| Firebombs were thrown at Congregation Beth El in Rutherford early Wednesday morning. larry Yudelson |
A firebomb attack on a synagogue in Rutherford is being investigated as an attempted homicide and a hate crime, Bergen County Prosecutor John Molinelli announced on Wednesday.
“You’re looking at 40 to 50 years in prison,” said Molinelli, addressing the “person or persons who are doing this act” at a Wednesday afternoon press conference.
“Turn yourself in and end this now,” he said. “We will ultimately solve this crime and make arrests.”
Around 4:30 a.m. Wednesday morning, several Molotov cocktails were thrown at Congregation Beth El, an Orthodox synagogue on a quiet residential street in Rutherford. One entered the second floor bedroom of the congregation’s rabbi, Nosson Schuman, and ignited his bedspread.
Schuman extinguished the fire — suffering minor burns on his hands — and evacuated the building’s inhabitants: he and his wife, their five children aged 5 to 17, and his two parents.
Schuman has served the small congregation since August 2009. While located in Bergen County, it is only two miles away from Passaic.
Molinelli called on religious and community groups — including churches and synagogues, as well as all area police — to be on heightened alert.
“I don’t think this is the type of offense where we should have a heightened awareness just in the Jewish community,” he said.
“This is not Damascus or Baghdad,” said Rep. Steve Rothman at the press conference. “This is Bergen County, New Jersey. We will catch them and prosecute to the full extent of the law.”
Rothman said he asked federal authorities to help the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office with the investigation and that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) is assisting.
Molinelli said that the quantity of firebombs thrown at the synagogue suggest that more than one person may have been involved. “We have a great deal of details on this. We have quite a bit more to go on,” in terms of the investigation, he said.
Molinelli said there was no evidence directly linking the Rutherford attack to last Tuesday’s arson at Congregation K’hal Adath Jeshurun in Paramus, or to the December spray paint vandalism attacks on synagogues in Maywood and Hackensack.
Etzion Neuer of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) said that his organization regards the attacks as related. “The Jewish community has been targeted. We would be foolish to suspect otherwise,” he said.
The ADL has raised the reward previously offered for information leading to the conviction of the perpetrator or perpetrators of the synagogue attacks to $2,500.
Said Neuer, “It’s important that people don’t use these incidents to become fearful. It’s important for the community to stand together in the face of hate,” and continue going to synagogue and Jewish communal events as always.
He repeated his calls for synagogues to draft security plans, a topic that was scheduled to be discussed Thursday night at the meeting previously called by the Jewish Community Relations Council and the Synagogoue Life Initiative.
“Too often, small synagogues feel they are immune because they’re too small to be on the radar. No one is immune,” he said.
Said Molinelli: “Security cameras are a wonderful way to assist law enforcement.”
Molinelli said that from the rabbis bedroom, he looked down to the ground and thought about the effort it took to throw the firebomb.
“What brings people to do this?” he asked.
WASHINGTON (JTA) -- Rep. Anthony Weiner resigned and apologized in the wake of a scandal in which he lied about sexually explicit exchanges on social media outlets.
“I am here today to apologize for the personal mistakes I have made and the embarrassment that I have caused,” Weiner (D-N.Y.) said at a news conference Thursday at a home for the elderly in Brooklyn where in the past he has announced his intention to run for office.
Weiner was under pressure from top Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives who had urged him to end the distraction of the scandal by leaving office.
Weiner was in treatment at an undisclosed location this week after confessing that he had sent at least six women sexually charged messages and photos through social media. After his confessional news conference last week, revelations about his lewd exchanges, including photos, continued to surface.
The House Ethics Committee was set to launch an investigation into whether Weiner had misused House resources to send the messages and then cover up the scandal.
Weiner, who is married to a top State Department official, Huma Abdein, is one of Israel’s staunchest defenders in the House.
Pre-eminent among lawmakers calling for him to step down were fellow members of the unofficial Jewish Hill caucus, including Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), the majority leader; Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee; Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.), the chairman of the Democrats House re-election campaign; and Reps. Allyson Schwartz (D-Pa.) and Sender Levin (D-Mich.)
JTA Wire Service
 | In a Middle East policy speech at the State Department, President Obama said the pre-1967 border should serve as the basis for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, May 19, 2011. Pete Souza / White House |
WASHINGTON – From accolades like “compelling” to accusations like “Auschwitz borders” to radio silence, to label the Jewish response to President Obama’s speech on Middle East policy as diverse understates matters.
The very breadth of the Middle East policy speech — 5,600 words and covering the entire Middle East and decades of history — helps explain the wildly divergent responses from Jewish groups and opinion shapers, even among some who are otherwise often on the same page.
One could as easily pick out points for Israel — slamming the Palestinian Authority’s pact with Hamas as well as its bid for unilateral statehood — as one could the demerits — for many, the most explicit endorsement of the pre-1967 lines as the basis for future borders by any American president.
But there are deeper currents running through the differences of opinion, reflecting a debate over how far Jewish groups must hew to Israeli government policy in the face of an imminent Palestinian push for statehood that some communal officials feel Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has failed to address adequately.
Another consideration was whether it is wise to alienate a U.S. president who seemingly has embraced a narrative of democracy promotion that some Jewish groups have long held up as a banner.
The most telling difference was between the cold-as-ice reaction issued by Netanyahu’s office and the effusive praise that emerged from two mainstream groups, the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League — usually among the first to take into account t Israeli government positions when formulating their own responses.
Netanyahu’s statement focused on the areas where he and Obama disagree, and virtually ignored the president’s nods toward recent Israeli demands.
“Prime Minister Netanyahu expects to hear a reaffirmation from President Obama of U.S. commitments made to Israel in 2004, which were overwhelmingly supported by both Houses of Congress,” the statement said. “Among other things, those commitments relate to Israel not having to withdraw to the 1967 lines which are both indefensible and which would leave major Israeli population centers in Judea and Samaria beyond those lines.”
The call to return to the parameters of President George W. Bush’s 2004 letter — a return that Obama officials have consistently rejected — was a clear response to the line in Obama’s speech that made front-page headlines around the world: “We believe the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states,” he said.
Previous presidents have spoken of the 1967 lines as an acknowledgment of Palestinian aspirations — not as a basis for negotiations.
Netanyahu’s statement alluded to other parts of Obama’s speech that crossed Israeli government red lines, including a call for an eventual full withdrawal from the West Bank, and postponing discussion of refugees and Jerusalem until later. Netanyahu wants a permanent Israeli military presence in the Jordan Valley, and says outright that a “right of return” of Palestinian refugees and their descendants is off the table.
Yet the AJC and ADL statements skated over these distinctions and went straight to the portions of the speech that represented Obama’s “gives” to a number of Netanyahu’s demands.
“The Palestinians must heed the President’s warnings about imprudent and self-defeating actions, including through campaigns to delegitimize Israel, plans to unilaterally declare statehood, and a unity agreement with a Hamas which remains committed to violence, rejection and anti-Semitism,” said the ADL in a statement that called the speech “compelling.”
That was a reference to Obama’s calling out of the Palestinian Authority for its recent pact with Hamas: “The recent announcement of an agreement between Fatah and Hamas raises profound and legitimate questions for Israel: How can one negotiate with a party that has shown itself unwilling to recognize your right to exist?” Obama said in his speech. “And in the weeks and months to come, Palestinian leaders will have to provide a credible answer to that question.”
The AJC focused on Obama’s rejection of the P.A. bid for U.N. recognition of Palestinian statehood.
“President Obama has sternly warned the Palestinians, and the international community, to stop this senseless drive to try to achieve a state without any negotiated agreement with Israel,” it said in its statement.
There were other more subtle “gives” that Jewish organizational officials noted in conversations after the speech: Obama referred deliberately to 1967 “lines” as opposed to “borders,” adopting Israel’s posture that the lines never had any international recognition, as opposed to the view of the Palestinians, who see them as the immutable border of their projected state.
Additionally, Obama rejected attempts, as he put it, to “delegitimize” Israel, a buzzword that Netanyahu has made a central platform of his diplomacy.
In mirror-image statements, the Zionist Organization of America and the Simon Wiesenthal Center skated over such concessions and took their cues from Netanyahu’s statement. The two organizations used variations on the phrase “Auschwitz borders” to refer to the 1967 lines. The ZOA went so far as to call on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to rescind its invitation to the president to speak on Sunday, labeling Obama the most hostile U.S. president to Israel ever.
B’nai B’rith International delivered a mixed response, praising Obama for rejecting the pact between Fatah and Hamas and the bid for U.N. recognition, but expressing “concern” about the 1967 lines. Liberal groups, like J Street and Americans for Peace Now, praised the speech as a basis for restarting stalled talks.
There were two elephants in the room saying nothing at all: AIPAC, which will host both Obama and Netanyahu at its annual conference beginning Sunday, and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the umbrella foreign policy group.
A former AIPAC director, Neal Sher, told JTA that the group’s leaders at least should be protesting Obama’s 1967 reference. “It would be unconscionable of the AIPAC leadership not to publicly express serious concerns about it,” he said.
Yet the real concerns may be with Netanyahu’s leadership in terms of devising a strategy of how to deal with the Palestinian bid for statehood. In recent months, Jewish leaders across the spectrum have privately expressed impatience with what they see as Netanyahu’s failure to come up with a plan, and were hoping he would do so when he addresses a joint meeting of Congress next Tuesday.
In a conversation with the Jewish leaders immediately following the speech, Steven Simon, the National Security Council official in charge of dealing with Israel and its neighbors, described September, when the U.N. General Assembly convenes, as a coming “train wreck.”
He said the only way to get the European states to oppose U.N. recognition of Palestinian statehood is to come up with another plan, which is what the Obama administration is trying to do.
Notably, there was no pushback from the callers, although there had been some negative reaction to Obama’s failure to say outright that demands for Palestinian refugees’ “right of return” to Israel should be off the table.
There also was the sense with the speech that Obama was moving away from what was perceived as his previous over-eagerness to engage with the region’s autocrats. His speech was unstinting in its condemnation of Syria and Iran, and the bulk of it was dedicated to promoting democracy in the region.
That, and his rhetorical shifts regarding the Palestinians, were signs that the president deserved a hearing, Jewish communal officials said.
Or, as the ADL statement put it: “This administration has come a long way in two years in terms of understanding of the nuances involved in bringing about Israeli-Palestinian peace and a better understanding of the realities and challenges confronting Israel.”
JTA Wire Service
WASHINGTON – President Obama said the future state of Palestine should be based on the pre-1967 border with mutually agreed land swaps with Israel.
In his address Thursday afternoon on U.S. policy in the Middle East, Obama told an audience at the State Department that the borders of a “sovereign, nonmilitarized” Palestinian state “should be based on 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps.”
Negotiations should focus first on territory and security, and then the difficult issues of the status of Jerusalem and what to do about the rights of Palestinian refugees can be broached, Obama said.
The speech, which focused mostly on the Arab democracy movements in the Arab world, marked the first time a U.S. president formally declared that the pre-Six Day War borders should form the basis of negotiations. In that war, Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai and Golan Heights from surrounding Arab countries. While Israel subsequently withdrew from the Sinai and Gaza, it annexed the Golan Heights and eastern Jerusalem and kept the West Bank in limbo.
“Recognizing that negotiations need to begin with the issues of territory and security does not mean that it will be easy to come back to the table,” Obama said, noting the new unity deal between Fatah and Hamas, a group foresworn to Israel’s destruction.
“How can one negotiate with a party that shows itself unwilling to recognize your right to exist?” Obama said. “In the weeks and months to come, Palestinian leaders will have to provide a credible answer to that question.”
The U.S. president did not announce a specific initiative to resume talks between the two sides.
Obama also said that the Palestinians’ plan to declare statehood at the U.N. General Assembly this September will not result in a state.
“For the Palestinians, efforts to delegitimize Israel will end in failure,” Obama said. “Symbolic actions to isolate Israel at the United Nations in September won’t create an independent state.”
He suggested both sides bore blame for the ongoing conflict, saying, “My administration has worked with the parties and the international community for over two years to end this conflict, yet expectations have gone unmet. Israeli settlement activity continues. Palestinians have walked away from talks.”
While affirming America’s commitment to Israel’s security and its vision as a Jewish democracy, Obama cautioned, “The dream of a Jewish and democratic state cannot be fulfilled with permanent occupation.”
Ultimately, the president said, making peace is up to the parties.
“No peace can be imposed upon them, nor can endless delay make the problem go away,” he said. “But what America and the international community can do is state frankly what everyone knows: a lasting peace will involve two states for two peoples. Israel as a Jewish state and the homeland for the Jewish people, and the state of Palestine as the homeland for the Palestinian people; each state enjoying self-determination, mutual recognition, and peace.”
JTA Wire Service
WASHINGTON – The U.S. Senate unanimously approved a resolution calling on the United Nations to rescind the Goldstone report.
Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and James Risch (R-Idaho) initiated the resolution last week after Richard Goldstone, a South African judge, retracted a key conclusion of the U.N. report he helped author on the 2009 Gaza war—that Israel had targeted civilians as a policy.
The resolution, passed Thursday night, “calls on the United Nations Human Rights Council members to reflect the author’s repudiation of the Goldstone report’s central findings, rescind the report, and reconsider further Council actions with respect to the report’s findings.”
Similar legislation is now circulating in the U.S. House of Representatives. Unlike the non-binding Senate resolution, those bills would tie U.N. funding to rescinsion of the Goldstone report.
Goldstone has also said that much of the remainder of the report still stands, such as Israel’s alleged slowness in prosecuting individuals accused of war crimes. His three fellow committee members said they stand by the report in its entirety.
JTA Wire Service
WASHINGTON – Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel would launch an international campaign to cancel the Goldstone Report after its author, ex-South African Judge Richard Goldstone, wrote in an Op-Ed in the Washington Post that Israel did not intentionally target civilians as a policy during the Gaza War, withdrawing a critical allegation in the report.
Netanyahu said he had asked his security adviser, Ya’akov Amidror, to establish a committee focused on “minimizing the damage caused” by the report.
“There are very few instances in which those who disseminate libels retract their libel. This happened in the case of the Goldstone Report,” Netanyahu said Sunday at the start of the weekly Cabinet meeting. “Goldstone himself said that all of the things that we have been saying all along are correct -- that Israel never intentionally fired at civilians and that our inquiries operated according to the highest international standards.
“Of course, this is in complete contrast to Hamas, which intentionally attacked and murdered civilians and, naturally, never carried out any sort of inquiry. This leads us to call for the immediate cancellation of the Goldstone Report.”
Goldstone wrote in Saturday’s Washington Post that “We know a lot more today about what happened in the Gaza war of 2008-09 than we did when I chaired the fact-finding mission appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council that produced what has come to be known as the Goldstone Report. If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.”
Goldstone withdrew what perhaps was his most damaging conclusion: That there was evidence suggesting Israel had deliberately targeted civilians during its war with Hamas.
Referring to a U.N. committee’s recent independent assessment of his report, Goldstone wrote in his Op-Ed that “While the investigations published by the Israeli military and recognized in the U.N. committee’s report have established the validity of some incidents that we investigated in cases involving individual soldiers, they also indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.”
Goldstone said he may have drawn different conclusions had Israel cooperated with his inquiry; Israel refused to do so, seeing the U.N. Human Rights Council as irredeemably biased.
He also said that it “goes without saying” that Hamas intentionally targeted civilians and noted that unlike Israel, the group did not investigate its own actions.
Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said Saturday that Goldstone’s “retreat does not change the fact war crimes had been committed against 1.5 million people in Gaza.” Abu Zuhri said that Hamas cooperated with the Goldstone commission.
Senior Fatah Central Committee member Nabil Shaath said Sunday that Goldstone retracted his committee’s report due to pressure.
Netanyahu on Saturday night called on the United Nations to “cancel” the report in light of Goldstone’s article, although he did not make clear what this would involve.
The American Jewish Committee said Goldstone should ask the United Nations to “revise and update” the report.
Rep. Ted Deutch (D-Fla.), a member of the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, called on the U.N. Human Rights Council to “retract” the report, which it had adopted.
Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said in a statement that “What is so distressing is the fact that Goldstone rushed to judgment in the first instance as to Israel’s alleged intention to target civilians without any convincing evidence.” He added that Goldstone’s “specious conclusion caused Israel untold damage in the international community and played a key role in fostering the campaigns of delegitimization of Israel.”
Foxman called Goldstone’s renunciation of his own report “A story of the continuing bias of the United Nations against Israel, a story of the unwillingness of the international community to take seriously the extremism and violence of Hamas, and a story of how a renowned jurist and member of the Jewish community allowed himself to be used by enemies of the Jewish state.”
Gerald Steinberg, president of NGO Monitor, said Goldstone “was misled by an orchestrated campaign led by powerful NGOs” and that the so-called ‘evidence’ provided by these groups was at the core of the political war against Israel. Goldstone was taken in by crude manipulation.”
World Jewish Congress Chair Evelyn Sommer called on the United Nations to recognize Goldstone’s retraction and “to revise the report issued by the U.N. that did immeasurable harm and damage to the State of Israel.”
“It is high time that the United Nations, which gives much lip service to the concept of reform of the world body, re-evaluate its methods of reporting and documentation of investigations such as that of Israel’s Operation in Gaza of 2
JTA Wire Service
Following widespread criticism, a Facebook page calling for a third Palestinian intifada against Israel was removed on March 29. On the Facebook page, Palestinians were urged to launch street protests following Friday May 15 and begin an uprising as modelled by similar uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco, and Jordan. Killing Jews en masse was emphasized.
According to the Facebook page, “Judgment Day will be brought upon us only once the Muslims have killed all of the Jews.” The page had more than 340,000 fans. However, even while the page was removed, a new page now exists in its place with the same name, “Third Palestinian Intifada.”
“As recently demonstrated, social networks can be used to overthrow governments, for good or bad, and even destabilize entire regions. Prominent social networks like Facebook can no longer afford to remain neutral as it relates to Israel’s right to exist. Therefore I appreciate their stand against violent and growing anti-Semitism,” Dave McQuade, founder of MediaReallyMatters.com, said.
Abraham Foxman, National Director for the Anti-Defamation League, said in a statement, “Facebook’s decision to remove the cause page calling for a “Third Palestinian Intifada” is a welcome development. We applaud Facebook’s willingness to continue to engage and consider this important question and we deeply appreciate their responsiveness.
By taking this action, Facebook has now recognized an important standard to be applied when evaluating issues of non-compliance with its terms of service involving distinctions between incitement to violence and legitimate calls for collective expressions of opinion and action. As it continues to monitor its pages, Facebook should be able to apply this standard in response to complaints about other pages with similar content. We hope that they will continue to vigilantly monitor their pages for other groups that call for violence or terrorism against Jews and Israel.”
Foxman had earlier filed an official complaint against Facebook for allowing the page to remain up. Foxman said last week, “We should not be so naïve to believe that a campaign for a ‘Third Intifada’ does not portend renewed violence, especially in the current climate that has seen a dramatic increase in rocket attacks from Gaza, the brutal murder of the Fogel family in the West Bank, and a terrorist bombing in Jerusalem.” Foxman had called upon Facebook to drop the controversial page on March 25, but got no response. In a statement, the ADL declared then “We are disappointed that Facebook has rejected our request to remove this site, which is in clear violation of their terms of service.”
In addition, Israeli Minister of Information and Diaspora Yuli-Yoel Edelstein wrote a letter to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, warning that the page includes calls to kill Jews and to liberate Jerusalem through violence. According to Edelstein’s letter, the Facebook page in question violates Facebook content regulations. Facebook has not released an official response to the Israeli government’s request or the ADL statement.
