Jewish Action Spring 2016

NO ARTIFICIAL INGREDIENTS. NO ARTIFICIAL COLORS. NO ARTIFICIAL FLAVORS. NO PRESERVATIVES. NO SULFITES ADDED. NO ADDED SUGAR. NO ARTIFICIAL INGREDIENTS. NO ARTIFICIAL COLORS. NO ARTIFICIAL FLAVORS. NO PRESERVATIVES. NO SULFITES ADDED. NO ADDED SUGAR.NO ARTIFICIAL INGREDIENTS. NO ARTIFICIAL COLORS. NO ARTIFICIAL FLAVORS. NO PRESERVATIVES. NO SULFITES ADDED. NO ARTIFICIAL INGREDIENTS. NO ARTIFICIAL COLORS. NO ARTIFICIAL FLAVORS. NO PRESERVATIVES. NO SULFITES ADDED.

NO ARTIFICIAL INGREDIENTS. NO ARTIFICIAL COLORS. NO ARTIFICIAL FLAVORS. NO PRESERVATIVES. NO SULFITES ADDED. NO ARTIFICIAL INGREDIENTS. NO ARTIFICIAL COLORS. NO ARTIFICIAL FLAVORS. NO PRESERVATIVES. NO SULFITES ADDED.NO ARTIFICIAL INGREDIENTS. NO ARTIFICIAL COLORS. NO ARTIFICIAL FLAVORS. NO PRESERVATIVES. NO SULFITES ADDED. NO ARTIFICIAL INGREDIENTS. NO ARTIFICIAL COLORS. NO ARTIFICIAL FLAVORS. NO PRESERVATIVES. NO SULFITES ADDED.




NO ARTIFICIAL INGREDIENTS. NO ARTIFICIAL COLORS. NO ARTIFICIAL FLAVORS. NO PRESERVATIVES. NO SULFITES ADDED. NO ARTIFICIAL INGREDIENTS. NO ARTIFICIAL COLORS. NO ARTIFICIAL FLAVORS. NO PRESERVATIVES. NO SULFITES ADDED.NO ARTIFICIAL INGREDIENTS. NO ARTIFICIAL COLORS. NO ARTIFICIAL FLAVORS. NO PRESERVATIVES. NO SULFITES ADDED. NO ADDED SUGAR. NO ARTIFICIAL INGREDIENTS. NO ARTIFICIAL COLORS. NO ARTIFICIAL FLAVORS. NO PRESERVATIVES. NO SULFITES ADDED. NO ADDED SUGAR.

NO ARTIFICIAL INGREDIENTS. NO ARTIFICIAL COLORS. NO ARTIFICIAL FLAVORS. NO PRESERVATIVES. NO SULFITES ADDED. NO ARTIFICIAL INGREDIENTS. NO ARTIFICIAL COLORS. NO ARTIFICIAL FLAVORS. NO PRESERVATIVES. NO SULFITES ADDED. RTIFICIAL INGREDIENTS. NO ARTIFICIAL COLORS. NO ARTIFICIAL FLAVORS. NO PRESERVATIVESNO ARTIFICIAL INGREDIENTS. NO ARTIFICIAL COLORS. NO ARTIFICIAL FLAVORS. NO PRESERVATIVES. NO SULFITES ADDED. NO ARTIFICIAL INGREDIENTS. NO ARTIFICIAL COLORS. NO ARTIFICIAL FLAVORS. NO PRESERVATIVES. NO SULFITES ADDED.








NO PRESERVATIVES.

NO ARTIFICIAL INGREDIENTS.

NO SULFITES ADDED.

NO ARTIFICIAL FLAVORS.

NO ARTIFICIAL COLORS.

100% JuiceKosher for Passover

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Jewish Action seeks to provide a forum for a diversity of legitimate opinions within the spectrum of Orthodox Judaism.Therefore, opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the policy or opinion of the Orthodox Union.

SPRING 5776/2016 VOL. 76, NO. 3

PAGE 26 PAGE 30

Jewish Action is published by the Orthodox Union • 11 Broadway, New York, NY 10004 212.563.4000. Printed Quarterly—Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall, plus Special Passover issue. ISSN No. 0447-7049. Subscription: $16.00 per year; Canadian, $20.00; Overseas, $60.00. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and additional offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Jewish Action, 11 Broadway, New York, NY 10004.

J E W I S H A C T I O N

PAGE 64

Spring 5776/2016 JEWISH ACTION I 1

16 Kosher Cookbooks: Retracing our History through RecipesBy Naomi Ross

26 Celebrity Kosher ChefsBy Naomi Ross

COVER STORY30 Unbroken Faith: American Jewish

Families Who Defied the OddsBy Bayla Sheva Brenner

52 The Orthodox Union’s Early Years:Fighting for Jewish Rights in a Very Different AmericaBy Rafael Medoff

46 Building Orthodox Judaism in America: The Life and Legacy of Harold M. JacobsBy Rafael MedoffReviewed by David Luchins

56 Review Essay: The Living Tree: Studies in Modern OrthodoxyBy Rabbi Shlomo Riskin Reviewed by David Berger

2 LETTERS

78 INSIDE THE OU

90THE CHEF’S TABLE

BOOKS

ISRAEL

Who Is a “Settler”?

JUST BETWEEN US74 Loving the Land

By Aryeh Z. Ginzberg

LASTING IMPRESSIONSMemory of a Second SederBy Steve Lipman

Cover: Andres Moncayo

Beyond Chicken and Potatoes: Pesach Never Tasted So Good!By Norene Gilletz

CHAIRMAN'S MESSAGE12By Gerald M. Schreck

4The Four Sons RedefinedBy Martin Nachimson

76 The Koren Mahzor for Yom Haatzma’ut and Yom YerushalayimTranslation by Rabbi Jonathan SacksReviewed by Shaul Robinson

LEGAL-EASE102 What’s the Truth about . . .

Muslim Anti-Semitism?By Ari Z. Zivotofsky

PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE

14 Saved By Shabbat: How to Put Media Messages in Proper Perspective By Michael Medved

60 Remembering the Mercaz MassacreBy Miriam Burstein

64 Rich Wine and Powerful History: A Shabbat Visit to Elon MorehBy Vera Schwarcz

66 Bringing Torah to Life in Har BrachaBy Elli Fischer

68 A Chareidi Zionist Moshav: Moshav Matityahu By Elli Fischer

72 On and Off the Beaten Track in . . . the Machal Memorial at Sha’ar HaGaiBy Peter Abelow

WELLNESS REPORT94 Going Green: Lettuce—

The Perfect Pesach VegetableBy Shira Isenberg

96 Circle, Arrow, Spiral: Exploring Gender in JudaismBy Miriam Kosman Reviewed by Allison Josephs

Photos: Collection of American Jewish Historical Society/Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

6 FROM THE DESK OF ALLEN I. FAGINA Journey Through a Region Turned Upside Down

70 The City of Four: Kiryat ArbaBy Toby Klein Greenwald

98 Kosher Movies: A Film Critic Discovers Life Lessons at the CinemaBy Rabbi Herbert J. Cohen, PhDReviewed by Daniel Renna

104

SPECIAL SECTION

Letters

More on Homeschoolingc Thank you for addressing the topic of homeschooling (“Homeschooling: A Growing Trend,” by Avigayil Perry, fall 2015). As a parent who is a certified teacher with an MBA, deciding to homeschool was one of the toughest decisions of my life.

Thank God, in Houston, we have a wonderfully supportive Orthodox community and have not felt ostracized in any way. In the article, some expressed the idea that meaningful interaction is hard to come by among the homeschooled. I disagree. We spend much of our time learning at various museums and zoos. The staff have come to know and love my children. My children also do not get much technology time (no computer and limited TV) as we want them to play creatively, independently and with each other. Play is a child’s work, as over sixty years of research has shown.

On a related note, the high cost of Orthodox life is largely driven by day school tuition. At $15,000 or more in Houston, without a scholarship, the cost is simply prohibitive. Nevertheless, were the majority of schools to open programs for homeschooling children, they would discover perhaps that both groups of students can benefit. Only one (non-Orthodox) school I know of has offered to develop a homeschool program if there is enough interest. But as the movement grows, perhaps the metrics will drive the cart.

HOLLY DAVIESHouston, Texas

Remembering Rabbi Gettingerc In the summer 2015 edition, Rabbi Dovid Cohen wrote “Missing Rabbi Gettinger,” from his perspective as Rabbi Emmanuel Gettinger’s successor at the Young Israel of the West Side in Manhattan. I would like

to write about Rabbi Gettinger from a different perspective. Rabbi Gettinger was our family rav for the past thirty years. Although we never lived on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, we got to know him and he became our morah hora’ah [halachic authority].

Rabbi Gettinger’s erudition was far beyond my capacity to judge, but his patience and his ability to understand and empathize were tangible. He rejoiced with us at our simchas and was there to provide meaningful support and direction in times of sorrow. He had the courage to pasken as he understood the halachah. He pursued what he felt was emes and directed us along that path. The pursuit of honor did not exist within his frame of reference. One of the few times he became truly angry at me was at my son’s chasuna, when he was called up to recite a berachah under the chuppah with the title “Harav Hagaon.” Rabbi Dovid Lifshitz referred to Rabbi Gettinger as the “Urim Vetumim” of Ezras Torah, the holy tzedakah organization to which Rabbi Gettinger devoted his life. A close relative of Rabbi Gettinger told me that there were times that Rabbi Yitzchok Hutner, the revered rosh yeshivah of Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin, would call Rabbi Gettinger to hear his opinion on a matter, and say, “Gettinger, you think straight.”

Rabbi Gettinger was very much in tune with the American psyche. He was thoroughly grounded in the secular world, yet his yirat Shamayim and emunah peshutah were never compromised. One could simply observe the rav as he davened his “shtiller Shemoneh Esrei” and realize that he was literally standing before the Borei Olam. Klal Yisrael should appreciate this adam gadol meod [tremendous human being] who was a “nechba el hakelim” [self-effacing]. My

THE MAGAZINE OF THE ORTHODOX UNIONwww.ou.org/jewish_action

Editor in ChiefNechama Carmel

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Assistant EditorSara Olson

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Contributing EditorsRabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein • Dr. Judith Bleich

Rabbi Emanuel Feldman • Rabbi Hillel GoldbergRabbi Sol Roth • Rabbi Jacob J. Schacter

Rabbi Berel Wein

Editorial CommitteeRabbi David Bashevkin • Rabbi Binyamin Ehrenkranz

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2 I JEWISH ACTION Spring 5776/2016

family and I, as well as many others who called Rabbi Gettinger their rav, miss him terribly. RABBI AVROHOM SCHNALL Monsey, New York

Celebrating 30 Years of Jewish Actionc Your recent issue marking thirty years of Jewish Action (“Celebrating 30 Years of Jewish Action,” winter 2015) could surely have spared a couple of lines to acknowledge its predecessor, Jewish Life, which began in 1946 and lasted until 1982, and the extraordinarily dedicated Saul Bernstein, the editor during much of that period. Jewish Life provided serious, in-depth analysis of key issues in the Jewish world and provided a forum for healthy, and sometimes no-holds-barred debate at a time when Orthodoxy was far weaker than it is today.

For those of us of a certain age, it is sorely missed.

RABBI DR. LAWRENCE GROSSMANQueens, New York

c I write in response to the “30 Changes in Jewish Life Over 30 Years” feature in Jewish Action’s fascinating thirtieth anniversary issue.

It’s been quite a thirty years, and it’s a bit stunning to learn that the number-one change has been “GOP, here we come”—the alleged shift of Jews to the Republican Party. Now, thoughtful people can probably debate if ei-ther of our major political parties is indeed “more sup-portive of Israel and aligned with Torah values.” But what is hard to debate are the empirical results of doz-ens of studies and exit polls that suggest that, if any-thing, Jews were more likely to vote for the more moderate Republican Party of the 70s and the 80s than the current Tea Party driven version.

Suffice it to note that every Republican presidential nominee between 1972 and 1984 received at least 35 percent of the Jewish vote in averaged exit polls and that no Republican presidential candidate since 1984 has matched that number (Romney’s 31 percent in 2012 is the high watermark). The results are even more strik-ing in Congressional exit polls.

If anything, Jews were apparently more comfortable in the party of Nixon, Ford and Reagan than in the party of Carson, Cruz and Trump.

DAVID LUCHINS, PHDBronx, New YorkThe author serves as chair of the Political Science Department of Touro College and was a national vice chair of Democrats for Nixon in 1972.

Abuse in the Homec Dr. Faye Walkenfeld’s review of the second edition of Rabbi Dr. Abraham J. Twerski’s vital book The Shame Borne in Silence: Spouse Abuse in the Jewish Community (fall 2015) made numerous important points. She writes, “education builds awareness and knowledge prepares


people for different eventualities.” At Shalom Task Force (www.ShalomTaskForce.org), we educate 1,000 twelfth graders in the US annually and 1,000 young women during their gap year in Israel. We describe the tools needed for healthy relationships and the warning signs of abuse. Foremost, we help victims with a listening ear and expert referrals with our Domestic Abuse Hotline (888) 883-2323.

DR. ALAN SINGERExecutive directorShalom Task ForceNew York, NY

A Father Speaks Out About Addictionc I read your recent article on drug addiction in the Jewish community with great interest (“Coming Out of Denial,” by Bayla Sheva Brenner, winter 2015). Sadly, there was little in it that was new to me. I have been dealing with the addiction of a child for the last five years (in reality much longer, but I was obtuse to the signs). I am glad that this plague is finally “coming out of the closet.”

I have had personal interaction with a number of the professionals Brenner quoted, all of whom deserve to be considered among the lamed-vav tzaddikim.

We in the Orthodox community live in a world where covering up defects is normal. No shidduch resume will state that someone’s brother was molested; no one will admit that his life is in chaos because of a child who steals, lies and faces death from overdose daily. Stigma is the op-erative word. We have to overcome the stigma and recog-nize that addiction is a disease. Parents shouldn’t have to live in fear of someone finding out, but we do.

I have found much succor and learned a great deal from attending 12-step meetings. There we see that we are not alone. It takes parents a long time to absorb one of our slo-gans: “You didn’t cause it, you can’t control it and you can’t cure it.” No rehab, not even the $10,000 a month rehab/spa on the beach, can make the slightest impact unless the ad-dict is ready to make a change.

One anecdote: a family in our community attended the same 12-step meetings that I do. At these meetings, we have the opportunity to share our feelings, and everyone responds with “Thanks for sharing, keep coming back.” Well, this family made a sheva berachos for their daughter who married a fine young student in a major yeshivah. Each speaker praised the family for their yichus, their tze-dakah and their wonderful character. They are “the best of the best,” everyone said. No one else in that room knew what they were going through with another one of their children. At the end of the sheva berachos, I approached the mother to wish her mazal tov. She looked at me with a wry smile and said, “Thanks for sharing.”

A LOVING FATHERReaders who want to reach the letter writer can do so by contacting the Jewish Action office.


President’s Message By Martin Nachimson

ow do we excite our children about Judaism? This is a question most Orthodox parents will ask themselves

at one time or another. Interestingly, the Haggadah provides

an answer. The authors of the Haggadah knew centuries ago what educational specialists have come to understand relatively recently—children are different and they learn differently. There are Four Sons, the Haggadah tells us, and each one represents a different kind of child who requires a different response, a different educational approach.

While the authors of the Haggadah identified certain timeless characteris-tics, I would like to ask the following: Who are the Four Sons of today? Having observed Jewish teens for decades due to my involvement with NCSY, I believe the Four Sons of contemporary society share some of the features of those sons in the Haggadah, but have different qualities as well.

First there is the Chacham. This is the child who is naturally drawn to Torah and Yahadut. Once he is introduced to the eternal teachings of Torah, he

enthusiastically absorbs them. He is eager to learn and to teach others. One need look no further than our own cadre of NCSY advisors to find such young people—students who are highly motivated and inspired. These young men and women who travel around the country from Shabbaton to Shabbaton bringing teens closer to Yiddishkeit are the secret behind NCSY’s extraordinary success—they are the fire, the soul and the engine behind the movement. Similarly, I cannot help but be impressed by the wonderfully caring and devoted advisors involved in Yachad, our program for those with developmental disabilities. Our NCSY and Yachad advisors exemplify true devotion to the klal through their hard work and dedication.

The second son mentioned in the Haggadah is the Rasha. Perhaps this is the child who “went off the derech,” because we, as a community, labeled him a rasha. We all know young people like this. There are hordes of girls and boys who go “off the derech” because the Orthodox Jewish community failed them. But the Haggadah teaches us that all four of these children deserve a voice, a place at the table. Torah is concerned with all kinds of children. We are obligated to not give up on anyone.

The third son is the “Simple Son”—the Tam, in the language of the Haggadah. Who is the Simple Son of today? I be-lieve this is the distracted son or daugh-ter—the child who has become so fixated on technology, he has difficulty focusing on anything else. Is it hard to reach the distracted, plugged in teen of today? Hard, yes. Impossible, no. NCSY excels at reaching kids “where they are at.” If

kids are online, we need to give them compelling and exciting online Torah content. (To the credit of the frum com-munity, there is a wealth of engaging Torah online, geared for all ages, such as OU Torah [www.ou.org/torah] and NCSY education resources [education.ncsy.org], to name a few.) No one un-derstands the teenage psyche as well as NCSY. And NCSY does a remarkable job connecting to teens on Instagram, Snap-chat—wherever they are in the world of social media.

Finally, there is the fourth son: the She’aino Yodeya Lishol, the child who does not know how to ask. This is the assimilated child who lacks the back-ground to ask even the most basic ques-tion about Yiddishkeit. How do we educate such a child? “At petach lo.” You initiate; you pose the question and pro-vide an answer they can relate to, de-spite their lack of a Jewish education or background. We at the OU welcome Jewish teens and young adults of all backgrounds through our many and multi-faceted programs, from NCSY and JSU (Jewish clubs for public school students) to our Heshe & Harriet Seif Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus and our Israel Free Spirit-Birthright Israel programs. We strive through our dynamic, creative and exceptionally well-run programs to bring Jews closer to their roots and to their heritage.

Most likely these descriptions do not conform to what the authors of the Hag-gadah had in mind. But these “Four Sons” certainly exist in the Orthodox world of today, and it is our responsi-bility to understand who they are and what they need in order to be part of the Torah community. g

H

The Four Sons Redefined

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M A K E Y O U R L A S T M I T Z V A H T H E M O S T I M P O R T A N T O N E !

Rabbi Y. Meshi-ZahavFounder & Director, ZAKA

Jerusalem, Israel

ASHKENAZI RABBIS

Rabbi Moshe TendlerYeshiva University

New York, NY

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Rabbi Nachum RabinovitchBirkat Moshe, Ma’ale

Adumim, Israel

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Rabbi Menachem KleinWest End SynagogueFrankfurt, Germany

ASHKENAZI RABBIS ASHKENAZI RABBIS

Rabbi Binyamin Wallsh Former Director of RCA

Jerusalem, Israel

Rabbi M. LichtensteinYeshivat Otniel

Har Hebron, Israel

ASHKENAZI RABBIS ASHKENAZI RABBIS

Rabbi Yaacov WarhaftigChief Rabbinate of Israel

Jerusalem, Israel

Rabbi Joseph Dweck Spanish & Portuguese Jews’

Cong., London, UK

UK RABBIS

Rabbi Shlomo Ellituv Shaare Hayim SephardiCong., Manchester, UK

UK RABBIS

Rabbi Dov KaplanHampstead Garden Suburb

Synagogue, London, UK

UK RABBIS

Rabbi Jeremy LawrenceFinchley United Synagogue

London, UK

UK RABBIS

Rav Adin SteinsaltzTeacher, philosopher, author

Jerusalem, Israel

CHABAD RABBIS

Rabbi Laibl WolfDean, Spirit Grow

Melbourne, Australia

CHABAD RABBISCHABAD RABBIS

Rabbi Moshe GutnickSenior Dayan, Sydney

Beth Din, Australia

Rabbi Yisrael DerenFairleld County, CT.

CHABAD RABBIS

SEPHARDIC RABBIS

Rabbi Eliyahu Ben-HaimMashadi Community

Av Bet Din of Queens, NY

Rabbi Sam KassinShehebar Sephardic Center

Jerusalem, Israel

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Rabbi Dr. Henry HassonPediatric Neurologist

Brooklyn, NY

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Rabbi Dr. Richard HidaryYeshiva University

New York, NY

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Rabbi Yamin LevyCong. Beth Hadassah

Great Neck, NY

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Rabbi Albert GabaiCongregation Mikveh Israel

Philadelphia, PA

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Rabbi Moshe ShamahSephardic Institute Syn.

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The story of Purim is the story of v’nahafoch hu—literally, of events fundamentally and profoundly reordered. It is a story of carefully made plans turned topsy turvy by Divine intervention; of plots, and subplots; of hopes unrealized and destiny fulfilled. It is a story of miraculous transformations, accomplished at breathtaking speed. Such is the story of today’s Middle East.

I was recently privileged, together with OU President Martin Nachimson, to represent the OU on the recent mission of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations to Turkey, Egypt and Israel. The ten-day mission, thoughtfully conceived of, and led by, Executive Vice Chairman of the Conference Malcolm Hoenlein, explored the tectonic forces that are currently reshaping the Middle East region with a speed and a ferocity that is truly extraordinary—with the disintegration of several nation-states; multiple insurgencies; and various proxy conflicts that have drawn regional and global powers and broken down—probably permanently—the entire post-World War I regional order that carved up the Ottoman Empire and that has essentially dictated the map of the Middle East for the past century.

These forces include:1) The demise of independent nation-

states with recognizable borders (including Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya and Yemen);

2) The disproportionate role of Iran in the region, and the concomitant alignment and realignment of the state and non-state actors within the region on the pro or anti-Iran side of the divide;

3) The long-range threat of a nuclear Iran and the non-nuclear consequences of billions of dollars of sanctions relief. (It is clear that delay of the Iranian nuclear threat has hardly eliminated it; it is equally clear that growing Iranian-North Korean cooperation in missile technology and nuclear capability is hardly receiving the attention it deserves.)

4) The Russian-Iranian alliance and its replacement of the US in the Mideast region;

5) The formation of new alliances, and the weakening of historic enmities between various regimes and Israel, which now stands as a formidable bulwark against Iranian hegemony;

6) The substantial withdrawal of American military power and influence from the region, to the consternation of longtime allies;

7) Religious sectarian struggles (including Shiite-Sunni, Alawite-Sunni, and intra-Sunni sectarianism, pitting “modern” Sunnis against the traditional Muslim Brotherhood); and

8) The impact of the Syrian refugee crisis (one-fifth of the population of Jordan are Syrian refugees; one-quarter of the population of Lebanon)

In Turkey, our delegation met at length with President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan and with Prime Minister of Turkey Ahmet Davutoglu. In Egypt, we spent almost three hours with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.

While in Israel, we were given high-level

briefings by a wide variety of Israeli officials and analysts. These included: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; Minister of Justice Ayelet Shaked; US Ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro; President of the State of Israel Reuven Rivlin; Minister of National Defense of Greece Panos Kammenos; Maj. Gen. (res.) Amos Gilad, director, Political-Military Affairs Bureau, Ministry of Defense; Maj. Gen. (ret.) Amos Yadlin, executive director of the Institute of National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University; Maj. Gen. Hertzi Halevy, head of the IDF Military, Intelligence Directorate; Mayor of Jerusalem Nir Barkat; Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Tzipi Hotovely; Dr. Michael Doran, senior fellow, Hudson Institute; Brig. Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser, project director, Regional Middle East Developments, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs; Minister of Defense Moshe Ya’alon; Minister of Public Security Gilad Erdan; Chairman, Yesh Atid Party Yair Lapid; Speaker of the Knesset Yuli Edelstein; Isaac Herzog, leader of the opposition; Amb. Jeremy Issacharoff, vice director general, Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Minister of Education, Minister of Diaspora Affairs and Chairman of the Jewish Home Party Naftali Bennett; Commander of the Israeli Air Force Maj. Gen. Amir Eshel; Deputy Police Commissioner Maj. Gen. Zohar Dvir and literally dozens of others from the foreign policy and security establishment in Israel, as well as senior representatives of the Israeli and foreign press.

Our delegation also traveled to the Syrian and Lebanese borders, where we were briefed by Brig. Gen. Yaniv Asor, Northern Division commander, at the Har Bental Strategic Overlook (Syrian border) and by Lt. Col. Avraham Cantor at the Mitzpeh Benaya Strategic Overlook (Lebanese

From the Desk of ALLEN I. FAGIN, Executive Vice President of the Orthodox Union

V’NAHAFOCH HU . . . A Journey Through a Region Turned Upside Down


border) on the current situation in the Golan and in Southern Lebanon. We had the opportunity to meet with a number of young men and women in the IDF who are heroically defending Israel’s northern borders. May Hashem bless them and watch over them.

Our meetings in Turkey, Egypt and Israel revealed complex and interlocking forces at play within the region. Here are some of the highlights:

TurkeyWe had the opportunity to meet with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu. Our meeting with President Erdogan was frank and wide-ranging. His primary message to us was that the Islamic terrorist threat was hardly unique to the US; it is a global problem cutting across geography, culture and religion. Combatting terrorism is a common problem, and the threat unites the community of nations.

Other subjects were prominent in the Erdogan dialogue as well: Turkish anti-Semitism (“Turkey has a zero tolerance for anti-Semitism”; “there is no difference between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia”); negotiations regarding the blockade of Gaza; developments in Syria and the Turkish-Syrian refugee crisis (there are 170,000 Syrian refugees currently in Turkey); Cyprus; and natural gas.

But it was clear that President Erdogan’s emphasis was on the evolving alliance between Russia and Iran, an alliance that Turkey views with growing alarm. The map of the Middle East is being redrawn—literally by the day. Northern Syria, and northern Iraq—both critical to Turkey’s security—are the scene of Russian and Iranian advances, and Turkish responsive actions. The Russian offensive, supported by Iranian-backed Shiite militias, has brought Syrian government forces to within fifteen miles of Turkey’s southern frontier. And the Kurdish military wing, the YPG militia, long deemed hostile by Turkey, has likewise stepped up its campaign and exploited the collapse of various Syrian rebel groups to extend its presence along the Turkish border. In short, Turkey is infuriated by the expansion of Kurdish influence in northern Syria, fearing it will encourage separatist activity among its own Kurdish population. The YPG, which Ankara considers a terrorist group, controls nearly all the territory along the Syrian-Turkish frontier. Turkey has threatened ground action in Syria, but is unlikely to make good on the threat without a clear indication of US support, which surely will not be forthcoming.

Significantly complicating matters is US support for the rapidly advancing Kurdish fighters in northern Syria, long seen by the US as the best chance on the ground to combat the Islamic State forces in Syria. Turkey, on the other hand, views the YPG as a terrorist organization and fears it will stir even greater unrest among the sizable enclaves of Turkish Kurds, portrayed by Turkey as Russian pawns. Indeed, just last week, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu blamed a Syrian-Kurdish militia fighter for a suicide car bombing that killed twenty-eight people in Ankara. He vowed retaliation in both Syria and Iraq. Davutoglu said that the attack was clear evidence that the YPG is a terrorist organization and that Turkey, as a NATO member, would expect cooperation from its allies (presumably including the United States) in combatting the group. The YPG, for its part, denied any responsibility for the

Meet Shlomo Anapolle of Edison, New Jersey. When it comes to

a love of Israel, few college students can match the Sabra passion

of this Yeshiva University junior. A pre-med, biology major with

plans to attend an Israeli medical school, Shlomo balances his

time between neo-natal diagnostic research, intensive shiurim

and a commitment to Israel advocacy.

Whether it’s planning lobbying missions to Washington, D.C.

with YUPAC or teaching English to teens in the Negev through

Counterpoint Israel, Shlomo brings to bear his leadership skills

for the sake of the Jewish people and homeland. He is proud to

invite Israeli diplomats to YU to help his peers contextualize

current events. Shlomo chose YU because, to him, Torah Umadda

isn’t merely the convergence of science and our mesorah¬

at Yeshiva University, it is the formula for a values-driven

preparation for life. This is the essence of Torah Umadda and

what sets YU apart.

Picture yourself at YU. #NowhereButHere

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The future is in your hands.

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bombing. Davutoglu also accused the Assad regime of complicity in the bombing and issued a warning to Moscow—whose sustained airstrikes in northern Syria have paved the way for YPG advances—against using the Kurdish militant group against Turkey. In a clear sign of escalating hostilities with Russia, Davutoglu threatened: “All those who intend to use terrorist organizations as proxies should know that this game of terror will turn around like a boomerang and hit them first.”

The shifting alliances between nation- states and multiple non-state ethnic and religious splinter groups are bewildering and staggeringly complex. My own view is that America’s virtual invisibility in the region is due, at least in part, to a fundamental inability to articulate, in a simple and coherent fashion, precisely what our interests are (other than the defeat of ISIL) and to explain in readily understandable terms who are the good guys and the bad guys. The answer is simply too complex. Consider the following example, which illustrates well the web of conflicting and shifting alliances that plague the coherent formulation of American foreign policy in today’s Middle East: Recently, Saudi Arabia (an ally of Turkey) dispatched fighter aircraft to the Incirlik Air Base in Turkey to assist the Turks in their fight with the Kurdish-Syrian militia, YPG. This is the same air base where US fighters are stationed, flying sorties in support of YPG’s actions against ISIL. Confusing . . . to say the least.

This US-Turkish tension (a clear sub-text in our meeting with Erdogan) threatens to significantly weaken the

NATO alliance, and places the United States in the perhaps untenable position of managing its strategic relationship with Turkey, while simultaneously seeking to check Russia’s influence in the region, and undermine ISIL, without the commitment of ground troops.

Despite these virtually irreconcilable dynamics, the small Jewish community in Turkey appears to feel reasonably safe and secure. We had the opportunity to spend a full day visiting with representatives of the Turkish Jewish community in Istanbul. There are approximately 17,000 Jews in Turkey, about 15,000 of them in Istanbul. The relations with the government are cordial (as was evident during a dinner hosted by the mayor of the Istanbul district, which houses the bulk of the Jewish community, and his wife). There is solid community infrastructure: a Jewish school with over 600 hundred students which we had an opportunity to visit; a number of active shuls; kosher food; an old age facility; and a number of social, cultural and educational programs. Yet, two bombings at Istanbul synagogues over the past number of years keep the community on high alert, and minimize outward signs of Jewish identity. Our group was specifically advised not to wear yarmulkes outdoors. Finally, and despite the community’s contagious optimism about its future, the predominantly aging population (only 3,500 of the community’s members are under thirty) poses a significant demographic challenge; a number of post high school students leave for college opportunities abroad and do not return; about 150 community members make aliyah annually. While not high in absolute

numbers, these departures represent a large percentage of the younger generation and continues to erode the viability of this once-flourishing community.

In sum, our visit to Turkey was a study in contrast between Turkish government policy and the feeling of the Turkish “street.” Without doubt, the government seeks a widening rapprochement with Israel, and greater security and commercial relations. Over $5 billion in trade is currently carried out between Israel and Turkey. Eleven flights a day connect the two countries. On our flight from Tel Aviv to Istanbul, there was barely an empty seat. Nonetheless, the attitude of the street has not kept pace. Anti-Semitism remains the most common form of racial or religious prejudice. Sixty-nine percent of Turks harbor anti-Semitic attitudes, according to a 2014 ADL poll. However, in a possible sign that the public thaw in Turkish-Israeli relations may be slowly trickling down to the masses, the Jewish community held a much-publicized public menorah lighting this past Chanukah—the first since the founding of the modern Turkish republic over a century ago. Perhaps this will signal

an evolution in Turkish public opinion and attitudes. The view of our group was that Erdogan’s message could not have been clearer—in calling for the protection of the Jewish community, and in denouncing both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia as war crimes.

Despite the gracious reception from both President Erdogan and Prime Minister Davutoglu, and their warm and embracing statements regarding rapprochement with Israel and the normalization of economic and security arrangements, we should not anticipate a rapid or fundamental change in Turkish-Israeli relations in the short run. We were, for example, baffled—shocked is perhaps a more apt description—at Erdogan’s cavalier description of the

OU Executive Vice President Allen I. Fagin presents a gift to Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon at the Forty-Second Annual Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations Leadership Mission to Israel. Photo: Avi Hayun

. . . Purim . . . is a story of carefully made plans turned topsy turvy by Divine intervention; of plots, and subplots; of hopes unrealized and destiny fulfilled. It is a story of miraculous transformations, accomplished at breathtaking speed. Such is the story of today’s Middle East.


Gaza terror tunnels as nothing more than convenient mechanisms for the transport of goods into and out of Gaza. Whether these comments were an aberration in the context of an otherwise positive and upbeat exchange or whether they reflect the long-standing (and continuing) Turkish support for Hamas was hard to discern. We learned that, in the convoluted dynamics of Middle Eastern culture, there are no absolutes; no straight lines to connect the dots, but instead a bewildering array of curves and intersecting lines that are the surface manifestation of shifting alliances and evolving friendships and enmities. Our Western sensibilities may chafe at the inconsistencies and reversals, but they are a part of the fabric of the contemporary landscape in the region.

EgyptOn February 11, we participated in what must be characterized as a historic meeting between representatives of the Conference of Presidents and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi at the Presidential Palace in Cairo. The meeting, which lasted almost three hours, covered a wide range of domestic and international issues, including US-Egyptian and Israeli-Egyptian relations; regional strategic alignments and threats (especially those posed by terrorist organizations and their supporters); and Iran in the post-JCPOA environment.

Sisi put aside his prepared remarks to address us for well over an hour before taking questions. He is personable, indeed, charming—and was remarkably frank. He was pointed in his criticism of the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood (“they cannot co-exist . . . they either rule or will kill you.”) And he was equally insistent on quality education, free of incitement or the tolerance of hate (“no Divine religion can instruct its followers to kill others”). He was harshly critical of Turkey for its support of Hamas, and for permitting Hamas terrorist training camps on Turkish soil.

Over and over, Sisi referenced—and applauded—the growing cooperation between Egypt and Israel, particularly on security matters. He dreams of enhanced cooperation in the future in economic development, tourism, energy and water. Three times during his remarks he emphasized that past hostilities with Israel were at an end. He expressed an almost gleeful excitement at the profound change in relations from the situation that pertained just several decades ago. “If thirty years ago I would have said to you that 1,000 Egyptian tanks would be deployed in the Sinai, and Egyptian warplanes would fly along the Israeli border, without anyone worrying about a stray bullet, would you have believed me?” There was simply no doubt that common, proximate enemies—Hamas and ISIL in Sinai—were fostering a new era in Israeli-Egyptian cooperation. But the Sisi regime has a tenuous hold on Egypt. The Egyptian economy is in shambles, tourism (in light of various terror attacks) is at an all-time low, and Egypt faces growing concerns about various terror groups, including in Libya, Yemen and the Sudan. Most importantly, the Egyptian fight against Hamas in Gaza and Sinai poses unique threats and saps its strength. The Egyptian army is suffering significant casualties from Hamas militias and armed ISIL Bedouin supporters. It is therefore not surprising that the unmistakable message of the Sisi visit was the need for far greater American support for the Sisi regime, including economic assistance and far greater American involvement in the region.

