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In an exclusive report from Nepal, our Contributing Editor Nathan Jeffay offers a first-hand look at the inspiring work of the 150-strong Israeli medical team, helping to save lives in the wake of a devastating earthquake.INTERNATIONAL
At IDF Hospital In Nepal, Healing And Heartbreak
Israel’s 150-strong medical staff seen as lifesaver amid the rubble.
Nathan Jeffay
Contributing Editor
Medical clown Smadar Harpats gets a smile from an injured Nepalese boy at IDF field hospital. Photos By Nathan Jeffay/JW
Kathmandu, Nepal — An 18-year-old lies on a bed at the entrance of a tent, with an injured head and just a stub where his right arm used to be. “When I saw him I thought he was dead,” said his father, Bim Mahi.
Nearby, there’s a new baby in an incubator, a woman clinging to life in the intensive care unit, a soldier praying in the synagogue, and a triage full of Nepalese who are flocking here based on word-of-mouth reports about the treatment on offer.
It’s just a normal day at Israel’s field hospital in Nepal, still reeling after a 7.8-magnitude earthquake rocked the country on April 25; the death toll now stands at more than 7,500.
One of the first faces that many of the patients see here is that of Avi Alpert, a U.S. immigrant to Israel who had no obligation to conscript to the army but signed up and put himself through basic training at age 42. Now, seven years later, the sense of duty that first got him into uniform has brought him to this makeshift Kathmandu facility.
As of Tuesday night, the field hospital has treated almost 1,000 patients, delivered seven babies — all of them healthy — and performed 50 surgeries. Its team, consisting of nearly 150 medical professionals here as part of their full-time army service or as reservists, sleeps in tiny one-man or two-man tents: even revered doctors like Jonathan Halevy, director-general of Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Centre, finds rest under canvas after a grueling shift.
Around here, Alpert is Mr. Clockwork: the man who keeps the emergency room running smoothly, which, in turn, keeps the whole place running smoothly. Despite the fact that we’re standing amid a collection of tents in a large field, doctors are walking around with tablets inputting digital records and people are waiting well under an hour to be seen. It’s a setup that “any emergency department in the world would envy,” said Alpert, a Baltimorean who used to work in New York.
Referral to the various departments is fast — so much so there’s a joke that Tel Avivans will soon start discovering that the quickest way to get a specialist appointment with an Israeli doctor is to fly to Nepal.
Mahi had never met an Israeli before his son was transferred here a few days after the quake. But when he hears the word Israel he smiles, and compliments the care. “Now we’re not worrying for his life as we were at the beginning,” he said.
Sitting on the young man’s bed is 52-year-old Baruch Antolovich, who lives in the Swiss Alps, where he runs a bed-and-breakfast. “I heard on Saturday about the earthquake, began to think, and then on Sunday night, my wife said: ‘So, are you going?’”
Antolovich, originally from Los Angeles, lived in Israel for 12 years from 1995, but has no military training. He also has no medical background. But he’s volunteered in disaster zones in the past, and decided to fly to Kathmandu at his own expense and appoint himself as hospital gofer. “I empty garbage cans, pick up garbage from the floor, feed patients — the stuff nobody really wants to do,” he said. “Everybody has a part.” He added: “I think we’re to be a light to the nation and this is a good example without words, which speaks for itself.”
A few other diaspora Jews have turned up here, including a nurse from New York and a doctor from San Francisco — but Antolovich is the only non-medic. He has been taking food to the young man who lost his arm, and feeding him when relatives are not on hand. “We have a kind of friendship now,” Antolovich commented. “He always has a big smile for me when I come to see him.”
Some of the heroism here takes place away from the bedsides, and in the back rooms. For example, when Pemba, a 15-year-old boy who had been trapped under rubble for five days, arrived, it was the advanced onsite lab that enabled him to survive.
Amazingly, he didn’t have a single visible injury, but there were serious concerns about the effect that spending so long under the rubble would have on his bodily functions. “We did lab tests on him all through the night,” said Olga Garachevsky, standing amid dozens of samples ready for analysis. Pemba received treatment for the impact of his entrapment, and is now recovering smoothly in another hospital — a far cry from the post-trauma care that many Nepalese, especially those in outlying areas, are receiving.
Every day among these tents is a mixture of the heartbreaking and the hopeful.
On Tuesday morning in the Intensive Care Unit, a 37-year-old woman is fighting for her life. Trapped for four days in the rubble, one of her legs had to be amputated. “Below the knee an amputation like this is easy to treat, but this amputation was very high, and it’s very hard to manage,” said her doctor, Eli Schwartz, head of tropical medicine at Tel Aviv’s Sheba Medical Center and the leading Israeli in his field.
The tragedy of this case goes even deeper. The woman’s 24-year-old daughter, born after she was raped at age 13, was also badly injured by the quake. She was hospitalized nearby, but died, and the authorities came to the Israeli hospital with the news.
But despite the heaviness weighing on everyone’s minds, joy reverberates through the place when there is something to celebrate. The births get everyone cooing. And signs of recovery also bring delight.
In the course of Tuesday morning, a woman, discovered by a rescue team in a village and brought to the hospital a few days ago unable to move or talk, is suddenly both moving and talking. Alaluf Heli, a 34-year-old who had helped to look after her, was elated. “Sometimes when I’m tired and missing my children it’s really very hard, and this kind of thing helps to give me the drive to continue,” he said.
Meanwhile, Bika Rana, a 25-year-old Nepalese soldier, is sitting in a wheelchair, feeling a new sense of encouragement after learning that his injured leg is healing well. “I’m happy, and hoping that I will be able to get back to my normal life.” he said, after recounting how his house collapsed on top of him as he tried to flee the quake.
The best light relief of the day comes suddenly, almost like a flash mob, when the crowd of people waiting for admission grows large. They are in for a surprise — or rather, five red-nosed baggy-trousered, balloon-inflating surprises. The Israel Defense Forces and the Israeli Embassy are hosting a team of medical clowns, from the Israeli NGO for medical clowning, Dream Doctors, which paid for its own flights.
As they mime, play and generally act daft, it becomes clear that waiting for a doctor has actually been transformed into the most entertaining experience that people have had in days. One of the clowns kneels down to a patient on a stretcher, with visible leg injuries from the quake. He affixes a red nose to him, and mock-interviews him for an imaginary TV station using an inflatable microphone. The patient Bata Nepali, a 53-year-old shopkeeper, has plenty to be glum about — he’s not only injured, but his house is destroyed. Yet he’s loving it, and declares in his mock interview that he wants one day to do a real television interview, and use it to praise Israel.
One of the clowns goes into the emergency room, where a young boy needs a lengthy and painful-looking change of dressing on his foot. Smadar Harpats sings, grunts and mimes, and woos him with balloons and airplanes all the way through the procedure, and the boy responds with big, broad, heart-melting smiles. It fills the whole ER with positive energy.
Harpats — or “Sunshine” to use her clown name — has been astounded by the response to clowning here. “Even children who have lost a leg, or who have been through other terrible pain, quickly decide they want to play,” she said.
Soldiers in the field hospital worked on Shabbat, and will do so again this weekend. This isn’t a violation of Jewish law, but rather following the rule that work should be continued even on Sabbath in cases of medical need. And religious soldiers are accommodated in the camp in a range of areas.
The food is kosher, there is a synagogue tent with three daily services, and a rabbi. An eruv is in place to allow carrying on Shabbat. And the hospital even kept the mitzvah of hachnasat orchim, receiving guests, last Shabbat. Around 100 Israelis who were still in Nepal, were hosted for Friday night dinner where, in line with army rules, Kiddush was recited before the meal started.
Judaism isn’t the only religion among soldiers. Ashraf Kheir, a 32-year-old Druze-Arab from Peki’in, said that his faith played a part in his keenness to serve Nepal via the IDF. “The education we have is to help every human being — and we have to be faithful to our country and its operations,” said Kheir, a paramedic and nurse, adding: “I just received a letter from my father saying how proud he is of me.”
The 200-strong official Israeli mission to Nepal, which is advising the government on managing the situation as well as running the hospital, is due to pack up and leave in the middle of next week. But when its members return to Israel, many will still mentally be in Nepal.
Eli Schwartz, who has the 37-year-old patient clinging to her life, said that he worries for people like her once the IDF pulls out. Nepal, with its limited health infrastructure, will be overloaded, he said. “These are severe wounds that need long-term care, and we’re worried about who here has the skill to deal with people like this when we leave.”
Schwartz, who said he regards Nepal as a “second home,” as he lived and worked here for a stint a few years ago, added: “It feels like you save life — but who knows what will happen later on?”
editor@jewishweek.org
Renewed efforts against museums and countries that refuse to return Nazi-looted art were given a boost this week. Staff Writer Stewart Ain explains why.INTERNATIONAL
New Art Restitution Effort Fueled By Return Of Work
Nazi-looted painting given back to Jewish family; lawyers pressing D.C. bill.
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
Attorneys Markus Stoetzel, right, and Mel Urbach, center, with state official Benjamin Lawsky stand beside “Painting of a Man.”
The return this week of a 17th-century oil painting to the daughter of a German art historian from whom the Nazis stole it is fueling efforts to revitalize campaigns against museums and countries that steadfastly refuse to return Nazi-looted art.
Federal legislation will be sought to strip museums of their right to dismiss claims for the Nazi-looted art they hold by arguing that the statute of limitations for the restitution of such art has expired, according to two lawyers who specialize in Holocaust restitution.
During a ceremony at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Lower Manhattan celebrating the return of the painting, “Portrait of a Man,” state officials also announced the creation of an online art gallery to help in the recovery of other Nazi looted art.
Benjamin Lawsky, New York State’s superintendent of its Department of Financial Services, told The Jewish Week that the state’s Holocaust Claims Processing Office(HCPO) has been working to return looted art to its rightful owners since 1998 and that the online art gallery (www.dfs.ny.gov/consumer/holocaust/gallery_map.htm) is designed to further those efforts.
“It will be related to the art we have recovered and not yet recovered, and we hope it will be an educational resource,” he said.
Anna Rubin, director of the HCPO since it was founded in 1997, said that to date her office has helped in the restitution of 101 pieces of art — including “Portrait of a Man” from the Louvre in Paris — that were lost, stolen or sold under duress during the time of Nazi rule from 1933 to 1945.
Charles Goldstein, president of the World Jewish Congress’ Commission on Art Recovery, applauded New York for being the only state in the country with a Holocaust restitution office that helps survivors and their heirs for free. Nevertheless, he noted, it is like a toothless tiger.
“They write letters and occasionally someone sees the letter with its state seal and complies,” he said. “But it has no enforcement power.”
Lawsky acknowledged that but said: “We have a moral authority. By doing detailed, careful work in being able to prove the provenance of a work of art, we are able to go in and negotiate [for its return to its rightful owner].
“If someone says, ‘I admit you are right but I am not giving you the painting,’ … the claimants could go to court and we would support their claim with our work.”
Angelika Mayer, whose father, August Liebmann Mayer, a prominent Munich art historian and curator from whom the Nazis stole “Portrait of a Man,” had initially sought the help of lawyers Mel Urbach in Manhattan and Markus Stoetzel in Germany to locate and return the work of art.
Stoetzel said he located it — a 2-foot-by-1-foot oil-on-wood painting by an unknown Italian master — hanging in the Louvre. He said he located it soon after being hired in 2008. He said he asked the HCPO for help in 2011 after his efforts fell on deaf ears.
In prepared remarks, Lawsky credited the French government and the Commission of Victims of Spoliation Resulting from the Anti-Semitic Legislation in Force during the Occupation (CIVS) in making the restitution possible. He said the two attorneys and the HCPO together submitted a claim to CIVS to recover the painting.
CIVS is responsible for resolving claims for artwork in the Musées Nationaux Récupération collection and “Portrait of a Man” was item number 801 and was held at the Louvre. HCPO said CIVS quickly recognized the rightful claim of Mayer’s only child based on the provenance of the painting.
“While the terrible damage caused by Nazi persecution can never be repaired, we hope that the recovery of this painting will deliver at least some small measure of justice,” Lawsky said.
The two lawyers described their work with the HCPO as a “strategic relationship” for which they were grateful. They said they have many other clients for whom they are also seeking restitution and that they will be asking Washington for help.
“Many of our clients are elderly or second and third generation and their cases have to be resolved as quickly as possible — there is no excuse for further delay,” said Stoetzel.
Urbach said they would be asking U.S. lawmakers to get the other 43 countries that signed onto the 1998 Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art to reaffirm their commitment to art restitution. The agreement said efforts should be made to publicize Nazi-looted art to locate their prewar owners and heirs. It said that where the prewar owners and heirs of Nazi-looted art have been identified, steps should be taken “expeditiously to achieve a just and fair solution.”
“We think this issue has fallen off the edge of a cliff and that amnesia is setting in, particularly in Germany,” Urbach said. “They seem to have forgotten or ignored the historical record, and this amnesia lets them hold onto this material. Imagine that we have to tell clients they have to go to court to prove that [Hermann] Goering orchestrated the confiscation of their family heirlooms.”
Stoetzel said it was, in fact, Goering, who ordered the seizure of Mayer’s art collection.
“We need an international coalition to exert pressure on all the parties to reanimate the spirit of the Washington Principles,” Stoetzel said. “That is especially true for Germany because the current setup there for restitution of looted art is a total failure — and Germany should be in the forefront of these efforts.”
Goldstein said the WJC is “focused on eliminating barriers to claims, such as the statute of limitations.”
Among the museums making that assertion is the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, Calif., which is fighting a claim by Marei von Saher, heir of Jewish Dutch art dealer Jacques Goudstikker, for a collection of 16th-century oil paintings by Lucas Cranach that was forcibly sold to the Nazis in 1940.
Goldstein cited also the case of Leone Meyer, daughter of Raoul Meyer, a Jewish businessman in Paris during the Nazi occupation, who is suing the University of Oklahoma in the hope of recovering “Shepherdess Bringing in Sheep,” an 1886 work by French Impressionist Camille Pissarro that was stolen by the Nazis from her father’s private collection. It now hangs in the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, which the university owns.
Although the school does not dispute the fact that the painting was looted by the Nazis, it is fighting the suit citing a 1950s court ruling in Switzerland that denied the Meyer family’s claim on grounds that there was a five-year window for such lawsuits.
Ronald Lauder, president of the WJC, has said such arguments are “not only immoral, they fly in the face of postwar agreements. The Nazi thefts from 1933-45 are the greatest displacement of artwork in human history.”
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed last year, Lauder said also that the 1998 Washington Conference was designed to “resolve the many and complicated issues surrounding the repatriation of Nazi-looted art.” He said the 11 principles the 44 nations adopted “agreed to look for Nazi-looted art in their public art collections and to resolve restitution claims in a just and fair manner.”
He pointed out also that in June 2009, the Holocaust Era Assets Conference in Prague reaffirmed the Washington Principles. Signed by the U.S. and 45 other nations, it sought to ensure that all Holocaust claims were resolved on their merits and not thwarted by technical legal defenses.
Goldstein said that the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Toledo Museum of Art and the Detroit Institute of Art are similarly citing the statute of limitations in their refusal to return Nazi-looted art. (Lauder is honorary chairman at the Museum of Modern Art.)
“When they are hiding behind the statute, they deter claims for anything in their museum,” Goldstein said.
“In Europe most of the museums are owned by the government. They aren’t able to raise the statute of limitations against a person who makes a claim for Holocaust restituted art in the Netherlands, France, Germany or Austria.”
But he noted that sometimes “countries simply oppose such claims, even though they signed the Washington Principles.” Among those countries are Hungary, Poland and Russia.
He said the “number one issue” before the WJC now is to “eliminate the barrier of the statute of limitations.”
Urbach said he and Stoetzel believe lawmakers should hold “hearings on Capitol Hill leading to legislation that would bar the use of the statute of limitation defense and set up an arbitration process whereby claims could be submitted and resolved in an economical and speedy fashion.”
Stoetzel added that such steps would “send a powerful message” to European nations still refusing to resolve restitution claims “that it is time they followed suit.”
stewart@jewishweek.org
And Culture Editor Sandee Brawarsky explores the growing literary genre of ex-Orthodox Jews describing their transition from insular communities, and the price they pay for leaving the fold.NEW YORK
Leaving The Fold, Onto The Bookshelf
Growing literary genre of ex-Orthodox testing traditional narrative of insular communities.
Sandee Brawarsky
Culture Editor
Shulem Deen was a man in his 20s when he felt bold enough to slip unseen into a public library. Like the inner-city African-American boy in Philip Roth’s “Goodbye, Columbus” who, on a visit to the Newark Public Library, first sees Gauguin’s striking paintings of exotic Tahiti, a world cracked open for Deen.
On a tiny chair in the children’s section, the Skverer chasid made his way through the World Book Encyclopedia, encountering Einstein, Egyptian hieroglyphics and Elvis Presley for the first time.
His debut memoir, “All Who Go Do Not Return” (Graywolf), is the latest work in the new and deepening literary tradition of brutally honest works by ex-chasidim about leaving their community. Through these books, the reading public is guided inside thecloistered worlds of chasidic life. Whether that cloistered world has been changed — opened up, if you will — by the growing number of these works remains a point of debate.
Deen is the poet laureate of ex-chasidim. His sentences flow with originality as he unveils his story with passion and sensitivity. Readers will be surprised to realize that he is largely self-taught, that most of his schooling was in Yiddish.
While “All Who Go Do Not Return” is a story of leaving, his is not the voice of someone in exile, looking back. Rather, Deen writes as a traveler, looking around and deeply noticing all that he missed in the outside world, yearning for knowledge and experience.
