Ami

DUST SETTLES AFTER ISRAELI ELECTIONS • LYME DISEASE: A NAZI WEAPON? EXCLUSIVE COVERAGE AND INTERVIEWS ROSH KOLLEL OF TORONTO ATTORNEY JULIUS BERMAN AUTHOR ANTHONY BIANCO GABBAI TZEDAKAH YOSEF WEBER

A Philanthropist Beyond Compare Reb Moshe Reichmann z”l 5691-- 5774

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1930 - 2013

ISSUE 141 OCTOBER 30, 2013 26 CHESHVAN 5774

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10.30.2013 2 6 C H E S H VA N 5 7 7 4

Departments

Features

32

ARNOOOSA P Getting down to business MAURICE STEI N

34

66

HE JOURNEY T One thing they can’t take away

38

68

SK A Jealous of my husband’s job

70

HE SHUL CHRONICLES T Bas mitzvah celebrations BRAINSTORM

28

72 74

30 31

77 78

MY WORD!

8 12 16

EDITORIAL Are Jews really that smart?

LETTERS ATIONAL AND N INTERNATIONAL NEWS YOS SI KRAUSZ

20 22 24

IN THE NEWS TURX

SIGHTINGS AND CITINGS BEN ROSEN

EWISH NEWS J Israeli elections—Chicago chasidish kollel CHANANYA BLEICH AND NESANEL GANTZ

EWISH LIVING IN: J West Hartford, Connecticut

YEDI DA WOLFE

MBASSADORS A Family therapy CHANY VOGE L

RABBI SHAI S TAUB

RABBI MOSH E TAUB

YITZY YABOK

THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE Flight to freedom

RABBI YITZCHAK ADLER

BUSINESS

RABBI SHOLOM FRI EDMANN

AS TOLD TO M IRI ROSE

ASH ER V. FI NN

STREETS OF LIFE Surveying the surveys RABBI MORDECHAI KAM ENETZKY

49

10 A M I M A G A Z I N E / / O C T O B E R 2 , 2 0 1 3 / / 2 8 T I S H R E I 5 7 7 4

Q & A WITH SHAI SECUNDA The Iranian Talmud RAFI BERGER

S PYVIEW: BLOWING THE LID OFF LYME The deadly imprint of Nazi spies JOHN LOFTUS

46

R AV SHLOMO MILLER REMEMBERS The famed rosh kollel on Moshe Reichmann RABBI YITZCHOK FRANKFURTER

49

R ESHAPING THE SKYLINE Reb Moshe Reichmann and his achievements

55

YOSSI KRAUSZ AND CHANANYA BLEICH

I N AN EMPIRE OF TZEDAKAH Moshe Reichmann’s gabbai tzedakah

56

YOSSI KRAUSZ

“ BRILLIANT BEYOND COMPARE” Julius Berman on Moshe Reichmann

58

RABBI YITZCHOK FRANKFURTER

T HE REICHMANN BIOGRAPHER A journalist remembers his subject.

RABBI YITZCHOK FRANKFURTER

RABBI YITZCHOK FRANKFURTER

Are Jews Really That Smart?

T

his month’s announcements from Stockholm about the newly-designated Nobel laureates made most Jewish people feel proud. Once again, a disproportionate number of Jews were Nobel Prize recipients. Jews comprise only 0.2% of the world’s population and 2% of the American populace. Yet between 1901 and 2013, 22% of all Nobel laureates and 37% of US recipients have been Jews.

Political scientist Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute described the disproportionate number of Jewish Nobel Prize winners this way: “In the first half of the 20th century, despite pervasive and continuing social discrimination against Jews throughout the Western world, despite the retraction of legal rights, and despite the Holocaust, Jews won 14% of Nobel Prizes in literature, chemistry, physics and medicine/physiology. In the second half of the 20th century, when Nobel Prizes began to be awarded to people from all over the world, that figure rose to 29%. So far, in the 21st century, it has been 32%.”

For sure, we Jews have a reputation for being an intelligent bunch. But the question as to what makes us intelligent continues to spark fierce scholarly debate and controversy. The issue has been in the forefront of the “nature versus nurture” battle, with some arguing that Jewish brainpower is best explained by the way we educate our children, and others saying that Jews have smart genes. Since Jews do not constitute a distinct genetic group—there is no “Jewish gene”—the notion that the intellectual capabilities of Jews are hereditary is problematic.

Political correctness, as well as charges of scientific racism, has further complicated the discussion. Then there are the anti-Semites who are infuriated, as Hitler was, by the very idea that Jews are naturally endowed with better minds.

Nobel Prize laureate Professor Robert Aumann, an Orthodox Jew, attributes Jewish intelligence to limmud haTorah. “Torah study is an intellectual pursuit, and honoring this ultimate value transfers to other pursuits as well,” he recently proclaimed. However, since most Jewish Nobel Prize recipients are not Orthodox and limmud haTorah does not rank very high in their hierarchy of values, this explanation seems dubious.

But before we become overly infatuated with our smarts, we ought to ask ourselves: Are we Jews really that smart? If the sole 8 A M I M A G A Z I N E / / O C T O B E R 3 0 , 2 0 1 3 / / 2 6 C H E S H VA N 5 7 7 4

barometer of intelligence is IQ, then the answer appears to be in the affirmative. The results of IQ tests of Ashkenazi Jews indicate a high mean score.

However, traditional definitions of intelligence, with their strict emphasis on cognitive skills such as memory and problem-solving, are somewhat outmoded. In the 1900s, several prominent researchers began to recognize the influence of the non-cognitive aspects of human makeup on intelligence and performance outcomes. These scholars argued that our models of intelligence are not complete unless we also take into account emotional intelligence, or what they have dubbed “EQ.” If Jewish intelligence were to be measured by this criterion, especially our ability to harness our emotions, it is painful to admit that we probably wouldn’t fare well at all. Our incessant self-destructive behavior certainly indicates that in the emotional arena there is much to be desired. No smart and emotionally stable nation, for example, would seek to socially engineer one of its proudest minorities while it is being threatened with annihilation by its enemies, as Israel is currently trying to do.

Psychoanalysts, beginning with Freud, have demonstrated that Jews exhibit particularly pronounced neurotic tendencies. A study carried out by sociologist Leo Srole showed that the Jewish rate of neuroses and character disorders is about three times as high as that of non-Jews.

While the Torah never refers to Jews as smart, it repeatedly describes them as being “stiff-necked.” The Midrash adds, “The Holy One, Blessed Be He, said to Moshe and Aharon: ‘My children are stubborn, angry and troublesome. You must therefore be prepared to withstand them even when they curse you; even when they stone you’” (Shemos Rabbah 7:3; see also Rambam Hilchos Sanhedrin 25:2). Being stiff-necked, stubborn, angry and troublesome would seem to indicate a rather low Jewish emotional quotient.

Nevertheless, Jews can justly maintain that they are very intelligent. However, their superior intelligence is neither nature nor nurture, but wholly stems from and is dependent on the mitzvos they keep. “Observe them therefore carefully, for this is your wisdom and understanding in the eyes of the nations, who will hear about all these statutes and say, ‘Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people’” (Devarim 4:6).

•

DATE

10/20/13 10/21/13 10/22/13 10/23/13

10/24/13 Daf HaYomi Schedule presented by Dirshu 10/25/13 DATE 10/26/13

10/27/13 10/20/13 10/28/13 10/21/13 10/29/13 10/22/13 10/30/13 10/23/13

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10/31/13 10/24/13 11/1/13 10/25/13

DATE 11/2/13 10/26/13 11/3/13 10/27/13 11/4/13 10/28/13

11/5/13 10/29/13 11/6/13 10/30/13

тАл╫д╫и╫й╫к ╫к╫Х╫Ь╫У╫Х╫ктАм

NOVEMBER 1, 2013 тАл╫Ы╫ЧтАШ ╫Ч╫й╫Х╫Я ╫к╫й╫втАЭ╫УтАм тАл╫Ф╫У╫Ь╫з╫ктАм тАл╫а╫и╫Х╫ктАм

тАл╫Т╫итАЭ╫РтАм

тАл╫итАЭ╫ктАм

11/7/13 10/31/13 11/8/13 11/1/13 11/9/13 11/2/13 11/10/13 11/11/13

ANTWERP

4:57 6:06 6:27

11/12/13

BALTIMORE

5:46 6:45 7:16

11/14/13

BOSTON

5:19 6:20 6:48

11/15/13

BROOKLYN

5:33 6:33 7:03

CHICAGO

5:24 6:27 6:56

DALLAS

6:17 7:13 7:48

DEAL

5:34 6:34 7:04

DETROIT

6:07 7:08 7:36

JERUSALEM

4:14 5:27 6:06

JOHANNESBURG 6:06 7:02 7:38 LAKEWOOD

5:35 6:35 7:05

LONDON

4:18 5:24 5:44

LOS ANGELES

5:41 6:38 7:11

MANCHESTER

4:18 5:29 5:47

MELBOURNE

7:36 8:38 9:08

MIAMI

6:21 7:14 7:51

MONSEY

5:33 6:33 7:03

MONTREAL

5:23 6:26 6:52

PARIS

5:12 6:18 6:41

PASSAIC

5:34 6:34 7:04

PHILADELPHIA

5:40 6:39 7:09

TEANECK

5:33 6:33 7:03

TEL AVIV TORONTO

4:28 5:28 6:03

5:50 6:51 7:19

WASHINGTON, DC 5:49 6:48 7:19 ZURICH

4:50 5:55 6:20

11/13/13

11/16/13

‫בס"ד‬

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Some people consider nutrition based treatment, alternative medicine. To me, it’s my first line of defense.

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LETTERS EXECUTIVE CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER

Rabbi Yitzchok Frankfurter

CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD

Chesky Kauftheil EDITORIAL

EDITOR IN CHIEF

Rabbi Yitzchok Frankfurter SENIOR EDITOR

Rechy Frankfurter MANAGING EDITOR

Yossi Krausz

RABBINIC EDITOR

Rabbi Moshe Taub CONTRIBUTORS

Rabbi Mordechai Kamenetzky Nesanel Gantz • John Loftus • Shmuel Sokol Maurice Stein • Rabbi Shais Taub • Turx Yedida Wolfe FEATURE EDITOR

Yitta Halberstam Mandelbaum FOOD EDITORS

Victoria Dwek • Leah Schapira EDITORIAL COORDINATOR

Toby Worch

COPY EDITORS

Basha Majerczyk Dina Schreiber Rabbi Yisroel Benedek ART ART DIRECTORS

David Kniazuk Alex Katalkin

ADVERTISING EXECUTIVE ACCOUNT MANAGER

Zack Blumenfeld

EXECUTIVE SALES DIRECTORS

Surie Katz Esther Friedman

EUROPE/ISRAEL ADVERTISING DIRECTOR

Sarah Margulies

ADVERTISING COORDINATOR

Malky Friedman

Ami Magazine P: 718.534.8800 F: 718.484.7731 info@amimagazine.org Ami Magazine. Published by Mezoogmag LLC. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form without prior written permission from the publisher is prohibited. The publisher reserves the right to edit all articles for clarity, space, and editorial sensitivities. Ami Magazine assumes no responsibility for the content of articles or advertisements in the publication, nor for the contents of books that are referred to or excerpted herein.

AN ARTICLE AND AHMED Lessons from a notary public In reference to “Streets of Life,” Issue 140

Dear Rabbi Kamenetzky: As usual, I immensely enjoyed your “Streets of Life” article this past week, entitled “Pray for Me.” Your articles are always inspiring, thought-provoking, and (last but certainly not least) entertaining. They are often repeated, mulled over and discussed at our Shabbos seudos.

I don’t know how you plan on “feering ois” with your article this week, but I had an incident this week that, on the heels of reading your article, really made me think.

Though I live in Lakewood, I work a “world away” in Yardley, Pennsylvania, as a Judaica principal in a community day school. The town of Yardley itself is a beautiful, historic town, which can certainly be aptly described as “small town America” (or in the yeshivishe vernacular, “hick town”).

Just yesterday, I needed something notarized, so after a few inquiries I found out that there’s a small business up the road that has a notary public. As I headed on over, I imagined how this office would look: nonstate-of-the-art furniture, piles of papers all around, and a no-longer-youthful proprietor. I was not disappointed.

I showed him the documents and asked if I could use his services, to which he readily agreed. He took the documents into his hand and in the other hand held the notary stamp. Before he proceeded, I asked him, “Don’t you want ID?” He looked at me, and in the most sincere voice he said, “Of course I require ID, but aren’t you a rabbi?”

With your observations still fresh in my mind, I realized that there is something really profound to be learned from my incident, and the story you shared with us.

Our communities, r”l, have had our share of self-inflicted black eyes. The news outlets and social media have a field day when we stumble, and it certainly does not bring much in the way of kiddush shem Shamayim.

Sometimes a feeling of despair can cross our minds that we have caused ourselves so much PR damage that it’s literally beyond the point of return. Or more significantly, our own perception of ourselves has been greatly lowered due to the actions of the few less exemplary chevrah among us. But then there are the bike-riding employees, cab drivers, bus drivers and of course notary publics, the simple average Joes (or Ahmeds) on the street who still very much believe in us and genuinely think of us as people of a higher calling who can be unquestionably trusted and even asked to pray on their behalf.

To me this was a real jolt, a wake-up call of how we must perceive ourselves, because this of course is our essence: honesty, integrity and a connection with G-d unparalleled by any nation. Sometimes it takes an Ahmed or a small town notary public to remind us of this.

Thanks for this article and all of your fantastic articles, and may you continue to inspire (and entertain) for years to come.

Yehoshua Ottensoser Lakewood/Yardley

LETTERS PICTURE WORTH A THOUSAND BITES News from the coffee room In reference to “Parnooosa”

Dear Editor: I thought you would enjoy this photo. Thanks to Ami, this biscotti became popular in BMG.

LANDER COLLEGE FOR MEN

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FOR LIFE BEIS MEDRASH L’TALMUD

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NOVARDOK TIDBITS Products of the system

In reference to “Novardok in the French Countryside,” Issue 136

Dear Editor: I wish to add a few things to your article on Novardok, namely, that Rav Efrayim Zaitchik, zt”l, who lived in New York and later had a kollel in Eretz Yisrael, was one of the famous products of the Novardoker Yeshiva. His sefer Hameoros Hagedolim, which I possess, is a real treasure. He wrote a lot about Novardok. Also, one of the greatest talmidim of Novardok was Rav Simcha Zelig Reiger, zt”l, the rosh beis din of Brisk. His expertise in halachah was so great that Rav Chaim Ozer Grodzinski, the rosh beis din of Vilna used to consult him. Rav Nekritz who was a rosh yeshivah in Novardok in New York, and spent the war years in Siberia, was also a great talmid chacham. Most of the talmidim were killed.

The handful who survived—including Rav Gershon Liebman, zt”l, and Rav Benzion Bruk, zt”l, accomplished a phenomenal rebirth of this bastion of Torah, as your article explains.

Sincerely, Lev Oppen

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Touro College is an Equal Opportunity Institution

An open letter to the community THERE ARE TWO IMPORTANT PRINCIPLES that have guided and inspired me to become Brooklyn District Attorney: The importance of the rule of law and the value of hard work.

I started out life in public housing. My mother struggled at times, raising three children by herself but she was determined to give us a better life. And she was committed to being a role model for us.

In 1973, she became one New York City’s first women to patrol the streets of New York City as a Police Officer. At that time, there were no locker rooms for women at the precinct, which meant my mother had to leave our apartment in uniform. While some people in the community were hostile to the police, my mother was not daunted by having to leave the apartment in uniform: she put herself on the line to protect the innocent and uphold the rule of law. Her courage taught me that in order to uphold the law one must be willing to take bold steps and not be swayed from one’s duty.

We eventually moved to Co-op City in the Bronx, a middle class neighborhood with a strong Jewish community. Our family was one of the few African American families in our building, and many of my neighbors were Jewish. All of our neighbors afforded us love and respect, and we repaid this generosity of spirit in kind.

After graduating from New York City public schools, I went to John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where I graduated magna cum laude. From there, I went on to NYU Law School, where I earned the prestigious Arthur T. Vanderbilt Medal at graduation for outstanding contributions to the law school community.

As a young lawyer, I served as an attorney in President Clinton’s Treasury Department, first as a Special Assistant to former Treasury Department Undersecretary for Enforcement Ronald Noble, and then in the General Counsel’s Office under Robert McNamara, Jr., who himself would go on to become General Counsel to the C.I.A.

In recent weeks, support for my candidacy has grown tremendously in every community, including in the Orthodox community.

During my time at Treasury, I served on the team that conducted the investigation into the murder of four agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms (“ATF”), as well as the shooting of twenty other agents, by David Koresh and the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas and drafted a section of the WACO Report submitted to President Bill Clinton.

After leaving the Treasury Department, I worked as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Brooklyn, where I was assigned to the Violent Crimes Section. In addition to prosecuting violent gangs, I also served on the federal prosecution team that secured the conviction of rogue NYPD Police Officer Justin Volpe, who brutally beat, tortured, and sodomized Abner Louima inside a bathroom at the 70th Precinct. I am proud to have played a part in this case, because the rule of law extends equally to those in government and law enforcement, who must be held responsible when they abuse their power.

After serving as a federal prosecutor, I decided to going into private practice, eventually starting my own firm Thompson Wigdor. Our law firm focuses on workplace discrimination, protecting the rights of Sabbath observers.

Public service is a calling, and one that runs deep, etched in my DNA. On Sept. 10th, I was humbled and honored to win the Democratic primary by 11 points. The voters gave me a clear mandate, based on my promise to uphold the rule of law, to work hard and to be fair. I will work to keep our great borough safe. From Borough Park to Brownsville, from Crown Heights to Coney Island, I am committed to bring fundamental fairness and instill a culture of excellence in public service at the DA’s office.

I have a track record of going after violent criminals and I will hold accountable individuals for abusing their position of authority as I did in the case of Officer Volpe.

At the same time, I will use my judgment and discretion to evaluate all of the current alternative-to-incarceration programs, which give those that deserve a second chance when warranted.

In recent weeks, support for my candidacy has grown tremendously in every community, including in the Orthodox community. I look forward to having everyone’s support on the general election, November 5th, and I will be honored to serve as your District Attorney.

Yours, Ken Thompson

NEWS

NATIONAL AND WORLD

A CLOSER LOOK

ANALYZING THE NEWS THAT MAKES A DIFFERENCE

Is the US Government Computer Illiterate?

THE LESSONS OF OBAMACARE’S TECH PROBLEM

O

bamacare has rocked American politics since it was first officially proposed in 2009. Yet despite all the hype and anticipation, the websites for signing up to the Obamacare health exchanges have been plagued by bugs, with the central federal website for residents of many states, HealthCare.gov, possibly the worst.

Even less-buggy sites haven’t shown strong results. Despite the fact that over 100,000 New Yorkers registered on the state’s Obamacare website, not a single one was actually enrolled with a plan by late last week. This was because state officials held off on actually sending the users’ data to the federal government’s system, because of technical issues.

To have insurance as soon as it is available, on January 1, Americans have to sign up by December 15. Those who fail to sign up by March 1 will face a tax penalty.

The idea that the deadline for the penalty should be postponed has already gained traction even among Democratic lawmakers. (This week, the Obama administration postponed the deadline by six weeks, but they say that was for a different reason.)

But there’s an even bigger question: How did this linchpin program for the Obama administration end up such a failure on

the information technology side?

Government slowness is one problem.

The main contractor for the consumer part of the federal website, Canadian company CGI Group Inc., didn’t start working on the site until this spring, even though they got the contract in December 2011: The government kept switching its require-

16 A M I M A G A Z I N E / / O C T O B E R 3 0 , 2 0 1 3 / / 2 6 C H E S H VA N 5 7 7 4

ments. But there has also been a good deal of incompetence pointed out in the programming of the websites that CGI and the other companies involved ended up producing.

To get an idea about why government seems technologically incompetent, Ami spoke to Daniel Castro, a senior analyst at

BY YOSSI KRAUSZ

the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. He said that technical issues are hardly a surprise in any new rollout of technology: “Large technology projects often run into problems. For example, Microsoft is having problems with its release of Windows 8. Apple’s had issues too. That’s not a government issue; it’s not a Microsoft problem. It’s the nature of rolling out large technology projects.”

He says that’s particularly true in the case of a totally new program, like the HealthCare.gov website, which isn’t merely a revamping of an earlier piece of technology.

But he says that some of the problems indicate a level of incompetence. “We’ve had reports of logins not working for new registration. We’ve had reports of the site being down—and, frankly, the site should have been built in a more scalable way.

We’ve had reports of simple 404 errors [the type of error that normally indicates a dead or broken Web link]. Those are the kinds of bugs that a well-tested site should not have. Those reflect poor management.”

Castro says that the US Government has a basic problem with IT (information technology). It can’t hire the best workers, and even when it contracts out, the contractors aren’t the best companies in the technology sector.

He explained: “Silicon Valley isn’t flying out to Washington when it needs help with its websites. It’s definitely the other way around.

“Part of that is just because of the nature of government when it hires. You have a lot of regulatory barriers to hiring and firing workers. In government, you don’t have the same kinds of strong incentives for workers as you do in the private sector, especially the tech sector. They don’t pay as much. That leads to different types of workers choosing government over Silicon Valley.

“If you’re a top-skilled CSS guru or you’ve got great Python skills [i.e., a top-

flight programmer], you’re probably not going into government as your first choice.”

Contracting the best outside firms is difficult because of government regulations, including the regulations designed to increase information security. “You have to know what FISMA [the Federal Information Security Act] is if you’re a government

health service had an electronic medical records system that was way over budget and didn’t work right, which they had to basically scrap and reboot.”

But other countries have done better, as well. “South Korea has been very innovative at successfully deploying IT across government in very large programs. Estonia is a smaller country, but it has deployed

“If you’re a top-skilled CSS guru or you’ve got great Python skills, you’re probably not going into government as your first choice.” contractor; you don’t need to know what FISMA is if you’re just creating a website for a tech startup.” So the contractors who end up doing government work are those who know best how to jump through the hoops of the regulations, rather than those who know best how to write computer code.

He says that these problems also mean that government is often behind the curve on technology issues.

“I wrote something this summer about how if you look on USAjobs.gov, you don’t find any job listings for people with skills in Hadoop, which is a really fast-growing data technology. If you look in the private sector, there are lots of people hiring for this. That, I think, is reflective of the fact that the federal government isn’t moving in the same direction, at the same speed, and at the same level of maturity as the private sector. We see that again and again; for example, they’re still hiring Cobalt programmers [that is, decade-old technology].”

The amount of money being spent on IT by the US government is immense; it’s more than $80 billion a year. Castro says, “They’re putting enough money into it; they’re not getting enough value out of it.”

Other governments have had similar debacles, Castro says. “The UK’s national

these huge IT services across the entire population, very complex systems that aren’t out there on the market yet. They have things like electronic identity cards, which they created. They have access to secure government services, which we don’t have. It’s not that government can’t do technology. You have to develop competency.”