We came away from our visits to Turkey and Egypt with an

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abiding sense of possibility—that conditions exist for profound changes in the relationships between large segments of the Muslim world and Israel, with potentially transformational opportunities for cooperation in regional security, technology, energy and commerce.

It was likewise clear that Israel recognizes and welcomes this growing rapprochement with large segments of the Arab world. As Prime Minister Netanyahu told us: “Major Arab countries are challenging their view of Israel. They don’t see Israel anymore as its enemy, but they see Israel as their ally, especially in the battle against militant Islam and its two fountainheads, militant Islamists led by Iran and the militant Islamists led by Daesh.”

SyriaThe five-year old Syrian civil war has wrought destruction on an unprecedented scale. More than 300,000 are dead and more than 10 million have been displaced from their homes and are refugees. Millions have ended up in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey and almost a million have fled to Europe—changing the ethnic and political balance in each country that has received them. The sheer size of the catastrophe is difficult to describe. As I write this piece, 1 million more Syrians are considered under siege and will likely join the exodus of refugees shortly.

The landscape of Northern Syria reflects the bewildering, kaleidoscopic array of competing forces that are defining and redefining the colliding realities of today’s Middle East. The defining, organizing principle is the de facto Russian-Iranian alliance, with each fulfilling complementary needs in the conflict. The Russians, reluctant to become (yet again) bogged

down under a large-scale commitment of ground troops, have contributed significant air power to the conflict. The Iranians, for their part, have committed (or supplied and financed) a mosaic of sectarian, Shiite inspired paramilitary proxies as ground forces—including their own Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hezbollah fighters, the Iraqi Shi’a Badr Brigade, the Afghan Shi’a Fatemiyun, in addition to the Syrian Army of Bashar Assad. This expanding Russian-Iranian alliance has been made possible by the deliberate absence of the United States from the arena—much to the chagrin of erstwhile allies like Turkey and the Saudis. The Obama administration appears strategically committed to being virtually non-existent in the region. While some slow progress is being made against ISIL, the strong consensus is that west of the Euphrates the United States is irrelevant to the regional realignments that are unfolding.

This state of affairs leaves the Sunni regimes, particularly Turkey and Saudi Arabia, with a Hobson’s choice: give in, and face the defeat of the Sunni Arab rebellion in Syria; or risk a frontal confrontation with the Russian-Iranian alliance, with no guarantee—indeed, with little prospect, of US support. It is, in my view, a conundrum that has “Made in America” stamped on its face.

Throughout most of the civil war in Syria, Israel has maintained a consistent,

essentially aloof, “bystander” policy, consciously avoiding being sucked into the controversy. Yet, in light of the recent successes of the Assad regime, buttressed by Russian and Iranian assistance, Israel’s approach to the Syrian conflict seems about to change. While Israel will not engage militarily, it will place renewed emphasis on protecting vital security interests (including acting to stem the flow of advanced military equipment from Syria to Hezbollah—Hezbollah weaponry now includes advanced radar systems, surface-to-air missiles and over 100,000 short and long-range rockets—preventing an Iranian land link with Hezbollah, and cultivating local rebel Sunni militias). The five-year conflict has served Israeli interests by sapping the strength of the Syrian military. And Hezbollah has devoted between a quarter and a third of its armed brigades to fight for the Syrian regime, and is losing dozens of fighters monthly. In contrast, the Israelis hope that the US will more fully engage, and offer greater support to the Sunni rebels and the Kurdish militias—in the process, diminishing the likelihood of a Hezbollah or Iranian presence on the Syrian border with the Golan.

One of the more fascinating panels at our conference was a dialogue with Dr. Michael Doran, a former national security advisor in President George W. Bush’s administration and currently a senior fellow of The Hudson Institute, a prestigious think tank. Doran shared a panel with Professor Eyal Zisser, a leading expert on Syria from the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University, and moderator Steve Linde, the editor-in-chief

of the Jerusalem Post. Doran eschewed the niceties of political and diplomatic discourse, and was blunt and to the point: If the Assad regime wins the civil war and Iran ends up controlling the Syrian-Golan border, Israel would have difficulty in defending itself. Doran warned that the Syrian situation could “worsen quickly.” He reserved particularly harsh comments for current US policy in Syria, noting that President Obama “represents a trend in the national security elite which sees Iran

Mr. Fagin greets Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Photo: Avi Hayun

“Major Arab countries are challenging their view of Israel. They don’t see Israel anymore as its enemy, but they see Israel as their ally, especially in the battle against militant Islam and its two fountainheads, militant Islamists led by Iran and the militant Islamists led by Daesh.”


as a natural ally of the US.” Professor Zisser echoed Doran’s pessimism: If Assad is victorious in the civil war, he may conclude that power is the only thing that can ensure his survival, and mount an aggressive campaign to rebuild his army with Russian support. “It will be a different Syria,” said Zisser. “Assad will no longer be the driver, but under Russian and Iranian influence.” And what of American power in the region? Says Zisser: “The US is clearly not a regional power anymore.” In short, we have abandoned the field to a coterie of proxies, rendering our current influence in the region marginal at best. It is unlikely—at least in the short term—that we will see any major shift in American policy on Syria (notwithstanding Turkish and Saudi pressure). Time will tell what the consequences of this policy will be on Israel and its security, and on other vital American interests in the region.

Greece, Cyprus and the Eastern MediterraneanThe recent summit between Israel, Greece and Cyprus, and the resultant cooperation treaty between them, foreshadows the creation of a new and potentially significant economic and strategic alliance between various states in the Eastern Mediterranean. Egypt has already made clear its desire to participate in such an alliance (as President Sisi told us: “I’m already in it”), and other countries may join as well. Part of this nascent alliance will see Israel as an energy exporter.

Israel and the Peace ProcessThe recently received French peace initiative (which calls for an international peace conference and, failing agreement, the unilateral recognition by France of a Palestinian state) has caused consternation among senior Israeli Foreign Ministry officials with whom we met. No one could clearly articulate the likely French motivation in floating this proposal at this time. Prime Minister Netanyahu referred to it as “strange,” noting that peace talks would face certain failure absent adequate assurances that would prevent Hamas, or ISIL (or both), from acquiring territory from which Israel might withdraw—assurances that could hardly be given at this time. Netanyahu received helpful, albeit perhaps unexpected, support from German Chancellor Angela Merkel who acknowledged that the current situation was hardly conducive to meaningful dialogue. Merkel’s pragmatic approach—acknowledging that “this is not the time for progress,” while at the same time seeking to lay the groundwork for renewed negotiations at some, undetermined, time in the future—was very much in keeping with the position of the Obama administration.

Even opposition leader Isaac Herzog has adopted a more realistic view with regard to renewed negotiations. Both the governing coalition and the Labor opposition now oppose creating a Palestinian state under prevailing conditions. In contrast to a strident, almost shrill tone when he addressed us last year in the run-up to the elections, Herzog was calm, forceful and statesman-like in his remarks, noting that while a two-state solution was not dead, it certainly was not on the current agenda. On the other hand, speaker after speaker noted the need to eventually deal with the Palestinian issue—from the perspective of international opinion and BDS implications; from the perspective of demographic imperatives (40 percent of Israel’s population is currently non-Jewish; in ten years it will be 50 percent); and from the perspective of the potentially disastrous consequences of a political void that would be left by a collapsed Palestinian Authority (as one Israeli diplomat told us, “Without the PA, we would have to reoccupy the West Bank”).

V’nahafoch hu; let us hope and pray that current conditions in the Middle East be turned from hostility and terror to peace and secu-rity for the State of Israel and for the region. g

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Chairman’s Message By Gerald M. Schreck

hile reviewing the table of contents for this edition, I could not help but be amazed

by the wide-ranging topics included in this issue. From Dr. David Berger’s insightful critique of Rabbi Shlomo Riskin’s new book The Living Tree: Studies in Modern Orthodoxy to our look at the diverse and growing communities in Yehuda and the Shomron, home now to nearly 400,000 Jews, this issue is filled with a variety of thought-provoking and inspirational material.

Once an issue is published, it is easy to overlook the enormous effort that went into its planning. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the devoted members of our exceptional editorial committee: Rabbi David Bashevkin, Rabbi Binyamin Ehrenkranz, Rabbi Avrohom Gordimer, David Olivestone, Rabbi Gil Student and Rabbi Dr. Tzvi Hersh Weinreb. Planning each issue entails endless debates and discussions, not

Gerald M. Schreck is the chairman of the Jewish Action Committee.

W

to mention countless hours spent reading and reviewing e-mails and submissions. Our committee members, who are mostly volunteers, dedicate their time and effort to Jewish Action because they believe in the importance of providing such a forum for the Orthodox world. Nechama Carmel, our talented editor, provides the “glue” that keeps the vision and its implementation together.

As a quarterly publication, Jewish Action has an advantage over weeklies and monthlies. In an age where everything is instant, even our information, Jewish Action takes the time to reflect and provide thoughtful, thoroughly researched articles that are crafted with care. Our cover story, for example, required extensive research. OU Senior Writer Bayla Sheva Brenner spent months interviewing members of various families in order to weave together these wonderfully inspiring narratives that tell of sacrifice and devotion to Yiddishkeit.

Reading these accounts of Jews who came to these shores in the late 1800s or early part of the twentieth century was particularly moving for me as my own family has a similar story. At the age of nineteen, in 1896, my paternal grandfather, Chaim Schreck, left Kolbuszowa, Poland, for America. However, after four short years, in which he managed to build a successful women’s apparel business, he was asked to return to Poland. As it turned out, before he had left, he had been engaged to Chaya Lichtman, my grandmother. Chaya was convinced one could not remain frum in the “treifa medina.” So Chaim returned,

married and raised a large family in his hometown. But this was not destined to last long. On May 6, 1919, a terrible pogrom took place in Kolbuszowa. A mob attacked Jews in the streets, and my great-grandfather, Pesach Lichtman, was thrown down a well and died. So many Jews were murdered and maimed in Kolbuszowa that it attracted international attention. After that fateful pogrom, an estimated 25 percent of the town’s Jews emigrated to America—Chaim and Chaya Schreck among them.

If life was hard in Poland because of the virulent anti-Semitism, in America the struggles were equally great, albeit different. I won’t go into the formidable challenges—the various accounts in our cover story describe them in great detail. Suffice to say, my grandparents and parents managed to pass on Yiddishkeit to their children only because of their deep emunah and strong Jewish home life.

In this wide-ranging issue, we also focus on the OU’s early history and some of our heroic leaders, including OU Presidents Rabbi Herbert Goldstein and Harold M. Jacobs, each of whom waged different battles in an attempt to strengthen Jewish life in America. Moving on to Pesach, our food columnist Norene Gilletz and nutrition writer Shira Isenberg provide recipes and tips on how to eat healthfully over yom tov.

I hope you find this issue as interesting as I do. We look forward to reader feedback. Feel free to e-mail your thoughts and comments to [email protected]. Wishing all of you a chag kasher vesomeach. g


Reflections Michael Medved

W hy do Americans feel so bad when, by every meaningful measure, we have it so good?That’s the question that troubles me every evening

as I head home from work. As host of a daily radio talk show that reaches more than four million listeners across the country, I’m exposed to a steady stream of self-pity and complaint. Callers from every major city regularly insist that our country faces imminent collapse or destruction, suggesting that the current generation has been conspicuously cursed. They echo prominent voices in media and politics that cite the seething anger of the populace and argue that candidates like Trump or Sanders express the righteous wrath of the suffering public.

But what measures of national well-being provide evidence to support such perceptions of misery and wretchedness? Economically, unemployment is down and the stock market is up over the last five years, while record numbers of children of every ethnicity graduate from high school and participate in some form of higher education. America is close to achieving the long-cherished dream of energy independence, while our air and water are cleaner than at any time in a half-century—despite hysterical warnings about climate change. While some cities like Baltimore and St. Louis have seen recent spikes in violence, the national crime rate continues its long-term downward trend, saving literally hundreds of thousands of lives in the last thirty years. Divorce and abortion rates have declined steadily over the same period, and our children are far less likely to abuse dangerous drugs than they were a generation ago.

Public opinion polls reflect an odd schizophrenia in the national mood: while we see the state of the nation in grim and dire terms, most of us continue to feel optimistic about our own lives. We believe our health care system is in crisis, but those of us—like me—who have recently gone through hospitalizations, end up praising the competence and compassion of our physicians and medical institutions. By overwhelming margins, Americans express satisfaction in their marriages and children, and in the schools that educate

those kids, at the same time that we deride the general state of family lives and education. Approval ratings for Congress as an institution have reached record lows, at the same time that we re-elect our own Congressmen with shocking regularity.

We seem to believe, in other words, that our fortunate personal realities constitute glaring exceptions to the general misfortune: our own spouses, doctors, schools, financial prospects and even elected representatives please us a great deal even while we lament the purportedly awful state of the society at large.

How to explain this irrational contradiction? We know a great deal about our personal status from the intimate experience of living our lives, but we assess the welfare of the world around us through the distorted lens of mass media. The messages from television, newspapers and especially the Internet mislead us in alarming and negative directions; the so-called “news business” has become a bad news business. When planes land on time or businesses make honest profit, no one will hear about it from mass media. In the event of a crash, in aviation or economics, it makes for blaring headlines and riveting reports.

As someone who makes a living by reporting and analyzing the news every day, I’m struck by the lack of perspective in media views of reality. Yes, every serious crime is shocking

and regrettable, but isn’t it important to note that the chances of victimization are much lower than they have been in the past? Sure, our political campaigns seem nasty and polarized, but are they truly worse than the days when prominent

Michael Medved hosts a three-hour, nationally syndicated daily radio talk show heard on more than 300 stations across the country. His thirteenth book, God’s Hand On America, will be published in 2016.

We know a great deal about our personal status from the intimate experience of living our lives, but we assess the welfare of the world around us through the distorted lens of mass media.


politicians killed or wounded one another in duels, or when Americans fought the bloodiest war in our history over an irresolvable regional-political dispute?

I’ve argued on air and in writing that the best way to gain perspective on our present problems would be to incorporate some of the practices of Torah Judaism, even for those unable or unwilling to make a religious commitment. In particular, observing Shabbat allows us to place the demands and distractions of daily life into a more reasonable and reassuring context. I’m better able to handle the hype and hysteria of my daily work because of the twenty-five hours a week that I’m cut off from it—no TV, no e-mail, no phone calls, no radio. Without such intrusions and distractions, it’s far easier to enjoy the blessings of friends, family and community.

We can cherish the gift of focusing on our personal blessings rather than public predicaments. When we say Kiddush on Friday night and welcome the peace of Shabbat, we recall both the glory of Creation and the Exodus from Egypt—expressing gratitude for the wonderful world the Almighty has made for each of us, as well as experiencing reliable deliverance from the slavery of the work week with its storm and stress. We’re commanded to remember (zachor) Shabbat by celebrating it, at the same time that we guard (shamor) its sanctity from extraneous demands. We emphasize the all-important

distinction between the urgent and the important. We live our crowded lives under the tyranny of the urgent, but Shabbat reminds us of realities and relationships—with family, with community and with God—that are lasting and meaningful.

Perhaps the prominent participation of American Jews in our top media institutions can someday play a role in reintroducing the perspective that the public presently lacks. An embrace of the most authentic practices and values of our

people could help individual media figures, as well as the culture at large, escape from the trendy predilection for doom and destruction while expressing appropriate gratitude for the prodigious and distinctive blessings that we’re fortunate to share. g

I’m better able to handle the hype and hysteria of my daily work because of the twenty-five hours a week that I’m cut off from it—no TV, no e-mail, no phone calls, no radio.

The OU and Jewish Action mourn the passing of Rabbi Chaim Yisroel Belsky, zt”l, the rosh

yeshivah of Yeshiva Torah Vodaath and OU Kosher Senior Halachic

Consultant. For nearly three decades, Rav Belsky, a Torah

giant and a true gadol, guided OU Kosher. His extraordinary mastery of halachah and profound grasp of the complexities of modern food production revolutionized modern-day kashrut. May his memory serve as a blessing.

An appropriate tribute will appear

in a future edition.


Jewish History

W hen Eli Genauer reads an old cookbook, it’s not for the recipes. Like a detective on the

hunt, Genauer searches cover to cover for clues of a time long passed and for insights that can be gleaned from them. Advertisements for the Ice Delivery Company (for icebox use) or for the North Pacific Railway in The Neighborhood Cook Book (Portland, 1912) are the kinds of historical traces that interest him. A longtime collector of old Jewish sefarim, Genauer, who lives in Seattle, acquired his first cookbook in 2008 at an auction at Kestenbaum & Company, a New York City-based boutique auction house dedicated to the sale of rare books, manuscripts and Judaica. When the Yiddish cookbook Vegetarish-Dietisher Kokhbukh, 400 Shpayzn Gemakht Oysshislekh Fun Grinsn (Vegetarian-Dietetic Cookbook: 400 Meals Made Exclusively from Vegetables [Vilna, 1938]) came up, he was intrigued. “The pre-auction estimate was one hundred to one hundred and fifty dollars. It ended up selling for $3,245. It hardly ever happens that the pre-auction estimate is so far off. That sort of piqued my interest in this category,” says Genauer. What would make a cookbook so valuable—how special could the recipes be?

A rare relic out of pre-war Vilna, Vegetarish-Dietisher provides evidence of a new modern Jewish

Naomi Ross is a cooking instructor and food writer. She teaches throughout the New York area and writes articles connecting cooking and Jewish inspiration.

culture evolving on the eve of the destruction of the Jewish community in Lithuania. Fania Lewando, the cookbook’s author, owned a vegetarian restaurant popular amongst the avant-garde—it provided a progressive atmosphere where she could serve up her philosophy on vegetarianism with generous helpings of mock kishke filled with mushrooms and breadcrumbs. She advocated growing your own food and using high-quality ingredients while teaching to make use of every last bit, without waste. Lewando was killed fleeing the Nazis after they invaded Vilna in 1941, and few copies of her cookbook remain.1 The menus and the ingredients used give a more complete picture of how people lived their everyday lives at the time. It is this kind of background history and context that piques Genauer’s curiosity.

Genauer chuckles as he points out some of the more subtle cultural elements evident in his collection. The compilers of Council Cook Book (San Francisco, 1909) were reputable German women and are referred to by their husbands’ names. “Mrs. David Hirschler wouldn’t have used her own name—it came out pre-suffrage.” The Ladies Auxiliary to Temple de Hirsch Famous Cook Book (Seattle, 1916) included home remedies and household tips like how to kill corns, remove iron rust and care for

By Naomi Ross


ivory handled knives. Notice these small details and an early snapshot of Jewish life in America emerges; trace our modern history through cookbooks and the connection between cooking and the Jewish experience will appear.

PRE-1900: THE EARLY YEARSOf his antique cookbook collection (about twenty-five books in all), almost all precede 1940. “This is for an auction taking place in Jerusalem,” explains Genauer, referring to Rebekka Wolf’s Kochbuch für Israelitische Frauen (Cookbook for Jewish Women [Berlin, 1851]), one of the most successful early Jewish cookbooks, which went through fourteen editions in several languages. Cookbooks like this one or The Jewish Manual or Practical Information in Jewish and Modern Cookery (London, 1846), the first Jewish cookbook written in the English language, appeared across Europe and served as common gifts for young brides, the aspiring Jewish bourgeois. Similarly, Esther Levy wrote the first Jewish cookbook in the United States, Jewish

Cookery Book on Principles of Economy Adapted for Jewish Housekeepers with the Addition of Many Useful Medicinal Recipes and Other Valuable Information Relative to Housekeeping and Domestic Management (Philadelphia, 1871). These early personal cookbooks focused on training an upper class kosher housewife and assumed a certain amount of domestic help was available at home.

“Most of the first [Jewish-American cookbooks] were printed for the Reform German Jews who had done away with kashrut. They had money to spend

and publish,” says Genauer. Aunt Babette’s (a pseudonym for Bertha Kramer), published by Edward H. Bloch (Cincinnati, 1889, with dozens of editions thereafter) offered lengthy instructions on gourmet cuisine and fashionable table setting, including non-kosher recipes, reflecting the Reform community from which it emerged. Indeed, Bloch’s brother-in-law was the head of the Reform movement, the predominate Jewish movement in America in the late 1800s. In 1880, most of the approximately 250,000 Jews in America identified with the Reform Movement—an easier avenue of worship for Jews of high social status and more synonymous with “proper” American religious experiences. As such, a sizeable number of the early Jewish cookbooks, especially community cookbooks, were not kosher.

1900-1950: COOKBOOKS TO ACCLIMATE, COOKBOOKS TO ASSIMILATEWhen the next wave of immigrants and refugees came to American shores in the early 1900s, community cookbooks proved an effective way of aiding them to acculturate and assimilate into the “New World.” This model fostered unity and raised financial support in one collaborative culinary swoop. Of the more than 700 Jewish cookbooks collected by Assistant Chief Librarian Roberta Saltzman at the New York Public Library’s Dorot Jewish Division, community cookbooks comprise the largest segment. At a 2013 exhibit on Jewish gastronomic literature, “American Foodways: The Jewish Contribution,” Jan Longone, founder of the University of Michigan Library’s fifteen-year-old Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive, accomplished the daunting feat of acquiring Jewish charity cookbooks from synagogues and Jewish groups in every state.

Most famous, The “Settlement” Cookbook (Milwaukee, 1901) by Lizzie Black Kander, raised funds for recent Jewish immigrants in Milwaukee. Forty editions and nearly two million copies of The

Published in London in 1907, this cookbook contains over 600 recipes and provides sample menus to assist the busy kosher housewife. Includes vintage ads, giving the cookbook a distinctly English flavor. Vintage cookbook images courtesy of Eli Genauer

Trace our modern history through cookbooks and the connection between cooking and the Jewish experience will appear.

One of the earliest Jewish charity cookbooks, The Neigh-borhood Cook Book was sold out within ten months of its first printing (Portland, 1912).


“Settlement” Cookbook sold, benefitting The Jewish Settlement House in Milwaukee, aiding immigrants’ assimilation into the American melting pot.

Published during the Great Depression, Soup to Nuts: Cook Book for Epicures (Emanu-El Sisterhood [San Francisco, 1932]) aimed at benefiting the unemployed. The introduction’s tattered, yellowed pages read: “Girls without work for long periods of time have been employed and paid (or others have volunteered) in the typing, stenciling, mimeographing, assembling and even decorating of this loose-leaf book.” While the Depression was crippling the nation, this cookbook served as a work project—each copy was hand-typed! At one of Genauer’s public lectures, where he spoke about his collection, an older woman in the crowd raised her hand and announced: “I was one of the typists!”

In contrast to these secular publications, many cookbooks did cater to the needs of new religious immigrants. Despite his early success and his Reform leanings, Bloch recognized a business opportunity. He released several cookbooks to serve the huge influx of kosher immigrants. The International Jewish Cook Book: 1600 Recipes According to the Jewish Dietary Laws with the Rules for Kashering: The Favorite Recipes of America, Austria, Germany, Russia, France, Poland, Roumania, Etc., by Florence Kreisler Greenbaum (New York, 1919) included a chapter on Passover dishes with explicit explanations on “how to set the table for the service of the ‘Seder’ on the eve of Passover or Pesach.” Recipes (which bordered on loose directives) described how to make a “Pesach borscht,” a recipe requiring that one begin preparing it approximately three weeks prior to Pesach.

The Jewish Home Beautiful (National Women’s League of the United Synagogue of America, New York, 1941) was produced with the hope of inspiring Jewish ritual observance by emphasizing the beauty of the Jewish table and tradition (e.g., cheese blintzes dusted with ten lines of cinnamon to represent the Ten Commandments for a Shavuot table). While immigrants were trying to assimilate

their first-generation American children into mainstream culture, the goal of this popular cookbook was to transmit Jewish religious practice from mother to daughter; by 1958, it had reached its ninth edition.

Appealing to the new immigrant population was beneficial to food manufacturers as well—both Jewish and non-Jewish alike. Early promotional kosher cookbooks were put out by kosher brands like Rokeach (Brooklyn, 1933), its book split in half: one side English, one side Yiddish.

Rumford Baking Powder reached out to the observant Jewish community in What Shall I Serve? Famous Recipes for Jewish Housewives (Rumford, 1931), offering traditional recipes that came “from a private search among Jewish mothers whose very joy in life is the preparation of Friday night’s supper for the family.” Apparently even then, mainstream manufacturers recognized the priority Jewish homes placed on home cooking and saw promise in demographic marketing.

1950-2000: PRESERVATION AND HISTORICAL COOKBOOKSAs Jews became further assimilated after World War II, the role of kosher cookbooks shifted towards maintaining culturally Jewish dishes. Waning religious observance created a desire to hang on to Jewish traditions through the foods that represented them; dishes like kugels, gefilte fish, and gribenes became iconic Jewish foods. The Art of Jewish Cooking by Jennie Grossinger (New York, 1958) and How to Cook Like a Jewish Mother by June Roth (New York, 1969) were both replete with Yiddishisms and heimishe flavor. In the latter, one chapter is lovingly entitled “Ess from the Cookie Jar: A Balabusta’s Bake-Off.” Kosher cookbooks sought to capture the flavor of Jewish life that tasted like home even as religious life was evaporating.

The 1980s and 1990s brought a shift to the style and purpose of kosher cookbooks, broadening them

Published in 1931 during the Great Depression, Soup to Nuts served as a work project at a time when jobs were scarce. Each copy of this cookbook was constructed by hand—from typing to binding to decoration.

Published by the Rumford Company in 1931, the recipes in this cookbook all involve baking power, Rumford’s primary product.

to become vehicles for teaching history and culture and preserving traditions. Claudia Roden’s James Beard Award winning The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand and Vilna to Present Day (New York, 1996), Joan Nathan’s Jewish Cooking in America (New York, 1994) and Gil Marks’ The World of Jewish Cooking: More Than 400 Delectable Recipes from Jewish Communities (New York, 1996) all brought history to the table, providing recipes, histories and perspectives on Jewish culinary traditions the world over. These cookbooks connected the dots between recipe and context, widening the definition of “Jewish” or “kosher” food.

While these cookbooks captured the rich culture and backgrounds of the Jewish diaspora in the past, one cookbook took on the role of

cultivating observant Jewish life for the future. In 1977, Lubavitch Women’s Organization: Junior Division published Spice and Spirit: The Complete Kosher Jewish Cookbook. Reprinted in 1990 by Lubavitch Women’s Cookbook Publications, Spice and Spirit, considered a classic, has sold more than 200,000 copies since its original appearance, according to the Chabad web site. The cookbook echoed the same warm loving-kindness shown toward every Jew that characterizes Chabad. Practical explanations and instructions for each holiday or mitzvah went hand in hand with a large anthology of simple recipes bound to aid any aspiring balabusta. The “Purple Cookbook” became the go-to for many kosher cooks.

of stunning, professionally-styled food wowed home cooks who until that point used books with very few pictures. Along came these enticingly modernized recipes—beautiful, elegant, trendy and proudly kosher. “Kosher” cooking was redefined.

With the explosive trend of glamorous creative cooking and eating and the rise of the celebrity chef, the Jewish cookbook industry has also boomed, the lion’s share being kosher. “The growth has been exponential,” agrees Shloime Eichler of Eichler’s Judaica, one of the largest sellers (and online sellers) of Jewish books and Judaica, based in Brooklyn. In the last fifteen years, Eichler’s cookbook section has grown from two or three shelves to fifteen shelves—a full aisle of cookbooks, and new ones are prominently displayed in the front of the store. While some are published by Jewish publishers, many are the product of mainstream publishers like HarperCollins, who have made it a priority to publish cookbooks using only kosher ingredients—an affirmation of the demand.

“With Food Network and the Internet, books have had to become so much more visual and so much

A Pesach cookbook published by Manischewitz in 1926, which, at the time, only produced matzah products. Like the Rokeach Cook Book and What Shall I Serve, Tempting Kosher Dishes was printed with one half English, one half Yiddish, to appeal to the new immigrant population (Cincinnati).

Council Cook Book.Published in 1909 in San Francisco.

Kosher cookbooks sought to capture the flavor of Jewish life that tasted like home even as religious life was evaporating.

2000 AND BEYOND: THE KOSHER REVOLUTIONThe year 2000 signaled a jump to the next chapter of modern kosher cookbooks. A fundraising cookbook published by Livingston, New Jersey’s Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy changed the way kosher home cooks were preparing their meals. The popularity of the The Kosher Palette (Livingston, 2000) marked a return to elegant fare, on par with the latest trends in non-kosher cuisine: gourmet ingredients, spices we never heard of and plenty of pretty pictures to make your mouth water. This book’s enormous success launched the career of its editor, Susie Fishbein, leading to her well-embraced Kosher By Design (Brooklyn, 2003) cookbook series. The visuals were a game changer—page after page


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ALMOND MACAROONS5 egg whites4 tsp. Manischewitz Cake Meal or Matzo Meal finely sifted1 lb. blanched almonds, ground finely1½ lbs. powdered sugar (4 cups)2 lemons, grated rind only

Beat egg whites stiff; mix together other ingredients and fold in. Grease a cookie sheet and dust thickly with Cake Meal. Place macaroons on it about an inch apart, dropping them from a teaspoon or forcing through a pastry tube with large round opening. Bake at 300° for fifteen minutes, then increase heat to brown macaroons. Let cool before removing from pan.

CINNAMON STICKS4 egg whites1 lb. pulverized sugar1 tbsp. cinnamon2 tbsp. Manischewitz Cake Meal or Matzo Meal finely sifted½ lb. almonds, grated

Beat egg whites stiff; fold in gradually other ingredients. Dust hands with cake meal, take about one tsp. of dough and roll into half-finger lengths, about as thick as your little finger. Place on a greased sheet about an inch apart. Bake in slow oven (300°) twenty to thirty minutes. Frost with boiled icing.

COCONUT MACAROONS5 eggs1 ½ cups sugar

What did American Jews eat during Pesach back in the 1940s and 50s? Check out some of these quaint recipes that are still appealing even today when kosher l’Pesach quinoa and pasta are readily available. From Tempting Kosher Dishes—

Prepared from World Famous Manischewitz Matzo Products, Fifth Edition (Cincinnati, 1944).

1 cup Manischewitz Matzo Meal2 cups (8 oz.) shredded coconut2 lemons, juice and grated rind

Beat eggs well, adding sugar gradually; add remaining ingredients. Drop by tablespoons on cookie sheet greased and sprinkled with meal. Bake in moderate oven (325°) half hour, increasing heat at the last to brown cookies. This recipe makes twenty-four macaroons.

HONEY KISSES2 eggs6 egg yolks1 tsp. sugar1 ½ lbs. honey (2 cups)1 cup sugar1 cup chopped almondsManischewitz Matzo Meal (to make dough stiff enough to roll—about 1 ½ cups)

Mix eggs, egg yolks, one teaspoon sugar, and matzo meal. Roll this dough out to half-inch diameter, then cut in half-inch lengths. Bring honey to boiling point, then put in the cubes of dough. After cooking fifteen minutes, add sugar and almonds, and cook about another half hour over a low fire, stirring often to prevent burning. Test by putting one of the kisses in cold water; if it sinks, cook awhile longer; if it says on top of water, it is done. Pour candy into buttered pan; when cool enough to handle, butter hands and roll together each ball and its surrounding candy. Wrap in waxed paper. This recipe makes about twelve dozen kisses.

prettier,” says cookbook author and pastry chef Paula Shoyer. “The audience has also changed—kosher [consumers] are much more aware of what the rest of the world is eating. Today, [those who keep kosher] really want to experience what everyone is eating—we just want it kosher. There is a sense of entitlement for that.” She attributes this to exposure, partly due to media, but also as an outgrowth of the ba’al teshuvah movement.

Unquestionably, we also have the OU to thank for this trend. The world’s largest and most respected kosher certification agency, the OU currently certifies 8,000 plants in more than eighty countries. “When we were growing up, super-sweet Malaga and Concord wines were the norm in Orthodox homes,” says Rabbi Menachem Genack, CEO, OU Kosher. “Over time, this has changed, and in the contemporary Orthodox world, a full range of fine kosher wine varietals are available for the kosher consumer. The extraordinary breadth of kosher products now available enables consumers to be more selective and discriminating in their food choices.” New cookbooks like the OU Press/Schocken Books’ The Covenant Kitchen: Food and Wine for the New Jewish Table (New York, 2015), which pairs recipes with the fine kosher wines of Covenant Winery, are catering to a more sophisticated and informed kosher consumer.

Classically trained in pastry arts in Europe, Shoyer found her niche in converting French dairy desserts into pareve versions. After editing two of Fishbein’s

books, she wrote The Kosher Baker (Waltham, 2010) to fill a gap in the literature for kosher cooks. Her goal: classic European favorites updated and adapted for the kosher home.

“The focus used to be on Jewish or traditional foods—now it is more about the food that just happens to be kosher,” observes Genauer about how kosher cookbooks have changed today. “It also reflects the economics of the times—people today can afford more expensive ingredients.” Shoyer’s most recent book,

The New Passover Menu (New York, 2015), surely makes use of many more ingredients than our grandmothers ever imagined. “We didn’t have hechshered almond or coconut milk ten years ago,” laughs Shoyer. With the help of kashrut organizations like the OU, “there is so much more to work with, and today’s cookbooks teach one how to use them.”

Despite dozens of new kosher cookbooks coming out each year though, there is a growing dependence on the Internet for recipes and kosher information.

The proliferation of kosher blogs and kosher recipe database web sites like joyofkosher.com or gourmetkoshercooking.com has made the experience of kosher cooking larger, more interactive. People can find all the new ideas and recipes they need without relying on a physical cookbook . . . and all at the swipe of a finger. Is this the next chapter in the evolution of kosher cookbooks? Will we trade in our dog-eared, oil-stained pages for the sleek (and easy to wipe) tablet? Not likely, suspects Shoyer. “Jews love to try new things, especially finding new recipes.” And if

within each cookbook is planted a hidden story about the evolution of Jewish life, then a garden of kosher cookbooks is still waiting to blossom. g


Published by OU Press in con-junction with Schocken Books, The Covenant Kitchen, a guide for the sophisticated kosher con-sumer, pairs recipes with the fine kosher wines of the Covenant Winery.

Known fondly as the “Purple Cookbook,” Spice and Spirit: The Complete Kosher Jewish Cook-book, published by Lubavitch, has become the go-to cookbook for many Jewish women for its easy-to-use recipes and interwoven notes on Jewish law, tradition and spirituality.

With the explosive trend of glamorous creative cooking and eating and the rise of the celebrity chef, the Jewish cookbook industry has also boomed, the lion’s share being kosher.

Notes1. The Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook: Garden-Fresh Recipes Rediscovered and Adapted for Today’s Kitchen (Schocken Books, 2015) is a modern adaptation, translated from the original Yiddish by Eve Jochnowitz, a teacher of Yiddish language and literature at the YIVO Institute for Jewish

Culture and The Workmen’s Circle.

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Stardom and the rise of the “celebrity chef” have created a place in modern society on par with the likes of sports personalities and actors. That visibil-ity has impacted the kosher world as well. Today, modern kosher cookbook authors are receiving their own celebrated status.

A practical and witty yet detailed approach has always been the way Norene Gilletz writes recipes. Brought up in a traditional Jewish home in Winnipeg, Canada,

Naomi Ross is a cooking instructor and food writer. She teaches throughout the New York area and writes articles connecting cooking and Jewish inspiration.