However, a Facebook spokesperson did respond last week to criticism. According to Bloomberg News Service, Facebook spokeswoman Debbie Frost said in an emailed response, “While some kinds of comments and content may be upsetting for someone - criticism of a certain culture, country, religion, lifestyle, or political ideology, for example—that alone is not a reason to remove the discussion.” Reportedly, Frost added, “We strongly believe that Facebook users have the ability to express their opinions, and we don’t typically take down content, groups or Pages that speak out against countries, religions, political entities, or ideas.” Much attention was focused on Facebook in the run-up to dictator Hosni Mubarak’s fall from grace in Egypt, as Net-savvy young activists spread the word on the website announcing protests and posting news, photos, and video. A declaration on the Facebook page calling for mass murder on May 15 stated that if Facebook dared block the page, “all Muslims will boycott Facebook forever.”
A Washington, DC, based constitutional advocacy group the American Center for Law and Justice, issued a statement syaing, “We applaud Facebook’s decision to remove the ‘Third Intifada’ group.” Jordan Sekulow, Director of International Operations for the ACLJ, continued, “While the access to freedom of speech, association, and political organization that Facebook provides to many who live under oppressive regimes has already proven to be world-changing, there is no need to accommodate those who actively seek to organize terrorist acts.”
In acknowledging the power of the Internet today, Sekulow said, “We know that terrorists have recognized the power of Facebook, and now we know that Facebook will work aggressively to prevent its platform from being used for these purposes while simultaneous protecting the rights so fundamental to mankind.”
Cutting Edge Correspondent Martin Barillas also edits Speroforum.com.
Senate President Extends Invitation to Ido Aharoni, Consul General of Israel in NY
Union, N.J. (March 18, 2011) – In a gesture of friendship and cooperation, Senate President Stephen Sweeney has invited Ido Aharoni, Consul General of Israel in NY to appear before the upper body of the legislature at the Senate Chamber on Monday March 21, 2011 at 2 p.m. Aharoni will make a formal presentation to the State Senate prior to the voting session.
Aharoni, who officially assumed the post of Consul General in February, after serving as Acting Consul General since August, represents the State of Israel to communities from throughout the tri-state areas of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. This is Aharoni’s second post in the New York Consulate. Between 2001 and 2005, he served there as Consul for Media and Public Affairs. During his tenure in Israel’s diplomatic corps, Aharoni has also served as Consul for Communications and Public Affairs at the Consulate General of Israel in Los Angeles. In 2006 he served as a Senior Advisor to Israel’s Foreign Minister and Vice Prime Minister, in charge of media and public affairs in Jerusalem, among other positions. In his earlier career, Aharoni served under then-Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, as Policy Assistant to Israel’s Chief negotiator with the Palestinians.
Following his appearance before the State Senate, at which he is expected to be presented with a proclamation by Senate President Sweeney, Aharoni will also be a guest at the meeting of the New Jersey-Israel Commission, convening for the first time under the newly appointed chairman Mark Levenson of West Orange, New Jersey.
In the words of Ruth Cole, President NJ State Association of Jewish Federations, “It is a great honor that Senate President Sweeney has extended this gesture of welcome and partnership between the officials of our great state and of the democratic nation of Israel. We are delighted that the visit will coincide with the new term of the New Jersey Israel Commission, and we thank Governor Chris Christie and Lieutenant Governor Kim Guadagno for their efforts to revitalize that body which fosters economic development, security cooperation and cultural exchanges between the State of New Jersey and the State of Israel.”
NJ State Association of Jewish Federations
Jacob Toporek, Executive Director
501 Green Lane, Suite 202
Union, New Jersey 07083
P: (908) 352-7930
Gov. Chris Christie on Tuesday approved 23 new charter schools for the state, including the Shalom Academy for students in Englewood and Teaneck. The school would be New Jersey’s second Hebrew immersion charter school.
The new Hebrew-language charter school is set to provide a Hebrew immersion program for up to 240 students in grades kindergarten to eight. The school, the brainchild of Englewood resident Raphael Bachrach, had been rejected by the state board of education three times in the past.
Bachrach did not immediately return calls for comment.
Local school leaders reportedly opposed the academy, which had been rejected three times by previous administrations, because they say it will drain resources from the public schools.
Before turning to the idea of a charter school, Bachrach had first sought to create a dual-language program in one of Englewood’s public schools, similar to existing programs for Spanish in some New Jersey schools, as an alternative to day school for tuition-burdened families. Difficulties with the Englewood school board eventually led to Bachrach abandoning the proposal for the charter school idea.
The Shalom Academy will be the second Hebrew-immersion charter school in the state, joining the Hatikvah International Academy that opened last year in East Brunswick with 108 students in kindergarten through second grade. Ninety percent of its students come from East Brunswick.
Hebrew charter schools, which offer nonreligious but Hebrew-focused curricula, are being looked at across the country as less expensive alternatives to Jewish day schools. Several of the schools are operating in New York and Florida.
A full report on the school will appear in The Jewish Standard next week.
The Jewish Standard and JTA Wire Service
Early on Jan. 11, 2010, Mother Jones’ magazine posted, on-line, an interview with Bryce Tierney, a friend of Jared Loughner, the man accused of the Tucson massacre that left six dead and injured 14 others. Among those wounded was (Jewish) congress member Gabrielle Giffords.
The Mother Jones’ reporter, Nick Baumann, quoted Tierney as saying that Jared Loughner’s mom is “Jewish.”
That same day this Mother Jones story was referenced by Jewish Telegraph Agency (JTA) Washington correspondent Ron Kampeas on his JTA web blog.
I write about Jews in popular culture for the newspapers and other media outlets listed below. I know how to research a person’s ancestry and I have a young friend in Canada, Michael, who is a “family history buff.” Together, we determined to get to the bottom of story, i.e., is Bryce Tierney correct — is Jared Loughner’s mother, Jewish?
Our conclusion, based on real research in census and other reliable records — was that it is exceedingly unlikely that Amy Totman Loughner, Jared’s mother, has any Jewish ancestry. We did real research and did not speculate like so many journalists on the internet and elsewhere. We rolled up our sleeves and did the work as fast as possible and, to some extent — we stopped this false story in its tracks.
I think you will find this article very interesting.
I contacted Ron Kampeas on January 11 after reading his report about the Mother Jones’ story. By the end of the day (Jan.11) — Michael and this writer had pretty much run down Jared’s mother’s ancestry and submitted our findings to Kampeas. He posted them unedited on his JTA blog on January 12.
Late on Jan. 12, Michael and this writer finished our research and tied-up a few loose ends in the family history story of Amy Loughner. Those findings are posted below. As you will see, also on Jan. 12, Mother Jones’ posted a footnote to its interview — citing this writer’s findings.
(The obituary notice I discuss below is found at the end of this article so it reads more smoothly. I have also omitted a comment Kampeas made after he re-posted my letter.)
Here is what Ron Kampeas posted on his website on Jan.12:
Loughner’s Jewish mother? Not so much
By Ron Kampeas · January 12, 2011
I noted the other day that an acquaintance of Jared Lee Loughner, the accused gunman in Gabrielle Giffords shooting in Tucson, believed his mother was Jewish.
Bryce Tierney told Mother Jones that Loughner listed Mein Kampf as a favorite book in part to provoke his Jewish mother.
Nate Bloom, the noted Jewish roots columnist and researcher, has done the legwork — and pretty much buries this notion.
I’ll hand it over to him:
AMY LOUGHNER’S ANCESTRY
NATE BLOOM
It is appalling how one comment — a friend of Jared Loughner telling a Mother Jones’ reporter that Jared Loughner’s mother is “Jewish” — goes viral in an instant.
In hours, “this fact” was all over on anti-Semitic sites. And, of course, there are the “commentators” who love to ‘blame the victim’ via some pop psychology theory that Jared acted out of “Jewish self-hatred.”
I figured that this was the moment to try and get “truth” dressed, and into the public arena a lot faster than usual. In other words, to use the tools of the internet to determine the veracity of what this friend told Mother Jones.
I cover Jews in popular culture for Jewish newspapers and I know how often famous people are mis-identified as Jewish or mis-identified as not Jewish. I also know that a lot of people are not outright lying about claiming someone is Jewish — they just get it wrong.
So, with my friend Michael, we ran down everything we could from public records on Jared Loughner’s mother’s family background. It took a lot of “search terms” and databases to find what we did.
Here’s what we found:
Jared Lee Loughner’s mother is Amy Totman Loughner;
Amy Loughner — Known Parentage from Public Records:
Her [Amy’s] parents were Lois May Totman and Laurence Edward Totman.
Lois M. Totman died in 1999 and Laurence E. Totman died in 2005. Both were registered nurses. Laurence worked at a VA facility in Tucson. We both found this info via google news archives, social security death index.
From 1930 census records
Laurence E. Totman was born in Illinois in 1925.
His (Laurence’s) parents were Laurence A. Totman and his wife, Mary.
Laurence Totman pere (the elder) was born in Kansas to a Pennsylvania father and an Illinois mother. Mary was from Illinois, as were both of her parents.
A sister-in-law named Myrtle M. Brennan is listed as living with them also.
1920/1910 census records — Totman Family:
In 1920, Lawrence Totman, (Jared’s) great-grandfather, is living with his aunt, Rosa Clarke, who was born in illinois to two Irish-born parents.
Rosa is his mother’s sister. On the 1910 census, his (Laurence, the elder) maternal grandparents are listed as Irish-born.
Father, Orvie Totman was born in Ohio to Ohio-born parents.
Amy Loughner’s Mother’s Line:
See obit, below, from Arlington (Illinois) Daily Record, June 24, 1999 — Obituary of Helen Medernach of Virgil, Illinois. Helen was the sister of Lois M. Totman (the mother of Amy Totman Loughner). Helen was the great aunt of Jared Loughner.
As you can see, Helen’s funeral (mass) was held at a Catholic church. Helen (and Lois) were the children of Anton Bleifuss and Jessie Bleifuss (nee Anderson). Lois M. Totman died just days after her sister, Helen.
According to the census records, Anton Bleifuss was born in Bremen, Germany, to German parents. Jessie Anderson Bleifuss was born in Illinois to a father born in Denmark and a mother born in Illinois.
Conclusion — It is exceedingly unlikely that Amy Loughner has any Jewish ancestry. The only “line” not traced his Amy’s father’s mother’s family. The other three lines (Amy’s father’s father, Amy’s mother’s father, and Amy’s mother;s mother) — show, to all but the most obtuse, that these were/are not Jewish families. Moreover, it is quite clear that Amy’s mother, Lois Bleifuss Totman, came from a Catholic family.
RON KAMPEAS ADDS:
At OpEd News, Rob Kall interviews Rabbi Stephanie Aaron of Giffords’ shul, Congregation Chaverim, she dispenses with any notion that the Loughner’s were in any way associated with the community:
“We had a meeting of the Tucson Board of Rabbis. We all looked at our rosters from many years back. No one has ever heard of the family — him, his parents, any of them. I can say with absolute certainty that we do not know him in pretty much the entire affiliated community.”
[Rob Kall interviewed Rabbi Aaron after a notorious anti-Semite invented a story that Amy Loughner was a member of the same synagogue as Representative Giffords. This total lie was picked-up by other Jew-haters and posted around the Internet].
END OF JANUARY 12, 2011 JTA COLUMN
Coda on Amy Totman Loughner’s Ancestry
Nate Bloom
January 13, 2010
In my letter, posted on the Jewish Telegraph Agency site on Jan. 12, 2010, I said:
Conclusion — It is exceedingly unlikely that Amy Loughner has any Jewish ancestry. The only “line” not traced is Amy’s father’s mother’s family. The other three lines (Amy’s father’s father, Amy’s mother’s father, and Amy’s mother’s mother) — show, to all but the most obtuse, that these were not Jewish families. Moreover, it is quite clear that Amy’s mother, Lois Bleifuss Totman, came from a Catholic family.
Well, I asked my friend Michael if we could find more on the one unknown line — Amy’s father’s mother’s family.
Once again, Amy’s father was Laurence E. Totman. Laurence’s parents were Laurence A. Totman and his wife, Mary.
I previously traced Laurence A. Totman’s ancestry. His (Laurence A.) mother was the daughter of two Irish born parents. His father, Orvie Totman, was almost certainly an American of Irish or English ancestry.
The ancestry of Laurence E. Totman’s wife, Mary, the paternal great-grandmother of Jared Loughner, was not explored in my last letter. I asked my friend, Michael, if Myrtle Brennan, the woman described as a “sister-in-law” and described as living with Laurence E. Totman and Mary in the 1930 census was the sister of Mary, Laurence Totman’s wife.
Michael replied in the affirmative. He told me something I did not know — the description of someone as a “sister-in-law” is always used by the census in relation to the “head of the household.” Laurence E. Totman was the head of the household. So, Myrtle Brennan had to be his wife’s sister, or his brother’s wife.
Michael further informed me that he found the whole Brennan family on the 1920 census. Mary Brennan (later Mary Brennan Totman) was born in Illinois. On the 1920 census, you find a household composed of Mary Brennan, her sister Myrtle Brennan, their brother Wallace, and parents Anna and John Brennan. John’s parents were born in Ireland. Anna’s mother was born in Ireland. Anna’s father was born in New York.
As for Anton Bleifuss, the maternal grandfather of Amy Loughner — speculation (by Mr. Kampeas) that he might have been Jewish is, in my opinion, not very well founded. Bleifuss is a pretty rare last name. I haven’t been able to find a single Jewish person with this last name and I tried using various “tricks” like checking the entire NY Times obituary and news archive—as well as google search terms like Jewish and Bleifuss.
The most famous person with the last name “Bleifuss,” investigative journalist Joel Bleifuss, is NOT Jewish.
What is known about Anton Bleifuss is that he was born in Germany. He appears to have come over (by ship) by himself (1907). He listed his race as “German” on the ship’s record. He became a naturalized citizen in 1916. He registered for the draft during WWII.
Final conclusion — -Amy Totman Loughner, based on the records, is of mostly Irish background on her father’s side and mixed ethnic background on her mother’s side — Irish, German, Danish, and possibly one or two other ethnic groups.
Very few persons born in Ireland were or are of Jewish background.
We know that Amy’s mother came from a Catholic family.
There is almost nothing left to research here. Again, the conclusion is that it is exceedingly unlikely that Amy Loughner has any Jewish ancestry.
I should add that Mother Jones’ reporter Nick Baumann, who started this hornet’s nest—has now footnoted his article, citing my research into Amy Loughner’s background. Baumann interviewed Bryce Tierney, a friend of Jared Loughner, on Jan. 10, 2011. Tierney mentioned that Loughner’s mother is “Jewish.”
On January 12, Baumann footnoted Tierney’s comment thus: “**Tierney says Loughner’s mom is Jewish. But a columnist who researched the subject doesn’t think that holds up. Tierney also said that Loughner himself was definitely not religious.”
Finally, I will say here — what I said to Mr. Baumann in an e-mail that he did not respond to. I thought it was irresponsible of him to quote Tierney about Amy Loughner’s “Jewishness” without doing any independent research as to this statement’s accuracy.
It was and is a charged situation — a Jewish congressperson was shot; there are allegations of ties by Jared Loughner to groups that, at the very least, flirt with anti-Semitism; anyone who knows anything about the sick world of anti-Semites knows that they would seize on this statement for their own twisted ends.
As I said to Mr. Baumann, “If a friend of Jared Loughner told you his mother was a Muslim would you have taken his word for it?” I think the answer is obvious. A liberal-left publication like Mother Jones wouldn’t want to be responsible for a backlash against Muslims based on a possibly wholly erroneous report that a mass murderer’s mother was Muslim. They would do some independent research and verification and not take one friend’s word for it.
The fact of the matter is that government (State and Federal) statistics consistently show that hate crimes against American Jews vastly outnumber those against American Muslims. But this fact does not seem to really penetrate the minds of most members of the mainstream and liberal-left media. So, they don’t take the steps they should take — prudent and reasonable steps—to verify before reporting that, again, a mass murderer’s mother is Jewish.
I am also thinking about the Arizona rabbis who had to take time away from their pastoral and other duties to check records to see if the Loughner family was ever connected to the Jewish community. They wouldn’t have had to do this if Mother Jones had refrained from quoting Tierney until they were sure of their facts.
One bright note — in trolling one notoriously anti-Semitic site, I was pleased to see that my findings had thrown them off their game of “blaming the Jews.” A few, remarkably, were even calling a liar the person who invented the story that Amy Loughner belongs to a Tucson synagogue.
By getting the facts out there very quickly — we have staunched the spread of a false story. However, no doubt, many of those who invent and believe anti-Semitic stories will not be swayed by any amount of evidence.
Nate Bloom
Jan.13, 2010
Oakland, CA
Columnist — American Israelite of Cincinnati, Cleveland Jewish News, Detroit Jewish News, New Jersey Jewish Standard, Tampa Jewish Federation News, Interfaithfamily.com
Links:
Mother Jones’ Story
http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/01/jared-lee-loughner-friend-voicemail-phone-message?page=1
The footnote “correction” appears on page 2 of this article.
Original JTA blog post:
http://blogs.jta.org/politics/article/2011/01/12/2742519/loughners-jewish-mother-not-so-much
Interview with Rabbi Aaron of Tucson:
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Exclusive-Giffords-Rabbi-by-Rob-Kall-110112-823.html
AMY LOUGHNER’S MOTHER’S SISTER’S OBITUARY
Date: June 24, 1999
Section: Business
Edition: Cook
Page: 10
Column: Obituaries
Helen Medernach of Virgil
A funeral Mass for Helen Medernach, 77, will be held at 10:30 a.m. Friday, at S.S. Peter & Paul Church. Fr. Aloysius Neumann will officiate.
Born Sept. 21, 1921, in Sycamore, the daughter of Anton and Jessie (nee Anderson) Bleifuss, she passed away peacefully Sunday, June 20, 1999, at Bethany Care Center in Sycamore, where she had made her home since May. Interment will be in S.S. Peter and Paul Cemetery, Virgil.
Helen grew up in Sycamore and graduated from Sycamore High School, class of 1939. She went on to take business courses which shortly landed her a job at Anaconda Wire Company in Sycamore. She went to California with her sister, Lois, and was employed in a business office for a few years before returning to work in Chicago. The last 20 years of her working career were spent in the business office at the Duplex Company in Sycamore.
She was united in marriage to William H. `Willie’ Medernach on May 16, 1959.
They made their home in Sycamore for a short time before moving to Virgil where they lived across the street from the church for many years.
Survivors include her sisters, Virginia Stran of DeKalb, Irene Luty of Covina, Calif., Lois (Lawrence) Totman of Tucson, Ariz. and Dorothy (`Trig’) Troeger of Sycamore; several nieces and nephews; and a family of dear friends. In addition, she leaves the quiet, simple legacy of one who cared. Her many thoughtful words of thanks, encouragement and friendship were patiently penned into countless cards that found their way into the hearts of many friends and neighbors through the years.
She was preceded in death by her parents; her husband in 1997; and brothers, Albert, Lyle, Leslie and Donald Bleifuss.
Friends may call from 4 to 8 p.m. today, at Conley Funeral Home, 116 W. Pierce St., Elburn, and from 9:30 a.m. until the time of the Mass Friday, at the church.
Memorials in her name may be made to Masses in her memory.y 12:
 | Debbie Friedman is credited with bringing a more folksy, sing-along style to American congregations. Courtesy of Limmud/Flickr |
Debbie Friedman is credited with bringing a more folksy, sing-along style to American congregations. (Photo courtesy of Limmud/Flickr)
Debbie Friedman, a popular singer and songwriter who is widely credited with reinvigorating synagogue music, has died.
Friedman died Sunday after being hospitalized in Southern California for several days with pneumonia. She was in her late 50s.
