Wednesday, November 4, 2015
Dear Reader,
A 200-year-old Torah scroll, written in Germany and soon to be dedicated at a Long Island ceremony commemorating Kristallnacht, is the center of a mystery that reflects the murky nexus of Jewish history and claims of Holocaust provenance. Staff Writer Steve Lipman has the story.
New York
Was This Torah Rescued From Kristallnacht?
The scroll reflects the murky nexus of Jewish history and claims of Holocaust provenance.
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
The late Queens Rabbi Israel Mowshowitz played key role in welcoming the Berlin Torah scroll.
It stands about two feet tall, is about 200 years old and comes in a fading green velvet cover. Many people will sing with it and dance with it on Monday night — and likely raise questions about its murky past.
Call it a Torah scroll whose history is a mystery.
During a Kristallnacht commemoration ceremony Nov. 9 at the Hewlett-East Rockaway Jewish Centre, members will dedicate a sefer Torah that was thought to be buried in Germany during World War II and then brought to the United States. During the next two weeks, two boys — Jesse Herrnson, son of Lisa and Rabbi Lev Herrnson; and Adam Polokoff, son of Deborah and Stuart Polokoff — whose East Rockaway families were responsible for the scroll’s return to use in synagogue services, will chant from it during their bar mitzvahs at the congregation.
The families will then take the scroll to Israel early next year for the boys’ symbolic joint bar mitzvah atop Masada, after which it will return here, to the International Synagogue at JFK Airport, its home for much of the last few decades.
The narrative of the scroll, honored for both its spiritual value and historical significance, is a matter of conjecture among members of the Long Island congregation. The main plot points, skeletal as they are and spread by oral history — the scroll is not a part of any Torah registry — are as follows:
It was written somewhere in Germany in the early 19th century; was presented as a gift to a synagogue in a German village by a bridegroom in 1846; remained in that synagogue until the Nazis came; was buried near the village’s synagogue a few days before Kristallnacht 77 years ago next week; was exhumed after the war by a member of the Jewish community who had survived the Shoah; was carried here by plane; and somehow came into the possession of the International Synagogue.
No one at either the International Synagogue or the Hewlett-East Rockaway congregation knows any more about the scroll or who brought it from Germany to the U.S. But someone, it turns out, does, or at least thinks she does.
Rabbi Debra Orenstein, spiritual leader of Congregation B’nai Israel in Emerson, N.J., said the scroll was given in the early 1950s to her grandfather, Rabbi Israel Mowshowitz, longtime pulpit rabbi of the Hillcrest Jewish Center in Queens and a founder, in 1958, of the International Synagogue. Rabbi Mowshowitz, a close friend of the late Gov. Mario Cuomo, died in 1992.
Rabbi Orenstein said she does not know the identity of the survivor who gave her grandfather the scroll. But there are other details of the story she claims to know.
Rabbi Mowshowitz, she said, made a practice of collecting Torah scrolls and having them restored for the International Synagogue and for his own congregation. One day, probably in the 1960s, he took possession of a group of six scrolls, one of which reportedly had been buried in a Jewish cemetery in Berlin.
Rabbi Mowshowitz arranged for that scroll to be repaired; he wanted it to be rededicated at the Hillcrest Jewish Center in a ceremony for all six scrolls.
“He wanted a Holocaust survivor to carry the Holocaust Torah” in the ceremony, Rabbi Orenstein said. He called a survivor who was a member of his congregation, “a Mr. Safirstein,” she recalled. Rabbi Mowshowitz told Markus Safirstein the story of the scroll, and said, “It would be a great honor if you, as a survivor, would carry it.
“Mr. Safirstein hung up on him,” Rabbi Orenstein said.
Fearing that he had offended Safirstein, bringing up painful wartime memories, Rabbi Mowshowitz drove right over to Safirstein’s house and apologized.
“Mr. Safirstein was crying,” Rabbi Orenstein said, based on the recollections she has heard from family members.
Safirstein told Rabbi Mowshowitz that his family in Berlin had lived next door to the chief of police, and his father was on good terms with the officer. The day before Kristallnacht, the chief of police told Safirstein’s father that “something is going to happen. Do whatever you can to protect yourselves or your possessions.”
Safirstein and his father took a scroll from the synagogue where they worshipped. “I buried it with my father,” Safirstein told Rabbi Mowshowitz. “Now the Torah has found me.”
Safirstein had no idea what had happened to the scroll since 1938. “It was a total surprise that someone else found it,” Rabbi Orenstein said, adding that “he did carry it” in the rededication ceremony.
Safirstein’s daughter, Judy Brodsky, who lives in Rockland County, heard a slightly different version of the scroll’s story from her father, who died eight years ago at 87.
She says he told her that he had buried the scroll, alone, a few days after Kristallnacht, taking it by bicycle to the cemetery, hiding it in a raincoat. He survived Auschwitz; his parents and two brothers perished there.
After the war he came to the U.S., where he married his teenage sweetheart, Margot, who had survived the war in England as a member of the Kindertransport. Margot, at 93, still lives in Riverdale.
Safirstein could not confirm that the scroll he carried in the synagogue ceremony was the same one he had buried in Berlin, Brodsky said. “I don’t know how many Torahs were in cemeteries in Berlin.”
Then again, she said, he couldn’t prove it wasn’t the same scroll.
No one can definitively prove the identity of the Torah in question, which was used at the Hillcrest Jewish Center for several years, was donated to the International Synagogue, went into storage and apparently became again posul, unfit for use, forgotten about.
Until the East Rockaway congregation decided to restore it again.
The Long Island synagogue’s upcoming Kristallnacht event at which the scroll will be dedicated, following a fundraising effort for its restoration, points both to the growing interest in obtaining and repairing Torahs that had survived the Holocaust, and to the difficulty in determining any scroll’s provenance.
A scroll that purportedly survived the Final Solution acquires a special aura, and consequently greater financial value than one with a more prosaic provenance, which can lead to fraud.
The most-noted recent case of misrepresentation of a Torah scroll’s background centered around Rabbi Menachem Youles, the owner of a Jewish bookstore in Wheaton, Md., who told tales of rescuing scrolls from the sites of Nazi concentration camps and billed himself as “the Jewish Indiana Jones,” but confessed in 2012 that he had lied about his putative adventures to increase the profits from the items’ sales that he pocketed through his Save a Torah nonprofit organization. Pleading guilty to mail fraud and wire fraud, he was sentenced to four years in federal prison.
For the people who supported the German scroll’s restoration, their motivation was purely theological and altruistic. “We know it’s a Holocaust survivor” who delivered the Torah, said Rabbi Bennett Rackman, who served as chaplain at the International Synagogue from 2001 to 2015.
Both Manny Weiss, who has served as the International Synagogue’s president for a dozen years, and Joel Zeitlin, a retired customs broker at JFK Airport and member of the International Synagogue’s board who brought the scroll to the attention of members of the Long Island congregation, told the same story about the scroll. Their story featured its burial on the eve of Kristallnacht.
But Michael Berenbaum, a prominent Holocaust historian and author, said that while the scroll likely emerged from Nazi Germany, he disputes some parts of its accepted chronology.
“It is not plausible that it was buried [a few days] before Kristallnacht,” Berenbaum said. The violence of Kristallnacht took place immediately after the assassination in Paris of Ernst vom Rath, a German embassy official, by Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old Polish Jew whose family was expelled from Germany, which would have ruled out prior warning of the pogrom. “Nobody knew about it” in advance.
On Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass on Nov. 9-10, 1938, 267 synagogues in Germany and annexed Austria were destroyed, hundreds of Jewish businesses were ransacked and thousands of Jewish men were arrested in an orchestrated pogrom; the outside world refused to stand up for the endangered Jews. Kristallnacht is widely considered the rehearsal for the Holocaust.
Could the scroll have been buried in the days after Kristallnacht, or taken into someone’s home as a precaution against further damage? Could it have been brought to the U.S. by a Holocaust survivor?
“That’s 100 percent possible,” Berenbaum said. “There are plenty of cases like this.”
The details don’t reduce the scroll’s symbolism as a holy artifact with Holocaust roots.
“Most people don’t know where their sefer Torah comes from,” said Daniel Wigodsky, the Torah scribe who repaired the International Synagogue scroll. “That’s a common story.”
Unlike artists, Torah scribes don’t sign or date their scrolls; it’s anonymous work.
The writing style and the deterioration of the scroll lend credence to the oral history that surrounds it, said Rabbi Wigodsky. A scribe who lives in White Plains and has repaired “hundreds” of scrolls over the last 12 years, he inspected it at the International Synagogue when contacted by Rabbi Herrnson a few years ago; its writing style was consistent with the type of sifrei Torah written in Germany or Czechoslovakia at least 150 years ago, he said. “It had a lot of wrinkles that were damaging letters.”
The JFK Synagogue Torah is a minority in the world of scrolls that survived the Shoah. There is no official count of the number of sifrei Torah that existed before World War II in Germany and its allied and occupied lands (most estimates put the figure in the tens of thousands) and how many emerged from the war intact or in various stages of disrepair. Most remained in their home countries, the property of their respective Jewish communities or of the national or local governments.
Most of the so-called Holocaust Torahs that traveled in subsequent years to the United States or other Western nations did so under the aegis of the Czech Torah Project of Westminster Synagogue in London. In the early 1960s, the London synagogue purchased some 1,500 scrolls from the Czechoslovakian government, ones that had belonged to synagogues in the provinces of Bohemia and Moravia. The scrolls, some of them as old as 250 years, had been collected and catalogued under Nazi watch during the war, became the property of the communist government after the war and were stored in Prague.
Employing a chasidic scribe from Israel, and other scribes after he retired, Westminster Synagogue had more than 1,000 Torahs repaired. Then they were "allocated on Permanent Loan" to congregations and other Jewish institutions around the world that wanted to house such a historic artifact; some scrolls that were beyond repair went to Jewish institutions to be put on display.
Several scrolls from the Czech Torah Project are now located in the Greater New York area.
A smaller number of Holocaust Torahs left post-war Europe in private hands — like those of the German Jew who purportedly came to Idlewild Airport, as JFK Airport was known in the early 1950s, or Satmar chasidim from Europe who immigrated to this country with scrolls they gave to their new synagogues.
Dealing in stolen Torah scrolls has become big business; many are stolen each year, and then sold for tens of thousands of dollars. Since the scrolls bear no readily apparent identifying marks — an individual Torah can rarely be identified by the untrained eye — an international Torah registry program (universaltorahregistry.org), developed by the Jewish Community Relations Council here, keeps a computerized databank of thousands of scrolls that feature a code of microperforations invisible to the naked eye.
The registry of “close to 10,000” scrolls “gives Torah owners the ability to put halachically approved IDs on Torahs,” said David Pollock, associate executive director of JCRC, who coordinated the development of the registry’s innovative technology. “Because we were founded in 1982, our registration records now span generations. Several times a month owners contact the UTR for help in establishing the provenance of their Torah, and our records often can help to settle disputes.”
The German scroll, which has an uncertain past, has a more certain future, as the second sefer Torah in the International Synagogue. The arc of its history will continue in the synagogue’s ark, and will be welcomed in a formal ceremony “as soon as we can,” said Rabbi Ari Korenblitt, the synagogue’s chaplain.
In the meantime, in the days after Kristallnacht, two bar mitzvah boys will hold the scroll in their hands and read from its sacred words, the same words that boys their age read in past decades, in past centuries.
“We are giving life to the scroll,” said Rabbi Herrnson, who serves as chaplain at Mercy Medical Center in Rockville Center, L.I., who researched the scroll’s history and coordinated the restoration effort, which has the support of the Holocaust Memorial & Tolerance Center of Long Island. “We are giving voice to those who died.”
steve@jewishweek.orgAuthor and professor Gil Troy shares his feelings about living in Israel these days, trying to keep calm amid the chaos of sporadic Palestinian attacks against Jews.
Israel News
Trying To Keep Calm Amid The Chaos
Vulnerability mixed with sweetness in the ‘new normal.’
Gil Troy
Special To The Jewish Week
Gil Troy
I live in Jerusalem but planned to spend this semester in America, launching my new book. But with a wife, four kids, many friends and 8 million targets, Jews and Arabs, in Israel, how can I rest easy away from home? Instead, I am crisscrossing the Atlantic “pond,” acting as if I hold the United Airlines Chair in American History, returning home whenever I can while fulfilling whatever book tour commitments I can.
Typically, I wake in New York or Washington and jog, often traversing once-crime-ridden areas that have become safe. Even if the one constant is change, the vector can go up or down. This reminds us, especially in young dynamic Israel, that things can improve or deteriorate.
Arriving in Jerusalem, I revert to my New Yorker-during-the-1970s-crime-spree mode, scrutinizing passersby, protecting my super-sized 360-degree personal-space bubble. Thinking magically, we improvise delusional dos and don’ts to keep walking through the raindrops. (Of course, statistically, cars remain far more dangerous than terrorists — and New York remains more dangerous than Jerusalem).
Jerusalem’s “new normal” involves staring at men’s midsections. Those packing pistols or clutching iPhones are safe. Then, no matter how liberal you are, no matter how much you cherish coexistence, you examine passing faces and “racially profile” — although it’s more a national and psychological assessment.
This is the Jerusalemite’s Dilemma: how to keep this diverse, safe, multicultural city friendly when menaced by murderers from one particular group? Political correctness cannot trump safety, but how can we prevent terrorists from spreading the cancer of mistrust that breeds more terrorism?
And what do we tell our children? My 13-year-old daughter has now had the experience of being in a classroom that turned hysterical when word spread that Palestinian murderers attacked the bus a dozen of her classmates took that morning, killing three people. My 15-year-old son has now had the experience of hearing warnings that a terrorist was caught trying to enter the mall that houses the gym where he works out. Our family is debating how bad does it get before you send the dog to a friend’s moshav so we don’t have to walk him at night? What do we teach our kids about tolerance when many on the other side cheer these crimes and sing “Stab, Stab”? How do we explain why our kids and their friends are targeted during the most innocent activities?
Ultimately, we trust our resilience to save us. Surprisingly, even armed with my pepper spray in the pocket of my jogging shorts, the situation starts feeling normal. Israel’s everyday heroes maintain routines. Initially, I was so conscious of my pepper spray, it felt like I was carrying around a fire hydrant. A few days later, I had so adjusted, I forgot I had it and got busted at airport security. (I smiled apologetically, saying, “Ani Yerushalmi,” “I am a Jerusalemite.” The security person smiled back — but confiscated it).
Characteristically, resisting terrorism brings out a remarkable Sabra sweetness beneath Israelis’ occasionally prickly exterior. People are looking out for one another, boker tov-ing and erev tov-ing frequently and warmly, as “good morning,” “good evening” become code words for “I’m no threat.” We’re all acting like concerned parents, being extra vigilant when kids cross in front of our cars, offering more people rides, looking out for one another. We’re also hugging our kids more tightly, more frequently, appreciating our health and the passing of another boring day more consciously, living life a bit more intensely.
That yearning for extra mass-parenting is widespread. I asked an Arab mechanic friend whose garage is next door to my daughter’s ballet studio to keep an extra eye on all the girls. His response: “Gilly, tell them that here, I’m like their abba.”
Israelis’ sweet vulnerability makes us deeply grateful for kind gestures from abroad. When I suggested on Facebook that Israel’s supporters order takeout from now-empty Jerusalem restaurants to deliver to now-overworked police officers and border police, the enthusiastic response overwhelmed me. (I’m not yet desperate enough to ask people to buy my book as a solidarity gesture, given my compressed time in America, but more desperate times might call for more desperate self-promotions.) All these campaigns and concerned e-mails from friends help tremendously. On the other hand, the silences, the finger pointing against us (although we’ve been targeted), and the radical Jews using this moment to denounce Israel, hurt disproportionately.