Interestingly, many of these successful cases were contracted out to US companies, which makes the fact that the US has failed all the more disturbing.

Castro is somewhat pessimistic about the prospect that the current discussion about Obamacare will help change the state of government IT. “It’s become politicized. Instead of saying that here’s an opportunity to see what’s wrong with government contracting and government IT—and how we can make that better—it’s being used to say here’s what’s wrong with Obamacare and health care run by the government. It makes sense why people are doing that, but at the end of the day, I think we’d get more return on the investment of our own time if we’d focus on why the IT side didn’t work and how we can fix that across government, rather than just going after the president on healthcare.”

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NEWS

NATIONAL AND WORLD

Hacking an Israeli Tunnel CYBERWAR GOES UNDERGROUND The threat of an attack on Israel’s infrastructure by hackers has been a topic of concern for some time now. But it turns out that such an attack happened last month, according to an Associated Press story quoting anonymous Israeli sources.

The Carmel Tunnels toll road in Haifa was locked down for 20 minutes on the night of September 8, according to the sources. The next morning, the tunnel was shut down for eight hours, starting during

morning rush hour. The shutdown led to massive traffic congestion.

Experts reportedly determined that the attack was not particularly sophisticated and was probably not the work of a foreign government like Iran, but rather a hacking group like Anonymous.

Israel’s National Cyber Bureau, which

LIFE IN NUMBERS

Going

It’s hard to buy a house in many markets.

That can be a sign of a booming economy; just look at the way house hunting is taking place in New York City. (The fact that it was built on an island doesn’t make things easier.)

But a housing boom can also be a cause for concern. The most recent boom in the US as a whole led to the worldwide collapse of the banking and financial sector. That was partially due to the sleazy lending practices and unscrupulous security construction that banks undertook. But the truth is that they couldn’t have been as successful as they were in carrying out those tricky acts had the housing market not been zooming along.

So there’s something scary in a new report from Goldman Sachs analysts that looked at the largest housing bubbles around the world, especially since its number one bubble is in Israel, with housing prices that have gone up 40 percent since 2009. A tax loophole has enticed global investors to sink their money in Israeli apartments; that loophole is supposed to be closed soon. But geography is the real problem; without much place to put new apartments, what there is will simply keep rising in price.

guards against hacking attacks, declined to comment, while the company that oversees the tunnels claimed that a simple glitch caused the tie-up.

The tunnel is a high-profile target. Authorities have considered using it as a mass bomb shelter in case of need, and a hacking attack could complicate that. If even an unsophisticated group found a way to attack the tunnel, it’s chilling to consider what damage to infrastructure a foreign government could succeed in carrying out.

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BY YOSSI KRAUSZ

U P D AT E S New Info on Stories We’ve Run Der Spiegel reported new Edward Snowden leaks last week that showed that German chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone—the one that she used for business relating to her political party—had been hacked by the National Security Agency. Some German pundits have expressed a certain amount of satisfaction with the revelation, because there had been criticism inside the country toward Merkel for failing to take a harder line with President Obama after the first group of Snowden documents revealed NSA spying on Germany’s communications infrastructure.

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The Israeli government released 26 Palestinian prisoners on Tuesday, as part of its concessions intended to advance the peace process. Every one of them had been involved in a murder, either of Israelis or of Palestinian collaborators with Israel.

NBC News reported this week that the Obama administration knew at least as early as 2010 that at least 40 to 67 percent of consumers would not be able to keep their previous health plans under Obamacare guidelines, and that many of those would end up needing to buy pricier plans, though President Obama continued to make claims that most people would not have to lose their plans. The loss of the old plans will mainly be due to changes in regulations made by Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services. Present estimates are that 80 percent may have to change their plans. The main Obamacare website still states that people who don’t want to change their plans won’t have to.

New statistics show that the number of homeless people in New York City’s subways has increased by 13 percent over last year. Some critics say that legal action over stop-andfrisk, which eventually led to a court ruling that the method is unconstitutional, has influenced police to reduce enforcement of vagrancy laws. Recent statistics have also shown a strong increase in gun violations and shootings in the months since the stop-and-frisk ruling. There goes the Big Apple.

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IN THE NEWS

BY TURX

The Train Wreck Has Left the Station THE SHEER BRILLIANCE BEHIND THE GOVERNMENT’S GREATEST MODERN FAILURE

I

’ve been spending the past few weeks trying to sign up for Obamacare, otherwise (and quite ironically) named the Affordable Care Act. At first it seemed really simple to navigate—in four simple steps: STEP ONE: Go to the website and promptly wait for it to crash.

STEP TWO: Follow the website’s advice and contact the call center.

STEP THREE: Wait for the call center’s representative to tell you that their website has crashed as well.

STEP FOUR: Follow the call center rep’s advice by going back to the website.

And so on. And some of you have been wondering why I’ve been forced to put this column on hold over the past two weeks?!

Furthermore, I’ll probably be spending the next few months embroiled in a series of IRS audits over the previous few sentences. So I may as well say something nice about the Affordable Care Act right now before making things worse for myself: I think—and bear with me here—that not only is the ACA an unmitigated piece of brilliance, it’s the very brilliance that the Republican Party has been clamoring for these past five years. That, too, works in four simple steps: STEP ONE: Announce that everyone must have health insurance.

STEP TWO: Announce that anyone without health insurance will get a hefty fine.

STEP THREE: Launch a half-a-billiondollar website that doesn’t allow anyone to actually sign up for health insurance.

STEP FOUR: Collect aforementioned hefty fines.

So there you have it. We use all the fine money to start paying off our debt and save the country. GOP, you guys are totally on board with that kinda’ stuff, right?

A few questions remain, though. Why did they have to build a more-than$500-million website for this program to be a success? Wouldn’t a $400-million site have done the trick?

Okay, so the website did cost over $500,000,000 to create. Does the government not realize how many $2,000 fines they’d have to collect just to offset the costs of the website alone? Does the government care? Does Obama care?

Well, you know who does care? The Republican Party does. And they express their outrage in four simple steps: STEP ONE: Root for Obamacare to fail

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(and do everything possible to make that happen).

STEP TWO: Complain that Obamacare is doomed to fail while reinforcing the parentheses of step one.

STEP THREE: Shut down the government to prevent Obamacare from failing.

STEP FOUR: Launch a Congressional investigation into why Obamacare isn’t launching quickly enough.

Great. So now the Obama administration is calling for a “tech surge” to take care of the website’s glitches. This tech surge, as far as I understand it, is not dissimilar to Bush’s military surge. Only in Bush’s days a bunch of 20-year-olds were sent to salvage a losing cause in Iraq and now a bunch of 20-year-olds are being sent in to salvage a losing entitlement program.

Here is the scoop behind that—and yes, it’s in four simple steps: STEP ONE: Create a massive government program full of loopholes that causes many people to lose their jobs.

STEP TWO: Blame the sudden job losses on the previous administration.

STEP THREE: Hire thousands of people to fix the broken program.

STEP FOUR: Take full credit for creating thousands of jobs.

So according to my theory, the glitches were all intentional. Still, one major glitch remains. Why did they ever name it the “Affordable Care Act,” if it’s not affordable, no one gets care, and from a purely operative perspective, it doesn’t “act”?

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Sightings&Citings Synopses of, and excerpts from, interesting items that have recently appeared here and there —and sometimes way over there—in the media WE’RE ALL VICTIMS NOW Art thief finds the real culprit Radu Dogaru, one of six Romanians on trial for a 2012 art heist in Holland, has threatened to sue the museum that was robbed—because it was too easy to steal from.

The Romanians stole seven paintings from the Kunsthal museum in Rotterdam. The paintings stolen included masterpieces by Gauguin, Monet and Picasso. They are estimated to have been worth $24 million.

The thieves had difficulty selling such famous paintings, however. When they eventually contacted dealers, the paintings generated such suspicion that Dogaru’s mother apparently burned all of the paintings in her home oven.

Dogaru’s defense attorney told reporters that the lack of security at the Kunsthal meant that “[w]e can clearly speak of negligence with serious consequences” and that “[I]f we do not receive answers about who is guilty” for the lack of secu-

And to think that I was always scared of clowns.

rity, “we are considering hiring Dutch lawyers to start a legal case in The Netherlands or in Romania,” to try to require the museum to share in repayment for the paintings.

A bout as good an argument as “My mom burned my homework.”

WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE Adelson miscounts the scorpions in the desert At a Yeshiva University event this past week focusing on threats to Jewish life from assimilation and Iran, billionaire businessman Sheldon Adelson was filmed suggesting the use of a nuclear weapon to negotiate with Iran.

Adelson said: “What I would say is, ‘Listen. You see that desert out there? I want to show you something.’ …You pick up your cell phone and you call somewhere in Nebraska, and you say, ‘OK, let it go.’ And so there’s an atomic weapon: goes over ballistic missiles, the middle of the desert, that doesn’t hurt a soul. Maybe a

couple of rattlesnakes, and scorpions, or whatever.

“And then you say, ‘See? The next one is in the middle of Tehran. So, we mean business.

You want to be wiped out? Go ahead and take a tough position and continue with your nuclear development. You want to be peaceful? Just reverse it all, and we will guarantee you that you can have a nuclear power plant for electricity purposes, energy purposes.’”

F ight fire with fire. Fight nukes with nukes. Fight crazy ayatollahs with crazy Jewish billionaires.

A CASE OF IDENTITY A slap in whose face?

A recent article in The New York Jewish Week started with an alarming sentence: “In a slap in the face to Diaspora rabbis, the Israeli Chief Rabbinate has rejected the word of one of American Jewry’s most well-known Orthodox rabbis, who in a letter was attesting to the Jewishness and single status of an Ameri-

MIXING UP THE CONTAINER WITH THE THING CONTAINED “The air we breathe is laced with cancer-causing substances and is being officially classified as carcinogenic to humans, the World Health Organization’s cancer agency said on Thursday.”

—The misleading first lines of a Reuters report on the WHO’s classification of air pollution, not air itself, as a carcinogen.

May I breathe now? can Jewish couple wishing to marry in Israel, the Jewish Week has learned.”

The article went on to explain that the “well-known Orthodox rabbi” in question was Avi Weiss, head of Yeshivas Chovevei Torah and ordainer of several maharats— Orthodox female “rabbis.”

He sure is well-known.

That’s why Diaspora rabbis are clapping.

DEPARTMENT OF HOPEFULLY UNNECESSARY EXPLANATIONS

“The people who do that, they’re not clowns. I can swear on my mother’s grave it wasn’t a clown. We are not like that... We are nonviolent.”

—Mexican clown leader Tomas Morales, talking to the Associated Press about the killing—at a children’s birthday party, by assailants in clown suits—of drug lord Francisco Rafael Arellano Felix.

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Bill de Blasio’s Mayoral Campaign is encircled by a Staunch Contingent of Renowned Jewish Activists THE WHO’S WHO IN THE ORTHODOX COMMUNITY, WHOM ARE AFFILIATED AND BACK THE DEMOCRATIC FRONTRUNNER IN NEW YORK’S 2013 MAYORAL ELECTION

B

ill de Blasio’s experience in the political arena has brought him in contact with diverse ethnic groups, which in essence is the power structure of New York. Initially as an aide to former Mayor David Dinkins, then as a senatorial campaign manager for Hillary Clinton and later as regional director for the federal housing programs. As a member of his school board in Brooklyn, de Blasio took the opportunity to run for an open City Council seat in Brooklyn’s 39th District and won the 2001 City Council election by a landslide. Throughout de Blasio’s political career, Bill displayed a keen interest to the needs of the Yeshivas and Mosdos; graciously advocating for the Boro Park Jewish Community under his headship.

Having earned a fond relationship and firm support from some of the elite in the Chassidic community, Bill de Blasio is proud to be in association with, and plans to bring forth the following close individuals’ credentials to serve him well in his victoriously hopeful - New York’s mayoral incumbency.

Avi Fink is the son of Rabbi Reuven Fink, Morah D’Asra of Young Israel of New Rochelle (YINR) since 1981. Rabbi Fink’s congruent’ membership expanded due to his devoted leadership skills and establishment of a new synagogue, along with the erection of the community’s first mikvah in 2008. Rabbi Fink received s’micha from HaRav Moshe Feinstein, zt’’l and in addition to serving as Rabbi at YINR he simultaneously teaches at Yeshiva University as a Talmud Instructor. Coming from such an illustrious background, Avi brings forth eloquent leadership skills and dedication which was evidenced in the past congressional campaigns he ran. Avi served as director in Anthony Weiner’s district office and is currently deputy chief of staff and senior advisor to Bill de Blasio’s mayoral campaign.

As a Chassidic operative in the political field, Pinny Ringel, a prominent Belzer Chassid is a loyal advisor to de Blasio and has vigorously been advocating by outreaching to the Jewish community. Before embarking in the mayoral campaign, Pinny received a bracha from the Belzer Rebbe, Shlit’’a: “You should be Nosei Chein (find grace) in people and may your chassidish levush (attire) serve you well!” Although Pinny avails himself to de Blasio’s cause 24/6, there is one hour that de Blasio respects and will not disturb Pinny – during his daily, hourly shuir! Pinny has previously worked for Simcha Felder and for Bloomberg’s mayoral election. Pinny is an active Shomrim member, a devoted community askan and was very involved in the Leiby Keletzky, a’’h case.

One of de Blasio’s first Jewish contacts was Rabbi Yitzchak Fleischer, founder and executive of Bobover Bikur Cholim. As a liberal Democrat, Fleischer helped de Blasio weave his way into the Orthodox community and spent months guiding de Blasio through midnight Boro Park synagogue circuits; earning him votes to win his 2001 City Council election. Rabbi Fleischer cites: “Whatever

we needed, he was always there for us”, and he expects that when de Blasio will be in City Hall the same policy will remain enact.

Renowned philanthropist Ari Noe is known in the Jewish community and in the media entertainment world as a Baal Tzedakah and also for his exemplary noble deeds. As a longtime personal friend to Bill de Blasio, Mr. Noe was one of de Blasio’s early supporters and is always exerting himself behind scenes as a keen advisor towards the mayoral campaign. At Ari Noe’s son’s Bar Mitzvah in 2009, Noe introduced Bill as: “Mr. Mayer”, to the applause of all.

Mr. Noe has recently power-brokered a wine tasting and fundraising event in Manhattan, which was hosted by the Sitt family.

At the event, Mr. de Blasio was hailed for standing up amid critics. Many high-ranking attendees from the real estate industry appreciated de Blasio’s approach and gave the frontrunner mayor a warm and receptive welcome.

To quote Mr. Noe’s introduction of Bill de Blasio: “The critics who find the bad in everything started bashing Bill, but Bill doesn’t back off on what he knows is right – he stands his ground!” Upon losing one of its greatest scholars and Jewish leader of this generation, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, zt’’l, Bill de Blasio promptly acknowledged the loss of a father figure to the Jewish world at large.

Rabbi Yeruchim Silber, executive Director of Boro Park’s JCC has guided and served as a liaison within the community to de Blasio, up until 2005 when he left the councilman’s office for a new vocation. The two still keep a warm relationship, with de Blasio still attending Silber’s simchas.

Elly Kleinman, a renowned philanthropist, supporter of many Yeshivas and member of Agudath Yisroel of America has won de Blasio’s endorsement in Agudah and among the Jewish community at large.

As the Director of the Flatbush Jewish Community Council (JCC ), real estate exectuive Leon Goldenberg has helped establish a longstanding relationship with the Agudah and de Blasio.

Hershy Dembitzer and Chaim Zeiger; both staunch Bobover activists are exerting themselves to advocate de Blasio for mayor. Their fond relationship with Bill was developed through evidencing his sincerity towards their Mosdos in general, and to the Jewish community as a whole, is what gives them the stamina to endorse de Blasio for mayor.

Bill de Blasio’s allies are eagerly anticipating the upcoming mayoral election. As his followers have numerous times cited: “The community has always been friendly with de Blasio and it is attested that he will remain holding an open door policy!”

JEWISHNEWS

Israel, Post Election MIXED RESULTS FOR THE CHAREIDI SECTOR

T

he long months of frenetic campaigning that saw the rise and fall of several candidates came to an abrupt halt this past Tuesday, when elections were finally held in over 100 municipalities across Israel. These elections were twofold in nature, with people casting their votes for one mayoralty candidate and numerous party representatives to the city councils.

To the secular Israeli public, local elections are rather humdrum, and most people don’t take an interest in them. To them, it’s mostly a question of who’s in charge of collecting the garbage, and since that doesn’t really matter much on the grand scale of things, secular voter turnout in local elections is usually low. This past week, the overall countrywide turnout was about 35 percent, demonstrating the relatively low importance ascribed to local elections by the general Israeli public.

But if the elections were relatively quiet in mostly secular cities (with the exception of large, key cities such as Yerushalayim and Tel Aviv), the situation among Israel’s chareidim was the polar opposite. In fact, the atmosphere was much more tense than the recent Knesset elections, when chareidim succeeded in increasing their number of mandates.

The reason? Several intriguing issues that have finally been resolved.

The first and simplest involved Shas and its chairman, Aryeh Deri, in the post-Rav Ovadia Yosef, z”l, era. It is clear that Rav Ovadia’s demise a mere two weeks ago had a strong effect on Shas voters, as they knew that Rav Ovadia would want them to

vote for his party. But a question loomed regarding Deri’s staying power at a time when Eli Yishai and others are hoping for the moment when he will stumble and abandon the Shas leadership.

Deri threw all of his political weight behind his candidates in the three cities that were of greatest interest to the chareidi public: Yerushalayim, Beit Shemesh and mainly Elad. In Yerushalayim the struggle was for the mayoralty, where Nir Barkat, the incumbent mayor, sought another term of office. Deri and Avigdor Lieberman, chairman of the Yisrael Beiteinu

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party, supported a religious Sefardi, Moshe Leon, for mayor. While he succeeded in winning widespread support in the Ashkenazi chareidi public as well, it was not enough to oust Barkat.

The struggle in Beit Shemesh was more difficult, as it involved the city’s very character, and was waged between the chareidi incumbent, Moshe Abutbul (Shas), and a secular candidate named Eli Cohen.

Many people in Israel view Beit Shemesh as a place that provides convenient and inexpensive housing solutions, whose numerous areas for new construction fall

BY CHANANYA BLEICH

into the hands of whichever circle is closest to the mayor. Thus, each of the forces in Beit Shemesh, chareidi and secular, coveted the mayoralty with all their hearts. If Cohen would have been elected, it would have meant the loss of construction sites for chareidim. The fact that the chareidi Abutbul won another term means that the reverse is now true. Deri, of course, supported Abutbul.

The Elad election battleground was most interesting of all. It should be emphasized that the struggle here was not between chareidi and secular candidates or about the religious character of the city. Elad is a completely chareidi city that has no worries regarding its religious future. Instead, both mayoral candidates and all lists for town council were composed of people who are shomrei Torah u’mitzvos. Here the issues were completely different, connected to prestige.

Elad has been a divided city for many years, with every mayor who assumed the job—till now from the Shas party, a reflection of the city’s majority Sefardi population—becoming embroiled in problems pertaining to its various communities. Nevertheless, many residents were fed up and wanted a change. Deri insisted on running Tzuriel Krispel, a Sefardi who headed the first Elad council, arguing that since most of the city is Sefardi, the mayor should also be Sefardi. His opponent was Yisrael Porush, son of MK Meir Porush and the candidate of Yahadut Hatorah and all of the Ashkenazi gedolim. Porush was viewed as the candidate representing those residents who wanted change—an apparent majority, given that Porush won the election.

It is now probably only a matter of time until the Shas constituency will want to settle accounts with Deri, if not call for his immediate resignation.

THE MOST DIFFICULT ISSUE OF ALL The second issue was the new Litvishe party that ran for the first time, Bnei Torah, led by Rav Shmuel Auerbach. In effect,

this new party challenged the veteran Litvishe party, Degel Hatorah, and the leadership of the Litvishe gedolei hador, Maran Rav Aharon Yehuda Leib Shteinman and Maran Rav Chaim Kanievsky.

Despite the split in the Litvishe public, up until recently there hadn’t been a schism that completely divided the factions. True, nine months ago, when elections were held for the Knesset, Rav Auerbach’s supporters threatened to launch a new breakaway party, but in the end they never carried through on their threat.

It must be understood that Rav Auerbach’s supporters wanted to demonstrate their electoral strength once and for all.

This was in response to the voices claiming that this Litvishe faction contained only several hundred people, and should be discounted.

Indeed, they proved their power in a big way. Running in three cities, Yerushalayim, Bnei Brak and Modi’in Illit, the Bnei Torah party registered a substantial achievement, electing one representative to the Yerushalayim council (who will probably also serve as deputy mayor, due to an advance agreement with Nir Barkat); two representatives in Bnei Brak and two in Modi’in Illit. The new party even submitted mayoral candidates in Yerushalayim and Modi’in Illit at the directive of Rav Auerbach, but they only received a negligible percentage of the popular vote. In Yerushalayim, 53 percent voted for Nir Barkat and 45 percent for Moshe Leon, with only a showing for Chaim Epstein, the candidate of Bnei Torah. In Modi’in Illit, the Bnei Torah mayoral candidate was Avraham Berger, but incumbent mayor Yaakov Gutterman (Yahadut Hatorah) defeated him by a landslide.

By contrast, the elections in Beitar Illit were quieter and less interesting to the chareidi public; there were no world wars between opposing parties, and this time the city wasn’t the center of attention. Nevertheless, the campaign wasn’t a total bore.

At the starting line, incumbent Mayor Meir Rubinstein (MK Porush’s candidate) faced

To the secular Israeli public, local elections are rather humdrum.

But the situation among chareidim was the polar opposite. three other candidates: Menachem Zeida, Chaim Weisberg and Yehuda Sofer. These three also ran new lists, as did Rubinstein’s party. Thus, although Rubinstein easily won the mayoralty as anticipated, two new parties succeeded in electing three representatives, a considerable feat.

On the morning after the elections we managed a brief interview with Yisrael Porush, Elad’s new mayor, despite his protestations that he had barely slept the night before and wasn’t properly prepared for an interview with the media.

When asked for a statement he replied, “I am very excited, and wish to thank the dedicated activists who worked day and night on the campaign.”

He further told us that as part of the changes he seeks to implement in Elad, he has set up a “first hundred days” team to provide him with ongoing support in the initial days of his term of office. The team includes MK Yaakov Asher and other highlevel advisors who will work together to revitalize the city.

Local elections in Israel have now ended. We can only hope that the painful ruptures that occurred in the course of the campaign will heal as quickly as possible.

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JEWISHNEWS

BY NESANEL GANTZ

Chasidim in Chicago A NEW CHASIDISHE KOLLEL GROWS IN CHICAGO

C

hicago, Illinois, is not the first place you think of when you think of a flourishing chasidishe kehillah. However, you may soon see as many shtreimels on some Chicago streets as on those of Williamsburg and Monroe. The first chasidishe kollel, Kollel Ahavas Torah, has been started by the Ziditchover Rebbe of Chicago, Rav Yehoshua Heschel Eichenstein, shlita, this winter zman. It’s a project that’s been years in the making.

