May/June 2023

Your summer reads from

Hadassah & You Together in Israel

AN EXPERIENCE YOU WILL TREASURE FOR A LIFETIME

Travel with Hadassah during our yearlong celebration of Hadassah & Israel — Together at 75.

Whether you want to take in breathtaking views on a jeep tour through the Golan Heights, savor mouthwatering flavors during a chef-led market tour in Jerusalem, or visit a premier artists village, we have tours with activities that speak to you.

You’ll also see more of Israel’s treasures — Hadassah’s hospitals and youth villages.

Early bird discounts of $600 are available. Space is limited. Register today!

2023 TOURS:

Hadassah Tour of Israel for First Timers

Led by Aileen Bormel | October 11–22, 2023

Hadassah Israel Together: Mothers, Daughters & Friends

Led by Ellen Hershkin & Lisa Hershkin Roth | October 24–November 3, 2023

Hadassah Israeli Cultural Curiosity Music, Art & Cuisine

Led by Peg Elefant & Valerie Lowenstein | November 5–15, 2023

Hadassah Keepers of the Gate Tour to Israel

Led by Linda Freedman Block & Roz Kantor | December 10–19, 2023

Hadassah Winter Family Tour

Led by Carol Rosenthal | December 21–31, 2023

Find out more by visiting events.hadassah.org/travel523 or calling Ayelet Tours at 1-800-237-1517.

THE WOMEN’S ZIONIST ORGANIZATION OF AMERICA, INC.

In this special issue, we explore some of the sociopolitical forces along with the arts, culture and food that have defined modern Israel since David Ben-Gurion declared independence on May 14, 1948.

ISRAELI WOMEN WHO LED THE WAY

By Jessica Steinberg

A wide array of female “firsts” in Israel have set standards, broken glass ceilings and been instrumental in helping shape the country. Among the accomplished women are athletes and scientists, politicians and businesswomen, actors and performing artists.

26 ISRAEL’S ETHNIC DEMOCRACY

By Daniel Gordis

“Though neither Israeli nor American Jewish leaders were ever inclined to stress this point,” Gordis, an author and fellow at Shalem College in Jerusalem, writes in this adapted excerpt from his new book, Impossible Takes Longer , “Israel was never intended to be a liberal democracy. Israel has always been something different, commonly called an ‘ethnic democracy.’ ”

32 ZIONIST WOMEN YOU SHOULD KNOW

By Alexandra Lapkin Schwank

This group of 18 inspiring Zionists includes immigrants and refugees, a Wall Street managing director and an entrepreneur, a rabbi and a Hollywood actress, writers, educators, activists and social media influencers. What they all have in common is making support for Israel central to their lives.

42

DEPARTMENTS

12 COMMENTARY

The Al Hanasim as aspirational prayer

14 ESSAY

My daughter, the diplomat

38 TRAVEL

The old-new kibbutz

42 FOOD

Multiculturalism on a plate

46 ARTS

Israeli women in the director’s chair

52 BOOKS

• Ne w titles illuminate the Zionist ent erprise

• A no vel treatment of marriage

16

A Unity of Purpose, Not of Opinion

May Israel remain a light unto the nations | By

When it comes to the “greatest” of anything, opinions vary. If the United Nations voted on which na‑ tion is the greatest, it’s likely no country would get more than a sin gle vote. If you Google the greatest watershed moments in world history, you’ll find many candidates—from the American, French and industrial revolutions to the smallpox vaccine, Guttenberg’s printing press and, well, the creation of Google itself.

But I am confident I can make one greatest assertion that can’t be seriously contradicted: In Jewish his tory, May 14, 1948, the day that David Ben Gurion proclaimed mod ern Israel’s independence, was the most important date in the last 2,000 years. It utterly transformed life as we know it, not just by recreating Jew ish sovereignty but also by altering the self image, culture and security of millions of Jews who were alive then or born subsequently. (Because of the elastic relationship between the Hebrew and secular calendars, Yom Ha’atzmaut—Independence Day— was celebrated in Israel this year on April 26.)

The impact of Israel’s indepen dence was not a temporary shift of perception but a permanent change in the Jewish condition. Jews every where knew there was now a fixed homeland where, if and when they showed up as immigrants—a status every Jewish family in history has

Rhoda Smolow

had at one time or another—the door would be open. This has been true for those comfortably ensconced in America, stuck in the Soviet Union, waiting in refugee camps in Germany, suddenly threatened in Egypt or Iraq, or anywhere else—whether we con templated moving or staying put.

tom. The ingathering of the exiles in Israel allowed us to see our true col‑ ors and—in the most literal sense— to unite.

Nationhood is wonderful, but exile was a good teacher. Israel and the Jewish people will endure only if we remain aware of vulnerabilities past and present. Ben Gurion under stood this as it applied to both war and peace.

Holidays, whether secular or reli gious, typically take us back to a time long before our own, reminding us that the world was not always as it is today. And what changed in 1948 was unique.

Israel’s existence altered the way the world looks at the Jew‑ ish people, mostly, though not always, for the better. And it altered the way we look at ourselves, in both pride and self awareness. Perhaps the most edifying result of Israel’s growth and development is that it enabled us to get to see our grand diversity. For the better part of two millennia, homogeneous Jewish communities lived largely in ignorance of the wide spectrum of Jewish culture and cus

“In the conflict of wills, the stronger will wins,” he observed in Ben Gurion Looks Back in Talks with Moshe Pearlman. “I knew we would be vastly outnumbered.... But for the Arab armies, failure would not mean the loss of their countries…. For us it would mean national destruction.”

Like the grand sweep of Jewish history, Israel is still a work in prog ress, struggling to define itself. Great doesn’t mean perfect, and a crisis of the moment should not distract us from a miracle for the ages.

The measure of anything called “greatest”—person, invention or event—should not be competing phenomena but the far from great conditions that illuminated the path to greatness. May the Jewish people, in respect, in debate and in our drive to improve, always recognize the con ditions that led us to May 14, 1948, and strive for a unity not of opinion, but of purpose. And may Israel be, as it already is in so many ways, a light unto the nations.

LIKE THE GRAND SWEEP OF JEWISH HISTORY, ISRAEL IS STILL A WORK IN PROGRESS, STRUGGLING TO DEFINE ITSELF.

The comprehensive transformation of our iconic Round Building is truly inspiring.

The gloriously renewed building will feature an additional 200 sorely needed patient beds, sparkling new medical specialty service and nursing station areas, and state-of-the-art equipment, among many other advances, increasing our capacity to deliver the very highest level of patient care, serve more patients and meet the ever-expanding healthcare needs of every human being who seeks our care. And all of it – from the heaviest beam to the littlest detail – is thanks to the generosity of people like you.

CHAIR Marlene Post

EXECUTIVE EDITOR Lisa Hostein

DEPUTY EDITOR Libby Barnea

SENIOR EDITOR Leah Finkelshteyn

DIGITAL EDITOR Arielle Kaplan

EDITOR EMERITUS Alan M. Tigay

DESIGN/PRODUCTION Regina and Samantha Marsh

Roselyn Bell

Ruth G. Cole

Nancy Falchuk

Gloria Goldreich

Blu Greenberg

Dara Horn

Israel on Our Minds

Celebration amid deep concern

By Lisa Hostein

EDITORIAL BOARD

Ruth B Hurwitz

Francine Klagsbrun

Anne Lapidus Lerner

Curt Leviant

Joy Levitt

Bonnie Lipton

Marcie Natan

Nessa Rapoport

Sima Schuster

Susan S. Smirnoff

Barbara Topol

HADASSAH NATIONAL PRESIDENT Rhoda Smolow

ADVERTISING

Celia Weintrob, Advertising and Marketing Manager

Phone: (212) 451-6283

Email: cweintrob@hadassah.org

Randi O’Connor, Advertising Sales Associate

Phone: (212) 451-6221

Email: roconnor@hadassah.org

Sara Ruderman, Ad Sales Representative

Phone: (585) 233-2050

Email: adsales.hadassah@gmail.com

CHANGE OF ADDRESS/MEMBERSHIP INQUIRIES

800-664-5646 • membership@hadassah.org

TO SUBSCRIBE DIRECTLY hadassahmagazine.org/subscribe • (212) 451-6283

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR letters@hadassah.org

EDITORIAL INQUIRIES

(212) 451-6289 • magazine@hadassah.org

GENERAL HADASSAH INQUIRIES (212) 355-7900

Hadassah Magazine is published in print bimonthly. © Copyright 2023, Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, Inc. issn 0017-6516. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and addi tional mailing offic es. Postmaster: Send address changes to Hadassah Magazine, 40 Wall Street, New York, NY 10005-1387. Subscription: $36.00.

Member

American Jewish Press Association Magazine Publishers of America

Hadassah does not endorse any products or services advertised in Hadassah Magazine unless specifically noted. The acceptance of advertising in Hadassah Magazine does not constitute recommendation, approval or other representation of the quality of products or services, or the credibility of any claims made by advertisers including, but not limited to, the kashrut of advertised food products. Use of any products or services advertised in Hadassah Magazine is solely at the user’s risk and Hadassah accepts no responsibility or liability in connection therewith.

Israel is on my mind more than usual these days, and I know I’m not alone. A mix of joy and worry consumes me as I contemplate how the nation that I love and once briefly called home has achieved such tremendous success but also is experiencing such extreme inner turmoil.

Despite the troubling times, there is much to celebrate as the country turns a relatively young 75. And that is what this special issue is all about.

We explore what defines Israel— the history, the people, the land, the food, the arts, the language. Some stories and images will inspire a nostalgic look back; others, we hope, will provide new understanding of what makes the Jewish state so amazing and complex.

In “Israeli Women Who Led the Way” (page 16), Jessica Steinberg profiles an impressive group of women who blazed trails, becoming noteworthy firsts in a wide array of fields. In my Q&A with Alice Shalvi, the matriarch of Israeli feminism weighs in not only on how far women have come, but also the challenges that remain for women and Israeli society as a whole (page 64).

Scholar and author Daniel Gordis also has much to say about Israel’s accomplishments and shortcomings in an adapted excerpt from his newest book, Impossible Takes Longer (page 26). Gordis’s book is one of a plethora of newly published works timed to coincide with Israel’s milestone anniversary. Alan Abbey reviews several of those new releases (page 52).

The author of one of those books,

Isabel Kershner of The New York Times, will be a panelist—along with writers Yossi Klein Halevi and Hen Mazzig—for our upcoming program, Israel at 75: Successes and Challenges, on May 18 at 12:30 p.m. ET. You won’t want to miss this virtual event. (Details on page 53.)

Elsewhere in the issue, Esther Hecht shows us what awaits the adventurous traveler at the country’s kibbutzim (page 38). Those quintessential Israeli collectives also pop up in the crossword puzzle (page 51), in the “About Hebrew” column (page 63) and in a tribute to Kibbutz Ketura at 50 (page 36).

Adeena Sussman gets down to the food basics as she asks: What single dish most aptly represents Israeli cuisine (page 42)? And Shoshanna Solomon trains her lens on the female filmmakers bringing decidedly different Israeli stories to the big screen (page 46).

For some history, check out fascinating details about Israel’s Declaration of Independence (page 11) and what Hadassah was up to around the time the modern state was born (page 35). Also get the first glimpse of 18 American Jewish women Hadassah is honoring this year for their Zionist activism (page 32).

As Shavuot approaches (beginning the evening of May 25), and we celebrate the giving of the Torah while the Jewish people were en route to the Promised Land, let us pray that Israel continues to thrive, and that our Israeli brothers and sisters find peace with their neighbors as well as with each other.

Celebrate Israel’s 75th

Yes, I’d like to support the Hadassah Magazine Circle

I do not wish to receive the jigsaw puzzle or cookbook in exchange for my donation in which event my entire donation will be tax deductible. Check here if you do not want your donation to be acknowledged in the magazine.

© 2023 Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, Inc. Hadassah is a registered trademark of Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, Inc. The solicitation disclosure on page 60 is incorporated in this solicitation. Contributions are tax deductible to the extent permitted by law. In accordance with IRS tax laws, only the amount of your gift that exceeds the fair market value of goods and services received in consideration for your gift is tax deductible as a charitable contribution. The fair market value of the puzzle offered in connection with your contribution is $36. This value represents the portion of your gift that is not tax deductible. If you want the entire amount of your contribution to be tax deductible, you may decline the puzzle by checking the appropriate box on the form.

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

‘CRITICAL’ COMMENT

The inclusion of Zee Abrams letter to the editor in the March/April 2023 issue is surprising. Abrams writes of Ethel Rosenberg that “Russia would never have gotten the atomic bomb without American spies like her.”

Never?

The various theoretical formulations for an atomic bomb and, after that, a hydrogen bomb and the concept of “critical mass” have been in physics and quantum mechanics textbooks for decades.

Michael Solarz Berkeley, Calif.

SMALL WORLD CONNECTION

I was so happy to read “How a Farming Village Saved My Family” by Sheryl Abbey in the March/April issue. The article included a picture of Abbey’s grandparents and mother immediately after their liberation in May 1945.

I immediately recognized the

grandmother, Irma Leopold, because she and my mother had been good friends in my hometown of Vineland, N.J., where Abbey’s family settled after the war. Indeed, my mother and Mrs. Leopold alternated as president of our local chapter of Pioneer Women (since renamed Na’amat) and worked on its annual fundraiser picnic.

I knew Mrs. Leopold because my mother used to “lend me out” as a child to help Mrs. Leopold set up for the picnic—an event described in detail in a book published in March 2023 Speaking Yiddish to Chickens, about the unique Jewish farming community in Vineland.

Mark Werner Raleigh, N.C.

BROADENED HORIZONS

I was somewhat saddened to read “The Wrong Kind of Jew” by Hen Mazzig in the March/April issue,

Visitors Center

There is a place in the heart of the Galilee, in the village of Kanna, where Jewish and Arab women work in equality and mutual respect. We invite you to visit and be a part of our vision of a true democratic society.

The

of our Work

Women’s Empowerment

but very glad that he has brought knowledge about the Mizrahi community to the fore. After all, some of our greatest sages were of Mizrahi origin, including the authors of the Babylonian Talmud.

When I was growing up in San Antonio, Texas, the child of immigrant East European Ashkenazi parents, I did not know about the existence of Jews from other cultures. In 1961, I married a Jewish fellow from Mexico City from the same Yiddish-speaking background and we lived there for several years. Mexico City had a large Ashkenazi community, a substantial Sephardi group of Spanish and Turkish origin and an equally vibrant Mizrahi sector, originating mainly from Syria. Social interaction between the groups was rare and intermarriage was severely frowned upon.

But times have changed. Today, intermarriage among the groups is common. We have an Ashkenazi grandniece married to someone of Syrian Jewish ancestry.

When my husband and I relocated to San Antonio in 1969, we formed a group of friends that included those with East European and German Ashkenazi heritage, one with a Sephardi lineage that can be traced back to 1400s Spain and others with Sephardi ancestry from France and Greece who had survived the Holocaust. I am so glad my horizons have broadened!

