New Jersey Jewish Standard Dec. 21, 2012

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December 21, 2012 · Vol. LXXXII · No. 13 · $1.00 JSTANDARD.COM

201180N E W J E R S E Y

JewishStandard

Justice defiled?Declassified CIA report suggestsPollard was sentenced to lifebecause of newspaper interview

Responding to Newtown:Articles, editorial, opinion

Pages 16-18, 24-26

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2 Jewish standard deCeMBer 21, 2012

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PUBLISHER’S STATEMENTJewish Standard (USPS 275-700 ISN 0021-6747) is published weekly on Fridays with an additional edition every October, by the New Jersey Jewish Media Group, 1086 Teaneck Road, Teaneck, NJ 07666. Periodicals postage paid at Hackensack, NJ and additional offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to New Jersey Jewish Media Group, 1086 Teaneck Road, Teaneck, NJ 07666. Subscription price is $30.00 per year. Out-of-state subscriptions are $45.00, Foreign countries subscriptions are $75.00.The appearance of an advertisement in The Jewish Standard does not constitute a kashrut endorsement. The publishing of a paid political advertisement does not constitute an endorsement of any candidate political party or political position by the newspaper, the Federation or any employees.The Jewish Standard assumes no responsibility to return unsolicited editorial or graphic materials. All rights in letters and unso-licited editorial, and graphic material will be treated as unconditionally assigned for publication and copyright purposes and subject to JEWISH STANDARD’s unrestricted right to edit and to comment editorially. Nothing may be reprinted in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher. © 2012

FYISoviet Jewry champion Jacob Goldberg remembered in Fair Lawn

This month we remember the epic struggle to free Soviet Jews, a struggle that culminated in the huge march that drew about a quarter of a million people to the nation’s capital 25

years agoThe movement began in the 1960s, thanks in large part to

Jacob Birnbaum, chair of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, and by Rabbi Jacob Goldberg of the Fort Tryon Jewish Center in upper Manhattan, who was the first chair of the Great New York Conference for Soviet Jewry.

Goldberg led the first protests for Soviet Jews in 1964, leading 300 rabbis from the New York Board of Rabbis on a march to the Soviet mission. He held a seder outside that mission, he worked with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr to organize a rally at Cooper Union, and he headed Solidarity Sunday marches and rallies. He visited the Soviet Union, smuggled in siddurim and other Jewish texts, and met with refuseniks both there and later, once they’d fulfilled their dreams of aliyah to Israel.

In Fair Lawn, a library at Darchei Noam is dedicated to Goldberg’s work. It includes tributes to him from Birnbaum and other move-ment leaders, including Jacob Javits, Robert F. Kennedy, Bella Abzug, and others.

leTTers To The edITor PAGe 19

We have to do more to prevent so much damage from future storms.

Claude Bienstock, Fair Lawn

CANdlelIGhTING TIMe: FrIdAY, deC. 21, 4:13 P.M.shABBAT eNds: sATUrdAY, deC. 22, 5:18 P.M.

Noshes .................................................................................................. 4oPINIoN ..............................................................................................16Cover sTorY....................................................................20TorAh CoMMeNTArY .................................46ArTs & CUlTUre .......................................................48

lIFeCYCle ....................................................................................52ClAssIFIed ..............................................................................54GAllerY .........................................................................................56reAl esTATe ....................................................................... 57

Contents No 9%

Yes 91%

Do you celebrate New Year’s Eve?

Do you think Jonathan Pollard will ever be pardoned or paroled?

To vote, log onto jstandard.com

ArTs & CUlTUre

New biography does justice to Brandeis 48 loCAl / IsrAel

What did Rabbi Cherlow say — and mean? 12

loCAl

A festival of latkes 8

loCAl

New Wayne YMCA to keep its Jewish soul 11

CoMMUNITY

Forward exposé brings back bad Yeshiva memories 6

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Jewish standard deCeMBer 21, 2012 3

Rabbi Jacob Goldberg, left, and Harold Maizer flank Bella Abzug as she signs the Declaration of Freedom for Russian Jews. Courtesy of Columbia university rare book and manusCript

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Community

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‘Lord of the Flies in Anatevka’YU acts swiftly as ex-students allege abuse

Larry yudeLson and abigaiL KLein Leichman

Yeshiva University moved quickly last week to reassure parents and students that it maintains a zero tolerance policy when it comes to the physi-

cal or psychological abuse of students. YU President Richard Joel acted following reports on the website of The Jewish Daily Forward and The New York Times that alleged that two men — a former principal of the Manhattan-based Yeshiva University High School for Boys (known as MTA) and a highly regarded former Teaneck rabbi who taught there — had engaged in both forms of abuse during the 1970s and ’80s.

“The actions described [in the news reports] represent heinous and inexcusable acts that are antithetical both to Torah values and to everything that Yeshiva University stands for,” Joel said in a statement. “They have no place here, in our community, or anywhere at all.”

For at least one Teaneck resident, the reports came as little surprise. Rather, the reports brought back unpleas-ant memories for Juda Engelmayer, who graduated MTA in 1987.

“When we were in school, [my friends and I] viewed it as a jail,” said Engelmayer, a public relations execu-tive whose father is executive editor of this newspaper.

The Jewish Standard interviewed him after a web-based search found a blog post he wrote about abuse in 2009.

Engelmayer and his classmates now are sharing their reactions on Facebook. “We’re all angry. We don’t know why no one raised it before,” Engelmayer said.

In his blog post three years ago, Engelmayer described his high-school experience. “Imagine ‘Lord of the Flies in Anatevka,’” he wrote.

In a comment to that post, another MTA student recalled being “a frequent victim of ‘wrestling with George.’”

As media reports in The Forward and the New York Times revealed last week, George was Rabbi George Finkelstein, the school’s principal. He was infamous among students for “summoning students into his office and inviting them to his Washington Heights apartment under the guise of Torah study, only to wrestle them to the ground against their will and pin his stimulated body over theirs,” in the words of former MTA student Mordechai Twersky. Twersky, who graduated MTA in 1981, is a journalist who now lives in Israel. He wrote this description of Finkelstein in an article published in February in the Beacon, an online journal started by Yeshiva University students.

In his statement, Joel apologized for the alleged mis-behavior, and noted that procedures now in place at YU’s institutions are meant to prevent such abuse and to act

swiftly when abuse is charged.“At this institution we continually review and

strengthen policies and practices addressing the safety of all members of the Yeshiva family,” Joel said in his state-ment, which was sent to, among others, members of its alumni mailing list. “We are vigilant and responsible, and always will be. While we cannot change the past, I can say with absolute certainty that Yeshiva University has implemented, and will continue to maintain and enforce, the policies and procedures necessary to assure a safe environment.”

Regarding the specific allegations in the news reports, Joel said, “The inappropriate behavior and abuse alleged by The Forward to have taken place in the past, and de-scribed in statements attributed by The Forward to [YU’s former president and current chancellor, Dr. Norman] Lamm, are reprehensible.”

He added, “The thought that such behavior could have occurred at our boys’ high school, or anywhere at this institution, at any time in its past, is more than suf-ficient reason to express on behalf of the University, my deepest, most profound apology.”

Reaction to the misdeeds at MTA came even from the White House, as the president’s chief of staff, Jack Lew, an Orthodox Jew, issued a sharp rebuke during his speech at YU’s annual Chanukah dinner, where he was guest of honor.

“The alleged behavior is despicable and cannot be tol-erated in any place, at any time, and the response must transcend the confines of religious teaching,” Lew said. “Leaders of this and every educational institution have a sacred responsibility under civil law to protect children from any action that might endanger or exploit them.”

Joel’s apology, however, came on the heels of a far

weaker mea culpa from Lamm, who headed the school during most of the 1970s and ’80s, when the alleged abuse took place.

“This was before things of this sort had attained a cer-tain notoriety,” Lamm is quoted as saying. “There was a great deal of confusion.

“My question was not whether to report to police, but to ask the person to leave the job.”

That appears to be the course Lamm eventually took with Finkelstein in 1995.

“When [the wrestling] came up, [Finkelstein] had de-cided to leave because he knew we were going to ask him to leave,” Lamm is quoted as saying.

Finkelstein went on to serve as dean of the Samuel Scheck Hillel Community Day School in North Miami Beach, Fla.

When asked why the university did not inform the Florida school about Finkelstein’s behavior, Lamm re-plied: “The responsibility of a school in hiring someone is to check with the previous job. No one checked with me about George.”

In 2001 Finkelstein moved to Israel, where he became executive director of the Jerusalem Great Synagogue, a post he held until stepping aside in November to become the Jerusalem institution’s ritual director. Soon after the abuse allegations were made public he resigned that post.

Also implicated in the news reports was Rabbi Macy Gordon, who was rabbi of Teaneck’s Congregation Bnai Yeshurun for nearly 25 years, until he made aliyah in 1985. During that time he also taught at MTA.

A former student, then 16, was quoted as saying that Gordon sodomized him with a toothbrush. The Forward also quoted the student’s father, who said that he raised

yu’s CARE: Going beyond zero tolerance

In his statement last week on the abuse scandal that has rocked Yeshiva University, the institution’s president, Richard Joel, made clear that things are

different today.“At each and every one of YU’s schools, including

Yeshiva University High School for Boys, there is zero tolerance for abuse or sexual harassment of any sort, of students, faculty or staff,” Joel wrote. “If, despite our best efforts, they should occur, procedures exist both to swiftly deal with the perpetrators and aid the victims. These policies are posted on our website and are com-municated directly to all employees annually.”

Additionally, he said, “Students are encouraged to

report any incidents of abuse to the University admin-istration and should feel safe knowing that their securi-ty is our number one concern. A hotline exists to enable confidential reporting of such complaints.”

Joel also boasted of “Yeshiva University’s many pro-grams in this area for rabbis, teachers, care providers, community leaders, parents and children,” among them “The Comprehensive Abuse Response Education (CARE) program at YU’s Institute for University-School Partnership [which] works with day schools around the country to keep children safe in their schools by addressing abuse issues with research, training, and consultation.”

“I can say with absolute certainty that Yeshiva University has implemented, and will continue to maintain and enforce, the policies and procedures necessary to assure a safe environment.”

— YU President Richard Joel

Macy Gordon Norman Lamm Richard Joel Juda Engelmayer

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the issue with an administrator, but nothing came of that.

“We had a lot of ties to YU, our family has a lot of ties to YU,” the father is quoted by the online edition of the newspaper as saying, “and at that point we also felt that this kind of exposé would not do [our son] any good, either.”

Reached in Israel by The Forward, Gordon was asked whether there was any contact that could be defined as sexual between him and students. “I don’t think so,” he replied. Pressed on his response, the rabbi said, “To the best of my memory, there was not.”

Following the first revelations, another former stu-dent, writer and bookseller Barry Singer, came forward to assert that Gordon was “malevolence personified.”

Singer said: “I believe that Macy Gordon found a way to emotionally abuse and intimidate any student that ever crossed his path. He conducted tzitzit checks under my shirt that made me very uncomfortable.”

The Orthodox Union put Gordon on a leave of ab-sence this week. He had been teaching a weekly class at the OU’s Israel Center in Jerusalem.

“When we became aware of the news article, we felt we had to investigate ourselves to see what kind of cre-dence to give [the claims],” Tzvi Hersh Weinreb, OU’s executive vice president emeritus, is quoted as saying.

Gordon, himself a graduate of the YU boys high school in 1949, earned his rabbinic ordination from YU’s Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary in 1956 and was hired by Teaneck’s fledgling Congregation Bnai Yeshurun in 1961. He requested early retirement in December

1984, and in 1985 he moved to Israel, where he has con-tinued to teach adult education courses.

By the time he left Bnai Yeshurun, the congregation had grown to more than 400 families (today it has 800 member and affiliate families). Gordon left a lasting legacy not only in the shul but in the greater community as well, according to two longtime Bnai Yeshurun mem-bers who spoke with the Jewish Standard on condition of anonymity.

“He was, in essence, the first rabbi of an Orthodox shul in Teaneck,” one source said. “He set the religious tone of the entire Orthodox community. He was an exception-ally fine speaker and teacher, and he made it his business to know all the members of the synagogue personally. Under his tenure, Teaneck’s Orthodox community really took off.”

In a 1982 article in The New York Times, “If You’re Thinking of Living In: Teaneck,” Gordon was asked about the perception of the township’s Orthodox Jews as insu-lar. ‘‘We have often been maligned as being separatists, isolationists. But, except in education, where we find it religiously necessary, I don’t feel we are,’’ he was quoted as saying.

Another longtime Bnai Yeshurun member related that Gordon was instrumental in bringing kosher retail shops and restaurants to Bergen County, particularly on Cedar Lane in Teaneck.

“He was a very strong presence. Teaneck at that time was a very infant community and he became a force for attracting a lot of [modern Orthodox] residents into Teaneck and did what needed to be done to build the

foundation. That was his greatest gift.”Both of these sources said they never experienced,

saw, or heard of any inappropriate behavior on Gordon’s part. The Forward’s follow-up story included remarks from former high school students who said they felt uncomfortable with Gordon’s “tzitzit checks,” where he would feel their backs to learn if they were wearing the traditional four-cornered fringed garment formally known as a tallit katan, or “small prayer shawl.” Such tzitzit checks, however, were not an unusual practice among teachers in Jewish schools, although asking to see the tzitzit strings was the usual method.

“Bnai Yeshurun is essentially a shul of YU graduates,” said the first source, “and Rabbi Gordon was noted for tzitzit checks, but that’s the extent of physical contact I ever heard about him.”

Trudy Levine, whose husband, Abraham, was presi-dent of Bnai Yeshurun for part of the time that Gordon was rabbi of the shul, said the two families were close friends and her children spent a lot of time playing with the four Gordon children.

“My kids were over there all the time, and I never heard any complaints from them,” she said, recalling Gordon as “a very good rabbi who gave terrific sermons” and who took on the high school teaching job because the Teaneck congregation was too small to pay him a full-time salary.

“He was a very good influence. I think it’s wrong for The Forward to have printed this one allegation without further investigation,” she added.

Juda Engelmayer

see abusE page 36

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After his tenure at Bnai Yeshurun, Gordon was director of a camp in Israel; honorary president of the non-profit Just One Life, which aids women considering abortions; and an advisory board member of the Council of Young Israel Rabbis in Israel.

Neither of two former MTA students with whom the Standard spoke this week recalled any encounters with Gordon.

“He was not my rebbe,” said Mordecai Twersky, whose article last February about Finkelstein in the online publication the Beacon — founded by YU students — prompted The Forward’s investigation.

Both, however, recalled an atmosphere they described as abusive, and that went beyond the two faculty mem-bers discussed by The Forward. Some of the rabbis they remember as cruel and abusive are dead; at least one is still working as a Jewish educator.

Twersky said he recalled “being tormented by one rabbi, trembling in fear as he would make an example of me and of others” who were not sufficiently prepared for Talmud class “and who risked being called upon and ridiculed by the rabbi in a ‘cross examination’ that would go on for up to an hour or more.

“Some students found this persecution entertaining. But it was excruciating and humiliating. It certainly did not motivate me to prepare and only turned me off,” Twersky said.

“That having been said, I can’t say this was the norm among teachers and faculty. I had some excellent teach-ers at MTA,” in both Jewish and secular classes.

“People don’t believe the stories,” Engelmayer said. “They think they’re all made up. They’re not.”

Engelmayer said that through their Facebook discus-

sion, he has learned that other MTA graduates “all have the same memories, they’re all angry, they don’t know why nobody raised it beforehand. The overall commen-tary is, why did it take so long to come out.

“There were plenty of abusive rabbis.”Different rabbis had different ways of dealing with

students. “Wrestling with the kids and grinding, that was [just] Rabbi Finkelstein,” Engelmayer said. He added that he had a friend at the school “who kind of had problems then. Instead of dealing with it, to shut him up, a rabbi tied him with duct tape from head to foot.”

The student left the school after that “and is kind of a troubled child now,” said Engelmayer. The rabbi who taped his friend, he added, now is a principal in another Jewish school.

Engelmayer recalled another rabbi as “an angry, angry guy. There was a lot of verbal abuse, yelling at students, ‘You’re a moron, you’re a [expletive].’”

“It was wrong when it was happening to us,” he said. “We had no means of correcting it. No one wanted to listen.

“It was a different time back then, a time when dis-cipline was a different world, when you maintained order and discipline with physical acts. The school wasn’t equipped to deal with problem children,” he said.

This was not a problem at all Jewish high schools in the 1980s, however, Engelmayer added.

“From my stories from colleagues at Ramaz and SAR” — modern Orthodox day schools in Manhattan and Riverdale, respectively — “it didn’t happen there. Only in the darker hat yeshivah world. MTA wasn’t a Brooklyn yeshivah, but it was the closest thing that resembled one in Manhattan. Classes were taught by a bunch of people who graduated rabbinical school and had no idea about child psychology.”

As a parent of two current students and one recent graduate of yeshivah high schools — Ramaz and Frisch — Engelmayer said there is “no comparison” between his experience and his children’s.

“My kids’ gripes with school tend to focus on the amount of homework they have, not the fact they hate going there because it is dark environment. We didn’t want to go to school because we were sick and afraid,” he said.

And if a teacher were to call one of his children a dis-gusting name?

“I would go right to the principal and demand action. That’s an unacceptable kind of behavior. You can’t teach kids that way, you can’t motivate them that way. They raise their hands in class, because even if they’re wrong, they’re not going to be called out. I was afraid to raise my hand, because if I was wrong, that was embarrassing,” he said.

Over the years, one change in particular is regarded as very positive by students: The free forum that YU stu-dents have on line.

Twersky was active on MTA’s high school newspaper; later, as a student at Yeshiva College, he was news edi-tor at the college’s Commentator newspaper, more than once arousing the ire of the administration for his report-ing in the university-funded publication.

He did not dare, however, to raise the issue of the abuse he suffered at MTA in print. That would not be a concern today, he said.

“I view the existence — and the emergence — of a publication like The Beacon as a constructive and healthy development for YU students,” he said. “I com-mend them for considering and accepting my piece for publication. This could not have happened with The Commentator years ago.”

JTA Wire Service contributed to this story.

abuse froM page 7

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Eight crazy latkesteaneck restaurant offers oily battlefield for big eaters contest

Josh Lipowsky

TEANECK – A little rain couldn’t keep these gastronomic gladiators from fes-tively feasting during Ma’adan’s annual Chanukah caloric challenge.

A light drizzle forced the eighth an-nual latke-eating contest inside Ma’adan’s Cedar Lane store on Sunday, instead of its usual spot on the pedestrian plaza, but new and returning contestants still turned out for the annual test of epicurean fortitude.

Seventeen-year-old Yitzi Taber of Bergenfield claimed the title in the 13-17 age division, finishing off four latkes. There were no entries in the under-13 category this year.

“It feels great,” he said. “I just re-ally wanted to win something. And I love latkes.”

In the adult category, it came down to a tie of eight latkes each between three-time champion Shalom Krischer of Teaneck and newcomer Barton Lee of Allendale. The pair headed to a “sudden-death” run-off to finish two latkes in the fastest time. When the crumbs finally settled, Lee was triumphant.

Lee credited his win to “a lot of will-power and determination,” he said. “And putting applesauce on the potato pan-cakes and pacing myself. [The applesauce] allowed the pancake to go down easier.”

This wasn’t Lee’s first foray into com-petitive eating. He had participated in hot dog eating contests while a student at Alfred University in Alfred, N.Y. This, how-ever, was his first kosher eating contest, he said.

“I just wanted to try it on a whim,” said the 45-year-old information analyst, who said he learned about the contest from reading the Jewish Standard. “I just said I had to do what I had to do in order to try to accomplish this feat. I was monitor-ing my progress and the progress of my competitor.”

This year’s contest was a real “nail bitter,” said Stuart Kahan, co-owner of

Ma’adan and the contest’s organizer. Last year’s winner, a first-time entrant and semi-professional eater, did not show, but contestants set new records for latkes devoured. At the end of the day, Lee and Krischer each had finished 10 of the quar-ter-pound latkes, or 5.5 pounds each.

(This reporter, continuing a los-ing streak of gastronomic proportions, finished only five latkes, a total of 1.25 pounds. It should be noted, however, that this feat was accomplished one-handed, while snapping pictures with the other hand.)

As in past years, Kahan offered prizes to the crowd in exchange for correct answers to Chanukah trivia questions, which he said adds an educational dimension to the contest.

“We want it to have meaning,” he said. “I don’t want it to be just a food fest.”

With the recent closings of Louie’s Charcoal Pit and Cedar Lane Cinemas, long-time stalwarts of the Cedar Lane business district, Kahan said he hopes that events like the latke contest will bring some positive attention to the area and help spark more foot traffic.

“Anything that shines a light on this business district helps,” he said. “Every event, every good word. I’m hoping differ-ent organizations will come through and find a solution to the theater.”

Keeping in mind that many people still are suffering from the effects of Hurricane Sandy, Kahan said that leftovers from the contest were to be picked up charities that would deliver them to those in need.

“This is what community’s about — doing things like this, helping out victims of Sandy,” he said. “When things like this happen, life still goes on, but you have to remember and deal with [tragedy].”

Besides the medals and gift certificates the winners receive, the contest has other rewards, he added. “You see the smiles, not just on the kids’ faces but on the adults’ faces. It’s a good Chanukah event.”

Barton Lee (left) and Yitzi Tabler (right) display their medals, flanking host Stuart Kahan. Josh LiPowsky

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From left, the Education Ministry’s Shlomo Ventura; fourth-place winner Daniel Cohen of France; Ezra Frazer; third-place winner Lenny Warner of Canada; first-place winner Refael Meyuchas; Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar; Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Education Ministry Director-General Dalit Shtauber. INTERNATIONAL BIBLE CONTEST

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So where did Yehoyada stash the money?Local man places second in Bible contest for adults in Jerusalem

AbigAil Klein leichmAn

Thanks to Superstorm Sandy, Teaneck’s Rabbi Ezra Frazer nearly did not make it to the International

Bible Contest for Adults in Jerusalem.An official from the Israel Education

Ministry had been trying to reach him for two days in order to tell him that his score on the preliminary quiz qualified him for a free trip to Israel for the international round on Dec. 12, the fifth night of Chanukah.

It’s a good thing she persisted. Frazer, who grew up in Teaneck and lives there now, took second place in the contest, held before a live studio audience at the International Convention Center in Jerusalem, broadcast throughout Israel and webcast worldwide.

“The Torah is the birth certificate and identity of every Jewish person,” Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar said as he opened the competition. “It is a priceless treasure and source of the Hebrew language; it is the foundation of our values and historical rights of our people.”

The show included a musical interlude, video clips of the contestants and of Jewish life in their home countries, and a final white-knuckle lighting round of 10 questions in 60 seconds read by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Frazer’s triumph was a sort of déjà vu. He had won the U.S. Chidon Ha-Tanakh-National Bible Contest for Jewish Youth in 1994, when he was a sophomore at the Torah Academy of Bergen County, and placed fifth in the 1995 international competition. Since 2009 he has been coordinator of the U.S. National Bible Contest, and he also teaches at Yeshiva University.

“A couple of years ago the Education Ministry announced that they wanted to

bring back the chidon for adults, and ever since then I kept my eyes peeled,” Frazer said on his last night in Israel.

In 2010, the adult version indeed was revived, but only for Israelis. This year, for the first time in 32 years, the contest was offered globally. Some 300 Jews in 51 countries took an online qualifying exam on Oct. 24. Frazer got 49 out of 50 questions correct, making him one of three Americans invited for a free week of touring, meetings, and rehearsals leading up to the contest.

“I remember thinking I wouldn’t have time to study, but I would try out just to see how much I know and how much I need to study better in the future,” said Frazer, a recent first-time father.

“Unlike in high school, where I could make it a major priority, here I have a two-month-old baby and a job. I studied on Shabbat, or when the baby was awake early anyway. I didn’t expect to do that well. But when I got to Israel, I realized all of us have other stuff going on; nobody is reading Tanach [Bible] all day.”

