As the need for aid in Haiti persists, local individuals and groups continue to mobilize.

UJA Federation of Northern New Jersey is still accepting donations for The Haiti Earthquake Relief Fund. All monies are sent directly to the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. As of Tuesday, the group had raised $123,676. Send donations through the UJA-NNJ Website, www.ujannj.org/Haiti, or by mail.

Teaneck resident and Judaic artist Deborah Ugoretz reports that her studio-mates have organized a fund-raising event entitled Small Works for a Big Cause: Artists Unite to Help Haiti. Organizers are asking people not only to attend the exhibit/sale but, if possible, to contribute a small piece of art. The event will take place on Jan. 31 from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. at BrassWorks, 105 Grove St. in Montclair. According to Ugoretz, the group seeks 2-D works, no larger than 12” on any side, and works will be sold for a suggested $50 minimum donation. All proceeds will go to Haiti earthquake relief organizations. Those interested in donating their artwork should send an e-mail to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

Combine the opportunity to raise money for Haiti with Zumba, the Latin-inspired dance fitness phenomenon, at “Zumba for Haiti” at the Bergen County YJCC on Feb. 21 from 12 noon to 1:15 p.m. Minimum donation is $18, payable to UJA-NNJ and designated for its earthquake relief fund. Zumba will be led by Missy Avalo, with guest instructors Shelley Capener and Anna Alon. The YJCC is at 605 Pascack Road, Township of Washington. For more information, call (201) 666-6610, ext. 291.

Northeast Podiatry Group and the Fair Lawn Jewish Center/Congregation Bnai Israel are collecting emergency medical supplies for Haiti’s burn and orthopedic trauma victims. Their goal is to fill a tractor-trailer with donations of medical supplies or used orthopedic equipment. The nearest drop-off point is the Jewish Center, at 10-10 Norma Ave. in Fair Lawn. For more information, send an e-mail to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or visit www.burnadvocates.org. Donors can also choose to contribute money to help defray shipping and distribution.

From left, Maria Pineda, Damary Collado, Eve Domercant, and Carlos Sanchez.

Former Englewood Mayor Michael Wildes has asked that those who want to donate material goods to the people of Haiti bring new or gently used clothing and baby supplies in plastic bags to his home at 250 Allison Court in Englewood. Wildes also urges people to contribute to the American Red Cross International Response Fund for Haitian Relief (www.redcross.org).

Twin brothers Seth and Philip Aronson will perform at Hamsa restaurant, 7 West Railroad Ave., in Tenafly on Wednesday, Feb. 3 from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. Admission is $10 at the door. All proceeds will be donated toward Haitian relief efforts. The duo, dubbed the Aronson Twins, grew up in Tenafly and now live in Closter with their families. In addition to writing and arranging their own songs, they frequently perform in the New York area.

Rep. Steve Rothman (D-NJ), a member of the House Appropriations State and Foreign Operations Subcommittee, met with the new administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Dr. Rajiv Shah, and Ambassador Craig Kelly, principal deputy assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, to discuss the current situation on the ground in Haiti. Said Rothman, “The international response to this crisis is a promising start, but there is still much more work to be done. USAID has set up a Website at haiti.usaid.gov where the latest information can be found on the situation in Haiti. Also, in order to help family members affected by this tragedy, my offices in New Jersey and Washington, D.C. remain available to help in any way we can at (201) 646-0808 and (202) 225-5061 respectively.”

The Ramaz school in Manhattan reports that the school is collecting money to distribute to both the American Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) and the American Jewish World Service. In addition, some classes set aside time to recite tehillim, psalms, on behalf of the victims. The school held a special assembly during which students were educated about the tragedy and suggestions were made as to how students might help. Subsequently, a middle school student produced T-shirts reading “Hearts 4 Haiti” and will donate proceeds from sales to the JDC. An upper school program included the reading of a prayer specially composed by British Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks to mark the tragedy. The school is also organizing relief efforts including food and clothing collections.

Palisades Medical Center staff members helped organize a medical mission and donation of medical supplies that will be delivered to Jimani on the Dominican Republic/Haitian border, to aid the victims of the earthquake. The donation will be brought to Jimani by representatives from Guardians of Healing and the Haitian-American Charitable Alliance, which scheduled medical missions for Jan. 31 through Feb. 7, and later in March. The Palisades Medical Center donation includes splints, bandages, surgical gowns, and other medical supplies and equipment.

The YJCC in Washington Township is launching a day program for adults with developmental disabilities. Called SAIL — Self-determination, Advocacy, Independence, Living — the program is for those 21 and over. It has received approval from the New Jersey Department of Human Services, with the YJCC designated a Real Life Choices Service Provider.

It “will provide services for those who have aged out of special-education services,” said Stacy Cancelarich, a licensed social worker who will head the program. “We call it SAIL because to set sail is to set out on a voyage; in this case, it is a voyage toward independence and personal growth. Our mission is to strengthen the foundation acquired in school-based learning so that the participants can continue to develop personal interests, skills and social relationships.”