Profile

Norene was schooled not with professional cooking classes, but in the delights of her mother’s home cooking, whom she adoringly remembers “would make magic from ingredients.”

Norene was always fascinated with the transformative process of cooking. After she married, she moved to Montreal and became the editor of B’nai B’rith Women’s cookbook Second Helpings, Please (Montreal, 1968). She became the voice of the book and shortly thereafter started working on her own book. Norene was halfway through the manuscript when she met the food processor, a new popular appliance at the time. She rewrote the manuscript entirely and self-published the first edition of The Pleasures of Your Food Processor (Montreal, 1979) (now the celebrated Food Processor Bible [Toronto, 1981]), selling 160,000 copies. “I remember typing it on an old fashioned typewriter in the hospital after my son was born!”

In 1975, Norene opened Norene’s Cuisine, a cooking shop that also offered classes. Originally

People overdo it on Pesach.

Use fresh produce, meats, et cetera, and keep your

menu simple. It’s not a competition. Start with a soup and a simple fish dish. Stick to the

outer aisles of the grocery store.

Norene’s Pesach Tip:

CELEBRITY

CHEFS

Food that’s good for you should taste good!”

Norene’s Motto:

Stardom and the rise of the “celebrity chef” have created a place for chefs in modern society on par with the likes of sports personalities and actors. That visibility has impacted the kosher

world as well. Today, modern kosher cookbook au-thors are receiving their own celebrated status.

KOSHER

NUTRITIOUS FOOD MAVEN: NORENE GILLETZ

Phot

o: D

oug

Gill

etz


the shop operated out of her basement, but eventually it moved to a storefront. During the ten years it was open, Norene joined the International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP). Taking master classes from experts like French chef Jacques Pépin was how she spent her vacations. “He taught me you don’t have to be bound by recipes.”

Zeroing in on specific diets and nutrition has become one of Norene’s specialties. Her books have become a support and resource for low-iodine diets, high-fiber eating, low GI (glycemic index) and all-around healthful cooking. Her latest project is no exception. Norene is currently working on a cookbook that focuses on reducing the risk of Alzheimer’s through diet, entitled Memory’s Kitchen—Save Your Brain, Put Science on Your Plate.

Cookbook writing (full disclosure: Norene has been the Jewish Action food columnist for the past few years) and consulting, recipe editing and indexing and nutritional analysis have shaped her professional life. Most recently though, Norene, based out of Toronto for the past eighteen years, has ventured into the commercial realm, launching Koogletz, her first product line of kugels, cakes and meatballs, all based on her own recipes and specs.

For Norene, connecting with her readers and students is part of the culinary experience. “It’s fun to find out from people that you’ve made a difference.” With a generous spirit and warm smile, she continues to reach out, anticipating the cooking questions her readers will ask and mentoring those new to the field. “You can communicate with food. Food opens doorways—everyone can relate to food.”

Susie Fishbein grew up in Oceanside, New York. With an MA in science, Susie enjoyed teaching fourth grade science in the Oceanside public schools prior to moving to Livingston, New Jersey to raise her family. She never expected that co-editing The Kosher Palette (Livingston, 2000), a fundraiser for her kids’ school (Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy in New Jersey), would launch her culinary career spanning fifteen years, an eight-cookbook Kosher By Design series and annual culinary tours.

“We tapped into a rich vein of what people were looking for—fine, modern and elegant food to put on our holiday and party tables. But the early cookbooks weren’t speaking to us visually,” Susie explains when describing her start. Inspired by what Ina Garten and Martha Stewart were doing so beautifully for the non-kosher world, she was determined to deliver that level of sophistication to the modern kosher home cook.

Drawing on her early experiences in the classroom, Susie uses her books and demos as opportunities to teach, reaching targeted audiences for each of her books. “I really wrote based on where I was in the kitchen and in life. Short On Time (Brooklyn, 2006) was about being a working parent and getting dinner on the table. Cooking Coach (Brooklyn, 2012) was a look back as a teacher—what lessons I could impart to all my readers.”

In 2008, Susie was voted one of the “Top 50 Most Influential Jews” by the Forward. Two

Plan your menus in advance and

use the recipes to prepare shopping

lists. Buying a dozen eggs isn’t helpful if your recipes in total require three

dozen!

Susie’s Pesach Tip:

Anyone can cook and anyone can get better at cooking. Slow down, stress less and enjoy the process.”

Susie’s Motto:

Phot

o: E

van

Sung

/The

New

Yor

k T

imes

/Red

ux

THE QUEEN OF ELEGANT, UPSCALE CUISINE: SUSIE FISHBEIN

Listen to Norene discuss kosher culinary trends at www.ou.org/life/food/savitsky_gilletz/.


years later, she was honored at the White House during Jewish American Heritage Month in recognition of her contributions to Jewish life. With over a half million copies sold, her books have revolutionized the way people think of kosher.

Always working on the next project, Susie has one more cookbook in store for her readers. Recently released, Kosher

I use a ton of ground nuts for baking during

Pesach and find that they are very expensive in the stores. I bought a coffee grinder

that I just use for nuts and grind

almonds, walnuts, hazelnuts,

pistachios, et cetera into a

powder, which is a healthy flour substitute during

the holiday.

PAULA’s Pesach Tip:

noticed that there were no current, modern cookbooks on fine, kosher desserts and began writing and converting baking classics to pareve—a natural application of her French pas-try training. “There was a gap in the literature and it had been a long time since a good kosher baking cookbook had been done,” she recalls. The Kosher Baker (Waltham, Mass., 2010) was followed by The Holiday Kosher Baker (New York, 2013). These books are part of what Paula calls her “baking revolution.”

Establishing herself as the go-to expert in kosher baking, Paula makes regular holiday appearances on television and radio. She successfully competed on the Food Network’s Sweet Genius and has re-cently had several appearances on the Hallmark Channel’s Home and Family.

“I love writing books. I love the process and I love creating recipes,” Paula confides. Her most recent book, The New Passover Menu (New York, 2015), modernizes Passover dishes while incorpo-rating ethnic ingredients and an international, global feel. Paula continues to derive inspiration from her varied world travels and strives to bring her readers new tastes that are specially adapted for Pesach dining. g

By Design Brings It Home is the eighth and final book in the Kosher By Design series. Brings It Home adapts much of what she has learned from international chefs, restaurateurs and cooks for the kosher home consumer. “We don’t speak the same language, but we speak food. [This book] touches on all the places I’ve been.”

I like to take traditional food and desserts and make them easier, healthier and more modern. As for desserts, I believe great desserts can be created no matter what special diet you are on.”

Paula’s Motto:

Cou

rtes

y of

Ste

rlin

g P

ublis

hing

Paula Shoyer started out her career as an attorney and speechwriter. But a few years spent in Europe in the mid-90s changed her direction entirely. Paula enrolled in a pastry course for fun while living in Paris. After receiving her pastry diploma from the Ecole de Gastronomie Francaise Ritz-Escoffier in 1995, she opened a dessert catering business that she ran for two years in Geneva, Switzerland, and began giving classes at fundraisers.

When Paula returned to the US, she continued teaching and developing recipes, as well as running Paula’s Parisian Pastries from her home in Chevy Chase, Maryland. While editing Susie Fishbein’s Kosher By Design Entertains (Brooklyn, 2005), she began considering writing her own book. Paula

BAKING GURU: PAULA SHOYER


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The grandchildren of Henry P. Cohn, who emigrated to the US from Germany around 1847. This photo is circa 1920, taken in front of the houses on Brookfield Avenue in Baltimore. From left: Florence, Sidney, Alvin, and Henry P. Cohn (named for his grandfather). Courtesy of Howard M. Cohn

Cover Story


UNBROKEN FAITH:American Jewish Families Who Defied the Odds

This is not only historically false, but it overlooks the extraordinary mesirut nefesh and devotion to Torah exhibited by hundreds of men and women who stubbornly and courageously fought to lay the foundation of Torah Judaism in America. In the pages ahead, we profile a

few of the illustrious families whose loyalty to Torah Judaism enabled them to pass on Yiddishkeit to future generations, despite the fact that they lived in a time when there were few, if any, yeshivot or day schools, when kosher food was not as readily available and when the contemporary conveniences of Orthodox life were but a dream. These men and women had, in the words of one of the interviewees, “backbones made of iron rods.” Indeed, their sacrifices paved the path for future generations, and enabled Orthodoxy in America to thrive and flourish.

Many assume Torah Judaism came to these shores in the aftermath of the Holocaust.

AS TOLD TO BAYLA SHEVA BRENNER


The Bienenfeld Family, New YorkYaakov Bienenfeld, a descendant of the famed Rema, emigrated from Austria to New York in the 1840s. Part of a wave of German-Jewish immigration to the US, he came to escape poverty and oppression and seek a brighter future. His son, Dr. Henry Lyons Bienenfeld, was a medical doctor and one of the first American-born Orthodox rabbis.

By Rabbi Yaakov Bienenfeld, great-great grandson of Yaakov Bienenfeld; rav of the Young Israel of Harrison, Westchester, New York

’m named after Jacob, my grandfather, who was named after Yaakov Bienenfeld, the patriarch of this family and my great-great-grandfather who came to the US in the 1840s. When he first came to New York, he settled in Harlem, where a Jewish community existed at the time. Many of the big churches in Harlem today used to be shuls. Additionally, most of the big shuls in Manhattan today were built in the 1800s, such as the West Side Institutional Synagogue, Congregation Ohab Zedek, Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun and Congregation Shearith Israel (the Spanish & Portuguese Synagogue).

In 1856, Yaakov Bienenfeld’s son, Henry Lyons, my great-grandfather, was born. Some time later, Yaakov was drafted to fight in the Civil War. When President Lincoln came to New York City, Yaakov took young Henry to the parade and they both got to meet the president and shake his hand.

Dr. Henry Lyons Bienenfeld was a huge talmid chacham. There were no yeshivot at the time; his father taught him how to learn Gemara. He was also a brilliant medical doctor who graduated from NYU School of Medicine in 1884. I have his writings on parts of the Talmud; he’s also quoted in sefarim. I have copies of the letters he wrote on Jewish philosophy that are currently found in the New York Public Library archives.

In the 1920s and ‘30s, Dr. Bienenfeld served as the chief physician of the New York City prison system. In addition, he had a medical practice on 110th Street in Harlem. My aunt, Rosabelle Bienenfeld Meltzer, remembered him riding around in his horse-drawn carriage making house calls.

Dr. Bienenfeld started the first kiruv organization in America, called The Advancement of Jewish Learning, to teach Americans [from immigrant families] who didn’t know much about Judaism. He was one of the few English-speaking talmidei chachamim at the time in the country. Totally Americanized, he found it difficult to express himself in Yiddish. When the family would prepare to bentch after eating a seudah, he would say, “Gentlemen, let us now say grace.”

When his son, Jacob Bienenfeld, my grandfather, was born in 1888, the family was second-generation American; Jacob was one of the first American-ordained Orthodox rabbis raised in an American home. The family valued education, both secular and Jewish. Jacob attended Columbia University and worked in the public school system as a math instructor; he also held degrees in philosophy and law. He finished Shas many times and served as a rav in downtown Manhattan.

When Jacob wanted to start dating in 1910, he asked his father, Dr. Bienenfeld, for permission to do so. His father responded, “Did you finish Shas three times and Shulchan Aruch once? You can’t get married unless you’ve done that.” They took learning seriously. That’s what enabled them to stay frum.

In the early 1900s, when Jewish communities took off on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and in Brooklyn, Dr. Bienenfeld and his son, Jacob, were some of the first in America to deliver daf yomi shiurim in English, as few rabbis were able to do so. Someone I once met told me he remembers the summers when Jewish immigrants would vacation in Sharon Springs or Lake Mohegan, and Dr. Bienenfeld would deliver the daf yomi shiur. When he had to return to work in the city, his son Jacob would teach daf yomi. When the community needed someone to represent them for political or educational reasons, my

Please note that the following stories are oral accounts, based on people’s memories. As such, we cannot vouch for the accuracy of the various details. For the sake of authenticity, transliterations follow both the Sephardic and Ashkenazic pronunciations, depending on the particular interviewee.

Bayla Sheva Brenner is a senior writer in the OU Communications and Marketing Department.

I


great-grandfather and grandfather were the go-to people. At one point, a few observant Jews approached my grandfather, and asked if Coca-Cola could be certified kosher. He was the first rabbi to give Coca-Cola a hechsher in 1930.

Dr. Bienenfeld lived into the 1940s. Many of his descendants are rabbanim or in chinuch. Most notable is his great-great-grandson, Rabbi Jonathan Bienenfeld, rav of the Young Israel of Cherry Hill in New Jersey.

By the time my father, Moshe, was born, yeshivot existed in America. He and his brothers attended Yeshiva D’Harlem on 114th Street and then Yeshiva Torah Vodaath in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in the 1920s and ‘30s.

A young man working on a doctorate in sociology devoted his thesis to the subject of German Jewish immigration. He told my cousin that our family’s story is very unusual. He said, “There aren’t many German Jewish families [in the US so long] I’ve studied who remained frum. It’s remarkable that yours is.”

By Yaakov Meltzer, cousin to Rabbi Yaakov BienenfeldMy mother, Rosabelle Bienenfeld, was born in 1920. (She

passed away recently at the age of ninety-five.) She didn’t have a formal Jewish education. Education came from the home. She was taught how to kasher meat, hilchos Shabbos, et cetera. Her father, Jacob, was a rav, so she was able to ask him any question she had.

My sense is that it wasn’t hard for them [to be frum]. From how my mother portrayed it, there was never a thought that being frum was a challenge; being frum was never a she’eilah.

They were brought up with a reverence for Torah. My mother recalled how her father, Jacob, and grandfather, Dr. Bienenfeld, were always learning.

There’s a famous Kotzker vort. Someone came to the Kotzker Rebbe and asked, “How can I encourage my son to learn Torah?” The Rebbe said, “You have to learn. Just telling your son to learn Torah will result in him growing up and telling his own children to learn Torah. Only if you learn Torah yourself will your son grow up to learn Torah.” In the Bienenfeld family, the children saw that their fathers always learned in their free time.

According to family tradition, this portrait of Dr. Henry Lyons Bienenfeld was painted by a prisoner who was incarcerated for forgery—presumably

art forgery. Courtesy of Jeff Bienenfeld

The business card of Dr. Henry L. Bienenfeld. Courtesy of Jeff Bienenfeld

Please note that the names depicted are only those mentioned and/or relevant to the narrative. Due to space constraints, these family trees are not comprehensive.


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The Hartman Family, New YorkMordechai (Max) Hartman was a young boy when he came to America with his parents in the late 1800s. When he married, he and his wife, Gittel (Gussie), were determined to preserve their way of life despite the pressure to assimilate.

By Rabbi Dr. Tzvi Hersh Weinreb, executive vice president, emeritus, of the Orthodox Union

When I was growing up, small farms still existed in Boro Park. I remember there were goats and chickens. It was a time when the majority of Jewish immigrants assimilated. Observant Judaism was perceived as being old fashioned, a relic from the Old Country.

Boro Park had these big shuls where the great chazzanim of those days used to daven. In the first half of the twentieth century, many of the congregants were not shomer Shabbos; they would daven at the Shabbos morning minyan and then go to work. This was a very common phenomenon. In their own minds these Jews felt that they were devout.

My maternal grandfather, Mordechai (Max) Hartman, and his buddies felt that this was terribly wrong. Shomer Shabbos meant shomer Shabbos, no matter what the sacrifice. He used to tell us about people he knew who had to get a new job every week in order to not work on Shabbos. Max felt they should have gone into business for themselves, which is what he did. He worked for a leather company and then opened his own leather business.

Max and his friends decided to form a shul, which they called Congregation Shomrei Shabbos. In order to become a member, you had to be 100 percent shomer Shabbos. I remember when I was six or seven years old, sitting with my grandfather while he and the shul board members discussed how to ascertain if a member was truly frum. Did the individual keep his store closed on Shabbos? Where did he buy his meat? They would have debates—should we let this person in? His store is closed on Shabbos, but he carries his packages to shul.

Today the shul is known colloquially as the “Shomrei Shabbos Shtiebel,” and there are minyanim every fifteen minutes throughout the day. There’s a plaque in the shul acknowledging all that my grandfather did for the congregation. This was one of my grandfather’s contributions to American Judaism.

My grandfather was not a particularly learned man, yet his dedication [to Yiddishkeit] came from his upbringing. He not only kept Shabbos, he insisted that we sing every single zemir in the siddur. My grandfather was stubborn in the best sense, akshanut d’kedushah—a holy stubbornness.

My grandparents were very Americanized, yet very religious. Despite the fact that my grandmother, Gussie, had no secular or Jewish education, she was very well read. She read everything in Yiddish translation, even Jules Verne novels and other classics. Around 1921, Gussie was one of the first women to become a licensed automobile driver in Brooklyn. She was the chairman of the Ladies Auxiliary at the shul. She probably was the mikvah

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lady as well. Boro Park had one mikvah then, and women would come from all over Brooklyn to use it. She also went to shul every single Shabbos when her health allowed her to do so.

My paternal grandfather, Chaim Yitzchok Weinreb, represented a different kind of commitment. He was a talmid chacham, a chassid who learned Shas many times. When he was in Galicia, Poland, he was the disciple and later, the personal secretary of the famed halachic authority of the early 1900s, Rabbi Sholom Mordechai Schwadron, known as the Maharsham. He received semichah from Rabbi Schwadron as well.

In Poland, Chaim Yitzchok had been destitute. At some point, he was offered the chance to become the shochet, mohel and teacher in Batavia, a town in upstate New York where an entire shtetl of Jews had emigrated en masse after a brutal pogrom. My grandfather didn’t want to go to America; he worried about his children remaining frum. The Chortkover Rebbe gave him a berachah that his children would remain frum.

He and his wife, Miriam, raised four sons and a daughter in Batavia. As soon as their sons turned eleven or twelve, they sent them to various yeshivot to study; some attended Yeshiva Torah Vodaath in Brooklyn.

Most of the family throughout the generations remained frum. The secret, as I see it, was Shabbos, taharas hamishpachah and the home. What both sets of grandparents had in common was that the home was a vibrant place for Yiddishkeit. Everyone felt part of it.

he Sch

Scheinerman Family, Washington, DC; New York

Yitzchok Aryeh Scheinerman emigrated from Russia in the 1880s and later brought his wife, Chana, and the rest of his family. His son, Peretz, married Annie (Sapp) in 1908. The couple moved to Washington, DC, where Peretz opened a dry-goods business. Realizing their growing family’s need for a Torah environment, they moved to Manhattan’s Lower East Side. They had nine children.

By Faigie Shoenig, daughter of Peretz and Annie ScheinermanWhen my parents, Peretz and Annie Scheinerman, lived

in Washington, DC [in the early part of the twentieth century], you could just walk onto the White House grounds. There were these beautiful green rolling hills where my brothers and their friends used to play ball. One time a man was standing on the porch of the White House, watching my brothers play. One of my brothers ran to catch a ball and stopped to pick up his yarmulke and put it back on his head. The man walked over; it was President Calvin Coolidge. He said, “It’s nice to see boys keeping their religion.” It was a different world.

My father sold men’s overalls and did very well until the Wall Street Crash of 1929. After the Crash, he lost his business; everyone lost their businesses then. My father had loans to pay off. He thought, “What am I doing in Washington, DC? I don’t have chinuch for my children; I don’t have a business.” He decided to move the family to

the Lower East Side. But he had to finish paying off his debts. It was not easy. He would work in Washington all week long and only come home for Shabbos. He would take the B & O (Baltimore and Ohio) Railroad, then a ferry from Hoboken to New York and finally, a trolley. We never had a car. We took trains and buses and the trolley, which cost three cents. My mother had to be very strong, which she was. During the Depression years, I never knew we were poor. Only when I was older did I realize the sacrifices my parents made.

I loved the Lower East Side. There were a lot of Italian Americans and Irish Americans in the neighborhood. We all got along well. People respected my parents because they held onto their beliefs no matter what. Once there was a Christmas play in school and I was supposed to have a role. My mother was a gentle, quiet woman, but not when it came to Yiddishkeit. She marched to the school and told the teacher, “My child cannot be in the play.”

Our parents instilled in us menschlichkeit and Yiddishkeit. They made it special to be a frum Jew.

When we lived on the Lower East Side, we didn’t have a phone. We would go to the candy store whenever we had to make a call.

When I was thirteen years old, we moved to Williamsburg. My sisters and I would walk across the Williamsburg Bridge every day to Seward Park High School, which had a handful of frum students. On Shabbos, my public school friends would see me and say, “Can’t you go to the movies today?” My mother would say, “No, Shabbos is Shabbos; we don’t go to the movies. No Jewish children should go to the

Sunday morning crowds fill the market at Orchard and Rivington in New York City, 1915. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division


movies.” Some of the girls thought they were pretty frum. Their homes were strictly kosher, but their fathers worked on Shabbos. Eventually they started coming to my house on Shabbos. My mother would give them nosh; it was like having a Bnos [a Shabbos youth group].

After I graduated high school, I got a job as a secretary in a Manhattan office. There were a lot of Jews working there, but they were very Americanized and barely religious. I used to say to myself all the time: “Remember who you are; remember what you are.”

[In the 1930s] Rebbetzin Vichna Kaplan came to America and started a seminary class for working girls who had never attended Bais Yaakov. I went to a class. It blew my mind; I remember everything that I learned there.

We are seventh-generation Americans with lots of children, beli ayin hara, named after my parents and my bubbes and zaydes. I am thankful to Hashem for all the goodness He has bestowed upon me.

By Fagie Rosen (nee Scheinerman), granddaughter of Peretz and Annie Scheinerman

My paternal grandparents, Peretz and Annie Scheinerman, had emunah. They taught their children and grandchildren Yiddishkeit by living it.

There’s a story told in the family: An irreligious man who was friendly with my grandfather bet on a horse and told him if the horse won the race, he’d split the winnings with him. The horse won. When the man came to Peretz prepared to give him half of the money, Peretz

asked him when he had bet on the horse. The man told Peretz he placed the bet on Saturday. Peretz told him he couldn’t take the money. My grandparents certainly could have used the money. Life wasn’t easy for them, but I think of them as the richest people in the world to have had such integrity.

When they lived in Washington, DC, the only available mikvah was in Baltimore. Today you can get from Washington to Baltimore in forty-five minutes. In those days it could take hours, but my grandmother made the journey. If for some reason she couldn’t travel to Baltimore, my grandmother would immerse in the Potomac River in Washington, even if she had to break ice to do so. That is how committed she was to halachah.

Since there were no Jewish schools, my grandparents “imported rebbes”—they would bring over teachers from Europe who would live with the family and teach the boys and the girls. That is how they gave their children a Jewish education.

My grandparents knew Rabbi Yaakov Yosef Herman [featured in the book All For The Boss], who told them that if they didn’t send my father Chunie [Elchonon] to Europe to learn, they would lose him. My father was an American kid—he played baseball, and he didn’t know how to learn when he was a young teenager. My zayde was working, so he couldn’t really teach him. My grandparents waited until my father was around fifteen and in 1934, they sent him to the Mirrer Yeshiva.

For my father, being sent to the Mir was like going straight from elementary school to Harvard. He didn’t have the skills to learn. The roshei yeshivah at the Mir sent him to Rabbi Elchonon Wasserman who had a mechinah in the famous Ohel Torah Yeshiva of Baranovitch, in White Russia. My father learned at Baranovitch for a year and a half, and then returned to the Mir to learn for the next four years.

When the war seemed imminent, my grandparents sent him a ticket to come home. Figuring that as an American he could always come home, my father gave the ticket to someone else. When my grandfather discovered this, it was close to Shabbos. He went to the Noviminsker Rebbe to ask him what to do. The rav said, “It’s pikuach nefesh; get him another ticket right away.” On Shabbos, my aunt Ethel walked over the Williamsburg Bridge to the Western Union store located on the Lower East Side to send her brother Chunie the money for another ticket. My father made it home, thank God. Before he left, he asked his roshei yeshivah what he should do to ensure that his future family stays frum in America. They told him: “Never look for kulos [leniencies].”

When my younger uncles came of age, they were sent to Telshe Yeshiva in Cleveland. One of my uncles, Uncle Itzie, now Rabbi Yitzchok Scheinerman, stayed in Telshe to learn and is still there.

At the time of my grandmother Annie’s passing in 1984 at the age of ninety-six, she had many, many children and great-grandchildren, all of whom are shomer Shabbos.



The Fertig Family, New Brunswick, New Jersey

In the late 1800s and early part of the twentieth century, New Brunswick, New Jersey boasted a strong Jewish community. Aharon Yehuda Fertig (Albert Leib) and his wife, Hadass (Hermione) came to the US in 1880. They had eleven children. In 1907, their son Avraham Zvi married Yocheved (Kauftheil).

They lived in New Brunswick, where they became pillars of the religious community.

By Chaim Fertig, great-grandson of Aharon Yehuda FertigIt’s a fallacy to say that Orthodox Judaism in America existed only from the 1940s onward. My grandchildren mark six generations since the arrival of the Fertig family in the US.

Aharon Yehuda and Hadass made the move to the US, not certain what they were going to find. It’s unclear exactly from which country they emigrated, although according to a 1900 US Census list, they are both listed as being born in Austria. Of their eleven children, the only child who cer-tainly remained frum was my grandfather, Avraham Zvi (we don’t know about the rest of the family).

Those people who remained frum were often very deter-mined personalities. When it came to Judaism, you had to be stubborn and inflexible. My great-grandfather, grand-father and father did not want to know gray; it was either black or white, it either was or it wasn’t. The most import-ant thing was adherence to halachah. In order to keep Shabbos, they had their own businesses. You became an entrepreneur and that is what made life manageable—it was very difficult otherwise. My grandfather, Avraham Zvi, ran a general store, selling virtually everything. You name it, he sold it. He was also in the paper and twine business. His store was behind his home on Lee Avenue, a few blocks from the shuls. People would come and buy, and during the bad years of the Depression, he would give them credit. He and my great-grandfather, Aharon Yehuda, were major supporters of the New Brunswick Jewish community.

My grandfather made choices based on his Judaism. When my father Joseph’s bar mitzvah was approaching, my grand-father realized that the shul they davened in, Congregation Ahavas Achim, was too small for the celebration. He and my great-grandfather, along with other members, decided to build a larger shul, eventually known as Congregation Poile Zedek, on Neilson Avenue, in New Brunswick. The shul building was completed in 1924 (tragically, the shul was recently destroyed in a fire). A dispute arose when someone on the building committee wanted to put the bimah up front [which was against accepted halachah]. My grandfather said, “It’s not happening,” but he was outvoted. He had donated significant funds toward the shul’s con-

struction, but he decided that my father’s bar mitzvah would take place, after all, at Congregation Ahavas Achim.

My wife and I recently went back to the old New Bruns-wick neighborhood, which is no longer a Jewish area. We drove over to Poile Zedek and found it locked. Just then, an elderly Jewish man approached us and asked if he could help. After I explained how my grandfather and great-grand-father were instrumental in building the shul and we wanted to see it, the man asked for my name. He said he remembered my grandmother, Yocheved, standing across the street by the Talmud Torah building and handing out candy bars to the kids to draw them to the junior congregation. He had been one of those kids.

We also visited the house where my father and grandfa-ther grew up. The indentation in the doorpost where the mezuzah had been placed was still visible. My father had told me that when he was a child, he had a horse that was kept in a stable behind the house. The stable was still there,

Left: Aharon Yehuda Fertig, great-grandfather of Chaim Fertig.Courtesy of Chaim Fertig

Above: Avraham Zvi, grandfather of Chaim Fertig. Courtesy of Chaim Fertig


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as well as the building where the general store was housed, which was now a carpenter’s workshop. The homeowner, a man in his fifties, asked me, “Was your grandfather a rabbi?” I said he wasn’t, but he was a religious Jew. The homeowner told me he had heard from his parents and the community that a very good and generous rabbi had lived there.

About twenty-five years ago, my brother was driving on the New Jersey Turnpike and realized at the tollbooth he didn’t have enough money to pay the toll. My brother rolled down the window and explained the problem. When the toll taker asked for his name, and he said Fertig, the toll taker asked, “Are you related to the Fertigs from New Brunswick?” My brother replied in the affirmative. The toll taker said, “Your grandfather sup-ported my family during the Depression,” and told my brother to pass through.

The Bruder Family, New YorkMany of the books on the history of American Orthodoxy include the names Bruder, Weberman, Fensterheim and Jacobs. These families helped build the spiritual foundation that enabled American Orthodoxy to flourish decades later.

Pinchas Aaron Bruder and his wife, Bracha, came to America in the 1870s from Galicia. Two of the Bruder children remained religious: Tzurtel, who married Moshe Weberman, and Chana, who married Moshe Yehuda Fried.

By Rabbi Chaim Yisroel Belsky, zt”l, former senior halachic consultant for OU Kosher and rosh yeshivah at Yeshiva Torah Vodaath. Our writer had the zechut of speaking with Rabbi Belsky about his illustrious family only a few months before he passed away. Please note that this essay is based on a conversation with Rabbi Belsky; however, it was heavily edited and is not a word-for-word transcript.

In the 1870s, my maternal great-great-grandfather, Pinchas Aaron Bruder, arrived in America. He was thirty-eight years old.

At the time, there were no organizations overseeing shechitah in America. Anyone who called himself a shochet and sold so-called kosher meat could do so. It was an impossible situation. A group of Chassidic Jews from Hungary who had immigrated to the Lower East Side requested that their rebbe in Europe, the Shinover Rebbe (Rabbi Yechezkel Shraga Halberstam) send over a reliable shochet. The Rebbe decided to send a young shochet and mohel, Pinchas Aaron Bruder. After receiving the Rebbe’s blessing that his children would remain shomer Shabbos in America, Pinchas Aaron agreed to emigrate to America. He and his family came on the SS Baltimore in 1874. My great-great-grandparents had an unusual advantage: because Pinchas Aaron served as a shochet and a mohel and had his own butcher shop, he didn’t have to work on Shabbos and the family had kosher meat.


Jewish market on the Lower East Side, New York, circa 1890. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

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Pinchas Aaron was mikarev many, many people. He was a tremendous masmid. He was also the shochet for Rabbi Yaakov Yosef, the famous chief rabbi of New York.

[At that time], there were few, if any, yeshivas, but there were hundreds of shuls. Every shul had an afternoon school. But unless one’s parents were exceptionally charismatic and strong in their Yiddishkeit [they could not transmit the Torah way of life]. The only thing that kept people clinging to tradition was when the family invested in Jewish education and hired rabbanim to teach the next generation.

The Bruders had many children, two of whom stayed religious: Tzurtel, who married Moshe Weberman and Chana, who married Moshe Yehuda Fried, who had moved to America with his family before the Civil War. Pinchas Aaron and Moshe ran the butcher store together.

The Rebbe’s berachah came true. Many thousands of the Bruder’s great-great-great-great-grandchildren are seventh- generation Americans, committed to the Torah way of life. They have spread out, living in Crown Heights, Toronto, Columbus—all over the place.

é é é éMy maternal grandfather, Binyamin Wilhelm, came to

America from Poland in 1907 as a teenager. His mother had died when he was around eight. [Shortly after], when he was about eleven, his cousin invited him to live with him. He lived

with his cousin until the latter moved to Eretz Yisrael, [at which point Binyamin] moved in with his grandfather. When he was sixteen or seventeen, his grandfather passed away.

Young Binyamin then decided to go to America. He had been corresponding with a friend who had moved to America and had been encouraging Binyamin to come. The friend assured him that there was a strong chevra of frum boys there. Binyamin reached America by taking a job as a mashgiach on a boat heading for the US. He arrived in the country without a penny in his pocket.

Experiencing so many challenges in his young life shaped Binyamin into a strong, determined person. His stubbornness turned out to be an advantage; he never faltered when it came to religious life; he resisted every difficulty. Once in the States, he joined the chevra of young men, all of whom made a pact not to give in on any aspect of Yiddishkeit. All of them went on to raise frum families.

My grandfather taught his three daughters every day; my mother, Chana Tzirel, was his second child. When the Chofetz Chaim published Nidchei Yisrael, my grandfather bought a copy for each of his girls. [Published in 1893, Nidchei Yisrael is a classic work on the importance of mitzvah observance in places where Jewish people are surrounded by non-Jews. The sefer was written specifically for American Jewry.] Every day, when they would come home from public school, he would learn the sefer with them.


Binyamin knew the importance of chinuch and felt that Williamsburg needed a yeshivah. He went door to door with Max Jacobs [his cousin through marriage] to convince Jewish parents about the need for a yeshivah. They encountered resistance as the notion of a yeshivah was unpopular at that time; people wanted their children to become Americans.

Nevertheless, in 1917, my grandfather managed to open Yeshiva Torah Vodaath. Despite the pessimistic outlook of American Jewry, the yeshivah opened its doors with ninety students. (My grandfather Binyamin’s oldest son, Chaim Yehoshua Wilhelm, was one of the first students of Torah Vodaath, as was my father Dov Belsky.) The Jacobs, along with the Wilhelms and the Webermans, were among the founding families of Torah Vodaath. Then my grandfather discovered Rabbi Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz and asked him to serve as the principal of Torah Vodaath; Rabbi Mendlowitz’s leadership succeeded in turning the yeshivah into a great institution. [Ed. note: By 1940, Yeshiva Torah Vodaath had 1,000 students. At the time, only 7,700 students were in Orthodox day schools or yeshivot nationwide. ] My grandfather was also instrumental in establishing the first Bais Yaakov for girls in Williamsburg in 1937. He was a leader and a mover. Rav Yaakov Kamenetsky once said about my grandfather: “Half of the Yiddishkeit in America came about because of Binyamin Wilhelm”; Then he added: “Maybe all of it.”

é é é éIn 1931, when my father, Dov Belsky, was eighteen years old,

he went to Europe to learn at Yeshiva Chofetz Chaim in Radin. He was one of the first American boys to go [to Europe to learn]. My father became close to the Chofetz Chaim. The Chofetz Chaim would hold his hand and say “Ay, from America, a boy coming from America.” He was amazed to see a ben Torah from America.

My father told me that when he dies, right after we get up from the shivah, we should go to Washington Cemetery in Brooklyn to visit his father’s grave. [My father explained that] when he was thirteen, all his friends from school left yeshivah

and left learning. He was the only one who didn’t, and he felt very lonely. He asked his father: “Maybe I should leave too?” His father put his hands around his shoulders and said, “Mayn kind, vestu blaybn baym lernen,” “My child, you are going to remain with Torah and learning,” which my father did. He wanted us to go to the cemetery to convey his thanks to his father for making him stay in yeshivah and become a ben Torah.

By Chayim Lando, third-great-grandson of Pinchas Aaron Bruder When the wave of Jewish immigrants came to the United States after the Holocaust, they weren’t coming to a country devoid of Torah. After the Holocaust, many Chassidim came to America and settled in Williamsburg because frum Jews were there already, and had set up an infrastructure for religious life. It’s unfortunate that kids growing up today don’t know about the mesirus nefesh that so many Jews—including my ancestors—had in the early years of building Torah in America.

When Pinchas Aaron Bruder settled in New York, his daughter Tzurtel stayed behind in Poland. She was already married to my great-great-grandfather, Moshe Weberman, and Moshe’s father was adamantly opposed to his son emigrating to America. A few years later, when Moshe’s father passed away, Moshe and Tzurtel joined Pinchas Aaron on the Lower East Side.

