel.
Representatives of Jewish organizations that coordinate joint activities with the Muslim community agreed that what they described as “the elephant in the room,” the often deteriorating political and military conditions in the Middle East peace process, presents a challenge that all the Jewish and Muslim participants circumvent by an agreeing-to-disagree approach. And then there is the increasing prominence of confrontational activist Pamela Geller. Her American Freedom Defense Initiative has sponsored bus posters that many people see as anti-Muslim and incendiary, and the AFDI sponsored this month’s Muhammad cartoon contest in Garland, Texas, where two jihadists were killed in a shootout with police. All of that, observers say, further complicates the work of Muslim-Jewish “dialogue” groups.
The Jews and Muslims in interfaith organizations either accept that they hold divergent points of view on the Israeli-Palestinian impasse, without allowing that disagreement to poison the relationship on issues on which they agree — or they intentionally postpone any discussions of the Middle East at all until both sides have established positions of mutual trust.
The latter is the policy of chapters of the Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom, an independent, all-women organization founded a few years ago by Sheryl Olitzky, a marketing consultant in central New Jersey who has a background in social activism. She established the Sisterhood with Atiya Aftab, a Muslim attorney who serves as a leader of her mosque in the same area of New Jersey.
The Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom brings together Jews and Muslims to pray and travel together and break each other’s mutual stereotypes. While it has maintained a low profile in much of the Jewish community, it has grown to more than a dozen chapters across the United States, including several in the greater New York area, each co-led by a Jewish and a Muslim woman.
The participants do not introduce discussions of the Middle East situation into their meetings for the first year and a half, Olitzky said. Participants agree that “it’s OK to be pro-Israel, it’s OK to be pro-Palestinian.”
The Sisterhood represents the new face — and the new faces — of Jewish dialogue and know-your-neighbor activities in this country.
“There is a recognition that the American Muslim community is growing exponentially,” said Rabbi Marc Schneier, founder of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, which coordinates leadership-level activities with a variety of ethnic and religious groups – especially, in the last decade (in addition to such emerging groups as Hispanics and Asians) with Muslims.
Such dialogue and joint activities are supplanting the type of Jewish-Christian dialogue work that dominated interfaith activities for much of the last century, and the black-Jewish community-building activities that were common in recent decades, Rabbi Schneier and other experts contacted by The Jewish Week said.
The last few years have seen a growth in organizations dedicated to the Muslim-Jewish relationship. Most of them, like the Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom, are formed at the grassroots level, and centered around hands-on social action work.
Some chapters have done such social action work as preparing sandwiches for homeless shelters, said Faria Abedin, a Bangladesh native and Princeton resident who serves as the Sisterhood’s national co-president. “Both of our religions are deeply rooted in charitable work. It’s a natural commonality.
Abedin said the Jewish women she has met through the Sisterhood “have become part of my life. It breaks down barriers to know people as human beings.”
“Sometimes talk isn’t enough,” said Daniel Zeltser, associate executive director of the Kings Bay Y, a founder of the Young Peace Builders, whose teenage participants work together in local soup kitchens and do other volunteer work for the homeless. The teens, Zeltser said, “want something that’s local. It’s your neighbor.”
Many of these new Muslim-Jewish encounters take place in members’ home, instead of synagogues and mosques or community centers.
These activities tend to attract like-minded, open-minded members of both faiths who accept dealing with individuals whom other members of their own groups fear or do not know well. They tend to be successful in building “intense” relationships because of the “contact theory” of sociology, Olitzky said – you’re unlikely to hate someone you have come to know well.
Other examples of the recent increase in grassroots/hands-on efforts are New York University’s Of Many Institute, founded by Rabbi Yehuda Sarna and Imam Kahlid Latif; the Young Peace Builders in southern Brooklyn, under the auspices of the Kings Bay Y, Turkish Cultural Center and heavily Turkish Amity School; informal interfaith work coordinated by Raysh Weiss, a rabbinical student at the Jewish Theological Seminary, including a break-fast event last year at the Malcolm Shabbaz Mosque in Harlem; and the Jewish Community Relations Council’s Center for Community Leadership, JCRC’s coalition-building arm.
A major part of the JCRC’s outreach activities is devoted to the Muslim community.
“We don’t do Muslim-Jewish ‘dialogue,’” said Rabbi Robert Kaplan, the Center’s director. Instead, he said, participants work together on such issues as services for aging immigrants, renovations of houses of worship, and education about each other’s religious requirements.