It is also a heartbreaking book, as Deen — at least for the time being — is no longer in touch with his five children, three daughters and two sons who range in age from 13 to 20. That’s not his choice, but a complicated outcome of family court, his ex-wife Gitty’s desire to shield them from his heretical ways, community pressure and the children’s absorption of communal norms of conformity. He writes of losing their hearts. Still, Deen is respectful of Gitty and the Skverers. Readers may hope that his children get to read this book and come to understand their father and his love for them.
Since Hella Winston’s groundbreaking study, “Unchosen: The Hidden Lives of Hasidic Rebels,” was published in 2005, there have been many books published by people who seem like they stepped out of her pages. Deen’s book belongs on bookshelvesalongside the compelling and much-discussed memoirs by formerly fervently Orthodox writers including Shalom Auslander, Deborah Feldman and Leah Vincent, and Anouk Markovits’ novel “I Am Forbidden.”
Just out last month is a film, “Felix and Meira,” about a young chasidicmarried woman drawn into a romance with a non-Jewish French Canadian and into a world outside of her restrictive Montreal community. It’s a gentle film, with images that linger. Meira’s loving husband is played by Luzer Twersky, a former chasid who grew up in Borough Park and left that world seven years ago.
And coming in July is a new memoir by Judy Brown, who in 2010 penned the young adult book, “Hush,” under the pseudonym Eishes Chayil (woman of valor) for fear of backlash in the chasidic world in which she grew up because of her depiction of sexual abuse within the community. Brown’s “This Is Not A Love Story” is her story of growing up in a family with six children, including a brother who is afflicted with a medical condition they don’t understand. Told in the voice of her younger self, Brown, who has left the chasidic community, although she remains religious, presents an insider’s view of family and communal life, with a questioning spirit.
Alan Brill, a professor in the graduate department of Jewish-Christian studies at Seton Hall University, points to an earlier tradition of chasidic rebels, like Isaac Joel Linetzky (1839 - 1915), a Yiddish writer born into a Chassidic family in Podolia, Ukraine. His novel, “Dos Poylishe Yingl” (“The Polish Boy,” 1869), satirizing Chassidic life in coarse and colorful language, appeared in 30 editions, the last in Kiev in 1939. The sequel was published under the evocative title “Der Vorm in Khreyn” (“The Worm in the Horseradish”).
Brill also mentions stories of people who went to the home of the poet and author Y. L. Peretz in Warsaw: “They came in as chasidim and left as secular Yiddish authors, writing accounts of the changes in their lives.”
Perhaps the ongoing appeal of these works has something to do with the fact that some Jews see their own family’s more traditional pasts in the characters’ strict lifestyle. The memoirs about leaving touch on extreme transformations and complex questions of faith, theology, tradition and family that many struggle with, albeit in different permutations.
“These are coming-of-age stories, but the writers are not teenagers but adults trying to understand the world we live in,” says Twersky, who is a writer as well as an actor. “Before, we had other people telling our stories. Now we are able to speak in our own voices.”
For him, acting in the film “Felix & Meira” was cathartic. “You go back to a place where you were and try to understand it. As an actor you can’t judge your characters. You have to believe in what they believe in at the moment.” He says that he now understands the place he came from in new ways, although he remains critical.
Brill, who closely follows the demographics of the Jewish community, says that nobody has any statistics about the number of people leaving chassidic life. When asked about whether people are also exiting from religious communities like Lakewood, N.J., which are fervently Orthodox but non-chasidic, he says that they are, but not to the same degree.
Brown points out that the chasidic community has quadrupled in the last generation — recent studies show that Borough Park has the highest birthrate of any New York City neighborhood — so that it makes sense that the number of people leaving is also larger. She says it’s natural that some would want to articulate their experience.
As to whether the chasidic communities are changing, Brill says, “I don’t think they change, in a direct sense of becoming more sensitive, more open, or more responsive. I do think these communities have a sense of what the [World Wide] Web brings into their world, how easy it is now to learn about the outside world. There’s greater awareness.
“There are a combination of things going on now,” he continues. “Abuses are being exposed; there are problems of pornography, incredible materialism — seeing how other people live. Real knowledge is available. You have to publicly buy a newspaper, but here the knowledge of what’s going on in the world is [privately] available on your phone. They haven’t come to grips with that yet.”
Twersky believes that he and his fellow chroniclers are indeed having an impact. “We are poking massive holes in the narrative: We are told as kids that if you go out, you’re going to end up in jail, or in rehab, that life will be horrible. The rise of this community is to inspire other people — kids, teenagers, people with kids — to think, ‘I can go out and make it. I can live the life I really want.’”
While Deen, the founding editor of the website Unpious (where he published distinguished work by a number of ex-chasidim), is indeed sad about what has happened with his family, he is not a broken man; rather, he is alive with possibility. In an interview, he shares his ideas with a thoughtfulness that belies how long and deeply he has been considering belief and reason, family and community, and building a new value system. After he married at 18 (he had met his wife for only a few moments before they agreed to wed) and had children, he lost his belief in all that he had been taught not to question.
This wasn’t the book Deen intended to write. He had in mind to write a novel, but his agent convinced him that it would be easier to sell a memoir. He says that he’s always had the impulse to write — as a teenager, he used to write in a florid rabbinic Hebrew and then in Yiddish. Early in his marriage, he published some essays in Yiddish. After sneaking a radio and then a computer into their home in New Square, he discovered the world of blogging in 2003 and attracted a huge audience to his (anonymous) “Hasidic Rebel” blog. Eventually, he was expelled from the Rockland County town as a heretic.
The memoir’s narrative skillfully goes back and forward in time, with flashbacks to his childhood and more innocent times. As a young student when he first visits New Square from Brooklyn, he is struck by the intensity, piety and warmth of the place, and the modesty of the people who seem less interested in remodeled kitchens than the chasidim he knew in Borough Park. Now, he recalls how he was truly uplifted and even ecstatic in his prayer life among the Skverers and he says, “Nothing in the secular world so far has been able to move me with that intensity.”
He no longer prays, but enjoys occasionally going to non-Orthodox synagogues, “connecting to a sense of peoplehood, mystery and culture.”
Deen says that one of the questions he is most frequently asked is whether leaving was worthwhile, whether he’d do it again
“Was it worth it? Absolutely. I’m happier, more fulfilled, I have a wonderful network of friends,” he says.
“Would I have done it if I knew I would lose my children? No I would not. That was too much to bear and I would not have been able to consciously take that step. But perhaps if I was better prepared, the outcome would not have been inevitable, and I’d like to think I’d have had the courage to undertake that battle, because living a fear-based life, lying and hiding to yourself and everyone around you, is no way to live.”
Deen now lives in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, and is on the board of Footsteps, an organization that helps individuals in different stages of leaving Chassidic life, providing much-needed counseling in job skills and education, along with a new sense of community. “Footsteps has saved lives in the most literal sense,” he says.
Basya Schechter, a musician and composer who leads the group “Pharaoh’s Daughter,” also grew up in the chassidic world and left it many years ago. She now serves as music director of Romemu, a progressive, egalitarian synagogue on the Upper West Side, and is studying to be a cantor.
She notes that people have been telling these stories through films and documentaries for the last 20 years, and more recently through memoirs. “Every story is so different, each journey is so individual.”
“I love the genre. Every time another book or movie comes out, I feel it is a triumph of a voice being heard.”
editor@jewishweek.org
Also in this issue, Israel Correspondent Michele Chabin on the bloody Ethiopian Israeli protests in Tel Aviv; how the folk rock duo Indigo Girls came to perform here this weekend at a benefit for Holocaust survivors; a new exhibition at YIVO shows how Jewish boxers and wrestlers once dominated their sports; Genesis Prize offers funds to a range of young, idealistic innovators; and a review of Alice Eve Cohen's moving memoir, "The Year My Mother Came Back."ISRAEL NEWS
Decades Of Frustration For Ethiopian Jews
Tel Aviv riot highlights entrenched discrimination, violence faced by immigrant community.
Michele Chabin
Israel Correspondent
Continued accusations of harassment of Ethiopian Jews in Israel led to riots this week in Tel Aviv. Getty Images
Jerusalem — The Talpiot Industrial Zone in south Jerusalem is home to some of Jerusalem’s poorest people. Housed in run-down buildings built decades ago for Jewish refugees from Arab countries, the crime rate is high, even with a police station located right across the street.
Many Jerusalemites of Ethiopian descent have moved in because they can’t afford to rent or buy anywhere else.
With little to do after school, the neighborhood children, the vast majority of them the Israeli-born children of Ethiopian immigrants, congregate in the local schoolyard to play soccer after doing their homework at the adjoining community center, where a charitable program helps children at risk.
For Moshe (not his real name), who is 12, the schoolyard is where he feels most at home. Surrounded by kids from the same Ethiopian background, he doesn’t have to put up with the racial slurs spewed by a handful of his schoolmates.
“Some of the boys have called me ‘kushi,’ Moshe said, uttering a derogatory Hebrew term equivalent to the N-word in English. “That gets me upset. I’m not kushi, I’m brown,” he asserted.
Moshe’s 13-year-old friend Yosef (also a pseudonym), said some of the boys in his school have called him “kushi” and “black” and “smelly.”
“They stopped after my parents spoke to the principal,” he said. “It’s not easy being Ethiopian. People hit us just because we’re brown,” he said, referring to the recent attack on an Ethiopian soldier by two white policemen. That attack, which was caught on video, and the many other alleged attacks against young Ethiopians perpetrated by white Israelis over the years, sparked two violent protests during the past week by members of Israel’s 120,000-strong Ethiopian Jewish community.
“I used to think Israel was a good country, but now I want to move to America,” Moshe said resolutely as a bunch of friends nodded their heads in agreement.
Many non-Ethiopian Israelis were shocked when a peaceful anti-racism demonstration in Tel Aviv organized by young Ethiopian activists turned violent. After Ethiopian youths — some say egged on by non-Ethiopian anarchists — blocked a major highway and started throwing rocks and stones at the police, the police responded with stun grenades and water cannons.
The events echo the riots in Baltimore following the April 19 death of Freddie Gray, who died of a neck injury while in police custody.
Members of the Ethiopian community say they were shocked, but not surprised, by the violent release of the pent-up anger and frustration felt by their Israeli-born teens and young adults.
“There is a problem, there are discrimination issues, there is racism in Israel,” Fentahun Assefa-Dawit, the director of Tebeka, an advocacy group for Ethiopian Israelis, told journalists Monday, just before meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the educational and socioeconomic gaps, as well as the long-standing discrimination Ethiopian Israelis deal with every day.
Some of these gaps haven’t closed significantly since the 1980s, when Israel first began bringing Ethiopian Jews to Israel.
Adults who immigrated — many of them farmers — found it difficult to learn Hebrew and adapt to a more urban way of life. Their children, including those who did not arrive in Israel years before the parents, were sent to Hebrew-only boarding schools. Some forgot Amharic, their parents’ only language. Away from home and exposed to a more modern way of life, many lost respect for their traditional parents.
Dorit Roer-Strier, a professor in Hebrew University’s School of Social Work, linked the community’s frustration to decades of discrimination.
“Ten years ago I did a study of the fathers and saw how immigration, poverty and discrimination was challenging the fathers’ well-being. The fathers felt their first obligation was to be providers for their children and earn a good living. They felt disrespected not only by Israeli society but by their own children,” Roer-Strier said.
Adding insult to injury, many Israeli rabbis have continued to doubt the Ethiopian community’s Jewishness, despite the fact that Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the late chief Sephardi rabbi, gave it his kosher stamp of approval.
Many Ethiopian Israelis also complain that the government patronizes them.
Until this year, for example, the education of all Ethiopian-Israeli students — including the 70 percent born in Israel — was under the auspices of the Ministry of Education’s Department for the Absorption of Immigrant Students. Many of those students were confined to segregated classes sometimes taught at a slower pace.
Although some of these classes as well as numerous enrichment programs run by the Jewish Agency and various NGOs have helped the youngest generation of Ethiopian Israelis to compete with their white peers and serve side by side with them during their IDF or National Service, many say employers won’t hire them.
“When an Ethiopian applies for a job, as qualified as he might be, as impressive as his CV might be, he is not going to be invited for the interview because he has an Ethiopian name,” Assefa-Dawit said. “When a local Rabbinate office refuses toregister a couple who wants to get married because they’re Ethiopian, when you see a school that says we cannot take more children because they have a quota of how many Ethiopians they will enroll, you can imagine what the feeling of young people will be.”
That has made it difficult for the community to emerge from poverty. Ethiopian families earn about 45 percent of the national average, according to the Bureau of Statistics.
Seated outside the beautiful, modern Ethiopian synagogue funded by the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews right next door to slim buildings in the Industrial Zone slums, Rabbi Shachar Aylin, the shul’s volunteer rabbi, bemoaned the institutional discrimination he said his community experiences day in and day out.
“My Israeli-born children don’t speak Amharic, yet other school children call them kushim,” said Aylin, who moved to Israel from Ethiopia when he was 16. “Israeli homes don’t teach equality to their children. Security guards and police single out black people, and especially our youth. I can’t tell you the number of times our youth have been beaten.”
Aylin, a soft-spoken man who volunteers at the synagogue because the Ministry of Religious Affairs has refused to pay for a rabbi there, although it funds many other local rabbis, related how security guards and police often “take our children to the police station and open a file against them, often for no reason.”
That is the reason, he said, that 40 percent of the youths held in Ofek Prison, a prison for minors, are of Ethiopian descent, according to the Los Angeles Times. Ethiopians represent less than 2 percent of the Israeli population.
Despite these many challenges, Aylin said, “I’m glad I made aliyah. Israel has many good people, but they are drowned out by the others.”
Assefa-Dawit noted that many of the protesters at the rallies carried Israeli flags and sang Israeli songs.
“Israel is our country — there’s no ‘us’ and ‘them,’” he said. “This is our home. [But] the community is crying out for the government to resolve this.”
editor@jewishweek.org
SHORT TAKES
Star-Studded Holocaust Benefit Hits NYC
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
Celebrities at a benefit sponsored by the Survivor Mitzvah Project. Courtesy of Survivor Mitzvah Project
The Indigo Girls booked a new gig — raising awareness about Holocaust survivors.
The American folk rock duo will be performing Saturday night in the East Village at a benefit for Holocaust survivors attended by a dozen Hollywood heavyweights, including “Titanic” star Frances Fisher, four-time Emmy-winner Valerie Harper and “Sex and the City” regular David Eigenberg. “The Stars Come Out For Survivors,” hosted by the Survivor Mitzvah Project, a nonprofit that aids survivors in Eastern Europe, will take place at Webster Hall.
“The floodgates have opened — we need to help the last survivors of the unluckiest generation,” said Zane Buzby, founder of the Survivor Mitzvah Project.
For Buzby, a noted television comedy director best known for the sitcom “Golden Girls,” bringing together stars and survivors is a “dramatic turn.”
“Most of these celebrities are known for their work in comedy — now, they are turning out to showcase a completely different side of their personality,” she said.
She was able to book the Indigo Girls because of their “history of activism,” said Buzby. The singers, Amy Ray and Emily Saliers, both identify as lesbian and are active in political and environmental causes.
Buzby started the organization in 2004 after a 10-day trip to Lithuania and Belarus left her moved and inspired.
“I went looking for my grandparents’ villages and left with the stories of eight elderly Holocaust survivors,” said Buzby. While there, she aided in bringing food, medicine and money to these survivors. “There is no shortage of Holocaust memorials and museums, but I realized what was missing was support for these elderly individuals, many of them sick and alone,” she said.
Today, the Survivor Mitzvah Project helps more than 2,000 elderly survivors in eight Eastern European countries. Aside from helping survivors monetarily, the project encourages them to share their stories.
The benefit taking place this weekend commemorates the anniversary of Victory Day, the 1945 surrender of Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union.
For the celebrities involved, the crowning moment of the benefit, Buzby said, is reading letters from survivors. She read from one, from an elderly survivor named Dora. “‘Desolate and lonely, you brought me joy,’” she read. “‘Thank you, faraway friend.’”
Tickets start at $60 and the link to purchase is websterhall.com/survivors
Doors Openat 7 P.M.
THE JW Q&A
Fighting To Keep Yiddish Culture Alive
Eddy Portnoy has created a new exhibit about Jewish boxers and wrestlers at YIVO Institute of Jewish Research in Manhattan.
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
Eddy Portnoy: Yiddish infused the society from which Jewish boxers and wrestlers emerged. Nick Romanenko/Rutgers University
An exhibition on the “Yiddish Fight Club,” about Jewish boxers and wrestlers, opened this week at the YIVO Institute of Jewish Research in Manhattan. It was created by Eddy Portnoy, who teaches in the Judaic Studies Program at Rutgers University and serves as academic advisor at YIVO’s Max Weinrich Center for Advanced Jewish Studies. The Jewish Week interviewed Portnoy by email; this is an edited transcript.
Q: The heyday of Jewish wrestlers was several decades ago. Why are we still interested in them?
A: Not everyone is interested. Those who are may find Jewish boxers and wrestlers compelling not only because athletes occupy valued positions in popular culture, but because Jewish athletes — and what’s more, Jewish athletes involved in violent sports — have become a rarity. Jewish involvement in boxing and wrestling also harkens back to a time when Jews were working class immigrants or the children of immigrants and part of a Jewish culture that seems more natural, or more authentic.
Despite the ascendancy of a strong Israel, is there a nostalgia for the era of visible, tough Jews?
