North Jersey Jewish Standard, Oct. 10, 2014

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201483NORTH JERSEY

TALMUDICALLY SPEAKING WITH DR. RUTH CALDERON page 6

VEGGING OUT WITH DR. TORAHFLORA page 10

A JEWISH CENTER WITH A RABBI-SHAPED HOLE page 16

THE JEWISH DRESSMAKER FDR TURNED AWAY page 39

Thursday with Cory

Last week, Senator Cory Booker sat with the Jewish Standard and told us about growing up in Bergen County and falling in love with Judaism

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CONTENTS

As seen on our FAcebook pAge

l There’s good news for sukkah lov-ers.

You might think it’s a bit late for this news. You may well be reading this very newspaper in your sukkah — after all, the holiday started Wednesday night.

but if you’re still nursing a bruised thumb or a bumped head from putting up your sukkah, you’ll find the latest product offers a promise of better next year.

As seen on a video that’s making the rounds — you can go to our page at Facebook.com/JewishStandard to watch for yourself — the technology of inflatable vinyl that brought us beach balls and bouncy castles has now come to the festive holiday booth.

It is packaged with its own electric pump, which inflates it in a minute —

and monitors the pressure to reinflate it automatically when necessary during the holiday. Water in the base prevents it from being blown away. Its roof is open, with an open grid designed to support bamboo schach.

The video promises that the sukkah’s design has been approved by Orthodox rabbis.

It is produced by an Israeli company called Yarok, meaning green — which is a bit of an odd name for an invention that transforms a harvest booth made from cast-off wood and recycled branches into a high tech marvel of electricity and plastic.

It is light enough and small enough to be easily stored and carried when it is not inflated.

No word on whether it is resistant to yellow jackets.

LArry yudeLson

Candlelighting: Friday, October 10, 6:05 p.m.Shabbat ends: Saturday, October 11, 7:03 p.m.

For out of Zion will come innovative disruptions in sukkah technology

l It’s not always easy being an etrog.

There’s the risk of insect infestation. There’s the fear that you might be dropped and your pitom — that dried stem so beloved by etrog connoisseurs — might become detached.

And that risk — so real this time of year — that you might be grabbed and violently shaken. In a synagogue, no less!

Well, let all who would do evil to an etrog beware. The “goodly fruit,” that sukkot mainstay, now has a comic defender.

Meet captain citrus!A product of the Florida citrus

council, he was designed by Marvel comics for a reported $1 million. His first adventure, teaming him up with Thor, captain America, Iron Man, and black Widow, can be found at www.floridacitrus.org/captain-citrus.

He’s powered by Florida sunshine.

And if his first loyalty is to Florida oranges and its juice — juice that has come under criticism from doctors who argue that the health benefits of its vitamins are offset by the dangers of its calories — that doesn’t mean

he will never venture out to protect citrons.

So all you who plot evil in the realm where there is more shade than light, you better think twice. captain citrus just might come to the etrog’s rescue.

LArry yudeLson

No guests, no glory. No girls?l Hosting visitors on Sukkot is not just a matter of neighborliness and conspic-uous hospitality. For the mystical work called the Zohar, Sukkot is an opportu-nity to invite the iconic ancestors of the Jewish people to drop in. And since for the Zohar, everything is connected as well as illuminated, these seven ances-tors — Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, Joseph, and Moses — are not only historical personages, but also separate aspects of God’s incompre-hensible, multifaceted Glory.

There is a ritual for inviting them. both the ritual and the guests themselves are known as ushpizin — the Aramaic word the Zohar uses for guests, which like the word hospitality derives from the Latin “hospes.”

And engravings of the seven biblical figures along with the Aramaic texts

long have been a staple of traditional sukkah decorations.

There’s a problem: Inviting these seven ancestors leaves a severe gender imbalance at your sukkah dinner.

In recent years, various matriarchs have been added to the list. At Neohasid.org, you can even find an Aramaic text of ushpizin, where patriarchs and matriarchs are invited together.

Dov Abramson, a graphic designer in Jerusalem, has addressed this problem in his own way: boldly and graphically.

He just published a series of 20 posters depicting “ushpizot,” women ranging from Eve and Sarah to Prime Minister Golda Meir and Torah scholar Nechama Leibowitz.

Order today for delivery well before

next Sukkot. LArry yudeLson

Marvelous news for etrogs

added that it was “clever” — the way that the film-makers enlarged the scope of the book by fo-cusing on Alexander’s up-set over his family’s “not sufficiently sympathetic” reaction to his very bad day. Viorst, by the way, is the author of four “Alex-ander” books, the latest (“Alexander, Who’s Trying to Be the Best Boy Ever”) was published this past summer.

Last year, PBS ran a well-received documentary

(“Makers: Women Who Make America”) about important figures in the women’s move-ment (including the late BETTY FRIEDAN and GLORIA STEINEM, now 80). This documentary inspired a new six-part series, focusing on im-portant women in six

discrete fields. Frankly, PBS publicity about this series has been poor, or I would have alerted you sooner. The good news is that you can almost certainly catch up with the first two episodes online, via on-demand, or when they are rerun later this year. New epi-sodes air Tuesday nights at 9 p.m. on most PBS stations. The September 30 episode, “Women in Comedy,” explored the history of funny women and commenta-tors included SARAH SILVERMAN, 43, and CHELSEA HANDLER, 39. The October 7 episode, “Women in Hollywood,” included commentary by LENA DUNHAM, 28, and director/writer NANCY MEYERS, 64. The up-coming October 14 epi-sode, “Women in Space,”

almost certainly will mention JUDITH RESNIK (1949-1986), the first woman Jewish astronaut. She died in the explosion of the Challenger shuttle. Also in this episode, of course, is the late Sally Ride, the first American woman in space.

Ride is the subject of a new acclaimed bi-ography by her friend, LYNN SHEER, 72, a well-known ABC journalist (“20/20”). Sheer recently talked to the Forward, about her own personal background. Sheer said: “I grew up in South Philadelphia and then we moved to the suburbs. We were Conservative. I went to Hebrew school and at Sunday school I

was confirmed. We didn’t have bat mitzvahs then. I still don’t know what being confirmed meant…. My father [LOUIS “Red” SHERR] was a star bas-ketball player for South Philadelphia High School. He also played for the University of Pennsyl-vania and the semi-pro South Philadelphia He-brew Association team [SPHA], which played in the American Basket-ball League [a precur-sor of the NBA]. EDDIE GOTTLIEB took many of the SPHA players to the Philadelphia War-riors [which he founded], although my father had stopped playing basket-ball by then.”

–N.B.

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David Krumholtz Judith Viorst Lynn Sheer

AT THE MOVIES:

Darkness and lightcolor the screen

Violence of a fic-tional sort is the fo-cus of “The Judge.”

Hank Palmer (Robert Downey, Jr.), who has long been estranged from his father (Rob-ert Duvall) and the rest of his family, returns to his hometown when his father, a judge, is sus-pected of murder. DAVID KRUMHOLTZ, 36, has a supporting role as Mike Kattan, a young pros-ecutor who challenges Hank’s moral views.

A new Disney flick, “Alexander and the Ter-rible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day,” is very much lighter. It follows 11-year-old Alexander as one calamity (like gum in his hair) follows another. Newcomer Ed Oxenbould plays Alex, with Jennifer Garner and Steve Carell playing his parents. Two other new-comers play Alexander’s 17-year old older brother and 16-year-old sister.The film is based on the 1972 children’s book of the same name, writ-ten by JUDITH VIORST, now 83. The book sold two million copies and already has been the subject of an animated TV movie and hit stage musical version. In the book, Alex is 5 years old and has two older brothers, Nick and An-

thony). Viorst and her husband of 54 years, the well-known politi-cal journalist and author MILTON VIORST, now 84, have three now-adult, successful sons. You guessed right—the sons are named ALEX, NICK, and ANTHONY. After writing 12 well-received children’s books and other works for adults, Judith Viorst switched gears in the mid-70s and earned a graduate degree in psychology. Her psychology-based books include 2003’s “The Grown Up Mar-riage” — advice about how to make a marriage work. In 2003, she spoke to JWeekly, the San Francisco Jewish paper, about her book about marriage, saying that Jewishness had been a source of cohesion for her. “Being a Jew has a family aspect for me,” Viorst said. “The family gathers here for the holi-days. We know we are Jews, but I wouldn’t say it has necessarily shaped my views on marriage.”

Publishers’ Weekly recently was on hand when Judith Viorst, along with her son Alex, now 47, and Alex’s wife and children caught a private screening of “Very Bad Day.” Viorst called it an “adorable movie” and she

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Across the great divideIsraeli MK Ruth Calderon to speak in Teaneck

LARRY YUDELSON

Congregation Rinat Yisrael does not host many non-Orthodox Talmud scholars.

Sure, it has a member who taught at the Reform Hebrew Union College.

But someone who doesn’t identify as Orthodox? Who is proud of solemnizing a gay marriage?

Yet Dr. Ruth Calderon, who will speak at the Teaneck synagogue Sunday evening, is not a typical Talmud scholar — of any sort.

She has made her career bridging the world of “secular” Israelis — to use the 19th century Hebrew phrase proudly claimed by Israel’s atheist, socialist pioneers — with that of the classic works of Jewish civiliza-tion, most notably the Talmud.

She earned a doctorate in Talmud at Hebrew University for a dissertation on structuralist approaches to understand-ing talmudic stories. She launched a move-ment of secular batei midrash, study halls where Jewish texts are studied in a tradi-tional manner but without traditional pre-suppositions. And she has written books to share her enthusiasm for the Talmud’s tales with the Israeli public. (The first was recently published in English as “A Bride for One Night”; the most recent appeared in Israel just before Rosh Hashanah.)

But what catapulted her to international fame — and the Rinat Yisrael guest list — was her election to the Knesset in 2013. A YouTube of her maiden Knesset speech went viral in some Jewish circles, and has been watched more than any other

talmudist’s video.And a talmudist’s video it was. After

briefly telling her story and her belief that “The Torah is not the property of one movement or another,” she read a short passage from the tractate Ketubbot, con-cerning a rabbi who forgot to return home on the eve of Yom Kippur and the tragedy that followed. Then she elaborated on it, pointing out nuances and implications — a master class from a master teacher.

David Jacobowitz, co-chair of Rinat’s adult education committee, said he and other members of is congregation were “astonished and happily surprised at the shiur,” or talmudic lecture. He was particu-larly struck by the charedi Knesset mem-ber “who tried to helpfully add some infor-mation rather than walking out in protest.”

“We saw that she dedicated herself to trying to reclaim Talmud and Jewish texts for the secular Israeli public who had been unfortunately estranged from their heri-tage for so long,” he said. “We felt it would be an honor to have her in our community to tell us more.”

Dr. Calderon first opened a Talmud as a 19-year-old college student. She remem-bers the urge to connect Jewishly going back to when she was 11.

“I felt I missed something. I felt something is lacking in the Israeli identity and educa-tion,” she said in an interview this week.

Somehow, she sensed something that her European-born parents had that was different from what she was taught in school and in the Zionist youth move-ments. She knew the missing ingredient had a name — “Judaism” — but she didn’t

know how or where she could get it. “I didn’t want to become religious” — mean-ing Orthodox — she said. “I didn’t think that was necessary. I wanted to stay in my beliefs and values, but I felt that I was igno-rant, as if I didn’t know part of my family. I felt I’m not respecting myself if I don’t know where I came from.”

Born in 1961, she had this realization in 1972. That was perhaps the peak year for a certain kind of irreligious Israeli-ness, fostered by the kibbutznik children of the pioneers, the sabras who ran the country. Five years after the Six Day War, the aus-terity of Israel’s first years was far behind, and the insecurity brought on by the Yom Kippur war was in the future — as was the renewed respect for Judaism that Men-achem Begin would bring into the public arena with his election. Young Ruth Calde-ron had noticed a real vacuum.

At 14, she gained a further education in the way Jewishness meant something more than just being Israeli. Her father, a professor of entomology specializing in the infestation of stored grains, spent a sabbatical year in Canberra, Australia. There, she was the only Jew in her school.

“Children asked me all kinds of things and I realized I don’t know much,” she said. So she decided she would learn.

If this were a chasidic tale, the next step in her journey to Talmud would be an encounter with the renegade scion of a famed talmudist. And indeed it was. She spent her army service in the educa-tion corps, arranging lectures and cultural activities for the soldiers in the tank corps.

One day she brought Ari Elon in to lec-ture on Talmud. Mr. Elon is the non-Ortho-dox, Talmud-teaching son of Menachem Elon, an Orthodox rabbi, Supreme Court justice, and expert on Talmudic law. Ms. Calderon asked Ari Elon where she could study Talmud the way he taught it and he

pointed her to the Oranim Teachers Col-lege, which offered a program in classic Jewish texts.

“The next day I took my backpack and hitchhiked to Oranim and enlisted,” she said.

When, after army service, she began classes and finally opened a Talmud, it lived up to her hopes.

“It really blew me away,” she said. “I felt — and still feel — that it is so relevant to our life here. Yesterday I was giving a class on the kibbutz where my partner lives. It’s like the Talmud was written about us yes-terday. It’s a very amazing book that you don’t always study in an existential way.”

After graduating from Oranim, she went to Jerusalem, pursuing a graduate degree in Talmud at the Hebrew Univer-sity. There, the Talmud was studied as any other academic subject. For the magic of traditional study, arguing with a chevruta — a study partner — in the study hall, she studied at the Shalom Hartman Institute.

“It was a wonderful place,” she said.But while it is deeply pluralist, the insti-

tute, like its founder, Rabbi David Hart-man, was at its core Orthodox. “I wanted to be not only a visitor, not a guest,” she recalled. “I wanted to be at home.”

So together with an Orthodox friend, she created Elul, a beit midrash where secular and Orthodox Jews would study together as equals.

Elul opened in the fall of 1989. It took its name not only from the month of its open-ing — the Hebrew month of anticipation and renewal preceding Rosh Hashanah — but from the famous pluralistic motto that the Talmud attributes to God: “elu v’elu divrei Elohim chayim”— “These and those are the words of the living God.”

It was not only the participants who came from different worlds. Ruth Calde-ron loved the Talmud, but in contrast to

No place like JerseyRuth Calderon considers herself a New Jersey patriot.

That’s partly from “a lovely three years” living in Livingston, from 2002 to 2005, when her then-husband was an emissary from Israel to the MetroWest Jewish federation.

And it’s also from reading Philip Roth, who taught her “that to understand American Jewry one has to understand New Jersey. It’s even more interesting than New York.”

Those years “have given a lot of gifts to my children, who are fluent in English. It’s affecting my work in the Knesset, in being sensitive to Jews in the world, not just Jews in Israel. It’s not just an Israeli state; Israel is a homeland for all Jews.

“It’s very important for me to say that I see Jews in the diaspora as full part-ners in building Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. It’s important for me to be a voice for them. I know you don’t vote [in Israeli elections], but I would like to be your congressman.”

Her American stay also gave her an appreciation for American modern Or-thodoxy.

“There’s some kind of openness in American Judaism. A positive attitude and a willingness to listen. I’m very happy to be speaking in an Orthodox synagogue in America. I feel at home,” she said.

Dr. Ruth Calderon wants others to join her on a path of Jewish discovery.

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a traditional yeshiva, the Elul curriculum expanded beyond Talmud and even beyond Jewish texts. The curriculum was the-matic — that first year the theme was creation — and the texts included works of Greek philoso-phers (in Hebrew trans-lation) and Israeli poets as well as Talmud and Zohar. Every text was approached in turn with the method of the beit midrash: First, an introductory presentation. Then, breaking into pairs — chevrutot — to read and discuss. And finally, the group would come together for a class to bring it all together.

“It was fun and exciting,” Ms. Calderon said. “I couldn’t find a place to be at home, so I was building my own nest. There was a lot of meaning in the effort. I was learn-ing all the time.”

The learning didn’t come just from the texts. For the participants, it was an inti-mate encounter across Israel’s religious-secular divide. (Because this was Israel, there were few participants who did not fit on one side or the other of that binary divide, but there were more than none.)

Secular Israelis could see religious Jewish texts through the eyes of Ortho-dox Jews. And Orthodox Jews could have the per-haps more unnerving expe-rience of seeing their famil-iar texts through the eyes of outsiders. One Orthodox participant that first year still remembers the eye-opening encounter with the words of Birkat Hamazon, the grace after meals, words he had

chanted daily since kindergarten, when his secular chevruta read them aloud as if a newspaper article as he encountered them for the very first time.

From that initial institution of 15 or 20 people, who met in a synagogue in Jerusa-lem, a movement grew. Dr. Calderon went on to found a similar institution, Alma, in Tel Aviv, in 1996; Elul continues, and there are a hundred other pluralist study halls across Israel, “a renaissance of Jew-ish study.”

All of this is “Torah l’shma” — study for its own sake.

“Degrees and academic criteria some-times hurt the freedom of study, the freedom of thought, the imagination of

feeling,” she said.Since joining the Knesset last year, she

has taken a leave of absence from Alma. But she is proud in its latest accomplish-ment: it is beginning a program with the kibbutz movement’s education school where teachers in training will spend time in the Alma beit midrash. This, she says, will ultimately bring the beit midrash method into the Israeli public school system.

Meanwhile, in the Knesset, she feels she is having some success in changing the Israeli conversation about Jewish identity.

“It’s a little more open. It’s not a binary choice of whether you’re Orthodox or nothing. You can express your Judaism in many different ways,” she said. “It’s like massaging the very tight muscle of how you can talk about Judaism in Israel.”

Her bill to permit civil marriage in Israel has stalled under opposition from an Orthodox party that is a coalition partner. “My legislation is usually kind of deep and big,” she said, and is in part about educat-ing the Israeli public toward the idea of change, since “you can’t change reality with legislation if it’s not ripe in society.”

One conversation she hopes to enshrine in law is a new approach to shmitta, the sabbatical year. It is designed to restore

the ancient idea of releasing debtors from their debts. She has launched a shmitta fund to get 5,000 Israeli families out of debt.

Participants will get budget counseling to begin balancing their budget. Then the organization will go with each of the fami-lies to their creditors to renegotiate their debt. “The creditor — the bank or electric company or whoever — will wipe off some of it; the family will pay a third of it, with no interest; and we are fundraising to pay the gap between the two,” she said.

“These families can come out of that terrible position where you have no credit and can do nothing economically, and we can fulfill the mitzvah of shmittat chovot — releasing from debts — since the time of Hillel” 2,000 years ago. “It’s at the same time a very ancient and a very modern, very sustainable kind of project.”

Save the dateWho: Knesset member Ruth Calderon

What: A talk, “Talmud as a bridge between secular and religious Israelis,” includ-ing a brief Talmud lesson

When: Sunday, October 12, 8 p.m.

Where: Congregation Rinat Yisrael, 389 West Englewood Ave.

a traditional yeshiva, the

haps more unnerving expe-rience of seeing their famil-iar texts through the eyes of outsiders. One Orthodox participant that first year still remembers the eye-opening encounter with the words of Birkat Hamazon, the grace

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Honoring

Touching the Dead Sea ScrollsIsrael Museum scholar to talk about his work with antiquities in Glen Rock

JOANNE PALMER

Imagine being able to lay a gentle finger on a part of the ancient, his-tory-laden, extraordinarily evoca-tive piece of parchment that is the

Dead Sea Scrolls. Imagine having the key that unlocks the door to the room where they lie.

“It’s a dream for any scholar to have such a treasure in his hands,” Dr. Adolfo Roitman said.

Dr. Roitman, the lucky scholar, is their curator, in charge of the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, where they are housed. He is going to talk about them locally on Sunday, October 12, and he Skyped from Israel to give a short preview.

“As everyone knows, the Dead Sea Scrolls are ancient Jewish documents discovered between 1946 and 1956 in the caves near a placed called Qumran, on the Dead Sea, about 35 kilometers east of Jerusalem,” Dr. Roitman said. “That discovery made a crucial contribution to modern scholarship on [the] Second Temple, and on the origins of historic Judaism.

“We have been exploring a full range of literature, beginning with biblical manu-scripts — the earliest unearthed were discovered in Qumran, from 250 B.C.E. We discovered a number of books long before we discovered the scrolls; wis-dom literature, magical books, liturgical books. We have a lot of layers in Qum-ran,” he said.

“That new perspective on ancient Juda-ism is particularly useful because we all are descended from rabbinical Judaism, which has shaped the understanding and self-understanding of Judaism for 2,000 years. These scrolls come from the period before rabbinical Judaism.

“When we see our modern Judaism through the lens of ancient Judaism” — that is, when we apply the lens discov-ered and slowly deciphered in the caves — “it looks quite different from the idea we have of ancient Judaism.”

For one thing, he said, the traditional Masoretic biblical text we use today was fixed about 1,000 years ago. Since then, “when any Jew goes into a new synagogue, he wouldn’t ask what version of the Torah they’re reading. There’s only one.”

That’s been true for a full millennium, but among the 200 or so biblical manu-scripts among the Dead Sea Scrolls, only 40 percent are very close to the texts as we have received them. “That means that 60 percent are not,” Dr. Roitman said. “There are crucial differences between those ver-sions and the ones we have today.

“For instance, one version of the book of Jeremiah is a third shorter than the one we have in our modern libraries. So we know that there were at least two ver-sions of the book of Jeremiah.”