Scheduled to begin by May, it will initially run on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, from 9:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Activities will include social, academic, daily living, and vocational skills, as well as recreational activities.

“An adult day program is a logical next step for YJCC special-needs programming,” said Gina Wellington, YJCC director of special services. “Like several special-needs programs at the Y, it is an outgrowth of a direct need. Our families and others in the community are lacking this adult day resource … and we are here to step up. Our community deserves a quality program, and I’m pleased that we are able to provide it.”

Intake interviews are being scheduled. For more information, e-mail Cancelarich at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or call her at (201) 666-6610, ext. 268.

The news is big business in Israel. Most families gather around the television at 8 each night for the newscast.

“It’s just an addiction,” said Liron Karass, the youth shlicha (emissary from Israel) at the Bergen County YJCC in Washington Township.

So Karass helped organize a talk Monday evening, “The Front Lines of Israel,” by two Israeli journalists, Yaron Brener and Miri Yehuda. Brener has been a photojournalist for eight and a half years, the last six for Yediot Achronot, a daily newspaper published in Tel Aviv. (Ynetnews.com is the online English-language version.) Yehuda is an award-winning freelance television news producer for foreign networks, such as NBC. The pair gave more than 50 people a behind-the-scenes look at modern journalism in Israel.

Miri Yehuda answers questions at the YJCC Monday night. Lloyd de Vries

“When I’m working, when I have my journalism hat on, I have no opinion at all,” Yehuda said, when asked whether Israeli journalists have a bias to the left or right. But news organizations have their own points of view, she added.

“Everybody has an agenda,” Yehuda said. “You’re free to choose who you work for,” just as consumers are free to choose where to shop — or where to get their news, she added. “You need to check out the media outlets.”

The program started with a presentation by Brener of his photographs. The subjects included suicide bombings, corruption trials, murders, preparation for Jewish holidays, Christian pilgrims, and even concerts by Iggy Pop and Lady Gaga.

“I have no idea who she is, actually,” Brener acknowledged, but photographing the concert was a “nice vacation for me.”

The pair are giving six talks in New Jersey this week. The one at the YJCC, co-sponsored by the Y, the Kehillah Partnership, and UJA Federation of Northern New Jersey’s Israel Program Center, was the third in the series.

Both are based in Tel Aviv, but do stories anywhere in the country.

Brener says when he wants pictures of Israeli Jews celebrating a holiday, he goes to Bnei Brak, an ultra-Orthodox community east of Tel Aviv; the residents of Tel Aviv aren’t that colorfully observant. And “when we have no other mission [assignment], we go to the beach” for photographs, he said, after showing a “winter scene” from Israel of a couple lying on a beach in bathing suits.

“Every day, we get up and wait for something to explode,” Brener said, adding that journalists in Israel have become blasé about rocket attacks from Gaza because they’re everyday occurrences.

Nevertheless, Brener choked up a little when he showed a picture he’d taken of five coffins wrapped in Israeli flags. He said that it’s hard to shoot such photographs — “I’m a soldier, too” — and noted that photojournalists use long lenses at funerals, so they don’t intrude on the mourners.

Yaron Brener talks about his career as a photojournalist in Israel.

One of Brener’s favorite photos is of Kadima party leader Ehud Olmert shortly after he became prime minister in 2006. The press photographers were restricted to an area on the floor, so the picture looks up, and there’s a recessed light over Olmert’s head that looks almost like a halo.

The photograph got modest play then, but a few years later, when Olmert was indicted on corruption charges, the photograph was used with captions to the effect of “He’s no angel.”

Brener also showed before and after pictures of a young man accused of running over and killing a young girl. When arrested, the man was clean-shaven and bareheaded. When his trial began, he had a long beard and a kippah.

Brener said it’s not unusual for those arrested to appear in court as more visibly observant, hoping the judge will be more lenient to them. The joke among Israeli journalists, Brener said, is that “when you go to jail, you get handcuffed, a gold suit, and a kippah.”

Yehuda conducted the question-and-answer session, although some of the attendees seemed more interested in expressing their own opinions, asking why Israel doesn’t do a better job in the propaganda war against Arabs or whether the evacuation of Jewish settlers from Gaza had accomplished anything.

Yehuda and Brener pointed out that they’re journalists, not policymakers. Yehuda later told The Jewish Standard that she had been more political at this talk than the two they’d given earlier in the week, but at all the talks, people said they are worried about how Israel is portrayed by the international press.

Brener said he uses digital cameras. “Of course. I work for the Internet. I need to shoot it yesterday.”

When asked what brand of cameras he uses, Brener reluctantly answered “Nikon,” but added, “It’s not the camera, I’m happy to say; it’s me.”

He brings to assignments two cameras, a laptop computer, flashes, and an aircard (a device that plugs into either a camera or a laptop to access the Internet wirelessly), all on his motorcycle. He carries a pager so he can be sent quickly to photograph stories.