Rav Moshe Weberman owned a deli on the Lower East Side. A very devout man, he purposely did not have chairs and tables in the store, as he didn’t want people to come in and eat without washing and bentching. In 1915, the Weberman’s daughter, Kate, my great-grandmother, married Mordechai Tzvi Dicker. Even though Mordechai Tzvi was European and his wife, Kate, was American, the family spoke English at home. A lot of the immigrants would mock them for not speaking Yiddish. Mordechai Tzvi used to say, “Me darf nisht redn Yiddish, me darf zayn Yiddish,” “We don’t have to speak Yiddish; we have to act Yiddish.” That’s a famous line that was passed down in the family.

Mordechai Tzvi owned a twine and paper store on Norfolk Street on the Lower East Side. [The business, MH Dicker,

The Bruder Patriarchs. From left: Pinchas Aaron Bruder, patriarch of the family; Moshe Weberman, his son-in-law; Tzurtel Bruder Weberman, wife of Moshe and daughter of Pinchas Aaron; and Bracha Bruder, wife of Pinchas Aaron and mother of Tzurtel. Courtesy of Surite Barkin

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recently closed.] The Webermans and the Dickers were active in bringing young people closer to Yiddishkeit; the Dickers ran an oneg every Shabbos to attract all the kids on the block, many of whom were not shomer Shabbos. They were active in Pirchei Agudath Israel of America, Zeirei Agudath Israel of America and the Young Israel movement.

My grandfather, Moshe Fensterheim (Mordechai Tzvi Dicker’s son-in-law), was one of the first talmidim to graduate from Torah Vodaath. When he finished high school, he wanted to work. His mother felt, which was quite rare in America in those days, that he would benefit from another year of learning. She promised him if he learned for another year in yeshivah, she would buy him a Shas from Europe, which by today’s standards probably cost thousands of dollars. My grandfather eventually became a mechanic, but that extra year of learning had a big impact on him. He received the promised Shas and kept it his entire life; he was even buried with it.

Almost thirty years ago there was a fiftieth yahrtzeit seudah for my great-great-grandfather Moshe Weberman. At that point in time a family tree was made, which had about 2,000 family members, of which around 1,800 were frum. There’s no question in my mind that the numbers today would be over 5,000, beli ayin hara. You’d be hard-pressed to find a community in the world where we don’t have relatives.

By Paul (Pinchas Aaron) Jacobs, great-great-grandson of Pinchas Aaron BruderBruder, Weberman, Fensterheim, Dicker, Wilhelm. I grew up hearing these names

In the late 1800s, only a fraction of American Jews were Orthodox; the Reform movement in America was officially organized in 1873. There were no yeshivot in those days; that was part of the spiritual risk of coming to the midbar (desert) of America. My p a t e r n a l g re a t-grandmother [Chana Fried, nee Bruder] as well as my grandmother [Kaila Jacobs, nee Fried] and their siblings had no formal Jewish education. The children were American raised and educated in

Yiddishkeit by their parents. It was only later, around 1890, that Etz Chaim Yeshiva, a cheder-type school for elementary age children was established on the Lower East Side; it

eventually evolved into Yeshiva University.

My father, Harold, graduated from one of the first classes of Torah Vodaath. [At the time, Torah Vodaath did not have a yeshivah gedolah] so after my father graduated, a rebbe from Torah Vodaath came over in the afternoons to teach my father and his brothers.

By the time my father’s sister Ruth, who was born in

1922, was ready for grade school, the nearest Jewish option was the Yeshivah of Crown Heights, which had been established in 1923. (Now in her nineties, Ruth is the last survivor in our family from that generation.)

After high school, the boys went on to college. There were two choices for college—City College in New York, which was free, or St. Johns University, a Catholic college in Williamsburg, for which one had to pay. The conundrum of the late 1920s was that Jews around the world, and particularly in America, were very sympathetic to the Soviet Union and were drawn to communism. Many of the movers and shakers in the communist movement were Jews. They saw it as a way out of the poverty and the discrimination of the Czarist regime. City College had a reputation of being a hotbed of communism and socialism.

My grandmother, Kaila, who was a very religious woman, said to my father, “Harold, if you go to City College, you may come out as a communist; if you go to St. Johns, you definitely will not come out as a goy.” He went to St. Johns.

My father, Harold, married Pearl Schraub and moved

to Crown Heights. Over the years, he was involved in different businesses. After WWII, he realized that with the soldiers coming home there would be a big boom in housing (the government subsidized housing for soldiers), so he started manufacturing kitchen cabinets. Eventually his cabinet business became the second-largest kitchen company in the US.

In his early forties, my father decided to devote the rest of his life to working for the klal. He began by focusing on the Sunday blue laws, which mandated that all stores be closed on Sundays. If you were shomer Shabbat, you had to close your shop on both Shabbat and Sunday, which presented huge financial challenges. My father succeeded in helping to change the law.

Harold M. Jacobs, father of Paul Jacobs and former president of the OU. Courtesy of Yeshiva University Archives, Harold M. Jacobs Papers

Rav Yaakov Kamenetsky once said about my grandfather: “Half of the Yiddishkeit in America came about

because of Binyamin Wilhelm”; Then he added: “Maybe all of it.”


Once he became involved in the political process, he joined the Madison Club, a Democratic Party branch that was widely regarded as the most powerful Democratic machine in the State of New York. He was the first Orthodox Jew to join that club and, in general, one of the first to be involved in politics. In fact, he was the one who introduced the political process to Rabbi Moshe Sherer of Agudath Israel of America; the two had been good friends from their early days in Williamsburg. In the 1940s and 50s, my father showed the world that a Jew wearing a yarmulke can interact with non-Jews, secular Jews and politicians at the highest level, while contributing to both the body politic and to the Jewish community.

In 1958, my father was invited to join the OU Board of Directors and was active in the OU for three decades, serving as vice president, president (1972-1978) and chairman of the board. He was considered to be the voice of Orthodox Judaism in the national Jewish organizations of that day, including the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council. His main interest, however, was ensuring that Jewish youth would not assimilate. He pushed for the growth of the OU’s highly successful youth group, NCSY. He mentored various lay leaders, as well as NCSYers, who are now prominent in Orthodox lay leadership. He was instrumental in setting up the OU Israel Center. [The Pearl and Harold Jacobs Zula Outreach Center in Yerushalayim—a drop-in center in Jerusalem for troubled Israeli teens—was dedicated in memory of my parents.] He also established Orthodox funeral standards for Jewish funeral homes throughout the country.

My father’s phone never stopped ringing with people requesting favors, whether it was getting someone a job, helping a yeshivah obtain a mortgage, getting someone admitted to a school, et cetera. Literally hundreds of people reached out to him. He just loved helping people.

Over the years, many people suggested we write a book about my father. This past year, which marked his twentieth yahrtzeit, we published his biography, entitled Building Orthodox Judaism in America: The Life and Legacy of Harold M. Jacobs, and distributed it at my grandson’s bar mitzvah (who is named after him). [A review of the book appears on the following page.]

The Cohn Family Baltimore, Maryland

Henry P. (Tzvi Pinchas) Cohn left Germany for America around 1847. In the States, Henry married his cousin

Fanny, who had been living in Virginia. Today, the Cohns are s ev en th-gen erat ion Americans and shomrei Torah and mitzvos.

By Bettie R. Mandelbaum (nee Cohn), great-granddaughter of Henry P. (Tzvi Pinchas) Cohn

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BUILDING ORTHODOX JUDAISM IN AMERICA: The Life and Legacy of Harold M. Jacobs

By Rafael Medoff304 pages

Reviewed by David Luchins

T he story is told of a visitor to the Netherlands who was given a lengthy

tour of that nation’s extensive system of dikes and asked, “How often does it flood around here?” When he was told “it hasn’t for the last fifty years,” he asked, “Then why do you need to spend so much time and money on these dikes if it doesn’t flood here anymore?”

Some readers may experience similar questions when picking up Rafael Medoff’s fascinating book Building Orthodox Judaism in America: The Life and Legacy of Harold M. Jacobs. “Why,” one might ask, “did Harold M. Jacobs spend so much time and exert so much effort for causes that seem so unnecessary to us?” The answer, of course, is that Harold Jacobs and a handful of intrepid, inspired individuals won these battles so decisively that our generation has the luxury of taking their accomplishments for granted.

To read Harold Jacobs’ life story is to read the astonishing story of twentieth-century American Orthodoxy, from a pitied anachronism to the most vibrant and fastest-growing segment of contemporary American Jewish life.

David Luchins, PhD, chair of the Political Science Department of Touro College, served on the OU Board during Harold Jacobs’ presidency.

Harold and his friends Moses I. Feuerstein, Harold H. Boxer, Dr. Bernard Lander, and, lehavdil bein chaim lechaim, Rabbi Joseph Karasick—still going strong in the leadership of the Orthodox Union well into his tenth decade—built the protective dikes and poured the institutional foundations that have helped create the unprecedented and unpredicted revival of Torah Judaism across North America.

Harold was a first. A member of the first class of Yeshiva Torah Vodaath (Brooklyn’s first yeshivah day school), a first-year camper at America’s first kosher overnight summer camp, the first outspoken, unmistakably Orthodox voice in the corridors of American political power in general and public higher education in particular (where he helped save the CUNY system as chairman of the CUNY Board of Trustees).

Harold came of age in an era that has been described as “fluid Orthodoxy,” in which the vast majority of the members of Orthodox synagogues were not personally Sabbath observant. His parents were the exception. His father, Max, was a proud (and quite successful) shomer Shabbat businessman and his mother, Kate (Kaila), was a pious woman and the primary force behind the construction of the first public mikvah in Brooklyn.

Who remembers the blue laws that forced Sabbath-observant places of business to be closed on Sunday as well? Ironically, the kosher butchers’ union was a major supporter of blue laws, because of an exemption clause that allowed butchers, and often only them, to do business on Sundays in New York State. After years of futile effort, it was Harold who forced future Assembly Speaker Stanley Steingut to agree to the repeal of this onerous legislation by challenging him in a Democratic primary and garnering so much support that a stunned Steingut agreed to switch his position in exchange for Harold dropping out of the race.

The reader of an “authorized biography” usually expects a lightly sourced, airbrushed version of history, in which the subject of the biography plays a larger-than-life role. If anything, this meticulously sourced and vigorously footnoted work

understates Harold Jacobs’ significant part in maintaining Black-Jewish relations during a very difficult time; his critical role in Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s initial 1976 Senate election (and how the senator cherished Harold’s advice and friendship), his vital assistance in securing Touro College’s New York State charter and, perhaps of most interest to readers of this magazine, his historic contribution as the only person to hold the top leadership positions in both the National Council of Young Israel and the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America (now known as the Orthodox Union).

Harold’s eight years as board chair and six years as president of the OU were among the most important in the organization’s history. Rabbi Karasick and Harold reframed and redirected the OU’s mission and mandate. NCSY was transformed from a tentative local-based organization into a continent-wide powerhouse. The OU established a presence in Israel via the World Conference of Synagogues and the OU Israel Center (now the Seymour J. Abrams Orthodox Union Jerusalem World Center). The first steps were taken to expand the role of women in the OU leadership with Harold appointing the first women directors in 1976 and making the first effort, more recently realized, to select women as officers. And the aging leadership of the OU was invigorated by a cadre of young leaders, many of whom were handpicked by Harold and remain active in the OU to this day. Several of these efforts were matters of considerable controversy at the time, as were Harold’s attempts to end the OU’s controversial participation in the Synagogue Council of America. There was considerable tension and dramatic confrontation.

Rafael Medoff does not pull any punches in reporting on these stormy debates and principled disagreements (albeit with a mistake or two in the dates and locations of key votes). This painstakingly re-searched and splendidly written book will help explain exactly who built those dikes and why we don’t worry that much any more about those floods. g

Books


My great-grandfather, Henry P. (Tzvi Pinchas) Cohn, was a Kohen. He left Germany because they had strict laws against Jews there, one of which imposed limitations on how many Jews in a family could get married. (This is why one of Yekke minhagim is that talleisim are worn by both single and married men; this way, German officials weren’t able to tell who was married and who wasn’t.) Before he left for America, Henry received a license to perform shechitah, since he was unsure if he would be able to obtain kosher meat in America.

When Henry first came to America and settled in Richmond, Virginia, he was a peddler. He married his cousin Fanny and in the middle of the Civil War, the couple moved to Baltimore. I assume they moved because it was easier to maintain an Orthodox life in Baltimore, which had attracted a relatively large number of Orthodox Jews. It was important to have other frum people to socialize with. Without a support system, one was likely to assimilate.

In 1863, during the Civil War, Henry paid a mercenary to fight in the war for him; the going price was a thousand dollars. In 1874, Henry traveled by ship back to Germany to visit his father, Simcha Katz (my great-grandfather changed the name to Cohn in America). The trip took about three weeks. On the ship he kept a diary in German and wrote letters to his family. I have the diary and the letters, which have been translated into English.

When he returned to Baltimore, he opened a small department store called The Favorite, which was closed on Shabbos. Anybody in Baltimore who wanted to keep Shabbos could get a job working there. The store would open on Motzaei Shabbos with lines of loyal customers waiting to enter.

While living in Richmond and in Baltimore, my great-grandfather, Henry P., wrote she’eilos to Rav Shmuel Salant in Yerushalayim and received written teshuvos, several of which we still have. The Cohns always stressed the importance of being close to a rav.

How did my great-grandparents stay frum in America, and not succumb to assimilation despite all of the challenges? They had backbones made of iron rods. The Torah was their guide and that was it; there was no other way. That’s how I was brought up. My mother told me that we were not to wear red because of a cherem of the Chasam Sofer. And that was final—the Cohns don’t wear red.

When I was a child, because most store-bought foods had no hashgachah, at home we wouldn’t eat anything [commercially processed]. We did everything ourselves, including grinding our own coffee beans. I didn’t know what candy was growing up because we couldn’t buy anything from the store. My family was stringent about the male adults only consuming cholov Yisrael. My mother would drive my grandfather Jacob to a farm every week and they would pasteurize the milk themselves and make cottage cheese. My grandparents, who lived around the corner from us when we were growing up, were known in Baltimore as the “Fruma Cohns.” As a little girl I used to watch my grandmother Rena kasher the chickens. Their

[spiritual] strength and commitment to [Judaism] were passed down through the generations.

By Zipora Blaivas, daughter of Bettie MandelbaumMy great-grandfather, Jacob Cohn, was one of nine children; Only three of those children ended up getting married, as there were a limited number of frum Jews to marry in America. They were proud German Jews whose dedication

Above: A young Jacob Cohn, son of the original Henry P. Cohn. One of nine children, he was one of the few to marry, as there was a dearth of frum Jews in the US at the time. Courtesy of Howard M. Cohn

Page 45: Simcha Katz, circa 1874, father of the original Henry P. Cohn. In 1874, Henry went back to visit his father, who had remained in Germany. Henry kept a diary and wrote many letters back to his family over the course of the trip. Courtesy of Howard M. Cohn



to Yiddishket precluded them from considering marrying out of the religion. When Jacob was in his upper twenties, he contracted a deadly illness. He made a neder that if Hashem healed him, he would get married and try to have a family. Baruch Hashem, Jacob recovered and married my great-grandmother, Rena (Rivka) Glass, who was also from a Jewish-German family.

In 1930, when my grandfather, Henry P. (Tzvi Pinchas) (named after his grandfather, the original family patriarch) got his first job, he told his boss that because of Shabbos he would leave early on Fridays. After a couple of weeks, his boss asked him, “How long are you going to do this leaving early on Friday thing?” His boss thought it was a passing phase. My grandfather answered, “As long as I’m alive.” Compromising on religion wasn’t an option. Rumor has it that he didn’t wear a yarmulke at work and because of this he didn’t eat while at work. He would eat in the morning before he left and when he returned home. When my grandfather came home with his first paycheck, he put aside some of the money in a little box designated

for ma’aser and told my grandmother, “This money does not belong to us.”

The Siegel Family Baltimore, Maryland

In the 1890s, Chaim and Sora Feiga Siegel left a life of poverty and anti-Semitism in Ponevezh, Lithuania, for the promise of a better future in America. Their first stop was Boston, Massachusetts. Upon hearing that Baltimore was in those days the “Yerushalayim of America,” they promptly headed south. The Siegel descendants were at the forefront of building the Torah infrastructure in Baltimore’s Jewish community. Chaim and Sora Feiga raised eight children, almost all of whom who not only remained true to Torah and mitzvot, but also influenced generations to do the same.

By Rabbi Elchonon Oberstein (husband of Feigi, the daughter of Chester Siegel). The author would like to thank Gerald Shavrick, who provided much of the information about his uncles Morris and Chester Siegel.

A Judaica shop on Broome Street, New York, 1942. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division


My wife’s paternal grandparents, Chaim and Sora Feiga Siegel, moved to Baltimore in 1900. The couple named their second American-born son after Chaim’s father, Yechezkel. But the midwife refused to put Yechezkel on his birth certificate. She said she would not burden an American boy with such a foreign name. One of his sisters solved the dilemma. A street in East Baltimore that she crossed on the way home from school was called Chester Street. It sounded a little like “Chezkel,” so that is how he got the name.

The poverty in East Baltimore, where most of the Jews lived at the time, was great; Chaim eked out a living selling chickens—he was a shochet and a butcher. Later, he started a hosiery company called the Hyman Siegel Hoisery Company. When he passed away in 1935, my wife’s father, Chester, and her uncle Morris took over the business.

Even though the level of shemirat hamitzvot in Baltimore was pretty high in those days, shemirat Shabbat was a constant struggle. The Siegels were determined to adhere to strict observance even if all around them others were abandoning Shabbat observance. Little Chester went to public school in the day and the Hebrew Parochial School after school. The Hebrew Parochial School, later named Talmudical Academy (TA), opened in 1917 with six students in a second-floor apartment. It was the third Jewish day school in the United States and the only one outside of

New York City. Until TA opened, the Siegel children went to public school and were taught limudei kodesh privately. In 1918, Baltimore was home to some 65,000 Jews. However, Chester, his brothers and sisters and the other frum boys and girls in East Baltimore were distressed to see how many of their contemporaries were leaving Torah observance. They founded a club called the Adas Bnei Israel. It was a place where their friends got together for shiurim and socializing. Morris led the youth groups, which included some members who later became roshei yeshivah, such as Rabbi Aharon Feldman, Rabbi Avigdor Miller, zt”l and Rabbi Mordechai Gifter, zt”l. The Siegels organized the Adas to encourage other young people to keep Shabbat. They wore pins on their lapels that read: “Judaism in general; Shabbat in particular.” During the Depression years, under the leadership of Morris, the Adas organized a job bureau so that people could get jobs that wouldn’t require them to work on Shabbat.

Adas Bnei Israel eventually became a shul in East Baltimore around 1920. My wife’s father gave shiurim in the shul. It is still a functioning shul in Baltimore, and today, the rabbi of the shul is Rabbi Shlomo Naiman, a descendant of Chaim Siegel.

Chester met his future wife, Rosalyn Weinstein, at the Adas. A teenager, she was visiting from Altoona, Pennsylvania and was overwhelmed to see so many frum young people. They were married outside of the Adas.

Sora Feiga Siegel, matriarch. Courtesy of the Oberstein and Shavrick families


Listen to Rabbi Elchonon Oberstein discuss how the Siegels built the Orthodox community of Baltimore at www.ou.org/life/community/savitsky_oberstein/.


The couple was childless for eighteen years before Rosalyn became pregnant. The Ladies Auxiliary of Ner Israel Rabbinical College threw her a baby shower. Years later, the mashgiach of Ner Israel, Rav Dovid Kronglass, zt”l, told me that he

couldn’t understand this strange American minhag to give a woman a shower before she gave birth. Unfortunately, when Rosalyn went into the hospital to have a C-section, the nurse gave her medicine intended for another patient and it killed the fetus.

Nothing shows the righteousness of this couple more than that they accepted the decree with emunah shleimah (complete faith). Not long afterward, the Siegels were blessed with two children, my wife, Feigi, and subsequently, her brother, Chaim.

Chester and Rosalyn were exemplars of the kind of ba’alei batim who built Baltimore and laid the foundations of everything we have today. Generations of Baltimoreans have told me over the years how much of their Yiddishkeit they owe to the Siegel family. Thousands of frum Jews exist today because their great-grandparents were influenced by the Adas way back in the olden days in East Baltimore.

There’s a cemetery on the outskirts of Baltimore where most of the Siegel relatives who have passed on are buried. There are many hundreds of descendants in the US, Israel and Canada who live their lives according to the values exemplified by Chaim and Sora Feiga Siegel. g

. . . the midwife refused to put Yechezkel on his birth certificate. She said she

would not burden an American boy with such a foreign name.

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Three generations of the Siegel family, builders of Baltimore’s Orthodox Jewish community. Top, from left: Morris, Chester and Daniel Siegel. Morris and Chester were particularly active in the leadership of the Adas Bnei Israel club (later shul). Middle: The five Siegel daughters, Lillian, Anna, Evelyn, Lena, and Rose. Bottom: Chaim Siegel, patriarch, and his wife, Sora Feiga, with their grandson Gerald Semer, son of their daughter Evelyn (standing directly above her son). Courtesy of the Oberstein and Shavrick families

For information and to apply contact Tina Atherall at 212.463.0400 ext. 5630 or [email protected] information and to apply contact Tina Atherall at 212.463.0400 ext. 5630 or [email protected]

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Where Knowledge and Values Meet


Dean Steven Huberman, Ph.D.


Dr. Rafael Medoff is founding director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in Washington, DC, and author of fourteen books about Jewish history, Zionism and the Holocaust, including the Historical Dictionary of Zionism (with Chaim I. Waxman [2008]).

Imagine an America in which all stores are closed on Sundays, few packaged foods bear kosher certification and the vast majority of Orthodox Jewish children

attend public school, where they are compelled to sing Christmas songs.

This may seem inconceivable to Orthodox Jews in today’s America, but it was exactly the situation that confronted the OU in its earliest days.

In 1898, twelve North American Orthodox synagogues came together to establish the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of the United States and Canada and to “protest against the declarations of Reform rabbis not in accord with our Torah,” and for the “defense of Orthodox Judaism whenever occasions arise in civic and social matters.”

The prominent mention of Reform rabbis in the OU’s mission statement reflects the profound concern among American Orthodox Jews as they watched the steady advance of Reform Judaism during the final decades of the nineteenth century. That era saw the US Reform movement establish a rabbinical seminary, a congregational arm and a rabbinical association. Along with them came the notorious treif banquet at which conspicuously non-kosher food was served to the first graduating class of American Reform rabbis—and the promulgation of the Pittsburgh Platform, the movement’s formal and radical break from traditional Judaism.

As the new century dawned, the Reform movement was marching forward, while the founders of the OU were playing catch-up.

America is a Treif Land Orthodoxy in America was weak and growing weaker. To begin with, the immigrants coming from Eastern Europe tended to be the least-observant segment of their native communities; they were the ones who set out for the New World in defiance of rabbis who warned that—as the Ridbaz (Rabbi David Willowski) famously put it—“America is a treif land.” They came to a country where there was no central kashrut supervision, no network of day schools—very little of the infrastructure needed to sustain Orthodox life. Outside of New York City, the situation was even bleaker.

The general temper of the times was the “melting pot”

philosophy of shedding Old World ways. The so-called “blue laws,” barring most businesses from opening on Sundays, put tremendous pressure on Jewish shopkeepers to open their doors on Shabbat in order to stay afloat. Discrimination against Jews in employment and housing, as well as some universities’ quotas on the admission of Jewish students, increased the pressure to assimilate.

Orthodox rabbis in the United States were deeply divided over how to respond to this situation. Professor Jeffrey S. Gurock, the leading historian of American Orthodox Judaism, describes it as a split between “resisters” and “accommodators.”

Resisters were immigrants from Eastern Europe who longed to recreate, on American soil, the world they left behind. They opposed using English in sermons, saw no need to improve the aesthetics of synagogues, and resented the idea of adding secular studies to yeshivah curricula. Their organization, the Agudath Ha-Rabbonim, urged strict separation from American life and from non-observant Jews.

The accommodators, by contrast, were born or at least raised in America, and recognized that Orthodox Judaism could not survive in the United States unless adjustments were made, within halachic parameters, to address the realities of life in the New World. Rabbis such as Henry Pereira Mendes and Bernard Drachman, and lay leaders such as Albert Lucas and Lewis Dembitz (uncle of future Supreme Court justice Louis D. Brandeis) founded the OU out of a conviction that a modernized Orthodoxy could survive, and even thrive, in America. Thus they set out with a dual mission: to compete with Reform Judaism for the spiritual allegiance of American Jews, and to fight for the religious rights of Jews in the wider world.

Jewish Children & Christmas HymnsThe OU’s early campaigns included obtaining permission for Jewish soldiers in the Spanish-American War to receive furloughs for yom tov; seeking alternative days for exams for the bar and other state licensing that were scheduled on Saturdays; opposing attempts by animal rights groups to restrict shechitah; enabling New York City municipal employees to receive leaves of absence for yom tov; and helping Sabbath observers find jobs via the OU’s employment bureau.

THE ORTHODOX UNION’S EARLY YEARS:Fighting for Jewish Rights in a Very Different America

By Rafael Medoff


Some of the OU’s battles resulted in speedy victories. In 1906, controversy erupted over public school teachers in New York City compelling Jewish pupils to take part in Christmas-related activities. Albert Lucas, secretary of the OU, appealed to the Board of Education to eliminate such practices as forcing children to sing Christmas hymns. The chairman of the Board’s Elementary School Committee condemned Lucas as an “agitator” and insisted the OU activist “does not have the support of the more intelligent Jews of this city.” He was mistaken. Thousands of Jewish parents heeded Lucas’s call for a city-wide one-day strike by Jewish students, which quickly resulted in a Board of Education directive to teachers to refrain from explicitly sectarian programming.

Other fights, however, would rage for decades. Attempts to eliminate blue laws, for example, meant going up against a deeply entrenched American tradition, dating

back to the era of the Puritans. Years of lobbying by the OU, joined at times by some non-Orthodox groups, made serious headway only as society at large gradually secularized and accepted a more comprehensive application of church-state separation. In New York City, the blue laws were not abolished until 1963, and only two years later in the rest of the state.

All of these OU efforts involved matters of high principle, whether equality under the law, freedom of religion, or the separation of church and state. But just as importantly, they served the practical purpose of making it more feasible for American Jews to observe Jewish religious law.

The same may be said of the OU’s pioneering efforts in outreach. While “resisters” angrily condemned the rampant assimilation among younger Jews, “accommodators” looked for ways, within halachah, to make Shabbat observance a more realistic option.

In 1900, the Jewish Endeavor Society, functioning as the de facto youth division of the OU, began establishing “young people’s synagogues” that appealed to the younger

generation by adding English-language sermons and eliminating distasteful practices such as schnoddering (publicly announcing the donation pledged by someone called up to the Torah). The rabbis who undertook these initiatives were Rabbi Drachman’s students. Many of them would later go on to establish important Modern Orthodox, OU-affiliated synagogues of their own. Especially notable was the Jewish Endeavorers’ transformation of Shabbat Minchah into the week’s major service. Recognizing that many of their congregants worked on Saturdays until the late afternoon, the Endeavorers decided to create as substantial a Shabbat experience as possible within this reality. This, they believed, was the only hope “to recall indifferent Jewry back to their ancestral faith.” It was an accommodation to the six-day American work week, to be sure, but was still within the confines of halachah.

New Role For Orthodox WomenThe passage of restrictive immigration laws in the early 1920s profoundly altered the makeup of the American Jewish community. The waves of East European immigrants that had reshaped US Jewry in the late 1800s and early 1900s were now almost entirely blocked out. Without the possibility of an infusion of tradition-minded newcomers, the fight to sustain Orthodoxy in America now became a struggle for the allegiance of the second generation, the children of those who had arrived in the early 1900s.

This meant that the OU had to be attuned to the changes going on in the surrounding society—changes that were profoundly influencing young American Jews along

Left: Vintage Ads from Jewish Life, the predecessor to Jewish Action.

Listen to Dr. Rafael Medoff discuss the OU’s early years at www.ou.org/life/history/savitsky_medoff/.

Below: A 1956 ad for a convention of the OU Women’s Branch.


with the rest of the public. One was the evolving status of women.

The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, granting women the right to vote, was adopted in 1920. Several parallel developments dramatically affected women’s lives. The amount of time devoted to housekeeping was significantly reduced by the invention of home appliances. The proliferation of canned and frozen foods, and the popularization of home refrigerators greatly simplified meal preparation. The mass marketing of beauty products and a new emphasis on women’s fashion likewise pointed to women’s increased freedom and self-awareness.

These changes were not lost on America’s Orthodox Jewish women. During this period, some Modern Orthodox synagogues agreed to grant women the status of full members, instead of counting them as part of their husbands’ membership, as had been the customary practice until then. Several shuls even began permitting women to serve on their board of directors. The Orthodox Union, for its part, in 1923 established its Women’s Branch, which assumed the task of overseeing the sisterhoods in hundreds of Orthodox synagogues nationwide. The sisterhoods were the vehicle for shuls’ female members to organize social and educational activities—sometimes with an important fundraising component—that were crucial to sustaining the synagogue as a center of Jewish communal life.

T h e f o u n d e r a n d pioneering leader of the OU Women’s Branch was Rebecca (Betty) Goldstein, who was in many ways the role model for the modern American Orthodox rebbetzin. The daughter of OU leader Harry Fischel, Betty earned both a BA at Barnard and a teacher’s d iploma from the Teachers Institute of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, which at the time was considered Modern Orthodox; when JTS

later moved away from Orthodoxy, she helped found the Hebrew Teacher’s Training School for Girls as an Orthodox alternative to JTS.

Rabbi Goldstein’s West Side Institutional Synagogue was the model of an early OU synagogue, focusing on the needs and interests of young people and bringing modern programming and decorum to synagogue life while remaining within the bounds of halachah.

As the Women’s Branch counseled local sisterhoods on programming and provided them with the administrative

know-how to function effectively, it “grew to represent an Orthodox female constituency and one, moreover, that sought to define the Orthodox Jewish experience from a woman’s perspective,” historian Jenna Weissman Joselit noted in her landmark study, New York’s Jewish Jews. By helping women play a significant role in Jewish communal and organizational life, the OU paved the way not only for w o m e n ’ s b o a r d membership to become standard practice, but also for women eventually to become the presidents of some mainstream American Orthodox synagogues.

The OU women also played a crucial role in education. At a time when Jewish schooling for girls was rare, the Women’s Branch stepped in to provide much-needed resources. Pamphlets produced by the Women’s Branch provided guidance on women’s ritual obligations and especially on kashrut, the key to a spiritually and physically healthy Jewish home. A series of popular kosher cookbooks reinforced these themes while supplying practical advice that made keeping kosher more attractive.

This growing role of women in American Orthodox life was to a significant extent responsible for launching the area of activity for which OU is best known: kosher certification of food products. To increase the variety of food products available to the women whom they were urging to keep kosher, Women’s Branch representatives in the mid and late 1920s began personally inspecting food-manufacturing plants and pressing the OU rabbinical leadership to expand its kashrut supervision efforts. The fact that Rabbi Goldstein was president of OU during that same period—from 1924 to 1933—facilitated the close correlation between the kashrut activities of the Women’s Branch under Rebbetzin Goldstein and the expansion of the certification work of the OU under her husband’s leadership.

The appearance of the OU seal of approval on a growing number of products, and the excitement in the Orthodox community that greeted the announcement of each new kosher-certified delicacy, marked a turning point in the building of a viable Orthodoxy in America. Although today we might not agree that the certification of a particular brand of ice cream was “an historic event for the Jews of America,” as its advertisement in the magazine Orthodox Union proclaimed in 1935, it is clear that the initiatives taken by the OU in its early years to make Orthodox practice feasible and attractive provided the foundation for the lifestyle that Orthodox Jews enjoy in America today. g

Right: Founder and pioneering leader of the OU Women’s Branch Rebecca (Betty) Goldstein. Above: Betty’s husband, Rabbi Herbert Goldstein, rabbi of the West Side Institutional Synagogue and OU president from 1924 to 1933. Courtesy of Aaron Reichel

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Review Essay

Rabbi Shlomo Riskin has a remarkable record of achievement. His ability to inspire and to evoke the deepest emotions combined with an acute intellect, organizational talent and creative vision

have made him a unique, even historic figure. Two of his recent books embody different elements of this constel-

lation of qualities. Listening to God presents occasionally embellished accounts of his experiences through the years and is often moving to a degree that cannot readily be captured in words. I feel a special sense of gratitude for this work. Four years ago, I was seriously ill for several months and had great difficulty concentrating. There were only two books that I found sufficiently engaging to overcome this debilitating state. One was Mevakshei Panecha, Rabbi Haim Sabato’s record of his conversations with Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, zt”l; the other was Listening to God.

The Living Tree reflects the intellectual and ideological dimension of Rabbi Riskin, and it demands more critical assessment. This is a collection of essays on a range of topics that embrace many of the quintessential concerns engaging Modern Orthodoxy: secular learning; dissent and pluralism in halachah; authority versus autonomy; ap-proaches to Biblical personalities; heretics and heresy; women as halachic scholars and judges; agunot; the State of Israel and the process of Redemption; the Jewish mission to the world; Jewish-Christian

interaction and dialogue. For no reason that I can fathom, the publisher fails to provide the dates and venues of any of these essays. This is no small impediment to gaining a picture of the development of the author’s thought, the currency of some of his positions, and the degree to which his arguments are orig-inal or derivative without engaging in a challenging and time-consuming research effort.

Needless to say, I cannot address the full range and richness of Rabbi Riskin’s discussions in this review. With respect to many of these issues, he presents a position characteristic of mainstream Modern Orthodoxy—or Orthodoxy tout court—with learning and clarity. In dealing with controversial matters, he often proffers arguments that reflect a command of the relevant texts and merit respect even from those who reject his position. Thus, the weight of halachic opinion militates against the appointment of women judges, but Rabbi Riskin, who directs a program that trains women for such positions, marshals the arguments for the minority view in a largely unexceptionable fashion. The wisdom of acting on this view is a separate and serious question.

The most radical element in that essay is an assertion—based on Rabbi Riskin’s understanding of a single sentence in Rabbi


Manoach’s commentary to Maimonides’s code—that women today who do not bear exclusive responsibility for running their household are obligated to perform time-bound com-mandments (pp. 122-123). I would be very surprised if Rabbi Riskin really rules in accordance with this position, and if he does not, the presentation in the book cries out for qualification.

His proposal for a solution to the tragedy of the agunah displays considerable learning as well as reasoned ar-guments that deserve attention. Rabbi Riskin wrote an

entire book setting forth and defending this proposal, which urges that rabbinic courts resort to the extreme option of annulling marriages (hafka’at kiddushin) in cases of prolonged, stubborn recalcitrance. He is well aware that even authorities who entertain this possibility in theory are unwilling to apply it except in the most dire circumstances such as “times of persecution and great slaughter” (p. 183, citing Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Auerbach). Rabbi Riskin maintains that the number of agunot has reached the point where we face an analogous emergency. For Rabbi Auerbach and all major decisors, many of whom reject this approach in principle, concern that the marital bond and its sanctity will be devalued by a policy of annulment requires maintaining a higher bar, and in this case

Dr. David Berger is dean and Ruth and I. Lewis Gordon professor of Jewish history at the Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies of Yeshiva University.