Sure. Although I’m not sure Israel comes into play the way that an individual boxer or wrestler would. While most American Jews support Israel in some abstract way, most have never been there, nor do they know much about it. As a result, it may not be a relevant symbol for them. A boxer, wrestler, or gangster, on the other hand, is a person with a narrative and much more relatable as a symbol of power.
How did you — a scholar who’s studied in France — become interested in something like boxing and wrestling, which many Jews today see as a somewhat lowbrow pastime?
Scholars can’t like boxing and wrestling? Scholars like all kinds of strange stuff you might not expect. Whether or not they include it in their work is another matter.
Who’s your favorite Jewish boxer or wrestler?
I don’t play favorites. They’re all incredibly fascinating in their own ways. Whether they became entrepreneur/rabbis like Raphael Halperin, or survived the Warsaw Ghetto like Shepsl Rotholtz, each one has an incredible story — in addition to their success in the ring.
An exhibit about Jewish boxers and wrestlers of bygone days seems like a topic for a historical institution, not for one dedicated to the preservation of Jewish culture. What do these guys have to do with Yiddish?
Isn’t it the mission of a Jewish historical institution to preserve Jewish culture? While Yiddish culture is a major focus, so are all aspects of eastern European Jewry and its diasporas. The boxers and wrestlers were all either Yiddish speakers or the children of Yiddish-speaking immigrants. Yiddish was a part of their lives and they and their Jewish fans spoke about their exploits in Yiddish. A unique vocabulary was created to describe these activities and the way they moved, punched or tackled all took place in Yiddish. All of this was also written about in the Yiddish press.
Jewish street fighters and gangsters were also common figures on the streets of pre-WWII immigrant ghettoes in places like New York and Warsaw. Even more than the boxers and wrestlers, this type of language emanated from them. Yiddish fighting slang that developed in the Yiddish underworld ultimately served to enrich the language. The YIVO linguists who collected these fighting words and phrases understood that languages find enrichment from all quarters and that the slang of the Yiddish-speaking underclass broadens the language as much as the linguistic creations of poets or scientists.
steve@jewishweek.org
NEW YORK
Genesis Prize Funds New Generation Of Social Entrepreneurs
Last year’s winner uses $1M prize to support tikkun olam projects from millennial innovators.
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
Michael Bloomberg, announced winners of his Genesis Generation Challenge grants. Courtesy of Bloomberg Philanthropies
A veteran of coexistence activism around the world, Tarek Elgawhary, an Egyptian Muslim who lives in Washington, was looking for a project to improve relations between Israeli and Palestinians. “You need to speak to this guy Ben,” friends told him.
Ben is Ben Jablonski, an Australian-born partner in an apparel company and former investment banker who has lived in Manhattan since 2006. Jablonski, who is Jewish, shares Elgawhary’s interest in the Middle East conflict.
They met here, became friends, and decided to found a project, Build Israel and Palestine, which will build a sewage treatment system for Arab villages in the West Bank that are not part of the Palestinian Authority’s still-developing sewage treatment grid.
They sought investments from Jews and Muslims, mostly in the United States, but the amount they raised left them short of what they needed to fully implement their project.
The project’s financial prospects brightened last week when it was announced as one of nine recipients of $100,000 Genesis Generation Challenge grants awarded by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who last year received the first Genesis Prize’s first $1 million grant. Funded by the office of Israel’s prime minister, the Jewish Agency and the Genesis Philanthropy Group, the prize is awarded to “exceptional individuals whose values and achievements will inspire the next generation of Jews.”
Bloomberg said he would use his prize money to establish a challenge competition to provide seed money for “innovative projects guided by Jewish values to address the world’s pressing issues.” The contest stipulated that each team of social entrepreneurs be led by someone age 20 to 36.
Jablonski, the team leader, is 32; co-founder Elgawhary, is 36.
While a few of the other eight awardees focus on projects in Israel, their scope largely is international. The 52 judges of the competition used a “fairly expansive” definition of Jewish values in choosing the winners, from some 2,000 individuals who initially expressed interest and 113 projects that were finally proposed, said Jill Smith, deputy CEO of the Genesis Prize Foundation. “Doing something to make the world better is part of what Jewish values are.”
The other Challenge recipients are:
♦ Building Up Canada, a nonprofit that will install energy-efficient technology inaffordable housing complexes in Toronto.
♦ eNable 3D Printed Prosthetics, which will provide advanced, computer-driven machines that will make free prosthetic limbs for people in countries affected by natural disasters.
♦ Lavan, an Israeli organization that will create “a community of American angel investors” to support projects “that strengthen Israeli and Jewish values.”
♦ Prize4Life, an Israeli nonprofit that is developing an app to help monitor ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) markers.
♦ Sanergy, a Kenya-based initiative that will produce a sanitation plant for Nairobi’s Mathare district.
♦ Sesame, which is developing a smartphone in Israel for disabled people who have no or limited use of their hands.
♦ Spark, which will provide micro-grants to poor, rural communities in Burundi for designing “social impact projects” like the building of schools or health centers.
♦ Vera Solutions, which has established a fellowship to support and mentor “passionate young professionals with skills to drive technology-based innovations in the social sector.”
The winning projects will receive their funding on a quarterly basis, be monitored regularly and receive mentoring from experienced entrepreneurs. But there is no guarantee that all will succeed, Bloomberg said at the Challenge’s announcement press conference last week at the Manhattan headquarters of Bloomberg Philanthropies. The money is a good investment in the future, with a Jewish flavor that emphasizes the shared Jewish values of Israelis and American Jews, he said.
“At a time when many Americans and Israelis fear the relationship between our countries has become irrevocably strained, we must recognize that the bond our citizens share is based on our common democratic values, like freedom, justice, innovation and community,” Bloomberg said.
Smith called the number and variety of the submitted projects a sign “that millennials want to make a difference in the world. The judges were inspired by the idea that in a time of polarization [especially in the Middle East] real people on the ground wanted to work together to make a difference.”
She said Build Israel and Palestine was the only submitted project in which Jewish and Muslim directors played a prominent role. “It is a great project — people would come together and transcend politics.”
“Current coexistence initiatives between Jews and Muslims do not create results because projects are funded almost exclusively by Jewish donors and organizations. If all parties are not invested financially and emotionally, it is extremely difficult to advance coexistence,” the project’s application states. “Our council consists of five Muslims and five Jews who are all eager to apply their resources and expertise” for Build Israel and Palestine.
While many Jewish organizations provide financial support to similar social entrepreneur projects, the Challenge sought to identify and foster members of the millennial generation who often have not achieved the recognition to qualify for such grants. The judges looked for “not the usual suspects” who already have established connections to the Jewish establishment. “We’ve reached a different audience,” she said, adding that social media played a large role in publicizing the competition.
Another advantage of focusing on the 20 to 36 age group is that it will create millennial-aged role models, which are more likely to inspire other millennials to become active in such humanitarian work than older winners would, she said.
“A hundred thousand dollars is not going to change the world, but it may help to attract more money” to each Challenge recipient, Smith said. The Challenge’s remaining $100,000 will pay for overhead.
Jablonski and Elgawhary declined to specify how much they had previously raised from Jewish and Muslim philanthropists in this country, but said the Challenge funds will enable them to start their sewage treatment project in the West Bank in the next few months; now they’re looking for the right village, with a population of about 300 residents.
“This [Challenge money] does give us a platform — it allows us to have more respect and recognition,” Jablonski said. “We are trying to address a problem on both sides [of the Israeli-Palestinian] divide that has nothing to do with geopolitics.”
He said his interest in the West Bank’s sewage treatment issue grew out of his previous volunteer work as founder of JNFuture, a leadership training program for the Jewish National Fund. That sparked his interest in land-use issues.
Some 75 percent of residents of the West Bank have no access to a grid of home sewage collection, Jablonski said. Instead, he said, sewage from most Arabs’ homes there goes directly into the ground, seeping into aquifers, the underground layer of water-bearing permeable rock or unconsolidated materials that Israel and the West Bank have in common. “It poisons the ground for both sides. It’s a shared aquifer,” he said.
In lieu of a wide-scale sewage treatment plant, the project will install a series of septic tanks that will turn out water fit to be used for agriculture in local fields using membrane-based technology that was recently proven effective by USAID, the philanthropic arm of the U.S. government.
The project, which has partnered with Israel’s Arava Institute, is endorsed by USAID and local municipalities on the West Bank, Jablonski said.
He said his project may expand to other regional problems, like the shortage of electric power or potable water, and will invite other participants to join the work of Build Israel and Palestine. “There is plenty of space for other people to get involved,” he said.
steve@jewishweek.org
BOOKS
Reconciling With Mom
Alice Eve Cohen’s memoir, ‘The Year My Mother Came Back.’
Sandee Brawarsky
Culture Editor
Alice Eve Cohen’s newest memoir recounts a difficult year in her adult life. Janet Charles Photos
Alice Eve Cohen didn’t expect her mother to take center stage in her memoir. But as she was writing about a very challenging year in the life of her family, her late mother seemed to appear, on the page and at the kitchen table.
“What is she doing here, I wondered,” she says in an interview in a café near her Manhattan home. She came to see that her story of her two daughters, one adopted and one biological, was also the story of her relationship with her mother, who died more than 35 years ago. Cohen, a solo theater artist, playwright and author of a previous memoir, has written an honest, compassionate and beautifully crafted story about being a mother and a daughter.
I have to admit, Cohen had me hooked with the title and didn’t let up. Many who have lost a parent have had the fantasy, yearning or hope she names, “The Year My Mother Came Back” (Algonquin).
The memoir covers 2008-2009: That year, Cohen’s youngest daughter Eliana needed to have serious surgery and her older daughter Julia, who was about to leave for college, decided to seek out her biological mother. At the same time, the author was diagnosed with breast cancer and required surgery. The book also flashes back to Cohen’s early life.
Cohen’s mother Louise Giventer Cohen had breast cancer when the author was 12 and she then had disfiguring surgery; Cohen felt that her loving mother became a shadow of herself. This mother and daughter then had a complicated and difficult connection, although by the time the author was completing Princeton, things warmed up between them again. Two weeks after they had dinner together and “seemed to accept each other lovingly,” Louise died suddenly, not of cancer, but of a cerebral hemorrhage. Alice was 22, devastated by the loss.
Louise was “a woman of her times and ahead of her time,” Cohen says. She was a left-wing intellectual, a sociologist and professor at Columbia who, because of her family and other duties, never had time to finish her dissertation. Cohen remembers her mother “typing as fast as she can” on the typewriter she’d had since she was a Barnard student — Louise wrote thousands of pages, working on it for much of her adult life. A social activist and feminist, Louise took her daughters campaigning for civil rights; she played tennis, made chicken soup and would throw salt over her left shoulder to keep away bad spirits.
But in the years since her mother’s death, Cohen had intentionally put Louise out of her mind, other than around the anniversary of her death, when the light of June days would flood her with memories.
She writes, “I exiled her, like banishing an errant boyfriend from my thoughts; burying my memories of her as deep as I could, so my unrelieved longing for her — and my anger at her — would go away.”
The memoir is a powerful story of forgiveness — forgiving her mother, forgiving herself, realizing that it’s OK not to be a perfect mother. Revisiting their relationship, she comes to understand Louise in a way that she didn’t in her youth, “to reconcile in a way that has benefited me and benefited my children.”
It’s also a story of how memory works. Cohen opens the memoir with a quote from the editor and writer William Maxwell:
“What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as a memory — meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion — is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling.”
Cohen’s first memoir, “What I Thought I Knew,” provides the backstory for this one. When she was a young woman, Cohen was told by doctors that she was infertile, and she and her then husband adopted a baby girl. About nine years later, when she was suffering from severe abdominal pain, doctors suggested that it was a symptom ofmenopause and when she felt worse, they thought it might be an abdominal tumor. In the emergency room, she learned that she didn’t have a tumor but was six months pregnant. She was then divorced and engaged to be married, and her fiancé (now husband) encouraged her to have the baby, even though there was evidence that the fetus was damaged by X rays, CAT scans and prescription hormones. After considering late-term abortion, at the 11th hour she decided to go ahead with childbirth.
The name Eliana means, “My God has answered me.” When Eliana was born, her body was curved like the letter C, and doctors said that she wouldn’t walk. But they were able to straighten her curved spine and lengthen her shorter leg, and now she can run several miles at a time.
When the first book was published and Eliana was asked if she was upset to learn that her mother had considered abortion, the wise fourth grader, replied, “I don’t care about what you thought of me before I was born. I care what you think of me now.” Now 15, Eliana has known all along that she is greatly loved.
That Cohen is a playwright and performer enhances her writing style. She has an ear for dialogue and a feeling for vivid characters that drive the plot.
“I think of the story of my memoir as I might think of telling a dramatic story in a play,” she says.
She has been drawn to Jewish themes in her plays, which include “Oklahoma Samovar,” based on her own family’s experience of coming to America from Latvia in 1889 and heading to Oklahama; a children’s play, “Hannah and the Hollow Challah”; a solo show based on her memoir “What I Thought I Knew”; and a multimedia piece about the Golem. She also acted in Joseph Chaiken’s production of “The Dybbuk” at the Public Theater.
To write this memoir, Cohen did research, interviewed her sisters, who remembered their mother differently, looked at old photo albums and tried to remember “what was left out — we don’t take pictures of difficult moments; I was trying to remember what was between the pages.”
She realized that she wasn’t just writing this for herself, but was writing for her mother. “She died before her contribution might have been known by as many people as might have been.”
While Cohen was working on the book, her father died at age 97. After consulting with her sisters, she included some details that she might not have included were he still alive. “I think the book is more complete — it tells a more honest story, of my entire family.”
Cohen grew up in Mamaroneck, where her family went to synagogue once in a while and celebrated holidays at home. At Princeton she became much more interested in Judaism. These days, she enjoys going to Congregation Beit Simchat Torah and admires its inclusivity.
At moments, she still feels her mother’s presence, even her hug. “It doesn’t matter whether she’s a ghost, or a memory, or my idea, or her idea, or God’s idea, or dust, or sound waves, or transfigured molecules, or an echo from the Cosmos. She’s here with me.”
Cohen points out that Mother’s Day (which became an official American holiday in 1914), has feminist underpinnings that would resonate for her mother. In 1870, suffragette, poet, abolitionist and author of “Battle Hymn of the Republic” Julia Howe Lord created the “Mother’s Day Proclamation,” calling on mothers to unite in promoting world peace and tried (unsuccessfully) to have a day dedicated to the cause.
Alice Eve Cohen will speak about “The Year My Mother Came Back” on a panel, “Three Memoirists on Motherhood,” with Abigail Thomas and Melissa Cistaro, on Wednesday, May 27 at 7 p.m. at McNally Jackson bookstore, 52 Prince St., Manhattan.
Enjoy the read, and be sure to check out our website for breaking news, exclusive videos, op-eds, features and blogs.
http://www.thejewishweek.com/
Gary Rosenblatt
BETWEEN THE LINES GARY ROSENBLATT
Setbacks Feared On Religious Freedoms
A Jew’s freedom to fully practice his or her religion is legally compromised in Israel.
Gary Rosenblatt
Editor and Publisher
Gary Rosenblatt
Item: A special bar and bat mitzvah ceremony for children withsevere autism, held annually for the last 25 years by the Masorti (Conservative) movement in Israel, was canceled two days prior to the event last week. It was scheduled to be held in Rehovot, a city with a diverse population of about 100,000 in the center of Israel, but the ultra-Orthodox mayor there banned the use of the only Conservative congregation for the ceremony, forcing its postponement.
The four children had been preparing for more than six months, and their families were distraught at the news, as was the rabbi of the congregation, Mikie Goldstein. He charged that the mayor, Rahamim Malul, was “using the children as pawns” and “forcing his personal religious views on these children.” The rabbi asserted in The Times of Israel that “in Israel there is no freedom of religion for Jews: it’s either the Orthodox way or no way. … There is an unholy alliance of politics and religion in Israel that has led many Jews to reject Judaism outright.”
While the circumstances in this case are dramatic and emotionally stirring, the charges are not new and the facts are well known. Israel is the one country where a Jew’s freedom to fully practice his or her religion is legally compromised. And those restrictions, which apply to marriage, divorce, conversion and burial, have a particularly negative impact on the 80 percent of the Jewish population that is not Orthodox.
Why, then, is there relatively little outcry or activism from Jews in the liberal religious movements — primarily Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist — who make up the large majority of the American Jewish population? Many of these people are quick to speak out or demonstrate on civil or human rights issues on behalf of others; why not for themselves when they are, in effect, seen as second-class Jewish citizens in the eyes of the charedi Chief Rabbinate in Israel, whose rulings affect Jews around the world?
I posed the question to Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, rabbi of the prominent Park Avenue Synagogue (Conservative), during a meeting last week of the Jewish Religious Equality Coalition, which seeks “to create alternatives to the exclusive control of the Chief Rabbinate over personal-status issues.” It took place here at the American Jewish Committee, the coalition’s chief sponsor.
Rabbi Cosgrove’s response was that with Israel facing an array of security worries, most notably the threat of a nuclear Iran and increasing diplomatic isolation, the issue of religious freedom is not a priority. “So the can gets kicked down the road,” he said. Consciously or not, many non-Orthodox American Jews are reluctant to put additional pressure on Israel when it is dealing with such dangerous external challenges.
While most Israelis are not Orthodox, and their resentment of the Chief Rabbinate’s control of their personal-status issues is deep, they, too, find other matters more pressing. In addition, the liberal religious movements that are a majority among U.S. Jews have only a small presence in Israeli society. The movements are illegitimate legally and, for the most part, a curiosity socially.
