JERUSALEM – Israel’s Supreme Court overturned the prison sentences for many of the mothers who defied a court order to return their daughters to an integrated Ashkenazi-Sephardi school.

The justices decided Tuesday to exempt 13 of the mothers from prison and to delay the sentences of nine others until their husbands complete their two-week prison sentences that began Thursday.

One of the mothers suffered a miscarriage on Monday. Hospital staff at the Mayanei Hayeshua Hospital told Ynet that they believe the woman’s emotional stress over the possibility of prison led to the miscarriage.

Thirty-five fathers entered a Jerusalem prison following demonstrations in Jerusalem and Bnai Brak that swelled to more than 100,000 people. Two other fathers on Tuesday were given until July 5 to begin their sentences.

The high court ruled last week that the mostly Ashkenazi haredi Orthodox parents who did not allow their daughters to attend a school with other Orthodox students who do not adhere to the same stringent tenants of the Slonim chasidim would serve the prison sentences. The parents already have faced threats and fines levied by the court.

The court said the parents’ reason for segregating their daughters is racial; the parents say it is religious.

JTA

Shush…. Daddy’s writing.”
As a young girl of about 4 or 5, before I really know my father, I am aware of his two distinct selves. First, there is my father the writer. He works for hours each day at a battered desk in my parents’ bedroom by a window that overlooks a small courtyard with a giant oak and a row of bent clotheslines, where the women in our building hang their laundry out to dry.

Perched on his desk is his scratched and dented Olympia, and from the other side of the closed door, I hear him peck away at the keys in a flurry of bird clacks, followed by long silences, during which I picture him gazing out the window into a sunny sky.

The Leon Lazarus of his daughter Rochelle’s memoir was a writer and editor for Martin Goodman’s Magazine Management Company (with friends Bruce Jay Friedman and Mario Puzo), as well as for Goodman’s Timely and Atlas comic-book companies, predecessors of Marvel Comics. He wrote more than 800 comic-book stories from 1947 through 1965.

“Recording Jewish Lives,” an anthology just published by the Kaplen JCC on the Palisades, grew out of a memoir-writing class there led from 2006 to 2009 by novelist, playwright, and biographer Susan Dworkin.

“People stayed in the class over time and worked very hard,” Dworkin said in a telephone interview last week. She said, for example, of Sarah Gottesman Lubin, who died in 2007 at 73 and to whom the book is dedicated, “she got closer and closer to the truth of her heart.” (Lubin lived in Englewood, and her family recently established a scholarship in her memory at Columbia University as well as the Sarah Gottesman Lubin Program for Arts & Crafts at the JCC.)

JERUSALEM – Despite the international outcry following last week’s lethal confrontation between Israeli commandos and militant pro-Palestinian activists aboard a Turkish vessel carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza, Israel insists its naval blockade of the Hamas-ruled territory is justified and will continue.

But even Israel’s closest allies backing the blockade as a legitimate means of cutting off weapons supplies to the Hamas regime, with which Israel is in an official state of belligerency, have been critical of the wider siege, which they say is hurting the people of Gaza far more than their fundamentalist rulers.

The general feeling among North Jersey Israelis following Israel’s raid on the Turkish flotilla to Gaza last week is one of disappointment, said Tenafly resident Udy Kashkash — disappointment in the world’s reaction and disappointment in how Israel has been treated in the media.

Despite world condemnation, though, 49 percent of U.S. voters believe pro-Palestinian activists on the flotilla were to blame for the resulting deaths, according to a Rasmussen Reports national survey released on Monday. Just 19 percent of those polled thought Israelis were to blame, while 32 percent were not sure.

New Jersey’s elected officials on both sides of the aisle appeared steadfast in their support of Israel after last week’s flotilla raid as Jewish leaders continued to lobby on behalf of the Jewish state.

“The most important thing that we as Americans can do,” said Leonard Cole, an adjunct professor of political science at Rutgers University, Newark, and former president of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, “is let our elected officials know that we feel strongly that Israel’s insistence on inspecting goods that are being brought into Gaza is entirely justified. If the tendency by some in the United States to curry favor with the Muslim world trumps the absolute requirement for fairness and support for the only democratic regime in that area, then we’re giving up the moral high ground.”

The college campus has been a battleground for public opinion on Israel for several years now, and the flotilla fiasco is sure to create passionate debate there. Jewish educators are moving quickly to get the facts out to high school and college students so they can be better prepared for what’s ahead.

“It’s important they know how to respond substantively. It’s important they know how to respond for their own Jewish pride so they do not feel like a victim,” said Rabbi Yaakov Glasser, director of the New Jersey region of National Council of Synagogue Youth, whose office is in Teaneck.

NCSY’s national office, under the auspices of the Orthodox Union in New York, recently sent out a list of talking points to its regions to teach teenagers the facts of the flotilla incident so they can respond constructively when Israel is criticized.