Veteran Israeli performer David Broza figured that if you can buy a Picasso on the Internet, you can also finance an album on the Internet.
So he took the highly unconventional route of producing his first Israeli album in nine years, “Safa Shlishit” (“Third Language”), entirely via the site Kickstarter. Released last summer, his 28th CD became one of the top five music projects ever kick-started online.
“I am a very down-to-earth singer-songwriter and not a techie, yet I went for the highest technology to do this project and I succeeded,” says Broza, 56, “despite the fact that it’s an album in Hebrew by an older artist, so it’s against all odds. It just shows you that you need to have a focus.”
The image of Israel and its place in the international community is always a hot topic, perhaps even more as 2012 looms as a historic year.
Against that backdrop, Jersey City-born businessman J. Harvey Karp is ratcheting up what he calls his “ongoing mitzvah project,” the webzine Israel Up Close (www.israelupclose.org).
You will not find Karp’s name mentioned anywhere on the site. He prefers to keep the spotlight squarely on the Jewish homeland through professionally produced video segments illustrating the myriad ways in which Israel and Israelis contribute to the world and work toward peace.
This summer, a special six-day group tour to Israel is planned by Nechama, Inc., a Northern New Jersey-based professionally facilitated support group for Jewish families who have experienced infant and pregnancy loss.
Dubbed “Health & Healing in Israel,” the July 2-8 tour offers an itinerary of spiritual, emotional and physical activities: hikes, swimming, and yoga at a spa hotel in the Galilee; a tree-planting ceremony in the Judean hills; visits to graves of Jewish ancestors; uplifting guest speakers; and daily support sessions and private counseling led by Nechama founder Reva Judas, a certified chaplain and kindergarten teacher at The Moriah School in Englewood.
JERUSALEM — It is no small task to provide fresh, accurate, and engaging adult-education material for 5,500 “wondering Jews” taking weekly classes at 49 Florence Melton Adult Mini-School locations in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, and now Hong Kong. The challenge is even greater because the Melton approach is trans-denominational.
That is the job of the small crew working under Yonatan Mirvis, director of Melton’s international headquarters at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the world’s largest academic center for Jewish education.
In October, when President Barack Obama nominated New Jersey Magistrate Judge Patty Shwartz to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, he commented that the East Rutherford resident “has a long and impressive record of service and a history of handing down fair and judicious decisions.”
Obama, however, may not have been aware of just how long her “impressive record” is. Shwartz’s sister and childhood friend both told The Jewish Standard that the 50-year-old judge always displayed a quick mind and an acute sense of fairness.
“Patty was always very social, very smart and quick-witted, very respectful, and never mean-spirited,” said her older sister, Nancy Brown, an emergency room nurse at St. Joseph’s Medical Center in Paterson. A third sister passed away in 1997, and the family also includes two brothers.
Illuminating talmudic attitudes toward the Hasmoneans
Lighting a Chanukah menorah (known as a chanukiah), singing “Maoz Tzur,” spinning a dreidel, flipping latkes, exchanging gifts. That is Chanukah in practice. Chanukah in theory is about religious freedom and Jewish sovereignty in the Holy Land.
Everyone who has ever seen a Chanukah play visualizes those themes in the person of Judah Maccabee, the mighty warrior of Modi’in who has come to symbolize victory over religious persecution — a precursor to the modern Israeli soldier-scholar.
Solomon Schechter, the man whose name graces Conservative day schools in North Jersey and across the country, was something of a scholarly swashbuckler.
The myriad scraps of Hebrew-scrawled documents he hauled out of a dusty crawlspace in an old Cairo synagogue at the end of the 19th century are the subject of “Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza,” by the Paterson-born poet Peter Cole (see sidebar) and the biographer Adina Hoffman (Nextbook/Schocken, 2011, $26.95).
Cole and Hoffman, who maintain residences in Jerusalem and New Haven, just wrapped up a North American publicity tour for their book about the 900 years’ worth of sacred texts, letters, poems, wills, marriage contracts, money orders, trousseau lists, prescriptions, petitions, and magic charms discovered in the Ben Ezra Synagogue Geniza (a depository for worn Jewish texts) by a colorful cadre of adventurer/scholars.
A young Israeli woman was suffering from severe anxiety attacks, rapidly losing weight and hair. Then her husband brought her to the Israel National Therapeutic Riding Association (INTRA) near the coastal city of Netanya.
A month later, after riding therapy horse Pocahantas (Pokey for short) twice a week, she has regained a bit of weight and, most important, a smile.
This was exactly the kind of situation for which Teaneck resident Minna Heilpern donated Pokey to INTRA about 10 years ago. Now head of the fundraising arm Friends of INTRA (Friendsofintra.org), Heilpern is among organizers of a benefit scheduled for Nov. 16, 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. at the Spanish Benevolent Society in Manhattan.
A support system for soldiers who left their families behind
Israel’s Lone Soldier Center in Memory of Michael Levin is a godsend, says Oren Hason, who made aliyah in 2008 from Fair Lawn and served in a field intelligence unit. A “lone soldier” is a young person who made aliyah on his or her own, and then joined the army.
“They helped me through a lot of bureaucratic mess,” Hason says of the Lone Soldier Center. “They are really angels.”
Josh Flaster, a former lone soldier who grew up in Phoenix, founded the center (http://www.lonesoldiercenter.com) in 2009. Several organizations provide services to the estimated 5,700 Israel Defense Forces soldiers who lack local family (including Friends of the IDF, see the sidebar on this page), but this is the only one run by former lone soldiers exclusively for lone soldiers.
