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A simmering controversy in the Orthodox community over the efforts of a new beit din to free agunot (chained women) has escalated, with a prominent Yeshiva University rabbi publicly dismissing the New York-based court's validity. Staff Reporter Hannah Dreyfus has the scoop.
Read more.New York
Leading Rabbi Deals Big Blow To Agunah Court
YU’s Schachter dismisses beit din solution as battle continues in Centrist/Modern Orthodox community.
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
After major Orthodox rabbi deals blow to agunah court, women's futures lie in the balance. Fotolia
In its first year, the New York-based International Beit Din (IBD), headed by Rabbi Simcha Krauss, a widely respected rabbi here and in Israel, has resolved nearly 20 cases of agunot, a chained women, freeing them from their loveless marriages.
In doing so, it has incurred the condemnation of some leading rabbinic authorities, most notably, and recently, Rabbi Hershel Schachter, a leading rosh yeshiva at Yeshiva University’s rabbinical school, who last month penned a public letter of protest dismissing the court’s collective rulings and pronouncing Rabbi Krauss unfit to make complex decisions regarding agunot.
(The issue has vexed rabbinic leaders for generations because according to halacha, or Jewish law, the recalcitrant husband must free his wife willingly.)
“From start to finish, this is a mistake,” Rabbi Schachter wrote in a three-paragraph letter, posted on an anonymously sponsored Torah website. The letter, written in Hebrew, says that only “great scholars of the generation” should be dealing with these sensitive matters. Rabbi Gedalia Dov Schwartz, head of the Beit Din of America, (the largest rabbinical court), and three other prominent rabbis also signed the letter.
As a result, various elements of the centrist and Modern Orthodox community are caught up in this controversy, which threatens to further divide the movement. And as the IBD struggles for acceptance, the women who have already been freed may face a new kind of limbo, worried if a subsequent marriage will be accepted in the community.
The new beit din has employed a traditional halachic approach, though sometimes using modern technology as well. In five recent cases, for example, the court reviewed videos of the couples' wedding and found one or both witnesses invalid, thereby annulling the marriage.
The ongoing controversy is engulfing Centrist Orthodoxy’s flagship institution, Yeshiva University, with which most of the rabbis involved are affiliated. And it mirrors a fight taking place in Israel today that pits a new, more liberal-minded conversion court — including Lincoln Square Synagogue founding rabbi and YU-ordained Shlomo Riskin and Rabbi David Stav — that is challenging the power of Israel’s charedi-dominated Chief Rabbinate on these issues.
Rabbi Menachem Penner, dean of YU’s rabbinic school, offered a statement on Tuesday, noting that the institution has “played a leading role in the effort to resolve the plight of agunot in a manner that is fully compliant with halacha,” citing its involvement in creating ORA (Organization for the Resolution of Agunot).
He noted that “our Roshei Yeshiva represent a variety of viewpoints, many of them, as well as most poskim [authorities] across the Orthodox spectrum, have expressed serious concern over the status of the beit din while noting the good will and motivation of its proponents.” The statement expressed empathy for agunot, but said efforts to release women from a marriage “must be balanced with the severity, halachic status and social consequences of such matters.”
Rabbi Shmuel Goldin, a pulpit rabbi in Englewood, N.J., and former president of the Rabbinical Council of America, the largest body of Orthodox rabbis, spoke of those social consequences.
“The court is not doing a favor for these women if it issues a solution that won’t be acceptable to a large population of Orthodox rabbis,” he said. He compared the court’s actions to efforts made in the 1990s by the late Rabbi Emanuel Rackman, a major figure in Modern Orthodoxy and president of Bar-Ilan University, who convened a beit din that issued divorces on the basis of kiddushei ta’ot, a Talmudic concept for annulment. His rulings were never widely accepted in the Orthodox world and many rabbis refused to officiate at the subsequent weddings of women who had been freed by the rabbi’s bet din.
“This isn’t a democracy, it’s a halachic process,” said Rabbi Goldin. “The power to make decisions has always been in the hands of the few who spend their lives steeped in its wells.”
The Issue’s True Face
For women like “Sarah Jacobs,” who asked that we not use her real name because she doesn’t want her husband to see her quoted in a newspaper, a mother of three in her mid-30s, the outcome of the IBD debate will determine her future. Jacobs grew up in a “yeshivish” Orthodox enclave in Brooklyn. At age 20, she met and married a 21-year-old Talmud scholar studying at a nearby yeshiva. They were engaged after seven weeks, 10 dates. Twelve years, three children and one diagnosis of mental illness later, she left him.
“I stayed until I couldn’t stand it any more,” Jacobs said in an interview with The Jewish Week. She didn’t want to specify her husband’s diagnosis but described it as severe and incurable. Though “things were not right from day one,” divorce, still carrying an indelible taboo in the Orthodox world, was her last resort. Over the course of the marriage, she and her children incurred repeated emotional and physical abuse, she said. He lobbed insults and threats at them, and sometimes even heavy pieces of furniture. Those he would shove onto Jacobs or her children after having pushed them to the ground, she said.
When Jacobs finally found the strength to leave in November 2011, her journey towards attaining a get, or religious divorce, began. Over five years, she visited five different religious courts in three states and two countries. During this time, she was subjected to financial extortion, disrespect, and the perpetual, fruitless waiting, she said.
Determined to remain in the Orthodox community, she learned of Rabbi Krauss’ beit din through an article in The Jewish Week. She met with him in March 2015. After nine hours of testimony and a six-page document explaining their decision, the three-member IBD ruled to annul her marriage on the Talmudic principle that the woman never would have married her husband if she had known he would act in an abusive fashion during the marriage.
“He dotted every ‘i’ and crossed every ‘t,’” she said of Rabbi Krauss. “He was so genuine, so compassionate. He is my only lifeline.”
Taking Sides
Rabbi Krauss, a longtime pulpit rabbi in Queens and the former president of Religious Zionistists of America, made aliyah several years ago but returned to New York for two years to launch the IBD. He declined to speak on the record, for the most part, but several prominent rabbis, including Rabbi Haskel Lookstein of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun on the Upper East Side, Rabbi Yosef Adler of Congregation Rinat Yisrael in Teaneck, N.J., and Rabbi David Bigman, a prominent Rosh Yeshiva in Israel, have voiced support for his efforts. A petition is now circulating in support of Rabbi Krauss and has been signed by 100 rabbis, though the rabbi chose not to release the names at this time.
“I have tremendous respect for Rabbi Krauss as a first-rate Talmud chacham [scholar] and somebody upon whom I can rely to make good decisions grounded in authentic and reliable halachic sources,” Rabbi Lookstein told The Jewish Week. In the case of an agunah, “every leniency that the halacha allows should be used,” he said. He also said that Rabbi Krauss’ approach is “entirely different” than the approach used by Rabbi Rackman, though he declined to elaborate.
Rabbi Adler similarly vouched for Rabbi Krauss’ credibility, pronouncing him a “first-class scholar.”
Many others have voiced support for Rabbi Krauss, but only off the record. One prominent New York rabbi who supports Rabbi Krauss but requested to remain anonymous described the situation as a social action problem. “It’s a game of numbers — everyone is waiting for the next guy to jump,” he said. “It’s a zero-sum game — everyone’s in, or nobody’s in.”
A prominent centrist Orthodox rabbi, also speaking off the record, said he was “surprised” Rabbi Schachter didn’t offer a fuller exposition of his reasoning for condemning the IBD in the heated aftermath of his letter. “He’s used to just invoking his own rabbinic authority, and of that being enough, but that doesn’t work anymore,” he said. More than anything else, this controversy foretells the emergence of a new movement, he said. “We’re heading for a split [within Orthodoxy] — at this point, it seems inevitable.”
Rabbi Schachter has not responded to requests for an interview.
Rabbi Avi Weiss, founder of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, a Modern Orthodox yeshiva that provides a more liberal alternative to Yeshiva University, wrote a letter to Rabbi Schachter, strongly criticizing his personal attack against Rabbi Krauss, The Jewish Week has learned. It defended Rabbi Schachter’s right to argue on the merits of his position, but said “no human being, let alone no rabbi, should be dismissed in such humiliating terms.” Rabbi Weiss called on Rabbi Schachter to publicly apologize in the spirit of the upcoming High Holy Days.
Several other rabbis who were interviewed referred, off the record, to Rabbi Schachter’s actions as “bullying.” But Rabbi Heshie Billet, senior rabbi at the Young Israel of Woodmere, offered a more pragmatic reason for not endorsing the IBD. He described Rabbi Krauss’ actions as “noble,” but said local rabbis can’t afford to undermine their loyalties to the Beit Din of America, the most prominent, mainstream religious court, which is headed by Rabbi Gedalia Dov Schwartz, a co-signer of the Rabbi Schachter letter.
“Since I live in New York, that’s my beit din, and I need their stamp of approval,” Rabbi Billet said. “It’s that simple.”
YU’s Internal Battle
The battle for the “soul of Orthodoxy” as one prominent rabbi termed it, is evident within Yeshiva University’s ranks. Two YU faculty members were pressured to disassociate from Rabbi Krauss’ beit din, despite strong personal convictions to support his mission.
Rabbi Yosef Blau, the spiritual adviser at Yeshiva University for nearly five decades and well-known for his advocacy confronting sexual abuse within the Orthodox community, has been a judge on the IBD since its founding. Every decision made by the court included Rabbi Blau, a well-known voice of authority within the community. Rabbi Yehuda Warburg, a dayan, or, religious judge, for the past 15 years, is the third judge on the court.
A few weeks ago Rabbi Blau was pressured to leave the court by colleagues within YU who disagreed with the court’s actions. Though Rabbi Blau declined to comment directly, a letter he submitted to Rabbi Krauss with his resignation cited a desire to “prevent controversy within YU” as his reason for departure.
According to a letter by Rabbi Krauss defending the IBD against Rabbi Schachter’s attack, Rabbi Blau agreed to resign in exchange for an agreement that Rabbi Schachter would not publicly attack the court. But according to the letter, Rabbi Schachter backtracked on the agreement within a few weeks and cited Rabbi’s Blau’s departure as evidence of the court’s questionable status.
Rabbi Moshe Kahn, a faculty member at YU’s Stern College for Women who teaches in the Graduate Program for Advanced Talmudic Study for women agreed to serve as an IBD judge after Rabbi Blau stepped down. But within a week he was pressured to resign. Though Rabbi Kahn declined to comment, a source within the university said pressure was put on the rabbi to step down for fear that his affiliation with the court would negatively impact funding for the GPATS program. The source also said that there were concerns that the roshei yeshiva at YU, who opposed the IBD, would dissuade their students from dating women in the GPATS program.
To Marry Or Not To Marry
How will this halachic battle play out for women who, after being freed by the IBD, seek to remarry?
Though Jacobs has slowly started to date again, she said she worries about her future status.
“I finally feel like I can breathe. After 15 years of being suffocated, I feel like myself. I feel like a person, not just a victim,” she said. Still, some men have stopped going out with her on learning that she was freed by the IBD.
“People have no problem breaking every other halacha, but when it comes to a get, they need the most stringent of stringencies,” she said. “It starts with the rabbis, this corrupt double-standard, and then everyone else just accepts blindly. In a minute, they can ruin everything I’ve worked towards over the past five years.”
In the last two weeks, since this controversy erupted, two women seeking the aid of the IBD have backed away. Still, Rabbi Krauss is committed to continue. After Rabbi Kahn’s resignation last week, another rabbi has been selected as a judge, though Rabbi Krauss declined to share the name until the appointment is official.
Rabbi Krauss, who is in his late 70s, walks with difficulty. Climbing a short flight of stairs, he paused on every step, making light conversation to distract from his belabored movements.
“You can hurt me, you can insult me,” he said of his critics. “But at the end of the day, this is not about me. This is a war. We’re fighting for these women. And if we win, the whole community wins. And if we lose,” he paused, a question hanging in his voice, “more is lost than we can ever know.”
Hannah@jewishweek.orgOur Josh Mitnick reports from Israel on the surge in French tourists this summer, possibly signaling an increase in aliyah from France. Read more.Israel News
French Jews Still Testing Israeli Waters
Will summer spike in French tourists translate into a wave of immigrants?
Joshua Mitnick
Contributing Editor
A Tel Aviv real estate brokerage firm with signs in French. Joshua Mitnick/JW
Tel Aviv — It’s the first night of the Israeli workweek, but as midnight approaches, the cafés near Tel Aviv’s beach are overflowing with patrons. A couple of steps closer to the water reveals an explanation: the city’s recently renovated beach promenade is awash with hundreds of teens and 20somethings carrying on in French.
Though Israeli hoteliers reported a 25 percent dip in bookings during the first half of 2015, likely the lingering fallout from last summer’s war in Gaza, everyone here seems to agree that the number of French tourists in Israel surged during the summer — possibly signaling a continuation of the rise in emigration from the country that is home to Europe’s largest Jewish community.
“All of my friends came this year. They all come to the beach promenade,” said Yonatan Marciano, a 25-year-old French immigrant to Israel.
More than a half year after an attack on a Paris kosher supermarket that left four Jews dead, French immigrants and tourists in Israel say interest in Israel remains robust. One local real estate broker who caters to French Jews said business has surged.
Meanwhile, the Jewish Agency says that 4,772 French immigrants arrived in Israel during the first seven months of the year. That represents an 11 percent increase from the same period one year ago, but it would mark a slowdown of the year-to-year growth in immigration from France.
Just steps away from the Mediterranean Sea, the Comacon real estate brokerage and its neighborhood competitors post property advertisements in French to appeal to the growing numbers of visitors.
“We have had a lot of work in the last half year. A lot of people who were thinking about coming here made their decision,” said Eric Guedj, the owner of Comacon, who estimates that his business has doubled from last year. “The situation in France is difficult, and because of that people are making a decision to buy or rent.”
Guedj said he already has an office in the southern city of Ashdod and is planning to open a branch in Netanya; both cities are known to attract French Jews because, like Tel Aviv, they are close to the sea. He said some French real estate investors who are anticipating a move are quietly selling stakes in France while building up the same property portfolio in Israel.
Guedj moved to Israel 10 years ago from the French Mediterranean city of Nice. He said many people are drawn to Israel or the U.S. because they believe they’ll be safer there when out in public. The proliferation of anti-Semitic attacks in France in recent years have made French Jews more anxious. “Here, in Israel, you know you can go out with children without having problems, and you’ll come back safely. In France, you couldn’t,” he said.
Most of Guedj’s clients are looking for rentals, preferring to test the waters of life in Israel before making the commitment to buy. “They want to see if it’s possible to live here, because mentality is different,” he said. “Either they will end up in Israel or Miami.”
Not far away from the real estate brokerages lies a strip of kosher restaurants — from sushi to pasta to burgers — that attract large numbers of French immigrants and tourists who linger there through the evening until after midnight.
“Everyone talks about moving to Israel,” said Sarah Davidovici, a university student, as she shared french fries with a group of high school friends from Paris. “Most of my friends think there is no future in France, and here there’s more security — and here we can practice our religion the way we want.”
But even though Davidovici is at the ideal age to relocate to Israel, like many other French Jewish youths, she and her friends say that they’re not certain that they can make the move. Some of her friends remarked that last summer’s war — in which rockets were fired from Gaza at Tel Aviv — gives them pause.
“I’m not certain that life here is easier than in France,” said Davidovici’s friend Anna Mouyal. “Sometimes we want to leave France, but not necessarily for Israel.”
When the world’s attention was focused on the terrorist attack on the Hyper Cacher market in Paris in January, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went to France with a message to Jews there that they should consider Israel as their future home. The Jewish Agency, meanwhile, made an oft-quoted prediction that it expected the pace of immigration to increase nearly 50 percent — from 7,100 in 2014 to about 10,000 by the end of this year. If aliyah continues at the same pace from earlier this year, the number of French immigrants will actually fall about 2,000 short of the prediction.
“They come to Israel for three weeks in August, and then they go back,” said Simon Hadad, a 33-year-old real estate agent and the son of French-speaking Jews, said of the many French tourists. “The anti-Semitism [back home] scares them, but it’s not their top priority. I always say that here it’s no less dangerous.”
Despite real estate broker Guedj’s claim that the Paris killings have triggered an upsurge in interest in relocating, other tourists and immigrants said they doubted that the murders alone were enough to boost immigration. For French Jews who have become accustomed to rising anti-Semitism in recent years, the attack did not prompt a dramatic reassessment of the situation, they argue.
“It’s not good to make aliyah because we are afraid of something in France. We need to make aliyah out of happiness,” said Raphael Bellaiche, a recent immigrant now serving in the Israeli army.
Others said that they were still too rooted in Paris. While young families and singles felt more free to move, middle-aged French Jews said they were not rushing to leave.
“I have a job, and I like Paris very much. I’m 60 years old. If I were to come here, what would I do?” said Guy Resnak. “If the situation is dangerous, I will leave, but so far, I’m not being touched by it.”
editor@jewishweek.orgAs Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu continues his apparently doomed campaign to convince American Jews to help block the Iran nuclear agreement, Yair Lapid, the founder and chair of the Yesh Atid party in Israel, has a different message for us. Staff Writer Stew Ain reports.
Leading Rabbi Deals Big Blow To Agunah Court
YU’s Schachter dismisses beit din solution as battle continues in Centrist/Modern Orthodox community.
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
After major Orthodox rabbi deals blow to agunah court, women's futures lie in the balance. Fotolia
In its first year, the New York-based International Beit Din (IBD), headed by Rabbi Simcha Krauss, a widely respected rabbi here and in Israel, has resolved nearly 20 cases of agunot, a chained women, freeing them from their loveless marriages.
In doing so, it has incurred the condemnation of some leading rabbinic authorities, most notably, and recently, Rabbi Hershel Schachter, a leading rosh yeshiva at Yeshiva University’s rabbinical school, who last month penned a public letter of protest dismissing the court’s collective rulings and pronouncing Rabbi Krauss unfit to make complex decisions regarding agunot.
(The issue has vexed rabbinic leaders for generations because according to halacha, or Jewish law, the recalcitrant husband must free his wife willingly.)
“From start to finish, this is a mistake,” Rabbi Schachter wrote in a three-paragraph letter, posted on an anonymously sponsored Torah website. The letter, written in Hebrew, says that only “great scholars of the generation” should be dealing with these sensitive matters. Rabbi Gedalia Dov Schwartz, head of the Beit Din of America, (the largest rabbinical court), and three other prominent rabbis also signed the letter.
As a result, various elements of the centrist and Modern Orthodox community are caught up in this controversy, which threatens to further divide the movement. And as the IBD struggles for acceptance, the women who have already been freed may face a new kind of limbo, worried if a subsequent marriage will be accepted in the community.
The new beit din has employed a traditional halachic approach, though sometimes using modern technology as well. In five recent cases, for example, the court reviewed videos of the couples' wedding and found one or both witnesses invalid, thereby annulling the marriage.
The ongoing controversy is engulfing Centrist Orthodoxy’s flagship institution, Yeshiva University, with which most of the rabbis involved are affiliated. And it mirrors a fight taking place in Israel today that pits a new, more liberal-minded conversion court — including Lincoln Square Synagogue founding rabbi and YU-ordained Shlomo Riskin and Rabbi David Stav — that is challenging the power of Israel’s charedi-dominated Chief Rabbinate on these issues.
Rabbi Menachem Penner, dean of YU’s rabbinic school, offered a statement on Tuesday, noting that the institution has “played a leading role in the effort to resolve the plight of agunot in a manner that is fully compliant with halacha,” citing its involvement in creating ORA (Organization for the Resolution of Agunot).