“More and more grassroots initiatives have grabbed hold of a similar set of methods – small-scale encounters, home hospitality, joint community service, visiting each other’s house of worship,” Rabbi Sarna said in an email interview. “We are seeing much less ‘sage on the stage’ dialogues between two religious leaders. People have come to recognize that this format does not really affect ‘the street.’ The most important discussions between Muslims and Jews are not about theology, but about lived experience.”
Olitzky said she intentionally limited the membership of her new organization, which she called the only such interfaith group in the country dedicated to Jewish and Islamic women, to one gender. The women “would pull in the men,” she said. “It’s really difficult to be Muslim or Jewish in the Christian world we live in. We find we share much more in common with each other than we do with Christian women.”
Next year the Sisterhood will sponsor a joint trip to Albania and Kosovo, to see living examples of Jews and Muslims who have protected each other.
Olitzky and Aftab will participate in a panel discussion after a one-woman play, “Unveiled,” about post-9/11 Islamophobia, performed by actress Rohina Malik at the 4th Street Theatre in Manhattan on June 4. The pair will discuss their respective religion’s perspective on issues raised in the play.
“One of the objectives … is to foster a dialogue between Muslim and non-Muslim theatergoers,” Olitzky said.
She said the rhetoric of Pamela Geller “just reinforces” the commitment of the participants of the Sisterhood. Muslim and Jewish women continue to meet each other and learn about each other, she said. “This is the way we change the world. We are changing the world, one Jewish and one Muslim woman at a time.”
New Rules Pave Way For Polish Expat Pensions
Move marks first time U.S. Holocaust survivors can apply formonthly payments from Polish government.
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
Lusia Eimer. Courtesy of Lusia Eimer.
Thousands of Holocaust survivors originally from Poland — more than 3,000 in New York alone — will for the first time be receiving applications to apply for $130-a-month pension payments from Poland, thanks to a law that took effect last month, The Jewish Week has learned.
The law is expected to benefit nearly 20,000 survivors worldwide.
Gideon Taylor, chair of operations at the World Jewish Restitution Organization, said his organization has been negotiating with Poland for the past six months to ensure that theapplication process is as easy as possible. He said arrangements were finalized after he flew to Warsaw last Thursday.
“There was a strong case made that it would be an important step for Poland to recognize these former Polish citizens,” he said, noting that most Jewish survivors of the Holocaust who live in Poland have been receiving the same pension since at least 1991.
But Holocaust survivor Lusia Eimer, 86, of Forest Hills, remains skeptical. “I can’t believe Poland will pay anything,” she said. “I’ll believe it when I see it because Poland is not so ready to give out money.”
In fact, Poland is the only country in Eastern Europe that has refused to create a claims process to permit the restitution of private property owned by Jews before the Holocaust, according to Greg Schneider, executive vice president of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
He said his office is sending out 12,500 applications to those believed eligible worldwide. The forms have been translated into English. The government of Israel is expected to send applications to another 7,000 of its citizens.
One of the things preventing Polish Jews who live outside of Poland from receiving the same pension as Polish residents was the requirement that the pension be automatically deposited in a bank in Poland. The new rules permit direct deposit into foreign bank accounts. The change was approved a year ago by the Polish parliament and President Bronisław Komorowski, and took effect last October for residents of the European Union and last month for those in the rest of the world.
Sebastian Rejak, the Polish foreign minister’s special envoy for relations with the Jewish diaspora, told The Times of Israel last year that the change was made because the old procedure was “cumbersome for many potential claimants.” The change means the Polish government will bear the cost of wiring money to claimants abroad.
The Polish government, Rejak was quoted as saying, has a special sympathy for Holocaust survivors and wishes to do “justice to those who suffered during the war — that’s how we see our responsibility to care for these people. … Ethnic criteria are irrelevant, but we acted with a special sensitivity for the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. …”
Schneider noted that Polish law “insists that the form be filled out in Polish. Most of the form asks for names, places and dates, but there is one part in which the applicant must describe what happened to him, so we are enclosing in the mailing a list of agencies” whose staffs have been trained to help complete the application.
In New York, the Selfhelp Community Services — Holocaust Survivor Program and several JCCs are among the organizations prepared to help survivors. Officials stress there is no need to hire a lawyer.
The WJRO put the latest information on the program online, including all the information mailed to survivors and a list of organizations prepared to help survivorsfill out the application at www.polishrestitution.com/pensions.
The pension program, known as the Legislation on War Veterans and Victims of War and Post-War Oppression, offers the monthly payments to both Jews and non-Jews who were detained by the Nazis in ghettos, prisons, concentration camps, extermination camps, or similar places of detention; forcibly deported to the Soviet Union; served in the Polish military, the Polish units of the Allied militaries, or in the Polish underground during World War II; or is otherwise considered a veteran or a victim of oppression.