As we hunker down in our homes, I still cherish the ideal of the normalized Jerusalem I experienced just last month. That’s when the Abu Tor multiplex cinema opened, linking our neighborhood with an Arab neighborhood, luring us all with Hollywood trash.
My first jog back home in Jerusalem, the only two Arabs I encountered were a young man and a woman with a hijab, necking in Yemin Moshe park, against the Old City’s stunning backdrop. Behind them was a sculpture I have passed hundreds of times and never noticed. The sculpture’s gold, reflective metal had these beautiful, sensual curves paralleling this intertwined couple’s curves. I marveled at this symbol of peace — then laughed the next day when I jogged passed the same sculpture and discovered that it commemorates the Etzioni Brigade’s fight for the Old City in 1948.
Jerusalem dances constantly between the past and the present, between peace and war, between the normal and the exceptional. I challenge the small minority of murderous Arab neighbors to describe what kind of city they want. And I applaud the rest of us for taking exceptional efforts to keep the peace, staying sane and normal.
[Gil Troy is the author of The Age of Clinton: America in the 1990s, just published by Thomas Dunne Books of St. Martin’s Press. A professor of history at McGill University, he is a visiting scholar this fall at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.]And Contributing Editor Josh Mitnick explores the controversy surrounding Israel's discovery of a massive offshore natural gas reserve as the competition for its control widens.
Israel News
A ‘Leviathan’ Of A Controversy
Israel’s natural gas saga developing some heated plot lines.
Joshua Mitnick
Contributing Editor
Monopoly in the making? One of Israel’s offshore natural gas fields. Getty Images
Tel Aviv — When energy exploration companies announced the discovery of a massive offshore natural gas reserve 80 miles from Haifa, Israelis celebrated the find as a boon to the local economy that would lower prices, fill government coffers and ensure the country’s energy security for decades to come.
Five years later, what to do with the reserves has become an ongoing political and regulatory mess for the government.
The Leviathan gas field is at the center of a years-long dispute in which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is accused by political critics of pushing an energy deal that leaves the Israeli public at the mercy of a U.S.-Israeli energy cartel with the ability to dictate a premium on their electricity bills for years to come.
The gas consortium that owns the rights to the field — led by Houston-based exploration company Noble Energy and the Delek Group — is complaining that Israel’s government has created a regulatory mess by changing the terms of the deal, letting lucrative export deals pass it by, scaring off new investors and boosting risks that the massive field will never be tapped. They say that the government stands to pocket $100 billion over the next 20 years from gas royalties.
But critics say that Netanyahu is ignoring the warnings of government regulators and instead ramming through a deal worth billions of dollars that hands over a public resource to Israel business tycoon Yitzhak Tshuva, the owner of the Delek energy group, and the exploration company Noble Energy.
“There’s no potential for competition in the gas framework; there’s no assurance for effective long-term price controls,” David Gilo, an antitrust commissioner who resigned several months ago over the gas deal, said in a speech at a business conference last week. “The environment and competition have come out on the bottom in this agreement.”
The latest uproar came this week when Israel’s economic minister, Aryeh Deri, resigned rather than override an Israeli antitrust commissioner’s ruling that the proposed arrangement would establish a monopoly without giving the government enough price oversight.
After giving Deri’s remaining government ministries extra budgets as compensation, Netanyahu, who now has taken over as economic minister, will invoke a never-before-used legal clause allowing the cabinet to veto the antitrust commissioner for reason of national security. Opposition politicians have appealed to the attorney general to see if the move is kosher.
Deri, who pledged to represent Israel’s “transparent” lower class during the election, is not the only populist politician to stand aside. Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon, who also pledged to represent the interests of the middle and working class during the election and weigh in on the gas deal, announced earlier this year that he had a conflict of interest and could not be involved.
“This is a sordid maneuver and an irrational and dubious move that will cost the citizens of Israel, according to international estimates, billions of shekels,” wrote Shelly Yachimovich of the opposition Labor Party on her Facebook page.
Using the slogan “stop the gas theft,” protest organizers are planning demonstrations this weekend in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Beersheva.
The controversy over the so-called “gas framework” has kicked up charges of crony capitalism from social activists and economic experts like the Finance Ministry’s former accountant general. The charges recall the slogans of Israel’s socioeconomic protests four years ago that took over Tel Aviv’s main boulevard and brought hundreds of thousands into the streets.
“The bottom line is that Israel has become the country with the highest housing prices in the West, the most expensive cars in the West, the most expensive food, and now gas,” said Yaron Zelicha, the former accountant general in the Finance Ministry.
With Noble threatening to take action to protect its stake in the project in case the gas framework falters, the prime minister has warned that approval is urgent and that Israel’s national security could be hurt by foot dragging. Netanyahu predicted that Israel’s natural gas resources will remain untapped and Israel’s government will forfeit tax proceeds from lucrative export contracts as energy companies look to countries like Iran for energy supply.
“If the gas framework doesn’t advance, industry and the entire economy will suffer a serious blow,” said Energy and Infrastructure Minister Yuval Steinitz, a close ally of the prime minister at a business conference last week sponsored by Haaretz. “Anyone who has eyes in his head, anyone who is rational and doesn’t get worked up must do their utmost to ensure that the gas framework is approved after three years of delays and serious damage.”
Private lobbyists and U.S. Congress members have even come to Israel to lobby Israel’s government on behalf of Noble Energy. Last year, Australian energy company Woodside cancelled a deal to come into Leviathan as a leading investor.
An official close to the energy consortium argued that the price that it will charge Israeli customers will be in line with global rates for natural gas. Opponents charge it will be twice as expensive. The official complained that Israeli officials upped requirements for government royalties, clamped tighter limits on lucrative exports, and required divestment of holdings in other Israeli offshore wells. The official dismissed the public protest against the gas deal as a marginal movement of leftists and “Marxists,” boosted by the liberal “Tel Aviv-based” media.
“From the minute of the discovery, it’s been a regulatory roller coaster. Every year they change the rules. You can’t invest and plan if you are not sure what the price is,” said the official. “No one will come here if there are no basic ground rules. Israel has got a very bad reputation in the world, especially in the gas world.”
A string of gas discoveries in Israel’s territorial waters since 2000 spurred first-ever interest in the country’s energy industry: in 2009 the Tamar field of 7.9 trillion cubic feet was discovered. Then came Leviathan with 16 trillion cubic feet. Several years later Crocodile” was discovered with 1.1 trillion cubic feet. Only Tamar is currently supplying Israel’s energy network.
The size of the gas finds made Israel the toast of the energy world and spurred expectations that the country would eventually reach a deal to export it to Europe through Turkey. In recent years, Israel signed initial deals for modest exports to Jordan and Egypt. But the exports looked less of a sure thing after a gas field bigger than Leviathan was discovered in August off the coast of Egypt — raising the potential for competition.
The energy saga is expected to drag on for the near future as the Knesset’s Economics Committee is planning to hold public hearings on the gas agreement, despite having no power to block the deal.
The gas opponents are expected to submit a petition to the Supreme Court against the deal, but political analysts and legal experts say the high court is unlikely to intervene. Despite years of political protests and wrangling over legislation, experts say that eventually the prime minister will push it through.
“The gas framework is very good for the Israeli economy — the price is not too costly,” said Avi Weiss, an economics professor at Bar-Ilan University and director of the Taub Center. “All of the cries of disaster are unreasonable. The disaster would be to not do it.”
editor@Jewishweek.orgAlso this issue, Congregation Bnai Jeshurun rabbi's next move; Orthodox group bans women rabbis, again, setting off a backlash; panel sees upside of interfaith marriage increase; Off-Broadway revival of Arthur Miller's "Incident At Vichy"; and Erica Brown offers advice on what not to say.
The JW Q&A
BJ Rabbi’s Next Move: Finding That ‘Still, Small Voice’
Rabbi Marcelo Bronstein plans to work as a mindfulness teacher based mostly in Costa Rica.
Sandee Brawarsky
Rabbi Marcelo Bronstein: To lead mindfulness retreats in Costa Rica.Rabbi Marcelo Bronstein announced recently that he will be stepping down from his full-time position at Congregation B’nai Jeshurun as of June 2017. While he will continue to serve part-time at BJ for three years after that, he plans to work as a mindfulness teacher, based mostly in Costa Rica. He’ll return to New York monthly and for the High Holidays.
Born in Argentina, Rabbi Bronstein, 61, and his wife Karina Zilberman have built a house in La Ecovilla, Costa Rica, in the mountains between San Jose and the Pacific. Rabbi Bronstein, also a clinical psychologist, plans to continue to lead mindfulness retreats in the Costa Rican countryside, as well as practice spiritual coaching and pastoral counseling via Internet platforms. He also plans to spend more time in Israel. This isn’t retirement,” he says. “I want to dedicate the rest of my rabbinate to help people go deeper into their souls, to find their own meaningful connection with the tradition.”
Q: How do you explain mindfulness most simply?
A: In the Unetaneh Tokef prayer we say on the High Holidays we speak of a “still, small voice” of God. Mindfulness is about finding the small still voice of the soul that we barely hear.
It doesn’t mean you can’t be thinking about the future. It’s about being aware. These days, we are constantly multitasking and being fragmented. We are on the phone, walking and texting, always with the anxiety that we are missing something more important than what is in front of us. The culture we live in is generating anxious people who are completely disconnected. We pay a price for that.
How did you become interested in mindfulness and meditation?
This is a long journey in my life. I started with meditation some 25 years ago. I began studying with a quantum physicist in Chile. The teacher I was able to become is completely related to my experiences — I studied in the chasidic world, participated in the Presencing Institute at MIT, went trekking in the mountains of Nepal, did a vision quest with Native Americans, exposed myself to the experience of mindfulness and nature. Something inside of me is constantly seeking.
I’ve been involved in institutional Jewish life since I was 19. For 10 years I was youth director of Communidad Bet El in Buenos Aires [the synagogue led by the late Rabbi Marshall Meyer, who later served at BJ] and was involved with Camp Ramah in Argentina for many years, the last two as director. I attended rabbinical school at Hebrew Union College in New York and then led a congregation in Chile for six years.
When I came back to New York in 1995 to take on a pulpit at BJ, I also began working with Rabbi Rachel Cowan, who shares my passion for this; we have been teaching together and leading meditation and mindfulness retreats and prayer services for BJ.
How do you teach mindfulness?
This has to be done through experience, not through a book. You have to be able to experience what happens to you when you are not multitasking, when you are paying attention — what happens to your blood pressure, to your body, to your being present. This has been studied scientifically — how stress can be reduced. Once you experience it, you think, how come I am living without it? We have the capacity to access the gardens of Eden that live inside of us.
What’s Jewish about this?
Look at all these books. [He points to his desk, where books by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and others on prayer, Kabbalah and meditation are spread out, as he is preparing a course]. Mindfulness is a new word. My word is kavvanah. Chasidim Rishonim, the early Pious Ones, used to stand still for an hour before saying the Shema. “For you the silence I praise,” the psalmist says. There’s a whole tradition of silence in Jewish mysticism.
I’ve never done anything Buddhist. I came to this through stress reduction, Jewish chanting and chasidut. Rabbi Heschel has been always my inspiration. Prayer matters, prayer is of consequence, prayer is transformative. In the retreats I aspire to achieve a balance between personal transformation, joy, movement, nature walks and bearing witness to social action projects.
I would like to show many Jews who are going to Eastern traditions that there is a wealth in the Jewish tradition that could uplift their world. I want to tell them, Come home. I would like to connect them with what they don’t know that they already have.
I have a calling: that I feel I have to do things in my life. It’s very Jewish.
How is mindfulness prayer different from other Jewish prayer?
Mindfulness prayer is less fixed prayer, more personal. You don’t have to rush. Jewish prayer is a balance between keva, what is fixed, and kavannah, intention. When doing mindfulness prayer, keva is negotiable, kavannah is not. You may cover fewer prayers, but you go deeper and deeper, to your heart and your soul.
What are some of the highlights of your 20 years at BJ?
BJ is a hub of creativity, a laboratory of Jewish possibility where ideas like this can be nurtured. It’s my spiritual home. By far, the highlight was to work with my best friend, Roly [Rabbi J. Rolando Matalon]. We grew up together in Buenos Aires. Not many people have the opportunity to work with their best friend. We learn from each other, have powerful and deep conversations. Marshall was my teacher and Roly’s. We are two disciples continuing the work, reshaping it.
editor@Jewishweek.orgNew York
RCA Bans Female Rabbis, Again; Agudath Goes Further
Moves come in wake of developments in Israel.
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
Yeshivat Maharat awards smicha to its graduates in June 2015. Courtesy of Yeshivat Maharat
The Rabbinical Council of America, the largest group of Orthodox rabbis, reaffirmed its position against the ordination of women in a resolution issued last Friday that reiterated nearly identical statements made in 2010 and 2013.
“New institutions in Israel have been ordaining women, and as part of the larger community we felt the need to speak out,” RCA executive vice president Mark Dratch told The Jewish Week.
He pointed to the recent actions of Rabbi Herzl Hefter, founder and Rosh Beit Midrash Har’el in Jerusalem, and Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, founding chief rabbi of Efrat, two prominent Orthodox rabbis who recently ordained women.
The reiteration of the RCA’s position has exposed the widening rift within the Orthodox community on the issue of women rabbis.
Following the RCA’s statement, Agudath Israel of America’s high rabbinical court released a kol koreh, or proclamation, Monday pronouncing “Open Orthodoxy” no longer a part of Orthodoxy and dismissing rabbinic ordination within that unofficial branch as meaningless. The rabbinic court specified the leadership and affiliates of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah for men, Yeshivat Maharat for women, and the International Rabbinic Fellowship, a fellowship of more than 200 Modern Orthodox clergy that functions as an alternative to the RCA. (Yesterday, the IRF released a statement reaffirming support for women’s growing participation in spiritual leadership and communal institutions.)
“They are no different than any other dissident movements throughout our history, that have rejected basic tenets,” the proclamation reads. It is signed by several leading charedi rabbis, including Rabbi Aryeh Kotler, the rosh yeshiva of Beth Medrash Gavoha in Lakewood, N.J., one of the largest yeshivas in the world, and Rabbi Dovid Feinstein, son of the late and widely regarded Torah scholar Rabbi Moshe Feinstein. Though the proclamation was written originally in Hebrew, it was published alongside an English translation.
Asked why his organization issued the resolution at this time, Rabbi Avi Shafran, a spokesman for Agudath Israel, said “there was no immediate stimulus, only the cumulative misrepresentation of the new movement [as Orthodox].”
Rabbi Avi Weiss, the key figure in “Open Orthodoxy” as founder of Yeshiva Chovevei Torah and Yeshivat Maharat, both in Riverdale, and co-founder of the IRJ, wrote this week that “the time has come” to allow women’s ordination in the Modern Orthodox movement. In an Opinion piece (see page 24) he asserted that “the debate concerning women’s ordination is not halachic but rather sociological.”
In sociological terms, Israel has been at the forefront of liberalizing Orthodoxy. A Jerusalem group, Shira Chadashah (A New Song), founded the partnership minyan, later duplicated here, where women are permitted to lead certain parts of the prayer service. And women spiritual leaders have been appointed with less attention.
Rabbi Jeffrey Fox, rosh yeshiva of Yeshivat Maharat, has referred to the mutual influence between Israel and America as “cross pollination.”
“The reality of women’s leadership in America mirrors what happens in Israel,” he told The Jewish Week after Rabbi Riskin, former spiritual leader of Lincoln Square Synagogue, named Jennie Rosenfeld the first female spiritual leader in Efrat. “Progress there means progress here.”