‘Not In The Cards’
At the AJC meeting more than 30 people, representing leadership from the Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist and Modern Orthodox communities, as well as AJC and the Anti-Defamation League, focused their discussion on the incoming Israeli government coalition, being formed this week by right of center and religious parties. Its makeup will present a challenge to the many pro-Israel organizations in the U.S. that favor a two-state solution to the Palestinian problem, since Prime Minister Netanyahu will be pressed — or allow himself to be pressed — internally to support settlements and resist ceding land.
Some participants at the meeting suggested that Netanyahu be told firmly by American Jewish leaders that support for Israel’s position on a range of key issues -- that include opposing the looming Iran nuclear agreement and the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement -- be tied to the Israeli government advancing efforts on the religious freedom front. But few believe that pro-Israel organizations would be silent on Iran or BDS even if the prime minister resists their pleas.
Speaking to the group at AJC, journalist and author Yossi Klein Halevi, who often writes about Israel-diaspora relations, warned that the best that advocates for religious freedom in Israel can hope for is to hold the line on the successes achieved in the last government coalition, which had no charedi parties. Those included a law to draft charedi yeshiva students into the army; accommodations for more equal prayerfor women at the Kotel; a bill that allows community rabbis, some of whom are more welcoming than the Chief Rabbinate, to perform conversions; and efforts to legalize civil marriage in Israel. The new government may seek to reverse those efforts and to re-introduce a controversial bill that appears to prioritize the Jewish nature of Israel over its democratic side.
“Religious pluralism is not in the cards in the foreseeable future, and we will not see any breakthroughs,” said Klein Halevi, a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, speaking to the group via Skype. His clear message was to lower expectations and work to prevent a reversal on gains. Focus on efforts on a municipal or local level rather than nationally, he advised, and work to bring more Israeli journalists and politicians on visits to the U.S. to better understand how Judaism is practiced here. He added that full religious equality should remain the coalition’s ultimate goal, but that it may take years, if not decades, to achieve.
Benny Ish-Shalom, founder and president of Beit Morasha, a Jerusalem-based institution advocating inclusivity in religious life, also addressed the group. As chairman of the board of the Joint Conversion Institute, an official state body in Israel founded 16 years ago, he said that 60,000 Israelis, mostly from the Russian immigrant population, have taken its courses but only 16,000 have converted. That “disappointing” figure, according to Ish-Shalom, is attributed to the fact that the Chief Rabbinate has set what many call an unnecessarily high bar for conversion, discouraging many would-be candidates.
He said the issue is political and bureaucratic more than theological and that as “your partner,” he supports the coalition’s efforts to liberalize the procedures. “Your role in this battle,” he told the group, “is to try to convince the prime minister and the Knesset,” by warning them of the negative impact Israel’s policies on religious freedoms are having on American Jews, who represent a key strategic ally to Israel. An Orthodox Jew himself, he said that the Rabbinical Council of America, the large Orthodox group, has ceded its authority to the Israeli Chief Rabbinate on conversions, and that “this must be challenged by you.”
‘Decreasing Points Of Contact’
Rabbi Cosgrove applauded Ish-Shalom on his incremental efforts, particularly in forming alliances with several key Orthodox rabbis in Israel seeking to ease restrictions within halacha, or Jewish law, while preserving the Orthodox monopoly on personal-status issues. But the Park Avenue Synagogue rabbi said that when it comes to his community, “we are in another universe from the Orthodox debate.” He and other non-Orthodox pulpit rabbis face serious issues of assimilation regularly in their work, he said, and he posed a series of questions that centered on “the decreasing points of contact” between “the two worlds” of Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews.
As a Conservative rabbi, he asked, should he “accept small victories” on the religious freedom front “or reject them” as insufficient, holding out for full recognition? “Do I defer to the Orthodox for the sake of Clal Yisrael [Jewish peoplehood] or say no,” it’s not enough?
There were no easy answers, and while it was agreed at the meeting that the coalition should continue with its overall objective while pushing for whatever gains it can, it was also noted that most of those in the room were middle-aged or older. The underlying concern is that many younger American Jews are distanced from Israel, the result either of disinterest, or discomfort with its policies on treatment of Palestinians and/or its lack of acceptance of non-Orthodox forms of Jewish practice.
Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Reform movement, insists that many of his constituents are indeed “exorcised about religious pluralism issues — I hear it wherever I go,” he told me. And while the movement supports liberalizing Orthodox conversions, there is frustration at the narrowness of the solutions and the lack of urgency for greater change.
Rabbi Jacobs believes that Netanyahu understands religious pluralism to be “a strategic issue” for Israel because it impacts on “the disaffection of American Jewry.” But the rabbi worries that the incoming Israeli government, with its parochial views, “will drive American Jews to feel distant from that government, and we may lose ground” in terms of support. For example, he said, if the new government revives the effort to pass a national state bill, codifying Israel as a Jewish state, “watch out when American Jews feel that democratic norms are being threatened. That’s what keeps me up at night.”
He is not alone. The more stories we hear about Israeli minorities alleging discrimination — be they Arabs or, just this week, Ethiopian Jews — or of special needs children prevented from celebrating a bar or bat mitzvah — the greater the risk of tearing the fragile threads that still bind us.
Gary@jewishweek.org
BETWEEN THE LINES GARY ROSENBLATT
Setbacks Feared On Religious Freedoms
A Jew’s freedom to fully practice his or her religion is legally compromised in Israel.
Gary Rosenblatt
Editor and Publisher
Gary Rosenblatt
Item: A special bar and bat mitzvah ceremony for children withsevere autism, held annually for the last 25 years by the Masorti (Conservative) movement in Israel, was canceled two days prior to the event last week. It was scheduled to be held in Rehovot, a city with a diverse population of about 100,000 in the center of Israel, but the ultra-Orthodox mayor there banned the use of the only Conservative congregation for the ceremony, forcing its postponement.
The four children had been preparing for more than six months, and their families were distraught at the news, as was the rabbi of the congregation, Mikie Goldstein. He charged that the mayor, Rahamim Malul, was “using the children as pawns” and “forcing his personal religious views on these children.” The rabbi asserted in The Times of Israel that “in Israel there is no freedom of religion for Jews: it’s either the Orthodox way or no way. … There is an unholy alliance of politics and religion in Israel that has led many Jews to reject Judaism outright.”
While the circumstances in this case are dramatic and emotionally stirring, the charges are not new and the facts are well known. Israel is the one country where a Jew’s freedom to fully practice his or her religion is legally compromised. And those restrictions, which apply to marriage, divorce, conversion and burial, have a particularly negative impact on the 80 percent of the Jewish population that is not Orthodox.
Why, then, is there relatively little outcry or activism from Jews in the liberal religious movements — primarily Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist — who make up the large majority of the American Jewish population? Many of these people are quick to speak out or demonstrate on civil or human rights issues on behalf of others; why not for themselves when they are, in effect, seen as second-class Jewish citizens in the eyes of the charedi Chief Rabbinate in Israel, whose rulings affect Jews around the world?
I posed the question to Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, rabbi of the prominent Park Avenue Synagogue (Conservative), during a meeting last week of the Jewish Religious Equality Coalition, which seeks “to create alternatives to the exclusive control of the Chief Rabbinate over personal-status issues.” It took place here at the American Jewish Committee, the coalition’s chief sponsor.
Rabbi Cosgrove’s response was that with Israel facing an array of security worries, most notably the threat of a nuclear Iran and increasing diplomatic isolation, the issue of religious freedom is not a priority. “So the can gets kicked down the road,” he said. Consciously or not, many non-Orthodox American Jews are reluctant to put additional pressure on Israel when it is dealing with such dangerous external challenges.
While most Israelis are not Orthodox, and their resentment of the Chief Rabbinate’s control of their personal-status issues is deep, they, too, find other matters more pressing. In addition, the liberal religious movements that are a majority among U.S. Jews have only a small presence in Israeli society. The movements are illegitimate legally and, for the most part, a curiosity socially.
‘Not In The Cards’
At the AJC meeting more than 30 people, representing leadership from the Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist and Modern Orthodox communities, as well as AJC and the Anti-Defamation League, focused their discussion on the incoming Israeli government coalition, being formed this week by right of center and religious parties. Its makeup will present a challenge to the many pro-Israel organizations in the U.S. that favor a two-state solution to the Palestinian problem, since Prime Minister Netanyahu will be pressed — or allow himself to be pressed — internally to support settlements and resist ceding land.
Some participants at the meeting suggested that Netanyahu be told firmly by American Jewish leaders that support for Israel’s position on a range of key issues -- that include opposing the looming Iran nuclear agreement and the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement -- be tied to the Israeli government advancing efforts on the religious freedom front. But few believe that pro-Israel organizations would be silent on Iran or BDS even if the prime minister resists their pleas.
Speaking to the group at AJC, journalist and author Yossi Klein Halevi, who often writes about Israel-diaspora relations, warned that the best that advocates for religious freedom in Israel can hope for is to hold the line on the successes achieved in the last government coalition, which had no charedi parties. Those included a law to draft charedi yeshiva students into the army; accommodations for more equal prayerfor women at the Kotel; a bill that allows community rabbis, some of whom are more welcoming than the Chief Rabbinate, to perform conversions; and efforts to legalize civil marriage in Israel. The new government may seek to reverse those efforts and to re-introduce a controversial bill that appears to prioritize the Jewish nature of Israel over its democratic side.
“Religious pluralism is not in the cards in the foreseeable future, and we will not see any breakthroughs,” said Klein Halevi, a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, speaking to the group via Skype. His clear message was to lower expectations and work to prevent a reversal on gains. Focus on efforts on a municipal or local level rather than nationally, he advised, and work to bring more Israeli journalists and politicians on visits to the U.S. to better understand how Judaism is practiced here. He added that full religious equality should remain the coalition’s ultimate goal, but that it may take years, if not decades, to achieve.
Benny Ish-Shalom, founder and president of Beit Morasha, a Jerusalem-based institution advocating inclusivity in religious life, also addressed the group. As chairman of the board of the Joint Conversion Institute, an official state body in Israel founded 16 years ago, he said that 60,000 Israelis, mostly from the Russian immigrant population, have taken its courses but only 16,000 have converted. That “disappointing” figure, according to Ish-Shalom, is attributed to the fact that the Chief Rabbinate has set what many call an unnecessarily high bar for conversion, discouraging many would-be candidates.
He said the issue is political and bureaucratic more than theological and that as “your partner,” he supports the coalition’s efforts to liberalize the procedures. “Your role in this battle,” he told the group, “is to try to convince the prime minister and the Knesset,” by warning them of the negative impact Israel’s policies on religious freedoms are having on American Jews, who represent a key strategic ally to Israel. An Orthodox Jew himself, he said that the Rabbinical Council of America, the large Orthodox group, has ceded its authority to the Israeli Chief Rabbinate on conversions, and that “this must be challenged by you.”
‘Decreasing Points Of Contact’
Rabbi Cosgrove applauded Ish-Shalom on his incremental efforts, particularly in forming alliances with several key Orthodox rabbis in Israel seeking to ease restrictions within halacha, or Jewish law, while preserving the Orthodox monopoly on personal-status issues. But the Park Avenue Synagogue rabbi said that when it comes to his community, “we are in another universe from the Orthodox debate.” He and other non-Orthodox pulpit rabbis face serious issues of assimilation regularly in their work, he said, and he posed a series of questions that centered on “the decreasing points of contact” between “the two worlds” of Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews.
As a Conservative rabbi, he asked, should he “accept small victories” on the religious freedom front “or reject them” as insufficient, holding out for full recognition? “Do I defer to the Orthodox for the sake of Clal Yisrael [Jewish peoplehood] or say no,” it’s not enough?
There were no easy answers, and while it was agreed at the meeting that the coalition should continue with its overall objective while pushing for whatever gains it can, it was also noted that most of those in the room were middle-aged or older. The underlying concern is that many younger American Jews are distanced from Israel, the result either of disinterest, or discomfort with its policies on treatment of Palestinians and/or its lack of acceptance of non-Orthodox forms of Jewish practice.
Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Reform movement, insists that many of his constituents are indeed “exorcised about religious pluralism issues — I hear it wherever I go,” he told me. And while the movement supports liberalizing Orthodox conversions, there is frustration at the narrowness of the solutions and the lack of urgency for greater change.
Rabbi Jacobs believes that Netanyahu understands religious pluralism to be “a strategic issue” for Israel because it impacts on “the disaffection of American Jewry.” But the rabbi worries that the incoming Israeli government, with its parochial views, “will drive American Jews to feel distant from that government, and we may lose ground” in terms of support. For example, he said, if the new government revives the effort to pass a national state bill, codifying Israel as a Jewish state, “watch out when American Jews feel that democratic norms are being threatened. That’s what keeps me up at night.”
He is not alone. The more stories we hear about Israeli minorities alleging discrimination — be they Arabs or, just this week, Ethiopian Jews — or of special needs children prevented from celebrating a bar or bat mitzvah — the greater the risk of tearing the fragile threads that still bind us.
Gary@jewishweek.org
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MUSINGS
Limitation And Freedom
Rabbi David Wolpe
Special To The Jewish Week
Rabbi David Wolpe
A famous philosophical principle comes to us from Immanuel Kant: “ought implies can.” In other words, you cannot suggest that someone ought to do something unless in fact, they can do it. This same principle is expressed by the Rabbis when they state that one is not allowed to make a rule that the community cannot abide.
The philosopher and wit Sidney Morgenbesser, reflecting on Kant’s principle that “ought implies can,” joked that in Jewish ethics, “can implies don’t.” It is certainly true that much is forbidden to one who follows Jewish law. But inside every limitation hides freedom. On Shabbat not spending money creates time for family, for reading and reflection, a freedom missing during the busy week. If you keep kosher, it frees you to be mindful about what you eat, and connected to both community and Jewish history.
Restrictions can, of course, be overdone, and prove destructive. But the hedge is more beautiful for being trimmed and the picture for being framed. In a free society we underestimate how liberating it can be to place limits on oneself, and often do not understand that only the one who can say “no” is truly free.
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.
Read MoreTRAVEL
Nostalgia On The Danube
Hilary Danailova
Travel Writer
A scene on Ulitsa Alexandrovska, a prominent pedestrian promenade in Ruse. Hilary Danailova/JW
The beautiful blue Danube was neither beautiful nor blue.
Gazing over a ramshackle assortment of trailers, creaky amusement-park rides and abandoned Mercedes parts, I surveyed the waterfront of the city Bulgarians call “the little Vienna” and concluded that Strauss would have trouble with the appellation. We were in Ruse, a Bulgarian city on the banks of that fabled river, which was an unappealing shade of gray. From our perch on a pedestrian wharf, we watched shady-looking men in dark jackets prowl and puff on cigarettes among the detritus below.
Oggi and I had come to Ruse to see whether its reputation as the Balkans’ most elegant city was deserved. While the regions just next door — Serbia, Hungary, Bosnia — were paved in cosmopolitan splendor under the more urbane Austria-Hungary, with grand boulevards and curlicued façades, Ottoman-controlled Bulgaria remained underdeveloped well into the 19th century. Ruse is always cited as the exception, the lone Bulgarian city that resembles Central Europe.
To say this is an exaggeration is a radical understatement. Ruse looks more or less like any other neglected, crumbling provincial city in full post-Socialist decline. Endless gray blocs sprawl across what could have been a pretty green hillside on the Bulgarian banks of the Danube — which, as it narrows toward the Black Sea, is only about half as wide as the Hudson.
Yes, Ruse was profoundly disappointing. But I had a fabulous time anyhow. As it turns out, a city in decay can be as fascinating — in a mournful, nostalgic way — as one in full flower.
Rejecting a modest English guesthouse, we followed signs for a hotel just off Ulitsa Alexandrovska, a pedestrian promenade, which gives onto a grand, pleasantly landscaped plaza known as Freedom Square. For $35 a night, we relaxed amid the well-preserved vestiges of Socialist splendor: a suite with two bathrooms and a living room, steaming-hot palacinkas with forest-berry jam and Nescafé for breakfast. In the foyer was a self-service shoeshine machine, a hallmark of hotels from the Soviet era.
The heyday of Ruse, and the zenith of Jewish life here, ended a century ago. Ruse’s first synagogue was built around the year 1800, when a Sephardic community coalesced on Eastern Europe’s most prominent waterway. Jewish merchants traded around the region, known as the Mizia, and across the Danube; several large synagogues, catering to Ashkenazic settlers as well as the dominant Sephardic population, were erected alongside neoclassical buildings, in fashionable shades of pink and yellow.
The ambitions of that time are still evident in the grandeur of Freedom Square, where an Italian classical-style statue known as the Monument of Liberty — the city mascot — towers over formal gardens. A few cobblestoned blocks away in Battenberg Square, the History Museum of Ruse is arguably the most beautiful building in town, occupying the daffodil-yellow fin-de-siècle Battenberg Palace. (Prince Alexander Battenberg, for whom many of Bulgaria’s notable places are named, was the country’s first sovereign ruler following independence from Istanbul in the late 19th century.)
It is telling about Balkan cities that their most prominent cultural institutions are history museums, rather than galleries of art. Few artists of international renown have emerged from the region; on the other hand, there is no shortage of history in the so-called powder keg of Europe. Jews form an integral part of that history in this polyglot corner of the Balkans, where Slavs, Hungarians, Romanians, Roma and Turks all contribute to the ethnic mix.