The Rebbe’s Chicago Center for Torah and Chesed is a major chesed organization in Chicago. One of the jewels in the organization is Chesed L’Avraham, the beis midrash.

“The Rebbe has long dreamed of founding this kollel,” said Rabbi Tzvi Bider, menahel of the new kollel. “He wanted to bring an authentic chasidishe taam to Chicago, with yungeleit who would lay a foundation for a future chasidishe kehillah here in town.”

Why did it take over ten years for the kollel to be established? “There is always the financial challenge,” explains Rabbi Bider. “It takes significant funding and a budget to accept the responsibility of opening a kollel as well as providing for several months’ stipend ahead of time.

Also, I think Chicago wasn’t ready for it.

Chicago, l’maasah, is a very Litvishe shtut, and they simply were not ready for it yet.

As Yiddishkeit has grown in Chicago, a lot of baalei batim felt this would be the next step in growth: making it a world-class city with Yidden of all stripes and sects.”

I asked Rabbi Bider how they attracted young chasidishe men to be, in essence, pioneers in Chicago. Additionally, I wondered about the qualifications to join the kollel.

“Rav Zalman Leib Eichenstein [the Ziditchover Rebbe’s son], is the dynamic rosh

Members of Kollel Ahavas Torah

kollel of the new kollel,” answered Rabbi Bider. “He was the one responsible for recruiting new members. He got in touch with his contacts from across the chasidishe spectrum, whether it be from Monsey, Boro Park, Williamsburg or Lakewood.

“As for why someone would want to join, we offered a great plan for a budding young talmid chacham. There’s a chasidishe kollel led by a dynamic rosh kollel.

The kollel purchased apartment buildings where the avreichim can live rent-free, and we also provide a monthly stipend.

“Once the word got around that we were starting a kollel, it went from friend to friend, and we had to end up turning down a lot of applicants. In order to qualify, you have to be a serious ben Torah who is me’urav im habriyos. And officially we took each yungerman for three years, but our long-term vision is that these people will find a makom in Chicago and be able to continue raising their families here. We don’t want people to come for three years and leave. We want to be able to build up the presence in Chicago. That’s the long term goal, to establish a chasidishe enclave

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in the Windy City, thus rendering us a world-class city where all Jews are welcome.”

Why haven’t chasidim settled in Chicago until now?

“Chasidim perfer insular communities where they are surrounded by their families and fellow chasidim. They like being near their rebbe. Even in Lakewood, it took a long time for chasidim to come."

The kollel has no official specific chasidishe affiliation. The yungeleit are a mix of Vizhnitz, Satmar, others and even some “non-affiliated chasidim.” The avreichim will learn two sedarim of the day with one another, and during night seder they will be learning with the baalei batim who come to the kollel to learn.

What reaction has the chasidishe kollel received from Chicagoans at large?

“Very warm,” said Rabbi Bider. “Ever since the kollel opened, I have heard nothing but praise for this new venture. Ironically, the founding donors for the kollel were not chasidish themselves. Rabbi Bider added, “We are looking forward to the chasidishe warmth that the kollel will bring.”

•

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JEWISH LIVING IN

West Hartford,

New England’s “best kept secret” Jewish community REAL ESTATE

W

hen my family relocated to West Hartford over 18 years ago, little did we know that we were moving to one of the great hidden secrets of Jewish life in the United States. West Hartford has a general population of 60,000, of which 20,000 are estimated to be Jewish. Public schools— and even the local campus of UConn (University of Connecticut)—close for the first day of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. It

Rentals: about $1,000/month for two bedrooms; $1,300/ month for three bedrooms Homeownership: $300,000 for a three-bedroom home; $400,000 for a four-bedroom home Larger and smaller homes are available near all the shuls.

is a town with 10 synagogues (of which six are Orthodox), and when the description grows to include all of the greater metropolitan area, the Jewish population grows to over 30,000 and the number of congregations grows to over 25.

For families seeking day-school education, West Hartford has three schools.

West Hartford does not have a kollel, and the small Orthodox population (divided among all of the Orthodox shuls) is decidedly Modern Orthodox. For senior citizens in need of health support services,

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the Jewish community supports adult assisted living at Summerwood and inpatient care at Hebrew Home and Hospital.

The community of a couple of hundred Orthodox families is growing. A catalyst for the growth is the excellence of the day schools, both of which are aligned with the doctrines of Yeshiva University. Another reason for the growth is the warmth and connectedness of a smaller-town atmosphere. The span from Beth David Synagogue in the south end of town to northernmost shul is only four miles. Re-

BY RABBI YITZCHOK ADLER

Connecticut



Cost of Living TUITION Sigel Hebrew Academy: range: from $4,940 for three-morning-only kindergarten to $15,450 for seventh and eighth grades (plus annual “PEP” fee: $2,960 per family, for those families who have students attending kindergarten through eighth grade).

Getting there From Boston/New York City: 2 hours

WEATHER West Hartford is one of the most picturesque places to enjoy a year with four distinct seasons. Around the same time that sukkahs are going up at Jewish homes, the multicolored leaves are coming down. By mid-November, the region looks like a blanket of brilliant reds, oranges and yellows. As the leaves blow away, they are followed by the blankets of snow that give West Hartford the look of winter majesty at its best. By the time spring arrives, everyone is outdoors planting gardens, biking and hiking. Summer is simply tranquil or, as is recorded in a children’s story: not too hot, not too cold, just right.

on Jewish Education and the Jewish Historical Society.

Jewish presence in Hartford dates back to the 19th century, when permission was granted to allow the first synagogue to be established in the state. In 1876, as a result of a letter-writing petition to the state legislature, Congregation Beth Israel built the first synagogue in Connecticut, and while Beth Israel moved to another property in 1936, that building continues to function today as the Charter Oak Cultural Center.

Over the decades, Connecticut’s Jewish population has had a presence on the national political scene, with leaders including Senator Abraham Ribicoff, Senator Joseph Lieberman and, currently, Senator Richard Blumenthal.

Jewish life in West Hartford is secured through the maintenance of several critical agencies. One is Mikveh Beth Israel at 61 North Main Street, which services the entire community. West Hartford has an eruv that is operational virtually every Shabbos; in fact, it was down only one Shabbos in the past many years, following an unusually heavy snowstorm, and it was back up after only a few days. The local vaad hakashrus is known as the Hartford



cently, a gemach of health care supplies (wheelchairs, walkers, cribs, etc.) was launched, and the effort has been well received by the community. Every shul operates its independent chesed committee, and all major lifecycle events are supported compassionately by friends and neighbors.

The communal umbrella, as in most cities, is the Jewish Federation. It shares a campus on the north side of town with the Mandell Jewish Community Center, Jewish Family Services, the Commission

From Israel: 10–12 hours to New York

Kashrut Commission, and it functions as the sole and exclusive provider of kosher supervision and certification in the area. It currently endorses two glatt kosher fresh meat and poultry butchers, five bakeries (one that is fully pas Yisrael), three glatt kosher caterers, one restaurant and assorted other local vendors. There is a community chevra kadisha (we should all live long and healthy lives) that is always on notice and ready to be of service. West Hartford has one supervised kosher restaurant, Shuman’s Deli in the Bloomfield area. But you can travel to Boston or New York for a day or an evening and you can still be home and comfortable at a reasonable hour.

“Come for a visit, stay for a lifetime”— West Hartford is the kind of place that, once you visit, you will wonder why you didn’t come sooner.

•

To submit a community’s story or to have your community featured here, please contact us at submissions@amimagazine.org.

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BUSINESS

l NEWS

B Y Y E D I DA WO LF E

Anxiety About Amazon IS THE WORLD’S RETAIL GIANT A MENACE?

“I

t’s very difficult to define what Amazon is,” according to financial analyst R. J. Hottovy.

Nevertheless Brad Stone’s new book, The Everything Store, attempts to capture what the world’s largest retailer signals about the future. Founder Jeff Bezos doesn’t tolerate any talk of worklife balance, disqualifying anyone who mentions the concept in an interview, while robots replace humans for recommending products and books. Even as the retail giant lost $39 million last year, Bezos has won Wall Street’s favor. Despite its uneven balance sheet, Amazon has a market capitalization, the value investors place on the company, that’s more than a quarter of Apple’s. This means the company can continue to invest in infrastructure while keeping prices ridiculously low to compete against Walmart, eBay, Microsoft and Apple. For now, investors are providing access to low-cost goods to society at large, a benefit of its long-term growth strategy. Opponents, however, wonder how long the societal good will last as Amazon replaces human employees with robots, and, having decimated the competition, raises prices. (Sources: Salon, The Atlantic)

Data Point The US government shutdown cost an estimated $18 billion in lost work. (Source: Slate)

Euroskepticism

18billion

LESSONS FOR EUROPE FROM THE US SHUTDOWN

Content Cops CREDIT CARDS UNDER PRESSURE TO POLICE

As the US and European Union discuss implementing a free trade agreement (TTIP), politicians like EU Parliament President Martin Schulz urge Europe to heed lessons from the recent US government shutdown. When political adversaries become enemies, extreme rhetoric chases away tangible solutions as each side proclaims its platform can save the nation. Schulz warns “Euroskeptic” groups against following the Tea Party’s model of disrupting the dialogue and thwarting compromise among political opponents.

The three-week closure also highlighted the public sector’s key role in making sure the economy runs smoothly as citizens missed services deemed “nonessential.”

Visa, MasterCard and American Express are increasingly caught in the middle of the free-speech debate.

Political groups push for the big three credit-card processors to police the content their customers sell online. It’s a tricky task, since the companies get a cut of every credit card transaction processed through their networks.

While there’s a legal mandate to block illegal transactions, some argue that asking credit card processors to police their customers’ content violates the First Amendment. Proponents of the censorship say the companies have a right to be selective about the businesses that rely on their services.

(Source: LinkedIn)

(Source: NPR)

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8 EGO TRIPS HOLDING YOU BACK

AT WORK 1. Ignoring feedback you don’t like 2. Believing your technical skills are enough 3. Only surrounding yourself with people like you 4. Not relinquishing control 5. Remaining unaware of your downstream impact 6. Underestimating how much you’re being watched 7. Losing touch with the frontline experience 8. Letting your efforts slide on some days and not on others

(Source: Business Insider)

BUSINESS

KIDDUSH HASHEM IN THE WORKPLACE / / AMBASSADORS l

Family Therapy “SHABBOS” FOR A MOTHER IN CRISIS B Y CHAN Y VO G E L

M

eir was the head of logistics in a furniture manufacturing company, where he worked alongside a woman named Latoya.

Latoya and Meir had a great system in place, and Latoya respected Meir’s unique ability to take projects and break them down into small, manageable tasks. She also appreciated what an easy person he was to talk to.

One day, Meir got a call on his cell phone. It was Latoya. He was a bit alarmed, as it was past business hours, and she was calling his personal number. Was something wrong?

Latoya, it turned out, was hysterical and in desperate need of Meir’s advice. Her son, Robbie, a normally happy ten-year-old boy, had recently started having problems. He was getting into trouble at school with his friends. His grades were slipping and he was facing the threat of being expelled from school. The worst part was that when Latoya tried to talk to him, he lashed out at her. He had become angry and confrontational, constantly baiting his mother to fight with him. She was a single mom with no support from Robbie’s father, or from anyone else.

She was at her wits’ end and had no idea what to do. Meir always seemed to deal with company issues so well; could he possibly help her figure out what to do with her son?

Meir thought for a moment, and with a quick whispered prayer to Hashem that he should say the right thing, he gave her some advice. He told her that she needed some time to connect to Robbie, to encourage him to talk to her and tell her what he was feeling.

Latoya was receptive to the idea, but was unsure of how to go about it. At that point, any time she would start a conversation with her son, Robbie turned hostile and picked a fight with her. Meir explained to her that Jews have one day a week when there is nothing more important than spending time with the people they love most. He told her all about Shabbos: how for 25 hours, all nonessential electronics are

turned off, and family becomes a priority.

She couldn’t believe it. “You mean you don’t watch TV? Text your friends? Play games on Xbox?” Meir laughed and told her that he didn’t own a TV. And on Shabbos, there was nothing more important to him than his children.

Together, Meir and Latoya worked out a plan.

Latoya would choose a night during the week that was convenient for her and Robbie. She would turn off the TV, her cell phone, her computer and his Xbox. They would have supper together and just talk. With the plan in place, Latoya felt much better. Meir hung up the phone, hoping for the best.

A few weeks later, Meir got another call from Latoya, this time to thank him. Robbie’s grades were up. He was doing well in school, he was no longer in trouble, and their house was peaceful again. In fact, Latoya and Robbie’s “Shabbos” had worked so well that she was going to do it two nights a week! Latoya thanked Meir over and over again, telling him that Robbie was truly a changed kid.

After that, Latoya told all of her friends what had happened.

“You know why the Jews are so cool? Because once a week the children are the most important priority in the parents’ home. If you want good kids, you gotta’ ask an Orthodox Jewish man his secrets!”

Today, Robbie and his mom enjoy a beautiful relationship, and as Robbie is turning into a fine young man, his mom makes sure he remembers whom to thank for it.

He was a bit alarmed, as it was past business hours, and she was calling his personal number.

•

To submit your story for this column or to have your story featured here, please contact us at submissions@amimagazine.org.

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BUSINESS

l PARNOOOSA

PARNOOOSA!

BY MAURICE STEIN

Getting Down to Business Now that the vetting process is over, join us as we follow our three chosen candidates and guide them through the process of finding a new job. Each week, we’ll analyze the steps they’ve taken to reach their goal and the important lessons we can derive from their journey.

CHAIM PROFILE: CHAIM W. Age: 21 Resides in: BORO PARK Family status: MARRIED; 1 CHILD Education: YESHIVAH, KOLLEL Field of interest: WORKING WITH PEOPLE, BEING CREATIVE Years of experience: NONE Chaim has made more progress in the last few days than he did over the past few months. He was a little surprised by the fact that I wasn’t going to tell him exactly what to do and which job to take.

He was hoping that working with me would be as simple as answering a few questions and then following my instructions, but as we all eventually learn, there are no shortcuts to success. It takes hard work and commitment to be all you can be, and while help is available, you alone must be the driver of your own life

and future.

The more I work with people, the more I realize that telling them what to do doesn’t work. You can give your opinion or make an observation, but ultimately you have to let them come to their own conclusions and be accountable for their actions. In fact, whenever you want someone else to make a decision for you, it’s usually because some part of you doesn’t want to be responsible for the outcome. But it’s your life, so you really have to take responsibility in order to feel in charge of creating the future you want.

Chaim called two commercial kitchens and asked if he could come down and learn more about the food industry. Both places were happy to help, and invited him to visit their premises. He had a great time, and was fascinated by how many different ways food can be decorated and presented.

Based on our discussions so far, it

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looks like Chaim has a passion for event catering/planning. There are two ways he can proceed. He can do this as an employee working for someone else, or he can go out on his own. While both options would allow him to be creative and come up with new ideas on how to make events special, the difference is that as an employee he would not have the pressure of running the business from a financial perspective.

The next step is to start learning the business by actually being involved in it.

This will allow him to learn the basics of food styling, to see if he really has a feeling for it. After a few months of working for a caterer and getting some training, he will be in a better position to decide whether he truly wants to work in this field.

I advised Chaim to reach out to a few caterers and try to find a job with one of them, ideally for pay. But if that’s not possible, he should offer to help out for free in order to learn the ropes.

SHALOM PROFILE: SHALOM T. Age: 24 Resides in: FLATBUSH Family status: MARRIED; 3 KIDS Education: YESHIVAH Field of interest: OPEN TO ANYTHING Years of experience: 1 YEAR IN SALES Over the past week, Shalom worked on formulating a very compelling vision for his future: He wants to create a place where people can come to launch their new business ideas and get the support and tools they need to succeed.

I was very surprised when Shalom told me this. It’s a rather large objective, but I can tell that he is passionate and motivated to do whatever it takes to see it happen.

Sometimes it takes a while for people to formulate their vision, but once they’ve done so their whole life changes. It imbues

SIMON PROFILE: SIMON W. Age: 56 Resides in: LAKEWOOD Family status: MARRIED; 8 KIDS Education: BACHELOR'S DEGREE Field of interest: BUSINESS MANAGEMENT AND/OR BOOKKEEPING When I met Simon in person, he made a great first impression. He is a professional and a great communicator, and definitely has a lot to contribute to a new startup needing guidance and inside help from someone who is experienced in the industry.

In the past, Simon ran his own businesses and did all the bookkeeping, so he is very familiar with business management as well as with managing the books. Both of these qualifications are

them with energy and makes them feel alive and hopeful. They’re comfortable in their own skin and excited about the future.

When Shalom told me his vision he kept apologizing that it sounded kind of grandiose and unrealistic. I explained to him that this is often the case with successful people who think big, and it’s okay if he can’t accomplish his goal overnight. He will work on creating a daily plan of action that will allow him to grow until his vision becomes a reality.

I’ve scheduled a meeting with Shalom to discuss this in more detail. I am very happy that he was able to articulate a clear vision in such a short period of time.

“The reason why so many older people are not finding a job is that they don’t know how to present themselves to the younger generation.”

important to startups.

A lot of people between the ages of 50 and 60 possess these skills from their previous work experiences. I think the reason that there are so many in this age group looking for jobs and not finding them is that they do not know how to present themselves to the younger generation. They don’t know how to explain their value and sell their qualifications. So if we can help Simon to find a way to communicate this, I think it will be a lot easier to find a job.

Another area to explore is to have Simon take a few classes in order to update his skills and match those of the newer generation. One of the fears about hiring older people is that they aren’t up on the latest technology. Since businesses today are very dependent on technology, employers want to be confident that whomever they hire will be up to speed. I am not yet sure which courses I want him to take, but I am looking into it.

•

You can contact Maurice at Maurice@ amimagazine.org or at askmaurice.com.

THE IRANIAN TALMUD DR. SHAI SECUNDA EXPLAINS HOW THE STUDY OF ANCIENT PERSIA CAN ENHANCE GEMARA STUDY

BY RAFI BERGER DR. SHAI SECUNDA is a fellow at the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He studied in Ner Israel Rabbinical College in Baltimore, at Yeshiva University and at Harvard. His research focuses on the Babylonian Talmud and its Sasanian (Persian) context. A new scholarly work he has written, The Iranian Talmud: Reading the Bavli in its Sasanian Context, was published by University of Pennsylvania Press this month. In it, Secunda looks at the insights to be gained in the Gemara by knowing about the culture in which it was written. He recently spoke with Ami about his studies.

You study the Talmud academically. That’s different from the style of learning in yeshivos, isn’t it?

On my own, I learn in the yeshivah style. But what I publish uses academic methods. That means a lot of things, from the basics of looking at manuscripts to the use of all sorts of different methodologies.

Is there tension in the academic study of Talmud for a religious Jew?

Of course.

But do you see academic study as beneficial to yeshivah learning?

Definitely. I think it enhances talmud Torah, most obviously when you are talking about the really basic tools that are used in academic Talmud study. For example, now that we have access to manuscripts in libraries all over the world at our fingertips, this can help us gain a better understanding of a sugya, the same way the Rishonim often quoted different girsa’os from old sources.

We can do the same, and we’re blessed with tools they could only dream of. So certainly on the most rudimentary level I think it’s an absolute win, with very little tension.

If you walk into the National Library in Israel, and especially the manuscript and microfilm room, you’ll find that a large majority of the people working there are chareidim, because they care the most. They’re most devoted to talmud Torah, and part of that involves establishing the best text, whether it’s the Ritva or even midrashim.

When you talk about other aspects of academic Talmud study, it does get a little trickier. The trickiest would be source criticism and trying to dissect how the page works and how it grew together. But it’s nowhere nearly as problematic as the use of these tools for studying Tanach. The Rishonim, too—and really anyone who

knows how to learn—recognized that there’s a difference between a “tanu rabbanan” and a “tanya,” or between what an Amora says and what the Gemara asks.

It’s taking these assumptions we all know and doing new things with them. But there, too, I don’t think there has to be a big problem. If these tools are used correctly and responsibly, they can enhance talmud Torah.

Explain what your latest book, The Iranian Talmud, is about.

The title is almost a play on words. We know the Gemara is called the Talmud Bavli. Unlike the Talmud Yerushalmi, where there is a question as to why it is called that—since the chachamim had already left Yerushalayim by the time it was written—the Bavli is so-called for a very good reason: The chachamim lived in Bavel. The point of the book is to ask: Well, what did Bavel mean, and what was it like during the period when the chachamim operated and worked?

If you open the history books and try to figure out what was going on, you’ll find that Bavel was the heart of the Persian or Iranian Empire.

But isn’t Bavel in Iraq, not Iran?

Geographically, it was in modern-day Iraq, but the winter capital of the ruling Persians, the Sasanians, was smack-dab in the middle of Bavel. In fact, Mechoza, where Rava lived, was in the metropolitan area of that capital. So the book asks: If that’s the case, what does it mean for Jewish history? What were the challenges we faced? What kinds of people did the Jews come into contact with? And ultimately, how can that help us read the Gemara more productively? How can it give us more insight into what the Gemara is doing in different places, and what it means?

That takes place on a number of different levels, first and foremost just in terms of language. Obviously, the Gemara is written in Aramaic, which was the lan2 6 C H E S H VA N 5 7 7 4 / / O C T O B E R 3 0 , 2 0 1 3 / / A M I M A G A Z I N E

35

If you walk into the National Library in Israel, you'll find that a large majority of the people working there are chareidim guage spoken by most people in Bavel, including non-Jews.

There were a lot of Christians. There were also a lot of pagans.

But the Persians who lived there, who were connected to the government, spoke Persian. Because of that, there are a lot of words that came into Aramaic from Persian and became regular words. Scholars have studied this for a long time. The Aruch, Rashi, and even the Geonim will explain a word, say that it is Persian, and tell us what it means.

That’s all well-known. But the question is: What kinds of concepts and ideas came along with those words?

What would that mean?

A nice example a friend of mine came up with is a long section in Maseches Megillah that is basically like a midrash, almost pasuk by pasuk, on Megillas Esther. In one place, the Gemara asks why Achashverosh became so enraged when Vashti refused to come to him. The Gemara suggests that she compared him to the stable master of her zeide, Belshazzar. It uses the Persian word for stable master. Beyond the linguistics, there’s also what it meant to be a stable master in Persia at that time. From Persian literature we learn that it was considered the lowest possible profession in the king’s court. More than that, some of the literature talks about the rise of the first Sasanian king, at what was basically the time of the Talmud, whose name was Ardashir. The stories about him describe how he started out as the stable master in the court of the previous monarch—Ardavad, who also shows up in the Gemara—and despite his humble beginnings proved himself to be a very gifted individual who went on to rule the empire.

So you have a certain word in that short little Gemara, and a whole series of motifs, stories and ideas that come along with it. I try to bring examples and show how some of these things affect how we understand the Gemara, whether short passages or broader questions.

Is there a dividing line in the Gemara where the Persian influence starts?