Because the new law requires also that a Polish veterans group vouch for the legitimacy of each claim, Schneider said the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants and the World Federation of Child Holocaust Survivors have both agreed to provide letters of endorsement.
In addition, because the Polish law requires applicants to have a Polish address, the WJRO arranged for the Auschwitz Jewish Center, under the aegis of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, to use its address for free for those who need it.
“The Polish government will send letters to survivors there, and the center will forward them to the survivors,” Schneider said.
“We’re trying to make it easy for survivors to comply,” he added.
Eimer said she knows of fellow Polish survivors living here who could use the pension. And she said she is pleasantly surprised that Poland has agreed to make the payments. Poland has long claimed it could not afford to make restitution to Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
Julius Berman, president of the Claims Conference, said in a statement, “The payments can make a real difference helping elderly survivors meet their daily needs and provides them a long-delayed measure of justice.”
Eimer said her survival in Poland during the Holocaust was nothing short of “a miracle.” She was born and raised in Kalisz near the German border, believed to be the oldest Jewish community in Poland. On the eve of World War II it was reportedly home to 20,000 Jews.
On Sept. 1, 1939, just days before Eimer’s 11th birthday, the Nazis invaded Poland. She said she, her parents and her older sister fled briefly before being caught. She was sent to the Lodz ghetto while her parents and sister were murdered in the Chelmno extermination camp.
“I was chosen by the president of the ghetto to be his foster child,” she recalled. “He had 10 boys and 10 girls in his home and kept us safe until they liquidated the ghetto in 1944. I was sent to Auschwitz and after two weeks … I volunteered to go to Hamburg to help rebuild homes that had been bombed by the Allies. I was there 10 months until they sent us all to Bergen-Belsen [concentration camp]. I was there for one week — starving — before the English liberated us” in April 1945.
Knowing that she had no family left in Kalisz, Eimer said she went to Sweden and wrote a letter — without an address — to her mother’s brother in Brooklyn. He got it with the help of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and arranged for her to get a student visa to the United States. She arrived in 1947 and two years later met and married an American, Leo Eimer. They had three children.
“Everyone of us who survived, survived by a miracle,” Eimer said. “There are 120,000 people in Kalisz now and I don’t think any of them are Jews.”
‘Peeping Rabbi’ Victims Weigh In On Sentence
Emotional court sentencing leaves victims and synagogue members satisfied.
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
A court sketch of Rabbi Barry Freundel at last week’s sentencing. YouTube via JTA
At Rabbi Barry Freundel’s sentencing last Friday in a Washington, D.C., courtroom, 28-year-old Kate Bailey wore an orange cardigan to symbolize the prison uniform she hoped he would soon wear.
Along with about 15 other victims, she stood next to the rabbi and read a prepared statement detailing his abuses.
“I was nervous [that] I’d become emotional, but I was just angry,” said Bailey, who converted under Rabbi Freundel in 2008. She spent three to four hours a week doing clerical work for him at his home office without pay, where she was often alone with him in the house. In 2009, Rabbi Freundel called her to say she needed to go in the mikvah, or ritual bath, again to complete her conversion ritual because there was a problem with her first visit. She later found out that she had been recorded.
In the courtroom, she refused to look at the rabbi, though other victims addressed their comments directly to him. “I didn’t look down at him once,” she said. “I had nothing left to say to him.”
Bailey was among the 70 victims who crowded into the main courtroom along with family members. An additional 30 or so were in an overflow courtroom. Orange blouses, scarves and sweaters signaled their solidarity in advocating prison time for Rabbi Freundel.
Rabbi Freundel was sentenced to six-and-a-half years in prison for videotaping dozens of nude women at the ritual bath that is part of his former congregation, Kesher Israel. The rabbi, now 64, was arrested last October and charged with six counts of voyeurism.
“You repeatedly and secretly violated the trust your victims had in you and you abused your power,” Senior Judge Geoffrey Alprin of D.C. Superior Court said at the sentencing, the Washington Post reported. Alprin also fined Freundel more than $13,000.
Prosecutors were seeking a 17-year prison sentence for the rabbi.
“It’s not as long as we asked for, but I’m satisfied,” said Bailey. “I’m happy his crimes are being taken seriously.”
Bethany Mandel, another of Rabbi Freundel’s victims who testified at the sentencing, said she thought the sentence was fair.
“A lot of us worried that he would only be given a year,” she said. “We wanted this crime to be taken seriously, not for our own sake, but because if sexual crimes of this nature go largely unpunished, people will be more hesitant to press similar charges in the future.”