Eleanor Siegal San Antonio, Texas

www.sindyanna.com

sindyanna@sindyan.org.il

972-4-651-6784

972-50-4330039

Scan to learn more:

8 MAY/JUNE 2023 I I hadassahmagazine.org

WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU!

TOGETHER, WE CAN HELP ISRAEL’S BUILDERS.

NOW AND FOR THE NEXT 74 YEARS.

Over more than 74 years, ordinary men and women devoted their lives to help build a new Jewish state. Many of these pioneers are now aging, frail, impoverished and alone. They need our help.

With more than 7,000 volunteers and 120+ branches throughout Israel, Yad Sarah is dedicated to helping to provide for Israel’s less fortunate — especially those who have sacrificed so much, who have dedicated their lives to build a nation.

We provide home and health care support services that enable people in Israel to remain independent at home and in their own communities despite illness or frailty.

Return the favor of service to Israel's Builders by supporting Yad Sarah today.

Eva H. Nurse, Mother, Grandmother, Yad Sarah client

Using Technology to Connect Jewish Teens in Israel and America

can and Israeli Jewish high school students who have been paired since 2020 for online chats through One2One, a program of Enter: The Jewish Peoplehood Alliance. The three-yearold initiative that began during pandemic lockdowns aims to bridge the Israel-Diaspora divide through dialogue.

And there’s plenty of dialogue on One2One, where teenagers chat weekly about everything from Jewish identity to politics to high school grades.

important for us to know how Jews get along outside of Israel” as well as “the opinions of us around the world.”

Emily Torkiya, a 15-year-old Jewish Texan, was preparing to visit Israel on a teen tour and wanted an insider’s view. Maya Halahmi, a 16-year-old Jerusalemite, was curious about America and needed to practice English. They met last year on Zoom, trading weekly insights into their respec -

tive worlds 7,000 miles apart.

“I learned about Texas, and since Emily trains her friends at the gym, she helped me improve my workout,” said Halahmi. “I taught Emily Hebrew slang. And her dad asked me about the army.”

Halahmi and Torkiya are among the 8,000 Ameri -

Shavuot’s Origins as a Wheat Harvest Festival

If Shavuot makes you think of blintzes and cheesecake, that’s because, according to some sources, a 13th century French Ashkenazi custom to eat dairy foods on what is really a Jewish harvest holiday spread as thick as cream cheese on a bagel.

Vegan educators and activists in Israel—a country that may have more vegans per capita than any other—say it’s time to rewind Shavuot, which begins the evening of May 25, to its roots as a wheat harvest festival. And to acknowledge what they deride as the cruelty of the dairy industry and the environmental and health

consequences of consuming its products.

Rabbi Asa Keisar is a vocal Israeli advocate for what he labels “religious veganism”—using the Torah and Talmud to expose the Jewish arguments against, for instance, eating meat. According to him, when the dairy custom arose almost a thousand years ago, Jews “had cows in their yard and they would take some milk while the calf would still suckle. But in our days, dairy products are coming through serious animal welfare sins.”

The dairy industry is also “very environmentally unfriendly,” said

Liel Busi, a 17-year-old from Netanya, admitted that he was “shocked to find out that Americans have two days of rest.” Now on his second Zoom partnership through One2One, Busi is delving deeper. “It’s

Omri Paz, founder of Vegan Friendly, a leading Israeli vegan advocacy and certification agency. He noted that raising cows for their milk causes gas emissions and overuses resources such as water, land and food to keep them fed.

Over the past decade, Vegan Friendly’s Shavuot campaigns have included a billboard on Israel’s Ayalon highway showing a dairy cow and her calf on their first— and last—day together, illustrating how cows are separated from

“We’re using technology that’s now a part of our world to facilitate these relationships,” noted Yael Rosen, the program director. One2One’s individualized algorithm is “like online dating,” she explained, using questions about hobbies, personality and availability to pair teens.

After the two-month commitment, many teens continue their

their calves so that the milk goes to humans. Other efforts have been the Shavuot Without Cheese festivals and a National Milk-Out initiative that highlighted plantbased cheeses and pasta dishes.

The group is now focusing its efforts on Vegan Fest Tel Aviv, an all-things-vegan extravaganza

Teens in One2One chat online about politics, school—and Taylor Swift and Harry Styles.

Hold the cheese at this Vegan Friendly-certified Domino’s pizzeria in Tel Aviv.

conversations on social media and WhatsApp. One2One also hosts an annual summer meetup in Israel for participants.

In Israel, where English language practice is another goal of the program, One2One works with the Israeli Ministry of Education to enroll participants. Americans, meanwhile, are recruited from various Jewish organizations; many sign up through RootOne, an Israel teen tour outfit, and earn credits toward future trips to the country.

“It’s been really cool to meet someone I wouldn’t have met otherwise and hear about the differences between Israeli and American culture,” reflected Josh Bagley, a 16-year-old from Minnesota who participated in One2One before heading to Israel last summer with RootOne. “I’ve got a new friend in Israel.”

Hilary Danailova

that kicks off on June 21 and that bills itself as the largest such event anywhere in the world, having attracted more than 100,000 participants to both its 2019 and 2022 festivals.

Beyond activism, Vegan Friendly certifies over 14,000 products and 3,000 restaurants, hotels and other ventures in Israel as well as in the United Kingdom. The organization recently launched in the United States, where more than 30 businesses have signed up for certification. (Download the Vegan Friendly app to search for certified outlets.)

“Shavuot isn’t really connected to dairy,” said Paz. “In the Bible, Shavuot is about harvesting wheat, so we need to get back to the original intention.”

—Jordana

Benami

ERETZ

ISRAEL

[the Land of Israel] was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.

So begins the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, better known as Israel’s Declaration of Independence, proclaimed and signed at the Tel Aviv Museum— today, Independence Hall—on May 14, 1948. But how well do you know modern Israel’s most foundational text?

Reading from a typewritten copy, it took David BenGurion approximately 16 minutes to deliver the Declaration before the several hundred guests at the museum and the thousands listening to the live transmission on the nascent radio station, Kol Yisrael.

Rabbi Yehuda Leib Fishman, a signer of the Declaration, recited the Shehecheyanu blessing after Ben-Gurion concluded with the final lines: “Placing our trust in the rock of Israel, we affix our signatures to this proclamation at this session of the Provisional Council of State, on the soil of the homeland, in the city of Tel Aviv, on this Sabbath eve, the 5th day of Iyar, 5708. The 14th of May, 1948.”

Thirty-seven people signed the Declaration, beginning with Ben-Gurion, who was then the executive head of the World Zionist Organization and chairman of the Jewish Agency for Palestine. The other signatories—including two women—were leading members of the Yishuv and the Provisional Council of the State of Israel.

Rachel Cohen Kagan, chairwoman of the Women’s International Zionist Organization, early champion of women’s rights in Israel and future member of Knesset, signed before her female colleague Golda Meir.

Three of the signers served as prime ministers: BenGurion (1948-1954, 1955-1963), Moshe Shertok (1954-1955) and Golda Meir (1969-1974). Yitzhak Ben-Zvi served as the second president of Israel (1925-1963).

The selection of “Israel” as the name for the modern state was officially acknowledged in the Declaration, ending speculation over other potential names, among them, Eretz Israel, Ziona, Palestine, Herzliya and Ever.

By June 1948, graphic designer and calligrapher Otte Wallish had completed his work on the Declaration Scroll, which is today in the collection of the Israel State Archives. Wallish transcribed the text in Ktav Stam, a traditional Jewish writing style used for most holy scrolls. The scroll consists of three sections of parchment stitched together: The first two, which are paper treated to resemble parchment made of animal skin, contain the text of the Declaration; the third, made of actual animal skin, features the signatures. —Libby Barnea

Celebrating the Miracle of Israel

The cradle of Jewish civilization must continue to connect Jews everywhere |

By Rabbi Tracy J. Kaplowitz

Each night on broadway, Leo Frank, played by Ben Platt, is lynched again. As I recently watched this indelible part of Georgia’s and Jewish American history unfold before me in the musical Parade, the message was clear: The security of Jews is not something to be taken for granted.

As we celebrated Yom Ha’atzmaut this spring, we recited liturgical additions for the holiday that address this concern for the safety of Jews. The special Al Hanisim prayer is based on traditional texts from Hanukkah and Purim, holidays that recall times when Jewish survival was not guaranteed. The contemporary prayer incorporated by some religious movements extols the creation of an independent Israel as a modern miracle after a long history of expulsions, inquisitions and genocides.

It praises God “for the miracle of our revival and the rebuilding of our

lives in our homeland” (from Tfilat HaAdam: An Israeli Reform Siddur). Israel won its independence so that it could welcome Jewish refugees to their one true homeland. The mission of providing refuge for Jews and facilitating their full citizenship in Israel remains a priority today.

Within the same Reform version of Al Hanisim lies a message about the kind of country Israel should strive to be: “Our lives will be founded on the basis of freedom, justice, and peace, in keeping with the vision of Israel’s prophets; for the faith and the hope, the striving for peace between the children of Sarah and the children of Hagar.”

Leaders have a choice. They can inspire their governments to lead ethically, or they can be like Israel’s ancient and present-day enemies, acting with cruelty and injustice. With this prayer, we express hope that Israel is destined to be morally cou-

rageous as it builds a home for the Jewish people.

Yet, as Israel turns 75, these idealized descriptions can ring hollow. Fissures that have been neatly covered over in Israeli society are now on display as deep chasms. Ministers in Israel’s coalition government freely spout racist beliefs. Political, diplomatic, financial, military and religious leaders both inside and outside of Israel warn of a potential path of destruction and even civil war.

The damage inflicted by proposed policies is not to Israel alone. Along with the birth of Israel as an independent state in 1948 came the birth of its twin—Jewish peoplehood, the extent to which world Jewry had never before experienced. The State of Israel would become the beating heart at the center of the Jewish people.

How did Israel contribute to our supercharged experience of Jewish peoplehood? First, the young state raised our awareness that we are indeed one beautifully diverse nation. As waves of refugees made aliyah, arriving by foot, boat and plane, Jews around the world became fascinated and proud of how multiethnic our people are. The mix of cultures and heritages that make up Israeli Jewish life today has enriched all aspects of society and contributes to the innovation the country is known for.

Second, Israel’s founders showed us that after 2,000 years without sovereignty, Jewish values can guide a nation in the establishment of a democracy in which all its citizens are declared equal.

And finally, Israel has taught the Jewish people not only to take pride in military prowess, but also that the greatest victories come from achieving peace, the kind that came through treaties with Egypt, Jordan and the Abraham Accords’ signatories. Priz-

ing peace, we pray that one day Israel will have a partner for peace among its closest neighbors, the Palestinians.

Even as we celebrate our peoplehood, we worry about the distance between North American liberal Jews and Israel that has been exacerbated by the recent turmoil. For years, surveys have reported that Jews— especially younger ones—feel less connected to the Jewish homeland.

We must act to bridge this distance. Let’s begin by identifying our ideological partners in Israel and lending them our support. Let’s teach the fundamental importance of Israel as the cradle of Jewish civilization and embrace our roots there. Let’s visit the land often and engage with our Israeli brethren as we seek to understand and value our similarities along with our differences.

The State of Israel, as the most powerful expression of Jewish peoplehood, has indelibly transformed world Jewry. This year, as I celebrate Israel’s milestone, I am honoring the Jewish and democratic values upon which the nation was founded and remembering how pursuit of these ideals has inspired and strengthened the Jewish people.

As I recited the Al Hanisim prayer on Yom Ha’atzmaut, officially observed on April 26, I recalled both the miracles of Israel’s past and prayed for the “miraculous deliverance of God’s people Israel” (from the Conservative movement’s Sim Shalom Siddur) to achieve our vibrant future.

May our prayers be answered.

Rabbi Tracy J. Kaplowitz, Ph.D., is the Marilyn G. and Joseph B. Schwartz Israel Fellow at Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York City, where she staffs the Amplify Israel initiative, a hub for liberal Jews to reclaim their connection to Israel. She is coordinating the Re-CHARGING Reform Judaism conference May 31 to June 1 (rechargingreform.com)

My Daughter Hadassah, the Haredi Diplomat

Representing Israel in Belgium and Luxembourg

By Linda Hirschel

It was friday, and hadassah was cutting potatoes for the cholent and preparing pistachio salmon and chicken schnitzel for Shabbat dinner. I had flown to Belgium from Israel the night before, and I had expected some socializing. Instead, Hadassah seemed to be on her phone an awful lot while dipping the schnitzel in breadcrumbs.

My daughter, Hadassah Aisenstark, is Israel’s deputy ambassador to Belgium and Luxembourg. (Idit Rosenzweig Abu serves as ambassador.) It soon became apparent that the texts and urgent calls were part of her job. That coming Sunday— November 11, 2022—there would be a vote in the United Nations regarding the legal status of Israel’s “prolonged occupation” of certain

territories. Hadassah was attempting to start a conversation between a Belgian representative and Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who were both attending a United Nations climate conference. Could a friendly schmooze tip the vote in Israel’s favor?

Apparently not. Belgium went on to vote for the anti-Israel measure. But the cholent must go on—and Hadassah, a 30-year-old haredi wife and mother of five, had to finish cooking before sundown.

Four years ago, Hadassah, the second of my seven children, applied for the foreign ministry’s diplomatic training course. She passed a number of psychological exams and took part in a six-month program in which she studied the consular services, read cases from the United Nations and

political crises and took part in simulations with the media.

Just as America is interested in diversity, so is Israel. Along with a Druze, an Ethiopian and representatives from other minority groups, Hadassah was chosen to become the first haredi deputy ambassador. Hadassah, her husband and their children moved to Belgium last August for her three-year appointment to the embassy. Her husband, Binyomin, still works for his Israeli business and travels back and forth between the two countries.

On Sunday morning, Hadassah and I nibbled our kosher Belgian pastries and sipped our coffee in her spacious living room. Over breakfast, she told me about her new posting.

“Ambassadors have three main roles,” she told me. “Dealing with the media, promoting Israeli business and culture and being pro-active in local Jewish issues.”

In december, hadassah planned a black-tie affair in Antwerp for 450 politicians, business leaders and other influential Belgians to publicize Israel’s success as the “startup nation.” For the event, she brought in representatives from Orcam, the creator of MyEye, a device that aids the blind and visually impaired, and ReWalk, the company behind a wearable robotic exoskeleton that enables individuals with spinal cord injury to stand and walk. When the companies presented their products, they apparently wowed the audience.

And in a presentation at the University of Antwerp on March 8, International Women’s Day, Hadassah included the pioneering work of Henrietta Szold among the “contributions of strong Jewish women throughout history.”

Hadassah Aisenstark at an event commemorating the Abraham Accords

“Henrietta Szold was a leader in the Zionist movement,” she told the gathering at the university’s Institute of Jewish Studies, “and she founded the Hadassah women’s organization in 1912…. Hadassah funded hospitals, a medical school, dental facilities, X-ray clinics, infant welfare stations, soup kitchens and other services for Jewish and Arab inhabitants.”