Little of that vitality endures on the streets of Ruse today. Crumbling sidewalks, shady in the verdant bloom of a South European spring, were largely empty during our visit. Sad, hulking Socialist-era buildings blight the urban center, while the few prewar façades have fallen into neglect, sooty and windowless. The overall feeling is one ofabandonment and dilapidation. Across the post-Communist landscape, third-tier cities like Ruse — once engines of regional industry — have seen an entire generation of young people migrate to the capital or abroad.
The Jews of Ruse were on the vanguard of emigration; a community that once numbered around 4,000 has dwindled to less than 200, with Shalom Ruse, the local Hebrew organization, serving as a resource for the largely elderly Jewish population that remains. As did Jews from elsewhere in the Balkans, most Bulgarian Jews resettled in Israel after World War II, though ties remain strong to the cities they left behind.
After visiting the History Museum and taking a stroll down Alexandrovska, we followed signs through a courtyard toward the elegant dining rooms of an 1890s villa, now a Turkish restaurant. Large parties, formally dressed, dined on tomato and feta salads and grilled kebabs in the soft glow of Old World chandeliers. The retro effect was enhanced by a singer who crooned a mix of 1980s Italian pop and Russian drinking songs — Cold War favorites that struck a nostalgic chord in Oggi.
The night was warm, and an evening crowd strolled through the gardens of Freedom Square long after dusk. In the rustling shade of elm trees, watching a moonrise over the Monument of Liberty, we settled into a café and imagined how the scene might have looked a century earlier, when Ruse was the Vienna of the Balkans.
editor@jewishweek.orgRead More
'The Heidi Chronicles': Jewish Enough?MUSINGS
Limitation And Freedom
Rabbi David Wolpe
Special To The Jewish Week
Rabbi David Wolpe
A famous philosophical principle comes to us from Immanuel Kant: “ought implies can.” In other words, you cannot suggest that someone ought to do something unless in fact, they can do it. This same principle is expressed by the Rabbis when they state that one is not allowed to make a rule that the community cannot abide.
The philosopher and wit Sidney Morgenbesser, reflecting on Kant’s principle that “ought implies can,” joked that in Jewish ethics, “can implies don’t.” It is certainly true that much is forbidden to one who follows Jewish law. But inside every limitation hides freedom. On Shabbat not spending money creates time for family, for reading and reflection, a freedom missing during the busy week. If you keep kosher, it frees you to be mindful about what you eat, and connected to both community and Jewish history.
Restrictions can, of course, be overdone, and prove destructive. But the hedge is more beautiful for being trimmed and the picture for being framed. In a free society we underestimate how liberating it can be to place limits on oneself, and often do not understand that only the one who can say “no” is truly free.
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.
Read MoreTRAVEL
Nostalgia On The Danube
Hilary Danailova
Travel Writer
A scene on Ulitsa Alexandrovska, a prominent pedestrian promenade in Ruse. Hilary Danailova/JW
The beautiful blue Danube was neither beautiful nor blue.
Gazing over a ramshackle assortment of trailers, creaky amusement-park rides and abandoned Mercedes parts, I surveyed the waterfront of the city Bulgarians call “the little Vienna” and concluded that Strauss would have trouble with the appellation. We were in Ruse, a Bulgarian city on the banks of that fabled river, which was an unappealing shade of gray. From our perch on a pedestrian wharf, we watched shady-looking men in dark jackets prowl and puff on cigarettes among the detritus below.
Oggi and I had come to Ruse to see whether its reputation as the Balkans’ most elegant city was deserved. While the regions just next door — Serbia, Hungary, Bosnia — were paved in cosmopolitan splendor under the more urbane Austria-Hungary, with grand boulevards and curlicued façades, Ottoman-controlled Bulgaria remained underdeveloped well into the 19th century. Ruse is always cited as the exception, the lone Bulgarian city that resembles Central Europe.
To say this is an exaggeration is a radical understatement. Ruse looks more or less like any other neglected, crumbling provincial city in full post-Socialist decline. Endless gray blocs sprawl across what could have been a pretty green hillside on the Bulgarian banks of the Danube — which, as it narrows toward the Black Sea, is only about half as wide as the Hudson.
Yes, Ruse was profoundly disappointing. But I had a fabulous time anyhow. As it turns out, a city in decay can be as fascinating — in a mournful, nostalgic way — as one in full flower.
Rejecting a modest English guesthouse, we followed signs for a hotel just off Ulitsa Alexandrovska, a pedestrian promenade, which gives onto a grand, pleasantly landscaped plaza known as Freedom Square. For $35 a night, we relaxed amid the well-preserved vestiges of Socialist splendor: a suite with two bathrooms and a living room, steaming-hot palacinkas with forest-berry jam and Nescafé for breakfast. In the foyer was a self-service shoeshine machine, a hallmark of hotels from the Soviet era.
The heyday of Ruse, and the zenith of Jewish life here, ended a century ago. Ruse’s first synagogue was built around the year 1800, when a Sephardic community coalesced on Eastern Europe’s most prominent waterway. Jewish merchants traded around the region, known as the Mizia, and across the Danube; several large synagogues, catering to Ashkenazic settlers as well as the dominant Sephardic population, were erected alongside neoclassical buildings, in fashionable shades of pink and yellow.
The ambitions of that time are still evident in the grandeur of Freedom Square, where an Italian classical-style statue known as the Monument of Liberty — the city mascot — towers over formal gardens. A few cobblestoned blocks away in Battenberg Square, the History Museum of Ruse is arguably the most beautiful building in town, occupying the daffodil-yellow fin-de-siècle Battenberg Palace. (Prince Alexander Battenberg, for whom many of Bulgaria’s notable places are named, was the country’s first sovereign ruler following independence from Istanbul in the late 19th century.)
It is telling about Balkan cities that their most prominent cultural institutions are history museums, rather than galleries of art. Few artists of international renown have emerged from the region; on the other hand, there is no shortage of history in the so-called powder keg of Europe. Jews form an integral part of that history in this polyglot corner of the Balkans, where Slavs, Hungarians, Romanians, Roma and Turks all contribute to the ethnic mix.
Little of that vitality endures on the streets of Ruse today. Crumbling sidewalks, shady in the verdant bloom of a South European spring, were largely empty during our visit. Sad, hulking Socialist-era buildings blight the urban center, while the few prewar façades have fallen into neglect, sooty and windowless. The overall feeling is one ofabandonment and dilapidation. Across the post-Communist landscape, third-tier cities like Ruse — once engines of regional industry — have seen an entire generation of young people migrate to the capital or abroad.
The Jews of Ruse were on the vanguard of emigration; a community that once numbered around 4,000 has dwindled to less than 200, with Shalom Ruse, the local Hebrew organization, serving as a resource for the largely elderly Jewish population that remains. As did Jews from elsewhere in the Balkans, most Bulgarian Jews resettled in Israel after World War II, though ties remain strong to the cities they left behind.
After visiting the History Museum and taking a stroll down Alexandrovska, we followed signs through a courtyard toward the elegant dining rooms of an 1890s villa, now a Turkish restaurant. Large parties, formally dressed, dined on tomato and feta salads and grilled kebabs in the soft glow of Old World chandeliers. The retro effect was enhanced by a singer who crooned a mix of 1980s Italian pop and Russian drinking songs — Cold War favorites that struck a nostalgic chord in Oggi.
The night was warm, and an evening crowd strolled through the gardens of Freedom Square long after dusk. In the rustling shade of elm trees, watching a moonrise over the Monument of Liberty, we settled into a café and imagined how the scene might have looked a century earlier, when Ruse was the Vienna of the Balkans.
editor@jewishweek.orgRead More
Revival of Wendy Wasserstein's play calls for a side of herring.
David Goldberg | Contributing Writer | Theater & Dance | 04/29/2015
On Tuesday, Elisabeth Moss was nominated for a Tony for her performance as Heidi Holland in Wendy Wasserstein’s most well known play, The Heidi Chronicles.
When Wendy Wasserstein’s Isn’t It Romantic opened in New York in 1983, theater critics deemed it to be “too Jewish.” But with a poised, contained performance by Moss, is the play Jewish enough to match up to its creator?
Wasserstein, beloved about town for her open personality and expressive middlebrow charm, fired back to the criticism, “When your name is Wendy Wasserstein and you’re from New York, you are the walking embodiment of ‘too Jewish’” as quoted by the Jewish Women’s Archive. Imbuing her plays with the pain and familiarity of being the last single intelligent girl at the party, Wasserstein crafted a historic gallery of female outsiders.
The Heidi Chronicles, which opened in 1989 and won the Tony award and the Pulitzer Prize, follows the struggles of a baby boomer feminist as she witnesses the evolution of personal and political life from the 1960’s through the ‘80’s. Now, 25 years after the original and nearly a decade after the passing of its writer, this generation’s revival of Heidi proves to be a charming production, but may lack the charismatic personality for which Wasserstein was known.
Jumping around between 1965-1989, Heidi moves at the speed of last year’s Oscar nominated film, Boyhood, or in this case, Womanhood With each scene change, girl groups from the Ronettes to the Go-Go’s introduce the years to come, as sensational pop culture tableaux flash by and lushly detailed sets roll out. The only constant: Heidi herself.
The titular heroine, originated by Joan Allen and now recreated by the enormously talented Elisabeth Moss (Mad Men) serves as a witness to the changes in her relationships, her place in society, and the feminist movement over twenty years. As an art historian, Heidi seeks to restore honor and prestige to female artists whose names were vilified in history. And while she never compromises her beliefs, she never really shares her motivations either. As the crown jewel of such a vocal creator, shouldn’t Heidi be a bit more fabrunt about something?
It seems that what made Heidi an outsider in 1989 makes her more of an every-feminist today. Without the politics, who is Heidi? Where are the ticks, neuroses, and wry observations that made Wasserstein such a fixture? Unable to make mistakes or really strike out, Moss feels confined and treasured, robbed of the chance to be dangerous.
But while Heidi herself may need time to adjust to 2015, her relationships haven’t lost a wink of relevance. Her childhood friend Susan, the brilliantly manic Ali Ahn, sashays into each decade’s trends, often leaving Heidi behind in search of a new identity. Peter(Bryce Pinkham) and Heidi challenge and frustrate each other: they don’t lock in place like the dead stereotype ofa single girl and her gay sidekick. And as Scoop Rosenbaum, Heidi’s on-again-off-again lover, Jason Biggs transcends his shlubby typecast and glides around as the type of slick man we’ve all fallen for – and who will never choose us.
With fabulous production design, a quick pace, and a ready and willing supporting cast, this revival will surely please fans of the original. But to connect with young audiences, Heidi must be more than an outsider, and reflect more than the politics of her time. If Moss can channel everything that made Wendy Wasserstein unique – her passion, her voice, her undeniable Jewishness – then this year’s Heidi could be as unique and iconic as the original.
TOP STORIES:INTERNATIONAL
At IDF Hospital In Nepal, Healing And Heartbreak
Israel’s 150-strong medical staff seen as lifesaver amid the rubble.
Nathan Jeffay
Contributing Editor
Medical clown Smadar Harpats gets a smile from an injured Nepalese boy at IDF field hospital. Photos By Nathan Jeffay/JW
Kathmandu, Nepal — An 18-year-old lies on a bed at the entrance of a tent, with an injured head and just a stub where his right arm used to be. “When I saw him I thought he was dead,” said his father, Bim Mahi.
Nearby, there’s a new baby in an incubator, a woman clinging to life in the intensive care unit, a soldier praying in the synagogue, and a triage full of Nepalese who are flocking here based on word-of-mouth reports about the treatment on offer.
It’s just a normal day at Israel’s field hospital in Nepal, still reeling after a 7.8-magnitude earthquake rocked the country on April 25; the death toll now stands at more than 7,500.
One of the first faces that many of the patients see here is that of Avi Alpert, a U.S. immigrant to Israel who had no obligation to conscript to the army but signed up and put himself through basic training at age 42. Now, seven years later, the sense of duty that first got him into uniform has brought him to this makeshift Kathmandu facility.
As of Tuesday night, the field hospital has treated almost 1,000 patients, delivered seven babies — all of them healthy — and performed 50 surgeries. Its team, consisting of nearly 150 medical professionals here as part of their full-time army service or as reservists, sleeps in tiny one-man or two-man tents: even revered doctors like Jonathan Halevy, director-general of Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Centre, finds rest under canvas after a grueling shift.
Around here, Alpert is Mr. Clockwork: the man who keeps the emergency room running smoothly, which, in turn, keeps the whole place running smoothly. Despite the fact that we’re standing amid a collection of tents in a large field, doctors are walking around with tablets inputting digital records and people are waiting well under an hour to be seen. It’s a setup that “any emergency department in the world would envy,” said Alpert, a Baltimorean who used to work in New York.
Referral to the various departments is fast — so much so there’s a joke that Tel Avivans will soon start discovering that the quickest way to get a specialist appointment with an Israeli doctor is to fly to Nepal.
Mahi had never met an Israeli before his son was transferred here a few days after the quake. But when he hears the word Israel he smiles, and compliments the care. “Now we’re not worrying for his life as we were at the beginning,” he said.
Sitting on the young man’s bed is 52-year-old Baruch Antolovich, who lives in the Swiss Alps, where he runs a bed-and-breakfast. “I heard on Saturday about the earthquake, began to think, and then on Sunday night, my wife said: ‘So, are you going?’”
Antolovich, originally from Los Angeles, lived in Israel for 12 years from 1995, but has no military training. He also has no medical background. But he’s volunteered in disaster zones in the past, and decided to fly to Kathmandu at his own expense and appoint himself as hospital gofer. “I empty garbage cans, pick up garbage from the floor, feed patients — the stuff nobody really wants to do,” he said. “Everybody has a part.” He added: “I think we’re to be a light to the nation and this is a good example without words, which speaks for itself.”
A few other diaspora Jews have turned up here, including a nurse from New York and a doctor from San Francisco — but Antolovich is the only non-medic. He has been taking food to the young man who lost his arm, and feeding him when relatives are not on hand. “We have a kind of friendship now,” Antolovich commented. “He always has a big smile for me when I come to see him.”
Some of the heroism here takes place away from the bedsides, and in the back rooms. For example, when Pemba, a 15-year-old boy who had been trapped under rubble for five days, arrived, it was the advanced onsite lab that enabled him to survive.
Amazingly, he didn’t have a single visible injury, but there were serious concerns about the effect that spending so long under the rubble would have on hisbodily functions. “We did lab tests on him all through the night,” said Olga Garachevsky, standing amid dozens of samples ready for analysis. Pemba received treatment for the impact of his entrapment, and is now recovering smoothly in another hospital — a far cry from the post-trauma care that many Nepalese, especially those in outlying areas, are receiving.
Every day among these tents is a mixture of the heartbreaking and the hopeful.
On Tuesday morning in the Intensive Care Unit, a 37-year-old woman is fighting for her life. Trapped for four days in the rubble, one of her legs had to be amputated. “Below the knee an amputation like this is easy to treat, but this amputation was very high, and it’s very hard to manage,” said her doctor, Eli Schwartz, head of tropical medicine at Tel Aviv’s Sheba Medical Center and the leading Israeli in his field.
The tragedy of this case goes even deeper. The woman’s 24-year-old daughter, born after she was raped at age 13, was also badly injured by the quake. She was hospitalized nearby, but died, and the authorities came to the Israeli hospital with the news.
But despite the heaviness weighing on everyone’s minds, joy reverberates through the place when there is something to celebrate. The births get everyone cooing. And signs of recovery also bring delight.
In the course of Tuesday morning, a woman, discovered by a rescue team in a village and brought to the hospital a few days ago unable to move or talk, is suddenly both moving and talking. Alaluf Heli, a 34-year-old who had helped to look after her, was elated. “Sometimes when I’m tired and missing my children it’s really very hard, and this kind of thing helps to give me the drive to continue,” he said.
Meanwhile, Bika Rana, a 25-year-old Nepalese soldier, is sitting in a wheelchair, feeling a new sense of encouragement after learning that his injured leg is healing well. “I’m happy, and hoping that I will be able to get back to my normal life.” he said, after recounting how his house collapsed on top of him as he tried to flee the quake.
The best light relief of the day comes suddenly, almost like a flash mob, when the crowd of people waiting for admission grows large. They are in for a surprise — or rather, five red-nosed baggy-trousered, balloon-inflating surprises. The Israel Defense Forces and the Israeli Embassy are hosting a team of medical clowns, from the Israeli NGO for medical clowning, Dream Doctors, which paid for its own flights.
As they mime, play and generally act daft, it becomes clear that waiting for a doctor has actually been transformed into the most entertaining experience that people have had in days. One of the clowns kneels down to a patient on a stretcher, with visible leg injuries from the quake. He affixes a red nose to him, and mock-interviews him for an imaginary TV station using an inflatable microphone. The patient Bata Nepali, a 53-year-old shopkeeper, has plenty to be glum about — he’s not only injured, but his house is destroyed. Yet he’s loving it, and declares in his mock interview that he wants one day to do a real television interview, and use it to praise Israel.
One of the clowns goes into the emergency room, where a young boy needs a lengthy and painful-looking change of dressing on his foot. Smadar Harpats sings, grunts and mimes, and woos him with balloons and airplanes all the way through the procedure, and the boy responds with big, broad, heart-melting smiles. It fills the whole ER with positive energy.
Harpats — or “Sunshine” to use her clown name — has been astounded by the response to clowning here. “Even children who have lost a leg, or who have been through other terrible pain, quickly decide they want to play,” she said.