The RCA statement praised the increase in women’s Torah study in recent years and cited what the group considers “appropriate” professional opportunities for learned women. These include taking on the roles of yoatzot halacha (advisers on Jewish law) and community scholars, and teaching at Yeshiva University’s Graduate Program for Women in Advanced Talmudic Study and as non-rabbinic school teachers. “So long as no rabbinic or ordained title such as ‘maharat’ is used in these positions, and so long as there is no implication of ordination or a rabbinic status, this resolution is inapplicable,” the resolution concludes.
Maharat is an acronym meaning female spiritual, legal and Torah leader.
But the resolution stated that members may not ordain women under a title other than rabbi, put a woman in a rabbinic position or give a female teacher of Jewish studies a title implying rabbinic ordination.
In response to the resolution, the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance (JOFA) circulated an online petition entitled “We Support Women in Orthodox Leadership Roles.” They received more than 1,000 signatures in the first 24 hours. Using the hashtag “Humans of JOFA,” the organization also began a campaign featuring prominent Orthodox voices in support of leadership roles for women.
“We believe individual communities and all of Klal Yisrael can only benefit from the inclusion of the voices and ideas of highly trained and committed women in positions of communal authority,” the petition reads.
The IRF, in a nuanced statement, called on communities and their rabbinic leaders to discuss the issue “in an open and reflective manner.” It asserted that “observant and committed Orthodox women who are learned, trained and competent should have every opportunity to fully serve the Jewish community” as teachers, pastoral counselors, spiritual preachers and guides as well as presidents of synagogues.
The resolutions released by the RCA in 2010 and 2013 were responding to the founding of Yeshivat Maharat, and the first ordination of its graduates, respectively.
Though the resolution was one of four annual resolutions voted on by RCA members over the past month — the other three regarded BDS, racism and the agunah crisis — it was the only one to be featured as “New and Noteworthy” on the RCA’s homepage and mass e-mailed to RCA affiliates. (The other three are posted on the RCA's website.) It was also the only resolution of the four to be proposed directly by the RCA membership, as opposed to by the resolutions committee, Rabbi Dratch noted.
Hannah@jewishweek.org
New York
New Study Challenges Bleak Outcomes Of Intermarriage
For millennial children of interfaith couples, intervention during emerging adulthood proves ‘critical.’
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
Rabbi Joy Levitt, professor Steven Cohen, and Rabbi Jeffrey Summit at last week’s panel. Hannah Dreyfus/JWThe 2013 Pew Center’s “Portrait of American Jewry,” which found a 71 percent intermarriage rate among non-Orthodox Jews and a 58 percent rate overall, caused much rabbinic hand-wringing and communal soul searching.
Few saw the soaring numbers, up from 43 percent in 1990 and 17 percent in 1970, as an opportunity.
But a study released earlier this month by the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University found that the millennial children of intermarriage are likely to find their way back into the fold — with the proper intervention.
The study found that experiences in college often are more likely to shape Jewish identity than childhood influences.
“The period of emerging adulthood is one of profound experimentation and change,” said sociologist Leonard Saxe, co-author of the study. “Jewish identity is open to influence well beyond the developmental years. The question moving forward is not ‘how many,’ but ‘how.’”
The results, based on surveys of more than 2,500 adult children of intermarriage and in-marriage between the ages of 19-32 (culled from the database of Birthright Israel applicants), compared the religious upbringing, college experiences and current attitudes of the two cohorts. Today, half of American millennials who identify as Jewish are the products of intermarriage, according to the study’s authors.
The conversation comes shortly after the Reconstructionist movement’s historic decision to drop the longstanding ban against intermarried rabbinical school students. Supporters of the change argued that the ban embraced an outdated way of defining Jewish identity and community, while opponents feared dropping the ban would undermine the movement’s commitment to Jewish peoplehood.
For Rebecca Levy, the 26-year-old daughter of intermarried parents, the question is personal. Levy joined a panel earlier this month at UJA-Federation to discuss the study’s findings. Though her fellow panelists — Jewish academics and outreach professionals — hotly debated the theoretical question of whether intermarriage was a “problem or opportunity,” Levy spoke from experience.
“I don’t see myself as a problem,” she said, responding to the moderator’s clumsily worded question inquiring if she thought of herself as a “problem.” Her retort: “I see my background as a huge asset.”
For Levy, a doctoral student at Harvard, grappling with identity was a part of dinner-table discussions growing up. “I dealt with constructing an identity earlier than most, but I don’t see that as a negative,” she said, remaining composed despite the rigorous questioning.
Levy’s journey to Jewish adulthood typifies what the study would consider an intermarriage success story. Though she grew up with no Jewish education and minimal observance of holidays, she joined a Jewish sorority as an undergraduate at Cornell. Shortly after college, she went on a Birthright Israel trip that left her deeply changed.
“I’m still in touch with the IDF soldiers who joined the trip,” she said, gesturing to her cell phone. “Just last night, I called to see how they’re doing,” she said, referring to the recent spate of terrorist attacks in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
Completing the Jewish journey, she met her fiancé at a Jewish event through her sorority. Together, they intend to raise a Jewish family.
“If you asked me five years ago what’s the most pressing issue, I would have said intermarriage,” said Rabbi Kerry Olitzky, executive director of Big Tent Judaism, a organization that provides diverse programming, services and outreach training. “Today, it’s engagement.”
He added that, unlike the boomer generation, millennials do not operate from a perspective of obligation, but rather from a perspective of personal gain. The March 2014 Pew study on millennials found that young adults are disengaging from institutions en masse, with nearly a third affiliating with no political party or religion.
“‘How would I benefit from engaging with my Judaism?’ — that’s the question outreach professionals have got to answer,” he said in a telephone interview.
Referencing Levy’s story, panelist Rabbi Jeffrey Summit, executive director of the Tufts University Hillel, stressed the importance of “peer-based relationship engagement.” Or, to paraphrase: college keg parties — in a Jewish context — matter.
“It’s the friends-bringing-friends effect,” said Rabbi Summit emphatically, stressing the importance of personal networking to attract Jewish-identified students. Over one-fifth of the 5,000-plus undergraduate population at Tufts is Jewish, according to Hillel International. Rabbi Summit said 65 percent of Jewish-identified students are involved with Hillel. A quarter of the students on Hillel’s leadership board, including the president, are children of intermarried parents.
“We have to stop talking about intermarriage as a shanda and a busha,” he said, using the Yiddish words for embarrassment and shame. “We have to see it as an opportunity to engage new students and come up with creative programming.”
“I met my fiancé at one such alcoholic evening,” Levy quipped. She seconded Rabbi Summit’s statement about the importance of Jewish “friends.” “They were my critical link. I wouldn’t have gone to Jewish events if I didn’t have friends to go with,” she said.
Still, Steven Cohen, research professor of Jewish Social Policy at Hebrew Union College, maintained that despite the possibility of successful intervention later in life, intermarriage is still an existential “problem.” Though the study stressed the importance of college programming, numbers across the board indicated that children of intermarriage were less likely to celebrate Jewish holidays, identify as Jewish or raise their children Jewish with no college Jewish experiences. The typical child of in-married parents identified as Jewish by religion 85 percent of the time, while the typical child of inmarried parents identified only 20 percent of the time.
“What surprised me about this: little. But what’s important to recognize here is a lot,” he said, adding that “fear of offending the intermarried” has often repressed candid conversation of the topic.
Cohen commended the study for the “grandparent finding,” the discovery that having an active relationship with a Jewish grandparent can be a game-changer for the adult children of intermarried parents. Thirty-six percent of children of intermarriage with a maternal Jewish grandparent said they were “very close to their grandparent(s).” Respondents described the importance of these relationships.
“I came to understand what Judaism meant through phone calls with my grandmother,” one 33-year-old male wrote on the survey.
“Kids might give mixed reviews about their parents, but they generally have nice things to say about grandparents,” said Cohen.
And while children of intermarriage were far less likely than children of in-marriage to have attended Jewish day school, Hebrew school or youth groups, participation in Birthright Israel, Judaic studies courses and campus activities sponsored by Hillel and Chabad effectively closed the gap in Jewish engagement between the two cohorts.
“I see myself as a Jew,” said Levy, responding to a question from the audience. Though she had maintained a steady composure throughout the conversation, as the questioning neared its end her voice began to crack. “What you have to realize is that I’m a whole person,” she said, wiping away tears as her fellow panelists, taken aback, scrambled to find a tissue. She pressed on, “I want both my parents to be proud of me.”
[*Rebecca Levy's name has been changed to ensure privacy.]
Theater
New Context Shapes Miller’s Shoah Play
Director hoping to banish earlier view of ‘Incident at Vichy.’
Ted Merwin
Special To The Jewish Week
Darren Pettie as LeDuc and Richard Thomas as Von Berg in Signature Theatre’s production of “Incident at Vichy.” Joan MarcusDeeply flawed human beings making profound moral choices populate almost all of Arthur Miller’s plays. But the Jewish dramatist rarely dealt as explicitly with the world’s collective responsibility for the Jews of Europe as in his 1964 one-act play, “Incident at Vichy”; it centers on a group of nine men and a boy who have been rounded up by German military and French police in Vichy France, and who wait to be “inspected” to see if they are Jewish under the laws of the Nazi “puppet” regime.
An Off-Broadway revival of the play opened last week in Midtown, where it joined other New York productions, such as the New Yiddish Rep’s “Death of a Salesman,” in marking the centennial of Miller’s birth.
Directed by Michael Wilson, “Incident at Vichy” is an ensemble piece with a cast of 17 actors, including Richard Thomas (John-Boy Walton on the 1970s TV series “The Waltons”), Frank Gaad (an FBI agent on the current FX show “The Americans”) and Jonathan Hadary (Herbie in the Tyne Daly production of “Gypsy” and Roy Cohn in the national tour of Tony Kushner’s “Millennium Approaches”).
In the first half of the play, the mostly Jewish prisoners, who include a psychoanalyst, an electrician, a rabbi and a painter, initially struggle to comprehend their situation, debate whether or not they are being detained for a routine check of their identity papers, and argue about whether or not the heart-stopping rumors of cattle cars and concentration camps could possibly be true. In the second half, as one by one they are summoned for their fateful (and ultimately fatal) interrogations, they discuss wider questions of the responsibilities that people owe to one another in situations of life and death.
The play climaxes with a highly charged conversation between the psychoanalyst, LeDuc (Darren Pettie), and a mistakenly arrested Austrian prince, Von Berg (Thomas); in the exchange, LeDuc reminds the guilt-stricken nobleman that “Each man has his Jew; the black, the yellow, the white, it is the other. And the Jews have their Jews. And now, now above all, you must see that you have yours — the man whose death leaves you relieved that you are not him...”
Inspired by Miller’s trip to the Mauthausen concentration camp and his witnessing of Nazi murder trials in Frankfurt in 1963, “Incident at Vichy” ran for only 32 performances over a five-month period when it first opened as a Lincoln Center Repertory Theatre production at the ANTA Washington Square Theater, while Lincoln Center itself was being redeveloped. It got a rave review from Howard Taubman of The New York Times, who called it “a moving play, a searching play, one of the most important plays of our time.”
But the production quickly fell victim to infighting among the leaders of the Lincoln Center Repertory Theatre: Harold Clurman, Elia Kazan and Robert Whitehead. The play has rarely been seen in New York since; a revival by the Actors Company in 2009 was panned by The New Yorker as “minor Miller,” a “heady exploration of guilt, fear, power and complicity that, unfortunately, never quite transcends the realm of philosophical exercise.”
Wilson aims to banish that perception with his production and to demonstrate that “Incident at Vichy” deserves to take its place in the canon of major Miller works. The original production, he told The Jewish Week in a telephone interview last week, took place only two decades after the events that are depicted. “People were reluctant in those days to confront this subject matter,” he speculated. But nowadays, he noted, our television screens brim with series like “Homeland” and “Narcos” that “take us every day to the atrocities of our time.”
In writing about “arguably the greatest atrocity ever to unfold in the history of our civilization,” Wilson added, Miller created a “strong dialectical argument for our responsibility to society, community, and to mankind, along with the dangers and perils of betraying that responsibility because of family allegiance or selfish motivation.” He called the play a “serious thriller,” a “spine-tingling and suspenseful” evening of theater. Two Jewish couples who attended a recent preview told him that the play had “ripped through them — their whole bodies were shaking at the end.”
In an interview with The Jewish Week, Thomas called “Incident at Vichy” a “big play in a small play’s body.” He noted that Miller examines a “dizzying” number of themes, including “passivity, the trained sense of victimhood, the difference between having morality and taking action.” Even those who pride themselves on having liberal values, Thomas observed, are often blind to the fact that they are “plugged into an oppressive system,” such as the oppression of African-Americans during the time period in which the play premiered, which Miller referred to frequently in his explanations of the play.
Joshua Polster, who teaches performing arts at Emerson College in Boston, is the former president of the Arthur Miller Society, which promotes the playwright’s works both in America and abroad. Polster told The Jewish Week that while the characters in “Incident at Vichy” may not be as “fully fleshed” as those in many of Miller’s other works, he sees a strong thesis in the play about “our need to not let our sense of guilt override our sense of responsible action.”
While the use of the word “incident” in the play’s title may seem, on the surface, to minimize what occurs in the play, Polster pointed out that Miller, “focuses time and again in his work on a particular family in order to make sense of larger events.”
After all, Polster reflected, “what seems like a relatively minor incident, once allowed to get out of control, can avalanche into a calamity.” Polster perceives alarming parallels between the play and what is happening today in different parts of the world, especially in France, where Jews are again fleeing from resurgent anti-Semitism. The play, Polster concluded, is “so powerful and gripping” that it will, he predicts, “continue to resonate for many years to come.”
[“Incident at Vichy” runs through Dec. 13 at Signature Theatre, 480 W. 42nd St. Performances are Tuesday-Friday at 7:30 p.m. and Saturday at 8 p.m. with Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2 p.m. (There are some Wednesday matinees at 2 p.m. as well.) For tickets, $25, call the box office at (212) 244-7529 or visit signaturetheatre.org.]
Jew By Voice
What Not To Say
It's time for Jewish sensitivity training.
Erica Brown
Special To The Jewish Week
Erica Brown
‘When you’re ready, I have a great guy for you.” I ask you, does any recently bereaved wife need to hear this when sitting shiva? No. The runners up in the Jewish foot-in-mouth prize for shiva awkwardness are those who say that the recently deceased is happier now or that the suffering is finally over. For those in the low chairs, the suffering has just begun. It got so bad that a friend reported that a bereaved woman sitting shiva in her own home silenced the chatter when she challenged a visitor, “Do you think it’s appropriate to say that?”
And please hold back when visiting a sick person. “You look terrible” is not an expression of empathy. “You look great” also doesn’t work well, as a friend in the hospital once told me. “I hope this is not what great looks like.” Speaking of death, restrain the impulse to ask if the illness is fatal.
Some people believe that the ultimate statement of compassion is, “I know exactly what you’re going through.” Wrong. This sounds like you are competing in the Jewish suffering Olympics. There is no competition when it comes to sorrow. We each fail and fall and face crisis uniquely. It’s best not to snatch someone else’s pain but leave it whole and untouched by your personal experience.
Also — never, never wish a woman mazal tov on being pregnant unless you know that she really is pregnant or the head is actually crowning. And even then double-check, possibly with her OBGYN. Women who suffer this insult never forget it and rarely forgive the asker. Pregnant women generally don’t love when you comment on their weight gain. When I was seven months pregnant and competing with Violet Beauregarde for the world’s largest short person, a colleague said loudly across the hall, “Erica, you look so pregnant.” The good Lord helped me reply: “And, you look so single.”