In one striking variation from what we know as classic Jewish thought, “we iden-tify ourselves as the people who brought the message of monotheism to mod-ern civilization,” Dr. Roitman said. “We believe in one God who is the creator of the universe.

“In some of the scrolls we have a dif-ferent theology, where there was one

God, the creator of the universe, but below God there were two major kinds of angels.” The leader of one of the par-ties sometimes is called Melchizedek or the Prince of Light; his opponent may be called Satan or the Prince of Darkness. “According to the Qumran theology, these forces were in an eternal strug-gle. This kind of belief is called dual-istic monotheism, and it sounds very strange to us because our perspective is so different.”

For a third example of changes in Jew-ish thought from the time when the Dead

Dr. Adolfo Roitman stands in front of the Shrine of the Book, established 50 years ago to house the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Sea Scrolls were written, “We see the books in the Bible as sacred literature, and then we have the cate-gory of apocryphal books, which are not regarded as sacred in Judaism —- they are also seen as non-sacred books by the Protestants. In Qumran, we have some books that we usually call apocryphal; there are so many copies of them there that the conclusion is that some of these books which we modern Jews regard as non-sacred, were seen as sacred by ancient Jews.” Pre-eminent among those books are Jubilees and the First Book of Enoch.

Did the scrolls found in Qumran reflect the norma-tive Judaism of the period, or was it instead a kind of heresy? “The question is a result of 2,000 years of rab-binical Judaism,” Dr. Roitman said. “We didn’t have a normative Judaism in ancient times. We had different groups or sects, some as well-known as the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes, and even the first Chris-tians. It is a non-historical perspective on Judaism to say that we had just one kind of Judaism.

“We could say that in ancient times, we had most of the Jews defining themselves around the backdrop of the Temple in Jerusalem, but they didn’t have just one official or normative Judaism.”

It has been 50 years since the Shrine of the Book was established, on April 20, 1965, and the museum will celebrate that anniversary throughout the year. Although some of the commemorations will appeal to academics, others will be aimed at the general public. “It will be very fun,” Dr. Roitman said.

Dr. Roitman was born in Argentina; Alberto Zeili-covich, the rabbi of Temple Beth Sholom of Fair Lawn, one of the two Conservative shuls hosting his talk, was his student in Jerusalem. The two come from the same Buenos Aires neighborhood, and went to the same Jewish day school. Dr. Roitman earned an undergraduate and a masters’ degree in anthropology in Buenos Aires, another master’s, this one in comparative religion, at the Hebrew Univer-sity, and then remained at the Hebrew University until he received a Ph.D. in ancient Jewish literature and religion. “And then, since November 1994, I have been in my position as curator of the Dead Sea Scrolls and head of the Shrine of the Book,” he said. He is the scroll’s second curator; the first, Magen Broshi, was appointed by the fabled archeologist and military leader Yigal Yadin, and held the posi-tion for 30 years.

“I remember the first day when he gave me the keys of the safe room where the Dead Sea Scrolls were,” Dr. Roitman said. “I feel very lucky. I have reached a climax in my academic career.

“My dream was to become a professor at the Hebrew University. I couldn’t even have dreamt of the possibility of being curator of the scrolls.

“But sometimes dreams — they come true.”

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Who: Dr. Adolfo Roitman, curator of the Dead Sea Scrolls and head of the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem

What: Will address “The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls for Judaism: Myth and Reality” in a presentation sponsored by both Temple Beth Sholom of Fair Lawn and the Glen Rock Jewish Center

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Flowers, trees, and TorahLocal scientist looks at Jewish texts with an ethnobotanist’s eye

Joanne Palmer

Okay. So why did civilization begin as a search for beer?

Who is the Jewish doctor who rescued tomatoes from witchcraft so we could have

them on pizza?Why did the apple, of all trees, become such a potent

symbol of religion?Well, to look for answers to those and many other sur-

prising questions, look to ethnobotany, the subject that most interests Dr. Jon Greenberg of Teaneck.

When you know more about the plants the Torah men-tions, you can have a more clear understanding of the metaphor and allusions that give life to the narrative. As is so often the case, the more you know, the more you can understand.

“Scientific knowledge can be useful as an aid to Torah learning,” Dr. Greenberg said. “It’s not biblical criticism, it’s not history per se — it’s really using the science to enrich our understanding and appreciation of Torah. That includes archeology, natural history,” and so much more.

Dr. Greenberg has a wide-ranging background. After graduating from Brown, he earned a doctorate in agron-omy from Cornell, so his scientific credentials are impres-sive. He has researched corn, alfalfa, and soybeans for the U.S. Department of Agriculture and for the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute for Cancer Research, so he adds hands-on experience to his academic curriculum vitae. And he has religious credentials as well — he studied with Rabbi Chaim Brovender at Yeshivat Hamivtar in Israel. After hav-ing taught for many years on the university level, since 2008 he has been on the faculty of the Abraham Joshua Heschel School in Manhattan, and he regularly leads tours and offers programs that combine his twin loves — Torah and nature — in surprising ways.

For more information on two upcoming programs — where you can get the answers to the questions posed at the top of this story, because certainly we can’t give them to you here — take a look at the box that accompa-nies this story.

He teaches a course called Science and Torah, in which he and the students talk about the nature of science and the nature of Torah — “their agendas, the methods, and their assumptions. We look at a couple of areas where they interact, which includes creation and evolution. We look at six or seven different approaches to try to understand the relationship between those two things.

“We also look at other areas — for example, the ques-tion of scientific statements in the Torah. What do we do with them if they don’t correspond to our understanding? I look at different approaches. Some used the science of their day. When it gets to halachic issues, I saw that we can’t assume that the explanation given there is the ulti-mate reason. We really aren’t given reasons for them, so people have the tendency to explain them in terms that make sense for them. So if we don’t find it easy to accept a classical explanation for why we do a mitzvah, that doesn’t mean that we don’t have the obligation for the mitzvah any more. It just means that we don’t understand it.”

He used as an example the famous, once widely accepted belief that pork is not kosher because it can carry

trichinosis. “These explanations can become dated very quickly,” he said.

The area that really piques his interest is that “often there is a deeper message being conveyed in the Talmud that is below the surface, beneath the literal meaning,” he said. He used as an example a story he has found himself citing frequently, he said. “Some people have the practice of adding a little olive oil when they open a container of olives, before they eat any. That’s based on two statements in the Talmud, about what was believed to help or to inter-fere with learning. One is that a person who eats olives often will forget his learning. The other is that a person who consumes olive oil often will retain things longer.”

This sounds odd. What can it mean?“There are people who accept these practices, because

rabbinical authorities tell them to, although now most people do not follow them. But whenever the Talmud takes an absolute statement like this one, we can rely on it being the case that the rabbis had access to much deeper sources of wisdom than we have. It is possible to get a much deeper lesson from this statement.

“Now I bring in agricultural and food history. Jews have

been consuming olive oil since biblical times for cooking. But it seems that Jews only began to eat olives in Roman times. For anyone, eating olives was a new thing — it was the Romans who figured out how to cure olives to make them edible. There is no question about the olive oil being kosher; that rule is there to tell you that it is not enough to go by the letter of the law. You have to go by tradition, too.”

In other words, Dr. Greenberg said, “It is okay to enjoy the latest delicacy, but don’t do it constantly. Remember the real things in life. Don’t pursue trends. Keep your eye on the real purpose of life.”

His approach to the Talmud takes the commonly debated question of “how to understand it — do we take it at face value or look for deeper mystical and philosophical meanings?”— and turns it over. “I am using secular knowl-edge to reveal a deeper meaning,” he said.

Botanical metaphor is so deeply embedded in the pro-phetic literature that if we don’t understand the botany, we have a hard time getting the metaphor itself. “They don’t spell out what they’re talking about because it was obvious to everyone then,” Dr. Greenberg said. “If you lived close to agriculture and nature, you’d know. But now

Top: Eryngo (Hebrew charchavina) is a plant that the Talmud suggests can be used for maror on Passover. It is soft and tender when young but becomes thorny, bitter, and inedible as it matures. The Talmud says about maror, “This is what the Egyptians were like — soft in the beginning and bitter in the end.” Bottom left, silver sage (Salvia argentea) grows on the Temple Mount. It bears a detailed resemblance to a menorah, with its three pairs of branches, central upright stalk, and tiny flowers shaped like ancient oil lamps. Bottom right, this prickly lettuce (scientific name Lactuca serriola, Hebrew chasa matzpen) is growing on a traffic island in Paramus. The wild ancestor of all cultivated lettuce, it is probably the original maror.

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Dr. Greenberg’s October scheduleWho: dr. Jon GreenbergWhat: Offers the torah Flora walking tour of the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens and a program called “noah’s wine vs. Pharaoh’s Beer.”

The Walking TourWhere: the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, 1000 washington avenue, BrooklynWhen: sunday, October 12, at 10:30 a.m. and again at 2 p.m.Why: to answer the questions posed at the top of this story, along with many others.How much and directions: details at dr. Greenberg’s website, www.torahflora.org/events.For reservations: email dr. Greenberg at [email protected]“Noah’s Wine vs. Pharaoh’s Beer”Where: the Jewish Center of Kew Gardens hills, 71-25 Main street, Flushing, n.Y.When: sunday, October 26, at 4 p.m.Why: to explore why Pharaoh drank wine but Moses drank beer, what’s wrong with horseradish, and many other interesting ethnobotanical Jewish byways.For whom: everyone 18 and over; id may be required.How much: Free, but space is limited and reservations are required. Call (718) 263-6500.For information: Go to www.torahflora.org/events.

we have to reconstruct it.“Psalm 128 has a very strange sort

of blessing,” he continued. (“Your wife shall be as a fruitful vine, in the inner-most parts of your house; your children like young olive saplings, round about your table,” it reads.)

Why?“It’s not hard to explain the first half”

— the wife as fruitful vine — “but the second part, about the olive saplings, doesn’t mean anything to us. But then every Jew had a few olive trees. Olive trees have two kinds of roots. The entire Mediterranean region has rocky, eroded soil. One set of roots grows deep into this soil, and can live for a long time. The second set of roots grows horizon-tally, just below the surface, and then turns upward and produces new shoots around the original tree. So olive trees are unusually long-lived; when a tree gets very old, the inside rots, but its own offspring have surrounded it like a wind-break. So the verse means that your chil-dren will support you when you are old; it’s a medical/social support system.

“Everyone then would have under-stood that intuitively,” Dr. Greenberg said. We need it explained painstakingly before we can get it.

But now, he continued, commercial agriculture has changed all that anyway. “We don’t want the old trees. We want small, young ones, packed in, so horti-culturalists will remove the small shoots. We call them mamzorim” — bastards. “The meaning has changed because the agricultural practice has changed.”

Although Dr. Greenberg is not the first Torah-based ethnobiologist, he is one of very few, and he is forging new paths for himself. He is interested in working across the broad spectrum of the Jewish world, showing the relevance of the Torah to lib-eral Jews and the value of science to more traditional ones. He refuses any labels himself. “I try to stay off the spectrum,” he said. “‘Don’t divide yourselves into factions,’ the Rambam says. The Rambam considered it a part of the biblical com-mandment, and I take it as a way to avoid putting myself into any one faction.

“This is the best way to learn.”

Dr. Jon Greenberg stands in the vineyard at HaGafen Cellars in California’s Napa Valley.

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Remembering AlisaAlisa Flatow’s family unveils mural in her honor at the Rosenbaum Yeshiva of North Jersey

JOANNE PALMER

A lisa Flatow, a 20-year-old Brandeis stu-dent from New Jer-sey whose dimples

flashed whenever she smiled, has been dead for almost exactly as long as she was alive.

She should have been 40 now, most likely the married mother of a small brood of children. But terrorists decided that they pre-ferred her dead, and they blew her up. Nothing personal, of course — she was just a name-less passenger on a bus in Israel, in the wrong place at the wrong time.

She was the oldest of five children, a vivid personality, a real person, and neither her parents nor her siblings ever have been willing to let her memory recede. Her father, Ste-ven Flatow, has fought vigorously to make the countries that funded her murder pay for it, and he has had some very real success.

And now the family has dedicated a wing of the Rosen-baum Yeshiva of North Jersey in her memory, so that all the school’s students, but most particularly the middle-school girls, most of whose classes are in the wing, can learn from and live by her example.

“Adam and I just felt that we were ready to do something in Alisa’s name,” Francine Mermelstein of Bergenfield said. Alisa Flatow, her family’s oldest child, had three sisters and a brother; Ms. Mermelstein is one of those sisters, and Adam is her husband. “Nineteen years later, and I still bump into people who say ‘I remember where I was when it hap-pened.’ Those are people about my age. But now there’s a whole new generation.

“Granted, my kids know about Alisa — we talk about her, and they know what happened — but there is a whole new generation of kids, and I want them to know.”

Francine and Adam Mermelstein have five children; the four older ones are at RYNJ, and the baby will be too, as soon as he is old enough. Although the Flatow children, who grew up in Essex County, went to the Kushner Academy in Livingston, which was local for them (and Alisa commuted to the Frisch Academy in Paramus, because Kushner then stopped in eighth grade), the three surviving Flatow sisters — Ms. Mermelstein, Gail Reider, and Ilana Berkowitz — all live in Bergenfield. Their brother, Eitan Flatow, lives in Israel. Many of Alisa’s nieces and nephews are stu-dents at RYNJ.

That means it was easy for the Merm-elsteins to realize the RYNJ was the right place for a memorial to Alisa, but they did not know at first what form it should take. “We spoke to the school, throwing around ideas,” Ms. Mermelstein said. “The second that they sug-gested naming the wing, I knew it was the right thing to do. It’s not that I had been thinking about that — I hadn’t been — but the second they said it I knew it was right.”

It’s not that she was suggestible, she continued, it was that the idea made such good sense. “If they had suggested naming the nursery wing, I wouldn’t have felt the same way. I would have said that it was a nice idea

— but I’m not feeling it. Sixth, seventh, eighth grades are a time when girls are so impressionable. They are trying to figure out who they are, and where they are going. And what better role model could they have than Alisa?

They have so much to learn and to gain from her.”Ms. Mermelstein was in 10th grade, a few years out of

middle school, when her sister was murdered. She was five years younger than Alisa. But she has some memories of Alisa as a middle-schooler. “I remember her walking with her friends, vague memories of her being in school. She was a little girl, hanging out with her friends. I remember her knee socks, I remember her glasses, and I remember her being with her friends.

“And I remember her being the life of the party, always the life of the party.”

Last Wednesday, the school unveiled a mural and the accompanying plaque. Cindy Zucker, the middle school girls’ mashgicha ruchanit — their religious guidance coun-selor — described the ceremony.

Michal Mermelstein, Alisa Flatow’s niece, a seventh grader at RYNJ, reads at the mural dedication. YARON KARL

This mural, showing various aspects of Jewish women, marks the Alisa Flatow wing of the Rosenbaum Yeshiva of North Jersey. YARON KARL

Alisa Flatow

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“The girls are wonderful girls, but when they came upstairs” — to the wing — “I have never seen them carry themselves with as much dignity and respect. And right away they were hooked.”

The mural had been hanging since the school year began, but it had been covered. The girls did not know what lay beneath the swaddling. “Every day, they walked by, and saw a wall with a big cover. They had no idea what was underneath,” Ms. Zucker said. “Then they were all sitting on the floor — there are 160 girls — and all of a sudden the sheet came off, and all of a sudden there was a collective” — she made the sound of a great gasp, the sound of awe. “It was so incredibly moving.”

“You could have heard a pin drop,” Ms. Mermel-stein agreed.

The mural, created by Rockland County artist Leah Chamish, shows women in many situations.

Each woman is a role model. “We have Sarah in front of her tent, and Miriam singing with the women after the parting of the Red Sea,” Ms. Zucker said. “We have Deborah judging, sitting under the tree; a mother and daughter lighting Shabbes candles together, some modern Israeli soldiers. In the cen-ter there is a picture of women davening at the Kotel. Each one symbolizes a different quality of Alisa’s.

“And then in the bottom frame there is a picture of YNJ girls learning Torah. You can tell by the class-room that it’s YNJ.

“The girls figured out who all the women are. And the end, I pointed to the last one, and I said ‘Girls, who is this?’ And they said ‘This is us.’”

“The idea is beauty, and the mural is breathtak-ingly beautiful, and the lessons are beautiful.”

Alisa Flatow’s photograph is on a glass plaque, hanging right next to the mural.

She too was a role model, Ms. Zucker said. She had not known Alisa, but she has heard many things about her. “She had so many friends,” she said. “She wanted to be friends with girls who were more reli-gious than she was, so she could learn from them, and she wanted to be friends with girls who were less religious, so she could teach them.” She saw herself as part of a chain. “That just hit home with the girls so much,” Ms. Zucker said.

The chain will continue to add links. “Every year, we will make a book,” Ms. Zucker added. “The girls will make a book of divrei Torah and give it to the fam-ily. That way they can see all the learning the girls are doing to honor their legacy. It won’t be just a plaque on the wall — they’ll really be living Alisa’s legacy.”

This mural, showing various aspects of Jewish women, marks the Alisa Flatow wing of the Rosenbaum Yeshiva of North Jersey. YARON KARL

The idea is beauty, and the mural is

breathtakingly beautiful, and the

lessons are beautiful.CINDY ZUCKER

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Making their own sweetnessBeekeepers care for hives on the roof of Miriam Apartments in Clifton

ABIGAIL KLEIN LEICHMAN

The Jewish year 5775 is shap-ing up to be the sweetest ever for residents of the Esther and Sam Schwartz Building (Miriam

Apartments II) at the Daughters of Miriam Center/The Gallen Institute in Clifton.

That’s because each of the 150 tenants received a Rosh Hashanah jar of honey made by the honeybees that live in the hives on the roof of their building.

This was the first harvest from Bubbe’s Bees, as the program was dubbed by mar-keting and development director Caren Speizer. It was her idea to install the hives last spring after she learned that honeybees are endangered. That means that the flow-ers that depend on pollination also are at risk of disappearing.

“We have many flowers in our 13-acre complex, and tall buildings, so I thought this would be a great fit, though it took a while for me to sell our board of trustees on the idea,” Ms. Speizer said.

Linda Emmer, the general manager for apartment services for the Miriam Apart-ments, admits that she also was skeptical until she understood that honeybees are vital to the ecosystem — and that they sel-dom sting.

Any remaining concerns were put to rest when Joe Lelinho and Eric Hanan of Bee Bold Apiaries in Essex County came to Clifton to give a presentation. The two men install and maintain hives for businesses, nonprofit groups, and educational orga-nizations throughout northern New Jersey and New York City.

“They showed us a working hive, and it was so cool,” Ms. Emmer said. “To watch it come to fruition was even more amaz-ing. Eric came every month after install-ing the two hives with a ‘starter’ set of bees, and after a while we could see the white, clear honey being scraped off the

combs. The honey took on more color as the months went on, because the bees were collecting nectar from different sur-rounding plant species.”

Mr. Hanan took photographs every time he came to check on the hives, and the pictures were shown on the lobby television screen so that residents could watch what was going on up on the roof. There are plans to install a camera there permanently.

“I look at the hives like apartment houses. One of the hives had so many bees that they added another level,” Ms. Emmer said. “Before Rosh Hashanah, we collected 200 one-and-a-half ounce jars of honey, about 60 pounds — pretty good for the first attempt. Everyone loved it when we gave out the honey to the whole building.”

Jars of Bubbe’s Bees honey were also gifted to the members of the board — by now wholehearted supporters of the ven-ture — with a message wishing them a sweet new year.

Ms. Speizer explained that the Esther and Sam Schwartz Building was created in 1979. It was developed as part of a pilot program, run through the office of Housing and Urban Development, to offer “congre-gate services” geared to allowing seniors to maintain their own homes for as long as possible. Congregate services combine shelter and services for the elderly, particu-larly for those who are no longer fully capa-ble of maintaining completely independent lives. They offer meals, housekeeping ser-vices, and assistance in one or more of the activities of daily living.

“Being able to provide an educational experience for the tenants as well as reap-ing the practical bounty of the honey, while also doing something that benefits the wider community, is directly in keeping with the center’s mission,” Ms. Speizer said.

“The recent decline in the honeybee population has become an international concern, and every hive has become important. The hives on the roof of Miriam Apartments II have not only survived, but thrived, producing a larger harvest than ini-tially anticipated.”

Wearing full beekeeper suits, Miriam Apartments II Manager Linda Emmer and Eric Hanan of Bee Bold Apiaries check on the progress of the hives in-stalled on the roof of the apartment building. CAREN SPEIZER

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Remembering a beloved wifeTeaneck family’s project lends expensive medical equipmentABIGAIL KLEIN LEICHMAN

After his wife, Renee Chaya, lost her nearly six-year battle with cancer in May 2013, Yehiel Levy and his sons, Chaim and Ronnie, decided to start a medical equipment free lending project in her memory.

The Rinat Chaim Gemach — “gemach” is a Hebrew acronym for good deeds — col-lects and lends new and gently used medical equipment for short term or long term use: a power wheelchair, standard wheelchairs, portable commodes, walkers, rollators (a foldable walker with four wheels and a seat), shower and tub chairs, crutches, and canes. The gemach does not charge recipients any-thing. The lending service has been up and running for a few months.