The winner was 24-year-old Rafael Meyuchas of Netanya, and Canadian contestant Lenny Warner took third place. The original field of 27 contestants — four Israelis and 23 foreigners — was whittled to 16 through a written test on Dec.10.

“They decided to have only one competitor per country in the televised round, but they allowed two from United States, because it’s so big, and two from Israel,” Frazer said. “In our group, all four Israelis were unbelievable. I’m sure any of the four of them would have beaten me.”

The first-round elimination question required contestants to recall an episode

see YEhoYaDa page 14

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organization.“Because I’m a little more aware of

the culture and holidays, I’m able to share that with our staff team,” Lev said. Despite his modesty, Lev actually is very well connected Jewishly, and he is a member of the board of his shul, the Jewish Congregation of Kinnelon.

The Metro Y chain is the largest Y organization in the state of New Jersey, “both in finances and the number of people we serve,” Lev said. “2013 will show that we have a $30 million budget.”

These resources have enabled the Y to invest in the facilities, where maintenance and upgrades had been deferred for years.

“We put in about a million and a half dollars in renovations,” Lev said. Renovations range from fixing a leaking roof and upgrading the heating and air conditioning to remodeling the social hall, adding new lights in the swimming pool, upgrading the lighting

The Wayne Y is maintaining its Jewish curriculum in the nursery school and day camp and its Jewish-focused senior programming, and “we’re looking for new areas” for Jewish programming, Lev said.

(In contrast, the other Ys Lev supervises do not have any specifically Christian component to their programming.)

The COO’s Jewish background and knowledge is helpful for the umbrella

Jewish holidays remain on the curriculum at the Wayne Y nursery school. Courtesy of Wayne ymCa

Wayne YMCA keeps Jewish soulLarry yudeLson

A year after a network of YMCAs took over operations of the YM-YWHA of North Jersey

in Wayne, the institution is boast-ing increased membership and capital improvements to the facility — even as it continues its commitment to Jewish programming.

“We’re showing that we can keep a Jewish curriculum in a previously standalone JCC, even if we’re a combined integrated entity,” Larry Lev said. Lev is the chief operating officer of Metro YMCAs of the Oranges, which has been operating the Wayne Y — now the Wayne YMCA — since last September.

The Wayne YMCA’s partnership between the Jewish Y — the nonprofit, founded in 1914 as the YMHA of Paterson, still owns the building — and the chain that includes five other Ys is the second such partnership. The first is in Toledo, Ohio, where the Jewish community center came under Y auspices in 1999, when Lev was leading the Y there.

see WaYne page 30

Wayne froM page 6


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Meet Larry Lev

Larry Lev has been a Y profes-sional for 40 years.

It’s a career that has taken him across the country and around the world — including to Israel. For two years, he was youth and camp director at the YMCA in Jerusalem.

“One of the things that was truly apparent to me when I lived in Israel was that the Y was the beacon of welcoming people of all faiths and all backgrounds,” Lev said. “It would not be unusual to see Jews, Muslims, and Christians playing on the basketball court together or swimming together.

Whatever was happening in the country or different parts of the city, the Y seemed to be the place that could bring people together.

“I see that here as well, as we have brought the Y mission together with the YMHA, to just bring people together. Everybody wants to be healthy. Especially if you look at the health and wellness part of the Y, there’s nothing religious about that. As I look at things I’ve seen around the world — I also had a short stint setting up a camping program in Athens — people are people.”

throughout the building, and installing new cardiovascular equipment in the health center.

Along with the financial influx have come a flurry of new programs designed to make the Y an integral presence for all of Wayne’s families.

The Y offers free swimming lessons to any second grader in town.

“It’s part of our being a community responsible organization,” Lev said. “The statistics are scary in terms of young kids who drown.”

Similarly, it has begun offering free membership to seventh graders, an offer it has been promoting in the town’s schools.

And next month, the Y hopes to offer an afterschool program that would pick students up from Wayne public schools and bring them to the Y for supervised homework, recreation, swimming,

archery, and the like until as late as 7 p.m.In the past year, Lev said, the Y has

boosted membership from 1,500 member units — individuals or families — to 1,850.

The Y has continued its role of being a center for the area Jewish community, hosting the Hartman Institute’s Engaging Israel program, which is led by area rabbis.

Reflecting its role as a Jewish institution within a broader non-Jewish enterprise, the Y has launched a “Building Bridges” program that invites participants from the five other Metro Ys — in Livingston, East Orange, Maplewood, and Hardyston — to experience Jewish events, including an interfaith seder for senior adults, a Yom Hashoah program for teen leaders, and Jewish holiday events that brought other Y nursery children to the Wayne Y’s sukkah.

Meet Roni Mishpati

Roni Mishpati is on the third stage of her teaching career.

And she’s only 21.In this phase, she’s a shlicha

— Israeli representative — assigned to northern New Jersey by the Jewish Agency for Israel. She works three days a week at the Wayne Y, and spends the rest of her week working for the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey and the Israeli Scouts troop based in Fair Lawn.

A year ago, she was an instructor for the Israeli army, training soldiers in a classified weapons system.

And before that, she practiced informal education as a scout leader in her home town, Ganei Tikva, a residential town of 12,000 near Tel Aviv. That experience helped her in the army: “Standing in front a crowd wasn’t that big of a deal for me,” she said.

Mishpati started in October. “I’m trying to find my way into every program at the Y that might have some Jewish content,” she said.

Among the new programs she’s planning: “I’m trying to develop a program for teenage girls about Israeli and Jewish women leaders throughout history. Girl power and stuff like that.”

She has a Tu Bi-Sh’vat seder planned for Jan. 27, to be led by Rabbi Randall Mark of Wayne’s Congregation Shomrei Torah. She’ll be bringing her Israeli scouts to the event, and she’s reaching

out to the Hillel at nearby William Paterson University.

Has she experienced any Christian impact from being under YMCA rather than YMHA auspices?

“No,” she answered. “I feel it’s a title. I don’t feel the Jewish community is less important.

They’re very considerate. They ask a lot of questions about what’s appropriate and what’s not.”

Mishpati’s roommate is the shlicha who works at the Kaplan JCC on the Palisades in Tenafly

“Everything is similar,” she said of the Y and the JCC.

“I really am glad to be here. I feel very welcomed. People are hungry for Jewish culture and Israel programming. People really want to know more.”

Mishpati’s grandparents all went to Israel from Poland; her parents were born in Israel. She lived in America with her parents for three years beginning in 1999, when her father worked for El Al at JFK airport.

And she loves America.“I love the culture and I love the

history,” she said. “I love the fact that both Israel and America are countries built by immigrants who moved here from all different places around the world — and you can feel it.

“There’s this one thing that unites everybody but everybody has their own input. You feel welcomed.”

Meet Tony Ceresoli

The last time the Wayne Y had a new executive direc-

tor, he arrived fresh from a decade as executive direc-tor of a 1,000-member synagogue.

Now, the Wayne Y has brought in someone with 27 years experience in the YMCA system.

Tony Ceresoli first encountered the world of Ys growing up in Rome, N.Y. As a high school sophomore, he would sneak into the Y every afternoon. Only later did he learn that the executive director didn’t kick him out because his father had bought him a membership.

After graduating from SUNY Cortland with a degree in physical education and teaching, Ceresoli moved back to Rome, where he found his first job back at the Y as a program director.

“I just stayed with it, and worked my way up through the ranks,” he said.

The Jewish focus of the Wayne Y makes this Y different from others he’s headed — but that’s not a problem for Ceresoli.

“Working with different beliefs and religions is common to what I do,” he said. “The Y movement is inclusive. We’ve been inclusive for 153 years now.”

At Wayne, “one of the goals is

to keep the strong Judeo principle that has built this facility and will keep the facility running for years to come. We have made a strong commitment. We have hired a staff that will keep working on that component of the YMCA.”

Ceresoli, who lived most recently in St. Petersburg, Fla., started work at the beginning of the month. He still is living in a hotel room and is looking for a studio apartment to rent until April, when his wife will join him. His two sons are in college.

His goal for the Wayne Y is “to bring it back to the days when — I was told — it was just bustling and hustling with people. I want to make this the community hub it once was — strong on Judaic principles — really a community center. To bring it back as a center of the community.”

With the umbrella Metro Y organization including six branches, “it’s a strong foundation. We have a lot of history of how to run programs, from a health and wellness program to our nursery, to senior programs. We feel at the YMCA we truly do encompass mind, body, and spirit.

“I’m personally excited to be involved in this community,” Ceresoli said. “There’s a great need here. Done right, it can be a really successful partnership for years to come.”

Wayne froM page 6

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Israeli rabbi clarifies positionCherlow says newspaper headline misrepresented his views on recognizing reform Judaism

Lois GoLdrich

It would be quite a game-changer if the Orthodox rabbinate in Israel were to recognize Reform Judaism.But, says one Orthodox Israeli rabbi,

when he suggested last week that the topic be discussed, he did not — despite newspaper reports to the contrary — de-cide in advance what the result should be.

“I did not call for a complete recogni-tion [of Reform] by the State of Israel,” Rabbi Yuval Cherlow wrote in an email to The Jewish Standard. “I oppose that. I called [for us] to reflect anew on how to enable someone who does not agree with what I think — about the fullness of halachah — to identify with the State of Israel.”

Taking issue with a headline in Haaretz — the issue of Dec. 16 read “Prominent Orthodox rabbi calls on Israel to recog-nize Reform Judaism” — Cherlow, a lead-ing Zionist Orthodox rabbi and head of the Petach Tikva hesder yeshiva, brushed off the firestorm that later erupted among fellow members of the rabbinic organiza-tion Tzohar.

According to Haaretz, the organiza-tion “reportedly distanced itself from Cherlow’s remarks, saying that it ‘op-poses any official recognition of Reform Judaism by the State of Israel, in terms of conversions or its general way.’”

“I expect that they will read my words in the original and not in the headlines of the Haaretz newspaper,” Cherlow wrote. “Everybody who reads my words in the original will relate to the seriousness of the words.”

The flap began when Cherlow sent a letter to his students following a visit to the United States. The Haaretz piece was based on that document.

In his letter, Cherlow decried the rate of assimilation in the United States and the increasing alienation many young people feel toward Israel. He wrote that non-Orthodox diaspora Jews do not want to identify with Israel both “because of the occupation, the racism, the control of another people by force” and because the religious movements to which they belong are not recognized.

“For decades I’ve written that hal-achah doesn’t recognize Reform mar-riages or conversions … but that does not cut off the Reform from being Jewish,” he wrote. “As such, they’re very important for us, and we must remain connected to them and ask ourselves whether we’re do-ing enough so that diaspora Reform Jews … will remain connected to the Jewish people — or else be lost.”

The rabbi’s letter said it is important that Israel take some action, whether by declaring that the issue is not on its agenda, raising the wall of separation, or fostering a dialogue in two areas. One, centering on halachic investiga-

tions, would yield “a rejection of those [Reform practices] we cannot accept ac-companied by acceptance of those with which we can connect.” The other area of discussion would be on “distinguishing between halachic rejection and political inclusion.”

In his email to The Jewish Standard, Cherlow stressed the importance of con-sidering these issues.

“It has to be on our agenda, both be-cause of [Israel’s] responsibility for the en-tire Jewish people and also because this whole process can chip away at the State of Israel if we don’t know how to go down this path,” he wrote. “It’s not fear that should motivate us but responsibility.”

Cherlow said his call for discussion of these issues is built on two premises: first, that he has properly defined the prob-lem — though he admits that others may frame it differently — and second, “that there is a way to transform the State of Israel into a place that calls also to the Reform and, furthermore, to those who are not identified, so they will tie them-selves anew to the Jewish people.”

His goal, he said, is to get beyond “name-calling and a war of slogans [and] put the topic on the agenda.”

The rabbi also called for the problems to be solved “in a free market atmo-sphere,” saying “the truth will prevail and does not need the power of the state in order to determine individuals’ status and the like.”

Cherlow said he meets occasionally, though not often, with Reform rabbis, and that those meetings take place only outside of Israel “because in Israel the matter is completely different.”

“It’s impossible to generalize,” he said. “There are some from whom I’m very, very distant. There are some who in their soul follow halachah, and they serve in Conservative and Reform congregations as part of the appropriate battle against assimilation. My conversation is mainly with them.”

However, he stressed, “What disturbs me more than those are the unaffiliated and those unconnected to any stream [of Judaism].”

The rabbi said he doesn’t think it is necessary to make changes in halachah to solve this problem.

“There’s a wide enough space within halachah to work,” he said.

Cherlow was among the founders of the Tzohar Foundation, which seeks to re-vitalize the role of the rabbinate in Israeli society by engaging in a meaningful dia-logue with the secular world.

Dr. Alan Brill, who is the Cooperman/Ross Endowed Professor in the Graduate Department of Jewish-Christian Studies at Seton Hall University, noted that while Tzohar is “strict by religious Zionist stan-dards, they’re liberal compared to cha-redi standards. They’re a group looking to preserve the authority of religious Zionist rabbis.”

Brill, who lives in Teaneck and spe-cializes, among other things, in mod-ern Jewish thought and contemporary Orthodoxy, said that Cherlow is “in the forefront of this new world of more outwardly directed religious Zionist thinkers.”

Noting that the rabbi has called for “embracing issues of our age,” Brill said that much of what Cherlow said in his letter to students is not new. Israel already grants autonomy to the Reform move-ment in many cases, but some local com-munities do not enforce these rulings.

Cherlow’s statement, Brill said, “is not novel in itself. His ideas will gain traction if someone picks them up and makes them into a social or political agenda.” Still, “His heart is always in the right place, even if he fails to spell things out.”

Rabbi Rick Jacobs, recently installed president of the Union for Reform Judaism, said he applauds Cherlow’s ef-forts “to engage all of K’lal Yisrael in Israel, so that all Jews feel welcome in their homeland. We wholeheartedly agree that many non-Orthodox Jews feel alienated by the Israeli government and that the state should recognize non-Orthodox de-nominations by differentiating between Jewish law and the policies of the State of

Israel.”“We witnessed a vivid example of

non-Orthodox discrimination when Anat Hoffman, head of the Reform move-ment’s Israel Religious Action Center, was arrested for the praying at the Western Wall, a holy Jewish site that should allow both egalitarian prayer and traditional prayer,” Jacobs said. “There are many oth-er examples of this intolerance: Weddings officiated by non-Orthodox rabbis are not recognized in Israel, and 4,000 Orthodox rabbis receive wages from the state, while only one non-Orthodox rabbi does. The list goes on and on.”

Rabbi Eric Yoffie, past president of the URJ, said that while Cherlow’s original statement neither endorsed nor em-braced the Reform movement, “He is say-ing that the religious situation in Israel is a problem for American Jews; and while this is self-evident, Israelis don’t appreci-ate and recognize it.”

Calling Cherlow’s observation “a very important message,” he added that the situation creates “an obstacle to the close relations we want and need.”

Yoffie said that a second point Cherlow made is that Orthodox Jews needn’t make halachic compromises in order to deal with the issue.

“We’re not looking for halachic recog-nition from the Orthodox establishment,” he said. “We want equal treatment by the government of Israel.” Cherlow wants the State of Israel “to make a more inclusive arrangement, not a compromise in hal-achah,” he pointed out.

“It’s not what we’re asking for,” Yoffie said. “They can do things to move toward inclusiveness and recognition by the gov-ernment without halachic compromises. This is an important point, for him to say that this is good for the Jewish people. We welcome it.”

Yoffie said that while “calling for dis-cussion is not the same as saying that something needs to be done … let’s acknowledge the wisdom in his original statement, which reflects a reality we hope the State of Israel will recognize.”

The former URJ president said that more attention must be paid to this issue

Rabbi Nathaniel Helfgot Rabbi Shmuel GoldinRabbi Allan Brill

Rabbi Yuval Cherlow

see miSRepReSeNted page 14

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now, as such incidents as the harassment of Women of the Wall continue to escalate.

“They’re not going away,” he said. “American Jews feel more strongly than ever.”

The issue is a hard one, according to Shmuel Goldin, who is Orthodox, head rabbi of Congregation Ahavath Torah in Englewood, and president of the Rabbinical Council of America. “My feeling is that the whole thing is

very complex,” Goldin said. “There are the relationships between the denominations here in the United States, the relationships between American Jewry and Israeli Jewry — all of those are very complex. To make a sweep-ing statement that suddenly the Orthodox movement is going to accept x, y, or z, and the state of Israel is going to accept x, y, or z — these statements usually are not productive.

“I think that it’s important for all of us to be in conver-sation and try to understand each other — each other’s parameters, differences, and similarities. There are philo-

misrepresented froM page 12

Jewish Family Service celebrates 60Jewish Family Service of Bergen and North Hudson raised $275,000 as it celebrated its 60th anniversary at the Rockleigh Country Club on Dec. 2.

More than 325 people gathered to honor current and former trustees. The funds raised will go toward JFS’s services, which include feeding hungry children, strengthening victims of domestic violence, coaching job seekers, counseling stressed families, and caring for the elderly.

from Kings II (12:8 and 10) regarding a leader’s direc-tive to priests to collect money for repairing the Holy Temple. They had to state the name of the leader (King Yeho’ash) and where the priest (Yehoyada) deposited the money (through a hole he bored in a chest beside the altar).

Eight remaining contestants were paired off by country for an elimination round. One of the pair answered while the other stayed in a soundproof booth.

“There was no time to think it through. The answer had to be at your fingertips,” Frazer said. “You had to stay calm in front of a huge crowd. Being in the Chidon as a kid definitely helped me to be calmer. I got eight out of 10 correct and the other American got seven out of 10 correct.”

In the final lightning round between Meyuchas, Frazer, Warner, and a French contestant, Frazer got nine out of 10 questions correct, while Meyuchas earned a perfect score. Frazer won NIS 30,000 (about $8,000) in addition to other prizes.

Among about a dozen relatives and friends cheering him on were his brother, Rabbi Aaron Frazer; Estelle Harris, a family friend and retired teacher from Yavneh Academy, from which Frazer graduated eighth grade, and Rabbi Zvi Grumet, Frazer’s assistant principal and Chidon coach at TABC back in 1994. His parents, wife, and students were watching on the Internet.

“Having a whole group of people rooting for you feels great,” Frazer said. As he told a reporter from Israel National News: “In what other country do you see an auditorium packed with people who want to see a Tanach contest?”

Yehoyada froM page 10

sophical differences that do divide us. Wherever we can cooperate and work together we should, but we should recognize those boundaries that we each have.”

Rabbi Nathaniel Helfgot, religious leader of Netivot Shalom in Teaneck, shared Cherlow’s consternation over the Haaretz headline.

“Haaretz likes to sensationalize,” he said. Rabbi Cherlow “thinks it is important for the discussion to oc-cur rather than saying this is what should happen. He feels the community should discuss the issues.”

Helfgot said his own view is very similar.“There has to be a very important distinction made

between halachah and the laws of the State of Israel,” he said. “They sometimes get confused.”

For example, he said, “I don’t think halachah, as I understand it, can accept the validity of Reform conver-sions, since they don’t meet the standards of normative halachic practice, and I don’t see that changing. On the other hand, the State of Israel is not a halachic state but rather is a nation-state of all the Jewish people. Many Jews are becoming alienated because they feel that the State of Israel does not respect the way they practice Judaism.”

“I disagree with that,” he said. “It’s a dangerous thing for Israel, and for support for — and connection between — Israel and the diaspora.”

The issue, he said, is the distinction between the secular state of Israel and its public policy, and what halachah will accept — which, he said, is “a totally different question.”

“Rabbi Cherlow was right and courageous in raising this issue for public discussion,” Helfgot said, adding that as time goes on, “it’s pretty clear that this will become a more contentious issue and ultimately will be decided in the Israel Supreme Court.”

“The writing’s on the wall,” he said. “The issue is going to be discussed very vigorously. God forbid it will cause a schism.”

doug Bern, Sheryl Sarnak, and Beth Nadel are on JFS’s board.Photos courtesy JFs

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Josh Cohen Photos

courtesy tABc

Six selected for honors at TABC dinnerTorah Academy of Bergen County will hold its 30th annual dinner on Sunday, Jan. 6, at 6 p.m., at Congregation Keter Torah in Teaneck. This year’s honorees are Ellen and Stanley Stone, Drs. Vickie and Elliot Shulman, Ceil Olivestone, and Josh Cohen.

Stanley Stone has chaired TABC’s fun-draising committee and has served as a member of the school’s executive board since 2008. Ellen Stone represents the school at its annual open house.

The Shulmans fundraise and recruit on behalf of the school and, along with their children, take part in multiple TABC activities.

Ceil Olivestone, TABC’s administrator, is responsible for many duties including overseeing budget, finance, office man-agement, and building maintenance. She and her husband will be making aliyah in January.

Josh Cohen a TABC 2007 graduate, funds and awards the annual Joshua Cohen Leadership award, recognizing a student who has exhibited outstanding leadership and character. He also volun-teers to different Jewish communities.

For reservations, call (201) 837-7696, ext. 150, tabc.org/dinner, or [email protected].

RYNJ’s 75th annual dinnerThe Rosenbaum Yeshiva of North Jersey will hold its 75th annual dinner on Sunday, Jan. 13, at Congregation Keter Torah in Teaneck. Dr. Chaim and Rachelle Mandelbaum, the guests of honor, are staunch RYNJ supporters and advo-cates. Rachelle Mandelbaum has served on the board of directors for the past 14 years and is a vice president. The couple served on the board of Congregation Beth Aaron in Teaneck and are active in the building of Teaneck’s new mikvah. They are the parents of Miri (RYNJ ‘05), Meital (RYNJ ‘07), Ari (RYNJ ‘10), and J.J., an eighth grader.

Rabbi Shlomo Hyman will receive the Derech Hachinuch award for his enthusiasm and energy in his classroom lessons during the 25 years he has taught at RYNJ. Rabbi Hyman serves as the youth rabbi at Congregation Ahavath Torah in Englewood, where he lives with his wife, Freidi, and their children, Bracha (RYNJ ‘07), Yaakov (RYNJ ‘09), Aharon (RYNJ ‘10), fifth grader Temima, and first grader Eliora.

For more information, call the school office, (201) 986-1414.

Rachelle and Dr. Chaim Mandelbaum Photos courtesy ryNJ

Rabbi Shlomo Hyman

JNF holds local eventsMore than 130 people attended the annual Teaneck Jewish National Fund buffet and dessert reception at Congregation Beth Sholom in Teaneck. Jewish National Fund shaliach Zevi Kahanov discussed the need for a new medical clinic in Sapir Center in Israel’s Arava region.

Honorees Dr. Harvey and Beth Gross, Terry and Gail Novetsky, and Dr. Jacqueline C. Brunetti, chief patholo-gist at Holy Name Medical Center, raised more than $180,000 for the project. Dr. Brunetti talked about her trip to Israel with her husband and about developments initiated by the OR Center in Israel’s Negev.

Jill and Seffi Janowski hosted an evening reception for the Jewish National Fund at the Carlyle in Cliffside Park on Nov. 15. Honorees included Drs. Carolyn Lieblich and Mark Shapiro. Funds raised will enhance the quality of

life for Israelis with disabilities with JNF’s partner, Aleh Negev.

For information about Jewish National Fund, contact [email protected].

Carolyn Shapiro, left, with Jill Janowski and Dr. Mark Shapiro. Photos courtesy JNF

Drs. Richard and Carolyn Lieblich and Mollie Lieblich.

Lester named JFSNJ coordinatorMelanie Lester is the Jewish Family Service of North Jersey’s outreach/volunteer program coordinator.

Her mother, a Holocaust survivor, was on a kinder-transport. With that as inspiration, Lester will fa-cilitate and recruit vol-unteers for JFSNJ’s Cafe Europa Holocaust survivor program.

She also will promote agency services in the com-munity, partner and collaborate with area agencies and schools, facilitate presentations and groups, and assist with agency events in the Wayne and Fair Lawn communities.