I’ve been thinking about why special events often bring out the worst in people because by the end of this month, my two oldest children will be married. When my first got married this past June — a fact that I shared with relative strangers if we engaged in conversation — I had several people ask me: “Do you like him?” I looked puzzled. You couldn’t have just asked me if I like my son-in-law. I love him, but if I didn’t would I tell you, a person I met only 10 minutes ago? Maybe I’m just weird, but I try not to share challenging family dynamics with people I hardly know.
And then there was the acquaintance from shul who heard my son got engaged and came over to wish me well. “How are you going to pay for two weddings?” he asked in passing. I was so stunned that after I put my eyeballs back in my head, I weakly replied, “That’s a great question” and walked away. When I shared this at home, my husband felt it would be better to just state the truth, “No problem. My husband works for the federal government, and I’m in Jewish education.” My daughter was sharper: “We’re doing that by keeping the numbers low. You’re not invited.”
“You shall not oppress one another, but fear your Lord because I am the Lord your God,” says Leviticus 25:17. The Talmud’s sages unpacked this verse as the biblical prohibition of oppressing someone with words: reminding another of a personal change that may bring them pain, attributing reasons for someone else’s suffering or using language that carries emotional barbs for another. Attaching the prohibition to fear God suggests that no one but God knows the intention you have when you use words to hurt. Only you can know if it’s intentional or a stupid slip. Just remember that a Divine Presence hovers over. There are consequences, even when we think no one will know. We always answer to someone.
New situations can bring out strange responses as everyone adjusts to new realities. For those who struggle with language, the impulse to say something, anything, can come out as an unfiltered sleight or odd incursion into the deepest areas of another’s personal life.
So here’s what people in crisis and happiness want to hear from you: heart-warming stories or any of these expressions. I am here for you. I am sorry. I am so happy for you. I am thinking of you. I care about you. I share your joy. I can’t imagine what you are going through. I love you.
Silence also works really well.
[Erica Brown’s column appears the first week of the month.]
Enjoy the read,
Gary Rosenblatt
P.S. Our website is always there for you with breaking news and exclusive videos, blogs, opinion and advice columns, and more. Check it out.
http://www.thejewishweek.com/?utm_source=November+4%2C+2015+WEDNESDAY+newsletter&utm_campaign=JWMG+11%2F4%2F15&utm_medium=email
Gary Rosenblatt
P.S. Our website is always there for you with breaking news and exclusive videos, blogs, opinion and advice columns, and more. Check it out.
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Gary Rosenblatt
BETWEEN THE LINES
Gary Rosenblatt
Dennis Ross Urges U.S. To Get Real On Mideast Life
The Arab states are more concerned about U.S. support for their own governments than Washington’s relationship with Jerusalem.
Gary Rosenblatt
Editor And Publisher
Gary Rosenblatt"Insanity," it is said, “is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Former Ambassador Dennis Ross, who helped shape U.S. foreign policy in the Mideast for nearly 30 years, has written an important book that applies the “insanity” thesis to relations between Washington and Jerusalem for more than six decades. It offers a thorough catalogue of examples of tensions, based in part on American presidents failing to learn obvious lessons in Mideast truths.
The book, “Doomed To Success: The U.S.-Israel Relationship From Truman to Obama” (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux), is a must-read for those who seek a deeper understanding of the complex, love-hate dance between successive U.S. and Israeli leaders. But Ross has set a higher goal for his target audience. He told me in an interview this week that the primary reason for writing the book is to provide the next president, and his or her senior advisers, “an understanding of some of the key assumptions embedded” in American Mideast policy that “go back decades” and “are not rooted in reality.”
Two theories that Ross focuses on in his book are that a close U.S. relationship with Israel has a negative impact on dealing with the Arab states, and that unless and until the Israel-Palestinian conflict is solved, there is little the U.S. can accomplish in the region. He cites numerous examples to show that these assumptions persist but have been proven wrong time after time. The Arab states, he writes, are more concerned about U.S. support for their own governments than Washington’s relationship with Jerusalem.
Israel frequently is viewed by those in the White House as more liability than asset — the chapter on the Obama administration is the longest in the book — and according to Ross, “our approach too often has missed the mark,” with U.S. policy makers failing to understand “the fundamental realities in the region,” and seemingly “unwilling or incapable of learning lessons.”
Ross calls out Susan Rice for being in the “liability” camp in her role as national security adviser under Obama. Indeed, news stories on the publication of “Doomed To Success” focused on Ross’ criticism of Rice as symbolic of those in the administration wary of Israel. In internal discussions, he wrote, she “nearly always took the view that the Israelis were hurting us and never took our needs into account.”
As for her boss, the president, Ross offers a more nuanced take, asserting that Obama cares deeply about the survival of the Jewish state but that his “distancing from Israel was deliberate and tied to the desire to reach out to the Muslims.” He writes that while Obama’s military and strategic support for Israel has been unprecedented, his “instinct to see the Palestinians as the victims in the conflict remained too strong” to allow for an “uncritical embrace” of Israel.
Ross describes a number of occasions when he disagreed with Obama, most notably over the president’s insistence on a settlement freeze in 2009, his unwillingness to visit Israel immediately after his Cairo speech that year, his insistence on characterizing Israeli settlements as illegal (not just unhelpful), and, in general, his pressuring Israel far more than the Palestinians on peace negotiations, openly criticizing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu while giving Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas a pass.
He also notes that Israel hurts its cause by failing to “share its bottom line” with administrations on how far it would go on concessions to the Palestinians. The Israelis fear that to do so would lead them to being pushed for more. But Ross believes candor increases trust, and the U.S. should assure Jerusalem that it would honor Israel’s security red lines. He also urges Jerusalem to recognize and address “alarm bells” in the demographic trends in America showing declining numbers of young people and minorities who understand or support Jerusalem’s views.
On the Iran nuclear deal, Ross told me that the country’s supreme leader is certain to test the U.S. once sanctions have been removed, and that the U.S. should form a “joint consultative committee with Israel on implementation” and make certain that Tehran understands “there will be a price to pay” for violations. He favors making the consequences clear to Iran.
No one has more solid credentials than Ross in writing on U.S.-Israel relations. He has helped make Mideast policy under four presidents, Republicans and Democrats, most recently with the National Security Council under President Obama as special assistant to the president on the Mideast, Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, Pakistan and South Asia. He helped the Israelis and Palestinians reach interim agreements during the Clinton years, when he was special Mideast coordinator. He also played a key role in the Israel-Jordan peace agreement and took part in talks between Israel and Syria.
With his tall good looks, calm demeanor and crisp articulation of his views, Ross, 66, has been an effective diplomat. He attributes his successes to building trust with key figures of authority in the Mideast by maintaining personal relationships with them and speaking forthrightly.
“I was always straight with them,” he said of both Arab and Israeli leaders, “and when there was a problem to be solved, they came to me.”
Not surprisingly, though, given his Jewish identity and the nature of his work, he has been criticized both as being too pro-Israel and as a self-hating Jew for his diplomatic efforts. All part of the job, was his attitude, especially regarding occasional charges in the Arab media that Ross favored Israel. But he spoke with a hint of irritation in recalling two “ugly” media leaks, no doubt from administration sources, that raised the specter of dual loyalty against him. Both, he noted, took place during the Obama years. The first, in 2010, was a report in Politico that accused Ross of appearing to be “far more sensitive to [Prime Minister] Netanyahu’s coalition politics than to U.S. interests.” Ross noted with satisfaction that Denis McDonough, the president’s chief of staff, issued a vigorous denial of the report the next day.
In May 2011, The New York Times published a front-page story suggesting that Ross, “by almost all accounts … Israel’s friend in the White House,” was a stumbling block to Obama’s plan to essentially make the pre-1967 borders the basis for a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians.
The leak, Ross said, “clearly was designed to undercut me for opposing the president.” And he scoffed at the suggestion that his views would trump those of the head of state.
Ross said that his years of experience in dealing with Mideast leaders gave him an advantage. “You get to read them and know when they are lying or telling the truth.”
In his many dealings with Yasir Arafat, did he ever feel the leader of the PLO was trustworthy? “No,” Ross said after a brief pause, citing a remark a colleague had made of Arafat: “If someone is ready to die for his cause, wouldn’t he lie for it?”
The cumulative effect of reading Ross’ 400-page book is that his insider experience reveals, over and over again, how successive presidents and their key advisers have failed to recognize or accept the benefits of openly embracing Israel for its role as a strong democratic ally in an increasingly troubled region. And that to do so would enhance, not hurt, the possibilities for Mideast peace. Still, as Ross implies in his book’s ironic title, given the shared values and overall goals of Washington and Jerusalem, there is reason to believe that efforts to strengthen these ties would result in a positive outcome.
gary@jewishweek.orgRead More
Musings
MUSINGS
Rabbi David Wolpe
The Israel Paradox
The Israel Paradox
Rabbi David Wolpe
Rabbi David WolpeHere is the secret that Israelis know: Life in Israel is both more normal and less normal than the world assumes.
Let’s start with more normal. Walking on the streets of Jerusalem — or Beersheva, or Eilat, or Tel Aviv, or Haifa — one feels safe. Each time I visit people ask if I’m worried. When I answer that I feel no more nervous here than on the streets of Los Angeles, or New York, or Miami, people think I’m exaggerating. But it is absolutely true. Life in Israel feels, well, like life.
At the same time, Israeli existence is less normal than people think. The streets may be safe but the corridors of history are perilous. This tiny nation is surrounded by implacable enemies, armed with ideology and weaponry and money. The United States, with Canada, Mexico and two oceans, or Europe, where after centuries of fighting the enmity is reduced to a vague cultural dislike, cannot imagine what it is to tread water in a sea of hostility.
Part of no group of nations, in a region that is melting down, Israel still has a life expectancy and happiness level that exceeds most of the developed nations of the world. Sound like a paradox? Welcome to Israel.
[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
For those with balky legs or hips_ car travel in the American West (above_ the mountains of Utah) is the perfect trip. Wikimedi
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Travel Writer
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Israel News
A ‘Leviathan’ Of A Controversy
Israel’s natural gas saga developing some heated plot lines.
Joshua Mitnick
Contributing Editor
Monopoly in the making? One of Israel’s offshore natural gas fields. Getty Images
Tel Aviv — When energy exploration companies announced the discovery of a massive offshore natural gas reserve 80 miles from Haifa, Israelis celebrated the find as a boon to the local economy that would lower prices, fill government coffers and ensure the country’s energy security for decades to come.
Five years later, what to do with the reserves has become an ongoing political and regulatory mess for the government.
The Leviathan gas field is at the center of a years-long dispute in which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is accused by political critics of pushing an energy deal that leaves the Israeli public at the mercy of a U.S.-Israeli energy cartel with the ability to dictate a premium on their electricity bills for years to come.
The gas consortium that owns the rights to the field — led by Houston-based exploration company Noble Energy and the Delek Group — is complaining that Israel’s government has created a regulatory mess by changing the terms of the deal, letting lucrative export deals pass it by, scaring off new investors and boosting risks that the massive field will never be tapped. They say that the government stands to pocket $100 billion over the next 20 years from gas royalties.
But critics say that Netanyahu is ignoring the warnings of government regulators and instead ramming through a deal worth billions of dollars that hands over a public resource to Israel business tycoon Yitzhak Tshuva, the owner of the Delek energy group, and the exploration company Noble Energy.
“There’s no potential for competition in the gas framework; there’s no assurance for effective long-term price controls,” David Gilo, an antitrust commissioner who resigned several months ago over the gas deal, said in a speech at a business conference last week. “The environment and competition have come out on the bottom in this agreement.”
The latest uproar came this week when Israel’s economic minister, Aryeh Deri, resigned rather than override an Israeli antitrust commissioner’s ruling that the proposed arrangement would establish a monopoly without giving the government enough price oversight.
After giving Deri’s remaining government ministries extra budgets as compensation, Netanyahu, who now has taken over as economic minister, will invoke a never-before-used legal clause allowing the cabinet to veto the antitrust commissioner for reason of national security. Opposition politicians have appealed to the attorney general to see if the move is kosher.
Deri, who pledged to represent Israel’s “transparent” lower class during the election, is not the only populist politician to stand aside. Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon, who also pledged to represent the interests of the middle and working class during the election and weigh in on the gas deal, announced earlier this year that he had a conflict of interest and could not be involved.
“This is a sordid maneuver and an irrational and dubious move that will cost the citizens of Israel, according to international estimates, billions of shekels,” wrote Shelly Yachimovich of the opposition Labor Party on her Facebook page.
Using the slogan “stop the gas theft,” protest organizers are planning demonstrations this weekend in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Beersheva.
The controversy over the so-called “gas framework” has kicked up charges of crony capitalism from social activists and economic experts like the Finance Ministry’s former accountant general. The charges recall the slogans of Israel’s socioeconomic protests four years ago that took over Tel Aviv’s main boulevard and brought hundreds of thousands into the streets.
“The bottom line is that Israel has become the country with the highest housing prices in the West, the most expensive cars in the West, the most expensive food, and now gas,” said Yaron Zelicha, the former accountant general in the Finance Ministry.
With Noble threatening to take action to protect its stake in the project in case the gas framework falters, the prime minister has warned that approval is urgent and that Israel’s national security could be hurt by foot dragging. Netanyahu predicted that Israel’s natural gas resources will remain untapped and Israel’s government will forfeit tax proceeds from lucrative export contracts as energy companies look to countries like Iran for energy supply.
“If the gas framework doesn’t advance, industry and the entire economy will suffer a serious blow,” said Energy and Infrastructure Minister Yuval Steinitz, a close ally of the prime minister at a business conference last week sponsored by Haaretz. “Anyone who has eyes in his head, anyone who is rational and doesn’t get worked up must do their utmost to ensure that the gas framework is approved after three years of delays and serious damage.”
Private lobbyists and U.S. Congress members have even come to Israel to lobby Israel’s government on behalf of Noble Energy. Last year, Australian energy company Woodside cancelled a deal to come into Leviathan as a leading investor.
An official close to the energy consortium argued that the price that it will charge Israeli customers will be in line with global rates for natural gas. Opponents charge it will be twice as expensive. The official complained that Israeli officials upped requirements for government royalties, clamped tighter limits on lucrative exports, and required divestment of holdings in other Israeli offshore wells. The official dismissed the public protest against the gas deal as a marginal movement of leftists and “Marxists,” boosted by the liberal “Tel Aviv-based” media.
“From the minute of the discovery, it’s been a regulatory roller coaster. Every year they change the rules. You can’t invest and plan if you are not sure what the price is,” said the official. “No one will come here if there are no basic ground rules. Israel has got a very bad reputation in the world, especially in the gas world.”
A string of gas discoveries in Israel’s territorial waters since 2000 spurred first-ever interest in the country’s energy industry: in 2009 the Tamar field of 7.9 trillion cubic feet was discovered. Then came Leviathan with 16 trillion cubic feet. Several years later Crocodile” was discovered with 1.1 trillion cubic feet. Only Tamar is currently supplying Israel’s energy network.
The size of the gas finds made Israel the toast of the energy world and spurred expectations that the country would eventually reach a deal to export it to Europe through Turkey. In recent years, Israel signed initial deals for modest exports to Jordan and Egypt. But the exports looked less of a sure thing after a gas field bigger than Leviathan was discovered in August off the coast of Egypt — raising the potential for competition.
The energy saga is expected to drag on for the near future as the Knesset’s Economics Committee is planning to hold public hearings on the gas agreement, despite having no power to block the deal.
The gas opponents are expected to submit a petition to the Supreme Court against the deal, but political analysts and legal experts say the high court is unlikely to intervene. Despite years of political protests and wrangling over legislation, experts say that eventually the prime minister will push it through.