On the monday evening of my visit, Hadassah returned home from the embassy, kicked off her heels, hung up her suit jacket and exchanged her wig for a scarf. Then came a call from the bathroom.

“Mama, I’m finished!”

Hadassah rolled up her sleeves

and went in to help her 3-year-old. The tumult continued.

“Mama, I have homework!” announced another child.

“Mama, I’m hungry!”

Hadassah plopped down next to me on the couch.

“Mama, he’s bothering me!”

“But he took my ball!”

Hadassah shook out a fluffy blanket. “Hey guys,” she said to all the kids, neutralizing their individual complaints. “Come cuddle with Savta and me.”

That’s my daughter, always the diplomat.

Deputy and Chief Aisenstark with Israeli Ambassador Idit Rosenzweig Abu

Linda Hirschel is a freelance writer living in Beit Shemesh.

BY 3.0

Israeli Women Who Led the Way

Historic firsts from politics to science to the arts

One wonders what golda Meir would make of women’s advancement 75 years into Israel’s existence.

As the country’s first and, so far, only female prime minister, from 1969 to 1974, Meir famously never declared herself a feminist, although she is known for having legislated a system of maternity leave that allowed women to more easily enter and remain in the workforce. Due in part to her family-friendly policies, nearly 60 percent of Israeli women currently work outside the home.

Among them is the current attorney general, Gali Baharav-Miara, who is entangled in the ongoing judicial reform battle playing out in Israel. She is the first woman to hold that office. Her legal colleague,

Esther Hayut, is the president of the Supreme Court, the third woman to serve in that position.

They are among a wide array of women who have set standards, broken glass ceilings and been instrumental in helping shape the country throughout its first three-quarters of a century.

Some of them feel gender had little to do with their path while others consider it a key to their success. Even as challenges for women remain, these “firsts”—just a select sample among many—focus on women who have made their mark across society, from politics and business to sports, the arts and medicine.

| By Jessica Steinberg

POLITICS/GOVERNMENT

Pnina tamano - shata , the first Ethiopian-born woman in the Knesset and the first of Ethiopian descent to serve as a government minister, was just 3 when she immigrated to Israel in 1984. The traumatic period included a nearly yearlong separation from her then-pregnant mother and older sister who got stuck temporarily in Sudan.

She remembers the Operation Moses flight aboard a Hercules aircraft with her father and other siblings where they were given bananas and candies. “I’ll never forget the bananas,” she said.

She also recalls the hardships of those early years in Israel, including

Jessica Steinberg is the arts and culture editor at The Times of Israel

Groundbreakers In disparate fields and disciplines, a number of ‘firsts’ have ushered in an era of opportunity for women in Israel, among them (clockwise from above) scientist Ada Yonath, singer Dana International and marathon champion Beatie Deutsch as well as (opposite page, from far right) Prime Minister Golda Meir and rhythmic gymnast Linoy Ashram.

her family’s financial struggles and missing Ethiopia as well as the blatant racism she says they faced from Israeli society—alongside feeling “a lot of love for Israel.”

“It was an emotional immigration,” said Tamano-Shata, 41. “We came with nothing, and we had to find our own way.”

As she grew up, Tamano-Shata decided that she wanted to be able “to fix things,” she said, and not just accept the difficulties experienced by her community.

“We had to expose it, the racism and poverty, and that exposure had to come from someone inside the community,” she said. But “it couldn’t be the generation of my parents.”

And so, Tamano-Shata, armed with a law degree from Ono Aca-

demic College, was elected to the Knesset in 2013 as a member of the Yesh Atid Party. In 2020, she was appointed Minister of Immigrant Absorption.

Now, having switched to the National Unity Party, which is part of the Knesset opposition, Tamano-Shata chairs the Committee on the Status of Women and Gender Equality.

“Before I’m Ethiopian, I’m a woman first,” she said.

Tamano-Shata has said her priorities for the committee are to address violence directed against women,

including domestic abuse, which is on the rise in Israel, as well as create better working conditions for women and help boost their socioeconomic standing.

Currently, of the 120 members of the Knesset, only 31 are women, with just nine in the governing coalition. Of the 32 ministerial positions, six are held by women.

Tamano-Shata credits her mother and her six sisters (she also has one brother) with giving her the strength to keep pushing forward.

“We were the first generation of Ethiopian Israelis to receive an education, and I needed that education to understand my rights,” she said. “But I’m formed from all of this: I’m a Jew, I’m a woman, I’m Ethiopian, I’m a mother. We’re built from so many circles, and I don’t give up on any of it.”

Pnina Tamano-Shata

DORIT BEINISCH

Former Supreme Court president

WHO SHE IS: First female president of Israel’s highest court; she was the ninth president, voted in unanimously, and served from 2006 to 2012.

BACKGROUND: Age 81, born in Tel Aviv, served for 28 years in the Ministry of Justice, where she was the first woman to hold several senior positions.

LITTLE-KNOWN FACT: Beinisch told late United States Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and National Public Radio’s Nina Totenberg—in 2014 at an event at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan—that while serving as attorney general, she would sometimes run out of meetings for 15 minutes to pick up her daughters from school.

RECENT ACCOMPLISHMENT: Beinisch has been active in her opposition to the government’s proposed judicial overhaul, appearing regularly on radio and television programs, podcasts and panels to explain the need for an independent judiciary in a democratic country.

QUOTE: “We [women] are more sensitive to certain issues because it’s the experience you bring to your office,” Beinisch shared with Ginsburg and Totenberg. “You bring your education, your experience, your personality, and being a woman is one of those qualities.”

DALIA ITZIK

Former speaker of the Knesset

WHO SHE IS: First female speaker of the Knesset, from 2006 to 2009; also served as acting president of Israel in 2007, part of a long career in politics.

BACKGROUND: Age 70, born in Jerusalem to an impoverished Iraqi family, one of eight children mostly raised by her “strong and determined mother” who “always showed compassion to others.”

LITTLE-KNOWN FACT: Despite her impression of strength and power, Itzik has many fears and has always worked hard to not let these fears take over, but rather allowed them to help her be more thorough and exact in her endeavors.

RECENT ACCOMPLISHMENT: In May 2021, she was appointed chair of the board of the Hadassah Medical Organization.

QUOTE: “I am a proud Israeli and a proud Jew and I think that Israel, with all its complexities and challenges, is no less than a miracle.”

ARTS/CULTURE

Natalie portman , the first Israeli to win an Academy Award, has always lived the life of a dual citizen.

The 41-year-old actress, named Neta-Lee Hershlag when she was born at Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem in Jerusalem, was raised in the United States, attending Jewish day schools and speaking Hebrew at home, thanks to her Israeli father.

A ballet dancer and theater fan from an early age, when she was 10, she turned down a modeling opportunity to pursue acting. With her mother as her manager, Portman took her paternal grandmother’s maiden name as her stage name and began garnering small roles, including while enrolled at Harvard University, where she earned a degree in psychology. In 2011, she won an Oscar for best actress in the psychological thriller Black Swan.

As an adult, Portman began exploring her Israeli background pub-

Natalie Portman

AVI OHAYON/ISRAEL GOVERMENT PRESS OFFICE (TOP LEFT); SHUTTERSTOCK (BOTTOM)

licly. She made her directorial debut with an adaptation of Amos Oz’s semi-autobiographical book A Tale of Love and Darkness, which she filmed in Israel and released in 2015. She gave her children, son Aleph and daughter Amalia, Israeli names.

Portman has supported the Hadassah Medical Organization in fundraising video campaigns over the years and has spoken out against antisemitism. She has also been vocally critical of some Israeli policies as well

as some of the nation’s leaders.

“I treasure my Israeli friends and family, Israeli food, books, art, cinema and dance,” Portman said in 2018 when she refused to accept the Genesis Prize at an in-person ceremony with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “Israel was created exactly 70 years ago as a haven for refugees from the Holocaust. But the mistreatment of those suffering from today’s atrocities is simply not in line with my Jewish values.”

SHULY

Singer

gender woman sends the wrong message to the nation’s youth.

NATAN

WHO SHE IS: First transgender winner of the Eurovision Song Contest, with the song “Diva” in 1998.

BACKGROUND: Age 54, Dana— whose legal name is Sharon Cohen—knew she identified as female from a young age and began performing as a drag queen before having gender-affirming surgery in her early 20s. An early dance album made her a hit in Israeli clubs, but she was initially banned from television and radio in reaction to claims that a trans-

LITTLE-KNOWN FACT: She wanted to become a singer since the age of 8, when she watched Israeli pop star Ofra Haza perform “ Chai ” at Eurovision in 1983.

RECENT ACCOMPLISHMENT: Filmed Viva la Diva ( Dana Kama in Hebrew), a reality show produced by Yes Studios and Sting TV about her life.

QUOTE: “Live and let live—that’s what I want from people. I want to educate people to love others and accept them for who they are, not to judge.”

WHO SHE IS: First singer to perform Naomi Shemer’s “Jerusalem of Gold,” two weeks before the outbreak of the Six-Day War in 1967, turning the song into a kind of national anthem of that time.

BACKGROUND: Age 76; when Shemer was looking for someone to sing her latest song, her daughter heard Natan on a local folk radio show and knew she had the right voice.

LITTLE-KNOWN FACT: Natan’s parents were both Holocaust survivors who met in London and immigrated to Israel after the war when Natan was still a toddler. They spoke English and German at home, and Natan had a hard time with Hebrew as a child.

RECENT ACCOMPLISHMENT: Natan still performs with her partner, Abie Levi, a former paratrooper, singing songs with meaningful messages while he tells stories of Israel’s history.

QUOTE: “My mother told me to sit down,” Natan said, recalling the phone call from her mother while she was in the middle of her army service, passing on the message from Naomi Shemer. “It’s a good thing I sat down on a chair because I would have fallen over. Naomi Shemer meant exposure.”

DANA INTERNATIONAL Eurovision winner

When yael arad , israel ’ s first Olympic medalist,

BRACHA “BEATIE” DEUTSCH

Marathon runner

WHO SHE IS: First female haredi Israeli marathon runner.

BACKGROUND: Age 33, grew up in Passaic, N.J., moved to Israel in 2008, married in 2009 and was the mother of four kids when she competed in her first marathon in 2016 in order to get back into shape. She ran the 2017 Tel Aviv marathon while seven months pregnant with her fifth child and then won the Tiberias marathon in 2019.

LITTLE-KNOWN FACT: Has a black belt in taekwondo.

RECENT ACCOMPLISHMENT: Running in the Tokyo Marathon with her next goal the 2024 Olympics in Paris.

QUOTE: “It’s a gift from God that I’m a good runner. I never give up on myself.”

In the end, it was Arad, then 24 and a dedicated judoka since age 8, who earned Israel its first Olympic victory—a silver in the half middleweight judo competition.

Arad, the daughter of two journalists, said her path to judo began in her Tel Aviv elementary school, where she was the kind of kid who loved playing outdoor games and “picking boys up and throwing them on their back.”

It wasn’t until she attended a judo training camp in Austria, at the age of 16, that she realized she had the talent to compete at the highest levels of the sport.

Arad’s Olympic win went against popular opinion that Jews, and Israelis, aren’t natural athletes. She contends that it was the lack of budgets and investments that had previously kept Israeli athletes from Olympic success, and that applied equally to women and men.

Arad, today 55, has worked in management positions since retiring from judo at age 29. She is currently president of the Olympic Committee of Israel, the first woman in that volunteer role.

“It’s a bonus that I’m a woman in this position, to show women that it’s possible to lead in Israeli sports,” she said. “But it’s no less important to show Israeli athletes that it’s possible for a former athlete to have a great career and transition to something else and be a volunteer in the Israeli ecosystem.”

LINOY ASHRAM

Olympic rhythmic gymnast

WHO SHE IS: First Israeli woman to win an Olympic gold medal, which she secured in rhythmic gymnastics at the Summer Olympics in Tokyo in 2021.

BACKGROUND: Age 23, grew up in Rishon Lezion, one of four kids, began training as a gymnast at age 7.

LITTLE-KNOWN FACT: Ashram’s trainers didn’t believe she could succeed on the mat, but she says her family and her self-confidence motivated her.

Yael Arad (CLOCKWISE FROM BOTTOM) AP IMAGES; COURTESY OF BEATIE DEUTSCH; AVSHALOM SASSONI/FLASH90

RECENT ACCOMPLISHMENT: After retiring from competition last year, she began working closely with the Shavot Academy of Self-Confidence, a nonprofit mentoring program for teenage girls.

QUOTE: “My trainers didn’t think I would amount to anything.”

FINANCE/BUSINESS

Karnit flug , the first female governor of the Bank of Israel, who served in that role from 2013 to 2018, has often said that she didn’t face discrimination as a woman during her 30 years at the country’s central bank.

Flug, 68, immigrated to Israel from Poland with her family at the

age of 3. She followed in the footsteps of her economist father, Noach Flug, an Auschwitz survivor who worked for three decades in civil service, including in the Finance Ministry and as a financial adviser to the Knesset’s Finance Committee.

Raised in Jerusalem, the young Flug took her father’s public service to new heights, earning a doctorate in economics from Columbia University and working for the International Monetary Fund before returning to Israel and making her professional home at the central bank.

“I learned the first elements of management in my parents’ home,” Flug said in a 2013 interview, citing her mother, a doctor, as well as her father. “I learned to focus on the goal, to be pragmatic….”

During her tenure, she was repeatedly ranked among the top 10 central bankers in the world by Global Finance magazine. Now the vice president of research and the William Davidson Senior Fellow for Economic Policy at the Israel Democracy Institute, Flug said that it was in her capacity as economic adviser to the government, part of her role as central bank governor, that she was able to consider policies that had different effects on men and women. She cited, for example, her push to raise the retirement age for women to ensure that they

WHO SHE IS: First female CEO of the Israeli national airline, one of only a few women to head an airline worldwide.

BACKGROUND: Age 48, grew up in a small farming community in the Negev, where she was her “father’s little shepherd.”

LITTLE-KNOWN FACT: Participates in Mamanet, a sports league for moms in which they play cachibol, also known as newcomb.

RECENT ACCOMPLISHMENT: In the second quarter of 2022, her first year on the job, EL AL posted its first quarter of profitability since 2015, after several years of losses exacerbated by the pandemic.

QUOTE: “We will not lend a hand to boycotts of any kind, certainly not against the prime minister of Israel,” the EL AL CEO said in early March when several pilots refused to fly Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, to Rome on official business, as part of the ongoing protests against the ruling coalition’s planned judicial reform. “It is a great honor for us to fly the prime minister on diplomatic missions. We have always done so and will continue to do so.”

had sufficient savings once they left the workforce. The move wasn’t popular at first because it meant women had to wait longer to become

DINA BEN TAL GANANCIA EL AL CEO

Karnit Flug COURTESY OF EL AL (TOP); HAIM ZACH/ISRAEL GOVERNMENT PRESS OFFICE

eligible for a national pension.