He noted that “our Roshei Yeshiva represent a variety of viewpoints, many of them, as well as most poskim [authorities] across the Orthodox spectrum, have expressed serious concern over the status of the beit din while noting the good will and motivation of its proponents.” The statement expressed empathy for agunot, but said efforts to release women from a marriage “must be balanced with the severity, halachic status and social consequences of such matters.”
Rabbi Shmuel Goldin, a pulpit rabbi in Englewood, N.J., and former president of the Rabbinical Council of America, the largest body of Orthodox rabbis, spoke of those social consequences.
“The court is not doing a favor for these women if it issues a solution that won’t be acceptable to a large population of Orthodox rabbis,” he said. He compared the court’s actions to efforts made in the 1990s by the late Rabbi Emanuel Rackman, a major figure in Modern Orthodoxy and president of Bar-Ilan University, who convened a beit din that issued divorces on the basis of kiddushei ta’ot, a Talmudic concept for annulment. His rulings were never widely accepted in the Orthodox world and many rabbis refused to officiate at the subsequent weddings of women who had been freed by the rabbi’s bet din.
“This isn’t a democracy, it’s a halachic process,” said Rabbi Goldin. “The power to make decisions has always been in the hands of the few who spend their lives steeped in its wells.”
The Issue’s True Face
For women like “Sarah Jacobs,” who asked that we not use her real name because she doesn’t want her husband to see her quoted in a newspaper, a mother of three in her mid-30s, the outcome of the IBD debate will determine her future. Jacobs grew up in a “yeshivish” Orthodox enclave in Brooklyn. At age 20, she met and married a 21-year-old Talmud scholar studying at a nearby yeshiva. They were engaged after seven weeks, 10 dates. Twelve years, three children and one diagnosis of mental illness later, she left him.
“I stayed until I couldn’t stand it any more,” Jacobs said in an interview with The Jewish Week. She didn’t want to specify her husband’s diagnosis but described it as severe and incurable. Though “things were not right from day one,” divorce, still carrying an indelible taboo in the Orthodox world, was her last resort. Over the course of the marriage, she and her children incurred repeated emotional and physical abuse, she said. He lobbed insults and threats at them, and sometimes even heavy pieces of furniture. Those he would shove onto Jacobs or her children after having pushed them to the ground, she said.
When Jacobs finally found the strength to leave in November 2011, her journey towards attaining a get, or religious divorce, began. Over five years, she visited five different religious courts in three states and two countries. During this time, she was subjected to financial extortion, disrespect, and the perpetual, fruitless waiting, she said.
Determined to remain in the Orthodox community, she learned of Rabbi Krauss’ beit din through an article in The Jewish Week. She met with him in March 2015. After nine hours of testimony and a six-page document explaining their decision, the three-member IBD ruled to annul her marriage on the Talmudic principle that the woman never would have married her husband if she had known he would act in an abusive fashion during the marriage.
“He dotted every ‘i’ and crossed every ‘t,’” she said of Rabbi Krauss. “He was so genuine, so compassionate. He is my only lifeline.”
Taking Sides
Rabbi Krauss, a longtime pulpit rabbi in Queens and the former president of Religious Zionistists of America, made aliyah several years ago but returned to New York for two years to launch the IBD. He declined to speak on the record, for the most part, but several prominent rabbis, including Rabbi Haskel Lookstein of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun on the Upper East Side, Rabbi Yosef Adler of Congregation Rinat Yisrael in Teaneck, N.J., and Rabbi David Bigman, a prominent Rosh Yeshiva in Israel, have voiced support for his efforts. A petition is now circulating in support of Rabbi Krauss and has been signed by 100 rabbis, though the rabbi chose not to release the names at this time.
“I have tremendous respect for Rabbi Krauss as a first-rate Talmud chacham [scholar] and somebody upon whom I can rely to make good decisions grounded in authentic and reliable halachic sources,” Rabbi Lookstein told The Jewish Week. In the case of an agunah, “every leniency that the halacha allows should be used,” he said. He also said that Rabbi Krauss’ approach is “entirely different” than the approach used by Rabbi Rackman, though he declined to elaborate.
Rabbi Adler similarly vouched for Rabbi Krauss’ credibility, pronouncing him a “first-class scholar.”
Many others have voiced support for Rabbi Krauss, but only off the record. One prominent New York rabbi who supports Rabbi Krauss but requested to remain anonymous described the situation as a social action problem. “It’s a game of numbers — everyone is waiting for the next guy to jump,” he said. “It’s a zero-sum game — everyone’s in, or nobody’s in.”
A prominent centrist Orthodox rabbi, also speaking off the record, said he was “surprised” Rabbi Schachter didn’t offer a fuller exposition of his reasoning for condemning the IBD in the heated aftermath of his letter. “He’s used to just invoking his own rabbinic authority, and of that being enough, but that doesn’t work anymore,” he said. More than anything else, this controversy foretells the emergence of a new movement, he said. “We’re heading for a split [within Orthodoxy] — at this point, it seems inevitable.”
Rabbi Schachter has not responded to requests for an interview.
Rabbi Avi Weiss, founder of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, a Modern Orthodox yeshiva that provides a more liberal alternative to Yeshiva University, wrote a letter to Rabbi Schachter, strongly criticizing his personal attack against Rabbi Krauss, The Jewish Week has learned. It defended Rabbi Schachter’s right to argue on the merits of his position, but said “no human being, let alone no rabbi, should be dismissed in such humiliating terms.” Rabbi Weiss called on Rabbi Schachter to publicly apologize in the spirit of the upcoming High Holy Days.
Several other rabbis who were interviewed referred, off the record, to Rabbi Schachter’s actions as “bullying.” But Rabbi Heshie Billet, senior rabbi at the Young Israel of Woodmere, offered a more pragmatic reason for not endorsing the IBD. He described Rabbi Krauss’ actions as “noble,” but said local rabbis can’t afford to undermine their loyalties to the Beit Din of America, the most prominent, mainstream religious court, which is headed by Rabbi Gedalia Dov Schwartz, a co-signer of the Rabbi Schachter letter.
“Since I live in New York, that’s my beit din, and I need their stamp of approval,” Rabbi Billet said. “It’s that simple.”
YU’s Internal Battle
The battle for the “soul of Orthodoxy” as one prominent rabbi termed it, is evident within Yeshiva University’s ranks. Two YU faculty members were pressured to disassociate from Rabbi Krauss’ beit din, despite strong personal convictions to support his mission.
Rabbi Yosef Blau, the spiritual adviser at Yeshiva University for nearly five decades and well-known for his advocacy confronting sexual abuse within the Orthodox community, has been a judge on the IBD since its founding. Every decision made by the court included Rabbi Blau, a well-known voice of authority within the community. Rabbi Yehuda Warburg, a dayan, or, religious judge, for the past 15 years, is the third judge on the court.
A few weeks ago Rabbi Blau was pressured to leave the court by colleagues within YU who disagreed with the court’s actions. Though Rabbi Blau declined to comment directly, a letter he submitted to Rabbi Krauss with his resignation cited a desire to “prevent controversy within YU” as his reason for departure.
According to a letter by Rabbi Krauss defending the IBD against Rabbi Schachter’s attack, Rabbi Blau agreed to resign in exchange for an agreement that Rabbi Schachter would not publicly attack the court. But according to the letter, Rabbi Schachter backtracked on the agreement within a few weeks and cited Rabbi’s Blau’s departure as evidence of the court’s questionable status.
Rabbi Moshe Kahn, a faculty member at YU’s Stern College for Women who teaches in the Graduate Program for Advanced Talmudic Study for women agreed to serve as an IBD judge after Rabbi Blau stepped down. But within a week he was pressured to resign. Though Rabbi Kahn declined to comment, a source within the university said pressure was put on the rabbi to step down for fear that his affiliation with the court would negatively impact funding for the GPATS program. The source also said that there were concerns that the roshei yeshiva at YU, who opposed the IBD, would dissuade their students from dating women in the GPATS program.
To Marry Or Not To Marry
How will this halachic battle play out for women who, after being freed by the IBD, seek to remarry?
Though Jacobs has slowly started to date again, she said she worries about her future status.
“I finally feel like I can breathe. After 15 years of being suffocated, I feel like myself. I feel like a person, not just a victim,” she said. Still, some men have stopped going out with her on learning that she was freed by the IBD.
“People have no problem breaking every other halacha, but when it comes to a get, they need the most stringent of stringencies,” she said. “It starts with the rabbis, this corrupt double-standard, and then everyone else just accepts blindly. In a minute, they can ruin everything I’ve worked towards over the past five years.”
In the last two weeks, since this controversy erupted, two women seeking the aid of the IBD have backed away. Still, Rabbi Krauss is committed to continue. After Rabbi Kahn’s resignation last week, another rabbi has been selected as a judge, though Rabbi Krauss declined to share the name until the appointment is official.
Rabbi Krauss, who is in his late 70s, walks with difficulty. Climbing a short flight of stairs, he paused on every step, making light conversation to distract from his belabored movements.
“You can hurt me, you can insult me,” he said of his critics. “But at the end of the day, this is not about me. This is a war. We’re fighting for these women. And if we win, the whole community wins. And if we lose,” he paused, a question hanging in his voice, “more is lost than we can ever know.”
Hannah@jewishweek.orgOur Josh Mitnick reports from Israel on the surge in French tourists this summer, possibly signaling an increase in aliyah from France. Read more.Israel News
French Jews Still Testing Israeli Waters
Will summer spike in French tourists translate into a wave of immigrants?
Joshua Mitnick
Contributing Editor
A Tel Aviv real estate brokerage firm with signs in French. Joshua Mitnick/JW
Tel Aviv — It’s the first night of the Israeli workweek, but as midnight approaches, the cafés near Tel Aviv’s beach are overflowing with patrons. A couple of steps closer to the water reveals an explanation: the city’s recently renovated beach promenade is awash with hundreds of teens and 20somethings carrying on in French.
Though Israeli hoteliers reported a 25 percent dip in bookings during the first half of 2015, likely the lingering fallout from last summer’s war in Gaza, everyone here seems to agree that the number of French tourists in Israel surged during the summer — possibly signaling a continuation of the rise in emigration from the country that is home to Europe’s largest Jewish community.
“All of my friends came this year. They all come to the beach promenade,” said Yonatan Marciano, a 25-year-old French immigrant to Israel.
More than a half year after an attack on a Paris kosher supermarket that left four Jews dead, French immigrants and tourists in Israel say interest in Israel remains robust. One local real estate broker who caters to French Jews said business has surged.
Meanwhile, the Jewish Agency says that 4,772 French immigrants arrived in Israel during the first seven months of the year. That represents an 11 percent increase from the same period one year ago, but it would mark a slowdown of the year-to-year growth in immigration from France.
Just steps away from the Mediterranean Sea, the Comacon real estate brokerage and its neighborhood competitors post property advertisements in French to appeal to the growing numbers of visitors.
“We have had a lot of work in the last half year. A lot of people who were thinking about coming here made their decision,” said Eric Guedj, the owner of Comacon, who estimates that his business has doubled from last year. “The situation in France is difficult, and because of that people are making a decision to buy or rent.”
Guedj said he already has an office in the southern city of Ashdod and is planning to open a branch in Netanya; both cities are known to attract French Jews because, like Tel Aviv, they are close to the sea. He said some French real estate investors who are anticipating a move are quietly selling stakes in France while building up the same property portfolio in Israel.
Guedj moved to Israel 10 years ago from the French Mediterranean city of Nice. He said many people are drawn to Israel or the U.S. because they believe they’ll be safer there when out in public. The proliferation of anti-Semitic attacks in France in recent years have made French Jews more anxious. “Here, in Israel, you know you can go out with children without having problems, and you’ll come back safely. In France, you couldn’t,” he said.
Most of Guedj’s clients are looking for rentals, preferring to test the waters of life in Israel before making the commitment to buy. “They want to see if it’s possible to live here, because mentality is different,” he said. “Either they will end up in Israel or Miami.”
Not far away from the real estate brokerages lies a strip of kosher restaurants — from sushi to pasta to burgers — that attract large numbers of French immigrants and tourists who linger there through the evening until after midnight.
“Everyone talks about moving to Israel,” said Sarah Davidovici, a university student, as she shared french fries with a group of high school friends from Paris. “Most of my friends think there is no future in France, and here there’s more security — and here we can practice our religion the way we want.”
But even though Davidovici is at the ideal age to relocate to Israel, like many other French Jewish youths, she and her friends say that they’re not certain that they can make the move. Some of her friends remarked that last summer’s war — in which rockets were fired from Gaza at Tel Aviv — gives them pause.
“I’m not certain that life here is easier than in France,” said Davidovici’s friend Anna Mouyal. “Sometimes we want to leave France, but not necessarily for Israel.”
When the world’s attention was focused on the terrorist attack on the Hyper Cacher market in Paris in January, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went to France with a message to Jews there that they should consider Israel as their future home. The Jewish Agency, meanwhile, made an oft-quoted prediction that it expected the pace of immigration to increase nearly 50 percent — from 7,100 in 2014 to about 10,000 by the end of this year. If aliyah continues at the same pace from earlier this year, the number of French immigrants will actually fall about 2,000 short of the prediction.
“They come to Israel for three weeks in August, and then they go back,” said Simon Hadad, a 33-year-old real estate agent and the son of French-speaking Jews, said of the many French tourists. “The anti-Semitism [back home] scares them, but it’s not their top priority. I always say that here it’s no less dangerous.”
Despite real estate broker Guedj’s claim that the Paris killings have triggered an upsurge in interest in relocating, other tourists and immigrants said they doubted that the murders alone were enough to boost immigration. For French Jews who have become accustomed to rising anti-Semitism in recent years, the attack did not prompt a dramatic reassessment of the situation, they argue.
“It’s not good to make aliyah because we are afraid of something in France. We need to make aliyah out of happiness,” said Raphael Bellaiche, a recent immigrant now serving in the Israeli army.
Others said that they were still too rooted in Paris. While young families and singles felt more free to move, middle-aged French Jews said they were not rushing to leave.
“I have a job, and I like Paris very much. I’m 60 years old. If I were to come here, what would I do?” said Guy Resnak. “If the situation is dangerous, I will leave, but so far, I’m not being touched by it.”
editor@jewishweek.orgAs Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu continues his apparently doomed campaign to convince American Jews to help block the Iran nuclear agreement, Yair Lapid, the founder and chair of the Yesh Atid party in Israel, has a different message for us. Staff Writer Stew Ain reports.
Read more.Israel News
Lapid Wades Into Dual-Loyalty Debate
Centrist Israeli leader says U.S. Jews should exercise ‘conscience’ on Iran deal.
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
Lapid: “We don’t want you to choose.” Getty Images
At a time when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is calling on American Jews to convince Congress to reject the Iran nuclear agreement, a prominent Israeli leader is telling them that it is OK to disagree.
“We don’t want you to choose between being American and being Jewish,” Yair Lapid, the founder and chair of Israel’s opposition centrist Yesh Atid party, told more than 500 participants of a webinar Monday organized by the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. “There shouldn’t be two conflicting possibilities. You should be living together peacefully, and Israel has a responsibility to make sure you are not put in this position.”
Lapid candidly told his American Jewish audience: “All Israelis are full of appreciation and are thankful that you are out there for us. But you have a conscience and have to make your own choice. It is not like Israel expects you to align with us automatically. We are telling you what we think — that this is a bad deal. If you agree with us, tell your congressman. But we don’t want to put you to a test. … What we need now is further quiet discussion.”
Lapid, a member of the Knesset, said the hateful attacks by Jews against Jews who disagree with them about the Iran nuclear deal has “tortured” American Jewry recently. That bitterness reached a fever pitch last week in the wake of Rep. Jerrold Nadler’s vote in favor of the deal; much of the criticism came from the Orthodox community, which has been strongly against the nuclear deal, which, they argue, won’t prevent Iran from getting a nuclear bomb.
The rhetoric and ads on both sides of the issue have become personal, sometimes crossing the line of civil discourse. The Jewish Week this week rejected an ad blasting Nadler that editors found “incendiary” in its wording and imagery.
Rabbi Leonard Matanky, president of the Orthodox movement’s Rabbinical Council of America, said he “received a very nasty tweet” after he tweeted that he was “proud to support the rabbinic position opposed to the Iran deal.”
“He called me a traitor … and suggested that Israel is a greater threat than Iran,” he said of the tweet.
“We need to maintain a civil discourse, but we have every right to advocate,” Rabbi Matanky said. “Both sides perceive this as a life or death issue. … Unfortunately political discourse in the U.S. has become extreme. This is what we see in many political issues that in the long run are less threatening than Iran. Look at the language used now in the presidential campaign. The Jewish community is a small part of the broader community, and what we are seeing in the Jewish community are the emotions and fears and language of current American politics.”
The president of the National Council of Young Israel, Farley Weiss, said the “vitriol on this started with the attacks on Sen. [Chuck] Schumer” after the New York Jewish Democrat announced his opposition to the nuclear agreement.
“There were attacks by both the administration and other left-wingers against him,” he said. “They questioned his patriotism and suggested that he cares more about Israeli concerns than American concerns. That to me is where I thought the first outrageous comments came. It was done to intimidate [other] Jewish lawmakers not to oppose the deal. And I think that led to the vitriol in the campaign and the response. I’m not justifying it, but that was the lightning rod that started everything.”
Weiss noted that the “vast majority of Jewish organizations oppose the deal for good reason, and I think two-thirds of Americans oppose it. … The only reason why so many lawmakers came out in favor of the deal is that the Obama administration said that if there is no deal, the only outcome would be war.”
Weiss added that he does not “know of anyone who supports it who would say it is a good deal — they say it is better than the alternative.”
Nathan Diament, executive director of the Orthodox Union’s Advocacy Center, said he recognizes that there are “deep and passionate convictions in the community over whether the deal should be supported or opposed.” But he said that kind of disagreement is different from the “extreme rhetoric” being heard, which he denounced.
The OU is planning a rally for “hundreds of rabbis” in Washington, D.C., next week, and a group trying to tamp down the rhetoric is planning a day of prayer next week. The Orthodox group Acheinu is calling on Jews from across the religious spectrum to recite Chapters 20 and 130 of Psalms anytime between 7 a.m. and noon on Tuesday. It is calling the event a Day of Jewish Unity, and a video it produced about the endeavor has been viewed more than 38,000 times.
But the group said the video has also elicited anti-Semitic and virulent comments, such as “Death to Israel.”
A spokesman for the group, Aaron Troodler, pointed out that the “days leading to the High Holy Days are certainly an appropriate time for reflection, repentance and prayer. The days leading up to perhaps the most consequential congressional vote in our lifetime is a compulsory time for unity and prayer.
“The fact that the schedule is such that the vote will fall around the High Holy Days is something we need to take heed of and do what is appropriate during this holy time on the Jewish calendar. At a time like this, when the Jewish people are facing an existential threat, we need to find ways to come together and unite as a nation rather than wasting our energy fighting among ourselves.”
He noted that Tuesday was selected for this event because it is the 82nd anniversary of the death of the Chofetz Chaim, who in pre-war Europe was renowned for preaching civility. Troodler said a delegation plans to travel to Belarus to pray at his grave.
Troodler added that in light of the “vitriolic diatribes that have ensued as a result of the upcoming congressional vote on the Iran deal, it is critical that we highlight the need to inject more civility into our public discourse.”