“The gas framework is very good for the Israeli economy — the price is not too costly,” said Avi Weiss, an economics professor at Bar-Ilan University and director of the Taub Center. “All of the cries of disaster are unreasonable. The disaster would be to not do it.”
editor@Jewishweek.orgRead More
New York
Was This Torah Rescued From Kristallnacht?
The scroll reflects the murky nexus of Jewish history and claims of Holocaust provenance.
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
The late Queens Rabbi Israel Mowshowitz played key role in welcoming the Berlin Torah scroll.
It stands about two feet tall, is about 200 years old and comes in a fading green velvet cover. Many people will sing with it and dance with it on Monday night — and likely raise questions about its murky past.
Call it a Torah scroll whose history is a mystery.
During a Kristallnacht commemoration ceremony Nov. 9 at the Hewlett-East Rockaway Jewish Centre, members will dedicate a sefer Torah that was thought to be buried in Germany during World War II and then brought to the United States. During the next two weeks, two boys — Jesse Herrnson, son of Lisa and Rabbi Lev Herrnson; and Adam Polokoff, son of Deborah and Stuart Polokoff — whose East Rockaway families were responsible for the scroll’s return to use in synagogue services, will chant from it during their bar mitzvahs at the congregation.
The families will then take the scroll to Israel early next year for the boys’ symbolic joint bar mitzvah atop Masada, after which it will return here, to the International Synagogue at JFK Airport, its home for much of the last few decades.
The narrative of the scroll, honored for both its spiritual value and historical significance, is a matter of conjecture among members of the Long Island congregation. The main plot points, skeletal as they are and spread by oral history — the scroll is not a part of any Torah registry — are as follows:
It was written somewhere in Germany in the early 19th century; was presented as a gift to a synagogue in a German village by a bridegroom in 1846; remained in that synagogue until the Nazis came; was buried near the village’s synagogue a few days before Kristallnacht 77 years ago next week; was exhumed after the war by a member of the Jewish community who had survived the Shoah; was carried here by plane; and somehow came into the possession of the International Synagogue.
No one at either the International Synagogue or the Hewlett-East Rockaway congregation knows any more about the scroll or who brought it from Germany to the U.S. But someone, it turns out, does, or at least thinks she does.
Rabbi Debra Orenstein, spiritual leader of Congregation B’nai Israel in Emerson, N.J., said the scroll was given in the early 1950s to her grandfather, Rabbi Israel Mowshowitz, longtime pulpit rabbi of the Hillcrest Jewish Center in Queens and a founder, in 1958, of the International Synagogue. Rabbi Mowshowitz, a close friend of the late Gov. Mario Cuomo, died in 1992.
Rabbi Orenstein said she does not know the identity of the survivor who gave her grandfather the scroll. But there are other details of the story she claims to know.
Rabbi Mowshowitz, she said, made a practice of collecting Torah scrolls and having them restored for the International Synagogue and for his own congregation. One day, probably in the 1960s, he took possession of a group of six scrolls, one of which reportedly had been buried in a Jewish cemetery in Berlin.
Rabbi Mowshowitz arranged for that scroll to be repaired; he wanted it to be rededicated at the Hillcrest Jewish Center in a ceremony for all six scrolls.
“He wanted a Holocaust survivor to carry the Holocaust Torah” in the ceremony, Rabbi Orenstein said. He called a survivor who was a member of his congregation, “a Mr. Safirstein,” she recalled. Rabbi Mowshowitz told Markus Safirstein the story of the scroll, and said, “It would be a great honor if you, as a survivor, would carry it.
“Mr. Safirstein hung up on him,” Rabbi Orenstein said.
Fearing that he had offended Safirstein, bringing up painful wartime memories, Rabbi Mowshowitz drove right over to Safirstein’s house and apologized.
“Mr. Safirstein was crying,” Rabbi Orenstein said, based on the recollections she has heard from family members.
Safirstein told Rabbi Mowshowitz that his family in Berlin had lived next door to the chief of police, and his father was on good terms with the officer. The day before Kristallnacht, the chief of police told Safirstein’s father that “something is going to happen. Do whatever you can to protect yourselves or your possessions.”
Safirstein and his father took a scroll from the synagogue where they worshipped. “I buried it with my father,” Safirstein told Rabbi Mowshowitz. “Now the Torah has found me.”
Safirstein had no idea what had happened to the scroll since 1938. “It was a total surprise that someone else found it,” Rabbi Orenstein said, adding that “he did carry it” in the rededication ceremony.
Safirstein’s daughter, Judy Brodsky, who lives in Rockland County, heard a slightly different version of the scroll’s story from her father, who died eight years ago at 87.
She says he told her that he had buried the scroll, alone, a few days after Kristallnacht, taking it by bicycle to the cemetery, hiding it in a raincoat. He survived Auschwitz; his parents and two brothers perished there.
After the war he came to the U.S., where he married his teenage sweetheart, Margot, who had survived the war in England as a member of the Kindertransport. Margot, at 93, still lives in Riverdale.
Safirstein could not confirm that the scroll he carried in the synagogue ceremony was the same one he had buried in Berlin, Brodsky said. “I don’t know how many Torahs were in cemeteries in Berlin.”
Then again, she said, he couldn’t prove it wasn’t the same scroll.
No one can definitively prove the identity of the Torah in question, which was used at the Hillcrest Jewish Center for several years, was donated to the International Synagogue, went into storage and apparently became again posul, unfit for use, forgotten about.
Until the East Rockaway congregation decided to restore it again.
The Long Island synagogue’s upcoming Kristallnacht event at which the scroll will be dedicated, following a fundraising effort for its restoration, points both to the growing interest in obtaining and repairing Torahs that had survived the Holocaust, and to the difficulty in determining any scroll’s provenance.
A scroll that purportedly survived the Final Solution acquires a special aura, and consequently greater financial value than one with a more prosaic provenance, which can lead to fraud.
The most-noted recent case of misrepresentation of a Torah scroll’s background centered around Rabbi Menachem Youles, the owner of a Jewish bookstore in Wheaton, Md., who told tales of rescuing scrolls from the sites of Nazi concentration camps and billed himself as “the Jewish Indiana Jones,” but confessed in 2012 that he had lied about his putative adventures to increase the profits from the items’ sales that he pocketed through his Save a Torah nonprofit organization. Pleading guilty to mail fraud and wire fraud, he was sentenced to four years in federal prison.
For the people who supported the German scroll’s restoration, their motivation was purely theological and altruistic. “We know it’s a Holocaust survivor” who delivered the Torah, said Rabbi Bennett Rackman, who served as chaplain at the International Synagogue from 2001 to 2015.
Both Manny Weiss, who has served as the International Synagogue’s president for a dozen years, and Joel Zeitlin, a retired customs broker at JFK Airport and member of the International Synagogue’s board who brought the scroll to the attention of members of the Long Island congregation, told the same story about the scroll. Their story featured its burial on the eve of Kristallnacht.
But Michael Berenbaum, a prominent Holocaust historian and author, said that while the scroll likely emerged from Nazi Germany, he disputes some parts of its accepted chronology.
“It is not plausible that it was buried [a few days] before Kristallnacht,” Berenbaum said. The violence of Kristallnacht took place immediately after the assassination in Paris of Ernst vom Rath, a German embassy official, by Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old Polish Jew whose family was expelled from Germany, which would have ruled out prior warning of the pogrom. “Nobody knew about it” in advance.
On Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass on Nov. 9-10, 1938, 267 synagogues in Germany and annexed Austria were destroyed, hundreds of Jewish businesses were ransacked and thousands of Jewish men were arrested in an orchestrated pogrom; the outside world refused to stand up for the endangered Jews. Kristallnacht is widely considered the rehearsal for the Holocaust.
Could the scroll have been buried in the days after Kristallnacht, or taken into someone’s home as a precaution against further damage? Could it have been brought to the U.S. by a Holocaust survivor?
“That’s 100 percent possible,” Berenbaum said. “There are plenty of cases like this.”
The details don’t reduce the scroll’s symbolism as a holy artifact with Holocaust roots.
“Most people don’t know where their sefer Torah comes from,” said Daniel Wigodsky, the Torah scribe who repaired the International Synagogue scroll. “That’s a common story.”
Unlike artists, Torah scribes don’t sign or date their scrolls; it’s anonymous work.
The writing style and the deterioration of the scroll lend credence to the oral history that surrounds it, said Rabbi Wigodsky. A scribe who lives in White Plains and has repaired “hundreds” of scrolls over the last 12 years, he inspected it at the International Synagogue when contacted by Rabbi Herrnson a few years ago; its writing style was consistent with the type of sifrei Torah written in Germany or Czechoslovakia at least 150 years ago, he said. “It had a lot of wrinkles that were damaging letters.”
The JFK Synagogue Torah is a minority in the world of scrolls that survived the Shoah. There is no official count of the number of sifrei Torah that existed before World War II in Germany and its allied and occupied lands (most estimates put the figure in the tens of thousands) and how many emerged from the war intact or in various stages of disrepair. Most remained in their home countries, the property of their respective Jewish communities or of the national or local governments.
Most of the so-called Holocaust Torahs that traveled in subsequent years to the United States or other Western nations did so under the aegis of the Czech Torah Project of Westminster Synagogue in London. In the early 1960s, the London synagogue purchased some 1,500 scrolls from the Czechoslovakian government, ones that had belonged to synagogues in the provinces of Bohemia and Moravia. The scrolls, some of them as old as 250 years, had been collected and catalogued under Nazi watch during the war, became the property of the communist government after the war and were stored in Prague.
Employing a chasidic scribe from Israel, and other scribes after he retired, Westminster Synagogue had more than 1,000 Torahs repaired. Then they were "allocated on Permanent Loan" to congregations and other Jewish institutions around the world that wanted to house such a historic artifact; some scrolls that were beyond repair went to Jewish institutions to be put on display.
Several scrolls from the Czech Torah Project are now located in the Greater New York area.
A smaller number of Holocaust Torahs left post-war Europe in private hands — like those of the German Jew who purportedly came to Idlewild Airport, as JFK Airport was known in the early 1950s, or Satmar chasidim from Europe who immigrated to this country with scrolls they gave to their new synagogues.
Dealing in stolen Torah scrolls has become big business; many are stolen each year, and then sold for tens of thousands of dollars. Since the scrolls bear no readily apparent identifying marks — an individual Torah can rarely be identified by the untrained eye — an international Torah registry program (universaltorahregistry.org), developed by the Jewish Community Relations Council here, keeps a computerized databank of thousands of scrolls that feature a code of microperforations invisible to the naked eye.
The registry of “close to 10,000” scrolls “gives Torah owners the ability to put halachically approved IDs on Torahs,” said David Pollock, associate executive director of JCRC, who coordinated the development of the registry’s innovative technology. “Because we were founded in 1982, our registration records now span generations. Several times a month owners contact the UTR for help in establishing the provenance of their Torah, and our records often can help to settle disputes.”
The German scroll, which has an uncertain past, has a more certain future, as the second sefer Torah in the International Synagogue. The arc of its history will continue in the synagogue’s ark, and will be welcomed in a formal ceremony “as soon as we can,” said Rabbi Ari Korenblitt, the synagogue’s chaplain.
In the meantime, in the days after Kristallnacht, two bar mitzvah boys will hold the scroll in their hands and read from its sacred words, the same words that boys their age read in past decades, in past centuries.
“We are giving life to the scroll,” said Rabbi Herrnson, who serves as chaplain at Mercy Medical Center in Rockville Center, L.I., who researched the scroll’s history and coordinated the restoration effort, which has the support of the Holocaust Memorial & Tolerance Center of Long Island. “We are giving voice to those who died.”
steve@jewishweek.orgRead More
Israel News
Trying To Keep Calm Amid The Chaos
Vulnerability mixed with sweetness in the ‘new normal.’
Gil Troy
Special To The Jewish Week
Gil Troy
I live in Jerusalem but planned to spend this semester in America, launching my new book. But with a wife, four kids, many friends and 8 million targets, Jews and Arabs, in Israel, how can I rest easy away from home? Instead, I am crisscrossing the Atlantic “pond,” acting as if I hold the United Airlines Chair in American History, returning home whenever I can while fulfilling whatever book tour commitments I can.
Typically, I wake in New York or Washington and jog, often traversing once-crime-ridden areas that have become safe. Even if the one constant is change, the vector can go up or down. This reminds us, especially in young dynamic Israel, that things can improve or deteriorate.
Arriving in Jerusalem, I revert to my New Yorker-during-the-1970s-crime-spree mode, scrutinizing passersby, protecting my super-sized 360-degree personal-space bubble. Thinking magically, we improvise delusional dos and don’ts to keep walking through the raindrops. (Of course, statistically, cars remain far more dangerous than terrorists — and New York remains more dangerous than Jerusalem).
Jerusalem’s “new normal” involves staring at men’s midsections. Those packing pistols or clutching iPhones are safe. Then, no matter how liberal you are, no matter how much you cherish coexistence, you examine passing faces and “racially profile” — although it’s more a national and psychological assessment.
This is the Jerusalemite’s Dilemma: how to keep this diverse, safe, multicultural city friendly when menaced by murderers from one particular group? Political correctness cannot trump safety, but how can we prevent terrorists from spreading the cancer of mistrust that breeds more terrorism?
And what do we tell our children? My 13-year-old daughter has now had the experience of being in a classroom that turned hysterical when word spread that Palestinian murderers attacked the bus a dozen of her classmates took that morning, killing three people. My 15-year-old son has now had the experience of hearing warnings that a terrorist was caught trying to enter the mall that houses the gym where he works out. Our family is debating how bad does it get before you send the dog to a friend’s moshav so we don’t have to walk him at night? What do we teach our kids about tolerance when many on the other side cheer these crimes and sing “Stab, Stab”? How do we explain why our kids and their friends are targeted during the most innocent activities?
Ultimately, we trust our resilience to save us. Surprisingly, even armed with my pepper spray in the pocket of my jogging shorts, the situation starts feeling normal. Israel’s everyday heroes maintain routines. Initially, I was so conscious of my pepper spray, it felt like I was carrying around a fire hydrant. A few days later, I had so adjusted, I forgot I had it and got busted at airport security. (I smiled apologetically, saying, “Ani Yerushalmi,” “I am a Jerusalemite.” The security person smiled back — but confiscated it).
Characteristically, resisting terrorism brings out a remarkable Sabra sweetness beneath Israelis’ occasionally prickly exterior. People are looking out for one another, boker tov-ing and erev tov-ing frequently and warmly, as “good morning,” “good evening” become code words for “I’m no threat.” We’re all acting like concerned parents, being extra vigilant when kids cross in front of our cars, offering more people rides, looking out for one another. We’re also hugging our kids more tightly, more frequently, appreciating our health and the passing of another boring day more consciously, living life a bit more intensely.
That yearning for extra mass-parenting is widespread. I asked an Arab mechanic friend whose garage is next door to my daughter’s ballet studio to keep an extra eye on all the girls. His response: “Gilly, tell them that here, I’m like their abba.”
Israelis’ sweet vulnerability makes us deeply grateful for kind gestures from abroad. When I suggested on Facebook that Israel’s supporters order takeout from now-empty Jerusalem restaurants to deliver to now-overworked police officers and border police, the enthusiastic response overwhelmed me. (I’m not yet desperate enough to ask people to buy my book as a solidarity gesture, given my compressed time in America, but more desperate times might call for more desperate self-promotions.) All these campaigns and concerned e-mails from friends help tremendously. On the other hand, the silences, the finger pointing against us (although we’ve been targeted), and the radical Jews using this moment to denounce Israel, hurt disproportionately.
As we hunker down in our homes, I still cherish the ideal of the normalized Jerusalem I experienced just last month. That’s when the Abu Tor multiplex cinema opened, linking our neighborhood with an Arab neighborhood, luring us all with Hollywood trash.