We know that historically the chachamim only began to flourish in Bavel when Rav arrived, at the beginning of the third century of the Common Era. Once Rav came, the community in Bavel took off. At that point, you can start to think about what it meant to be living in a new environment. For example, there’s a mishnah in Bava Basra about hilchos shecheinim [the laws of 36 A M I M A G A Z I N E / / O C T O B E R 3 0 , 2 0 1 3 / / 2 6 C H E S H VA N 5 7 7 4

neighbors]. The courtyards were built differently in Bavel. How did they apply the Mishnah, written in Eretz Yisrael under Roman rule, to this new architectural context?

This is only one small aspect. The most important story of the Gemara is how the chachamim continued what the Tanna’im and Amora’im had done in Eretz Yisrael. But I try to show that it is still productive to think about what the new environment meant.

What brought you to this field of study?

Part of it was simply learning in yeshivah and wondering about all of these strange references made by the chachamim.

Another part was a personal connection.

When I decided that I wanted to learn more about the academic method, I decided to go to YU to pursue a PhD. I wanted to learn with [Professor of Jewish History and Talmud Studies] Yaakov Elman, who is still there and has a big influence on this area of study. What he originally worked on—and why I wanted to work with him—was the Tosefta. I had an obsession with it. When I was learning, I would always check the Tosefta. Why is this beraisa in the Gemara different from the Tosefta? What is the Tosefta?

How does it work? He wrote quite a bit about this, and I wanted to study with him.

I left Baltimore when I got married and came to New York. At that time, Yaakov Elman had just started studying the language that was spoken by the Persians then, Middle Persian, and his enthusiasm for it was infectious. He said, “Listen, I’m very happy to learn Tosefta with you to your heart’s content, but…” He was very excited about the things he was learning. Through that personal connection, I realized this was something I wanted to look into more deeply.

Is there a lot of Persian literature dating from that time?

There isn’t very much. It’s not like what we have in the Western world. For many years, academics have been using things written in Greek or Latin to help understand midrashim or the Yerushalmi, especially at the level of word meaning. A large percentage of words in the Midrash are Greek.

There’s much less material surviving from that period in Middle Persian. Essentially, what we have are a lot of religious texts related to the ancient Persian-Iranian religion, which is called Zoroastrianism. Then we have a few purely legal

texts, which are very interesting. One is called the Book of a Thousand Decisions. It goes through property and family law, and gives you an idea of the kind of civil law that was operational at that time. As for the religious non-Jewish texts that have survived, many of them are legal or [about] ritual. There’s a huge focus on purity and impurity, which is interesting, as a Jew, because it’s a topic we care very much about.

There are also all kinds of mythological texts about different creatures and the like. In fact, the famous stories about Rabba bar bar Chanah mention a lot of the same creatures described in some of them.

The last type that survived was what you’d call courtly literature, relating to the monarchy and life in the royal court. That actually became very important in Iranian culture. The big text they look to is called the Shahnameh. It’s like Homer’s Odyssey for them. It was during this period that their literature first developed, and there are connections to some stories about the Persian kings in the Gemara.

So you look for connections between those texts and pieces of Gemara?

Yes. In the book, most of my examples are from what you’d call aggadah. But I’ve also looked at legal issues in the past, as have others.

Yaakov Elman has been working on something with regard to the laws of ona’ah [cheating in business], which matches up well with how things operated in the Sasanian legal system.

The point of my book is to show what can be done.

Is there a thesis that you present?

The thesis, first and foremost, is that this is valuable. But the real thesis is somewhat technical. It has to do with how we read texts from different corpuses with something called intertextuality—taking into account how texts interact with one another. Even when we talk, we use words from different languages, and those languages interact with one another. That’s something linguists have been studying for almost a century.

We’re talking here about texts that emerged from two totally different cultures. The Gemara comes from a Jewish context and, more broadly, from a Semitic context. These Persian texts come, ultimately, from an Indo-European context. Persian is not like Arabic, a Semitic language. It’s a whole different linguistic system and

way of thinking. Yet the fact is that Jews and Persians flourished in the same area for hundreds and hundreds of years. So I try to chart a path for how these texts might interact with one another.

Are there any examples you can give of these interactions?

Here’s a nice one. There’s a group of stories in the Gemara about three people: Rava, Shvur Malka, or Shapur the king – in this case Shapur II, who ruled when Rava was alive – and Shvur Malka’s mother, referred to in the Gemara as Ifra Hurmuz. In the stories, Ifra Hurmuz is often protecting the Jews from Shvur Malka. Rashi gives a reason why: She wanted to be megayeir [convert to Judaism]. There’s an interesting dynamic among the three.

In Taanis 24b, she tells Shvur Malka that he shouldn’t have “eisek devarim” [contentious dealings] with the Jews. That, at least, is how it appears in the printed edition. But if you look in the Aruch and some kisvei yad, you find a Persian word there: “haikar.” That doesn’t mean just dealings; it means disputes. Don’t dispute the Jews, is what she was saying. The same word shows up in the courtly literature in connection with Shvur Malka. It describes how this king, Shapur II, tried to engage all of his subjects, of different extractions, in disputes, almost like religious disputations.

He wanted to learn about their knowledge and what they had to say. You can see from this one example that the Gemara was aware that Shvur Malka was trying to engage in debates and that Ifra Hurmuz was trying to back him away from the Jews, because she saw them as special.

Is there any connection between the subject of your studies and modern-day Iran?

I discuss this in the epilogue of the book. The big game changer was the Islamic conquest. When the Gemara was written, Islam didn’t exist. Then, of course, in 1979, Iran officially became an Islamic republic.

Until Islam, the Jews had a relatively easy time in Bavel. If you compare the situation of Jews in Eretz Yisrael and in Bavel, Bavel was pretty good. There are hints in the Gemara of minor persecutions. They took our menorahs away sometimes when their priests were overzealous and thought we would harm the fire, which was a sacred element to them. But otherwise, it was pretty good. Even into the Middle Ages, the situation wasn’t too bad. There were famous Jewish poets who wrote in JudeoPersian, their version of Yiddish. The complications arose later, in the 16th century, and then with the Islamic Revolution.

Perhaps because I’ve had contact with non-Jewish scholars of this period, some from Iran and even some still living there, I wonder, maybe naively, that if it was possible for Jews to have a healthy, positive relationship with Iran, then perhaps one day that could again be the case.

Most of what I say, however, is only historically relevant. I joke that I wasn’t able to figure out that Rouhani was going to become president of Iran. But neither were my friends who are experts on modern-day Iran.  2 6 C H E S H VA N 5 7 7 4 / / O C T O B E R 3 0 , 2 0 1 3 / / A M I M A G A Z I N E

37

by John Loftus

Blowing the Lid Off Lyme

How America’s Nazi spies have left a deadly lasting imprint

T

he other night was our forty-first wedding anniversary and I was feeling well enough to skip the wheelchair and just go for a stroll with my wife, Susan. It turned out to be an eventful evening.

It started out nicely.

My home health aide dropped my wife and me off at our favorite seafood restaurant. The weather in St. Petersburg was so nice that we sat at an outdoor table. Our sneaky daughter had called ahead from New York and had cocktails and appetizers waiting. Life is tough, eh?

After dinner we strolled down the sidewalk past an old rundown hotel that had just been refurbished with several dazzling restaurants. I had read a wonderful review about the new open-air patio so we caught the elevator to the rooftop. Beautiful view, nice tent-like cabanas along the side. I liked shade so we headed there. I didn’t notice the reserved sign.

As we headed back towards the inside, a pair of women about our age waived us over and invited us to sit in their cabana.

Lovely. Everything was going great. What could go wrong? The women were working with a private foundation to rehab rundown housing for the poor. They were new to St. Pete, so Susan said we would show them around. We handed them our cards.

The younger woman looked at my card and a strange look came over her face.

“You know, there is a famous John Loftus,” she said. Susan smiled her death’s head grin and said noncommittally. “Oh yeah.”

I know that look. I got up to move my walker or some such excuse. The woman said, “No, really. There is a very famous guy with the same name.” My wife smiled and gave in graciously. “Yeah, we know.

That’s him.”

I was trapped. The woman said, “Really, you are the famous John Loftus?” I said, “I’m afraid I am.” You have to understand.

Susan and I don’t get to go out much, and the last thing she wanted was to have our

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"‫מעודדים בכל לב את התוכנית "לב טהור‬ ‫ תשס"ח‬,‫ ג' לסדר ואלה שמות בני ישראל‬.‫ב"ה‬ ‫ איש על מחנהו‬,‫ בחינוך תשב"ר במדינות ארה"ב‬,'‫ אישי הסגולה העמלים במלאכת ה‬,‫למע"כ מצדיקי הרבים ככוכבים‬ – ‫ ה' עליהם יחיו‬,‫ואיש על דגלו‬ ‫ מלמדים ברוכים – בכמות ובאיכות – נדרשת‬,‫ בחסד עליון‬,‫בד בבד עם התפתחות מערכות החינוך התורני בארה"ב‬ ‫נגף על‬-‫השקט להציב אבני‬-‫ לעומת הנסיונות מעצת היצר המרשיע ללא‬,‫ עשיית משמרת למשמרת‬,‫העמידה על המשמר‬ .‫דרכם הטהורה של שלומי אמונים‬ ‫ הן במעשי ניוול מידם‬,‫ היא התופעה המבישה של התעללויות בילדים‬,‫אחת מן הבעיות הכאובות שאין להעלים ממנה עין‬ ‫מנוס מבקשת‬-‫ אמנם אין‬,‫ כבוד אלקים הסתר דבר‬.‫ רח"ל‬,‫ והן בהזנחה גופנית ונפשית בבית ובמשפחה‬,‫דרך‬-‫של סוטי‬ .‫נפש לאומללים שנפלו ברשת עכורה זו‬-‫ ולהמציא מזור ותעלת‬,‫עצה ותושייה ונקיטת אמצעים ראויים לעצור בעוד מועד‬ ‫ יראים‬,‫ מעובדת בידי צוות מחנכים דגולים‬,"‫ הובאה לפנינו תוכנית "לב טהור‬,‫בשליחותם של גדולי התורה שליט"א‬ ‫פעולה למחנכי מוסדות התורה סימני זיהוי שונים‬-‫ בתוכנית זו משורטטים קוי‬.‫ ובראשם הרב ר' משה בק שליט"א‬,‫ושלמים‬ .‫ והכשרה מקצועית מתאימה לטיפול בקרבנות של התעללויות‬,‫ דרכי תגובה נכונות לתלונה ואזהרה‬,‫של מקרים שכאלו‬ ‫ לפקוח עיניהם על כל הנעשה ולהזדקק לשאלות ולספיקות המתעוררים‬,‫על התוכנית סמכו ידיהם גדולי התורה שליט"א‬ ‫ והן מצד תוכנה של התוכנית אשר‬,‫ הן בגין הצורך המצער הדורש מענה נכון וראוי‬,‫ גם לנו נראים הדברים מאוד‬.‫לפי העניין‬ .‫ בדעה ישרה שרוח חכמים נוחה הימנה‬,‫כלליה ופרטיה ערוכים ברוב עצה ותושייה‬ ‫ יזדקק‬,‫ אין ספק שראוי עד מאוד שכל מחנך החפץ להתעסק בקדשים ולעשות מלאכת ה' באמונה ולא ברמייה‬,‫ובכן‬ ‫ ומה נכון שגם מוסדות החינוך ידרשו‬.‫ כדי לדעת הדרך לילך בה והמעשה אשר יעשה‬,‫להתלמד ולהתאמן בתוכנית זו‬ .‫ הנוגעת במישרין לאחריותם ולאחריותו של המחנך למילוי תפקידם באמת ובאמונה‬,‫מהמחנכים להזדקק להכשרה זו‬ ‫ ויהי נועם ה' עליכם‬,‫ להעמיד לגיונו של מלך לכבוד שמים‬,‫ להמשיך ביתר שאת ועוז בעבודת הקודש‬,‫ה' עמכם גבורי החיל‬ .‫ומעשי ידכם יכונן‬

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by John Loftus

One of the Nazi scientists was a little careless and the ticks got out…Then people started to get sick by the thousands. Then people started dying. lovely evening interrupted by some fan gushing about how wonderful her husband is. I am a nice guy, but I am hardly a two-cent celebrity. My wife saved lives as a psychotherapist, but no one comes rushing up to her on the street to tell her how wonderful she is. She is. She puts up with me. No easy task.

I was getting ready to make polite excuses and find another restaurant when the woman said, “I am from Cape Cod. I have Lyme disease. My mother died of it.” Susan waved at me to sit down.

Later that night, Susan called our daughter Meg to describe the evening. “And there was this lovely woman, and she just wanted to thank your father for what he did for everyone who suffers from Lyme disease.”

Meg said “Dad? What did Dad have to do with Lyme disease?”

Sue replied that the woman said I was a hero to people suffering with Lyme. I was the first person to expose the connection to biological weapons research.

Meg sounded a bit skeptical. “How come I didn’t know about this? When did this all happen?”

Susan said “You were very young.”

She was. It happened just after she was born.

The Perfect Incubator I quit the US Department of Justice in disgust in 1981. I appeared on 60 Minutes in May of 1982 and my book, The Belarus Secret, came out a few months later. Something like 25 million people had seen my interview with Mike Wallace. After I blew the 42 A M I M A G A Z I N E / / O C T O B E R 3 0 , 2 0 1 3 / / 2 6 C H E S H VA N 5 7 7 4

whistle on Nazis in America, it seemed that everywhere I went strangers would come up to talk to me. Some of them were spies.

Apparently I had made a good impression with the American intelligence community. Instead of leaking secrets of state, I had done the right thing and fought with the CIA Pre-Publication Censorship Board for permission to release my book. Word had gotten out that I was one of the good guys. Now everyone wanted to tell me his secrets.

This guy was different: a well-dressed businessman, serious. He said that I had missed a few things. He told me how we had accidentally dropped a nuclear warhead on US soil and were lucky that we didn’t lose South Carolina. The other secret blunder was Lyme disease.

After World War II, the Army had set up an artillery range at Fort Terry on Plum Island, New York, to test some of the captured Nazi biological weapons, including insect bombs filled with poisonous vermin. The island was a perfect testing ground, an ideal home for Plum Island Animal Disease Center. Nothing could escape, and most of the time, the prevailing winds blew everything out to sea anyway.

The Army wanted to test how far these insect vectors would go.

It was supposed to be a harmless test. One of the ticks the Nazis found in North Africa caused an unusual rash that looked just like a bulls-eye. It didn’t hurt anybody. That’s what they thought, anyway. It was just a way to measure how much damage an insect vector with real poison could inflict.

But one of the Nazi scientists was a little careless and the ticks got out at Plum Island. Somehow—maybe through a bird or a deer (deer can swim a couple of miles in the ocean)—the Nazi tick made it across the water from Plum Island and landed in the town of Lyme, Connecticut. A lot of people started getting the bull’s eye rash, but no one knew what it was. Then people started to get sick by the thousands. Then people started dying.

The old spy (whose name I never knew) told me that the whole thing had been covered up. A gigantic study was done in New England under the guise of another disease—multiple sclerosis, I think he said. What they were really looking at was how many people were infected, and how could Lyme disease be contained.

The answer was: It couldn’t. The disease kept spreading, and the Army kept covering it up, hoping that it would not spread too fast or that someone would find a cure.

Nazis in Plum Island Now this conversation must have taken place in 1982, because I included a short mention of it for the trade paperback edition of The Belarus Secret, which came out in late 1982, early 1983.

It was just a brief couple of paragraphs, but it caused a bit of a controversy.

One of the leading Lyme disease experts, Michael Carroll, later recalled that “In the book, The Belarus Secret, author John Loftus, the Justice Department employee who exposed Kurt Waldheim

as a Nazi, states that Nazi germ warfare scientists had experimented with poison ticks dropped from planes to spread rare diseases. Loftus also states that he had received information that the United States had tested some of these poison ticks on the Plum Island artillery range off the coast of Connecticut during the early part of the 1950s.”

As the controversy began to spread, a nurse who was one of the early Lyme victims clutched my book in rage as he demanded to know about the alleged Lyme cover-up at a national scientific conference. The spokesman from the US Department of Agriculture dismissed the whole thing as some “men from Mars” conspiracy theories. The general response was that I seemed to be a rather sober and responsible attorney, but if I had fabricated this information about Lyme disease, then I should be prosecuted.

Over the years, it has now become clear that someone should be prosecuted all right, but it sure isn’t me. There is some evidence suggesting that Lyme disease did not even exist in America before the Plum Island experiments. Plum Island lab director Jerry Callis confirms that there was indeed secret tick research on Plum Island, but he claims that none of the poisoned

ticks ever escaped: “Plum Island experimented with ticks, but never outside of containment. We had a tick colony where you take them and feed them on the virus and breed ticks to see how many generations it would last, on and on, until it’s diluted. Recently they reinstated the tick colony.”

It should be noted that the first “bull’s eye rash” in America was not reported until after World War II. Before then there was not a single confirmed incident of Lyme disease, although there were some historical records that suggest a few people may have suffered from similar illnesses.

Certainly the disease existed in Europe and Asia for centuries, but it was not prevalent in America, and certainly not widespread as it is now.

The Texas Tick in New England And then there is the Texas tick that hitchhiked to Plum Island. Dr. Carroll wrote: “The focal point of experimentation on Plum Island in the 1970s, the Lone Star tick-like Lyme disease, is now spread throughout New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. How did that happen?” A long overlooked document obtained from the files of an investigation by the office of former Long Island Congressman Thomas

Downey sheds new light on the second, more damning connection to Lyme disease.

Congressman Downey had a lot of constituents dying of Lyme disease. Plum Island is off the coast of Long Island. He found a 1978 internal research document from the Department of Agriculture. Dr. Carroll explains, “In laymen’s terms, Plum Island was experimenting with the Lone Star tick—feeding them on viruses and testing them on pigs—during the ground zero year of Lyme disease. They did not transmit African swine fever to pigs, said the document, but they might have transmitted Bb (Lyme disease) to researchers or to the island’s vectors.”

So the ticks did get out. They might have infected lab workers or even Plum Island’s mice and water fowl, “the island’s vectors” or possible disease carriers. Interestingly, the Texas tick they were playing with at Plum Island had never visited New England before: “The Lone Star tick, named after the white star on the back of the female, is a hard tick; along with its cousin, the deer tick, it is a culprit in the spread of Lyme disease. Interestingly, at that time, the Lone Star tick’s habitat was confined to Texas. Today, however, it is endemic throughout New York, Connecticut and New Jersey. And no one can really explain

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how it migrated all the way from Texas.”

Dr. Carroll has an explanation. The Nazis did it, just as I had written in my book back in 1982. Carroll explains: “A former employee at Plum Island in the 1950s has personal recollection of a ‘Nazi scientist’ releasing ticks outdoors on Plum Island….A source who worked on Plum Island in the 1950s recalls that animal handlers and a scientist released ticks outdoors on the island. ‘They called him the Nazi scientist, when they came in, in 1951—they were inoculating these ticks,’ and a picture he once saw ‘shows the animal handler pointing to the area on Plum where they released the ticks.’”

Dr. Erich Traub was one of the Nazi scientists brought to America in 1949 as part of Operation Paperclip. When I went public in 1982, no one even knew what caused Lyme disease. That same year, scientist Willy Burgdorfer published an article in Science magazine for the first time linking a new bacterium as the causative agent of Lyme disease. The spirochete was later named Borrelia burgdorferi, or Bb, in his honor.

A Spy’s Gift to America I interviewed the stranger and started writing about Lyme disease in 1982, before the first article on ticks was even published. It wasn’t until five years later that scientists found Bb spirochetes in tick saliva, confirming that Lyme disease was indeed spread by tick bites. So why did I risk my reputation in 1982 writing about an unknown scandal at Plum Island? Why was I so sure the stranger I met was telling me the truth about the Nazi tick tests that turned into Lyme disease?

Well for one thing, his story about dropping an A-bomb on South Carolina sure checked out. In 1958, a B-47 air crew on its way to England simply goofed up. The co-pilot went to get coffee while checking something, and instead of grabbing the ladder he grabbed the bomb release

mechanism. The plane just dropped it by accident on the little town of Mars Bluff, South Carolina.

It didn’t get much press attention at the time because the government said that the hydrogen bomb was empty; its plutonium core had not even been loaded. That, my source said, was a lie. The conventional explosives detonated, leaving a 35-foot crater.

Five of the seven nuclear fail-safe devices failed in the explosion, but the bomb did not go off. Only two little links were all that stood between a harmless accident and the nuclear vaporization of an entire American county. Yeah, my source knew what he was talking about. Like me, he had once held a Q clearance for nuclear weapons.

There was another reason I trusted his information about Nazi experiments at

Plum Island. I had seen many, many similar reports in other secrets archives back in the day. There is a Top Secret vault underneath the US War College at Carlisle Barracks in Pennsylvania. Inside is a military study on how to plunge communist Russia into starvation by floating balloons filled with “wheat rust” virus over the grain fields of the Ukraine.

There were other Top Secret reports on “clandestine attacks on crops and animals,” but the file folders are empty. Their contents have been destroyed without authorization or documentation. I can guess why. The British had actually used the insect bombs tested at Plum Island. There is a record in the UN where the North Korean delegate screamed about overhead bombs exploding and scattering insects

The Russian bug bombs were designed by the same guy who later conducted the tick experiments at Plum Island—Erich Traub.

44 A M I M A G A Z I N E / / O C T O B E R 3 0 , 2 0 1 3 / / 2 6 C H E S H VA N 5 7 7 4

Let It Be Known Technically, Plum Island was under the command of Nelson Rockefeller, President Eisenhower’s Secretary of the Department of Agriculture. But the USDA always loaned the island for whatever the US military wanted to test. Now the funny thing is that Traub studied at Rockefeller’s university before World War II. Later on, as Gerald Ford’s vice president, Nelson Rockefeller headed up a special commission headed by the late Senator Ted Kennedy to try to block Congressional investigations of intelligence abuses, which seems to have targeted Plum Island.

One of the things that Senator Kennedy specifically wanted to investigate was biological weapons tests that may

have harmed American health. Funny that Rockefeller owned a huge chicken breeding farm not far from Lyme, Connecticut.

Funny that Traub published a paper on how chickens get infected with viruses.

Now, these conclusions and the tips I got from my anonymous friend are not supported by everyone, including those who head national organizations dealing with Lyme disease research. Infections and syndromes similar to Lyme disease were found in early America, but scientists think that deforestation killed off the carriers. Why did it suddenly appear again?

Scientists aren’t quite sure. Why were the first modern cases of Lyme disease concentrated on Long Island and in Connecticut, the closest areas to Plum Island? Some people still aren’t quite sure.

It’s all probably just a coincidence, but my friend Rachel Vernon says you see hundreds of bunches of coincidences when you start researching Lyme disease.

She will be furious when the British start opening up their files in 2022. Talk about coincidences. The British actually dropped “bug bombs” on Nazi Germany during World War II. Churchill himself authorized it, according to the secret files I read.

I interviewed Germans who described how they were called out of school to pick potato bugs off their potato crop.