As a social worker, she facilitated focus groups with patients, caregivers, and health care profession-als. She has led anger management and social skills groups as well as grandparent support groups, and she has counseled individuals, families, and children. She also teaches marketing at Raritan Valley Community College. For information call (973) 595-0111 or go to www.jfsnorthjersey.org.

Melanie Lester courtesy

JFsNJ

From left are Terry and Gail Novetsky, Dr. Jacqueline Brunetti, and Beth and Dr. Harvey Gross. GerAld BerNsteiN


Time to get the guns

Norcross, Ga., Feb. 22; Oakland, Calif., April 2; Seattle, Wash., May 20; Aurora, Colo., July 20; Oak Creek, Wisc., Aug. 5; Minneapolis, Minn.,

Sept. 27; Newton, Conn., Dec. 14 — seven mass murders in 11 months in the United States.

We concede the point. Guns do not kill people; people kill people. People just kill more people with guns than without them.

More effective gun control probably would not have stopped Adam Lanza. Does anyone, however, seriously contend that he would have been able to massacre 20 children and six adults if he had to strangle them, or thrust a knife into each of them — in the 15 minutes or so it took him to pour multiple rounds into his victims?

Mass murder is not possible without weapons capable of mass murder — and rapid-fire, quick-loading magazined guns and rifles are weapons capable of mass murder. That is what they were designed for. They can mass murder at a single clip, be reloaded in the batting of an eyelash, and kill again, and again, and 20 times again; and 50 times again.

“Better background checks” is a mantra, not a solu-tion. The Houston Chronicle in September reported that 4,000 guns are stolen in that city alone every year — every year. Multiply that by every major city.

While the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms says that stolen guns only account for about 15 percent of handguns that are used in crimes, that is still a lot of guns obtained without background checks.

Guns also are obtained by lying on applications, the ATF reports; by hiring third parties to buy them; by know-ing which streets to go down and whom to ask on those streets. Background checks do not apply.

The answer is not to tighten the rules on who may buy guns; it is to get all but the most basic revolvers and hunt-ing rifles out of most people’s hands. It is to tighten the requirements for establishing a need to own a weapon in the first place. It is to make eminently traceable any guns, rifles and ammunition manufactured in or sold in the United States. It is to establish tough federal gun control standards that every state must follow. It is to make it impossible to buy guns, rifles, and the ammuni-tion for them without valid photo ID permits that can be instantly checked by computer for authenticity. It is to impose criminal penalties on any gun sellers who do not do due diligence.

How many more dead children do we need to con-vince us to get the most dangerous guns and rifles off the streets, out of our homes and offices, and into the incinerators?

Specious argumentAlready, we hear the refrain: “What about Israel? Everyone owns a gun in Israel. Assault weapons, too. Automatic weapons. The problem is not the guns.”

It is a specious argument. Israel actually has very strict gun control laws. In fact, it has the highest rejection rate of gun applications in the world; the number is some-where between 40 and 45 percent. And approval does

not end it. The guns must be traceable, and the Interior Ministry must certify that the applicant has a need for the weapon.

If we must put Israel into the gun control discussion, then, let us focus on the strictness of its laws, not the fictional version that gun control opponents are so quick to proffer.

And then there is mental health . . . We are not attempting to equate what happened last week in Newtown, Conn., to what happened years ago at Yeshiva University High School for Boys. There are similarities, however, including that to sexually abuse youngsters is another way of killing them, albeit psychologically.

Above all else, however, what these two major events have most in common is that clearly disturbed people went undisturbed by everyone around them. Adam Lanza was seen harassing people on his local streets and clearly displaying the characteristics of a dangerous per-son who needed help. People avoided him rather than getting help for him.

Those guilty of sexual abuse are vicious predators, to be sure, but it is also just as sure that they are people with mental problems. The current chancellor of YU and its former president, Rabbi Norman Lamm, admits that he knew of at least one serial abuser, but that he did not get the person help. Rather, he got him another job.

These are wake-up calls. As a community, we need to get better at identifying mental distress and treating it, not avoiding it nor ignoring it. We also need to set up and adequately fund treatment centers. We have delayed act-ing long enough.

Free Pollard nowIt seems likely that Jonathan Jay Pollard, the former civilian intelligence analyst for the U.S. Navy who was convicted of passing on United States intelligence data to Israel, was given a life sentence because he granted the Jerusalem Post newspaper an interview in defiance of a federal plea bargain.

That, at least, is what a just declassified Central Intelligence Agency assessment claims. According to the CIA assessment, Pollard spied in the United States, not on it. He transmitted intelligence regarding the Soviet Union and Arab states to Israel, but never passed on in-telligence regarding the United States (nor did Israel ask him to do so).

That does not excuse his crime, but his crime is not why he was jailed for life, apparently. This injustice has gone far enough. It is time to set him free. Write the White House today and urge President Barack Obama to pardon Pollard now that we all know the truth. The address is the White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, D.C. 20500.

Better still, go to http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/submit-questions-and-comments and e-mail the president.

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Angry men acting out

How to reduce much of the gun violence in America

Shmuley Boteach

Nobody knows why Adam Lanza shot 20 small children and six adults

many times. How a human being becomes a monster is something complex. The consensus is that he was a psycho who went off. Dismissing him as a violent nut-job, however, is too convenient for a nation where mass shootings are becoming common. None of us, though, could have contemplated 20 six- and seven-year-olds shot many times.

The United States is becoming an angrier place, with more people, especially men, feeling disenfranchised, lonely, broken, and in despair. When that anger turns to rage, it is downright dangerous. Yes, guns make it easier

for that rage to become deadly — and only cowards would refuse to hold a national conversation now

about gun laws, wherever that leads — but it is also un-deniable that if there were not so many twisted, furious, and incensed people in our country, there would not be people pulling the trigger.

The Torah reading last week spoke of the ordeal of Joseph. After being sold into slavery, by his own broth-ers, he rises to a position of great power through his God-given gift of interpreting dreams. When those same brothers are forced to come down to Egypt from Canaan to buy food amid a regional famine, the Bible says tell-ingly: “And Joseph recognized his brothers, but they did not recognize him.”

Really? He was their brother. Yes, he was older now. Yes, he was in a much more powerful social position. But who does not recognize a brother?

The deeper meaning of the verse, however, is that they never recognized him, even as a child. Consumed by jealousy, they had stripped him of his humanity. A vic-tim always remembers his tormentors, but the tormen-tors rarely recognize their victim, even when its their own flesh and blood. The process of murdering some-one involves first degrading them in one’s mind, denying their personhood, and transforming them into a focus of rage. Joseph’s brothers could not see a brother who was always invisible to them.

Before Lanza committed mass murder against chil-dren, he murdered his mother. Rage does not recognize flesh and blood. Anger knows nothing of family or

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is the author of 29 books, including “The Broken American Male” and the upcoming “The Fed-up Man of Faith: Challenging God in the Face of Tragedy and Suf-fering.”

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loved ones.Controlling anger may not control monsters such as

Lanza. From my experience, people become enraged when they do not feel valued. They become angry when they feel overlooked. We have to create a culture that celebrates the individual gifts of individual citizens and makes people feel like they belong.

Lanza partially fits that profile. At 20, he may not have been old enough to experience the many disap-pointments that would make him hate the world, but media reports have him as a lifelong oddball. He would often be seen around his Connecticut town standing on street corners staring at people. People walked by him to avoid him because he was so weird. He may have been a nut and he may have been dangerous, but he also epitomized the disenfranchised, the disaffected, and perhaps also the insane.

Of course, it is a fools’ game to try and discern what precisely motivated his diabolical evil.

Anger in America, however, must be addressed.In my 20-year career as a marriage and relation-

ships counselor, I have never seen so many brothers and sisters fighting over money, with jealousy and envy ripping apart families, or men who are unemployed or underemployed feeling so desperately worthless.

We in the United States so narrowly define success in material terms that there is little room left for soul-fulness. Failure to climb the material ladder results in feelings of inferiority. Ever more these days men are feeling like failures and losers. Fuming and indignant at a society that they feel belittles them, they want to pun-ish that society.

Right now in our country we have four principal cat-egories of success: wealth, fame, power, and beauty. We read constantly about the man who is in the Forbes 400, the movie star who dates other movie stars, the political figure who is on the rise, and the supermodel who has the world at her feet. What we need to read more about are ordinary men and women who are fantastic be-cause they are good husbands, who are special because they are loving wives, who are remembered because they are super moms, who are appreciated because they are great dads.

Simply put, the money-and-success culture in which we are immersed is making too many men feel like failures. This is especially true in a time of high unemployment and a bad economy. Men need to feel like a million dollars — not when they make a million dollars, but when they read their children bedtime sto-ries. Men need to feel like they are winners — not when they win the football pool, but when they sit with their children to watch the game. We need to ensure that we give people our respect and attention not for who they are, but for what they are —decent and kind and caring.

We also need to fix families. As a culture, we cannot just obsess over gay marriage; we need to obsess about fixing broken marriages. Lanza was a child of divorce — a fact not much focused on in the media — and divorce brings in its wake its own kind of rage. We have to bring brothers and sisters closer together, and end family feuds that rob people of relationships with those who love them most, leaving them more isolated and alone.

Ultimately, there are no easy solutions to the epi-demic-in-the-making of mass shootings in the United States. There is an easy way, however, to make people feel more cherished and less alien. We can start with a simple teaching of the Talmud that I have always found profound. “Greet every person with a warm demeanor.” The Talmud then says of the great mishnaic sage Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, “no man ever gave him greeting first, even a non-Jew in the street.”

A small hello on a street corner, even to someone who seems like an unsociable oddity, might sometimes be enough to remind that person that he or she is part of a larger human family.

They all were God’s childrenHow sad that some in Jewish media saw only one victim

Joanne Palmer

A dead child is a dead child.I’m sorry to be so blunt, but sometimes

things have to be said straightforwardly.The nightmare horror of last Friday hangs in the air;

no matter what your politics, its stench clogs your nos-trils. We all are damaged, stricken, lessened by it.

There is no division between murdered children. They are not Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, atheists. They are just dead children. They lie on the ground, each perforated by many bullets, joined in a putrid swamp of congealed blood.

This is a national disaster for us as Americans and as civilized human beings.

If ever there is a time when it does not matter who is Jewish and who is not, that time would have to be now.

The Forward and JTA — the news service that once called itself the Jewish Telegraphic Agency — felt com-pelled to tell us that one of the children had been Jewish. Later, we learned that another also may have been. The Forward, Los Angeles Jewish Journal, and others focus on the one as if there were not 19 other little bodies.

Many of us, coming from a range of political and reli-gious positions but Jewish to our cores, looked at those news stories with disgusted disbelief.

Now is not a time to put divisions between us — or at least that particular division. It seems likely that soon we will break into two camps, subdivided into many smaller ones, as we debate gun control. Another debate over how to treat mental illness, how much money to devote to it, where that money should come from, and how to recon-cile our desire to provide people with as much freedom as possible with our need to keep ourselves safe from preventable harm inevitably will divide us as well.

Other parts of the Jewish world have recognized this truth, as is clear in the press releases we read. The Orthodox Union sent out a statement expressing its grief for all the victims. The National Council of Young Israel, generally thought of as being to the OU’s right, was even more explicit. “This tragedy transcends religious affilia-tions,” it read. “The horrific loss affects us all and we shed tears for each and every one of those whose lives were cut short by this nightmare. We feel their families’ pain, share in their sorrow, and join in their grief.”

So why did two Jewish news agencies and several Jewish newspapers feel compelled to tell us that one child was Jewish, as if only he mattered? (And please understand that yes, he mattered. He was a whole world, and his murder shatters the world. It’s just that 20 worlds shattered into smithereens on Friday, and six more be-side those.)

Is it because they think we think that we still have to prove that we’re real Americans, living surrounded by other real Americans? We actually don’t think that. We’ve been real Americans for a very long time now.

Is it because they think we care only about other Jews? If they do, they’re wrong. The press releases from the OU and Young Israel, and from across Judaism’s streams, dis-prove that. A Chabad rabbi at Noah Pozner’s funeral told NPR that all the children were now with God — not just

one of them, but all of them.Is it because on some level we’re still reflexively fear-

ful? That’s probably at least partially true. Probably more than a few of us stared at the murderer’s name and feared that it might have been Jewish. It looked as if it could have been truncated from a longer, possibly eastern European name. I think, though, that we think that be-cause we know that we are prey to the same lunacy and evil as everyone else. We no longer think that Jews are always and only victims.

So did the Jewish media write what they did because they have to write something, because the particular vacuum that nature was abhorring just then was the gap-ing empty news hole?

The Forward began as a weekly Yiddish-language newspaper. Although it still publishes a Yiddish version, the Forverts, the main publication is in English. Its hard-copy edition still in theory is a weekly, but it is updated online constantly. And JTA sends out stories a few times a day, six days a week, and updates its website frequently as well.

The weekly newspapers that got into the act sent out eblasts (and so did we — but we did not send one that said “Jewish boy shot”).

So was it our insatiable demand for the latest story, for more and more detail, that made these Jewish media outlets divide the dead?

It seems that many of us felt the need to know as much as possible about what happened. We have a huge need to understand; to try to form some plot, some narrative thread, somehow to make sense of the un-understand-able. That is a normal distancing mechanism. If we can shape nightmare into a story, then we give ourselves the ability to get outside it to some extent. If we can ascribe motives to killers and attributes to their victims, if we can define their circumstances as specifically and narrowly as possible, then we can assure ourselves that we and the people we love are safe because we don’t fit those criteria. We are outside that particular narrative.

The problem, of course, is that our need to know out-strips reporters’ ability to inform. The technology that can get every rumor out in record time is in place, but our human ability to get real information, check it, place it in context, and convey it to readers in grammatical and properly structured English is no faster than it used to be. That, I think, is why the news services rush to supply us both with faulty information — the murderer’s name was not Ryan, his mother was not a kindergarten teacher at Sandy Hook Elementary, the murdering Adam did not have contact with any teachers on Thursday — and fill space with irrelevant facts masquerading as deep truths.

The deepest truth is that 20 children and six adults were murdered, shot by a cold-blooded killer whose motives are opaque to us but whose evil is clear. That one or possibly two of the children were Jewish is of no relevance. That all of them were innocent and that all 26 dead deserved to live is all that matters.

We are united in our grief and outrage. The world has become a smaller and dingier place.

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JewisH stAndArd deCeMBer 21, 2012 17

editorialop-ed

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op-ed

Handguns and halachah2012 record makes clear (again) that guns kill children, too

Shammai engelmayer

This column ran in August. We are reprinting it now in the wake of last week’s mass murder in Newtown, Conn., because any debate on gun control must not be limited to fast-firing assault weapons.

Jan. 4, 2012: In Brownsville, Tex., an eighth-grader aims a firearm at classmates. Police are called. The youth opens fire on the police. He is shot. He will die of his wounds.

Feb. 21, 2012: In Murfreesboro, Tenn., two youths at a local high school open fire at a crowd; a 14-year-old boy is shot.

Feb. 23, 2012: In a Port Orchard, Wash., elementary school, a nine-year-old boy shoots and critically wounds an eight-year-old girl with a .45-caliber pistol.

Feb. 27, 2012: In a Chardon, Ohio, high school cafeteria, a 17-year-old opens fire, killing three and wounding two.

April 2, 2012: In an Oakland, Calif., religious vocational school, a 43-year-old man opens fire on a group of students, killing seven and wounding three.

Fortunately, there were times in 2012 when the students with the guns did not kill anyone — barely.

On Jan. 6, 2012, on a packed schoolbus in Mesa, Ariz., a handgun carried on board by a seven-year-old accidentally discharged. The bullet lodged in the back of another student’s seat. No one was injured. The seven-year-old found the gun in a closet at home.

On Jan. 18, in a Mesa high school, a 12-year-old was apprehended with a semiautomatic handgun and a loaded magazine, both taken from his grandfather’s house. He told authorities he was considering suicide.

On Jan. 30, a 16-year-old Harper Woods, Mich, high school student accidentally discharged a .9-mm handgun he was carrying in his backpack. He brought the gun from home. No one was injured, but a search of the building reportedly turned up two more students with concealed weapons.

Also on Jan. 30, in northwestern Las Vegas, Nev., a 16-year-old student was arrested for carrying a loaded .9-mm revolver. Two days later, police discovered a .32-caliber handgun on another student.

FACT: In the United States every year, over 3,000 children and teens die from gunfire; that is a rate of 8.22 children a day.

FACT: One-third of all households with children

younger than 18 have a firearm.FACT: More than 40 percent

of gun-owning households with children store their guns unlocked.

FACT: One-fourth of homes with children and guns have a loaded firearm.

FACT: Among gun-owning parents who reported that their children had never handled their firearms at home, 22 percent of the children, questioned separately, said that they had.

FACT: Gun death rates are seven times higher in the states with the highest household gun ownership.

This column views issues through the prism of halachah. We need to ask how these facts and statistics inform Jewish law on the issue of gun manufacture and ownership. As I see it, there are four basic questions here:

1. Is it permissible to manufacture a weapon intended for self-defense that does not have state-of-the-art protective devices to prevent accidental firing, or the firing of the gun by an unauthorized user?

2. Is it permissible to purchase a gun without such state-of-the-art protective devices?

3. Is it permissible to purchase such a gun if no other gun is available and there is a need for a weapon of self defense?

4. If it is permissible, what degree of care must the gun owner take?

The answer to Questions 1 and 2 actually begin at the same place. Torah law requires that, when building a house, a person must build a parapet around the roof, “that you should not bring any blood upon your house, if any man falls from there.” (Deuteronomy 22:8)

Rabbinic decisions make clear that this mitzvah, this commandment, is subject to the broadest interpretation possible. (See the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Bava Kama 15b.

Maimonides, in his Mishneh Torah, The Laws of Murder and the Preservation of Life, Chapter 11:4, explains that this mitzvah includes “everything that is inherently dangerous and could, in normal circumstances, cause a person to die.” Anything that fits that bill requires a “parapet” around it, meaning that every effort must be extended to prevent the item from causing an unintentional death.

Other commentators also note, as does Rabbi

Shamshon Raphael Hirsch, that this mitzvah even requires “local civil authorities to intervene to have anything at all which might be dangerous removed” from a person’s premises. (See his commentary on the verse.)

Distinction must be made between the offensive weapon required by military and police personnel, and the defensive one that alone should be permissible to ordinary civilians. While a “parapet” is required for both, the nature of the protective device is necessarily different for each. The offensive weapon should be safe enough to reasonably protect against mishaps, but not so encumbered that it is virtually useless in the field. The defensive weapon should also be able to be used if the need arises, God forbid, but the degree of protection against mishaps must be greater.

With this in mind, it is possible to argue that guns intended for self-defense must have the best available protection against accidental or unauthorized use, or else they may not be brought into the home.

The third question is more difficult. What if no one manufactures a weapon of self-defense that utilizes the best available protection against accidental or unauthorized use? If there is a perceived or well-established need for self-defense weapons, does the “parapet” requirement prohibit obtaining such a weapon despite the need?

The simple answer is no. Preservation of life takes precedence over virtually everything else. (See especially BT Yoma 84b.)

The more complicated answer requires evaluating a variety of factors (including providing the answer to question no. 4). Among these factors are whether the danger is real or imagined; whether other modes of defense against a criminal attack would accomplish the same end; whether the degree of protection the gun owner must provide to protect against the gun being misused or misfired is so great that it renders gun ownership moot in any case; and so forth.

Obviously, once in the house, the gun must be kept in a place secure enough that it is absolutely — not virtually — child proof. If that is not possible, then halachically perhaps gun ownership is not possible in homes with children.

If you need an additional incentive, consider this: Between the time I began writing this column on Tuesday morning and it arrives in your mailbox midday Friday, at least 28 children will have died from a gunshot. Four more will die before kiddush is recited. Shabbat shalom?

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Opinions expressed in the op-ed and letters columns are not necessarily those of The Jewish Standard. Include a day-time telephone number with your letters. The Jewish Standard reserves the right to edit letters. Write to Letters, The Jewish Standard, 1086 Teaneck Road, Teaneck, NJ 07666, or e-mail [email protected]. Hand-written letters are not acceptable.

Wake up nowUnlike Steven Tencer, who has excoriated Republican Sheldon Adelson in a letter to the Jewish Standard (Dec. 7), I was grateful to Adelson for supporting Mitt Romney in the November election. I also thank this paper for giv-ing Adelson a chance to air his views in its pre-election Point-Counterpoint feature. They clearly reflected his concern for our country and for Israel.

As a former Democrat, I have joined others who have changed over. It is always good to test one’s ideas, and the best way is to listen to the “loyal opposition,” and not to tune out if they are bearers of bad news. My late husband, a Holocaust survivor who lost all his family, told us how nobody in his town believed the true stories that filtered back from the camps. If they had listened, many would be alive today.

I think we must tune in to the warning signs of in-cipient tyranny now appearing in our society, in abuse of the law by the supposed defenders of the law, in the weakening of our system of checks and balances, in the rule of unelected czars, in the politics of class warfare, in the disinformation circulated as truth. Good-hearted Jews are often the last to see evil in others. Let us not once more wake up when it is too late.

Naomi SteinbergerTenafly

Planning for future stormsHurricane Sandy was a devastating storm. We have to do more to prevent so much damage from future storms. The government should do everything to deal with in-frastructure. Stronger concrete barriers are needed to help prevent future flooding.

As a real estate salesman with 38 years of experience, I know that I cannot sell a house that is full of water.

The status quo is unacceptable. We have had many studies. It is time now to prevent future damage.

We need to do more to prevent loss of electricity for one or two weeks.

Holland and Belgium had problems with floods after World War II. They did something to deal with these problems.

Claude BienstockFair Lawn

Helping the mentally illWe are all currently absorbed with the beautiful small children and brave women who died at the hands of a terribly sick young man. He is not the first to commit such a heinous crime.

Children were massacred in the Holocaust like flies, by madmen. Violence against children in Israel, Mumbai, Russia, have been unbearably frequent and tragic. We have witnessed too much insanity of those with distorted minds perpetrated by violence on those weaker. Guns have been the vehicle of power in most killings, but guns alone cannot shoot and aim. What causes such a human being to massacre those weaker?

The issue is mental illness, a problem that is not be-ing treated comprehensively anywhere in the world. It is not a new illness. It is as old as time.

For the most part, we Jews as a people ignore it or hide it. It is seemingly too unwieldy to manage. The Jewish federation has no divisions to help the mentally ill. The Jewish agency is limited in what it can and will do to help. There are too many small divisions and no cohesive sup-port systems.

I am the mother of a mentally ill young man. For years I have struggled to get help for him. He lives on the streets in another state, and simply refuses medica-tion or cannot get it freely. He is not supervised when he is on these medications — and therein lies the issue. He is manic, on the street, on and off medications, with nowhere to live and an inability to work and no one to supervise or pay for his medications. I have spent years trying to find a way to help him.

There are times when he has been so out of control he has threatened to kill or hurt others.

No one cares. No one listens. No one wants to save this man/child. A young adult at 18 is not an adult. He is an old child. At that point all services stop. He is now in

his thirties.It didn’t matter if the shooter of the children in

Newtown was bipolar, psychotic, autistic or just plain” insane.” He was very disturbed and apparently he was not helped.

Where are the words that should have been said by those in our government?

We need much more help for the mentally ill among us. We need comprehensive help and great amounts of money and minds to solve this problem. The jails are the only recourse for many, and the streets are where so many land, people like my son and the children of others, who simply cannot help themselves and whose families have no resources.

Let us look at this part of the issue. Let us finally get the mentally ill out of the closets that they are in, and that their parents are in when they are ashamed.

I am not.Sandra Steuer Cohen

Teaneck

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JOANNE PALMER

Jonathan Pollard has been in prison for over 28 years. That is enough time for a person to molder, shrivel, and die, at least from the inside.

Opinion has been sharply divided about whether there is any moral justice in this. Pollard was accused of spying for Israel in 1985 and imprisoned; in 1987 he was given a life sentence in return for a plea bargain after being assured that he would serve only a few years. His supporters say that he did no harm to the United States, and that many people convicted of having betrayed this country in ways that Pollard did not have been given far shorter sentences. His opponents say that his willingness to give the United States’ secrets away — or more accurately, to sell them — demands harsh reprisal. And, they say, federal officials, from Caspar Weinberger in the Reagan era to Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden earlier this year, have implied that there is still-hidden material that would make clear the depth of his crime and the danger inherent in his release.