In his comments in the JCPA webinar, Lapid defended Nadler for his decision to support the nuclear agreement, criticizing those who posted hateful messages on Nadler’s Facebook page, such as one that said: “You failed the American People, you Failed as a Jew and you failed Israel!!”
“Jerry Nadler is very pro-Israel,” Lapid said. “He opposed the Iraq war not because he is anti-war but because he said if Iraq falls it would increase the influence of Iran in the Middle East. To say Jerry Nadler does not understand the risks Iran poses is not true.”
He was also critical of those who use Holocaust imagery to oppose the deal, saying his father was a Holocaust survivor who “disliked comparisons to the Holocaust.”
“This is not the Holocaust because the IDF is the strongest army in the Middle East,” he said. “We have very good intelligence and we have American friends. We will act before a Holocaust will come, so we should not speak of Holocaust visions.”
stewart@jewishweek.org
Lapid Wades Into Dual-Loyalty Debate
Centrist Israeli leader says U.S. Jews should exercise ‘conscience’ on Iran deal.
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
Lapid: “We don’t want you to choose.” Getty Images
At a time when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is calling on American Jews to convince Congress to reject the Iran nuclear agreement, a prominent Israeli leader is telling them that it is OK to disagree.
“We don’t want you to choose between being American and being Jewish,” Yair Lapid, the founder and chair of Israel’s opposition centrist Yesh Atid party, told more than 500 participants of a webinar Monday organized by the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. “There shouldn’t be two conflicting possibilities. You should be living together peacefully, and Israel has a responsibility to make sure you are not put in this position.”
Lapid candidly told his American Jewish audience: “All Israelis are full of appreciation and are thankful that you are out there for us. But you have a conscience and have to make your own choice. It is not like Israel expects you to align with us automatically. We are telling you what we think — that this is a bad deal. If you agree with us, tell your congressman. But we don’t want to put you to a test. … What we need now is further quiet discussion.”
Lapid, a member of the Knesset, said the hateful attacks by Jews against Jews who disagree with them about the Iran nuclear deal has “tortured” American Jewry recently. That bitterness reached a fever pitch last week in the wake of Rep. Jerrold Nadler’s vote in favor of the deal; much of the criticism came from the Orthodox community, which has been strongly against the nuclear deal, which, they argue, won’t prevent Iran from getting a nuclear bomb.
The rhetoric and ads on both sides of the issue have become personal, sometimes crossing the line of civil discourse. The Jewish Week this week rejected an ad blasting Nadler that editors found “incendiary” in its wording and imagery.
Rabbi Leonard Matanky, president of the Orthodox movement’s Rabbinical Council of America, said he “received a very nasty tweet” after he tweeted that he was “proud to support the rabbinic position opposed to the Iran deal.”
“He called me a traitor … and suggested that Israel is a greater threat than Iran,” he said of the tweet.
“We need to maintain a civil discourse, but we have every right to advocate,” Rabbi Matanky said. “Both sides perceive this as a life or death issue. … Unfortunately political discourse in the U.S. has become extreme. This is what we see in many political issues that in the long run are less threatening than Iran. Look at the language used now in the presidential campaign. The Jewish community is a small part of the broader community, and what we are seeing in the Jewish community are the emotions and fears and language of current American politics.”
The president of the National Council of Young Israel, Farley Weiss, said the “vitriol on this started with the attacks on Sen. [Chuck] Schumer” after the New York Jewish Democrat announced his opposition to the nuclear agreement.
“There were attacks by both the administration and other left-wingers against him,” he said. “They questioned his patriotism and suggested that he cares more about Israeli concerns than American concerns. That to me is where I thought the first outrageous comments came. It was done to intimidate [other] Jewish lawmakers not to oppose the deal. And I think that led to the vitriol in the campaign and the response. I’m not justifying it, but that was the lightning rod that started everything.”
Weiss noted that the “vast majority of Jewish organizations oppose the deal for good reason, and I think two-thirds of Americans oppose it. … The only reason why so many lawmakers came out in favor of the deal is that the Obama administration said that if there is no deal, the only outcome would be war.”
Weiss added that he does not “know of anyone who supports it who would say it is a good deal — they say it is better than the alternative.”
Nathan Diament, executive director of the Orthodox Union’s Advocacy Center, said he recognizes that there are “deep and passionate convictions in the community over whether the deal should be supported or opposed.” But he said that kind of disagreement is different from the “extreme rhetoric” being heard, which he denounced.
The OU is planning a rally for “hundreds of rabbis” in Washington, D.C., next week, and a group trying to tamp down the rhetoric is planning a day of prayer next week. The Orthodox group Acheinu is calling on Jews from across the religious spectrum to recite Chapters 20 and 130 of Psalms anytime between 7 a.m. and noon on Tuesday. It is calling the event a Day of Jewish Unity, and a video it produced about the endeavor has been viewed more than 38,000 times.
But the group said the video has also elicited anti-Semitic and virulent comments, such as “Death to Israel.”
A spokesman for the group, Aaron Troodler, pointed out that the “days leading to the High Holy Days are certainly an appropriate time for reflection, repentance and prayer. The days leading up to perhaps the most consequential congressional vote in our lifetime is a compulsory time for unity and prayer.
“The fact that the schedule is such that the vote will fall around the High Holy Days is something we need to take heed of and do what is appropriate during this holy time on the Jewish calendar. At a time like this, when the Jewish people are facing an existential threat, we need to find ways to come together and unite as a nation rather than wasting our energy fighting among ourselves.”
He noted that Tuesday was selected for this event because it is the 82nd anniversary of the death of the Chofetz Chaim, who in pre-war Europe was renowned for preaching civility. Troodler said a delegation plans to travel to Belarus to pray at his grave.
Troodler added that in light of the “vitriolic diatribes that have ensued as a result of the upcoming congressional vote on the Iran deal, it is critical that we highlight the need to inject more civility into our public discourse.”
In his comments in the JCPA webinar, Lapid defended Nadler for his decision to support the nuclear agreement, criticizing those who posted hateful messages on Nadler’s Facebook page, such as one that said: “You failed the American People, you Failed as a Jew and you failed Israel!!”
“Jerry Nadler is very pro-Israel,” Lapid said. “He opposed the Iraq war not because he is anti-war but because he said if Iraq falls it would increase the influence of Iran in the Middle East. To say Jerry Nadler does not understand the risks Iran poses is not true.”
He was also critical of those who use Holocaust imagery to oppose the deal, saying his father was a Holocaust survivor who “disliked comparisons to the Holocaust.”
“This is not the Holocaust because the IDF is the strongest army in the Middle East,” he said. “We have very good intelligence and we have American friends. We will act before a Holocaust will come, so we should not speak of Holocaust visions.”
stewart@jewishweek.org
Read More
Also this week, a grassroots Jewish outreach effort in Suffolk County is targeting the unaffiliated; a wide range of Food and Wine offerings for Rosh HaShanah; Erica Brown speaks out against attributing tragic events to specific sinful behavior; and our special Fall Arts Preview offers upcoming highlights in theater, film, music and visual arts.New York
Outreach In Suffolk — With A Wow!
Amid county’s Jewish woes, new efforts to reach the unaffiliated and intermarried.
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
Rachel Katz and her daughter at a JWOW event. Courtesy of JWOW
JWOW is looking to, well, wow the unattached Jews of Suffolk County.
No, not that JWoww, Snooki’s bosomy running mate on “The Jersey Shore.”
This JWOW, the splashily named volunteer grassroots group Jewish Without Walls, is at the leading edge of an outreach effort — both local and national — that is hoping to rejuvenate Jewish life in Suffolk.
The county has seen its share of woes Jewishly. Synagogue affiliation in the area continues to fall, and the intermarriage rate is the highest in the New York City area. Earlier this summer, the Conservative Commack Jewish Center, which once had a membership of 250, merged with the nearby Dix Hills Jewish Center. In a bid to stay alive, Smithtown’s Temple Beth Shalom sold its building two years ago to a church that allows it to continue using the building rent-free.
And the county’s only kosher butcher closed a year ago, citing declining sales, as did one of the two kosher Bagel Boss stores. All of which makes Suffolk a kind of experimental ground zero for outreach.
Into the breach has stepped JWOW, founded in 2011 by Beth Finger of Nesconset, L.I. In a few short years, it has increasingly become a major player in Suffolk, bringing together as many as 600 Jewish families, of whom nearly half do not belong to a synagogue and about 30 percent are interfaith families.
Rachel Katz and her family have taken notice. A few months after moving to the Island three years ago, Katz and her 3-year-old daughter Naomi were walking through the Smith Haven Mall in Lake Grove when they spotted some balloons and a Jewish star.
“I said, ‘We’re going this way, Naomi,’” she recalled. “I was excited to see a gathering of Jewish people. I didn’t expect it and everyone was so very happy and festive.”
It was a JWOW Chanukah event, one of the many the organization has planned in the past few years.
JWOW, along with the Suffolk Y JCC in Commack, the Eastern Long Island Jewish Alliance (ELIJA) and UJA-Federation of New York, are four organizations seeking to engage the 39 percent of Suffolk’s nearly 86,000 Jews who are intermarried and the 65 percent who are unaffiliated with a synagogue.
Elija, founded last year, recently launched a web page, elijali.org., to post all Jewish activities in Suffolk, according to its co-chairman, Rabbi Steven Moss.
Its mission, which is similar to that of the Alliance, is to promote Jewish events in the county, whose Jewish population dipped by 4,000 between 2002 and 2011, according to UJA-Federation’s Jewish Communal Study of 2011.
And soon, a national outreach organization, Big Tent Judaism (formerly the Jewish Outreach Institute) will move into Suffolk after a successful run in northern Westchester.
Finger said the efforts of JWOW are more cultural than religious, an approach that seems to be in step with broader patterns of Jewish life revealed in the much-publicized 2013 Pew Research Center study.
“I don’t think prayer is the way most Jews connect to their Judaism,” Finger observed.
“The same methods we use to welcome interfaith families we use to welcome Jewish families, because they [also] often have little [Jewish] knowledge,” Finger said. “So we don’t use Hebrew in the title of any of our programs. And on Lag b’Omer when we had a fun family field day, we didn’t say it was for Lag b’Omer, because many people would not know how to pronounce it. So we simply said come for a family field day and picnic — and in little letters we wrote, ‘To celebrate Lag b’Omer.’”
At the event, Finger said, she spoke briefly about the holiday and noted that all of the arts and crafts activities were in keeping with the Lag b’Omer theme of bonfires and bows and arrows. About 20 families attended this year.
In advance of the High Holy Days this year, Finger said JWOW would be holding a Shababeque — a kosher barbecue — on Sept. 11 at a private home in Setauket. The event — which features backyard children’s games — attracted 60 young families last year, and Finger said that this year Cantor Judy Merrick would be on hand to lead participants in a sing-along of Shabbat and holiday songs.
She said she would also be posting on the group’s website (jewishwithoutwalls.org) a list of synagogues in Suffolk that offer free High Holiday services and/or programs, such as tot services and yizkor services.
The largest JWOW turnout is the one for its annual Chanukah event at the Smith Haven Mall; last year’s event attracted 500 people.
When it comes to Shabbat dinners, Finger said her invitations are for “a Friday night dinner — and we don’t write Shabbos, but rather Shabbat. Shabbos is too insider, and it has an Orthodox connotation. Plenty of Jews have that feeling — they don’t feel that Judaism is theirs; they feel on the outside.
“Part of that is that they are Jewishly illiterate. Even if they went to Hebrew school, it ended when they were 13 and they don’t feel a connection. ... And when they go to synagogue, they feel like a fish out of water. ... I don’t think prayer is the way most Jews connect to their Judaism.”
Katz said she and her husband, who is not Jewish, are raising their two children as Jews and have joined an area Reform synagogue, Temple Isaiah in Stony Brook.
“It’s nice to meet people in synagogue, but JWOW is more laid back,” said Katz, 41, who grew up in a Conservative synagogue and went to Hebrew school and a Jewish camp. “Both are nice opportunities to meet with Jewish people. JWOW has programs running continuously for younger children, and it is setting up playgroups for children who are not yet in school. Some events are in people’s homes; it’s a nice alternative to synagogue life.”
Sarah Pew, her husband and two children moved to Stony Brook three years ago from Lafayette, Ind. They both grew up in Texas. Sarah, 34, attended a Conservative Jewish day school.
She said she learned about JWOW from the website meetup.com, but that the timing of its events did not work for her son. So she said JWOW let her create her own tots program for children 5 and under.
“JWOW Tots has grown and there is now J Babies for 0- to 2-year-olds, and a weekly playgroup at someone’s house in Setauket,” she said. “My husband and I don’t belong to any synagogue but go to events at all of them. What JWOW gave us was the Jewish community; a good number of our Jewish friends we made through JWOW.”
She added, “I did Rosh HaShanah and Purim and a model seder with 10 to 15 families ... . My kids are not old enough to make it through a real seder, so this seder was maybe 15 minutes long; there was lots of singing and the kids got to play. ... JWOW offers a place to learn the cultural and spiritual side of Judaism without feeling overwhelmed.”
Finger said she learned many of her outreach ideas from Big Tent Judaism. Rabbi Kerry Olitsky, that group’s executive director, said JWOW is now “aligned with our work” and that he is working with “other institutions that are not there yet.”
Rabbi Olitsky said his group’s name change, from Jewish Outreach Institute, was made to “reflect our operating ideology.”
Initially founded in 1987 as a research institute to study the then new phenomenon of interfaith marriage, Big Tent Judaism now concentrates on engaging interfaith families.
“Our work has evolved considerably to include direct program services, professional and lay leadership training, and advocacy for an inclusive Jewish community.” The organization has professional affiliates in several parts of the country trained by the organization in best practices for outreach and retention.
Big Tent Judaism was hired last year to help support UJA-Federation of New York’s “broader goal of creating and promoting an inclusive Jewish community,” according to Rebecca Katz-White, a planning executive in UJA-Federation’s Commission on the Jewish People.
Two years ago those efforts began to focus on teaching a group of lay leaders and professionals in 25 Jewish institutions in northern Westchester ways to engage newcomers.
“We concentrated on community building and helping the institutions work internally,” she said. “We are looking for long-term institutional and community cultural change.”
Katz-White said both northern Westchester and Suffolk County — whose program begins next year — were chosen for this effort because of the high number of interfaith families. In Westchester, 28 percent of Jews are intermarried; in Suffolk, the rate is 39 percent, according to UJA-Federation’s Jewish Community Study of 2011.
She said UJA-Federation’s contract with Big Tent Judaism last year was for $70,000. This year, the organization will be paid $50,000 to train 15 to 20 Jewish communal professionals how to develop new programs that reach out to interfaith households and less-engaged Jews.
Finger said her group’s activities are concentrated in northwestern and central Suffolk, home to most of the county’s Jews. With a grant from UJA-Federation, a recent survey of JWOW members found that 58 percent live in the Smithtown-Port Jefferson-Stony Brook area.
The survey’s authors noted that one-third of JWOW members who responded to the survey consider themselves Conservative Jews, while 28 percent said Reform and another 22 percent said “Just Jewish.”
JWOW extended its reach into Queens in mid-August with what Finger described as a “successful” Shabbat-in-the-Park pilot program in Forest Hills featuring a Shabbat storyteller, crafts, grape juice and challah.
Also this week, a grassroots Jewish outreach effort in Suffolk County is targeting the unaffiliated; a wide range of Food and Wine offerings for Rosh HaShanah; Erica Brown speaks out against attributing tragic events to specific sinful behavior; and our special Fall Arts Preview offers upcoming highlights in theater, film, music and visual arts.New York
Outreach In Suffolk — With A Wow!
Amid county’s Jewish woes, new efforts to reach the unaffiliated and intermarried.
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
Rachel Katz and her daughter at a JWOW event. Courtesy of JWOW
JWOW is looking to, well, wow the unattached Jews of Suffolk County.
No, not that JWoww, Snooki’s bosomy running mate on “The Jersey Shore.”
This JWOW, the splashily named volunteer grassroots group Jewish Without Walls, is at the leading edge of an outreach effort — both local and national — that is hoping to rejuvenate Jewish life in Suffolk.
The county has seen its share of woes Jewishly. Synagogue affiliation in the area continues to fall, and the intermarriage rate is the highest in the New York City area. Earlier this summer, the Conservative Commack Jewish Center, which once had a membership of 250, merged with the nearby Dix Hills Jewish Center. In a bid to stay alive, Smithtown’s Temple Beth Shalom sold its building two years ago to a church that allows it to continue using the building rent-free.
And the county’s only kosher butcher closed a year ago, citing declining sales, as did one of the two kosher Bagel Boss stores. All of which makes Suffolk a kind of experimental ground zero for outreach.
Into the breach has stepped JWOW, founded in 2011 by Beth Finger of Nesconset, L.I. In a few short years, it has increasingly become a major player in Suffolk, bringing together as many as 600 Jewish families, of whom nearly half do not belong to a synagogue and about 30 percent are interfaith families.
Rachel Katz and her family have taken notice. A few months after moving to the Island three years ago, Katz and her 3-year-old daughter Naomi were walking through the Smith Haven Mall in Lake Grove when they spotted some balloons and a Jewish star.
“I said, ‘We’re going this way, Naomi,’” she recalled. “I was excited to see a gathering of Jewish people. I didn’t expect it and everyone was so very happy and festive.”
It was a JWOW Chanukah event, one of the many the organization has planned in the past few years.
JWOW, along with the Suffolk Y JCC in Commack, the Eastern Long Island Jewish Alliance (ELIJA) and UJA-Federation of New York, are four organizations seeking to engage the 39 percent of Suffolk’s nearly 86,000 Jews who are intermarried and the 65 percent who are unaffiliated with a synagogue.
Elija, founded last year, recently launched a web page, elijali.org., to post all Jewish activities in Suffolk, according to its co-chairman, Rabbi Steven Moss.
Its mission, which is similar to that of the Alliance, is to promote Jewish events in the county, whose Jewish population dipped by 4,000 between 2002 and 2011, according to UJA-Federation’s Jewish Communal Study of 2011.
And soon, a national outreach organization, Big Tent Judaism (formerly the Jewish Outreach Institute) will move into Suffolk after a successful run in northern Westchester.
Finger said the efforts of JWOW are more cultural than religious, an approach that seems to be in step with broader patterns of Jewish life revealed in the much-publicized 2013 Pew Research Center study.
“I don’t think prayer is the way most Jews connect to their Judaism,” Finger observed.
“The same methods we use to welcome interfaith families we use to welcome Jewish families, because they [also] often have little [Jewish] knowledge,” Finger said. “So we don’t use Hebrew in the title of any of our programs. And on Lag b’Omer when we had a fun family field day, we didn’t say it was for Lag b’Omer, because many people would not know how to pronounce it. So we simply said come for a family field day and picnic — and in little letters we wrote, ‘To celebrate Lag b’Omer.’”
At the event, Finger said, she spoke briefly about the holiday and noted that all of the arts and crafts activities were in keeping with the Lag b’Omer theme of bonfires and bows and arrows. About 20 families attended this year.
In advance of the High Holy Days this year, Finger said JWOW would be holding a Shababeque — a kosher barbecue — on Sept. 11 at a private home in Setauket. The event — which features backyard children’s games — attracted 60 young families last year, and Finger said that this year Cantor Judy Merrick would be on hand to lead participants in a sing-along of Shabbat and holiday songs.
She said she would also be posting on the group’s website (jewishwithoutwalls.org) a list of synagogues in Suffolk that offer free High Holiday services and/or programs, such as tot services and yizkor services.