When she left the central bank in 2018, Flug said, she “felt a little like Moses,” who didn’t make it to the Promised Land, as several of her policies had not yet been legislated. It took another three years to pass a law that raised the retirement age for women—from 62 to 65 for those born in 1970 or later.

DANIT PELEG Fashion Designer

WHO SHE IS: First designer in the world to create 3D-printed ready-to-wear clothing and entrepreneur.

BACKGROUND: Age 35, born in Beersheva and grew up in Reut, a town between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Now the mother of two young children, Peleg says her innovation came from her final project when she was a student at Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art.

LITTLE-KNOWN FACT: Her 2015 TED Talk

SCIENCE

When ada yonath won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009, she was the first Israeli woman to attain a Nobel and only the fourth woman in history to win the prestigious award in chemistry.

But the 83-year-old crystallographer, conducting research in the materials branch of science that deals with discerning the arrangement and bonding of atoms in crystalline solids, sees those claims of “firsts” as irrelevant. Science is gender independent, said Yonath, best known for her groundbreaking work in understanding how cells build proteins.

has been translated into 40 languages.

RECENT ACCOMPLISHMENT: Collaborating with the European Union Innovation Center in Croatia to engineer a printer for creating large-scale textiles; working with Japanese corporation Mitsui & Co. and the Moon Creative Lab in Palo Alto to refine the texture of 3D-printed textiles.

QUOTE: “Over the years, I’ve become more empowered to see that I can make a change and push the boundaries of a completely new industry and make an impact, so that’s empowered me to be strong.”

She was born in Jerusalem to observant parents who emigrated to Israel from Poland in 1933. They struggled to make ends meet, running a small grocery store and living in a cramped apartment with her aunt’s family. Books, said Yonath, were her escape.

The young Yonath was always interested in science and conducted experiments on the family’s balcony. One time, she fractured her arm while trying to calculate the height of the balcony; another time, she caused a fire while attempting to see if water moves faster than kerosene.

She was inspired by Marie Curie, the radium researcher and two-time Nobel Prize winner, after reading the French woman’s biography. Particu-

ORNA BERRY Chief scientist

WHO SHE IS: First female chief scientist of Israel, a role she held from 1997 to 2000. A computer scientist and hightech entrepreneur, Berry is considered one of the most important women in Israel’s tech industry.

BACKGROUND: Age 73, born in Jerusalem, raised in Tel Aviv, earned her Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Southern California.

LITTLE-KNOWN FACT: She is dyslexic and says that if she had gone into social sciences, she probably would have failed because of the amount of reading required.

RECENT ACCOMPLISHMENT: Joined the management team as director of technology of Google Cloud’s office of CTO (chief technology officer).

QUOTE: “The world knows that women’s equality is a growth engine for economies in the 21st century. Integrating women in the job market influences the growth of the economy.”

TECH, TRAILBLAZERS AND TATTOOS

“I admired her immediate understanding of the potential of this physical property and her extremely fast response to very fresh scientific findings,” Yonath said.

accepted by the international scientific community, but Yonath ultimately gained credibility with her work. She shares the Nobel with two men, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas A. Steitz.

larly impressive, she said, was Curie’s invention during World War I of a car with a built-in X-ray machine that could be driven to the battlefield and used by surgeons to treat wounded troops.

After post-doctoral work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon, Yonath returned to the Weizmann Institute, where she had earned her Ph.D. There, she established Israel’s first protein crystallography laboratory in order to better understand the structure and function of ribosomes—the site in a cell that synthesizes protein.  Her methodology wasn’t at first

ZIONISM

“Winning the Nobel is great” in itself, said Yonath, “not only as the first Israeli female to win it.”

Is there another Israeli woman who is alive today who made history in some field over the past 75 years that you want to tell us about? We know there are many more female “firsts” out there! Send your suggestions with a few lines about what this woman accomplished to letters@ hadassah.org

SAVE THE DATE

OCT 25-26 2023

Meet prominent Zionist innovators. Be inspired by trailblazing Zionist women. Reaffirm your commitment to Zionism.

From social media, Israeli music and TV, the tattoo taboo and food culture to the unique experiences of Zionists balancing multiple identities, this virtual event spotlights Zionism in all its complexities.

Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, Inc.

©2023 Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, Inc. Hadassah and the H logo are registered trademarks of Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, Inc.

Ada Yonath

The ‘First’ Women of HMO

By Barbara Sofer

Resilience in the face of crises and awareness of their own strengths and weaknesses helped these pioneering women at the Hadassah Medical Organization become super achievers. They never saw barriers as dead ends. Even though Israel is a high-tech and medical powerhouse, it’s still a traditional society with a strong emphasis on women putting family first. Those who have made it, including the women featured here, will tell you what a boon a supportive parent and/or spouse is—not just for career coaching or emotional support, but as actual backup.

DR. POLINA STEPENSKY Head of HMO’s Department of Bone Marrow Transplantation and Immunotherapy

WHO SHE IS: First physician in the world to cure a fatal bone disease called osteopetrosis, a rare disorder in which a child’s bones are literally petrified.

BACKGROUND: Age 55, emigrated in 1991 from her native Vinnytsia, Ukraine, where she was studying medicine. In Israel, she was advised that “only geniuses can be doctors” so she switched to nursing before turning back to medicine and graduating cum laude from the Hadassah-Hebrew University School of Medicine.

LITTLE-KNOWN FACT: Pioneered ongoing training of Ukrainian medical staff in cancer treatments at HMO as an expression of support for the embattled country of her birth.

Dr . shaden salameh - youssef was making her morning rounds in December 2020 as head of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Hadassah Hospital Mount Scopus when she checked on a 58-year-old woman who had been recently admitted with stomach pains and dizziness. Dr. Salameh-Youssef read the blood tests and looked at the patient. “Something in her color was wrong,” she said. “Then I heard that she’d cooked mushroom soup, and I knew we had a ticking bomb.”

The patient was suffering from mushroom poisoning and was about to go into shock and organ failure.

“I’d never seen a case like this, but I’d learned about it in my studies. I knew that there would be a sudden deterioration that could cost her life,”

said Dr. Salameh-Youssef. “There’s something that goes beyond the number of tests that has to do with experience and intuition in medicine.”

Both knowledge and experience were hard-won for Dr. SalamehYoussef, the first Arab woman in Israel to head a hospital emergency department. The 40-something doc tor grew up in the village of Tur’an near Nazareth in the Galilee. At age 10, she decided to pursue a career in medicine after her grandfather had a heart attack and she was the one who needed to find help.

There were no local medical ser vices near the village, and she had difficulty describing his condition by phone to the paramedics and convincing them that they needed to come immediately.

Although Hebrew was her second

RECENT ACCOMPLISHMENT: Developed the first CAR-T immunotherapy treatment outside of the United States and China to treat and cure multiple myeloma, a blood cancer.

Barbara Sofer, an award-winning journalist and author, is Israel director of public relations for Hadassah.

Dr. Shaden Salameh-Youssef

Former head of Hadassah’s nursing programs

WHO SHE IS: First to academize the field of nursing in Israel; under her leadership, the Hadassah school of nursing became the first academic nursing school, with Bachelor of Nursing degrees conferred by Hadassah and the Hebrew University.

BACKGROUND: Age 103, born on December 5, 1919, in Brno, Czechoslovakia, and received a rare entry certificate, granted in 1939 by the British authorities, to study at Hadassah’s school of nursing in Jerusalem.

language and English her third, she passed the entrance exams for the Hadassah-Hebrew University School of Medicine. She completed a residency in internal and emergency medicine and also obtained a master’s degree in health administration.

“All along the way, people told me I was dreaming, that I’d never make it,” she said. “What did Henrietta Szold say? Dream big! That’s my life theme.”

Since being appointed head of the Mount Scopus emergency room in 2019, she has supervised the expansion and refurbishment of the busy department. This includes the establishment of northern Jerusalem’s first shock-trauma center, which treats patients affected by terrorism, motor accidents and falls.

LITTLE-KNOWN FACT: Her late husband, musician Eli Freud, was a relative of Sigmund Freud, the psychoanalyst.

RECENT ACCOMPLISHMENT: Still active in the alumni society of Hadassah’s nursing school.

QUOTE: Steiner-Freud was teaching students at Hadassah’s school of nursing, then on Mount Scopus, on April 13, 1948, when she heard the Arab attack on the medical convoy bringing medical and military supplies and personnel to the Mount Scopus hospital not far away. “I kept teaching because I knew war was coming and we’d need every nurse.”

A mother of three who is married to Hadassah urologist Dr. Fadi Youssef, Dr. Salameh-Youssef recently took part in the Executive Leadership Program at Harvard Business School.

As for the woman suffering from mushroom poisoning: She was in intensive care for five weeks, resuscitated three times, then transferred to Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem, where she was put on a heart-lung machine. After round-the-clock treatment, she woke up from her coma, but it was weeks before she could walk and function independently.

“It’s a miracle survival,” said Dr. Salameh-Youssef. “Sometimes what looks like a plain belly ache turns out to be a life-or-death emergency. Telling the difference is what we’re there for.”

DR. DINA BEN-YEHUDA

Dean of the Hadassah-Hebrew University Faculty of Medicine; head of HMO’s Department of Hematology

WHO SHE IS: In 2017, became the first woman to head Hadassah’s faculty of medicine; clinical hematologist and physician-researcher.

BACKGROUND: Age 69, born in Haifa, decided to become a doctor at age 3 after her older brother died of cancer.

LITTLE-KNOWN FACT: First female soldier to be awarded an Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff citation, presented to her in 1974 for initiating home visits to families whose children were missing in action or killed.

RECENT ACCOMPLISHMENT:

Headed the national committee in 2022 that decided which new medications will be paid for by the public health system. Named to the Israeli magazine Globes ’ 2023 list of 50 influential women in the State of Israel.

QUOTE: Speaking of the medical school’s newest advanced track in computational medicine, combining “big data” with medicine to determine patient protocols, she quipped, “I’m already registering my five preschool grandchildren. That’s the future.”

JUDITH STEINER-FREUD

Israel’s Ethnic Democracy

How ‘democratic’ got left out of the Declaration of Independence

By Daniel Gordis

In almost all the videos of the United Nations’ November 29, 1947, vote on Resolution 181 (the “Partition Plan”), the passage of the resolution immediately cuts to Jews across the world celebrating, wiping tears from their eyes and, in Palestine, dancing in the streets. After 2,000 years, the Jews would once again have a state.

Those celebrants all understood that Resolution 181 called for the creation of two states, one Jewish and one Arab. What they probably did not realize, though, was that the United Nations specifically stipulated that “the Provisional Council of Government of each State shall… hold elections to the Constituent Assembly which shall be conducted on democratic lines.” The resolution then added a very significant second demand: “The Constituent Assembly of each State shall draft a democratic constitution for its State….”

The United Nations, in other words, made two clear demands:

Both countries had to be democracies and had to hold elections “not later than two months after the withdrawal of the armed forces of the mandatory power.” That, the United Nations resolution explicitly stated, was to then lead to the ratification of a constitution in each country.

That the new Jewish state would be a democracy was obvious to everyone. The Zionist movement had been democratic from its earliest beginnings. By the Second Zionist Congress in Basel in 1898, women were voting and running for office, long before they could in any European country. The political institutions of the Yishuv had been democratic from their creation; the pre-state Jewish community in Palestine was, by the 1930s, a fully democratic state in waiting.

Jews in the Western Diaspora therefore certainly expected that Israel would be a democracy; they would have considered anything else a failed state from the outset. And now the United Nations had made

democracy an explicit requirement.

Yet Resolution 181 went further, stipulating that in the democracies that were to emerge, “no discrimination of any kind shall be made between the inhabitants on the ground of race, religion, language or sex.” The resolution also required protection of religious holy sites as well as access to them.

On the surface, the emerging Jewish state seemed anxious to demonstrate to the world that it fully intended to comply with those international demands. Paragraph 13 of the Declaration of Independence, formally known as the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, proclaims:

The State of Israel will…ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants

Nascent State David Ben-Gurion reads the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel at what was then the Tel Aviv Museum on May 14, 1948.

irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.

Given the yishuv’s apparent interest in illustrating its openness to these demands of the United Nations, it seems surprising that the Declaration does not contain the words “democratic” or “democracy.”

David Ben-Gurion was deeply committed to Israel’s being a democracy; about that, there is no doubt. Given that, here is what seems strange: Early drafts of the Declaration did include the word, but BenGurion’s closer collaborators deleted it, and he chose not to reinsert it. Why?

Mordechai Beham, the young lawyer assigned the task of drafting the Declaration, began by studying and copying sections of the American Declaration of Independence. His first draft was richly peppered with Thomas Jefferson’s language. Is it possible that, since the American Declaration does not mention democracy, Beham assumed that Israel’s also had no need for the word?

Perhaps. But the world was watching, and Resolution 181 was clear. Given that the United Nations resolution included the word “democratic” several times, later editors of the Declaration’s draft apparently felt that leaving the word out would be unwise. When Beham’s draft was passed on to Zvi Berenson—then the legal adviser to the Histadrut (still

Israel’s largest labor union) and eventually a justice of the Supreme Court—Berenson added “democratic.” His proposed text defined the emerging Jewish state as “a free, independent and democratic Jewish state.”

But between Berenson’s addition and Ben-Gurion’s final wordsmithing just before May 14, 1948, the draft went through several additional

What was Ben-Gurion’s reasoning? At the time, the “old man” (he was called that long before he was old) offered no explanation. But shortly thereafter, in September, he penned an entry in his diary that indicates that the deletion was no oversight. Essentially explaining the Declaration’s promise that Israel would be “a society as envisioned by the prophets,” he wrote:

As for western democracy, I’m for Jewish democracy. “Western” doesn’t suffice. Being a Jew is not simply a biological fact, but…also a matter of morals, ethics…. The value of life and human freedom are, for us, more deeply embedded thanks to the biblical prophets than western democracy…. I would like our future to be founded on prophetic ethics (man created in the image of God, love your neighbor as yourself—these foster an egalitarian life as in the kibbutz), on cutting-edge science and technology.

To be sure, Ben-Gurion, whose love for the Bible is now the stuff of legend, probably did prefer Amos and Isaiah as inspirations to Thomas Jefferson. He may well have believed that some of the values of “Jewish democracy” were embedded in the Bible.

edits. As the clock ticked down to the Friday afternoon declaration of statehood, Moshe Shertok deleted the word “democracy.” Had Ben-Gurion asked him to do so? Did he believe he knew what Ben-Gurion would have wanted?

Whatever the case, the Declaration was finalized with no mention of “democracy.”

Yet there were likely other considerations as well. “Democracy” was a Western notion, and in 1948, Ben Gurion was cultivating relationships with both the United States and the USSR, which had voted in favor of Resolution 181 and the creation of a Jewish state. Was Ben-Gurion trying not to antagonize the Soviets? (Recall that Shertok, who deleted the word,

It’s Official Then-Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett (right) along with Israeli diplomats David Hacohen (left) and Abba Eban raise the Israeli flag at the United Nations in New York after the country’s admittance to the world body.

would become Israel’s first foreign minister, at which time he changed his last name to Sharett.) Perhaps.