“The uniqueness of this gemach is that we deliver and pick up at no cost,” said Mr. Levy, who lives in Teaneck. “There is already one medical gemach in Teaneck, but only for wheelchairs. As far as I know, we are the only ones who offer all these items.”

Although the gemach is intended to serve all of Bergen County — and even lent a piece

of equipment to someone in New York recently — this is very much a story based in Teaneck, and specifically at Congregation Beth Aaron, which the Levys joined about a year after moving to town 10 years ago.

“When Renee and I were battling this ter-rible disease, we got a lot of support from

the Beth Aaron community and Rabbi and Chaviva Rothwachs,” Mr. Levy said.

“Many friends would come to help Renee at the drop of a hat. One woman came and sat with her every evening for hours. Another woman would come and play board games with her when I was away at work. All the

people in Beth Aaron who took care of her also took care of me, making meals or making sure I had a place to be on Shabbes.”

As those difficult years wore on, Renee Levy needed more and more pieces of medi-cal equipment to maintain her mobility. “It was very expensive, even to rent,” Mr. Levy said. “Buying it was out of the question, because there is so much insurance paper-work involved. So after my wife left us, we thought this would be a good way to give back to all these wonderful people, and even beyond our own community.”

Mr. Levy operates the gemach with trustees Larry Kahn and Micah Kaufman, fellow Beth Aaron members. Rabbi Larry Rothwachs, the synagogue’s spiritual leader, spread aware-ness of the project among Bergen County rabbis and named the project Rinat Chaim, which means “Joy of Life.” The name also hints at Renee Levy’s name, and at her sons’ as well. (It was the Levys’ son Chaim who first came up with the idea for the gemach.)

Rabbi Rothwachs said he was not fully aware of the need for such a service before.

From left, Larry Kahn, Louis Karp, Moishe Singer, Yehiel Levy, Rabbi Larry Rothwachs, and Micah Kaufman all were instrumental in creating the gemach. PAUL LUSTIGER

SEE REMEMBERING PAGE 32

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2014 Candidates Forums

Free and open to the community – light refreshments will be served. All dietary laws strictly observed.

Please join us for

5TH CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICTRoy Cho (D)

Monday, October 20, 20147:00 - 9:00 pm

Hosted by Temple Israel and Jewish Community Center475 Grove Street, Ridgewood, NJ

*note – As a 501 (c)(3) the sponsoring organizations do not endorse candidates for public offi ce. All qualifi ed candidates were invited to

attend this forum. 9TH CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICTCongressman William Pascrell (D) • Dr. Dierdre Paul (R)

Monday, October 27 , 20147:00 - 9:00 pm

Hosted by Community Baptist Church of Englewood 224 First Street, Englewood, NJ

For further information contact JCRC | 201-820-3944 | www.jfnnj.org/jcrc

Democrat & Republican

Co-sponsored by Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey’s Jewish Community Relations Council and Bergen County NAACP

in partnership with Bergen County African American Voters Coalition

Black Clergy Council of Teaneck, Englewood and vicinityNational Council of Jewish Women Bergen County Section

North Jersey Board of RabbisNorthern New Jersey Region of Hadassah

CRC of Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest NJThe Jewish Standard

605 Pascack Road, Washington Township, NJ 07676

ANNE FRANK’SSTEP SISTERSTEP SISTERMrs. Eva Schloss

ANNE Eternal Flame invites you toAn Historic Evening With

TICKETS: $45, $25, STUDENTS $15

PURCHASE AT: 201.476.0157 or ETERNALFLAME.ORG

Enter the world of Anne Frank as told by her stepsister and childhood friend.

Eternal Flame: A project of Valley ChabadSupported by the George & Martha Rich Foundation ValleyChabad.org

Mrs. Eva Schloss

TICKETS: $45, $25, STUDENTS $15

Enter the world of Anne Frankas told by her

605 Pascack Road, Washington Township, NJ 07676605 Pascack Road, Washington Township, NJ 07676605 Pascack Road, Washington Township, NJ 07676605 Pascack Road, Washington Township, NJ 07676605 Pascack Road, Washington Township, NJ 07676

Monday, 10.27.14 7:00pmBergen County YJCC

Teaneck Jewish Center downsizes its rabbiLARRY YUDELSON

Teaneck’s oldest synagogue will no longer employ a rabbi. It says it cannot afford one.

Next Shabbat, the first following Simchat Torah, will be Rabbi Lawrence Zierler’s last at

the Jewish Center of Teaneck, which was founded in 1933.“It has been a good eight years, and I have enjoyed the

opportunity to serve the Center membership and increase its profile in the community with an array of exciting and cutting-edge programs,” Rabbi Zierler said.

“Unfortunately,” said Isaac Student, the congregation’s president, “the Center cannot afford a rabbi at this pres-ent time, so we both agreed it would be best if he would step down.

“With this change, we have enough of an income that we can meet all of our expenses until June,” the end of the synagogue’s fiscal year.

At its core, the synagogue’s problem is an aging mem-bership. As Teaneck’s Orthodox population grew in recent decades, the Jewish Center remained without a mechitza separating men and women, which had become the sine qua non of Orthodox congregations. But the congregation also resisted the trend toward egalitarian worship; its long-time spiritual leader, Rabbi David Feldman, was a leader of the Union for Traditional Judaism, which formed in the 1980s to protest the Conservative movement’s decision

to ordain women. When Rabbi Feldman took the pulpit in 1982, the congregation was one of the largest in the country.

When Rabbi Zierler came to the synagogue in 2006, it was with the understanding that he would guide the syna-gogue toward Orthodoxy. Three years ago, after installing a mechitza, the Jewish Center affiliated with the Orthodox Union.

None of this was enough to create a mem-bership renaissance, however, or to persuade enough families to abandon existing Ortho-dox congregations, the nearest of which is only half a mile away.

Services will continue at the congregation.“We are going to have some people leading

Shabbes services,” Mr. Student said. “We have a daily minyan.”

The Teaneck Jewish Center’s founders built the shul with the vision of the syna-gogue at the core of a community center, complete with a swimming pool and gymna-sium. Now, however, those facilities mostly are rented out. Educational institutions, including a pre-school and the Heichal Hatorah yeshiva high school, use its classroom space. These tenants enable the congre-gation to maintain its building, which is “expensive to maintain,” Mr. Student said.

“The building is serving its purpose, which is to serve the Jewish community,” he continued. “We want to make sure it continues doing that as long as possible.”

To that end, the congregation is “now talking to several Jewish groups, to arrange some sort of partnership agreement for the future. We’ve main-tained the building for 80 years, serving the Teaneck Jewish community, and we’re hoping to maintain it for 80 years to come.”

Jewish Center of Teaneck, above, and Rabbi Lawrence Zierler, inset. MICHAEL LAVES

Local

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JFNNJ professional groups hear from Israeli journalistJewish Federation of Northern New Jersey’s Commerce & Professionals and Physicians & Dentists met for a network-ing breakfast this week in Englewood Hospital & Medical Center’s Feriole Wing to hear renowned Israeli journalist, Alon Ben David discuss where Israel stands in the wake of Operation Protective Edge. He also gave an assess-ment of the changing landscape in the Middle East and spoke about the rise of ISIS, the Arab states that could be regarded as relatively moderate, and what the possibilities are for a lessening of hostilities and a cessation of rocket attacks in the South. COURTESY JFNNJ

Rabbi André Ungar wins prestigious AJC awardRabbi André Ungar received the American Jewish Committee’s Moral Courage award last month. He is the rabbi emeritus of Temple Emanuel of the Pascack Valley in Woodcliff Lake. The award was presented at AJC’s New York City gala, attended by 1,000 people, celebrating interfaith cooperation and understanding.

The AJC also honored Stanley M. Bergman and his family with its Global Interfaith Leadership award. Mr. Bergman, chairman of the board and CEO of Henry Schein, Inc., is the AJC’s president.

Leslie Bergman, Stanley Bergman’s brother, pre-sented the award to Rabbi Ungar. It reads: “Presented to Rabbi André Ungar, exiled years ago from apart-heid South Africa for your steadfast moral dissent. You have called out fearlessly, decade after decade, for the rights and dignity of all.”

Rabbi David Saperstein, left, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, with Leslie Bergman, president of the European Union for Progressive Judaism, and Rabbi André Ungar. ELLEN DUBIN

Pictured from left are foundation CEO Jason Shames, Alon Ben David, Daniel Shlufman, and Dr. Jonathan Mangot.

Yeshiva High SchoolOpen House Programs

2014

www.JewishEdProject.org

Ma’ayanot Yeshiva High School for GirlsSUNDAY, OCTOBER 26TH

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Registration 12:30 p.m. Program 1:00pm - 4:00pm

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503 West 259th StreetRiverdale, New York 10471

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Rabbi Joseph H. Lookstein Upper School of RamazSATURDAY NOVEMBER 8TH

DOORS OPEN 7:30 PMPROGRAM BEGINS AT 8:00PM

60 East 78th St. · New York, NY 10075Randy Krevat, Director of Admissions

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Pre-register at: www.ramaz.org/preregister2014

Torah Academy of Bergen CountySUNDAY, NOVEMBER 2NDREGISTRATION AT 9:15AM

PROGRAM 10:00AM-1:OOPM

Program begins at 10:00am1600 Queen Anne Road, Teaneck, NJ 07666Ms. Donna Hoenig, Director of Admissions

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JewishStandard

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Editor EmeritaRebecca Kaplan Boroson

Days of miracles and wonders

Recently, officials in the Repub-lic of Belarus gave a fancy reception, complete with marching band, to Israeli

chef Gil Hovav. He is the great grandson of Eliezer Ben Yehuda, who was born in 1858 in the village of Luzhki in what is now Belarus and was then the Russian prov-ince of Vilnius. It’s hard to know what Ben Yehuda — born Eliezer Perlman — would have made of the fuss made by Belarusians eager to claim him as their own. He was, after all, a staunch Zionist and Hebrew nationalist. Even before he moved to eretz Yisrael at the age of 23 and embarked on his project to revive the Hebrew language, he had escaped from home, first to study in what is now Latvia, and then to Paris to study at the Sorbonne.

It’s easier to imagine, however, how Eliezer Ben Yehuda would have greeted today’s world of internet and smart phones. It is a world in which Hebrew, while not the largest and most popular of languages, coexists easily with English and Russian and Chinese and Spanish. You can download a Hebrew keyboard for your phone as easily as one in Cyrillic or Chinese. You can navigate seamlessly

between a Wikipedia page in English and its Hebrew version — which, depending on the initiative of the editor of the Hebrew Wikipedia page, might have more infor-mation. (While the Hebrew entry for Pres-ident Ulysses S. Grant, to take one random example, is considerably shorter than the English entry, the Hebrew entry for Knes-set Member Ruth Calderon has extra, valu-able information.)

That both President Grant and MK Calderon coexist within one encyclopedia is itself a sign of walls breaking down. Once you had to turn to the Jewish Encyclopedia or the Encyclopedia Judaica to research topics of Jewish but not “general” inter-est. But Wikipedia is some dozens of times larger than the Encyclopedia Britannica, so there is room for Jews amid the politi-cians. Hebrew ranks 39th among Wikipe-dia languages in terms of the number of articles — fewer than Arabic, Esperanto, and Lithuanian, but more than Croatian, Estonian, and Latin. Belorussian ranks only 57th on the list.

It’s easy to take this for granted. But a generation ago, the Hebrew language was banned in the Soviet Union. Today, Israe-lis and Arabs quietly cooperate on the

committees that work out how the Inter-net displays right-to-left languages.

It’s not clear whether our local Jewish schools are taking proper advantage of the resource that is Hebrew Wikipedia. The Hebrew entry on Derek Jeter is only four paragraphs long — but those are four paragraphs that will be interesting to base-ball-loving students. (They also present a challenge worthy of Eliezer Ben Yehuda: Apparently Hebrew does not yet have a word for “shortstop.”)

Of course, we must add the tired caveats that anyone can edit Wikipedia, that it may contain malicious errors, and so forth. A more “professional” encyclopedia might not have such thorough coverage of popu-lar culture — but then it might not contain an entry on MK Calderon either.

And sometimes Wikipedia’s failures can provide an amusement of their own.

Take the entry for Eliezer Ben Yehuda, which begins: “Eliezer Ben Yehuda was a Litvak lexicographer and newspaper editor.”

At least, that’s how it begins as of this writing. By the time you read this, the Belarusians may have claimed him as their own. — LY

KEEPING THE FAITH

The luckiest people are the pols

W e are in the final leg of Election 2014. The airwaves are filled with political commercials, and our mailboxes — virtual and real — are

filled with campaign literature.Barbra Streisand got it wrong. The “luckiest

people in the world” are our politicians and gov-ernment officials, because they are not subject to Jewish law. If they were, they would have trouble getting through a single day.

Consider, for example, how many items on the “For the sin of” litany we ran through on Yom Kip-pur are ones politicians and government officials violate with abandon.

Several come quickly to mind: “For the sin we committed against You by utterance of the lips…; in speech…; by deliberate lying…; by slander…; by ridicule.” We can also throw in “by hasty condem-

nation,” something of which members of any congressional committee are guilty on a routine basis, as are governmental heads throughout the West who were quick to condemn Israel for bombing Hamas, and are now themselves bombing ISIS. Then there is “by deliber-ate deceit…; [and] by

wronging our neighbor” by misrepresenting his or her record.

Here is a completely made-up campaign sce-nario to illustrate the point.

A candidate’s commercial opens by showing us a family collecting food from a local charity. The narrator informs us that nearly 15 percent of fami-lies in the area live below the poverty line. “Most of the family breadwinners work, but only for the minimum wage. The minimum wage doesn’t allow them to feed their families. Yet the incum-bent voted against an increase in the minimum wage three times in one year alone.”

Every word in the commercial is true—but not

Shammai Engelmayer is rabbi of Temple Israel Community Center | Congregation Heichal Yisrael in Cliffside Park and Temple Beth El of North Bergen.


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Editorial

Taking advantage of what we have

We are now halfway through the holidays that mark the month of Tishrei, making the most

intense, most family- and food- and shul-filled time of the Jewish year. (And our calendar is never short of intense, family-, food- and shul-filled intervals.)

Soon the year will start in earnest; soon the sukkot will be down, challot will be loaf-shaped again, and the Torah scrolls will change their white covers for their richly colored rest-of-the-year mantles. The year’s relentless march toward winter will resume.

This community, though, has not taken any time off. Right here and right now, our impressive intellectual appetites are on display, as well as our equally impressive ability to feed them with high-level schol-ars and speakers.

Some of this is reflected in our pages this week. Ruth Calderon, the liberal talmudist

and member of the Israeli Knesset who will be speaking at Congregation Rinat Yisrael, is, to be blunt, a major big deal, and so is the fact that she has been invited by Rinat. She personifies the values of Jewish text study, of the way that the desire to learn, to engage with text, to dig deeply into the words, to search them for meaning, to find meaning in tradition while translating it into the modern world, seems embedded in our genes. Rinat Yisrael is an Orthodox shul; its invitation to her is both gracious and open-minded.

Dr. Adolfo Roitman, who made aliyah from Argentina and has spent the last 20 years holding the key to the room that houses the Dead Sea Scrolls, will talk about the new understanding of Second Temple Judaism that amazing find has given us. Two local Conservative syna-gogues, the Glen Rock Jewish Center and Temple Beth Sholom of Fair Lawn, are working together to host him. And Dr.

Jon Greenberg of Teaneck will continue to offer new insights into what seemingly indecipherable botanic images and meta-phors in our texts would have meant in their own time.

And that’s just skimming the surface. There are so many ongoing programs that we couldn’t begin to list them, and we know that new ones start all the time. Among many other things, the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey has announced its new adult education series, “An Affair of the Heart: Intimate Relation-ships and God,” set to start with a fascinat-ing panel discussion, featuring four smart local rabbis, on Thursday, October 30, at 7:30 in the evening. We’ll have more details next week.

We hope that among your goals for the new year we have just started is to take advantage of some of these programs, to learn more, and to grow from it. The opportunity is right here. Use it! —JP

Shammai Engelmayer

KEEPING THE FAITH

The luckiest people are the pols

W e are in the final leg of Election 2014. The airwaves are filled with political commercials, and our mailboxes — virtual and real — are

filled with campaign literature.Barbra Streisand got it wrong. The “luckiest

people in the world” are our politicians and gov-ernment officials, because they are not subject to Jewish law. If they were, they would have trouble getting through a single day.

Consider, for example, how many items on the “For the sin of” litany we ran through on Yom Kip-pur are ones politicians and government officials violate with abandon.

Several come quickly to mind: “For the sin we committed against You by utterance of the lips…; in speech…; by deliberate lying…; by slander…; by ridicule.” We can also throw in “by hasty condem-

nation,” something of which members of any congressional committee are guilty on a routine basis, as are governmental heads throughout the West who were quick to condemn Israel for bombing Hamas, and are now themselves bombing ISIS. Then there is “by deliber-ate deceit…; [and] by

wronging our neighbor” by misrepresenting his or her record.

Here is a completely made-up campaign sce-nario to illustrate the point.

A candidate’s commercial opens by showing us a family collecting food from a local charity. The narrator informs us that nearly 15 percent of fami-lies in the area live below the poverty line. “Most of the family breadwinners work, but only for the minimum wage. The minimum wage doesn’t allow them to feed their families. Yet the incum-bent voted against an increase in the minimum wage three times in one year alone.”

Every word in the commercial is true—but not

Op-Ed

the whole truth. The incumbent, in fact, voted at least four times since taking office to raise the minimum wage. In one particular year, however, the increase was attached to a bill that would have denied minimum wage employees from receiving health insurance benefits. The incumbent could not vote for such a bill.

This is a made-up example, but there are scores of real ones airing right now, and they violate so many Jewish laws, it is hard to know where to begin.

There is, for example, the law called “motzi shem ra,” which means saying something that would put someone else in a bad light. It also violates the laws of lashon hara (bad speech); the words may be true, but they are being used to convey an untruth.

Then there is the law against putting a stumbling block before the blind (see Leviticus 19:14), which in this case means not only deliberately withholding vital information a voter needs to make an informed decision, but also pro-viding information in such a way as to mislead intention-ally. (See, for example, the commentary in Sifra to Leviti-cus 19:14.)

Politicians and officials often put stumbling blocks in front of each other as well, and at times they can have serious consequences.

The current Secret Service scandal is a perfect example of this. First, we and Congress were told that an unarmed man who was not acting suspiciously suddenly jumped a White House fence, ran across the lawn, but was wrestled to the ground at the front door.

This was an uncommon lapse, the now resigned Secret Service director, Julia Pierson, assured the House Com-mittee on Oversight and Reform. As Pierson explained it, it was her job to brief the president whenever a security breach occurred when the Secret Service was protecting the First Family.

Pierson then was asked, “What percentage of the time do you inform the president that his personal security has in any way, shape or form been breached?”

“A hundred percent of the time,” she responded.She was then asked, “In calendar year 2014, how many

times has that happened?”Never in 2014, she said, “except for one occasion, for

the September 19 incident,” after the man jumped the fence. The inference was clear: One incident in an entire year does not a crisis make.

As it turns out, the man had a knife, so he was armed. Two Secret Service agents recognized him on the street as someone who tried to break into the White House once before. He was not stopped at the front door; he got as far as the East Room at the far end of the building. To do so, he ran past an alarm system that had been disabled, reportedly because it made too much noise when it was set off.

As for the incident being an uncommon lapse in secu-rity, the director neglected to mention that just three days earlier, in Atlanta, an armed man with three convictions for assault and battery was allowed into an elevator with the president. Pierson had not briefed the president about that incident, despite her “hundred percent of the time” claim. Distorting the truth can have serious consequences when it comes to protecting lives.

These sins are on the heads of politicians and govern-ment officials.

There are sins on our heads, as well. For us aver-age citizens, the key is caveat emptor — let the buyer beware. As we head down the electoral stretch, it is not enough to watch commercials, read advertise-ments, and listen to speeches, before deciding how to vote. We have to do our homework. After all, acting “out of ignorance…[and] presumptuously, or in error” were also on the “For the sin of” list.

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Becoming unstuck

A bird got stuck inside my house the other week.

I had been feeling sick that day and slid open a dining room win-

dow that had a missing screen.Oops.After much shrieking on my part, and shrieky

tweeting on the bird’s, I finally lured it into a bedroom, where I had opened wide another unscreened window, and quickly shut the door. Eventually, after I hesitantly peeked in a couple of times only to see the bird flying frantically back and forth across the room, it finally found its way through the window and out of my house for good.

The next day, after taking a break from saying, “Hey, remember that time there was a bird flying around in our house?” and once my nerves were calm, I started to imagine how the bird must have felt being stuck inside some mysteri-ous structure with no point of escape. Upstairs, downstairs, this room, that room, no way out, no way out! Worst. Night-mare. Ever.

No one likes to feel stuck. Such is one theme, as I see it, of Sukkot.

We’re instructed on Sukkot to build temporary huts to com-memorate those set up by the Jews traveling through the des-ert, as well as to give a nod to the protective cloud that jour-neyed alongside them. These little homes are designed so that they are solid enough to house and protect a person, but they are made to be temporary. In constructing a sukkah, we’re instructed to build a roof so that there is more shade than sun, but there also is enough open space to see some stars.