Many Jews see anti-Semitism and perhaps anti-Israel bias in the length of Pollard’s sentence, while others see in Pollard a Jew whose venality put other Jews at risk by opening us all to accusations of double loyalty.

The last big push to release Pollard based on new information ended in 2006, when his bid to have his sentence vacated and his new team of lawyers allowed to see classified documents was overturned.

We still hear about Pollard periodically — his supporters had pushed for clemency from President George H.W. Bush just before he left office, and then again last year, when President Barack Obama was compiling his Christmas clemency list. We heard about him a week ago, when he was rushed to the hospital from prison, and then sent back.

And now new information has surfaced.It’s from a seemingly unimpeachable source —

newly declassified parts of a 1987 Central Intelligence Agency damage assessment of the case, along with supporting documentation. It’s been published and is available online through the National Security Archive, a highly respected, 50-year-old nongovernmental organization that is funded by publication revenues, grants, foundations, and individual donors, accepts no money from the government, and is housed at George Washington University. (To find the documents, google National Security Archive and Jonathan Pollard.)

The documents now have been partially declassified because the National Security Archive filed a mandatory declassification review. That was denied, but the archive appealed, and it was released. Some sections still are

blocked out, but a great deal of information is visible.

Despite all the emotion that has gone into the Pollard case, archive representatives pursued it because “it’s an interesting case,” according to Jeffrey T. Richelson, a senior fellow there. “When you know that there are documents like that, then it’s the archive’s charge to go after it.”

The documents in question hold the key to the puzzle of why the government felt compelled to hold Pollard as it did. In 2006, when Pollard’s new lawyers, Jacques Semelman and Eliot Lauer of the Manhattan law firm Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle, applied for the information, they were told that it was classified. At least five documents were partially sealed.

“No member of the public could gain access to them,” Semelman, who lives in Bergen County, told the Jewish Standard at the time. (Semelman is still Pollard’s lawyer; after initially agreeing to talk to the Standard about the new developments, he later changed his mind. All quotes from him here are from 2006.)

“We need to see those documents,” Semelman said; they were believed to hold the reason the government was so adamant in demanding a life sentence. “[W]e know from the public court file that part of what is in the file are predictions by Caspar Weinberger as to possible outcomes based on what Pollard did. We would like to see what the predictions are, because it may be that at the time of the sentencing the judge read the predictions, became alarmed, and thought that the possible doomsday scenario justified life in prison. But if these predictions have not materialized, after all these years,

Jonathan Pollard, above, and one of the doc-uments in the case against him. The boxed text is newly declassified. The empty spaces cover text that still is classified.

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Cover story


What the CIA said

Despite some blanks, a bit of clarity emerges on Pollard case

blocked out, but a great deal of information is

Despite all the emotion that has gone into the Pollard case, archive representatives

Jonathan Pollard, above, and one of the doc-

text is newly declassified. The empty spaces

the judge should take that into account.”The site links to many fascinating documents; the

one that seems to hold the most riches is document 11, the CIA damage assessment, which is different from the Weinberger document. It includes biographical data, which makes Pollard seem smart but eccentric at best, frequently troubled and often duplicitous, not a villain and also not a hero.

In general, the documents seem to prove Pollard’s case, at least as far as we can see.

According to the summary on the site, when Pollard spied for Israel in 1984 and 1985, “his Israeli handlers asked primarily for nuclear, military and technical information on the Arab states, Pakistan, and the Soviet Union — not on the United States.” One of the reasons most frequently given about why Pollard is still in prison is that he spied on the United States. These documents show that not to have been the case. Instead, Pollard’s CIA debriefers said that he cooperated “in good faith” with them.

Still, even in these only partially declassified documents, the story is somewhat murky.

According to the documents, one of the reasons for Pollard’s sentence was that he gave an interview to the Jerusalem Post. The implication is that the government reacted in a fit of pique, but that’s not necessarily fair, Richelson said. The reaction was because “one of the points the government raised was that he was providing classified information, and this showed that he was a recidivist. Even in those interviews some of the information he was providing was classified.”

Pollard’s attorneys insisted at the time that the government had approved Wolf Blitzer’s interview.

Some of the material in the documents is cinematic. There is a vignette involving Pollard and Rafi Eitan, who worked for an Israeli intelligence service called the Scientific Liaison Bureau, or Lakam. The narrative on the National Security Archive takes up the story. “According to Pollard, his case officer, standing behind Pollard, shook his head ‘no’ in response to many of Eitan’s

requests — including those for information on the PLO’s Force 17, CIA psychological studies or other intelligence containing ‘dirt’ on senior Israeli officials, as well as information identifying the ‘rats’ in Israel (by which he apparently meant Israelis who provided information to the United States).” What this anecdote loses in clarity, it gains in drama.

There is no smoking gun in either direction in these documents, Richelson said. The documents are partially classified, which means that we still don’t know what the blanked out parts say. What’s new in them is “detail on what the Israelis wanted, particularly in regard to Syria. Also there are specifics about what they didn’t want — United States’ military plans, that sort of thing.”

So now we have a more detailed understanding of Jonathan Jay Pollard, and some idea that what he did, while certainly bad, might not have been nearly as bad as we had been led to believe.

And we have a 58-year-old man who has been in prison for 28 years and one month today, Friday, Dec. 21.

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The First Amendment prisonerFrom the start, innuendo and veiled threats clouded the truth

SHAMMAI ENGELMAYER

The date was Nov. 21, 1985.A 31-year-old civilian U.S. Navy intelligence

analyst specializing in counterterrorism and his wife were inside the gates of the Israel embassy in Washington, D.C., seeking asylum. The embassy guards refused them entry into the building, instead ordering them to leave. No sooner did they exit the gates than agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation descended on them and arrested the analyst, Jonathan Jay Pollard. Soon thereafter, he was charged with passing on sensitive intelligence data to a foreign government — the State of Israel.

Anne Henderson-Pollard, meanwhile, was allowed to leave. As yet, the FBI had no evidence on which to detain

her. She was, however, followed from the embassy. A short while later, Henderson-Pollard lost her FBI tail and met up with Pollard’s Israeli handler, Aviem Sella. She told him what had happened. Sella and his crew of Pollard-runners left the United States before the FBI could close in on them.

The Jewish community here was dumbfounded by the accusation. Israel, the media were reporting, had asked an American Jew to spy on America for the Jewish state. Fears of an anti-Semitic backlash were rampant. Almost from the beginning, therefore, Jewish organizations openly condemned Pollard and disassociated themselves from him and his actions. They were less quick to condemn Israel, preferring instead to accept its claim

that Pollard was part of a “rogue operation” for which it was not responsible. On Dec. 2, a telephone call from Prime Minister Shimon Peres reassured Secretary of State George Shultz that this was true. (Within a few months, Shultz would become disheartedened at what he saw as Israeli footdragging on the Pollard investigation.)

Less than a month after Pollard’s arrest, on Dec. 16, Vice President George H.W. Bush stood before an audience at Yeshiva University, where he was receiving an honorary degree. No one, he said, would even think of accusing the American Jewish community of dual loyalty; have no fear. His message was interpreted as “back off on Pollard, or else we will level the dual loyalty charge at you.” An editorial in The New York Jewish Week called

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Bush on this, but most Jewish organizations remained silent. They got the message.

Over the next months, leaks began to find their way into the newspapers. Pollard was a master spy. Pollard had passed on extremely sensitive material on the United States that threatened the security of the United States. Pollard had put the lives of intelligence agents and sources at risk. There was information so sensitive that only the judge would be allowed to see it.

On June 4, 1986, Pollard accepted a plea bargain. He would plead guilty to a single count of delivering classified material to a foreign government. The average prison term for that count was four years in prison.

On Feb. 15, 1987, three weeks before Pollard was to be sentenced, the Washington correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, Wolf Blitzer, published a jailhouse interview he did with Pollard. The story was picked up by The Washington Post, which ran it under the headline, “Israel’s master spy.” The interview was denounced by the government as a violation of the plea agreement.

That in itself was a strange development. As Pollard’s attorneys noted to the court at his sentencing, “The government approved Mr. Pollard’s application [for the interview], and two interviews took place inside the prison with government approval. Under the plea agreement, any interviews had to be approved by the Director of Naval Intelligence. Mr. Pollard had been led to believe that his written requests for authorization had received all necessary approvals within the government. Indeed, it would not have been possible for Mr. Blitzer to enter the prison at all, much less equipped with tape recorder and camera, without government approval.”

The court would hear none of it. On March 4, 1987, reportedly based on a secret “damage assessment” submitted to him in camera by Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, U.S. Circuit Court Judge Aubrey Robinson Jr. sentenced Pollard to life. (As it turns out, the judge asked Weinberger to prepare that report, according to Weinberger in an interview with the late journalist David Twersky.) The harsh sentence began to change American Jewish attitudes. Something was amiss. Then as now, such a sentence was unheard of for someone guilty of spying for an ally. The average sentence for such a crime until then — and since then —is seven years.

Indeed, something was amiss. As it turns out, Pollard’s sentence was not due to secret information. He was not even close to being a “master spy”; Blitzer would use that label again, this time as part of the title of his book on the case. The only information he was passing on to Israel was information Israel by treaty obligation was supposed to receive from the United States, but was not being made privy to, such as Iraq’s chemical warfare potential. Rather, the judge was punishing him for having granted Blitzer the interview, his attorneys’ statement notwithstanding. (See accompanying article.)

Over the years, there has been a growing movement within the Jewish community to obtain Pollard’s release. Late last year, in fact, the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism repeated its call for Pollard’s release following news reports that President Barack Obama had considered freeing him, only to be talked out of doing so by Vice President Joe Biden, who reportedly said he would see Pollard released “over my dead body.”

It is not the first time a Democratic president has been talked out of ending Pollard’s incarceration. President Bill Clinton reportedly was prepared to free Pollard in late 1998, as an incentive to win concessions from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the Wye River Conference.

A public comment by Clinton that he was considering the release brought a storm of protest. The director of central intelligence at the time, George Tenet, threatened to resign. Howls of protest also came from Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Melvin Laird, Caspar Weinberger, James Schlesinger, and Elliot Richardson — all former defense secretaries (and in one case, a once-and-future one). Clinton was forced to back off.

By the time this newspaper reaches subscribers, Pollard will have been in prison for 9,892 days. One month ago, on Nov. 21, he began his 28th year behind bars. If the CIA damage assessment is correct, Pollard may very well be this country’s longest-serving First Amendment prisoner.

Pollard is eligible for parole in late 2015 and could be released in November of that year. If he is paroled, or if his sentence is commuted before then, he likely would be deported to Israel.

A Pollard timeline•BornAug.7,1954,inGalveston,Texas.Pollard’s

family moves to South Bend, Ind., in 1961, where his father, an award-winning microbiologist, teaches at Notre Dame.

•PollardmakesfirsttriptoIsraelin1970aspartof a science program at the Weizmann Institute. Pollard is hospitalized after fighting with another student.

•Pollardobtainsapoliticalsciencedegreein1976 from Stanford University. He claims ties to the Mossad and of having dual American-Israeli citizenship, both untrue. He enrolls in several graduate schools, but never completes a postgraduate program. He meets his future wife, Anne Henderson, while both live in Sacramento, Calif.

•In1979,PollardappliestotheCIAforaposition,but is rejected after admitting in a polygraph test to drug use. Hired by the U.S. Navy as an intelligence specialist, he is denied top security clearance. He is reassigned after two months, when his boss calls for his firing.

•Pollardtriestosellaproposalforaback-channelSouth Africa operation to a higher-up, Adm. Sumner Shapiro, who characterizes him as a “kook.”

•Pollard’ssecurityclearanceisreinstatedin1982after a psychiatrist concludes he has no mental illness. In 1984, Pollard is accepted for a position as an analyst for the Naval Intelligence Command.

•PollardbeginspassinginformationtoAviemSella,an Israeli Air Force colonel on leave as a student at New York University. Pollard accepts $10,000 and a diamond and sapphire ring. He is put on a retainer of $1,500 per month.

•InNovember1985,Pollardgivesapartialconfession to the FBI after being discovered by a co-worker removing documents from his office. He and wife try to gain asylum at the Israel embassy, but are rebuffed by guards. Pollard is arrested but his wife is allowed to leave. She tips off Sella. The colonel, his wife, and two other Israelis flee the United States.

•PollardacceptsapleaagreementinJune1986,admitting one count of conspiracy to deliver defense information to a foreign government.

•InMarch1987,heissentencedtolifeinprison.Anne Henderson-Pollard is sentenced to five years and paroled after serving three and one-half years.

•IsraelgrantscitizenshiptoPollardinNovember1995, maintaining he worked for a rogue operation.

•In1998,PrimeMinisterBenjaminNetanyahuadmits Pollard served as an information source and that the government had paid for two of his attorneys.

•Netanyahuvisitstheconvictedspyinprisonin2002.

•InJune2011,theUnitedStatesdeniesarequesttoallow Pollard to attend his father’s funeral.

— Compiled by Jonathan Lazarus

Cover story

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Jewish schools reconsider security, grapple with how to talk about tragedyChavie Lieber

Like many other mothers, Patti Weiss Levy’s heart broke when she heard about last Friday’s shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown,

Conn.The longtime Connecticut resident lives an hour

away from Newtown, so she assumed she wouldn’t know anyone involved. But as details of the massacre began to emerge, Weiss Levy says she realized just how small Connecticut is.

“We later found out my daughter babysat for one of the children killed,” Weiss Levy said. “And the drummer in my daughter’s band could not attend a concert that night because his sister was one of the teachers killed, too. They were the nicest people, and this whole thing is horrid, just unspeakable.”

As the funerals began Monday for the 20 children and six adults gunned down last Friday by 20-year-old Adam Lanza, Jewish schools around the country grappled with how to discuss the tragedy appropriately with students and whether there are ways to improve security at their

own schools.Administration officials at the Bicultural Day School

in Stamford, Conn., about 30 miles from Newtown, spent all of Monday combing the grounds with security ex-perts, one faculty member said. The entire staff arrived at the school early in the morning for a meeting about how to discuss the Newtown massacre with their students. This week, the staff’s main concern was to make sure their building had the best security system possible.

The school also had a personal connection to Newtown: A teacher at Bicultural is married to Rabbi Shaul Praver, who led the funeral service for one of the victims, 6-year-old Noah Pozner.

Around the country, parents of Jewish school stu-dents expressed concerns about security. At the Hillel Day School in Boca Raton, Fla., school officials said they received a torrent of emails from parents requesting that they update their security system and emergency proce-dures. The head of school, Rabbi Samuel Levine, said the school was considering its options.

“Our school building is on the Jewish federation cam-pus, so you would have to pass through security,” Levine said. “But that doesn’t mean that if someone wanted to get on campus, they couldn’t. We’re sitting down with campus security this afternoon to review our security procedures and drills and see if there are any changes we can make.”

David Finell, head of school at the Rockwern Academy in Cincinnati, said the shooting generated a new sense of urgency about reviewing security precautions.

“When you have this type of tragedy, it makes people revisit their procedures,” Finell said. “We run plenty of emergency drills, but after this we are going to start having more and we’re going to implement some new security changes, though I can’t share what they are right now.”

When it came to talking with students, Jewish ad-ministrators took different approaches to discussing the Newtown shooting. The question was how to talk to students in an effective and appropriate way while also taking care not to alarm younger students unnecessarily.

Ramaz, a Modern Orthodox school in New York, ran an extensive program for middle and high school stu-dents and made faculty members available to speak with anyone who requested it. Ramaz did not provide the pro-gram for younger children.

“A lot of our students seem to have been taken with the tragic events, so we encouraged feelings of sympa-thy for the victims and their families, and made sure the students felt our school was safe,” said Rabbi Paul Shaviv, noting that teachers were prepared to talk to the younger children if they asked questions.

Boca’s Hillel School addressed the tragedy in a morn-ing assembly for the middle school and dispatched school psychologists to talk to the lower grades.

“We need to be sensitive to the younger children,” Levine said. “I’m sure there was plenty of discussion about this over the Shabbos table, and there were prob-ably kids present.”

At the Levine Academy in Dallas, the head of school, Mark Stolovitsky, said that in seeking an age-appropriate way to talk about the shooting, the events in Connecticut were explained in terms of Bible or Disney stories. Like the stories of Purim or Passover, the children understand the concept of a “bad guy,” he said. “We want kids to feel safe in school, but we also need to tell kids that there are bad men who do bad things.”

Levine Academy also is considering a new school entrance strategy. Now, only one of the school’s two en-trances is guarded by armed security. After the shooting, Stolovitsky said his staff will explore ways for all students to enter through the same door.

“I also think we need to change our mindset and be more vigilant,” Stolovitsky said. “Make sure you stop peo-ple wandering around your school you don’t recognize, even if they are smiling. And we need to keep practicing emergency drills, where children know how to hide out of plain sight. This is why we have drills. It’s unlikely it will happen, but we need to be prepared.”

While hiring armed guards and improving secu-rity systems might be obvious steps, school adminis-trators also say they don’t want to turn their facilities into fortified prisons. Levine noted that at Sandy Hook Elementary, the shooter, Lanza, was able to force his way inside despite the school’s impressive security system.

“The Connecticut school was locked. They did all the right things, and this somehow happened,” Levine said.

“We have security cameras, we feel safe,” Stolovitsky

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Noah Pozner, 6, was among the 20 child victims of the massacre at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., that also claimed six adults. Courtesy Pozner family, via forward

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Please join NCSY and 250 public school students from

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added. “We could choose to have metal detectors and provide a whole new stage of security. But we live in an open, free society and this is a school. The security needs to be appropriate.”

Finell says the most important role for educators or parents briefing kids about the shooting is to remain calm. At his school, teachers led discussions about the shooting but waited for children in younger grades to initiate them. The school also is planning an optional memorial service. Finell stressed the importance of not becoming too visibly emotional.

“These kids are looking to us for their emotional cues,” he said. “We can’t show any fear or let them know how upset we are by all of this. We need to be reassuring at times like these and talk to them about all the safety precautions we are doing, show them that our number one goal is to take care of them.”

JTA Wire Service

Noah Pozner, 6, was among the 20 child victims of the massacre at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., that also claimed six adults. Courtesy Pozner family, via forward

brief

Dead Sea Scrolls are scanned and available in online libraryJERUSALEM – The Dead Sea Scrolls are now available online.

The Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library, a free online library of the Dead Sea Scrolls, went live Tuesday.

The library, a collaboration between the Israel Antiquities Authority and the Google R&D center in Israel, provides access to high-resolution images of the scrolls, as well as additional data and background information.

The entire collection includes 900 manuscripts com-prising about 30,000 Dead Sea Scrolls fragments. The first scrolls were discovered 65 years ago in the caves of Qumran in southern Israel’s Judean Desert.

It will take three more years for all of the scrolls’ frag-ments to be photographed and put online. The high-resolution images are making parts of the fragments that were not clear to the naked eye visible. The images are being scanned in a special Israel Antiquities Authority lab with equipment originally developed for NASA.

Currently about 4,000 scans of infrared photographs of the scrolls taken shortly after their discovery are avail-able online, as well as 1,000 recent scans.

The library will make the fragments accessible to both scholars and the public.

The Israel Museum last year put five of its manu-scripts online, also in partnership with Google.

The Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library was funded with a major gift from the Leon Levy Foundation, with additional major funding from the Arcadia Foundation and the Yad Hanadiv Foundation.

JTA Wire Service

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Newtown massacre prompts Jewish groups to push for action on gun controlRon Kampeas

WASHINGTON – In the wake of the shooting rampage in Newtown, Conn., Jewish groups are looking to build alli-ances and back legislation to strengthen gun control laws.

Rabbi David Saperstein, the director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, said that his group is assembling a coalition that would be ready to act once the right legislation comes along.

“The point now is to create the atmosphere in which there is a demand for action, using our voices, organizing the parents in our pews,” Saperstein said. “When the parents across America start crying out for effective action, if there’s religious leadership, it will galvanize the community to create the moral demand that moves toward sensible legislation.”

Staff at the RAC, the locus for gun control initiatives in the Jewish community in past decades, spent Monday reaching out to other Jewish leaders, as well as to leaders of other faith communities.

“The best way is to rally the faith community and come together around shared policy,” RAC spokeswoman Rachel Laser said.

A number of Jewish groups have indicated that they will back a gun control bill proposed Monday by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the first since the Newtown shooting. It would ban more than 100 assault weapons and ammunition clips that contain more than 10 rounds.

The Newtown killer, Adam Lanza, used a Bushmaster AR-15 assault rifle registered in the name of his mother, whom he killed before heading to Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, where he murdered 20 children and six adults before killing himself. Police have said he used multiple clips, although their capacity has not been reported publicly.

Jared Loughner, the gunman in the January 2011 attack in Tucson, Ariz., that grievously wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) and killed six others, had a 33-round magazine.

The legislation, Feinstein said in a statement on Monday, “will be carefully focused on the most dangerous guns that have killed so many people over the years while protecting the rights of gun owners by exempting hundreds of weapons that fall outside the bill’s scope.”

In 1994, Feinstein helped draft the last iteration of an assault weapons ban. It lapsed in 2004, after the National Rifle Association fought against its renewal.

B’nai B’rith International demanded the reinstatement of the assault weapons ban on Monday.

“Assault weapons enable a shooter to fire multiple rounds without stopping to reload as they automatically expel and load ammunition with each trigger-pull,” B’nai B’rith said in a statement. “There is no sane, acceptable, reasonable need in a civilian setting to fire off large rounds of ammunition.”

The Jewish Council for Public Affairs circulated a petition through its constituent Jewish community relations councils that calls for “meaningful legislation to limit access to assault weapons and high capacity ammunition magazines, aggressive enforcement of firearm regulations, robust efforts to ensure that every person in need has access to quality mental health care, and a serious national conversation about violence in media and games.”

Officials of Jewish groups planning action said the likeliest vehicle would be Feinstein’s legislation, which she plans to introduce as soon as Congress reconvenes in January.

“We have been in touch with Sen. Feinstein,” Susan Turnbull said. Turnbull chairs Jewish Women International, a group that has combatting domestic

violence as a principal focus. “We support her bill.”The National Council of Jewish Women, which has

also taken a leading role in the Jewish community on gun control initiatives in the past, announced its support Tuesday for the Feinstein legislation and for legislation proposed by Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) that would tighten background checks. The NCJW has mobilized a grassroots network of activists to push for gun control legislation. Hadassah also called on Congress to introduce reforms.

The United Synagogue for Conservative Judaism and the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly on Monday called not only for a ban on assault weapons, but for longer purchase times, deeper background checks, coding ammunition for identification, and banning online sales of ammunition.

President Barack Obama, attending a prayer vigil in Newtown on Sunday, said that he was ready to back action that would address such violence.

“Are we really prepared to say that we’re powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard?” he said. “Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?”

Although he was short on specifics, a number of observers said that Obama’s strong language suggested he was ready to do what he had avoided in his first term: Advance assault weapons restrictions.

In addition to Feinstein and Schumer, a number of other Jewish lawmakers have also weighed in. Rep. Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.), who will be the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee in the next Congress, said in a statement that “expressions of sympathy must be matched by concrete actions.”

Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.), who is retiring, expressed support for an assault weapons ban and proposed a national commission on mass shootings.

In addition to banning assault weapons, Jewish groups also are seeking broader initiatives to address violence.

Rabbi Levi Shemtov, who directs American Friends of Lubavitch, said he would bring a study that links mandatory moments of silence to drops in juvenile violence to lawmakers’ attention.

Turnbull of Jewish Women International said that any legislation should deal also with identifying and treating people whose mental health should preclude their gaining access to weapons.