Still another possibility stemmed from the reality of the Middle East. The leaders of the about-to-be-declared state understood that Israel, once it came to be, was hardly going to have congenial neighbors. The country would be born in the crucible of war, and it would likely have to make complex, even painful choices. What if Israel were to decide to place Israeli Arabs under military rather than civilian authority (which was indeed the case from 1948 to 1966)? Would the world say it was not living up to its promise to be a democracy? Or might the term “democratic” open Israel up to the challenge that it could therefore not define itself as a Jewish state?

Might people ask whether a “real” democracy could accord everyone equal rights and protection under the law but still give preferential status to one religion or one ethnicity by making the Jewish holidays national holidays, making the language of the Jews the official language of the state, or by granting Jews—but not others— the automatic right to immigrate?

Here is what is often completely overlooked when we assess Israel’s democracy: While there was much to

learn from America, Israel was never meant to be the sort of democracy that Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison had in mind for the United States. It was founded for an entirely different purpose; that purpose had to do with the future of the Jewish people, not with a political experiment in self-governance that had implications for the entire world, as was the case with the United States.

Though neither israeli nor American Jewish leaders were ever inclined to stress this point, Israel was never intended to be a liberal democracy. Israel has always been something different, commonly called an “ethnic democracy.”

In an ethnic democracy, all citizens have equal claims on civil and political rights, but the majority group (Jews in Israel’s case) have some sort of favored cultural, political and, at times, legal status. The motivation for this type of democracy in Israel stems from the very purpose of the state, which was, as British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour had put it in the Balfour Declaration in 1917, to be “a national home for the Jewish people.” If America was devoted (in theory) to a universal vision of

“huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” whoever they might be and wherever they might have come from, Israel was a more particularistic project, about healing, protecting and cultivating the flourishing of the Jewish people.

Yes, Israel would be a democratic country, but not in the classic liberal democratic sense. And that is a critical distinction. One cannot understand some of what Israel does—such as passing a law declaring that it is the nation-state of the Jewish people when 20 percent of its population is not Jewish—without appreciating this fundamental difference between Israel and Western democracies.

I believe that Israel has made a critical mistake over the years in not being more explicit about its unique kind of democracy. Of course, it was convenient that Americans and Jews throughout the world saw Israel almost as a Hebrew-speaking, falafel-eating America. If America was (then) seen as a model for all the world to emulate, why not suggest—or at least implicitly encourage people to believe—that Israel was a miniature America? For those seeking to foster an affinity between the United States and Israel, or between American Jews and the Jewish state, encouraging that view

Dancing in the Streets Jews everywhere rejoiced after the new state was proclaimed—from schoolchildren in Camden, N.J. (left) to kids in Tel Aviv.

of Israel might well have seemed strategically wise.

But it was a short-sighted strategy. Over the decades, and especially with the rise of a generation that does not recall the world in which Israel was created, that obfuscation has created expectations of Israel— throughout the West but especially among Jews in the Diaspora—that it could never meet.

The most obvious way to be explicit about the kind of democracy Israel would become would have been in a constitution—which Israel never wrote. Though Israel’s Declaration of Independence promised a constitution by October 1, that was wholly unrealistic. How could Israel debate and pass such a document in a mere four months?

Ben-Gurion never intended to push for a constitution. The just-born country had been cobbled together by communists, socialists and freemarket capitalists; the religious, tra-

ditional and rabidly secular; those who hoped for a shared state with Jews and Arabs and those who thought that would be suicide. Trying to write a constitution would have highlighted the chasms between the visions of Israel among those who founded the state and could have toppled the entire fragile house of cards.

Yet America’s experience is ominously instructive here. America’s founders decided not to address the issue of slavery in 1789, when the Constitution was ratified. Seventytwo years later, the long-simmering disagreements exploded into a catastrophic civil war.

Israel today is just as deeply divided—over the role of religion in the Jewish state, the status of non-Orthodox Judaism, the relative power of the Supreme Court (seen as “left”) and the Knesset (now mostly “right”), who should be eligible to come to Israel under the Law of Return and more.

Might a constitution have settled some of these questions, thus avoiding the judicial crisis that has gripped Israel for the past several months? It is impossible to know. What is clear, though, is that Israel’s leaders would do well to look at America and to be reminded of how lethal the divisions at the heart of a young democracy can be.

Israelis need to find their own Abraham Lincoln—a leader with gravitas who can help a nation to heal, who can lead a national conversation designed to make difficult decisions and resolve long-simmering disagreements, and who can help shape a renewed nation that, we hope, will survive for centuries to come.

Daniel Gordis is Koret Distinguished Fellow at Shalem College in Jerusalem. This essay is an adapted excerpt from his new book, Impossible Takes Longer: 75 Years After Its Creation, Has Israel Fulfilled Its Founders’ Dreams? Copyright © 2023 by Daniel Gordis. Published by Ecco, with permission of Harper Collins.

Foundational Turnaround Israelis protesting proposed judicial reforms across the country this year displayed parts of the Declaration of Independence. Here, demonstrators used text from Paragraph 13 of the Declaration to make their point.

An XX/XY Breakthrough

Addressing the gender health gap at a cellular level

By Wendy Elliman

Covid-19, like other infectious diseases, affects more men than women. Women, however, are at higher risk than men for autoimmune disorders, including multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis. Autism is more common among men, while Alzheimer’s and other neurological degenerative diseases are more common in women. The list of differences between men and women around health and disease is a long one.

“Gender should be central to personalizing health decisions and administering health care,” said Dr. Ithai Waldhorn. His doctoral research at the Hadassah Medical Organization’s Sidney and Judy Swartz Stem Cell Research Center at the Goldyne Savad Institute of Gene Therapy has led to the creation of the first human female and male cells with the same genetic code—i.e., cells that are identical except for their sex chromosomes. The breakthrough provides researchers with a novel platform to address harmful bias in health care and medical research.

“Differences between the sexes are real and important,” said Dr.

Waldhorn, whose doctorate was supervised by center director and founder Dr. Benjamin Reubinoff. “The efficacy and side effects of many medications vary between the sexes, as do the incidence and course of many illnesses.”

This reality, however, had for decades been neglected by medical researchers, health authorities and pharmaceutical companies, with women excluded from early-phase clinical trials of novel drugs until the 1990s. Men were the overwhelming majority of study subjects in drug and other clinical trials, with the results then applied to women. Thus, far more is known today about how diseases affect men—from incidence, course and symptoms to diagnosis and the efficacy and toxicity of new medications. One result is that the side effects of some medications pose greater risks for women than men, which has led to them being taken off pharmacy shelves in recent years.

Since the early 2000s, women have been included in medical research in greater numbers, but, Dr. Waldhorn noted, some studies show that women are still underrepresented in clinical

trials. A 2021 report in the journal JAMA Network Open, for example, found that women are marginalized as subjects in medical literature, particularly in studies related to oncology, cardiology, neurology, immunology and hematology.

“It wasn’t until 2014 that the National Institutes of Health ruled that every preclinical study they fund must include equal numbers of men and women,” said Dr. Waldhorn.

His interest in researching gender differences in medicine began with the question of whether distinctions are the result of hormones or sex chromosomes. Which of the two, for example, is responsible for differences in heart attack symptoms that in women often manifest as indigestion, shortness of breath or back pain, and in men as sharp chest pain followed by collapse.

“It’s a difficult area to study because, in nature, there are no genetically identical men and women—so there was no research model,” said

HADASSAH RANKED WORLD LEADER IN ONCOLOGY

The Hadassah Medical Organization in Jerusalem has been recognized as a global leader in oncology by Newsweek magazine, making it the sole medical institution in Israel to receive this distinction. The prestigious honor was given as part of Newsweek’ s “World’s Best Hospitals” 2023 list, which ranks hospitals based on a range of criteria, including medical expertise, patient satisfaction and quality of care in an annual assessment of medical centers in 28 countries in partnership with the global data firm Statista. In addition, for the fifth year in a row, the magazine also named Hadassah one of the world’s top hospitals in both cardiology and in smart technology.

Dr. Waldhorn. “Without a laboratory research model, huge numbers of men and women must be tested and compared, both in the lab and clinically.”

Thinking about how to generate male and female cells that are identical in every way except their sex chromosomes, he theorized that they may be found in patients with Klinefelter syndrome, a genetic abnormality that affects one to two in every 1,000 men. In Klinefelter syndrome, men are born with an extra X chromosome.

“Instead of the normal XY in their cells that creates a male, they are XXY,” Dr. Waldhorn explained. “But sometimes, one of the X or Y chromosomes is spontaneously ejected from a cell, leaving subpopulations of normal, genetically identical male (XY) and female (XX) cells in the same individual.”

In 2012, Dr. Waldhorn located such cells in a New Jersey biorepository, the Coriell Institute for Medical Research. He then took his idea to the Goldyne Savad Institute and Dr. Reubinoff, who, he said, had “long been interested in gender medicine.” Dr. Reubinoff, a pioneer in stem cell research, was the second in the world to derive human embryonic stem cell lines and the first to differentiate them into various body tissues.

“As a physician, my work with stem cells has always been about developing them for clinical application,” said Dr. Reubinoff.

He was indeed interested in Dr. Waldhorn’s research, so a team was built. Join-

ing Drs. Reubinoff and Waldhorn were four Goldyne Savad Institute scientists—Tikva Turetsky and Drs. Debora Steiner, Yaniv Gil and Michal Gropp—as well as Hebrew University’s Dr. Hadar Benyamini, a specialist in the field of bioinformatics, which uses software tools to collect and analyze complex biological data.

The team reprogrammed the rare Klinefelter donor cells into what are called pluripotent cells, which can mature into any human cell type— from hearts and kidneys to bones and brains.

“It took a decade,” said Dr. Reubinoff, “but we succeeded in creating, for the first time in history, an unlimited source of male and female cells carrying the same genetic code.”

This makes the study of sex-related differences in multiple body tissues possible, he explained, “and will hopefully lead to new discoveries about gender differences.”

“Because the genetic code of the cells is identical, the gender differences will show up clearly, neither masked nor distorted by genetic variability,” said Dr. Waldhorn. Any variations in results can then be attributed solely to the differences in their sex chromosomes and not due to any other genetic dissimilarities. The results of the Hadassah research were published in November 2022 in the leading journal Stem Cell Reports. The discovery has been hailed as a breakthrough in gender medicine and an important contribution to the development of better health care for both genders.

HADASSAH ON CALL

Decode today’s developments in health and medicine, from new treatments to tips on staying healthy, with the Hadassah On Call podcast. In each episode, journalist Maayan Hoffman, a third-generation Hadassah member, interviews one of the Hadassah Medical Organization’s top doctors, nurses or medical innovators. In May, Hoffman will speak to Dr. Michal Lotem, head of the Hadassah Cancer Research Center, about using mRNA research to fight cancer. Catch up on recent episodes, including a discussion about eating disorders with Dr. Esti GaliliWeisstub, director of HMO’s Herman Dana Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and subscribe and share your comments at hadassah.org/hadassah oncall or wherever you listen to podcasts.

“Groups from Europe and North America have approached us for our cells since we published, and we are, of course, sharing them,” said Dr. Reubinoff. “Teams worldwide will use them to study the impact of sex chromosomes and hormones on disease processes and differences in the ways that men and women react to pharmaceuticals. Beyond that, we’ll be looking for answers as to why certain diseases are more common in one gender than in another, and why the same disorders manifest differently in the two.”

Dr. Waldhorn, like Dr. Reubinoff, is both a scientist and physician.

“We bring medicine and science together. We use science to advance medicine,” he said. “In this age of personalized medicine, it makes no sense to address only the male half of the population.”

Wendy Elliman is a British-born science writer who has lived in Israel for more than four decades.

Dr. Benjamin Reubinoff

BY LAURA ROSENBERG

Zionist Women You Should Know

Support for Israel is a central part of their lives

By Alexandra Lapkin Schwank

As part of Hadassah’s yearlong celebration of Israel’s 75 years of statehood—including a virtual symposium, “Inspire Zionism: Tech, Trailblazers and Tattoos,” set for October 25-26—the organization is highlighting the Zionist achievements of 18 Jewish women (hadassah.org/18women) .

The honorees live all over the United States and in Israel and represent the diversity of the Jewish community. Among them are immigrants and refugees, a Wall Street managing director and an entrepreneur, a rabbi and a Hollywood actress, writers, educators, activists and social media influencers.

“We were looking to highlight women in the Zionist world who weren’t highlighted before,” said Michelle Rojas-Tal, who last year became Hadassah’s first-ever Zionist scholar-in-residence. “We also wanted to make the list as diverse as possible, professionally and geographically. And we searched for women who were active Zionists, but who did not necessarily work in the world of Jewish and Zionist organizations.”

These dynamic women, four of whom are profiled here, underscore that Zionism remains not only relevant, but central to the lives of many Jews.

AMY LIN ALBERTSON

On social media, Amy Lin Albertson’s mes sage to young Jewish people rings loud and clear: Do not be afraid to show the world who you are. “I’m always pushing being unapologet ically Jewish,” said the 31-year-old.

Albertson, a Jewish Chinese American, is an

online activist and public speaker as well as a consultant for At The Well project, a Jewish women’s group, and an associate at the Tel Aviv Institute, a pro-Israel digital content and social media collaborative.

Growing up in Sacramento, Calif., with an Ashkenazi Jewish father and a Chinese American mother, she celebrated Christian and Jewish holidays, albeit in a secular way. Today, she proudly identifies as “100 percent Chinese and 100 percent Jewish.”

Albertson’s journey to Jewish advocacy and education began with a protest on her college campus. While a sophomore at Portland State University, the Hillel chapter screened the documentary Israel Inside . When the screening was protested, she recalled that she “had no idea what was going on. Why did people hate Israel? I didn’t know Israel was controversial. This sparked my curiosity, and I took it upon myself to learn as much as possible about Israel and its culture.”

Albertson co-founded a student group called Cultural and Historical Association for Israel (CHAI), which remains active today.

After an inspiring Birthright Israel experi

Chinese, American and Israeli identities on social media.

When Covid hit, Albertson moved back to California, where she reassessed her approach to online activism. She decided to change her focus from reacting to messages of antisemitism and anti-Zionism to instead creating content that celebrates Jewish culture and religion, including on her Instagram page, where she has more than 15,000 followers.

“I don’t want young people to feel that Judaism and Jewishness are a burden,” she said. “I want them to see it as something beautiful.”

LEAH SOIBEL

Leah Soibel’s work in countering the rise of antisemitism is often invisible yet far-reaching.

As founder and CEO of the media organization Fuente Latina, the 45-year-old connects Spanish-speaking journalists with resources to cover the news in Israel and the wider Jewish world. For most Hispanics, Soibel explained, Israel is Terra Santa , the Holy Land, but they don’t have much understanding of the country beyond Christian religious history.

“I view what we’re doing in the media as public diplomacy and national security,” she said. “We know there’s a direct link between negative images in the media and increasing antisemitic attacks. If we can help decrease the amount of negative imagery that’s seen on news, we can break down stereotypes and improve relations.”