“Debbie influenced and enriched contemporary Jewish music in a profound way,” read a statement published Sunday on the website of the Union for Reform Judaism. “Her music crossed generational and denominational lines and carved a powerful legacy of authentic Jewish spirituality into our daily lives.”
Friedman brought a more folksy, sing-along style to American congregations. In 2007 she was appointed to the faculty of the Reform movement’s cantorial school in a sign that her style had gained mainstream acceptance.
She is best known for her composition “Mi Shebeirach,” a prayer for healing that is sung in many North American congregations.
Friedman released more than 20 albums and performed in sold-out concerts around the world at synagogues, churches, schools and prestigious venues such as Carnegie Hall. She received dozens of awards and was lauded by critics worldwide.
“Debbie Friedman was an extraordinary treasure of our movement and an individual of great influence,” said Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism. “Twenty-five years ago, North American Jews had forgotten how to sing. Debbie reminded us how to sing, she taught us how to sing. She gave us the vehicles that enabled us to sing. Then she impacted our youth and our camps and, ultimately, from there she impacted our synagogues.
“What happens in the synagogues of Reform Judaism today -- the voices of song -- are in large measure due to the insight, brilliance and influence of Debbie Friedman.”
JTA
WASHINGTON – The 8th District in southern Arizona represented by U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords comprises liberal Tucson and its rural hinterlands, which means moderation is a must. But it also means that spirits and tensions run high.
Giffords’ office in Tucson was ransacked in March following her vote for health care reform — a vote the Democrat told reporters that she would cast even if it meant her career. She refused to be cowed, but she also took aim at the hyped rhetoric. She cast the back-and-forth as part of the democratic process.
“We’ve had hundreds and hundreds of protesters over the course of the last several months,” Giffords told MSNBC after the middle-of-the-night attack, which left a window shattered. “Our democracy is a light — really a beacon — around the world because we effect change at the ballot box and not because of these outbursts of violence and the yelling.”
She called on all leaders — of both parties and in the community — to consider how they cast their arguments. Giffords, who last week took the oath of office for her third term, noted how her re-election bid was being treated by 2012 GOP presidential hopeful Sarah Palin.
“The way she has it depicted is that she has the crosshairs of a gunsight over our district,” Giffords said. “When people do that they’ve got to realize there’s consequences to that action.”
Palin removed the chart from her Facebook page after news of the Jan. 8 shootings of 17 at a Tucson shopping center that left Giffords in critical condition and extended her prayers to the Arizona lawmaker and the other victims. Six people were killed in the attack.
Such gestures were not likely to tamp down suggestions that the fevered rhetoric from some right-wing precincts helped create the atmosphere that led to the shooting allegedly by Jared Lee Loughner, who was said to be “mentally unstable.”
“You have a vice-presidential candidate for a major party who runs ads with targets saying ‘remove Gabby Giffords’ and a young man with issues,” Mark Rubin, a Tucson-area lawyer and a Democratic Party activist, told JTA. “You’re going to spend a long time convincing me it doesn’t have something to do with it.”
Spencer Giffords, the congresswoman’s father, wept when the New York Post asked him if his daughter had enemies.
“The Tea Party,” he said, referring to the conservative insurgency that targeted her, resulting in one of last November’s closest elections.
Local Tea Party leaders condemned the attack, but also reportedly rejected the notion that they needed to tone down their rhetoric.
Giffords supported gun rights, but it didn’t stop opponents from identifying her with her party’s efforts to increase restrictions on possession. Police in 2009 removed a man carrying a gun from Giffords’ meet-the-voters event in 2009, and her opponent, Jesse Kelly, hosted a campaign event inviting supporters to shoot with him titled “Get on Target for Victory in November.”
Loughner, who is being held by the FBI, may have been influenced by American Renaissance, an extremist anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic group, according to a Department of Homeland Security memo distributed to law enforcement and obtained by Fox News Channel.
Loughner, 22, listed Adolf Hitler’s manifesto “Mein Kampf” as a favorite book on one of his social media sites. Police were seeking a white middle-aged man as a possible accomplice.
“One suspect, now in custody, may be directly responsible for this crime,” the National Jewish Democratic Council said in a statement. “But it is fair to say — in today’s political climate, and given today’s political rhetoric — that many have contributed to the building levels of vitriol in our political discourse that have surely contributed to the atmosphere in which this event transpired.”
Conservatives were quick to say that drawing lines between the attack and heated rhetoric was premature.
“Fair?” Jennifer Rubin said on her Washington Post blog. “How so, and on what evidence is this string of flimsy assumptions based?”
It wasn’t just Democrats, however — the Reform movement and the JCPA, a public policy umbrella body bringing together Jewish groups across the religious and political spectrum, also made the connection.
“While we do not know the motives for today’s attack, we do know that it cannot be viewed apart from the climate of violence and the degradation of civil society that are anathema to democracy,” the JCPA said Saturday.
Jonathan Rothschild, Giffords’ longtime friend, said he wanted to know more before he made a final judgment.
Giffords during her campaign “suffered vitriolic hate rhetoric,” he said, “but you don’t know how much this enters into it.”
JTA Wire Service
A U.S. Department of Homeland Security memo reportedly notes that Gabriel Giffords is Jewish in describing the motives of the Arizona congresswoman’s alleged assailant.
The memo, obtained by Fox News Channel, says that Jared Lee Loughner mentioned American Renaissance, an extremist anti-immigrant group, in some of his own postings.
“The group’s ideology is anti-government, anti-immigration, anti-ZOG (Zionist Occupational Government), anti-Semitic,” says the memo sent to law enforcement, which also notes that Giffords, a Democrat, was the first Jewish congresswoman from Arizona.
Loughner was arrested after Giffords and at least 16 others were shot Saturday at a meet-your-lawmaker event at a Tucson shopping mall. Six people were killed, including a 9-year-old girl and a federal judge, John Roll. Loughner was tackled and arrested. Giffords, a Democrat in her third term, remains in critical condition after being shot in the head.
Loughner, who is being held by the FBI and has been described by authorities as “unstable,” reportedly listed “Mein Kampf” and the “Communist Manifesto” as two of his favorite books on his MySpace page. Several hours before the shooting he reportedly left a “Goodbye friends” message, which also said “Please don’t be mad at me.”
Giffords was outside one of her signature “Congress at your corner” events outside a Safeway in Tucson, part of her congressional district, when the gunman approached and shot her. A Giffords staff member, Gabe Zimmerman, 30, the organizer of the event, was among the six casualties.
A suspected accomplice whose image was captured on a surveillance video camera outside the shopping center also is being sought, according to reports.
Dr. Michael Lemole a surgeon at the University Medical Center in Tucson, Ariz. said Sunday morning at a news conference that Giffords was responding to doctors’ commands. During a two-hour surgery on Saturday, doctors removed bone fragments from her brain in order to help reduce swelling. The bullet went through the left side of her head, he said.
Giffords was elected to Congress in the Democratic sweep in 2006. She made her Jewish identity part of her campaign.
“If you want something done, your best bet is to ask a Jewish woman to do it,” Giffords, a former state senator, said at the time. “Jewish women -- by our tradition and by the way we were raised -- have an ability to cut through all the reasons why something should, shouldn’t or can’t be done, and pull people together to be successful.”
Giffords, 40, was raised “mixed” by a Christian Scientist mother and Jewish father, but said she decided she was Jewish only following a visit to Israel in 2001. She attended services at a local Reform synagogue.
In a recent photo, she posed with the new U.S. House of Representatives speaker, Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio), at her swearing-in with her hand on the Five Books of Moses.
Giffords fought a hard re-election battle last year against the national anti-incumbent, anti-Democratic mood. She tacked to the right of her party on immigration, saying border security was of primary consideration.
The election was called in her favor weeks after the vote.
Giffords’ office had been vandalized in March after she voted for health care reform. Friends said she had received threats for her positions on health care and for opposing her state’s new law allowing police to arrest undocumented immigrants during routine stops.
The National Jewish Democratic Council suggested that the heated rhetoric of the last year contributed to the climate that led to the attack.
“One suspect, now in custody, may be directly responsible for this crime,” the group said in a statement. “But it is fair to say -- in today’s political climate, and given today’s political rhetoric -- that many have contributed to the building levels of vitriol in our political discourse that have surely contributed to the atmosphere in which this event transpired.”
JTA Wire Service
WASHINGTON – The event was typical Gabrielle Giffords: no barriers, all comers — Democrats, Republicans and independents welcome to talk about what was on their minds and in their hearts.
While she was deep in a conversation with an older couple about health care — the issue for which she was willing to risk her career — a gunman strode up to the Arizona congresswoman and shot her point blank in the head.
The critical wounding Jan. 8 of Giffords and the slaughter of six people standing near her — including a federal judge, her chief of community outreach and a 9-year-old girl interested in politics — brought to a screeching halt the easy, open ambience that typified Giffords’ politics, friends and associates said.
“She’s a warm person,” Stuart Mellan, the president of the Jewish Federation of Southern Arizona, said as he walked away from a prayer service Saturday night at Temple Emanuel in Tucson, one of the southeastern Arizona cities that Giffords represents in Congress. “Everyone called her Gabby, and she would give a hug and remember your name.”
Giffords was the president of the tire company founded by her grandfather when she was propelled into state politics in part because of her concerns about the availability of health care. She switched her registration from Republican to Democrat and in 2001, at 30, she was elected to the Arizona Legislature.
She gained prominence quickly in that body and in 2006, at 36, she became the first Jewish woman elected to Congress from her state.
At the same time, her Judaism was becoming more central to her identity. The turning point came in 2001 following a tour of Israel with the American Jewish Committee, she told The Arizona Star in 2007.
“It just cemented the fact that I wanted to spend more time with my own personal, spiritual growth. I felt very committed to Judaism,” she said. “Religion means different things to different people. It provides me with grounding, a better understanding of who I came from.”
Her wedding to Cmdr. Mark Kelly, an astronaut, was written up in The New York Times. The item noted that a mariachi band played Jewish music and there were two canopies — a chupah and one of swords held up by Kelly’s Navy buddies.
“That was Gabby,” Jonathan Rothschild, a longtime friend who served on her campaign’s executive committee, recalled to JTA. “The real irony of this thing is her Judaism is central to her, but she is the kind of person who reaches out to everybody.”
Giffords’ father is Jewish and her mother is a Christian Scientist, and she was raised in both faiths. Her grandfather, Akiba Hornstein, changed his name to Giffords after moving from New York to Arizona, in part because he did not want his Jewishness to be an issue in unfamiliar territory.
The women on her father’s side of the family seemed to guide her toward identifying with Judaism.
“In my family, if you want to get something done you take it to the Jewish women relatives,” she told JTA in 2006. “Jewish women, by and large, know how to get things done.”
Giffords, who last week took the oath of office for her third term in Congress, has pushed Jewish and pro-Israel issues to the forefront at the state and federal levels. She initiated an Arizona law facilitating Holocaust-era insurance claims for survivors, and in Congress she led an effort to keep Iran from obtaining parts for combat aircraft.
She didn’t stint in seeking Jewish and pro-Israel funding. Rep. Shelley Berkley (D-Nev.), the premier pro-Israel lawmaker in Congress, fundraised for her, as did Steve Rabinowitz, the Washington public relations maven whose shop represents a slate of Jewish groups.
“She was so heimishe, so down to earth,” Rabinowitz, himself from Tucson, recalled of his fundraiser last spring.
Almost as soon as she was elected to the state Legislature, Giffords was enmeshed in Arizona’s signature issue — rights for undocumented immigrants — according to Josh Protas, who directed the Tucson-area Jewish Community Relations Council for years before moving to Washington in 2009 to direct the D.C. office of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs.
Protas recalled meeting with Giffords as part of the area faith coalition promoting immigrant rights.
“We met with her around immigration issues and she was sensitive to the faith community’s concerns,” he said.
Her approach to the issue was typical for the moderate Democrat, Protas said: She attempted to synthesize what she regarded as the valid viewpoints of both sides on the divisive issue.
“Understanding the complexities of the immigration situation was something important to her,” he said. It came from “a sense of the Jewish value around how we treat the stranger, a history of the Jewish community — but she had recognition of the strong need for security.”
It was a posture that led Giffords to hit both the state and federal governments last year: She blasted the Obama administration for not doing enough to secure the border, but also slammed as repressive a new Arizona law that allowed police to arrest undocumented immigrants during routine stops.
“She was very moderate in her views and willing to meet with folks on all sides,” Protas said. “She took a lot of heat particularly the last couple of years from both the far right and the far left.”
In the end, her greatest vulnerability might have been her openness.
The day Jim Kolbe said he was not seeking re-election to Congress, Giffords told Rothschild that she would run for the seat. Rothschild had one bit of advice for her: Come back every weekend to meet constituents. Not hanging out with the locals had led to the defeat of Kolbe’s Democratic predecessor.
He didn’t need to convince her; she was back virtually every weekend.
And her open, engaging approach appeared to pay off.
Despite representing a swing district, she survived the Republican wave in November. And just three days before the shooting she was back in Washington — with one hand up and one hand on the Jewish Bible, grinning at her swearing-in at the Capitol.
On Saturday she was back in Tucson, at a parking lot smiling at all comers.
JTA Wire Service
Phoenix, AZ, January 9, 2011 – The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today condemned the tragic shooting rampage that wounded U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and killed and wounded more than a dozen innocent bystanders in Tucson, with reports of six dead and 14 wounded.
Miriam Weisman, ADL Arizona Regional Board Chair, and Bill Straus, ADL Arizona Regional Director, issued the following statement:
We are shocked by this unconscionable and horrific act of violence against one of our highly respected public servants. We agree with President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner that this was more than an attack on one member of Congress - it is an attack on all public servants and the very fabric of our democracy.
During her years in the statehouse, Rep. Giffords served on the ADL Arizona Regional Board. Her affiliation with ADL, which monitors and exposes hate and extremist groups, contributed to her awareness of the nexus between hate ideology and violence. It is a testament to her dedication to her constituents that despite past threats against her, Rep. Giffords has always been so accessible to the people she represents. Our thoughts and prayers are with Congresswoman Giffords and the other victims and their families.
ADL remains in contact with law enforcement as investigators endeavor to establish a motive for the attack. It is critical to determine whether the alleged shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, acted alone or with others, and whether he was influenced by extremist literature, propaganda or hate speech. While it is still not clear whether the attack was motivated by political ideology, the tragedy has already led to, as Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik put it, “soul searching” about the connection between incivility and violence. We applaud Sheriff Dupnik’s statements condemning the volatile nature of political discourse in America and for taking this investigation seriously.
“The events yesterday in Arizona are a shocking wake up call for all Americans, especially those involved in politics and government.
“While do not know the motives of the individual accused of shooting Rep. Giffords and killing six others, this atrocity is an alarm that we all must wake up to.
“Inflammatory rhetoric coming from both sides of the political aisle has come to dominate our political discourse. It cannot continue. It is time to ratchet down the intensity of our rhetoric both during campaigns and in the course of governing debates.
“Demonizing your political adversary; questioning your opponent’s loyalty to this nation or to a particular group; or statements calling for the torture of your opponent or his or her physical demise belong in the Nazi Party or World War II – not in political parties of the United States in 2011.
As a political leader, I ask the members of my party to think carefully about the words and images they use in their political fliers; in their television and radio commercials and on the Internet. I ask the political consultants to use better judgment in guiding their candidates and I would hope the candidates will reject the over-the-top suggestions of the people they hire to run their campaigns.
Political disputes in America are settled at the ballot box, not with the business end of an M-16 rifle. As citizens, we live under the rule of law; we place ourselves under the guidance of the U.S. Constitution, and we accept the will of the voters on Election Day.
I encourage citizens to work for change if that is what they want, but to do so respectfully
The political parties and candidates who square off in elections and who battle on the floors of the legislatures in county administration buildings, or town halls are not enemies, they are merely political opponents. We are all Americans.
We can be proud of our right to free speech, but we cannot abuse it without consequence.
Robert Yudin is the Bergen County Republican Party Chairman.
WASHINGTON – In response to the tragic shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords and others in Tucson today, Kathy Manning, the chair of the board of The Jewish Federations of North America, released the following statement on behalf of the Federation movement:
“We are shocked and saddened by the savage attack on Representative Gabrielle Giffords today. Rep. Giffords is an active member of the Tucson Jewish community, and a leader in promoting Jewish communal concerns on Capitol Hill. We mourn the loss of life, and pray for a speedy recovery for all of the injured. Our hearts and prayers are extended to Rep. Giffords’ family and the entire community during this difficult time.”
The Jewish Federation movement is the largest Jewish philanthropy collective in the world and The Jewish Federations of North America is dedicated to promoting awareness and involvement among the Jewish community in the United States and Canada.
WASHINGTON (JTA) -- Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) was in critical condition after being shot in the head.
Giffords was outside one of her signature “Congress at your corner” events outside a Safeway in Tucson, the district she represented, when a gunman approached and shot her in the head.
The gunman, identified by media as Jared Lee Loughner, shot 17 people, killing six of them, including a 9-year old boy and a federal judge, John Roll. The gunman was tackled and arrested.
Doctors said Giffords was expected to survive, although it was not yet known what her condition would be.
Giffords was elected to Congress in the Democratic sweep in 2006. The first Jewish woman elected to Congress from the state, she made her Jewish identity part of her campaign.
“If you want something done, your best bet is to ask a Jewish woman to do it,” said Giffords, a former state senator, said at the time. “Jewish women — by our tradition and by the way we were raised — have an ability to cut through all the reasons why something should, shouldn’t or can’t be done and pull people together to be successful.”
Giffords, 40, was raised “mixed” by a Christian Scientist mother and Jewish father, but said that after a visit to Israel in 2001, she had decided she was Jewish only. She attended services at a local Reform synagogue.
In one of her last photos, she posed with the new U.S. House of Representatives speaker, Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) at her swearing in; her hand is on the “Five Books of Moses.”
Giffords fought a hard election this year, against the national anti-incumbent, anti-Democratic mood. She tacked to the right of her party on immigration, saying border security was of primary consideration.
The election was called in her favor weeks after the vote.
Giffords’ office had been vandalized in March, after she voted for health care reform. Friends said she had received threats for her positions on health care and for opposing her state’s new law allowing police to arrest undocumented immigrants during routine stops.
The National Jewish Democratic Council suggested that the heated rhetoric of the last year contributed to the climate that led to the attack.
“One suspect, now in custody, may be directly responsible for this crime,” the group said in a statement. “But it is fair to say -- in today’s political climate, and given today’s political rhetoric -- that many have contributed to the building levels of vitriol in our political discourse that have surely contributed to the atmosphere in which this event transpired.”
JTA Wire Service
WASHINGTON, D.C. December 9, 2010 – In response today’s attack against Representative Gabrielle Giffords, her staff, and residents at a constituent event in Tucson, Arizona, Rabbi David Saperstein, Director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, issued the following statement:
Our thoughts and prayers go out to the family of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, a remarkable public servant shot while meeting with constituents today. Rep. Giffords is a member of Reform Congregation Chaverim in Tucson, and our entire community shares her family’s concern and pain.
We send our condolences to the families of those killed in this horrible act of violence, including U.S. District Judge John Roll, and pray for those who were wounded. As dark a day as this is for our nation, we know that it is immeasurably more painful for those whose family members were killed or injured.
We have had a close and fruitful relationship with Rep. Giffords and her staff throughout her time in Congress. She is a leading advocate for sensible immigration reform, a strong and thoughtful voice on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and is willing to cast difficult votes on issues she believes in, including health care reform. (It was her support for health care reform, which led to an earlier attack on her office in Tucson.)