“We will back any legislation that bans assault weapons and the ammunition as well as giving families what they need to treat individuals with a proclivity toward violence,” said Turnbull, a former vice-chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee. “I think this will be the ‘big idea,’ that the president is not going to limit the conversation to just guns.”

JTA Wire Service

President Obama attends the Sandy Hook interfaith vigil at Newtown High School in Newtown, Conn., on Sunday. Pete Souza/White houSe

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How will Israelis and Palestinians fare during Obama’s second term?Ron Kampeas

WASHINGTON – Is history about to repeat itself?President Barack Obama’s first three years in office

saw some serious tussling with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the peace process and settlements.

Now, with Obama beginning his second term and Netanyahu looking pretty certain to win next month’s Israeli elections, will there be a replay of past tensions?

Not for now, experts suggest, saying that the Obama administration does not seem eager to wade back into the Israeli-Palestinian morass, preferring to keep it on the back burner.

David Makovsky, director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s Project on the Middle East Peace Process, dismissed pre-election suggestions that Obama would ramp up pressure on Israel over the peace process in his second term as overblown.

“I don’t think a lot of the political physics are suspended in a second term,” he said. “There are some in Israel who see a second presidential term as the king, but Obama’s going to want to use his replenished political capital carefully.”

Makovksy said that between tough negotiations with the Republicans on fiscal issues and looming foreign policy challenges — including Iran’s nuclear program and tumult in the Middle East — Obama is not going to make Israeli-Palestinian issues a priority.

Moreover, Makovsky suggested, there is no clear opening for a breakthrough right now.

“It’s probably safe to assume that right now there’s no grand deal to be done between Israelis and Palestinians,” he said.

Steve Rosen, a former foreign policy director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee who has criticized Obama for pressuring Israel, said that the president seems to have accepted that there are limits to what Americans can do without willing partners.

“I think Obama no longer buys the catechism that we are this close to an agreement and all we need is presidential involvement,” Rosen said. “I don’t think it’s just a political calculation or he’s distracted or he’s afraid of the pro-Israel lobby. He never had a secret plan to go for broke after the elections — the plan was ascribed to him by a combination of people on the right who feared it and people on the left who dreamed of it.”

American journalist Peter Beinart recently wrote in the Daily Beast that the Obama administration, frustrated with Netanyahu, had decided to pursue a policy of “benign neglect” toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Beinart, a prominent critic of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians, cited unnamed administration officials who said that while the U.S. would still provide military and diplomatic assistance to Israel, it would no longer push to relaunch direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.

“Senior administration officials believe the Israeli leader has no interest in the wrenching compromises necessary to birth a viable Palestinian state,” Beinart wrote. “Instead, they believe, he wants the façade of a peace process because it insulates him from international pressure. By refusing to make that charade possible, Obama officials believe, they are forcing Netanyahu to own his rejectionism, and letting an angry world take it from there.”

But in an interview with reporters earlier this month, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, said that the two countries were in agreement that the fault for the lack of negotiations belongs to the Palestinians, who have refused to rejoin talks in the

absence of a settlement freeze.“Our position remains unchanged — we are willing

to negotiate with the Palestinians, today, not tomorrow, in Washington, Jerusalem, Ramallah, wherever, directly without preconditions on all the core issues to reach peace,” Oren said. “That’s not only our position, that’s the position of President Obama and the administration.”

Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East negotiator under both Republican and Democratic administrations, agreed that Obama is likely to pull back from engaging with the Israeli-Palestinian issue, having been burned by it in the past. He also said that Obama needs to maintain amicable relations with Netanyahu as he works to find a non-military solution to the Iranian nuclear issue.

But Miller predicted that the president eventually would re-engage, if only because he did not want to be remembered as the president who let the two-state solution die.

“It doesn’t mean he has to rush, but I’m betting you that by the time he’s done, he’ll have engaged in some way on the Israeli-Palestinian issue,” said Miller, a vice president for new initiatives at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington.

Since the U.S. presidential election, there have been a number of significant developments in the Israeli-Palestinian arena. But they have not sparked any major blow-ups in U.S.-Israel relations.

A top Israeli official privately told one American Jewish interlocutor who spoke with JTA that Obama’s backing of Israel during its conflict last month with Hamas in the Gaza Strip was “A-plus.”

The United States then stood with Israel and just seven other countries in opposing the Palestinians’ successful bid to enhance their status to non-member state at the United Nations.

The Obama administration did, however, criticize Israel’s announcement, made soon after the U.N. vote, that it planned new construction in eastern Jerusalem and the west bank.

In his Daily Beast article, Beinart argued that the Obama administration did not exert itself to line up votes for Israel at the U.N., but also was restrained in its criticism of Israel’s construction plans — both of which reflect its new hands-off approach.

New developments also have the potential to shake up U.S.-Israel relations. Among the potential game-changers are an empowered Hamas, a lurch to the right in Israel’s government, and the prospect of top foreign policy and defense spots in a second-term Obama cabinet going to figures who have been critical of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta — both of whom enjoy relatively warm relations with Israeli leaders — have said they will retire next year.

The two reported frontrunners to replace them both have had their differences with Israel. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the most likely Clinton replacement, has been among the sharpest congressional critics of Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip.

Many in pro-Israel circles are expressing alarm over the prospect of former Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel replacing Panetta. Hagel, a Republican who says he is a supporter of Israel, has often found himself at odds with pro-Israel groups. As a senator, he refused to sign on to congressional letters backed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, calling such statements “stupid.”

JTA Wire Service

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At the White House, Chanukah’s light comes from Sandy-ravaged shul’s chanukiyahRon Kampeas

WASHINGTON – It has become something of a White House Chanukah tradition.

For the second time, the Obama White House used a chanukiyah from a hurricane-hit region to mark the holiday.

This Chanukah, Rabbi David Bauman brought to the White House one of two 90-year-old chanukiot that survived when Hurricane Sandy ravaged Temple Israel in Long Beach, N.Y. The chanukiyah used at the White House in 2010 was from a New Orleans synagogue hit by Hurricane Katrina.

“This 90-year-old menorah survived, and I am willing to bet it will survive an-other 90 years, and another 90 years after that,” Obama said before the candles were lit on Thursday night at the White House Chanukah party. “So tonight, it shines as a symbol of perseverance, and as a reminder of those who are still recovering from Sandy’s destruction — a reminder of resilience and hope and the fact that we will be there for them as they recover.”

Jarrod Bernstein, the White House’s

32-year-old director of Jewish outreach, was behind the choice of candelabra. He told JTA that Jewish organizational efforts to help rebuild both Jewish and non-Jewish commu-nities hit by Sandy fit perfectly with President Obama’s emphasis on getting relief to the Northeast in the storm’s wake.

“Having a menorah with meaning allows us to embody the best spirit of Jewish expe-rience, in the middle of what is a national challenge,” Bernstein said. “There is a Jewish dimension to this — the American Jewish community is ‘working to make this a more perfect union,’ as the president often calls it.”

Bernstein described his “aha” moment during a drive to visit family in New York, where he served for years as a commu-nity outreach official for Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He had been agonizing about what would serve as the most potent symbol joining the holiday with Obama administra-tion policy.

His wife, Hildy Kuryk — who also hap-a 90-year-old chanukiyah from Temple israel, a suburban new york syna-gogue hit hard by hurricane Sandy, was featured at the White house Chanukah party. BRUCE SKLOVER/COURTESY TEMPLE ISRAEL

see Chanukiya page 31


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At the White House, Chanukah’s light comes from Sandy-ravaged shul’s chanukiyahRon Kampeas

32-year-old director of Jewish outreach, was behind the choice of candelabra. He told JTA that Jewish organizational efforts to help rebuild both Jewish and non-Jewish commu-nities hit by Sandy fit perfectly with President Obama’s emphasis on getting relief to the Northeast in the storm’s wake.

“Having a menorah with meaning allows us to embody the best spirit of Jewish expe-rience, in the middle of what is a national challenge,” Bernstein said. “There is a Jewish dimension to this — the American Jewish community is ‘working to make this a more perfect union,’ as the president often calls it.”

Bernstein described his “aha” moment during a drive to visit family in New York, where he served for years as a commu-nity outreach official for Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He had been agonizing about what would serve as the most potent symbol joining the holiday with Obama administra-tion policy.

His wife, Hildy Kuryk — who also hap-

pens to be the Democratic National Committee’s finance director — suggested a chanukiyah from one of the many New York-area synagogues hit by Sandy.

“The story of what’s going on there — the rededica-tion and re-sanctification of these communities, there’s definitely a correlation” with Chanukah, Bernstein said.

Bernstein contacted the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, a group he was familiar with from his Bloomberg days and which he admired for working with both Jewish and non-Jewish communities. That led him, in turn, to Temple Israel, established in 1920.

The seven-foot brass chanukiyah is one of a pair dat-ing from at least the building’s 1923 construction, said Rabbi David Bauman, interviewed as he ferried it to Washington for the party. The two were spared because they had stood on an upper floor.

Bauman said he at first didn’t believe the White House was on the line. When he understood it was for real, he said, it was like a ray of light.

He recalled Psalm 30, associated with the dedication of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem: “Weeping may stay for the night, but rejoicing comes in the morning.”

Bauman said he hoped the Chanukah party would garner attention not only for the synagogue, but for his neighbors.

“The region and my synagogue’s devastation with Hurricane Sandy has been incredibly dark,” he said. “Coming to the White House is not only an honor for us but for the entire region.”

Bauman, 41, a reserve chaplain in the U.S. Marines, leads a nondenominational shul that he describes as “Conservadox,” with both separate and mixed seating. There also is a beit midrash; much of the damage was to holy books and Torah scrolls.

The damage, he said, totaled $5 million, and in-surance covered just a fraction of that. Moreover, his institution, like other houses of worship, are not neces-sarily entitled to the federal recovery money because of religion-state separation.

“Hopefully, this will be a way for us to get the story out and raise some money to rebuild,” he said.

JTA Wire Service

Check weekly for recipes at

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The Hagel dialecticDefenders and mostly detractors tussle over Israel record

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WASHINGTON – The expected nomination of former Sen. Chuck Hagel as the next defense secretary has sparked an outcry from segments of the pro-Israel community.

Media reports in recent days have said that Hagel, a Republican who represented Nebraska in the U.S. Senate from 1997 to 2009, is President Barack Obama’s all-but-certain nominee for defense secretary, in line to replace Leon Panetta, who hopes to retire early next year.

The reports have sparked open anxiety about the prospect of someone who has had a contentious rela-tionship with pro-Israel groups in a post at the very nexus of the defense relationship between Israel and the United States.

“Chuck Hagel would not be the first, second, or third choice for the American Jewish community’s friends of Israel,” Abraham Foxman, the Anti-Defamation League’s national director, wrote in an email to Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin. “His record relating to Israel and the U.S.-Israel relationship is, at best, disturbing, and at worst, very troubling. The sentiments he’s expressed about the Jewish lobby border on anti-Semitism in the genre of professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt and former president Jimmy Carter.”

Foxman was referring to remarks Hagel made in an interview in which he explained why he did not sign on to letters backed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee that were endorsed by many of his Senate colleagues. “The Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here,” he said. He also said: “I’m a United States sena-tor. I’m not an Israeli senator.”

Hagel, a decorated Vietnam War veteran, would bring bipartisan and military credibility to the office. He refused to back any candidate in 2008 but he traveled overseas with Obama, suggesting that the relatively inex-perienced candidate had his confidence.

Obama repaid Hagel by naming him co-chairman of the Intelligence Advisory Board, as well as to a number of other advisory positions.

The prospect of a Hagel nomination has set off alarm bells in much of the pro-Israel community, with broad-sides aimed at him in such conservative publications as the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, and Commentary.

The Republican Jewish Coalition has circulated bullet points noting Hagel’s departures from pro-Israel ortho-doxies during his Senate career, including his refusal to sign on to letters supporting Israel and calling for in-creased isolation of Iran and its surrogate in Lebanon, Hezbollah.

The RJC list resembled a similar one circulated by its Democratic counterpart, the National Jewish Democratic Council, in 2007, when Hagel briefly consid-ered a run for the presidency.

The NJDC president, David Harris, declined to com-ment on Hagel last week, saying he would not have anything to say until there was a formal announce-ment. Hagel is not the only name circulating as a pos-sible defense secretary, although he has gotten the most attention.

Some pro-Israel Democrats have circulated the attack pieces to journalists, reflecting anxieties among hawkish Democrats who had defended Obama against charges that he would distance himself from Israel in his second term.

Hagel, who says he is a supporter of Israel, has ques-tioned the efficacy of Iran sanctions and has called for engagement with Hamas. He has also been outspoken against the prospect of military engagement with Iran.

“I think talking about going to war with Iran in fairly specific terms should be carefully reviewed,” he said in 2010 at a forum organized by the Atlantic Council, a foreign policy think tank that he chairs. “And that’s pretty dangerous talk.”

Rep. Shelley Berkley (D-Nev.), a stalwart supporter of Israel who is retiring from Congress after losing a Senate bid, issued a statement Tuesday opposing a Hagel nomination.

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Former Sen. Chuck Hagel at the Forum on the Law of the Sea Convention in Washington D.C, in May. Glenn Fawcett / DoD Photosee HageL page 34

JewIsh stanDarD DeCeMBer 21, 2012 33

Former Sen. Chuck Hagel at the Forum on the Law of the Sea Convention in Washington D.C, in May. Glenn Fawcett / DoD Photo

trast to the stated policies of our nation and he would be the wrong choice for America’s next secretary of de-fense,” Berkley said.

Hagel’s Jewish defenders said his independence rec-ommends him.

“Hagel understands the shared values” between Israel and the United States, said Aaron David Miller, a former U.S. Middle East negotiator who is now a vice president at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. “He believes in a special relationship but not an exclusive relationship.”

Miller conducted the interview with Hagel that was cited by Foxman. It was published in his 2008 book, “The Much Too Promised Land.”

Robert Wexler, a former congressman who was a top Jewish surrogate for Obama in both the 2008 and 2012 elections, said that trashing Hagel based on views that did not necessarily jibe with the pro-Israel community would damage Israel’s cause.

“It’s entirely appropriate to question the nominee on their issues related to Israel, and certainly the groups

should engage in the political process,” Wexler said in an interview. “But to suggest that an American senator who served his nation honorably is somehow disqualified because he may possess a different point of view regard-ing what is best for America in terms of engagement with Iran or Hamas — I don’t think that is appropriate.”

J Street, the dovish Israel policy group that advocates for an enhanced U.S. role in Middle East peacemaking, also defended Hagel.

“Sen. Hagel was among the first in his party to realize that the U.S. occupation of Iraq had turned into a quag-mire that was taking thousands of American and tens of thousands of Iraqi lives without a clear strategic ratio-nale,” J Street said in a statement. “He took a brave stand against the majority in his own party and led a crucial debate that helped pave the way for President Obama to withdraw American troops from Iraq.”

Hagel and Obama are not completely aligned on the particulars of Obama’s defense policy, but broadly they have been allies. As senators, both men were sharply critical of President George W. Bush’s Iraq policies, and on Iran and Syria they have both emphasized negotiation and diplomacy as a critical component in inducing rogue

nations to back down from belligerent postures.Time after time, Hagel’s positions have landed him on

the wrong side of a pro-Israel community noted for its long memory.

The American Jewish Committee noted that in 1999 Hagel was the lone senator out of 100 who refused to join in a letter to then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin threat-ening to cut assistance if he did not take substantive steps to quash anti-Semitism.

“This was an issue of motherhood and apple pie,” the AJC’s spokesman, Ken Bandler, said. “The concern we had 13 years ago still stands today.”

His prickliness about the role of pro-Israel groups on the Hill is not helping Hagel’s cause. In 2007, he told the Arab American Institute that he had dropped his bid for the presidency because a pro-Israel donor had told him that if he wanted funding his support for Israel should be “automatic.”

“First, I am an American senator,” Hagel said to ap-plause. He also said he would not sacrifice his friend-ships in the Arab world to please pro-Israel groups. “No relationship should be founded on holding hostage other relationships,” he said. JTA Wire Service

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Columbia U. program director removes anti-Israel Facebook postA photo and text calling an Israeli soldier a “terrorist” and “killer” were removed from the Facebook page of a Columbia University program director.

Maryam Zohny, program director of the university’s Center for Palestine Studies, removed the post from her personal Facebook wall after the Anti-Defamation League sent a letter to Columbia University President Lee Bollinger, expressing concern about the post.

The post that Zohny shared on Dec. 13 read: “Israeli terrorist ‘Nofar Mizrahi’/Killer of the Martyr Muhamad Salayme/Wanted by the Resistance.” The post, which has been circulating on Facebook, includes the photo of the female Israeli soldier as well as the logos of several Palestinian terrorist groups.

Mizrahi is the Israeli soldier who last week shot and killed a Palestinian teen in Hebron as he threatened an-other soldier with what turned out to be a toy gun.

Zohny also has removed her place of employment from the “about” section of her Facebook page, which is open only to her social network friends.

“We welcome the fact that Zohny has removed the of-fensive post from her Facebook wall,” said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL national director, in response to a query from JTA. “But this is a band-aid, this is a cosmetic fix. The more significant problem is that here is an individual on the faculty, a person responsible for helping shape the views of young students, who has essentially used her personal Facebook page to advocate murder.”

In his letter to Bollinger, Foxman called the post “deeply disturbing.”

“As a University official ostensibly responsible for helping to educate students about the Middle East, the sentiments expressed in this post are alarming and unacceptable. This offensive posting, and Ms. Zohny’s apparent animus towards Israel, call into question her judgment as a university official. It also raises sev-eral questions about the credibility and objectivity of the Center with which she is affiliated, an academic program presumably responsible for educating students about the Middle East,” the letter said.

Bollinger has not responded to the letter, according to the ADL.

JTA Wire Service

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Hunting for the perfect (JNF) Christmas tree — in IsraelBen SaleS

GIVAT YESHAYAHU, Israel – Winding up and down the rows of Arizona brush trees, Jason Heeney sees slim pick-ings for Christmas.

“This tree would be hard to put the star on,” he said. “It’s totally flat, like a smushed nose.”

The Michigan native and his friend, native Parisian Emie Genty, have driven an hour from their homes in Tel Aviv for what has become an annual tradition: the Christmas tree hunt at a Jewish National Fund forest. For about $20 apiece, they and anyone else can buy a subsidized tree this week, courtesy of JNF. The buyers include Christian Arabs, Russians, tourists, and curious Israeli Jews.

The trees resemble the conifers traditionally used as Christmas trees in America, though they are a bit sparser, paler, and shorter — their average height is 6 feet.

JNF’s director of VIP ceremonies and protocol, Andy Michelson, estimates that individuals, embassies, and Israeli churches will buy nearly 1,000 trees this year. That’s a 20 percent increase over last year, the result of a new Internet advertising campaign. The program has existed for almost 20 years, and the forest here has about 3,000 trees. JNF maintains a similar forest in northern Israel.

Approximately 150,000 Christians — four-fifths of them Arab — live in Israel.

Though the tree distribution program costs thousands of dollars, Michelson said that American Jewish supporters of JNF should not be upset that their money is going for something that benefits Christians in Israel.

“Our projects are for all people living in Israel, so when we build a park, we build it for everyone, regardless of whether they’re Jewish, Christian, or Muslim,” he said, adding that many of JNF’s donors are non-Jews from Europe.

“They see Israel doing this, and it creates a good feeling and peace between people,” said Maor Malka, a JNF tour guide and firefighter who has staffed the distribution for two years. “We also increase awareness of JNF.”

JNF is best known for planting trees, not chopping them down. Michelson said the four-inch stumps left from the Christmas trees regenerate quickly, in as little as two years.

That was disappointing for Heeney, who was looking for a bigger tree — maybe eight feet high. Examining tree after tree — “No, no, no, no, no” — he lamented that “the branches are really flimsy, not like a Christmas tree” in the United States. It’s harder to hang decorations on these trees, he says.

Heeney, who is married to a native Israeli, grew up on a farm. When he was a child his family would visit the nearby forest and chop down a tree as Dec. 25 approached. Since he moved to Tel Aviv 2 1/2 years ago, he has maintained American Christmas traditions. He hosts a family dinner with his in-laws on Christmas Eve and a party for friends the next day, with gifts and carols.

“It’s strange celebrating Christmas in Israel,” he said. “In the United States it’s a national cultural event. There’s a change in the way people interact with each other, the generosity of spirit, plus the lights. It’s pretty. I miss the snow.”

Not all of the customers in Givat Yeshayahu — in central Israel, just south of Jerusalem’s suburbs — had Christmas on their minds. Miriam, originally from Moscow, was helping a friend buy a tree for New Year’s, a Russian tradition. She had bought plastic trees in years past, but found the JNF offer on the Internet this year.

“It’s not connected to religion; we like to decorate the tree,” she said. “We don’t do it on a holiday and we don’t sing Merry Christmas.”

Miriam found a tree she liked, as did Heeney and Genty, who squeezed three of them into their sedan after a 45-minute search. But not all the customers were happy with the selection. One man walked back to his car

after looking for only a few minutes.“I have something like this in my yard,” he said.

JTA Wire Service

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Living the Journey: Hospice and Palliative CareJacqueline Kates, Community Relations Coordinator, Holy Name Medical Center

“Birth is a beginningAnd death a destinationAnd life is a journey,A sacred pilgrimage – to life everlasting.”

Alvin Fine, Gates of Repentance

Although death comes to us all, many people find it difficult to think about the end of life. Yet, knowledge of the options available to ease the journey of someone who no longer responds to curative treatment can help to guide and support the patient and his/her family or caregiver in making end-of-life decisions.

Hospice is a care philosophy that emphasizes quality of life, rather than length of life, for people coping with advanced illness. Healthcare professionals from various disciplines form the Hospice and Palliative Services team at Holy Name Medical Center. By incorporating physical, spiritual and psychosocial elements, the team advocates for patients’ wishes and becomes an invaluable source of information, support and comfort for loved ones. Recognizing death as a natural part of life and respecting the dignity and sanctity of life, hospice and palliative services enable the patient to live each day as fully as possible, by providing resources, tools and a compassionate presence to support the stages of life.

The term hospice is often misunderstood; hospice does not mean “giving up.” By treating the person, rather than the disease, hospice can offer hope, a sense of control and choice. Patients can receive aggressive relief for pain and other symptoms, are not subjected to repeated ER visits and preventable hospitalizations, and often feel less lonely and

helpless. Studies have shown that patients receiving hospice care often live longer – in increased physical comfort and relieved that the burden of their care has been lifted from their loved ones.

Palliative services focus on pain and symptom control, as well as supportive care to improve a patient’s quality of life, for individuals facing chronic progressive, incurable illnesses, whether or not they are eligible for hospice care. These services are designed to instill physical, mental, emotional and spiritual well-being and include integrative therapies such as massage therapy, art therapy, pet therapy, music therapy, aromatherapy and Reiki, in conjunction with clinical pain and symptom management. Both hospice and palliative services may be provided in a variety of environments, including private home, hospital, nursing home, assisted living community, residential group home or in a specialized hospice facility such as the Villa Marie Claire, Holy Name’s freestanding hospice in Saddle River.

Villa Marie Claire is a unique residential hospice. Situated on 26 acres, each patient has a private room and bath, with every bed facing a window. Services provided at the Villa are family- centered, with an entire floor dedicated to overnight accommodations for family members, if needed. As with all of Holy Name’s Hospice and Palliative Services, the staff has been trained to provide culturally and religiously sensitive healthcare services. The welcoming and homelike atmosphere of Villa Marie Claire speaks to a profound belief that, whatever an individual’s medical diagnosis or physical and cognitive abilities, quality can be achieved at every stage of life.

For information about Holy Name Medical Center Hospice and Palliative Services or Villa Marie Claire, call 201-833-3188. Holy Name Medical Center’s hospice services are accredited by the National Institute for Jewish Hospice.