Maggid BooksNew Milford, Connecticut & Jerusalem2014 • 384 pages Reviewed by David Berger

THE LIVING TREE: STUDIES IN MODERN ORTHODOXYBy Rabbi Shlomo Riskin


Rabbi Riskin understands that he cannot act on his proposal.In one instance, his zeal to help agunot leads him to make an

argument that appears incoherent. He asserts that a growing number of Israeli couples, fearful of iggun, opt for marriage with halachically invalid ceremonies or with no ceremony at all, and this will “more likely lead to mamzerut and adultery than a rare hafka’at kiddushin” (p. 189). Since it is precisely a valid marriage that can later lead to those consequences, I am unable to make sense of this argument.

In some other areas where Rabbi Riskin advocates a liberal stance, he nonetheless tempers it with a conservative caveat. Thus, he is willing to go very far indeed in giving women posi-tions of religious leadership, including the title of morat hora’ah, but he stops short of using the term rabbi because there are communities where rabbis are expected to lead services or read the Torah (p. 132). He permits an individual to modify the bless-ing “You have not made me a woman” in accordance with a formula that he proposes, but would not allow this in public prayer without the endorsement of leading halachic authorities (pp. 158-159). He endorses the value of dissent and pluralism in halachah but makes the extremely important point that “hal-akhic legitimacy can only be accorded to those who accept upon themselves the axioms upon which the halakhic system is based,” which he describes as “submission to a higher autonomous system” and acceptance of “an external and objective halakha.”

Let us now turn to three controversial issues with significant implications. In the last generation or two, the proper approach to the great figures in the Bible has triggered strong disagree-ments among Orthodox thinkers and educators both in Israel and the Diaspora. Should these figures be seen as virtually perfect or should imperfections be acknowledged? Rabbi Riskin vigorously argues for the second position, asserting that one should recognize the legitimacy of following peshat, which he calls “literal interpretation.” It is of considerable interest that he does not automatically choose interpretations critical of these heroes. Thus, in other essays, he regards Jacob and Re-becca’s deception of Isaac favorably, despite the fact that it is an almost paradigmatic example for those who maintain that peshat sometimes indicates that the Torah is critical of patri-archal behavior.

Nonetheless, he maintains a critical stance in several cases where the plain meaning of the text provides little support for his position or even militates against it. Thus, he defends the suggestion, which has become widespread in certain circles, that Abraham should have argued with God about the akeidah

and hence failed the test (p. 97). He goes on to validate other readings as well, but insists that this one is entirely legitimate. It is telling that despite his placing the discussion within the context of literal interpretation, he does not even allude to the verse that makes this understanding problematic, to wit, the reward promised to Abraham “because you have obeyed Me.”

Similarly, he defends his proposal that Sarah left Abraham and went to Hebron, where she died, because she opposed her husband’s actions at the akeidah. This is based entirely on the premise that the Torah’s near-juxtaposition of Sarah’s death in Hebron to the akeidah means that it took place immediately thereafter, though even on this assumption we have nothing resembling actual evidence for Rabbi Riskin’s conjecture. This proposal, moreover, requires the affirmation—endorsed of course by a midrash—that Isaac was thirty-seven years old at the akeidah, which probably stands in tension with our instincts regarding peshat. My own view is that we must sometimes entertain the possibility, even likelihood, of moral failings by Biblical heroes, but this should not be our first or even our second instinct. We should endorse such a conclusion only if we believe that the plain meaning of the text strongly supports it. I cannot elaborate here, but too many Orthodox Jews have lost sight of this point.

In another essay (pp. 107-116), Rabbi Riskin poses the ques-tion “Who’s an Apikoros?” and essentially responds, “No one.” The argument is that it is wrong to identify anyone

as an apikoros because it is difficult to define what that is. Mai-monides himself was accused of heresy; the Talmud defines apikoros by actions like scorning a scholar, but not by the cri-terion of unacceptable beliefs; the Chazon Ish said that no one today should be subject to the treatment inflicted on a heretic; and contemporary theological deviationists are generally the product of their education and environment. It is also pragmat-ically self-defeating to condemn rather than build.

Much of this is, no doubt, correct, but some of it is misleading. The position that the category of apikoros should be defined by actions and not beliefs sidesteps the other categories listed in the relevant mishnah (which, to be sure, is quoted in full) that exclude one from the World to Come on the basis of beliefs. While there is much to be said for a tolerant attitude toward contemporary adherents of heretical beliefs, there is great dan-ger in blurring or erasing the category of heresy itself. This essay does not quite do this, but it comes perilously close. The issue is of acute importance at this time, when we are witness to an assault on the position that beliefs matter at all1 and when ad-herents of positions that are heretical by any historic measure are welcomed, especially in the Dati Leumi community in Israel, as respected Orthodox figures. A religion, certainly an Orthodox version of a religion, requires boundaries.

Rabbi Riskin, like many Religious Zionists, attributes redemp-tive significance to the State of Israel, but he goes further than most. His very definition of Modern Orthodoxy includes our obligation “to initiate redemption” (p. xiii). The establishment of the State, he says, is a key step in a larger Jewish mission.

Immediately before turning to the obligation to “engage the world,” Rabbi Riskin argues that Israel must take an “inclusiv-ist” position with respect to the conversion of people of Jewish

Rabbi Riskin poses the question “Who’s an

Apikoros?” and essentially responds, “No one.”


descent who are not halachically Jewish (p. 213). Here the brief discussion is beset by considerable tension. The point of Rabbi Riskin’s proposal is unquestionably to facilitate the conversion of Israeli adults from the former Soviet Union who are not prepared to accept the yoke of the commandments without reservations. He maintains, explicitly drawing upon Rabbi Haim Amsalem’s Zera Yisrael, that they do not have to embrace the full gamut of observance. He goes on to say that their conversion requires emphasis on “Jewish values and traditions—Sabbath, festivals and kashrut—rather than details of our prayer ritual” (p. 213). The surprising contrast with prayer ritual can create the impression that their observance of the Sabbath and kashrut does have to meet Orthodox standards, but this cannot be what Rabbi Riskin means, for the manifest reason that the people he is targeting are unprepared to accept such an obligation. He undoubtedly requires a lesser level of observance, but he is hesitant to say this with full clarity. Moreover, his appeal in this context to Rabbi Joseph Ber Soloveitchik’s covenantal categories of fate and destiny, which these converts join by their willingness to live in Israel and serve in the IDF, ignores compelling evidence that Rabbi Soloveitchik would have rejected a lenient position on the convert’s acceptance of the commandments.2

As to the larger Jewish mission, Rabbi Riskin provides am-bitious essays on attitudes toward Christianity and dialogue with Christians that are provocative and problematic. He asserts that avodah zarah has been and presumably should be defined in terms of the immoral behavior of ancient pagans, thus de-nuding the definition of theological content (p. 288). He main-tains that all rabbinic authorities in medieval Ashkenaz as well as Rabbi Yosef Karo “considered Trinitarian Christianity to be illegitimate theology but ruled that Christians are not idolaters” (p. 307). “The overwhelming majority of Middle Age decisors . . . did not believe Christianity to be idolatry for the Christians” (p. 328). At the same time, without advocating a full missionary enterprise, he perceives an obligation to persuade receptive Christians to recognize the truth of the Jewish faith.

I have elsewhere indicated that I would very much like to embrace the possibility—suggested by Rabbi Isaac Her-zog—that only the immoral paganism of old must be re-

moved from the Land of Israel, and some aspects of the much-discussed, extremely liberal position of the Meiri (noted by Rabbi Riskin on p. 307) can and should be mobilized in governing our relationship to Christians and to non-Jews in general. Nonetheless, it is deeply objectionable to blur, trivial-ize and even erase the theological dimension of avodah zarah, which is the most grievous theological sin in Judaism. Medie-val Jews did not give their lives to avoid an “illegitimate theol-

ogy,” and it is not at all the case that the majority, let alone the overwhelming majority, of medieval decisors did not believe Christianity to be avodah zarah for (born) Christians, though many modern ones did take this position. From my perspective, Christianity can best be characterized as avodah zarah in a monotheistic mode, and it is of great importance to recognize that although it is indeed avodah zarah, certainly for Jews, there is a chasm separating it from paganism.3

Rabbi Riskin’s advocacy of theological interaction with Chris-tians has led him to a re-evaluation of Rabbi Soloveitchik’s opposition to interfaith theological dialogue expressed in the celebrated essay “Confrontation” (pp. 313-339). Essentially, he argues that Rabbi Soloveitchik was opposed to theological di-alogue only under conditions that no longer apply given the changed attitude toward Judaism among Catholics, evangelicals and many mainstream Protestants. I responded at length to the Hebrew version of this essay.4 In my view, Rabbi Riskin’s argu-ment is based on a tendentious and indefensible reading of “Confrontation” and is refuted by a simple fact. Rabbi Solove-itchik provided guidance to the RCA and OU with respect to interfaith dialogue even after the bulk of the changes to which Rabbi Riskin refers had already taken place. This guidance decidedly followed the principles set forth in “Confrontation.”

I am not prepared to say that this ends the discussion. Rabbi Riskin is not precluded from maintaining that the acute chal-lenges facing Israel require cultivating Christian supporters even through the means of theological interaction, but this argument should be made without turning Rabbi Soloveitchik into an unwilling ally.

Finally, I note briefly that a work devoted to Modern Ortho-doxy should maintain standards of historical and linguistic scholarship that would pass muster in the academy. In too many instances, Rabbi Riskin makes assertions that do not come close to passing this test. Here is one example in each of these cate-gories. 1) To resolve a difficulty in Maimonides’s code, he sug-gests that “those who lived in Israel in [Maimonides’s] day were all halakhic sages” (p. 241). 2) He suggests that the four-letter name of God (Y-H-V-H), ahavah (love), and the Aramaic hav (give), which in point of fact have three different roots, share the same basic meaning and are linguistically connected (p. 65). One should at least consult experts before committing such speculations to writing.

For all its drawbacks, this is a stimulating work on issues of great moment by an influential leader and thinker whose views deserve our sustained attention. gNotes1. See Menachem Kellner, Must a Jew Believe Anything? (London and Port-

land, Oregon, 1999), soon to appear in Hebrew, and my review essay in Tra-dition 33:4 (1999): 81-89. Kellner responded to the review—in my opinion unpersuasively—in an afterword to the second edition (2006).

2. For Rabbi Soloveitchik’s powerful evocation of the commitment entailed by conversion, see Al Ha-Teshuvah (Jerusalem, 1975), pp. 136-137.

3. I expressed the views noted in this paragraph in “Jews, Gentiles, and the Modern Egalitarian Ethos: Some Tentative Thoughts,” in the Orthodox Forum volume Formulating Responses in an Egalitarian Age, ed. by Marc Stern (Lanham, MD, 2005), pp. 83-108.

4. “Emunah bi-Reshut ha-Yahid,” Makor Rishon: Musaf Shabbat, Nov. 16, 2012. The easiest way to access this article is through a Hebrew Google search under emunah bi-reshut ha-yahid.

it is deeply objectionable to blur, trivialize and even erase the theological dimension of avodah zarah, which is the most grievous theological sin in Judaism.

T hursday night, March 6th, 2008, Rosh Chodesh Adar Bet 5768: Around eight pm, while my husband Baruch, a student at Yeshivat Mercaz HaRav, and I are enjoying a

relaxing supper, a man from the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Jabel Mukaber, wearing a black stocking cap and carrying a cardboard TV box, climbs the five steps from the sidewalk to the courtyard of Mercaz HaRav. He strides forward and rests the box on a stone ledge. Spotting three teenage boys mulling around the dormitory entrance, he reaches into the box and draws out a Kalashnikov rifle.

In the middle of supper, our phone rings. It’s my mother-in-law. “What?” Baruch sounds confused. “No, we didn’t hear the news.” He hangs up the phone and switches on the radio. “There was a terror attack in the yeshivah,” he whispers.

A terrorist walked into the yeshivah’s library, where students were studying Gemara, and sprayed the room with bullets. He killed eight boys and wounded eleven others. Twenty minutes after the shooting began, an off-duty soldier leaped across the street, joining an armed student, who crept out of the main study hall; together they shot and killed the terrorist. It is unclear whether there is a second gunman elsewhere in the yeshivah. Students in the dormitory are being evacuated to homes of married students in the neighborhood.

As I listen to the news, I feel chills. The shock is accompanied by denial. It can’t be. My husband was just in yeshivah an hour ago! This type of thing happens in the news, to other people. This can’t be happening to me.

“I’m going back,” Baruch announces. “You’re what?” I shout. There could be another gunman or

a ticking bomb waiting for the police and paramedics who respond to the shooting.

“I need to be there. I need to be with my friends.” From his perspective, this is natural. He was just there. His friends who were there are traumatized. They are all supporting each other,

and he feels like he needs to do something. “No, Baruch, don’t leave me alone!” I am frightened and

clingy, and the pregnancy hormones just intensify these feelings. I can’t bear to picture my husband walking into a room full of blood, tears, broken glass and bullet casings. I also don’t want to spend the night alone with my fear. I have no family in Israel and no friends in the neighborhood. Baruch is the one who just missed a brush with death, but I am the one in tears. He sits back down beside me. He won’t leave me crying. He comforts me, though I should be comforting him tonight.

A neighbor invites us to watch the news on TV. Leaning forward on the old mustard yellow couch, we are riveted to the screen. We are interrupted only by friends and family calling to check on us. “Thank God,” I repeat over and over. “Baruch was home.” My husband could have been there, but he wasn’t. Sirens wail and red lights flash into the dark night before the anchorman on the screen, punctuated by scenes of blood splattered on the tile floor of the library. As my husband points out friends and rabbis being interviewed or pacing the sidewalk, I silently thank God for keeping him alive. I thank Baruch aloud for staying home.

More than just a home, a yeshivah is a sanctuary. And we expect people learning Torah to receive an extra layer of Divine protection. Tonight is Rosh Chodesh Adar, a lucky month for the Jewish people, a month when we are saved from our enemies. This is not a time to mourn.

Later, while Baruch tosses and turns in bed, I close my eyes and think how despite tonight’s attack, I cannot picture myself living anywhere but Israel. When I moved here alone after high school, towards the end of the Second Intifada, I knew that I could be exposing myself and my future family to terrorism, but I still chose to live in the land the Jewish people have been praying to return to for thousands of years. With

Miriam Burstein is a teacher and freelance writer living in Jerusalem.

By Miriam Burstein

R EMEMB E R I NG

On the Eighth Anniversary of the Mercaz HaRav Massacre

Mourners carry the body of one of the students killed in the terror shooting attack at the Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva in Jerusalem.

MASSACRETHE MERCAZ

Israel


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teenage courage, I came in spite of the danger. Tonight, with the determination of a mature adult, I choose to stay, to remain connected to my people and our land.

By morning, I am calm enough to let Baruch go back to Mercaz HaRav for the funeral. I don’t know any of the dead personally, and relying on the custom of pregnant women not attending funerals, I listen to the funeral on the radio instead. I don’t want to see eight young men buried with their blood-soaked holy books. As it’s a Friday and Rosh Chodesh Adar, there are no lengthy eulogies. I punch my challah dough with all my strength, releasing pain, sorrow and anger, until my muscles feel weak and I sink into a chair, sobbing. I separate a small piece of dough to burn, hoping that this mitzvah will be a merit for the souls of Avraham David, Ro’i, Neria, Yonatan, Yochai, Segev, Yonadav and Doron.

The week following the funeral, I hardly recognize my normally cheerful husband. During the day, Baruch joins groups of friends comforting mourners. At night, he goes to sleep early. One evening, during supper, I try to break through to him.

“Did you know them?” I ask.“I knew all of them by face, but only three learned in Mercaz

HaRav. The other five were in Yashlatz, the high school connected to the yeshivah.”

“Were you friends with them?” I probe, hesitantly.“One.” Baruch pushes the food around his plate. “Doron

Mehereta. He was twenty-six. He walked hundreds of kilometers through Ethiopia to come to Israel with his parents when he was just ten years old. Two of his brothers died on that journey. He was a good friend.”

“Some of my other friends were injured.” Baruch continues.“They were shot?” I lean forward.“No. They jumped out the dormitory windows. When the

terrorist first went into the yeshivah, he entered the dormitory. People in the rooms upstairs heard the shots and didn’t know where the terrorist would head next. So they jumped out the windows.”

“They jumped out a second-story window?” I ask. “One of the rabbis was too scared to jump,” says Baruch, “so

they pushed him.”“They pushed a rabbi out the window?” “They had to,” Baruch answers. “They were trying to save

his life.”A month later, I meet Baruch’s chavruta who injured his back

jumping out a window. He still wears a brace and can’t sit for more than a few minutes at a time.

Two weeks after the shooting, I elbow my way through a sea of skirts, shoulders and kerchiefs in the ladies’ balcony at the yeshivah, nearly tripping on a clown and a waist-high Queen Esther. I’ve never been here on Purim, and I ask a woman I recognize if it’s always so crowded. She says she’s never seen the yeshivah this full. Someone bangs on a shtender in the men’s section below. We all rise, and the rabbi begins the berachot recited prior to reading the Megillah.

“Blessed are You . . . Who has commanded us to read the Megillah.”

“Amen!” The crowd responds.“Blessed are You . . . Who performed miracles for our forefathers,

in those days,” his voice rises, clear and strong, “at this time.”“Amen!!” This response is louder than the first.“Blessed are You . . .,” he begins in the same clear, strong voice,

“Who has kept us alive—” His voice cracks. He pauses. “—And


sustained us,” his voice trembles. He lets out one sob, regains his composure and shouts, “and brought us to this day.”

“Amen!!!” everyone shouts. With the women beside me, I whisper my response, choking on tears. We are alive. Why do I have the privilege of standing here now, when the eight murdered boys do not?

This year, Purim falls on Shabbat in Jerusalem, so the mitzvot are spread out from Friday to Sunday. Baruch and I spend Shabbat in Kiryat Moshe. Conversations revolve around the shooting. Now I am ready to learn more. “Where were you when the shooting happened?” I whisper to my husband’s friends’ wives. “Where was your husband? Were you scared?”

I keep getting similar answers.“We were all home.”“Thank God, my husband was home.”“Thank God, the kids slept through it.”“Can you imagine if the terrorist had gone into the main study

hall instead of the much smaller library?”“Thank God, none of the victims were married. They left no

widows or orphans.”At first, my stomach tightens at this last response. It seems like

an awful thing to say. But I realize that no one is belittling the pain of the victims’ families. This is just the way they relate to the tragedy. These women would never say such a thing in public. Amongst ourselves, however, we understand that this is our biggest fear—to become widows. Thank God, there were no widows or orphans.

We return to Kiryat Moshe on Sunday to distribute mishloach manot. In one rabbi’s home, Baruch takes up his traditional position as wine pourer, refilling plastic cups as they are passed his way. I sit in the kitchen, chatting with the rabbi’s wife. She picks up two wine bottles and hands them to someone teetering his way into the dining room, freeing up her hands just in time to receive four empty bottles in return. She smiles at me, shaking her head. “The bottles are coming back faster than usual. They need it more this year.”

It has been nearly eight years, four children, three wars, and countless terror attacks since the shooting in Mercaz HaRav, and I don’t know how this story will end. I am constantly reminded of the daily threat of terrorism. When my daughter awakens from nightmares of being chased by Arabs, I remember. When I read about a baby being deliberately run over at a train stop, I squeeze my baby and remember. When I walk my son to the bus stop in front of Mercaz HaRav to wait for a bus to his school in Har Nof, a neighborhood where five people were butchered in shul, I remember. I hope my children won’t still experience these daily fears in twenty years. Perhaps, by the time they are parents, there will be peace. g

Baruch is the one who just missed a brush with death, but I am the one in tears.“ “

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There is a common misconception that all residents of areas that were liberated during the Six-Day War are Orthodox, or of a particular political bent or that their towns are all “bedroom” communities. In fact, the residents of “yishuvim” —the Hebrew word for any settlement but which has come to refer to those in Judea and Samaria—are mostly “ordinary people,” with no greater a percentage of those on the fringe than in any locale; the only difference being that yishuvim are usually under the world’s microscope.

Some move for the religious atmosphere (assuming they choose an Orthodox yishuv), some for the Zionist ideology, others for the better quality of life—the affordable housing, fresh air and beautiful views, and still others for a combination of the above.

The demographic makeup of each yishuv varies, but most include a combination of sabras and olim, plenty of whom come from Western Europe, North America, the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia. The settlements are as diverse as their populations; some are farming communities and frontier villages; others, such as Modi’in Illit, Ma’ale Adumim, Beitar Illit and Ariel, have achieved city status. Economically, they are thriving , producing industries and successful businesses, many of which employ local Arabs.

Today Israelis of all kinds live in more than 150 different kibbutzim, towns, moshavim and cities in Judea, Samaria and the Golan Heights. They are what most of the international community likes to call “settlements.” But to 383,000 Jews, these communities are simply “home.”

Y ou will yet plant vineyards on the hills of Shomron, and those who plant will surely

savor the fruit of their labor” (Jeremiah 31: 5-6).There is a unique Chinese expression for native village—gu xiang [gû xiàng]—which is not necessarily a place where you are born but a locale from which ancestral roots call to you in the language of the heart and of the soul. Over four decades of teaching Chinese history, I thought this term was untranslatable.

Until this past summer when I visited Elon Moreh in the Shomron for Shabbat. Here I saw and felt the pull of the land that was first glimpsed by Avraham Avinu, the first Jew commanded to come to Israel. Here, too, I met some of the vatikim—the brave and spirited founders of today’s flourishing

community of some 350 families. Against all odds, these men and women were determined to come home to the Shomron and witness the prophecy of Jeremiah unfold with their own eyes.

Over excellent Cabernet Sauvignon—grown and bottled in Elon Moreh—I heard the moving history of this Jewish community from my hosts, Rochelle and Zev Saffer, and their Friday night guests, which included Benny Katzover, one of the fiery founders of Gush Emunim in the 1970s.

I had glimpsed the vineyards before the start of Shabbat while on a tour of Mount Kabir, which rises precipitously above Elon Moreh. With a Tanach in hand, Zev guided me along the mountaintop, showing me

Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal right opposite the community, near the ancient city of Shechem (Nablus).

Until the founding of Elon Moreh, some were tempted to dismiss the call of our Jewish gu xiang as mere narrative. This made the right of the Jewish people’s return to Shomron easier to avoid or even deny. Then, in 1980, a secular professor of archaeology from Haifa University, Adam Zertal, discovered the large, whole stones and pottery shards which proved that this was indeed the location of the altar of Joshua on Mount Ebal, dating back to 1250 BCE. The academic (and political) community did not immediately embrace the truth embedded in the facts on the ground. Eventually, Zertal

Rich Wine and Powerful History: A Shabbat Visit to Elon Moreh By Vera Schwarcz

ELON MOREH

Who is a“Settler”?TOBY KLEIN GREENWALD

Toby Klein Greenwald is a journalist, educator and community theater director who lives in Efrat, Israel with her family.

Vera Schwarcz was Freeman Professor of East Asian studies at Wesleyan University, until her recent retirement. She is the author of eight books.

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When God said to Joshua, “Every place on which the soles of your feet will tread I have given to you, as I have spoken to Moses,” it was one more command in a long line of Biblical commands to the Children of Abraham to spread out and live in the Land of Israel.

The “settlement enterprise” did not begin in 1967, or in 1948 or even in the twentieth century. There has never been a time when Jews were not living in Eretz Yisrael or dreaming from afar about how they will one day reach it.

In the wake of the Six-Day War, the Old City of Jerusalem, Judea, Sa-maria, Gaza and the Golan Heights—all of which had been, at one time or another, locations of vibrant Jewish life—were liberated and the nation was euphoric.

Naturally, plans commenced for rebuilding the Old City of Jerusalem, which had been destroyed by the Arabs after it fell in battle in May 1948.

The children of Gush Etzion, whose parents had been massacred by the Arabs who overtook it in May 1948, began to return home in 1967 to rebuild. Today Gush Etzion has twenty-two communities and 70,000 residents, in addition to the town of Efrat, which is a separate municipal entity.

The first kibbutz on the Golan Heights was founded in July 1967 and by 1970 there were twelve communities. In 1981 the Golan was officially annexed to Israel. Today there are twenty-nine communities.

Another group, led by Rabbi Moshe Levinger and Rabbi Eliezer Waldman, turned their eyes to the historic city of Hevron, In 1968, a few Jewish families spent Pesach in the Park Hotel in Hevron and decided to stay. Today there is a Jewish community in Hevron in addition to Kiryat Arba.

In the Gaza area, Kfar Darom had been established in 1946 by a group from Kfar Hanoar Hadati of Kfar Chassidim. The residents were forced to vacate it in 1948, after holding out for 222 days, under seige by the Egyptians. It was reestablished in 1970 by a Nahal army group. From 1973 onward, more communities were added in the Gaza area, eventually reaching twenty-one Jewish communities before their expulsion in 2005.

The resettlement of Jerusalem, Gush Etzion, Hevron and Gaza, and the beginning of the founding of kibbutzim and communities in the Golan Heights, predated the creation of the Gush Emunim movement, which took place in 1974. It was this movement that led to the mushrooming of additional communities within Judea and Samaria. Today, they checker-board the landscape of Eretz Yisrael. God’s words to Abraham, Moses and Joshua live today in the modern State of Israel.

Historical Snapshot: The Settlement Enterprise

published his findings in a key book entitled Am Nolad (The Birth of a Nation).

Rochelle and Zev, like Benny, did not return to the Shomron because a professor of archaeology validated the Jewish claim to the area. They had come some years earlier out of a passionate conviction that the Jewish people had roots in the Shomron and that homecoming would give them a more meaningful life.

At the Shabbat meal, Benny recalls the small garin, the seedling group that decided to come back to the heart of Israel after the 1967 war. They were guided by the teachings of Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak HaCohen Kook, the first chief rabbi of Israel, and his son Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook. Several in the group had studied at Yeshivat Mercaz HaRav. Others, like the Saffers (new olim in 1976), joined out of a simple belief that the Jewish people should be able to sink roots any place in the Land of Israel.

It was a rough, difficult start. Politicians, including Shimon Peres, were greatly encouraging at first. Later, they reneged under international pressure. Sharon and Begin also supported the vision of returning to ancestral roots in Elon Moreh, but dragged their heels as a small group of families got ready to break ground with their bare hands. The most poignant memory at the Shabbat table concerned the aged Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook. These young people embodied the teachings of Rabbi Kook’s father and his own ideals; yet, he too, was reluctant to give them the green light for this homecoming in the Shomron. (Hevron and Kiryat Arba had received his approval earlier.) Benny and his friends sought their rabbi’s blessing twice. The third time, trembling with awe and also strengthened by their conviction, they went to meet Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook and to tell him that they were going to establish Elon Moreh.

The teacher’s response was loving and personal: he embraced each of the young men, held their hands and caressed their faces. These actions, more than any words, sustained them in the hard years

of living in tents—and later, in days of mourning for those murdered by terrorists swelling up from the Arab villages that had become openly hostile after the Oslo Accords. The main synagogue (one of eight in the community) is named Rachamei Tirzah for two of the children whose lives were cut short due to terrorism. As I traveled on the bus to and from the Shomron, I could not help but notice that every intersection had a memorial stone for someone killed by terrorists.

This Shabbat, however, almost forty years after the founding of Elon Moreh, the visionary founders are savoring the fruits of their labors. In today’s community, the vatikim are joined by immigrants from France, America, Russia, Argentina and Peru.

Zev tells me the history of a small community in the high Peruvian Andes that started to follow Judaism simply out of love for the Jewish Bible and a sincere quest for truth. These native peoples had no Biblical roots, just a longing to join the Jewish people. Israeli rabbis agreed to convert them and they made aliyah as a group. Elon Moreh embraced several dozen of these converts. Zev’s son, who grew up in Elon Moreh, married the daughter of one of the Peruvian Jews. There are more layers to

Toby Klein Greenwald

T here are many words that come to mind when describing Jewish

communities deep within the Shomron; “pragmatic” is not one of them. Yet Har Bracha, more than any other yishuv and perhaps more than any other community in Israel, is the product of an attempt to translate a particular vision of Torah-centered communal life into a holistic plan that encompasses practicalities like economic self-sufficiency, higher education, commuting distances and the costs of housing and day care. And that plan is becoming a reality.

Har Bracha draws its name from a verse in the Torah: “When the Lord, your God, brings you into the land you are entering, in order to possess it, pronounce the blessing on Mount Gerizim. . .” (Devarim

11:29). The community is indeed located atop the more southerly of Mount Ger-izim’s twin summits, the more northerly of which overlooks the city of Shechem and faces Mount Ebal, Gerizim’s coun-terpart. Access to Har Bracha is via Route 60, which roughly tracks the an-cient road from Hevron to Shechem along Israel’s central ridge—the road taken by Avraham on his way to sacrifice Yitzchak, and by Yosef seeking his broth-ers at Yaakov’s request. Just before the turnoff to Har Bracha, the road runs through the Arab town of Huwara.

Har Bracha was founded at the site of a Nahal Brigade military outpost in 1982, but when Yonaton and Jackie Behar moved there just as the First Intifada began in late 1987, they were only the

thirteenth family to join the community. The community was then seeking a rabbi, and Yonaton recommended one of his teachers from the yeshivah in Beit El: Rabbi Eliezer Melamed. Behar recalls that when Rabbi Melamed first visited, he said, “I think I can come up with many chiddushim here.” At the time, Behar thought that Rabbi Melamed was referring to Talmudic novellae, but now realizes that Rabbi Melamed was dreaming of what Behar calls “communal chiddushim,” innovative ways to build a great community. Har Bracha elected Rabbi Melamed as its rabbi, and in the generation since, it has become an expression of his vision of a Torah-centered community. No mere ornament or figurehead, Rabbi Melamed is the


this homecoming in the Shomron than I had ever imagined possible.

These layers simply provide proof for the vision of gu xiang that animated the founders of Elon Moreh in the mid-1970s. This is not to say that these elders are not worried about the future of their beautiful community. Concerns about politics and terrorism loom large, but they do not overshadow the peace and joy of Shabbat. Rabbi Elyakim Levanon, rav of Elon Moreh, spoke movingly about his own three decades in this special community. He focused on the division of the Land of Israel among the tribes by the goral—a Divine instrument for identifying which landscape best suited the characteristics of each of the Twelve Tribes of Israel.

Elon Moreh, located in the Shomron, is situated of the slopes of Har Kabir, northeast of the city of Shechem (Nablus). Photo: Eitan Lasser

Bringing Torah to Life in Har Bracha By Elli FischerHAR BRACHA

He spoke about being born near Haifa, and educated in Jerusalem. But somehow, along the way, he felt the pull of this particular ancestral legacy in the lands given to the Tribe of Joseph. “Here I feel the inner peace that comes from knowing how each tribe heard the cry of the goral according to its own innermost spiritual roots,” he said.

Strolling along the sidewalks of Elon Moreh, watching dozens of children hurtling down the street on bicycles and tricycles—the boys with kippot and peyot flying—I feel a sense of well-being. We belong here. We come from here.

Rabbi Elli Fischer is a writer and translator living in Modi’in.

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: Elon Moreh

First grade girls in Elon Moreh.


cornerstone of this community and the reason for its success.Another milestone occurred in 1992 with the founding of

Yeshivat Har Bracha under Rabbi Melamed’s leadership. It is a hesder yeshivah, which combines Torah study with military service in a five-year program. Its curriculum focuses on the study of halachah from its sources in the Talmud through to practical application. Rabbi Melamed, after all, is the author of Peninei Halachah, a sixteen-volume (so far) contemporary hala-chic code that has sold close to a million books and is fast be-coming the Religious Zionist Shulchan Aruch (full disclosure: this author is the general editor of the English Peninei Halachah series, of which five volumes have appeared). Emphasis on applied halachah in yeshivot is not unprecedented, but few contemporary yeshivot emphasize this sort of study.

Another unique element of the yeshivah is a program called Shiluvim, which offers housing to single and married students at Ariel University—about twenty minutes away by car—while the students in turn commit to at least fifteen weekly hours of Torah study at Yeshivat Har Bracha. Many alumni of the yeshi-vah’s hesder program stay in the community they have grown to love while they attend university, begin their professional training and start families. Many graduates of the Shiluvim program later choose to settle permanently in Har Bracha, and the program has fueled the community’s rapid growth over the past decade. The yeshivah and the community have thus de-

veloped a mutually beneficial relationship: the yeshivah’s Shi-luvim program attracts new young families, while the community models the lifestyle to which the yeshivah wants its students to aspire.

Both of these unique aspects of Yeshivat Har Bracha reflect Rabbi Melamed’s vision and innovative approach to yeshivah study and community building—namely, the fact that he views them as two sides of the same coin. Torah study is not discon-nected from life or a retreat from the world. Rather, it is the central organizing principle of all facets of life. Rabbi Melamed, in fact, discourages full-time yeshivah study after a few years unless one is planning a career in the rabbinate or education. One must learn to make Torah central to his or her life even while pursuing a career. Thus, Har Bracha has a significant number of computer programmers, nurses, engineers and law-yers (as well as a fair share of rabbis and educators). Its residents work in media (especially outlets related to Arutz Sheva), local government and security. There is a local boutique winery, and each year a group of American Christian Zionists comes to help with the grape harvest, in accordance with their understand-ing of certain Biblical prophecies. But Har Bracha’s biggest export is Torah, primarily through the vehicle of Peninei Halachah and Rabbi Melamed’s other writings. Residents work-ing in all these professions aspire to keep Torah at the center of their lives by engaging in regular Torah study and by con-ducting themselves according to its guidance in their profes-sional careers.

Avraham Herman is a native of Allentown, Pennsylvania, who grew up in Elizabeth, New Jersey. He and his wife, Nomi, a Teaneck native, are among the few relatively recent olim who live in Har Bracha (though there is a sizeable number of residents who made aliyah as children or whose parents are English-speaking olim). A patent attorney by trade and a marathoner, unicyclist and homebrewer by pas-sion, Herman says that Har Bracha’s professional diversity is no accident: “The goal of Torah study is the full expression of Torah in all facets of life, including professional and communal life. Community itself should be an actual phys-ical manifestation of a Torah way of life. This vision requires people in all sorts of professions bringing Torah to more areas of human experience.”

Women at an event in Har Bracha.

Har Bracha is located in the Shomron, atop the more southerly of Mount Gerizim’s twin summits. Courtesy of Mazkirut Har Bracha (facebook.com/Har.Bracha)

: Har Bracha


On Shabbat especially, there is a strong emphasis on devoting considerable time to Torah study. One of Rabbi Melamed’s refrains is that Shabbat must be the spiritual anchor of the week, and he therefore urges people to spend six hours learning Torah over Shabbat. In Har Bracha, there are about thirty shiurim available to men and women each Shabbat. The highlight is Rabbi Melamed’s Shabbat afternoon derashah. The vast major-ity of Har Bracha’s adult population attends this hour-long lecture which, harking back to the heyday of Shabbat discourses, weaves together observations on the parashah, halachic instruc-tion, practical wisdom, stories, humor and commentary on current events.