My new friend, the lady whose mom died from Lyme disease, wants you to know that if you ever go to the state park at Truro on Cape Cod, please stay on the marked trails.

Don’t go into the bushes. That’s where the ticks are. The poison ticks are still there.

There are signs warning people, she told me, “but they are not very big. It’s as if they don’t want people to know.”

•

fronet.co.il

crawling all over the snow.

Other records show that the Nazis may have tested similar bug bombs on the Russians. The Russian bug bombs were designed by the same guy who later conducted the tick experiments at Plum Island—Erich Traub. In fact, the Army even offered Traub command of Plum Island, but he turned the job down.

After the war, the US had agreed that America would get the Nazi rocket scientists but the British would get the Nazi germ warfare experts. The British scientific liaison to the US at the time of the Plum Island tests was Donald Maclean, Kim Philby’s associate in MI6 and fellow communist double-agent.

Traub was in Soviet hands after World War II, but somehow managed to escape into the custody of British Intelligence.

Communist spies Philby and MacLean then peddled Traub (and even worse people) to Army Intelligence. The reason was that America had to prepare defenses against bug bombs, and the British could not afford to pay for the research. But it seems they would share their Nazi scientists for some tests at Plum Island. Wasn’t Kim Philby nice to us? Thank you, Nelson Rockefeller, for covering it all up.

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Attorney John Loftus, author of America’s Nazi Secret, is a retired Army officer, intelligence analyst and federal prosecutor. He previously held a Q clearance for nuclear top secrets while working for the US government.

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‫המועצה לשימור‬

‫צמרת העיר‬

R E M E M B E R I N G REB MOSHE REICHMANN, Z”L, AND HIS ACCOMPLISHMENTS

5691—5774 1930—2013

Rav Shlomo Miller

ROSH KOLLEL OF TORONTO

Shares His Memories By

Rabbi Yitzchok Frankfurter Perhaps the most poignant comments about Reb Moshe (Paul) Reichmann, z"l, were made to me by a columnist for the Toronto Star, David Olive. He had interviewed Paul Reichmann, and he said, “Paul Reichmann never viewed money as an end in itself, but merely as a means with which to accomplish far greater things. Paul Reichmann was actually not comfortable with riches. He seemed anxious to shed personal wealth through charity.

“In an interview with me in the late 1980s, Paul Reichmann cited Maimonides that his students should devote themselves to intellectual rather than commercial pursuits. There are enough crazies out there, the Jewish philosopher said, to tend to the material world. A bit awkwardly, Reichmann said to me, ‘I guess I am one of the crazies.’”

That someone of Mr. Reichmann's stature, who had rubbed shoulders with kings and prime ministers, should be cognizant that commercial pursuits are not the greatest achievment of man is beyond praise.

I have no doubt that the Rambam, who

wrote that "Charity is an identifying mark of a righteous person" would hardly have viewed him as "one of the crazies," but as one of the heroes of our time. And how could he have not? Reb Moshe singlehandedly supported thousands of Torah institutions and impoverished individuals. People like him are few and very far between.

With these thoughts in mind, I met with Rav Shlomo Miller just a day after the levayah of Reb Moshe Reichmann. Rav Shlomo Miller came to New York to attend a family bar mitzvah and he was gracious to spend some time with me to share his memories about the patron and founder of the kollel that Rav Miller heads in Toronto. Rav Miller, a native of Baltimore and a talmid of Rav Aharon Kotler, zt”l, in Lakewood, is a leading posek and Torah authority and heads kollelim in Toronto and Lakewood. What follows are Rav Miller's memories.

It’s absolutely true that he viewed wealth as a means to accomplish great things. Though he lost a lot of money, he wasn’t brokenhearted. His attitude was 'Hashem nasan v'Hashem lokach [G-d gave and G-d took].' If Hashem wants him to do more, he’ll do more. If not, not.

He wasn’t a gavra rabba because he gave tzedakah. He gave tzedakah because he was a gavra rabba.

And he was a gavra rabba in everything.

People came to him for all kinds of business advice, and he gave advice to everyone. When young people came to him with plans to start a business, he lent them the money to get started—millions of dollars—which he never got back. He signed arvus [co-signed] for millions of dollars to banks.

He had a gevurah [strength]. And he tempered it with chesed.

He was chesed and gevurah with tiferes, sheinkeit, and always calm.

He never got upset. People made him meshuga, but he was always calm. He was a moradig [incredible] ba’al middos.

The amount of tzedakah he gave was unbelievable. His chesed was moradig, with no request for any kavod.

He wanted no kavod. He hated kavod.

That’s why there’s no building with his name on it.

About 40 years ago, when they built the Bais Yaakov building, three gevirim chipped in to pay for the whole building. He wouldn’t put his name on it, but the other two wanted their names, so they put his name together with theirs.

He was attached to the gedolei Yisrael—the Chazon Ish, Rav Shach. He was machshiv Torah and talmidei chachamim. He was very close with Rav Tuvia Weiss; they were in yeshivah together. He had a close relationship with Rav Meir Erlanger; they used to learn together.

Moshe Reichmann started the kollel in Toronto, in Cheshvan of 1970. It was his idea. He had learned in Gateshead. He understood what a kollel is. And he helped all the other kollelim start. They all came to him for money. He helped change America into a makom Torah.

In the beginning he basically supported the kollel in Toronto himself. I recall one time he came to the kollel and he had a chiyuv to daven for the amud—probably after his father was niftar. There was another chiyuv, so Moshe wanted to make another minyan. I said that we don’t make separate minyanim in the kollel; we’ll give him the amud in the regular minyan. He wouldn’t take it away from the other person. Instead, he left and went somewhere else to daven, even though he was supporting the whole kollel!

After his losses in 1992 he still supplied a part of the kollel’s budget, but not everything. Then he held b’shitah that the mosdos need a fundraising apparatus and can’t just depend on him.

He told me that when he was facing bankruptcy, he could have extracted a billion dollars from the project. It would have been legal, but it would have looked bad. He spoke to one of the gedolim who said, 'It would be a chilul Hashem; don’t do it.' And he didn’t do it.

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There were certain Torah institutions in Toronto before him, but there were many fewer before he brought in the kollel 43 years ago.

The cheder was dying out because people had nothing to stay for.

You couldn’t get melamdim to come here. So he figured he’d make a kollel. And it made a tremendous change. Now there are, baruch Hashem, several kollelim in Toronto.

There are 28 yungeleit in the kollel now. His son-in-law used to learn with us and now has his own kollel, a more chasidishe one.

There was a day school before him. He opened up a cheder type of school that teaches in Yiddish. He started a Bais Yaakov. He was very shtark [strong] in his Toradik hashkafos.

When I mentioned him at the Torah Umesorah convention in Toronto this Shabbos, I said that because he was very makpid about keeping mesorah, I wanted to speak in Yiddish.

Someone at the Torah Umesorah convention told me, 'He did a lot for Toronto.' I replied, 'For all of America. And not just for America. For mosdos all over the world.' When he could, he gave everywhere. And gevirim everywhere were taught to give by Moshe Reichmann.

He was a ben Torah himself. I used to learn with him at night in the kollel. Rabbi Hirschman [the other rosh kollel] mentioned in his hesped that he had stopped coming to the kollel because aniyim [poor people] were coming to his door and he wasn’t there, so he felt he had to be at home.

When he first got married, he was in Morocco. He was involved in Otzar HaTorah. He went to help Sefardi children. And all the years he helped their mosdos a lot.

Even though he gave money, he never said dei'os [made demands]. He wasn’t controlling.

That’s an ikar hametzius [rarity]—gelt without dei'os.

And there were many other things that should be known about him. Non-Jews knew he was a man of his word. It was a great kiddush Hashem. And with shmiras Shabbos—he was moradig.

There’s a teshuvah in Igros Moshe about owning a public company and whether there’s a heter to keep it open on Shabbos if you’re the main owner but you’re not controlling it on Shabbos. Rav Moshe was maskim [agreed] to a heter I gave. But Moshe Reichmann told me that despite that, he had asked Rav Moshe later, when he met him, 'Is it proper for me to do it?' Rav Moshe said he could.

There were parking lots in the buildings he owned. On Shabbos, he did not charge for parking. He wouldn’t take money for Shabbos.

Someone once forged his name on a letter-of-intent. He went to Rav Moshe to ask if he could tell the authorities that it wasn’t his signature, as he might get some other Yid in trouble. Rav Moshe told him he was allowed to, yet he wouldn’t do it anyway.

He also had a koach [ability] to be quiet. Sometimes at a meeting he wouldn’t answer. He told me: 'There’s a time to be quiet.'

Reshaping the Skyline— of the Torah World REB MOSHE REICHMANN, Z”L, AND HIS ACCOMPLISHMENTS

By Yossi Krausz and Chananya Bleich

Reb Moshe Yosef Reichmann passed away at the age of 83. Many of the obituaries written about him in the secular press pointed to the way he and his brothers reshaped the skylines of a number of world cities. New York, London, Mexico City, Boston, Chicago and of course Toronto, his home for over 50 years—were all transformed by buildings he erected.

Less apparent to the eye was the way he redesigned the Jewish world and its institutions. For many years, those in need of funds, whether for yeshivos and other mosdos or for private causes, would make their way to Toronto, where he and his brothers had an entire system set up to handle the mind-boggling amount of tzedakah that was distributed.

A person looking for Moshe Reichmann’s buildings need only look up. The tallest building in Canada and one of the highest office buildings in all of Latin America are both his creations. The incredible effect he had on Jewish life, however, is less easy to spot. There are certain institutions that are clearly associated with him; the Lakewood kollel in Toronto (Kollel Toronto) is a prime example. But because the Reichmanns almost never had their names advertised on the walls of yeshivos or other facilities they helped fund, Moshe Reichmann’s contributions, gargantuan as they were, might escape the notice of the average person on the street.

For those of us old enough to remember, we recall the fear that gripped many people in charge of collecting for Torah institutions when the Reichmanns’ fortunes took a turn for the worse in 1992.

Until then, there had been the sense of a safety net for any yeshivah that found itself in dire straits; afterwards, that no longer existed.

It has been estimated that the Reichmanns gave approximately $50 million a year to tzedakah before the crash; afterwards, at least initially, their total assets were worth “only” $100 million. The collectors were justified in being afraid; the original level of philanthropy would not be sustainable.

But just like the physical structures that Moshe Reichmann built, which we can still marvel at, the Torah world continues to bear his imprint, affecting virtually every frum Jew of the modern era.

Escape and beyond

Reb Moshe Reichmann’s unparalleled entrepreneurship, both on the business front and in the Jewish communal world, was something he had observed at home. Originally from Hungary, where three of their children were born, Shmaya and Reneé Reichmann moved to Vienna, Austria, in the 1920s, where Shmaya had a successful egg distribution business. Their three youngest sons, 50 A M I M A G A Z I N E / / O C T O B E R 3 0 , 2 0 1 3 / / 2 6 C H E S H VA N 5 7 7 4

including Moshe, were born in Vienna.

The Reichmanns managed to escape the Nazis through profound hashgachah pratis. The family had returned to Hungary to celebrate the bar mitzvah of Edward, the oldest son, as Shmaya’s father was too sick to travel. That same day the Nazis invaded Austria and the Reichmanns never returned, escaping first to Paris, France, and then south to Tangier, Morocco.

There, Shmaya once again became successful as a money changer and banker, while Mrs. Reichmann devised a complex plan to get food to Jews in German concentration camps. These packages were sent under the auspices of the Spanish Red Cross. Because Franco, the Spanish dictator, had an alliance with Hitler, and because the packages were labeled as designated for prisoners of war (Mrs. Reichmann having successfully convinced the Spanish Red Cross to label the Jewish inmates as such), they made their way to the starving Jews and saved numerous lives.

After the war, Moshe went to England to learn in Schneider’s Yeshiva, where the famous story in which he volunteered to get bread for the yeshivah, and the rosh yeshivah blessed him with wealth, took place. He later learned in Gateshead, followed by Ponovezh in Eretz Yisrael. For the rest of his life he remained a talmid of Rav Shach, whom Reb Moshe assisted in carrying out various endeavors on behalf of the Torah world.

He ultimately ended up at the Mir. In 1953 Rav Avraham Kalmanowitz asked Reb Moshe to travel back to Morocco, where Reb Moshe’s parents still lived, to serve as the educational director of Otzar Hatorah, the yeshivah system Rav Kalmanowitz had set up in the country. Reb Moshe was involved in the education of thousands of Jewish children, and later told a reporter that this was one of the most fulfilling periods of his life.

Despite being Ashkenazic, Moshe Reichmann strongly supported Sephardi Torah institutions around the world throughout his life.

After the 1956 war in the Sinai Peninsula, Jewish life in Morocco was threatened by Arab unrest. Reb Moshe, who married that same year, left Morocco with his extended family and ultimately settled in Canada.

Growth

Moshe’s oldest brother, Edward, had established a tile and flooring company in Montreal, but urged Moshe and his other siblings to settle in Toronto because of its economic opportunities. Moshe, Albert and Ralph Reichmann set up a similar business there, also named Olympia Floor and Wall Tile, like Edward’s company.

Dr. David Moskovits (left), George Soros (center), and Moshe Reichmann

Tiles, however, would eventually prove to be the least of the brothers’ business interests. The experience of building a warehouse for their company opened them up to the idea of going into real estate and construction. Their corporation, Olympia & York, was born soon afterward. While they started out constructing small commercial buildings locally, the sky soon became the limit.

Even before his business had grown to the massive multinational corporation it would eventually become, Reb Moshe was a baal chesed of note. Dr. David Moskovits, a well-known askan on behalf of European Jewry, spoke to Ami about his long friendship with Reb Moshe Reichmann, which actually started with an act of chesed.

“I was born in Romania. At the end of 1961 the Skulener Rebbe took us out of Romania, and our passport allowed us to enter Belgium. But our stay there was very short, only two weeks. In the meantime, we were supposed to get a sponsorship to come to Canada, where my mother had a brother.

“We needed a patron to sponsor us and guarantee that we wouldn’t be a burden to Canada, and Moshe stepped in to sponsor me.” This led to a close relationship between the two that lasted for many years.

Dr. Moskovits says that Moshe Reichmann’s willingness to sponsor a refugee was a reflection of his strong desire to save Jews and Jewish communities. “He was Rav Shach’s talmid, and Rav Shach had an incredible input in his life. If you spoke to Rav Shach, you could understand who Reb Moshe Reichmann was. He was a man of the world, and was a friend to every individual in need.”

Many of those efforts on behalf of Jewish communities were close

to home. Dr. Moskovits says that while the Reichmanns’ business was taking off, Yiddishkeit in Toronto was declining. “Many young couples were getting married and moving to the United States. Reb Shmaya, Moshe’s father, told him, ‘Look, the Gemara says that if you’re in a place where it looks like Yiddishkeit is going under, you have to leave. You need to do something about this.’

“He took this very seriously. He talked to countless young couples to try to understand why they didn’t want to live in Toronto, even though he was a very busy man who did not have spare time. He was involved 24 hours a day in learning and doing business.

“The problem was primarily jobs—there weren’t any available in Toronto. In the United States, there were textile companies. But at the time, industries like that didn’t exist in Canada. So I came up with a project: to go into plastics. It was only about ten years after plastic had been developed. I explained to him that a plastic factory was a 24-hour operation that would need employees, which would be ideal for yungeleit.”

For seven months they mulled over the idea, not because Moshe Reichmann was looking to start a plastics factory per se, but because it was a reasonable plan that could conceivably rejuvenate the Jewish community.

“He told me to take a survey of how much plastic was being sold in Canada. What did I know about surveys? But I started calling all the statistics offices in Canada, and they sent me a pile of documents a foot thick. I gave that to him.”

Dr. Moskovits says that the subsequent discussions he had with Moshe Reichmann about the potential project constituted a com2 6 C H E S H VA N 5 7 7 4 / / O C T O B E R 3 0 , 2 0 1 3 / / A M I M A G A Z I N E

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plete education in business. “You don’t get that in business school, because the professor himself isn’t a businessman. But he was a businessman, and he took time out of his busy schedule to speak to me. It wasn’t just something he talked about; it was something he immersed himself in. He would listen to every word you said and answer all your questions. I don’t think he spoke to anyone his age as much as he spoke to me, a greenhorn, to get me on track.”

The plastics factory did not end up being built. A different project would eventually bring yungeleit back to Toronto: the Lakewood kollel. But Dr. Moskovits (who eventually started his own plastics company in the US) says that the amount of attention Reichmann gave to the idea was indicative of how much he was willing to do to keep a Jewish community alive.

According to Dr. Moskovitz, Reichmann was eager for the Jewish community to produce not only talmidei chachamim in the form of rabbanim and kollel yungeleit, but also in the form of ehrliche baalei batim who learn.

Moshe Reichmann’s kindness and humility were legendary. “In any picture you see of him where he’s greeting someone, he’s always bent over a little towards the person. He was an eideleh mentch.”

Those middos were something young people could easily look to and emulate.

Dr. Moskovits says that Moshe Reichmann’s drive in business was derived from a particular view of man’s purpose in the world. “You have to do; you have to accomplish. It’s important how you are seen as a Jewish person.” To him, business ventures weren’t just a way of making money; they were a way of making a kiddush Hashem as well.

Up to the sky

The first major project of Olympia & York was Flemingdon Park, a business development in the Toronto suburbs that had been started by an American company and never finished. The brothers bought the majority of the development in 1965 and completed it.

That success led a few years later, in 1973, to Olympia & York’s successful bid to take over the Toronto Star building, as well as most of the rest of the block it was on in the city’s financial district. Olympia & York would build Canada’s tallest skyscraper on that site, First Canadian Place.

Of course, it did not happen overnight. When David Crombie was elected Toronto’s mayor, the city council passed a resolution barring buildings of that proposed height. After at least a dozen meetings between Moshe Reichmann and Crombie, permission was granted to build. The skyscraper, which incorporated innovative building techniques that helped it go up in record time and in a cost-effective manner, was erected in 1975, although some elements weren’t completed until 1982.

The amazing performance by a company that hadn’t previously worked on skyscrapers shocked many. Perhaps even more fascinating was that the tower went up with such speed despite the fact that construction was halted on Shabbos and Yom Tov. The Reichmanns paid their workers overtime to work on Sunday and gave them off on all non-Jewish holidays as well. This resulted in a total of 65 days a year that their construction sites were silent. One architect commented, “All of the contracts stipulated the days that you couldn’t 52 A M I M A G A Z I N E / / O C T O B E R 3 0 , 2 0 1 3 / / 2 6 C H E S H VA N 5 7 7 4

work on the job. That included a lot of days in the fall, when it was so critical to get the shovel in the ground and get the building up.”

Their actions were viewed with great respect.

The next huge acquisition was in New York City, when they bought the Uris buildings for around $300 million, at a time when real estate prices were depressed. Within a couple of years their value jumped to $3 billion. Olympia & York did not build those eight buildings, but made an unprecedented profit from them.

Olympia & York’s next mega-project was the construction of the World Financial Center, the complex of five skyscrapers across from the World Trade Center site, along with the Winter Garden Atrium and its shops and indoor grove of palm trees. The buildings remained largely undamaged by the attacks of September 11, which some attribute to their careful construction by the Reichmanns.

As Olympia & York grew, it also acquired other companies, eventually including even Gulf Oil’s Canadian subsidiary. These and other successes were seen by many as triumphs of Moshe Reichmann’s ability to take calculated risks on enormous ventures.

Ami spoke to Oskar Lustig, who served as a comptroller at the firm of Olympia & York from 1963 to 1992. While he says that he obviously has no way of knowing how much the merits of the Reichmanns’ many charitable acts contributed to their success, he saw many character traits in them that were exemplary. “Aside from their natural brilliance and diligence, I attribute it to three things: One, the almost complete unanimity and harmony between the brothers in running the business. Second, the fact that their word was their bond, even if it proved to be costly. There was such a degree of trust that the phrase was not an exaggeration. A third point—and this is very different from American business practices—I don’t think I ever heard a raised voice in the 30 years I was there, either on the part of the Reichmanns or senior management, even though business was carried out on an extremely large scale.”

The Reichmanns’ tzedakah empire grew along with the expansion of their business. It is estimated they gave over $1 billion to tzedakah. Answering the requests for aid from around the world would eventually require a fulltime staff.

Although most of the Reichmanns’ philanthropy benefited frum mosdos and individuals, their reputation spread far beyond the Jewish world. Reb Yisrael Meir Gross, who worked as a gabbai tzedakah for Moshe Reichmann, told me, “One time we received a letter that had only been addressed ‘Reichmann Charity Canada.’

We couldn’t believe that it actually got there.”

There were a select number of institutions that Moshe Reichmann had an arrangement with; he would pay however much money they were lacking at the end of each month. And during the 1980s, he paid off the debts of hundreds of Israeli yeshivos and Torah institutions.

Rav Eliyahu Raful, rosh yeshivah of Neve Aretz, was close to Moshe Reichmann. Rav Raful told Ami this week that Moshe Reichmann was the first one to introduce the Torah world to philanthropy on such a large magnitude. “He set the standard for the other negidim, who learned from him and continued his magnanimous legacy.” Rav Raful says that Reichmann applied his “head of an ilui [genius]” to ideas and projects related to helping the Torah world.

Architectural model of the World Financial Center

One special objective was Reichmann’s desire to aid the Sephardic Jews and shield them from the anti-religious influence of the Jewish Agency, which brought down a spiritual disaster on the Aliyat Hanoar groups of Sephardic Jews, and not only them. Rav Raful said, “I can quote an expression I heard Maran Rav Shach say about Reichmann: ‘I cannot understand how one person was privileged by the Heavens to maintain the entire Torah world.’”

Another goal Reb Moshe furthered was in solving the great housing shortage among the chareidi public. Reichmann initiated the construction of chareidi cities outside Yerushalayim and Bnei Brak, and simultaneously he gave about $10,000 to each married couple when they came to buy an apartment. Although the money was initially offered as a loan, in many cases he waived repayment when he saw that this gift would assist the Torah scholars.

Reichmann was an active partner in the

establishment of the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Beit Shemesh, the neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo, and the towns of Rechasim (near Haifa) and Ofakim (in the Negev).

His contributions caused these Torah sites to blossom.

Reichmann funded Yeshivas Beis Shmaya in Bnei Brak, named after his father, from beginning to end. The rosh yeshivah, Rav Shlomo Englander, told Ami: “When the yeshivah was founded, he asked me to work hard to establish a top-notch yeshivah for Sephardic Jews that would be the Sephardic counterpart to the Ponovezh Yeshiva of the Lithuanian world. He labored intensively and with dedication to raise the prestige of Torah. For a long time, in addition to the yeshivah, he also maintained a kollel in which more than a hundred distinguished avreichim learned Torah.”

One of his close associates tells the following story about a meeting Moshe Reichmann held with a notable businessman who

wanted to discuss a large-scale business venture involving millions of dollars. Reb Moshe arrived at the man’s office and waited in the reception room. The wealthy businessman waited in his office, wondering why Reb Moshe still had not arrived well past the hour they had set for the appointment.