Soibel, herself a Latina Jewish woman who divides her time between Miami and Jerusalem, is uniquely suited for this type of work. She was born and raised in St. Louis, Mo.; her parents had fled political persecution in Buenos Aires. Growing up, she attended Jewish

in Middle America,” Soibel recalled. “I was a confusing character for anyone whom I met.” Early on, she said, she learned to represent the Jewish community to non-Jewish audiences.

After earning her B.A. from Dickinson College, she went on to study Arabic at the American University in Cairo, followed by graduate degrees from George Washington University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

In 2012, as antisemitism started rising around the world, Soibel founded the nonprofit Fuente Latina.

“The diversity that is Israel doesn’t come across very often in full scale in the media,” she said. “We’re just empowering journalists to do their jobs.”

TABBY REFAEL

An award-winning journalist for Los Angeles’s Jewish Journal , Tabby Refael has a lot to write about.

Refael, 40, spent the first years of her life in Iran. At an all-girls school in Tehran, where her teachers were radical Shiites who wore black hijabs, she lined up with her classmates every morning to chant “Death to Israel! Death to America!” Her parents, staunch Zionists who listened to Voice of Israel radio broadcasts in Persian, were powerless to intervene.

The family ultimately fled the country in 1988, during the Iran-Iraq War, and found refuge in California.

“I grew up a penniless, unassimilated refugee in 1990s Beverly Hills,” Refael recalled. Her parents rented a small apartment half a block from the city limits, just so she and her sister could attend Beverly Hills public schools.

In one of her Jewish Journal columns, Refael wrote that her Beverly Hills elementary school, Horace Mann, was “the most important and redeeming space I would ever know after my trauma in Iran.”

She went on to study communi cations at the University of California San Diego, where “I saw anti-Zionist and antisemitic activism, the likes of which I haven’t seen since I was in Iran,” she said. In response, she became a pro-Israel activist on campus.

“I realized that as an Iranian-born Jew who had lived in the Middle East, my voice was very important,” she said.

After graduation, she worked as a director of academic affairs for the Consulate General of Israel in Los Angeles before earning a graduate degree in public diplomacy from the University of Southern California and becoming a journalist. She also co-founded 30 Years After, a nonprofit that helps Iranian American Jews get involved in American civic, political and Jewish life.

Refael continues to write about the Persian Jewish community, women, religion, Iran and the Middle East. But, she said, “the topic that’s truly close to my heart is expressing the pains and dreams of refugees and immigrants—and specifically the Mizrahi and Sephardi ones.”

ZOYA RAYNES

Philanthropic work is how Zoya Raynes prefers to express her gratitude.

“In America, we get to be who we want to be, in the realm that we want to be in,” she said. “I feel so privileged to live the life that I do.”

Raynes’s family emigrated from Kiev in 1979, when she was 3 years old, and settled in Baltimore. Jewish philanthropists helped make it possible for her and other Soviet Jews to come to the United States, and Raynes grew up seeing her parents give back to the community that welcomed them.

“I see philanthropy and Zionism on a continuum of my responsibilities as a Jewish person,” she said.

Today, the 47-year-old lives a full and busy life in New York City. She is a managing director at Bank of America and sits on the board of five Jewish organizations—Jewish Funders Network, Congregation Shearith Israel, UJA Federation of New York’s Investment

HADASSAH’S 18 HONOREES

Amy Lin Albertson | Pro-Israel digital content producer

Mayim Bialik | Actress, Jeopardy! host and neuroscientist

Shiva Beck | Attorney and Jewish Agency for Israel board member

Laura Ben-David | Pro-Israel speaker, writer and photographer

Daniella Greenbaum Davis | Journalist and television producer

Rayna Rose Exelbierd | Holocaust educator and speaker

Rabbi Rachel Marder | Congregation

Beth El, South Orange, N.J.

Megan Nathan | COO of Israel on Campus Coalition

Zoya Raynes | Finance executive and Jewish nonprofit board member

Tabby Refael | Journalist and Persian Jewish activist

Danielle Rugoff | Social entrepreneur in community building

Ana Sazonov | Executive director of the Columbia Jewish Federation, S.C.

Emily Schrader | Digital journalist and social media agency CEO

Naava Shafner | Orthodox feminist activist

Leah Soibel | Founder of Fuente Latina media nonprofit | STEM entrepreneur and philanthropist ChayaLeah | Hillel director in Long Beach, Calif.

Melissa Weiss | Executive editor of Jewish

University graduate. “There are so many people we lose who are not connected. And the community needs them, financially and otherwise.”

To fix the leak, she believes in talking to children early on about tzedakah to the Jewish world and in helping people in their 20s, 30s and 40s get involved in Jewish causes they feel passionate about.

Raynes views her own “cause” as helping Jewish nonprofits grow and thrive. She facilitates behind-the-scenes work connecting people who could benefit from collaborating and improving best practices.

“I don’t need to start an organization, I don’t need my name on an organization,” Raynes said. “I like to support different organizations to further their trajectory, connecting us and making us a stronger community.”

Snapshots of Hadassah’s pioneering

REMEMBERING CARMELA KALMANSON

Carmela Kalmanson, a former national president of Hadassah who passed away on March 8 in West Palm Beach, Fla., just one day before she would have turned 96, is being remembered fondly by her Hadassah family and friends.

Marlene Post, chair of Hadassah Magazine who also became a national president, still vividly recalls one of the central tenets of leadership imparted by her mentor.

“Every member, whether they are active in their chapter now, will be active or used to be

in Israel

active, are essential,” Post credited Kalmanson as saying. “Value every member and give every person the opportunity to become a leader.”

Carmela Efros Kalmanson, known as Carmie, led Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, from 1988 to 1991.

Kalmanson dedicated much of her life to Zionist activism and Jewish education, and she led Hadassah at a critical juncture in Israel’s history. Born into a Zionist family in Cleveland, Ohio—her mother was a sabra and a member of the first class of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem—she was connected to Israel from early childhood. During her presidency, the Hadassah Medical Organization increased fund -

Alexandra Lapkin Schwank is a freelance writer in the Boston area.

ing for AIDS treatment in Israel and expanded its ophthalmologic outreach to Africa.

As the Cold War ended, HMO, Hadassah college in Jerusalem and Youth Aliyah all mobilized to help in the absorption, education, retraining and employment of the masses of Jews streaming into Israel from the Soviet Union. In January 1991, Kalmanson led an emergency Hadassah mission to Israel during the Gulf War, at a time when Israel was under missile attack from Iraq and Hadassah’s hospitals were on high alert. Just four months later, after one of the mass airlifts of Ethiopian Jews to Israel, Hadassah allocated $3 million to Youth Aliyah to adapt its programs to meet the needs of the new immigrants.

In her decades-long service to Hadassah, Kalmanson also served as chair of HMO,  Hadassah Magazine and the Zionist Affairs and Public Affairs departments.

“Carmie was an inspirational president—a people person who was both a gracious listener and gracious leader,” Post said of her colleague from the Nassau Region in Long Island, N.Y.

Beyond her leadership in Hadassah, Kalmanson served the Jewish community widely, including as a delegate to six World Zionist Congresses, as an elected lifetime Honorary Fellow of the World Zionist Organization and on the national board of the State of Israel Bonds.

Kalmanson is survived by her daughters, Dr. Nina Kalmanson Purvin and Helene Kalmanson Epstein; her sons-in-law, Dr. Arthur Purvin and Brad Epstein; three grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. Her husband, Dr. Martin Kalmanson, predeceased her in 2017.

ZIONISM…DID YOU KNOW?

Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organi‑ zation of America, turned 36—double chai!—about two months before Israel’s founding in 1948. Here’s a glance at the organization during that era:

The Rothschild-Hadassah University Hospital, the first teaching hospital and medical center in Mandate Palestine, opened on Mount Scopus in 1939.

O n April 13, 1948, a convoy bringing medical and military supplies and personnel to the Mount Scopus hospital was ambushed by Arab forces. Seventy-eight people, including doctors, nurses, students, patients, faculty members and the Haganah fighters escorting the convoy, plus one British soldier, were killed. Hadassah lost access to the Mount Scopus campus for 19 years.

Hadassah doc tors and nurses treated many of the 15,000 wounded in the War of Independence (1947 to 1949).

Rose Halprin was serving the second of her two terms as Hadassah national president when, on May 12, 1948, she authorized a statement to preempt any assumption that Americans Jews might owe dual allegiance to America and the soon-to-be-declared Jewish state. The statement affirmed that American Jewish citizens owed their allegiance only to America. Similar statements were disseminated by a number of Jewish organizations around the founding of Israel.

In 1948, membership in Hadassah rose to 242,962—an almost 40 percent increase from 1945.

Young Judaea, then under the auspices

of Hadassah, had over 30,000 members in 1948.

H enrietta Szold once said of her leadership of Youth Aliyah that “I, too, am a totalitarian. I want to rescue the totality of German youth.” By 1948, Youth Aliyah had rescued 12,332 children from Europe and another 4,000 from Asia and Africa.

E arlier, in 1942, Hadassah was the fifth-largest contributor in the country to the effort to market war bonds, selling over $200 million in bonds.

In the advocacy arena, in 1946, thenHadassah National President Judith Epstein testified before the Anglo-American Board of Inquiry to urge the British to open Palestine to Jewish refugees.

In 1947, Hadassah leaders and members lobbied the American government to support the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine.

NOW YOU KNOW… MORE ABOUT HADASSAH AROUND 1948

Carmela Kalmanson

Hadassah President Rose Halprin (top) speaking before Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion (far left) and others in Jerusalem in 1949; children at Ramat Hadassah youth village in 1950

KIBBUTZ KETURA’S FIRST 50 YEARS

Kibbutz Ketura was founded in November 1973, just after the Yom Kippur War, by a group of Young Judaea alumni following their Year Course experience. Four of those founders still live there. Today, Ketura has approximately 180 members—over 30 of them Young Judaea alumnae—and is home to sophisticated sustainable-technology businesses as well as the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies.

Since its inception, the collective has welcomed temporary residents, many of them while participating in Young Judaea’s summer in Israel or Year Course program. As many of these recollections submitted by past Ketura volunteers suggest, the Negev-area kibbutz has experienced significant growth since its earliest days. To read more stories, go online to hadassahmagazine.org

Working in the fields, picking and packing peppers and melons, ingrained in me a deep connection to the Land of Israel. Especially living on Kibbutz Ketura when it was young—then only 6 years old—I wanted to do my part to help the kibbutz prosper. I took great pride in our work, that we could actually grow crops in the desert. Experiencing Israel and Ketura with Young Judaea Year Course was transformative. It taught me about Zionist ideals and pursuing your dreams, and most importantly, fostered lifelong friendships I still have today.

Greta Rothschild Chicago, Ill.

Iwas a volunteer at the kibbutz in September 1974. Ketura’s location is such that its closest international border is with Jordan. That year, Israel Defense Forces’ reservists were living on the kibbutz because Israel had yet to sign its 1994 peace treaty with Jordan. My assignment was to clean the reservists’ “crappers.” In addition, after receiving a short course on how to use an Uzi submachine gun, I was asked to pull night guard duty, part of which involved driving to Ketura’s fields, which were even closer to

I studied at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies in the fall of 1998. My favorite class was the marine biology of coral reefs. We got to snorkel in the Gulf of Aqaba and learn about the wildlife we encountered.  We also dove at night using underwater flashlights to see the nocturnal life along the reef. It was the best college credit I ever earned.

Through the Arava Institute, I had an internship discussing environmental issues on the Live with Clive Show , a radio show that was broadcast out of Eilat. I researched different topics, from fish farms to solar power, and interviewed guests.

Along with other students and kibbutzniks, I toured the country. We celebrated Christmas in Bethlehem, Ramadan on the kibbutz with several Jordanians and Palestinians, and Hanukkah. We camped at the Dead Sea and traveled to Ein Gedi. We made a brief visit to Jordan, where we stayed for an extra day with some students. As we walked to our hostel, we were intercepted in the street by Jordanian kids who encouraged us to come to their house and join their family for tea. We could barely understand each other’s language, yet their hospitality was overwhelming.

Jason Katcoff

Pikesville, Md.

In 1978, I heard that Ketura was looking for people connected to Young Judaea who were committed to Zionism and building the Land of Israel. Without too much thinking, I quickly

volunteered and spent about nine months at the kibbutz.

In those early days, there was no swimming pool, and the bomb shelter housed the synagogue. There was an active social and cultural life. Members were committed to building a religiously pluralistic, traditional, respectful Jewish life.

Although I had family and friends in Israel, I do not remember leaving the kibbutz much to visit. I had volunteered to work, and that is what I did, mainly in the kitchen. We showed up early, around 5:00 a.m., to get everything ready for breakfast. I got really good at making a lot of pancakes at once, flipping them at just the right moment. I had already learned to cook in large quantities at Young Judaea conventions, but I perfected my skills in the Ketura kitchen.

the Jordanian border, to turn on the sprinklers. David Pomeranz  Brookline, Mass.

Sandie Leonard and daughter Anat

Greta Rothschild (at right in both photos) with Shoshi Herz, a Hebrew teacher at Ketura, in 1979 and 2022

I returned a few years later while on a honeymoon trip and have visited several times since. May Ketura go from strength to strength and help make peace between Israel and her neighbors.

Tobi Cooper Houston, Texas

My husband, Seth, and I joined a garin —a group of young adults mostly connected to Young Judaea in the Boston and Philadelphia areas—in 1975 to become members of Ketura.

We worked various jobs at the kibbutz: planting, weeding and harvesting crops in the fields; kitchen duty; laundry; taking care of the babies in the nursery; raising turkeys for market and milking cows.

Our daughter, Anat, was born on the first day of summer in 1977. Missing family back in the United States, we decided to return home, but we cherish the wonderful memories we

have of our time in Israel—especially Ketura. Sandie Leonard  Nashua,

N.H.

Before entering college, each of my three sons took a gap year to attend the Year Course program in Israel. My middle son, Yakir, was part of the group assigned to spend three months at Ketura in the spring of 1985, where he worked in the date orchards. Fast-forward several decades, and my

grandson Elie, on Year Course during 20182019, spent several months at Ketura, where he worked in the laundry room with the housekeeping brigade for the mini-hotel operated by Ketura as well as the date packing area. And my granddaughter Jessica was in Israel during the Covid pandemic and the Gaza war of May 2021, and was able to visit Ketura.

Eleanor Siegal San Antonio, Texas

AreYOUPayingTOOMUCH

*Annualpremiumsshownareforpreferredplusnonsmokerclass(preferrednonsmokerclassfor$100,000faceamounts) Equivalentpremiumsareavailableforotherunderwritingclasses,ages,faceamountsandpaymentmodes.