We do not yet know the specific motive behind this despicable act. But there can be no ignoring the increasing culture of violence in our nation and particularly in our political discourse. Dehumanizing language and images of violence are regularly used to express differences of opinion on political issues. Such language is too often heard by others, including those who may be mentally ill or ideologically extreme, to justify the actual use of violence. It continues to be far too easy to acquire guns, including the weapon used in today’s shootings. Americans must be able to have robust and healthy differences of opinion while respecting the humanity and patriotism of those with whom they disagree.
We, together with so many others, have supported and developed programs to address the disintegration of our political culture. As we can see from today’s bloodshed, to call for “civility,” only begins to scratch the surface of what
is needed. We are committed to working with America’s religious leaders of all faiths, and others, to elevate aggressively the state of our political discourse.
But today, of course, we stand stunned and deeply saddened. And we pray that Rep. Giffords’ husband Mark and her entire family find support comfort and strength among their friends and family, as we join them in praying for her full recovery.
The Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism is the Washington office of the Union for Reform Judaism, whose more than 900 congregations across North America encompass 1.5 million Reform Jews, and the Central Conference of American Rabbis, whose membership includes more than 1,800 Reform rabbis. Visit www.rac.org
WASHINGTON – Jewish leaders expressed outrage at an attack by Glenn Beck on George Soros’ World War II childhood.
Beck, the Fox News Channel provocateur, is running a series this week on his radio and TV shows portraying Soros, a billionaire businessman and philanthropist, as attempting to control the U.S. economy.
In his radio show Wednesday, Beck revived an unfounded claim that Soros as a child in Hungary helped ship Jews to death camps.
“And George Soros used to go around with this anti-Semite and deliver papers to the Jews and confiscate their property and then ship them off,” Beck said. “And George Soros was part of it. He would help confiscate the stuff. It was frightening.
“Here’s a Jewish boy helping send the Jews to the death camps. And I am certainly not saying that George Soros enjoyed that, even had a choice. I mean, he’s 14 years old. He was surviving. So I’m not making a judgment. That’s between him and God. As a 14-year-old boy, I don’t know what you would do.”
In fact Soros, then 13 and living under the protection of a non-Jewish Hungarian, on one occasion joined the older man when he was ordered by Nazis to inventory the estate of a Hungarian Jew who had fled.
On another occasion, the local Jewish council had ordered Soros to deliver letters to local lawyers. Soros’ father, Tivadar, realized the letters were to Jewish lawyers and meant to expedite their deportation. He told his son to warn the targets to flee and ended the boy’s work with the council.
Soros, 80, has been slammed in some Jewish circles over his calls for increased U.S. engagement in the Middle East peace process and his strong criticism of Israeli policies. In recent months, some pro-Israel advocates and pundits have ripped J Street for accepting his money and lying about it. But the loudest Jewish voices in this case have belonged to those defending Soros from Beck’s attacks.
“This is the height of ignorance or insensitivity, or both,” said Abraham Foxman, the director of the Anti-Defamation League, who noted that as a child, he was protected by non-Jews who had not revealed his background to him.
“As a kid, at 6, I spit at Jews -- does that make me part of the Nazi machine?” Foxman said. “There’s an arrogance here for Glenn Beck, a non-Jew, to set the standards of what makes a good Jew.”
Elan Steinberg, the vice president of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants, called Beck’s attack “improper.”
“When you make a particularly monstrous accusation such as this, you have to have proof,” he said. “I have seen no proof.”
Simon Greer, the director of Jewish Funds for Justice, was one of several Jewish leaders who had confronted Beck after he said during the recent election season that terms like “social justice” lead to death camps.
Greer and other Jewish leaders met with senior Fox News Channel officials, and subsequently Beck sent Greer a note saying he understood “the sensitivity and sacred nature of this dark chapter in human history.”
Greer said Wednesday that Beck and Fox had made a “mockery of their professed understanding.”
“No one who truly understands ‘the sensitivity and sacred nature’ of the Holocaust would deliberately and grotesquely mischaracterize the experience of a 13-year-old Jew in Nazi-occupied Hungary whose father hid him with a non-Jewish family to keep him alive,” Greer said. “Many other Jews survived the attempted extermination of the Jewish people by changing their identities and hiding with Righteous Gentiles. With today’s falsehoods, Beck has engaged in a form of Holocaust revisionism.”
A number of commentators have described Beck’s series this week as employing anti-Semitic tropes.
“Beck went beyond demonizing him; he cast him as the protagonist in an updated ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion,’ “ Michelle Goldberg wrote on the Daily Beast. “He described Soros as the most powerful man on earth, the creator of a ‘shadow government’ that manipulates regimes and currencies for its own enrichment. Obama is his ‘puppet,’ Beck says. Soros has even ‘infiltrated the churches.’ He foments social unrest and economic distress so he can bring down governments, all for his own financial gain.”
Media Matters, a liberal media watchdog, noted that Beck in one instance extracted a quote about Soros’ alleged abuses in Malaysia from a longer speech in which former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad makes an issue of Soros being a Jew.
JTA
Board members and active volunteers of the Jewish National Fund’s Northern New Jersey Region bid farewell to Talia Tzour, longtime JNF shaliach serving Bergen and Passaic counties, at a Jan. 15 event. Jill and Seffi Janowski hosted the event in their Cresskill home. Tzour is returning home to Israel and will continue working for KKL-JNF. Jocelyn Inglis was introduced at the event as JNF’s new regional director.
 | Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and President Barack Obama, seen here at a September 2011 meeting at the United Nations in New York, are likely to meet again in Washington on March 5, as decisions on Iran come to a head. Avi Ohayon/GPO/FLASH90 |
WASHINGTON – March 5 is shaping up to be a crucial day in the effort to rein in Iran’s nuclear program.
In Vienna, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will convene to consider its inspectors’ latest report on Iran’s nuclear program. The last such report came closer than ever to indicting the Iranian regime for making weapons, and it helped spur stronger international sanctions against Tehran.
Several hours later, in Washington, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu will deliver a speech to an American Israel Public Affairs policy conference about what should happen next with Iran. Either before or after the AIPAC meeting, Netanyahu likely will meet with President Barack Obama to discuss Iran options.
It may appear to some to be a carefully arranged scenario, especially if the IAEA issues a negative report on Iran before Netanyahu steps up to the AIPAC podium, but it is truly a coincidence.
Attendance by Israeli prime ministers at the annual AIPAC policy conference, which these days draws nearly 10,000 people, is generally a must. The IAEA board, although it meets twice a year, does not set a date until several months in advance.
The confluence of events underscores how decision-making on Iran is drawing closer for all the parties, and could come to a head if not by March, then before the year ends, according to recent media reports.
“Israel is in a delicate place,” Uzi Rabi, the director of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, told a small group of reporters during a visit this week to Washington, where he met with officials under the auspices of The Israel Project. “It has committed itself to a military engagement” unless Iran retreats from its suspected nuclear program, he said.
“I don’t see how we can skip that after August,” Rabi added, noting that the fall is the approximate deadline that Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak has set before Iran’s program becomes too intractable to curtail through a military strike.
There are signs that the Obama and Netanyahu governments, after a period of uncertainty, have begun to coordinate their message on Iran.
Rabi, who also chairs Tel Aviv University’s Middle East history department, said he heard that the recent visit to Israel by Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “made things clearer.” Previously, media sources reported that there were tensions between the two countries because Israel was refusing to give the United States advance warning of an Iran strike.
In the wake of Dempsey’s meetings with his counterparts, U.S. and Israeli officials reset a date for the Austere Challenge, the largest-ever joint anti-missile exercise, for sometime around October, according to officials who have knowledge of the discussions, and U.S. military officials will visit Israel later this month to plan the exercise. A decision by Israel in December to postpone the exercise, originally set for May, spurred talk of distancing between the two countries, even though Israel repeatedly denied that.
Obama sought to set such doubts about coordination to rest in a pre-Super Bowl interview he gave Sunday to NBC.
“We have closer military and intelligence consultation between our two countries than we ever have,” he said when Matt Lauer asked him if he expected advance warning from Israel in case of a strike. “And my No. 1 priority continues to be the security of the United States, but also the security of Israel, and we are going to make sure that we work in lockstep as we proceed to try to solve this, hopefully diplomatically.”
The same day, Obama signed off on the most restrictive Iran sanctions yet, targeting Iran’s Central Bank, essentially making it impossible for third parties to deal with the U.S. and Iranian economies simultaneously.
A letter to Congress accompanying the order notes that it comports with the enhanced sanctions law passed by Congress in December and underscores its expansive intent. The order enhances freezes on U.S. dealings with Iran dating back to 1995 that forced any U.S. entity or its subsidiary to return funds that are identified as having originated with sanctioned Iranian individuals or entities.
Mark Dubowitz, the director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a think tank that tracks the effectiveness of sanctions, said the Central Bank sanctions will accelerate the impoverishment of the Iranian regime.
“It’s an effective way to target Iranian government assets being processed through the U.S. financial system, and potentially to freeze those assets for later distribution to victims of Iranian terrorism,” he said.
Congressional aides involved in sanctions legislation noted that the order comports with the law signed by Obama on Dec. 31 that was authored by Sens. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) and Mark Kirk (R-Ill.). Still, it was a sign of the urgency that the Obama administration is now attaching to heading off a nuclear Iran — and the prospect of an Israeli or U.S. military strike — that the president issued the order well within the 60 days provided by the law before he had to invoke a waiver.
Obama administration officials, in conversations in recent weeks with their Israeli counterparts and with Jewish and Israeli media, emphasized that it was necessary to line up substantive international support for the sanctions in order for them not to backfire. One nightmare scenario, they said, would be for oil prices to rise as a result of the sanctions, thus further enriching Iran’s theocracy.
That international support appears to be lining up: On Jan. 23, the European Union imposed an oil embargo on Iran. On Monday, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal al Saud, who runs Saudi Arabia’s Kingdom Holding Company, told CNBC that the Saudis would not allow the price of oil to top $100 a barrel. It is currently at $97 a barrel.
Rabi said that for Israel to hold off on a military strike, it would have to see substantive steps toward the likely disintegration of Iran’s current regime. The impoverishment of the Iranian middle class, precipitating upward pressure on the regime, would be one sign.
“Sanctions will work,” he said, “if the ayatollahs feel that the whole saga is aiming at their very survival.”
Another sign would be meaningful inspections at Iranian nuclear sites, including the one near Qom uncovered by Western intelligence in 2009. A team of IAEA inspectors last month met with Iranian officials in an attempt to resume comprehensive inspections.
For now, Israeli leaders seem satisfied with the pace of pressure on Iran. After meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Tuesday, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said he “thanked her for the determined stance of the United States on the Iran issue and said the steps taken in recent weeks send an important message to the entire region.”
JTA Wire Service
Paramus-Bat Sheva Hadassah marked “H” Month during Kabbalat Shabbat services on Jan. 20 at the Jewish Community Center of Paramus. On behalf of the chapter, Rhoda Fried presented a copy of “Saving Israel” by David Gordis to the shul’s library; Rabbi Arthur Weiner accepted on behalf of the library.
“H” Month is a project to reach out and make the chapter known to the community. The group meets monthly at the JCCP.
Torah Academy of Bergen County will host its 29th annual dinner on Sunday, Feb. 26, at 6 p.m., at Congregation Keter Torah in Teaneck.
Rabbi Yosef Adler, the head of school, is guest of honor. Service awards will be presented to Betsy Levy, Marcy Zecher, and Rebecca Zirman, co-presidents of TABC’s Parent Association (TAPA). Rabbi Josh Kahn, dean of student life, will receive the Faculty Award, and the Alumni Service Award will be presented to Yaakov Lisker (class of 1997).
TABC’s annual dinner provides financial aid for its students. Cost is $200 a person to attend, and special alumni rates apply. Contact Ryan Hyman, director of community relations, at (201) 837-7696, ext. 150, or .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
Stuart Skolnick will be honored at a gala at Congregation Shomrei Torah in Wayne on Saturday, March 3, beginning at 7:30 p.m. The event includes music, dancing, food, and open bar.
Skolnick, chair of the shul’s ritual committee for the past six years, has taught in the adult school, is a bar mitzvah tutor, and frequently leads davening. He introduced Friday Night Live (Shomrei Torah’s instrumental Kabbalat Shabbat) services and assists with the strategic planning committee. For the past two years, he has served as the synagogue’s High Holy Days cantor.
Dinner costs $109 per person. An ad journal will be published in conjunction with the event.
Call (973) 696-2500 or http://www.ShomreiTorahWCC.org.
 | Alan “Shlomo” Veingrad |
Valley Chabad teens will be attending the National CTeen Shabbaton this weekend in New York City joining teens from more than 40 cities in North America and Europe. Jewish Super Bowl champ Alan “Shlomo” Veingrad (Dallas Cowboys offensive lineman, 1993) will be the guest speaker. Veingrad was among the Jewish football players who made it to the Super Bowl profiled in the Feb. 3 issue of The Jewish Standard. Veingrad began observing after he left football and is now a member of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement.
Sharsheret (Hebrew for chain), a national not-for-profit organization supporting young women and their families of all Jewish backgrounds facing breast cancer, offers Purim (March 8) cards. A package of 12 costs $36, with an additional charge for shipping and handling. They can also be picked up in Sharsheret’s Teaneck office or at The Judaica House in Teaneck. (201) 833-2341 or www.sharsheret.org.
 | A poster issued jointly by the Department of Homeland Security, the Jewish Federations of North America, and the Secure Community Network urges synagogue goers to be on the alert for anything that looks suspicious or out of the ordinary. |
WASHINGTON – When America’s top intelligence official said that Iran’s regime is considering attacks on U.S. soil, he cited a single incident and qualified the assessment with a “probably.”
Intelligence and law enforcement experts, however, say that the Jan. 31 warning by the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, was likely based on more than the evidence he cited.
“I would be surprised to learn a statement like that was not backed up by intelligence,” said Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
The question of whether Iran will respond to escalating international pressure over its nuclear program with terrorist attacks on overseas targets is of particular concern to Jewish communities around the world.
While there has been intense speculation over how Iran would respond to a possible Israeli or U.S. military strike against its nuclear facilities, experts already are citing with concern a series of recent foiled plots, allegedly connected to Iran, or such of its proxies as the Lebanese-backed Hezbollah militia, against Jewish and non-Jewish targets.
In his written unclassified testimony submitted to the U.S. Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence, Clapper cited only the alleged plot revealed in October to assassinate Saudi ambassador Adel Al-Jubeir at the Cafe Milano, a popular Georgetown hangout for the powerful and influential. The attack allegedly had the backing of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.
“The 2011 plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States shows that some Iranian officials — probably including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — have changed their calculus and are now more willing to conduct an attack in the United States in response to real or perceived U.S. actions that threaten the regime,” Clapper wrote.
Matthew Levitt, a former deputy assistant secretary for intelligence and analysis at the Treasury Department under George W. Bush, said Clapper’s inclusion of Khamenei in his warning, even with the “probably” qualification, was no accident.
“People are careful to say what they mean, and nothing more,” he said of the intelligence community. “As soon as I read that, I said, ‘Uh-oh, that’s not just a statement to say the threat to the ambassador was real. [Khamenei] was in there to say it went to the top.”
Sources close to law enforcement say there is no specific threat of an attack, although the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security in recent weeks have intensified their monitoring of possible threats.
On Feb. 3, ABC News cited an Israeli internal security document in reporting that Jewish and Israeli institutions in the Unites States are on high alert over concerns that they will be targeted by Iran or a proxy. According to ABC, the head of security for the Israeli consul general for the Mid-Atlantic states wrote in a letter that the security threat has increased on “guarded sites,” such as Israeli embassies and consulates, and such “soft sites” as synagogues, Jewish schools, kosher restaurants, and Jewish community centers.
ABC also reported that local and regional law enforcement and intelligence officials in U.S. and Canadian cities — including New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Toronto — have increased security at Israeli and Jewish institutions, and that federal officials also have increased vigilance in looking for imminent attacks.
“In the past few weeks, there has been an escalation in threats against Israeli and Jewish targets around the world,” ABC quoted a U.S. regional intelligence document as saying. “Open source has reported many demonstrations against Israel are expected to be concentrated on Israeli embassies and consulates. Such demonstrations have occurred internationally, as well as domestically. These demonstrations could potentially turn violent at local synagogues, restaurants, the Israeli embassy, and other Israeli sites.”
The document added, “Law enforcement should be vigilant when making periodic checks at all Jewish facilities.”
An Israeli intelligence report warned that forged Israeli passports might be used by potential terrorists to leave the Middle East and enter the United States and Canada.
As the tensions over Iran’s nuclear program mounted, Jewish security professionals noted the possible threat to Jewish institutions around the world.
A number of disrupted plots overseas in recent weeks have raised concerns, said Paul Goldenberg, national director of the Secure Community Network, an effort funded by the Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA) that works on strengthening security for Jewish institutions.
“The people that want to come after Israel overseas will look at Jewish targets in the host nations, as well,” he said. “They will look not just at embassies, but at synagogues and JCCs as secondary targets.”
An example cited by Goldenberg of the conflation of Jewish and Israeli targets was the late January arrests of at least two Azerbaijani citizens in connection with an alleged plot to kill two rabbis and the Israeli ambassador in the capital city, Baku. A third man reportedly also was charged, but remains at large.
Azerbaijan’s national security ministry accused Iranian intelligence agents of arming and equipping the three men, the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz reported. Haaretz suggested the plot was intended as retaliation for the assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists. Israel’s Counter-Terrorism Bureau has issued a travel warning for Azerbaijan.
In addition to the Baku attacks, Israeli officials alerted authorities in Thailand to a potential attack and, on Jan. 13, a Lebanese man was arrested for allegedly planning a bombing attack against Israelis and Jews.
Levitt, who is now a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said there was a period in which Iran was reluctant to strike out against targets overseas.
Iran was implicated in the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people and wounded hundreds. An Argentine prosecutor eventually accused five Iranians and the operational chief of the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah, Imad Mughniyah, of involvement in the attack. Interpol issued warrants for their arrests in 2007.
Iran, which has always denied involvement in the AMIA attack, was stung by the diplomatic backlash in its wake, and it is widely believed to have ordered its proxies to confine operations to the Middle East.
The trigger that renewed the threat of overseas attacks was the assassination of Mughniyah by a car bomb in Syria in 2008. Hezbollah blames Israel’s Mossad for the assassination, Levitt said.
“We will pick the time, the place, the punishment, the means, and the method,” Hezbollah chief Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah said at the time.
Jewish communities in the United States and overseas have issued security alerts each year since then on the Feb. 12 anniversary of the killing.
Levitt said the intensification of Iran’s isolation as the result of sanctions targeting its suspected nuclear weapons program and the heightened U.S. military posture have likely contributed to the intelligence community’s sense that more attempts on overseas targets may be imminent.
“We’re at a point where Iran, when pushed into a corner and we’re finally doing things that have an impact on the nuclear program, the likelihood it lashes out increases,” he said.
Another factor that has spurred Iranian threats of retribution is the spate of assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists.
“From now on, in any place, if any nation or any group confronts the Zionist regime, we will endorse and we will help,” Khamenei said Feb. 3 in a Friday sermon translated by the Associated Press. “We have no fear expressing this.”
Dubowitz said such statements merited heightened alert.
“The overall question of what other aggressive actions the Iranians are willing to take in response to our pressure means Jewish institutions in the United States need to take reasonable precautions,” he said.
JTA Wire Service
News reports notwithstanding, “There is no indication that there are any specific and/or imminent threats to Jewish communities in the U.S. at this time as a result of recent events,” according to an alert received this week by the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) of the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey. Nevertheless, the alert said, that could change “should military action break out in the Middle East in coming months.”