Finally the man went to the hallway and looked around, when suddenly he saw his guest in the waiting room. He asked Reichmann, “Why didn’t you come into my office all this time?”

Reichmann answered that he was told to wait in the waiting room, and that was what he did. The man immediately turned to his personal secretary and asked how she could let Reb Moshe wait this way, and she answered that she was certain he was just another meshulach asking for money, so she asked him to wait.

When Moshe heard this, he got up immediately and said, “If this is how you treat ‘a mere meshulach’ who comes to ask for help

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53

(above) Samuel Reichmann, (above right) Renee Reichmann sent food packages via the Red Cross from Tangier, (below right) a younger Paul Reichmann

in his distress, then I won’t do business with people like this.” He left the room and waived the opportunity for a large, profitable transaction, because he could not bear to see such conduct.

Throughout it all, Moshe Reichmann and his family were never ostentatious. He continued to live in the same house as before, and remained true to his upbringing and the years he had spent in yeshivah.

Reb Aron Zvi Gestetner, Moshe Reichmann’s first cousin, was an employee in their business for 31 years. “To put it succinctly,” he told me, “he started out as a true ben Torah and remained one, despite the billions. That was central to his being. The rest he used as a tool, very effectively and extremely generously.” He points to Moshe’s sons and son-in-law as an indication of that set of priorities. Even those who are in business have an extensive learning schedule, he says. “Business is absolutely a far second.”

Endings

It was the development of a business center in East London’s Canary Wharf that ultimately caused the bankruptcy and dissolution of Olympia & York. There were a number of contributing factors, including the financial state of the company; a downturn in office space rentals, which meant that the buildings remained without major tenants; and the failure of the British government to extend a subway line to the area, limiting its use for city firms.

Eventually Moshe Reichmann’s vision for the development would be vindicated; Canary Wharf is now a huge success. In fact, he would later bring a group of investors back into the project, so that for a time he continued to have a share of his huge accomplishment.

Unfortunately, however, his holdings never returned to their original state. He apparently took this in stride, and modestly

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discussed his failure with reporters eager to pounce on a toppled billionaire.

Yet despite the media’s thirst for sensationalism, the coverage his passing has engendered shows the magnitude of his kiddush Hashem. There is a sense of great respect for him from news outlets around the world. Even papers known for their biases against religious Jews could only comment respectfully and even with admiration. His honesty and generosity were established fact.

His passing is a blow. Not only did Moshe Reichmann support Torah on an unprecedented scale, but he inspired Jewish philanthropists around the world to do the same.

His physical buildings were constructed for permanence, but his spiritual work is for eternity.

Yehi zichro baruch. 

Inside an Empire of Tzedakah

By Yossi Krausz

YOSEF YEHUDA WEBER WAS THE GABBAI TZEDAKAH FOR REB MOSHE REICHMAN DURING TWO PERIODS, DURING THE 1980S AND THEN FROM 2003 TO 2008. HE SPOKE WITH AMI ABOUT THE

Reb Moshe Reichmann meeting Rav Michel Yehuda Lefkowitz

I

t wasn’t possible for him to meet everyone. Even those he met, he would usually send to me afterward. I would check up on them a little bit. I would find out how much we gave them in the past; I would check up on how big the yeshivah was; I would check up on how big the need was. Then every one or two weeks I would go to him with a list. He would decide then, or often he had already decided. It was quite mesudar (organized).

They came to him in his house, not at his business. In the busy times, it was hard to see him, but those who were close to him could get to see him somehow. Those coming for smaller amounts usually came to me directly, and I usually gave what he had given in the past.

People don’t really understand how much he gave. He often gave and people didn’t know they were getting from him. There was a chashuve Yid in Eretz Yisrael whom he supported for years. He helped him to buy a house, but it was really a matanah (present).

He made it seem as if it was a loan. He didn’t want people to feel uncomfortable.

He definitely tried to avoid publicity. He could give half a million dollars or a million dollars to a mosad, just by the way, and then it was finished. There was no “guest of honor” [at a dinner] or anything. He just gave it.

That he would do it that way was just

WORK HE DID FOR HIM. understood. I think he had this from his parents. His father had a relative in Montreal with whom he was in business at one time. That relative was sick for years and years. Reb Moshe’s father told his relative, “We still have some money left over from the business that belongs to you,” and he supported him for years like that. It was in Reb Moshe’s genes.

In the good times, there were three mosdos in Toronto—the kollel, the Bais Yaakov elementary school, and Yeshiva Yesodei Hatorah—that would call him at the end of the month and say, “We’re short such an amount,” and he would just send a check. They were large amounts of money. For other mosdos, he gave a good percentage of the budget. Even afterward, about ten years ago, when he bought back Canary Wharf and he had money again, he gave a certain percentage of the budget of all of the mosdos in Toronto to them every month. They would come to me with their expenses and he would pay a certain percentage.

They came to him from all over the world.

He was really makir tov. A second cousin of his came to him in the ’80s. He was in London and wanted help buying a business.

Reb Moshe told me that he remembered that this person’s grandfather—Reb Moshe’s mother’s uncle—helped him out in Vienna

(when Reb Moshe was a child), so he wanted to repay him. He gave him 70,000 pounds to buy a business.

In the ’80s, when he paid off all of the debts of the mosdos in Eretz Yisrael—and there were hundreds and hundreds of mosdos—that did not go through me. That went through Eretz Yisrael.

I had one secretary under me. It was a full-time job.

I used to take letters and faxes to him.

He had a good nose. It was interesting; if the sob story was too big, he usually didn’t buy it. He had a sense for that.

When he was big—when he was building the World Financial Center in New York and when he was building in Toronto—it was very difficult for him to find time to review everything.

What I think is that he taught the olam how to give tzedakah. Even nowadays, in some countries, just because you own a lot doesn’t mean that you give. But in North America, he taught people how to give.

In everything he was a genius. When he walked into a room, even if you didn’t know him, you stood up.

When he lost his money, he took it so graciously, I can’t tell you.

There’s nothing that you can really say, because whatever you say… He was such a special person—one in a million. 

2 6 C H E S H VA N 5 7 7 4 / / O C T O B E R 3 0 , 2 0 1 3 / / A M I M A G A Z I N E

55

“Brilliant Beyond Compare”

By Rabbi Yitzchok Frankfurter

JULIUS BERMAN IS THE CHAIRMAN OF THE CONFERENCE ON JEWISH MATERIAL CLAIMS AGAINST GERMANY,

THE

CHAIRMAN

EMERITUS

OF

RIETS

(YESHIVA UNIVERSITY'S RABBINICAL SEMINARY), AND A PAST PRESIDENT OF THE ORTHODOX UNION. HE IS A RETIRED PARTNER AT THE LAW FIRM OF KAYE SCHOLER LLP. HE WAS THE LEGAL REPRESENTATIVE OF OLYMPIA & YORK IN THE UNITED STATES FROM THE TIME THAT THE COMPANY FIRST INITIATED THE PURCHASE OF THE URIS BUILDINGS IN THE LATE 1970S. MR. BERMAN EVENTUALLY SERVED FOR FIVE YEARS AS THE EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT/CHIEF LEGAL OFFICER OF OLYMJulius Berman

T

here was a Minchah minyan that had started in the offices of Olympia & York, held a couple of floors above us. It was my practice to stop in Paul's office and then accompany him upstairs. After a day or two or three of davening together, he came over to and asked, “Why are they doing a heicheh Kedushah [shortened Shemoneh Esrei]?” I said that I didn’t know and that I would ask. Later I came back and told him that they were doing a heicheh Kedushah because they understood that the Reichmanns wanted them to finish Minchah earlier. He became very upset and said, “Absolutely not. I don’t know who suggested that.” Immediately they switched to a full chazaras hashatz. That was the kind of person he was.

There was a major piece of litigation that Olympia & York was involved with. It revolved around the question of what had occurred at a certain luncheon. He had met at that luncheon with the president and chairman of the board of a major insurance company that did a substantial amount of real estate financing. Paul testified very specifically about what had happened then, in terms of the financial details of a proposed transaction. The other side took the position that it had just been a social lunch, that the two heads of the companies had been meeting together to get to know one another better.

Paul always spoke in a low voice, so that the judge had to ask him several times to speak up. He was cross-examined by the other side, who suggested that maybe he was mistaken and that it had really been a social lunch, to which he basically responded that that was impossible. The lunch had been long ago, and the opposing side asked him how he knew that it

PIA & YORK, AS WELL. HE SHARED WITH AMI HIS MEMORIES OF MOSHE REICHMANN. wasn’t just social. He softly responded, “I don’t go to social lunches.”

He was so businesslike. There was a time that we were both at a wedding in New York, and there was a large amount of dancing. That wasn’t his style. Because duty requires it, he would get up and dance for a little bit, after being importuned to do so. But it just wasn’t his style. So he asked me to go out with him to the hall to talk for a minute or two. By the end of the talk, which was close to an hour later, I was totally sweating. He was, number one, so full of business; and number two, brilliant beyond compare. I had to catch up to him. He just took it for granted that I was totally with him, especially because I was his lawyer, so to speak.

To put it simply, he was brilliant. His financial acumen and his ability to think, like in chess, of the fourth step down the line, not just the first or the second or the third step—he was way ahead of everyone.

There was a time that a media outlet was writing a long profile of him. They asked to speak to me, and I was uncomfortable about that, because I wasn’t certain whether he was interested in that kind of publicity. I spoke to him, and I mentioned that one question that might come up was whether his Talmudic background and his ability to learn impacted on his ability to engage in the highest level of finances and real estate development. I was fashioning a paragraph that would suggest a cause-and-effect relationship, and he immediately vetoed it. He said, “I don’t want them to write that I’m some kind of religious freak, and that because I learn well in beis midrash I became a great real estate investor.” I think that what he was saying was first of all that, in a realistic sense, just because you’ve learned doesn’t mean you should try to jump into the market and become a billionaire. I also think that he felt that he the ability to learn and also to do financial business, but not that the learning was a springboard.

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We all know how charitable he was. I remember once that a rebbe came to him. The rebbe had a major financial problem, and he had a whole educational edifice, with a school and a kollel. Moshe being Moshe, because of the relationship, he was willing to give him a very significant grant.

But he insisted that the rebbe meet with him to discuss the financial issues. He was prepared to help him out, but was not prepared to help him go down the drain. He wanted to make sure that each part of the establishment made sense, and if some part did not make sense, he would tell him. He would also often request that the supporters of an institution that came to him should contribute as well, rather than just saying that the Reichmanns would take care of it. But at the same time, I remember that he would sometimes come up to me after a meeting with someone and give me a piece of tissue paper and say, “Please take care of this.” I would look down at it and there would be scribbling on it that would say, “$500,000 to X.” That was how he recorded his commitments that needed to be implemented.

I believe that his general demeanor of not raising his voice and not getting excited reflected his personality. He wasn’t an extrovert, by any means. But he knew how powerful he was, both financially and intellectually, and he still spoke to people in a way that they wouldn’t realize who he was if they didn’t know him. Of course, many people knew who he was. But if you didn’t know, you wouldn’t know from his demeanor. He spoke to you level and as straight as he could, whether you were an individual who was dealing with him in business or in tzedakah.

I recall once that a friend of his asked him for a major amount of money as a short-term loan. He gave it. When it came for the time to pay it back, the man paid it back. Of course, it was interest-free entirely. But afterward, the man told me that he would like to make a donation to the kollel that Moshe supported in Toronto. I mentioned it to Moshe, and he vetoed it right away. He said, “Listen. My arrangement with the kollel is that whatever money they need at the end of the month I will give them. So for all intents and purposes, if the person I lent the money to makes a donation to the kollel, he’s making a donation to me, because he’s alleviating my obligation somewhat. There’s absolutely no way that I would allow it.”

I remember that I was meeting with him on a business matter in his office in 1982. As I was talking to him, the secretary came in and told me that the Secretary of State, George Schultz, was trying to reach me [as the head of the OU at the time] from Washington. That impressed me, because I had never given them my phone number, but if they want to reach you, they reach you. I appreciated it, perhaps because of my ego. But I remember that for Paul, it was somewhat like he had to tolerate an interruption in a business meeting [despite the fact that it was from the Secretary of State]. 

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THE REICHMANN BIOGRAPHER REMEMBERS ANTHONY BIANCO, a noted journalist and business writer, is the author of the acclaimed book on the history of the Reichmann family, which was once considered one of the ten richest families in the world: “The Reichmanns: Faith, Fortune, and the Empire of Olympia & York” (1997). He also worked as a reporter and writer on the celebrated documentary film: “Faith and Fortune: The Reichmann Story” (2000).

ANTHONY BIANCO SHARES HIS INDELIBLE IMPRESSIONS OF PAUL REICHMANN.

BY RABBI YITZCHOK FRANKFURTER

Paul Reichmann and then Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney look at a model of the proposed Canary Wharf in London.

What so fascinated you about the Reichmanns that prompted you to write a book about them?

As a business writer, I had written about real estate development, but never about them. When the Canary Wharf debacle brought down the company, Vanity Fair approached me and asked me to write a story about the rise and fall of Olympia & York. After that, Random House suggested I write a book about the Reichmanns. They’d gotten quite a bit of coverage in Canada because of two libel suits, one against Toronto Life magazine, which I believe was settled out of court in terms favorable to the Reichmanns. But there was always a great feeling of mystery surrounding the Reichmanns and also some trepidation on the part of publishers. This very ambitious editor at Random House thought it would make a good book. I was fascinated by the story and decided to do it.

Why was there trepidation?

Because they’d already brought two libel suits and won one of them. They had a reputation for going after reporters who defamed them. That seemed justified to me.

Did you interview Paul Reichmann for the book?

Yes. It took me five years to write that book. Initially, the Reichmann family, including Paul, refused to cooperate. But after two years I’d done so much work on the family history and discovered documents that they themselves had never found, so they decided this was a serious project. Paul in particular then started cooperating. I spent many, many hours interviewing him in Toronto and New York.

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How did you find him as a person?

He was very formal, very polite and very guarded in some ways. He was also very talkative when it came to his business. He was eager to talk about some aspects of Olympia & York.

He always wore a suit and tie. I’d meet him in his house on a Sunday and he’d be dressed in a suit and tie. He had a formal, dignified manner and was very even-tempered. I never saw any evidence of him being upset or angry, even when we were talking about the failure of the business. He was a very self-contained person.

How much of a toll did the sudden collapse of Olympia & York take on him?

There was no visible effect when you spoke to him. But I think that beneath the surface it took quite a toll.

It created a difference among the three brothers—Paul, Albert and Ralph—who started and ran Olympia & York. Canary Wharf was a scale of risk taking that the rest of the family wasn’t comfortable with. But Paul did it because he believed in his vision.

Second of all, while they lost a huge amount of money, it really seemed to me that the business and his reputation as a businessman were more important to him than his fortune. Many people who would have been humiliated that way would

have walked away. Instead, he worked hard to get back into Canary Wharf so he could have a role in managing it as it succeeded as a business. I think it was really important to him to still be there when the concept, his vision, would be proven in commercial terms, even though his ownership of it by then was small.

Do you think he was a creative genius?

Yes. A lot of people who worked with him used the word “genius.” He certainly had visions of projects that hadn’t occurred to anyone else, at least not on the same scale, and he was willing to take enormous financial risks to make them come true.

But if you look at the successful part of his career, his nerve and willingness to take tremendous risk were just as important as his genius, which is being able to envision developments in wasteland... I mean, the World Financial Center in New York was built on land that didn’t even exist until they took it out of the sea. He was a visionary. I think that’s a better word than genius.

He was a property visionary.

His financing schemes were very creative.

He got financing from some of the major investment banks on Wall Street including Salomon Brothers, and as he got to know those people he was involved in some pretty novel schemes of investing in derivatives and so forth. But he didn’t conceive of those. That’s the kind of investing the Wall Street firms came up with and tried to sell to their clients. Again, I think that’s more of an indication of his nerve and appetite for risk. Of course, he had the intellectual ability to appreciate that. To me, it’s the same combination of traits.

Well, he certainly proved himself as a risk-taker with the Canary Wharf project.

He made an enormous un-hedged bet, which was excessively risky. There was no margin for failure in the way he approached Canary Wharf, either in its financing or timing. He had such complete confidence in his ability to succeed that he left himself no margin of error.

And everything was leveraged against that bet?

To the extent that I was able to determine, he basically risked the entire fortune there.

It was leveraged to some extent, though it’s hard to determine exactly how much.

Some people blamed Thatcher for not coming through on her promise to build the underground railway to Canary Wharf.

She made promises she didn’t keep. But if you’re realistic, you’re always dealing with government on large projects, and it is very naïve to take all their promises at face value.

I do believe Paul Reichmann was too trusting of Margaret Thatcher, but that’s as much his fault as hers. Everyone knows that government and politics are uncertain businesses with uncertain outcomes, and you can’t bet the bank on them.

Did he openly express these misgivings to you?

He was diplomatic in discussing government figures. He would never directly criticize Margaret Thatcher. And he was also not very forthcoming to me about admitting his own errors.

I assume he was self-reflective. But he wasn’t someone who would share his own self-criticism to a reporter. And he wasn’t one to dwell on his past mistakes. He was always thinking about the present and looking towards the future. He wouldn’t deny what had happened, but he wasn’t a person who was going to spend a lot of time helping you figure out where he went wrong.

Did he have a comeback?

Yes. He recreated himself as a credible international property developer, measured not just by his ability to resume a managerial role in Canary Wharf but by major projects in Mexico City. He was still operating on a pretty impressive scale.

But he definitely lost his invincible aura?

Yes. Yet he was still able to finance major projects. His reputation before the failure of Canary Wharf was almost magical. He went from one success to another with never a misstep for a long, long time, first building in Canada and then coming to the US and

tors. There’s no way of knowing. He wouldn’t talk about it.

Did he restructure some of his holdings with the bankruptcy filing, or was everything liquidated?

Canary Wharf’s debt was restructured in a way to allow it to continue to operate. In the process, all the equity O&Y had in the development was wiped out. Canary Wharf continued on without the Reichmanns, without their ownership.

What did you find fascinating about the history of that particular Jewish family? Is it a Jewish story?

Really? Well, the most accurate estimates are the ones based on public stockholdings. I would think that none of Paul’s assets were based on public stocks. That may be true. But I’d take it with a grain of salt. He may have made back a lot of money, but I really have no idea what he was worth when he died.

The first part of the story is entirely Jewish. I was raised Catholic. When I started writing the book, I had only a passing knowledge of what had gone on in Europe before and during the Holocaust. I did a lot of deep research into that.

To call it “fascinating” is a little patronizing. I was deeply absorbed by the research; it was compelling. And the Reichmanns’ story in the foreground always fascinated me. It was difficult to do. Part of the appeal was simply the challenge of it. I’m not Jewish. And these are events of long ago that are documented erratically. Just figuring out what really happened was a great journalistic adventure that took me all around Europe. I did many interviews with people who had known them in Tangier. Some were still there, some in Antwerp, some in Australia. It was an amazing journalistic adventure.

The matriarch, Renee Reichmann, had this rescue program that she was able to engineer from Tangier, saving mostly Hungarian Jews. They did more than just survive. They were always very active both in rescue and in business.

I saw reports that he subsequently lost Canary Wharf again to lenders at a later date. Is that correct?

His father, Samuel, was a pretty wealthy man too.

When he came back in, he didn’t assume financial control; he had an equity stake and a major managerial role. I don’t think Canary Wharf went bankrupt a second time. But at a certain point he left that managerial role. He may have been squeezed out, or maybe he just decided he’d had enough. But there was no second financial failure for the Reichmanns at Canary Wharf.

I would assume that that second investment in it actually succeeded, as there was a point when it was fully leased.

He made his fortune as an egg merchant in Hungary, as an exporter to Vienna. Of course, that business was appropriated. In Tangier he became a currency trader, and again made a fair amount of money. It’s hard to know exactly how much.

He was an adept businessman who was successful in two very different businesses. That sort of branched into banking. So his sons had a successful example to emulate, someone who had succeeded twice in very different circumstances.

The dominant personality in the family seems to have been the mother, Renee Reichmann, who was a very forceful, courageous and enterprising woman. She was a very strong figure they all revered.

buying eight buildings in Manhattan no one else wanted, quickly turning that investment into a multi-billion dollar gain, then building the World Financial Center, which no one else dared to do… He was like a magician. Even after Canary Wharf there was still a residue of his reputation that allowed him to function as a developer of very large international projects. But, of course, he was no longer the “magician.”

According to some in the Canadian media he was worth $1.8 billion when he passed away.

Was everything taken away from him after his bankruptcy filing?

It’s hard to know what assets he may have had that weren’t subject to O&Y’s indebtedness. He had a great deal of financial sophistication. It’s quite possible there was a portion of the fortune that was simply beyond the reach of the banks and credi62 A M I M A G A Z I N E / / O C T O B E R 3 0 , 2 0 1 3 / / 2 6 C H E S H VA N 5 7 7 4

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The impression I got from my reporting was that the family was greatly philanthropic. They were like the Rockefellers in their own particular milieu. I encountered a great deal of respect for them and dependence on their money as well as their willingness to give it to yeshivos. Their influence extended everywhere in the strictly observant part of the Jewish world.

How did other business people view his Orthodoxy?

I think it was part of his mystique. The Canada that existed when he was starting out in business was a very clubby, AngloSaxon kind of world, and he wasn’t a member of the club. He was obviously an outsider. But unlike many other outsiders, he was proud and happy to be outside. He was very secure in his own identity. As they began to succeed, the fact that he was very Orthodox became a part of his mystique in the eyes of gentile businessmen. They really had no clue. He moved between these two worlds in a way that none of them did.

In the early days there were a lot of stories about their strict observance and how it would be manifested in the running of Olympia & York. These concepts were unfamiliar to the other businessmen. They were sort of mystified, but mostly respectful as it became clear that the Reichmanns really knew what they were doing in business.

Was there any anti-Semitic response to his downfall?

There must have been some anti-Semitic gloating, but I didn’t hear it. And it certainly wasn’t apparent among major business people. I didn’t pick that up at all.

Which project was he the most proud of?

I think that even though Canary Wharf brought the family down, it was also a great source of pride in that the vision was so ambitious and he was so far ahead of his time, in the great world capital of London.

The second would be the World Financial Center, which was similar to Canary Wharf in terms of daring and vision but on a smaller scale. Still, five magnificent buildings built on a landfill on Wall Street! That

was always a success.

Then there was First Canadian Place, the skyscraper he built in the heart of Toronto’s financial district.

I think he had strong feelings about all of these buildings. I would say his degree of attachment to them was proportional to the degree of risk he took in making them and the scale and vision associated with them.

He was proud of Canary Wharf even after the crash?

Yes. If you take the long-term view, Canary Wharf was actually a great success.

Here was a debilitated old docklands in a part of London that no one went to. He turned it into an office tower city over the course of a couple decades and changed the balance of the business geography in London, one of the great business capitals of the world. And he did it against all odds.