I view the sukkah in this way, as a protective entity where we can eat (and where some people sleep), but also as some-thing that is assembled and dismantled at the very least within the span of eight days. It’s like a camping trip, in a way; it’s not just about building the tent and “living” in it, but also about how we feel after versus before, when our trip comes to an end. We are transformed. If Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are about spiritual renewal through prayer, Sukkot is a way to show this physically, by “moving” our location in these tem-porary huts. When we enter the sukkah and then go out again, we become unstuck from where we were before, and we have the opportunity to start again elsewhere. We are freed from one reality and can thus reinvent ourselves in a new spiritual space—this is shown symbolically via the building, “living in,” and dismantling of the sukkah.

I wonder if that bird felt any different after being stuck inside my house. Did it reinvent itself, too? Was it some-how transformed once it had found the way back to its

new home outside?I like that idea—finding the way back to

its new home, a new self—just like a person reinventing himself from the High Holidays, through Sukkot, and out the other end as a new, fresh-eyed being. I find it appropriate that the holiday occurs in autumn, a time of change, when the leaves turn from their classic green to yellow, red, orange, and brown—the golden tones of a sunset (which is yet another transfor-mation in itself ).

And yet my most transformative moment occurred not in autumn, nor in a sukkah, but

under a clear night sky in the summer on an ACHVA Israel trip between 10th and 11th grades. We had a two-day hiking adven-ture in the desert, resting overnight under the stars. Under this wide sky I felt unstuck, freed, experiencing a feeling of protection that far trumped any other time in my life.

I suppose, despite it being summer and we being out in the open, the desert hike offered something similar to the themes of Sukkot—becoming unstuck, transformation— in that through it we were changed, not just from that night under the stars but from the journey of climbing over boulders and up steep cliffs on our way to the air-conditioned buses on the other side. Our dehydrated selves returned to civilization, where our thirst was quenched and we could see the world through fresh eyes. (Especially in my case — my counselor made me drink two liters of water right before going on a 2.5-hour bus ride. That was fun and eye-opening.)

I guess my takeaway message is this: Now is the time to transform ourselves—to take the spiritual pledges from Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur to change, and then to take action

practically and physically, or what-ever the case may be.

Second takeaway message: It’s really important to fix your win-dow screens. Now that I’ve said that, I need to change my ways in practice, and carry out that which I have pledged.

Alternatively, I can turn my house into an aviary. See, there you have it—transformation at its best.

Dena Croog is a writer and editor in Teaneck whose work has focused primarily on psychiatry, mental health, and the book publishing industry. More information is available at www.denacroog.com.

Dena Croog

If Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are

about spiritual renewal through prayer, Sukkot

is a way to show this physically, by “moving”

our location in these temporary huts.

Opinion


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Time to move on

A s the director of a proudly Zionist organization, it isn’t often I can say that I agree with the Palestinian Author-

ity’s anti-Semitic, terrorism-sponsoring, Holocaust-denying, opposition-squash-ing dictator Mahmoud Abbas.

Indeed, his “genocide speech,” as Abbas’s UN speech on erev Rosh Hasha-nah has come to be known in Israel, was replete with stunning fabrications and age-old libels.

Yet his ultimate assessment of the pros-pects for future negotiations between the PA and Israel is one I can’t help but embrace. He said, “[I]t is no longer acceptable, nor possible, to repeat meth-ods that have proven futile, or to con-tinue with approaches that have repeat-edly failed and require comprehensive review and radical correction.”

He is right. We must make a change.It is long past time for Israel and its

supporters to wake from the 21 year dream of a negotiated peace with Pales-tinian Arabs. Breaking up is hard to do, but how often can Israel get used and abused and still believe the relationship can work? The PA no longer tries to hide its rejection of a negotiated peace with

Israel. Replete with deplor-able lies, threats, and an embrace of unilateralism, Abbas’s speech was noth-ing less than a declaration of diplomatic war on Israel.

Not that we should be sur-prised. Even with the ter-rorist group Hamas’s serial attacks and crimes this sum-mer, including public execu-tions that would make their ISIS brethren proud, Abbas maintained his unity coalition, as he emphasized again last week.

So why continue to pretend that Abbas is a moderate? Why continue to reward (and generously fund) Israel’s sworn ene-mies? We need to close this chapter and readopt our former policy of not negoti-ating with terrorists — and add a policy of not relabeling terrorists as moderates, just so we can negotiate with them.

In case, as in the past, we were slow to get the message, Abbas made sure to repeat it in various ways.

First, Abbas said that his goal is to “rec-tify the historic injustice inflicted on the Palestinian people in Al-Nakba of 1948.” In other words, he seeks to “rectify”

the founding of Israel alto-gether. This position has long been reflected in the PA’s actions and words — from its rejectionist charter, to its maps and textbooks showing all of Israel as Arab land, to its outright refusal, sans counter-offer, to accept Israeli offers in 2000 and 2008. Abbas once again let us know that his goal is not Palestinian Arab statehood.

He aims to eliminate Jewish Israel.Second, Abbas publicly discarded the

mantle of moderation. Throughout his speech, Abbas justified violence and extremism, “armed resistance” and “the traditions of our national struggle” — i.e., terrorism and military attacks on Israeli civilians. Can we finally face it ? He’s just not that into us — existing.

Finally, Abbas once again embraced his true leadership role, as commander in chief of the diplomatic war against Israel. Time and again he reaffirmed the PA’s embrace of “Big Lie” tactics, with outrageous claims of Israeli aggression, war crimes, apartheid, and genocide. In attempting to achieve a state unilaterally,

Palestinian Arabs count on rampant anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism to bolster their efforts. The PA is doubling down on defamation as diplomacy.

Supporters of ongoing “peace” talks consistently excuse this type of repug-nant behavior in order stay in the rela-tionship. They advocate ongoing fund-ing of the PA, knowing much foreign aid directly supports terrorism and graft. And they seek to justify Arab violence creatively rather than to put the blame where it belongs. Incredibly, there were Israeli MKs who bemoaned the “delays” the speech would cause, rather than its hateful content. Better to replay the Pal-estinian Arab narrative of nonsense than face the hard reality, that the ongoing war to destroy Israel is the ideological and tactical goal of the Palestinian Arab leaders.

Refusing to recognize this makes it all the more likely the abuse will continue. We see this with the ever more strident and violent anti-Semitism, spouting the same lies as Abbas, now seen everywhere from European capitals to American college campuses. We cannot defend our interests vigorously while affirming the legitimacy of those who work to destroy us.

Laura Fein

An American’s Yom Kippur in Israel

A man of my age — I am just a few months short of 88 — does not like changes.

We like to be in familiar places, doing familiar things with familiar people. This tendency also applies to the marking of Jewish holidays. I like to be in a familiar synagogue, hearing the voices of familiar clergy, singing familiar melodies and hearing the sound of a familiar shofar.

Back in the 1930’s, when Yom Kippur rolled around, my father would take me to the New Temple of Brno in Czechoslovakia, where we sat in a pew that was completely occupied by family members — male family members, of course. Mother, aunts and sun-dry female cousins all were relegated to the balcony. My father was one of 13 siblings, so there was no shortage of uncles, aunts, cousins and in-laws to occupy a consider-able portion of the temple.

For a small child the services were pure agony. I was handed a heavy prayer book and was invited to follow along. Because I was going to the school run by the Jew-ish community in Brno, I started learning Hebrew in kindergarten. But even when I was 8 years old, and in third grade, I could not read fast enough to keep up. Also, the prayer book was designed to be used for all occasions and holidays, so there were

constant instructions to “add this for Suc-coth” or “delete this on Shabbat.” And to make these instructions more challeng-ing, they were not in German or Czech, languages I knew. Instead, they were printed using Hebrew letters but actu-ally were in Yiddish. Each member of the congregation was obliged to bring his own siddur. So, once I was lost in the Hebrew text, I had to con-fess that fact to my father, who would guide me to the right place in the book. I always felt terribly guilty when I had to do this, as if I had offended God by not paying attention.

By the time I was 10 years old, perhaps to make my visits to the synagogue pleasanter, I volunteered to sing in the choir and was happily accepted. Now I only had to read the music pages, and I always knew where we were during the service. Alas, that lasted only two years, until right after the High Holiday in 1940. That was when the Nazis permanently closed our beautiful and familiar shul.

Some 15 years of chaos, turmoil, and instability followed, as our family engi-neered its escape from Europe, arrived in the United States, and moved several times

while trying to establish a foothold. Also, during these years, I served in the United States navy, went to college, and started a career. Not surprisingly, I found myself in a different synagogue each year, mark-ing the High Holidays in new surroundings, led by a great variety of rabbis and cantors. It wasn’t until I was married and settled in New Jersey that once again I began to enjoy the warm familiar environ-ment of the same congrega-

tion year after year.Temple Emanuel of the Pascack Val-

ley in Woodcliff Lake was incorporated in 1929 and grew to become one of the larg-est congregations in the state. By 1966, when we joined, it already was under the leadership of the rabbi, cantor, and school principal who guided it for nearly half a century. Now, once again, each Yom Kip-pur, I was surrounded by familiar things. When you arrived, a supply of kippot, tal-litot, and prayer books awaited you. The whole congregation used the same prayer book; should you lose your place or allow your mind to wonder, the rabbi would guide you gently back to the right page. The book

had English text alongside the Hebrew one, so you knew not just that you were praying but what you were praying. For the next 57 years, Temple Emanuel was my home on Yom Kippur.

Until this year.This year, my sabra wife convinced me

that we should travel to Israel a few days after Rosh Hashanah and spend the Day of Atonement in Israel. I asked Israeli friends and relatives: “What does a practicing but non-Orthodox Jew do on Yom Kippur in Israel?” The first thing they asked: “Will you fast?” “Of course, I will fast! I have done so since I was 12 years old — even in the navy.” “Well, there must be a temple near you in Rishon — although it is most likely Orthodox.”

Suddenly I had this sinking feeling that I will, once again, have to revert to the con-ditions of the Brno synagogue, with my wife hidden away somewhere, everyone reading from a different book, and a can-tor storming through the service under the assumption that every one can follow the text. “No, I don’t think we want to do that,” I responded. “Well, than all you can do is stay at home, read, study, rest, go for a walk or visit neighbors” I was told. I was deeply disappointed by this choice. What kind of a way was this to spend Yom Kippur?

Charles Ticho

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But I shouldn’t have worried. The day turned out to be unique and quite appropriate for the occasion. First, there was the absolute quiet that descended on the city — the streets and highways were virtually empty of all traffic, the television and radio stations were mute, the phones stopped ringing, and I faced the prospect of spending the day without touching food, drink, and the computer. With this uncommon silence came a chance to meditate, to reflect, and to exercise some much- needed self-examination. In many ways, the day became an unexpected pseudo-religious experience. This had, in fact to my sur-prise, become a quite meaningful Day of Atonement.

When the day of fasting ended and things returned to their normal state, I realized that I had not pined for the usual synagogue service, missed the camara-derie of a congregation, or searched for the voices of a cantor or a rabbi. The only thing I truly missed was the sound of the shofar.

Last week, after Prime Minister Netanyahu met President Obama to discuss the dramatic changes and threats in the region, we were witness to the narrowness of thought the blind commitment to the “peace process” can induce. Rather than respond with substance to the larger issues, Obama issued a knee-jerk condemnation of Israel because Jerusa-lem’s municipal government issued building permits for new apartments. (Never mind that, as Netanyahu correctly responded, it is plainly anti-Semitic to bar Jews from moving to Jerusalem.) Abbas already had announced his abandonment of future negotiations and rededicated his efforts to attack Israel diplomati-cally and economically. Yet Obama chose to pretend that the show can go on.

Obama’s motives are a subject for separate con-sideration. But what of the majority of the Ameri-can pro-Israel community, represented by our major Jewish organizations, who for more than 20 years have supported fruitless rounds of negotiations and endless one-sided compromise, while threats to Jews and Israel only increase? Will they continue to treat the PLO, the PA, Fatah, and Abbas himself as “mod-erates” and “peace partners,” overlooking their ven-omous words and evil deeds? Or will they break with the past and set new policies grounded in the truth?

Let’s hope they trust Abbas one last time. Take him at his word. And break with the PA once and for all.

Laura Fein is the executive director of ZOA-NJ. She welcomes your feedback at www.ZOA-NJ.org, www.facebook.com/ZOA-NJ, and [email protected].

This year, my sabra wife convinced me

that we should travel to Israel a few days

after Rosh Hashanah and spend the Day

of Atonement in Israel.

Joanne Palmer

Often it’s easy to pick out a non-Jewish candidate trawling for Jewish votes.

He’ll show up at a shul wear-ing a fancy crocheted kippah with his name spelled out along the edge; it’ll be pinned to cover the bald spot precisely. (Really, if you’re going to wear one, you might as well benefit from it, right?)

He’ll throw out Yiddishisms with aban-don — mishuganeh here, mensch there, oy, oy everywhere. He’ll talk about getting a bagel with a schmear. (Do you know any Jew who has ever eaten one of those? Me neither.)

In order to show his deep, lifelong sense of connection to the Jewish community, he’ll pander so hard it must make his teeth hurt.

But if you are looking for an actual Judeophile, a non-Jew whose connection to the Jewish world is longstanding, emo-tional, spiritual, intellectual, and clearly real, you would have to direct your gaze in another direction.

You’d find yourself looking at Cory Booker —New Jersey’s junior U.S. senator — who visited the Jewish Standard’s offices last week.

Instead of flinging out Yiddish mala-propisms, he’ll quote from the machzor, in Hebrew; he’ll cite biblical chapter and verse, again in Hebrew, and he’ll launch into a spirited explanation of why he insisted on being a co-president rather than the only president of Oxford’s L’Chaim Society.

But before we get to Mr. Booker’s ties to the Jewish world, let’s explore his connec-tions to Bergen County.

Cory Booker’s first memories come from here; he was born in Washington, D.C. in 1969, but he moved to Harrington Park when he was just a few months old. His was one of a very few African-Ameri-can families around.

From the time he was an infant, Mr. Booker lived through history.

His father, Cary, went to Fisk University, and his mother, Carolyn, to North Carolina

Central University; both are historically black colleges. Both were among the first black people hired by IBM (his mother in human resources and his father in sales). They were both civil rights activists — Caro-lyn Booker, who was a schoolteacher dur-ing the first March on Washington in 1963, used her entire summer vacation to help organize it, her son said.)

They also were devoted parents who wanted to bring up their family — which includes an older son, Cary Jr. — in a nice house in the suburbs. Black people were not welcome, though. “My mom would find a house in northern Bergen County; the realtors would see that it’s a black fam-ily and tell them that the house was sold,” Mr. Booker said. “My parents ended up going to the Fair Housing Council of North-ern New Jersey.” The council would send

out a white couple, who would pretend to be interested in the house. “It was an amazing story,” Mr. Booker said. “They found a house in Harrington Park — 123 Norma Road — and a test couple, who was white, bid on it. And then, on the day of the closing, the white couple didn’t show, but my parents did. They brought a law-yer — a volunteer — who by the way was Jewish.

“The real estate agent was so angry that he punched the lawyer and set his dog on my dad.” (The dog was there because the real estate agent worked at home; it was his family’s dog.) “A melee breaks out. Eventu-ally, the agent breaks down and starts cry-ing. He said that he was afraid to sell them the house — he was pressured not to sell to them, and he told them ‘You’ll ruin the town if you move in.’” He was afraid of the

phenomenon called “white flight.”“My joke is that every time my dad told

the story, the dog got bigger,” Mr. Booker added.

“The family that owned the house turned out to be a good family, and they were very apologetic. They sold the house to my parents.”

After that dramatic beginning, the fam-ily settled in, eventually moving to a bigger house in town. “It was the best commu-nity you could imagine,” Mr. Booker said. “It was incredibly nurturing.”

It’s not as if people did not notice that he didn’t look exactly like them. Because the only exposure most of his neighbors had to black culture was what they saw on television, “a lot of good kids had warped ideas of African Americans,” Mr. Booker said. “If I had a dollar for every time some-one asked to touch my hair…

“We were living in an age where the school system was not diverse.”

Life, he saw, was complicated. “Grow-ing up, you see the beauty of the town, the goodness of the people — class moth-ers, soccer coaches — and also lots of inci-dents that remind you that you are differ-ent. Whenever we drove over the bridge to Washington Heights, my brother and I would be pulled over by the police, who assumed we were there to buy drugs.

“We still don’t live in an equal world.”Cory and Cary Booker went to Northern

Valley Regional High School at Old Tap-pan. “When I go back to my home com-munity I feel such a debt of gratitude to Harrington Park and to Old Tappan,” he said. “The teachers, the coaches. I don’t know where I’d be right now if it weren’t for the extraordinary love that people had for my brother and me. We were the sons of two working parents. I would eat at other people’s houses; they’d watch over us, shuttle us back and forth in carpools. The level of goodness…

“I had an amazing eighth-grade teacher, Mr. Walker, the guy who taught me to play basketball. I had a terrible fear of speaking in front of people at school and he gave me confidence. Two nights a week he would hold a coffeehouse, a social time, on his

Cover Story


JS-22

A love storyCory Booker talks about growing up in

Harrington Park, falling in love with Judaism

Mr. Booker addresses an audience at a senior center in Monroe Township in 2004.

Cover Story


JS-23

Cory Booker talks to us at the offices of the Jewish Standard in Teaneck. Jerry Szubin

Cover Story


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own time, with his own dollar. He would spin his own records. That was the forum where I learned to social-ize, where I got the courage to ask a girl to dance, and where I learned to deal with rejection.” (Yes, the invita-tion and the rejection were direct cause and effect, he confirmed.)

Another of his favorite memories is the first record he ever bought for himself, when he rode his bicycle to Flipside Records in neighboring Closter. “I am embar-rassed to say it was a Supertramp album, ‘Breakfast in America,’” he laughed.

Mr. Booker’s father owned a restaurant on Teaneck Road in Teaneck when his older son was in middle school. He called it Cab’s Kitchen — it was named after the initials of his sons, Cory Anthony and Cary Alfred. “I am a vegetarian now, but it had the best ribs I ever tasted,” Mr. Booker said. “It was a great experience for me. Everyone in America should have to wait tables, should have a direct service job.” The skills he learned ranged from cleaning chicken to meeting “lots of folks from all different kinds of backgrounds.”

Mr. Booker’s father died almost exactly a year ago, just two days before Mr. Booker won his race for New Jer-sey’s senate seat. His mother just moved to Las Vegas, where she has family.

“I had a Norman Rockwell childhood,” he said. “It is hard for me to communicate to kids how blessed in this

world they are to grow up in such a loving and nurtur-ing place.”

When he was asked if New Jersey’s unique home rule system, which grants unprecedented autonomy to the state’s many small towns, makes it easier for them to remain tight-knit, the conversation took a brief detour into public policy.

No, it doesn’t, he said heatedly. “We have to pay too many taxes. You can preserve the state’s character and culture and still have a lot more shared services, which would greatly reduce the cost of government.” If one police department can serve both the south Bronx and the Upper East Side of Manhattan, surely one depart-ment could serve more than one culturally similar small Bergen County town. And he knows that regionalized schools work because he got such a good education at Northern Valley, which is one of two high schools in a regionalized system, he added.

After Mr. Booker graduated from Northern Valley Old Tappan, he went to Stanford University, where he earned both an undergraduate and a master’s degree. Then he went to Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar. It was there that he discovered Judaism.

“It’s hard to understand love,” Mr. Booker said. “Can you understand why you fell in love with your first boy-friend? Why you were attracted to him? I always ask my mom why she fell in love with my dad. My dad said that

Senator Cory Booker and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, who first met at Oxford, have remained close friends.

Cory Booker was a star in both football and aca-demics in high school and again in college; above, graduates of Northern Valley Old Tappan gather at a homecoming dance in the late 1980s. Mr. Booker graduated in 1986.

Cover Story


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for him it was luck and his good fortune.“With me, with Judaism, it was a love story.”It is important to note here that Mr. Booker is not Jew-

ish. He did not convert to Judaism, nor will he. But that does not detract in any way from his love for it, or from his deep understanding of it. He grew up going to the Centennial AME church in Closter, “just a little down Closter Dock Road from Flipside Records,” and now he belongs to a Baptist church in Newark, where he lives, and where he was mayor from 2006 until last year. “I am a Christian who believes that we need to have a world that exalts the highest of human values, and Judaism is a foundational faith. Before Christianity and Islam there were Moses and the Torah.

“My faith is deepened and enriched by Judaism. Because of my studies of Judaism I have studied Hindu-ism and I have begun studying Islam. It has made me a much better Christian.”

So how did he fall in love with Judaism?He had met many Jews as he grew up.“I went to my

share of bar mitzvahs, but I had never studied Juda-ism from its spiritual and intellectual foundation, and I never was introduced to the faith,” he said. “But I get to Oxford, I’m a 22-year-old kid, and during my first week a young lady invites me to have dinner with her. At the last second, she writes me a note about where to meet her.

“She says, ‘Meet me at the L’Chaim Society.’” Mimicking himself, Mr. Booker pronounces it Le-Chaym, as if it rhymes with Auntie Mame. “I asked how to pronounce it, and finally someone told me,” he said ruefully.

“I remember stumbling around to find this building — it was on the third floor — and I finally get to the door, I swing it open, and I walk in.” What he saw was entirely alien to him. “All I could think of was a movie my mother had taken me to see. ‘Yentl.’”