The largest JWOW turnout is the one for its annual Chanukah event at the Smith Haven Mall; last year’s event attracted 500 people.
When it comes to Shabbat dinners, Finger said her invitations are for “a Friday night dinner — and we don’t write Shabbos, but rather Shabbat. Shabbos is too insider, and it has an Orthodox connotation. Plenty of Jews have that feeling — they don’t feel that Judaism is theirs; they feel on the outside.
“Part of that is that they are Jewishly illiterate. Even if they went to Hebrew school, it ended when they were 13 and they don’t feel a connection. ... And when they go to synagogue, they feel like a fish out of water. ... I don’t think prayer is the way most Jews connect to their Judaism.”
Katz said she and her husband, who is not Jewish, are raising their two children as Jews and have joined an area Reform synagogue, Temple Isaiah in Stony Brook.
“It’s nice to meet people in synagogue, but JWOW is more laid back,” said Katz, 41, who grew up in a Conservative synagogue and went to Hebrew school and a Jewish camp. “Both are nice opportunities to meet with Jewish people. JWOW has programs running continuously for younger children, and it is setting up playgroups for children who are not yet in school. Some events are in people’s homes; it’s a nice alternative to synagogue life.”
Sarah Pew, her husband and two children moved to Stony Brook three years ago from Lafayette, Ind. They both grew up in Texas. Sarah, 34, attended a Conservative Jewish day school.
She said she learned about JWOW from the website meetup.com, but that the timing of its events did not work for her son. So she said JWOW let her create her own tots program for children 5 and under.
“JWOW Tots has grown and there is now J Babies for 0- to 2-year-olds, and a weekly playgroup at someone’s house in Setauket,” she said. “My husband and I don’t belong to any synagogue but go to events at all of them. What JWOW gave us was the Jewish community; a good number of our Jewish friends we made through JWOW.”
She added, “I did Rosh HaShanah and Purim and a model seder with 10 to 15 families ... . My kids are not old enough to make it through a real seder, so this seder was maybe 15 minutes long; there was lots of singing and the kids got to play. ... JWOW offers a place to learn the cultural and spiritual side of Judaism without feeling overwhelmed.”
Finger said she learned many of her outreach ideas from Big Tent Judaism. Rabbi Kerry Olitsky, that group’s executive director, said JWOW is now “aligned with our work” and that he is working with “other institutions that are not there yet.”
Rabbi Olitsky said his group’s name change, from Jewish Outreach Institute, was made to “reflect our operating ideology.”
Initially founded in 1987 as a research institute to study the then new phenomenon of interfaith marriage, Big Tent Judaism now concentrates on engaging interfaith families.
“Our work has evolved considerably to include direct program services, professional and lay leadership training, and advocacy for an inclusive Jewish community.” The organization has professional affiliates in several parts of the country trained by the organization in best practices for outreach and retention.
Big Tent Judaism was hired last year to help support UJA-Federation of New York’s “broader goal of creating and promoting an inclusive Jewish community,” according to Rebecca Katz-White, a planning executive in UJA-Federation’s Commission on the Jewish People.
Two years ago those efforts began to focus on teaching a group of lay leaders and professionals in 25 Jewish institutions in northern Westchester ways to engage newcomers.
“We concentrated on community building and helping the institutions work internally,” she said. “We are looking for long-term institutional and community cultural change.”
Katz-White said both northern Westchester and Suffolk County — whose program begins next year — were chosen for this effort because of the high number of interfaith families. In Westchester, 28 percent of Jews are intermarried; in Suffolk, the rate is 39 percent, according to UJA-Federation’s Jewish Community Study of 2011.
She said UJA-Federation’s contract with Big Tent Judaism last year was for $70,000. This year, the organization will be paid $50,000 to train 15 to 20 Jewish communal professionals how to develop new programs that reach out to interfaith households and less-engaged Jews.
Finger said her group’s activities are concentrated in northwestern and central Suffolk, home to most of the county’s Jews. With a grant from UJA-Federation, a recent survey of JWOW members found that 58 percent live in the Smithtown-Port Jefferson-Stony Brook area.
The survey’s authors noted that one-third of JWOW members who responded to the survey consider themselves Conservative Jews, while 28 percent said Reform and another 22 percent said “Just Jewish.”
JWOW extended its reach into Queens in mid-August with what Finger described as a “successful” Shabbat-in-the-Park pilot program in Forest Hills featuring a Shabbat storyteller, crafts, grape juice and challah.
Read More
A recipe, that is, for Jewish outreach.
Families planning to attend are asked to register on JWOW’s website, jewishwithoutwalls.org.
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Jew By Voice
On Causes And Causality
Erica Brown
Special To The Jewish WeekErica Brown
Soon enough, we will stand in synagogue hungry and self-deprecating if we are doing our jobs correctly. It will be Yom Kippur, and we will raise a closed fist to what we hope is an open heart and say words of contrition, apologies to those we love and hurt. We will think about the long and non-linear path to repentance. For a moment, please personalize this Al Chet: “…for the sin which we have committed before You with an utterance of the lips.” What comes to mind?
For me, any number of my own misstatements surface in an embarrassing mountain of personal speech failures, and those are only the ones I remember. There are words — thousands of them a year — that we say that can never be taken back. It is no wonder that a family member likes to say that every person gets an allotment of words in one lifetime. When you use all those words up, you die. How’s that as an incentive to keep your mouth shut? Oy, the utterance of the lips.
Two particular leadership utterances come to mind this year: statements about causality and about slippery slopes.
In the past many years, an anti-gay preacher told congregants that Hurricane Sandy was because of the marriage equality act. More than one rabbi publically attributed Hurricane Katrina’s devastating casualties to the evacuation of Jewish settlers from Gaza. A Muslim New York-based imam blamed America for the 9/11 attacks. A rabbi publically stated that the Holocaust happened because of Jewish Sabbath transgressors.
Maimonides writes that we must scour our deeds when bad things happen. He does not, however, say that someone else should do that for us. That’s an inside job. It’s time religious leaders get out of the casualty business and back to the cause business: ethics, prayer, consolation, study. Accusatory statements are a huge distraction to a clergy’s main order of business. Controversial, incendiary statements suck up psychic energy and precious time. Religious leaders are either stuck apologizing to others or defending themselves. What is to be gained when so much is to be lost?
It is a biblical prohibition to attribute a cause for someone else’s suffering: hona’at devarim. Words maim and damage, sometimes permanently. When said by a representative of the faith, they can cause the listener to abandon religion altogether, a causal relationship no one needs. Causality statements also hurt the institutions leaders represent. Individuals make statements that are associated with organizations. People wonder: is that the view of this synagogue, this Jewish nonprofit, this university? The biggest institution at peril is Judaism itself. Many years ago in Israel, a bus of middle school children was in a fatal accident. In the midst of collective mourning, a rabbi publically explained the accident: the boys on the bus were not wearing tefillin. This did not get anyone to wear tefillin. It may have inspired some people to stop wearing tefillin.
A subtler form of causality is the slippery slope argument. Labeling something a slippery slope suggests a series of events that move quickly, is hard to control and that lead in the direction of disaster. This was recently articulated by an influential rabbi who suggested that advanced women’s Jewish learning needs to be re-evaluated. It has led to too much acceptance of egalitarianism and homosexuality within traditional Judaism. Get off the slippery slope.
Problem: one thing always leads to another. We just don’t know what that other is. It’s pure speculation. And the fact that one thing leads to another is not always a bad thing. Sometimes we call this progress. One person’s slippery slope is another person’s ladder of opportunity. One of the early innovators of artificial intelligence, John McCarthy, said, “When I see a slippery slope, my instinct is to build a terrace.” Take it slowly. Create mindful way stations so that potential pitfalls are negotiated with skill.
Underlying the slippery slope argument is that we can and should turn back time, but just how far? Should we close universities to women or make sure that a woman’s dollar is worth even less than a man’s? Should we repeal women’s suffrage? It’s the slippery slope in reverse, and it ain’t pretty. It is also unrealistic. I don’t love cellphones. I think the Internet is often dangerous, but it’s here to stay. Harsh pronouncements don’t help anyone negotiate complex current realities. We need leaders to help us negotiate a more sacred reality in the here and now.
Religious leaders should not be in the causality business. Faith is strong, but people are weak. Things get misconstrued, and travel fast. One wrong utterance of the lips can do too much damage to an already fragile spiritual eco-system. So hold back before you hold forth. Please.
Erica Brown’s column appears the first week of the month.
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Gary Rosenblatt
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BETWEEN THE LINES
Gary Rosenblatt
A League Of Their Own
An evening spent at the team’s 4-year-old gem of a ballpark, Provident Bank Park, reminds a visitor of the real pleasures of baseball. Within its cozy, kids-oriented confines (4,500 seats, an outdoor playground and the chance for boys and girls to run around the bases after the game) fans are up close to the action. You can hear the pop of an occasional 90-mile-an-hour fastball as it hits the catcher’s glove, the crack of the bat making contact, and even the excited comments of the players at times. Sitting in the front row near the third-base dugout, we heard a youthful slugger who appeared to be in his late teens and had just launched a majestic home run into the left field stands, exclaim excitedly to his third-base coach as he rounded the bases, “Man, I sure hit that one.”
It’s that combination of athletic skill and youthful exuberance that can charm a fan more used to the stoic professionalism of major leaguers on the field.
Most of the Boulders players are in their mid-20s and either were not drafted by The Bigs, released by a minor league team, or are simply talented locals playing primarily for the love of the game and hoping for a miracle. (The level of competition is said to be on a par with single-A in the minors.)
You’ve got to love a team that plays in a league with the New Jersey Jackals and Quebec Capitales, and whose official team hotel is the Super 8 in Mahwah, N.J.
One perk: You can take the family to the ballpark and sit in quality seats for far less than a single ticket to a Yankee or Mets game. And from that vantage point, and freed of the nervous tension associated with rooting for one’s favorite big league team, you can just sit back and appreciate the beauty of the game — the ballet-like moves of the shortstop going deep in the hole for a grounder and then pivoting and throwing to first, or the grace of a fleet-footed outfielder racing into the gap to run down a sinking line drive.
Our local grandkids who attended recent games with us are 11, 10, 9, 8, and 5, with varying interests in sports. The newest addition, Ella Grace (Esther Lea Gittel) — named for my son-in-law’s father, my mom and a maternal aunt — was born in June, and stayed home. Already displaying a sweet disposition, she can wait until next season to take in a ballgame, we figured.
Asher, 11, and his brother, Zachary, 9, are talented athletes who take their Little League games as seriously as their father did his in his day. They watched the Boulders game carefully, offering knowledgeable comments about the action on the field, like when to bunt or steal a base.
Their cousins were fascinated to learn there is no clock in baseball, no way of knowing how long a game will last, and that the longest professional baseball game (in Pawtucket, R.I., in 1981) lasted 32 consecutive innings, and all night. (A worrisome thought for their grandmother, a good sport at such outings, but with reasonable limits.)
Roni, 10, a budding filmmaker, chose to video the action; Noa, 8, loved watching high foul balls land in the stands or, not infrequently, go over the roof behind home plate and into the parking lot (“What if one lands on our car?” she asked); and Yair, 5, wrapped in a blanket in the cool night air, was happy just to take it all in and stay up way past his bedtime.
I look forward to taking our West Coast grandkids, Moshe Kol, 3 1/2, and his sister, Malka Nava, born in January, to their first game, perhaps to see the Los Angeles Dodgers, their paternal-great-grandfather’s favorite team, though he knew them best as the loveable, sometimes infuriating Brooklyn Bums.
Sitting on a clear, late summer night at the Boulders games, relishing the presence of my family, and now with grandkids of my own, I feel a sharp awareness of the passage of time. But the feeling soon gives way to tender childhood memories of going to the ballpark with my dad and brother, and the enduring thrill of entering the stadium and first seeing the green grass of the infield.
The kid in you still comes out at a ballgame, and baseball is special among sports because it takes its time (despite efforts to speed it up). Unlike the frenzy associated with time-bound football, basketball or soccer, there are plenty of opportunities between pitches at a baseball game to have conversations with those around you — about the game or whatever else is on your mind, or theirs.
So I’m grateful to the Rockland Boulders for taking my mind off the disappointing O’s this past month and focusing it on the things that count.
Not all of baseball’s best moments happen on the field, and the memories can last a lifetime — just like a true fan’s ideal game, which never ends.
gary@jewishweek.orgRead More
Rabbi David Wolpe
A recipe, that is, for Jewish outreach.
Families planning to attend are asked to register on JWOW’s website, jewishwithoutwalls.org.
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Jew By VoiceOn Causes And Causality
Erica Brown
Special To The Jewish WeekErica Brown
Soon enough, we will stand in synagogue hungry and self-deprecating if we are doing our jobs correctly. It will be Yom Kippur, and we will raise a closed fist to what we hope is an open heart and say words of contrition, apologies to those we love and hurt. We will think about the long and non-linear path to repentance. For a moment, please personalize this Al Chet: “…for the sin which we have committed before You with an utterance of the lips.” What comes to mind?
For me, any number of my own misstatements surface in an embarrassing mountain of personal speech failures, and those are only the ones I remember. There are words — thousands of them a year — that we say that can never be taken back. It is no wonder that a family member likes to say that every person gets an allotment of words in one lifetime. When you use all those words up, you die. How’s that as an incentive to keep your mouth shut? Oy, the utterance of the lips.
Two particular leadership utterances come to mind this year: statements about causality and about slippery slopes.
In the past many years, an anti-gay preacher told congregants that Hurricane Sandy was because of the marriage equality act. More than one rabbi publically attributed Hurricane Katrina’s devastating casualties to the evacuation of Jewish settlers from Gaza. A Muslim New York-based imam blamed America for the 9/11 attacks. A rabbi publically stated that the Holocaust happened because of Jewish Sabbath transgressors.
Maimonides writes that we must scour our deeds when bad things happen. He does not, however, say that someone else should do that for us. That’s an inside job. It’s time religious leaders get out of the casualty business and back to the cause business: ethics, prayer, consolation, study. Accusatory statements are a huge distraction to a clergy’s main order of business. Controversial, incendiary statements suck up psychic energy and precious time. Religious leaders are either stuck apologizing to others or defending themselves. What is to be gained when so much is to be lost?
It is a biblical prohibition to attribute a cause for someone else’s suffering: hona’at devarim. Words maim and damage, sometimes permanently. When said by a representative of the faith, they can cause the listener to abandon religion altogether, a causal relationship no one needs. Causality statements also hurt the institutions leaders represent. Individuals make statements that are associated with organizations. People wonder: is that the view of this synagogue, this Jewish nonprofit, this university? The biggest institution at peril is Judaism itself. Many years ago in Israel, a bus of middle school children was in a fatal accident. In the midst of collective mourning, a rabbi publically explained the accident: the boys on the bus were not wearing tefillin. This did not get anyone to wear tefillin. It may have inspired some people to stop wearing tefillin.
A subtler form of causality is the slippery slope argument. Labeling something a slippery slope suggests a series of events that move quickly, is hard to control and that lead in the direction of disaster. This was recently articulated by an influential rabbi who suggested that advanced women’s Jewish learning needs to be re-evaluated. It has led to too much acceptance of egalitarianism and homosexuality within traditional Judaism. Get off the slippery slope.
Problem: one thing always leads to another. We just don’t know what that other is. It’s pure speculation. And the fact that one thing leads to another is not always a bad thing. Sometimes we call this progress. One person’s slippery slope is another person’s ladder of opportunity. One of the early innovators of artificial intelligence, John McCarthy, said, “When I see a slippery slope, my instinct is to build a terrace.” Take it slowly. Create mindful way stations so that potential pitfalls are negotiated with skill.
Underlying the slippery slope argument is that we can and should turn back time, but just how far? Should we close universities to women or make sure that a woman’s dollar is worth even less than a man’s? Should we repeal women’s suffrage? It’s the slippery slope in reverse, and it ain’t pretty. It is also unrealistic. I don’t love cellphones. I think the Internet is often dangerous, but it’s here to stay. Harsh pronouncements don’t help anyone negotiate complex current realities. We need leaders to help us negotiate a more sacred reality in the here and now.
Religious leaders should not be in the causality business. Faith is strong, but people are weak. Things get misconstrued, and travel fast. One wrong utterance of the lips can do too much damage to an already fragile spiritual eco-system. So hold back before you hold forth. Please.
Erica Brown’s column appears the first week of the month.
Fall Arts Preview 2015
A Sizzling Season: A Yiddish “Death of a Salesman.” John Zorn's ‘Masada’ premiere. A Moshe Safdie retrospective.
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Gary Rosenblatt
P.S. You know the drill. Our website is always there for you with breaking news and exclusive videos, blogs, opinion essays, advice columns and more.
http://www.thejewishweek.com/Gary Rosenblatt
BETWEEN THE LINES
Gary Rosenblatt
A League Of Their Own
At a baseball game played by professionals, but not affiliated with the majors or the minors, you can just sit back and appreciate the beauty.
It’s quite possible you’ve not heard of the Rockland Boulders baseball team. They’re not in the major leagues. They’re not affiliated with the minor leagues, either. They’re an independent professional team in the Can-Am (Canadian-American) League that calls Pomona, N.Y., in Rockland County, home. And as my hopes for the Baltimore Orioles making it to the post-season slowly fade amidst a succession of painful one-run and extra-inning losses, I’ve taken solace in — and my grandkids to — Boulders games in recent days.An evening spent at the team’s 4-year-old gem of a ballpark, Provident Bank Park, reminds a visitor of the real pleasures of baseball. Within its cozy, kids-oriented confines (4,500 seats, an outdoor playground and the chance for boys and girls to run around the bases after the game) fans are up close to the action. You can hear the pop of an occasional 90-mile-an-hour fastball as it hits the catcher’s glove, the crack of the bat making contact, and even the excited comments of the players at times. Sitting in the front row near the third-base dugout, we heard a youthful slugger who appeared to be in his late teens and had just launched a majestic home run into the left field stands, exclaim excitedly to his third-base coach as he rounded the bases, “Man, I sure hit that one.”
It’s that combination of athletic skill and youthful exuberance that can charm a fan more used to the stoic professionalism of major leaguers on the field.
Most of the Boulders players are in their mid-20s and either were not drafted by The Bigs, released by a minor league team, or are simply talented locals playing primarily for the love of the game and hoping for a miracle. (The level of competition is said to be on a par with single-A in the minors.)
You’ve got to love a team that plays in a league with the New Jersey Jackals and Quebec Capitales, and whose official team hotel is the Super 8 in Mahwah, N.J.
One perk: You can take the family to the ballpark and sit in quality seats for far less than a single ticket to a Yankee or Mets game. And from that vantage point, and freed of the nervous tension associated with rooting for one’s favorite big league team, you can just sit back and appreciate the beauty of the game — the ballet-like moves of the shortstop going deep in the hole for a grounder and then pivoting and throwing to first, or the grace of a fleet-footed outfielder racing into the gap to run down a sinking line drive.
Our local grandkids who attended recent games with us are 11, 10, 9, 8, and 5, with varying interests in sports. The newest addition, Ella Grace (Esther Lea Gittel) — named for my son-in-law’s father, my mom and a maternal aunt — was born in June, and stayed home. Already displaying a sweet disposition, she can wait until next season to take in a ballgame, we figured.
Asher, 11, and his brother, Zachary, 9, are talented athletes who take their Little League games as seriously as their father did his in his day. They watched the Boulders game carefully, offering knowledgeable comments about the action on the field, like when to bunt or steal a base.