Because of the way he approached it, leaving himself no financial margin of error, he ruined his fortune in the process. But the complex itself was a great success. And to him, I think that was far more important than the money. That was his mentality.

That’s why he was so eager to come back into it and have a role.

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Was his vision to be a grand builder of cities?

No. He wasn’t an urban redeveloper in the sense that he wanted to build housing for poor people. He wanted to create great high-end office buildings for big corporations. I think it was important to him to build those developments in parts of cities that had been overlooked or were run down.

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What did you find to be unique about his philanthropy?

Where did he get that kind of ambition?

I think it was a kind of pride that he and his family, who were poor outsiders in the conventional sense, could build the most magnificent, beautifully appointed and designed office towers for the biggest corporations and succeed in that very visible way in the larger economy, and still be true to who they were in terms of their religious identity.

He took great pride in the quality of his buildings. He wanted name architects. He wanted to make magnificent monuments to his taste and vision.

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Was he trying to prove to the world that he could be Orthodox and do all this?

Wharf, though that never surfaced publicly.

I don’t know. I think it was important to be able to straddle the two worlds. He wanted to be absolutely respected, if not revered, by the business establishment without being part of it.

Were you in touch with the Reichmanns after the book was published?

Did you find him a very private individual?

Was Paul happy with it?

Yes. We talked quite a bit about his youth in Morocco and his work with Otzar Hatorah, which he was very proud of. He would converse pretty easily about the basic facts of his life. But he was not someone who conveyed emotion about anything. He was a very buttoned-down, private man in that sense.

He was very charismatic in the sense that he was persuasive.

He could get investors and lenders to risk a lot of money for his ideas. But he wasn’t the kind of back-slapping guy who’d tell jokes and invite you around to meet the family. He kept his family life completely separate from his business life.

Paul always contended that he never read it. His wife told a different story. I believe Leah Reichmann, his wife, was an admirer of the book.

I don’t think Paul really studied it. But he heard from her and others what was in it and raised no objections. I certainly never got even the threat of a libel suit.

Was he unique in the business world?

Absolutely. In my 30 years of writing about Wall Street and corporate people he was a one-of-a-kind.

His mystique was a result of who he was, and I think he deliberately cultivated it. That helped him a great deal in the business.

For one thing, people wanted to meet him. Lenders, investors, brokers—everyone wanted to meet this mystery man from Toronto with the magic touch in real estate. Also, once you did meet him you couldn’t quite figure him out; the mystery didn’t fade. In fact, it only increased because he wasn’t a type you had encountered before. He was very charming and interesting. He spoke with an accent, though his English was very good. He was a very compelling figure in that way.

Did you meet the other brothers too?

I spent a lot of time with Edward, the oldest brother who lived in Israel, but I also met with him in New York and Miami. He was a very unusual character in his own right. He sort of anticipated what would happen to the family through his own business career. He was initially a great success in Montreal and then failed. As the oldest brother, he had a really valuable perspective.

Albert, who was the second most important brother in the real estate business, wouldn’t talk to me, but I spent a lot of time talking to his son Phillip. Ralph, the third brother, didn’t talk to me either.

Paul Reichmann’s wife did speak to me and helped me in different ways, as did other people in the family.

Was Paul the brains?

Definitely. And he was the engine of risk-taking. He was completely dominant. I think it started off as a fairly equal partnership, but he dominated it entirely as time passed. Edward was never part of Olympia & York. He was always separate.

Ralph was really the tile business maven. Albert and Paul were the developers, and Paul dominated that relationship. Differences of opinion emerged between the two, especially over Canary 64 A M I M A G A Z I N E / / O C T O B E R 3 0 , 2 0 1 3 / / 2 6 C H E S H VA N 5 7 7 4

To some extent.

Well, you seem to be an admirer of them.

I think it’s a sympathetic yet tough-minded book. I gave up long ago trying to anticipate how subjects of stories will react, but in the case of the Reichmanns there was no problem. I never heard any criticism about the book from them.

How would you sum up Paul Reichmann’s life?

He was a truly larger-than-life figure of a sort that I cannot think of any analogue for, in North American business anyway. He was a great albeit flawed visionary of property development. And he was also a pious man of faith who created a large philanthropic world for himself. These are not combinations of traits that you encounter very often.

The fact that he succeeded on such a grand scale, and then failed to such a colossal degree, then continued doing what he had been doing to the extent that he could, is also equally remarkable as an example of his resilience. Many people in his position would have slunk away, never to be heard from again. He was unfazed. He made his comeback and demonstrated that it was really more about the buildings and the development than the money. Altogether, a one-of-a-kind figure.

Do you think his personality was related to his early youth and surviving the Holocaust?

I think the family history certainly had a lot to do with his philanthropy. Beyond that, I believe their identity as not just survivors but people who triumphed over their circumstances was a big part of his resilience, ambition and the high standards to which he held himself. The Reichmanns had a pride in themselves that was beneath everything they did. 

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JOURNEY B Y R A B B I S H OL OM F R I E D M A N N

A W E E K LY L O O K A T T H E K L E I N M A N F A M I LY H O L O C A U S T E D U C A T I O N C E N T E R

The Government Shutdown ONE THING THEY CAN’T TAKE AWAY...

T

he collective sigh of relief was practically audible last week as our nation’s (dispensable) Federal employees got back to work. The NSA, EPA and IRS were once again snooping, protecting and collecting on behalf of taxpayers nationwide. There were, however, many lesser known casualties, such as the Alaskan crab fishermen who missed a few days of crabbing because they were waiting for their permits to arrive. These weeks are crucial because the Japanese are waiting for king crabs in honor of their holiday. Well, at least the crabs didn’t mind.

The truth is that almost everyone was affected at least in a minor way, the Kleinman Family Holocaust Education Center included. We have established a collaboration with the US Holocaust Museum in Washington to share rare artifacts, and a scheduled meeting was canceled due to the shutdown. We rescheduled the meeting, but the image of a shuttered museum bounced around in my head. Then the questions emerged: What happens when a museum is closed? Do we stop remembering? Do we really need to have a constant

reminder of past tragedies?

As usual, the answers can be found in the Torah. We know that Hashem wants us to be b’simchah, to serve Him with joy.

We cannot be consumed with fear and trauma, and there are specific times in the Jewish calendar to mark our tragedies. We mourn on Tishah B’Av and other fast days, but the Torah gives much more prominence to the yamim tovim, which are joyful occasions for the performance of mitzvos, and for family time and uplifting tefillos.

But even the yamim tovim are punctuated by solemn reminders such as Yizkor, and in Musaf we recall our exodus from Yerushalayim. Until Mashiach arrives, our simchah is not complete.

I once heard a fantastic thought from Rav Mordechai (Mottel) Pogramansky, zt”l, on this topic. Rav Mottel was recognized as a great iluy and tzaddik in Telshe Yeshiva before the war. When the Nazis, ym”s, invaded, he was trapped in the Kovno ghetto, but miraculously remained undetected despite many thorough roundups.

Witnesses say he stayed hidden, all the while completely immersed in thoughts of Torah and mussar without any sefarim

66 A M I M A G A Z I N E / / O C T O B E R 3 0 , 2 0 1 3 / / 2 6 C H E S H VA N 5 7 7 4

at all! He died a few years after the war, but his deep Torah teachings made a lasting impact.

He once explained the pasuk that is commonly used to conclude hespedim, which mentions that in the future, Hashem will wipe all our tears from our faces. The Midrash comments: even tears of joy. Why will joyous tears be wiped away? Rav Mottel explained that people cry at joyous occasions, such as at a child’s wedding, because although now they are at the peak of happiness, subconsciously they know it is just a fleeting moment, and life is full of sorrow. When Mashiach

(clockwise from top left) Letter from Samuel Blinder. Property of KFHEC. Samuel Blinder in Hillersleben, Germany.

Property of KFHEC. The Bluzhever Rebbe (seated center) in the Agudas Yisroel headquarters after his arrival in the United States.

arrives, we will no longer cry tears of joy, because we will all be able to clearly see the hand of Hashem.

The Bobover Rebbe, Rav Shlomo Halberstam, zt”l, composed a kinah commemorating the destruction and suffering of European Jewry. It is now included by many shuls as part of the standard Tishah B’Av kinos. In the opening stanza, he pleads, “For all generations, do not forget,

until you will merit witnessing the final consolation.” We have incorporated this phrase into the KFHEC logo because it is the guiding force behind everything we do.

As director of an educational museum, I will be the first to admit that such institutions are merely stepping stones along the shaky path of life. They serve the purpose of helping us refocus on past events that

In Ami Issue 138, we published a photo of Chaplain Samuel Blinder examining sifrei Torah that the Nazis had looted and stored in Frankfurt, Germany.

Several readers contacted us wanting to know if we have any additional information.

The KFHEC archive is in possession of a letter dated May 13, 1945, written by Chaplain Blinder to the Agudas Yisrael upon his return to the United States.

He informs them that the Bluzhever Rebbe (then known as the Prochniker Rav) was among 2,400 Jews liberated

by American forces and is residing in Hillersleben, Germany.

Based on that information we can assume that the photo of the sifrei Torah was taken in early April, shortly after the liberation of Frankfurt.

may otherwise be forgotten. But the main exhibits should be constructed in our minds and carried in our hearts. So even if the US Holocaust Museum has closed for a while, the memories are with us wherever we go. We strive to heed the words of the Bobover Rebbe, and keep the legacy of the kedoshim alive for future generations.

Their stories will remain sources of sadness—and inspiration—even as we celebrate, until Mashiach arrives and dispels the darkness forever.

•

Rabbi Sholom Friedmann is the Director of the Kleinman Family Holocaust Education Center, located in Brooklyn, NY. To learn more, visit kfhec.org. You can also contact the Center at kfhec@kfhec.org or 718-759-6200.

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I’m Jealous of My Husband’s Professional Life Dear Rabbi Taub: I had always wanted to be a professional with a stimulating job, but realized early on that this would not be a reality for me because I strongly feel that a mother should be the one raising her children. I believe I have been doing this with love and joy even though I work from home at a job I do not enjoy. Yet since my husband has joined the professional world, I feel myself wishing that I was the one in New York City attending professional meetings and office social functions!

And then there is another aspect that I am ashamed to admit because I realize how ridiculous it is: The fact that my husband works alongside immodestly dressed young women every day has brought out a rebellious streak in me and has made me very resentful at having to dress in a tzniusdik manner.

So many frum men are working in secular and mixed environments. Are their wives struggling with such feelings too, or is there something wrong with me? What can I do to stop feeling like this?

I am eagerly awaiting your reply.

Sincerely, Missing Out

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D

ear Missing Out: Your letter reminds me of something that I once heard from the mashpia, HaRav R’ Manis Friedman. R’ Manis spoke about how in the “old days”—really as recently as 50 or 60 years ago—a man went out to work in the morning because his family was waiting at home for him to get food to put on the table. He didn’t go off to a life of his own. He didn’t go off to “another world.” He went out of the house in order to provide for the house.

But something happened, and working became an end unto itself. It became its own world with its own relationships. The man then had a dual loyalty. There was a tug-of-war between the man’s family and his career. Then, even more recently, the tug-of-war ended. The career won. So if a man got a call from his wife at work, he was annoyed. Or if he came home from work tired and the kids were crying, he didn’t want to deal with it. Once this became common, women started saying, “Why should I sacrifice to run a home that’s not even a home for a family, that’s not even a family? Why should I be the one to give up having a life?”

Your letter is representative of a general issue in the world today that is unfortunately becoming ever more common even among observant families. It used to be less of a problem in more traditional homes, but in today’s day and age, even the most “erlicher Yidden” have become influenced by this newfangled and foreign worldview.

So I completely sympathize with you.

Why should you be the one to stay home and give up on your aspirations? I am not being sarcastic at all by the way. I am quite serious when I say that if it’s okay for your husband to have an exciting life outside of the home, then why shouldn’t you? Indeed, why should you be the one to make the sacrifices that make it possible for him to go out and have a career? As you

say, you would like to “be a professional with a stimulating job,” and the only reason you don’t pursue that is because you “strongly feel that a mother should be the one raising her children.”

On the other hand, I could ask a deeper question: Where did your husband get the idea that he’s supposed to have a double life? I understand that once he has a double life, then it’s not fair for you to not be able to have one as well. I truly mean that.

But what I am asking is: Where did it even become a “thing” that a married person with children is supposed to leave the house and “join the professional world”? Those are the exact words you used. Your husband has “joined the professional world.” And if that’s what he has really done, if he has actually joined another world, then it’s only logical that you say: “Since my husband has joined the professional world, I feel myself wishing that I was the one in New York City attending professional meetings and office social functions!” Of course you feel that way. Why should he have all the fun?

Again, no sarcasm is intended here at all.

If your husband were off plowing in the field all day, I doubt you’d feel resentful.

But if he gets to participate in an exciting, fast-paced world with all sorts of interesting people, well, then of course you’re envious of him.

Then there’s that other thing that you are “ashamed to admit” because you “realize how ridiculous it is”—namely that your husband “works alongside immodestly dressed young women every day.”

Why are you ashamed to admit it? Why is it ridiculous? I understand it completely and it makes perfect sense that it “has brought out a rebellious streak” in you and you have become “very resentful at having to dress in a tzniusdik manner.” This is a natural reaction.

Once upon a time, if a man were a laborer or a farmer, he could pretty much avoid being around women. If he were a merchant or a shopkeeper, however,

then it was pretty unavoidable, but he didn’t view his job as a dispensation for socializing with women. Work wasn’t an excuse to steal a secret thrill by talking to people he wouldn’t normally talk to or behaving toward them in a way he wouldn’t normally behave. A man did what he had to do. And sometimes it pained him to have to do it. But he didn’t relish it. To the contrary, he saw it as a chore.

Today, even in completely frum workplaces, we find that people often feel comfortable to take liberties that they wouldn’t

asking him to do that which is ultimately the most pleasurable and satisfying thing for him. And that is to be a real man. He can never really be happy living a double life. It doesn’t work. So you’re not trying to deprive him. You’re not asking him to

IF YOUR HUSBAND WERE OFF PLOWING IN THE FIELD ALL DAY, I DOUBT YOU’D FEEL RESENTFUL. normally take. Two weeks ago, I wrote to a woman who was upset that her husband was socializing with mixed gender groups on social media sites. I told her that the Internet gives a false feeling of stepping into an alternate reality where normal restrictions aren’t felt. Well, I hate to say it, but if this is true for the alternate reality of the Internet, it is also very often true of the alternate reality that is the workplace. And this is my point. The workplace cannot be an alternate reality.

I feel that your feelings are completely justified, and that your discomfort is a healthy way that your own mind and heart are calling your attention to a problem. I think that you need to have a discussion with your husband. Perhaps you can begin by reading this column together with him.

Remember, you are not trying to ruin his good time. On the contrary, you are

make a sacrifice. You’re asking him to have a discussion with you about basic values.

And this discussion will lead—with Hashem’s help—to the best kind of life for both of you.

With blessing, RST

•

Rabbi Shais Taub is a noted expert on Jewish spirituality and addiction. He is the author of the best-selling G-d of Our Understanding: Jewish Spirituality and Recovery from Addiction.

Questions to Rabbi Shais Taub should be sent to ask@amimagazine.org.

Rabbi Shais Taub is available for private consultations. For an appointment, contact him at Ask@Amimagazine.org.

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On Bas Mitzvah Celebrations, Part 1

SHOULD WE SIGNIFICANTLY CELEBRATE A GIRL'S COMING OF AGE? My Dear Granddaughter, I will now share with you something about this day on which you enter into Torah and mitzvos. On this day…[individuals] must feel and recognize that it is as if it is their own personal Shavuos, on which the Torah was given.

The Gemara therefore teaches that one must be exceedingly happy on this day [of the giving of the Torah—likely a reference to the idea of “kulo lachem” on Atzeres]; so too on the day a child becomes a legal adult [in mitzvos], when one merits to be commanded in the mitzvos of the Torah like all members of the Jewish people, to you this is like the day of Matan Torah.

From the depths of my heart I bless you with mazal tov, and may it be His will that He helps you—and the rest of the family—in growing and increasing, with health and contentment, in success in the learning and in the fine middos that you have.

You should be a source of pride and blessing for your wonderful parents and all of us.

—Rav Shlomo Zalman Auerbach, zt”l, writing to his granddaughter on the occasion of her bas mitzvah

T

his week my eldest daughter turned bas mitzvah.

B’chasdei Hashem, I am a father of four girls. Including my wife there are, ka”h, five females who live in my house.

I am the only male. I have no complaints, other than not wanting to help dress up dolls anymore.

I remember well the first time I was home alone for Shabbos. My wife—away with our

daughters and her extended family—set up the licht for me to light Erev Shabbos.

I recited the brachah and then lit the candles (the order in which men should light— Aruch Hashulchan, Shulchan Aruch Harav, et al., siman 263).

I then glanced at something: the Yehi Ratzon that women say at candle lighting. As I read that tefillah for the first time in my life, I was struck by just how much the Jewish mother—her deeds and tefillos—have sustained us as a nation.

Chazal teach how the Jewish woman was the cause of our first exodus from Egypt, and it is taught that she too will be the cause for the bringing of Mashiach (see shu”t Divrei Menachem, vol.

1:35).

When one looks at the stories of the women found in sefer Bereishis, one cannot help but notice how without them so much would fall apart: • Without Sarah’s insistence, Yishmael would have continued to live in the home and be a bad influence on Yitzchak.

• Without Rivkah, the brachos of klal Yisrael would have gone to Eisav.

• Without Rachel giving away the secret code, Yaakov would not have married Leah

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(his true zivug, according to the Zohar).

• Without the Bnos Lot—and without Tamar—there would have been no seeds for Mashiach.

• And indeed, without Chavah, there would be no death in the world.

This is not to be seen as patronizing. The influence that women have, like all power,

BY RABBI MOSHE TAUB

can work for both good and bad.

They matter.

Chazal teach how during periods when both neviim and nevios existed, the leaders would choose the nevios over the neviim (Megillah 14b)!

This message of the Jewish women’s important role in our nation’s past, present and future is not one I just preach, or simply gab on about. Rather, it is the message with which I seek to permeate my home.

It is also the reason I have been struggling with a question.

For rabbis in out-of-town shuls, it is not uncommon to be asked—or challenged— regarding the discrepancy between bar mitzvah and bas mitzvah celebrations.

The basic argument posed to them is a strong one that goes something like this: When a male turns 13, we celebrate his change from nonobligatory Torah observer to obligatory Torah observer with some kind of feast or celebration, at least one that is familial. A female goes through the same change, albeit a year younger, so we should have the same celebration for her. Yet most in the chareidi world don’t. Why? The underlying premise is simple enough: There seems to be no logical advantage to the Jewish male’s metamorphosis than that of the Jewish female’s.

Indeed it is the very clarity of this argument that begs, in my mind, a different question: The same rabbanim u’geonim throughout the centuries who studied the deepest minutiae of logic and law were certainly able to see this same premise—and many of them, like Rashi, only had daughters whom they cherished and valued. Yet for whatever reason, this argument did not convince them.

To me it is the very obviousness—blatancy, even—of the question that begs the point: “…and yet they did not agree.”

Why? Why would the generations of Talmudic minds before us ignore this obvious impropriety?

This is far more of an intriguing, challenging issue than to just shrug our shoulders and say that times have changed (although, as we will see next week, the Seridei Eish— Rabbi Yaakov Yechiel Weinberg—would seem to make just that argument).

Next week we will further explore this incongruity: how I explain it to my baalei batim and how I explain it to my daughters.

But that is not the only discrepancy: The Rema (siman 225; from Midrash Rabbah to Toldos, 63:10) codifies the custom of a father making the brachah of “Baruch Sheptarani” when one’s son becomes a bar mitzvah.

Why don’t we make this same brachah for

that this is due to the greater wisdom that women have (this seems to be the simple understanding of the Gemara there).

The Levush (Hilchos Yom Kippur) says that this is due to biological realities.

Rambam (Peirush Hamishnayos) says that this due to the fact that women tend to die earlier than men, so that we give them a oneyear head start! (We should note that today women generally live longer than men.)

Let me end this week in the theme in which we began: In 1913, a family of Belzer chasidim had to flee their home in Kraków and settle in Vienna.

The influence that women have, like all power, can work for both good and bad.

They matter. a bas mitzvah?

The Pri Megadim, the Kaf Hachayim and shu”t Rivevos Efraim (1:158) all speak to this last issue.

The Kaf Hachayim suggests that since a girl—as opposed to a boy—stays in the home through her teenage years, a father cannot yet say this brachah! This only begs the question: Why not then say it whenever she does leave the home? (See the other sources cited for different explanations.)

Another more-famous discrepancy is the different ages at which boys and girls become bnei mitzvah.

The idea of one becoming obligated in mitzvos at these two specific ages is made clear in Chazal in any number of places, and seems to be a fiat from Moshe Rabbeinu— halachah l’Moshe miSinai. (See Bereishis 34:24 with Rashi to Nazir 29b; 21:8 with Bereishis Rabbah 53:10; Niddah 45-46, et al.)

As to why there is this distinction between boys and girls, we find three explanations: The Tosfos HaRosh to Niddah explains

The first Shabbos in the new city was Shabbos Chanukah, and one of the daughters went to hear what Rabbi Fleish—the rabbi in Vienna at the time—would say in his drashah.

He spoke about Yehudis, and how she helped save the Yidden in the Chanukah story. He then spoke about how important of a role a Jewish woman can play in Jewish history.

Right then and there, this daughter of Belzer chasidim decided to make her own mark on Jewish history.

Just four years later, in 1917, she opened the first modern Jewish girls’ school: Bais Yaakov.

May my daughters—and yours—always be aware of their value to klal Yisrael.  Rabbi Moshe Taub has served as the rabbi of the Young Israel of Greater Buffalo since September 2003, and also serves as the rav hamachshir of the Buffalo Vaad Hakashrus.

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BRAIN STORM YITZY YABOK is the pen name of a young man who shares his life-altering experience in Ami’s exclusive serial. His story, which began a little more than 12 years ago and traverses several continents, has touched the hearts of people all over the world and been an inspiration to many who face challenges. He has lectured before all kinds of audiences, from medical doctors to

kollel yungeleit, about his nisyonos and salvation. He is currently a rebbe in the Midwest and a candidate for a license in clinical mental health counseling. With the blessings of gedolei Torah and tzaddikei Yisrael, he now shares the chasdei Hashem that were bestowed upon him, as both chizzuk and guidance for all those who may be dealing with traumatic illness.

CHAPTER LIII

For my third round of chemo-

therapy, the drug they’d be prescribing was either VP-16 or CPT-11. “VP-16” (etoposide) is derived from the names of the scientists who worked on developing it (von Wartburg and von Kuhn) and podophyllotoxin, the plant derivative that is its main ingredient. CPT-11 is also known as irinotecan or by its brand name, Camptosar. But whichever one they chose, they were both vicious compounds whose side effects could scare the living daylights out of anyone.

Both drugs are considered irritants that affect the veins when administered intravenously. This causes them to swell and even occasionally rupture. When that happens there can be severe tissue damage, which is why the oncologists and nurses have to be extremely skilled in the delivery of these medications.