He saw men in long coats and black hats, “and really bad tailoring. The coats all had strings hanging out of them.

“It was one of those moments when everything stops,” he contin-ued. “Everyone looks at you, and I can read everyone’s mind. They’re all thinking what is this large black guy doing here?

“And I’m thinking that too.“And then a very frum-looking

woman comes over to me, and says ‘Are you Cory Booker?’ And I say yes, and she says, ‘I’m sorry.’ The woman I was supposed to meet had stood me up, and this woman was giving me that message. So I turn to leave, and then she asked me the question that changed my life. She said, ‘Would you stay for dinner?’

“Abraham was said to be favored by God because he kept his tent open on all sides. My favorite Torah image is when Abraham was sitting there, in pain, because he had just been circumcised, and God hadn’t blessed him yet. And then three strangers come, and despite his pain he gets up and runs to greet them. And then he gets his blessing.”

That kind of goodness — chessed, Mr. Booker called it — was what he felt emanating from that young woman. That was Debbie Boteach, then 18 or 19 years old, the wife of the head of the L’Chaim Society, Rabbi Shmu-ley Boteach. (The L’Chaim Society is Oxford’s Chabad house.)

“She said come sit with us, so I ended up at the only empty seat at any table. It had been hers. She gave me her seat.

“I happened to be sitting next to Shmuley, the most meshugah rabbi in America. He’s 25, I’m 22. We start talking. We talk about tolerance. Both of us had written and talked about how tolerance is cynical. It says ‘I will stomach your right to be different, and if you vanish off

As mayor of Newark, Mr. Booker joins contestant Yitzi Taber and some of his Torah Academy of Bergen County buddies at the 2013 Manischewitz Cookoff in Newark.

Senator Cory Booker and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, who first met at Oxford, have remained close friends. Rabbi Boteach and Mr. Booker stand by the Lubavitcher rebbe’s grave in Queens.

Cover Story


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the face of the earth I won’t care.’“It shouldn’t be tolerance. It should be love. Love is

a recognition that I need you, that we can learn from each other, that your difference makes me better. We are talking about this common value, and by the end of the night I’m carrying the Torah, and dancing with it. I had a kippah on.

“It was Simchat Torah, a holiday I’d never heard of.“The next day my love was tested. I sat down with

some friends — one Jewish, one not — and I said I was blown away with joy. I had met someone who shared my values about tolerance and goodness and mercy, who understood my feelings about tolerance ver-sus love. They said ‘Do you know that you were in a Chabad house? Did you know that they are right-wing wackos?’ They castigated me for socializing with them.

“That did not resonate with what I had experi-enced, so I decided to confront the rabbi. That led to one of the more interesting conversations of my life. We talked for a good two hours — imagine, this was a rabbi on Simchat Torah! I realized that he and I did not agree on everything.

“I told him a story about Alex Haley and Malcolm X. The two of them were on a subway together, and a white, conservatively dressed businessman walked over to Malcolm and said, ‘Mr. X, I do not agree with everything you say, but I like you and I respect your style.’ Malcolm stood up, and everyone got scared. They all held their breath. And then Malcolm said, ‘There are no two people who agree on everything.’

“So we agreed that most people think that love is just good feelings, just affection, but love really neces-sitates knowledge. How can you love someone you don’t really know? We said that the tragedy of man is that man knows so little of man. So we said, ‘Why don’t we do an experiment in love?’ So we agreed to exchange books from each other’s culture. That started an incredible odyssey into Judaism for me.

“The first book I gave him was Malcolm X’s auto-biography, and he gave me ‘Night’ by Elie Wiesel. I started devouring this stuff. When I started reading about Hillel and Maimonides, great pluralistic think-ers, that just sent me inevitably to the Torah.

“Parallel to that study was my discovering the

Cory Booker visits a Hindu temple in Robinsville.

Cover Story

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majesty of Shabbat, which the three Abrahamic cul-tures share. It is meant to be a house of prayer for many nations. But most of us don’t stop, don’t slow down.

“Sitting around a Shabbat table was so powerful for me that I started bringing friends to the Chabad house, not only Jewish friends but also Christians and Mus-lims. By the time my first year was over, I was not only studying Torah. The L’Chaim Society had mushroomed to become the second largest society by membership at Oxford. We were bringing in international speakers, often doing it in conjunction with the Oxford Union.”

At the end of that year, “Shmuley comes to me, and

Mr. Booker captioned this photo “Epic selfie with young Democrats.” He took it at a meeting of high school students from around the country on July 8 in Washington.

Mr. Booker and his niece climb the rock wall at the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City this summer.

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says ‘You evidence the universal idea of Noahide law, and I want you to be president of this organization.’ I said, ‘I knew you were crazy before, but now I know you’re meshugah.’ I said no.

“So we argued, and I said that I would do it only if there were a Jewish co-president. So I became the first goy in the history of the world to be co-president of a Chabad house.

“That led to a wonderful second year.“Shmuley did not proselytize,” he continued. “It is

not a proselytizing faith. The aim was not to make me a Jew. The Torah is a book of ethics.”

There are two ethical pillars, Mr. Booker said. “The first value is the one that Abraham showed, sitting in his tent, when the three angels came up to him. That was goodness, kindness, and mercy.

“And then, what does he do but argue?” As soon as he has seen off the angels, God told Abraham about the impending destruction of Sodom, and Abraham argued with God, trying to save the city. “The audac-ity!” Mr. Booker said. “The chutzpah!

“So the second pillar is justice. No matter what, no matter who, you stand up and fight for justice.

“Yom Kippur is the anniversary of the second time Moses comes down from the mountain.” Mount Sinai, that is, with the tablets God had given him. “The first time he comes down, he sees the people with the Golden Calf. Moses says to God, ‘If you destroy these people, erase me from this book. I don’t want any part of you.’” Again, someone argued with God — and won.

“A side anecdote,” Mr. Booker added. “They kept the broken tablets with the whole ones in the ark of the covenant. You gotta have everything, the good, the bad, the ugly, the shameful.

“That’s true in life, and in American history. Slavery, the subjugation of women, the horrendous killing and murder of Native Americans, Abu Ghraib — it takes all that to make a whole.”

Mr. Booker returned to his friendship with Rabbi Boteach. “I could write a dissertation about our dis-agreements,” he said. “But nobody has ever written about this. When the rebbe” — that’s the Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson— “dies, I am getting on a plane for my first visit to Israel. Shmuley was supposed to go with me, but he diverts to New York.” He wanted to be present, to be at the funeral.

“But after the rebbe’s death there was a power vac-uum, and then Chabad in England turned on Shmuley. He supported gays and lesbians, and he had non-Jewish members. They told him to get rid of the non-Jews or you must leave Chabad England.” Rabbi Boteach did not comply with the demands, “so they turned on him,” Mr. Booker said. ““He said, ‘I am not going to remove the non-Jewish members.’ I was devastated, and Deb-bie was devastated, but he was removed from Chabad.”

After Oxford, Mr. Booker’s next stop was law school at Yale. “But there was something missing,” he said. “So I connected with a 21-year-old Chabad rabbi, and we started a group modeled on the L’Chaim Society. It started with five guys around a table, and now it has hundreds of members.” That group, which first was called the Chai Society, became the Eliezer Society; it is about to undergo another, not-yet-announced name change.

“It was a great experience at Yale,” Mr. Booker said. “And once Chabad has you, they never let you go.” He started meeting other Chabad rabbis, and became increasingly involved in New Jersey Jewish life once he moved back to his home state.

“Jesus was a Jew,” he said. “His preaching was from Jewish ideals. For me, fundamental to my faith is humility. There is no way that I or my faith has all the

answers. I could not have such arrogance as to believe that in any way I have a monopoly on the truth.

“My path is my own access to the divine. It has been enriched deeply by my willingness to appreciate the awe-someness of other faiths and other faith journeys.

“Gandhi used to say ‘Honor your incarnation.’ There is a purpose to your having been born a Jew. We should explore what that means. Being Jewish cannot be reduced to a kugel or a chulent. People say ‘I’m a Jew because of my food and

my culture,’ but you can go from the Ashkenazi Jews of New Jersey to the Sephardi Jews of Iran to the Jews of Ethiopia. What does it really mean to be Jewish? The ideas and the values, the ability to stand up to God when there is injustice, to show goodness and kindness and decency to strangers — those are all Jewish ideals.

“To me, this country and this world needs Judaism, exalted through the fealty of Jews to Jewish ideals,” Mr. Booker said.

In August, Mr. Booker held a news conference in Camden to announce a Department of Labor grant for the Youthbuild program.

Opinion


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Another obscene Israel analogy

For several decades now, Israel’s enemies have defamed the Jewish state actively and willfully by comparing its actions to the atrocities committed by the worst villains in recent history.

We all know about the ludicrous and insulting parallel drawn between Israel and the former apartheid regime in South Africa. It was precisely that parallel that underpinned the notorious U.N. General Assembly resolution of 1975,

which has since been rescinded, that equated Zionism with racism.

And we know, too, of the obscene comparison between Israel and Nazi Germany. Among those who have endorsed this ghastly canard, which takes the Nazi Holocaust as its starting point in order to trivialize the mass murder of 6 million Jews, is the newly elected Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who opined at the height of the Gaza war

over the summer that Israel was “worse” than Hitler.

But now there’s a new analogy—and it’s one that attacks Israel by using a contemporary reference. Appropriately for our digi-tal age, it takes the form of a Twitter hashtag: #JSIL.

If it’s not immediately clear what that means, JSIL is a spinoff of ISIL, refer-ring to the “Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant,” the barbaric jihadist terrorist organization (now known simply as Islamic State) with whom we are now at war. JSIL, meanwhile, stands for “Jewish State in the Levant.”

Yes, you read that correctly. There are people out there who are seriously equating a gang of rapists, decapitators, slave traders, and genocidal killers with a democratic state that takes the trouble, whenever it is dragged into an armed conflict, of informing civilians on the other side when and where it will be launching an attack so that they can get themselves to safety.

Who, exactly, are the people making this analogy? Well, it’s the usual crowd, and we can take some—but not much—comfort in that. Credit for the #JSIL hashtag lies with the U.S.-based pro-Hamas activist Max Blu-menthal. The son of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s veteran confidante Sidney Blumenthal, young Max rivals the worst anti-Semitic propagandists of the Soviet Union. Over the last few years, Blumenthal’s anti-Israel screeds have become progressively more outlandish. But not content with grossly misrepresenting the Nazi Holocaust, he now insults the thousands of Yazidi, Christian, and Kurdish victims of Islamic State vio-lence by asserting that Israel inhabits the same moral universe as these murderers.

Blumenthal made the Israel-Islamic State compari-son during a session of the “Russell Tribunal on Pales-tine,” an unaccountable kangaroo court dedicated to smearing Israel with the crime of genocide. Fittingly, Blumenthal was flanked by the rock musician Roger Waters and the film director Ken Loach as he did so. Quite like the musical output of his band, Pink Floyd, Waters’s political interventions on Israel have gotten more boring and predictable as he gets older. Much the same can be said of Loach, who has continually insisted that Israel is the cause of the anti-Semitic vio-lence plaguing Jews in Europe, Latin America, and elsewhere.

Why, though, should we worry about the usual suspects when they find a new theme to play with? After all, they’ve made the apartheid and Nazi com-parisons, and yet Israel continues to thrive. Leading politicians around the world have joined the chorus of condemnation of anti-Semitism, and Hamas has only a bruised Palestinian population to show for its efforts to eliminate Israel. Similarly, we might say that how-ever offensive and downright stupid the Islamic State comparison is, it won’t change a damn thing when it comes to policy.

Regrettably, I don’t think we have the luxury of com-placency on this one. Just this week, Deutsche Welle, the taxpayer-funded German broadcaster, published an article on its website that cast American Jews vol-unteering for the IDF in the same light as Muslims from Europe and elsewhere joining the Islamic State terrorists.

Leave aside the fact that such an equation is being made by Germans—who really should, by now, know better. What is more significant for our purposes is the

Ben Cohen

The Twitter page for the hashtag #JSIL, which equates Israel and the terrorist group calling itself Islamic State TWITTER

Opinion

JS-31*


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potential impact that this equation can have on the formulation of policy. If we rightly seek to criminalize those among our Muslim citizens who join the Islamic State onslaughts, we open ourselves up to the conten-tion that foreign Jews fighting with the IDF should be treated in the same manner. Certainly, Blumenthal and his anti-Semitic cohorts will argue that such peo-ple are war criminals—and what the Deutsche Welle piece demonstrates is how easily this clumsy, morally illiterate argument can penetrate the mainstream.

Inadvertently, the same article offers a solution to this dilemma in its conclusion, which says, “But when former Israeli Americans return to the U.S. after their military service, they will be treated much differently than those who wish to return, tired of fighting with extremist groups. The former will be welcomed and

commended and accepted by family and friends, while the latter will likely be arrested, imprisoned, and interrogated with little chance of returning to an American way of life.”

That is how it should be. American Jews fighting with the IDF are fighting with an ally of the U.S. and Western democracy. Those who join Islamic State, on the other hand, are fighting for the destruction of everything we stand for. We need to ensure that the law in Europe and the United States continues to rec-ognize this vital distinction. JNS.ORG

Ben Cohen writes for JNS.org and is a contributor to the Wall Street Journal, Commentary, Haaretz, and other publications. His book, “Some Of My Best Friends: A Journey Through Twenty-First Century Antisemitism,” is now available.

The Twitter page for the hashtag #JSIL, which equates Israel and the terrorist group calling itself Islamic State TWITTER

There are people out there who are seriously equating a gang of rapists,

decapitators, slave traders,

and genocidal killers with a

democratic state.

Local/Jewish World


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מכיר בבת אל חצרון בבא מהכא: ״ואחר אלאלאלא

״מניניני יבתיבתיב: ווכ גוגוב״, שש את לו דלדלד עלעלעד...ותת גג אבי

חוקחוקקקי״. מ הוהודה ״י יבתיבתיב ווכ חוקחוקקקים״ מ דודו יר מכיר

הושהושע י יניניא, רבבי . דדת הושהושע י ככרבבי אולאולאו דד יןיתיןיתין

ה אששש א דודותו – יששש דולדול בבי ה אששש אדם א שנשנשש :

יםניםנים בב לו יויו דודותו – יה דולדול בבי יםניםנים בב לו יויו תו, ה

עלעלערב ו זרעךך את זרע ״ב״בבבקקר ננאמר תו, שש

או הזה ר יכשש זה אי יודע אינךך ככי ידךך

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disciples died in a plague. However, Rav Sherira Gaon

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tion or to war. If so, this would appear to be related to

the bar Kokheva revolt, of which Rabbi Akiva was an

ardent supporter. It is reasonable to surmise that Rabbi

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and when the Romans suppressed the revolt with great

brutality, these students were killed.

The image depicts an engraving that was prepared

by the Roman senate in honor of Hadrian after he

succeeded in suppressing the bar Kokheva revolt. It is

currently at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

Engraving in honor of Hadrian after he suppressed the bar Kokheva

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point in Judea, with Samaria continuing to the north.

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י ככרבבי כלכלכה מתתנא: ה רב אמר

ביל תתורה מלמלמד

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T

ractate Yevamot?Tractate Yevamot?

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• Side-by-sidetranslation

Studied Torah in his youth, etc.

commentaries questioned the necessity Studied Torah in his youth, etc. – וכו׳ דודותו דולדול בבי תורה ד

commentaries questioned the necessity of this exposition. Since

Torah study is a mitzva that applies at all times, why is it necessary

to derive from this verse that even if one studied in his youth

Yevamot Vol I.indb 37Yevamot Vol I.indb 37Yevamot Vol I.indb 37Yevamot Vol I.indb 37Yevamot Vol I.indb 37Yevamot Vol I.indb 37Yevamot Vol I.indb 37Yevamot Vol I.indb 37Yevamot Vol I.indb 37Yevamot Vol I.indb 37Yevamot Vol I.indb 37Yevamot Vol I.indb 37Yevamot Vol I.indb 37Yevamot Vol I.indb 37Yevamot Vol I.indb 37Yevamot Vol I.indb 37

commentaries questioned the necessity

Torah study is a mitzva that applies at a


Location of Antipatris commentaries questioned the necessity

Torah study is a mitzva that applies at a


he should study more in his old age? The Keren Ora suggests

that this is referring to the additional toil in Torah that one must

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He might change his mind or add new insights in his maturity.

416 Antipatris




















































































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“Although it only opened its doors recently, through word of mouth alone there has already been a lot of interest,” he said. “Yehiel spent a lot of time and effort to set this up in a profes-sional and dignified way, and I hope it will be helpful to the community for years to come.”

Another shul member, Moishe B. Singer, created the web-site www.rinatchaimgemach.com, which people can use to learn how to donate equipment or money, see what is avail-able, and request loans.

Yet another Beth Aaron member, attorney Louis Karp,

donated his services to secure 501c3 not-for-profit status for the gemach. And Izzy Salomon, also of Beth Aaron, has offered his warehouse to store the equipment.

Mr. Kahn’s teenage son, Eli, is coordinating youth volun-teers who clean and maintain the equipment. Mr. Levy and Mr. Kaufman make most of the deliveries.

Mr. Levy said that he and Renee met in 1974 in Israel, when both were working for Israel Aerospace Industries. “She was born in Cairo, and after the Six-Day War she migrated with her mother, father and seven siblings to France for two years,” he said. “Then they made aliya to Bat Yam.”

The couple wed in 1975 and lived in the Tel Aviv suburb

of Givatayim, where Ms. Levy taught Arabic and French in local schools. In October 2005, their son Chaim’s employer moved him to the United States, and his parents followed him to Teaneck. Ms. Levy worked at an Oradell law firm special-izing in representing American Jews whose loved ones were victims of terror attacks in Israel.

“In December 2007 we found, to our shock, that she was diagnosed with cancer,” Mr. Levy said. “We had a lot of ongo-ing and loving support from the community, but unfortu-nately after six years the disease caught up with my beloved. About four months later, Chaim had the idea to form the med-ical equipment gemach in her memory.”

Remembering FROM PAGE 15

BRIEFS

Two Israeli soldiers injured by Hezbollah blast along Lebanon borderAn explosion near the Lebanon border on Tuesday wounded two Israeli soldiers, the Israel Defense Forces said. Hezbollah claimed responsibility for the blast.

According to the IDF, the blast was caused by an explosive device planted to attack its soldiers. A source told Lebanon’s Daily Star that an explosive device went off near an Israeli tank near the Al-Sendaneh area in the Kfar Shuba hills.

Lebanese security sources told the Daily Star that Israel launched at least 15 explosives in retaliation.

The incident comes amid growing tension along the Israeli-Lebanese border, which is patrolled by U.N. peace-keepers. On Sunday, IDF soldiers fired at a Lebanese cell that was trying to infiltrate Israel. JNS.ORG

Israel takes precautions against EbolaIsraeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu convened a special meeting Monday to discuss precautions against an Ebola outbreak in Israel.

Health Minister Yael German, Transportation and Road Safety Minister Yisrael Katz, Deputy Interior Minister Faina Kirshenbaum, and representatives of the Israel Defense Forces, police, and Foreign Ministry were at the meeting.

The countries with the highest risk of Ebola are Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone in western Africa. Accordingly, Israel has decided to increase efforts to identify people entering it from those countries. The foreign and health ministries have also urged Israelis to avoid traveling to those destinations, according to Israel Hayom.

Foreign Ministry Director-General Nissim Ben-Shetrit said Israel has sent three mobile clinics to Ebola-affected areas in western Africa. JNS.ORG

56 Islamic State flags discovered in northern Israeli cityMunicipal landscapers working in an industrial zone in the northern Israeli city of Nazareth Illit discovered a torn bag containing 56 black Islamic State flags on Tuesday. The flags were handed over to the police and an investi-gation has been launched, Israel Hayom reported.

Investigators suspect that the person who possessed the flags was trying to get rid of them. “In light of recent media reports surrounding the [Islamic State’s] illegal sta-tus and the illegality of possessing its symbols, it looks as though someone decided against distributing or hanging them,” a police official told Israel’s Channel 2.

The Israeli Defense Ministry has outlawed membership or any activity suggesting membership in the Sunni terror-ist organization. JNS.ORG

Jewish World

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GABRIELLE BIRKNER

Rabbi Gil Steinlauf, who was the rabbi of Temple Israel and Jewish Community Center in Ridgewood from 2001 until

he moved to Adas Israel Congregation in Washington, D.C., in 2008, struggled for decades with an identity that he acknowl-edged publicly only this week.

On the Monday after Yom Kippur, Rabbi Steinlauf, who is married and the senior rabbi at Adas Israel, a large and historic Conservative synagogue, announced that he is gay.

“With much pain and tears, together with my beloved wife, I have come to understand that I could walk my path with the greatest strength, with the greatest peace in my heart, with the greatest heal-ing and wholeness, when I finally acknowl-edged that I am a gay man,” Rabbi Stein-lauf, 45, wrote in an email to congregants.

He said that he and his wife of 20 years, Rabbi Batya Steinlauf — the director of social justice and interfaith initiatives at the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington — would divorce.

Even as a child, Gil Steinlauf wrote, he recognized a “difference” in himself, but he never let it define him or affect his choice of a spouse.

