In a country where “football” means soccer, you would think the Super Bowl would be a relic of the past for U.S. émigrés. However, for many of them the annual NFL championship game is cause for a party, complete with nachos and subs.
Steve Leibowitz, president of American Football in Israel, estimates that hundreds of fans will attend dozens of Super Bowl parties in Israel as the New England Patriots and New York Giants face each other on Feb. 5 — even though kickoff translates to 1:30 in the morning Israel time.
“In the old days, I used to organize Super Bowl parties at hotels because there was no way to watch at home,” said Leibowitz, a native New Yorker. “It’s kind of like wanting to celebrate Thanksgiving — it’s a part of the culture you grew up in, that you could take part in even if you were Jewish. It’s another reason for a party, but here it’s just at a very inconvenient hour. People arrange to come late to work or school the next day.”
A group of Yeshiva University students landed at Ben-Gurion Airport in mid-January and went to prison, then went on to a halfway house for former convicts. Clearly, this was not the usual college semester-break trip.
The 15 men and 15 women were on an eight-day experiential program in Israel, “Tzedek and Tzedaka,” offered by the university’s Center for the Jewish Future (CJF) to explore the concepts of justice and social justice in a modern democratic Jewish state.
A second YU group of 10 participated in “Art at ORT,” focusing on social activism and the empowerment of Israeli teenagers through art.
Why did Adir Schwartz-Settenbrino choose to celebrate his bar mitzvah in Jerusalem with a cognitively disabled Israeli “twin” he had never met, rather than party with his peers at home?
“The main reason I gave up my bar mitzvah with friends to twin it with a disabled child is because when you have it by yourself, getting all the attention and gifts, [you] feel too self-centered,” explains the Clifton youth, a student at Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy. “I wanted to be able to take what I have the opportunity to do and share it with somebody who wouldn’t have had it otherwise.”
Two years after the earthquake that devastated Haiti, medical students at Quisqueya University earlier this month took part in the island nation’s first “White Coat Ceremony,” marking the commitment of medical students there to providing compassionate, patient-based care.
This symbolic ritual for future doctors, now common at U.S. and Israeli medical schools, was introduced in 1993 by the Englewood Cliffs-based Arnold P. Gold Foundation. It has since spread to 18 countries, including Afghanistan, Japan, and now Haiti, thanks to the efforts of Tenafly resident Dr. Galit M. Sacajiu.
“Some of you may be asking yourselves, when medical school buildings and operating rooms have yet to be rebuilt and a single medical textbook is a luxury, when we have no laboratories, and so many of our brothers and sisters still live in makeshift homes, why invest in an event such as this ceremony of humanism in medicine?” asked Sacajiu, in her remarks at the Jan. 16 ceremony.
A swift and massive Jewish response followed the 7.0-magnitude earthquake on Jan. 12, 2010, that caused more than 250,000 deaths and at least as many injuries in Haiti.
The Jewish Federations of North America partnered with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee to funnel millions of dollars of contributions to help in the relief work. Israel was among the first of many countries to send humanitarian aid.
The 236 military, security, rescue, and medical personnel sent by Israel’s Foreign Ministry arrived at Port-Au-Prince on two Boeing 747 jets leased from El Al by Tzahal (the hebrew acronym that stands for Israel Defense Forces, or IDF). A Tzahal field hospital was set up in a soccer field near the airport just four hours after landing on Jan. 15, the first such treatment facility to be up and running after the devastating earthquake.
From Bibles to novels, English-language Judaica from Israel accounts for much of the inventory on American Jewish bookstore shelves.
A case in point: For the first time in his 27-book run, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach has chosen to work with an Israeli publisher: Gefen will produce the Englewood writer’s forthcoming book, “Kosher Jesus.”
Shoppers at the Feb. 5-26 Seforim Sale at Yeshiva University, the largest Jewish book sale in North America (see sidebar), will find Israeli publishers well represented.
Rabbi Yaacov Haber, a former Monsey pulpit rabbi and co-founder of the year-old Mosaica Press in Jerusalem, says there are practical and emotional reasons for this trend.
The Seforim (Books) Sale, Yeshiva University’s annual student-run event, has become the largest Jewish book sale in North America. This year it is scheduled for Feb. 5-26 in Belfer Hall, 2495 Amsterdam Ave., Manhattan.
Last year, more than 15,000 people browsed among some 10,000 discounted Judaica titles including cookbooks, children’s books, music and lecture CDs, educational software, and rabbinic and academic literature.
“We try to draw different crowds, by providing books people can’t buy anywhere else — including some from Israel,” said Sam Ulrich, the Los Angeles native running the sale this year.
Former Teaneck resident Zahava D. Englard credits best-selling authors Leon Uris and Stephenie Meyer for turning her into a novelist.
Uris’ magnum opus, “Exodus,” so inspired Englard as a teenager that she kept nudging her 15-year-old youngest child, Nili, to read it. Nili, however, prefers fantasy novels, like Meyer’s “Twilight” books.
“So to get me off her back, she said, ‘You read “Twilight” and I’ll read “Exodus.”’ And I actually fell in love with it and read the whole series,” says Englard. “After the first book, I thought, ‘I could do this.’ That’s when I decided to write a novel.”
A few minutes of hate give way to many days of love and support
On Monday, Rabbi Nosson Schuman went shopping with his wife to buy new sheets to replace the ones scorched by a Molotov cocktail thrown through their bedroom window just before dawn on Jan. 11.
That night, he had planned to kick off a new adult-ed class on prayer in Congregation Beth El of Rutherford, the small synagogue that shares the house where he and his family have lived since August 2009. Instead, the congregants gathered to discuss the incident, which police are still puzzling over.
JERUSALEM — It was not only Israeli tech savvy that 26 South Carolina business and academic leaders were eager to explore during a recent mission to Israel, but also how that know-how translates into making the world a better place.
“Where else but Israel do technology and goodwill work so closely together?” asked businessman Jonathan Zucker, director of the newly formed South Carolina-Israel Collaboration (SCIC).
The delegates flew home from Israel with 50 fresh business and research partnerships — including a dozen in the hot-topic area of “aging in place.”