My first jog back home in Jerusalem, the only two Arabs I encountered were a young man and a woman with a hijab, necking in Yemin Moshe park, against the Old City’s stunning backdrop. Behind them was a sculpture I have passed hundreds of times and never noticed. The sculpture’s gold, reflective metal had these beautiful, sensual curves paralleling this intertwined couple’s curves. I marveled at this symbol of peace — then laughed the next day when I jogged passed the same sculpture and discovered that it commemorates the Etzioni Brigade’s fight for the Old City in 1948.
Jerusalem dances constantly between the past and the present, between peace and war, between the normal and the exceptional. I challenge the small minority of murderous Arab neighbors to describe what kind of city they want. And I applaud the rest of us for taking exceptional efforts to keep the peace, staying sane and normal.
Gil Troy is the author of The Age of Clinton: America in the 1990s, just published by Thomas Dunne Books of St. Martin’s Press. A professor of history at McGill University, he is a visiting scholar this fall at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.Read More
New York
RCA Bans Female Rabbis, Again; Agudath Goes Further
Moves come in wake of developments in Israel.
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
Yeshivat Maharat awards smicha to its graduates in June 2015. Courtesy of Yeshivat MaharatThe Rabbinical Council of America, the largest group of Orthodox rabbis, reaffirmed its position against the ordination of women in a resolution issued last Friday that reiterated nearly identical statements made in 2010 and 2013.
“New institutions in Israel have been ordaining women, and as part of the larger community we felt the need to speak out,” RCA executive vice president Mark Dratch told The Jewish Week.
He pointed to the recent actions of Rabbi Herzl Hefter, founder and Rosh Beit Midrash Har’el in Jerusalem, and Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, founding chief rabbi of Efrat, two prominent Orthodox rabbis who recently ordained women.
The reiteration of the RCA’s position has exposed the widening rift within the Orthodox community on the issue of women rabbis.
Following the RCA’s statement, Agudath Israel of America’s high rabbinical court released a kol koreh, or proclamation, Monday pronouncing “Open Orthodoxy” no longer a part of Orthodoxy and dismissing rabbinic ordination within that unofficial branch as meaningless. The rabbinic court specified the leadership and affiliates of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah for men, Yeshivat Maharat for women, and the International Rabbinic Fellowship, a fellowship of more than 200 Modern Orthodox clergy that functions as an alternative to the RCA. (Yesterday, the IRF released a statement reaffirming support for women’s growing participation in spiritual leadership and communal institutions.)
“They are no different than any other dissident movements throughout our history, that have rejected basic tenets,” the proclamation reads. It is signed by several leading charedi rabbis, including Rabbi Aryeh Kotler, the rosh yeshiva of Beth Medrash Gavoha in Lakewood, N.J., one of the largest yeshivas in the world, and Rabbi Dovid Feinstein, son of the late and widely regarded Torah scholar Rabbi Moshe Feinstein. Though the proclamation was written originally in Hebrew, it was published alongside an English translation.
Asked why his organization issued the resolution at this time, Rabbi Avi Shafran, a spokesman for Agudath Israel, said “there was no immediate stimulus, only the cumulative misrepresentation of the new movement [as Orthodox].”
Rabbi Avi Weiss, the key figure in “Open Orthodoxy” as founder of Yeshiva Chovevei Torah and Yeshivat Maharat, both in Riverdale, and co-founder of the IRJ, wrote this week that “the time has come” to allow women’s ordination in the Modern Orthodox movement. In an Opinion piece (see page 24) he asserted that “the debate concerning women’s ordination is not halachic but rather sociological.”
In sociological terms, Israel has been at the forefront of liberalizing Orthodoxy. A Jerusalem group, Shira Chadashah (A New Song), founded the partnership minyan, later duplicated here, where women are permitted to lead certain parts of the prayer service. And women spiritual leaders have been appointed with less attention.
Rabbi Jeffrey Fox, rosh yeshiva of Yeshivat Maharat, has referred to the mutual influence between Israel and America as “cross pollination.”
“The reality of women’s leadership in America mirrors what happens in Israel,” he told The Jewish Week after Rabbi Riskin, former spiritual leader of Lincoln Square Synagogue, named Jennie Rosenfeld the first female spiritual leader in Efrat. “Progress there means progress here.”
The RCA statement praised the increase in women’s Torah study in recent years and cited what the group considers “appropriate” professional opportunities for learned women. These include taking on the roles of yoatzot halacha (advisers on Jewish law) and community scholars, and teaching at Yeshiva University’s Graduate Program for Women in Advanced Talmudic Study and as non-rabbinic school teachers. “So long as no rabbinic or ordained title such as ‘maharat’ is used in these positions, and so long as there is no implication of ordination or a rabbinic status, this resolution is inapplicable,” the resolution concludes.
Maharat is an acronym meaning female spiritual, legal and Torah leader.
But the resolution stated that members may not ordain women under a title other than rabbi, put a woman in a rabbinic position or give a female teacher of Jewish studies a title implying rabbinic ordination.
In response to the resolution, the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance (JOFA) circulated an online petition entitled “We Support Women in Orthodox Leadership Roles.” They received more than 1,000 signatures in the first 24 hours. Using the hashtag “Humans of JOFA,” the organization also began a campaign featuring prominent Orthodox voices in support of leadership roles for women.
“We believe individual communities and all of Klal Yisrael can only benefit from the inclusion of the voices and ideas of highly trained and committed women in positions of communal authority,” the petition reads.
The IRF, in a nuanced statement, called on communities and their rabbinic leaders to discuss the issue “in an open and reflective manner.” It asserted that “observant and committed Orthodox women who are learned, trained and competent should have every opportunity to fully serve the Jewish community” as teachers, pastoral counselors, spiritual preachers and guides as well as presidents of synagogues.
The resolutions released by the RCA in 2010 and 2013 were responding to the founding of Yeshivat Maharat, and the first ordination of its graduates, respectively.
Though the resolution was one of four annual resolutions voted on by RCA members over the past month — the other three regarded BDS, racism and the agunah crisis — it was the only one to be featured as “New and Noteworthy” on the RCA’s homepage and mass e-mailed to RCA affiliates. (The other three are posted on the RCA's website.) It was also the only resolution of the four to be proposed directly by the RCA membership, as opposed to by the resolutions committee, Rabbi Dratch noted.
Hannah@jewishweek.orgRead More
The Jewish Week
BETWEEN THE LINES
Gary Rosenblatt
Dennis Ross Urges U.S. To Get Real On Mideast Life
The Arab states are more concerned about U.S. support for their own governments than Washington’s relationship with Jerusalem.
Gary Rosenblatt
Editor And Publisher
Gary Rosenblatt"Insanity," it is said, “is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Former Ambassador Dennis Ross, who helped shape U.S. foreign policy in the Mideast for nearly 30 years, has written an important book that applies the “insanity” thesis to relations between Washington and Jerusalem for more than six decades. It offers a thorough catalogue of examples of tensions, based in part on American presidents failing to learn obvious lessons in Mideast truths.
The book, “Doomed To Success: The U.S.-Israel Relationship From Truman to Obama” (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux), is a must-read for those who seek a deeper understanding of the complex, love-hate dance between successive U.S. and Israeli leaders. But Ross has set a higher goal for his target audience. He told me in an interview this week that the primary reason for writing the book is to provide the next president, and his or her senior advisers, “an understanding of some of the key assumptions embedded” in American Mideast policy that “go back decades” and “are not rooted in reality.”
Two theories that Ross focuses on in his book are that a close U.S. relationship with Israel has a negative impact on dealing with the Arab states, and that unless and until the Israel-Palestinian conflict is solved, there is little the U.S. can accomplish in the region. He cites numerous examples to show that these assumptions persist but have been proven wrong time after time. The Arab states, he writes, are more concerned about U.S. support for their own governments than Washington’s relationship with Jerusalem.
Israel frequently is viewed by those in the White House as more liability than asset — the chapter on the Obama administration is the longest in the book — and according to Ross, “our approach too often has missed the mark,” with U.S. policy makers failing to understand “the fundamental realities in the region,” and seemingly “unwilling or incapable of learning lessons.”
Ross calls out Susan Rice for being in the “liability” camp in her role as national security adviser under Obama. Indeed, news stories on the publication of “Doomed To Success” focused on Ross’ criticism of Rice as symbolic of those in the administration wary of Israel. In internal discussions, he wrote, she “nearly always took the view that the Israelis were hurting us and never took our needs into account.”
As for her boss, the president, Ross offers a more nuanced take, asserting that Obama cares deeply about the survival of the Jewish state but that his “distancing from Israel was deliberate and tied to the desire to reach out to the Muslims.” He writes that while Obama’s military and strategic support for Israel has been unprecedented, his “instinct to see the Palestinians as the victims in the conflict remained too strong” to allow for an “uncritical embrace” of Israel.
Ross describes a number of occasions when he disagreed with Obama, most notably over the president’s insistence on a settlement freeze in 2009, his unwillingness to visit Israel immediately after his Cairo speech that year, his insistence on characterizing Israeli settlements as illegal (not just unhelpful), and, in general, his pressuring Israel far more than the Palestinians on peace negotiations, openly criticizing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu while giving Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas a pass.
He also notes that Israel hurts its cause by failing to “share its bottom line” with administrations on how far it would go on concessions to the Palestinians. The Israelis fear that to do so would lead them to being pushed for more. But Ross believes candor increases trust, and the U.S. should assure Jerusalem that it would honor Israel’s security red lines. He also urges Jerusalem to recognize and address “alarm bells” in the demographic trends in America showing declining numbers of young people and minorities who understand or support Jerusalem’s views.
On the Iran nuclear deal, Ross told me that the country’s supreme leader is certain to test the U.S. once sanctions have been removed, and that the U.S. should form a “joint consultative committee with Israel on implementation” and make certain that Tehran understands “there will be a price to pay” for violations. He favors making the consequences clear to Iran.
No one has more solid credentials than Ross in writing on U.S.-Israel relations. He has helped make Mideast policy under four presidents, Republicans and Democrats, most recently with the National Security Council under President Obama as special assistant to the president on the Mideast, Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, Pakistan and South Asia. He helped the Israelis and Palestinians reach interim agreements during the Clinton years, when he was special Mideast coordinator. He also played a key role in the Israel-Jordan peace agreement and took part in talks between Israel and Syria.
With his tall good looks, calm demeanor and crisp articulation of his views, Ross, 66, has been an effective diplomat. He attributes his successes to building trust with key figures of authority in the Mideast by maintaining personal relationships with them and speaking forthrightly.
“I was always straight with them,” he said of both Arab and Israeli leaders, “and when there was a problem to be solved, they came to me.”
Not surprisingly, though, given his Jewish identity and the nature of his work, he has been criticized both as being too pro-Israel and as a self-hating Jew for his diplomatic efforts. All part of the job, was his attitude, especially regarding occasional charges in the Arab media that Ross favored Israel. But he spoke with a hint of irritation in recalling two “ugly” media leaks, no doubt from administration sources, that raised the specter of dual loyalty against him. Both, he noted, took place during the Obama years. The first, in 2010, was a report in Politico that accused Ross of appearing to be “far more sensitive to [Prime Minister] Netanyahu’s coalition politics than to U.S. interests.” Ross noted with satisfaction that Denis McDonough, the president’s chief of staff, issued a vigorous denial of the report the next day.
In May 2011, The New York Times published a front-page story suggesting that Ross, “by almost all accounts … Israel’s friend in the White House,” was a stumbling block to Obama’s plan to essentially make the pre-1967 borders the basis for a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians.
The leak, Ross said, “clearly was designed to undercut me for opposing the president.” And he scoffed at the suggestion that his views would trump those of the head of state.
Ross said that his years of experience in dealing with Mideast leaders gave him an advantage. “You get to read them and know when they are lying or telling the truth.”
In his many dealings with Yasir Arafat, did he ever feel the leader of the PLO was trustworthy? “No,” Ross said after a brief pause, citing a remark a colleague had made of Arafat: “If someone is ready to die for his cause, wouldn’t he lie for it?”
The cumulative effect of reading Ross’ 400-page book is that his insider experience reveals, over and over again, how successive presidents and their key advisers have failed to recognize or accept the benefits of openly embracing Israel for its role as a strong democratic ally in an increasingly troubled region. And that to do so would enhance, not hurt, the possibilities for Mideast peace. Still, as Ross implies in his book’s ironic title, given the shared values and overall goals of Washington and Jerusalem, there is reason to believe that efforts to strengthen these ties would result in a positive outcome.
gary@jewishweek.orgRead More
MusingsMUSINGS
Rabbi David Wolpe
The Israel Paradox
The Israel Paradox
Rabbi David Wolpe
Rabbi David WolpeHere is the secret that Israelis know: Life in Israel is both more normal and less normal than the world assumes.
Let’s start with more normal. Walking on the streets of Jerusalem — or Beersheva, or Eilat, or Tel Aviv, or Haifa — one feels safe. Each time I visit people ask if I’m worried. When I answer that I feel no more nervous here than on the streets of Los Angeles, or New York, or Miami, people think I’m exaggerating. But it is absolutely true. Life in Israel feels, well, like life.
At the same time, Israeli existence is less normal than people think. The streets may be safe but the corridors of history are perilous. This tiny nation is surrounded by implacable enemies, armed with ideology and weaponry and money. The United States, with Canada, Mexico and two oceans, or Europe, where after centuries of fighting the enmity is reduced to a vague cultural dislike, cannot imagine what it is to tread water in a sea of hostility.
Part of no group of nations, in a region that is melting down, Israel still has a life expectancy and happiness level that exceeds most of the developed nations of the world. Sound like a paradox? Welcome to Israel.
[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
For those with balky legs or hips_ car travel in the American West (above_ the mountains of Utah) is the perfect trip. Wikimedi
TRAVEL
Low Impact Vacations
Hilary Danailova
Travel Writer
Recently, a colleague wrote asking for vacation advice. She and her husband badly needed a getaway, but her prematurely deteriorated hip joint made walking more than two blocks painful, and she would have to wait a year for surgery with her preferred doctor. With her limited mobility, she wondered: What were her options?
As it happens, she came to the right place for advice. Your klutzy correspondent has suffered a series of orthopedic mishaps over the past few years, a scenario that complicates the life of a professional globetrotter.
Note that I said complicates, not terminates. Traveling with limited mobility is not only possible, it can also be enjoyable — and if it isn’t always the way we would prefer to tour, it is almost always more fun than nursing that sore joint at home.
After offering my colleague detailed vacation advice for the mobility-impaired, I thought it worthwhile to share with my readers. Many of us will end up in this situation at some point — a frustrating limbo between the able and the officially, long-term disabled. The latter — and this is not to discount their considerable challenges — can plan travel with a degree of predictability, official accommodation, and investment in mobility-enhancing devices that are not practical for the temporarily sidelined.
Many travelers with limited mobility opt for cruises, letting the boat do the schlepping — and taking advantage of myriad entertainment options just steps from the bedroom. My friend didn’t think she was a cruise person, though, and I agreed; if you prefer to fill your days with as much sightseeing as possible, rather than relax and socialize in between ports of call, a cruise may not scratch that itch.
There are exceptions, such as sails through Alaskan glaciers, the fjords of Norway, or the canals of France — surrounded by scenery at all times, from the comfort of a boat deck. The most visually stimulating cruises take you places you would have a hard time seeing otherwise.
But as I advised my colleague, my personal recommendation for the hobbling-but-still-upright is a road trip. Regular readers will know that I am a huge fan of behind-the-wheel exploration, which allows a degree of freedom, spontaneity and individualized comfort impossible on an organized tour or city itinerary.