“I sought to marry a woman because of a belief that this was the right thing for me,” Rabbi Steinlauf wrote. “This convic-tion was reinforced by having grown up in a different era, when the attitudes and counsel of adult professionals and peers encouraged me to deny this uncertain aspect of myself. I met and fell in love with Batya, a wonderful woman who loved and

accepted me exactly as I am.”Ultimately, though, “the dissonance

between my inside and my outside became undeniable, then unwise, and finally intol-erable,” he said.

The Steinlaufs have three children.A letter of support from the congre-

gation’s president, Arnie Podgorsky, accompanied Rabbi Steinlauf’s announce-ment. Mr. Podgorsky said the rabbi had the full support of the congregation’s lay leadership.

“Our synagogue is strong, large, and inclusive — a big tent with room and respect for all,” he wrote. “Rabbi Steinlauf, along with the rest of the clergy, will con-tinue to advance new paths to Torah, mak-ing Judaism and its tools for a beautiful life more accessible for more Jews. We will

continue our diverse approaches to wor-ship, from the traditional to the innova-tive. At the same time, we understand that Rabbi Steinlauf will be undergoing a chal-lenging personal transition in the coming months, and we extend to him patience and a generous spirit.”

Mr. Podgorsky said that Rabbi Steinlauf shared his news with the officers of Adas Israel earlier this fall.

“We determined together that he would see the congregation through the High Holy Days in the customary way, and then make his news public,” Mr. Podgorsky’s letter said.

Rabbi Steinlauf graduated from Princ-eton, studied at the Pardes Institute in Jeru-salem, and was ordained at the Jewish Theo-logical Seminary in Manhattan in 1998.

Adas Israel counts many prominent members among its approximately 1,500 family units, including the journalist Jef-frey Goldberg. On Monday, in a post on the Atlantic’s website, www.theatlantic.com, Mr. Goldberg put Rabbi Steinlauf ’s announcement in context.

“Rabbi Steinlauf fell into an odd liminal moment in history,” he wrote. “If he were a 25-year-old rabbi, there would be no drama here, no nothing, in fact, because he would simply be a rabbi who happens to be gay. The Conservative movement of Judaism has changed over the past decade or two in unimaginable ways. I have trou-ble picturing a synagogue that wouldn’t hire a gay rabbi. On the other hand, if he were 60 years old now, with the same iden-tity, he most likely would have been able to glide toward retirement, his secret intact.”

A 2006 decision from the Rabbinical Assembly’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards paved the way for the ordi-nation of gay rabbis and the recognition of same-sex unions in the Conservative movement.

In 2012, Rabbi Steinlauf officiated at the first same-sex wedding at Adas Israel. He wrote about that union, and about the sanctity of same-sex love, in a column pub-lished in the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles last year.

“I reject the idea that the Bible declares that the only sacred love that can exist is the love between a man and a woman,” he wrote. “Love is queer — it can never be limited to our categorizations of roles and gender. Love is commitment, presence, and kindness so awesome and mysterious that nothing in our power can contain it.”

JTA WIRE SERVICE

Former Ridgewood rabbi comes out as gay

Rabbi Gil Steinlauf says his announcement came with “much pain and tears.”

BRIEFS

Christian-Jewish group plans major push for immigration to IsraelThe International Fellowship of Christians and Jews plans to substantially increase its efforts to increase immigration to Israel, especially from countries of the former Soviet Union.

Eli Cohen, the former head of the Jewish Agency for Isra-el’s aliyah department, will head the initiative. While formal plans have not been announced, the IFCJ, which has in the past worked closely with the Jewish Agency and other immi-gration-focused Jewish organizations, has indicated that it will likely now work on its own to increase aliyah.

“I view increasing the number of new immigrants to Israel as a Zionist project and as a central pillar of the work of The Fellowship to support Israeli society and assist Jews in need of help across the world,” IFCJ Presi-dent Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein said.

Founded in 1983, the IFCJ promotes understanding between Jews and Christians. The group has raised more than a billion dollars—mostly from Christian donors—for Jew-ish immigration, social programs in Israel, and aid for strug-gling Jewish communities around the world.

More recently, the IFCJ has been involved in stepping up aliyah from Ukraine amid the instability and conflict with Russian-backed rebel groups, spending millions of dollars on emergency aid and putting together flights to Israel for the Jewish community there.

Last May, Eckstein was honored with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee’s Raoul Wallenberg Award for his “profound contribution to the Jewish peo-ple” as the head of IFCJ. JNS.ORG

Hamas official: wiping out Israel would be easier from West BankIf the Gaza-based terrorist group Hamas gains a foothold in the West Bank, it would be able to wipe out Israel and establish an Islamic state in its place, senior Hamas offi-cial Mahmoud al-Zahar recently told the Palestinian news outlet Al-Ayyam.

“[Some] have said Hamas wants to create an Islamic emirate in Gaza. We won’t do that, but we will build an Islamic state in Palestine, all of Palestine,” al-Zahar said in a translated interview posted by Palestinian Media Watch on Sunday.

According to al-Zahar, if Hamas could “transfer what it has or just a small part of it to the West Bank,” it “would be

able to settle the battle of the final promise with a speed that no one can imagine.” JNS.ORG

Work begins on final tunnel of Tel Aviv-Jerusalem high-speed railPrime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz attended a ceremony marking the beginning of work on a massive tunnel that will be the final project of the planned Tel Aviv-Jerusalem high-speed rail line, expected to be completed in 2017.

The tunnel, which will be the longest in Israel at nearly seven miles, will run between the towns of Sha’ar HaGai and Mevaseret Zion.

Netanyahu said that the ultimate goal is to have a high-speed rail line connecting the entire country from “Kiryat Shimona in the north to Eilat in the south” that could even one day “connect to Jordan in the east,” Israel’s Channel 2 reported.

The high-speed rail line has cost $1.9 billion and is expected to carry passengers between Tel Aviv and Jeru-salem in 28 minutes, including stops at Ben-Gurion Air-port as well as the cities of Modiin and Latrun. The cur-rent rail connection between the two cities follows an old Ottoman-era rail line that takes considerably more time.

JNS.ORG

Jewish World


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NEWS ANALYSIS

U.S. has no clear path back to Israeli-Palestinian negotiationsRON KAMPEAS

WASHINGTON — Palestinian Author-ity President Mahmoud Abbas is talking tough. And Israel and the United States don’t seem to mind too much — or else think that their best option at this point is to grin and bear it.

Abbas used his September 26 speech to the United Nations General Assembly to accuse Israel of racism and genocide. He and his aides again are raising the pos-sibility of seeking U.N. action to sanction Israel. They appear ready to bypass nego-tiations with Israel in favor of seeking an international declaration of a Palestinian state — positions consistently opposed by Israel and the United States.

Still, Israeli and U.S. officials have been relatively tepid in their responses. For example, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose dramatic and asser-tive speeches have become an annual tra-dition at the General Assembly, offered only a quick rejection of Abbas’ withering speech.

Perhaps more telling: Israel no longer seems to be pushing the Obama adminis-tration to penalize Abbas. That represents a pivot from Israel’s posture following the breakdown in talks between Israelis and Palestinians in April and before the onset of this summer’s Gaza war. During those months, Israel and its allies in the U.S. pro-Israel community and in Congress were threatening to cut assistance to the Pales-tinian Authority if Abbas sustained a gov-ernment of technocrats that was backed by Hamas.

But Abbas is smelling a lot sweeter after Israel’s war with Hamas, according to a lobbyist who works Middle East issues

on Capitol Hill. Lawmakers who wanted to punish Abbas before the war are now backing proposals that would return his Fatah party to authority in the Gaza Strip, where it was ousted by Hamas in bloody fighting in 2007.

“Especially with this possible new role in Gaza, Israel may want to keep the Pales-tinian Authority on life support,” said the lobbyist, who was speaking anonymously in order to be candid.

The Obama administration does not want the Palestinian Authority to bring its case for statehood to the United Nations again, but would not say what it was pre-pared to do to prevent the P.A. from com-ing before the Security Council.

“I won’t comment on hypotheticals,” a senior administration official said when asked about Abbas’ proposal last month at the General Assembly to consider an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, with land swaps, within a limited time period.

“I will say, however, that we strongly believe that the preferred course of action is for the parties to reach an agreement on final-status issues directly,” said the offi-cial, who also spoke on condition of ano-nymity to be candid. “We have long made clear that negotiations are the means by which this conflict will be resolved and that a resolution to it cannot by imposed on the parties.”

Translation: The Obama administration wants to try getting the parties back to the table to renew negotiations that collapsed in April before considering how to deal with the latest Palestinian U.N. initiative.

The Palestinians failed ultimately in their 2012 effort to garner Security Coun-cil recognition, not just because the United States made clear it would veto any such attempt, hypothetical or not, but because the Palestinians could not acquire the nine votes out of 15 necessary to take up the bid.

This time, the Palestinians believe their chances have improved. The Jordanian delegation, currently occupying one of the Security Council’s rotating seats, is circu-lating a draft resolution that would have a state in place by November 2016, with its capital in Jerusalem.

If the Obama administration is not as forthrightly pushing back against the reso-lution now as it did in 2012, it’s because it lacks a viable alternative, said Tamara Coffman Wittes, the director of the Cen-ter for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.

“The United States does not have a

pathway back to negotiations,” said Wittes, a Middle East official at the State Depart-ment during Obama’s first term.

She pointed out that the Israelis and the Palestinians are at considerable odds: Abbas wants to bypass Israel and take his case to the U.N., while Netanyahu wants to ignore the Palestinians altogether and is pushing for peace with other Arab nations first.

“It’s a much easier place for the United States to say ‘Don’t worry about that, let’s do this instead,’” said Wittes, describing the circumstances of U.S. diplomacy two years ago, when the administration was able to tell Security Council members that it is was cobbling together talks and that a resolution was premature.

“It’s much more difficult for the United States to block action in the United Nations” under the current circumstances, she said. “If it doesn’t have that alterna-tive, it’s left with watering down the reso-lution, trying to moderate it.”

It’s not clear how any statehood resolu-tion could be moderated so that it would be acceptable to Israel while also satisfying the Palestinians. The nine months of talks that ended earlier this year did not seem to produce any formula to overcome Pal-estinian objections to two Israeli positions: recognition of Israel as a Jewish state and for continued Israeli military control of the Jordan Valley.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry may next canvas regional powers next week to

see how to advance talks when he attends a conference in Cairo. The gathering is aimed at raising funds to rebuild the Gaza Strip following this summer’s war.

The American Israel Public Affairs Com-mittee is backing bids to fund the Pales-tinian Authority while underscoring that such funding is conditional on its actions in international arenas. Particularly of con-cern would be any Palestinian attempt to bring Israel before the International Crim-inal Court because of its actions in Gaza this summer, an AIPAC official suggested.

In an email, the official forwarded lan-guage in current U.S. law that would stop funding in case the Palestinians “initiate an International Criminal Court judicially authorized investigation, or actively sup-port such an investigation, that subjects Israeli nationals to an investigation for alleged crimes against Palestinians.”

Netanyahu has said that any attempt to bring Israel before the ICC would spell the end of the peace process.

And going to the court would also be a red line for Congress, said Senator Mark Kirk (R-Ill.).

“U.S. law makes it crystal clear that any attempt by the Palestinian Authority to use the International Criminal Court to casti-gate Israel will terminate U.S. funds to the West Bank and Gaza, period,” Kirk wrote in an email. “The Palestinian Authority should have absolutely no doubt that the U.S. Congress will enforce this.”

JTA WIRE SERVICE

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas addresses the United Nations General Assembly on September 26. During that speech he called for a Palestin-ian state. TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

It’s not clear how any

statehood resolution could

be moderated so that it would be

acceptable to Israel while also satisfying

the Palestinians.

JS-35


Professional Children’s Theater Series

Professional Children’s Theater Series

An exciting introduction to live theAter for children Ages 3+

Fly Guy & Other Stories—A MusicaltheAtreworks usA

A new musical from the one of the best children’s theaters in the US. Based on favorite stories: Fly Guy Meets Fly Girl, Diary of a Worm, Fluffy the Classroom Guinea Pig, Horace & Morris But Mostly Dolores, Kitten’s First Full Moon, Lilly’s Big Day and Paper Bag Princess.sun, oct 26, 2 pm

ticket informAtion

$12 advance sale per person, per show

$17 day of performance, if available

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Group rates available. No refunds or exchanges.

Space is limited!

Tickets can be purchased at the JCC Front Desk

or online at jccotp.org/theaterseries

For more info visit our website or call 201.408.1493.

Alice in Wonderland—The MusicalpushcArt plAyers

A dream…. a story…. an adventure! Pushcart Players brings the zany, fantastical tale of Alice in Wonderland to life. Filled with Lewis Carroll’s brilliant nonsense, madcap

characters and Pushcart’s whimsical music and design, this production offers an inspired moment of theater that young viewers will long remember!

sun, dec 7, 2 pm

The Rainbow Fish—The MusicalArtspower

A delightful and touching musical based on the popular book by Marcus Pfister about friendship and sharing. Rainbow Fish loves being the most beautiful creature in the ocean and refuses to give away any of his shiny silver scales to admirers in the neighborhood. One day a wise old Octopus shows him a great new way to have real friends and be happy.sun, jAn 11, 2 pm

Puss in High-tops— A cool take on Puss in Bootsflying ship productions

A whimsical fast-paced musical based on the classic French tale with a cool and contemporary twist. The adventures of a clever street-wise cat

who outwits everyone and wins favor with the king.sun, nov 16, 2 pm

kAplen JCC on the Palisades tAub cAmpus | 411 e clinton Ave, tenAfly, nj 07670 | 201.569.7900 | jccotp.org

Jewish World


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200 Jews move into SilwanTensions rise in eastern Jerusalem

BEN SALES

JERUSALEM — Jewish and Arab residents of the Jerusalem neigh-borhood of Silwan disagree on whether the neighborhood is his-torically Jewish or Arab.

They disagree about whether Israeli Jews should be living there.

They even disagree on what to call one of the main streets in the neighborhood, a predominantly Arab area just outside the walls of the Old City.

The approximately 50,000 Arab residents of Silwan call it Wadi Hilweh Street, after one of the neighborhood’s districts. The 700 or so Jewish residents call it Maalot Ir David Street, or “Ascent to the City of David Street,” after the adjacent archaeological site containing remains of King David’s Jerusalem.

The dispute over the street name is emblematic of tensions that have existed here since Jews first began acquiring property in the neighborhood more than 20 years ago. But they rose signifi-cantly last week, after about 200 Jews moved into 25 apartments in Silwan in the middle of the night.

To some Silwan Arabs, the new arrivals are infiltrators who dis-turb the peace with private secu-rity guards and aim to deprive Silwan of its Arab character. The Jewish residents see the neigh-borhood as a historically Jewish area and see no reason why Jews should be restricted from living there.

“We’re talking about an area that has tremendous signifi-cance to billions of people all over the world,” said Zeev Oren-stein, the director of interna-tional affairs for Elad, the Israeli NGO responsible for much of Silwan’s Jewish population growth. “It’s a place of identity, of meaning, of faith. For that reason, I would expect people to say it’s natural, in Jerusalem, the capital of the State of Israel, that if a person wants to live in this area and has the means to legally purchase a property, that’s something that should be respected.”

Elad runs the City of David

archaeological park, which exhibits the remains of King David’s palace, as well as an underground tunnel once used to transport water. These attrac-tions draw about a half-million visitors a year to Silwan.

Since 1991, the organization has bought or built residential units for hundreds of Jews in Silwan. Elad is also hoping to build a multi-story visitors cen-ter on the site of a parking lot purchased a decade ago from Arabs. After the purchase, archaeologists discovered millennia-old archaeological remains there.

Orenstein said Jews and Arabs mostly coexist peacefully in Sil-wan. Hebrew and Arabic con-versation can be heard from the windows of adjacent apartments in a quiet section of the neigh-borhood that intersects with the

archaeological park.But signs of tension aren’t

hard to find. Streets are dot-ted with security cameras and a private security company, paid for by Israel’s Housing Ministry, conducts patrols. An Israeli-owned parking lot is shut off behind a metal barri-cade. One Jewish resident said that the City of David’s manage-ment instructed residents not to speak to the press.

“I feel like a stranger here,” said Ahmed Karain, a conve-nience-store owner whose family has lived in the neighborhood for four generations. “What do we have? What services do we get? The city abandons us.”

The Jewish population growth in Silwan is part of a larger Jew-ish expansion in eastern Jerusa-lem. Last week, a project to build more than 2,000 housing units in

the Givat Hamatos neighborhood was sharply condemned by the United States and the European Union, both of which described the move as harmful to peace prospects.

“They’re looking to enhance Israeli control of this area,” said Yehudit Oppenheimer, execu-tive director of Ir Amim, a non-governmental organization that advocates for Arab Jerusalem-ites. “They are using archaeology for this. Through their activities they want to change the char-acter of Silwan and to prevent a diplomatic solution regarding Jerusalem.”

Orenstein said Elad was not involved in the purchase of the most recent 25 apartments, which were bought by a com-pany called Kendall Finance. Elad only advised Kendall on how best to move tenants into

the apartments, Orenstein said, and suggested that resi-dents move in the middle of the night because the move could provoke altercations with local Arabs.

Arab residents have contested the legality of some of the sales, and a 2009 report by Ir Amim, citing court documents, alleged that Elad acquired property in Silwan that was declared absen-tee property based on false depositions. Orenstein said Elad “works with the full accordance of the law.”

“We look forward to the day where you can move into the apartment you purchased in the middle of the day,” Orenstein said. “Right now, unfortunately, there are extremists who seek to make an issue of Arabs and Jews living together.”

JTA WIRE SERVICE

Israel border police confront a Palestinian man in Silwan, a neighborhood in eastern Jerusalem. Jews moved into 25 apartments there in the middle of the night on September 30. SLIMAN KHADER/FLASH90

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Read.

Follow.Join the

conversation.

Gallery


JS-38*

n 1 To help local low-income seniors, the Kaplen JCC on the Pali-sades in Tenafly collected about 5,000 briefs during a month-long adult care brief drive, coordinated by Marlene Ceragno, a recre-ational therapist in the JCC’s senior department. The distribu-tion is being handled by the Center for Food Action, BC Cheer Program, Pascack Valley Meals on Wheels, and JFS Kosher Meals on Wheels. From left, Michele Ogden, of Visiting Homemak-ers; Freeholder Chairman David L. Ganz; Englewood Council-woman Lynne Algrant; Ms. Ceragno; Freeholder Vice-Chair Dr. Joan Voss; and the Center for Food Action’s Jennifer Johnson,.

n 2 In commemoration of the 50th yahrzeit of Rebbetzin Chana Schneerson, the Lubavitcher rebbe’s mother, women of the Hillside/Elizabeth community gathered at the home of Shterney Kanelsky for a farbrengen. Ms. Kanelsky, associate director of Bris Avrohom, sponsored the meeting in memory of the 10th yahrzeit of her mother, Rebbetzin Chaya Esther Zaltzman, which falls on erev Yom Kippur.

n 3 Ben Porat Yosef sixth graders help build the school’s sukkah, which the kindergarteners decorated. It will be used during chol hamoed (the intermediate days of Suk-kot) for student lunch and holiday activities.

n 4 Marina Umansky, the Jewish Home at Rockleigh’s assistant direc-tor of recreation, left, with JHR resident Joanie Koch at a recent group watercolor art exhibit by JHR residents at Bunbury’s in Piermont, N.Y. The exhibit evolved from a class given at JHR over the past year.

n 5 Students at the Hebrew school at the Chabad Jewish Cen-ter of NW Bergen County took part in a Tashlich ceremony at a stream behind the synagogue in Franklin Lakes.

n 6 The Queen’s Tea, a project of the Chabad Center of Pas-saic County to benefit its Friendship Circle program, was held last month at the Packanack Lake Clubhouse. The tea hon-ored Lana Ladenheim, Nigina Shindelman, and Debra Till for their community involvement. More than 140 women attended the brunch, which featured guest speaker Liesel Appel.

n 7 The sisterhood of Temple Beth Sholom in Park Ridge held its first annual 5K “Dalia’s Walk,” held in memory of Dalia Lei-bowitz, the cantor’s wife, who died of cancer last year at 53. More than 100 people participated, raising $10,000, which will be used to improve the daily life of women fighting cancer. The sisterhood plans to assist with transportation, meals, shopping, pet care, and the other everyday needs that often become dif-ficult for a family to manage when a mother becomes ill.

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Arts & Culture

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The Jewish dressmaker FDR turned awayRAFAEL MEDOFF

WASHINGTON — Was the Jewish “lady tai-lor” who ran a Prague dressmaking shop a potential Nazi spy?

The Roosevelt administration appar-ently thought so.

The Jewish Museum Milwaukee recently opened a remarkable exhibit about the late Hedy Strnad, a Jewish-Czech dressmaker who with her hus-band, Paul, attempted to immigrate to the United States on the eve of the Holocaust.

The exhibit has its roots in a December 1939 letter sent by Paul to his cousins in

Milwaukee, asking them to help seek per-mission for him and his wife to come to America. Paul enclosed eight of Hedy’s clothing design sketches. He knew the U.S. authorities would turn away refugees who might have trouble finding employ-ment; Hedy’s sketches demonstrated her professional skills.