Trendsetter® Super10,Trendsetter® Super15,Trendsetter® Super20,andTrendsetter® Super30aretermlifeinsurancepoliciesissuedbyTransamericaLifeInsuranceCompany,CedarRapids,IA52499. Premiumsincreaseannuallystartinginyear11forTrendsetterSuper10,inyear16forTrendsetterSuper15,inyear21forTrendsetterSuper20,andinyear31forTrendsetterSuper30. Policyforms andnumbersmayvary,andthesepoliciesmaynotbeavailableinalljurisdictions.Insuranceeligibilityandpremiumsaresubjecttounderwriting.Inmoststates,intheeventofsuicideduringthefirsttwopolicy years,deathbenefitsarelimitedonlytothereturnofpremiumspaid.Suicideisnodefensetopaymentoflifeinsurancebenefits,norissuicidewhileinsaneadefensetopaymentofaccidentaldeathbenefits,ifany, underthispolicywherethepolicyisissuedtoaMissouricitizen,unlesstheinsurercanshowthattheinsuredintendedsuicidewhens/heappliedforthepolicy,regardlessofanylanguagetothecontraryinthepolicy. TransamericaLifeInsuranceCompanyisratedA(Excellent)byA.M.BestforfinancialstrengthasofSeptember12,2019.Aisthethirdhighestof16ratings awardedbyA.M.Best,aleadingindependentratingservicethatevaluatesinsurancecompanies’financialstrengthandabilitytomeetobligationstopolicyholders.

Yakir Siegal harvesting dates from a palm tree at Ketura in 1985

Trends in Kibbutz Hospitality

One of Israel’s quintessential tourism experiences

By Esther Hecht

Kibbutz is “still the sexiest word in the world, even though most kibbutzim no longer have their original collective format,” David Duvdevani of Kibbutz Gesher Haziv, said in an attempt to explain the enduring attraction of Israel’s unique, century-long social experiment that slowly gave rise to an equally unique travel industry.

“Tourists know that kibbutz accommodations are good value for money, informal, clean, in a garden setting, in nature and near places to tour,” added Duvdevani, whose 37 years in hotel management and marketing have given him a broad view of the country’s offerings.

Nearly all of Israel’s roughly 270 kibbutzim provide accommodations, ranging from a yurt at Hanita in the Western Galilee to the four-star hotel at Ginosar on the shores of the Kinneret. Four kibbutzim, including Kibbutz Ein Gedi at the Dead Sea, have true spas of thermal mineral baths and others, Duvdevani said,

use the term more loosely to refer to amenities such as whirlpools, saunas and hot stone massages. All have swimming pools and the overwhelming majority feature kosher dining halls.

Not only are most kibbutzim located in the countryside and surrounded by lush gardens, many border on, or incorporate, nature reserves. Kibbutz Dan in the North, at the foot of Mount Hermon and at the start of the Israel National Trail, is adjacent to the Tel Dan Nature Reserve, with its burbling brooks, wading pool, hiking trails and archaeological remains dating back 5,000 years. Kibbutz Kalia in the South, four miles from the Dead Sea, is near the Ein Feshkha Nature Reserve and its series of pools for swimming and surprisingly rich flora and fauna.

And Kibbutz Lotan, 30 miles north of Eilat, is home to the Lotan Nature and Bird Reserve, a verdant sanctuary in a desert area that houses

birds year-round and where, in the spring and in fall, hundreds of millions of migrating hoopoes, redthroated pipits, yellow wagtails and a host of other avian guests stop to rest.

How did kibbutzim, founded as agricultural collectives, get into the hospitality business? The reasons are diverse. At Gesher Haziv, established in 1949 just north of Nahariya, it was a matter of simple necessity, according to Rose Schwartz, who managed the guest house for seven years.

“Many of the founding members were from North America, and when their families came to visit in the 1960s, there were no extra rooms,” she said. The kibbutzniks had lived in tents at first, then in simple wooden cabins and finally in permanent homes. The cabins were converted into hospitality rooms until a guest house was built. Today, the kibbutz has accommodations less than a mile from the pristine Achziv beach on the Mediterranean.

Before kibbutzim developed hospitality for tourists, some operated so-called relaxation homes or convalescent homes, where members of the Histadrut, the General Organization of Workers in Israel—many of whose jobs involved manual labor— would spend their annual vacations.

Kibbutz Ginosar’s sprawling campus along the Kinneret

Their requirements were basic. “People would sit on deck chairs, read a book, swim in the pool and eat five meals a day,” Duvdevani said.

The convalescent home experience with its five meals a day was an integral part of life in the early years of the state and was immortalized in humorous songs and in skits such as the now classic “Ochel, Kadima, Ochel” (Food, Go for it, Food), with lines like “You’re not really that hungry, but the factory’s paying for it.”

One such home was built in 1953 at Kibbutz HaGoshrim, north of the Kinneret. The main building incorporated the arches and stone pillars of a winter palace erected in the 1930s for Mahmoud Fa’ur, the Bedouin ruler of the area, who later sold the land to Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael-Jewish National Fund. The highlight for

guests was sitting on deck chairs and dabbling their feet in the cool water of the Jordan River’s tributaries, which flow through the kibbutz.

When the vacation practices of Histadrut members evolved, the convalescent homes re-emerged as amenity-rich hotels. Today, HaGoshrim Hotel and Nature, for example, has retained the arches and stone pillars of the Bedouin palace, but now also features a luxurious spa with an authentic Turkish hammam as well as a waterfall, restored windmill and shaded riverside trail.

A third development in kibbutz hospitality grew out of the departure of many young adults from kibbutzim at the end of the 1980s, Duvdevani said. This created a surplus of rooms, which were renovated and branded first as “guest rooms”

and “bed and breakfasts” and then as “country lodgings.” Initially intended for Israelis, the rooms were spartan, but were gradually upgraded. Now, there are two levels of kibbutz accommodation: hotels, which are typically four star, and country lodgings, mostly three and a few four star. (Some kibbutzim offer both types.) Unlike hotels, Duvdevani said, country lodgings are usually one-story structures, two stories at most.

The dining hall—the tribal hearth where kibbutz members would meet and socialize—was one of the casualties of the privatization of many kibbutzim following the financial crisis of the 1980s. Today, a small number of dining halls still function, including those on Kibbutz Afikim near the Kinneret and Kibbutz Sdot Yam, just south of Caesarea.

(TOP);

Nostalgia Trip to the 1970s Lunchtime at the dining hall at Kibbutz Sdot Yam; women at the convalescent home run by Kibbutz Hafetz Haim

Lodgings at the eco-friendly Kibbutz Lotan near Eilat

IF YOU GO

Kibbutzim present a cornucopia of attractions. For a wide listing of options, consult the Kibbutz Visit website (kibbutzvisit.com)

HORSEBACK RIDING: Yair Sharet, the founder of Sirin Riders, is a third generation kibbutznik who lives on Kibbutz Magal, halfway between Tel Aviv and Haifa. He loves to present Israel to visitors who share his passion for horseback riding. His year-round riding vacations set out from a point arranged with the client and include a tour of his birthplace, Kibbutz Degania Bet, just south of the Kinneret.

OUTDOOR ADVENTURE: Kayaking and rafting on the Jordan River, on routes suitable for families and/ or for the more adventurous, are among the attractions at Kibbutz Kfar Blum in the Upper Galilee. Its Top Rope adventure park features a 39-foot rock climbing wall, a rope bridge and a zip line over the river.

BEACH ACCESS: Twenty miles south of Haifa, the warm waters of the Mediterranean beckon visitors to the Nahsholim Holiday Village Kibbutz Hotel. Walk out a few yards from the premium rooms—

some with their own pools—and you’re on a private beach. An added attraction is HaMizgagaMuseum of Archaeology and Glass.

BOTANICAL GARDENS: Numbered markers guide visitors on the walking trail at Kibbutz Ein Gedi, whose gardens are cared for by members. Various cacti, a large African sycamore fig tree that has developed a furry trunk to prevent dehydration, date palms, huge African baobab trees and the towering kapok tree are among the sights.

HISTORY: Kibbutz Lohamei Hageta’ot in the Western Galilee is the site of the first Holocaust museum in the world: The Ghetto Fighters’ House-Itzhak Katzenelson Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Heritage Museum. The museum and kibbutz, whose name translates to “ghetto fighters,” were founded by Holocaust survivors in 1949. The Yad Layeled Children’s Memorial Museum, opened in 1995, introduces children to the Holocaust.

ARCHAEOLOGY: A detailed zodiac mosaic covers the floor of the sixth century C.E. Beit Alpha Synagogue, today part of a national park adjacent to Kibbutz Beit Alpha just northwest of Beit She’an.

One section depicts the biblical story of the binding of Isaac. The central panel features the 12 signs of the zodiac surrounding Helios, the Greco-Roman sun god, labeled with their Hebrew names. Visitors can also tour a Japanese garden in neighboring Kibbutz Heftziba.

ART: In 1925, Ein Harod in the Jezreel Valley—the first large-scale kibbutz—became the center of the countrywide kibbutz movement. In 1937, member Haim Atar inaugurated one of the first art institutions in Israel. In 1948, the museum’s collection—today known as the Mishkan Museum of Art—was moved to an imposing building designed in a modernist style by architect and kibbutz member Samuel Bickels.

MUSIC: The Upper Valley Voice of Music Festival, offering chamber music performed by the best artists from Israel and overseas, is held in July at Kfar Blum, along

with the Voice of Music Festival for Children.

WINERIES: The estate winery of Kibbutz Tzuba, in the Judean Hills outside Jerusalem, provides tastings of its kosher vintages. On Fridays, a rich brunch spread likewise includes a tasting, followed by a tour of the kibbutz. The Kiftzuba amusement park and Galita Chocolate Farm will appeal to children.

ORTHODOX: Kibbutz Lavi in the Lower Galilee, founded in 1949 by observant young immigrants from the United Kingdom, operates a four-star hotel with kitchens certified as mehadrin kosher—one of the highest standards of kashrut certification in Israel. The pool requires a modest dress code and offers separate hours for men and women as well as family time. Check-in, checkout and driving of cars are not allowed on Shabbat and Jewish holidays.

HaMizgaga-Museum of Archaeology and Glass

The botanical garden at Kibbutz Ein Gedi

Another highlight of a kibbutz stay is learning about the collective way of life and how it has developed over time. Today, dozens of guides run tours of various kinds. In Kibbutz Afikim, a collective that is not privatized, kibbutznik Amotz Brotman takes guests on tours in which he sings Israeli songs, strums on his guitar and recounts with humor a century of kibbutz history. He leads visitors to a series of communal buildings, like the dining hall and former children’s quarters, as well as to Afimilk, the kibbutz-owned agrotech firm whose computerized systems oversee the management and milking of millions of cows worldwide.

And in the constantly evolving world of kibbutz hospitality, some tours reflect the times. Kibbutz Lotan provides an hourlong eco tour that showcases its organic food production, renewable energy and recycling. Similarly, the tour in nearby Kibbutz Ketura, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year (see story, page 36), focuses on sustainability projects.

One guide recalled an incident in the 1960s, when Kibbutz Ayelet HaShachar, 20 miles south of Kiryat Shmona, was a pioneer of kibbutz hospitality. One day, another guide with whom he was friendly got up early, asked the person in charge of the communal refrigerator for all

his frozen chickens and promised to repay him. Then he hung the chickens on the trees in the apple orchard. After showing his tour the cowshed and the chicken coop, he said, “The pioneers in Israel can grow everything on trees—even chickens.”

Then he brought them to the or-

chard, and they all burst out laughing. The chickens in the apple orchards may be gone, but kibbutz hospitality continues to attract and to offer something for everyone.

Esther Hecht is a journalist and travel writer based in Jerusalem.

The grounds of Kibbutz HaGoshrim A vineyard tour at Kibbutz Tzuba

Defining the Israeli Kitchen

Where multiculturalism comes served on a plate

By Adeena Sussman

Yom huledet sameach , israel ! Happy birthday to my beloved, beautiful—and currently very troubled—homeland. In spite of the divisiveness in the national state of affairs as we approach Israel’s 75th birthday, Independence Day remains an occasion to celebrate.

And I’m not one to lose my appetite during stressful times, much less joyous ones, so at this important milestone, my thoughts have turned to food. Specifically, with this question in mind: What single dish most aptly represents the cuisine of my adopted country?

Israeli food culture remains a bright spot on the world stage. Israel’s melting-pot cuisine continues its well-deserved ambassadorship, showcasing a nation whose multiculturalism is at the core of its identity—an identity that continues to evolve with every passing year.

To help determine the country’s flagship dish, I reached out to Israeli chef friends and colleagues to weigh in with their choices—and some of them answered with a mouthful of carbohydrates.

“I’d say anything in a pita,” said Naama Shefi, the founder of New York-based Jewish Food Society as well as Asif Culinary Institute of Israel, located in Tel Aviv. “Pita is not just a pocket bread but a way of life. We put all sorts of things inside, from chicken livers, falafel and shawarma to fried eggplant, steak and even cauliflower. It makes for a perfect portable lunch.”

Shefi favors stuffing her pitas (the plural in Hebrew is “pitot”) with schnitzel—pounded chicken cutlets that have been breaded and pan-fried. That’s a pairing that Israeli-born, New York-based spice entrepreneur Lior Lev Sercarz of

La Boîte spice shop endorses for its unique Israeliness.

“Pita symbolizes the beautiful crossroads of all the cultures intersecting in Israel, encased in a round of bread,” said Sercarz, author of The Middle Eastern Pantry, a cookbook scheduled for release in June, and co-founder and chief culinary officer of the new Galilee Culinary Institute located at Kibbutz Gonen. “The Ashkenazi roots of the schnitzel, the Middle Eastern roots of the pita— when put together, it’s almost the Israeli equivalent of a burger.”

James Beard award-winning chef

Lior Lev Sercarz

Crispy Sesame

Schnitzel

Serves 4

1 c up dried breadcrumbs

1/2 c up panko breadcrumbs

1/4 c up sesame seeds

1/2 t easpoon paprika

1/2 t easpoon garlic powder

1/2 t easpoon freshly ground black pepper, plus more f or seasoning

Creamy Green

Shakshuka

Serves 4-6

1/3 c up extra virgin olive oil

1 large onion, finely diced

3 large garlic cloves, thinly slic ed

1 pound (about 16 c ups) roughly chopped st emmed mixed green leaves (such as kale, spinach, chard), from

1 1/2 pounds unstemmed mixed greens

1/4 c up vegetable broth

1 c up packed mixed fresh herbs (parsle y, cilantro, basil), finely chopped

1 t easpoon chopped fresh thyme, za’atar or oregano

1 t easpoon fine sea salt, plus more for seasoning

1/4 t easpoon cayenne pepper, or more if you like it hot

2 large eggs, beaten

1/2 c up all-purpose flour

4 6- ounce boneless, sk inless chicken breast halves

1/2 c up vegetable oil, for fr ying, plus more as needed

1. In a shallow dish, combine the dried breadcrumbs, panko, sesame seeds, paprika, garlic powder, 1/4 teaspoon of the black pepper, 1/2 teaspoon of the salt and the cayenne. Place the beaten eggs in another shallow dish.