A commonsense, holistic approach pervades many aspects of communal life. Shalev Cayam, who moved to Israel with his family at age twelve, studied at Yeshivat Har Bracha and now serves as Har Bracha’s general secretary, says, “A goal of this community is to make raising happy, healthy and well-educated children cost-effective.” Day care, preschool and extracurric-ular programs can be prohibitively expensive; Cayam’s office, as part of its service to the community, leverages economies of scale and negotiates directly with providers, thereby cutting out layers of overhead and reducing costs by up to 40 percent. Instead of tendering construction companies to build and sell homes, Cayam’s office deals directly with contractors for con-struction projects. Thus, even by Shomron standards, housing in Har Bracha is quite inexpensive.

Here too, Rabbi Melamed’s influence is felt. He stresses the laws and values of tzedakah, but within a larger context of money management and long-term savings and investment. While most rabbis in the Shomron maintain, for halachic and ideological reasons, that only Jewish labor may be used in the construction of homes, Rabbi Melamed recently ruled that Arab labor may

be used: it is more abundant, cheaper and it furthers the over-all goal of Jewish settlement of the Land of Israel. Torah, eco-nomics, community-building and yishuv Eretz Yisrael all come together as a whole.

It is worth noting that the Arab laborers building homes in Har Bracha are transported to work from afar. Local Arabs would be stigmatized within their communities if it became known that they build Jewish homes in the Shomron. This state of affairs is reflective of the larger relationship—or lack thereof—between residents of Har Bracha and their Arab neighbors. The most common interactions center around security incidents, and in Har Bracha, such incidents are rare.

There is a fascinating exception to this rule, though: the Samaritans. This community is the remnant of what rabbinic literature calls the “Kutim,” the amalgam of Israelite and foreign tribes that practice a religion similar to Judaism, and which experienced its heyday during the early part of the Second Temple era. About half of today’s Samaritan community, numbering less than 500 people, live in a village on Mount Gerizim, just to the north of Har Bracha. This community still offers a paschal sacrifice, an event that has become something of a tourist attraction for Israelis.

The aggregate result of the implementation of the various elements of the vision for Har Bracha is a community that has experienced double-digit population growth—the high-est within its regional council—each year for the past decade, by attracting new families and having about a hundred babies each year. Its population now exceeds 2,000, in 330 house-holds. And there is no slowing down. The dream is for Har Bracha to become a town and then a city. True to its name, it is indeed becoming a mountain of blessing.

MOSHAV MATITYAHU A Chareidi Zionist Moshav By Elli Fischer

I t is easy to overlook Moshav Matityahu. It is located on a strategic hill that over-

looks Ben-Gurion Airport, across the road from Hashmonaim, a Modern Orthodox suburb that is popular among American olim. One reaches Matityahu from the road to Kiryat Sefer, the first neighborhood in the Chareidi city of Modi’in Illit. Consider-ing that Matityahu’s population of about a hundred families is dwarfed by Modi’in Illit’s population of over 60,000, one can be forgiven for assuming it is a neighborhood of that large and rapidly growing city. Yet Matityahu has its own unique history and character. It is located between Modi’in Illit and Hashmonaim ideologically as well as geographically. In fact, when Modi’in Illit recently tried to annex Matityahu into its municipality, the courts ruled against the merger, partially on the grounds that Mat-ityahu’s population would not fit well with

the almost entirely Chareidi population of Modi’in Illit.

In 1978, a group of American Jewish fam-ilies formed the nucleus of a Torah commu-nity they wished to build in Israel. They first moved to the community of Mevo Horon to learn the skills necessary to work the land and operate a moshav, or a collec-tive farm, and the first twenty families moved to Matityahu in the summer of 1981. The fledgling moshav was affiliated with Po’alei Agudat Yisrael (PAI), a now-defunct political party and social movement for working Chareidim. During those first years—before they had telephones or a hookup to the national electrical grid, and before it had rained enough to fill up Mat-ityahu’s mikvah—they received assistance from other PAI communities, especially Mevo Horon, with its two telephones, mik-vah and small grocery store.

The moshav has undergone numerous changes since its founding. The original members were English-speaking olim who moved to Israel in order to work the land and lead lives infused with Torah. Like sev-eral other PAI communities, they were

Rabbi Zev Leff


unabashedly Zionistic, celebrating Yom Ha’atzmaut with the recitation of Hallel. This attitude was in keeping with the rulings of Matityahu’s first rabbi, Rabbi Yehuda Herzl Henkin, a renowned posek, grandson of Rabbi Yosef Eliyahu Henkin, husband of Rabbanit Chana Henkin (see Jewish Action’s “Anglos Who Have Had an Impact,” spring 2014 issue), and father of Rabbi Eitam Henkin, Hy”d.

Rabbi Henkin left the moshav after a year and in the fall of 1983, Matityahu installed Rabbi Zev Leff as its new rabbi, a position that he retains to this day. Rabbi Leff left his pulpit at the Young Israel of Greater Miami to become the rav of a fledg-ling community with one-tenth the number of families. (A for-mer NCSYer, Rabbi Leff is also the founding member of NCSY’s Miami chapter and served as chapter president from 1964 to 1965.) An alumnus of the Telshe Yeshiva in Cleveland, Rabbi Leff changed the community’s religious focus, bringing it more

in line with Chareidi sensibilities and attracting more of a Ye-shivish element. The community developed a unique Charei-di-Zionist blend during these years. One could see black hats along with knitted kippot (occasionally worn under the black hat). Hallel was no longer recited on Yom Ha’atzmaut, but the community marked the day with an annual softball game, in which Rabbi Leff served as designated pitcher for both teams. Some of the young men from Matityahu opted for extended full-time yeshivah study in lieu of military service, but most, following Rabbi Leff ’s guidance, served in the IDF, whether for the full three years, in tandem with yeshivah study, or after several years in yeshivah.

Another major change occurred in the early 1990s, when the moshav privatized after a decade as a collective endeavor, and most members found jobs outside the community.

These changes—Religious Zionist to Chareidi, and from col-lective endeavor to privatization—may seem fairly momentous, but Meir Migdal, one of the original members and the current

chairman of Matityahu’s Management Committee, believes otherwise: “Collective ownership was never a function of ide-ology. It was what made sense at the time. Our main focus was always to build a Torah community in Eretz Yisrael. With all the changes and the bumps in the road, we have succeeded.”

Matityahu has now entered a third phase of its existence. What was once frontier is now heartland. The nearby cities of Modi’in and Modi’in Illit, with a composite population approaching 200,000, have brought urban amenities and conveniences to Matityahu. It has become a destination for Israeli Chareidi fam-ilies who want proximity to Modi’in Illit and its schools (virtu-ally all residents of Matityahu send their children to schools in Modi’in Illit), but who still want to keep a bit of distance from it. In recent national elections, the single ballot box with the highest percentage of voters for United Torah Judaism (the Ashkenazic Chareidi party) was the one on Matityahu, with 97 percent. It is increasingly uncommon for the young men of Matityahu to join the IDF in any form, and fewer olim view Matityahu as a destination. New houses are being built, and some of the new residents are seeking to integrate into Mati-tyahu’s community, but others are creating their own new community there. For the first time in its history, Matityahu now has two synagogues. The vast majority of adults, men and women, work for a living, but Yom Ha’atzmaut is no longer publicly celebrated.

Today, Matityahu has two distinct populations. There are the old-timers—the English-speaking founders who by now are largely empty-nesters—and the younger population, which is growing rapidly, tends to be more Israeli and mainstream Cha-reidi, and has no memory of those first hard years. Still, the two populations get along well, aided by friction-limiting age differ-ences, and many of the newcomers are still attracted to the sense of community and to Rabbi Leff ’s leadership. The future is somewhat uncertain, but Matityahu has successfully reinvented itself before. Odds are that it will do so again.

It is located between Modi’in Illit and Hashmonaim ideologically as well as geographically.

Street view of Moshav Matityahu. The moshav is located between Modi’in Illit and Hashmonaim ideologically as well as geographically. Photo: Flash 90

: Moshav Matityahu

R abbi Ya’akov Litman, Hy”d and his eighteen-year-old son Netanel, Hy”d, of Kiryat Arba, were murdered by terrorists

on November 13, 2015, near Otniel (south Hevron Mountains), on their way to the Shabbat chatan of Ariel Biegel. He was due to marry Yaakov’s daughter, Sarah Techiya, four days later. I remember thinking, after the initial shock and horror, that they would probably have just a tiny and sad family wedding.

But the people of Kiryat Arba are made of different stuff.During the shivah, Sarah told Yediot Aharonot, “This evening,

instead of wearing a bridal dress, I will sit on the floor with a torn shirt. But very soon, we will marry in a large and happy wedding. We will go on and be happy as Father and Netanel always were. We will not be crushed.” And indeed, as Sarah and Ariel predicted, multitudes came to make them happy and their wedding was broadcast and made waves throughout the world.

The history of modern-day settlement in Kiryat Arba and in the heart of Hevron is of a deeply committed and dedi-cated community that refuses to be crushed, terrorist at-tacks and controversy notwithstanding, and which continues to flourish and grow.

Known as the “City of our Forefathers,” Hevron is one of the oldest cities in the world. Kiryat Arba, named perhaps for the giant “Arba” who had three sons, or for the four giants Joshua and Calev encountered while they toured Canaan, or for the four couples buried there (Avraham and Sara, Yitzchak and Rivka, Yaakov and Leah and—according to tradition—Adam and Chava) or for all the above, has approximately eight thousand residents, comprised of native-born Israelis and olim from North America, South America, England, France, Peru, India, Ethiopia, Russia and the former Soviet Union and elsewhere.

On the eve of Pesach 1968, Rabbi Moshe and Miriam Levinger and Rabbi Eliezer and Ruth Waldman and their children, joined by a small group of families, rented the Park Hotel in Hevron for the Pesach Seder. They stayed, and in 1971, Kiryat Arba was built. It attained local council status in 1979.

The early years of the Jews in resettled Hevron-Kiryat Arba were not easy. The community was moved from the Park Hotel to a British-built Tegart fort known as the Government House (which housed Jordanian security forces before the Six-Day War), where there was a communal kitchen, a beit midrash for yeshivah students, a multi-aged pre-school, a school for the lower grades, and an apartment for single young women who helped out in the community. Most of the families were Orthodox, many of them students of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook of Yeshivat Mercaz HaRav. Other residents had fascinating life stories, such as a Chabadnik artist Baruch Nachshon, who later became world famous; an Italian convert; and a young French-born yeshivah student named Shlomo Langenauer, today known as Rabbi Shlomo Aviner of Beit El.

A general view of Kiryat Arba, in Southern West Bank, adjoining the city of Hevron. Photo: Michal Fattal/Flash90


The Me’arat HaMachpela, the spiritual heart of Hevron and Kiryat Arba. Photo: Yehoshua Halevi

KIRYAT ARBA The City of Four Toby Klein Greenwald


: Kiryat Arba

Today, approximately 125 Jews live in “downtown Hevron,” in what is known as the Avraham Avinu neighborhood, in build-ings that were originally owned by Jews and were repurchased and renovated by the residents. Yeshiva Shavei Hevron is also located there. This old-new neighborhood was created after 1979, when Rebbetzin Levinger and a group of women moved into Beit Hadassah, a building that had been a Jewish medical clinic that had served both Jews and Muslims before the 1929 Hevron Massacre.

Kiryat Arba is flourishing. It has twenty-three kindergartens with 620 children; five elementary schools; schools providing special education; a dorm high school (ulpana) for girls; a ye-shivah high school; Yeshivat Nir Kiryat Arba, a yeshivah of higher learning; and Midrashet Shirat Hevron, a Torah insti-tution for young women.

People work either in “the Kirya,” as the main neighborhood of Kiryat Arba is called, or in Jerusalem. Local businesses include Bank Leumi, retail shops, medical centers, real estate offices, an optician, a dentist, attorneys, a bakery, a carpentry shop and more.

“Kiryat Arba is very much connected to Hevron and the Me’arat HaMachpela,” says Chana (Porath) Idels, who has been living in Hevron since 1968. “[It is because of the Me’arah] that Kiryat Arba was built.”

While Jews and Arabs tend to live in relatively close proximity in Hevron, “security is more or less like all of Yesha [Yehudah, Shomron and Gaza],” says Chana. “In this latest ‘wave’ [of terror], we lost four residents, Hy”d, not to mention soldiers who have

been killed while on active duty over the years.” One of the most famous soldiers killed while on duty in Hevron was Colonel Dror Weinberg of Jerusalem, who was murdered by terrorists on a Friday night in 2002, while defending Jews returning home from prayer.

Chana made aliyah from Cleveland two months after the Six-Day War. Her wedding was one of the first in the renewed Hevron, and was held in the Government Building, where the feast was spread out between three army dining halls. She is a mother of nine (“bli ayin hara”) and grandmother of more than sixty (“I never give an exact number—but then who’s counting?”)

“This a great place to live,” says Chana. “There is a real mix here—a variety of religious and secular types and a high level of friendship and cooperation between the various groups and indi-viduals. There are many converts to Judaism [one of whom was born to the Muslim J’aabri clan of Hevron] and a significant num-ber of young couples, including second and third-generation res-idents; there are many, many births in the community.” It is due to this large, growing demographic that Kiryat Arba is currently experiencing a serious shortage of apartments.

“Many of those who went on to settle the Shomron and elsewhere began their journey in Hevron, Kiryat Arba,” says Chana. “We live the reality that this land is God-given, now and forever.” g

The author wants to thank Chana Porath Idels for her invaluable assistance in preparing this article. The author was present in the Park Hotel (where she met Moshe Dayan), and lived in Kiryat Arba. Today she lives in Efrat with her husband.


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On and Off the Beaten Track in . . .

Memorialat Sha’ar HaGai


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hall your brethren go to war, while you settle here?” (Numbers 32:6)When the Biblical Tribes of Reuven and Gad wanted to settle on the eastern bank of the Jordan River, Moshe

rebuked them, insisting that they join the other tribes in battle. Only once the entire land was conquered were they allowed to “return [to the East Bank], so that [they would] come out pure in the eyes of God and of Israel” (Numbers 32:22). The Biblical precedent of Jews living outside of the land fighting for Eretz Yisrael occurred again in 1947 and is a recurring phenomenon in Israel today.

In 1947-8, some 3,500 Machal members from thirty-seven coun-tries rallied to Israel’s defense (Machal is the Hebrew acronym for overseas volunteers [Mitnadvei Chutz La’Aretz]). These men and women, Jews as well as non-Jews, came to help the fledgling Jewish State battle for its existence. David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, said of these courageous volunteers, “The Machal forces were the Diaspora’s most important contribution to the survival of the State of Israel.”

Many of the Machal volunteers were veterans of World War II, and as such, brought much-needed military skills and expertise to the newly formed IDF. They served with distinction in every branch of the IDF—air force, infantry, medical corps, et cetera. Tragically, one hundred and twenty-three Machalniks were killed in action during Israel’s War of Independence.

The Machal Memorial at Sha’ar HaGai, dedicated in 1993, was created to honor these Machalniks, men and women from the Diaspora who gave their lives for the State of Israel. A memorial service to the Machal soldiers who fell defending Israel is held every Yom HaZikaron at the Memorial.

The Machal Memorial is very accessible; it is a true shame to miss it. Heading towards Jerusalem or Tel Aviv on the Beit Shemesh Road (Route 38), the Memorial is on the right-hand side (east of the road), just before the turnoff towards Jerusalem. Please take

a moment to stop and pay honor to these volunteers from the Diaspora and the thousands of others over the years, without whom there might not be an Israel today.

Recently, I attended a wedding in the United States and found myself seated next to Paul Kaminetzky, a 1948 Machalnik, and his wife, Susan. Paul shared his story with me, which I found so in-spiring, I decided to devote this column to Machalniks of the past and the present.

Paul’s story of self-sacrifice is typical of a Machalnik. A native New Yorker who served in the US Navy during World War II, Paul joined the effort to bring Holocaust survivors to Palestine on “il-legal” boats like the Exodus. Paul was serving as an officer on a boat known as the HaTikvah when the British intercepted it. All of the “illegals,” including Paul, were interned in Cyprus. He was then taken to the Atlit detention camp in Palestine, located just south of Haifa. Paul managed to escape and return to America, but subsequently returned to Palestine to assist yet another clandestine operation—a ship carrying 1,500 Holocaust survivors. During Is-rael’s War of Independence, Paul served in the nascent Israeli Navy.

In the course of researching this article, I also learned about the well-known Machalnik, Zipporah Porath. Zipporah grew up in Manhattan, and in 1947, went to study at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University on a one-year program. Caught up in Israel’s War of Independence, she joined the Haganah and served as a medic during the siege of Jerusalem. Zipporah ended up remaining in Israel after the war (she currently lives in Tel Aviv). A popular lecturer, she is the author of Letters from Jerusalem, 1947-1948, a compilation of the letters she wrote to her family back in New York during Israel’s War of Independence. The letters, full of her thoughts and feelings during those harrowing days, capture the historic events in a unique way. The volume has gone through five editions in English and one in Hebrew.

These are but two stories among the hundreds of remarkable

S

Machal the

accounts of bravery and dedication to the Jewish people that took place in 1947-8, many of which can be found on the Machal web site.

After the war, most Machalniks returned to their home coun-tries, though about 500 settled in Israel and raised families. But the story of Machal and its contribution to the State of Israel continues. Volunteers from all over the world—lone soldiers—continue to serve in the IDF. They come from a diverse array of countries and cultures, but they are all singularly committed to joining their brethren in Israel to defend the right of the Jewish people to be a free people in their own homeland.

For those interested in exploring the topic of lone soldiers further, check out the American Veterans of Israel Legacy Corp at israelvets.com. The site contains an online virtual museum that conveys the history of lone soldiers in the IDF, as well as detailed lists of the names of the approximately 1,500 North American men and women, including Jews and Christians, who risked their lives in service of the Jewish people from 1946 to 1949.

“In my wildest reveries,” states Zipporah in her book, “as I was growing up in New York, I never imagined that I would see the Zionist dream of a Jewish state materialize in my own life-time or that I would personally take part in making it come true.” Several generations later, many of us cannot even envision a world without a State of Israel.

The Biblical story of Reuven and Gad and the shining example of Machal volunteers remind us that every Jew should feel the commitment and obligation to defend the Jewish people and the Land of Israel, whether or not one lives there. g

The Machal Memorial at Sha’ar HaGai, dedicated in 1993, was created to honor Machalniks, those who came from outside of Israel to voluntarily fight on behalf of Israel and the Jewish people. The memorial is made up of the letters Mem, Chet and Lamed, forming the word Machal. Photo: Yehoshua Halevi

As I began to dig into the story of Israel’s War of Independence, I discovered some fascinating facts about Machalniks:

• The first pilot to shoot down an enemy plane in Israel’s War of Independence was Gideon Lichtman from Newark, New Jersey.

• The first commander of the Israeli Navy was Paul Shulman of New York City, an Annapolis graduate.

• Ben Dunkelman of Toronto, Canada, was a military advisor to the Harel Brigade and a member of the team that discov-ered the goat path that became the Burma Road, which saved Jerusalem.

• The 72nd Battalion included the non-Jewish company commander Tom Derek Bowden, a.k.a. Captain Appel. A British paratroop officer in World War II, he was taken prisoner because of letters found in his pockets from Pales-tinian Jewish friends, and was sent to Bergen-Belsen con-centration camp.

• Jack Freedman of Great Britain covertly gave assistance to the Sherut Avir [Air Force] while still a member of the Royal Air Force. When he joined the Sherut Avir in February of 1948, he oversaw the restoration of twenty former RAF planes, as well as the construction of a Spitfire plane, all from scrap. Freedman also trained many of the young aircraft mechanics who later assumed important positions.

• Most of the crew of the Exodus, the famous clandestine aliyah boat, were Americans.

• The first general (aluf ) of the fledgling Israeli army was Colonel David (Mickey) Marcus, a West Point graduate from New York City. Marcus was tragically killed by friendly fire on June 11, 1948.

Today, Machal volunteers can find support from a special or-ganization known as the Lone Soldier Center (lonesoldiercen-ter.com), established in memory of Michael Levin, z”l, in 2009. Michael was a lone soldier who was killed in action during the Second Lebanon War in 2006. He was twenty-two years old.

The Lone Soldier Center provides services to young men and women in the IDF who are in Israel without families, either as new olim or Machal volunteers. The Lone Soldier Tel Aviv office recently dedicated the Stanley Medicks Machal Room, which has an exhibit of wall panels highlighting the heroic and inspiring history of Machal volunteers over the years. The center is located at Ben Yehuda 23 (the corner of Shalom Alechem 5) in Tel Aviv. To visit, call 03.560.1931.


OU Reaches Out to Lone Soldiers NCSY Alumni, in coordination with the Seymour J. Abrams Jerusalem World Center (the OU Israel Center), launched a new initiative to support NCSY alumni who are lone soldiers in the IDF. Through varied programs, such as “Latte and Learning” and Shabbatonim, this initiative will help lone soldiers adjust to army life while they are far from home and, at the same time, strengthen their connection to Yahadut and the NCSY alumni community. The project was kicked off at a January event held at a Yerusha-layim restaurant and attended by nearly 100 current and former IDF and Sherut Leumi members.


Just Between Us

A lmost a year ago, I received a call that was profoundly disturbing. First, some background. Last year, in recognition of the six-

ty-seventh anniversary of the State of Israel, a yeshivah in my neighborhood organized a yom iyun to acknowledge the wonder-ful gift that Hashem bestowed upon Klal Yisrael after close to 2,000 years. Incidentally, this particular yeshivah’s mesorah is to not alter the seder hatefillah on Yom Ha’atzmaut or to celebrate the day in a manner that conflicts with the restrictions of the sefirah period.

The yeshivah administration invited me to share a few thoughts about the significance of Eretz Yisrael in our lives, which I happily did.

The caller heard about the talk I gave and contacted me to express his displeasure. How could I share in the celebration of a government whose secular outlook and orientation is wreaking havoc on religious life in Eretz Yisrael? he demanded. What about the difficulties facing the Chareidi community in Eretz Yisrael, particularly over the last few years with numerous governmental laws being enacted that significantly impact the quality of life in the Chareidi community? And finally, how could someone who was close to Rav Yosef Shalom Elyashiv, zt”l, and also a talmid of Rav Henoch Leibowitz, zt”l, veer so far from the mesorah and give a public talk about Eretz Yisrael on Yom Ha’atzmaut?”

While I did not have the opportunity to respond to the caller at the time (he hung up rather abruptly), with Yom Ha’atzmaut almost here once again, I offer my reflections here.

The Rambam, when addressing the topic of one afflicted with tzara’at (a leper), discusses an interesting halachah: a Kohen who is blind in one eye cannot rule on a nega (skin lesion associated with tzara’at), even if he has perfect vision in the other eye. This is indeed a perplexing halachah. However, an insight from the Meshech Choch-mah may provide some insight. When the Torah instructs the Kohen to look at the signs of tzara’at, it repeats the word “vera’ah” — “he should look.” The implication is that it does not suffice to look once, the Kohen must examine the evidence of tzara’at twice. Why? This is because the Kohen should not just examine the affliction itself, he has to examine the individual’s entire situation before rendering him tamei. He has to look at the whole person and his predicament before determining his halachic status. Perhaps this is why a Kohen who is blind in one eye cannot render a halachic decision on a nega. Symbolically, he needs excellent vision to view the entire situation.

This is the very message I would like to convey to the irate caller:

one must have a wide-ranging view to fully grasp the gift of Eretz Hakodesh. Yes, there are difficulties and challenges in Eretz Yisrael, at times even painful ones, but how can any God-fearing Jew not be filled with gratitude and awe for this Divine present? Indeed, the greatest rabbanim throughout history always expressed a pro-found love of and appreciation for Eretz Yisrael.

Rav Avraham Yitzchak HaKohen Kook was once stuck in Swit-zerland during WWI. When he returned to Eretz Yisrael, he mar-veled at the sight of the Judean Mountains as he ascended to Yerushalayim. One of his students said, “But rebbe, you just saw the Swiss Alps, said to be the most beautiful in the world.” To which Rav Kook replied, “The Alps didn’t speak to me, the Mountains of Yehuda do; they are mine.”

Anyone who reads the letters in Pachad Yitzchak cannot help but be overwhelmed by the depth of Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner’s love for Eretz Yisrael. In one place he writes, “The fire of ahavat Eretz Yisrael burns inside me.” In another, he writes: “I was zocheh to be there. I saw, I heard, but I did not acquire it, for Chazal say that ‘Eretz Yisrael is only acquired with yissurim.’ I hope the next time I come, it will be through yissurim.”

Rabbi Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz was also known for his deep affection for Eretz Yisrael. He once quipped, “A Yid in chutz la’Aretz is like a polar bear in the Bronx Zoo. Yes, it eats and sleeps and is taken care of, but it is still not in its natural habitat.”

The previous Amshinover Rebbe, Rabbi Yerachmiel Yehuda Myer Kalish, was known for his passionate love of Eretz Yisrael. Once during a hot spell in the middle of the Eretz Yisrael summer, his driver, who out of respect for the Rebbe would wear a jacket in his presence, felt uncomfortable in the stifling heat. He asked the Rebbe if he could remove his jacket as it was so hot. The Rebbe replied, “For my part you can [even] take off your shirt, but please don’t speak lashon hara about Eretz Yisrael.”

Presumably, the Rebbe had the gemara in Kesubot in mind (112A), which describes how Rav Ami and Rav Asi, who were learning together, would move from the sun to the shade when it was either too hot or too cold to avoid having any negative feelings about Eretz Yisrael.

The Maharal explains that the Jewish nation committed two terrible sins during the forty years of wandering: Chet HaEgel (the Sin of the Golden Calf ) and Chet HaMeraglim (the Sin of the Spies). Hakadosh Baruch Hu was able to forgive the Jewish people for Chet

This year, since Yom Ha’atzmaut falls so soon after Pesach, we decided to include this article in our Pesach edition.

Loving the Land

By Aryeh Z. Ginzberg

Rabbi Aryeh Zev Ginzberg is rav of the Chofetz Chaim Torah Center in Cedarhurst, New York.

Photo: Yehoshua Halevi


HaEgel; however, He could not forgive them for Chet HaMeraglim. Why? Hakadosh Baruch Hu can be “mochel on His own kavod,” but He cannot forgo the respect due to Eretz Yisrael.

So what’s my response to the indignant caller? Love of Eretz Yisrael is our mesorah. While not everyone celebrates this love in the same manner, as some change the tefillah on Yom Ha’atzmaut and others do not, taking a few moments on Israel’s Independence Day (as well as on every other day of the year!) to reflect on the Divine gift and berachah of Eretz Yisrael is not just the right thing to do, it is our obligation.

The caller mentioned Rav Yosef Shalom Elyashiv and my rebbe, Rav Henoch Leibowitz. An interesting tidbit is that the name Elyashiv itself is based on a deep feeling for Eretz Yisrael. Rav Elyashiv’s family name was originally Luria (the same last name of the Ari, zt”l). Several generations back, Rav Elyashiv’s great-grandfather made aliyah to Eretz Yisrael, but the challenges were great and the family was forced to return to Europe. As an expression of their longing to return to Eretz Yisrael, Rav Elyashiv’s great-grandfather changed his last name to “Elyashiv,” in other words, “Keil yashiv,” Hashem should return us to Eretz Yisrael. Maybe in the zechut of changing his name to reflect this lofty goal, Rav Elyashiv’s great-grandfather merited to have a great-grandson not only return to Eretz Yisrael but lead Klal Yisrael from the holy city of Yerushalayim for decades.

While my rebbe, Rav Leibowitz, did not alter his tefillah on Yom Ha’atzmaut, he infused three generations of talmidim with his tremendous love for Eretz Yisrael. More than thirty years ago, I brought the rosh yeshivah to the Kotel for Minchah and asked him if he would like to see the Jewish Quarter, which had, at that time, undergone extensive reconstruction. He would love to see it, he said, but he was already elderly and it wasn’t easy for him to walk. We slowly walked together, and despite my incessant offers to stop and rest, the rosh yeshivah was so moved to be walking on those ancient streets, he couldn’t bring himself to stop.

These were our rabbanim who pass on our mesorah and whose depth of love for Eretz Yisrael knew no bounds.

I recently came across a beautiful story about Rabbi Aryeh Levin, known as “the tzaddik of Yerushalayim.” In 1949, Dr. Hillel Seidman, a Chassidic Jew and Holocaust survivor who was the chief archivist of the Warsaw Kehillah (Dr. Seidman kept a faithful account of the Warsaw Ghetto’s last days, from the deportations to the final uprising) arrived in Eretz Yisrael for a visit. It was the eve of Independence Day, and as he went out into the streets, he was surprised to see the sixty-four-year-old rav dancing with the youth in the streets, his face beaming with joy. When Dr. Seidman asked him why he was dancing with such fervor, Rabbi Levin responded, “After the sea of tears and the flood of hardships that befell our Jewish brethren in the Holocaust, we finally have the good fortune to see Jewish children dancing with joy in their hearts; isn’t that reason enough for us to give praise and thanksgiving to Hakadosh Baruch Hu?”

It certainly is. g

Taking a few moments on Israel’s Independence Day (as well as on every other day of the year!) to reflect on the Divine gift and berachah of Eretz Yisrael is not just the right thing to do, it is our obligation.

THE KOREN MAHZOR for Yom Haatzma’ut and Yom Yerushalayim

Translation by Rabbi Jonathan SacksKoren Publishers • Jerusalem, 2015

Reviewed by Shaul Robinson

T here is a long and not especially suc-cessful history of attempts to pop-

ularize a Yom Ha’atzmaut machzor for the English-speaking world. In 1964, Mr. Armin Krausz of Sheffield, England, ar-ranged for such a machzor to be published by Routledge. The then chief rabbi of Great Britain and the Commonwealth, Rabbi Is-rael Brodie, was asked to approve it for use in synagogues under his authority, a request which he turned down.

In 1972, his successor, Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits, was asked to endorse a second edition of the machzor. He declined to do so, but instead agreed to write a foreword to the new edition. Rather than offer an endorsement, Rabbi Jakobovits took issue in the foreword with the fact that the machzor reflected solely the halachic views of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, and therefore differed considerably from the way in which Yom Ha’atzmaut had begun to be observed by Zionist congregations in the Diaspora.

Chief Rabbi Jakobovits endorsed celebrating Yom Ha’atzmaut as a religious occasion, “. . . but with reservations that distinguish it from the established cycle of festivals in the Jewish calendar.” The publishers declined to print the foreword as submitted, which turned out to matter little, as the machzor never caught on. Other

Rabbi Shaul Robinson was born in Glasgow, Scotland. He has been senior rabbi of Manhat-tan’s Lincoln Square Synagogue since 2005.

attempts have apparently been made over the years; in preparing for the move to the new Lincoln Square Synagogue building three years ago, boxes containing hundreds of copies of another unsuccessful Yom Ha’atzmaut machzor were discovered in the old building. They had never been used.

Will this very well-produced, thorough and absorbing work succeed in its creators’ aim of becoming an accepted prayer book for use in Modern Orthodox congregations? It remains to be seen.

The volume is made up of two parts. The first is a siddur, which like any other machzor, contains all the prayers from Minchah Service on the eve of the holiday to Ma’ariv at its conclusion. (A separate section includes prayers to be recited on Yom Yerushalayim.)

The second part of the volume is a collection of twenty-five essays penned by some of the luminaries in the Religious Zionist world, including Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Rabbi Hershel Schachter and Rabbi Mosheh Lichtenstein. Significantly, some of the essays are by authors whose works are only rarely translated into English, such as Rabbi Shaul Yisraeli, z”l and Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, z”l. The essays deal with many topics connected to the Land of Israel and the State of Israel, as well as observations on the observance of Yom Ha’atzmaut and Yom Yerushalayim.

These essays are uniformly well produced and edited, and as a unit make up one of the most important works in the English language on Religious Zionism.

It is, however, as a siddur that the work is presented, and by which it will ultimately be judged. The siddur is in the standard, beautifully produced Koren format with the English translation on the right-hand page and the Hebrew on the left. The translation is by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, but an entirely new commentary has been written by Rabbi Moshe Taragin and Rabbi Binyamin Lau, linking wherever possible the prayers with the themes of Yom Ha’atzmaut. But, of course, the point of a machzor is to conveniently bring together those prayers that are not said on a regular weekday or Shabbat and to provide guidance for the less-familiar parts of the liturgy. The Koren Mahzor for Yom Haatzma’ut follows, in the main, the liturgy recommended by the Chief Rabbinate of Israel for Yom Ha’atzmaut, but

with a number of optional extras included. A halachic discussion of such questions as when Tachanun is to be recited at Minchah on erev Yom Ha’atzmaut (depends what time Minchah is being said) and whether Shehecheyanu should be said on this day (preferably should not) are included.

But it is in the liturgy itself that the biggest surprises are to be found. For example, a suggested text for Al Hanissim to be recited in the Amidah prayer is included. No compelling reason for its inclusion is given, other than to quote authorities who assert that there is nothing to forbid it. Indeed, the editors themselves concede that it is “commonly omitted.”

This and the inclusion of other prayers such as Hallel with a blessing as part of the evening service, the full Pesukei D’zimra usually recited only on Shabbat and yom tov, Torah Reading even for a Tuesday or Wednesday, a haftarah, et cetera, all serve to highlight something fundamentally discordant about this otherwise very welcome work: it does not reflect the usage and liturgy of the communities to whom it is being marketed.

While Dati Leumi shuls in Israel mostly follow this nusach on Yom Ha’atzmaut, the same cannot be said for shuls outside of Israel. Machzorim exist so that prayer services can proceed smoothly and without interruption or confusion. I cannot think of more than a handful of shuls or schools around the world that would follow the prayers—from beginning to end —as presented. The authors have chosen to include a “maximalist” offering of Yom Ha’atzmaut prayers, and not one that reflects at all the typical service in the vast majority of communities around the world. At the end of the day, what saves the work is the superb and very worthwhile collection of essays that makes up the other half of the machzor. Will this publication find the necessary foothold in institutions that will make its fortune different from so many previous efforts? I hope so. While writing this review, two copies of the machzor arrived at my apartment, gifts for my recently Bat Mitzvahed twin daughters. I hope they will make good use of at least substantial parts of this very well-produced volume. g



Inside The OU

Representatives of the Orthodox community in Manhattan’s Upper West Side gathered this past December at the Manhattan residence of Allen I. Fagin, OU Executive Vice President, to discuss and exchange strategies to strengthen the local community.

The event, spearheaded by Mr. Fagin and Rabbi Dovid Cohen, OU Department of Synagogue and Community Services Regional Director for Manhattan, Bronx, Westchester and Connecticut, was attended by rabbis and lay leaders of twelve local institutions including West Side Sephardic Congregation, the Jewish Center, Kehilat Rayim Ahuvim, West Side Institutional Synagogue, Lincoln Square Synagogue, Manhattan Day School and the West Side Council of Orthodox Jewish Organizations. Representatives from several OU departments, including Synagogue and Community Services, the Harriet & Heshe Seif Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus and NCSY, were also present.

“A great cross-section of the Upper West Side community was in attendance,” says Rabbi Cohen. “Many attendees commented

on the value of bringing such a diverse group together to discuss communal issues.”