Testimony submitted to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum, by the Strnads’ niece, Brigitte Rohaczek, pro-vided the Milwaukee exhibit designers with additional information. She shared poignant memories of her vivacious Aunt Hedy — her real name was Hedwig — and the dressmaking shop she owned and operated in Prague. Hedy — a “lady tai-lor,” as Rohaczek described her — some-times had her seamstresses sew clothes

for Rohaczek’s dolls.The directors of the Milwaukee

museum came up with an innovative way to remember the Strnads: enlisting the costume makers from the Milwau-kee Repertory Theater to create clothing based on Hedy’s sketches.

The resulting exhibit, “Stitching His-tory from the Holocaust,” is a powerful and moving way to introduce an indi-vidual, personal dimension to Holocaust remembrance. It features eight outfits, among them fitted blouses and blazers, paired with A-line skirts, and knee-length dresses that cinched at the waist.

Why were the Strnads denied admis-sion to the United States? America’s immigration laws at the time made it dif-ficult for refugees such as the Strnads to

enter, and the way the Roosevelt admin-istration implemented those laws made it even harder.

Franklin Roosevelt’s State Depart-ment piled on extra requirements and

Paul and Hedy Strnad were rejected in their efforts to flee Czechoslovakia and seek safe haven in the United States on the eve of the Holocaust.

SEE STRNAD PAGE 41

Rafael Medoff is director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies.

These are among the designs by Hedy Strnad displayed at the Jewish Museum Milwaukee exhibit. PHOTOS COURTESY JEWISH MUSEUM MILWAUKEE


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Crossword BY DAVID BENKOF

October 18 & 19

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DATE!

As Seen In

Across1. Month that bring joy, traditionally5. Some Jaffa fruits10. Dave Berg’s magazine13. Many synagogue fundraisers15. Israel, as far as Iran is concerned16. Avraham, for short17. “Makin’ Whoopee” singer19. Purim drink, perhaps20. Gaon of note21. The sun does it as Shabbat ends22. Ratio for mathematician John von

Neumann23. Tanach prophet25. Happen again, as a Jewish holiday27. Levittown feature31. Scooby ___ (Cartoon shepherded by

Fred Silverman)32. Abbr. for the name of Rabbi Issac

Luria, with “The”33. Paddan ___ (whence patriarch

Abram)35. Bat mitzvah dances39. Program to save Jewish children

during World War II43. 52-Down rival44. The ___ Frank House (Amsterdam

tourist trap)45. Dead or Red body of water46. Where Jacques Derrida was born

(abbr.)48. “Hey There, It’s ___” (feature film

which Mel Blanc contributed to)51. Supervised Jewish slaves in Egypt55. “L’hitraot!”56. AJC target57. One of dozens in the Talmud (abbr.)59. Primo Levi’s lands63. “Jerusalem Post” money-makers64. Heavily contested part of Jerusalem66. Daisy ___ (“Li’l Abner” character)67. “The ___” (Conor Cruise O’Brien

work about Israel)68. Clem ___ (Eef Barzelay’s alt country

band)69. Adam Levine participated in the “ice

bucket challenge” to raise money for it (abbr.)

70. Freud and Sokolow71. Circumcise

Down1. Middle ___ (Crusades period)2. Movement for Tristan Tzara3. He played a presidential candidate in

Sorkin’s “West Wing”4. Attacked Entebbe5. Michele of “Glee”6. Holiday ___7. In an Israel cab, it’s called a “moneh”8. Wailed at the Wall9. Enemy of Isr.10. Street ___ (David Blaine talent)11. “___ Malkeinu” (“Our Father, Our

King”)12. NYU historian Hasia14. Capture territory, as during the Six-

Day War18. He’s on many Second Temple Period

coins22. Cause for excitement at “Haaretz”24. Neturei ___ (anti-Zionist Jewish

group)26. Reactions to Yehudi Menhuin playing

the violin27. Sponge ___ (Passover desert)28. Novelist Leon (“Exodus”)29. It’s sometimes thrown for tashlich on

Rosh Hashana30. Worker at a Purim event34. Purim gifts Shalach ___36. Bette Midler’s “The ___”37. Bay ___ (one-time site of The House

of Love and Prayer)38. Darren who created “Melrose Place”40. Abby and others41. Treif swimmers42. Israeli Zionism sometimes does it to

the diaspora47. Surrendered, as Bobby Fischer

sometimes would at chess49. Ashton and Mila or Chelsea and

Marc50. Rothschild and de Hirsch51. Jewish favorite of 201252. See 43-Across53. Lessens emigration restrictions54. Jewish ___ International (spin-off

from B’nai Brith)58. Org. that gives a Dinah Shore schol-

arship60. The Second Temple was left in it

after 70 CE61. “The King ___”62. It may lead to the mikvah64. It screens tourists flying from NYC

to Tel Aviv65. Densely populated Jewish neighbor-

hood (abbr.)

The solution for last week’s puzzle is on page 43.


JS-41*

Arts & Culture


One of Hedy Strnad’s designs, seen in the exhibit “Stitching History from the Holocaust.”

D’var Torah


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Sukkot: The happy holiday

The classical rabbis referred to Sukkot simply as HeChag: The Holiday.

We wouldn’t call it that today, when many more people attend services on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur than on Sukkot. But when the Temple stood in Jerusalem, Sukkot was the time to be there.

The Talmud says that one who has not seen the Sukkot water libation ceremony in the Temple has not seen rejoicing!

While the Temple is no more and we no longer offer water libations, for those who observe Sukkot it is still a very happy time. The High Holy Days are a serious time filled with prayer and introspection. But then we come to Sukkot and the fun begins! We move outside and build a sukkah, a temporary dwelling to spend a week

communing with nature, experiencing God’s wonders in a way more personal and direct than most of us usually do. We decorate our sukkot so that they are beautiful; we invite family, friends, and community to join us for meals.

The mitzvah is to dwell in sukkot for a week, as it says in the Book of Leviticus: “You shall live in sukkot seven days; all citizens in Israel shall live in Sukkot, in order that future generations may

know that I made the Israelite people live in sukkot when I brought them out of the land of Egypt.” (23:42-43) So the sukkah is a historical reminder of our forty year wandering in the desert where God protected us. It is also the fall harvest festival, the forerunner of Thanksgiving. We look at our bounty and we give thanks

to God, provider of all.We purchase for ourselves a lulav and

etrog set and for a week we bless and shake them. After all the words we said on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we stop with all the talking and take action. We pick up our lulav and etrog set, hold the four items together, and we shake them as a wordless prayer. We recognize God’s presence in nature, in all that grows, in every corner of the world. It is something so far removed from our regular experience that it feels both strange and meaningful at the same time. It can be done by young and old alike, it takes no practice or training. All you have to do is to open your heart and mind, making yourself ready to try something new and different.

We often think of our Judaism as logical and rational. On Sukkot, though, we not only invite living guests, but our long dead ancestors too! The tradition of Ushpizin comes from the mystical world of Kabbalah; on each of the

seven nights of Sukkot we invite seven Biblical characters: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, Joseph, and David. Many also invite seven women from our tradition today as well. There is not yet an agreed-upon list, but many use the seven female prophets named in the Talmud (BT Megillah 14a-b): Sarah, Miriam, Deborah, Hannah, Abigail, Huldah, and Esther. Other lists include Rebecca, Rachel, Leah, Eve, and Ruth.

If you’ve sat through the long services of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, then you owe it to yourself to enjoy some of the joy of Sukkot — shake that lulav and eat in the sukkah. Take your Judaism out of the synagogue, sit under the stars and contemplate the beauty of nature and the fragility of life. Be thankful for all that you have. Enjoy the people around you. Slow down, turn off your electronics and breathe deeply.

Don’t miss out on all that Judaism has to offer. The best is yet to come.

Wishing you a very joyous Sukkot!

Rabbi Randall MarkShomrei Torah - Wayne Conservative Congregation

bureaucratic obstacles. In an internal memo in 1940, Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long sketched out his department’s policy to “delay and effectively stop” refugee immigration by putting “every obstacle in the way,” such as requiring additional documents and resorting to “various administrative devices which would postpone and post-pone the granting of the visas.”

The annual quota of immigrants from Czechoslovakia was small — just 2,874 — but even that quota was not filled in any year during FDR’s 12 years in office.

In 1940, the year the Strnads wanted to immigrate, the Czech quota was only 68 percent filled; nearly 1,000 quota places sat unused. Even though there was room in the quota, and even though Hedy was a successful businesswoman and the cou-ple had relatives in the United States, the Strnads’ applications were turned down.

At the same time the Strnads were seeking a haven, refugee advocates were trying to convince the Roosevelt

administration to permit European Jews to settle in areas that were at the time U.S. territories but not states, such as the Vir-gin Islands and Alaska.

After Kristallnacht in November 1938, the governor and legislative assembly of the Virgin Islands offered to open its doors to Jewish refugees, but Roosevelt personally blocked the proposal.

In public and private statements, FDR claimed that Nazi spies might sneak into America disguised as refugees. U.S. offi-cials imagined that if spies reached the Virgin Islands, it would put them within easy reach of the mainland United States. (No Nazi spies were ever discovered among the few Jewish refugees who were let into the country.)

As for proposals to settle Jews in Alaska, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes Jr. noted in his diary that Roosevelt said he would support the plan only if no more than 10 percent of the settlers were Jews — so as “to avoid the undoubted criticism that we would be subjected to if there were an undue proportion of Jews,” FDR explained.

Shortly afterward, the administration

pushed through legislation that made it even more difficult for Jewish refu-gees to qualify for U.S. visas. The “close relatives” edict, as it was called, barred the entry of anyone who had close rela-tives in Europe. The theory was that the Nazis might take their relatives hostage in order to force them to become spies for Hitler. An interesting theory, but there was no evidence to substantiate it.

With all doors shut, the fate of Paul and Hedy — and countless other Jewish refu-gees — was sealed. They were sent first to the Terezin concentration camp, an hour north of Prague. Then they were deported to the Warsaw Ghetto.

What exactly happened next is unclear. They may have been murdered in War-saw, or they may have been deported, along with the other Jews of Warsaw, to the Treblinka death camp and died there.

The “Stitching History” exhibit, open through February 28, is a fitting tribute to a life taken too soon. It is also a sad reminder of a time when the U.S. govern-ment regarded Jewish refugees — even a lady tailor from Prague — as a danger.

JTA WIRE SERVICE

Strnad FROM PAGE 39

These are among the designs by Hedy Strnad displayed at the Jewish Museum Milwaukee exhibit. PHOTOS COURTESY JEWISH MUSEUM MILWAUKEE

Calendar


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Friday OCTOBER 10

Shabbat in Wayne: The Chabad Center of Passaic County hosts a Sukkot meal following Mincha-Maariv services, 6 p.m. 194 Ratzer Road. Chani, (973) 964-6274 or www.jewishwayne.com.

Shabbat in Leonia: Congregation Adas Emuno has a Sukkot pot luck dinner at 6:30, followed by services at 7:30 and folk music in the sukkah at 8:15. 254 Broad Ave. (201) 592-1712 or www.adasemuno.org.

Saturday OCTOBER 11

Shabbat for pets in River Edge: Temple Avodat Shalom offers a petting zoo, 3:45 p.m., pizza in the sukkah at 5, and pet blessings in the sukkah at 5:45. Pets must be on a leash or in an appropriate pet carrier. 385 Howland Ave. (201) 489-2463.

Sunday OCTOBER 12

Children’s program: The Jewish Community Center of Paramus/Congregation Beth Tikvah continues a “Sunday Specials” series for 4- to 7-year-olds, 9:30-11 a.m. Monthly activities include songs, crafts, bouncy castle, science, and cooking. Nut-free snacks. East 304 Midland Ave. (201) 262-7733 or [email protected].

Sukkot in Wayne: The Chabad Center of Passaic County hosts a Simchas Bais Hashoeva breakfast in the sukkah, 10 a.m. Party for adults and children with stories and entertainment by John Pizzi. 194 Ratzer Road. Chani, (973) 964-6274 or www.jewishwayne.com.

Dr. Adolfo Roitman

Dead Sea scrolls: The Glen Rock Jewish Center and Temple Beth Sholom of Fair Lawn sponsor a program on “The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls for Judaism:

Myth and Reality,” by Dr. Adolfo Roitman, at the GRJC, 11 a.m. 682 Harristown Road. (201) 797-9321, ext. 415, or (201) 652-6624.

Sukkot in Teaneck: Congregation Rinat Yisrael hosts the Wandering Que, a kosher pop-up smokehouse barbecue with a large Texas-style wood-burning barbecue, in the shul’s parking lot/sukkah, 12:15-9 p.m. Barbecue menu features award-winning pulled and sliced brisket (platters and sandwiches), ribs, chicken, turkey legs, hot dogs/sausages, chili, cholent, lamb belly, “bacon” baked beans, soup, key limeade, and side dishes. 389 West Englewood Ave. (201) 837-2795.

Family program in New Milford: Solomon Schechter Day School of Bergen County offers “Sundays at Schechter,” a community-wide Jewish themed interactive family series, with a “Sukkah Bash with Musical IQ,” 1-3 p.m. Storytelling, musical instruments, songs, drumming workshops, arts and crafts, and nut-free snacks. Special lunch for alumni families with

young children at 12:30. 295 McKinley Ave. (201) 262-9898, ext. 213 or [email protected].

Sukkot in Franklin Lakes: The Chabad Jewish Center of NW Bergen County has a community children’s pizza party in the largest sukkah in the town, 4 p.m. Activities include making personal stone-baked pizzas, refreshments, crafts, prizes, children’s entertainment, and lively Israeli music. 75 Pulis Ave. Rabbi Chanoch Kaplan, (201) 848-0449 or [email protected].

Ruth Calderon

Knesset member in Teaneck: Ruth Calderon, a member of the Israeli Knesset, discusses “Talmud as a Bridge Between Secular and Religious Israelis” at Congregation Rinat Yisrael, 8 p.m. 389 W. Englewood Ave. (201) 837-2795.

Celebrating Rabbi Goldin in Englewood: To honor Rabbi Shmuel Goldin’s completion of his Torah commentary, “Unlocking the Torah Text,” Congregation Ahavath Torah honors its head rabbi at a Simchat Beit Hashoeva in the shul’s new sukkah, 7 p.m. Music, dance, and refreshments. Book sets available for sale and signing. 240 Broad Ave. (201) 568-1315 or www.ahavathtorah.org.

Monday OCTOBER 13

Senior program in Wayne: The Chabad Center of Passaic County continues its “Smile on Seniors” program with soup in the sukkah, at the center, 11:30 a.m. Light brunch. $5. 194 Ratzer Road. (973) 694-6274 or [email protected].

Hadassah meets in Teaneck: Teaneck-Hackensack Hadassah meets at Congregation

Beth Sholom for a catered dairy luncheon in the sukkah, 12:30 p.m. Refreshments. 354 Maitland Ave. Inge, (201) 837-2948.

Tuesday OCTOBER 14

Rabbi Alberto Zeilicovich

Holocaust survivor group in Fair Lawn: Cafe Europa, a social program the Jewish Family Service of North Jersey sponsors for Holocaust survivors, funded in part by the Conference on Material Claims Against Germany, Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey, and private donations, meets at the Fair Lawn Jewish Center/Congregation B’nai Israel, 11 a.m.-1 p.m. Rabbi Alberto Zeilicovich of Temple Beth Sholom in Fair Lawn will discuss “A Different Perspective on the High Holy Days.” Light lunch. 10-10 Norma

Ave. Transportation available. (973) 595-0111 or www.jfsnorthjersey.org.

Sukkah party in Teaneck: CareOne in Teaneck hosts a community sukkah party with a magic show by Simon Mandal and face painting by Snazzy Jazzy, 1-3 p.m. 544 Teaneck Road. (201) 862-3300.

Wednesday OCTOBER 15

Bus trip to the Bronx: The Englewood & Cliffs chapter of ORT America hosts a bus trip/ guided tour to Woodlawn Cemetery and City Island, with a gourmet lunch. Bus leaves at 8:45 a.m. from Cong. Gesher Shalom/JCC of Fort Lee, 1449 Anderson Ave. Bunny, (201) 585-2028.

Simchat Torah in Tenafly: Temple Sinai of Bergen County offers a young family service, 5:30 p.m., for 2- to 6-year-olds, who must be accompanied by a parent. 1 Engle St. (201) 568-3035.

Simchat Torah in Leonia: Congregation Adas Emuno has pizza in the sukkah, 6 p.m., and services at 7. 254 Broad Ave. (201) 592-1712 or www.adasemuno.org.

Simchat Torah and consecration service in Closter: Temple Beth El invites the community to an erev Simchat Torah/consecration service led by Rabbi David S. Widzer and Cantor Rica Timman, 6:30 p.m. 221 Schraalenburgh Road. (201) 768-5112.

Simchat Torah and consecration service in River Edge: Temple Avodat Shalom invites the community to an erev Simchat Torah/consecration service for new religious school students, 7 p.m. 385 Howland Ave. (201) 489-2463.

Thursday OCTOBER 16

Simchat Torah in River Edge: Temple Avodat Shalom has a service, 10 a.m., followed by Torah study and lunch sponsored by Rabbi Jacobson’s discretionary fund, 10 a.m. 385 Howland Ave. (201) 489-2463.

The kids’ bluegrass band Astrograss performs a family concert at Manhattan’s Jewish Museum on Sunday, October 12, at 11:30 a.m. Some of the songs are from the group’s 2012 album, “Colored Pencil Factory”; others celebrate the natural world,

in honor of Sukkot. 1109 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street. (212) 423-3337 or TheJewishMuseum.org.

OCT.

12

Calendar


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Simchat Torah in Franklin Lakes: The Chabad Jewish Center of NW Bergen County has a community Simchat Torah celebration, 5:30 p.m. including an open bar, buffet dinner, children’s program with prizes, and dancing all night long. 75 Pulis Ave. Rabbi Chanoch Kaplan, (201) 848-0449 or [email protected].

Simchat Torah in Wayne: The Chabad Center of Passaic County celebrates with dancing, buffet dinner, prizes for children, 6:30 p.m. 194 Ratzer Road. Chani, (973) 964-6274 or www.jewishwayne.com.

Simchat Torah in Emerson: Congregation B’nai Israel offers services; Hebrew school students, recent alumni, and adults can watch an entire Torah scroll be unfurled, followed by singing and dancing with the Torah, 7:30 p.m. Refreshments. 53 Palisade Ave. (201) 265-2272 or www.bisrael.com.

Simchat Torah in Paramus: The Jewish Community Center of Paramus/Congregation Beth Tikvah offers a community celebration, 7:15 p.m. East 304 Midland Ave. (201) 262-7691 or www.jccparamus.org.

Friday OCTOBER 17

Simchat Torah for women: The Teaneck Women’s Tefillah begins its celebration with Shacharit at 8:45 a.m., followed by hakafot, Torah reading, Musaf, and a kiddush. All women welcome to participate. For location information, email [email protected].

Shabbat in Closter: Temple Beth El in Closter invites the community to Shabbat evening services at 7:30 pm. 221 Schraalenburgh Road, Closter. 201-768-5112

Shabbat in Teaneck: Temple Emeth hosts a festive kosher Shabbat dinner at 6 p.m., followed by services and the annual Rabbi Joshua Trachtenberg Memorial Lecture, where Rabbi Geoffrey A. Mittleman, founding director of Sinai and Synapses, will talk about “The Strange Nature of Time.” 1666 Windsor Road. Dinner reservations, (201) 833-1322 or www.emeth.org.

Saturday OCTOBER 18

Military bridge in Montebello: The sisterhood of the Montebello Jewish Center hosts a night of military bridge, 7:30 p.m. 34 Montebello Road, Montebello, N.Y. (845) 357-2430.

Sunday OCTOBER 19

Susan Tuchman

Anti-Semitism at college: The Bergen County High School of Jewish Studies invites parents of college-bound teens to a community-wide breakfast at Ma’yanot Yeshiva High School for Girls in Teaneck, 9:45 a.m.-12:30 p.m. Susan Tuchman, director of the Center for Law & Justice for the Zionist Organization of America, will speak.1650 Palisade Ave. (201) 488-0834 or www.wizevents.com/register/2950.

Open house/family event in Closter: Temple Emanu-El offers “Fall Family Day,” with a trackless train, face painting, photo booth, petting zoo, pony rides, food, bouncy house, and CMEK basketball, 11:15 a.m.-1:15 p.m. 180 Piermont Road. (201) 750-9997, or www.templeemanu-el.com.

Parents learn about Shabbat: The Jewish Community Center of Paramus/Congregation Beth Tikvah offers its Parent Involvement Program, led by Rob Chananie and Eileen Schneider, to teach parents of bnai mitzvah children about the Shabbat services, 9:45 a.m. East 304 Midland Ave. (201) 262-7691 or www.jccparamus.org.

Awareness walk in Westwood: The social action committee of Congregation B’nai Israel in Emerson co-sponsors the “Walk for Water” with the Westwood Area Clergy Council to raise awareness for the women of Rwanda, at

Westvale Park on Sand Road, 1-5 p.m. Attendees meet at the park and bring 2-liter bottles or gallon jugs to fill the bottles at Pascack Brook Park. (201) 666-8998 or [email protected].