My personal strategy was to put my husband behind the wheel and spend all day seeing lots of interesting things by car: countrysides, mountains, pretty villages with compact plazas at their core, coastlines, even urban neighborhoods.
When I traveled last year on an injured ankle, I had him drop me off, park and come to meet me — at the restaurant, the boutique, or wherever else I wanted to get out and explore. Obviously, this strategy works best with a physically fit companion who is willing to do at least some of the driving. In a larger party, the less mobile can take a seat at a café, survey the passing crowd and wait while companions stroll and sightsee.
Coastal drives are particularly fun because you don’t feel you’re compromising by not walking. While you miss a lot in a city by not being able to walk its neighborhoods, the best low-impact vacations are the ones where you see things sitting down (like Big Sur on California’s Pacific Coast Highway) that you probably couldn’t see any other way.
Eating and drinking well is a big emphasis, taking the place of long walks. Atmospheric places to dine and imbibe allow the scenery to stroll by while you sit and watch. Concerts, live shows, sports events, and other seated entertainments can take the place of wearying museums.
On that note, rural areas with lots of natural scenery to explore are obviously ideal. Out in the countryside, you don’t have to feel guilty about not spending time in big, important, joint-wearying museums. Any sights you encounter are probably skippable — or small enough to do in less time than it takes for that hip to give out.
Europe is great for this because the castle-dotted landscapes are stunning, parking is easy in villages, roads are generally good, and weather is usually decent if you’re far enough south. (One drawback: if your driver is over a certain age, often 75, it can be impossible to rent a car abroad.)
Compensate for winter’s shorter days and limited sightseeing by getting an early start and planning memorable dinners. Southern Spain is a great choice, with mild weather and relatively long days even in midwinter.
The Western United States is another obvious spot: Much of this territory is stunningly scenic, visually diverse and rural enough that you don’t feel you’re missing out by not walking. From the spectacular shorelines and mountains of Southern California to the Arizona desert highways and the frontier towns of New Mexico, this region was designed for the car.
And if you fall in love with a walking-friendly town, take notes and plan to come back.
editor@jewishweek.org
Featured on NYBLUEPRINT
The Kosher Cheese Wheels Are Turning
Maya Klausner
Editor
Where there’s a Jewish will, there’s a whey. It’s not the Messiah, but something holy has arrived; and its name is kosher Parmigiano-Reggiano.
Kashrut abiding turophiles will be tickled to learn that the O.P. (original Parmesan) cheese from Italy has recently joined the ranks of kosher fare. The cheese debuted at the Israeli pavilion in the Milan world’s fair, according to Haaretz.
While other versions of kosher traditional Italian grated cheeses have existed, it is not until now that there is an authentic kosher Parmesan that preserves both the integrity of the complex, cheese-making process as well as meets the scrupulous standards of dietary law for observant Jews.
Thanks can be directed to cheese makers, Bertinelli and Casieficio Colla, the former of which unveiled its first cheese wheel at Milan’s Expo 2015.
Boasting a Star of David and the word “kosher” written in Hebrew, the giant wheel was finally cut – officially making the consumption of cheese a religious experience.
The “king of Italian cheeses” earned its regal moniker from its stringent, particular requirements, such as the strict regulations of the cows’ diets, the region it must be produced in and its long ripening period.
“It has been a big challenge: bringing together an accurate culinary Italian tradition and the strict requirements of kashrut, without affecting the quality of the product,” said the company’s CEO, Nicola Bertinelli, at the ceremony in Milan as reported by Haaretz.
Bertinelli will be rolling out roughly 5,000 wheels of the kosher cheese annually.
For those who don’t reside in Italy, fear not – Bertinelli plans to export the Parmesan to the Israeli and North American markets.
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Israel News
A ‘Leviathan’ Of A Controversy
Israel’s natural gas saga developing some heated plot lines.
Joshua Mitnick
Contributing Editor
Monopoly in the making? One of Israel’s offshore natural gas fields. Getty Images
Tel Aviv — When energy exploration companies announced the discovery of a massive offshore natural gas reserve 80 miles from Haifa, Israelis celebrated the find as a boon to the local economy that would lower prices, fill government coffers and ensure the country’s energy security for decades to come.
Five years later, what to do with the reserves has become an ongoing political and regulatory mess for the government.
The Leviathan gas field is at the center of a years-long dispute in which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is accused by political critics of pushing an energy deal that leaves the Israeli public at the mercy of a U.S.-Israeli energy cartel with the ability to dictate a premium on their electricity bills for years to come.
The gas consortium that owns the rights to the field — led by Houston-based exploration company Noble Energy and the Delek Group — is complaining that Israel’s government has created a regulatory mess by changing the terms of the deal, letting lucrative export deals pass it by, scaring off new investors and boosting risks that the massive field will never be tapped. They say that the government stands to pocket $100 billion over the next 20 years from gas royalties.
But critics say that Netanyahu is ignoring the warnings of government regulators and instead ramming through a deal worth billions of dollars that hands over a public resource to Israel business tycoon Yitzhak Tshuva, the owner of the Delek energy group, and the exploration company Noble Energy.
“There’s no potential for competition in the gas framework; there’s no assurance for effective long-term price controls,” David Gilo, an antitrust commissioner who resigned several months ago over the gas deal, said in a speech at a business conference last week. “The environment and competition have come out on the bottom in this agreement.”
The latest uproar came this week when Israel’s economic minister, Aryeh Deri, resigned rather than override an Israeli antitrust commissioner’s ruling that the proposed arrangement would establish a monopoly without giving the government enough price oversight.
After giving Deri’s remaining government ministries extra budgets as compensation, Netanyahu, who now has taken over as economic minister, will invoke a never-before-used legal clause allowing the cabinet to veto the antitrust commissioner for reason of national security. Opposition politicians have appealed to the attorney general to see if the move is kosher.
Deri, who pledged to represent Israel’s “transparent” lower class during the election, is not the only populist politician to stand aside. Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon, who also pledged to represent the interests of the middle and working class during the election and weigh in on the gas deal, announced earlier this year that he had a conflict of interest and could not be involved.
“This is a sordid maneuver and an irrational and dubious move that will cost the citizens of Israel, according to international estimates, billions of shekels,” wrote Shelly Yachimovich of the opposition Labor Party on her Facebook page.
Using the slogan “stop the gas theft,” protest organizers are planning demonstrations this weekend in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Beersheva.
The controversy over the so-called “gas framework” has kicked up charges of crony capitalism from social activists and economic experts like the Finance Ministry’s former accountant general. The charges recall the slogans of Israel’s socioeconomic protests four years ago that took over Tel Aviv’s main boulevard and brought hundreds of thousands into the streets.
“The bottom line is that Israel has become the country with the highest housing prices in the West, the most expensive cars in the West, the most expensive food, and now gas,” said Yaron Zelicha, the former accountant general in the Finance Ministry.
With Noble threatening to take action to protect its stake in the project in case the gas framework falters, the prime minister has warned that approval is urgent and that Israel’s national security could be hurt by foot dragging. Netanyahu predicted that Israel’s natural gas resources will remain untapped and Israel’s government will forfeit tax proceeds from lucrative export contracts as energy companies look to countries like Iran for energy supply.
“If the gas framework doesn’t advance, industry and the entire economy will suffer a serious blow,” said Energy and Infrastructure Minister Yuval Steinitz, a close ally of the prime minister at a business conference last week sponsored by Haaretz. “Anyone who has eyes in his head, anyone who is rational and doesn’t get worked up must do their utmost to ensure that the gas framework is approved after three years of delays and serious damage.”
Private lobbyists and U.S. Congress members have even come to Israel to lobby Israel’s government on behalf of Noble Energy. Last year, Australian energy company Woodside cancelled a deal to come into Leviathan as a leading investor.
An official close to the energy consortium argued that the price that it will charge Israeli customers will be in line with global rates for natural gas. Opponents charge it will be twice as expensive. The official complained that Israeli officials upped requirements for government royalties, clamped tighter limits on lucrative exports, and required divestment of holdings in other Israeli offshore wells. The official dismissed the public protest against the gas deal as a marginal movement of leftists and “Marxists,” boosted by the liberal “Tel Aviv-based” media.
“From the minute of the discovery, it’s been a regulatory roller coaster. Every year they change the rules. You can’t invest and plan if you are not sure what the price is,” said the official. “No one will come here if there are no basic ground rules. Israel has got a very bad reputation in the world, especially in the gas world.”
A string of gas discoveries in Israel’s territorial waters since 2000 spurred first-ever interest in the country’s energy industry: in 2009 the Tamar field of 7.9 trillion cubic feet was discovered. Then came Leviathan with 16 trillion cubic feet. Several years later Crocodile” was discovered with 1.1 trillion cubic feet. Only Tamar is currently supplying Israel’s energy network.
The size of the gas finds made Israel the toast of the energy world and spurred expectations that the country would eventually reach a deal to export it to Europe through Turkey. In recent years, Israel signed initial deals for modest exports to Jordan and Egypt. But the exports looked less of a sure thing after a gas field bigger than Leviathan was discovered in August off the coast of Egypt — raising the potential for competition.
The energy saga is expected to drag on for the near future as the Knesset’s Economics Committee is planning to hold public hearings on the gas agreement, despite having no power to block the deal.
The gas opponents are expected to submit a petition to the Supreme Court against the deal, but political analysts and legal experts say the high court is unlikely to intervene. Despite years of political protests and wrangling over legislation, experts say that eventually the prime minister will push it through.
“The gas framework is very good for the Israeli economy — the price is not too costly,” said Avi Weiss, an economics professor at Bar-Ilan University and director of the Taub Center. “All of the cries of disaster are unreasonable. The disaster would be to not do it.”
editor@Jewishweek.orgRead More
New York
Was This Torah Rescued From Kristallnacht?
The scroll reflects the murky nexus of Jewish history and claims of Holocaust provenance.
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
The late Queens Rabbi Israel Mowshowitz played key role in welcoming the Berlin Torah scroll.
It stands about two feet tall, is about 200 years old and comes in a fading green velvet cover. Many people will sing with it and dance with it on Monday night — and likely raise questions about its murky past.
Call it a Torah scroll whose history is a mystery.
During a Kristallnacht commemoration ceremony Nov. 9 at the Hewlett-East Rockaway Jewish Centre, members will dedicate a sefer Torah that was thought to be buried in Germany during World War II and then brought to the United States. During the next two weeks, two boys — Jesse Herrnson, son of Lisa and Rabbi Lev Herrnson; and Adam Polokoff, son of Deborah and Stuart Polokoff — whose East Rockaway families were responsible for the scroll’s return to use in synagogue services, will chant from it during their bar mitzvahs at the congregation.
The families will then take the scroll to Israel early next year for the boys’ symbolic joint bar mitzvah atop Masada, after which it will return here, to the International Synagogue at JFK Airport, its home for much of the last few decades.
The narrative of the scroll, honored for both its spiritual value and historical significance, is a matter of conjecture among members of the Long Island congregation. The main plot points, skeletal as they are and spread by oral history — the scroll is not a part of any Torah registry — are as follows:
It was written somewhere in Germany in the early 19th century; was presented as a gift to a synagogue in a German village by a bridegroom in 1846; remained in that synagogue until the Nazis came; was buried near the village’s synagogue a few days before Kristallnacht 77 years ago next week; was exhumed after the war by a member of the Jewish community who had survived the Shoah; was carried here by plane; and somehow came into the possession of the International Synagogue.
No one at either the International Synagogue or the Hewlett-East Rockaway congregation knows any more about the scroll or who brought it from Germany to the U.S. But someone, it turns out, does, or at least thinks she does.
Rabbi Debra Orenstein, spiritual leader of Congregation B’nai Israel in Emerson, N.J., said the scroll was given in the early 1950s to her grandfather, Rabbi Israel Mowshowitz, longtime pulpit rabbi of the Hillcrest Jewish Center in Queens and a founder, in 1958, of the International Synagogue. Rabbi Mowshowitz, a close friend of the late Gov. Mario Cuomo, died in 1992.
Rabbi Orenstein said she does not know the identity of the survivor who gave her grandfather the scroll. But there are other details of the story she claims to know.
Rabbi Mowshowitz, she said, made a practice of collecting Torah scrolls and having them restored for the International Synagogue and for his own congregation. One day, probably in the 1960s, he took possession of a group of six scrolls, one of which reportedly had been buried in a Jewish cemetery in Berlin.
Rabbi Mowshowitz arranged for that scroll to be repaired; he wanted it to be rededicated at the Hillcrest Jewish Center in a ceremony for all six scrolls.
“He wanted a Holocaust survivor to carry the Holocaust Torah” in the ceremony, Rabbi Orenstein said. He called a survivor who was a member of his congregation, “a Mr. Safirstein,” she recalled. Rabbi Mowshowitz told Markus Safirstein the story of the scroll, and said, “It would be a great honor if you, as a survivor, would carry it.
“Mr. Safirstein hung up on him,” Rabbi Orenstein said.
Fearing that he had offended Safirstein, bringing up painful wartime memories, Rabbi Mowshowitz drove right over to Safirstein’s house and apologized.
“Mr. Safirstein was crying,” Rabbi Orenstein said, based on the recollections she has heard from family members.
Safirstein told Rabbi Mowshowitz that his family in Berlin had lived next door to the chief of police, and his father was on good terms with the officer. The day before Kristallnacht, the chief of police told Safirstein’s father that “something is going to happen. Do whatever you can to protect yourselves or your possessions.”
Safirstein and his father took a scroll from the synagogue where they worshipped. “I buried it with my father,” Safirstein told Rabbi Mowshowitz. “Now the Torah has found me.”
Safirstein had no idea what had happened to the scroll since 1938. “It was a total surprise that someone else found it,” Rabbi Orenstein said, adding that “he did carry it” in the rededication ceremony.
Safirstein’s daughter, Judy Brodsky, who lives in Rockland County, heard a slightly different version of the scroll’s story from her father, who died eight years ago at 87.
She says he told her that he had buried the scroll, alone, a few days after Kristallnacht, taking it by bicycle to the cemetery, hiding it in a raincoat. He survived Auschwitz; his parents and two brothers perished there.
After the war he came to the U.S., where he married his teenage sweetheart, Margot, who had survived the war in England as a member of the Kindertransport. Margot, at 93, still lives in Riverdale.
Safirstein could not confirm that the scroll he carried in the synagogue ceremony was the same one he had buried in Berlin, Brodsky said. “I don’t know how many Torahs were in cemeteries in Berlin.”
Then again, she said, he couldn’t prove it wasn’t the same scroll.
No one can definitively prove the identity of the Torah in question, which was used at the Hillcrest Jewish Center for several years, was donated to the International Synagogue, went into storage and apparently became again posul, unfit for use, forgotten about.
Until the East Rockaway congregation decided to restore it again.
The Long Island synagogue’s upcoming Kristallnacht event at which the scroll will be dedicated, following a fundraising effort for its restoration, points both to the growing interest in obtaining and repairing Torahs that had survived the Holocaust, and to the difficulty in determining any scroll’s provenance.
A scroll that purportedly survived the Final Solution acquires a special aura, and consequently greater financial value than one with a more prosaic provenance, which can lead to fraud.
The most-noted recent case of misrepresentation of a Torah scroll’s background centered around Rabbi Menachem Youles, the owner of a Jewish bookstore in Wheaton, Md., who told tales of rescuing scrolls from the sites of Nazi concentration camps and billed himself as “the Jewish Indiana Jones,” but confessed in 2012 that he had lied about his putative adventures to increase the profits from the items’ sales that he pocketed through his Save a Torah nonprofit organization. Pleading guilty to mail fraud and wire fraud, he was sentenced to four years in federal prison.