An open attack on Iran is only one “trigger” that could raise the threat level, the alert said. “Increased pressure from sanctions, continued perceived threats from Israel, the United States, and others, sabotage against nuclear facilities, and continued alleged assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists” could also bring about an Iranian response aimed at Jewish or Israeli targets in the West, especially the United States.
The alert was sent to the JCRC and Jewish organizations nationwide by the Secure Community Network (SCN), which describes itself “as the central address for the Jewish community concerning matters of communal safety, security, and all-hazards preparedness and response.” SCN is made up of the member organizations of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and the Jewish Federations of North America, among other communal institutions.
The alert set out a number of suggestions for Jewish organizations to follow. “Simply put,” the SCN alert said, “a baseline of security should be established which can be built upon in the event [of] a change in threat level or security conditions....”
Among the suggestions:
“Be aware of your surroundings and remain alert for suspicious persons or activity.
“Trust your instincts and err on the side of caution; report suspicious persons/activity immediately....
“Convene [a] Security Committee or Crisis Management Team to review [your] current security program, policies, and procedures....
“Review and implement appropriate security measures with a specific focus on access control, perimeter security, suspicious behavior/activity, [and] crisis communication plans....
“Monitor and control who is entering the facility....Visitors should be escorted at all times....
“Do not provide specific facility, organization, or staff information to suspicious or unknown [telephone] callers....
“Record and/or document suspicious, or threatening phone calls....
“Do not accept a package from an unknown individual....
“Review your organizational website for personal or sensitive facility information....
“Familiarize yourself with the building evacuation policy and procedures....”
For more information and additional resources, synagogues, schools, and other communal institutions are urged to visit the organization’s website, www.scnus.org. SCN’s telephone number is (212) 284-6940.
An intensive afternoon Jewish studies program for area high school students is being planned for next year.
Yoel Kaplan says the Community Talmud Torah that he plans to open in September will serve public school students and others who are not being served by the community’s yeshivah high schools.
“There should be alternatives for students who are not living up to their fullest potential with the current models of Jewish education,” he says. “There are a lot of students who could do better in an alternative program that addresses their individual needs and is a little bit less cookie-cutter.”
 | Yoel Kaplan |
Already, Kaplan has signed up two faculty members to teach and work on the curriculum: Dr. Daniel Rynhold, a professor of modern Jewish philosophy at Yeshiva University’s Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies, and Rabbi Ely Allen, director of the Hillel of Northern New Jersey and a teacher at YU’s program for non-yeshivah graduates.
“This is not meant to be a replacement of any of the yeshivah high schools,” says Allen, noting that his son is enrolled at the Torah Academy of Bergen County.
There are presently “dozens” of students from Orthodox homes not in yeshivah high school, he says.
Last month, Teaneck High School ran a special recruitment program showcasing the school to day school graduates. The hour-long school tour and presentation drew a reported 40 parents and students.
At a time when the Orthodox community is agonizing about the affordability of day school and yeshivah tuitions, the Community Talmud Torah’s pricetag will be of interest: At $5,000 per year, it is a fraction of the more than $24,000 charged by the Frisch School in Paramus — an amount that is representative of day school tuitions generally.
Until this year, Kaplan served as vice principal at Bergen County High School of Jewish Studies. That program meets only once a week, and students choose from a menu of course offerings.
The Community Talmud Torah plans on meeting four afternoons a week, for two hours each day. And there will be a fixed curriculum, drawing on Jewish Montessori programs, designed to provide “a framework, the big picture of where everything fits in,” he says.
“We want students to engage the primary texts, the Torah, mishnah, Rambam, maybe a little gemara. Having them really learn Hebrew roots, prefixes, and suffixes; the timeline of Chumash; an outline of Tanach chapter by chapter. Knowing the 613 mitzvot, the 39 m’lachot [labors prohibited on Shabbat], having them really hold those pieces.”
Kaplan said the school will have “a holistic focus. It teaches students how to apply and live the Torah, rather than learning about Torah and about Judaism. The goal is to facilitate students in really building a strong faith-based, intellectually driven framework for their Judaism and their spirituality.
“We will expect our students to share their Judaism with others by going out into the real world. We’re empowering and entrusting teens, the next generation, with the Torah. We’re offering them the support system and the infrastructure of how to get the information,” he says.
“The pursuit of Jewish content and Jewish knowledge is a life long pursuit. We are giving student the tools to be lifelong learners.”
For Kaplan, spending high school out of the shelter of the yeshivah system makes more sense than waiting until college.
“While they’re in high school, we need to start to teach them how to live a Jewish lifestyle in a secular environment. We can give them the opportunity, with guidance and structure and the tools to do that in a safe way, little by little. They’re still living at home; their parents still have influence over their decisions; their teachers still have influence.
“The Torah and Judaism have survived for thousands of years. I believe if you teach Torah properly, in a way that is candid, honest, and relevant, teenagers are able to step up and integrate the information in a very healthy way.”
A generation or two ago, the Talmud Torah — the afternoon Hebrew school — was the standard Jewish educational model even in Orthodox synagogues. That model fell by the wayside with the spread of yeshivah high schools and the perception that the institution of the Talmud Torah failed to generate sufficient commitment to traditional Judaism.
Is the Talmud Torah ready for a comeback?
“Even though we’re utilizing the structure of a Talmud Torah, we’re really redefining what it means,” says Kaplan. “By utilizing the best practices of education as we know them today and integrating them into a Talmud Torah model, we’re hitting on something that, in fact, can be very successful.”
More information on the program is available at cooltorah.org.
There are moments when a Major Leaguer’s behavior on the baseball diamond can translate into valuable life lessons.
So says baseball great Ralph Branca.
Branca, the Dodger pitcher who played with Jackie Robinson, recalls that the baseball legend faced intense discrimination (in 1947, he broke through baseball’s color barrier), but he played his best despite the opposition. “He performed admirably under extreme pressure,” said Branca, who befriended Robinson when others on the field gave him the cold shoulder.
Robinson handled his opponents well, even when he felt like exploding with rage. The repercussions of his acts extended beyond batting and pitching. Robinson’s integration of baseball was a blow to segregation and led the way for other racial barriers to fade away.
Branca will share such gem-like recollections with students as the keynote speaker of Torah Academy of Bergen County’s (TABC) Book Day on Feb. 15.
The interdisciplinary program, in which the high school’s staff and student body analyze the same book during a day of workshops and speakers, is the brainchild of Dr. Carol Master, the English Department chairman, and Librarian Leah Moskovits.
The fact that the entire staff and student body have read the same book and are discussing it together is very unifying, said Master. “Usually everyone is with their own grade and section,” added Moskovits. “This brings the whole school together.”
The students are enthusiastic about the program, which is in its second year, said Moskovits. “They stopped me in the hall from day one to ask which book we were reading this year.”
Akiva Marder, a TABC junior, said he enjoyed the book selections this year and last. “The book is something we want to read, as opposed to something we have to read,” said Marder, adding that each book selection has been vastly different.
The workshop sessions cover an array of topics spanning multiple disciplines — from relationship-building to texting in Yiddish to the Irish and Jewish immigration experience, to racial barriers for pro athletes in the 1940s and 1950s, boasted Moskovits.
The Book Day program, which will include workshops by TABC teachers and outside talent, will culminate in a performance by Zalmen Mlotek, the artistic director of the National Yiddish Theatre-Folksbiene.
TABC principal Rabbi Yosef Adler, who is a lifelong sports enthusiast, will deliver a session about racial barriers in sports in the 1940s and 1950s.
Such a variety of workshop topics appeals to students because they can explore new areas of learning that are not typically addressed during class, said Marder. “Since there is such a wide range of sessions to choose from during Book Day, students can choose what they feel passionate about and have a good experience,” he said.
Last year, the subject of Book Day was “Persepolis,” a graphic memoir about a girl living in Iran during the time of the revolution, and the featured speaker was a Jew who escaped after the revolution broke, said Master.
This year, the school will tackle “Snow in August” by Pete Hamill, which grapples with multiple themes, including a friendship that crops up between a Yiddish- speaking rabbi and an Irish Catholic boy, discrimination, anti-Semitism, baseball, Jackie Robinson, and the Golem.
Hamill’s book hit home with many of the students, said Doni Cohen, a TABC junior who serves on the Book Day Committee, because it touches on so many issues that are pertinent to their lives and to Jewish history.
The friendship of the rabbi and the Irish boy develops against the backdrop of anti-Semitic incidents in Brooklyn in the 1940s.
“Many of our grandparents lived in that exact setting when they immigrated to America after World War II in the 1940s, and that connects our Jewish history to the book, as well,” he said.
While Branca may praise Robinson’s heroism for his role as a civil rights pioneer, Cohen asserts that Branca, who is mentioned in Hamill’s book, is an inspiration for today’s young people.
“Mr. Branca was one of the few players who did not sign a petition circling the clubhouse in the 1947 season refusing to play with an African-American,” said Cohen admiringly.
“When many refused to line up on the field with Jackie Robinson before the game in which he broke the color barrier, Mr. Branca was courageous enough to be one of the only men to line up with Jackie as a sign of solidarity with him.
“He exhibited the bravery and courage to defend Jackie Robinson against racism,” said Cohen. “I greatly respect what he did.”
More than 60 years, baseball big leaguer Ralph Branca kept famously quiet about the 1951 baseball game between the Giants and Dodgers that ended with the Giants winning the pennant.
Branca, of the Brooklyn Dodgers, served the final pitch resulting in Bobby Thomson’s three-run home run, which was dubbed “the shot heard ‘round the world.”
The historic game marked a crushing defeat for Branca, who, because of that one ill-fated pitch, became known by many as a “goat,” while Thomson was crowned a hero.
 | Ralph Branca in 1953 at age 26. |
It was not until 2001 that the truth came out in a story by The Wall Street Journal that the Giants had obtained the Dodgers’ secret signs and that Thompson likely knew a fastball was coming.
Branca, who was told about the “industrial espionage” by a teammate in the 1950s, never uttered a word about it. Many credit Branca for his lack of bitterness. In fact, he remained close friends with Thomson until the latter’s death in 2010.
Branca went on to enjoy a busy life off field: he has been married to his wife, Ann, for more than five decades, became a successful businessman, father and grandfather, and helped run an organization to help indigent ballplayers.
Branca recently broke his silence about the cheating scandal in his memoir, “A Moment in Time: An American Story of Baseball, Heartbreak and Grace” (Scribner: 2011) in which he writes, “I was a damn effective pitcher. It pains me to be remembered for one unfortunate pitch….”
Branca discovered another surprising detail about his life in recent years: that his mother, Kati Berger, who married Branca’s Italian Catholic father and raised her brood of 17 children as Catholics, was a Jew. This fact was unearthed by a journalist who revealed that Branca’s mother was a Hungarian Jew who had converted to Catholicism after coming to America in 1900, and that family members were killed in concentration camps during the Shoah.
This news came as somewhat of a shock to Branca, whose mother brought him to church regularly. He himself served as a “Shabbes Goy” for a neighbor who paid him a few cents to light her stove on Shabbat, he recalled.
Branca grew up in Mount Vernon, N.Y., and signed a contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers when he was 18. He was a three-time All-Star who pitched in the World Series twice and played professional baseball for 12 seasons, from 1944 to 1956.
Now a sharp 85-year-old, Branca will be the keynote speaker at the Torah Academy of Bergen County’s Book Day on Feb. 15. He spoke to The Jewish Standard in a telephone interview. The following is an excerpt from the conversation:
Q: Does your book “A Moment in Time” convey any special message to readers?
Branca: I think the life lesson from it is really that life is not a straight uphill path. You have your ups and downs. I had my down and lived through it. I took the high road. I knew the Giants stole the pennant and never talked about it. The lesson is you can take the high road and still feel good about it.
Q: What inspired you to write your book?
Branca: I started to write a memoir because my nieces and nephews have been badgering me to write a book for 40 years. It’s an easy read and it sounds just like you are talking to me. It talks about my life as a kid and goes into my career in baseball.
Q: What message do you have for young people, particularly the TABC students whom you will speak to next week?
Branca: When I talk to the boys, I’ll talk about Jackie Robinson and what he went through — the struggles he went through as the first black man in Major League baseball. He turned the other cheek so many times and performed admirably under extreme pressure. He showed how to have courage. What impressed me about him was how he performed under extreme pressure. He was thrust into a role he never thought about deeply until he was there. He did so much for the blacks because he was the first. He performed very very well, especially the first year. He was put in a strange position. He was the only [black] guy on the team. He just came through admirably. He just turned the other check and didn’t fight back. Philadelphia was extremely bad. They threw watermelon and black cats on the field. But he got through it. People today can’t imagine it because things have changed so much since then. He was called the “N word” all the time.
Q: It must have come as quite a surprise to you to learn very late in life that your mother was Jewish. What was your reaction to the news?
Branca: My mother being Jewish doesn’t affect me. I’ve always been friendly with Jews my whole life, being in New York. I just took it in stride. She didn’t practice anything Jewish. We went to church all the time. I just say “Hey, there’s nothing wrong with my being Jewish.” I don’t think I would have done anything different had I known years ago about this. I am what I am. Jewish people are great people. There are a lot of similarities growing up Italian and growing up Jewish. We both have close-knit families. And we both like salami, right?
Q: Many people may remember you for “the shot heard ‘round the world,” but what do you want your legacy to be?
Branca: I guess that I lived through a crisis that was really illegal and I knew about it and never said anything about it until someone else broke the story. I don’t know if that makes me a mensch or what. I had the courage to go through all that nonsense and never told anyone how the Giants stole the pennant. That might be the biggest part of my life. I always feared being called a sore loser or a cry baby. When it came from someone else’s lips, Josh Prager of The Wall Street Journal, it gave it legitimacy and then my tongue was loosened. But if I had talked about it first, they wouldn’t have respected me.
On January 1, 2012, Joe Frost turned 107.
Honored last year by the city of Clifton as its oldest resident, Frost has lived in that city since the age of 12.
“He was born in Passaic in 1905,” said Bill Frisch, Frost’s 80-year-old nephew, also a Clifton resident. “We have his birth certificate.”
His uncle, however, moved to the neighboring town as a child and is still there, albeit now at Daughters of Miriam.
“Joe’s been a member here forever,” said Karen Schutz, executive director of the Clifton Jewish Center, where Frisch is immediate past president. The shul “is very proud to have the oldest living resident in the City of Clifton,” she added. “Last year, a proclamation and the key to the city were presented to him by Mayor James Anzaldi at our center.”
Schutz said Frost was a “regular” at the synagogue.
 | Joe Frost courtesy CJC |
“He was an avid minyannaire,” she said, noting that, until this year, he was a fixture at Saturday and Sunday services. “He’s an incredible person. Until this year, he was living alone in his home, taking care of his own needs. He’s mostly blind and deaf now, but he knew where he was going. This year, we finagled him into Daughters of Miriam, since it was not a safe situation.”
Has Frost adapted?
“He started riding the stationary bike and singing,” said Schutz, whose congregation made a birthday party for Frost last month. “Channel 9 did a spot on him. They asked him, ‘Why are you singing?’ He said, ‘It makes me feel happy.’”
The birthday party, said Schutz, had a large turnout.
“He’s a very warm and friendly person, beloved by the center. Everyone came to see ‘Uncle Joe,’” she said, noting that Frisch picked up his uncle from Daughters of Miriam and brought him to the event. “It’s unreal. You wouldn’t know he’s 107.”
While Frost has some physical disabilities, said Schutz, his memory remains keen, except for events that have happened recently. For example, he has much to say about the “gazillion presidents” he has seen come and go.
“But I ask him what he had for breakfast and he doesn’t remember,” said his nephew. “He says, ‘Breakfast is always the same.’”
Growing up in Clifton with his parents and seven siblings, Frost lived on Market St., which, said Frisch, contained many Jewish families.
“My mother was his sister,” he said. “He’s the only remaining one in family. Most of them went in their 80s.”
Frisch said Frost has some 10 nieces and nephews, all of them retired and many now living outside the area. “But we all keep in contact,” he said.
Frost, he said, was a trained dental technician who worked in laboratories. In the Navy during World War II and attached to the Seabees, he was posted to Guam.
“When they heard he was a dental technician, they switched him to the medical corps,” said Frisch, noting that after the war, when Frost returned, he took over the meat market and grocery store his parents had built on Van Houten Avenue.
“It was the first business on the avenue,” he said. “They had built the first home there. It was a dirt road at the time. There were no cars. Even doctors came to see you in a horse and buggy.
“He came home and modernized the store,” said Frisch, noting that it had been run during the war by Frost’s sisters and his brother Harry. “He was a good craftsman — a carpenter and a plumber.”
Frisch said he worked in the family grocery store every summer throughout his high school years. So did many of his friends. “I still meet fellows who worked there,” he said.
When Frost returned from the war, said his nephew, that area of Clifton was mainly Polish and Italian, and his uncle soon realized that the children of the original residents could no longer make the ethnic dishes cooked by their parents. “He saw the need for Polish and Italian recipes, the stuff their parents made at home, like Italian sausage and Polish pierogies. So he started to make them. It was so good, the people who moved away from there still ordered them.”
Frost did not like to work for others, “only for himself and with family,” said Frisch. “He had a very good mind, he saw the future, and he saw the changes,” often advising his family on career choices.
“He’s very intelligent. He should have gone for a doctorate,” said his nephew, explaining that in a family with so many siblings, there was money enough to send only one son for professional training. Frost’s brother Michael was able to become a dentist, thanks to financial help from his brothers and sisters.
Still, he said, “He was proud of his work as a dental technician and was honored during his time in the service.”
“If you ask him, he’ll say you should live a simple life, eat proper foods, and that’s what he attributes his long life to. When he spoke with his doctor, he said, ‘Hey Joe. Why are you living so long?’ My uncle said, ‘I don’t know. You’re the doctor. You tell me.’”
According to Frisch, the doctor did offer a reason.
Since Frost was a lifelong bachelor, the doctor suggested the reason for his longevity is, “You don’t have a mother-in-law.”
 | Nathan Ulin in his late 80s. |
Lee Miller and Steve Ulin have learned a great deal from their father, now 101. Born in Sieradz, Poland, in 1910, Nathan Ulin taught his children the virtues of independence, ethical behavior, and pride in the Jewish people.
“From the time I was little, he always said make your family and the Jewish community proud,” recalls his son Steve, a Hillsdale resident. “He said, ‘My word is my bond and I stand by it. You have to do the same.’ He’s a very ethical and moral person. It’s primary in his life to be thought of in that way.”
“Until just a few years ago, he’s always been a fiercely independent man,” added Ulin’s daughter Lee Miller, a resident of East Brunswick. Her father — whose travels took him from Poland to Massachusetts to New Jersey — now lives at Daughters of Miriam in Clifton.
“From the time he was a teenager and even after his marriage, he contributed financially to his parents,” she said. “He would often tell us that whatever he achieved, it was done on his own. He had a willingness to work hard and not depend on anyone else for assistance. [He would say] a man can do most anything he sets his mind to.”
Ulin’s love of family has also impressed his children.
“Family is probably the pride and joy of his life,” said Miller, “and I’m certain he’d say this is the most important part of a lifetime. He’d [also] most likely tell us to lead a productive life. To him that meant work — he’s never been much of a player.”
Her father, she said, lost his younger brother many years ago, but “his 92-year-old sister is alive and living in Nevada.” His wife Jean died 26 years ago, and he has two children, four grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren, in addition to nephews and nieces.
Steve Ulin said the experience of anti-Semitism played a major role in shaping his father’s outlook. “He always said Jewish boys have two strikes against them,” he said. “You have to be 10 times better in every way because of that.”
Nathan Ulin’s family left Poland in 1923. According to Miller, her grandfather — who had been in the Polish army and a prisoner of war — lost his cabinet manufacturing business, and there was no longer a viable means of livelihood for him in Poland. The family came to the United States, settling in Massachusetts.