Their cousins were fascinated to learn there is no clock in baseball, no way of knowing how long a game will last, and that the longest professional baseball game (in Pawtucket, R.I., in 1981) lasted 32 consecutive innings, and all night. (A worrisome thought for their grandmother, a good sport at such outings, but with reasonable limits.)
Roni, 10, a budding filmmaker, chose to video the action; Noa, 8, loved watching high foul balls land in the stands or, not infrequently, go over the roof behind home plate and into the parking lot (“What if one lands on our car?” she asked); and Yair, 5, wrapped in a blanket in the cool night air, was happy just to take it all in and stay up way past his bedtime.
I look forward to taking our West Coast grandkids, Moshe Kol, 3 1/2, and his sister, Malka Nava, born in January, to their first game, perhaps to see the Los Angeles Dodgers, their paternal-great-grandfather’s favorite team, though he knew them best as the loveable, sometimes infuriating Brooklyn Bums.
Sitting on a clear, late summer night at the Boulders games, relishing the presence of my family, and now with grandkids of my own, I feel a sharp awareness of the passage of time. But the feeling soon gives way to tender childhood memories of going to the ballpark with my dad and brother, and the enduring thrill of entering the stadium and first seeing the green grass of the infield.
The kid in you still comes out at a ballgame, and baseball is special among sports because it takes its time (despite efforts to speed it up). Unlike the frenzy associated with time-bound football, basketball or soccer, there are plenty of opportunities between pitches at a baseball game to have conversations with those around you — about the game or whatever else is on your mind, or theirs.
So I’m grateful to the Rockland Boulders for taking my mind off the disappointing O’s this past month and focusing it on the things that count.
Not all of baseball’s best moments happen on the field, and the memories can last a lifetime — just like a true fan’s ideal game, which never ends.
gary@jewishweek.orgRead More
Rabbi David Wolpe
MUSINGS
Rabbi David Wolpe
Shabbat, For Body And SoulLate there has been a spate of articles about howmuch people work. Those who spend more time atthe office are apparently less healthy than those whowork moderately.
In other words, Shabbat is a health measure.
Shabbat does not only enable us to take a day off from work. When we do it right, it enables us to take a day of from thinking about work. On Shabbat, the Rabbis teach us, you are supposed to imagine all your needs fulfilled. You don’t have to worry about that deal, or this waiting email, or that unresolved issue — it is done. The world is perfect as it is; you need not change it.
Yes, it will all return. But the break itself is necessary and healthy. Where once home was a refuge from work, email and the Internet have brought work to the home. Shabbat offers a break from the endless cycle of engagement and obligation. Work is an essential part of life, but work is not life. Community, prayer, family and food help us keep our balance in this vertiginous world. Celebrate Shabbat — it is a boon for body and soul.
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 More
SPECIAL SECTION
Fall Arts Preview 2015
A Sizzling Season: A Yiddish “Death of a Salesman.” John Zorn's ‘Masada’ premiere. A Moshe Safdie retrospective.
Inside This Special Section
The Lomans In Yiddish: ‘Gib Achtung’
The Prosecution Bears Witness
Still Scaling Masada’s Heights
Book
Site Specific
Film List
Music List
Theater List
Visual Art List
Read More
The Negev is an up-and-coming region for Israel travel. Israel Ministry of Tourism
TRAVEL
Tourism Notes, From North To South
Hilary Danailova
Travel WriterIt may be one of the world’s oldest civilizations, but there’s always something new in Israel.
Every season brings just-unearthed archaeological finds and novel museums, burgeoning neighborhoods and buzzy new boîtes. In the heart of Jerusalem, a glittering pyramid is rising; Daniel Libeskind’s 26-story stone-and-glass tower, to be completed by 2019, will offer rooftop dining, an observatory, a public plaza and upscale shopping at the city’s second-tallest edifice.
All over Israel, visitors will find technologically sophisticated, more accessible ways to experience Israel’s sights, both ancient and modern — as well as expanded options for flights, lodgings and entertainment.
To help you plan your next trip, the Israel Ministry of Tourism recently launched a brand-new website (Israel.travel) specifically aimed at the Jewish traveler. American Jews represent nearly half of all visitors to Israel, according to the ministry’s latest statistics, so this kind of investment makes sense.
I recently perused the site and found it to be a visually engaging, fun-to-read improvement over past web portals. To be sure, some sections of the site are still under construction — the monthly events calendar was incomplete as of last week — but among the highlights are destination-specific capsules, including a section devoted to tourism in the up-and-coming Negev Desert region.
There’s also a helpful area dedicated to helping American Jews plan “destination” b’nai mitzvah trips to Israel — a longtime tradition that is growing in popularity. And the new FAQs offer concise, candid answers to common concerns (such as whether Israel stamps visitors’ passports, complicating travel to nearby Muslim an Arab countries; the answer is no).
Getting to Israel is also easier than ever, thanks to expanded flight alternatives. El Al recently added Boston-Logan Airport to its growing list of North American departure points, with three direct flights per week, and American Airlines became the latest U.S. airline to offer Israel flights as a result of its merger with U.S. Airways.
Newly added routes from Ryanair, the Ireland-based discount carrier, allow travelers to connect cheaply from Eastern Europe. Now you can tack on a jaunt to Tel Aviv from a heritage tour in Krakow or Budapest — among the newest connections.
Once you land — or even before you go — plan your cultural itinerary with the Museums in Israel National Portal. It’s a handy new app that allows users to explore the country’s astounding 1.5 million items, treasures from virtually anywhere and any angle.
In person, there’s a lot that’s new at Israel’s museums — including the nation’s first institution to showcase modern and contemporary Arab art, the Arab Museum of Contemporary Art and Heritage; it was unveiled just this summer. Conceived by two Israeli artists and situated in Sakhnin, a predominantly Muslim city in the Galilee, the museum opened with an exhibit whose name translates to “dialogue” — a note of hope in a time of tension.
Tension aside, 2015 also marks the first half-century of the Israel Museum, the nation’s premier cultural institution. After an expansion five years ago that doubled its exhibition space, the Museum is showing off its astounding collection in novel and inspired ways — most notably with a series of 50th birthday shows whose centerpiece is “A Brief History of Humankind,” on display through the end of the year. Inspired by Yuval Noah Harari’s eponymous bestseller, the exhibition explores hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution through objects from the museum’s vast collections, both ancient and modern.
Israel Museum visitors can also tour new galleries of Israeli art that opened in May, surveys of particularly noteworthy collections, and “Gold from the Sea,” a glittering display of precious-metal treasures from the coastal ruins at Caesarea.
Another landmark institution, the Israel Philharmonic, highlights the nation’s continued artistic vibrancy with a 2015-16 season featuring venerable and up-and-coming artists from around the globe. They include American Jewish musicians like the pianist Emanuel Ax and the conductor Michael Stern (son of Isaac), as well as the Russian-born pianists Igor Levit and Daniil Trifonov and conductor Kirill Petrenko — all rising international stars.
And if you haven’t seen the Philharmonic play at home in several years, you may not have had the opportunity to hear one of the newest arrivals on the classical circuit: Now in its sixth year, the Gary Bertini Israeli Choir allows the orchestra to stage increasingly ambitious choral works.
Serving a nation in need of distraction, live music of all kinds remains a highlight of many an Israel trip. One uniquely Israeli experience is a visit to the Elma, an arts complex and luxury hotel in the historic village of Zichron Ya’akov.
A short ride from Tel Aviv, the Elma hosts an eclectic lineup of Israeli and foreign performers at its 750-seat auditorium — and many audience members head upstairs after the last note, relaxing on a private balcony overlooking the Mediterranean, and savoring the best of what makes Israel special.
editor@jewishweek.orgRead More
Crowded subway in NYC. Via Wikimedia
Featured on NYBLUEPRINT
10 Subway Commandments
Maya Klausner
Editor ComedyAnd the Lord said “thou shalt not be a subway schmuck”
We all know how much we New Yorkers love and rely on our subterranean locomotive system. We also know that it can be one of the most stressful and metaphysically challenging experiences in this claustrophobia inducing concrete jungle.
So to help everyone out, here are 10 simple rules for everyone to follow to make your underground commute a little more bearable.
1. Thou shalt not read a book whilst going up or down the stairs (also … really?)
2. Thou shalt not text whilst walking (high treason during rush hour).
3. Thou shalt remove thy backpack.
4. Thou shalt not make overly amorous displays of affection (defy at your own risk, NYC is a bitter, bitter place.)
5. Thou shalt not eat spaghetti and meatballs.
6. Thou shalt not play music without headphones (no one wants to hear Daddy Yankee’s “Gasolina” on repeat … in any setting.)
7. Thou shalt not scream about nothing.
8. Thou shalt not bring thy bike (you made your choice.)
9. Thou shalt not sit directly next to someone in an otherwise empty car (because it’s one of the creepiest possible things you can do.)
10. Thou shalt not kill.
Read More
Rabbi David Wolpe
Shabbat, For Body And SoulLate there has been a spate of articles about howmuch people work. Those who spend more time atthe office are apparently less healthy than those whowork moderately.
In other words, Shabbat is a health measure.
Shabbat does not only enable us to take a day off from work. When we do it right, it enables us to take a day of from thinking about work. On Shabbat, the Rabbis teach us, you are supposed to imagine all your needs fulfilled. You don’t have to worry about that deal, or this waiting email, or that unresolved issue — it is done. The world is perfect as it is; you need not change it.
Yes, it will all return. But the break itself is necessary and healthy. Where once home was a refuge from work, email and the Internet have brought work to the home. Shabbat offers a break from the endless cycle of engagement and obligation. Work is an essential part of life, but work is not life. Community, prayer, family and food help us keep our balance in this vertiginous world. Celebrate Shabbat — it is a boon for body and soul.
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 More
SPECIAL SECTION
Fall Arts Preview 2015
A Sizzling Season: A Yiddish “Death of a Salesman.” John Zorn's ‘Masada’ premiere. A Moshe Safdie retrospective.
Inside This Special Section
The Lomans In Yiddish: ‘Gib Achtung’
The Prosecution Bears Witness
Still Scaling Masada’s Heights
Book
Site Specific
Film List
Music List
Theater List
Visual Art List
Read More
The Negev is an up-and-coming region for Israel travel. Israel Ministry of Tourism
TRAVEL
Tourism Notes, From North To South
Hilary Danailova
Travel WriterIt may be one of the world’s oldest civilizations, but there’s always something new in Israel.
Every season brings just-unearthed archaeological finds and novel museums, burgeoning neighborhoods and buzzy new boîtes. In the heart of Jerusalem, a glittering pyramid is rising; Daniel Libeskind’s 26-story stone-and-glass tower, to be completed by 2019, will offer rooftop dining, an observatory, a public plaza and upscale shopping at the city’s second-tallest edifice.
All over Israel, visitors will find technologically sophisticated, more accessible ways to experience Israel’s sights, both ancient and modern — as well as expanded options for flights, lodgings and entertainment.
To help you plan your next trip, the Israel Ministry of Tourism recently launched a brand-new website (Israel.travel) specifically aimed at the Jewish traveler. American Jews represent nearly half of all visitors to Israel, according to the ministry’s latest statistics, so this kind of investment makes sense.
I recently perused the site and found it to be a visually engaging, fun-to-read improvement over past web portals. To be sure, some sections of the site are still under construction — the monthly events calendar was incomplete as of last week — but among the highlights are destination-specific capsules, including a section devoted to tourism in the up-and-coming Negev Desert region.
There’s also a helpful area dedicated to helping American Jews plan “destination” b’nai mitzvah trips to Israel — a longtime tradition that is growing in popularity. And the new FAQs offer concise, candid answers to common concerns (such as whether Israel stamps visitors’ passports, complicating travel to nearby Muslim an Arab countries; the answer is no).
Getting to Israel is also easier than ever, thanks to expanded flight alternatives. El Al recently added Boston-Logan Airport to its growing list of North American departure points, with three direct flights per week, and American Airlines became the latest U.S. airline to offer Israel flights as a result of its merger with U.S. Airways.
Newly added routes from Ryanair, the Ireland-based discount carrier, allow travelers to connect cheaply from Eastern Europe. Now you can tack on a jaunt to Tel Aviv from a heritage tour in Krakow or Budapest — among the newest connections.
Once you land — or even before you go — plan your cultural itinerary with the Museums in Israel National Portal. It’s a handy new app that allows users to explore the country’s astounding 1.5 million items, treasures from virtually anywhere and any angle.
In person, there’s a lot that’s new at Israel’s museums — including the nation’s first institution to showcase modern and contemporary Arab art, the Arab Museum of Contemporary Art and Heritage; it was unveiled just this summer. Conceived by two Israeli artists and situated in Sakhnin, a predominantly Muslim city in the Galilee, the museum opened with an exhibit whose name translates to “dialogue” — a note of hope in a time of tension.
Tension aside, 2015 also marks the first half-century of the Israel Museum, the nation’s premier cultural institution. After an expansion five years ago that doubled its exhibition space, the Museum is showing off its astounding collection in novel and inspired ways — most notably with a series of 50th birthday shows whose centerpiece is “A Brief History of Humankind,” on display through the end of the year. Inspired by Yuval Noah Harari’s eponymous bestseller, the exhibition explores hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution through objects from the museum’s vast collections, both ancient and modern.
Israel Museum visitors can also tour new galleries of Israeli art that opened in May, surveys of particularly noteworthy collections, and “Gold from the Sea,” a glittering display of precious-metal treasures from the coastal ruins at Caesarea.
Another landmark institution, the Israel Philharmonic, highlights the nation’s continued artistic vibrancy with a 2015-16 season featuring venerable and up-and-coming artists from around the globe. They include American Jewish musicians like the pianist Emanuel Ax and the conductor Michael Stern (son of Isaac), as well as the Russian-born pianists Igor Levit and Daniil Trifonov and conductor Kirill Petrenko — all rising international stars.
And if you haven’t seen the Philharmonic play at home in several years, you may not have had the opportunity to hear one of the newest arrivals on the classical circuit: Now in its sixth year, the Gary Bertini Israeli Choir allows the orchestra to stage increasingly ambitious choral works.
Serving a nation in need of distraction, live music of all kinds remains a highlight of many an Israel trip. One uniquely Israeli experience is a visit to the Elma, an arts complex and luxury hotel in the historic village of Zichron Ya’akov.
A short ride from Tel Aviv, the Elma hosts an eclectic lineup of Israeli and foreign performers at its 750-seat auditorium — and many audience members head upstairs after the last note, relaxing on a private balcony overlooking the Mediterranean, and savoring the best of what makes Israel special.
editor@jewishweek.orgRead More
Crowded subway in NYC. Via Wikimedia
Featured on NYBLUEPRINT
10 Subway Commandments
Maya Klausner
Editor ComedyAnd the Lord said “thou shalt not be a subway schmuck”
We all know how much we New Yorkers love and rely on our subterranean locomotive system. We also know that it can be one of the most stressful and metaphysically challenging experiences in this claustrophobia inducing concrete jungle.
So to help everyone out, here are 10 simple rules for everyone to follow to make your underground commute a little more bearable.
1. Thou shalt not read a book whilst going up or down the stairs (also … really?)
2. Thou shalt not text whilst walking (high treason during rush hour).
3. Thou shalt remove thy backpack.
4. Thou shalt not make overly amorous displays of affection (defy at your own risk, NYC is a bitter, bitter place.)
5. Thou shalt not eat spaghetti and meatballs.
6. Thou shalt not play music without headphones (no one wants to hear Daddy Yankee’s “Gasolina” on repeat … in any setting.)
7. Thou shalt not scream about nothing.
8. Thou shalt not bring thy bike (you made your choice.)
9. Thou shalt not sit directly next to someone in an otherwise empty car (because it’s one of the creepiest possible things you can do.)
10. Thou shalt not kill.
Read More
Watch 6-time European Champs Maccabi Tel Aviv battle long-time rival Armani Milan in the first-ever Euroleague Basketball game on Oct. 4 at Madison Square Garden!
Click here for tickets.
TOP STORIES:Israel News
French Jews Still Testing Israeli Waters
Will summer spike in French tourists translate into a wave of immigrants?
Joshua Mitnick
Contributing Editor
A Tel Aviv real estate brokerage firm with signs in French. Joshua Mitnick/JW
Tel Aviv — It’s the first night of the Israeli workweek, but as midnight approaches, the cafés near Tel Aviv’s beach are overflowing with patrons. A couple of steps closer to the water reveals an explanation: the city’s recently renovated beach promenade is awash with hundreds of teens and 20somethings carrying on in French.
Though Israeli hoteliers reported a 25 percent dip in bookings during the first half of 2015, likely the lingering fallout from last summer’s war in Gaza, everyone here seems to agree that the number of French tourists in Israel surged during the summer — possibly signaling a continuation of the rise in emigration from the country that is home to Europe’s largest Jewish community.
“All of my friends came this year. They all come to the beach promenade,” said Yonatan Marciano, a 25-year-old French immigrant to Israel.
More than a half year after an attack on a Paris kosher supermarket that left four Jews dead, French immigrants and tourists in Israel say interest in Israel remains robust. One local real estate broker who caters to French Jews said business has surged.
Meanwhile, the Jewish Agency says that 4,772 French immigrants arrived in Israel during the first seven months of the year. That represents an 11 percent increase from the same period one year ago, but it would mark a slowdown of the year-to-year growth in immigration from France.
Just steps away from the Mediterranean Sea, the Comacon real estate brokerage and its neighborhood competitors post property advertisements in French to appeal to the growing numbers of visitors.
“We have had a lot of work in the last half year. A lot of people who were thinking about coming here made their decision,” said Eric Guedj, the owner of Comacon, who estimates that his business has doubled from last year. “The situation in France is difficult, and because of that people are making a decision to buy or rent.”
Guedj said he already has an office in the southern city of Ashdod and is planning to open a branch in Netanya; both cities are known to attract French Jews because, like Tel Aviv, they are close to the sea. He said some French real estate investors who are anticipating a move are quietly selling stakes in France while building up the same property portfolio in Israel.
Guedj moved to Israel 10 years ago from the French Mediterranean city of Nice. He said many people are drawn to Israel or the U.S. because they believe they’ll be safer there when out in public. The proliferation of anti-Semitic attacks in France in recent years have made French Jews more anxious. “Here, in Israel, you know you can go out with children without having problems, and you’ll come back safely. In France, you couldn’t,” he said.
Most of Guedj’s clients are looking for rentals, preferring to test the waters of life in Israel before making the commitment to buy. “They want to see if it’s possible to live here, because mentality is different,” he said. “Either they will end up in Israel or Miami.”
Not far away from the real estate brokerages lies a strip of kosher restaurants — from sushi to pasta to burgers — that attract large numbers of French immigrants and tourists who linger there through the evening until after midnight.
“Everyone talks about moving to Israel,” said Sarah Davidovici, a university student, as she shared french fries with a group of high school friends from Paris. “Most of my friends think there is no future in France, and here there’s more security — and here we can practice our religion the way we want.”
But even though Davidovici is at the ideal age to relocate to Israel, like many other French Jewish youths, she and her friends say that they’re not certain that they can make the move. Some of her friends remarked that last summer’s war — in which rockets were fired from Gaza at Tel Aviv — gives them pause.
“I’m not certain that life here is easier than in France,” said Davidovici’s friend Anna Mouyal. “Sometimes we want to leave France, but not necessarily for Israel.”