For the people who supported the German scroll’s restoration, their motivation was purely theological and altruistic. “We know it’s a Holocaust survivor” who delivered the Torah, said Rabbi Bennett Rackman, who served as chaplain at the International Synagogue from 2001 to 2015.
Both Manny Weiss, who has served as the International Synagogue’s president for a dozen years, and Joel Zeitlin, a retired customs broker at JFK Airport and member of the International Synagogue’s board who brought the scroll to the attention of members of the Long Island congregation, told the same story about the scroll. Their story featured its burial on the eve of Kristallnacht.
But Michael Berenbaum, a prominent Holocaust historian and author, said that while the scroll likely emerged from Nazi Germany, he disputes some parts of its accepted chronology.
“It is not plausible that it was buried [a few days] before Kristallnacht,” Berenbaum said. The violence of Kristallnacht took place immediately after the assassination in Paris of Ernst vom Rath, a German embassy official, by Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old Polish Jew whose family was expelled from Germany, which would have ruled out prior warning of the pogrom. “Nobody knew about it” in advance.
On Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass on Nov. 9-10, 1938, 267 synagogues in Germany and annexed Austria were destroyed, hundreds of Jewish businesses were ransacked and thousands of Jewish men were arrested in an orchestrated pogrom; the outside world refused to stand up for the endangered Jews. Kristallnacht is widely considered the rehearsal for the Holocaust.
Could the scroll have been buried in the days after Kristallnacht, or taken into someone’s home as a precaution against further damage? Could it have been brought to the U.S. by a Holocaust survivor?
“That’s 100 percent possible,” Berenbaum said. “There are plenty of cases like this.”
The details don’t reduce the scroll’s symbolism as a holy artifact with Holocaust roots.
“Most people don’t know where their sefer Torah comes from,” said Daniel Wigodsky, the Torah scribe who repaired the International Synagogue scroll. “That’s a common story.”
Unlike artists, Torah scribes don’t sign or date their scrolls; it’s anonymous work.
The writing style and the deterioration of the scroll lend credence to the oral history that surrounds it, said Rabbi Wigodsky. A scribe who lives in White Plains and has repaired “hundreds” of scrolls over the last 12 years, he inspected it at the International Synagogue when contacted by Rabbi Herrnson a few years ago; its writing style was consistent with the type of sifrei Torah written in Germany or Czechoslovakia at least 150 years ago, he said. “It had a lot of wrinkles that were damaging letters.”
The JFK Synagogue Torah is a minority in the world of scrolls that survived the Shoah. There is no official count of the number of sifrei Torah that existed before World War II in Germany and its allied and occupied lands (most estimates put the figure in the tens of thousands) and how many emerged from the war intact or in various stages of disrepair. Most remained in their home countries, the property of their respective Jewish communities or of the national or local governments.
Most of the so-called Holocaust Torahs that traveled in subsequent years to the United States or other Western nations did so under the aegis of the Czech Torah Project of Westminster Synagogue in London. In the early 1960s, the London synagogue purchased some 1,500 scrolls from the Czechoslovakian government, ones that had belonged to synagogues in the provinces of Bohemia and Moravia. The scrolls, some of them as old as 250 years, had been collected and catalogued under Nazi watch during the war, became the property of the communist government after the war and were stored in Prague.
Employing a chasidic scribe from Israel, and other scribes after he retired, Westminster Synagogue had more than 1,000 Torahs repaired. Then they were "allocated on Permanent Loan" to congregations and other Jewish institutions around the world that wanted to house such a historic artifact; some scrolls that were beyond repair went to Jewish institutions to be put on display.
Several scrolls from the Czech Torah Project are now located in the Greater New York area.
A smaller number of Holocaust Torahs left post-war Europe in private hands — like those of the German Jew who purportedly came to Idlewild Airport, as JFK Airport was known in the early 1950s, or Satmar chasidim from Europe who immigrated to this country with scrolls they gave to their new synagogues.
Dealing in stolen Torah scrolls has become big business; many are stolen each year, and then sold for tens of thousands of dollars. Since the scrolls bear no readily apparent identifying marks — an individual Torah can rarely be identified by the untrained eye — an international Torah registry program (universaltorahregistry.org), developed by the Jewish Community Relations Council here, keeps a computerized databank of thousands of scrolls that feature a code of microperforations invisible to the naked eye.
The registry of “close to 10,000” scrolls “gives Torah owners the ability to put halachically approved IDs on Torahs,” said David Pollock, associate executive director of JCRC, who coordinated the development of the registry’s innovative technology. “Because we were founded in 1982, our registration records now span generations. Several times a month owners contact the UTR for help in establishing the provenance of their Torah, and our records often can help to settle disputes.”
The German scroll, which has an uncertain past, has a more certain future, as the second sefer Torah in the International Synagogue. The arc of its history will continue in the synagogue’s ark, and will be welcomed in a formal ceremony “as soon as we can,” said Rabbi Ari Korenblitt, the synagogue’s chaplain.
In the meantime, in the days after Kristallnacht, two bar mitzvah boys will hold the scroll in their hands and read from its sacred words, the same words that boys their age read in past decades, in past centuries.
“We are giving life to the scroll,” said Rabbi Herrnson, who serves as chaplain at Mercy Medical Center in Rockville Center, L.I., who researched the scroll’s history and coordinated the restoration effort, which has the support of the Holocaust Memorial & Tolerance Center of Long Island. “We are giving voice to those who died.”
steve@jewishweek.orgRead More
Israel News
Trying To Keep Calm Amid The Chaos
Vulnerability mixed with sweetness in the ‘new normal.’
Gil Troy
Special To The Jewish Week
Gil Troy
I live in Jerusalem but planned to spend this semester in America, launching my new book. But with a wife, four kids, many friends and 8 million targets, Jews and Arabs, in Israel, how can I rest easy away from home? Instead, I am crisscrossing the Atlantic “pond,” acting as if I hold the United Airlines Chair in American History, returning home whenever I can while fulfilling whatever book tour commitments I can.
Typically, I wake in New York or Washington and jog, often traversing once-crime-ridden areas that have become safe. Even if the one constant is change, the vector can go up or down. This reminds us, especially in young dynamic Israel, that things can improve or deteriorate.
Arriving in Jerusalem, I revert to my New Yorker-during-the-1970s-crime-spree mode, scrutinizing passersby, protecting my super-sized 360-degree personal-space bubble. Thinking magically, we improvise delusional dos and don’ts to keep walking through the raindrops. (Of course, statistically, cars remain far more dangerous than terrorists — and New York remains more dangerous than Jerusalem).
Jerusalem’s “new normal” involves staring at men’s midsections. Those packing pistols or clutching iPhones are safe. Then, no matter how liberal you are, no matter how much you cherish coexistence, you examine passing faces and “racially profile” — although it’s more a national and psychological assessment.
This is the Jerusalemite’s Dilemma: how to keep this diverse, safe, multicultural city friendly when menaced by murderers from one particular group? Political correctness cannot trump safety, but how can we prevent terrorists from spreading the cancer of mistrust that breeds more terrorism?
And what do we tell our children? My 13-year-old daughter has now had the experience of being in a classroom that turned hysterical when word spread that Palestinian murderers attacked the bus a dozen of her classmates took that morning, killing three people. My 15-year-old son has now had the experience of hearing warnings that a terrorist was caught trying to enter the mall that houses the gym where he works out. Our family is debating how bad does it get before you send the dog to a friend’s moshav so we don’t have to walk him at night? What do we teach our kids about tolerance when many on the other side cheer these crimes and sing “Stab, Stab”? How do we explain why our kids and their friends are targeted during the most innocent activities?
Ultimately, we trust our resilience to save us. Surprisingly, even armed with my pepper spray in the pocket of my jogging shorts, the situation starts feeling normal. Israel’s everyday heroes maintain routines. Initially, I was so conscious of my pepper spray, it felt like I was carrying around a fire hydrant. A few days later, I had so adjusted, I forgot I had it and got busted at airport security. (I smiled apologetically, saying, “Ani Yerushalmi,” “I am a Jerusalemite.” The security person smiled back — but confiscated it).
Characteristically, resisting terrorism brings out a remarkable Sabra sweetness beneath Israelis’ occasionally prickly exterior. People are looking out for one another, boker tov-ing and erev tov-ing frequently and warmly, as “good morning,” “good evening” become code words for “I’m no threat.” We’re all acting like concerned parents, being extra vigilant when kids cross in front of our cars, offering more people rides, looking out for one another. We’re also hugging our kids more tightly, more frequently, appreciating our health and the passing of another boring day more consciously, living life a bit more intensely.
That yearning for extra mass-parenting is widespread. I asked an Arab mechanic friend whose garage is next door to my daughter’s ballet studio to keep an extra eye on all the girls. His response: “Gilly, tell them that here, I’m like their abba.”
Israelis’ sweet vulnerability makes us deeply grateful for kind gestures from abroad. When I suggested on Facebook that Israel’s supporters order takeout from now-empty Jerusalem restaurants to deliver to now-overworked police officers and border police, the enthusiastic response overwhelmed me. (I’m not yet desperate enough to ask people to buy my book as a solidarity gesture, given my compressed time in America, but more desperate times might call for more desperate self-promotions.) All these campaigns and concerned e-mails from friends help tremendously. On the other hand, the silences, the finger pointing against us (although we’ve been targeted), and the radical Jews using this moment to denounce Israel, hurt disproportionately.
As we hunker down in our homes, I still cherish the ideal of the normalized Jerusalem I experienced just last month. That’s when the Abu Tor multiplex cinema opened, linking our neighborhood with an Arab neighborhood, luring us all with Hollywood trash.
My first jog back home in Jerusalem, the only two Arabs I encountered were a young man and a woman with a hijab, necking in Yemin Moshe park, against the Old City’s stunning backdrop. Behind them was a sculpture I have passed hundreds of times and never noticed. The sculpture’s gold, reflective metal had these beautiful, sensual curves paralleling this intertwined couple’s curves. I marveled at this symbol of peace — then laughed the next day when I jogged passed the same sculpture and discovered that it commemorates the Etzioni Brigade’s fight for the Old City in 1948.
Jerusalem dances constantly between the past and the present, between peace and war, between the normal and the exceptional. I challenge the small minority of murderous Arab neighbors to describe what kind of city they want. And I applaud the rest of us for taking exceptional efforts to keep the peace, staying sane and normal.
Gil Troy is the author of The Age of Clinton: America in the 1990s, just published by Thomas Dunne Books of St. Martin’s Press. A professor of history at McGill University, he is a visiting scholar this fall at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.Read More
New York
RCA Bans Female Rabbis, Again; Agudath Goes Further
Moves come in wake of developments in Israel.
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
Yeshivat Maharat awards smicha to its graduates in June 2015. Courtesy of Yeshivat MaharatThe Rabbinical Council of America, the largest group of Orthodox rabbis, reaffirmed its position against the ordination of women in a resolution issued last Friday that reiterated nearly identical statements made in 2010 and 2013.
“New institutions in Israel have been ordaining women, and as part of the larger community we felt the need to speak out,” RCA executive vice president Mark Dratch told The Jewish Week.
He pointed to the recent actions of Rabbi Herzl Hefter, founder and Rosh Beit Midrash Har’el in Jerusalem, and Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, founding chief rabbi of Efrat, two prominent Orthodox rabbis who recently ordained women.
The reiteration of the RCA’s position has exposed the widening rift within the Orthodox community on the issue of women rabbis.
Following the RCA’s statement, Agudath Israel of America’s high rabbinical court released a kol koreh, or proclamation, Monday pronouncing “Open Orthodoxy” no longer a part of Orthodoxy and dismissing rabbinic ordination within that unofficial branch as meaningless. The rabbinic court specified the leadership and affiliates of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah for men, Yeshivat Maharat for women, and the International Rabbinic Fellowship, a fellowship of more than 200 Modern Orthodox clergy that functions as an alternative to the RCA. (Yesterday, the IRF released a statement reaffirming support for women’s growing participation in spiritual leadership and communal institutions.)
“They are no different than any other dissident movements throughout our history, that have rejected basic tenets,” the proclamation reads. It is signed by several leading charedi rabbis, including Rabbi Aryeh Kotler, the rosh yeshiva of Beth Medrash Gavoha in Lakewood, N.J., one of the largest yeshivas in the world, and Rabbi Dovid Feinstein, son of the late and widely regarded Torah scholar Rabbi Moshe Feinstein. Though the proclamation was written originally in Hebrew, it was published alongside an English translation.
Asked why his organization issued the resolution at this time, Rabbi Avi Shafran, a spokesman for Agudath Israel, said “there was no immediate stimulus, only the cumulative misrepresentation of the new movement [as Orthodox].”
Rabbi Avi Weiss, the key figure in “Open Orthodoxy” as founder of Yeshiva Chovevei Torah and Yeshivat Maharat, both in Riverdale, and co-founder of the IRJ, wrote this week that “the time has come” to allow women’s ordination in the Modern Orthodox movement. In an Opinion piece (see page 24) he asserted that “the debate concerning women’s ordination is not halachic but rather sociological.”
In sociological terms, Israel has been at the forefront of liberalizing Orthodoxy. A Jerusalem group, Shira Chadashah (A New Song), founded the partnership minyan, later duplicated here, where women are permitted to lead certain parts of the prayer service. And women spiritual leaders have been appointed with less attention.
Rabbi Jeffrey Fox, rosh yeshiva of Yeshivat Maharat, has referred to the mutual influence between Israel and America as “cross pollination.”
“The reality of women’s leadership in America mirrors what happens in Israel,” he told The Jewish Week after Rabbi Riskin, former spiritual leader of Lincoln Square Synagogue, named Jennie Rosenfeld the first female spiritual leader in Efrat. “Progress there means progress here.”
The RCA statement praised the increase in women’s Torah study in recent years and cited what the group considers “appropriate” professional opportunities for learned women. These include taking on the roles of yoatzot halacha (advisers on Jewish law) and community scholars, and teaching at Yeshiva University’s Graduate Program for Women in Advanced Talmudic Study and as non-rabbinic school teachers. “So long as no rabbinic or ordained title such as ‘maharat’ is used in these positions, and so long as there is no implication of ordination or a rabbinic status, this resolution is inapplicable,” the resolution concludes.
Maharat is an acronym meaning female spiritual, legal and Torah leader.
But the resolution stated that members may not ordain women under a title other than rabbi, put a woman in a rabbinic position or give a female teacher of Jewish studies a title implying rabbinic ordination.
In response to the resolution, the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance (JOFA) circulated an online petition entitled “We Support Women in Orthodox Leadership Roles.” They received more than 1,000 signatures in the first 24 hours. Using the hashtag “Humans of JOFA,” the organization also began a campaign featuring prominent Orthodox voices in support of leadership roles for women.
“We believe individual communities and all of Klal Yisrael can only benefit from the inclusion of the voices and ideas of highly trained and committed women in positions of communal authority,” the petition reads.
The IRF, in a nuanced statement, called on communities and their rabbinic leaders to discuss the issue “in an open and reflective manner.” It asserted that “observant and committed Orthodox women who are learned, trained and competent should have every opportunity to fully serve the Jewish community” as teachers, pastoral counselors, spiritual preachers and guides as well as presidents of synagogues.
The resolutions released by the RCA in 2010 and 2013 were responding to the founding of Yeshivat Maharat, and the first ordination of its graduates, respectively.
Though the resolution was one of four annual resolutions voted on by RCA members over the past month — the other three regarded BDS, racism and the agunah crisis — it was the only one to be featured as “New and Noteworthy” on the RCA’s homepage and mass e-mailed to RCA affiliates. (The other three are posted on the RCA's website.) It was also the only resolution of the four to be proposed directly by the RCA membership, as opposed to by the resolutions committee, Rabbi Dratch noted.
Hannah@jewishweek.orgRead More
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