Nathan’s early years in Poland left their mark on him, said his son.
“One time his mother sent him and his brother for milk on Pesach. They carried it in a big metal container. Some Polish boys wanted to put chametz into the milk. He and his brother stood back to back with the metal milk canister between them. They took off their big leather belts and kept swinging them, until eventually the boys left them alone.”
Even in the United States, Ulin encountered hostility when he first arrived. “Anti-Semitism was rife,” said his son, citing the influence of then current media personalities such as Father Charles Coughlin. “My father was trying to learn English, and the first thing he learned in school was anti-Semitic words.”
Still, his father noted and appreciated the changes he saw during his lifetime.
“He’s seen a tremendous change from the time when Jewish couldn’t get jobs in big companies,” said his son. “He saw in his lifetime that Jews could be hired by merit. He’s very happy about that.”
After his marriage in 1937, Ulin moved to New Jersey, joining his wife’s brothers in their butcher business.
“He was a very strong man,” said his son. “He had worked for a kosher butcher shop in Brookline, Mass., and after work he went to a gym.”
There he learned to box — a lifelong passion — ultimately participating in a half-dozen professional fights to earn extra money during the depression.
“My zaydie was out of work,” said Steve Ulin. “My father was the oldest of the three children and supported the family.”
Identifying the greatest challenges faced by her father, Miller said they were “learning the language as a teenager, learning a trade, making an income during the Depression to help the family, and putting together a life after becoming a widower.” Her mother died in 1985.
Despite these hurdles, she said, he was able to build a good life, buy a home, and send his children to college.
He is also an ardent Zionist, say his children.
“Israel was always on his mind,” recalls his son. “He was a news freak and was always proud when Israel did anything, like grow hybrid corn. He would say ‘Only the Jews could do that.’”
In North Bergen — where family members were among the founders of both Temple Beth El and Temple Beth Abraham — the Ulins attended Beth El. Keeping their membership there even after they moved, they later joined the Fort Lee Jewish Center.
Even today, at Daughters of Miriam, Nathan Ulin goes to daily minyan, said his son.
“He can’t see well enough to read [the siddur], but he feels proud that he can be wheeled there and counted in the minyan.”
In addition, the 101-year-old has always had a strong sense of social justice.
Because of his own family’s experience, and that of the Jewish people as a whole, “he was sensitized to minorities and those who were disadvantaged,” said his son. “When he opened up his store in Montclair, he was proud that he could hire black truck drivers. He didn’t miss an opportunity to remind us that we should think about people who don’t have.”
Why has he lived so long? “Because he wants to,” said his son. “He never gives up.”
A new book unveils the joy of sex for a group that has traditionally kept the subject under wraps — Orthodox Jews. “There wasn’t any source of accurate sexual information for the religious community,” said Dr. David Ribner, co-author with Dr. Jennie Rosenfeld of the book “Et Le’ehov [a time to love]: The Newlywed’s Guide to Physical Intimacy.”
Ribner, who is director of the sex therapy training program at Bar Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel, reported that the current consensus at sex therapy conventions is that “there’s a right for everyone to have sexual enjoyment.”
 | Dr. David Ribner |
A Jerusalem resident, Ribner is visiting the United States to promote his new book and to present information on sexual relations within marriage for the religious Jewish community. He has experienced some frustration, however, in the process of bringing his message to that community.
“So far, I have been unable to get a single Anglo-Jewish media to do a book review, or a Jewish bookstore to carry the book. This reflects a failure of the Jewish community in general to confront this issue,” said Ribner. “It reflects our experience in Israel also. Other than Steimatzky’s, Jewish bookstores won’t carry the book. There is a fearfulness to discuss a very sensitive topic.”
Steimatzky’s is a large chain of secular bookstores in Israel.
The introduction to the book states: “Regrettably, this area of education has long been neglected in the religious world, and while there has been some recent improvement, no source material of this kind has yet been available….This kind of information was once passed from parent to child; our impression is that this is no longer the norm. As a result, many couples are left to face this critical area of their lives with little guidance or information.”
Ribner, who was trained in marital and sex therapy in the 1970s, collaborated with Rosenfeld on the book. Rosenfeld was one of the founders of Tzelem, an organization whose goal is to provide sex education for the religious community. He met his co-author when he was invited by Tzelem to do a workshop. They are now working on a Hebrew translation of the book.
“It’s very explicit,” said Ribner about the book. “We do not use metaphoric language, we use explicit language. In the back of the book, we have explicit diagrams.” The co-authors decided to tuck those diagrams away in a sealed envelope, pasted to the inside back cover. A label sealing the flap warns: “Note: This envelope contains illustrations that are meant to accompany the text and to clarify certain points with regard to male and female sexual anatomy and sexual positions. These illustrations are therefore explicit, and each person should take this into account before viewing the drawings.”
“If we were going to do it, we wanted people to understand what we were talking about,” said Ribner. “But it is written within the boundaries of traditional Judaism.”
“This is not a book of Jewish law,” continued Ribner. “If any problems arise, we urge people to seek out their own rabbis.”
The book includes basic information on anatomy and sexual functioning, communication issues, foreplay, intercourse, family purity issues, and how to address sexual problems that might be encountered.
“We deal clearly with various sexual positions, to help couples expand their sexual repertoire; to make this a part of their lives,” said Ribner. “We encourage people to deal with problems. We encourage them to speak to sexual counselors.”
Ribner has worked with secular and non-Jewish populations, as well as strictly observant Jews, who now make up the majority of his clinical practice. “The problems and sexual dysfunctions are pretty much the same across the board,” he said. “What is special to the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox populations is the lack of accurate sexual information.”
Since his practice is located in Israel, Ribner deals with mostly charedi couples. “There’s more exposure to more accurate information in America,” Ribner said. “That kind of information is more easily acquired in America.”
The Internet has provided a tremendous source of information about sexual matters and, said Ribner, “that genie is not going to be put back into the bottle.”
Ribner noted that access to information via the web is both “good and bad.” He explained that “filtering out what is accurate information and not accurate information is more difficult.” Therefore, the book provides a list of other books, as well as websites where people can find reliable and useful information.
Ribner cited other dramatic changes in the past 50 years, which include the birth control pill that “divorced sex for procreation from sex for enjoyment. Sex is seen as an enjoyable part of people’s lives.”
How we define gender also has changed, said Ribner. “And there is more openness about homosexuality. People are willing to confront issues that are more problematic.”
Hormonal treatments and surgical treatments are now available so that “we can solve a lot of sexual dysfunction issues that we could never do before.” He explained, “What comes into the office of the sex therapist can find relief now. For modern sex therapy and sexual health, there are a plethora of interventions.”
“My own experience is that the rabbis have been very supportive of having young couples and older couples have as much sexual satisfaction as possible. This is a critical aspect of marital relationships,” said Ribner. “Rabbis, up to and including chasidic [rabbis], refer people to me all the time.”
Ribner is scheduled to speak at synagogues in Teaneck and Tenafly, Yeshiva University, and Yeshivat Chovevei Torah. “The very fact that I’m coming to speak at Orthodox synagogues is something that wouldn’t have happened 20-30 years ago,” Ribner said.
Et Le’ehov [a time to love]: The Newlywed’s Guide to Physical Intimacy (2011) was published by Gefen Publishing House, Jerusalem, Israel, and can be ordered from Gefen Books, Lynbrook, NY (http://www.gefenpublishing.com) or Amazon.com.
Dr. Miryam Z. Wahrman, science writer for The Jewish Standard, is professor of biology at William Paterson University of New Jersey (WPU), and author of “Brave New Judaism: When Science and Scripture Collide” (Brandeis University/UPNE Press, 2004). At WPU, she heads a biology research lab and serves as director of the WPU MAST Program for training math and science teachers
Last spring, I walked into a sixth-grade classroom where the girls welcomed me with squeals of delight, excited to show me the dance routine they had created to the rap song “Take It Off.” The lyrics include:
“Now we’re looking like pimps in my gold Trans-AmThe girls told me they had performed their dance routine as they peeled off layers of clothing until they were down to their bathing suits. Their original performance was for the talent show at a Jewish co-ed sleepaway camp.
Since I am a former Planned Parenthood educator and the founder of JLove and Values, a group dedicated to educating Jewish youth and professionals on adolescent sexuality, I was able to turn this event into an opportunity to discuss healthy life choices and responsible decision-making based on Jewish values and moral reasoning.
 | Mara Yacobi |
I asked the girls to create a list of everything they do from the moment they get up to the moment they go sleep, and then place those on a continuum, categorizing the list into private and public behaviors.
The girls quickly started to engage in conversations about how “context” was important depending on the behavior. However, they collectively agreed taking off one’s clothes was a private event.
“Well,” I said, “I wonder where this performance would fall on our continuum?”
An engaging and meaningful conversation followed about what they felt it meant to be made in God’s image, and how to follow traditions of modesty when they live in a culture that promotes sexiness.
The whole incident was a reminder of just how important sex education is, not only in low-income communities with high rates of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections (STIs), but also in our relatively privileged and sheltered Jewish community.
Contrary to stereotype, Jewish teenagers do become pregnant in high school; they are susceptible to contracting STIs; and they are sexually abused. Statistics, however, are difficult to come by, as many cases are “hushed up” or “taken care of” while a student is studying in Israel or abroad. I have heard countless stories in workshops from girls who ended up in abusive relationships in Israel because they were under the naïve misconception that “Jewish men are safe.”
In my experience, most Jewish day school students have not received any authentic sexuality education. They might have had a cursory class on puberty or the prevention of STIs — if they were lucky. This approach to sexuality education does not work, however. A survey commissioned by the Metropolitan Life Foundation involving more than 45,000 students in 2,000 schools found no obvious difference between the behaviors of students with no health education and those who received it for one year. Only after three years of continuous health programs and information did such education influence behavior patterns.
Young people today are bombarded with messages about sexuality: Retail stores have background music playing with overtly sexual lyrics. Pop-up advertisements with suggestive images commonly appear on our computer screens. Reality TV shows portray high-risk sexual behavior and unhealthy relationships.
Are we in the Jewish community giving our adolescents enough information and time to talk about the changes they are experiencing?
As our children grow and attend camp, overnight youth group events, or overseas study programs, where the social environments often lead to intense bonding and romantic exploration, have we prepared them with the information they need to protect themselves from sexual assault, date rape, or unintended pregnancy? Have we made it clear that we are created in God’s image and that our bodies are a gift we must honor?
Parents are — and should be — the primary educators who provide their children with information and values about sexuality. However, they often do not know how to begin such conversations, or they assume that discussing sexuality is a one-time conversation about reproduction.
The school nurse at a local Jewish day school called me recently to come in and do a “special workshop” on sexuality because there was “a situation in the high school,” and one of the girls was afraid she might be pregnant. While I agreed to go, this incident reflects another tendency in our community: to educate when it is already too late.
We have a unique opportunity to educate from a Jewish values perspective. Day schools in particular provide an ideal spiritual framework for presenting not only sexual ethics within a Jewish framework, but also the reproductive content that teenagers need in order to learn about sexuality.
It is a poor excuse when our schools claim not to have the time for special topics like sexuality education. Sexuality education is one of the most fundamental areas of knowledge that young people need to know; it forms a basis for their entire lives.
Mara Yacobi, a licensed social worker, lives in Edgewater. A certified sexuality educator, she is the founder of Jlove and Values (www.jloveandvalues.com). A version of this article originally appeared in The New York Jewish Week and is printed here with permission of the author.
LOS ANGELES – Ask Dr. David Ribner what he thinks about Jewish couples using sex toys and you get an answer you may not have expected.
The chairman of the sex therapy training program at the School of Social Work at Bar-Ilan University in Israel and himself a certified sex therapist, Ribner answers questions about the acceptability of the devices at http://www.koshersextoys.net, a website that sells the devices and is geared to Orthodox Jews.
“While Jewish law and tradition have long recognized the centrality of sexual satisfaction to a successful marriage,” he said in a response to a question for this article, “only recently have we been witness to more public efforts to promote this goal. Kosher Sex Toys [which runs the website and sells the items] is a step in this direction.”
Ribner, who also is a Yeshiva University-ordained rabbi, co-authored “Et Le’ehov [a time to love]: The Newlywed’s Guide to Physical Intimacy,” with Dr. Jennie Rosenfeld.
The mission of Kosher Sex Toys, the website proclaims, is to “provide married adults with products that can help enhance their intimate moments without involving crude or indecent pictures or text.” The website promises that nothing on the site “will make you blush,” and product pictures do not feature people.
“It is our firm belief at koshersextoys.net that there is absolutely nothing wrong from either a moral or religious standpoint with two married adults enjoying each other sexually in whatever way makes them happy,” the website adds. “As a matter of fact, we believe it is the moral obligation of each partner in a marriage to do whatever is possible to satisfy their partner, and that the only way for a marriage to be happy and fulfilling is for it to have a healthy and exciting sex life. We hope with our site to help people who would otherwise be reluctant to buy the types of product we carry be more comfortable doing so, and to help them have happier and more fulfilling sex lives and marriages.”
In a real sense, Kosher Sex Toys is everything you wanted to know about sex, but were afraid to look at — and uncertain whether to use. The company, located in Lakewood, a city with a large center-right Orthodox population, would seem ideally situated to service this niche market in what Inc. magazine estimates is a $2 billion industry.
Many of the items available for sale — we hesitate to list them in a family newspaper — are sold on other sites, as well. “It’s our attitude and how it’s sold that makes it different,” said founder and CEO Gavriel (his wife made him promise not to use his last name).
At first blush, a sex toy web site operated by an Orthodox Jew from Lakewood might seem unusual, but Jews and sexual aids appear to go back into biblical times. Rachel, the barren wife of Jacob, asked her sister Leah for some mandrakes, a root found in the Middle East that was considered to have aphrodisiacal qualities.
Gavriel says he researches each of his more than 300 items but does not personally test them, adding that “I only want to carry things that are safe.”
JTA Wire Service
There is a good play buried in the three-hour production of “Professor Bernhardi” from the Marvell Rep, but you have to wade through a lot of Germanic bluster and posturing to get to it. Written by Austrian Jewish physician-turned-playwright Arthur Schnitzler in 1912, the play traces the fallout from a bitter confrontation between a respected Jewish doctor and a Catholic priest in 1900 Vienna.
Controversial from its beginnings, “Professor Bernhardi” was banned by Austrian censors before its first production. The Nazis later blacklisted all of Schnitzler’s works, most of which deal frankly with sexuality, describing them as “Jewish filth.” The first full English-language production was in 1936, five years after Schnitzler’s death, in London. The play has been rarely performed in the United States, but this translation by G.J. Weinberger is running in repertory with another controversial play, “The Threepenny Opera,” in a season devoted to “burned & banned” plays.
What could be more contemporary than the conflict between science and religion? It is on front pages every day, it seems.
“Professor Bernhardi” opens in an anteroom at a high-class clinic in Vienna. A young woman is dying of infection after a botched abortion. Her physician has given her an injection of camphor to ease the pain, and she has entered into a blissful delusional state — she believes she is well and will be going home soon. When a priest arrives to offer her last rites, the ritual that will allow her to enter Heaven, the clinic director, Professor Bernhardi, refuses to let him enter. His rationale is that once the woman sees the priest, she will know she is dying. Bernhardi wants to give her a happy death, one free of anxiety. Ergo, no last rites.
In no surprise to anyone but Bernhardi, the priest is outraged, and so is a large segment of Catholic Austrian society. Bernhardi, however, is blithely unconcerned. He believes totally in his correctness. It is a battle between “houses of God versus houses of healing,” as far as he is concerned, and he cannot imagine that anyone could see it any other way. Sam Tsoutsouvas plays Bernhardi with just the right note of inflexibility; he is as certain of the truth as any zealot. Utterly rational, he explains to everyone that all will be well, and there is nothing to worry about.
Everyone around him — and it seems to be a cast of hundreds — is very worried. “We live in a Christian state,” one of his colleagues reminds him, and if the board of directors does not support him, the clinic may fail. Bernhardi holds an ace, and that is his relationship to his patient, a prince of the province. As long as the prince supports him, he is okay. But how long will that be? Then there is the possibility of appointing a non-Jewish doctor to the staff instead of a more intellectual Jewish doctor. Will Bernhardi do it?
The wheeling and dealing reveals the precarious situation of Austrian Jews; they are tolerated but despised, no matter how many convert to Christianity or join German dueling clubs.
And this is part of the problem. While the portrayal of anti-Semitism may have been shocking to Schnitzler’s Austrian audiences, it is routine today and not nearly as pertinent as the struggle between faith and science. A lot of the arguing about the position of the Jews could have been cut without losing much, and it might have left the central issue in clearer focus. The play is extraordinarily talky, and lot of the talk does not take it anywhere. A leaner script would have been able to move more adroitly.
Still, even with all the long-winded Germanic exposition, the play holds one’s attention. There are enough turns in the plot so that the audience cannot foresee the end, and director Lenny Leibowitz keeps things moving as best he can. The acting overall is satisfactory, with a few standouts, and that helps. Perhaps the next production of “Professor Bernhardi” will be shorter and more compelling.
“Professor Bernardi” can be seen at TBG Theatre on West 36th Street through Feb. 29.
For more information about the 2012 season, visit www.marvellrep.com
WASHINGTON – Birth control is rapidly gaining steam as an election-year wedge issue, with Jewish advocates lobbying out front and behind the scenes in what is shaping up as a clash between calls for individual freedom and religious liberty.
Several Jewish groups and lawmakers played a behind-the-scenes role in the latest flashpoint: last month’s order by the Obama administration requiring most religious institutions — other than houses of worship — to include contraceptives in health care coverage for their employees. The order has been strongly criticized by the Republican presidential front-runners, who portray it as proof that the Obama administration is hostile to religious communities.
Even before the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued its ruling, the Republican presidential primary battle had helped put the contraception debate back on the campaign agenda. Taking the fight in the other direction, the GOP candidates argued in effect that states should have the right to ban birth control.
During one debate, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum argued that the U.S. Supreme Court wrongly decided the landmark 1963 Griswold v. Connecticut case that blocked states from criminalizing the use of birth control by a married couple and cemented the constitutional right to privacy. Romney, Santorum, and Newt Gingrich all have voiced support for the so-called Personhood Amendment, a measure that defines a fertilized egg as a human being and, say advocates on both sides, could be interpreted to ban some forms of birth control.
Never went away
While recent events have thrust the issue back into the national limelight, Jewish groups say the issue never really went away.
It is not just that the role of government in making birth control available is inextricably wrapped into abortion, its better-publicized sister when it comes to reproductive controversies. The issue also goes to the core of an American argument that has endured for decades over which entity in a democracy is more entitled to religious freedoms, the individual or the health care provider.
The division over who is pre-eminent under the law — a community and its institutions or the individual — splits the Jewish community. Orthodox and more liberal groups took opposite sides on last month’s Health Department order requiring all religious institutions except for houses of worship to include contraceptives in health care coverage.
“The larger issue here is the issue of the relationship between religious employers and employees, and religious providers and patients, and the rights of each,” said Abba Cohen, the Washington director of Agudath Israel of America, an Orthodox umbrella group.
If the issue is playing out more prominently in the public eye, it is because the actors in the church-state separation controversy are seizing the political moment of an election season defined increasingly by cultural divisions between left and right, said Sammie Moshenberg, the director of the National Council for Jewish Women’s (NCJW) Washington office.
“There has been a longtime effort to really restrict women’s reproductive help overall,” she said. “But the people fighting this fight to make women’s health care less accessible have been emboldened by things on the political scene, most notably the anti-choice majority in the House of Representatives.”