Soldiers in the field hospital worked on Shabbat, and will do so again this weekend. This isn’t a violation of Jewish law, but rather following the rule that work should be continued even on Sabbath in cases of medical need. And religious soldiers are accommodated in the camp in a range of areas.
The food is kosher, there is a synagogue tent with three daily services, and a rabbi. An eruv is in place to allow carrying on Shabbat. And the hospital even kept the mitzvah of hachnasat orchim, receiving guests, last Shabbat. Around 100 Israelis who were still in Nepal, were hosted for Friday night dinner where, in line with army rules, Kiddush was recited before the meal started.
Judaism isn’t the only religion among soldiers. Ashraf Kheir, a 32-year-old Druze-Arab from Peki’in, said that his faith played a part in his keenness to serve Nepal via the IDF. “The education we have is to help every human being — and we have to be faithful to our country and its operations,” said Kheir, a paramedic and nurse, adding: “I just received a letter from my father saying how proud he is of me.”
The 200-strong official Israeli mission to Nepal, which is advising the government on managing the situation as well as running the hospital, is due to pack up and leave in the middle of next week. But when its members return to Israel, many will still mentally be in Nepal.
Eli Schwartz, who has the 37-year-old patient clinging to her life, said that he worries for people like her once the IDF pulls out. Nepal, with its limited health infrastructure, will be overloaded, he said. “These are severe wounds that need long-term care, and we’re worried about who here has the skill to deal with people like this when we leave.”
Schwartz, who said he regards Nepal as a “second home,” as he lived and worked here for a stint a few years ago, added: “It feels like you save life — but who knows what will happen later on?”
editor@jewishweek.org
Read MoreNEW YORK
Genesis Prize Funds New Generation Of Social Entrepreneurs
Last year’s winner uses $1M prize to support tikkun olam projects from millennial innovators.
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
Michael Bloomberg, announced winners of his Genesis Generation Challenge grants. Courtesy of Bloomberg Philanthropies
A veteran of coexistence activism around the world, Tarek Elgawhary, an Egyptian Muslim who lives in Washington, was looking for a project to improve relations between Israeli and Palestinians. “You need to speak to this guy Ben,” friends told him.
Ben is Ben Jablonski, an Australian-born partner in an apparel company and former investment banker who has lived in Manhattan since 2006. Jablonski, who is Jewish, shares Elgawhary’s interest in the Middle East conflict.
They met here, became friends, and decided to found a project, Build Israel and Palestine, which will build a sewage treatment system for Arab villages in the West Bank that are not part of the Palestinian Authority’s still-developing sewage treatment grid.
They sought investments from Jews and Muslims, mostly in the United States, but the amount they raised left them short of what they needed to fully implement their project.
The project’s financial prospects brightened last week when it was announced as one of nine recipients of $100,000 Genesis Generation Challenge grants awarded by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who last year received the first Genesis Prize’s first $1 million grant. Funded by the office of Israel’s prime minister, the Jewish Agency and the Genesis Philanthropy Group, the prize is awarded to “exceptional individuals whose values and achievements will inspire the next generation of Jews.”
Bloomberg said he would use his prize money to establish a challenge competition to provide seed money for “innovative projects guided by Jewish values to address the world’s pressing issues.” The contest stipulated that each team of social entrepreneurs be led by someone age 20 to 36.
Jablonski, the team leader, is 32; co-founder Elgawhary, is 36.
While a few of the other eight awardees focus on projects in Israel, their scope largely is international. The 52 judges of the competition used a “fairly expansive” definition of Jewish values in choosing the winners, from some 2,000 individuals who initially expressed interest and 113 projects that were finally proposed, said Jill Smith, deputy CEO of the Genesis Prize Foundation. “Doing something to make the world better is part of what Jewish values are.”
The other Challenge recipients are:
♦ Building Up Canada, a nonprofit that will install energy-efficient technology inaffordable housing complexes in Toronto.
♦ eNable 3D Printed Prosthetics, which will provide advanced, computer-driven machines that will make free prosthetic limbs for people in countries affected by natural disasters.
♦ Lavan, an Israeli organization that will create “a community of American angel investors” to support projects “that strengthen Israeli and Jewish values.”
♦ Prize4Life, an Israeli nonprofit that is developing an app to help monitor ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) markers.
♦ Sanergy, a Kenya-based initiative that will produce a sanitation plant for Nairobi’s Mathare district.
♦ Sesame, which is developing a smartphone in Israel for disabled people who have no or limited use of their hands.
♦ Spark, which will provide micro-grants to poor, rural communities in Burundi for designing “social impact projects” like the building of schools or health centers.
♦ Vera Solutions, which has established a fellowship to support and mentor “passionate young professionals with skills to drive technology-based innovations in the social sector.”
The winning projects will receive their funding on a quarterly basis, be monitored regularly and receive mentoring from experienced entrepreneurs. But there is no guarantee that all will succeed, Bloomberg said at the Challenge’s announcement press conference last week at the Manhattan headquarters of Bloomberg Philanthropies. The money is a good investment in the future, with a Jewish flavor that emphasizes the shared Jewish values of Israelis and American Jews, he said.
“At a time when many Americans and Israelis fear the relationship between our countries has become irrevocably strained, we must recognize that the bond our citizens share is based on our common democratic values, like freedom, justice, innovation and community,” Bloomberg said.
Smith called the number and variety of the submitted projects a sign “that millennials want to make a difference in the world. The judges were inspired by the idea that in a time of polarization [especially in the Middle East] real people on the ground wanted to work together to make a difference.”
She said Build Israel and Palestine was the only submitted project in which Jewish and Muslim directors played a prominent role. “It is a great project — people would come together and transcend politics.”
“Current coexistence initiatives between Jews and Muslims do not create results because projects are funded almost exclusively by Jewish donors and organizations. If all parties are not invested financially and emotionally, it is extremely difficult to advance coexistence,” the project’s application states. “Our council consists of five Muslims and five Jews who are all eager to apply their resources and expertise” for Build Israel and Palestine.
While many Jewish organizations provide financial support to similar social entrepreneur projects, the Challenge sought to identify and foster members of the millennial generation who often have not achieved the recognition to qualify for such grants. The judges looked for “not the usual suspects” who already have established connections to the Jewish establishment. “We’ve reached a different audience,” she said, adding that social media played a large role in publicizing the competition.
Another advantage of focusing on the 20 to 36 age group is that it will create millennial-aged role models, which are more likely to inspire other millennials to become active in such humanitarian work than older winners would, she said.
“A hundred thousand dollars is not going to change the world, but it may help to attract more money” to each Challenge recipient, Smith said. The Challenge’s remaining $100,000 will pay for overhead.
Jablonski and Elgawhary declined to specify how much they had previously raised from Jewish and Muslim philanthropists in this country, but said the Challenge funds will enable them to start their sewage treatment project in the West Bank in the next few months; now they’re looking for the right village, with a population of about 300 residents.
“This [Challenge money] does give us a platform — it allows us to have more respect and recognition,” Jablonski said. “We are trying to address a problem on both sides [of the Israeli-Palestinian] divide that has nothing to do with geopolitics.”
He said his interest in the West Bank’s sewage treatment issue grew out of his previous volunteer work as founder of JNFuture, a leadership training program for the Jewish National Fund. That sparked his interest in land-use issues.
Some 75 percent of residents of the West Bank have no access to a grid of home sewage collection, Jablonski said. Instead, he said, sewage from most Arabs’ homes there goes directly into the ground, seeping into aquifers, the underground layer of water-bearing permeable rock or unconsolidated materials that Israel and the West Bank have in common. “It poisons the ground for both sides. It’s a shared aquifer,” he said.
In lieu of a wide-scale sewage treatment plant, the project will install a series of septic tanks that will turn out water fit to be used for agriculture in local fields using membrane-based technology that was recently proven effective by USAID, the philanthropic arm of the U.S. government.
The project, which has partnered with Israel’s Arava Institute, is endorsed by USAID and local municipalities on the West Bank, Jablonski said.
He said his project may expand to other regional problems, like the shortage of electric power or potable water, and will invite other participants to join the work of Build Israel and Palestine. “There is plenty of space for other people to get involved,” he said.
steve@jewishweek.org
Read MoreNEW YORK
Leaving The Fold, Onto The Bookshelf
Growing literary genre of ex-Orthodox testing traditional narrative of insular communities.
Sandee Brawarsky
Culture Editor
Shulem Deen was a man in his 20s when he felt bold enough to slip unseen into a public library. Like the inner-city African-American boy in Philip Roth’s “Goodbye, Columbus” who, on a visit to the Newark Public Library, first sees Gauguin’s striking paintings of exotic Tahiti, a world cracked open for Deen.
On a tiny chair in the children’s section, the Skverer chasid made his way through the World Book Encyclopedia, encountering Einstein, Egyptian hieroglyphics and Elvis Presley for the first time.
His debut memoir, “All Who Go Do Not Return” (Graywolf), is the latest work in the new and deepening literary tradition of brutally honest works by ex-chasidim about leaving their community. Through these books, the reading public is guided inside thecloistered worlds of chasidic life. Whether that cloistered world has been changed — opened up, if you will — by the growing number of these works remains a point of debate.
Deen is the poet laureate of ex-chasidim. His sentences flow with originality as he unveils his story with passion and sensitivity. Readers will be surprised to realize that he is largely self-taught, that most of his schooling was in Yiddish.
While “All Who Go Do Not Return” is a story of leaving, his is not the voice of someone in exile, looking back. Rather, Deen writes as a traveler, looking around and deeply noticing all that he missed in the outside world, yearning for knowledge and experience.
It is also a heartbreaking book, as Deen — at least for the time being — is no longer in touch with his five children, three daughters and two sons who range in age from 13 to 20. That’s not his choice, but a complicated outcome of family court, his ex-wife Gitty’s desire to shield them from his heretical ways, community pressure and the children’s absorption of communal norms of conformity. He writes of losing their hearts. Still, Deen is respectful of Gitty and the Skverers. Readers may hope that his children get to read this book and come to understand their father and his love for them.
Since Hella Winston’s groundbreaking study, “Unchosen: The Hidden Lives of Hasidic Rebels,” was published in 2005, there have been many books published by people who seem like they stepped out of her pages. Deen’s book belongs on bookshelves alongside the compelling and much-discussed memoirs by formerly fervently Orthodox writers including Shalom Auslander, Deborah Feldman and Leah Vincent, and Anouk Markovits’ novel “I Am Forbidden.”
Just out last month is a film, “Felix and Meira,” about a young chasidicmarried woman drawn into a romance with a non-Jewish French Canadian and into a world outside of her restrictive Montreal community. It’s a gentle film, with images that linger. Meira’s loving husband is played by Luzer Twersky, a former chasid who grew up in Borough Park and left that world seven years ago.
And coming in July is a new memoir by Judy Brown, who in 2010 penned the young adult book, “Hush,” under the pseudonym Eishes Chayil (woman of valor) for fear of backlash in the chasidic world in which she grew up because of her depiction of sexual abuse within the community. Brown’s “This Is Not A Love Story” is her story of growing up in a family with six children, including a brother who is afflicted with a medical condition they don’t understand. Told in the voice of her younger self, Brown, who has left the chasidic community, although she remains religious, presents an insider’s view of family and communal life, with a questioning spirit.
Alan Brill, a professor in the graduate department of Jewish-Christian studies at Seton Hall University, points to an earlier tradition of chasidic rebels, like Isaac Joel Linetzky (1839 - 1915), a Yiddish writer born into a Chassidic family in Podolia, Ukraine. His novel, “Dos Poylishe Yingl” (“The Polish Boy,” 1869), satirizing Chassidic life in coarse and colorful language, appeared in 30 editions, the last in Kiev in 1939. The sequel was published under the evocative title “Der Vorm in Khreyn” (“The Worm in the Horseradish”).
Brill also mentions stories of people who went to the home of the poet and author Y. L. Peretz in Warsaw: “They came in as chasidim and left as secular Yiddish authors, writing accounts of the changes in their lives.”
Perhaps the ongoing appeal of these works has something to do with the fact that some Jews see their own family’s more traditional pasts in the characters’ strict lifestyle. The memoirs about leaving touch on extreme transformations and complex questions of faith, theology, tradition and family that many struggle with, albeit in different permutations.
“These are coming-of-age stories, but the writers are not teenagers but adults trying to understand the world we live in,” says Twersky, who is a writer as well as an actor. “Before, we had other people telling our stories. Now we are able to speak in our own voices.”
For him, acting in the film “Felix & Meira” was cathartic. “You go back to a place where you were and try to understand it. As an actor you can’t judge your characters. You have to believe in what they believe in at the moment.” He says that he now understands the place he came from in new ways, although he remains critical.
Brill, who closely follows the demographics of the Jewish community, says that nobody has any statistics about the number of people leaving chassidic life. When asked about whether people are also exiting from religious communities like Lakewood, N.J., which are fervently Orthodox but non-chasidic, he says that they are, but not to the same degree.
Brown points out that the chasidic community has quadrupled in the last generation — recent studies show that Borough Park has the highest birthrate of any New York City neighborhood — so that it makes sense that the number of people leaving is also larger. She says it’s natural that some would want to articulate their experience.
As to whether the chasidic communities are changing, Brill says, “I don’t think they change, in a direct sense of becoming more sensitive, more open, or more responsive. I do think these communities have a sense of what the [World Wide] Web brings into their world, how easy it is now to learn about the outside world. There’s greater awareness.
“There are a combination of things going on now,” he continues. “Abuses are being exposed; there are problems of pornography, incredible materialism — seeing how other people live. Real knowledge is available. You have to publicly buy a newspaper, but here the knowledge of what’s going on in the world is [privately] available on your phone. They haven’t come to grips with that yet.”
Twersky believes that he and his fellow chroniclers are indeed having an impact. “We are poking massive holes in the narrative: We are told as kids that if you go out, you’re going to end up in jail, or in rehab, that life will be horrible. The rise of this community is to inspire other people — kids, teenagers, people with kids — to think, ‘I can go out and make it. I can live the life I really want.’”
While Deen, the founding editor of the website Unpious (where he published distinguished work by a number of ex-chasidim), is indeed sad about what has happened with his family, he is not a broken man; rather, he is alive with possibility. In an interview, he shares his ideas with a thoughtfulness that belies how long and deeply he has been considering belief and reason, family and community, and building a new value system. After he married at 18 (he had met his wife for only a few moments before they agreed to wed) and had children, he lost his belief in all that he had been taught not to question.
This wasn’t the book Deen intended to write. He had in mind to write a novel, but his agent convinced him that it would be easier to sell a memoir. He says that he’s always had the impulse to write — as a teenager, he used to write in a florid rabbinic Hebrew and then in Yiddish. Early in his marriage, he published some essays in Yiddish. After sneaking a radio and then a computer into their home in New Square, he discovered the world of blogging in 2003 and attracted a huge audience to his (anonymous) “Hasidic Rebel” blog. Eventually, he was expelled from the Rockland County town as a heretic.
The memoir’s narrative skillfully goes back and forward in time, with flashbacks to his childhood and more innocent times. As a young student when he first visits New Square from Brooklyn, he is struck by the intensity, piety and warmth of the place, and the modesty of the people who seem less interested in remodeled kitchens than the chasidim he knew in Borough Park. Now, he recalls how he was truly uplifted and even ecstatic in his prayer life among the Skverers and he says, “Nothing in the secular world so far has been able to move me with that intensity.”
He no longer prays, but enjoys occasionally going to non-Orthodox synagogues, “connecting to a sense of peoplehood, mystery and culture.”
Deen says that one of the questions he is most frequently asked is whether leaving was worthwhile, whether he’d do it again
“Was it worth it? Absolutely. I’m happier, more fulfilled, I have a wonderful network of friends,” he says.
“Would I have done it if I knew I would lose my children? No I would not. That was too much to bear and I would not have been able to consciously take that step. But perhaps if I was better prepared, the outcome would not have been inevitable, and I’d like to think I’d have had the courage to undertake that battle, because living a fear-based life, lying and hiding to yourself and everyone around you, is no way to live.”
Deen now lives in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, and is on the board of Footsteps, an organization that helps individuals in different stages of leaving Chassidic life, providing much-needed counseling in job skills and education, along with a new sense of community. “Footsteps has saved lives in the most literal sense,” he says.
Basya Schechter, a musician and composer who leads the group “Pharaoh’s Daughter,” also grew up in the chassidic world and left it many years ago. She now serves as music director of Romemu, a progressive, egalitarian synagogue on the Upper West Side, and is studying to be a cantor.
She notes that people have been telling these stories through films and documentaries for the last 20 years, and more recently through memoirs. “Every story is so different, each journey is so individual.”
“I love the genre. Every time another book or movie comes out, I feel it is a triumph of a voice being heard.”
editor@jewishweek.org
Read MoreISRAEL NEWS
Decades Of Frustration For Ethiopian Jews
Tel Aviv riot highlights entrenched discrimination, violence faced by immigrant community.
Michele Chabin
Israel Correspondent
Continued accusations of harassment of Ethiopian Jews in Israel led to riots this week in Tel Aviv. Getty Images
Jerusalem — The Talpiot Industrial Zone in south Jerusalem is home to some of Jerusalem’s poorest people. Housed in run-down buildings built decades ago for Jewish refugees from Arab countries, the crime rate is high, even with a police station located right across the street.
Many Jerusalemites of Ethiopian descent have moved in because they can’t afford to rent or buy anywhere else.
With little to do after school, the neighborhood children, the vast majority of them the Israeli-born children of Ethiopian immigrants, congregate in the local schoolyard to play soccer after doing their homework at the adjoining community center, where a charitable program helps children at risk.