Film in Franklin Lakes: Temple Emanuel of North Jersey hosts a screening of “The 1939 World’s Fair in New York City,” 2 p.m. The silent color recording is from the Medicus Amateur Film Collection; a soundtrack of dance music from the 1920s and 1930s has been added. Refreshments. 558 High Mountain Road. (201) 560-0200 or www.tenjfl.org.

Cabaret entertainment in Fair Lawn: Temple Beth Sholom hosts “Cabaret Night on the Lower East Side,” including entertainment by the mentalist team of Larry & Raven, comedy by Brad Zimmerman, and a show by ventriloquist Kenny Warren, all emceed by Matt Liebman. Catering by Kosher Nosh, 5:30 p.m. 40-25 Fair Lawn Ave. (201) 797-9321.

SinglesSunday OCTOBER 12

Senior singles meet in West Nyack: Singles 65+ meets for a social bagel and lox brunch at the JCC Rockland, 11 a.m. 450 West Nyack Road. $8. Gene Arkin, (845) 356-5525.

Sunday OCTOBER 19

Singles meet in Caldwell: New Jersey Jewish Singles 45+ meets for lunch, Pictionary, prizes, and mingling at Congregation Agudath Israel, 12:45 p.m. $10. 20 Academy Road. (973) 226-3600, ext. 145, [email protected], or [email protected].

Thursday OCTOBER 23

Widows and widowers meet in Glen Rock: Movin’ On, a monthly luncheon group for widows and widowers, meets at the Glen Rock Jewish Center, 12:30-2 p.m. 682 Harristown Road. $5 for lunch. (201) 652-6624 or [email protected].

Free outdoor workout Oct. 19The Kaplen JCC on the Palisades will host “Jewish New Year, New You” — a free, one-hour high intensity workout — with JCC master trainer Kimani Greene. For teens and adults of all levels, the class will fea-ture a live DJ and will be held outdoors, weather permitting, on the JCC tennis courts. The goal is to help people take one step further to a healthier lifestyle as the new Jewish Year begins.

The JCC has a skilled, inspirational team of certified fitness instructors teaching Yoga, Pilates, Barre, Spin, Zumba, and more.

The rain date is Sunday, October 26, from 10 to 11 a.m. For information, call Barbara Marrott at (201) 408-1475 or [email protected].

Community sukkah party at Care OneCare One at Teaneck is hosting a sukkah party for the community on Tuesday, October 14, from 1 to 3 p.m. Magician Simon Mandal will perform at 1:30, and Snazzy Jazzy will offer face painting. Care One is at 544 Teaneck Road. For informa-tion, call (201) 862-3300.

Simon Mandal

Acrobats from Peking coming to EnglewoodThe National Acrobats of Peking will perform on Saturday, Novem-ber 8, at 8 p.m., at the Bergen Per-forming Arts Center, 30 North Van Brunt Street in Englewood. Tickets are available at www.ticketmaster.com or www.bergenpac.org, or at the box office, (201) 227-1030.

Children’s program features nature presentationThe religious school at the Jewish Com-munity Center of Paramus/Congrega-tion Beth Tikvah continues a free Sunday Special series for children in kindergar-ten to second grade. The next day in the series, Sunday, October 12, at 9:30 a.m., is a nature program with Elinor Grayzel, a naturalist educator from Flat Rock Brook Nature Center. Kosher nut-free snacks will be served in the shul’s sukkah.

The synagogue is at 304 East Midland Ave., in Paramus. For information, call (201) 262-7733 or email [email protected].

Obituaries


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Ralph Goldman, former JDC head and a builder of Israel, dies at 100MARCY OSTER AND RON KAMPEAS

JERUSALEM — Ralph Goldman, who as a young man helped shepherd the State of Israel into existence and later devoted his professional life to bring-ing humanitarian relief to Jews across the globe, has died at 100.

Mr. Goldman, who worked with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee since 1968 — he served twice as its chief executive and still held the title of honorary executive vice president — died on Tuesday in Jerusalem, where he had lived for decades.

Active in arming and populating pre-state Israel, he went on to lead the effort to bring American tech-nical know-how and educational techniques to the fledgling state.

“Ralph was an iconic and transformative figure who embodied the notion that all Jews are responsible for one another throughout his long and extraor-dinary life,” the JDC’s CEO, Alan Gill, said.

Born on September 1, 1914, in the town of Lechovitz in what is now Ukraine, when he was 11 Mr. Goldman and his family immigrated to a Jewish suburb of Boston, where he attended the local public schools during the day and Hebrew school five days a week in the late afternoons. Graduating from Hebrew College

in 1934, he delivered the valedic-tory speech in Hebrew.

As a young man, Mr. Gold-man was involved in local Zionist endeavors. In 1937 he won a con-test sponsored by a student Zion-ist organization for his essay on Stalin’s idea of creating a “home-land for the Jews” in Siberia. He was awarded a fellowship to spend a year in British Mandate Palestine, where he participated in the establishment of Kibbutz Hanita in the Galilee.

He later recalled two months during the 1938 fellowship he spent in Jerusalem, where he and some friends sought out Zionist leaders such as Berl Katznelson, Moshe Sharett, and Menachem Ussishkin, who barely were known in the outside world, but were heroes to the young Zionists.

“We simply said to them please tell us what’s happening, and they took us seriously,” Mr. Gold-man said in an undated interview posted on YouTube.

Mr. Goldman returned to the United States and went on to earn a bachelor’s degree from Boston University and a master’s in social work from Harvard.

He served in the U.S. Army from 1942 to 1945, first in the United States, then in England. At the conclusion of World War II, he was stationed in Germany, where he was assigned to assist Jews in Displaced Persons camps.

He was active in the New York operation of pre-state Israel’s army, the Haganah, helping to buy and lease airplanes and ships to carry immigrants from Europe to Palestine, and assisting in the effort to recruit personnel for the nascent force. Through this work Mr. Goldman met and befriended Teddy Kollek, who later would become the longtime mayor of Jerusalem.

Decades later, Mr. Goldman still registered embarrassment when he was reminded of his purchase of the President Warf-ield, a one-time ferry. Named for the shipping magnate uncle of Wallis Simpson — the Baltimore socialite and notorious admirer of Hitler who had married King Edward VIII — the boat was flat-bottomed and unsuitable for long sea voyages. The President Warfield barely made it across the Atlantic to Marseilles, where 5,000 Jewish refugees awaited passage to British Mandate Palestine.

His Haganah colleagues were furious with Mr. Goldman, but they also were desperate to move, so they prepared the boat for launch, with Mr. Goldman help-ing to manage the passage across the Mediterranean. The boat was renamed the Exodus, and its

standoff outside Haifa became a symbol of Jewish resistance to Britain’s refusal to allow in Jews.

Mr. Goldman became a close confidant and adviser to Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, and in 1951 he was in charge of the prime minister’s initial visit to the United States as head of state. Mr. Goldman spent several years after that coordinat-ing a U.S. program that delivered technical know-how to emerging countries; a 1951 announcement in New York said he was heading up the search for “skilled work-ers” to train Israelis.

He later served as executive director of the American-Israel Cultural Foundation and the Israel Education Fund, an arm of the United Jewish Appeal that helped establish and improve high schools in Israel.

Mr. Goldman joined the JDC in 1968, when he became the asso-ciate director of its Israel opera-tion, establishing its department for the care of the elderly and introducing innovations in early childhood care. He would serve as the chief executive of JDC from 1976 until 1985, and again from 1986 to 1988.

Mr. Goldman was a driving force in JDC’s low-profile activi-ties behind the Iron Curtain, and

in the 1970s and 1980s he brought JDC programs back into the open in communist countries. He led sensitive negotiations with Soviet leaders, navigating JDC’s return to what would become the for-mer Soviet Union almost imme-diately after its collapse.

Asked in 2012 how he pulled off such negotiations without the benefit of diplomatic training or accreditation, Mr. Goldman said, “I was representing the Jewish people. I couldn’t afford to fail.”

Last month Limmud FSU and the Jewish community of Belarus joined to celebrate Mr. Gold-man’s 100th birthday as part of the opening gala at the begin-ning of a Limmud FSU confer-ence held in Vitebsk.

Mr. Goldman also was honored at JDC’s centennial celebration in Jerusalem in May.

His son, David Ben-Rafael, a senior Israeli diplomat, was killed in the March 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Argen-tina. Mr. Goldman is survived by his daughters, Judith Baumgold of Jerusalem and Naomi Gold-man of New York; a daughter-in-law, Elisa Ben-Rafael of Jeru-salem; and six grandchildren, as well as great-grandchildren.

JTA WIRE SERVICERalph Goldman helping Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion with his coat. COURTESY JDC

Then-Israeli President Shimon Peres, standing, greets Ralph Goldman at a salute for the former American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee leader’s 100th birthday in 2014. COURTESY JDC

Obituaries


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WIEN & WIEN, INC.MEMORIAL CHAPELS

800-322-0533

402 PARK STREET, HACKENSACK, NJ 07601

ALAN L. MUSICANT, Mgr., N.J. Lic. No. 2890

MARTIN D. KASDAN, N.J. Lic. No. 4482

IRVING KLEINBERG, N.J. Lic. No. 2517

Advance Planning Conferences Conveniently Arranged

at Our Funeral Home or in Your Own Home

GuttermanMusicantWien.com

A joyous Sukkot to you and your familyfrom the members of the Jewish Memorial Chapel

841 Allwood Road • Clifton, NJ 07012973-779-3048 • Fax 973-779-3191www.JewishMemorialChapel.orgVincent Marazo, ManagerNJ License No. 3424

Adas Israel • PassaicAgudath Israel • CaldwellAhavas Achim • BloomfieldAhavas Israel • PassaicAmelia Lodge • Cli�onBeth Ahm • VeronaBeth El • RutherfordBeth Israel • Fair Lawn

Beth Shalom • Pompton Lakes

B’nai Shalom • West OrangeChevra Thilim • Passaic

Cli�on Jewish Center • Cli�onDaughters of Miriam • Cli�on

Farband • PassaicHungarian Hebrew Men • Pinebrook

Jewish Federa�on • Cli�on

Jewish War Veterans Post 47 • Cli�onKnights of Pythias Memorial

Associa�on • Cli�onPassaic Hebrew Verein • Passaic

Pine Brook Jewish Center • MontvilleShomrei Emunah • MontclairTemple Emanuel • Cli�on

Temple Ner Tamid • BloomfieldTifereth Israel • PassaicYoung Israel • Passaic

COMMUNITY OWNED AND OPERATED SINCE 1921 • NON�PROFIT

Established 1902

Headstones, Duplicate Markers and Cemetery LetteringWith Personalized and Top Quality Service

Please call 1-800-675-5624

www.kochmonument.com

76 Johnson Ave., Hackensack, NJ 07601

201-791-0015 800-525-3834

LOUIS SUBURBAN CHAPEL, INC.Exclusive Jewish Funeral Chapel

Sensitive to Needs of the Jewish Community for Over 50 Years

13-01 Broadway (Route 4 West) · Fair Lawn, NJ Richard Louis - Manager George Louis - Founder NJ Lic. No. 3088 1924-1996

• Serving NJ, NY, FL & Israel• Graveside services at all NJ & NY cemeteries

• Prepaid funerals and all medicaid funeral benefits honored

“Always within a family’s financial means”

• Our Facilities Will Accommodate Your Family’s Needs

• Handicap Accessibility From Large Parking Area

Conveniently LocatedW-150 Route 4 East • Paramus, NJ 07652

201.843.9090 1.800.426.5869

Robert Schoem’s Menorah Chapel, Inc

Jewish Funeral DirectorsFamily Owned & managed

Generations of Lasting Service to the Jewish Community

• Serving NJ, NY, FL & Throughout USA

• Prepaid & Preneed Planning• Graveside Services

Gary Schoem – Manager - NJ Lic. 3811

Dr. Arthur GenenDr. Arthur Genen, 79, of Emerson, died October 5. He received his Ph.D. from New York Univer-sity and was a long-time professor, teacher, and guidance counselor.

He is survived by his wife, Barbara; children, Dr. Linda Genen (Wil-liam Huckins), and Dr. Lawrence (Lauren); a sister, Ruthie Genen Glassman (Russ); and two grandchildren.

Contributions can be sent to the American Macular Degeneration Foundation or Ameri-can Heart Association. Arrangements were by Gutterman and Musicant Jewish Funeral Directors, Hackensack.

Ange GuezAnge Guez of New York City, 92, died October 5.

Born in Tunisia, he was a retired electrician.

Predeceased by his wife, Julie, and a son, Francis, he is survived by daughters Martine and Michelle Horowitz, both of Fort Lee; a sister, Frieda Gabriel of Canada; and two grandchildren.

Arrangements were by Eden Memorial Chapels, Fort Lee.

Florence Nydick Florence Nydick, neé Moskowitz, 92, of Jersey City, died on October 4.

Before retiring, she was a secretary at Henry Snyder High School in Jersey City. She was a former member of ORT Hudson County, Ameri-can Jewish Congress, and the Skyline Cabana Club.

Predeceased by her husband, Hy, in 2003, she is survived by her children, Alan of Rock-leigh, and Jody Druda ( Joseph) of Jersey City.

Arrangements were by Eden Memorial Chapels, Fort Lee.

Yefim ReznikYefim Reznik, 67, of Fair Lawn, died October 2.

Before retiring, he was a bus driver for New Jer-sey Transit and had been a professional soccer player in Russia.

Predeceased by a son, Lawrence, he is survived by his wife, Ida; a son, Gary (Leslie), and six grandchildren.

Arrangements were by Louis Suburban Chapel, Fair Lawn.

Eleanor SchwartzEleanor M., Schwartz, 98, of Fair Lawn, died October 2. Arrangements were by Louis Suburban Chapel, Fair Lawn.

Rita Sherman Rita J. Sherman, 94, a life-long resident of Passaic-Clifton, died October 2.

Predeceased by her husband, Abe, she is survived by her chil-dren, Alan (Debbie), and Barbara Bressler; a sister, Harriette Gonsky; three grandchildren, and two great-grandsons.

Arrangements were by Jewish Memorial Chapel in Clifton.

Elliott TaradashEilliott Jules Taradash, 87, of East Hampton, N.Y., formerly of Clifton, died September 3.

He attended the Illinois Institute of Technology and served as a sergeant in the Army Corps of Engineers during World War II. He graduated from New York University and worked at M. Gross-man & Son, Inc., a manu-facturer of Betmar Hats. He served many terms as

president of the Jewish Federation of Passaic and Clifton and the Northern New Jersey chapter of B’nai B’rith.

He is survived by his wife of 64 years, Gloria, daughters Meryl Tara-dash (Wayne La Pierre) and Lauree Dash Austin (Ford); and a grandson.

Donations can be sent to the Jewish Center of the Hamptons. Arrange-ments were by Jewish Memorial Chapel, Clifton.

Classified


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Home energy auditEnsure an energy-efficient house this winterMARK J. DONOVAN

An energy-efficient house is tan-tamount to keeping winter heat-ing bills down. By conducting a fall season home energy audit,

no doubt you will find ways to save energy at home this winter. Even if your home was originally constructed as an energy-efficient house, ultimately time and nature have a way of taking their toll on your home. For example, opening and closing doors and windows over months and years can cause weatherstripping to break down and lose its ability to insulate and protect your home from cold winter drafts.

To ensure an energy-efficient home this

winter, grab a pen and notebook, and take a tour of your home and conduct your own home energy audit. Start in the furnace room. Check to see when you most recently had your furnace cleaned. It should be cleaned every year, even if it is a gas furnace. A clean furnace is critical for ensuring that it is operating safely and efficiently.

If your home has a basement, check the exposed hot water supply pipes and see whether they are insulated with pipe foam insulation. If not, insulate them. It’s cheap, and it is an easy do-it-yourself project for saving energy at home.

Next on your home energy audit is to check all the doors and windows and con-firm that they open and close properly.

Inspect the weatherstripping to confirm that it’s in good working order, as well. Ideally, examine the doors and windows on a cool, windy day so that you can check for drafts.

The attic is the chief culprit for winter home energy loss. Heat rises, and if the attic is improperly insulated, heat from the lower living areas of the home will find its way into the attic and eventually out of the home via the ridge and soffit roof vents.

Inspect the attic for proper insulation. Depending upon where you live, you should have at least R-30 or R-38 insu-lation in the attic. Make sure that when inspecting the insulation, you check for small breaks. Even the smallest of un-insulated areas in the attic can lead to a dramatic reduction in energy efficiency.

Next take a look at the shower heads in your bathrooms. Heating water is another major culprit in high energy costs. By replacing the old shower heads

with low-flow shower heads, you can dramatically save energy at home.

After addressing the big-ticket items in your home energy audit, look at the electrical appliances and light fixtures. By replacing the standard incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent light bulbs, you can reduce your home’s lighting energy consumption by as much as 70 percent. Also, if you have the bud-get, consider replacing some of the old appliances — for example, the refrigera-tor, dishwasher, microwave, and washer and dryer — with Energy Star appliances.

So conduct your own home energy audit this fall, and implement some, if not all, of the suggestions I recom-mended. By doing so, you will be guar-anteed to have an energy-efficient house this winter. CREATORS.COM

Mark J. Donovan’s website is at http://www.homeadditionplus.com.

Your furnace should be cleaned every year for safety and efficiency.

Real Estate & Business


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Allan Dorfman Broker/Associate

201-461-6764 Eve201-970-4118 Cell

201-585-8080 x144 [email protected]

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2013

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[email protected] · [email protected] · www.MironProperties.com/NJ

Each Miron Properties office is independently owned and operated.

Contact us today for your complimentary consultation!

CLOSTER

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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

Remarkable Service. Exceptional Results.

Real Estate & Business


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SELLING YOUR HOME?

Call Susan Laskin TodayTo Make Your Next Move A Successful One!

©2014 Coldwell Banker Real Estate LLC. Coldwell Banker is a registered trademark licensed to Coldwell Banker Real Estate LLC. An Equal Opportunity Company. Equal Housing Opportunity. Owned and Operated by NRT LLC.

Cell: 201-615-5353 BergenCountyRealEstateSource.com

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Limitless Arts: a new program for students with special needsbergenPAC Performing arts School announces classes in dance, music and drama for children and teens ages 2-18+ with special needs. The classes will be run in collaboration with Renee Red-ding-Jones of The Center for Life and Learning. Classes are taught by trained and experienced professionals and offer small class sizes. Classes run from Octo-ber 6, 2014 to June 14, 2015. Registration is accepted throughout the year. Visit bergenpac.org/limitlessarts for details. To enroll now or for more information: (201) 816-8160 x35 or [email protected].

As the education center of bergenPAC, The Performing Arts School continues

to broaden its reach to include students with varying levels of ability. “We are so proud to offer this exciting new program,” said Alexander Roland Diaz, director of education. “This perfectly supports and reflects our mission to make the performing arts accessible to everyone.”

The creation of the program expands the school’s curriculum to include classes for individuals who require greater support in a group setting. The smaller group setting and low student to teacher ratio will allow participants an opportunity to explore their artistic interests in a nurturing and stimulating environment.

Friedberg and Morrison attend workshopFriedberg Properties’ Teresa Morrison, manager-relocation director, and Marlyn Friedberg, broker-owner, attended Lead-ing Real Estate Companies of the World Fall Workshop in Providence, Rhode Island, on September 15-16. Participants included brokers, managers and reloca-tion directors from top real estate �irms around the country.

The workshop offered a range of educational sessions on topics relating to today’s real estate market and included a variety of open forum discussions that concentrated on how to best serve the

interests of home buyers and sellers. Friedberg Properties is the Bergen County area representative of Leading Real Estate Companies of the World, the largest network of top independent local and regional brand-name brokerage �irms in the residential sector of real estate. Over 500 �irms af�iliated with Leading RE are represented by 3,500 of�ices and 120,000 associates in nearly 50 countries.

For further information, visit fr iedbergproperties.com or call 201-568-1818.

‘Little White Lie’ featured at Teaneck film festivalA documentary revealing a Jewish moth-er’s “Little White Lie” is one of the fea-tured �ilms at this year’s Teaneck Inter-national Film Festival in November.

“We were very much drawn to the subject matter of this �ilm, which is why we chose to sponsor it,” said Joel Goldin, sales and marketing director at Heritage Pointe of Teaneck, the independent senior community. “It’s a very moving documentary that should resonate with the �ilm festival’s audience.”

“Little White Lie” is the story of its �ilmmaker, Lacey Schwartz, a Harvard Law School graduate, who grew up as an only child in a Jewish family in upstate New York. Dark complexioned, she had long been told throughout her childhood that she favored her father’s swarthy Sicilian

grandfather. She didn’t learn until she returned from college after her freshman year and confronted her mother, that she was, in fact, the result of an extramarital affair her mother had with an African-American.

Now 37, Schwartz worked 10 years making the �ilm, which was recently featured in The New York Times.

“In interviews Schwartz has said that she hopes the �ilm will start discussions not only around race, but about the consequences of keeping family secrets,” said Goldin. “I think it’s the one �ilm that attendees at this year’s festival won’t want to miss.”

The festival runs from Friday, November 7, through Sunday, November 9, when “Little White Lie” will be aired at Temple Emeth.

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North Jersey Jewish Standard, Oct. 10, 2014

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Transcript of North Jersey Jewish Standard, Oct. 10, 2014