Over an elegant catered dinner, attendees touched upon a wide range of topics, including improving programming for young families, coordinating security on a communal level, providing support and guidance to the influx of French Jews who have settled in Manhattan due to rising anti-Semitism in France and galvanizing the local singles crowd, a task that all attendees agreed might be their greatest communal challenge and opportunity.

Some of the initiatives that grew out of the event include new and dynamic programming for Orthodox teens in the area, to be organized by Rabbi Cohen in conjunction with Manhattan Day School. Also in the works is an Upper West Side welcome event in the summer for singles who are new to the community, spearheaded by Congregation Ohab Zedek along with OU-JLIC, Hart Levine, founder of Heart2Heart, and Rabbi Cohen. g

Strengthening

the Upper West Side Community

Birthright Israel, arguably the largest project undertaken by the Jewish community in recent memory, has provided 500,000 Jewish young adults with ten-day trips to Israel on which they learn and connect with one another, Israel and their Jewish identities. Modern Orthodox participants looking for a Birthright Israel experience might think there’s not much for them to learn, having grown up in largely observant Jewish communities. However, OU Israel Free Spirit, an official Birthright Israel organizer, has designed the “Modox” trips specifically geared toward Modern Orthodox participants that fit their needs and interests.

“What we find is a strengthening of the bonds that are built in yeshivot and days schools,” says Ari Ziegler, Group Leader and Program Associate at OU Israel Free Spirit, who has led five Modern Orthodox Birthright Israel groups. “These participants are already entering with a strong Jew-ish background and we see a deepening of those connections and an enrichment of their already ingrained Jewish values.”

With an action-filled itinerary, featuring hiking, rafting, jeeping and more, the trips provide Modern Orthodox par-ticipants with an unforgettable experience that strengthens their Jewish identities and their bonds with Israel, and helps

them discover for themselves how they fit into a global Jewish community.

“I didn’t know what to expect going in,” says Devon Taylor, a twenty-four-year-old day school graduate who lives in Philadelphia and had not been to Israel since his early teens. “But I was shocked by the close connection I felt to Israel. I felt like I was home.”

The next trip is set for Summer 2016 with registration already open at www.israelfreespirit.com/app. g

Participants during the Winter 2016 OU Israel Free Spirit Modox trip. Photo: Avi Grunwald

OU Israel Free Spirit Offers Trips for Modern Orthodox Youth

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OU Israel Free Spirit Offers Trips for Modern Orthodox Youth


Chanukah arrived early at the Orthodox Union headquarters in New York as the OU celebrated a Chanukat Habayit this fall in honor of its newly renovated office space.

Held on November 11th, the invitation-only event featured a cocktail reception, guided tours of the renovated premises and remarks by OU Executive Vice President Allen I. Fagin, OU President Martin Nachimson and Moses Marx, landlord. Mr. Marx had the honor of affixing the new mezuzah and reciting the Shehecheyanu.

With the OU rapidly expanding its multi-faceted programs and hiring more staff on all levels, additional and more effectively utilized space was essential. Two years ago, the OU began extensive renovations to attain more collaborative space, a more comfortable and attractive workplace, upgraded technology and greater efficiencies in the work environment. “When we first moved into the building, most of the furniture was inherited and outdated . . . the space was not modernized,” said Mr. Fagin. “With upgraded security, more open space and natural light, new furniture and carpeting, OU staff can be proud of where they work.”

Renovations were executed without displacing the staff.New additions to the premises, highlighted in the tours,

include a mother’s wellness room, a collaborative lounge and additional small conference rooms.

“This Chanukat HaBayit . . . reflects the growing size, strength and accomplishments of the OU,” said Mr. Nachimson. g

As part of its initiative to reach out to Jewish communities across the United States, the OU’s Department of Synagogue and Community Services has announced the appointment of Rabbi Avi Heller as its regional director for New Jersey and Rockland County, New York. In his new role, he will work with synagogues and communities in these areas.

“There is an incredibly thriving synagogue community in New Jersey as well as in Rockland County, and I hope to bring together, grow and leverage this network of shuls to strengthen them individually and as a whole,” says Rabbi Heller.

Originally from Denver, Rabbi Heller has served for the past six years as the Director of Education for the Manhattan Jewish Experience (MJE), an outreach program for young professionals. Rabbi Heller and his wife, Shira, served as the Torah educators at the Harriet & Heshe Seif Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus (JLIC) program at Boston University. Rabbi Heller has also served as the Director of the Boca Raton

Community Kollel and the Rabbi of the Boca Raton Synagogue West and was the Bronfman Fellow at Hillel International.

“By virtue of his extensive experience, Rabbi Heller certainly understands the demands, needs and challenges of synagogue rabbinic and lay leaders,” says Rabbi Judah Isaacs, Director of Community Engagement. “His work will enhance the crucial role of the shul as the gateway to the broad range of OU programs and services. As our ‘man on the ground,’ Rabbi Heller will be able to forge robust relationships with the Jewish communities in the region.”

Rabbi Heller received his BA in international relations and affairs from Boston University and rabbinic ordination from Yeshiva University’s Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary. He also completed his MA in Bible from Yeshiva University’s Bernard Revel School of Graduate Studies. The Hellers live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with their three children. g

Synagogue Services Expansion Continues:

NEW REGIONAL DIRECTOR APPOINTED

OU officers celebrate the newly renovated OU headquarters in downtown Manhattan. From left: OU President Martin Nachimson; Moses Marx, landlord; OU Executive Vice President Allen I. Fagin, and Chair of the OU Board of Directors Howard Tzvi Friedman. Photo: Kruter Photography

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This past December, an estimated 4,500 OU supporters and congregants of OU-member synagogues participated in the 2015 OU West Coast Convention, held in shuls throughout the greater Los Angeles area. The annual community-based convention aims to involve local OU member synagogues and their congregants in meaningful shiurim and lectures impacting the community-at-large. Scholars-in-residence are hosted within the community, and paired with individual shuls. The theme of this year’s convention, in which approximately eleven shuls and four schools participated, was “Leadership in Challenging Times.”

“The world around us and the Jewish people, in particular, are beset with many challenges,” says OU West Coast Director

Highlights of the OU

OU leaders gather at the gala dinner of the 2015 OU West Coast Convention. From left: OU Executive Vice President Allen I. Fagin, OU President Martin Nachimson, radio personality and author Michael Medved, OU West Coast President Dr. Steven Tabak and OU West Coast Director Rabbi Alan Kalinsky.

Recovering from a communal scandal, engaging millennials, managing a crisis during a natural disaster and applying for-profit business principles to your shul are just a few of the relevant and timely topics addressed at the OU’s Eighth Annual National Synagogue Executive Directors Conference held this past fall.

Sponsored by the OU’s Karasick Department of Synagogue Services, the three-day seminar in Atlanta, Georgia, drew representatives from thirty-two shuls in thirteen states and two Canadian provinces. The conference, with the theme of “Growing a Mikdash Me’at,” focused on how lay and professional leaders play an instrumental role in running a synagogue and strengthening a community. Two Atlanta-based shuls, Congregation Beth Jacob and the Young Israel of Toco Hills, co-hosted the conference. “The support and professional development I receive from the conference and network has been invaluable to the work that I do,” says Eliana Leader, Executive Director of the Young Israel of Toco Hills, “and my shul has benefited from the great ideas and successful programs shared by other shuls.”

“The strength of this event is how it utilizes the network of OU member shuls that our department has created,” says Associate Director of Synagogue Services and Regional Director for Long Island Rabbi Yehuda Friedman, who coordinated the

conference. “An executive director from a shul in Omaha and another from Beverly Hills can sit together and share ideas and practices, enabling communities of all sizes to build each other.”

The annual conference is part of the Department of Synagogue Services’ larger initiative to provide consultation to synagogue and communal leaders, with over 200 synagogues reached in the last year.

Building Shuls and Communities at the Synagogue Executive Directors Conference

Michael Karlin, Past President of Congregation Bnai Yeshurun in Teaneck, New Jersey, presenting ways to strengthen shul financial management and accountability during the recent Synagogue Executive Directors Conference.


2015 West Coast Convention

Rabbi Alan Kalinsky. “But perhaps the greatest challenge that we face in our world today is the lack of leadership.”

Highlights of the convention include: keynote address by noted broadcaster and author Michael Medved; shiurim by Rabbi Hershel Schachter, senior posek of OU Kosher and rosh yeshivah at Yeshiva University’s Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary; and a plenary session moderated by OU Executive Vice President Allen I. Fagin with panelists Michael Medved, Associate Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center Rabbi Abraham Cooper, and Executive Director for World Jewish Congress Betty Ehrenberg. g


Thanks to the efforts of City Councilman David Greenfield and two years of intense lobbying spearheaded by OU Advocacy with an array of partners, New York has become the first city in the country to pass legislation that provides children in non-public schools the same security as their peers in public schools. Councilman Greenfield championed the new provision, known as Introduction 65-A, leading the push until it was signed into law January 5. Once it takes effect April 1, it will provide $19.8 million in city funding in the first year for non-public schools to train and hire unarmed, licensed, private security guards at schools with at least 300 students, with one additional officer per each 500 students. A school with 2,000 students, for example, would be provided with five guards.

Councilman Greenfield called the bill’s passage a historic day for children’s safety in New York. “Our city decided years ago that children deserve to be protected before something happens because they are children,” he said. “All we are doing . . . is extending that same protection to non-public school children. That’s something we should all be proud of.”

The new measure translates to enhanced security for as many as 200,000 non-public school children in New York City, about half of whom attend Jewish institutions. The city already provides security guards for district schools regardless of size, location or particular security threats.

“This is a tremendous win for equity and fairness for all New York City students,” said Maury Litwack, OU Advocacy’s Director of State Political Affairs. “It is our obligation to keep all children safe, regardless of which school they attend.”

In addition to protecting children, the measure will also save parents and schools tens of thousand dollars a year, Litwack said. OU Advocacy-led efforts to encourage approval of the new legislation included testifying at City Council hearings, meeting with City Council members and mayoral staff and bringing politicians to local Jewish schools to view security needs first-hand.OU Advocacy has been focused on similar security legislation

in other states as well. In New Jersey, for example, OU Advocacy worked to increase 2016 funding for non-public security services and equipment for the first time in twenty years. In Pennsylvania, OU Advocacy worked with state legislators to include non-public schools in its Safe Schools Act, which provides funding for safety officers and other measures such as electronic monitoring and conflict resolution programs.

The New York City legislation is an enormous relief for school leaders such as Rabbi Baruch Rothman, Director of Institutional Advancement for Yeshiva Darchei Torah in Far Rockaway, New York. In the face of increasing anti-Semitic incidents worldwide and the recent spate of terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, California, parents at the pre-K through twelfth grade school have been expressing increasing concern about whether the school was doing enough for their children’s safety.

“Parents have been worried, and understandably so given the concerns our community faces,” Rabbi Rothman said. While the school already has a security patrol system in place, the new legislation will give Rabbi Rothman and the rest of the school’s community greater peace of mind. “This helps us continue our focus on learning rather than worrying about how to keep our children safe.”

Such sentiments are echoed by other Jewish school leaders. At Brooklyn’s Yeshivah of Flatbush, Rabbi Seth Linfield, Executive Director, called the bill “a top legislative priority for our school.” Yeshivah of Flatbush actively participated in advocating for Introduction 65A.

“This legislation is a game-changer for our children’s security, and OU Advocacy’s tireless efforts kept this issue at the forefront of the New York City Council’s agenda,” Rabbi Linfield said. “We are grateful not only for the OU’s persistence but also for uniting all of us to focus on the same goal: keeping our children safe.” g

OU Advocacy

New York CityApprovesLandmark Legislationfor School Security

With security a top concern for Jewish schools and shuls, OU Advocacy welcomed Congress’s approval of $20 million for the US Department of Homeland Security’s Nonprofit Security Grant Program (NSGP) for fiscal year 2016. The persistent efforts by OU Advocacy, its coalition partners and Capitol Hill allies paid off, securing $7 million more than the previous year and the highest funding level for the program since 2007.

The NSGP enables religious entities and other nonprofits—including synagogues and day schools—to protect themselves from terror attacks by improving building security and preparedness training.

OU Advocacy spearheaded creation of the program along with partner organizations in the wake of 9/11. Congress first funded the NSGP in 2005, and the Department of Homeland Security has since delivered $120 million to protect many nonprofit institutions in major urban areas—with most of those funds going to Orthodox and other Jewish community institutions.

The boost in funding comes at a critical moment for the Jewish community, which faces a 20 percent increase in anti-Semitic incidents across the United States and terrorist attacks targeting

Jews worldwide. The need for vigilance—and the resources to pay for them—was highlighted recently by ISIS videos circulating online calling for violence against Jews at home and abroad.

Indeed, the grant program has been a crucial resource for Jewish life: Since its inception, synagogues, day schools and other Jewish communal facilities have used the grants to beef up safety through enhancements such as security cameras, metal detectors, concrete barriers, outdoor lighting, shatterproof windows and controlled entry systems.

“As terror attacks have increased in recent months —such as the killing of nine people at a Charleston, South Carolina church in June—it is clear the NSGP must be increased and expanded to protect all vulnerable communities,” OU Executive Director for Public Policy Nathan Diament said.

“We are very thankful that the Department of Homeland Security and our Congressional supporters recognize the ongoing need to keep at-risk religious and nonprofit facilities safe and secure, but there’s more to be done,” Diament said. “All of us, regardless of our beliefs, have the right to defend our communities from those who seek to do us harm.” g


OU Advocacy Helps Secure

Big Win for Jewish Community Security

Two hundred Team Yachad runners from across North America—joined by an additional 200 family and friends to cheer them on—gathered in Miami this past January to participate in the Miami Marathon and Half-Marathon. Some of the Yachad participants were in jogging strollers pushed by a partner; others ran, jogged and walked. Yachad’s marathon weekend, lasting from Thursday through Sunday, is known to bring people together from all walks of life to enjoy Shabbat, hear from inspirational speakers, participate in ruach, and prepare for the physical adventure of Sunday’s run.

The runners, many of whom trained for months, had a clear goal: to raise funds for Yachad-National Jewish Council for Disabilities, the OU’s program that provides social, educational and recreational programs for Jewish individuals with disabilities. This is the team’s seventh consecutive year participating in the Miami race.

“The weekend [prior to the race] is really a celebration of the months and months of work our runners have put into both fundraising and training,” says Eli Hagler, Associate Director of Yachad. “This one weekend helps Yachad provide hundreds of programs as well as thousands of dollars of scholarship money to help Yachad members all over the world participate in our programs.”

“Crossing the finish line was empowering,” says Shira Hochberg, a Yachad supporter from Teaneck, New Jersey, with no prior race experience.

Although the massive snowstorm that blanketed the East Coast created travel complications after the race, the Team Yachad staff did everything they could to ensure that every participant was taken

care of, from changing hundreds of airline flights to covering hotel and catering accommodations.

If you missed this year’s Miami marathon, don’t despair! Upcoming Yachad marathons include:

Jerusalem Marathon: Half-Marathon and 10K, March 18, 2016Toronto Marathon: Half-Marathon and 5K, May 1, 2016Or “Your Race, Your Date—Anytime, Anywhere!” You can

participate in any event taking place anywhere at any time. Let Team Yachad know which event you are participating in and Yachad will help you raise money while accomplishing a great personal goal.

Go to teamyachad.com to register today. g

Three Team Yachad runners moments after crossing the finish line at the Miami Marathon and Half-Marathon. From left: Oren Neuwirth of New Rochelle, New York; David Orlansky of New York City; and Yoni Steinfeld of Woodmere, New York.

Miami Runs on TeamYachad

Friends and supporters gathered this past January at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York to attend this year’s Ben Zakkai Honor Society’s NCSY National Scholarship Reception.

The annual event recognizes the achievements of NCSY alumni who provide meaningful service to the klal. Proceeds from the dinner provide scholarship funds for high school NCSYers to attend summer programs in North America and Israel, and to enable teens to continue their Jewish education after high school.

Three honorees were presented with awards: Terry and Dennis M. Eisenberg of Brooklyn, New York; Dr. Murray Leben of Teaneck, New Jersey; and Rabbi Dave and Chani Felsenthal of Passaic, New Jersey. Rabbi Felsenthal is Director of the OU’s

Next Gen Division, which provides outreach programs to college and post-college students across the country.

The night of celebration also saw four new inductees to the Ben Zakkai Honor Society, NCSY Alumni’s “Hall of Fame”: David Cutler of Staten Island, New York; Eli Weinstein of West Hempstead, New York; David Statman of Los Angeles, California; and Elliot Tanzman of Queens, New York. David Cutler serves as Director of NCSY Summer Programs.

“The vitality and success of NCSY is largely a tribute to the devotion, dedication and passion that our inductees and honorees bring to every aspect of their personal and communal lives,” says OU National Vice President Dr. David Luchins, who co-chaired the dinner along with his wife, Vivian, Chair of the NCSY Summer Programs Committee. g

Highlights of the


Director, OU Next Gen Rabbi Dave Felsenthal and his wife, Chani, are awarded the Rebbetzin Elaine and Rabbi Pinchas Stolper Service Award. From left: Dr. and Mrs. Luchins; Ms. Novak; Secretary of the Ben Zakkai Society Allison Katz; Rabbi and Mrs. Felsenthal; Mr. Fagin; Director, Association of Jewish Outreach Professionals Rabbi Yitzchok Lowenbraun and Rabbi Greenland.

Dinner honoree Dr. Murray Leben, surrounded by family, receives the Enid and Harold Boxer Memorial Award. From left: Leor Leben; Donny Goldin; Tamara Leben Goldin; Dr. Leben; Regional Director of New Jersey NCSY Rabbi Ethan Katz; Mr. Fagin; Oren Leben and Shana Leben.

Honorees Terry and Dennis M. Eisenberg are presented with the Ezra Ben Zion Lightman Memorial Award. From left: International Director of NCSY Rabbi Micah Greenland; Mr. and Mrs. Eisenberg; OU Executive Vice President Allen I. Fagin; OU National Vice President Dr. David Luchins and his wife, Vivian, Dinner Chairs, and OU Vice President Isabelle Novak, Chair of the Ben Zakkai Honor Society. Photos: Kruter Photography

Twenty-First Annual Ben Zakkai Dinner

OU Calls Upon Shuls

Following a meeting between the parents of Lt. Hadar Goldin, Hy”d, and OU Executive Vice President Allen I. Fagin, and the call of the Chief Rabbis of Israel to pray that the bodies of Lt. Goldin and St.-Sgt. Oron Shaul, Hy”d, be returned for proper burial, the OU urged its network of shuls to recite a special Av HaRachamim for the fallen heroes. Both officers were killed during Operation Protective Edge in the summer of 2014 and their remains are being held by Hamas.

The OU Department of Synagogue and Community Services designed a specially created Av HaRachamim card, which includes the Hebrew prayer developed by the Chief Rabbis of Israel as well as a translation in English. The card was distributed to the OU’s network of 400 shuls across the country. The Av HaRachamim is to be recited at the point when each shul recites the “Mi Sheberach” prayer, often around Kriat HaTorah. “It is our obligation to daven for the return of these bodies and to ensure that they receive a proper Jewish burial,” says Rabbi Judah Isaacs, Director of Community Engagement. To obtain the card, e-mail [email protected]. g

to Pray for Return of Soldiers’ Bodies

The Av HaRachamim card, distributed to the OU network of shuls across the country.


With the need to grow our multifaceted and cutting-edge programs to address the ever-increasing needs of the world-wide Jewish community, the OU has hired Arnold Gerson to serve as Chief Institutional Advancement Officer. In this capacity, Arnold will oversee all fundraising strategy and activity across the organization, as well as help shape related communications strategy.

A non-profit leader with extensive development experience, Arnold has held several significant development roles; most recently, he was the Chief Executive Officer of American Friends of Magen David Adom (AFMDA), where he oversaw all organizational management, development and branding. Seeing campaign returns increase by 83 percent, Arnold’s tenure at AFMDA was marked by heightened professionalism, increased engagement of lay leadership and a strategic shift to a major gifts focus that yielded exceptional returns. “I am delighted that, after an extensive search process, we have hired a consummate professional to serve as our Chief Insti-tutional Advancement Officer,” said OU Executive Vice Pres-

ident Allen I. Fagin. “Arnold brings to the OU decades of leadership experience with major Jewish philanthropic or-ganizations, and a unique track record of success in building teams of development professionals. We look forward to transforming the OU’s institutional advancement efforts into a first-class platform for growing our extraordinary array of programs and services.”

“I am excited to be working with both the professionals and lay leadership of the OU to significantly increase fundraising revenue to meet the growing needs of the critically important programs that the OU funds,” says Arnold.

Arnold also served as Executive Vice President of AMIT for five years, where the annual campaign nearly doubled under his leadership, and as Executive Director of the annual campaign at UJA-Federation of New York, where he was responsible for managing and developing a $75 million cam-paign. Arnold has an MA in social and industrial psychology from Bar-Ilan University in Israel and he attended Columbia University’s Institute for Not-for-Profit Management. g

OU Expands Development Department

Hires New Chief InstitutionalAdvancement Officer

Arnold Gerson

Phot

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With the extraordinary growth of the OU’s Harriet & Heshe Seif Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus, now on twenty-two campuses across North America, the OU hired Alan Goldman to serve as Director of Development for OU-JLIC.

“In the last two years alone, we’ve added five new campuses,” says Rabbi Ilan Haber, OU-JLIC National Director. “It’s important to ensure that we have the financial backing to sustain our remarkable growth. Alan will focus his energies on ensuring we have the funding to continue to directly impact more than 2,000 college students annually.”

An accomplished development professional, Alan most recently worked as Development Director for Greater Cleveland Volunteers, where he oversaw all elements of fund development for the agency. Prior to that, he worked for the Jewish Federation of Cleveland. “I am glad to be back in the Jewish nonprofit sector, and I am very impressed with what OU-JLIC is doing across the country,” says Alan. “I am looking forward to helping the program grow and deepen its impact.”

Making sure that OU Israel Free Spirit participants get the most out of their trips, the OU recently hired Rayna Kalish to serve as Development Director for the program.

“A critical component of our program is follow up,” says Rabbi Dave Felsenthal, Director of the OU’s Next Gen Division. After each trip (OU Israel Free Spirit runs some sixty trips a year), the OU makes sure to keep an ongoing connection to participants. The OU invites participants to Friday night campus dinners, has them sign up for chavruta study and even encourages some to attend yeshivah in Israel. “Funding is a crucial element in ensuring the long-term success of our trips,” says Rabbi Dave.

A seasoned fundraiser, Rayna worked at the American Technion Society in New York for the past sixteen years, where she specialized in connecting donors to their passion. Rayna has extensive experience working with high-level donors and running events. “Rayna is a dynamic and creative fundraiser whose passion for Israel and the

Jewish people will, no doubt, ensure that she excels in this position,” says Rabbi Dave.

“I am thrilled to be raising funds to keep the excitement of OU Israel Free Spirit alive after the Birthright Israel trip,” says Rayna. “I can think of no greater cause than

connecting young Jewish people to their homeland and to their roots, bonding them to a lifelong commitment to their Judaism.” g

Meet the New

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Chumash Mesoras Harav: Vayikra

Edited by Dr. Arnold LustigerOU Press, Nehorah Publications and Ohr Publishing

In the third volume of Chumash Mesoras Harav, Dr. Arnold Lustiger has again succeeded in creating a seamless commentary on the Chumash out of a diverse array of lectures, essays and books containing the ideas of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, the “Rav.”

Sefer Vayikra, perhaps the most difficult of the books of the Chumash, provides a fertile ground for the Rav’s analysis. Here, the fruitful interaction

between lomdus and philosophy, the Rav’s trademark, finds expression in Vayikra’s most perplexing laws, from the parallel between the rites of the metzora and the mourner to the contrast between the service of the High Priest and of the scapegoat. In addition to halachic mastery, in the Rav’s hands seemingly esoteric laws give rise to universal philosophic principles. To give just one example, the Rav explains the language of the verse regarding the punishment for one who consumes blood (Vayikra 17:10), “and I will cut him off from among his people”:

If man wants to defeat death and scoff at nihility, he must somehow elevate himself above this order of meaningless existence and come close to the order of eternity. To gain a pass to everlasting reality, he must represent God . . . This is possible only if the individual Jew includes himself in Knesses Yisrael, the community which was burdened at the dawn of history with the divine logos and ethos, God’s word and ethical system . . . Only when the individual joins this community may he lay claim to a deathless existence. Only through identification with the origin may one gain eternal life.

The Chumash Mesoras Harav: Vayikra joins the preceding volumes on Bereishit and Shemot as a classic commentary on the books of the Torah. g

The Concise Code of Jewish Law: A Guide to the Observance of Shabbat—Revised Edition

By Rabbi Gersion Appel Revised edition edited by Rabbi Daniel GoldsteinOU Press, Maggid Books and Yeshiva University Press

Despite the eternal nature of halachah, each generation requires its own halachic works. Some hala-chic works are expansive, theoret-ical and appeal to the intellect, while others are more practical, to the point and answer the crying need for day-to-day guidance in proper halachic observance. The Concise Code of Jewish Law is an up-to-date work of halachah le-ma’aseh for our generation, pre-sented, as its title suggests, in a

concise and user-friendly format. (This volume on Hilchot Shabbat is the first of a projected four-volume series cov-ering all areas of practical halachah.) The text, which loosely follows the organization of the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch, is accompanied by notes with more detailed ex-amples and applications, as well as a section of Hebrew sources and references at the end of the volume.

First published a generation ago by Rabbi Gersion Appel, the work has been updated by Rabbi Daniel Goldstein in style and in substance to address new technological de-velopments and the opinions of recent posekim. Unique among halachic works in English, Concise Code incorpo-rates not only classic sources such as the Chayei Adam, Mishnah Berurah and Aruch Hashulchan, but a wide spec-trum of the greatest posekim from the recent past such as Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Rabbi Shaul Yisraeli and Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Auerbach, down to the leading posekim of our own day such as Rabbi Nachum Rabinovitch, Rabbi Hershel Schachter, Rabbi Mordechai Willig and Rabbi Eliezer Melamed.

The enthusiastic haskamot of Rabbi Ahron Soloveichik and Rabbi Dovid Lifshitz to the prior edition, and of Rabbi Hershel Schachter and Rabbi Mordechai Willig to the new edition, attest to the important place Concise Code should occupy in your library. Concise Code makes a per-fect text for students, as well as for all those interested in enhancing their observance of halachah and acquiring greater knowledge about the intricacies of practical halachah in our generation.

Order online atOUPRESS.ORG


Albondiga SoupAdapted from Celebrate: Food, Family, Shabbos by Elizabeth Kurtz, to benefit Emunah of AmericaYields 10 servings

This exotic Spanish soup is a Pesach favorite for Elizabeth Kurtz’s family, precisely because it tastes nothing like Pesach. Carrots and zucchini, fresh cilantro, wonderfully rich broth and flavorful meatballs—albondigas—make a filling first course that your family and guests will love.

Meatballs1 pound ground turkey1/3 cup matzah meal 1/4 cup finely chopped fresh cilantro1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley1/2 tsp ground cumin1 1/2 tsp kosher salt1 large egg, lightly beaten

Soup2 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil1 yellow onion, finely chopped

By Norene GilletzThe Chef’s Table

Norene Gilletz is the leading author of kosher cookbooks in Canada. Visit her web site at www.gourmania.com or e-mail her at [email protected].

Preparing healthy, satisfying and delicious meals for family and friends during the eight days of Pesach is a huge challenge. The secret is to focus on plant-based foods, including a variety of colorful, fiber-packed vegetables and fruits, either enjoyed on their own or added to easy-to-prepare recipes. So much better for you than filling up on potatoes and starchy, processed carbs, eating far too many eggs and indulging on too much matzah shmeared with butter and jam.

This scrumptious selection of wholesome, flexible, family-friendly foods will bring rave reviews from everyone seated at your Pesach table.

2 cloves garlic, minced6 cups chicken broth 2 cups water2 Tbsp tomato paste2 carrots, peeled and sliced1 large zucchini, halved lengthwise and sliced1/2 cup chopped fresh cilantro or parsley1 tsp dried oregano3/4 tsp kosher salt1/2 tsp ground black pepper1 avocado, pitted and chopped, for garnish1 lime, cut into wedges, for garnish1/4 cup minced fresh cilantro or parsley, for garnish

Combine ground turkey, matzah meal, cilantro, parsley, cumin, and salt in a medium bowl. Use a wooden spoon to gently stir the mixture until blended. Add egg, mixing just until combined. Form into 1-inch balls.

Heat oil in a large stockpot over medium-high heat. Add onion and cook, stirring occasionally, until soft, about 6 minutes. Add garlic and cook until fragrant, about 1 minute. Add broth, water, and tomato paste, stirring to dissolve. Add carrots; bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce to a simmer and add meatballs; cook 15 minutes over medium-low heat. Add zucchini; cook until carrots and zucchini are tender and meatballs are cooked through, an additional 10 to 15 minutes.

Add chopped cilantro, oregano, salt and pepper. Serve hot with avocado, lime wedges and a sprinkle of minced cilantro.

Photo: EyeCandyTOMango Chicken with Leeks & Red Peppers

PESACH NEVER

Norene’s Notes:Make Ahead: This soup can be prepared two days ahead of time. Store covered in the refrigerator or freeze up to three months. Defrost in the refrigerator. Reheat over medium heat before serving.

Roasted Beet and Asparagus Salad Adapted from Celebrate: Food, Family, Shabbos by Elizabeth Kurtz, to benefit Emunah of AmericaYields 8 servings

Gorgeous and delicious roasted beets and asparagus layer this salad with color. Elizabeth Kurtz likes to serve it on a platter instead of a bowl to really showcase the vegetables. This unique preparation of traditional Pesach ingredients is sure to impress your guests.

Salad2 beets, peeled and cut into 1/2-inch cubes1/2 tsp kosher salt3 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil, divided8 spears green or white asparagus6 cups chopped romaine lettuce1/2 cup sliced hearts of palm1 cup honey-glazed pecans

Dressing1/3 cup balsamic vinegar1/4 cup sugar1 tsp kosher salt1 clove garlic, minced3/4 cup safflower oil

Preheat oven to 425°F. Line a large baking sheet with aluminum foil.Toss beets with salt and 2 Tbsp of olive oil; place on prepared

baking sheet. Roast until softened, about 40 minutes. Let cool. Arrange asparagus on a separate baking sheet; drizzle with

the remaining tablespoon of olive oil. Roast just until crisp, 5 to 7 minutes for green asparagus or 8 to 9 minutes for white. Let cool, and then cut into 2-inch pieces or leave whole.

Arrange romaine lettuce on a large platter. Scatter with hearts of palm, pecans, roasted beets and asparagus.

Whisk together vinegar, sugar, salt and garlic in a small bowl. Slowly add oil, whisking continuously until emulsified. Pour over salad; toss and serve immediately.

Norene’s Notes:Make Ahead: Dressing, beets and asparagus can be made two days in advance. Beets tend to turn everything pink, so store them separately. Bring dressing to room temperature before using and dress salad just before serving. Tip: Use gloves or a paper towel when cutting cooked or uncooked

Albondiga Soup Photo: Jon Edwards Photography



beets. Their beautiful color stains not only the counter but also your fingers. Lighten Up: Substitute 1/3 cup toasted chopped pecans for the honey-glazed pecans. Omit the 3 Tbsp olive oil used for roasting the beets and asparagus. Instead, spray the vegetables with olive oil cooking spray. For the dressing, reduce the balsamic vinegar to 1/4 cup, the sugar to 2 Tbsp, and the oil to 1/3 cup. Add 2 Tbsp water.

Quinoa with Roasted Veggies Adapted from The Silver Platter: Simple to Spectacular by Daniella Silver and Norene Gilletz (ArtScroll)Yields 10 servings

With five different roasted veggies, this colorful dish is great for a crowd. It’s a cross between a salad and a side dish that is vegan-friendly, protein-rich and gluten-free.

Roasted Vegetables1 medium red onion, diced1 red bell pepper, diced1 zucchini, diced (do not peel)1 small sweet potato, peeled and diced4 cloves garlic, minced (about 2 tsp)2 Tbsp olive oilkosher saltfreshly ground black pepper

Quinoa3 cups lightly salted water1 1/2 cups quinoa, rinsed and drained

Dressing1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil1/3 cup balsamic vinegar2 to 3 Tbsp honey1 1/2 tsp kosher salt1/4 tsp black pepper

Preheat oven to 400°F. Line a rimmed baking sheet with parchment paper.

In a large bowl, combine onion, bell pepper, zucchini, sweet potato and garlic. Drizzle with oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and toss to combine. Spread in a single layer on prepared baking sheet. Roast, uncovered, for 35-45 minutes, until golden.

Meanwhile, bring water to a boil in a medium saucepan over high heat. Add quinoa and reduce heat. Simmer, covered, for 15 minutes or until tender. Remove from heat and let stand for 10 minutes, covered. Fluff quinoa with a fork.

Combine ingredients for dressing in a glass jar; seal tightly and shake well.

In a serving bowl, combine cooked quinoa with roasted veggies and dressing. Mix well. Serve hot or at room temperature. Do not freeze.

Norene’s Notes:One-Dish Meal: Top with thinly sliced chicken breast, chunks of salmon, or even cubes of gefilte fish. Roasted Veggies: The roasted vegetables can be enjoyed on their own as a simple, healthful side dish. Instead of dicing the veg-gies, either cut them into 1-inch chunks or cut into strips. Instead of sweet potato, substitute butternut squash. You can add 2 cups of sliced mushrooms and 1 small Asian eggplant to the veggie mix—no need to peel the eggplant first.

Quinoa with Roasted VeggiesPhoto: EyeCandyTO


*Please note the OU only recommends quinoa on Pesach when bearing an OU-P.

Mango Chicken with Leeks & Red PeppersAdapted from The Silver Platter: Simple to Spectacular by Daniella Silver and Norene Gilletz (ArtScroll)

This unique combo of leeks, red pepper and mango is a perfect way to jazz up your basic roast chicken. The tropical taste of mango adds a sweet flavor and a pop of bright color. This Pesach, be bold in the kitchen and try new things—that’s the best way to cook.

Chicken2 chickens (about 3 lb/1.4 kg each), cut into eighthskosher saltfreshly ground black pepper2 tsp sweet paprika2 tsp onion powder2 tsp garlic powder2 tsp dried basil1/4 cup honey

Topping2 Tbsp olive oil3 large leeks, thinly sliced2 red bell peppers, halved and thinly sliced2 mangoes, peeled and thinly sliced1/2 tsp kosher salt, or to tastefreshly ground black pepper

Preheat oven to 400°F. Coat a large roasting pan with nonstick cooking spray.

Trim and discard excess fat from chicken pieces. Arrange chicken, skin side up, in a single layer in prepared pan. Sprinkle with salt, pepper, paprika, onion powder, garlic powder and basil. Drizzle honey over chicken. Rub chicken on all sides to coat with spices and honey. (Can be prepared up to 24 hours in advance and refrigerated, covered.)

Roast, uncovered, for 1 hour and 20 minutes, until cooked through and juices run clear. Baste occasionally.

Meanwhile, in a large skillet, heat oil over medium-high heat. Sauté leeks and red peppers for 7-8 minutes, until golden. Stir in mangoes. Season with salt and pepper; cook until heated through, about 3 minutes.