I was told by the doctors at Duke that it was basically my choice, and that I should base my decision on the side effects I was likely to endure. They felt that because of the progress I was making on the Temodar and the fact that I hadn’t had any setbacks,

they could be a little more flexible in prescribing the next medication. Then I was told that there was a pill form of VP-16; that certainly made the choice easier for me. I was hoping that the doctors would see it that way too. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would choose an IV over a pill, but maybe it had to do with other factors. I decided to go with the lesser of the two evils—the pill form of VP-16. I was forewarned, though, that just because the medication was oral didn’t necessarily mean that the side effects would be any less severe.

I was shocked when I learned that the entire course of treatment consisted of a single dose. That’s right, just one pill.

That was the gantze ma’aseh. However, even in pill form the side effects of VP-16 were devastating. The results of that one little tablet I swallowed turned out to be low white blood cell counts (increasing the risk of infection), low platelet counts (increasing the risk of bleeding) and more hair loss, although I actually felt better about it this time than last. But worst of all was the nausea and vomiting,

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for which I was prescribed Zofran.

I have a friend who had previously gone through his own medical situation.

He was diagnosed with leukemia in the 9th grade. When I mentioned the Zofran to him, he offered to get hold of a natural, plant-based, anti-nausea remedy that he had found worked much more effectively, otherwise known as marijuana. He claimed that there was nothing wrong with using it for medicinal purposes. I asked my doctor about my friend’s offer.

“It definitely works,” he said, “but I cannot tell you to do something illegal.” I did not end up using it. It flew in the face of everything I had been taught growing up. I just couldn’t do it.

In retrospect I kind of regret my decision because I had some really bad, bad episodes. I will never forget the night I emptied my stomach four times in rapid succession, and then 15 minutes after I finally fell asleep at three in the morning I woke up shivering, drenched in sweat and feeling the worst I had ever felt in my life. I knew that I would dehydrate if I didn’t drink something, but I couldn’t

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hold anything down. I remember thinking that I would never feel normal again. It seemed like the feeling of being in a daze and the general malaise would last forever. I had no strength to get out of bed, let alone walk around and be productive. It made me feel worthless, almost hopeless, but I did a great job of concealing it.

It took three weeks for the side effects to start to abate. Slowly, I began to regain my strength until I was able to attend seder regularly and wasn’t limited in my ability to concentrate. The chemo had seemingly knocked out my mental functioning; I was always preoccupied with trying to feel a bit better.

At that point I needed another MRI to follow up on the tumor’s progress, or hopefully lack of it. Again, I found myself trying to conceal my fear. I didn’t want to place undue stress on anyone close to me, or make my family even more panicky if they had to endure watching me suffer from apprehension. So I went about my business as usual until the day I was scheduled to travel back to Duke. This was sometime in the beginning of June 2001, almost five months after my original surgery. I actually felt very good about the upcoming MRI. The side effects of the drugs I had just taken were so awful that it made me think the medication had actually done some real damage to whatever remnants of tumor cells there might be.

Unfortunately, though, the results of the MRI left us devastated and with a sense of utter hopelessness. The tumor was back, and rearing its ugly head. Okay, so technically it wasn’t back. Based on its location and minute size, the doctors thought it was part of the original tumor that had somehow been invisible on all the post-op scans. To this day I don’t understand how such a thing is possible, but that’s what they said—and who am I to argue? What really mattered was what to do about it.

Dr. Friedman left us with a choice: another round of chemotherapy, with the more potent CPT-11, which does not have a pill version, at a higher dosage than the equivalent VP-16 I had just finished, or going under the knife a second time, either at Duke under the care of their head neurosurgeon, Dr. Allan Friedman, or back in New York with Dr. Fred Epstein.

Well, I certainly didn’t want to endure anything even remotely similar to what I had just experienced. And to think that this time would be worse! No way! I would rather undergo ten surgeries than go through that again.

And when Dr. Epstein called the proposed surgery a “layup,â€? sort of a slam dunk, my decision was all but made. ď Ź To be continued...

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Flight to Freedom

A MOTHER STRUGGLES TO FORGIVE AFTER HER DAUGHTER GOES OFF THE DERECH

I

t’s been six years since my daughter Sury’s ordeal began. In some “off-the-derech” cases, it’s a series of small events that leads a child astray. In our case, my daughter had already adjusted to a new school and even started to blossom there, and suddenly it happened. My husband and I had just returned from the hospital, where our two-year-old had undergone surgery, and were shocked to find our daughter home from school. The minute our daughter saw us, she dissolved into tears.

Between sobs she told us she had been expelled from school.

“What for?” we asked, shocked.

What she told us she had been accused of doing was unthinkable. Unrepeatable.

It was impossible to imagine our daughter guilty of such an act. But the principal insisted it was true, even showing us a paper signed by Sury admitting she had done it.

“What happened?” I whispered to Sury as she clung to my shoulder.

“I didn’t do anything…I promise.”

“Then why did you sign that paper?”

“The principal kept me in the office for hours, grilling me. I told her over and over that I didn’t do anything, but she kept saying it would be better for me if I signed the letter… So I did. And then she expelled me.”

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AS TOLD TO MIRI ROSE

something she hadn’t done and then punished her for it?

My husband stayed home with Sury to console her while I drove down to the school, and marched into the principal’s office. She hardly looked surprised as I stormed in; in hindsight I realize that she was probably expecting me.

“Can you tell me why my daughter has been suspended?” I said, trying to keep my anger in check.

“I imagine she already told you herself,” she replied tersely.

“She told me that she hasn’t done anything wrong, that she was interrogated for hours, that you pushed her to confess until she finally gave in.”

She leaned back in her chair, regarding me as if I was one of her wayward students. “She wouldn’t have confessed if she hadn’t done anything wrong.” She was so calm about it, so nonchalant. It was infuriating.

Still, I tried to be respectful. “Could it be that you’re mistaken?”

She shook her head with concrete finality. “No. It’s clear as day to me, and to the rest of the administration that your daughter is guilty.”

“Is that so?” I cried out to her. “Then I would like a meeting with them, and with the rav backing this school.”

“You can call the rav.” The phone rang, and she directed her attention to it. I dumbly left the room, not believing that my child’s life was less important than the phone call she just took.

I called the rav backing the school. It was as if he was prepared for my phone call.

“I can’t help you,” he said.

Oh, how painful those words were! I felt

like I had sunk to the bottom of the ocean; there was no one to talk to.

For the next six months I made attempt after failed attempt to clear my daughter’s name and set things right with the school.

It was like trying to push through stone.

Meanwhile, my daughter sank deeper and deeper into depression, withdrawing from her old friends and, eventually, from us.

Her confidence shattered, she lost interest

just like that. He was not trying to hurt anyone; he was just trapped and trying to break free.”

Sury stayed home from school for an entire year. She had her ups and downs. It was heart-wrenching for our entire family.

Finally, Sury agreed to go to a seminary in Eretz Yisrael. We cautiously breathed a sigh of relief. Six months passed and we saw small steps of progress.

Sury’s eyes were downcast; she’d been crying for hours. in everything.

She began sleeping through Shabbos.

She ignored her friends’ attempts to reestablish contact with her and fell in with a group of kids she never would have associated with before this incident. Eventually she was going out with them almost every night. We tried not to push her too hard— we tried not to blame her.

Sury ignored our phone calls when she was out with her new friends. She kept us up waiting, sometimes until dawn. When she was home, she was gruff and sullen with everyone, even the little ones.

When I was really down, I would listen to the Chazak hotline. One day, I was listening and I cried along as a mother recounted her experience with her teenage son who had overdosed. I listened intently. She said, “This is his nisayon just as much as it is ours. It’s like a child who can’t speak; the only way to express the words he has trapped inside is to lash out, to cry, to run away. My son’s neshamah is

I was relieved and grateful, of course, but, I was still angry. I knew all the platitudes about resentment hurting no one but me, but I could not forgive the school’s administation for what they did to my daughter. I didn’t want to forgive them.

But then we had our share of more heartache. I lost my job; my son’s engagement fell through; my youngest was rejected by two different yeshivos. And things with Sury were still far from perfect.

My husband gently suggested that maybe the anger I’d been holding onto so tightly was the cause of the tzaros we’d been having. He’d heard powerful stories about people who had yeshuos after they were able to forgive those who had wronged them. Maybe, he said, it was time to let my resentment go.

“Let it go?” I almost yelled at him. “After what we’ve been through? There’s no way!”

“Do you really think this is helping you?

Let’s try to forgive. I know it is hard, very hard in fact. But think of what you could

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do to generate changes for our family.

Please, just consider it.”

I did consider it. For weeks, I considered it. Finally, one day I decided to take a step toward forgiveness.

I called the principal who had expelled Sury. I didn’t really know what to say to her, or what I expected her to say, but I had to do my hishtadlus.

I placed the call, secretly hoping no one would pick up, but within seconds I heard the secretary’s cheerful voice. I asked her to put me through to the principal.

She picked up after the second ring.

“This is Rebbetzin G.” “Hello, this is Mrs. Stein. I don’t know if you remember me, but my daughter Sury attended your school.”

“Of course I remember Sury,” she replied. Her voice was neutral.

I cleared my throat. “Um, well, this is hard for me to say, but since things have become a little rough in my family recently, my husband and I believe it has to do with letting go of anger from the past. I have had a lot of resentment about the ordeal Sury went through at your school, but I want to be able to forgive and forget. That’s why I’m calling.”

There were a long few seconds of silence. “Well,” she said finally, “I give you a lot of credit.”

I felt my guard go up. “What do you mean?”

“Trying to forgive. It’s a tough thing to do. Important, but tough.”

“Yes, it is,” I conceded.

“Not that I know what there is to forgive…”

I was indignant. She doesn’t know what there is to forgive? “How about my daughter, for one thing?” I say. “She was never the same after what happened to her. And for what? For nothing. She was punished for something she didn’t even do!”

The principal’s voice was calm on the other end of the phone. “Mrs. Stein, are you really calling to forgive, or to rehash what happened? What is it that you want?”

“I want…” I trailed off, unsure of what to say.

What did I want? I wanted my daughter vindicated. I wanted the principal to take responsibility for the years of aggravation we’d gone through. I needed her to say that she was wrong.

“Look,” the principal said. “I have no doubt that your family has been through the mill. I’m sorry for that; I would never intentionally cause someone pain. Back then, I acted based on the information I had, not out of spite, chas v’shalom. I told Sury to sign that paper because I believed she was involved, and the consequences would have been far worse if we found out later that she’d lied too. I thought I did the right thing, and I still do. If it’s an admission of wrongdoing you want, I’m sorry, but I can’t give you that.”

“You don’t think it’s remotely possible that you could have been wrong?”

“Of course I could have been wrong— no one’s perfect—but I don’t think I was.”

She released a long, heavy sigh. “Clearly you’re in need of something from me in order to get to a place of forgiveness. So I will say this: I’m sorry for the hardship your family went through. And on the slight chance that I made a mistake, I’m sorry for that, too.”

It should have been enough. But it wasn’t. I said goodbye and hung up.

I was in turmoil for hours after the conversation. I tried cleaning the kitchen, scrubbing at my pots so hard I almost burned through the steel. The walls of my house felt like they were closing in on me.

I finally rushed out the door, barely paying attention to where I was going. I found myself at the waterfront a few blocks away.

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I sat down on a bench, looking out at the gray-green river.

Nearby were two fishermen holding their rods over the gate. At first I didn’t pay them much attention, but I looked up when I noticed a sharp movement in the water.

Right where the men had cast their bait, two birds were thrashing at each other, entwined at the feet. They emitted strange, haunting cries, much different from regular birdcalls.

“Why are they doing that?” one man asked the other. “Are they fighting?”

“No, I think… I think they’re caught!

On my bait!”

The birds, I realized, were screaming, crying out in pain.

One of the men gave a soft pull on his fishing rod and the birds moved closer to the dock. The slight movement set them writhing even more fiercely than before.

Gingerly, the man reeled in his line and delicately set them free.

As I watched the birds fly away toward the horizon, I remembered what I’d heard from that woman on the Chazak hotline years before: “My son’s neshamah was trapped and was trying to break free.”

I realized that this must have been what it was like for my daughter for six long years, wrestling with herself and longing to break free. And that’s how it’s been for me too. And it’s time to let it go.

Recently I called Sury. She picked up the phone and rapidly said, “Is this very important because I’m in the middle of O’z V’Hadar?” My heart contracted with excitement and nachas consumed my entire being. This was the first time she uttered such sweet words. I think I can forgive.

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To submit your story for this column or to have your story featured here, please contact us at submissions@amimagazine.org.

my word!

A S H E R V. F I N N

Each week, “My Word!”—penned by the esteemed president of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to English—highlights often-misused or misspelled phrases or words, common grammatical challenges, unusual expressions or neologisms. Or it just calls attention to curious or interesting locutions.

So if you want to learn some new things about English—or are already expert in the language and want to prove it to yourself—you’ve come to the right place.

Who Is Noam Sane?

H

e’s everywhere and yet doesn’t seem to exist at all, this Noam Sane. He’s invoked in countless conversations, whether on cellphones or in the (still occasionally seen) old-fashioned way of communicating, face-to-face. What he has to do with anything isn’t usually (or, really, ever) clear. But there he is, and there, and there, mentioned without any particular emotion but, from the sheer frequency of being cited, clearly an important guy.

Take this one-side-of-a-phone-call that your faithful columnist recently overheard on a bus (grammar uncorrected): “So, um, I called Tyrone up and he told me—Noam Sane?— he couldn’t pay me yet! I got mad—Noam Sane?—and so I say, Tyrone, you better—Noam Sane?—get me my cash if, Noam Sane, you know what’s good for you! Noam Sane?”

Another puzzling interjection, this one, it seems, used exclusively in cellphone exchanges, doesn’t seem to be a name but some sort of strange greeting, in the form of an incomprehensible question. I refer to “wayuat.” If it’s a received call, it follows a more traditional greeting—as in “Hi! Wayuat?”

And used by a caller, it is often the very first word spoken: “Wayuat”? Once, when I overheard both the caller and the person being called—who was on speakerphone—the conversation went: “Yo! Wayuat?

“The mall. WaYUat?” The conversation, needless to say, went downhill from there.

Getting back to Noam Sane, though, I recently met an old friend from the ‘hood. Rufus and I used to play stickball together back in the day, but I haven’t seen him in years. Walking down the street, though, I spied someone who looked very much like him.

“Rufus?” I asked, tentatively. “Yeah,” he answered a little suspiciously, but then, looking hard at me, his eyes grew wide and he shouted, “Asher V.? That who you be?” Rufus was always good with rhymes.

“Indeed,” I answered happily, and we hugged. Then came an invitation I hadn’t anticipated.

“Sup!” he offered enthusiastically.

Now Rufus should have known well from the days of our youth that I couldn’t sup with him, not unless he had become an observant, kosher-keeping Jew, which, from the looks of him, didn’t seem to have occurred.

So I politely explained “Oh, Rufus, you must have forgotten that I can’t eat at your house. Nothing personal but I keep kosher. I do, however, much appreciate the kind offer!”

Rufus seemed as puzzled by my response as I had been by his invitation. So I decided to change the subject. “How have you been, my man?”

“Great!” he answered enthusiastically. “I been working hard and collecting dead presidents!”

Oh my! I said to myself, could Rufus be in the assassination business? It didn’t fit my memory of his character at all. But he didn’t seem in the least embarrassed, so I just let the comment go.

He went on to tell me about a business he was running, which, as I understood it, involved landscaping services, a perfectly legitimate field (ha ha! pun intended!), perhaps a cover for his… less savory occupation.

I filled him in about my own career as a language columnist and, of course, he was duly impressed. But I guess, as they say, one can’t go home again. Times change and so do people. So, indeed, does language.

Noam Sane?

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Surveying the Surveys STRANGE QUESTIONS, STRANGER ANSWERS

T

wo weeks ago, the cover of Ami said it all, in one succinct word: “bizarre.” In a small blurb, the publisher tried to lure the readers with the tagline: “Editor of Pew survey explains its bizarre findings.”

The Pew Report, for those who humor me by disclosing that they only purchase Ami for the back pages, was an extensive survey of the state of American Jewry, done by the Pew Research Center. In their own words, they are “a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world.”

The survey, which interviewed about 3,500 Americans, was comprised of myriad questions asked of respondents who said they were Jewish when asked about their religion. The survey questions were on various topics: Who is a Jew? What makes a Jew? Is it a matter of belief or ancestry, allegiance or alliance, etc.?

The study looked at intermarriage, observance, and political affiliations, plus attitudes towards discrimination and race, as well as faith. And among the responses offered along with the good old tikkun olam and working-toward-justice- andequality—were “eating Jewish foods” and

“having a good sense of humor.” Pass the lox, please! Get it?

I’m not sure if I was impressed by or contemptuous of the creativity of the questions, but they were indeed extensive. It seems that the only question that they did not ask was, “Do you define your Judaism by your relationship with Ami Magazine? I would have loved to have seen the response to that.

In all seriousness, there were quite a number of bizarre questions, and according to the Pew study, an equal number of bizarre

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responses. One of the two that struck me the most was a question concerning the handling of money on Shabbos. It was not surprising that only 4 percent of Reform Jews and 13 percent of Conservative Jews said that they “avoid handling money on the Sabbath.” What was quite surprising was that, according to the survey, only 81 percent of Modern Orthodox Jews avoid it as well.

But what really shocked me was the next statistic. The report included a category of Jews named “ultra-Orthodox Jews.” I always question the word “ultra.” It reminds me of the jingle for Ultra Brite toothpaste and makes me think that perhaps ultra-Orthodox Jews use that brand. Maybe “ultraOrthodox” is the Pew equivalent of the Brooklyn question “Are they heimish?” Or perhaps their study used “ultra” as determined by the length of one’s pei’os, or attendance at Lag Ba’Omer festivities in Meron, or High Holy Day services in Uman. To me, either you adhere to the Shulchan Aruch or you don’t.

Be that as it may, I assume ultra-Orthodox is a code name for chasidim. I don’t think that the survey included the Briskers or kollel yungeleit, or those makpid on yashan (even if they don’t dress in black and white).

In any event, they popped the money question to the ultra-Orthodox as well, and

RABBI MORDECHAI KAMENETZKY

lo and behold, only 76 percent of the ultras said that they avoid handling money on Shabbos! Yikes! I don’t want to be judgmental but that is a full 5 percent less than those deemed Modern Orthodox. For the life of me, I do not understand what that means.

Who in his right mind, who openly calls himself ultra-Orthodox, would readily admit that he handles money on Shabbos? Is that some sort of joke?

So I tried to do what I could to understand this contradiction. I closed my eyes and imagined the following phone conversation: “Hello. Is this Mr. Schwartz?”

The voice on the other end of the line, somewhere in the heart of Williamsburg or Boro Park responds, “Yah. Do redt Schvartz.”

“Hi. We’re from the Pew Organization and we’d like to ask you a few…”

“Pew? Vos iz dos Poo? Du mainst Poo-pa? Ich bin mit de Satmar, and I already gave to the yeshivah.”

“No, no, Mr. Schwartz. We want to ask you about Judaism.”

“Vaht iz Judaism? You mean Yiddishkeit?”

“Yes sir, we mean Yiddishkeit.”

And the questions go on and on. They ask if he’s Orthodox. (I don’t know if he answers the toothpaste question.) Is he ultra, chasidic, or Satmar? Actually Chabad was upset that they were not included as a unique class of Judaism—an item that I refrain from commenting on.

However, I just imagine Mr. Schwartz sitting in his study and finally getting the question: “Mr. Schwartz, do you avoid handling money on the Sabbath?”

“Vus fregst du? Do I vaht?”

“Sir, do you avoid handling money on the Sabbath?”

Mr. Schwartz wants to help. He already replied that being a Jew means answering all questions with total honesty (see question number 214). And so he repeats: “Do I avoid hondeling money on Shabbos?” He pauses.

He did speak about a deal the other week, and about the economy, and his shares in

Google, he recalls. And so he replies, “Do I not hondel money? Vos zol ich zugun? You know, I am going to the shtiebel and Yankel asks me sometimes, ‘How’s the gesheft.’ Mir shmeezed. We hondel. We hondel a lot of things. Okay, I’ll be moideh. I guess I hondel money on Shabbos.”

There you have it!

And thus the Pew survey found this large percentage of ultra-Orthodox Jews who “hondel” money on Shabbos.

Another quirky question in the survey

The only story of an Orthodox Jew having an Xmas tree came out of the apocryphal tales of my alma mater. dealt with an Xmas tree. (Note: They did not use that spelling in the survey.) According to the survey, about a third of Jews (32 percent) say they had an Xmas tree in their home last year, including 27 percent of “Jews by religion” and 51 percent of “Jews of no religion.” Their finding that having such a tree was especially common among Jews who are married to non-Jews (71 percent of that group) does not surprise me. I have a few intermarrieds on my block that do, though one displays a menorah as well, just in case.

In the words of another fellow I met who does both: “I have to hedge my bets. Maybe I was takeh wrong about marrying out.”

Thankfully, relatively few Orthodox Jews say there was an Xmas tree in their home last year. But there’s a fly in the ointment. One percent of those quirky “ultra-Orthodox”

admit to the Pew Crew that they are secretly stowing a tree somewhere in their home. A Kratzmich tree! Is someone out of his mind?

Am I missing something here? Don’t tell me that they are also, Heaven forbid, “hedging their bets.” For the life of me, I can’t imagine the guys who hondel money admitting that, even in the minute percentage that the Pew Crew reported. After all, 100 percent said they participated in a Pesach seder last year.

Let’s look at the numbers and analyze their findings. Take the Siyum HaShas, for example. I think 90,000 attended. Half were ultras, yes? Or the 30,000 that came to Foley Square to protest the Israeli government’s dealing with yeshivos in recent months.

I assume all were ultras. One percent of 30,000…that’s 300. Are you telling me that 300 of those Jews have Xmas trees? In fact, the only story of an Orthodox Jew having an Xmas tree came out of the apocryphal tales of my alma mater, where a couple of guys back in the early ’70s, or maybe late ’60s, brought an old, discarded tree into their dormitory room and hung their socks on it.

And even that raised the ire of the rosh yeshivah to the extent that his shouts and his yelling at them reverberated throughout the halls of the yeshivah. I guess the screaming worked. One of the two boys is a prominent rosh yeshivah today. And the tree? It was gotten rid of, and the socks were washed.

Maybe the guy with the tree was that guy from the dorm! Who knows?

So I’m not exactly sure how we can interpret all of these findings. Many of them, especially those on identity and assimilation, are truly disheartening, However, I must admit that the word used on the cover of Ami was truly appropriate to some of them: bizarre. 

Rabbi Mordechai Kamenetzky is the rosh yeshivah of Yeshiva Toras Chaim at South Shore, a weekly columnist in Yated Ne’eman, and the author of the Parsha Parable series. He can share your story through the “Streets of Life,” and can be reached at editorial@amimagazine.org

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