Congregation Kesher Israel, where Rabbi Freundel served for 25 years before being fired in December, released a statement on Friday pronouncing the sentence a turning point.
“Today’s decision turns a page in this dark chapter for our community,” the statement read. “Despite our pain, our community is moving forward."
Elanit Rothschild Jakabovics, president of the Kesher Israel board, told the Jewish Week in an email correspondence that social services and support groups are still being offered at the synagogue. “We still have a long road ahead and the wound still hurts, but I’m confident we can continue down this path of healing, unity, and communal growth,” she said.
The congregation is in the process of hiring an interim rabbi, she said.
Rabbi Freundel will appeal the sentence he received for 52 counts of misdemeanor voyeurism, according to his lawyer, Jeffery Harris, who said the sentence was “illegal.”
“I think the sentence is harsh but more importantly is illegal in that consecutive sentences are not permissible based on the law and the facts,” he wrote to the Jewish Week in an email correspondence. Rabbi Freundel was sentenced to 45 days on each of 52 counts of voyeurism to be served consecutively, which comes to 2,340 days in prison, just under than six-and-a-half years.
According to the guidelines on concurrent and consecutive sentences in the District of Columbia Sentencing and Criminal Code, convictions arising out of the same act or course of conduct are considered one conviction for the purpose of sentencing. However, separate and distinct events can be sentenced consecutively. According to the code, offenses that take place at different times or in different places are considered distinct events.
“I would be surprised if the court imposed a consecutive sentence when it was impermissible,” said Patrice Sultan, a Washington, D.C., defense attorney. Though she noted that there is a “gray area” when it comes to consecutive sentencing, deference is left to the court. “If multiple crimes were committed on multiple different dates, the court has discretion to run the sentences consecutively,” she said.
In addition to the 52 women Rabbi Freundel filmed while they were completely naked between March 4, 2012 and Sept. 19, 2014, he recorded an additional 100 women since April 2009 who were not part of the criminal complaint due to the statute of limitations.
Harris’ argument that all 52 counts should be considered one offense “could potentially undermine the argument that the other 100 victims fall outside the statute,” she added in an email following the interview.
At the mikvah, the rabbi used between one and three cameras, hiding the devices in a digital clock radio, a tissue box holder and a small tabletop fan, and aiming them at the toilet and shower in the mikvah dressing room, according to the prosecution’s memo explaining its sentencing recommendations.
According to Mandel, there was a smattering of applause in the courtroom after the sentence was read.
“It was more a collective exhale of relief,” she said.
In addition to his crimes, Rabbi Freundel videotaped himself engaged in “sexual situations” with “several women” who may not have consented to being recorded, according to the memo.
The prosecution’s memo also notes that Rabbi Freundel surreptitiously videotaped a domestic violence abuse victim in the bathroom and bedroom of a safe house that he had established for her.
“I thought I saw a holy man of God, a man whom I could trust to protect me from outside evils, but I have come to see the blackness which hid beneath the garments,” the victim said in a court document. “The dreadful symptoms I once banished have returned. … I dare not look at myself unclothed in a mirror, for it is a glaring reminder of what was taken and stolen.”
When this victim’s statement was read out loud in court on Friday, the judge visibly shook his head in dismay, said Mandel. She said it was the only time during the sentencing that the judge showed emotion.
During the sentencing, victims shared how Rabbi Freundel had taped them after advising them to seek refuge in the mikvah after traumatic life events. Karin Bleeg, 32, told the judge that the rabbi encouraged her to use the mikvah when her grandmother died and then recorded her, according to the Washington Post.
“This wasn’t just a camera in the mikvah,” said Mandel, who said she has since counseled several victims who have turned to her for support. “He violated women when they were most vulnerable. Six-and-a-half years does not seem like a lot if you really knew everything he did.”
In the statement Mandel read before the court, she called Rabbi Freundel a “sociopath” who “won’t stop” until he is “forced to.”
Though executive vice president of the Rabbinical Council of America Mark Dratch declined to comment on Freundel’s sentence, he said that the new conversion committee, created to prevent future abuses, will publish its findings at the end of June. Rabbi Freundel used to be in charge of the Council’s conversion policies.
Though the sentencing afforded closure to some, Bailey said the “ordeal” has caused her to question her place in Orthodoxy.
“It wasn’t just about voyeurism — this whole experience highlighted vulnerabilities in the Orthodox system. The way women are treated, the way converts are treated — so much work is needed,” she said. “Maybe it’s just not for me anymore.”
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