Brener told the Standard that he’s been threatened and had his cameras broken “so many times” while covering stories, but not at terror or military incidents. There he feels insulated.

“Israel is a very comfortable place to cover a conflict,” Yehuda said. “You can go home, spend half a day at the beach, then go back to the craziness.”

Seated, from left, are panelists Rabbi Debra Orenstein, Avi Smolen, Rabbi David Fine, and Rabbi Ruth Zlotnick. Standing, from left, are BARJ students Miriam Edelstein, Melinda Graber, and Sarah Mironov. The students reported on the BARJ trip to Washington with the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. Lloyd de Vries

About 50 people attended a screening of “Hineini: Coming Out in a Jewish High School” and panel discussion last week at the YJCC in Washington Township.

The film follows Shulamit Izen’s quest to gain acceptance at her Boston-area school, not only for herself as a lesbian, but also for other LGBT students there.

This was the second of three screenings and discussions planned by the Jewish Community Relations Council and Synagogue Leadership Initiative of UJA Federation of Northern New Jersey. The first was held in November at the Kaplen JCC in Tenafly and the third will be held at the YM-YWHA of North Jersey, in Wayne, next month.

Rabbi Ruth Zlotnick of Temple Beth Or in Washington Township moderated the panel, whose members were Rabbis Debra Orenstein of Cong. B’nai Israel in Emerson and David J. Fine of Temple Israel and Jewish Community Center in Ridgewood, both Conservative. Also on the panel was Avi Smolen, who married his partner, Justin Rosen, in October in a civil ceremony in Connecticut and a Jewish ceremony in Syosset, N.Y.

In the audience were students of the Bergen Academy of Reform Judaism, which normally meets at Temple Beth Or on Wednesday nights. The screening was the BARJ session for the week.

Rabbi Neal Borovitz, chair of the JCRC and religious leader of Temple Avodat Shalom in River Edge, told The Jewish Standard that “one of the things that JCRC wants is to keep the issues of civility and acceptance in front of our Northern New Jersey community.”

After the screening, Orenstein said, “It shouldn’t be such an enormous challenge to see the humanity and divinity in another person.

“If you can’t feel at home in your spiritual home, something is very, very wrong. We have to understand the full range of diversity,” she said.

Smolen said there are differences between a community that comes together of free will — such as in a civic organization — and a school where students are thrown together. It’s harder to walk away from the latter than from a voluntary group that isn’t accepting of you.

The announcement in The Standard of Smolen’s gay marriage touched off a storm of controversy.

“That to me was my standing up for my identity,” Smolen said. “That community then had to have a discussion about” whether to accept homosexuals.

Smolen, who is a development and communications associate in the New York City office of Keren Or, a center in Jerusalem for blind and multi-disabled children and young adults, said he did not submit the wedding announcement to be hurtful, but to celebrate a lifecycle event.

To “come out,” “you have to feel comfortable with who you are,” Smolen said, in response to a question from Borovitz.

Smolen, who is Conservative, said he has Orthodox friends who had a much tougher time dealing with their homosexuality, because there are no Orthodox role models and no one in that community to talk to about the issue.

An audience member said that Izen had the courage to declare her sexual identity because her parents accepted her as she was. Many young Jewish gays and lesbians don’t have that support, and struggle, the woman added.

“The challenge is to imagine oneself as the other,” said Fine. He said what Shulamit Izen experienced at her high school was similar to his experience as an observant Jew attending a public high school.

Just as Izen thought she was alone until one day she spotted a rainbow keychain on a teacher’s desk, indicating that the teacher might be gay, Fine one day watched as a teacher monitoring study hall put on a beret, opened a large book and read from it, then closed it and removed the beret. When Fine got a look at the book, he discovered it was a section of Talmud.

Fine added that he had engaged in a vigorous debate in his seminary about accepting homosexuals in the Jewish community. He told of a woman friend who cried when she read a paper he had written on the subject and revealed that she was a lesbian. That showed him, he said, that “these are real people,” not just abstractions.

Fine later served on a Conservative movement committee that drafted rules on gays and lesbians serving as rabbis. He wrote a dissenting paper that argued for greater inclusiveness than the committee had recommended.

Izen entered her high school as a freshman in the fall of 2000. An audience member who teaches at both the Bergen County High School of Jewish Studies and BARJ said that students at both schools are more tolerant than those at Izen’s school.

Zlotnick pointed out that Izen’s school in suburban Boston has been transformed not by the headmaster, not by the teachers, but by a student.

The evening closed with a report by three BARJ students who took a trip to Washington with the Religious Action Center of the Union of Reform Judaism. Miriam Edelstein and Sarah Mironov of River Dell High School and Melinda Graber of Tenafly High School delivered a speech they had made to members of the U.S. Senate in support of anti-bullying legislation protecting LGBT students.