For Moshe (not his real name), who is 12, the schoolyard is where he feels most at home. Surrounded by kids from the same Ethiopian background, he doesn’t have to put up with the racial slurs spewed by a handful of his schoolmates.
“Some of the boys have called me ‘kushi,’ Moshe said, uttering a derogatory Hebrew term equivalent to the N-word in English. “That gets me upset. I’m not kushi, I’m brown,” he asserted.
Moshe’s 13-year-old friend Yosef (also a pseudonym), said some of the boys in his school have called him “kushi” and “black” and “smelly.”
“They stopped after my parents spoke to the principal,” he said. “It’s not easy being Ethiopian. People hit us just because we’re brown,” he said, referring to the recent attack on an Ethiopian soldier by two white policemen. That attack, which was caught on video, and the many other alleged attacks against young Ethiopians perpetrated by white Israelis over the years, sparked two violent protests during the past week by members of Israel’s 120,000-strong Ethiopian Jewish community.
“I used to think Israel was a good country, but now I want to move to America,” Moshe said resolutely as a bunch of friends nodded their heads in agreement.
Many non-Ethiopian Israelis were shocked when a peaceful anti-racism demonstration in Tel Aviv organized by young Ethiopian activists turned violent. After Ethiopian youths — some say egged on by non-Ethiopian anarchists — blocked a major highway and started throwing rocks and stones at the police, the police responded with stun grenades and water cannons.
The events echo the riots in Baltimore following the April 19 death of Freddie Gray, who died of a neck injury while in police custody.
Members of the Ethiopian community say they were shocked, but not surprised, by the violent release of the pent-up anger and frustration felt by their Israeli-born teens and young adults.
“There is a problem, there are discrimination issues, there is racism in Israel,” Fentahun Assefa-Dawit, the director of Tebeka, an advocacy group for Ethiopian Israelis, told journalists Monday, just before meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the educational and socioeconomic gaps, as well as the long-standing discrimination Ethiopian Israelis deal with every day.
Some of these gaps haven’t closed significantly since the 1980s, when Israel first began bringing Ethiopian Jews to Israel.
Adults who immigrated — many of them farmers — found it difficult to learn Hebrew and adapt to a more urban way of life. Their children, including those who did not arrive in Israel years before the parents, were sent to Hebrew-only boarding schools. Some forgot Amharic, their parents’ only language. Away from home and exposed to a more modern way of life, many lost respect for their traditional parents.
Dorit Roer-Strier, a professor in Hebrew University’s School of Social Work, linked the community’s frustration to decades of discrimination.
“Ten years ago I did a study of the fathers and saw how immigration, poverty and discrimination was challenging the fathers’ well-being. The fathers felt their first obligation was to be providers for their children and earn a good living. They felt disrespected not only by Israeli society but by their own children,” Roer-Strier said.
Adding insult to injury, many Israeli rabbis have continued to doubt the Ethiopian community’s Jewishness, despite the fact that Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the late chief Sephardi rabbi, gave it his kosher stamp of approval.
Many Ethiopian Israelis also complain that the government patronizes them.
Until this year, for example, the education of all Ethiopian-Israeli students — including the 70 percent born in Israel — was under the auspices of the Ministry of Education’s Department for the Absorption of Immigrant Students. Many of those students were confined to segregated classes sometimes taught at a slower pace.
Although some of these classes as well as numerous enrichment programs run by the Jewish Agency and various NGOs have helped the youngest generation of Ethiopian Israelis to compete with their white peers and serve side by side with them during their IDF or National Service, many say employers won’t hire them.
“When an Ethiopian applies for a job, as qualified as he might be, as impressive as his CV might be, he is not going to be invited for the interview because he has an Ethiopian name,” Assefa-Dawit said. “When a local Rabbinate office refuses toregister a couple who wants to get married because they’re Ethiopian, when you see a school that says we cannot take more children because they have a quota of how many Ethiopians they will enroll, you can imagine what the feeling of young people will be.”
That has made it difficult for the community to emerge from poverty. Ethiopian families earn about 45 percent of the national average, according to the Bureau of Statistics.
Seated outside the beautiful, modern Ethiopian synagogue funded by the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews right next door to slim buildings in the Industrial Zone slums, Rabbi Shachar Aylin, the shul’s volunteer rabbi, bemoaned the institutional discrimination he said his community experiences day in and day out.
“My Israeli-born children don’t speak Amharic, yet other school children call them kushim,” said Aylin, who moved to Israel from Ethiopia when he was 16. “Israeli homes don’t teach equality to their children. Security guards and police single out black people, and especially our youth. I can’t tell you the number of times our youth have been beaten.”
Aylin, a soft-spoken man who volunteers at the synagogue because the Ministry of Religious Affairs has refused to pay for a rabbi there, although it funds many other local rabbis, related how security guards and police often “take our children to the police station and open a file against them, often for no reason.”
That is the reason, he said, that 40 percent of the youths held in Ofek Prison, a prison for minors, are of Ethiopian descent, according to the Los Angeles Times. Ethiopians represent less than 2 percent of the Israeli population.
Despite these many challenges, Aylin said, “I’m glad I made aliyah. Israel has many good people, but they are drowned out by the others.”
Assefa-Dawit noted that many of the protesters at the rallies carried Israeli flags and sang Israeli songs.
“Israel is our country — there’s no ‘us’ and ‘them,’” he said. “This is our home. [But] the community is crying out for the government to resolve this.”
editor@jewishweek.org
Read More
The Jewish Week
At IDF Hospital In Nepal, Healing And Heartbreak
Israel’s 150-strong medical staff seen as lifesaver amid the rubble.
Nathan Jeffay
Contributing Editor
Medical clown Smadar Harpats gets a smile from an injured Nepalese boy at IDF field hospital. Photos By Nathan Jeffay/JW
Kathmandu, Nepal — An 18-year-old lies on a bed at the entrance of a tent, with an injured head and just a stub where his right arm used to be. “When I saw him I thought he was dead,” said his father, Bim Mahi.
Nearby, there’s a new baby in an incubator, a woman clinging to life in the intensive care unit, a soldier praying in the synagogue, and a triage full of Nepalese who are flocking here based on word-of-mouth reports about the treatment on offer.
It’s just a normal day at Israel’s field hospital in Nepal, still reeling after a 7.8-magnitude earthquake rocked the country on April 25; the death toll now stands at more than 7,500.
One of the first faces that many of the patients see here is that of Avi Alpert, a U.S. immigrant to Israel who had no obligation to conscript to the army but signed up and put himself through basic training at age 42. Now, seven years later, the sense of duty that first got him into uniform has brought him to this makeshift Kathmandu facility.
As of Tuesday night, the field hospital has treated almost 1,000 patients, delivered seven babies — all of them healthy — and performed 50 surgeries. Its team, consisting of nearly 150 medical professionals here as part of their full-time army service or as reservists, sleeps in tiny one-man or two-man tents: even revered doctors like Jonathan Halevy, director-general of Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Centre, finds rest under canvas after a grueling shift.
Around here, Alpert is Mr. Clockwork: the man who keeps the emergency room running smoothly, which, in turn, keeps the whole place running smoothly. Despite the fact that we’re standing amid a collection of tents in a large field, doctors are walking around with tablets inputting digital records and people are waiting well under an hour to be seen. It’s a setup that “any emergency department in the world would envy,” said Alpert, a Baltimorean who used to work in New York.
Referral to the various departments is fast — so much so there’s a joke that Tel Avivans will soon start discovering that the quickest way to get a specialist appointment with an Israeli doctor is to fly to Nepal.
Mahi had never met an Israeli before his son was transferred here a few days after the quake. But when he hears the word Israel he smiles, and compliments the care. “Now we’re not worrying for his life as we were at the beginning,” he said.
Sitting on the young man’s bed is 52-year-old Baruch Antolovich, who lives in the Swiss Alps, where he runs a bed-and-breakfast. “I heard on Saturday about the earthquake, began to think, and then on Sunday night, my wife said: ‘So, are you going?’”
Antolovich, originally from Los Angeles, lived in Israel for 12 years from 1995, but has no military training. He also has no medical background. But he’s volunteered in disaster zones in the past, and decided to fly to Kathmandu at his own expense and appoint himself as hospital gofer. “I empty garbage cans, pick up garbage from the floor, feed patients — the stuff nobody really wants to do,” he said. “Everybody has a part.” He added: “I think we’re to be a light to the nation and this is a good example without words, which speaks for itself.”
A few other diaspora Jews have turned up here, including a nurse from New York and a doctor from San Francisco — but Antolovich is the only non-medic. He has been taking food to the young man who lost his arm, and feeding him when relatives are not on hand. “We have a kind of friendship now,” Antolovich commented. “He always has a big smile for me when I come to see him.”
Some of the heroism here takes place away from the bedsides, and in the back rooms. For example, when Pemba, a 15-year-old boy who had been trapped under rubble for five days, arrived, it was the advanced onsite lab that enabled him to survive.
Amazingly, he didn’t have a single visible injury, but there were serious concerns about the effect that spending so long under the rubble would have on hisbodily functions. “We did lab tests on him all through the night,” said Olga Garachevsky, standing amid dozens of samples ready for analysis. Pemba received treatment for the impact of his entrapment, and is now recovering smoothly in another hospital — a far cry from the post-trauma care that many Nepalese, especially those in outlying areas, are receiving.
Every day among these tents is a mixture of the heartbreaking and the hopeful.
On Tuesday morning in the Intensive Care Unit, a 37-year-old woman is fighting for her life. Trapped for four days in the rubble, one of her legs had to be amputated. “Below the knee an amputation like this is easy to treat, but this amputation was very high, and it’s very hard to manage,” said her doctor, Eli Schwartz, head of tropical medicine at Tel Aviv’s Sheba Medical Center and the leading Israeli in his field.
The tragedy of this case goes even deeper. The woman’s 24-year-old daughter, born after she was raped at age 13, was also badly injured by the quake. She was hospitalized nearby, but died, and the authorities came to the Israeli hospital with the news.
But despite the heaviness weighing on everyone’s minds, joy reverberates through the place when there is something to celebrate. The births get everyone cooing. And signs of recovery also bring delight.
In the course of Tuesday morning, a woman, discovered by a rescue team in a village and brought to the hospital a few days ago unable to move or talk, is suddenly both moving and talking. Alaluf Heli, a 34-year-old who had helped to look after her, was elated. “Sometimes when I’m tired and missing my children it’s really very hard, and this kind of thing helps to give me the drive to continue,” he said.
Meanwhile, Bika Rana, a 25-year-old Nepalese soldier, is sitting in a wheelchair, feeling a new sense of encouragement after learning that his injured leg is healing well. “I’m happy, and hoping that I will be able to get back to my normal life.” he said, after recounting how his house collapsed on top of him as he tried to flee the quake.
The best light relief of the day comes suddenly, almost like a flash mob, when the crowd of people waiting for admission grows large. They are in for a surprise — or rather, five red-nosed baggy-trousered, balloon-inflating surprises. The Israel Defense Forces and the Israeli Embassy are hosting a team of medical clowns, from the Israeli NGO for medical clowning, Dream Doctors, which paid for its own flights.
As they mime, play and generally act daft, it becomes clear that waiting for a doctor has actually been transformed into the most entertaining experience that people have had in days. One of the clowns kneels down to a patient on a stretcher, with visible leg injuries from the quake. He affixes a red nose to him, and mock-interviews him for an imaginary TV station using an inflatable microphone. The patient Bata Nepali, a 53-year-old shopkeeper, has plenty to be glum about — he’s not only injured, but his house is destroyed. Yet he’s loving it, and declares in his mock interview that he wants one day to do a real television interview, and use it to praise Israel.
One of the clowns goes into the emergency room, where a young boy needs a lengthy and painful-looking change of dressing on his foot. Smadar Harpats sings, grunts and mimes, and woos him with balloons and airplanes all the way through the procedure, and the boy responds with big, broad, heart-melting smiles. It fills the whole ER with positive energy.
Harpats — or “Sunshine” to use her clown name — has been astounded by the response to clowning here. “Even children who have lost a leg, or who have been through other terrible pain, quickly decide they want to play,” she said.
Soldiers in the field hospital worked on Shabbat, and will do so again this weekend. This isn’t a violation of Jewish law, but rather following the rule that work should be continued even on Sabbath in cases of medical need. And religious soldiers are accommodated in the camp in a range of areas.
The food is kosher, there is a synagogue tent with three daily services, and a rabbi. An eruv is in place to allow carrying on Shabbat. And the hospital even kept the mitzvah of hachnasat orchim, receiving guests, last Shabbat. Around 100 Israelis who were still in Nepal, were hosted for Friday night dinner where, in line with army rules, Kiddush was recited before the meal started.
Judaism isn’t the only religion among soldiers. Ashraf Kheir, a 32-year-old Druze-Arab from Peki’in, said that his faith played a part in his keenness to serve Nepal via the IDF. “The education we have is to help every human being — and we have to be faithful to our country and its operations,” said Kheir, a paramedic and nurse, adding: “I just received a letter from my father saying how proud he is of me.”
The 200-strong official Israeli mission to Nepal, which is advising the government on managing the situation as well as running the hospital, is due to pack up and leave in the middle of next week. But when its members return to Israel, many will still mentally be in Nepal.
Eli Schwartz, who has the 37-year-old patient clinging to her life, said that he worries for people like her once the IDF pulls out. Nepal, with its limited health infrastructure, will be overloaded, he said. “These are severe wounds that need long-term care, and we’re worried about who here has the skill to deal with people like this when we leave.”
Schwartz, who said he regards Nepal as a “second home,” as he lived and worked here for a stint a few years ago, added: “It feels like you save life — but who knows what will happen later on?”
editor@jewishweek.org
Read MoreNEW YORK
Genesis Prize Funds New Generation Of Social Entrepreneurs
Last year’s winner uses $1M prize to support tikkun olam projects from millennial innovators.
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
Michael Bloomberg, announced winners of his Genesis Generation Challenge grants. Courtesy of Bloomberg Philanthropies
A veteran of coexistence activism around the world, Tarek Elgawhary, an Egyptian Muslim who lives in Washington, was looking for a project to improve relations between Israeli and Palestinians. “You need to speak to this guy Ben,” friends told him.
Ben is Ben Jablonski, an Australian-born partner in an apparel company and former investment banker who has lived in Manhattan since 2006. Jablonski, who is Jewish, shares Elgawhary’s interest in the Middle East conflict.
They met here, became friends, and decided to found a project, Build Israel and Palestine, which will build a sewage treatment system for Arab villages in the West Bank that are not part of the Palestinian Authority’s still-developing sewage treatment grid.
They sought investments from Jews and Muslims, mostly in the United States, but the amount they raised left them short of what they needed to fully implement their project.
The project’s financial prospects brightened last week when it was announced as one of nine recipients of $100,000 Genesis Generation Challenge grants awarded by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who last year received the first Genesis Prize’s first $1 million grant. Funded by the office of Israel’s prime minister, the Jewish Agency and the Genesis Philanthropy Group, the prize is awarded to “exceptional individuals whose values and achievements will inspire the next generation of Jews.”
Bloomberg said he would use his prize money to establish a challenge competition to provide seed money for “innovative projects guided by Jewish values to address the world’s pressing issues.” The contest stipulated that each team of social entrepreneurs be led by someone age 20 to 36.
Jablonski, the team leader, is 32; co-founder Elgawhary, is 36.
While a few of the other eight awardees focus on projects in Israel, their scope largely is international. The 52 judges of the competition used a “fairly expansive” definition of Jewish values in choosing the winners, from some 2,000 individuals who initially expressed interest and 113 projects that were finally proposed, said Jill Smith, deputy CEO of the Genesis Prize Foundation. “Doing something to make the world better is part of what Jewish values are.”
The other Challenge recipients are:
♦ Building Up Canada, a nonprofit that will install energy-efficient technology inaffordable housing complexes in Toronto.
♦ eNable 3D Printed Prosthetics, which will provide advanced, computer-driven machines that will make free prosthetic limbs for people in countries affected by natural disasters.
♦ Lavan, an Israeli organization that will create “a community of American angel investors” to support projects “that strengthen Israeli and Jewish values.”
♦ Prize4Life, an Israeli nonprofit that is developing an app to help monitor ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) markers.
♦ Sanergy, a Kenya-based initiative that will produce a sanitation plant for Nairobi’s Mathare district.
♦ Sesame, which is developing a smartphone in Israel for disabled people who have no or limited use of their hands.
♦ Spark, which will provide micro-grants to poor, rural communities in Burundi for designing “social impact projects” like the building of schools or health centers.
♦ Vera Solutions, which has established a fellowship to support and mentor “passionate young professionals with skills to drive technology-based innovations in the social sector.”
The winning projects will receive their funding on a quarterly basis, be monitored regularly and receive mentoring from experienced entrepreneurs. But there is no guarantee that all will succeed, Bloomberg said at the Challenge’s announcement press conference last week at the Manhattan headquarters of Bloomberg Philanthropies. The money is a good investment in the future, with a Jewish flavor that emphasizes the shared Jewish values of Israelis and American Jews, he said.
“At a time when many Americans and Israelis fear the relationship between our countries has become irrevocably strained, we must recognize that the bond our citizens share is based on our common democratic values, like freedom, justice, innovation and community,” Bloomberg said.
Smith called the number and variety of the submitted projects a sign “that millennials want to make a difference in the world. The judges were inspired by the idea that in a time of polarization [especially in the Middle East] real people on the ground wanted to work together to make a difference.”