When the world’s attention was focused on the terrorist attack on the Hyper Cacher market in Paris in January, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went to France with a message to Jews there that they should consider Israel as their future home. The Jewish Agency, meanwhile, made an oft-quoted prediction that it expected the pace of immigration to increase nearly 50 percent — from 7,100 in 2014 to about 10,000 by the end of this year. If aliyah continues at the same pace from earlier this year, the number of French immigrants will actually fall about 2,000 short of the prediction.
“They come to Israel for three weeks in August, and then they go back,” said Simon Hadad, a 33-year-old real estate agent and the son of French-speaking Jews, said of the many French tourists. “The anti-Semitism [back home] scares them, but it’s not their top priority. I always say that here it’s no less dangerous.”
Despite real estate broker Guedj’s claim that the Paris killings have triggered an upsurge in interest in relocating, other tourists and immigrants said they doubted that the murders alone were enough to boost immigration. For French Jews who have become accustomed to rising anti-Semitism in recent years, the attack did not prompt a dramatic reassessment of the situation, they argue.
“It’s not good to make aliyah because we are afraid of something in France. We need to make aliyah out of happiness,” said Raphael Bellaiche, a recent immigrant now serving in the Israeli army.
Others said that they were still too rooted in Paris. While young families and singles felt more free to move, middle-aged French Jews said they were not rushing to leave.
“I have a job, and I like Paris very much. I’m 60 years old. If I were to come here, what would I do?” said Guy Resnak. “If the situation is dangerous, I will leave, but so far, I’m not being touched by it.”
editor@jewishweek.orgAs Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu continues his apparently doomed campaign to convince American Jews to help block the Iran nuclear agreement, Yair Lapid, the founder and chair of the Yesh Atid party in Israel, has a different message for us. Staff Writer Stew Ain reports.
Read More New York
Leading Rabbi Deals Big Blow To Agunah Court
YU’s Schachter dismisses beit din solution as battle continues in Centrist/Modern Orthodox community.
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
After major Orthodox rabbi deals blow to agunah court, women's futures lie in the balance. Fotolia
In its first year, the New York-based International Beit Din (IBD), headed by Rabbi Simcha Krauss, a widely respected rabbi here and in Israel, has resolved nearly 20 cases of agunot, a chained women, freeing them from their loveless marriages.
In doing so, it has incurred the condemnation of some leading rabbinic authorities, most notably, and recently, Rabbi Hershel Schachter, a leading rosh yeshiva at Yeshiva University’s rabbinical school, who last month penned a public letter of protest dismissing the court’s collective rulings and pronouncing Rabbi Krauss unfit to make complex decisions regarding agunot.
(The issue has vexed rabbinic leaders for generations because according to halacha, or Jewish law, the recalcitrant husband must free his wife willingly.)
“From start to finish, this is a mistake,” Rabbi Schachter wrote in a three-paragraph letter, posted on an anonymously sponsored Torah website. The letter, written in Hebrew, says that only “great scholars of the generation” should be dealing with these sensitive matters. Rabbi Gedalia Dov Schwartz, head of the Beit Din of America, (the largest rabbinical court), and three other prominent rabbis also signed the letter.
As a result, various elements of the centrist and Modern Orthodox community are caught up in this controversy, which threatens to further divide the movement. And as the IBD struggles for acceptance, the women who have already been freed may face a new kind of limbo, worried if a subsequent marriage will be accepted in the community.
The new beit din has employed a traditional halachic approach, though sometimes using modern technology as well. In five recent cases, for example, the court reviewed videos of the couples' wedding and found one or both witnesses invalid, thereby annulling the marriage.
The ongoing controversy is engulfing Centrist Orthodoxy’s flagship institution, Yeshiva University, with which most of the rabbis involved are affiliated. And it mirrors a fight taking place in Israel today that pits a new, more liberal-minded conversion court — including Lincoln Square Synagogue founding rabbi and YU-ordained Shlomo Riskin and Rabbi David Stav — that is challenging the power of Israel’s charedi-dominated Chief Rabbinate on these issues.
Rabbi Menachem Penner, dean of YU’s rabbinic school, offered a statement on Tuesday, noting that the institution has “played a leading role in the effort to resolve the plight of agunot in a manner that is fully compliant with halacha,” citing its involvement in creating ORA (Organization for the Resolution of Agunot).
He noted that “our Roshei Yeshiva represent a variety of viewpoints, many of them, as well as most poskim [authorities] across the Orthodox spectrum, have expressed serious concern over the status of the beit din while noting the good will and motivation of its proponents.” The statement expressed empathy for agunot, but said efforts to release women from a marriage “must be balanced with the severity, halachic status and social consequences of such matters.”
Rabbi Shmuel Goldin, a pulpit rabbi in Englewood, N.J., and former president of the Rabbinical Council of America, the largest body of Orthodox rabbis, spoke of those social consequences.
“The court is not doing a favor for these women if it issues a solution that won’t be acceptable to a large population of Orthodox rabbis,” he said. He compared the court’s actions to efforts made in the 1990s by the late Rabbi Emanuel Rackman, a major figure in Modern Orthodoxy and president of Bar-Ilan University, who convened a beit din that issued divorces on the basis of kiddushei ta’ot, a Talmudic concept for annulment. His rulings were never widely accepted in the Orthodox world and many rabbis refused to officiate at the subsequent weddings of women who had been freed by the rabbi’s bet din.
“This isn’t a democracy, it’s a halachic process,” said Rabbi Goldin. “The power to make decisions has always been in the hands of the few who spend their lives steeped in its wells.”
The Issue’s True Face
For women like “Sarah Jacobs,” who asked that we not use her real name because she doesn’t want her husband to see her quoted in a newspaper, a mother of three in her mid-30s, the outcome of the IBD debate will determine her future. Jacobs grew up in a “yeshivish” Orthodox enclave in Brooklyn. At age 20, she met and married a 21-year-old Talmud scholar studying at a nearby yeshiva. They were engaged after seven weeks, 10 dates. Twelve years, three children and one diagnosis of mental illness later, she left him.
“I stayed until I couldn’t stand it any more,” Jacobs said in an interview with The Jewish Week. She didn’t want to specify her husband’s diagnosis but described it as severe and incurable. Though “things were not right from day one,” divorce, still carrying an indelible taboo in the Orthodox world, was her last resort. Over the course of the marriage, she and her children incurred repeated emotional and physical abuse, she said. He lobbed insults and threats at them, and sometimes even heavy pieces of furniture. Those he would shove onto Jacobs or her children after having pushed them to the ground, she said.
When Jacobs finally found the strength to leave in November 2011, her journey towards attaining a get, or religious divorce, began. Over five years, she visited five different religious courts in three states and two countries. During this time, she was subjected to financial extortion, disrespect, and the perpetual, fruitless waiting, she said.
Determined to remain in the Orthodox community, she learned of Rabbi Krauss’ beit din through an article in The Jewish Week. She met with him in March 2015. After nine hours of testimony and a six-page document explaining their decision, the three-member IBD ruled to annul her marriage on the Talmudic principle that the woman never would have married her husband if she had known he would act in an abusive fashion during the marriage.
“He dotted every ‘i’ and crossed every ‘t,’” she said of Rabbi Krauss. “He was so genuine, so compassionate. He is my only lifeline.”
Taking Sides
Rabbi Krauss, a longtime pulpit rabbi in Queens and the former president of Religious Zionistists of America, made aliyah several years ago but returned to New York for two years to launch the IBD. He declined to speak on the record, for the most part, but several prominent rabbis, including Rabbi Haskel Lookstein of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun on the Upper East Side, Rabbi Yosef Adler of Congregation Rinat Yisrael in Teaneck, N.J., and Rabbi David Bigman, a prominent Rosh Yeshiva in Israel, have voiced support for his efforts. A petition is now circulating in support of Rabbi Krauss and has been signed by 100 rabbis, though the rabbi chose not to release the names at this time.
“I have tremendous respect for Rabbi Krauss as a first-rate Talmud chacham [scholar] and somebody upon whom I can rely to make good decisions grounded in authentic and reliable halachic sources,” Rabbi Lookstein told The Jewish Week. In the case of an agunah, “every leniency that the halacha allows should be used,” he said. He also said that Rabbi Krauss’ approach is “entirely different” than the approach used by Rabbi Rackman, though he declined to elaborate.
Rabbi Adler similarly vouched for Rabbi Krauss’ credibility, pronouncing him a “first-class scholar.”
Many others have voiced support for Rabbi Krauss, but only off the record. One prominent New York rabbi who supports Rabbi Krauss but requested to remain anonymous described the situation as a social action problem. “It’s a game of numbers — everyone is waiting for the next guy to jump,” he said. “It’s a zero-sum game — everyone’s in, or nobody’s in.”
A prominent centrist Orthodox rabbi, also speaking off the record, said he was “surprised” Rabbi Schachter didn’t offer a fuller exposition of his reasoning for condemning the IBD in the heated aftermath of his letter. “He’s used to just invoking his own rabbinic authority, and of that being enough, but that doesn’t work anymore,” he said. More than anything else, this controversy foretells the emergence of a new movement, he said. “We’re heading for a split [within Orthodoxy] — at this point, it seems inevitable.”
Rabbi Schachter has not responded to requests for an interview.
Rabbi Avi Weiss, founder of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, a Modern Orthodox yeshiva that provides a more liberal alternative to Yeshiva University, wrote a letter to Rabbi Schachter, strongly criticizing his personal attack against Rabbi Krauss, The Jewish Week has learned. It defended Rabbi Schachter’s right to argue on the merits of his position, but said “no human being, let alone no rabbi, should be dismissed in such humiliating terms.” Rabbi Weiss called on Rabbi Schachter to publicly apologize in the spirit of the upcoming High Holy Days.
Several other rabbis who were interviewed referred, off the record, to Rabbi Schachter’s actions as “bullying.” But Rabbi Heshie Billet, senior rabbi at the Young Israel of Woodmere, offered a more pragmatic reason for not endorsing the IBD. He described Rabbi Krauss’ actions as “noble,” but said local rabbis can’t afford to undermine their loyalties to the Beit Din of America, the most prominent, mainstream religious court, which is headed by Rabbi Gedalia Dov Schwartz, a co-signer of the Rabbi Schachter letter.
“Since I live in New York, that’s my beit din, and I need their stamp of approval,” Rabbi Billet said. “It’s that simple.”
YU’s Internal Battle
The battle for the “soul of Orthodoxy” as one prominent rabbi termed it, is evident within Yeshiva University’s ranks. Two YU faculty members were pressured to disassociate from Rabbi Krauss’ beit din, despite strong personal convictions to support his mission.
Rabbi Yosef Blau, the spiritual adviser at Yeshiva University for nearly five decades and well-known for his advocacy confronting sexual abuse within the Orthodox community, has been a judge on the IBD since its founding. Every decision made by the court included Rabbi Blau, a well-known voice of authority within the community. Rabbi Yehuda Warburg, a dayan, or, religious judge, for the past 15 years, is the third judge on the court.
A few weeks ago Rabbi Blau was pressured to leave the court by colleagues within YU who disagreed with the court’s actions. Though Rabbi Blau declined to comment directly, a letter he submitted to Rabbi Krauss with his resignation cited a desire to “prevent controversy within YU” as his reason for departure.
According to a letter by Rabbi Krauss defending the IBD against Rabbi Schachter’s attack, Rabbi Blau agreed to resign in exchange for an agreement that Rabbi Schachter would not publicly attack the court. But according to the letter, Rabbi Schachter backtracked on the agreement within a few weeks and cited Rabbi’s Blau’s departure as evidence of the court’s questionable status.
Rabbi Moshe Kahn, a faculty member at YU’s Stern College for Women who teaches in the Graduate Program for Advanced Talmudic Study for women agreed to serve as an IBD judge after Rabbi Blau stepped down. But within a week he was pressured to resign. Though Rabbi Kahn declined to comment, a source within the university said pressure was put on the rabbi to step down for fear that his affiliation with the court would negatively impact funding for the GPATS program. The source also said that there were concerns that the roshei yeshiva at YU, who opposed the IBD, would dissuade their students from dating women in the GPATS program.
To Marry Or Not To Marry
How will this halachic battle play out for women who, after being freed by the IBD, seek to remarry?
Though Jacobs has slowly started to date again, she said she worries about her future status.
“I finally feel like I can breathe. After 15 years of being suffocated, I feel like myself. I feel like a person, not just a victim,” she said. Still, some men have stopped going out with her on learning that she was freed by the IBD.
“People have no problem breaking every other halacha, but when it comes to a get, they need the most stringent of stringencies,” she said. “It starts with the rabbis, this corrupt double-standard, and then everyone else just accepts blindly. In a minute, they can ruin everything I’ve worked towards over the past five years.”
In the last two weeks, since this controversy erupted, two women seeking the aid of the IBD have backed away. Still, Rabbi Krauss is committed to continue. After Rabbi Kahn’s resignation last week, another rabbi has been selected as a judge, though Rabbi Krauss declined to share the name until the appointment is official.
Rabbi Krauss, who is in his late 70s, walks with difficulty. Climbing a short flight of stairs, he paused on every step, making light conversation to distract from his belabored movements.
“You can hurt me, you can insult me,” he said of his critics. “But at the end of the day, this is not about me. This is a war. We’re fighting for these women. And if we win, the whole community wins. And if we lose,” he paused, a question hanging in his voice, “more is lost than we can ever know.”
Hannah@jewishweek.orgOur Josh Mitnick reports from Israel on the surge in French tourists this summer, possibly signaling an increase in aliyah from France.
Read More Israel News
Lapid Wades Into Dual-Loyalty Debate
Centrist Israeli leader says U.S. Jews should exercise ‘conscience’ on Iran deal.
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
Lapid: “We don’t want you to choose.” Getty Images
At a time when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is calling on American Jews to convince Congress to reject the Iran nuclear agreement, a prominent Israeli leader is telling them that it is OK to disagree.
“We don’t want you to choose between being American and being Jewish,” Yair Lapid, the founder and chair of Israel’s opposition centrist Yesh Atid party, told more than 500 participants of a webinar Monday organized by the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. “There shouldn’t be two conflicting possibilities. You should be living together peacefully, and Israel has a responsibility to make sure you are not put in this position.”
Lapid candidly told his American Jewish audience: “All Israelis are full of appreciation and are thankful that you are out there for us. But you have a conscience and have to make your own choice. It is not like Israel expects you to align with us automatically. We are telling you what we think — that this is a bad deal. If you agree with us, tell your congressman. But we don’t want to put you to a test. … What we need now is further quiet discussion.”
Lapid, a member of the Knesset, said the hateful attacks by Jews against Jews who disagree with them about the Iran nuclear deal has “tortured” American Jewry recently. That bitterness reached a fever pitch last week in the wake of Rep. Jerrold Nadler’s vote in favor of the deal; much of the criticism came from the Orthodox community, which has been strongly against the nuclear deal, which, they argue, won’t prevent Iran from getting a nuclear bomb.
The rhetoric and ads on both sides of the issue have become personal, sometimes crossing the line of civil discourse. The Jewish Week this week rejected an ad blasting Nadler that editors found “incendiary” in its wording and imagery.
Rabbi Leonard Matanky, president of the Orthodox movement’s Rabbinical Council of America, said he “received a very nasty tweet” after he tweeted that he was “proud to support the rabbinic position opposed to the Iran deal.”
“He called me a traitor … and suggested that Israel is a greater threat than Iran,” he said of the tweet.
“We need to maintain a civil discourse, but we have every right to advocate,” Rabbi Matanky said. “Both sides perceive this as a life or death issue. … Unfortunately political discourse in the U.S. has become extreme. This is what we see in many political issues that in the long run are less threatening than Iran. Look at the language used now in the presidential campaign. The Jewish community is a small part of the broader community, and what we are seeing in the Jewish community are the emotions and fears and language of current American politics.”
The president of the National Council of Young Israel, Farley Weiss, said the “vitriol on this started with the attacks on Sen. [Chuck] Schumer” after the New York Jewish Democrat announced his opposition to the nuclear agreement.
“There were attacks by both the administration and other left-wingers against him,” he said. “They questioned his patriotism and suggested that he cares more about Israeli concerns than American concerns. That to me is where I thought the first outrageous comments came. It was done to intimidate [other] Jewish lawmakers not to oppose the deal. And I think that led to the vitriol in the campaign and the response. I’m not justifying it, but that was the lightning rod that started everything.”
Weiss noted that the “vast majority of Jewish organizations oppose the deal for good reason, and I think two-thirds of Americans oppose it. … The only reason why so many lawmakers came out in favor of the deal is that the Obama administration said that if there is no deal, the only outcome would be war.”
Weiss added that he does not “know of anyone who supports it who would say it is a good deal — they say it is better than the alternative.”
Nathan Diament, executive director of the Orthodox Union’s Advocacy Center, said he recognizes that there are “deep and passionate convictions in the community over whether the deal should be supported or opposed.” But he said that kind of disagreement is different from the “extreme rhetoric” being heard, which he denounced.
The OU is planning a rally for “hundreds of rabbis” in Washington, D.C., next week, and a group trying to tamp down the rhetoric is planning a day of prayer next week. The Orthodox group Acheinu is calling on Jews from across the religious spectrum to recite Chapters 20 and 130 of Psalms anytime between 7 a.m. and noon on Tuesday. It is calling the event a Day of Jewish Unity, and a video it produced about the endeavor has been viewed more than 38,000 times.
But the group said the video has also elicited anti-Semitic and virulent comments, such as “Death to Israel.”
A spokesman for the group, Aaron Troodler, pointed out that the “days leading to the High Holy Days are certainly an appropriate time for reflection, repentance and prayer. The days leading up to perhaps the most consequential congressional vote in our lifetime is a compulsory time for unity and prayer.
“The fact that the schedule is such that the vote will fall around the High Holy Days is something we need to take heed of and do what is appropriate during this holy time on the Jewish calendar. At a time like this, when the Jewish people are facing an existential threat, we need to find ways to come together and unite as a nation rather than wasting our energy fighting among ourselves.”
He noted that Tuesday was selected for this event because it is the 82nd anniversary of the death of the Chofetz Chaim, who in pre-war Europe was renowned for preaching civility. Troodler said a delegation plans to travel to Belarus to pray at his grave.
Troodler added that in light of the “vitriolic diatribes that have ensued as a result of the upcoming congressional vote on the Iran deal, it is critical that we highlight the need to inject more civility into our public discourse.”
In his comments in the JCPA webinar, Lapid defended Nadler for his decision to support the nuclear agreement, criticizing those who posted hateful messages on Nadler’s Facebook page, such as one that said: “You failed the American People, you Failed as a Jew and you failed Israel!!”
“Jerry Nadler is very pro-Israel,” Lapid said. “He opposed the Iraq war not because he is anti-war but because he said if Iraq falls it would increase the influence of Iran in the Middle East. To say Jerry Nadler does not understand the risks Iran poses is not true.”
He was also critical of those who use Holocaust imagery to oppose the deal, saying his father was a Holocaust survivor who “disliked comparisons to the Holocaust.”
“This is not the Holocaust because the IDF is the strongest army in the Middle East,” he said. “We have very good intelligence and we have American friends. We will act before a Holocaust will come, so we should not speak of Holocaust visions.”
stewart@jewishweek.org
Read More New York
Outreach In Suffolk — With A Wow!
Amid county’s Jewish woes, new efforts to reach the unaffiliated and intermarried.
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
Rachel Katz and her daughter at a JWOW event. Courtesy of JWOW
JWOW is looking to, well, wow the unattached Jews of Suffolk County.
No, not that JWoww, Snooki’s bosomy running mate on “The Jersey Shore.”