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Better brain surgery, with flight simulation techisrael air Force vets develop selman surgical rehearsal Platform that lets neurosurgeons practice for difficult cases


Just as pilots can use flight simulators to practice for difficult missions before setting foot in a plane, now brain surgeons can rehearse challenging microsur-

gical procedures before making a single incision.Already in use at U.S. teaching hospitals and soon to be

available to practicing neurosurgeons, the Selman Surgical Rehearsal Platform (SRP) neurosurgery simulator gener-ates 3D images from the individual patient’s standard CT and MRI scans. The lifelike preview shows how surgical instruments will interact with the patient’s tissue and how the delicate brain structures will respond.

SRP was developed by former Israel Air Force officers Moty Avisar and Alon Geri, who know a thing or two about the life-or-death importance of practicing in a sophisti-cated simulated environment.

Three years in the making, the SRP was launched at the Congress of Neurological Surgeons in October 2012, where it was selected as a “new technology to watch.” Patent ap-provals have come through for the technique of turning static medical imagery into a dynamic model.

“The majority of translating what we knew from flight simulation to surgery was to understand more about what realism means,” says Avisar.

“In flight, it’s about the sun and the shadows of trees and mountains. In surgery, it’s more about how light re-

flects off tissue and how a surgeon understands depths and distances. It took us a while to understand how to translate a simulation into a realistic model. But according to sur-geon feedback, we are there. They feel they are in the OR.”

Surgical TheaterThe “Selman” part of the product name is after Dr. Warren Selman, chief neurosurgeon at University Hospital’s Case Medical Center and chairman of neurological surgery at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, Ohio.

Selman helped to found the company Surgical Theater — based in Ohio with offices in Ramat Gan outside Tel Aviv — as a result of overhearing Avisar discussing flight simula-tor technology while waiting to be seated at an Ohio coffee shop. Intrigued by the possibilities in the medical field, he introduced himself and the discussion really took off.

“It’s a Midwest culture, so people talk with each other in line,” jokes Surgical Theater CEO and President Avisar, who has master’s degrees in system engineering, electrical and computer engineering and business.

Though the company only recently applied to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the SRP is already a valu-able tool for surgical residents using a library of images

from typical case studies.“We’re expecting it to be cleared in early 2013 so sur-

geons can upload images from the next day’s patients and rehearse,” says Avisar.

Participants anywhere can simultaneously view and practice the same case with real-time feedback, and work together on planning an operation.

“Being able to collaborate with peers and guide younger surgeons through a complex neurosurgical procedure — on a model with life-like response — before taking the patient to the operating room is ideal,” Selman said. “It’s something that just wasn’t possible until now.”

He and Dr. Fred Meyer of Minnesota’s Mayo Clinic are establishing a long-distance collaboration with Israeli surgeons and medical students supervised by Dr. Moshe Hadani, chief of neurosurgery at Israel’s Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer. They will test the SRP’s effective-ness as a teaching tool not just for brain surgeons but also for spine surgeons. Israel21c.org

From left, Dr. Warren Selman, Moty Avisar and Alon Geri. Photo by Keith berr PhotograPhy

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How do I stay in shape during the holidays?leliA mArcus

OK, you’ve eaten a lot of doughnuts and latkes. The kids will be out of school. Your schedule and routine are completely thrown off as is

your eating. You still have New Year’s to get through. How do you find time to fit your workouts in — and not eat all the great food you are likely to continue to encounter? You can’t get away from it. What do you do? Admit defeat? Forget the workouts and eat whatever you want? After all, it is the holidays. Maybe wait until New Year’s, then make a resolution to loose what you

gained?I suggest another alternative.Moderation.Yep, moderation, and that includes with your work-

out schedule as well as your holiday treat intake.Can’t get your regular workout routine in? What can

you do, reasonably, really? Fewer times per week? How about twice? Even if you only get it in once during some weeks, it’s better then none. Even if you don’t make it this week, go next week. Don’t give up.

Maybe the problem isn’t how many times per week but for how long. Break your workout into chunks. How about 20 minutes? Is that more doable? You can get your upper body done in 20 minutes. You could probably get your lower body work done in 15 minutes. Cardio? As long as you are doing 20 minutes, you’re good.

Remember, we’re talking about maintenance here or at least slowing the gain, not weight loss.

What about food? Don’t deprive yourself. If you deprive yourself, you know what will happen? You will hit a breaking point and say, “The HECK with it! I’m EATING!” And you will eat way more than you would have if you had just allowed yourself some treats in the first place. The key, be moderate. Allow yourself some treats. Choose the ones you really want and be reason-able in the quantity.

Don’t forget that liquid has calories too. Maybe be-fore going out to that get-together, look up the calories for your favorite beverage treat so you can make an informed decision about what you decide to indulge in. Don’t just look up the calories but be mindful of how many calories for what quantity. Starbucks, for exam-ple, has the nutritional breakdown for all of their spe-cialty coffee and hot chocolate drinks on their website.

What about those alcoholic drinks? Look around, search the net. Find what is a lower calorie expense while still satisfying and feels like you are celebrating in the holiday spirit. Plan ahead before those luscious treats are staring you in the face and you find yourself thinking, “it’s just one...or two….”

One last food strategy: eat before you go on an out-ing. Never go hungry. That’s like going to the grocery store hungry. You never know what you’ll end up with or end up eating or drinking.

And to return to exercise: While you allow yourself some slack during the holidays, commit to getting back to your regular routine after the holidays are over. If you plan ahead and keep things moderate, even if you do gain weight during the holidays, it will be far less than if you just let it all go.

Enjoy yourself!

Lelia Marcus is a certified personal trainer. For more informa-tion, visit LeliaMarcus.com or call (201) 657-8507.

Seminar at Allendale to offer nutritional and exercise adviceDr. Susan Amy Flanzman, an internist at Bergen Medical Associates, will offer tips on eating right and remaining healthy at a free discussion on Thursday, Jan. 17.

The talk, which will focus on healthy lifestyle issues, is free and will be held at the Atrium Assisted Living at the Allendale Community for Mature Living, 85 Harreton Road, Allendale.

Flanzman, board certified in internal medicine, has 25 years of experience assisting patients in understand-ing their own internal medical makeup, enabling them to take responsibility for their own health. She focuses on integrating alternative and traditional medicine. Her goal is to help others make healthy lifestyle decisions and reduce the increased health risks associated with aging.

The program will be held in the Atrium Lounge. There is no cost, but pre-registration is preferred. The event includes dinner and is part of a monthly caregiver sup-port group and seminar series featuring health topics for seniors and their families.

To pre-register call Marion at (201) 825-0660 ext. 7997.

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It’s just my time… and it can be wonderful

In a bedroom in his childhood home, Forest Gump (Tom Hanks) finds his mother (Sally Fields) lying in bed dying. “What’s the matter Mama?” Forest asks

with genuine concern. She answers with practically, “It’s just my time, Forest, it’s just my time!”

Any senior will tell you life is short. Our time seems to come quickly, as if life is an express train reaching its destination in too hurriedly a manner. Many advise us to simply enjoy the journey, for the destination can be abrupt and final.

We are but mind and body and for us to enjoy the trip, to ply our soul on the tracks of time, we must be physical-ly and mentally invested in the journey. The voyage does not stop when we become seniors. We do not stop look-ing out the train’s window as the present becomes the

past; we do not stop interacting with family and friends; we do not stop experiencing, learning, and growing; we do not stop engaging in life.

The train ride bestows so many gifts and joys, but also takes its toll in so many dramatic ways. Our bodies’ age and falter — a certain frailty is bequeathed to the aged just as a dynamic energy is bestowed upon the young. Our minds aren’t as quick — they wander in thought or follow a quixotic course. But we are also blessed with the ability, even in age, to grow both in mind and body. Even as the train nears its final destination, we can still navigate our trip and control our speed and direction. We have the absolute power to remain strong and sharp. Absent a debilitating disease or injury, our body and mind will respond to the stress of exercise. Our muscles

can become stronger; our minds more adept. The activi-ties of daily living can be managed with the confidence of a youth gone by and the experience of an age yet to come. What a wonderful combination. What a wonderful train ride!

It’s just my time! Let us make it a good time. Let us make it an invested time. Let us make it a healthy time. Enjoy the journey!

Copyright © 2012 Richard J. Portugal. All rights reserved.

Richard Portugal is the founder and owner of Fitness Senior Style, which exercises seniors for balance, strength, and cogni-tive fitness in their own homes. He has been certified as a senior trainer by the American Senior Fitness Association. For further information, call (201) 937-4722.

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Teaneck Radiology Center to partner with ColumbiaTeaneck Radiology Center has launched a partnership with Columbia University’s Department of Radiology. Under the agreement, the center’s MRI and CT scans will be read exclusively by radiologists from Columbia, using its radiology department’s protocols.

The department is known for its medical imaging, re-search, innovation, and radiology resources. The hospital is rated among the top 10 nationally. Columbia’s radiolo-gists have advanced training through subspeciality fel-lowships in neauroradiology, musculoskeletal imaging, and body imaging.

Teaneck Radiology approached Columbia nearly two years ago about forming a partnership. Columbia agreed after being satisfied that Teaneck Radiology met its stan-dards of care. The partnership allows Columbia-affiliated physicians to provide their patients with Columbia im-aging services with the conveniences of an outpatient facility.

“Being physically so close to Columbia, we thought that working with them would present an opportu-nity to provide university-level radiology locally,” said Dr. Adrienne Greenblatt, Teaneck Radiology’s medical director. “Our referring doctors are very pleased by this association.”

Teaneck Radiology was the first outpatient imagine center to open in Bergen County, more than 25 years ago. The center offers digital services, including for X-rays, mammography, and 16 slice multi-detector CT Scan. Sedation services are also offered for both children and adults.

For more information about the center or to schedule an appointment, visit ww.teaneckradiology.com or call (201) 836-2500.


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Healing power of music at Allendalesenior campus promotes the benefits of music for residents

Music has the power to make people dance, sing, smile or cry, and its positive effects

are clear when composer and arranger Itay Goren performs at The Allendale Community for Mature Living, a senior campus. “Music transcends our daily language, and uplift spirits,” said Goren. “It reawakens something in people that makes them feel more alive.”

Goren, a classical pianist, brought his love of music to Allendale recently when he performed with 30 members of a vocal ensemble from Ramapo College of New Jersey known as CantaNova. The concert featured music inspired by the Civil War era. As assistant conductor, Goren accompanied the vocal group on piano. In addition to his work with the ensemble, he is also on the faculty of the music department at Ramapo where he teaches piano and theory.

For the past few years, Goren has performed extensively in solo recitals, chamber music and as a soloist with orchestras in the New York metropolitan

area and abroad.“Music has a way of reaching people,

helping to raise spirits and transform moods which can be very therapeutic for seniors,” said Mary Stampleman, ADC, director of therapeutic recreation and public relations for The Atrium Assisted Living. “Musical performances such as these are not just entertaining, they are also healing. It was an incredible oppor-tunity to have Mr. Goren perform here for the second time and for the first time with his vocal ensemble.”

Music takes what we’re thinking or feeling and gives it a voice, added Goren. “It’s a great pleasure for me to make people happy with my music. I feel privi-leged when I play for an audience that is so appreciative. I can’t imagine anything better,” he said.

The Allendale Community offers a wide variety of musical performances on a regular basis. For more information about upcoming programs, call (201) 825-0660 or visit www.allendalecommu-nity.com.

The Shirat Chessed Choir performed a Chanukah concert at Heritage Pointe of Teaneck. The Bergen County-based group performs annually at the independent senior living community.

www.jstandard.com

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Canceling cancer cells with new radiationisraeli scientists find a way to generate millimeter rays and use them to render lung growths incapable of reproducing


Somewhere on the spectrum between electro-magnetic waves that produce visible light, and those that cook food in a microwave oven, are

millimeter waves that might hold the key to conquering cancer cells.

When tested in an Israeli lab on human lung-cancer cells, millimeter wave radiation knocked out the cells’ ability to reproduce.

“It disrupts their activity, although we don’t yet know how beyond some speculation regarding the mecha-nism,” says Asher Yahalom, head of Ariel University Center’s Free Electron Laser (FEL) Laboratory User Center, who also noted that the rays seem to have no ef-fect on normal cells.

Millimeter waves have lots of possible applications — everything from diagnosing skin cancer to improv-ing communication devices — but the Israeli research team is the first in the world to study their effect on lung cancer.

Yahalom says that until quite recently nobody had the tools to produce millimeter waves. The university’s FEL lab developed a free-electron laser that does this by accelerating electrons close to the speed of light and setting them on a wiggly trajectory.

“The question was what would be an application for this laser, and we thought about trying it for different things,” says Yahalom, currently a visiting fellow at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge, England.

The Ariel team presented the dramatic results at November’s third International IEEE Conference on Microwaves, Communications, Antennas and Electronic Systems in Tel Aviv.

The researchers have collaborated on more in-depth studies with colleagues at a Danish university, funded by the Eva and Henry Fraenkel Foundation in Denmark.

“We are still gathering more data to be absolutely sure this effect is statistically significant and not due to any unrelated factors,” Yahalom says.

New approach to radiation therapyA better alternative to X-rays has long been sought because although they kill cancer cells, they also kill healthy surrounding cells.

Millimeter radiation is an entirely different ap-proach, says Yahalom.

“There are two kinds of radiation,” he explains. “Ionizing radiation is what is usually used for cancer. It has the ability to tear apart molecules, so it causes death to all cells. What we have done is quite different. Millimeter wave radiation is non-ionizing, so it may in-terrupt functionality but not the cell itself.”

Once the Ariel lab devised a way to source millimeter rays, physics professor Konstantin Komoshvili began the experiments on specially incubated lung-cancer cells in conjunction with professor Jacob Levitan, mi-crowave and millimeter wave expert professor Boris Kapilevich, and molecular biologist Stella Aronov.

While the Israeli and Danish scientists check and double-check the results of their experiments using radiation sources that do not exist anywhere else in Israel, scientists in several countries are studying tera-hertz waves, which are a bit shorter than millimeter waves. Professor Rafi Korenstein’s team from Tel Aviv University had previously looked at their effects on healthy white blood cells.

“We went the other way around — we wanted to see how the radiation affects non-healthy cells, and this is quite novel,” says Yahalom.

Israel21c.org

Lung cancer cells, following irradiation with millimeter waves, cannot reproduce.


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A Full Service IndependentRental Retirement Community

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Heritage Pointe of Teaneck600 Frank W. Burr Boulevard, Teaneck, New Jersey

That’s the Pointe. Heritage Pointe.

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Sandy-struck couple sheltered

One night. That’s all it took for Larry and Yetta Eichen to lose the Belle Harbor home they had

lived in for the last 50 years, and every-thing in it.

It was on Oct. 29 that hurricane Sandy hit Belle Harbor in the Rockaways with a vengeance.

“First, the water rose 24 to 30 inches,” said Larry, “and then came the tidal surge. Eight feet of water took out the entire bot-tom floor of our home. We lost everything — gas, the hot water boiler, all of our fur-niture, our clothes, mementos, pictures. Hurricane Sandy took everything, except us.”

The Eichens, who have been married for 62 years, spent the next few weeks moving from one hotel and shelter to an-other. “It was frustrating,” said Larry. “We didn’t know where we were going to be from one night to the next.”

That’s when Allison, one of the couple’s nine grandchildren, came to the rescue. Looking for a respite place for her grand-parents, the girl came across the website for Heritage Pointe of Teaneck. She told her parents, who live in Bergen County, and within a few days the Eichens were moved into the premier senior living community.

“It’s been a blessing being here,” said Larry, who retired as a mechanical engi-neer about 30 years ago. “They offer us refuge here. It’s affordable, the people are friendly and the food is great. One of the cooks always walks around the room while we are eating and asks how the food is and if there is any need for improve-ment. We don’t think there is, but it’s nice that they ask.”

The Eichens were originally plan-

ning to stay at Heritage Pointe for two months, but their house still needs numerous repairs, which means they will probably stay longer. Larry said he misses practicing his hobbies at home: painting, sculpting, fishing and, most important, operating his ham radio. He said he lost all of his ham radio equip-ment in the storm surge, all of which is too expensive to replace. However, he and Yetta are content for now at Heritage Pointe.

“We like to socialize, so we enjoy meet-ing and greeting the other residents,” he said. “We have participated in some of the discussion groups and it feels like an ex-tended family here. Nobody who comes here is alone. They won’t let you be alone.”

Having lost everything, the Eichens feel like they have been treated like fam-ily by the residents and staff at Heritage Pointe.

“I was walking down the hallway and one of the guys who lives here and knows our story stopped me and said: ‘Can I of-fer you my sweater?’ Absolutely amazing. I wear it with pride, but I am returning it when we leave here to go home. We have lost everything and these people have been so kind to us. They have literally given us the clothes off their back.

“In Judaism, if someone offers you help, you have to accept it. So many have offered us help and we are so grateful.”

The Eichens enjoy their temporary home, but they know it will come to an end soon.

“As a mechanical engineer, I deal in fact,” said Larry. “We are grateful to our family and for our new friends here, but we will be going home. And that is a fact.”

Can-Fite begins trials of new impotence treatmentnicKy blAcKburn

Israeli biotech company Can-Fite BioPharma plans to enter the field of impotence treatment after the company discovered that its new anti-inflamma-tory drug could also have an impact on impotence.

In anti-inflammation trials, the com-pany discovered that the active ingredient in its CF101 drug is suitable for treating impotence.

The company first noticed the unex-pected side-effect in animal trials, but did not attribute significance to their finding. It was only in human trials, when patients declined to return the drugs when the trial had finished, that the company real-ized something unusual was going on.

“We saw that patients were not re-turning all the drugs at the end of the trial. When we clarified why this was, we

found that some of the patients in the trial suffered from sexual dysfunction, and enjoyed a revival of their abilities when taking our drug, within six months of taking the treatment,” Can-Fite CEO Pnina Fishman told Israel’s financial daily, Globes.

CF101 stimulates Adenosine, which researchers around the world have found is related to relaxing the blood vessels. This is part of the erection process, said Fishman.

Can-Fite is now developing a new drug, CF602, which uses a different cock-tail of the same active ingredients, but will be used to treat impotence. The drug has already been tested in pre-clinical trials and is looking safer even than CF101, ac-cording to Fishman.

Israel21c.org

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Nanobot ‘truck’ delivers lifesaving cargoUsing the new complex science of dna origami, an israeli biologist folds genetic material into a unique targeted delivery system for drugs


Origami, the Japanese art of paper folding, is thousands of years old. DNA origami, the science

of folding genetic material, was invent-ed only in 2006. Ido Bachelet, an Israeli structural and computational biologist, is one of the few people in the world who’s an expert at this.

But he’s not folding DNA strands into pretty cranes and butterflies. As he explains in a Nature video with his Harvard research partner Shawn Douglas, Bachelet’s microscopic structures could perform many useful medical tasks.

Their barrel-shaped DNA nano-robot (“nanobot”) is produced by meticulously folding strands of DNA and visualizing the folded shapes under an electron microscope. The mouth of the barrel is shut with latches and hinges also made of DNA, which is an exceptionally stable and versatile material. The latches are programmed to unlock only when the nanobot comes in contact with the right “key” — specific biomarkers on the sur-face of cells.

“The goal of the robot is to act like a truck, carrying cargo from point A to point B,” says Bachelet.

One load they could deliver is che-motherapy drugs. When they encounter surface biomarkers for the cancer they’re programmed to target, the latches open — unleashing the therapeutic cargo.

Normal cells are unaffected.“It’s a very cool topic,” Bachelet says

from his lab at Bar-Ilan University, where he is a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Life Sciences and the Institute of Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials. “You can encode a lot of things in DNA. It can compute numbers, rec-ognize molecular targets, perform work like a motor, act like an enzyme. So why not integrate all these functions into one structure?”

With a background in therapeutics and molecular design honed at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Bachelet started thinking about this idea shortly before joining Douglas at Harvard’s prestigious Church Lab for his post-doctoral studies in December 2009.

DNA origami had been innovated at the California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech) in Pasadena just three years before. Nobody had described a feasible way of turning it into a therapeutic tool.

He and Douglas, a biophysicist and computer scientist, experimented suc-cessfully with six different “locks” and six corresponding cancer cell lines in a test tube. They also tested payloads that activate the immune system. Their initial findings were published in a February 2012 issue of Science magazine. Over the past six months, Bachelet has started moving into animal studies by injecting the DNA nanorobots into lab insects at Bar-Ilan, and he is nearly ready to submit his further findings for publication.

Cargo in, cargo outWorking with DNA is kind of like sewing a garment on a nano level.

“DNA origami enables us to fold any shape we want from DNA,” Bachelet ex-plains. “To optimize the manufacturing process we stabilize the structure with DNA accessories like pins, which we re-move when the structure is complete.”

Because “cargo” loading is accom-plished by free diffusion in and out of the DNA barrel, the tiny structure can be programmed not only to deliver a load but also to pick one up and take it some-where else.

Potential applications in medical di-agnostics and therapeutics alone have several potential developers in Israel and in the United States eager to commercial-ize the invention.

“How it develops depends where people want to take it,” says Bachelet. “We started the lab six months ago, and we are still researching the mechanism, doing tricks with it to try to improve it. This will require an unusual model of investment or commercialization because it’s a totally new category with very unique technical challenges.”

Paul Rothemund, inventor of DNA ori-gami, has said that Bachelet and Douglas’ work “takes us one more step along the path from the smartest drugs of today to the kind of medical nanobots we might imagine” for tomorrow.

Israel21c.org

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This image of the DNA nanobot, courtesy of Shawn Douglas, was created with Molecular Maya and Cadnano software.


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Diets give long-term health benefits, even if you gain back weightstaying on a Mediterranean or low-carb regime offers long-lasting effects even if some pounds creep back, according to a new israeli study.


If you stick with a Mediterranean or low-carbohydrate diet, you’ll be healthier in the long run even if you

regain a few pounds after years on the plan, according to a follow-up study by Israel’s Nuclear Research Center and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU).

The results of the study, published last week in a peer-reviewed letter in the New England Journal of Medicine, updated the findings from the land-mark 24-month Dietary Intervention Randomized Controlled Trial (DIRECT).

In the DIRECT study, 322 moderately obese subjects were randomly assigned to one of three diets available at home and in their workplace cafeteria: low fat, restricted-calorie; Mediterranean, restricted-calorie; or low-carbohydrate, non-restricted-calorie.

The Mediterranean diet is based on traditional eating habits of Greeks, Israelis and other Mediterranean-area nations. It emphasizes fruits and vegetables, whole grains, legumes, seeds and nuts, olive oil, herbs and spices instead of salt, and moderate amounts of red wine. Fish and poultry are included in meals at least twice a week, while red meat is limited to no more than a few times a month.

While all three approaches led to a healthy reduction of blood pressure, the low-carb and Mediterranean diets showed especially beneficial metabolic effects of lower cholesterol, triglycerides and arteriosclerosis. Apparently, these

results weren’t just temporary.“Our follow up subsequent data shows

lasting, positive effects of Mediterranean and low-carbohydrate diets six years later,” said Dr. Dan Schwarzfuchs from the Nuclear Research Center in Dimona, where the research on 259 of the original participants was conducted.

The significance of the Israeli follow-up study is that data from trials compar-ing the effectiveness of weight-loss diets rarely go beyond the initial intervention period, explained BGU researcher Iris Shai, a registered dietitian.

In the four-year post-intervention, each DIRECT participant regained nearly six pounds. During the entire six-year period, including the initial study, partici-pants lost approximately six-and-a-half pounds on the Mediterranean diet and 3.7 pounds on a low-carb diet. More than two-thirds of the participants continued with their original assigned diet.

The researchers also found that after six years, the HDL/LDL cholesterol ratio remained significantly lower only in peo-ple on the low-carbohydrate diet, while triglyceride levels remained significantly lower in both the Mediterranean and low-carbohydrate diets.

The researchers are now performing a new long-term dietary intervention trial to trigger weight-loss mechanisms using a range of dietary strategies and novel techniques.

BiondVax takes on avian fluViVA sArAh Press

Reports of bird flu outbreaks are in the headlines again but now an Israeli bio-tech company says its trial results could keep human infection at bay.