The most recent evidence of the division is related to the rule under the Affordable Care Act requiring employer-provided health insurance plans to include contraception and related “preventive” services for employees.
Groups take sides
Catholic Church leaders had urged that an exemption for religious institutions be broadened from houses of worship to include a range of religiously affiliated institutions, such as hospitals. Top Catholic officials, including New York Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan, currently president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, made their case in private meetings with President Barack Obama.
A number of Jewish groups and lawmakers pushed back from the other side. NCJW organized a meeting with senior administration officials, as well as representatives of Jewish Women International and a number of liberal Christian umbrella groups. Two eminent Jewish congresswomen, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), the latter one of Obama’s earliest backers in his bid for the presidency, became involved.
On Jan. 20, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a statement that the exemption would stay as is: confined to houses of worship.
Schakowsky praised the decision, saying it was “inconceivable” that contraception was once again controversial. “No employer should decide for a woman whether she can access the health care services that she and her doctor decide are necessary,” she said.
“This decision will help working families by giving them access to free birth control,” Boxer wrote on the online news website The Huffington Post. “The cost of birth control can be prohibitive for many women, particularly in these difficult economic times.”
NCJW applauded the decision, as well, but said it wished there were no exceptions at all.
Orthodox groups said the decision was a disappointment. “To say the government will afford religious liberty only to the most insular of religious institutions, but not to those that serve, or employ, people of other faiths is a troubling view of faith and what role it should play in America,” Nathan Diament, the director of the Washington office of the Orthodox Union, wrote in a letter published Feb. 5 in The New York Times.
The Agudah’s Cohen said the issue was one of keeping government out of religious determinations.
Troublesome wording
Rabbi David Saperstein, the director of the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center, said the decision is vexing because the language it uses to distinguish between strictly religious institutions, which would be exempt, and those that are less so is vague. To be exempt, according to the order, an institution must “primarily” serve and employ those of its faith.
“‘Primarily’ is a terribly vague term that will lead to lawsuits that will not help the cause of contraception or the cause of religious freedom,” Saperstein said in an interview.
The issue quickly took on the colors of a partisan debate.
In their speeches after the Jan. 31 Florida primary, Gingrich and Romney each said they would extend the exemption to the broader category of religious institutions as soon as they assumed office. Gingrich called the decision part of what he said was Obama’s “war against religion.” Romney said it was a “direct attack on religious liberty.”
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), touted as a possible vice-presidential pick if Romney is nominated, has introduced a bill that would supersede the policy.
Sources among Capitol Hill Democrats say they are alarmed by the recent intensity of the effort to roll back gains in preserving individual rights in determining birth control decisions. They point to the failed attempt in Mississippi last election to define life as starting from conception and similar bills now pending in Congress.
Emblematic of the politicized tone, Moshenberg said, was the recent controversy involving the Susan B. Komen foundation’s decision — later reversed — to cut off Planned Parenthood from a program offering free breast cancer screenings to low-income women.
“Komen and birth control should be completely different issues — except for the fact that the people on the other side are exactly the same people,” she said.
JTA Wire Service
 | Activists connected to Jews Against Hydrofracking demonstrating in New Jersey on Nov. 21. Jews Against Hydrofracking |
As concerns mount over the environmental and public health consequences of hydraulic fracturing, known as fracking, Jewish groups are coalescing around a strategy that supports efforts to extract natural gas from shale rock while seeking to mitigate its worst effects.
In May, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA), the community’s main public policy umbrella group, will consider a draft resolution on fracking that in its current form acknowledges the potential benefits of a major new source of natural gas while urging greater oversight and government regulation of the practice.
“Our goal is to see energy independence that protects the environment,” said Sybil Sanchez, executive director of the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life (COEJL), an initiative of the JCPA that promotes environmental stewardship.
Fracking refers to the process of pumping water, sand, and chemicals into rock deep below the surface of the earth in an effort to release trapped deposits of natural gas. The controversial technique, which critics allege poisons groundwater and creates significant public health problems near drilling sites, has grown into a major policy debate.
In Pennsylvania, thousands of wells already have been dug to tap gas from the Marcellus Shale Deposit, a vast subterranean rock formation that is believed to hold enough natural gas to supply American demand for decades. New York, which also sits atop the Marcellus, has a moratorium in place on fracking, but Gov. Andrew Cuomo is considering lifting the ban.
At least four Jewish summer camps in northern Pennsylvania known to attract youths from northern New Jersey have signed leases to permit fracking on their land, the Forward reported last summer.
In the Jewish community, the fracking debate pits two established communal policy objectives against one another: protection of the environment versus the desire to achieve independence from foreign energy sources, particularly from the Arab Middle East.
Energy independence is among the major policy objectives of the American Jewish Committee, whose New York chapter was scheduled to host a panel discussion earlier this week (Feb. 6) with three speakers who either endorse fracking or accept its inevitability.
Richard Foltin, AJCommittee’s director of national and legislative affairs, told JTA that his organization believes that natural gas can be safely extracted from shale.
“We see this as a crucial part of a larger, multifaceted approach to promote reduced energy dependence that also includes enhanced efficiency and movement toward alternative fuels and alternative technologies,” Foltin said. “We want to see development of these domestic resources go forward — as safely as possible, but with an emphasis on allowing it to be done.”
Some environmental activists are deeply skeptical of both those claims.
The environmental safety of fracking has yet to be conclusively demonstrated, they say, and the industry has a poor track record. Moreover, even if the environmental concerns were addressed, the effects on foreign oil imports are likely to be negligible in the short term.
“The impact that increased natural gas production has on our consumption of foreign oil has more to do with whether or not natural gas becomes a viable vehicle fuel,” said Mark Brownstein, an attorney with the Environmental Defense Fund and a panelist at the AJCommittee event. “The vast majority of oil is for transportation.”
Even so, fracking is virtually certain not just to continue but to expand. Thousands of wells already have been drilled, vast economic interests incentives are at play, and the natural gas would be a cleaner-burning replacement for coal, the main U.S. source of energy.
Consequently, some in the environmental world have adopted a harm-minimization strategy rather than pushing for an outright ban.
The JCPA resolution, which was proposed by the Jewish Labor Committee, the Jewish Reconstructionist Federation and the community relations councils of Pittsburgh and Silicon Valley in California, urges legislation that eliminates the gas industry’s exemption from the Safe Drinking Water Act and requires full disclosure of the chemicals used in fracking.
“In an ideal world, it would not be happening at all,” said Deborah Goldberg, an attorney at Earthjustice and another AJCommittee panelist. “We’re realists. We know this is going forward in many parts of the country and that it will go forward whether we like it or not. So in those areas we are working to get the best possible protections in place that we can.”
For some, though, no regulatory regime will ever be sufficient.
“We should not be expanding it,” said Mirele Goldsmith, an organizer with Jews Against Hydrofracking who would like to see New York ban the practice permanently. “We should instead be looking at renewable sources of energy that don’t have the risks that hydrofracking has.”
JTA Wire Service
Scientists using ground-probing electronics may have discovered the missing mass graves at the site of Treblinka, one of the Nazis’ most notorious death camps.
No actual bodies were found, and the graves were not excavated, in keeping with Jewish law, but bones and bone fragments were discovered in the ground, according to Caroline Sturdy Colls, a forensic archeologist at Straffordshire University in Britain who headed the research.
The underground structures detected by her equipment outlines what most likely are the graves.
 | Caroline Sturdy Colls, right, with a reporter for the BBC at the site of Treblinka, where she has found signs of previously missing mass grave sites. Courtesy Caroline Sturdy Colls |
Historians believe as many as 850,000 people, mostly Jews and some Roma died at Treblinka.
Although eyewitnesses told of the existence of mass graves, the Germans did everything they could to cover up their crimes, and the inability of researchers to find them was sometimes used by Holocaust deniers to claim large-scale murder did not occur at Treblinka.
Sturdy Colls used aerial photographs from the 1940s, satellite imagery, GPS mapping devices, and new ground-penetrating radar. The radar could not detect corpses, but could detect differences between the ground and disturbances and inconsistencies in the ground, such as buried objects, in 11 areas.
“Given their size and location, there is a strong case for arguing that they represent burial areas,” she said.
Sturdy Colls began working at Treblinka in 2010. She and her colleagues used radar and electrical imaging to get an idea of what was underground without actually disturbing the site. One of the first things she discovered was that the early maps of the site were incorrect — the northern boundary line was off by 160 feet.
After the war, Treblinka’s neighbors looted some of the graves, seeking gold they thought the Jews had hidden. That complicated the topography, but Sturdy Colls’ equipment found several pits exactly where witnesses said they would be found.
The largest is 85 feet long, 55 feet wide and at least 13 feet deep, with a ramp for access. At least five others that deep also are in the area.
On July 23, 1942, Treblinka was opened as an extermination camp in east-central Poland, part of Germany’s Operation Rheinhard, the extermination of European Jewry.
It was designed for one purpose: murder. Ninety-five percent of the people sent there were killed immediately, mostly by carbon monoxide poisoning from tank engines pumped into gas chambers.
Treblinka was closed on Oct. 19, 1943, following a rebellion by the Sonderkommando unit — Jews forced to assist in operating the camp. Several German and Ukrainian guards were killed in the rebellion, enabling 300 prisoners to escape.
The Germans, however, were suddenly afraid that their crimes would be detected.
In 1943, they had discovered the bodies of thousands of Polish officers executed by the Russians at Katyn three years earlier, and realized that if anyone found the bodies at concentration camps, they would be blamed.
SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, Germany’s interior minister, ordered that whenever a camp was to be abandoned, all the bodies had to be exhumed and cremated, Sturdy Colls said.
Most of the victims at Treblinka were buried right after death, although some were cremated. Following Himmler’s orders, the Germans dug up the bodies and cremated them using railroad ties and wood from the forest. They then reburied the ashes in the same graves.
At first, they tried mixing the ashes with the dirt, but when that did not seem to work, the Germans simply dumped the ashes back in the trenches.
Sturdy Colls said that it takes very high temperatures to cremate a human body, and bone fragments almost always remain after the process, even when the cremation is done in a modern facility.
The job was done in a rush. As late as the 1960s, human remains would emerge from the ground, often after a rainstorm.
The Germans leveled the camp, destroying all the buildings, built a fake farm on the site of the bakery and even settled a Ukrainian family on the farm to make it look as if nothing had happened there. Little of the camp remained above ground.
“They kept up this deception even if they abandoned the site,” Sturdy Colls said. “They had a fake railway station. They had signs. They obviously knew what they were doing.”
A five-day Polish war crimes investigation in 1946 found a cellar passage with the “protruding remains of burnt posts, the foundations of the administration building, and the old well. Here and there can also be traced the remains of burnt fence posts and pieces of barbed wire, and short sections of paved road. There are also other traces.”
The early researchers also found decomposing corpses that the Germans had misplaced. Construction of a stone memorial at the site also turned up human remains.
They did not, however, find the graves themselves until the current research.
“We mapped what we can. We’ve identified 11 individual pits that we can survey,” said Sturdy Colls, whose work is ongoing. “A good chunk of the memorial was built where they thought the mass graves were, so there is a good chance there are more in the forest and under the memorial itself.”
JTA Wire Service
The Boys’ Choir of Teaneck’s Congregation Beth Aaron is looking for first- to seventh-grade members. Participants learn new songs, participate in performances in and out of the shul, and will be a part of an upcoming CD. Pictures and videos of the group’s performances are on the shul’s website, www.bethaaron.org, in the Events Committees/Youth section. For information, contact directors Benjy Rosenbluth, (201) 357-5685, or Yehiel Levy, (201) 357-5495, or .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
Yeshiva University will present “A Lens on Israel: A Society through its Cinema,” the Ring Family Film Festival, from Feb. 14 to 23. The four-part event will be supplemented by lectures, workshops, and open forums with leading Israeli actors, writers, producers, and directors. Capping the event is the Feb. 16 screening of “Footnote” — the Oscar-nominated Joseph Cedar film that won “Best Screenplay” at Cannes, and “Best Picture” at the Israeli Ophir Awards. It is among the five contenders for “Best Foreign Language Film” at this year’s Academy Awards. Following the screening, Cedar and actor Lior Ashkenazi will take questions from the audience.
The free festival opens on Feb. 14 with the screening of the internationally acclaimed drama, “Restoration.” The 2008 film “For My Father” will be shown on Feb. 15, and the festival concludes with “Three Mothers” on Feb. 23. Visit www.yu.edu/film-festival.
Leket Israel, Israel’s National Food Bank and largest food rescue network, is selling printed Purim cards. For every dollar donated, the organization will rescue 10 pounds of produce from farms and packing houses to benefit Israel’s poor.
It costs $36 for 18 cards and envelopes, $70 for 36, $90 for 54, and $170 for 108. Unlimited Purim e-cards and video cards are available for $18. To order, call (201) 331-0070 or www.purim.leket.org.
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Yashar LaChayal (Straight to the Soldier) will deliver mishloach manot (gift baskets) to soldiers in Israel, from Har Dov in the north to the southern tip of the Negev, including IDF bases on the periphery. Baskets will be assembled by volunteers and delivered on Purim.
Year round, the organization provides soldiers on the front lines with basic necessities and supports lone and injured soldiers and financially distressed families of soldiers.
The group reports that 100 percent of donations go directly to Israel’s soldiers with funds from the Moskowitz family funding all operating expenses.
The Purim drive continues through March 7. Visit www.yasharlachayal.org.
 | Rep. Eric Cantor |
On Sunday, Feb. 12, at 4:30 p.m., NORPAC, along with hosts Yael and Rabbi Steve Weil, will sponsor an event for House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) at a private home in Englewood. Cantor is the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in America.
For information, call Mindy Berman, (201) 788-5133, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), or Mort Fridman at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
Joseph Whiting, son of Sara and Timothy Whiting of Ridgewood, celebrated becoming a bar mitzvah on Feb. 4 at Temple Beth Or in Washington Township.
Sofia Levinson, daughter of Sara and Joshua Levinson of Tenafly and sister of Maya and Isaac, celebrated becoming a bat mitzvah on Feb. 4 at Temple Emanu-El in Closter.
Ryan Lieman, son of Julie and Ira Lieman of Fair Lawn and brother of Jordan and Aimee, celebrated becoming a bar mitzvah on Feb. 4 at the Fair Lawn Jewish Center/Congregation B’nai Israel.
Julia Lawrence, daughter of Jill and Jeffrey Lawrence of Old Tappan, celebrated becoming a bat mitzvah on Feb. 4 at Temple Beth El of Northern Valley in Closter.
Max Abraham Seligsohn was born on Jan. 12 at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City to Daniella and Daniel Seligsohn of Manhattan. He weighed 6 pounds, 10 ounces. His grandparents are Sandy and Jerry Seligsohn of Scarsdale, N.Y., and Ruby and Bobby Kaplan of Teaneck.
Rebecca Bonifacio, daughter of Melissa and Mark Bonifacio of Northvale, celebrated becoming a bat mitzvah on Feb. 4 at Temple Beth El of Northern Valley in Closter.
One would have expected the laws that follow the Aseret HaDibrot, the Ten Commandments, to be of great urgency and importance. Yet the two laws that follow are not only seemingly mundane and prosaic but greatly misplaced in this arena of high moments.
The Torah text states, “and if you make for Me an altar of stones, do not build it out of hewn stones; for by wielding your sword upon them, you have profaned them. Do not ascend my altar by steps, that your nakedness may be exposed upon it” (Exodus 20:22-23).
We have apparently moved from the pageantry of the moment of Revelation, with its attending thunder and lightning, to the apparently ordinary issues related to the construction of an altar. The prohibition against using a sword in preparing the stones of the altar and the need to use a ramp instead of stairs to alight should more logically appear in the last chapter of Sefer Shemot. That is, where the construction of the desert Tabernacle, the Mishkan, is properly mandated and detailed.
Homiletically, and by extension existentially, the Torah might very well be instructing us in a vital way, to prevent egregious behavior that could easily flow from a flawed comprehension of what the Torah demands of us. On the one hand, the embrace of the Torah at that Sinaitic moment and all similar affirmations by successive generations can easily be corrupted by misplaced ideals and extremist attitudes. The difference between stairs and a ramp is that one climbs faster on the former, but tires quickly and needs to stop and rest. Climbing a ramp, while slower, is less tedious and because it takes effort to stand still on an incline one is encouraged to keep moving. The climb to Torah in deed and creed, in observance and understanding, should be approached in a similar vein, namely as a graduated ascent that also allows for studied consideration and careful integration.
Furthermore, there is the concern and conviction that the only way for Torah to endure is through coercive means. We are therefore enjoined not to build an altar, which serves as the locus and focus from which we give of ourselves to God and community, with a sword, an obvious implement of war. One cannot use terror-like tactics and militant means to impart and impose the message of Judaism.
Instead we are expected to “walk in God’s ways”—”v’halachto bi-drachav.” This doctrine of “imitatio Dei,” according to the Rambam, means that just as God is “rachum v’chanun,” “merciful and gracious,” so must one be in the proper development of his/her religious character and spiritual personality. The events of late in Israel are a stark reminder of the possibilities for the Torah’s teachings and values to be tragically corrupted and misrepresented through “kefiah datit” or religious coercion.
The final lesson of the ramp of the altar is that of accessibility. The ramp as a requisite element of the Mizbeach’s construction can be seen to symbolize the need to bring all close to the Divine. Not only do ramps in the Mishkan of old and in our sanctuaries today send a welcome message to the physically frail and handicapped, but they convey, to one and all, that everyone matters, regardless of affiliation, health, or station in life. The earthly climb that we each make toward transcendence must be carefully considered and calibrated, measured and mediated, crafted and molded out of tools and tones of love and understanding.
Muslims can call for sharia law, condemn the United States as “The Great Satan,” call for the destruction of Israel, and shout down speakers at college forums — but heaven forbid that anyone should speak ill of the “Religion of Peace.”
Muslims raised a ruckus because Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, an intelligence officer who has been critical of Islam, was scheduled to speak at a West Point prayer breakfast. He has withdrawn from the event. Muslims have protested pro-Israel speakers on college campuses and other venues, and have sent their minions in to scream and shout until the speakers give up and leave.
Freedom of speech, it seems, is only permissible when it conforms to the Muslim way of thinking. Now they are able to control who speaks at our nation’s military academies. Sharia law is on the horizon.
Not revealed in last week’s editorial “Primary Concerns” is that Saul Alinsky authored the book “Rules for Radicals.” He taught that radicals do not flaunt their radicalism, but infiltrate the system from within. In 1985, Barack Obama began serving as a community organizer in Chicago working for the Developing Communities Project, which was an Alinskyite group. Alinsky believed that the ends justify the means. How can The Jewish Standard defend this person and his ideas?
In an article in the Jan. 27 issue about the closing of the Gittelman Day School, the word “mensches” appeared as part of a quote. There is no such word in German or in Yiddish.
In the Feb. 4, issue the error was repeated on page 3, but by the time we got to page 8, the error was corrected. Well almost, but not quite. While you printed the correct plural form, there is no “t” in Mensch or in Menschen. While some might consider this nitpicking, I feel strongly that a publication has an obligation to use proper spelling and grammar at all times.
WASHINGTON – Anti-Israel sentiment in the Middle East is not merely characterized by sharp political differences. It mimics and is fueled by the most defamatory and dangerous of historical anti-Jewish themes. For confirmation, we need look no further than a widely published political cartoonist, a Jordan-based Palestinian named Emad Hajjaj. His cartoons regularly feature blatant incitement, equating Israel with the Third Reich, crudely caricaturing Jews as bloodthirsty monsters, portraying menorahs as weapons, and showing the “crucifixion” of Palestinians on a cross marked by a Star of David.