This JWOW, the splashily named volunteer grassroots group Jewish Without Walls, is at the leading edge of an outreach effort — both local and national — that is hoping to rejuvenate Jewish life in Suffolk.
The county has seen its share of woes Jewishly. Synagogue affiliation in the area continues to fall, and the intermarriage rate is the highest in the New York City area. Earlier this summer, the Conservative Commack Jewish Center, which once had a membership of 250, merged with the nearby Dix Hills Jewish Center. In a bid to stay alive, Smithtown’s Temple Beth Shalom sold its building two years ago to a church that allows it to continue using the building rent-free.
And the county’s only kosher butcher closed a year ago, citing declining sales, as did one of the two kosher Bagel Boss stores. All of which makes Suffolk a kind of experimental ground zero for outreach.
Into the breach has stepped JWOW, founded in 2011 by Beth Finger of Nesconset, L.I. In a few short years, it has increasingly become a major player in Suffolk, bringing together as many as 600 Jewish families, of whom nearly half do not belong to a synagogue and about 30 percent are interfaith families.
Rachel Katz and her family have taken notice. A few months after moving to the Island three years ago, Katz and her 3-year-old daughter Naomi were walking through the Smith Haven Mall in Lake Grove when they spotted some balloons and a Jewish star.
“I said, ‘We’re going this way, Naomi,’” she recalled. “I was excited to see a gathering of Jewish people. I didn’t expect it and everyone was so very happy and festive.”
It was a JWOW Chanukah event, one of the many the organization has planned in the past few years.
JWOW, along with the Suffolk Y JCC in Commack, the Eastern Long Island Jewish Alliance (ELIJA) and UJA-Federation of New York, are four organizations seeking to engage the 39 percent of Suffolk’s nearly 86,000 Jews who are intermarried and the 65 percent who are unaffiliated with a synagogue.
Elija, founded last year, recently launched a web page, elijali.org., to post all Jewish activities in Suffolk, according to its co-chairman, Rabbi Steven Moss.
Its mission, which is similar to that of the Alliance, is to promote Jewish events in the county, whose Jewish population dipped by 4,000 between 2002 and 2011, according to UJA-Federation’s Jewish Communal Study of 2011.
And soon, a national outreach organization, Big Tent Judaism (formerly the Jewish Outreach Institute) will move into Suffolk after a successful run in northern Westchester.
Finger said the efforts of JWOW are more cultural than religious, an approach that seems to be in step with broader patterns of Jewish life revealed in the much-publicized 2013 Pew Research Center study.
“I don’t think prayer is the way most Jews connect to their Judaism,” Finger observed.
“The same methods we use to welcome interfaith families we use to welcome Jewish families, because they [also] often have little [Jewish] knowledge,” Finger said. “So we don’t use Hebrew in the title of any of our programs. And on Lag b’Omer when we had a fun family field day, we didn’t say it was for Lag b’Omer, because many people would not know how to pronounce it. So we simply said come for a family field day and picnic — and in little letters we wrote, ‘To celebrate Lag b’Omer.’”
At the event, Finger said, she spoke briefly about the holiday and noted that all of the arts and crafts activities were in keeping with the Lag b’Omer theme of bonfires and bows and arrows. About 20 families attended this year.
In advance of the High Holy Days this year, Finger said JWOW would be holding a Shababeque — a kosher barbecue — on Sept. 11 at a private home in Setauket. The event — which features backyard children’s games — attracted 60 young families last year, and Finger said that this year Cantor Judy Merrick would be on hand to lead participants in a sing-along of Shabbat and holiday songs.
She said she would also be posting on the group’s website (jewishwithoutwalls.org) a list of synagogues in Suffolk that offer free High Holiday services and/or programs, such as tot services and yizkor services.
The largest JWOW turnout is the one for its annual Chanukah event at the Smith Haven Mall; last year’s event attracted 500 people.
When it comes to Shabbat dinners, Finger said her invitations are for “a Friday night dinner — and we don’t write Shabbos, but rather Shabbat. Shabbos is too insider, and it has an Orthodox connotation. Plenty of Jews have that feeling — they don’t feel that Judaism is theirs; they feel on the outside.
“Part of that is that they are Jewishly illiterate. Even if they went to Hebrew school, it ended when they were 13 and they don’t feel a connection. ... And when they go to synagogue, they feel like a fish out of water. ... I don’t think prayer is the way most Jews connect to their Judaism.”
Katz said she and her husband, who is not Jewish, are raising their two children as Jews and have joined an area Reform synagogue, Temple Isaiah in Stony Brook.
“It’s nice to meet people in synagogue, but JWOW is more laid back,” said Katz, 41, who grew up in a Conservative synagogue and went to Hebrew school and a Jewish camp. “Both are nice opportunities to meet with Jewish people. JWOW has programs running continuously for younger children, and it is setting up playgroups for children who are not yet in school. Some events are in people’s homes; it’s a nice alternative to synagogue life.”
Sarah Pew, her husband and two children moved to Stony Brook three years ago from Lafayette, Ind. They both grew up in Texas. Sarah, 34, attended a Conservative Jewish day school.
She said she learned about JWOW from the website meetup.com, but that the timing of its events did not work for her son. So she said JWOW let her create her own tots program for children 5 and under.
“JWOW Tots has grown and there is now J Babies for 0- to 2-year-olds, and a weekly playgroup at someone’s house in Setauket,” she said. “My husband and I don’t belong to any synagogue but go to events at all of them. What JWOW gave us was the Jewish community; a good number of our Jewish friends we made through JWOW.”
She added, “I did Rosh HaShanah and Purim and a model seder with 10 to 15 families ... . My kids are not old enough to make it through a real seder, so this seder was maybe 15 minutes long; there was lots of singing and the kids got to play. ... JWOW offers a place to learn the cultural and spiritual side of Judaism without feeling overwhelmed.”
Finger said she learned many of her outreach ideas from Big Tent Judaism. Rabbi Kerry Olitsky, that group’s executive director, said JWOW is now “aligned with our work” and that he is working with “other institutions that are not there yet.”
Rabbi Olitsky said his group’s name change, from Jewish Outreach Institute, was made to “reflect our operating ideology.”
Initially founded in 1987 as a research institute to study the then new phenomenon of interfaith marriage, Big Tent Judaism now concentrates on engaging interfaith families.
“Our work has evolved considerably to include direct program services, professional and lay leadership training, and advocacy for an inclusive Jewish community.” The organization has professional affiliates in several parts of the country trained by the organization in best practices for outreach and retention.
Big Tent Judaism was hired last year to help support UJA-Federation of New York’s “broader goal of creating and promoting an inclusive Jewish community,” according to Rebecca Katz-White, a planning executive in UJA-Federation’s Commission on the Jewish People.
Two years ago those efforts began to focus on teaching a group of lay leaders and professionals in 25 Jewish institutions in northern Westchester ways to engage newcomers.
“We concentrated on community building and helping the institutions work internally,” she said. “We are looking for long-term institutional and community cultural change.”
Katz-White said both northern Westchester and Suffolk County — whose program begins next year — were chosen for this effort because of the high number of interfaith families. In Westchester, 28 percent of Jews are intermarried; in Suffolk, the rate is 39 percent, according to UJA-Federation’s Jewish Community Study of 2011.
She said UJA-Federation’s contract with Big Tent Judaism last year was for $70,000. This year, the organization will be paid $50,000 to train 15 to 20 Jewish communal professionals how to develop new programs that reach out to interfaith households and less-engaged Jews.
Finger said her group’s activities are concentrated in northwestern and central Suffolk, home to most of the county’s Jews. With a grant from UJA-Federation, a recent survey of JWOW members found that 58 percent live in the Smithtown-Port Jefferson-Stony Brook area.
The survey’s authors noted that one-third of JWOW members who responded to the survey consider themselves Conservative Jews, while 28 percent said Reform and another 22 percent said “Just Jewish.”
JWOW extended its reach into Queens in mid-August with what Finger described as a “successful” Shabbat-in-the-Park pilot program in Forest Hills featuring a Shabbat storyteller, crafts, grape juice and challah.
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TOP STORIES:Israel News
French Jews Still Testing Israeli Waters
Will summer spike in French tourists translate into a wave of immigrants?
Joshua Mitnick
Contributing Editor
A Tel Aviv real estate brokerage firm with signs in French. Joshua Mitnick/JW
Tel Aviv — It’s the first night of the Israeli workweek, but as midnight approaches, the cafés near Tel Aviv’s beach are overflowing with patrons. A couple of steps closer to the water reveals an explanation: the city’s recently renovated beach promenade is awash with hundreds of teens and 20somethings carrying on in French.
Though Israeli hoteliers reported a 25 percent dip in bookings during the first half of 2015, likely the lingering fallout from last summer’s war in Gaza, everyone here seems to agree that the number of French tourists in Israel surged during the summer — possibly signaling a continuation of the rise in emigration from the country that is home to Europe’s largest Jewish community.
“All of my friends came this year. They all come to the beach promenade,” said Yonatan Marciano, a 25-year-old French immigrant to Israel.
More than a half year after an attack on a Paris kosher supermarket that left four Jews dead, French immigrants and tourists in Israel say interest in Israel remains robust. One local real estate broker who caters to French Jews said business has surged.
Meanwhile, the Jewish Agency says that 4,772 French immigrants arrived in Israel during the first seven months of the year. That represents an 11 percent increase from the same period one year ago, but it would mark a slowdown of the year-to-year growth in immigration from France.
Just steps away from the Mediterranean Sea, the Comacon real estate brokerage and its neighborhood competitors post property advertisements in French to appeal to the growing numbers of visitors.
“We have had a lot of work in the last half year. A lot of people who were thinking about coming here made their decision,” said Eric Guedj, the owner of Comacon, who estimates that his business has doubled from last year. “The situation in France is difficult, and because of that people are making a decision to buy or rent.”
Guedj said he already has an office in the southern city of Ashdod and is planning to open a branch in Netanya; both cities are known to attract French Jews because, like Tel Aviv, they are close to the sea. He said some French real estate investors who are anticipating a move are quietly selling stakes in France while building up the same property portfolio in Israel.
Guedj moved to Israel 10 years ago from the French Mediterranean city of Nice. He said many people are drawn to Israel or the U.S. because they believe they’ll be safer there when out in public. The proliferation of anti-Semitic attacks in France in recent years have made French Jews more anxious. “Here, in Israel, you know you can go out with children without having problems, and you’ll come back safely. In France, you couldn’t,” he said.
Most of Guedj’s clients are looking for rentals, preferring to test the waters of life in Israel before making the commitment to buy. “They want to see if it’s possible to live here, because mentality is different,” he said. “Either they will end up in Israel or Miami.”
Not far away from the real estate brokerages lies a strip of kosher restaurants — from sushi to pasta to burgers — that attract large numbers of French immigrants and tourists who linger there through the evening until after midnight.
“Everyone talks about moving to Israel,” said Sarah Davidovici, a university student, as she shared french fries with a group of high school friends from Paris. “Most of my friends think there is no future in France, and here there’s more security — and here we can practice our religion the way we want.”
But even though Davidovici is at the ideal age to relocate to Israel, like many other French Jewish youths, she and her friends say that they’re not certain that they can make the move. Some of her friends remarked that last summer’s war — in which rockets were fired from Gaza at Tel Aviv — gives them pause.
“I’m not certain that life here is easier than in France,” said Davidovici’s friend Anna Mouyal. “Sometimes we want to leave France, but not necessarily for Israel.”
When the world’s attention was focused on the terrorist attack on the Hyper Cacher market in Paris in January, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went to France with a message to Jews there that they should consider Israel as their future home. The Jewish Agency, meanwhile, made an oft-quoted prediction that it expected the pace of immigration to increase nearly 50 percent — from 7,100 in 2014 to about 10,000 by the end of this year. If aliyah continues at the same pace from earlier this year, the number of French immigrants will actually fall about 2,000 short of the prediction.
“They come to Israel for three weeks in August, and then they go back,” said Simon Hadad, a 33-year-old real estate agent and the son of French-speaking Jews, said of the many French tourists. “The anti-Semitism [back home] scares them, but it’s not their top priority. I always say that here it’s no less dangerous.”
Despite real estate broker Guedj’s claim that the Paris killings have triggered an upsurge in interest in relocating, other tourists and immigrants said they doubted that the murders alone were enough to boost immigration. For French Jews who have become accustomed to rising anti-Semitism in recent years, the attack did not prompt a dramatic reassessment of the situation, they argue.
“It’s not good to make aliyah because we are afraid of something in France. We need to make aliyah out of happiness,” said Raphael Bellaiche, a recent immigrant now serving in the Israeli army.
Others said that they were still too rooted in Paris. While young families and singles felt more free to move, middle-aged French Jews said they were not rushing to leave.
“I have a job, and I like Paris very much. I’m 60 years old. If I were to come here, what would I do?” said Guy Resnak. “If the situation is dangerous, I will leave, but so far, I’m not being touched by it.”
editor@jewishweek.orgAs Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu continues his apparently doomed campaign to convince American Jews to help block the Iran nuclear agreement, Yair Lapid, the founder and chair of the Yesh Atid party in Israel, has a different message for us. Staff Writer Stew Ain reports.
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New YorkLeading Rabbi Deals Big Blow To Agunah Court
YU’s Schachter dismisses beit din solution as battle continues in Centrist/Modern Orthodox community.
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
After major Orthodox rabbi deals blow to agunah court, women's futures lie in the balance. Fotolia
In its first year, the New York-based International Beit Din (IBD), headed by Rabbi Simcha Krauss, a widely respected rabbi here and in Israel, has resolved nearly 20 cases of agunot, a chained women, freeing them from their loveless marriages.
In doing so, it has incurred the condemnation of some leading rabbinic authorities, most notably, and recently, Rabbi Hershel Schachter, a leading rosh yeshiva at Yeshiva University’s rabbinical school, who last month penned a public letter of protest dismissing the court’s collective rulings and pronouncing Rabbi Krauss unfit to make complex decisions regarding agunot.
(The issue has vexed rabbinic leaders for generations because according to halacha, or Jewish law, the recalcitrant husband must free his wife willingly.)
“From start to finish, this is a mistake,” Rabbi Schachter wrote in a three-paragraph letter, posted on an anonymously sponsored Torah website. The letter, written in Hebrew, says that only “great scholars of the generation” should be dealing with these sensitive matters. Rabbi Gedalia Dov Schwartz, head of the Beit Din of America, (the largest rabbinical court), and three other prominent rabbis also signed the letter.
As a result, various elements of the centrist and Modern Orthodox community are caught up in this controversy, which threatens to further divide the movement. And as the IBD struggles for acceptance, the women who have already been freed may face a new kind of limbo, worried if a subsequent marriage will be accepted in the community.
The new beit din has employed a traditional halachic approach, though sometimes using modern technology as well. In five recent cases, for example, the court reviewed videos of the couples' wedding and found one or both witnesses invalid, thereby annulling the marriage.
The ongoing controversy is engulfing Centrist Orthodoxy’s flagship institution, Yeshiva University, with which most of the rabbis involved are affiliated. And it mirrors a fight taking place in Israel today that pits a new, more liberal-minded conversion court — including Lincoln Square Synagogue founding rabbi and YU-ordained Shlomo Riskin and Rabbi David Stav — that is challenging the power of Israel’s charedi-dominated Chief Rabbinate on these issues.
Rabbi Menachem Penner, dean of YU’s rabbinic school, offered a statement on Tuesday, noting that the institution has “played a leading role in the effort to resolve the plight of agunot in a manner that is fully compliant with halacha,” citing its involvement in creating ORA (Organization for the Resolution of Agunot).
He noted that “our Roshei Yeshiva represent a variety of viewpoints, many of them, as well as most poskim [authorities] across the Orthodox spectrum, have expressed serious concern over the status of the beit din while noting the good will and motivation of its proponents.” The statement expressed empathy for agunot, but said efforts to release women from a marriage “must be balanced with the severity, halachic status and social consequences of such matters.”
Rabbi Shmuel Goldin, a pulpit rabbi in Englewood, N.J., and former president of the Rabbinical Council of America, the largest body of Orthodox rabbis, spoke of those social consequences.
“The court is not doing a favor for these women if it issues a solution that won’t be acceptable to a large population of Orthodox rabbis,” he said. He compared the court’s actions to efforts made in the 1990s by the late Rabbi Emanuel Rackman, a major figure in Modern Orthodoxy and president of Bar-Ilan University, who convened a beit din that issued divorces on the basis of kiddushei ta’ot, a Talmudic concept for annulment. His rulings were never widely accepted in the Orthodox world and many rabbis refused to officiate at the subsequent weddings of women who had been freed by the rabbi’s bet din.
“This isn’t a democracy, it’s a halachic process,” said Rabbi Goldin. “The power to make decisions has always been in the hands of the few who spend their lives steeped in its wells.”
The Issue’s True Face
For women like “Sarah Jacobs,” who asked that we not use her real name because she doesn’t want her husband to see her quoted in a newspaper, a mother of three in her mid-30s, the outcome of the IBD debate will determine her future. Jacobs grew up in a “yeshivish” Orthodox enclave in Brooklyn. At age 20, she met and married a 21-year-old Talmud scholar studying at a nearby yeshiva. They were engaged after seven weeks, 10 dates. Twelve years, three children and one diagnosis of mental illness later, she left him.
“I stayed until I couldn’t stand it any more,” Jacobs said in an interview with The Jewish Week. She didn’t want to specify her husband’s diagnosis but described it as severe and incurable. Though “things were not right from day one,” divorce, still carrying an indelible taboo in the Orthodox world, was her last resort. Over the course of the marriage, she and her children incurred repeated emotional and physical abuse, she said. He lobbed insults and threats at them, and sometimes even heavy pieces of furniture. Those he would shove onto Jacobs or her children after having pushed them to the ground, she said.
When Jacobs finally found the strength to leave in November 2011, her journey towards attaining a get, or religious divorce, began. Over five years, she visited five different religious courts in three states and two countries. During this time, she was subjected to financial extortion, disrespect, and the perpetual, fruitless waiting, she said.
Determined to remain in the Orthodox community, she learned of Rabbi Krauss’ beit din through an article in The Jewish Week. She met with him in March 2015. After nine hours of testimony and a six-page document explaining their decision, the three-member IBD ruled to annul her marriage on the Talmudic principle that the woman never would have married her husband if she had known he would act in an abusive fashion during the marriage.
“He dotted every ‘i’ and crossed every ‘t,’” she said of Rabbi Krauss. “He was so genuine, so compassionate. He is my only lifeline.”
Taking Sides
Rabbi Krauss, a longtime pulpit rabbi in Queens and the former president of Religious Zionistists of America, made aliyah several years ago but returned to New York for two years to launch the IBD. He declined to speak on the record, for the most part, but several prominent rabbis, including Rabbi Haskel Lookstein of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun on the Upper East Side, Rabbi Yosef Adler of Congregation Rinat Yisrael in Teaneck, N.J., and Rabbi David Bigman, a prominent Rosh Yeshiva in Israel, have voiced support for his efforts. A petition is now circulating in support of Rabbi Krauss and has been signed by 100 rabbis, though the rabbi chose not to release the names at this time.
“I have tremendous respect for Rabbi Krauss as a first-rate Talmud chacham [scholar] and somebody upon whom I can rely to make good decisions grounded in authentic and reliable halachic sources,” Rabbi Lookstein told The Jewish Week. In the case of an agunah, “every leniency that the halacha allows should be used,” he said. He also said that Rabbi Krauss’ approach is “entirely different” than the approach used by Rabbi Rackman, though he declined to elaborate.