BiondVax Pharmaceuticals has announced positive results from repeated pre-clinical studies in which administration of its universal influenza vaccine M-001 before H5N1 pandemic vaccine significantly increased levels of antibodies directed against bird flu hemagglutinin protein.

Priming with the M-001 vaccine before an H5N1 pandemic vaccine means people would only need one inoculation shot instead of two H5N1 pandemic vaccine doses.

At the moment, influenza vaccines are strain-specific and manufacturers can only begin preparing a pandemic-specific vaccine after the outbreak of a

deadly disease. But six months could pass between pandemic alert and pandemic vaccines reaching the market. If M-001 is used during this time period, BiondVax says it will enhance immunity and increase the number of people responding to the pandemic strain-specific vaccine.

“BiondVax has accomplished another milestone, pre-clinical proof-of-principle for M-001 serving as a pre-pandemic primer. This achievement, along with BiondVax’s success in passing a QP GMP audit, paves the way for multinational human clinical studies examining M-001 priming of bird flu vaccines,” said BiondVax’s CEO, Dr. Ron Babecoff.

BiondVax will present its data from these studies at the WHO conference in Hong Kong in January 2013.

Israel21c.org

D’var Torah

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Vayigash: Emotional rescue

Rabbi Levi NeuboRt

Anshei Lubavitch, Chabad, Fair Lawn

This week’s Torah portion, Vayigash, begins with Judah’s impassioned plea to the viceroy of Egypt to

release his brother Benjamin from Egyptian bondage. At the time, Judah would not have imagined that the man he was addressing (Egypt was then the world’s superpower) was his long lost brother who had been sold into slavery twenty two years earlier.

Judah entreated the viceroy, “Please, my lord, let now your servant speak something into my lord’s ears, and please do not be angry with your servant, for you are like Pharaoh.” The casual reader might get the

impression from Judah’s opening words that included “please,” “my master,” and “your servant,” that he spoke softly and humbly to the viceroy. However, Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki (Rashi), the pre-eminent commentator of the Torah, deduces from Judah’s appeal for mercy from the viceroy that Judah must have given the viceroy good reason to be angry. And, because Judah had done nothing other than speak to the viceroy, the viceroy’s anger toward him could have been caused only by harsh words from Judah. Rashi, citing the Midrash, concludes that Judah had warned

the viceroy that if Benjamin was not re-leased, the viceroy would be punished by Heaven and that Judah would personally kill both the viceroy and Pharaoh!

This raises the question: Why would Judah threaten the two most powerful men on the planet? Surely, it would have been wiser to use diplomacy (and perhaps resort to warnings and threats if that failed).

In a Shabbat address in the winter of 1965, the Lubavitcher Rebbe explained that at that moment Judah spoke to the viceroy on behalf of Benjamin, nothing else mattered more than his brother’s physi-cal and spiritual well-being. Judah was so embroiled that he was incapable of a calculated act. His brother was in danger; he acted instinctively. As the Yiddish saying goes, “When it hurts, you scream!” And to the extent that Judah was capable of ratio-nal thought, Judah believed that speaking harshly to the viceroy would have a greater impact than diplomacy: The viceroy would see just how great Judah’s brotherly love was, that he was willing to put his own life in imminent danger, and so Judah hoped that his heartfelt but harsh words would pierce the heart and mind of the one with that power to release his brother. And in-

deed, Judah prevailed!We see from this that when it comes to

saving a Jewish child from enslavement to cultures and ideologies that are foreign to Judaism, we must act instinctively. True, we must dress our remarks with “please,” and “do not be angry,” but the immediate, strong, and heartfelt words must come through without compromise. It is not a time for diplomacy; it is time to show raw hurt, concern, and love. It is not a time to call on so-called experts and academics who will then pencil in an appointment at a convenient time to dish out advice. Nor is it a time to thoroughly discuss, carefully deliberate, and cautiously ponder how the “Egyptians” (those around us) might react, and only then perhaps actually em-bark on a course of action (but only if one can be found that will not ruffle anyone’s feathers).

Immediate action is the call of the day! Each and every one of us must do all that we can to ensure that our children, and the Jewish children down the block, are shown and taught the beauty of our heritage. And as the Rebbe famously said, “even if [all that] you know [is the Jewish letter] Aleph, then teach Aleph.”

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Eating local? Kosher consumers are splitChavie Lieber

The sun was shining over the Union Square farmers market on a recent chilly morning as Chris Mitchell, a

34-year-old chef at the fashionable kosher eatery Jezebel, loomed over a table of Jerusalem artichokes. The six-foot-some-thing Georgia native carefully inspected the exterior of the root vegetable before buying a handful to serve as dried chips.

Mitchell comes to the downtown Manhattan market every morning to buy Jezebel’s produce as part of the restaurant’s commitment to purchase locally produced food.

“If you care about what you’re eating, and who you are feeding your food to, you’ll want to know where it comes from,” Mitchell said. “That’s the beauty of buying locally.”

The locavore movement has become one of the hottest food trends in recent years, propelled by advocates who see it as a conscientious and environmentally friendly alternative to industrial food trucked in over long distances. Produce from local sources often keeps longer and helps keep dollars in the local economy.

But for many kosher consumers, both individuals and restaurants, limiting themselves to local food makes neither practical nor financial sense.

“It seems to me like another layer of worry I have to tack onto my food shopping,” Erin Reichner, a Brooklyn mother of seven, said. “The price of keeping kosher means I want to pay less for my produce. I buy plenty of fruit for my children, and I don’t care where it comes from.”

Such declarations aside, interest in local food has exploded in recent years.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the number of farmers markets in the country has more than quadrupled since 1994 and grew by nearly 10 percent in 2012 alone. That’s in addition to the growth of Community Supported Agriculture programs, or CSAs, in which consumers purchase a farm share for a fixed price in the spring and receive a box of produce every week

during the season. Basically none of these existed in the United States in the early 1980s; today there are estimated to be more than 6,000.

“The best way to cook is to have the farm dictate what your menu should be by buying local produce that’s in season,” Gabriel Garcia said. He’s the chef at Tierra Sur, a renowned kosher restaurant at the Herzog Winery in California that buys all its produce and meat from local sources.

Garcia said his restaurant’s New Year’s resolution is to procure all its food from suppliers within 200 miles.

“Food tastes better if it’s naturally available,” he said. “Like why would you eat berries in the winter from a grocery store when they are not in season if the winter veggies are hearty, delicious, and available?”

In the Jewish world, the trend is manifest in the growth of Jewish CSAs over the past eight years. There are now 58 of them across the country, diverting $7 million in Jewish purchasing power from grocery stores to local farmers, according to the Jewish environmental group Hazon.

“Our traditional laws can inspire us to think how we want to approach agriculture,” Hazon’s Daniel Infeld said. “The root of kosher means ‘fit to eat,’ and eating locally should coincide with kashrut.”

Most kosher restaurants, however, are not on board with the move toward local suppliers. A Chicago restaurateur said he was struggling enough to cover rent, kosher certification, and the premium necessary to buy organic produce. Adding the additional limitation of local just wasn’t in the cards, he said.

“I’ve been told that local produce lasts longer, but I can get a much better price if I’m buying in bulk from other countries,” said the owner, who asked that his name not be used. “Plus, I’m in that category of local businesses and I need to take care of myself. I’m not in the position to spend that extra money right now.”

Others say the issue is the hassle.

With all the additional requirements of running a kosher eatery, local food is seen as an unnecessary headache. Moreover, kosher meat from local sources isn’t readily available in many places.

“It’s just not a realistic ideal,” said Moshe Wendel, the chef at the celebrated kosher restaurant Pardes in Brooklyn. “It’s not a feasible thing to do, and I would never recommend it to anyone who keeps kosher because it’s a hassle when you have so many other things to worry about.”

For many locavores, the impulse to shun national brands goes beyond mere environmental considerations. Consumers are increasingly conscious of their food’s provenance and knowing the grower is often the most straightforward way to ensure that what they put in their mouths comes from a trusted source.

“If you are already keeping kosher, then you know strict discipline for dietary customs,” said Jezebel’s Mitchell. “So why not aim for the best quality? If you care about kosher and organic, you should care about local.”

But that kind of approach is also limiting. For caterers, who are called upon often to provide customers with an array of options, refusing to provide tomatoes in January could have a detrimental impact on business.

“Buying from areas other than where you live will supply you with a wider range of food,” said Alison Barnett of Celebrations Kosher Catering in New Jersey. “As a caterer, I need to have the freshest produce, but I also need a secure and stable supply coming to the kitchen.”

At Shopper’s Haven, a kosher market serving the largely Orthodox community of Monsey, N.Y., Darren Klapper held up a package of kosher meat selling for $25.99 that ultimately would become part of his Thanksgiving meal.

“I can’t keep up with kosher prices, and then you want me to eat organic because the world is scared of a little pesticide spray, and in addition to that pay for peppers from a neighboring farm that are double the price?” Klapper said. “It’s a bit much.”

JTA Wire Service

brief

Richard Falk removed from Human Rights Watch committeeHuman Rights Watch has removed Richard Falk, United Nations special rapporteur on Palestinian human rights, from one of its local committees.

Falk, who has compared Israel’s treat-ment of the Palestinians to the actions of the Nazis and suggested that the U.S. gov-ernment may have had foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks, was removed Tuesday from the international nongovernmental organization’s local committee in Santa Barbara, Calif.

U.N. Watch said in a letter to its sup-

porters that Falk’s removal from the com-mittee came after U.N. Watch sent an open letter to Human Rights Watch call-ing for Falk’s removal.

The Human Rights Watch website has been updated to remove Falk’s name from the committee.

Falk, who is Jewish, wrote on his blog that he had been asked to resign by the organization but said that he believed it was “because of my connection with the UN, which is contrary to HRW policy.”

JTA Wire Service

Arts & culture

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Jonathan E. Lazarus

What criteria should be used to judge one of the country’s pre-

eminent jurists, a black-robed superstar whose rulings still reverberate through society near-ly a century later? And on what basis should a verdict be rendered for the entirety of his rich and resonant service to the judiciary, Zionism, his family, and the American community as a whole?

Happily, the task of evaluating and explicating the life of Louis Dembitz Brandeis was taken up by law and history professor Melvin Urofsky of Virginia Commonwealth University. His magisterial “Louis D. Brandeis: A Life” was published in 2010 to acclaim and awards. Now issued in paperback, the compelling story of the man who arguably was the nation’s first “National Jew” and the first of his faith to serve on the Supreme Court becomes available to a fresh and wider audience.

Covering the terrain with assurance and a bracing prose style, Urofsky illuminates the Zelig-like odyssey of a man who was born five years before the Civil War and whose life extended to the eve of World War II, a pe-riod of profound ferment and change for America. The phrase “indispensable man” seems perfectly coined for Brandeis, whose advice was solicited by presidents fac-ing grave global challenges as well as Garment District unions whose members literally sacrificed their lives for improved working conditions.

In modern parlance he would be called a go-to guy, just as in an earlier age he would have been characterized as a renaissance man. So wide and pervasive was the re-spect accorded his intellect, analytical prowess, and rep-utation for fairness that no sector of American life during the progressive era was exempt from a brush with the Brandeisian. Even old-line Brahmins and haughty WASPs with whom he jousted in the courtroom and regulatory chambers grudgingly respected his protean abilities.

Urofsky traces Brandeis’s determination to blaze new trails in the teaching, litigation, and interpretation of the law and his unwavering commitment to reform movements to an upbringing provided by doting but demanding parents. Adolph and Frederika Brandeis fled the anti-Semitism of the Austrian empire in the wake of the events roiling Europe in 1848. They were part of the first great wave of Jewish immigration to America and ultimately settled in Louisville, Kentucky. Adolph built

a prosperous grain merchandising business, at least through the Civil War, while Frederika directed a nonre-ligious but fervently cultured, highly idealistic, and ethi-cally motivated household.

The youngest of four siblings, Louis had an adored older brother, Alfred, with whom he maintained a life-long closeness that included the daily exchange of let-ters. While young, Louis’s skin was slightly yellowed from bouts of malaria, but he was robust enough to spend three years on the Continent in the early 1870s when his family relocated so his father could regain his health after a series of business reversals. Louis honed his German, fell under the spell of Goethe and Schiller, excelled at advanced studies, and was exposed to the wider world. But no matter where he later traveled, even on his trip to Palestine, Brandeis always would compare the places he

saw to moderate-sized Louisville. His Jeffersonian values about the size of government, individual speech and pri-vacy rights, and the “curse of bigness” in business were taking root early on.

Back home and well prepared for the rigors of Harvard Law, Brandeis carved out a brilliant academic career, graduating as valedictorian despite vision problems that required him to hire readers. He benefited enormously from the new Socratic teaching methods put into prac-tice by an inspired faculty in place of fusty rote memori-zation. The Harvard experience fostered his passionate appreciation of classical literature and the methodology used by the Greeks to operate their community of ideas. Brandeis’s lifelong moral and ethical compass had be-come fixed at true north. He would practice law but aspire to be an exemplary citizen of the modern republic.

Urofsky seamlessly shifts the emphasis at this point from the linear development of a gifted youth to a more nuanced portrait of a brilliant young attorney slightly adrift. Brandeis remained at Harvard after graduation, tutoring and teaching, before reluctantly heading to St. Louis at the behest of relatives and joining a law firm for what proved to be an unsatisfying year. He was lured back to Boston by college chum Samuel Warren to estab-lish what would become a lucrative and publicly spirited practice. (The relationship cooled considerably when Warren married an anti-Semitic socialite who shunned Brandeis; Warren soon withdrew from the enterprise to accept a position in his family shoe business.)

The 1890s were heady years for the successor practice and its senior partner. Although he excelled at litigation, Brandeis felt most fulfilled when he could act as “counsel to the situation,” doing more good by resolving an im-passe for all parties without resorting to trial. His stature and reputation burgeoned throughout New England, helped by the articles he and Warren wrote for the Harvard Law Review — one a masterpiece on the right to privacy — and a series of high-profile cases where he acted essentially as a public advocate in areas as dispa-rate as liquor regulation and poorhouse reform and as a bulwark against the predatory practices of transit com-panies, railroads, and utilities.

But his proudest achievement, and one in which he retained a paternalistic interest, was the establishment of savings bank life insurance. In what became a model for the nation, Brandeis helped Massachusetts set up the system after he humbled the titans of the insurance in-

Louis D. Brandeis: A LifeMelvin I. Urofsky

Schocken Books, 955 pp., $24.95

National Jew

The long and remarkable life and career of Justice Louis Dembitz Brandeis

Justice Louis Dembitz Brandeis wearing the robes of the Supreme Court.


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Taft maintained collegiality with Brandeis despite an earlier confrontation.

Arts & culture

dustry at regulatory hearings. By mastering the complex-ities of actuarial science and ratemaking, he had exposed the excessive profits and greed of top executives. He also understood the court of public opinion and cultivated a network of contacts in the press to go along with his own unerring public relations instincts in building support for causes. The life insurance offensive lifted this two-tiered approach to new heights.

Increasingly known as the “people’s lawyer,” Brandeis, at 34, courted and wed Alice Goldmark of New York, a woman 10 years his junior. The union would produce two daughters, Susan, who after some troubled teen years went on to become an accomplished attorney, and Elizabeth, who pursued an academic career in econom-ics. Both delighted and rewarded the couple with grand-children. Urofsky treats the family dynamic warmly, and in the case of Alice’s periodic breakdowns and sanitarium care, with great sensitivity. Her situation improved dra-matically after Brandeis was confirmed to the Supreme Court and the couple began spending most of the year in Washington. Mrs. Brandeis blossomed as she and her husband became renowned for the wit and wisdom that flowed during weekly salons at their apartment.

During the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, Brandeis’s reputation expanded from regional to national status. He confronted the house of Morgan and railroad monopolies, served as mediator to the garment industry in the wake of the Triangle Shirt Waist tragedy, conducted pioneering hear-ings for the creation of the Federal Reserve and Federal Trade Commission, and caught Taft (later his boss on the top court) engaging in a deception during the notorious Pinchot-Ballinger case. His political affiliations, such as they were, had morphed from Mugwump Republican to Roosevelt Progressive to Wilsonian Democrat.

At this juncture, another biographer might have en-countered headwinds interweaving the many threads in a career as diverse and layered as his. Urofsky, how-ever, proceeds smartly to Brandeis: Act 2 (leadership of American Zionism and economic “tutor” to Woodrow Wilson) and Brandeis: Act 3 (the Supreme Court and elder statesmanship). Although clearly an admirer, he avoids becoming hagiographic and is not afraid to call out the jurist for a surprising lack of initiative in the civil rights arena, considering his activism in other spheres, and for clinging to quixotic notions of scale and size in corporate America.

A galvanizing personal event occurred in 1914 when Brandeis was persuaded to lead and re-energize the American Zionist movement. As usual, he carried a full plate at the time, but he had been snubbed by Wilson for a cabinet post because of objections from big business. Thus a non-observant Jew had been called upon to rec-oncile the high ideals of his 2,000-year-old religion with the realities of an American society still churning its way through the second industrial revolution and poised to

take center stage of a world at war.Brandeis brought superb organizational skills to bear

on the fractious elements of American Zionism, but he never overcame the hostility of Chaim Weizmann and the European clique, who felt he lacked the yiddishkeit and kishkas necessary for the creation of a Jewish homeland. Brandeis viewed Palestine as the perfect laboratory to replicate the Jeffersonian virtues he so cherished but that now had irretrievably vanished from his own country. Urofsky consistently asserts that Brandeis did not feel conflicted or suffer divided loyalties serving the cause,

reasoning that it vindicated him as a more authentic American and helped him pay tribute to his observant uncle, Lewis Naphtali Dembitz. (So in awe was Brandeis of his relative that when he was a teenager he changed his middle name to Dembitz.)

By 1918 he had completely refashioned the move-ment of “Men! Money! Discipline!” into the Zionist Organization of America, motivated its efforts to ease the suffering of war-torn European Jews, elevated the status of Hadassah, and fought for the Balfour Declaration. While lobbying postwar European leaders in 1919, he made his long-contemplated trip to Palestine and became intoxicated by the possibilities of a Jewish homeland. But two years later, domestic policy schisms and deteriorating relationships with Europe’s Zionists became so dire that Brandeis and his key stewards re-signed from the umbrella leadership council of American group. Without his cachet, the organization plunged into a decade of stagnation, reversed only when Brandeis was recalled to its helm during the Great Depression. By then, he had firmly established his eminence as an associate justice of the Supreme Court.

In 1916, Wilson would not be denied a second oppor-tunity to bring Brandeis into government at the highest level. His nominee survived a bare-knuckled vetting process more bruising than those of today, with the added discomfort of not being able, by custom, to testify at the proceedings. If the quality of a person’s enemies is a measure of his standing, then Brandeis succeeded plu-perfectly. A host of blustery business leaders recounted his sins — protecting the public while increasing govern-ment oversight of their activities — barely concealing their annoyance with the possibility that he would gain admission to their club.

Urofsky treats the undercurrent of anti-Semitism at

the six-month hearings more as a background malignan-cy than as fodder for a separate chapter heading. What is apparent throughout the volume is that this deep, perva-sive, and virulent pathology infected all levels of society to a much greater degree than it does today. Urofsky is no stranger to the territory, having touched on it in previous writings. He also makes clear Brandeis’s ability to sur-mount nearly every nasty situation with intellect, humor, or forbearance.

Ultimately, the nominee was confirmed to an aging court whose members included Chief Justice Edward White, the Victorian-mannered, slightly inept appoin-tee of Grover Cleveland, and Associate Justice James McReynolds, an overtly Jew-baiting reactionary. But there was one gem among the brethren, the remarkable Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. He and Brandeis would go on to form a firm friendship and legal symbiosis for nearly two decades. With other tribunal members, Brandeis maintained collegial relationships, no matter how con-servative they were or how opposed to his view of a liv-ing, evolving law.

This is not the place to recount either Brandeis’s groundbreaking decisions or his pedestrian ones, but Urofsky does so in masterful detail. Brandeis’s debut opinion concerned the butterfat content of ice cream while one of his last rulings was the epic Erie Railroad v. Tompkins, where he essentially rebalanced state and fed-eral jurisdictions. Brandeis served throughout the 1920s under Chief Justice Taft, who seemingly bore no grudge from the Ballinger case. The former president leaned on Brandeis for advice in complex rate decisions but was clearly exasperated by his judicial philosophy, feeling he was too far outside the conservative mainstream. In the 1930s, Charles Evans Hughes helmed the court and took it through the “packing” attempt by Franklin Roosevelt to leverage better rulings for New Deal legislation. Hughes was accessible, relatively flexible, and a good sound-ing board for Brandeis, especially when retirement approached.

After leaving the tribunal in 1939 Brandeis could take joy in his family, pride in his pivotal role in establishing the University of Louisville Law School (Harvard had grown too large for his tastes), and solace in the knowl-edge that attorneys now routinely submitted “Brandeis briefs,” the gold standard for exhaustive preparation, command of the facts, control of the footnotes, and an unerring instinct for a just cause. His values and legacy would live on through the law he helped fashion and the thousands of lawyers, judges and government regulators he had influenced. And even the titans of industry and plutocrats who had opposed him were now, perforce, observant of his reforms

Perhaps Urofsky could have titled the book “Louis Brandeis: An Overflowing Life.”

Jonathan E. Lazarus is a former news editor of The Star-Ledger

The “people’s lawyer” took on the vested interests and helped revolutionize the art of litigation during a long and illustrious career.

The Supreme Court in 1925. Brandeis is seated, right, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. is to the left of Chief Justice William Howard Taft, center.

Woodrow Wilson nominated Brandeis as the first Jew to sit on the top court.

Calendar

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saturday [dec. 22]

Parenting conference in Elizabeth The Orthodox Union’s Department of Community Engagement, Jewish Family Service of Central New Jersey, and the Jewish Educational Center, offer a parenting conference with local rabbis and Orthodox mental health professionals on “The Effects of Media and the Internet on Your Children’s Morality” at Bruriah High School, 7:15 p.m. 35 North Ave. (212) 613-8351, www.oucommunity.org, or [email protected].

saturday [dec. 29]

Fundraiser with illusionist Master illusionist Elliot Zimet performs in support of Kids of Courage at Congregation Rinat Yisrael in Teaneck. Refreshments, 6:30 p.m.; show at 7:30. KOC helps children and young adults faced with chronic and terminal diagnoses conquer illness through adventure. 389 West Englewood Ave. (201) 836-4503 or [email protected].

singles

monday [dec. 24]

Comedy and socializing in NYC Jewish singles 35+ are welcome to join Chabad of Midtown for a comedy show, 7-10:30 p.m. Refreshments and raffle prizes. 509 Fifth Ave., Second Floor (between 42nd and 43rd streets). (973) 851-9070 or [email protected].

For marriage minded Jewish women A seminar, “Inner Self/Outer Self,” offers a spiritual and physical makeover from head to toe with certified makeup artists, professional hair stylists, a nutritional therapist, personal trainer, spiritual and dating life coach, image consultant/stylist, and Zumba. Bring sneakers. Demonstrations, discussions, applications, refreshments, giveaways, and prizes. Congregation Talmud Torah Adereth El, 2-6:30 p.m. Registration, 1:45. 133 East 29th St., Manhattan, between Lexington and Third Avenue. Rescheduled due to hurricane. (973) 851-9070 or [email protected].

wednesday [jan. 9]

Senior singles meet Super Singles 65+ meet and schmooze at the JCC Rockland, 7 p.m. Refreshments. 450 West Nyack Road, West Nyack, N.Y. Gene Arkin, (845) 356-5525.

tuesday [dec 25]

School open house Prospective students (nursery through third graders) and their parents are invited to an open house at the Lubavitch on the Palisades School in Tenafly. Activities, tours, and light breakfast. 11 Harold St. (201) 871-1152 or [email protected].

wednesday [dec. 26]

Sean Altman of Jewmongous Photo Provided

Jewmongous in concert Comedic songstress Cynthia Kaplan is a guest at a Jewmongous concert at Mexicali Live in Teaneck. Doors open at 6 p.m.; concert at 7. 1409 Queen Anne Road. (201) 833-0011 or mexicalilive.com.

thursday [dec. 27]

Lunch and learn in Tenafly Lubavitch on the Palisades concludes a lunch and learn session on “The Kabbalah of You” at the Chabad House, 11 a.m. 11 Harold St. (201) 871-1152.

monday [dec. 24]

Senior program in Wayne The Chabad Center of Passaic County continues its Smile on Seniors program at the center, 11:30 a.m., with brunch and a discussion led by Chani Gurkov. 194 Ratzer Road. (973) 694-6274 or [email protected].

