On her twice-yearly trips to Israel from New Jersey, Chaya Goldsmith has steamed rice at a Hazon Yeshaya soup kitchen, picked vegetables for Leket national food bank, assisted the elderly at the Yad LeKashish: Lifeline for the Old, made signs for the ALYN Pediatric and Adolescent Rehabilitation Center bike-a-thon, danced with children at Keren Or-Jerusalem Center for Blind Children with Multiple Disabilities, and whatever else she can do to assist a variety of Israeli charitable endeavors.
It is not that Goldsmith ignores needs in her own backyard — she has also volunteered as a matchmaker, Kosher Meals on Wheels driver, and worker in a Bergen County homeless shelter and hospital.
Daniel Shechtman’s rigorous Israeli upbringing gave him the tenacity to keep him on a prize-winning scientific course despite ridicule from colleagues.
During paramilitary training at his Israeli high school, Shechtman was usually the first to jump on the barbed wire blocking the students’ path as they ran through a field.
“Everybody steps on you, and then you try to shake yourself loose and run after them,” the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology professor said at a Jerusalem press conference after the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced he was to become the 10th Israeli to win a Nobel Prize.
Shechtman said that his rigorous early training “definitely” influenced his ability to withstand the professional scorn that first greeted his groundbreaking discovery of quasicrystals, atoms making up non-repeating structural patterns found in aluminum alloys.
Keeping Rockleigh’s quality high despite Medicaid cuts
Some little girls dream of being nurses when they grow up. Sunni Herman dreamed of being a nursing home administrator. And on Oct. 16, at the Jewish Home at Rockleigh’s annual gala, Herman will mark one year as the executive vice president, CEO, and administrator of the 180-resident facility.
“I’m very passionate about what I do here,” says Herman, a 38-year-old mother of three. “I am very driven.”
Herman and her husband, Jonathan, relocated their family from West Hempstead, N.Y., to Teaneck soon after she took over from Charles P. Berkowitz, now president and CEO of the Jewish Home Family, the organizational parent of the Jewish Home’s various facilities.
Helping Haitian burn victims a priority for local lawyer
Sam Davis got news seemingly straight from the Book of Life on Rosh Hashanah: A badly injured boy named Lucken Colas was finally discharged from the Haiti burn clinic that the Teaneck-based attorney helped establish as founding director of the Burn Advocates Network (BAN).
“It’s news like that that makes the mission worthwhile,” says Davis, who visited the impoverished island nation for the fifth time in August to check on existing projects and get new ones off the ground.
Although January will mark two years since the devastating hurricane from which Haiti is still struggling to recover, serious burns resulting from the disaster — and from everyday conditions in the tent cities in which many natives are housed — have not faded from Davis’ priority list.
There is no more earthy holiday than Sukkot, when Jews not only are supposed to eat their meals outside in a hut, but are also commanded to gather four species of vegetation — a closed date palm frond, myrtle boughs, willow branches and citron fruit — in accordance with Leviticus 23:40. “On the first day, you shall take the product of hadar trees, branches of palm trees, boughs of leafy trees, and willows of the brook, and you shall rejoice before the Lord seven days.”
Sukkot, after all, not only commemorates the days of desert wanderings, but also is a thanksgiving for the autumn fruit harvest.
The myrtle and willow are inexpensive commodities. The frond (lulav) and citron (etrog) are a different story. Most are imported from Israel — although they grow in other places, including Morocco, Mexico, California, and Texas. Other factors described below also push up the price.
Rishon LeZion, Israel — The primitive music of the shofar on Rosh Hashanah is supposed to stir reflections on repentance. This year, when you hear the plaintive notes, you might also think of Avi Mishan sorting through antelope horns in South Africa.
Mishan, 44, owns one of Israel’s four major shofar production facilities (the others are in the Golan Heights, Haifa and Tel Aviv). He and his 14 employees turn out thousands of shofarot (the plural of “shofar” in Hebrew) to sell here and abroad. “Right now, we have new clients from Paraguay and Mexico,” he says.
Progress in detection of genetic diseases is spurring a new push for Ashkenazi Jews to get screened, but timeless questions of Jewish medical ethics are being raised anew.
Rabbi David Golinkin, the Conservative Jewish law expert, says the core issue has not changed since the days when screening was available only for Tay-Sachs disease.Golinkin will be scholar-in-residence at Temple Beth Sholom in Fair Lawn during Shabbat on Sept. 23-24.
“The main discussion vis-à-vis genetic disease is whether it justifies abortion,” Golinkin told The Jewish Standard in Jerusalem, where he lives and works at the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies.
Rabbi David Golinkin to be Fair Lawn scholar-in-residence
“There’s a huge thirst for learning,” says leading Conservative scholar and halachist Rabbi David Golinkin, who will be Shabbat scholar-in-residence at Temple Beth Sholom in Fair Lawn on Sept. 23-24.
President and professor of Jewish law at the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem, Golinkin served for 20 years as chairman of the Vaad Halachah (the Law Committee) of the Rabbinical Assembly of Israel, which writes responsa (answers to questions of Jewish law) for the Conservative (Masorti) Movement there. He has lectured in such cities as Puerto Rico, Paris, London, Montreal, St. Louis, Los Angeles, Tucson, Phoenix, Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, Atlanta, Chicago, and Reno.
Low pay lowers morale, but mentoring helps keep exits down
As the 2011-2012 school year dawns, financially strapped Jewish day schools are faced with myriad challenges. The statistical likelihood of many new teachers leaving the profession within their first three years on the job, coupled with recent economic constraints, highlights one of those challenges.
“Low paycheck, low morale, and not feeling valued by administrators” is how “Shira,” a young teacher at a Northern New Jersey day school, describes her work. Speaking on condition of anonymity, Shira said she feels at a professional dead end. “There is no protection, no union, no tenure. I should be making about $6,000 or $7,000 more than I am now.”
“I really couldn’t say if I would have remained a teacher without a mentor,” said Rabbi Simcha Schaum, now starting his sixth year teaching middle-schoolers in Yavneh Academy. During his first two years, his mentor through the Jewish New Teacher Project was Fayge Safran, former assistant principal at Ma’ayanot Yeshiva High School for Girls.
“Her mentoring was absolutely invaluable,” said Schaum. “She came each week to observe a class, and we met for an hour to discuss what was going right with my classes, what was going wrong, and what I could do to improve.