Rabbi Adler similarly vouched for Rabbi Krauss’ credibility, pronouncing him a “first-class scholar.”
Many others have voiced support for Rabbi Krauss, but only off the record. One prominent New York rabbi who supports Rabbi Krauss but requested to remain anonymous described the situation as a social action problem. “It’s a game of numbers — everyone is waiting for the next guy to jump,” he said. “It’s a zero-sum game — everyone’s in, or nobody’s in.”
A prominent centrist Orthodox rabbi, also speaking off the record, said he was “surprised” Rabbi Schachter didn’t offer a fuller exposition of his reasoning for condemning the IBD in the heated aftermath of his letter. “He’s used to just invoking his own rabbinic authority, and of that being enough, but that doesn’t work anymore,” he said. More than anything else, this controversy foretells the emergence of a new movement, he said. “We’re heading for a split [within Orthodoxy] — at this point, it seems inevitable.”
Rabbi Schachter has not responded to requests for an interview.
Rabbi Avi Weiss, founder of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, a Modern Orthodox yeshiva that provides a more liberal alternative to Yeshiva University, wrote a letter to Rabbi Schachter, strongly criticizing his personal attack against Rabbi Krauss, The Jewish Week has learned. It defended Rabbi Schachter’s right to argue on the merits of his position, but said “no human being, let alone no rabbi, should be dismissed in such humiliating terms.” Rabbi Weiss called on Rabbi Schachter to publicly apologize in the spirit of the upcoming High Holy Days.
Several other rabbis who were interviewed referred, off the record, to Rabbi Schachter’s actions as “bullying.” But Rabbi Heshie Billet, senior rabbi at the Young Israel of Woodmere, offered a more pragmatic reason for not endorsing the IBD. He described Rabbi Krauss’ actions as “noble,” but said local rabbis can’t afford to undermine their loyalties to the Beit Din of America, the most prominent, mainstream religious court, which is headed by Rabbi Gedalia Dov Schwartz, a co-signer of the Rabbi Schachter letter.
“Since I live in New York, that’s my beit din, and I need their stamp of approval,” Rabbi Billet said. “It’s that simple.”
YU’s Internal Battle
The battle for the “soul of Orthodoxy” as one prominent rabbi termed it, is evident within Yeshiva University’s ranks. Two YU faculty members were pressured to disassociate from Rabbi Krauss’ beit din, despite strong personal convictions to support his mission.
Rabbi Yosef Blau, the spiritual adviser at Yeshiva University for nearly five decades and well-known for his advocacy confronting sexual abuse within the Orthodox community, has been a judge on the IBD since its founding. Every decision made by the court included Rabbi Blau, a well-known voice of authority within the community. Rabbi Yehuda Warburg, a dayan, or, religious judge, for the past 15 years, is the third judge on the court.
A few weeks ago Rabbi Blau was pressured to leave the court by colleagues within YU who disagreed with the court’s actions. Though Rabbi Blau declined to comment directly, a letter he submitted to Rabbi Krauss with his resignation cited a desire to “prevent controversy within YU” as his reason for departure.
According to a letter by Rabbi Krauss defending the IBD against Rabbi Schachter’s attack, Rabbi Blau agreed to resign in exchange for an agreement that Rabbi Schachter would not publicly attack the court. But according to the letter, Rabbi Schachter backtracked on the agreement within a few weeks and cited Rabbi’s Blau’s departure as evidence of the court’s questionable status.
Rabbi Moshe Kahn, a faculty member at YU’s Stern College for Women who teaches in the Graduate Program for Advanced Talmudic Study for women agreed to serve as an IBD judge after Rabbi Blau stepped down. But within a week he was pressured to resign. Though Rabbi Kahn declined to comment, a source within the university said pressure was put on the rabbi to step down for fear that his affiliation with the court would negatively impact funding for the GPATS program. The source also said that there were concerns that the roshei yeshiva at YU, who opposed the IBD, would dissuade their students from dating women in the GPATS program.
To Marry Or Not To Marry
How will this halachic battle play out for women who, after being freed by the IBD, seek to remarry?
Though Jacobs has slowly started to date again, she said she worries about her future status.
“I finally feel like I can breathe. After 15 years of being suffocated, I feel like myself. I feel like a person, not just a victim,” she said. Still, some men have stopped going out with her on learning that she was freed by the IBD.
“People have no problem breaking every other halacha, but when it comes to a get, they need the most stringent of stringencies,” she said. “It starts with the rabbis, this corrupt double-standard, and then everyone else just accepts blindly. In a minute, they can ruin everything I’ve worked towards over the past five years.”
In the last two weeks, since this controversy erupted, two women seeking the aid of the IBD have backed away. Still, Rabbi Krauss is committed to continue. After Rabbi Kahn’s resignation last week, another rabbi has been selected as a judge, though Rabbi Krauss declined to share the name until the appointment is official.
Rabbi Krauss, who is in his late 70s, walks with difficulty. Climbing a short flight of stairs, he paused on every step, making light conversation to distract from his belabored movements.
“You can hurt me, you can insult me,” he said of his critics. “But at the end of the day, this is not about me. This is a war. We’re fighting for these women. And if we win, the whole community wins. And if we lose,” he paused, a question hanging in his voice, “more is lost than we can ever know.”
Hannah@jewishweek.orgOur Josh Mitnick reports from Israel on the surge in French tourists this summer, possibly signaling an increase in aliyah from France.
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Israel NewsLapid Wades Into Dual-Loyalty Debate
Centrist Israeli leader says U.S. Jews should exercise ‘conscience’ on Iran deal.
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
Lapid: “We don’t want you to choose.” Getty Images
At a time when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is calling on American Jews to convince Congress to reject the Iran nuclear agreement, a prominent Israeli leader is telling them that it is OK to disagree.
“We don’t want you to choose between being American and being Jewish,” Yair Lapid, the founder and chair of Israel’s opposition centrist Yesh Atid party, told more than 500 participants of a webinar Monday organized by the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. “There shouldn’t be two conflicting possibilities. You should be living together peacefully, and Israel has a responsibility to make sure you are not put in this position.”
Lapid candidly told his American Jewish audience: “All Israelis are full of appreciation and are thankful that you are out there for us. But you have a conscience and have to make your own choice. It is not like Israel expects you to align with us automatically. We are telling you what we think — that this is a bad deal. If you agree with us, tell your congressman. But we don’t want to put you to a test. … What we need now is further quiet discussion.”
Lapid, a member of the Knesset, said the hateful attacks by Jews against Jews who disagree with them about the Iran nuclear deal has “tortured” American Jewry recently. That bitterness reached a fever pitch last week in the wake of Rep. Jerrold Nadler’s vote in favor of the deal; much of the criticism came from the Orthodox community, which has been strongly against the nuclear deal, which, they argue, won’t prevent Iran from getting a nuclear bomb.
The rhetoric and ads on both sides of the issue have become personal, sometimes crossing the line of civil discourse. The Jewish Week this week rejected an ad blasting Nadler that editors found “incendiary” in its wording and imagery.
Rabbi Leonard Matanky, president of the Orthodox movement’s Rabbinical Council of America, said he “received a very nasty tweet” after he tweeted that he was “proud to support the rabbinic position opposed to the Iran deal.”
“He called me a traitor … and suggested that Israel is a greater threat than Iran,” he said of the tweet.
“We need to maintain a civil discourse, but we have every right to advocate,” Rabbi Matanky said. “Both sides perceive this as a life or death issue. … Unfortunately political discourse in the U.S. has become extreme. This is what we see in many political issues that in the long run are less threatening than Iran. Look at the language used now in the presidential campaign. The Jewish community is a small part of the broader community, and what we are seeing in the Jewish community are the emotions and fears and language of current American politics.”
The president of the National Council of Young Israel, Farley Weiss, said the “vitriol on this started with the attacks on Sen. [Chuck] Schumer” after the New York Jewish Democrat announced his opposition to the nuclear agreement.
“There were attacks by both the administration and other left-wingers against him,” he said. “They questioned his patriotism and suggested that he cares more about Israeli concerns than American concerns. That to me is where I thought the first outrageous comments came. It was done to intimidate [other] Jewish lawmakers not to oppose the deal. And I think that led to the vitriol in the campaign and the response. I’m not justifying it, but that was the lightning rod that started everything.”
Weiss noted that the “vast majority of Jewish organizations oppose the deal for good reason, and I think two-thirds of Americans oppose it. … The only reason why so many lawmakers came out in favor of the deal is that the Obama administration said that if there is no deal, the only outcome would be war.”
Weiss added that he does not “know of anyone who supports it who would say it is a good deal — they say it is better than the alternative.”
Nathan Diament, executive director of the Orthodox Union’s Advocacy Center, said he recognizes that there are “deep and passionate convictions in the community over whether the deal should be supported or opposed.” But he said that kind of disagreement is different from the “extreme rhetoric” being heard, which he denounced.
The OU is planning a rally for “hundreds of rabbis” in Washington, D.C., next week, and a group trying to tamp down the rhetoric is planning a day of prayer next week. The Orthodox group Acheinu is calling on Jews from across the religious spectrum to recite Chapters 20 and 130 of Psalms anytime between 7 a.m. and noon on Tuesday. It is calling the event a Day of Jewish Unity, and a video it produced about the endeavor has been viewed more than 38,000 times.
But the group said the video has also elicited anti-Semitic and virulent comments, such as “Death to Israel.”
A spokesman for the group, Aaron Troodler, pointed out that the “days leading to the High Holy Days are certainly an appropriate time for reflection, repentance and prayer. The days leading up to perhaps the most consequential congressional vote in our lifetime is a compulsory time for unity and prayer.
“The fact that the schedule is such that the vote will fall around the High Holy Days is something we need to take heed of and do what is appropriate during this holy time on the Jewish calendar. At a time like this, when the Jewish people are facing an existential threat, we need to find ways to come together and unite as a nation rather than wasting our energy fighting among ourselves.”
He noted that Tuesday was selected for this event because it is the 82nd anniversary of the death of the Chofetz Chaim, who in pre-war Europe was renowned for preaching civility. Troodler said a delegation plans to travel to Belarus to pray at his grave.
Troodler added that in light of the “vitriolic diatribes that have ensued as a result of the upcoming congressional vote on the Iran deal, it is critical that we highlight the need to inject more civility into our public discourse.”
In his comments in the JCPA webinar, Lapid defended Nadler for his decision to support the nuclear agreement, criticizing those who posted hateful messages on Nadler’s Facebook page, such as one that said: “You failed the American People, you Failed as a Jew and you failed Israel!!”
“Jerry Nadler is very pro-Israel,” Lapid said. “He opposed the Iraq war not because he is anti-war but because he said if Iraq falls it would increase the influence of Iran in the Middle East. To say Jerry Nadler does not understand the risks Iran poses is not true.”
He was also critical of those who use Holocaust imagery to oppose the deal, saying his father was a Holocaust survivor who “disliked comparisons to the Holocaust.”
“This is not the Holocaust because the IDF is the strongest army in the Middle East,” he said. “We have very good intelligence and we have American friends. We will act before a Holocaust will come, so we should not speak of Holocaust visions.”
stewart@jewishweek.org
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New YorkOutreach In Suffolk — With A Wow!
Amid county’s Jewish woes, new efforts to reach the unaffiliated and intermarried.
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
Rachel Katz and her daughter at a JWOW event. Courtesy of JWOW
JWOW is looking to, well, wow the unattached Jews of Suffolk County.
No, not that JWoww, Snooki’s bosomy running mate on “The Jersey Shore.”
This JWOW, the splashily named volunteer grassroots group Jewish Without Walls, is at the leading edge of an outreach effort — both local and national — that is hoping to rejuvenate Jewish life in Suffolk.
The county has seen its share of woes Jewishly. Synagogue affiliation in the area continues to fall, and the intermarriage rate is the highest in the New York City area. Earlier this summer, the Conservative Commack Jewish Center, which once had a membership of 250, merged with the nearby Dix Hills Jewish Center. In a bid to stay alive, Smithtown’s Temple Beth Shalom sold its building two years ago to a church that allows it to continue using the building rent-free.
And the county’s only kosher butcher closed a year ago, citing declining sales, as did one of the two kosher Bagel Boss stores. All of which makes Suffolk a kind of experimental ground zero for outreach.
Into the breach has stepped JWOW, founded in 2011 by Beth Finger of Nesconset, L.I. In a few short years, it has increasingly become a major player in Suffolk, bringing together as many as 600 Jewish families, of whom nearly half do not belong to a synagogue and about 30 percent are interfaith families.
Rachel Katz and her family have taken notice. A few months after moving to the Island three years ago, Katz and her 3-year-old daughter Naomi were walking through the Smith Haven Mall in Lake Grove when they spotted some balloons and a Jewish star.
“I said, ‘We’re going this way, Naomi,’” she recalled. “I was excited to see a gathering of Jewish people. I didn’t expect it and everyone was so very happy and festive.”
It was a JWOW Chanukah event, one of the many the organization has planned in the past few years.
JWOW, along with the Suffolk Y JCC in Commack, the Eastern Long Island Jewish Alliance (ELIJA) and UJA-Federation of New York, are four organizations seeking to engage the 39 percent of Suffolk’s nearly 86,000 Jews who are intermarried and the 65 percent who are unaffiliated with a synagogue.
Elija, founded last year, recently launched a web page, elijali.org., to post all Jewish activities in Suffolk, according to its co-chairman, Rabbi Steven Moss.
Its mission, which is similar to that of the Alliance, is to promote Jewish events in the county, whose Jewish population dipped by 4,000 between 2002 and 2011, according to UJA-Federation’s Jewish Communal Study of 2011.
And soon, a national outreach organization, Big Tent Judaism (formerly the Jewish Outreach Institute) will move into Suffolk after a successful run in northern Westchester.
Finger said the efforts of JWOW are more cultural than religious, an approach that seems to be in step with broader patterns of Jewish life revealed in the much-publicized 2013 Pew Research Center study.
“I don’t think prayer is the way most Jews connect to their Judaism,” Finger observed.
“The same methods we use to welcome interfaith families we use to welcome Jewish families, because they [also] often have little [Jewish] knowledge,” Finger said. “So we don’t use Hebrew in the title of any of our programs. And on Lag b’Omer when we had a fun family field day, we didn’t say it was for Lag b’Omer, because many people would not know how to pronounce it. So we simply said come for a family field day and picnic — and in little letters we wrote, ‘To celebrate Lag b’Omer.’”
At the event, Finger said, she spoke briefly about the holiday and noted that all of the arts and crafts activities were in keeping with the Lag b’Omer theme of bonfires and bows and arrows. About 20 families attended this year.
In advance of the High Holy Days this year, Finger said JWOW would be holding a Shababeque — a kosher barbecue — on Sept. 11 at a private home in Setauket. The event — which features backyard children’s games — attracted 60 young families last year, and Finger said that this year Cantor Judy Merrick would be on hand to lead participants in a sing-along of Shabbat and holiday songs.
She said she would also be posting on the group’s website (jewishwithoutwalls.org) a list of synagogues in Suffolk that offer free High Holiday services and/or programs, such as tot services and yizkor services.
The largest JWOW turnout is the one for its annual Chanukah event at the Smith Haven Mall; last year’s event attracted 500 people.
When it comes to Shabbat dinners, Finger said her invitations are for “a Friday night dinner — and we don’t write Shabbos, but rather Shabbat. Shabbos is too insider, and it has an Orthodox connotation. Plenty of Jews have that feeling — they don’t feel that Judaism is theirs; they feel on the outside.
“Part of that is that they are Jewishly illiterate. Even if they went to Hebrew school, it ended when they were 13 and they don’t feel a connection. ... And when they go to synagogue, they feel like a fish out of water. ... I don’t think prayer is the way most Jews connect to their Judaism.”
Katz said she and her husband, who is not Jewish, are raising their two children as Jews and have joined an area Reform synagogue, Temple Isaiah in Stony Brook.
“It’s nice to meet people in synagogue, but JWOW is more laid back,” said Katz, 41, who grew up in a Conservative synagogue and went to Hebrew school and a Jewish camp. “Both are nice opportunities to meet with Jewish people. JWOW has programs running continuously for younger children, and it is setting up playgroups for children who are not yet in school. Some events are in people’s homes; it’s a nice alternative to synagogue life.”
Sarah Pew, her husband and two children moved to Stony Brook three years ago from Lafayette, Ind. They both grew up in Texas. Sarah, 34, attended a Conservative Jewish day school.
She said she learned about JWOW from the website meetup.com, but that the timing of its events did not work for her son. So she said JWOW let her create her own tots program for children 5 and under.
“JWOW Tots has grown and there is now J Babies for 0- to 2-year-olds, and a weekly playgroup at someone’s house in Setauket,” she said. “My husband and I don’t belong to any synagogue but go to events at all of them. What JWOW gave us was the Jewish community; a good number of our Jewish friends we made through JWOW.”
She added, “I did Rosh HaShanah and Purim and a model seder with 10 to 15 families ... . My kids are not old enough to make it through a real seder, so this seder was maybe 15 minutes long; there was lots of singing and the kids got to play. ... JWOW offers a place to learn the cultural and spiritual side of Judaism without feeling overwhelmed.”
Finger said she learned many of her outreach ideas from Big Tent Judaism. Rabbi Kerry Olitsky, that group’s executive director, said JWOW is now “aligned with our work” and that he is working with “other institutions that are not there yet.”
Rabbi Olitsky said his group’s name change, from Jewish Outreach Institute, was made to “reflect our operating ideology.”
Initially founded in 1987 as a research institute to study the then new phenomenon of interfaith marriage, Big Tent Judaism now concentrates on engaging interfaith families.
“Our work has evolved considerably to include direct program services, professional and lay leadership training, and advocacy for an inclusive Jewish community.” The organization has professional affiliates in several parts of the country trained by the organization in best practices for outreach and retention.
Big Tent Judaism was hired last year to help support UJA-Federation of New York’s “broader goal of creating and promoting an inclusive Jewish community,” according to Rebecca Katz-White, a planning executive in UJA-Federation’s Commission on the Jewish People.
Two years ago those efforts began to focus on teaching a group of lay leaders and professionals in 25 Jewish institutions in northern Westchester ways to engage newcomers.
“We concentrated on community building and helping the institutions work internally,” she said. “We are looking for long-term institutional and community cultural change.”
Katz-White said both northern Westchester and Suffolk County — whose program begins next year — were chosen for this effort because of the high number of interfaith families. In Westchester, 28 percent of Jews are intermarried; in Suffolk, the rate is 39 percent, according to UJA-Federation’s Jewish Community Study of 2011.
She said UJA-Federation’s contract with Big Tent Judaism last year was for $70,000. This year, the organization will be paid $50,000 to train 15 to 20 Jewish communal professionals how to develop new programs that reach out to interfaith households and less-engaged Jews.
Finger said her group’s activities are concentrated in northwestern and central Suffolk, home to most of the county’s Jews. With a grant from UJA-Federation, a recent survey of JWOW members found that 58 percent live in the Smithtown-Port Jefferson-Stony Brook area.
The survey’s authors noted that one-third of JWOW members who responded to the survey consider themselves Conservative Jews, while 28 percent said Reform and another 22 percent said “Just Jewish.”
JWOW extended its reach into Queens in mid-August with what Finger described as a “successful” Shabbat-in-the-Park pilot program in Forest Hills featuring a Shabbat storyteller, crafts, grape juice and challah.
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