She said Build Israel and Palestine was the only submitted project in which Jewish and Muslim directors played a prominent role. “It is a great project — people would come together and transcend politics.”
“Current coexistence initiatives between Jews and Muslims do not create results because projects are funded almost exclusively by Jewish donors and organizations. If all parties are not invested financially and emotionally, it is extremely difficult to advance coexistence,” the project’s application states. “Our council consists of five Muslims and five Jews who are all eager to apply their resources and expertise” for Build Israel and Palestine.
While many Jewish organizations provide financial support to similar social entrepreneur projects, the Challenge sought to identify and foster members of the millennial generation who often have not achieved the recognition to qualify for such grants. The judges looked for “not the usual suspects” who already have established connections to the Jewish establishment. “We’ve reached a different audience,” she said, adding that social media played a large role in publicizing the competition.
Another advantage of focusing on the 20 to 36 age group is that it will create millennial-aged role models, which are more likely to inspire other millennials to become active in such humanitarian work than older winners would, she said.
“A hundred thousand dollars is not going to change the world, but it may help to attract more money” to each Challenge recipient, Smith said. The Challenge’s remaining $100,000 will pay for overhead.
Jablonski and Elgawhary declined to specify how much they had previously raised from Jewish and Muslim philanthropists in this country, but said the Challenge funds will enable them to start their sewage treatment project in the West Bank in the next few months; now they’re looking for the right village, with a population of about 300 residents.
“This [Challenge money] does give us a platform — it allows us to have more respect and recognition,” Jablonski said. “We are trying to address a problem on both sides [of the Israeli-Palestinian] divide that has nothing to do with geopolitics.”
He said his interest in the West Bank’s sewage treatment issue grew out of his previous volunteer work as founder of JNFuture, a leadership training program for the Jewish National Fund. That sparked his interest in land-use issues.
Some 75 percent of residents of the West Bank have no access to a grid of home sewage collection, Jablonski said. Instead, he said, sewage from most Arabs’ homes there goes directly into the ground, seeping into aquifers, the underground layer of water-bearing permeable rock or unconsolidated materials that Israel and the West Bank have in common. “It poisons the ground for both sides. It’s a shared aquifer,” he said.
In lieu of a wide-scale sewage treatment plant, the project will install a series of septic tanks that will turn out water fit to be used for agriculture in local fields using membrane-based technology that was recently proven effective by USAID, the philanthropic arm of the U.S. government.
The project, which has partnered with Israel’s Arava Institute, is endorsed by USAID and local municipalities on the West Bank, Jablonski said.
He said his project may expand to other regional problems, like the shortage of electric power or potable water, and will invite other participants to join the work of Build Israel and Palestine. “There is plenty of space for other people to get involved,” he said.
steve@jewishweek.org
Read MoreNEW YORK
Leaving The Fold, Onto The Bookshelf
Growing literary genre of ex-Orthodox testing traditional narrative of insular communities.
Sandee Brawarsky
Culture Editor
Shulem Deen was a man in his 20s when he felt bold enough to slip unseen into a public library. Like the inner-city African-American boy in Philip Roth’s “Goodbye, Columbus” who, on a visit to the Newark Public Library, first sees Gauguin’s striking paintings of exotic Tahiti, a world cracked open for Deen.
On a tiny chair in the children’s section, the Skverer chasid made his way through the World Book Encyclopedia, encountering Einstein, Egyptian hieroglyphics and Elvis Presley for the first time.
His debut memoir, “All Who Go Do Not Return” (Graywolf), is the latest work in the new and deepening literary tradition of brutally honest works by ex-chasidim about leaving their community. Through these books, the reading public is guided inside thecloistered worlds of chasidic life. Whether that cloistered world has been changed — opened up, if you will — by the growing number of these works remains a point of debate.
Deen is the poet laureate of ex-chasidim. His sentences flow with originality as he unveils his story with passion and sensitivity. Readers will be surprised to realize that he is largely self-taught, that most of his schooling was in Yiddish.
While “All Who Go Do Not Return” is a story of leaving, his is not the voice of someone in exile, looking back. Rather, Deen writes as a traveler, looking around and deeply noticing all that he missed in the outside world, yearning for knowledge and experience.
It is also a heartbreaking book, as Deen — at least for the time being — is no longer in touch with his five children, three daughters and two sons who range in age from 13 to 20. That’s not his choice, but a complicated outcome of family court, his ex-wife Gitty’s desire to shield them from his heretical ways, community pressure and the children’s absorption of communal norms of conformity. He writes of losing their hearts. Still, Deen is respectful of Gitty and the Skverers. Readers may hope that his children get to read this book and come to understand their father and his love for them.
Since Hella Winston’s groundbreaking study, “Unchosen: The Hidden Lives of Hasidic Rebels,” was published in 2005, there have been many books published by people who seem like they stepped out of her pages. Deen’s book belongs on bookshelves alongside the compelling and much-discussed memoirs by formerly fervently Orthodox writers including Shalom Auslander, Deborah Feldman and Leah Vincent, and Anouk Markovits’ novel “I Am Forbidden.”
Just out last month is a film, “Felix and Meira,” about a young chasidicmarried woman drawn into a romance with a non-Jewish French Canadian and into a world outside of her restrictive Montreal community. It’s a gentle film, with images that linger. Meira’s loving husband is played by Luzer Twersky, a former chasid who grew up in Borough Park and left that world seven years ago.
And coming in July is a new memoir by Judy Brown, who in 2010 penned the young adult book, “Hush,” under the pseudonym Eishes Chayil (woman of valor) for fear of backlash in the chasidic world in which she grew up because of her depiction of sexual abuse within the community. Brown’s “This Is Not A Love Story” is her story of growing up in a family with six children, including a brother who is afflicted with a medical condition they don’t understand. Told in the voice of her younger self, Brown, who has left the chasidic community, although she remains religious, presents an insider’s view of family and communal life, with a questioning spirit.
Alan Brill, a professor in the graduate department of Jewish-Christian studies at Seton Hall University, points to an earlier tradition of chasidic rebels, like Isaac Joel Linetzky (1839 - 1915), a Yiddish writer born into a Chassidic family in Podolia, Ukraine. His novel, “Dos Poylishe Yingl” (“The Polish Boy,” 1869), satirizing Chassidic life in coarse and colorful language, appeared in 30 editions, the last in Kiev in 1939. The sequel was published under the evocative title “Der Vorm in Khreyn” (“The Worm in the Horseradish”).
Brill also mentions stories of people who went to the home of the poet and author Y. L. Peretz in Warsaw: “They came in as chasidim and left as secular Yiddish authors, writing accounts of the changes in their lives.”
Perhaps the ongoing appeal of these works has something to do with the fact that some Jews see their own family’s more traditional pasts in the characters’ strict lifestyle. The memoirs about leaving touch on extreme transformations and complex questions of faith, theology, tradition and family that many struggle with, albeit in different permutations.
“These are coming-of-age stories, but the writers are not teenagers but adults trying to understand the world we live in,” says Twersky, who is a writer as well as an actor. “Before, we had other people telling our stories. Now we are able to speak in our own voices.”
For him, acting in the film “Felix & Meira” was cathartic. “You go back to a place where you were and try to understand it. As an actor you can’t judge your characters. You have to believe in what they believe in at the moment.” He says that he now understands the place he came from in new ways, although he remains critical.
Brill, who closely follows the demographics of the Jewish community, says that nobody has any statistics about the number of people leaving chassidic life. When asked about whether people are also exiting from religious communities like Lakewood, N.J., which are fervently Orthodox but non-chasidic, he says that they are, but not to the same degree.
Brown points out that the chasidic community has quadrupled in the last generation — recent studies show that Borough Park has the highest birthrate of any New York City neighborhood — so that it makes sense that the number of people leaving is also larger. She says it’s natural that some would want to articulate their experience.
As to whether the chasidic communities are changing, Brill says, “I don’t think they change, in a direct sense of becoming more sensitive, more open, or more responsive. I do think these communities have a sense of what the [World Wide] Web brings into their world, how easy it is now to learn about the outside world. There’s greater awareness.
“There are a combination of things going on now,” he continues. “Abuses are being exposed; there are problems of pornography, incredible materialism — seeing how other people live. Real knowledge is available. You have to publicly buy a newspaper, but here the knowledge of what’s going on in the world is [privately] available on your phone. They haven’t come to grips with that yet.”
Twersky believes that he and his fellow chroniclers are indeed having an impact. “We are poking massive holes in the narrative: We are told as kids that if you go out, you’re going to end up in jail, or in rehab, that life will be horrible. The rise of this community is to inspire other people — kids, teenagers, people with kids — to think, ‘I can go out and make it. I can live the life I really want.’”
While Deen, the founding editor of the website Unpious (where he published distinguished work by a number of ex-chasidim), is indeed sad about what has happened with his family, he is not a broken man; rather, he is alive with possibility. In an interview, he shares his ideas with a thoughtfulness that belies how long and deeply he has been considering belief and reason, family and community, and building a new value system. After he married at 18 (he had met his wife for only a few moments before they agreed to wed) and had children, he lost his belief in all that he had been taught not to question.
This wasn’t the book Deen intended to write. He had in mind to write a novel, but his agent convinced him that it would be easier to sell a memoir. He says that he’s always had the impulse to write — as a teenager, he used to write in a florid rabbinic Hebrew and then in Yiddish. Early in his marriage, he published some essays in Yiddish. After sneaking a radio and then a computer into their home in New Square, he discovered the world of blogging in 2003 and attracted a huge audience to his (anonymous) “Hasidic Rebel” blog. Eventually, he was expelled from the Rockland County town as a heretic.
The memoir’s narrative skillfully goes back and forward in time, with flashbacks to his childhood and more innocent times. As a young student when he first visits New Square from Brooklyn, he is struck by the intensity, piety and warmth of the place, and the modesty of the people who seem less interested in remodeled kitchens than the chasidim he knew in Borough Park. Now, he recalls how he was truly uplifted and even ecstatic in his prayer life among the Skverers and he says, “Nothing in the secular world so far has been able to move me with that intensity.”
He no longer prays, but enjoys occasionally going to non-Orthodox synagogues, “connecting to a sense of peoplehood, mystery and culture.”
Deen says that one of the questions he is most frequently asked is whether leaving was worthwhile, whether he’d do it again
“Was it worth it? Absolutely. I’m happier, more fulfilled, I have a wonderful network of friends,” he says.
“Would I have done it if I knew I would lose my children? No I would not. That was too much to bear and I would not have been able to consciously take that step. But perhaps if I was better prepared, the outcome would not have been inevitable, and I’d like to think I’d have had the courage to undertake that battle, because living a fear-based life, lying and hiding to yourself and everyone around you, is no way to live.”
Deen now lives in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, and is on the board of Footsteps, an organization that helps individuals in different stages of leaving Chassidic life, providing much-needed counseling in job skills and education, along with a new sense of community. “Footsteps has saved lives in the most literal sense,” he says.
Basya Schechter, a musician and composer who leads the group “Pharaoh’s Daughter,” also grew up in the chassidic world and left it many years ago. She now serves as music director of Romemu, a progressive, egalitarian synagogue on the Upper West Side, and is studying to be a cantor.
She notes that people have been telling these stories through films and documentaries for the last 20 years, and more recently through memoirs. “Every story is so different, each journey is so individual.”
“I love the genre. Every time another book or movie comes out, I feel it is a triumph of a voice being heard.”
editor@jewishweek.org
Read MoreISRAEL NEWS
Decades Of Frustration For Ethiopian Jews
Tel Aviv riot highlights entrenched discrimination, violence faced by immigrant community.
Michele Chabin
Israel Correspondent
Continued accusations of harassment of Ethiopian Jews in Israel led to riots this week in Tel Aviv. Getty Images
Jerusalem — The Talpiot Industrial Zone in south Jerusalem is home to some of Jerusalem’s poorest people. Housed in run-down buildings built decades ago for Jewish refugees from Arab countries, the crime rate is high, even with a police station located right across the street.
Many Jerusalemites of Ethiopian descent have moved in because they can’t afford to rent or buy anywhere else.
With little to do after school, the neighborhood children, the vast majority of them the Israeli-born children of Ethiopian immigrants, congregate in the local schoolyard to play soccer after doing their homework at the adjoining community center, where a charitable program helps children at risk.
For Moshe (not his real name), who is 12, the schoolyard is where he feels most at home. Surrounded by kids from the same Ethiopian background, he doesn’t have to put up with the racial slurs spewed by a handful of his schoolmates.
“Some of the boys have called me ‘kushi,’ Moshe said, uttering a derogatory Hebrew term equivalent to the N-word in English. “That gets me upset. I’m not kushi, I’m brown,” he asserted.
Moshe’s 13-year-old friend Yosef (also a pseudonym), said some of the boys in his school have called him “kushi” and “black” and “smelly.”
“They stopped after my parents spoke to the principal,” he said. “It’s not easy being Ethiopian. People hit us just because we’re brown,” he said, referring to the recent attack on an Ethiopian soldier by two white policemen. That attack, which was caught on video, and the many other alleged attacks against young Ethiopians perpetrated by white Israelis over the years, sparked two violent protests during the past week by members of Israel’s 120,000-strong Ethiopian Jewish community.
“I used to think Israel was a good country, but now I want to move to America,” Moshe said resolutely as a bunch of friends nodded their heads in agreement.
Many non-Ethiopian Israelis were shocked when a peaceful anti-racism demonstration in Tel Aviv organized by young Ethiopian activists turned violent. After Ethiopian youths — some say egged on by non-Ethiopian anarchists — blocked a major highway and started throwing rocks and stones at the police, the police responded with stun grenades and water cannons.
The events echo the riots in Baltimore following the April 19 death of Freddie Gray, who died of a neck injury while in police custody.
Members of the Ethiopian community say they were shocked, but not surprised, by the violent release of the pent-up anger and frustration felt by their Israeli-born teens and young adults.
“There is a problem, there are discrimination issues, there is racism in Israel,” Fentahun Assefa-Dawit, the director of Tebeka, an advocacy group for Ethiopian Israelis, told journalists Monday, just before meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the educational and socioeconomic gaps, as well as the long-standing discrimination Ethiopian Israelis deal with every day.
Some of these gaps haven’t closed significantly since the 1980s, when Israel first began bringing Ethiopian Jews to Israel.
Adults who immigrated — many of them farmers — found it difficult to learn Hebrew and adapt to a more urban way of life. Their children, including those who did not arrive in Israel years before the parents, were sent to Hebrew-only boarding schools. Some forgot Amharic, their parents’ only language. Away from home and exposed to a more modern way of life, many lost respect for their traditional parents.
Dorit Roer-Strier, a professor in Hebrew University’s School of Social Work, linked the community’s frustration to decades of discrimination.
“Ten years ago I did a study of the fathers and saw how immigration, poverty and discrimination was challenging the fathers’ well-being. The fathers felt their first obligation was to be providers for their children and earn a good living. They felt disrespected not only by Israeli society but by their own children,” Roer-Strier said.
Adding insult to injury, many Israeli rabbis have continued to doubt the Ethiopian community’s Jewishness, despite the fact that Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the late chief Sephardi rabbi, gave it his kosher stamp of approval.
Many Ethiopian Israelis also complain that the government patronizes them.
Until this year, for example, the education of all Ethiopian-Israeli students — including the 70 percent born in Israel — was under the auspices of the Ministry of Education’s Department for the Absorption of Immigrant Students. Many of those students were confined to segregated classes sometimes taught at a slower pace.
Although some of these classes as well as numerous enrichment programs run by the Jewish Agency and various NGOs have helped the youngest generation of Ethiopian Israelis to compete with their white peers and serve side by side with them during their IDF or National Service, many say employers won’t hire them.
“When an Ethiopian applies for a job, as qualified as he might be, as impressive as his CV might be, he is not going to be invited for the interview because he has an Ethiopian name,” Assefa-Dawit said. “When a local Rabbinate office refuses toregister a couple who wants to get married because they’re Ethiopian, when you see a school that says we cannot take more children because they have a quota of how many Ethiopians they will enroll, you can imagine what the feeling of young people will be.”
That has made it difficult for the community to emerge from poverty. Ethiopian families earn about 45 percent of the national average, according to the Bureau of Statistics.
Seated outside the beautiful, modern Ethiopian synagogue funded by the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews right next door to slim buildings in the Industrial Zone slums, Rabbi Shachar Aylin, the shul’s volunteer rabbi, bemoaned the institutional discrimination he said his community experiences day in and day out.
“My Israeli-born children don’t speak Amharic, yet other school children call them kushim,” said Aylin, who moved to Israel from Ethiopia when he was 16. “Israeli homes don’t teach equality to their children. Security guards and police single out black people, and especially our youth. I can’t tell you the number of times our youth have been beaten.”
Aylin, a soft-spoken man who volunteers at the synagogue because the Ministry of Religious Affairs has refused to pay for a rabbi there, although it funds many other local rabbis, related how security guards and police often “take our children to the police station and open a file against them, often for no reason.”
That is the reason, he said, that 40 percent of the youths held in Ofek Prison, a prison for minors, are of Ethiopian descent, according to the Los Angeles Times. Ethiopians represent less than 2 percent of the Israeli population.
Despite these many challenges, Aylin said, “I’m glad I made aliyah. Israel has many good people, but they are drowned out by the others.”
Assefa-Dawit noted that many of the protesters at the rallies carried Israeli flags and sang Israeli songs.
“Israel is our country — there’s no ‘us’ and ‘them,’” he said. “This is our home. [But] the community is crying out for the government to resolve this.”
editor@jewishweek.org
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