Shmuel Birnham’s road from Vancouver rabbi to official Jewish clergyman of the 2010 Winter Olympics began, in all places, at an interfaith service with the Dalai Lama.
During the Tibetan leader’s 2004 visit to Vancouver, Hong Chian, a local Buddhist doctor, invited Birnham to be one of the Jewish representatives at the service. When the Olympics rolled around, Chian, who serves on the multifaith committee for the Olympics, called on Birnham again — this time to head up the team of Jewish clergy providing spiritual support to visiting athletes.
When the call from Germany arrived at the Spector family home in Lenox, Mass., last month, the voice on the other end betrayed little of the excitement one would expect from a newly minted Olympian.
Laura Spector, 22, had qualified for the U.S. Olympic biathlon team that will be competing this month in Vancouver.
“It was a very quiet voice, and it was just, ‘Daddy, Hi it’s Laura. I made the team,’” her father, Jesse, recalled. “It was just like that. It was that quiet, from this 5-foot, 100-pound kid. It was probably a very emotional three to five seconds because her voice sounded as though, ‘Dad, I didn’t make the team.’ But she was so composed. It had its own — I don’t know — moment is the only way I can put it.”
JERUSALEM – The Conservative synagogue movement is launching a campaign to protest the recent questioning and possible prosecution of a leader of the group Women of the Wall.
For more than two decades, the group has been organizing regular women’s prayer services at the Western Wall and pressing for expanded worship rights at Judaism’s holiest pilgrimage site. Last week its chairwoman, Anat Hoffman, was summoned to a Jerusalem police station for questioning.
According to Hoffman, also director of the Reform movement’s Israel Religious Action Center and a former member of the Jerusalem City Council, she was questioned by police about her role in Women of the Wall, fingerprinted, and told that her case was being referred to the attorney general for prosecution.
NITZAN, Israel – More than four years after her family was ejected from their home in the Gaza Strip, Karen Sarfaty lives with her husband and four of their children in a small pre-fab house in this small town located about midway between the southern Israeli cities of Ashkelon and Ashdod.
Neither she nor her husband have found adequate employment. The compensation she received from the government is running out. Her daughter is only now beginning to overcome the trauma of their forced removal from Gaza. And while the lots allocated to them to build permanent houses are nearly ready, Sarfati says she lacks the money for construction.
“I have a lot of anger inside of me,” Sarfaty told JTA. “If [the evacuation] had to be, then it had to be. But at least if it had to be, it should have been done the right way.”
SELMA, Ala. – From the street, the red-brick facade of Temple Mishkan Israel retains all the grandeur of when it was first built in 1899. But step inside, and the degradation of a once proud synagogue is apparent everywhere, from the well-scuffed wood of its pews and holy ark to the cracks lining the soaring supports for its vaulted ceiling, a result of chronic water damage from a leaky roof. Only a series of magnificent stained glass windows appear to have withstood the corrosion of time.
Selma’s Jewish community, which once numbered well over 100 families, is down to its final dozen or so members, and the synagogue hasn’t been in frequent use for years. With the community having accepted the fact of its eventual disappearance, the remaining members have invested their hopes in a plan to transform the historic synagogue into a museum dedicated to the history of a community that was once an important civic presence here.
AMSTERDAM – A hushed crowd filed into a standing-room-only space above the Escape Club in Amsterdam last week to hear the Iranian-Canadian filmmaker Maziar Bahari describe the four months he spent in a Tehran jail.
Bahari was arrested without charge in June following the disputed re-election of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
In tones of compassion and respect for what he had endured — physical abuse, interrogations, solitary confinement — he was peppered with questions: on the prospects for real democracy in Iran, on the fate of his comrades in the struggle for reform, even about his grandmother.
VIENNA – From a shelf in his office, Ariel Muzicant extracts a weathered copy of a May 1985 community newsletter whose cover sports a graph depicting the Jewish population of Vienna nosediving.
From its postwar peak of about 9,000 in the early 1960s, the graph projected the Jewish population dipping below 5,000 by the turn of the millennium.
Nearly a quarter-century after that dire prediction, the worst has been avoided: The number of registered community members in Vienna stands at about 7,500 and, according to Muzicant, the community president, it is “technically growing.”
But leaders of the Viennese Jewish community, Muzicant among them, again are warning of disaster unless the community increases its ranks. And the consensus on how to do it can be summed up in a single word: immigration.
MEXICO CITY – In the final days of September, Alan Grabinsky and Paul Feldman moved into an apartment on a quiet circle in this city’s Condesa neighborhood, establishing only the second Latin American outpost of the global network of Jewish residences known as Moishe Houses.
In their new home, Grabinsky and Feldman will organize social gatherings for Jews in their 20s and 30s while creating an inclusive hub for post-collegiates in a country where Jews typically marry young and settle in the heavily Jewish suburbs in the western part of Mexico City.
Grabinsky and Feldman say their project is, in part, a reaction to the insularity of the Mexican Jewish community, which they see as overly cut off from the wider society, cloistered behind high walls, and too intent on warding off the crime and violence that remains an ever-present part of life in this city of 25 million.
MEXICO CITY – To most of the world, Diego Rivera is seen as one of the greats of Mexican art, the creator of legendary murals that adorn the walls of national monuments in Mexico City and elsewhere.
But for a small cadre of Mexican Jewish writers and intellectuals, Rivera was something of a landsman, a descendant of Spanish conversos who shared their own left-wing politics.
Though Rivera never practiced Judaism or affiliated with Mexico’s tiny Jewish community, he nonetheless developed close friendships with a number of prominent Jews and even illustrated a book of Yiddish poetry, “City of Palaces,” by Isaac Berliner.
When Amir Gissin helped come up with an idea to remake Israel’s international image several years ago, it’s unlikely he imagined that the showcasing of Israeli films in Toronto would spark a star-studded Hollywood brouhaha over artistic expression and cultural boycotts.
But that’s what happened as Israel became the major flashpoint at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.
In an interview last year with the Canadian Jewish News, Gissin boasted that his new marketing idea, known as Brand Israel, would help reshape public perceptions of the Jewish state and culminate in a major presence at the 2009 festival.
The presence turned out to be the focus on Tel Aviv as part of the festival’s new City to City program, which included an appearance by the city’s mayor and VIP receptions in addition to the screening of 10 Israeli films.