Winter family fun The Glen Rock Jewish Center hosts its “Winter Celebration” with Chinese food, music, games, bingo, and movies, 5:30 p.m. 682 Harristown Road. (201) 652-6624.


David Broza, also called the “Israeli Bruce Springsteen,” performs folk-rock, written and sung in Hebrew, Spanish, and English. The international guitarist/singer-songwriter performs his annual “Not Exactly Christmas Eve” concert on Monday, Dec. 24, 7:30 p.m., at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. (212) 415-5500 or www.92Y.org. He will also perform at Anshe Emeth Memorial Temple in New Brunswick on Tuesday, Dec. 25, 3 p.m. 222 Livingston Ave. (732) 545-6484, www.aemt.net or davidbroza.net. Photo Courtesy 92nd street y

The Museum of Jewish Heritage-A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, 36 Battery Place in Manhattan, offers music, film, and arts and crafts from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. The museum opens at 10. A concert featuring Metropolitan Klezmer is at 1. Call (646) 437-4202 or www.mjhnyc.org.

Metropolitan Klezmer AngelA Jimenez

The Macaroons

The Macaroons will perform three guitar-based concerts at the Jewish Museum, Fifth Avenue and 92nd Street in Manhattan, at 11:30 a.m. and 1:15 and 3 p.m. Adults are asked to accompany their children. Call (212) 423-3337 or TheJewishmuseum.org.

Family museum events on Tuesday, Dec. 25 ANNouNCE Your

EvENTSwe welcome announce-ments of upcoming events. announcements are free. accompanying photos must be high resolution, jpg files.

not every release will be published.

Please include a daytime telephone number and send to:

NJ Jewish Media Group1086 Teaneck rd.

Teaneck, NJ 07666pr@jewishmediagroup.

com201-837-8818

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Golda’s chicken soup recipe is in, horse-drawn carriages and smoking on stage are out

Marcy Oster

JERUSALEM – Here are some stories from Israel that you may have missed:

Golda’s chicken soup recipe a secret no longerGolda Meir’s chicken soup recipe was declassified.

The Israel State Archives this month released the late prime minister’s recipe, which was typed in English on a Foreign Ministry letterhead.

The upper left-hand corner of the page reads “Incoming Cable – Classified,” which the state archives says is an optical illusion. Someone copied the chicken soup document along with an unrelated one behind it in the file.

“Boil the chicken with parsley, celery, cut-up carrots, peeled onion, salt, pepper a pinch of paprika until the chicken is tender,” the recipe begins, with no quantities listed.

According to the archives, Meir hosted her closest allies for important discussions in her kitchen. Whether they got to taste her chicken soup is unknown.

Hold your horses … and donkeysThe not-so-unusual sight of horses and donkeys hauling items on some Israeli streets and highways may soon be a thing of the past.

Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz has agreed to push for a nationwide ban on the practice, which has led to the mistreatment of the animals. Israel would be the first country to impose such a nationwide ban.

The Ministry of Transportation’s new regulations, which are awaiting approval by the finance minister, were suggested by Hakol Chai, or Everything Lives, the Israeli sister charity of the U.S.-based Concern for Helping Animals in Israel, or CHAI, which is part of the International Coalition to Ban Horse-Drawn Carriages.

The animals typically haul furniture, scrap metal, rocks from construction sites, heavy produce such as watermelons to market and old clothing.

All the world’s a stage — including the no smoking signSnuff out those cigarettes on stage.

Israel’s Supreme Court ruled this month in a class-action lawsuit led by a frequent theater-goer that the strict no smoking laws here also must be observed on stage in order to protect the public health. The right to health takes precedence over the right to freedom of expression, according to the court.

The suit was brought against the Haifa Municipal Theater over popular actress Orly Zilbershatz-Banai’s smoking during a 5 1/2-minute monologue during the play “Hamakom Mimenu Bati,” The Jerusalem Post reported. A photo of Zilbershatz-Banai during the smoking scene was featured in an announcement for the play on the theater’s website.

The theater said it should be exempt from observing the no-smoking rule due to “freedom of expression.” While the court sided with the complainants, it did not issue a fine to the theater.

School for future prophets opensA school to train new Jewish prophets opened in a gentri-fied neighborhood of southern Tel Aviv.

The Cain and Abel School of Prophets is run by Rabbi Shmuel Portman Hapartzi, who is affiliated with

Chabad-Lubavitch’s messianic stream, Ynet reported.Ten students have registered for what Hapartzi calls

the basic course, according to Ynet.Prophecy historically ended with the destruction of

the Second Holy Temple and is not supposed to return until the messianic age.

Hapartzi told Ynet that the beginning of the messianic age has arrived and that prophecy now is permitted.

The future prophets will take courses in face reading, dream interpretation and how angels communicate, and will learn how to achieve divine spirit, Ynet reported. The students will not necessarily become prophets upon completion of their coursework.

“It won’t just happen without a person being chosen from above,” Hapartzi said.

JTA Wire Service

FEBRUARY 12 8PM

Lifecycle

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B’nai mitzvah

Julia BernsteinJulia Bernstein, daughter of Lauren and Mark Bernstein of Old Tappan, celebrated becom-ing a bat mitzvah on Dec. 15 at Temple Beth El of Northern Valley in Closter.

Riley BoagRiley Boag, son of Penny Glass Boag and John Boag of Ridgewood and brother of Melissa and Jake, celebrated becoming a bar mitzvah on Dec. 15 at Temple Beth Or in Washington Township.

Rachel BrunnRachel Brunn, daughter of Shari and Kevin Brunn of Hillsdale and sister of Samantha, cel-ebrated becoming a bat mitz-vah on Nov. 30 at Temple Beth Sholom in Park Ridge.

Itamar MandelzisItamar Mandelzis, son of Sima and Gil Mandelzis of Tenafly, celebrated becoming a bar mitz-vah on Dec. 15 at Temple Beth El of Northern Valley in Closter.

Michael Port

Michael Port, son of Jackie and Warren Port of Woodcliff Lake and brother of Lianna, celebrated becoming a bar mitzvah on Dec. 15 at Temple Emanuel of the Pascack Valley in Woodcliff Lake.

Jake Schauer

Jake Schauer, son of Cheryl and Ron Schauer of Paramus and brother of Dan, celebrated becoming a bar mitzvah on Dec. 15 at Temple Avodat Shalom in River Edge. His grandparents are Bernice Diller of Yonkers, N.Y., and Elsie Schauer of Hackensack.

Andrew SeidenbergAndrew Seidenberg, son of Drs. Keith and Ellen Wald of Wyckoff and brother of Jack, celebrated becoming a bar mitzvah on Dec. 15 at Temple Beth Rishon in Wyckoff.

Sesame Coated Pretzel Rings

OBituaries

Sydelle NewmanSydelle Newman, née Schwartz, 87, of Paramus, formerly of New Milford, died on Dec. 16.

She was formerly an artist and seamstress to a New York designer.

Predeceased by her husband Leonard in 1996, and a sister, Edwina Aronson, she is sur-vived by a son, Eric (Michelle) of Hawthorne; grandchildren, Kyle and Luke; and niece and nephew, Wayne and Nancy.

Arrangements were by Robert Schoem’s Menorah Chapel, Paramus.

Jonathan RothJonathan Aryeh Roth, 21, of Teaneck, died on Dec. 16.

He is survived by his parents, Ruth and Phillip Roth; sisters, Danielle and Nina; and grandfather, Saul Tepler.

Shiva is being observed at the Roth residence. Contributions can be made to the FIDF Headquarters, New York. Arrangements were by Gutterman and Musicant Jewish Funeral Directors, Hackensack.

Marilyn SussmanMarilyn Sussman, née Goodman, 79, of Yorktown Heights, N.Y., formerly of Fort Lee, died on Dec. 16 at Hudson Valley Hospital, Peekskill, N.Y.

Born in New York City, she was a board member and secre-tary of the American Disability Association in Fort Lee.

Predeceased by her husband, Marvin, in 2011, she is survived by children, Linda Jacolow of Yorktown Heights, Barbara Seligman of Fair Lawn, and Jack of Santa Monica, Calif.; and grandchildren, Jennifer, Alicia, Rachel, and Emily.

Arrangements were by Eden Memorial Chapels, Fort Lee.

mazal tOv

Mazal tov to Rachel Blumenthal, née Jacobs, of Springfield, Va., formerly of Fair Lawn, on the release of two nonfiction books that deal with her experience as a high-risk patient on strict hospital bed rest at Inova Fairfax Hospital in Fairfax, Va. “One Recumbent Mommy: A Humorous Encounter With Bedrest” chronicles the ups and downs of longterm hospital bedrest during her second pregnancy. “Wherever I Am, I Will Love You Still: A Book About An Extended Hospital Stay,” a picture book, is written from the point of view of her 2-year-old son and describes how he dealt with her absence while she was in the hospital. Blumenthal is the daughter of Ellen and Marc Jacobs of Fair Lawn.

Obituaries

are prepared with

information provided by

funeral homes. Correcting

errors is the responsibility

of the funeral home.

Hannah StarrHannah Starr, daughter of Betty Starr of Washington Township, celebrated becoming a bat mitz-vah on Dec. 15 at Temple Beth Or in Washington Township.

Daniel SteinbergDaniel Steinberg, son of Hilary Posner and Michael Steinberg of Tenafly and brother of Andrew Steinberg, celebrated becom-ing a bar mitzvah on Dec. 15 at Temple Sinai of Bergen County in Tenafly.

Samantha Tubin

Samantha Tubin, daughter of Karen and Howard Tubin of Tenafly and sister of Abigail and Emmie, celebrated becoming a bat mitzvah on Dec. 15 at Temple Sinai of Bergen County in Tenafly.

Celebrate your simchawe welcome announcements of readers’ bar/bat mitzvahs,

engagements, marriages and births. announcements are free, but there is a $10 charge for photographs, which must be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope if the photograph is to be

returned. there is a $10 charge for mazal tov announcements plus a $10 photograph charge.

Please include a daytime telephone number and send to:

NJ Jewish Media Group1086 Teaneck Rd.

Teaneck, NJ [email protected]

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Ernest WalenskyErnest Walensky, 80, of Oradell, formerly of Montclair, died on Dec. 16.

Born in Newark, he earned his undergraduate and a master’s degree from New York University. He was a U.S. Navy veteran of the Korean War, serving from 1951 to 1955. He was a member of the American Legion Post 41 in Oradell. In 2008 he retired from Wachovia Securities — now Wells Fargo Securities — after a long career as a stockbroker and certified financial planner with several firms.

Predeceased by a sister, Rhoda, he is survived by his wife, Dorothy; daughter, Michelle (Steve); and a grand-child, Hannah. Arrangements were by Gutterman and Musicant Jewish Funeral Directors, Hackensack.

Philip WeiselPhilip M. Weisel, 90, of Fair Lawn, died on Dec. 16. Arrangements were by Louis Suburban Chapel, Fair Lawn.

Norman WoodlandNorman Joseph Woodland, 91, of Edgewater, died on Dec. 9 at home.

Born in Atlantic City, he was an Army veteran of World War II. A retired engineer for IBM in Raleigh, N.C., he created the idea for the bar code and patented it in 1960.

He is survived by his wife, Jacqueline, née Blumberg; daughters Susan of New York City and Betsy Karpenkopf of Israel; a brother, David, of Arizona; and a grandchild, Ella. Arrangements were by Eden Memorial Chapels, Fort Lee.

Linda WaxmanLinda Waxman, 70, of Fair Lawn, died on Dec. 17.

Before retiring, she was the office manager/book-keeper for Data Industries in Fair Lawn and Paramus. She was an active member of Temple Beth Sholom in Fair Lawn, serving as recording secretary for its sister-hood for 20 years, a board member for over 25 years, and a member of the shul’s board of education. She was also Democratic county committeewoman of the 4th District in Fair Lawn.

She is survived by her husband, Robert, children, Alan (Claudia), Steven (Barbara), and Deborah (Brian); a sis-ter, Ruth Biren (Bernard); and five grandchildren.

Donations can be sent to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York. Arrangements were by Louis Suburban Chapel, Fair Lawn.

Joseph WroblewskiJoseph Wroblewski, 87, of Sunny Isles Beach, Fla., formerly of Brooklyn, died on Dec. 12 at Mount Sinai Hospital in Miami Beach, Fla.

Born in Poland, he owned a confectionary store in Brooklyn before retiring and was a member of Piotrkov Relief Society of New York.

He is survived by his wife, Hania, neé Stzykold; daughters, Linda and Roselyn of Englewood, and Elizabeth of Tampa, Fla.; and a son, Michael of Long Beach, N.Y. Arrangements were by Eden Memorial Chapels, Fort Lee.

Contributions in memory ofMatthew Zimmerman, 34, of Tenafly, who died on Dec. 3,

can be sent to:The Defining Moment Foundation

126 Chestnut StreetEnglewood, NJ 07631

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GALLERY

1 Gan Yaldenu in Bergenfield held its Chanukah family day. Here is the Wasserman family: Brielle,

wearing the dreidel frame she decorated, Odeliah, David, and baby Hadar. Courtesy Gy

2 The children of the Shirley and Paul Pintel Nursery School of the Fair Lawn Jewish Center/CBI

participated in a Chanukah celebration. rona L. KLein

3 Yeshiva College Dramatics Society honored Rabbi Dr. John Krug of Teaneck at a Dec. 2 reception

with a special performance of its 100th production, “12 Angry Men.” Krug, who became involved with YCDS as a student actor 42 years ago, has served as lighting director in both faculty and volunteer capacities ever since. Courtesy yu

4 Chai Lifeline project coordinators Yoel Kar, far left, and Tova Kressner, far right, flank Moriah’s

principal, Elliot Prager; Chai Lifeline’s executive director, Rabbi Simcha Scholar, and a Moriah teacher, Chaya Devorah Senft. Prager and Senft accepted an award at the Chai Lifeline annual dinner for Moriah after the school raised more than $60,000 in a walkathon for Chai Lifeline. Courtesy Moriah

5 Hundreds of adults and children went to “Chanukah Wonderland” at Bris Avrohom of Fair

Lawn. Hebrew school students are pictured decorating a menorah cake that was symbolically lit. Courtesy Bris

avrohoM of fair Lawn

6 Religious school and nursery school students at the Glen Rock Jewish Center gathered with

their teachers, parents, and Rabbi Neil Tow, center, for Chanukah Fun Day. Courtesy GrJC

7 Teens, including Anabelle Kaplan and Sara Dellafave, pictured, from Chabad of NW Bergen

County’s TAG (Thinking Acting Giving) group, had a pre-Chanukah celebration with residents of the Esplanade at Chestnut Ridge, N.Y. Courtesy ChaBad

8 Sixth graders from the Glen Rock Jewish Center’s religious school joined students from

local synagogues at the Jewish Community Center in Paramus for a Jewish art experience with artist Julie Wohl. Children used oil pastels and watercolors to create a drawing based on a prayer. Courtesy GrJC

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Young artists to be featured in local gallery exhibitOne River School of Art & Design, an art education fa-cility in Englewood, will present a new exhibit called “Art Effect,” which will showcase the works of their stu-dents and faculty. The show will run from December 28 through January 5.

Included in “Art Effect” will be creations by 26 stu-dents who are taking classes at One River School of Art & Design from Englewood, Englewood Cliffs, Cresskill, Bergenfield, Tenafly, Edgewater, Closter, Cliffside Park, Demarest, Harrington Park, Hackensack, West New York, and Fort Lee.

“We’re thrilled to present our first student show, which is a culmination of our first season of teaching at One River School,” says Matt Ross, founder of One River

School of Art & Design. “Families, friends, and members of our students’ communities will be quite impressed with the level of talent on display. Building the One River Gallery space has been a labor of love, and having the privilege of giving our students a chance to publically exhibit their work is an honor.”

Along with presenting the artwork of students — who range in age from five years old to adult — and school faculty in the School’s associated gallery, Ross will also be making select works from “Art Effect” available for a silent auction, with all of the net proceeds going towards Englewood Hospital and Medical Center. Included in the items available for auction will be creations by Jim Torok and Erik den Breejen, two Brooklyn-based professional

artists who will be featured in a two person show at One River Gallery that opens on January 10.

“We believe that using art to help the community is central to our purpose, and that’s why we picked the name ‘Art Effect’ for our community shows,” explains Ross. “It’s through this kind of collaboration that art’s ef-fect goes above and beyond its beauty, and we hope that our student exhibitions become a meaningful way to connect our work to Englewood Hospital Medical Center for years to come.”

For more information about “Art Effect” at One River Gallery, go to OneRiverSchool.com or call the school at (201) 266-5244.

Elisabeth Morrow student Maxie Anthon starts “Helping Hands Drive”When 8th grade Elisabeth Morrow School student and Englewood resident Maxie Anthon (14) learned from her father that there were fellow students in need in her own community, she took immediate action and urged on fel-low students and teachers in the “Helping Hands Drive.” Anthon’s father, a technology teacher at the Grieco School in Englewood, told Maxie the reality that there are many children nearby who are in need of assistance, particularly with the harsh weather approaching. Anthon sprang into action, creating flyers and alerting fellow students that many Grieco School students could use a helping hand, thus initiating the ‘Helping Hands Drive.” In addition, Maxie encouraged the EMS community to support these children through the Center For Food Action. Jennifer Rothman, director of communications at the Center for Food Action, spoke at a Morrow assem-bly educating students on the “Snack Pack Initiative” for Grieco School Students.

“The ‘Helping Hands Drive’ is reflective of the val-ues Elisabeth Morrow students are taught,” says Aaron Cooper, headmaster of The Elisabeth Morrow School. “We incorporate the 4C’s (Cooperation, Consideration, Compassion, and Courtesy) into everything we teach at EMS in an effort to create thoughtful and kind students who respond to the needs of those around them. It is tes-tament to that curriculum that this student-led initiative garnered such traction in the community and will truly benefit those in need.”

The drive began on November 13th with Elisabeth Morrow students collecting food, toys, sneakers, and money to the CFA — including a check for $3700 — to give to those who need it most within the community.

Five Star Mah Jongg cancelled for DecemberThe monthly Mah Jongg Social hosted by Five Star Premier Residences of Teaneck will not be held in December. The next event will be Monday, January 28, 2013.

Seniors are always encouraged to sign up either singly or with friends to make their own foursome. There is no charge to attend, but a response is required. If you are interested in becoming a coach or would like more infor-mation about the monthly game, please call Kathy Frost at (201) 836-7474.

Southside Jonny at William Paterson“Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes” will perform at the Shea Center for Performing Arts of William Paterson University on January 26 at 8 p.m. As one of New Jersey’s most well-known musical groups, it has performed alongside other NJ stars including Bruce Springsteen and Bon Jovi. Tickets are available at the box office at (973) 720-2371 or through www.WP-Presents.org.

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Ruth Miron-SchleiderBroker/Owner

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BergenCountyRealEstateSource.com Cell: 201-615-5353

Jazz trumpeter Chris Botti to play at bergenPAC next monthWith Impressions, trumpeter Chris Botti’s new Sony CD, Botti has thoroughly es-tablished himself as one of the important and innovative figures of the contempo-rary music world. Botti was nominated for two Grammy awards, including Best Pop Instrumental Album.

Botti seemed destined to become a musician — and even to become the kind of musician he is today — almost from the very beginning. Born in Portland, Oregon, he was encouraged to pursue music by his mother, a concert pianist. He also had an early taste of the international world that would become his primary territory as a successful performing artist. His father, who is Italian, taught English and Italian languages, and he took the family to live in Italy for several years, beginning when Botti was in the first grade.

His early career was spent crafting his skills with music ranging from Buddy Rich and Frank Sinatra to Natalie Cole and Joni Mitchell. Throughout the ’90s and into the new century, Botti played extensively with Paul Simon, and had an especially creative association with Sting.

Those gigs — and those relationships — were, he says, powerful learning experiences.

“Watching artists like Sting and Paul and Joni Mitchell,” explains Botti, “how they get in and out of songs, how they introduce people, whether they would do this or that sort of thing, what they would say about one of their players. All that was a huge asset for me. I wouldn’t be the performer I am today without that background.”

Botti will perform on Wednesday, Jan. 9, at 8 p.m. at bergenPAC.

Helaine Glantz, a resident at Heritage Pointe of Teaneck, shown here with executive director Elizabeth Andropoli, lights the menorah at the premium senior living community.

Fragments of Dead Sea Scrolls go onlineViVa Sarah PreSS

To mark the 65th anniversary of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Israel Antiquities Authority and Google teamed up to put 5,000 images of the Dead Sea Scrolls online in full color and high resolution. Anyone with an internet connection can go to the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library at www.dead-seascrolls.org.il and explore these famed manuscripts.

“Only five conservators worldwide are authorized to handle the Dead Sea Scrolls. Now, everyone can ‘touch’ the scrolls on-screen around the globe, and view them in spectacular quality, equiva-lent to the original,” said Shuka Dorfman, director of the Israel Antiquities Authority.

The new site offers detailed views of five of the most complete scrolls, which were found at Qumran and were written nearly 2,000 years ago.

“The IAA, in collaboration with

Google, presents the scrolls online, using the most advanced imaging technol-ogy. Thus, this most important national treasure is available to the general public, preserving it for future generations,” said Dorfman.

The five Dead Sea Scrolls that have been digitized include the Great Isaiah Scroll, the Community Rule Scroll, the Commentary on Habakkuk Scroll, the Temple Scroll, and the War Scroll. Web surfers can magnify and examine texts in exacting detail.

“The Dead Sea Scrolls Project with the Israel Museum enriches and preserves an important part of world heritage by mak-ing it accessible to all on the internet,” said Professor Yossi Matias, Managing Director of Google’s R&D Center in Israel.

The library was assembled over the course of two years using advanced tech-nology first developed by NASA.

Israel21c.org

JS-59


BERGENFIELD

8 ALICE PLACE Beautiful spacious new construction.

TEANECK

1094 TRAFALGAR STREETBrick & stone Colonial Cape.

ENGLEWOOD CLIFFS $1,350,000

48 VAN NOSTRAND AVENUEMagnifi cent brick Colonial.


230 WALNUT STREET.64 acre. Picturesque property.


60-64 HILLSIDE AVENUE6 BR. 6.5 BTH. Numerous amenities.

TENAFLY

140 DOWNEY DRIVE Great 6 BR East Hill home.

SUNNYSIDE $230,000

41-09 41ST ST, #2-ALarge L-shaped studio.

WILLIAMSBURG

490 METROPOLITAN AVENUECommercial. Prime Block.

TRIBECA $3,985,000

110 DUANE STREETPosh penthouse. Prime location.

EAST VILLAGE

424 10TH STGreat one bedroom unit.

SOHO

214 MULBERRY STREETStudio fl ex 1. Corner unit.

DUMBO

205 WATER STREETBrand new construction.

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COLONIAL!

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SOLD!

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[email protected] · [email protected] · www.MironProperties.com/NJ

Each Miron Properties office is independently owned and operated.

Contact us for your complimentary consultation

We specialize in residential and commercial rentals and sales.We will be happy to assist you with all your real estate needs.

Jeffrey SchleiderBroker/Owner

Miron Properties NY

Ruth Miron-SchleiderBroker/Owner

Miron Properties NJ

NJ: T: 201.266.8555 • M: 201.906.6024NY: T: 212.888.6250 • M: 917.576.0776

New Jersey Jewish Standard Dec. 21, 2012

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Transcript of New Jersey Jewish Standard Dec. 21, 2012