None of this is exceptional. What is surprising, or should be, is the international indifference to — indeed, complicity in — vile and incendiary Arab anti-Semitism without parallel, quantitatively or qualitatively, on the Israeli side of the regional divide. Yet B’nai B’rith has found that among those claimed as clients by Hajjaj’s public relations firm Abu Mahjoob Creative Productions Company are not only several local government bodies, but also foreign organizations such as the British Council and the major corporations Visa, Orange, the German industrial giant Siemens, and others. If this was not bad enough, the firm’s client list features multiple agencies of the United Nations — including the United Nations Development Fund for Women (now merged into U.N. Women), the United Nations Development Programme and the United Nations Children’s Fund, or UNICEF.
Hajjaj’s open record of abundant anti-Semitic output makes it unlikely that prominent clients are unaware of patronizing a hatemonger. His cartoons have been included in U.S. State Department reporting on anti-Semitism, and the United Nations Human Rights Council’s notorious special rapporteur on the Palestinians, Richard Falk, not too long ago posted an anti-Semitic, anti-American Hajjaj cartoon on his blog. Falk, in a new post, has again celebrated the abandonment of diplomacy in favor of anti-Israel boycotts, divestment, and sanctions. This “authoritative” U.N. figure’s agitation is especially unhelpful when even some civil society groups in the United States, such as elements of the Presbyterian Church (USA) and the United Methodist Church, urge economic leverage as a means to single out Israel for pressure and isolation.
Sadly, there can be little dispute of the ubiquity and intensity of anti-Semitism in Arab and other Muslim-majority lands. After all, these are the societies where remarkably many folks continue to believe that 9/11 was a Zionist plot, that the Shoah is a fabrication, that a now-despised native son such as Muammar Gadhafi was Jewish, and that Jews are fated to violent subjugation as the “sons of apes and pigs.” It then becomes a bit more understandable, if no less frightening, that two random Israeli boys, happened upon by random Palestinians, could be stoned to death in 2001.
People expressing reasonable, measured criticism of Israel cannot, of course, be considered anti-Israel or anti-Semitic. However, animus to Zionism itself — simply the existence of the democratic Jewish state — frequently betrays denial of Jews’ basic rights and history.
Natan Sharansky has identified three elements that signal where criticism of Israel crosses over into bigotry: delegitimization, double standards, and demonization. In 2005, the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (now known as the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights) essentially echoed these terms. The Vatican, too, has recognized the clear correlation between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.
While anti-Semitism has existed in many regions, the modern Arab world stands out with the dramatic flight of its Jews. The Jewish population in Arab countries has dropped from some 800,000 six decades ago to perhaps 6,000 today, not to mention the exodus from neighboring non-Arab Muslim countries. These numbers do not lie. The Pew Global Attitudes Project has confirmed unfathomable antipathy toward not merely Israel but “Jews” both in Arab states and non-Arab Muslim states far removed from any territorial dispute with Israel. In all but one of the seven nations surveyed, 96 to 98 percent of respondents had negative views of Jews; in Indonesia, a slightly less commanding 91 percent shared this outlook.
Needless to say, the kind of dehumanization to which so many Arab opinion-shapers subject Israelis and Jews would not be tolerated against other groups.
In the pursuit of justice and coexistence, non-selectivity in tackling prejudice is vital. The Jewish community has often been at the forefront of challenging mistreatment of Christians, Muslims and those of other faiths. While much of the world is willing to turn a blind eye to key barriers to reconciliation in the Middle East, let us ensure that no institution is unaccountable for complicity in these foremost impediments to peace.
JTA
Let Ethiopians tell their stories — and let us listen
Over the past weeks, protests have spread throughout Israel calling for a response to racism targeted at the country’s Ethiopian community. Sparked by a Channel 2 story on discrimination in Kityat Malachi, citizens have taken to the streets to show their outrage at the status quo. Although the despicable slurs and actions that triggered these protests are blatant examples of these grievances, they conceal a deeper issue.
Beyond more overt examples, Ethiopian Israelis are often considered less desirable neighbors, and frequently have a harder time finding a job. They are perceived as a poor, underprivileged community, and face the stigma of lacking the capability to contribute equally, even if this myth is belied by reality. Some of this is outright racism, but the rest is symptomatic of a deeper and far more widespread prejudice: indirect or concealed racism.
This sentiment is dramatized even in circles that would never admit to harboring prejudice.
The primary vehicle to overcoming these obstacles is exposing reality through education, gaining knowledge of the range of personal stories.
The lack of education becomes abundantly clear when we consider how little the average Israeli knows of the Ethiopian Aliyah. They may be able to name Operations Moses and Solomon, but not much beyond that.
How many of us — in Israel or outside it — know that more than 4,000 Ethiopian Jews lost their lives on the way to Israel? How many know that nearly every family lost at least one loved one? And that it was not only the Mossad who worked to save the Ethiopian Jews, but that there was enormous activism from local members of the Ethiopian Jewish community?
An even stronger tool, however, is exposing Israeli society to the personal accounts of these same Ethiopian immigrants. Each Ethiopian family has its own story of aliyah, uplifting and inspiring for its own reasons. Hearing these stories, however, and gaining entrance to them is something that takes initiative from the public — to ask, to take interest, and to invite speakers to schools and communities. It also asks the Ethiopian community to share their experiences, often buried deep inside.
One project that strives to create tolerance on the basis of these stories is Project Abrah, which sheds light on the stories of Prisoners of Zion, individuals jailed in Ethiopia or neighboring countries as a result of their Zionist activity. In this project, both Israeli Ethiopian and non-Ethiopian youth work together to make films on the little known stories of these remarkable individuals.
For the Israeli Ethiopians, it is a way to promote intergenerational dialogue, and to utilize the heroic actions of their own community as a foundation for developing communal pride. For non-Ethiopians, it is a way to understand the community, break down walls and shatter stigmas. By listening to the stories of others, they begin to internalize the legacy of this community. This, in turn, impacts their interaction with the wider Ethiopian population, changing a relationship based on distance and preconceptions to one of mutual respect and admiration.
Education — with emphasis on programs that involve personal stories — is the key to bridging cultural gaps in our society. In this way, someone who began as an “other” becomes “another” — a fellow member of a wonderfully diverse community.
JERUSALEM — The recent violence in Beit Shemesh and in Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim neighborhood has led me to speak out against the so-called “sikrikim” in the harshest possible terms, equating their actions to terrorism. Sikrikim — Sicarii-ites — is the name given to a fringe anti-Zionist vigilante group, loosely linked to Neturei Karta and said to have been at the forefront of many of the recent violent attacks against innocent Israelis.
In my mind, there is a dangerous similarity in their actions and those of Islamist terrorists. I do not use this comparison lightly. As the founder of the ZAKA rescue and recovery organization, I know only too well the horror of terror.
These charedi hooligans have wreaked havoc through harassment and violence for far too long. It does not really matter how they justify their actions. They cannot be allowed to go on like this at the expense of innocent bystanders, whose only crime is being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and at the expense of the charedi community, whose collective reputation and image are being tarred by their individual brush.
There would be communal outcry if terrorists dressed up as charedim, attacked a bus in Mea Shearim, broke its windows, and injured innocent men, women, and children. However, if charedim themselves do something similar in the name of religious zealotry, a cloak of silence spreads across the charedi community. It is a double standard and it has to end, and I call upon charedi community leaders to make their voices heard.
The silence of the majority of our leaders has allowed a tiny fringe group of extremists to hijack the media into thinking it represents the entire charedi community in Israel. This terrible generalization could not be further from the truth. It is insulting to those of us who have worked for so many years to bridge the gaps of understanding with all sectors of Israeli society.
As a proud 11th-generation Jerusalemite from Mea Shearim, I know the anti-Zionist Neturei Karta very well, having been raised in their midst and spoon-fed their ideology through my formative years. I was personally arrested no less than 34 times for organizing protests against what I then saw as the “evil Zionist regime.” As I grew older, I realized that unlike my traditional attire, not everything is black and white.
My abhorrent view of the “Zionists” came to a sudden and drastic halt on July 6, 1989, when I witnessed the aftermath of an Islamic Jihad terrorist attack on the No. 405 bus en route to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv. Hearing the commotion, I ran from my yeshivah studies to witness a sobering image that would remain imprinted on my mind forever. Sixteen innocent Jews lay among the carnage, including young soldiers, elderly Jerusalemites, North American tourists, and Israeli teenagers.
Suddenly, it became clear in my mind that if terrorists do not discriminate between Jews, then neither should I. Instinctively, I ran towards the mangled bus and began to help prepare the victims for burial. Unbeknown to me at the time, these were the humble beginnings of ZAKA.
I used my organizational skills and contacts to build a framework in which young charedi men could give back to society in a way that no other government body was prepared to do. We took responsibility for collecting the remains of terror victims for burial, attending one terror attack after another. Our volunteers received professional training and worked side by side with all of the other emergency services. Suddenly, people began to associate at least some charedi as caring individuals fulfilling a critical role in society.
Today, ZAKA has thousands of volunteers from all sectors in Israeli society — Jews, Christians, Druze, and Muslims. Our work has progressed into that of a United Nations-recognized international rescue-and-recovery organization with branches across the globe, ready to deploy to any mass casualty situation.
Once I realized that the Jewish people were one, I began to understand our global role as a “light unto the nations.” What better light can we provide than saving lives and assisting others in their time of need, irrespective of race, color, or creed? As our sages tell us, “All of mankind was created in the image of God” — not just Jews, and certainly not just charedi Jews.
Authentic Judaism is not about highlighting differences and attacking those who do not share your world view. It is about bringing the world closer to perfection, tikkun olam, working together for the sake of the greater good.
The fanatics hide behind the legitimacy of religious garb and spend their time desecrating all that is holy. Through aggression and sick media gimmicks, they seek to bully society into capitulating to their every wish and paint all of Torah Judaism as xenophobic and intolerant.
The only way to fight their hate is to increase our love and understanding. We must continue to work together as human beings, irrelevant of race, color or creed to make this world a better place for generations to come.
JTA Wire Service
Let me state this clearly. Despite some news reports, I am not a candidate for Congress in New Jersey’s Ninth Congreessional District. I am considering becoming a candidate, however, and I so informed the Bergen County Republican Organization (BCPO). People considering becoming candidated had until Jan. 31 to inform the BCPO of their interest; otherwise, they could not be considered for the party’s nomination (although they could run in a primary).
Truth regardless of consequences
While I am not candidate, I am actively exploring the viability of such a candidacy, including my ability to integrate existing responsibilities into the considerable effort a serious candidacy will entail.
And I want you to know why. Why would a rabbi run for Congress? In my case, it is because the problems we are seeing in our great nation are not caused by an economic downturn, as proclaimed by media and politicians alike, but by a values erosion. Congress so desperately needs a values-voice. I have sought to be that voice in other sectors of American society; I could be that voice in Congress, as well.
The values that have dominated the U.S. political landscape for decades are the obsessions with gay marriage and abortion, to the exclusion of nearly all others, which explains why our country is so incredibly religious yet so seemingly decadent. It is time to expand the values conversation and policy agenda.
Let us begin with really saving the institution of marriage by focusing squarely on the divorce rate — anywhere between 40 percent and 50 percent, depending on how one plays with the numbers. Any way you look at it, however, the divorce rate is outrageous. I will promote legislation that will fight marital breakdown by making marital counseling tax-deductible. We should be offering husbands and wives whose families are collapsing a financial incentive to get the help they need so that their children do not end up like yo-yos bouncing from home to home. I am a child of divorce, and I have helped families move away from the brink of a tragedy that must finally be addressed on a grand scale.
There is a need to recreate an American Sabbath so that parents have an incentive to take their children to a park rather than to a mall. Bergen County is the only county left in the United States that keeps its shopping malls shut on Sundays, thereby allowing families to coalesce around the dinner table rather than a department store counter.
Beyond helping the family, this will also help counter the growing materialism that continues to poison the American soul, leading to the near-collapse of a $10 trillion economy just three years ago when we had homes that were never large enough, cars that were never new enough, and designer labels that were never fashionable enough.
Eighty-one percent of 18- to 25-year-olds surveyed in a Pew Research Center poll said getting rich is their generation’s most important or second-most-important life goal, while 51 percent said the same about being famous.
I am pro-wealth, but only when it is consecrated to a goal higher than mere consumption. That is why I advocate a moment of silence to start the day in public schools, so children are given time to reflect on issues and something larger than themselves. Separation of church and state is key in our nation. That, however, means not imposing a religious creed on any citizen; it does not mean chasing God from public life.
We should also be combating the growing narcissism of our children by proposing a year of national service after high school. Just two percent of the population of the United States protects our freedom in the military while the remainder do scant public service. With one daughter now entering the Israeli army and a son who has been nominated to West Point, I believe strongly in children who choose to serve.
The reality-TV generation, which experiences exploitation as a way of life, needs to rediscover human dignity. Of course people want food, clothing, and shelter. More than anything else, however, they want a life of dignity and self-sufficiency. Dignity is the human aura that accrues to the individual through self-reliance. A dependent life is a fundamentally undignified life. Self-respect is earned through the sweat of one’s brow. Yes, we want to be able to pay our bills; yes, we all seek material comforts. Yet we also seek an existence infused with relevance and meaning. Government, of course, must provide a safety net for a rainy day, but only self-reliance creates a sunny life. Citizens can take both moral and financial responsibility for their own future; Congress can help them do so.
High taxes and a complicated tax code that imposes a greater burden on the “barely haves” are also values issues, not political ones. For working parents to survive this economic downturn, for them to have money to spend on the needs of their families, there must be a lessening of the outrageous tax burden. I agree with Warren Buffet; that billionaires should not be paying taxes that are lower than what their secretaries pay, and the overall tax burden needs to come way down. A flat tax and a simplification of the tax code are essential.
When it comes to education, parents have a right to choose who educates their children and to which schools they send their children and, as such, vouchers empowering school choice are a must. We must simultaneously, however, strengthen our public schools by introducing more values-based learning as well as a dress code that fosters dignity and self-worth.
In foreign policy, this country must be true to its promise by forgoing ambiguity and firmly opposing tyrrany wherever it exists — including Iran and Syria.
This country also needs to stand unambiguously beside Israel, its most stalwart and reliable ally. President Barack Obama, thankfully, has reversed course on his unfair pressure on Israel and deserves credit for increasing military and intelligence cooperation with the Jewish state. Who is to say, however, why he did so? Is it because of his shellacking in the 2010 midterm elections? Will the pressure on Israel resume when the pressure of re-election is taken from him?
Israel is this country’s surrogate in championing democratic ideals in the world’s most dangerous region. That makes supporting it a values issue, not a political one.
I do not know whether I will run for the Ninth CD seat. I do know why I would want to.
It was 9:58 p.m. Sunday evening. The day before, Syria launched its assault on Homs. It is said that anywhere between 217 and 260 people were killed by Bashar al-Assad’s forces on that first day. On Sunday, it is estimated that an additional 60 people were killed.
In southern Afghanistan, a bomb planted near a market killed a little girl and injured three boys. In northwestern Pakistan, another bomb killed a Pakistani soldier and wounded 11 others.
At 9:58 p.m., e-mail blasts — the modern equivalent of breaking news bulletins — arrived from both The New York Times and National Public Radio: The New York Giants defeated the New England Patriots to win the Super Bowl.
On Jan. 20, police in Wayne entered the home of an elderly man named Donald Domsky. They found him lying dead in a doorway. He had been dead in that doorway since sometime in December 2010. In the intervening 13 months, his mail kept piling up outside his home; his grass went unmowed; he defaulted on his property taxes and his utilities. Yet in all that time, no one bothered to knock on his door, or call the police, not even the people from Wayne’s public works department who responded to neighbor complaints and came to mow the lawn. The neighbors complained about the grass, but not about the fact that the old man whose grass it was had been missing for many months.
This is the nature of the society in which we live. We are more concerned with what happens on a football field than on a killing field. We are more concerned about the unsightliness of an overgrown lawn than the lack of any sighting of the person who should be mowing it.
We ravenously throw our arms around materialism, but keep our neighbors at arms’ length.
This is not a Jewish issue, in the sense that the “we” here encompasses everyone, Jews and non-Jews alike. Clearly, the issue is a general societal one.
Yet it is a specific Jewish issue, as well, because creating a better world — tikkun olam — is not merely a Jewish issue, it is the Jewish mission.
Perhaps our community can establish and coordinate a “year of Jewish values,” during which all levels of the education spectrum — from early childhood to adult — create and teach specific Jewish values, while pulpit rabbis devote a sermon a month to those same values. Perhaps, too, our educators, rabbis, and social workers can put their minds together to create a “Jewish values fair” or some similar event that will entertain, yet educate. Perhaps we can create a “conversations curriculum” that parents and children can use around the dinner table on Friday evenings during this “year of Jewish values.”
Jewish values are not for Jews alone and many are not even unique to us. If we remind ourselves of what those values are, however, perhaps we can inspire the greater community in which we live to do the same.
Wow.. what an exciting week it has been. The New York Giants were victorious in their Super Bowl quest. Hope everyone enjoyed last week’s Jewish Standard cover story with a round up of local eateries and their SB foods. My children were scattered, some together, and one at school.. and we were at our friend’s home with a nice small crowd of 7. The camaraderie, company, game, and catered deli/chicken wings, spinach dip in a hollowed out football-shaped pumpernickel bread, mini hot dogs, knishes, and of course, dessert to wash it all down, were great. Several of the office staff here event went to the stadium for Tuesday’s welcome rally.
Anyway, back to reality.
I found this delicious recipe in a newer cookbook “How to Cook Like a Jewish Grandmother—Old-Fashioned Jewish Recipes” by Marla Brooks.
Melt-in-Your-Mouth Short Ribs
Yes, short ribs are a bit of an indulgence and sometimes a little fatty, but once in a while, everyone needs to splurge.
3 pounds short ribs
1/4 cup honey
1 cup beef broth
1 cup ketchup
dash Worcestershire sauce
salt and pepper to taste
2 onions, thinly sliced
2 large carrots, sliced
Broil ribs in broiler for 5 to 10 minutes, or until brown. While ribs are browning, mix honey, broth, ketchup, and Worcestershire together and set aside. Saute´ vegetables until soft and place in roasting pan. When ribs are done, place on top of veggies. Pour sauce over ribs. Cover and bake at 350 degrees for about 2 hours, turning ribs once or twice during baking. Serves 4.
Grandma’s Hot Beef Borscht
(fleishig borscht)
2 quarts water
2 pounds beef brisket
10 small beets, julienned or diced
2 yellow onions, sliced
juice of 2 lemons
2 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons salt
pepper to taste
Place the water, meat, beets, and onions in a Dutch oven and bring to a boil. Lower heat to simmer and cook until the meat is tender. Add lemon juice, sugar, salt, and pepper and simmer about 10 minutes. Taste for seasonings. Serve with crackers. Serves 6 to 8.
You may encounter anti-semitism where you don’t expect it.
In the January issue of Angie’s List, New York City New Jersey edition, on p. 15, is an item about an insurance adjuster accused of fraud. (Angie’s List is an organization intended to help people find trustworthy repairmen, doctors, contractors, etc.)
A woman in West Park, Fla., hired Abraham Blumberg, CEO of National Loss Consultants in Miami, to negotiate her claim to fix a leaky roof after a storm.
The insurance company issued a check to Blumberg for $5,000, but the woman was not successful in getting her portion of the money from Blumberg,
Eventually Blumberg pleaded guilty to pocketing more than $360,000 in insurance claims from 82 victims, according to the Florida Department of Financial Services.
He was sentenced to 364 days in jail and 30 years of probation. The state revoked his license.
In case readers didn’t conclude that Blumberg was Jewish, Angie’s List ran a photograph of him.
With a full beard. And wearing a skullcap.