Transfer chicken to a serving platter; pour on topping.Norene’s Notes:

Tip: To clean leeks, trim off most of the green part of each leek. Make 4 lengthwise cuts almost to the root so that the leek resembles a broom. Swish leeks in a sink filled with cold water to remove any sand or grit. Dry well. Cut off and discard root end.

Wishing youand your familypeace and joythis Passover.

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Shira Isenberg is a registered dietitian and writer in Memphis, Tennessee. She has a master’s degree in public health nutrition from Hunter College in New York.

Wellness Report Shira Isenberg

QI’m elbow-deep in soapy water checking my maror for the Seder,

while chatting with a friend on the phone, who tells me that lettuce has no nutritional value. Is that true? If so, why are people always talking about eating more greens?

AThere’s no reason to be bitter about your maror this Pesach season.

Lettuce—which grows well in the spring, making it perfect for Chag Ha’Aviv—is actually a catch-all name for a number of different types. The one your friend is probably thinking of is iceberg lettuce. It is a little light in nutritional value, but it’s definitely still good for you. One cup of iceberg lettuce has between 8 and 10 calories, which barely makes a dent in

your diet—that’s one reason it’s such a hit among people trying to lose weight. You also get 1 gram of fiber, which contributes to feelings of satiety, and helps control calorie intake. Not to mention about 14 micrograms of vitamin K (about 12 percent of the recommended amount for adults).

If you save some of that maror for salads and have a cup of romaine lettuce instead, for the same 8 calories and 1 gram of fiber you can get about 4100 IU of vitamin A—more than the recommended daily intake amount. Plus you’ll get about 50 micrograms of vitamin K, more than double that of iceberg. You will also get about 60 micrograms of folate, which at 15 percent of recommended intake isn’t too shabby.

Keep in mind, there are other types of lettuce too—like red leaf lettuce, which

has about half the vitamin A in romaine (about 2100 IU per cup) and butterhead, which comes in a bit lower at 1800 IU per cup but also contains 40 micrograms of folate.

So lettuce has plenty of redeeming nutritional value. Moreover, as a popular base for salads, it’s a vehicle for getting even more vegetables into your diet. In fact, lettuce is the third most commonly eaten fresh vegetable in the US, according to the Agricultural Marketing Resource Center. Those green leaves also make a great, low-carb substitute for wraps and sandwich bread, making it ideal for use on Pesach. (Not to mention those pre-Pesach days when the house is already free of chometz and you can’t eat matzah yet.)

But there are many more vegetables that are richer in nutrients than lettuce. So why are nutritionists always promoting green leafy vegetables?

That’s because there is a host of lettuce-like leafy greens that pack an even stronger nutritional punch. Their standout nutrients are vitamins A and K, along with additional health benefits. Take a look:

• ARUGULA: This peppery-tasting green leaf is from the cruciferous vegetable family, which research has shown may help reduce the risk of certain cancers,

GOING GREEN

Lettuce—The Perfect Pesach Vegetable


including colon, breast, prostate and lung. A cup of arugula provides 5 calories along with 475 IU of vitamin A, about 20 micrograms of vitamin K, and 32 milligrams of calcium.

• KALE: The vegetable of the decade, no doubt, kale has been increasing in popularity—for good reason. Also a cruciferous vegetable with cancer-protective properties, kale contains lutein and zeaxanthin, two phytonutrients (plant nutrients) thought to be important for eye health, among other benefits. Kale is rich in vitamin A (1600 IU), vitamin K (110 micrograms) and has about 20 milligrams of vitamin C. Maybe its one flaw is that it’s a little annoying to check for bugs because of its curly edges.

•SPINACH: Perhaps spinach was Popeye’s favorite for its content of vitamin A (2800

IU) and vitamin K (145 micrograms). Although it has a nice amount of calcium—thirty milligrams per cup—spinach is also a source of oxalates, which bind to calcium so it’s not well absorbed. However, cooking reduces oxalate content, making that calcium more readily available for absorption by the body. Spinach also contains lutein and zeaxanthin. Stocking your freezer with bags of pre-checked spinach is a no-brainer.

• COLLARD GREENS: Kind of like kale, but a bit beefier, collard greens have 1800 IU of vitamin A and about 160 micrograms of vitamin K per cup. They do contain some oxalates, but because you’ll probably cook your collards, you’ll likely absorb much of the 80 milligrams of calcium per cup.

• SWISS CHARD: Part of the beet family, Swiss chard has been said to taste like

beets. Vitamin K is its star nutrient, with about 300 micrograms per cup. It’s also got 2200 IU of vitamin A and a sprinkle of vitamin C (10 milligrams). Like spinach, it contains oxalates, which bind to calcium, so the 18 milligrams found in a cup probably don’t count.

• CABBAGE: At 18 calories, a cup of shredded cabbage provides 2 grams of fiber, 25 milligrams of vitamin C, 30 micrograms of folate, and 50 micrograms of vitamin K. It’s fairly easy to incorporate this cruciferous vegetable into your diet, with the proliferation of coleslaw mixes and shredded cabbage available at the supermarket. And I know we’re talking greens here, but if you choose red cabbage which has a similar nutrient profile (a bit more vitamin A, a bit less folate and vitamin K), you’ll also get the addition of anthocyanins, the color pigments that are potent phytochemicals (plant chemicals) thought to have antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. g

This Pesach, instead of loading up on the carbs, go for a salad!

FIVE SALAD FIXESMix it up. Say you love iceberg lettuce—throw in a handful of spinach or kale to bump up the nutritional quality a bit.

Add other vegetables—or any other nutritious food—to bump up the variety of nutrients. For added protein, how about diced chicken or a bit of shredded cheese? Add crunch—and healthy fat and protein—with chopped nuts.

Watch the dressing! You don’t want to undo the health benefits by going overboard on calories with dressing. Sprinkle, don’t souse.

Don’t skimp on the greens. If you’re aiming for more veggies, it’s going to take two cups of lettuce to equal one vegetable serving.

Balance the bitter. An acidic dressing (for example, one made with lemon or lime juice) may make a bitter green more appealing. Another idea—add cut up fruit to boost sweetness.

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Books

CIRCLE, ARROW, SPIRAL: Exploring Gender in Judaism

By Miriam KosmanMekor Press, imprint of Menucha PublishersBrooklyn, NY, 2014 • 376 pages

Reviewed by Allison Josephs

Circle, Arrow, Spiral: Exploring Gender in Judaism is a fascinating book that

turns the women in Judaism conversation on its head. Growing up as a Conservative Jew, I was certain that Orthodox women were “subjugated.” When I started exploring Orthodoxy in my late teens, I was repeatedly told that women in Orthodoxy are considered “different than men but equal.” There were compelling arguments, such as how the righteous women were the ones who redeemed us from Egypt and who will bring about the final Redemption; Creation went from simple to complex (ending with woman); and sexual rights for women in marriage were spelled out thousands of years ago.

While I was used to an egalitarian syna-gogue set-up from childhood, as I learned about women’s exemption from time-bound mitzvot, it all seemed logical. Being a mother of four, it is clear to me that if my husband and I were both obligated to daven with a minyan three times a day, the kids would suffer.

Many non-Orthodox Jews disagree with the “different-but-equal” approach, and contend that it is mere apologetics. Author Miriam Kosman, who was born, bred and continues to be Chareidi, agrees with them!

Allison Josephs is director of Jew in the City, which breaks down stereotypes about religious Jews and offers a humorous, meaningful look into Orthodox Judaism through the power of new media.

The basic gist of her book (which is packed with a very impressive list of both Jewish [i.e, midrash, Talmud] and secular sources [feminist literature]) is that the relationship between men and women is based on a pas-sage in Chullin 60b, where the moon’s light is diminished:

The moon said to the Holy One, Blessed Be He, “Master of the World, two kings cannot share the same crown.” He said to her, “Go and make yourself small.” He saw that she was still upset. The Holy One, Blessed Be He said, “Bring an atonement for Me that I di-minished the moon.”

Kosman, a doctoral candidate at Bar-Ilan University, argues that in Creation, man and woman started off as equals too, but after the sin in the Garden of Eden, the status of woman was lowered. The good news, though, according to Kosman, is that when Mashiach comes, the moon’s light (i.e., women’s stance in Judaism) will be restored. The shift is al-ready beginning to take place, she explains.

Though I find this “men-and-women-are-unequal” approach troubling, there are many ideas in this book which do resonate with me, such as Kosman’s acknowledgement that while there are such things as “feminine traits—what she calls “circle” (like being present in the moment) and “masculine traits”—what she calls “arrow” (like being ambitious)—all men and women have a mix-ture of both.

Kosman also writes that the Western world places a premium on “masculine” traits, i.e., always looking to get ahead, while Eastern religions value the “feminine” traits, i.e., satisfied in the “Zen” mentality.

With the passage of time, the world tends to value feminine and Eastern traits more, and the ultimate goal, according to Kosman, is to blend the two—to take the best aspects of the circle and the best aspects of the arrow and create a spiral. While I appreciate being a complex human being—one who can be both “in the moment” and full of ambition—I agree with Kosman that the carving out of distinct masculine and feminine traits in the Jewish sphere allows for attributes to “blend,” as opposed to the blurring of gender we witness taking place in the secular world.

That said, the idea that women and men are not equal leaves me feeling challenged and confused. On the one hand, we know that women throughout history were sub-

jugated in various ways. They had less free-dom than men, were more susceptible to being overpowered by men, and were less likely to be valued for their intelligence. On the other hand, I don’t ever want to have to tell my daughters that they’re inferior to their brothers in any way.

As I’ve grappled with some of the most challenging aspects of women’s roles in Ju-daism as I became more religious, I’ve always fallen back on the fact that Orthodox women, by and large, are treated with tremendous respect in traditional Jewish communities. In the eighteen years I’ve been living in the Orthodox world, I’ve seen how women are valued in the religious world (with a few rare exceptions), and the greatest proof is in the pudding. But telling men that they have a higher status than women, and telling women the same seems like a surefire way to ensure more women will be taken advan-tage of, even though I know that this is not Kosman’s intention at all.

Kosman also attempts, unsuccessfully, to apply the “sun/moon inequality” model to explain some of the most difficult as-pects concerning women and halachah—like why Jewish divorce gives men more control. Kosman says she did this because we’re supposed to try to understand the mitzvot to the best of our ability so that they’ll be more meaningful to us. While I agree with that sentiment, I am uncom-fortable with the way Kosman tries to explain away complex issues:

The ketubah . . . may seem patriarchal, but it can also be seen as the valuation of the fe-male voice and an awareness of its vulnera-bility . . . . In a Jewish marriage, man is cast an initiator—he commits and obligates himself to fulfilling her needs. This framework does not have to reflect her subordinate status; in-stead, honestly acknowledging the potential differences between men and women can pro-vide the framework for mutuality and equal-ity to flourish (p. 263).

Instead of attempting to explain certain inexplicable mitzvot, as Kosman does, which perhaps borders on justifying suffering, I personally am much happier living with ambiguity and with unanswered questions. g

KOSHER MOVIES: A Film Critic Discovers Life Lessons at the Cinema

By Rabbi Herbert J. Cohen, PhDUrim PublicationsJerusalem, 2015 • 290 pages

Reviewed by Daniel Renna

T his year marks the centenary of the release of D.W. Griffith’s

monumental Birth of a Nation, a film that—despite the controversy that continues to surround it because of its rampant racism—set the motion picture on its way to being the dominant and most influential medium of visual arts in the twentieth century. As the first successful feature-length film, Birth of a Nation revolutionized movie storytelling through its epic sweep, its cast of hundreds and its nearly three-hour length. The hullabaloo that it engendered testified to its enormous cultural influence at the time and the effect that it had on catapulting a fledgling movie industry into the center of American cultural expression.

At the forefront of the ensuing motion picture revolution were Jews. Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, Marcus Loew, William Fox and Irving Thalberg were among the principal founders of such important motion picture studios and production companies as Paramount Pictures, Fox and MGM. The trajectory of the film industry, and the

Daniel Renna is a foreign service officer and cur-rently the senior desk officer for the Democratic Re-public of the Congo at the US State Department. He taught American popular culture to American studies majors in Armenia.

cultural influence it brought to bear, necessarily contained a significant Jewish element. It is no surprise that the first motion picture with sound was The Jazz Singer, the story of a traditional Jew who seeks fame and fortune as a popular entertainer and the tension of assimilation that such a pursuit engenders, starring Al Jolson, himself the son of a chazzan. Jewish values that mirrored those of society at large, such as overcoming adversity, the triumph of hope and the belief in second chances, became ingrained in the American psyche through their depiction on the silver screen.

The relationship Jews have had with the prevailing culture around them has often been fraught with tension, particularly following the Emancipation, when Jews were invited to join that culture. One of the greatest challenges that has defined American Jewish life since the nineteenth century has been the degree to which Jews would engage with popular culture, with the most traditional rejecting it outright and the more liberal embracing it—sometimes exclusively—along with their American identities. In his engaging new book, Kosher Movies: A Film Critic Discovers Life Lessons at the Cinema, Rabbi Dr. Herbert Cohen taps into many of those rudimentary values that have served as the foundational underpinnings of 100 years of storytelling on film. In so doing, Rabbi Cohen highlights the peculiarity of the Modern Orthodox approach to engagement with popular culture—and film, in particular—as a means to glean from it common experiences of life that can and should enhance an Orthodox expression and appreciation of the world, and humanity within it.

Kosher Movies is ostensibly a collection of short essays on movies (billed somewhat misleadingly as “reviews”) that serve to reinforce this Modern Orthodox ideal. Grouped together by themes such as parenting, relationships, sports and adversity, ethics and self-improvement, these selections—largely no more than two

pages each—intend to discuss the overarching leitmotifs and ideas that the films themselves convey to reach almost a homiletical conclusion of some of what Orthodox Jews should garner from watching movies as varied as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Goldfinger.

Nevertheless, one should not confuse this book with more classical film reference works such as those of famous movie critics Leonard Maltin or Roger Ebert. For instance, Rabbi Cohen’s review of The Iron Lady, a monumental film chronicling former British Prime Minister Margaret

Thatcher’s rise to and fall from power, concentrates exclusively on the interaction between Thatcher and her children, an important, yet thoroughly minor element to a performance that earned Meryl Streep her third Academy Award. Read together, however, these essays speak less about the movies they describe and more about the intellectual and personal development of the author. The autobiographical nature of the book, particularly its usage of films as touchstones to significant characters and events in Rabbi Cohen’s development, is at once intensely personal and thoroughly engaging.

Via film reviews, the reader becomes privy to some of the most important and powerful moments of Rabbi Cohen’s life: the first time he sat in a shiur given by Rabbi Joseph Ber Soloveitchik, zt”l, his relationships with Rabbi Chaim Pinchas Scheinberg, zt”l, and Rav Aharon Lichtenstein, zt”l, the birth of his children, the agony over the shocking loss of his first wife, his remarriage, his teaching career in Canada, his aliyah and his new life in

Jewish values that mirrored those of society at large such as overcoming adversity, the triumph of hope and the belief in second chances became ingrained in the American psyche through their depiction on the silver screen.


For more information, contact Rabbi Yosef Grossman at [email protected], 212.613.8212 or 914.391.9470.Sponsored by the Harry H. Beren Foundation of New Jersey

*Kollel Beth HaTalmud in Melbourne has hosted ten Harry H. Beren ASK OU Global SKYPE Shiurim to date! SKYPE

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POPULAR TOPICS INCLUDE:· The Mesorah of Kosher Birds, Eggs and Animals · Current Kosher Fish Issues· The Production of Kosher Wine and Liquor· The New Shmata Bedikah for Checking Fruits and Vegetables· Meet the OU’s Meat Team …Or request a topic of specific interest to your community, group or organization.

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Israel. What emerges is an extraordinary story of someone truly committed to the essential elements of the Modern Orthodox ethos, tapping into the inherent tension between Torah culture and that of the surrounding world to tease out unique insights into God’s creation. Tying these carefully selected anecdotes to the motion pictures he reviews, Rabbi Cohen accomplishes the improbable: eliciting divrei Torah from what otherwise might be considered frivolous entertainment. Moreover, through his love of both Torah

and film, Rabbi Cohen brings to the fore the comforting attributes that both religion and popular culture share in their inherent relatability.

Kosher Movies succeeds in promoting some ideals that in many quarters have been considered passé, namely the effective synergy of the devotion to Torah and the careful

application of general, in this case, popular culture. Coming of age at Yeshiva University in the 1960s, arguably the zenith of these ideas, Rabbi Cohen rejects the contemporary notion that the Modern Orthodox approach is intrinsically flawed and does not work. On the contrary, he states that “We learn about God not only through His words but also His works. My task as a teacher of . . . film is to give students the tools to discriminate between the wheat and chaff of secular culture.” Rabbi Cohen’s unapologetic love of both Torah and movies is evident throughout. Though the book contains the necessary caveat that one should consult movie parental advisories to determine the propriety of films in family and school settings, Kosher Movies remains a strong advocate for watching films through a specific lens of Torah.

Western society, both Jewish and secular, has taken many turns since the first feature film and the heyday of Modern Orthodox thought. In an age of abject permissiveness in secular culture and the meaningless hollowness of the trend of “Social Orthodoxy,” Kosher Movies reminds us that there are spiritual and inspirational nuggets of gold to be discovered and harnessed from the world around us as depicted in popular culture that truly complement a Torah lifestyle. g

“We learn about God not only through His words but also His works. My task as a teacher of . . . film is to give students the tools to discriminate between the wheat and chaff of secular culture.”

Rabbi Yehuda Amital • Rabbi Yitzchak Herzog • Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits • Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Kook • Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm • Prof. Nechama Leibowitz • Rabbi Dr. Aharon Lichtenstein • Rabbi Ahron Soloveichik • Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik • Rabbi Dr. Isadore Twersky Rabbi Yehuda Amital • Rabbi Yitzchak Herzog • Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits • Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Kook • Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm • Prof. Nechama Leibowitz • Rabbi Dr. Aharon Lichtenstein • Rabbi Ahron Soloveichik • Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik • Rabbi Dr. Isadore Twersky Rabbi Yehuda Amital • Rabbi Yitzchak Herzog • Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits • Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Kook • Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm • Prof. Nechama Leibowitz • Rabbi Dr. Aharon Lichtenstein • Rabbi Ahron Soloveichik • Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik • Rabbi Dr. Isadore Twersky Rabbi Yehuda Amital • Rabbi Yitzchak Herzog • Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits • Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Kook • Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm • Prof. Nechama Leibowitz • Rabbi Dr. Aharon Lichtenstein • Rabbi Ahron Soloveichik • Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik • Rabbi Dr. Isadore Twersky Rabbi Yehuda Amital • Rabbi Yitzchak Herzog • Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits • Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Kook • Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm • Prof. Nechama Leibowitz • Rabbi Dr. Aharon Lichtenstein • Rabbi Ahron Soloveichik • Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik • Rabbi Dr. Isadore Twersky Rabbi Yehuda Amital • Rabbi Yitzchak Herzog • Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits • Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Kook • Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm • Prof. Nechama Leibowitz • Rabbi Dr. Aharon Lichtenstein • Rabbi Ahron Soloveichik • Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik • Rabbi Dr. Isadore Twersky Rabbi Yehuda Amital • Rabbi Yitzchak Herzog • Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits • Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Kook • Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm • Prof. Nechama Leibowitz • Rabbi Dr. Aharon Lichtenstein • Rabbi Ahron

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Available online and at your local Jewish bookstore.

Distinguished contemporary scholars paint intellectual portraits of 20th century luminaries, illustrating how each figure bridged the worlds of Torah and the West in a unique way.

Five classic works by Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, some collected for the first time, address both perennial questions of religious existence and dilemmas specific to the modern era.

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Misconception: Unlike the Jews of Christian Europe who suffered pogroms, blood libels, Crusades, et cetera, the Jews living under Islamic rule were not persecuted. It was the rise of the Zionist movement that spurred Muslim anti-Semitism.Fact: Jews living under Islamic rule were no strangers to persecution. Background: Founded in the early seventh century, Islam quickly conquered vast areas and “persuaded” many to convert. For some 1,400 years, Jews lived under Muslim rule in various Arab lands. There were better and worse times, depending on the particular time period and country. But even in good times, Jews were always regarded as second-class citizens. Islam views itself as Din al-Haqq, the “religion of truth,” while Judaism and Christianity are viewed as Din al-Batil “religion[s] of falsehood.” Therefore one who adheres to a religion of falsehood can never attain the status of one who accepts the “religion of truth.”

At the time Mohammed founded the religion, Jews lived in every major town in the Arabian Peninsula. Initially he hoped to interest the Jews in Islam, but when they refused to convert, he led a brutal campaign against them. In addition, the terms imposed on the surviving Jews which designated them as dhimmis, “protected” non-Muslims subject to sanctioned discrimination, set the precedent for subsequent Islamic law.1

The Jews, together with other non-Muslims, were to live as a subject population as outlined in the Pact of Umar, the document of surrender offered by the victorious second caliph, Umar b. al-Khattab, to the Christian patriarch of Jerusalem in 637.2 One of the terms of the pact is that non-Muslims must wear distinctive clothing, a decree that took many forms over the centuries.

For example, in 807, Baghdad’s caliph forced the Jews to wear a yellow badge, which was later adapted by Christian Europe and ultimately, by the Nazis. In Yemen, the Atarot Edict of 1667 prohibited Jews from

wearing amana (headgear), and the Earlocks Edict made it compulsory for Jewish men to grow earlocks (peyot).3

Rambam, born in Cordoba, Spain in 1138, experienced persecution and exile firsthand when the Almohads, a Muslim sect with a policy of forced conversions, conquered Spain.4 His family fled to Fez, Morocco in 1160, then to the Crusader-ruled Land of Israel in 1165 and finally to Egypt in 1167. Once in Egypt, Rambam spent much of his life living in a tolerant Muslim society. However, many Jews living in other regions under Islamic rule feigned allegiance to Islam and practiced Judaism in secret, prompting the Rambam to pen his famous Epistle on Martyrdom (Iggeret HaShmad), in which he offered solace to forced converts. Some years later, the Jews of Yemen, threatened with forced conversion, turned to the Rambam for advice. In response, in 1172, he wrote his celebrated Epistle to Yemen (Iggeret Teiman) where he wrote: “Remember, my coreligionists, that on account of the vast number of our sins, God has hurled us into the midst of this people, the Nation of Ishmael, who have persecuted us severely, and passed baneful and discriminatory legislation against us . . . No nation has ever done more harm to Israel.”5

The Rambam’s teacher in Fez, Judah ibn Sussan, was martyred in 1165. This was followed in 1232 with the massacre of the Jews in Marrakesh. Following a brief respite, persecution of Jews in Morocco resumed and the first mellah, or ghetto, was established in Fez in 1438. The late eighteenth century again saw the widespread plunder and slaughter of Moroccan Jewry.6

Even during relatively peaceful times, conditions for Moroccan Jews were tough. They were forced to walk barefoot in certain towns,7 and in other towns, had to wear sandals of straw. Muslim children would often throw stones at Jews in the streets.8

For the most part, the situation for Jews in Arab lands was precarious. In eleventh- century Granada, the leading Jewish

authority, Shmuel HaNagid, was vizier for over three decades until his death in 1056, and times were peaceful for the Jewish population. Then in 1066, Shmuel HaNagid’s son Joseph was murdered by a frenzied mob. His body was crucified on the city’s main gate and the following morning the savage mob slaughtered the entire Jewish community of Granada, an estimated 5,000 Jews, and razed the Jewish Quarter.9

Around 1140, during the “Golden Age” of Muslim-ruled Spain, Rav Yehudah HaLevi, a poet, philosopher and physician, chose to leave the Diaspora and move to Eretz Yisrael. While at the time his leaving a relatively comfortable life probably raised a few eyebrows among his fellow Jews, less than a decade later the Almohads overran his native Spain and imposed forced conversions.

The blood libel, a European Christian invention that first arose in the twelfth century, made its way to Islamic countries by the seventeenth century. The most famous Muslim blood libel was the 1840 Damascus Affair that resulted in torture, death and destruction.

Even Jews living in the Land of Israel prior to 1917, when it was under Islamic rule, were subject to persecution. It was not the Zionists who initiated the return to the Land in modern times, but rather the followers of the Gra who, in the early nineteenth century, made their way to Eretz Yisrael from Europe. Settling in Safed, they bolstered the local Jewish community, which by 1830 numbered about 4,000, constituting half of the city’s population. The day after Shavuot in 1834, Arab villagers attacked the Safed Jews, raped the women, destroyed the synagogues, and drove the Jews from their homes. Rabbi Neta, the son of the famous Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Shklov, hid in a cave in the cemetery. When the mob found him, they gouged out one of his eyes. After thirty-three days of mayhem in which several Jews were killed, many more wounded, 500 Torah scrolls desecrated, and almost all of the Jewish possessions stolen or destroyed,


What’s the Truth about . . . Muslim Anti-Semitism?

By Ari Z. Zivotofsky

Rabbi Dr. Ari Z. Zivotofsky is on the faculty of the Brain Science Program at Bar-Ilan University in Israel.

relative calm was restored to Safed.10 Thus, even before the advent of modern Zionism, the local Muslims could not live in peace with their Jewish neighbors.

In Iran, the situation for Jews was no better. Iranian Shiite Muslims carried anti-Jewish laws to absurd heights. In the seventeenth century, Jews in Iran were not even allowed to go outside in the rain, for fear of contaminating rainwater. Jews had to wear different clothes, live in smaller houses, salute Muslims and ride donkeys instead of horses. On March 26, 1839, a Muslim boy, upset at the wages he received from a Jewish woman, ran through the streets of Mashhad screaming that the Jews had killed a dog and called it Hussein to mock Muslims on their holy day. Thousands of frenzied Muslims stormed the Jewish Quarter. They destroyed everything in sight and burnt the synagogue. They killed thirty-two Jews and gave the rest an ultimatum: conversion or death. The Jewish population converted and for the next 100 years the Mashhadi Jews lived a double life.11

To be sure, over time there have been and there continue to be examples of moderate Muslims. In 909 the Fatimid Caliphate started to take shape in North Africa, and in 969 the Fatimids conquered Egypt. The Fatimids were ruled by an imam who was perceived to be infallible and thus could act as he wished towards the dhimmi; he did not impose the required discriminatory tariffs on dhimmis, and a period of relative prosperity ensued, leading to the flourishing of two historically significant yeshivot in Kairouan, Tunisia. Unquestionably, the best years for Jews under Islamic rule were the Islamic High Middle Ages (900 to 1200, a period that included the “Golden Age of Spain”). While Jews were cognizant of their status as dhimmi during this period, for the most part they prospered and lived in peace throughout North Africa.

However, throughout history, peaceful times for Jews under Islamic rule were overshadowed by periods of mayhem—murders, massacres, pillaging, destruction of synagogues and forced conversions. No Jewish population was immune. Events occurred in Tunisia (in 1864, the synagogues of Djerba were burned), in Libya (in 1588, Jews endured forcible conversions and in 1785, hundreds were slaughtered), in Yemen (Jews were banished from 1678 until 1681)12 and in Algeria (in 1805, dozens of Jews were murdered).13

Ottoman Turkey is perceived as having been a tolerant society, especially because Spanish and Portuguese Jews fled there in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to escape the Inquisition. But In Ishmael’s House, A History of Jews in Muslim Lands, historian Martin Gilbert (p. 92) relates that “when there was a lull in persecution—bless them—they called it ‘the golden age.’ It was not a golden age. It was an age when the Jews were persecuted less.” Or as an Israeli scholar of Yemenite descent explained to me, the Jews of Yemen experienced the same discrimination in the twentieth century as they did in the seventh century. As dhimmis, he would compare them to a battered wife—when they were slapped on only one cheek instead of two, they would say that things were good. But they never truly were.

One sometimes hears Jews of Sephardic ancestry fondly reminisce about the good relationships their grandparents had with the Arab neighbors. Those stories are usually from the European colonization period. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the European powers occupied much of the Muslim countries in North Africa and the Middle East. During these periods of foreign domination, the Jews often viewed the Europeans as their ticket out of the dhimmi status and played significant roles in the European administrations. It was during this period that Jews attained upper middle class status, prospered and essentially lived peacefully in Muslim countries. But in reality these countries were not under Islamic control at the time. Furthermore, the Jewish “collaboration” with the foreign governments triggered the deadly backlash that occurred with the rise of Arab nationalism and the eventual withdrawal of the Europeans.

The facts are clear: Muslim persecution, which at times extended to all “infidels,” i.e., non-Muslims, and at times specifically targeted Jews, dates back to the founding of Islam. Moreover, it existed in all Muslim countries through the generations. It was not the establishment of the modern State of Israel, nor the founding of its precursor, political Zionism, that is the source of Muslim anti-Semitism. Nor can it be attributed to the liberation of Judea and Samaria, or to a Jewish presence on the Har Habayit. Muslim anti-Semitism is an ancient phenomenon that is deeply entrenched within Islamic culture and religion. Knowing

and understanding the history of Jews under Islamic rule is important because, as Princeton historian Mark Cohen writes in Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages [(Princeton, 1994), 7]: “The proposition that historical Islamic tolerance gave way in the twentieth century to Arab hostility in reaction to Zionist encroachment became a theme of Arab propaganda against Israel14 both in politics and in writings about Jewish-Arab history.”

This article has dealt with the experience of Jews living as a minority in Muslim-ruled lands. Today, for the first time since the founding of Islam, Jews have an independent state in which lives a sizable Muslim minority. The overwhelming majority of Jews have been willing to treat the Muslim citizens as equals and that is what is enshrined in Israeli law. There is no apartheid or institutional discrimination in the Jewish State against Muslims. Muslims are found in nearly all aspects of Israeli society, from the Knesset to the hospitals, Supreme Court, universities and the IDF. gNotes1. Martin Gilbert, In Ishmael’s House, A History of

Jews in Muslim Lands (New Haven & London, 2010), 20-22.

2. Norman Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands (Phila-delphia, 1979), 25-26.

3. Reuben Ahroni, The Jews of the British Crown Colony of Aden (Leiden, 1994), 43.

4. While some Jews chose to become “anusim,” the Rambam was adamant that when faced with reli-gious persecution, one must flee.

5. David Hartman, Crisis and Leadership: Epistles of Maimonides, translated by Abraham Halkin (Phila-delphia, 1985), 126; Stillman, 241.

6. Heskel Haddad, Jews of Arab and Islamic Coun-tries (New York, 1984), 75.

7. Moses Montefiore traveled to Morocco (Jan 26, 1863) to negotiate rights for the Jews from the sultan and describes in his diaries (vol. 2, p. 152) that “the Jews here are not allowed to walk the streets except barefooted.”

8. Stillman, 83-84.9. Martin Gilbert, The Jews in Arab Lands: Their

History in Maps (London, 1976), 48-49.10. Avraham Yaari, The Goodly Heritage, abridged

and translated by Israel Schen (Jerusalem, 1958), 37-44.

11. Dan Ross, Acts of Faith: A Journey to the Fringes of Jewish Identity (New York, 1982), 67-82.

12. Mark Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages (Princeton 1994), 169.

13. Gilbert, Jews in Arab Lands, Map 4.14. Unfortunately, the myth is perpetuated by Jews

too. Extreme anti-Zionist Jewish groups use it to bolster their claim that Muslim terrorists are not anti-Semitic, they are merely anti-Zionist.


W hy is this night not like all other nights?” we ask ourselves at the Seder each year.I answer that question by remembering a Seder that

was not like all other Sedarim.As a chutznik, a term Israelis use for people like me who

live outside of Israel, I face a constant challenge whenever I visit friends in Jerusalem for one of the Shalosh Regalim—Pesach, Shavuot and Sukkot: what do I do on the second day of yom tov?

Some Orthodox Jews keep one day of the holiday, just like people who live in Israel, a minority but legitimate halachic option. However, I feel uncomfortable doing that; as long as my home is in the Diaspora, I act in Israel as I do in New York City, praying the holiday prayers and observing the holiday restric-tions for two days instead of one. This means finding a sec-ond-day chag minyan while most men in my friends’ Chareidi neighborhood are at a Chol Hamoed worship service on the second day of Pesach and Sukkot or, in the case of Shavuot, a weekday minyan. It also means additional yom tov meals.

The minyanim are easy to locate. Within a mile’s walk, in a neighborhood that is home to several yeshivot serving students from overseas, and countless visitors like me from abroad, a choice of second-day minyanim are available. I usually walk to one up the hill from my adopted family, while the streets are filled with Chassidic and Yeshivish folks shopping and driving cars, activities that someone keeping yom tov obviously would not do. On the way to shul I’m always reminded that I’m a guest in Eretz Israel, not yet a resident of the Jewish homeland. I’m further reminded when my hosts, inevitably forgetting that I’m still in yom tov mode, ask me to turn on a light or go shopping for them or do something else that one does not do on chag.

Then there are the meals. My hosts are always glad, on Suk-kot, to set me up in their sukkah for a seudah while they go about their non-yom tov activities. One year, Meyer Birnbaum z”l, of Lieutenant Birnbaum fame, the one-time member of the US Army who wrote a popular book about his experiences as a frum officer in uniform, graciously invited me to join him in his sukkah, a ten-minute walk from where I was staying, on what for me was the second night of the holiday. It wasn’t yom tov for him, but for a few hours he sat with me and regaled me with tales of the army and life afterwards in Israel. It’s a mem-

ory I’ll always treasure. Another year, on Pesach, a student from my rosh yeshivah host’s kollel invited me to a second Seder he and his wife were making for one of their parents from Eu-rope who was spending Pesach with them. One year I had nowhere else to go, so I decided to make my own Seder at my friends’ apartment.

When I came back from shul that night, my hostess Shulamis, a native of Phoenix who came to Israel for seminary and never went back full-time to the States, had set up a small table with a tablecloth and Kiddush cup as well as two covered matzahs and the other accoutrements of the festive meal. A wonderful cook, she’d prepared a scrumptious meal for me. At the larger main table, the rest of the growing family ate their Chol Hamoed meal and went about their Chol Hamoed duties, making phone calls and plans for the rest of the holiday. I sat down at my table, opened my Haggadah, and prepared to make my own, truncated solo Seder.

Then Chaim came over.He’s one of the family’s dozen children. He was about nine

years old then, a student in a Chareidi school. I’d known him most of his young life. “I don’t want you to make a Seder by yourself, Steve,” he said. “I’ll eat with you.” His parents had not pushed him to sit with me; he simply had learned in school to be a mensch. Chaim, in his yom tov suit, pulled up a chair next to me, opened his own Haggadah—probably a Hebrew-only one, unlike mine in Hebrew and English—and we started read-ing. Over the next few hours—I didn’t have to rush, since I had someone to share the Seder with me—he told me what he had learned in school about the night’s readings and rituals, he told me stories about the Sedarim he had been a part of in his Jeru-salem home, he helped me understand parts of the Haggadah that he as a kid understood better than I as an adult did. And he helped me feel totally at home. His insights may not have been as profound as those of the adults who usually surround me at a Seder table, but his enthusiasm and his desire to make sure that his honorary uncle didn’t sit by himself, provided a stronger lesson. A lesson that with the right company, one Seder does not have to be like all other Sedarim. g

A frequent contributor to Jewish Action, Steve Lipman is a staff writer for the Jewish Week in New York.

Lasting Impressions By Steve Lipman

Second SederMemory of a


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