2. In a third shallow dish, combine the flour with the remaining 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon black pepper.

3. S eason the chicken generously with salt and black pepper. Place each piece between 2 pieces of plastic wrap and pound lightly with a mallet to achieve a thickness anywhere between 1/8 and 1/4 inch. If you prefer your schnitzels to be smaller, this is the time to halve them.

4. Line a sheet tray with parchment. Dredge the cutlets in the flour, then the egg, then the breadcrumb mixture, shaking off the excess after each step and pressing the crumbs in firmly on both sides. Arrange them on the sheet tray as you finish the breading process. If desired, wait 30 minutes before frying (this helps the crumbs adhere better).

5. In a heavy skillet, heat the vegetable oil over medium heat for 2 to 3 minutes; the oil should be hot but not smoking. Working in batches, lay 2 cutlets in the pan and fry until the underside is golden brown and crisp, 2 to 3 minutes. Flip and fry for 2 to 3 more minutes. Drain on paper towels, season with salt and pepper to taste, and serve hot.

1 tablespoon finely chopped jalapeños

1 t easpoon kosher salt

1/4 t easpoon freshly ground black pepper

1/8 t easpoon freshly grated nutmeg, plus more to taste

1/2 c up half-and-half (or 3/4 cup if you’re feeling the creamed-spinach vibe)

8 large eggs

2. In a 12-inch o ven-safe skillet, heat the olive oil over medium heat. Add the onions and cook, stirring, until lightly golden, 9 to 10 minutes. Add the garlic and cook, stirring 1 more minute. Raise the heat to medium-high,

then add the greens in batches, stirring as they wilt and release most of their liquid, 2 to 3 minutes per batch (you don’t want the greens to be completely dead, but they should have slumped and reduced in size significantly). Add the vegetable broth and cook until mostly absorbed. Stir in the mixed herbs, thyme, jalapeño, salt, pep per and nutmeg.

3. P reheat the broiler.

4. Reduc the heat on the stove to mediumlow, stir in the halfand-half, and simmer until the mixture unifies and

thickens slightly, 1 to 2 minutes. Use a spoon to hollow out eight small wells for the eggs and crack the eggs into the wells. Cook for 3 minutes, then transfer to the oven and cook until the whites

1. S et a rack in the top third of the oven.

PHOTOS BY DAN PEREZ. RECIPES FROM ‘SABABA: FRESH, SUNNY FLAVORS FROM MY ISRAELI KITCHEN’ BY ADEENA SUSSMAN

Michael Solomonov, co-owner of Zahav, a restaurant in Philadelphia, along with many other eateries there as well as in New York City, believes it’s the condiments—Yemenite schug (hot sauce), Iraqi amba (mango sauce), Moroccan harissa, among

others—that make the dish.

“They are the United Nations of flavors, and you can mix them however you like,” he told me.

In a land known for its farm-fresh, market-driven cuisine, vegetables also loom large.

“For me, the pinnacle of the Israeli plate is a chopped vegetable salad seasoned with fresh lemon juice and grassy, spicy olive oil made from local green suri olives,” said Merav Sarig, an Israeli food editor and partner in HaShizra, an initiative to promote women in the food and wine industries. “In Israel, we have a bounty of fresh vegetables year-round, and the warm climate typical of this region creates a constant craving for them. A green salad is a non-negotiable element of every meal in Israel, and not just dinner—breakfast, too. It’s a taste of childhood that endures through adulthood.”

In Israel, diners will often encounter a chopped vegetable salad served alongside shakshuka, a North African skillet delicacy of eggs with runny yolks suspended in a spicy tomato and bell pepper sauce. With shakshuka perhaps Israel’s most famous culinary export of late, you can even buy a kit to make it at most Trader Joe’s.

“The red version is great, but for me it’s green shakshuka,” said Avivit Priel, chef and owner of Ouzeria, a Mediterranean restaurant in Tel Aviv, referring to versions of shakshuka that typically use wilted greens and herbs as a bed for eggs. “It’s that fusion of traditional with the new, combining local ingredients in a dish that is both cooked but fresh.”

Merav Sarig

Hedai Offaim

But what if israel’s defining dish isn’t a dish at all? Hedai Offaim, a farmer, restaurateur and musician who lives in the Judean Hills near Jerusalem, has a different answer altogether.

“It’s less about what’s on the table than about how it is being eaten by the people at the meal,” said Offaim. “The unique thing about our food culture is that people gather in the kitchen to eat a variety of foods from a variety of cultures because they’re looking to each other to help retrieve a joint identity that was lost for 2,000 years.”

In Offaim’s kitchen, manifestations of that identity might include a Mizrahi-influenced lamb shank roasted with whole Medjool dates or a warm

Ashkenazi egg and potato salad.

“Today,” he said, “when there seem to be fractures and divisions among parts of society, the one place they all meet is around the table.”

As you celebrate Israel this spring, enjoy my recipes for green shakshuka—an inspired choice for any upcoming dairy Shavuot menu—and chicken schnitzel from my cookbook Sababa: Fresh, Sunny Flavors from My Israeli Kitchen.

And for my pita recipe, go online to hadassahmagazine.org.

Adeena Sussman is the author of Sababa: Fresh, Sunny Flavors from My Israeli Kitchen and the upcoming Shabbat: Recipes and Rituals from My Kitchen to Yours , set to be released on September 5. She lives in Tel Aviv.

Naama Shefi

Claiming the Director’s Chair

Female filmmakers in Israel are breaking the celluloid ceiling

By Shoshanna Solomon

In one moving scene in the critically acclaimed Cinema Sabaya, Nasrin, a middle-aged Israeli Arab lawyer, presents a brief film she created about her husband trimming his toenails. She then opens up about the difficulties in their relationship.

“He is constantly preoccupied with money and finances. He’s forgotten about romance,” she tells the seven Jewish and Israeli Arab women seated with her in a circle in their filmmaking workshop.

“Remind him,” advises 73-year-old grandmother Awatef.

“Why do I always have to make an effort?” Nasrin asks. “He should, too.” The discussion then meanders from marriage to the difficulties of

divorce in traditional Muslim and Jewish communities.

Hailed as a feature film about “conversation and compassion” by The New York Times, Cinema Sabaya is set largely in one small room in a community center in Hadera, in northern Israel, where the women share footage that they have taken as part of the exercises assigned by Rona, their teacher.

As the story unfolds, the women— among them are also a librarian, a recent university graduate and stayat-home mothers—gradually explore their cultural and religious differences as well as what unifies them as women, mothers, daughters and wives.

“Via their personal stories, we get

a wider picture of women in Israel and a picture, a facet, of Israeli society,” said Orit Fouks Rotem, who wrote and directed Cinema Sabaya.

In 2022, Fouks Rotem’s feature debut won five Ophir Awards, Israel’s equivalent to the Academy Awards, including best picture and best director. Cinema Sabaya, which will be available for streaming in the United States in June, was also Israel’s official submission to the 95th Academy Awards, held earlier this year.

It is one of several recent award-winning films that testify to the significant strides that women have made in the Israeli film industry. Where once men made up the lion’s share of positions behind the camera, Israeli women are now sitting in the director’s chair in increasing numbers, helming productions from documentaries to feature films with large budgets.

“In the past 20 years, there has been a flourishing of movies made by female Israeli directors,” said Yaara Ozery, a Ph.D. student and lecturer at The Steve Tisch School of Film and Television at Tel Aviv Univer

The filmmaking workshop in ‘Cinema Sabaya’

sity, whose research focuses on Israeli women in cinema in the 21st century. “They are attaining success also internationally, in well-known film festivals such as Sundance, Venice, Tribeca and Toronto.”

In addition to Cinema Sabaya, such films include Asia, directed by Ruthy Pribar, whose plot follows a struggling single mother, and Savoy, from Zohar Wagner, which tells the story of a woman who was taken hostage in a 1975 terrorist attack at a Tel Aviv hotel. They join a roster of groundbreaking women-helmed films from the past two decades, among them haredi director Rama Burshtein’s debut, Fill the Void, and the dark comedy Zero Motivation, directed by Talya Lavie.

While many movies made in Israel describe the military experience or have broader national themes, the narratives women bring to the screen are largely “more personal and biographical,” noted Eyal Boers, head of the film and television track at Ariel University’s Moskowitz School of Communication and former chairman of the Israel Film Council.

These films address the complex problems, desires and hopes particular to women, said Ozery. They focus on “women’s solidarity and women’s trauma.”

In an interview at a tel aviv

Rotem explained that she made a movie centered on women’s lives because she with that Indeed, in Cinema

Sabaya, all the male characters have only minor roles and are largely relegated to the background.

The Hadera-born director mined her personal experiences for inspiration. Her mother, Revital Fouks, who serves as the adviser to the Hadera mayor on women’s issues, had participated in a workshop that taught photography to Jewish and Arab women. When Fouks Rotem heard about the class, it planted the seed of an idea for a film.

Fouks Rotem researched her vision by teaching videography classes to women in the mixed Arab-Jewish city of Akko and at Givat Haviva’s Jewish-Arab Center for Peace, an education center in northern Israel that promotes reconciliation between the two populations.

“The women I met during these classes and the stories I heard inspired my movie,” she said.

But it took nearly eight years to make Cinema Sabaya. Fouks Rotem postponed filming after she became pregnant with her and her husband’s second child. Nine months after giving birth to her son (she also has a daughter), she shot the movie in a 12-day blitz.

“It was terrible,” she said. “I hired a full-time nanny who earned more than I did. It was very hard mentally to cope with the situation. I slept in the living room the whole time we shot the movie, because my son cried at night, so I didn’t sleep well.”

Smadar Zamir’s 2020 documentary, In the Director’s Chair Sits a Woman, delves into the very challenges faced by Fouks Rotem and her peers. Through a series of monologues, 26 women—including Lavie and Burshtein—reveal the sacrifices they have made to pursue a career in film.

Also featured is Dina Zvi-Riklis,

director and writer of Three Mothers and the shorts Look Out and The Ambassador’s Wife, among others, who opens up about the lack of female mentors in the industry.

“There was no surrounding support,” she says in the documentary. “You couldn’t call another female director and say: ‘Listen, give me a couple of tips.… How should I do this? Should I insist on that?’ There was no dialogue because there was no one with whom [to talk]. There were only men.”

Still other directors share in the documentary the difficulties they had in funding their projects; gaining access to what some of the women call the “men’s-only club” in which movie deals are “made at urinals”; the struggle to balance career and motherhood; and how men in the field find it hard to take directions from a woman.

“As we worked on the documentary, we realized that the role models reach beyond the cinema industry and talk about the experience of being a woman in a man’s world,” Zamir, the film’s director, said in an interview. “This documentary about female directors specifically became a metaphor for women being guests in the world of men.”

While gender inequities in the industry remain a challenge, directors and researchers do acknowledge significant gains.

According to a 2021 report from the Adva Center, a think tank that tracks social and economic development in Israel, women directed 21 percent of the feature films released in Israel between 2013 and 2018, the most recent years studied by the center. The number represents a substantial increase from the mere

Orit Fouks Rotem

7 percent of films made by women between 1948 and 2000.

The change is attributed in part to the allocation of state funds to more female-helmed projects. (Israeli filmmaking—documentaries in particular—is dependent on government subsidies.) In addition, lobbying by the Women in Film and Television Forum plus the New Cinema Law, which was enacted in 1999 and seeks to regulate public funding, ensures that the committees that select film projects reflect Israel’s diverse communities.

The committees today include Mizrahim, Israeli Arabs, haredi Jews and others previously not represented and are “more or less balanced” between men and women, according to Lior Elefant, the main author of the Adva report.

Nevertheless, the report noted that “In the world of mainstream cinema, the masculine narrative is still very much the norm and men’s stories are far more likely to be perceived as universal, whilst women’s stories are still perceived as a cinematic niche.”

Still, a woman in the director’s chair has become more common. And these filmmakers themselves belong to a wide swath of Israeli society and bring their particular perspectives to their projects, said Boers of Ariel University.

“How does a woman experience military service?” he said. “How does a woman experience Orthodox society that expects you to marry your sister’s husband in case your sister dies?”

The movies that Boers referenced are, respectively, Lavie’s dark comedy Zero Motivation, a bona fide hit internationally, and Burshtein’s Fill the Void. Other influential and distinctive women-made movies of the last 10 years include the late Ronit Elkabetz’s Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem and In Between by Maysaloun Hamoud, an Israeli Arab.

Burshtein is widely regarded as the first director to bring the haredi woman’s perspective to the big screen. Fill the Void, which won seven Ophir Awards in 2013, including for best director, tells the story of 18-year-old Shira Mendelman being pressured by her mother to marry her older brother-in-law after her sister dies in childbirth. Her second film, the 2016 romantic comedy The Wedding Plan, about 30-something Michal who books

a wedding hall even though she has no groom, was even more popular. Outspoken and witty, Michal, with her mop of unruly hair, doesn’t fit the mold of demure, young haredi bride. Nevertheless, she trusts that God will provide her with a match.

For her part, Lavie explores another distinct aspect of Israeli society—women in the Israel Defense Forces—in her 2014 film, Zero Motivation. Best friends Zohar and Daffi are stuck doing mind-numbing clerical work at a remote desert outpost for their mandatory IDF service, shredding paper and making coffee for male commanders who stare and make comments about their bodies.

While Israeli movies have traditionally celebrated male protagonists as heroic figures risking their lives for mission and country, said Ozery, Zero Motivation challenges perceptions of the army. The film, which won six Ophirs as well as prizes at international film festivals, satirizes the IDF as an institution that squanders the time of its female soldiers and objectifies them sexually.

“It was something we never saw before. The most dangerous weapon in these women’s hands was a stapler,” Ozery said, referring to a key scene where Zohar, Daffi and the rest of their unit use staplers to duel each other.

Two recent and very different films, Asia and Savoy, both winners of multiple Ophirs, similarly raise issues of belonging and acceptance, alienation and stereotypes. Asia, the 2020 debut from director

Daughter and mother bond in ‘Asia’

DANIELLA NOWITZ (TOP); IDF ARCHIVE (LEFT, ABOVE); MOSHE MISHALI (LEFT, BELOW)

A 1975 archival image with Kochava Levy (top); a scene from ‘Savoy’

Pribar, follows Asia, a single mother and Russian immigrant who struggles to raise her teenage daughter, Vika. The two barely interact: Asia is focused on her job as a nurse, while Vika, played by Shira Haas of Shtisel fame, would rather drink and smoke pot with her friends. This routine gets shaken up when Vika’s health deteriorates, forging a tight connection between the two.

“I wanted to tell a story of a mother and daughter who have no choice but to be with each other, who get closer when faced with a very complicated reality,” Pribar said in an interview. “There’s a lot of baggage, unresolved issues. Without the illness that upended their lives, I don’t think Asia and Vika would have reached that same level of intimacy.”

The docudrama Savoy, directed by Wagner and released last year, weaves together scripted recreations with archival footage. It tells the real-life story of Kochava Levy, a 31-yearold Yemenite woman who was taken hostage together with nine others during a terrorist attack at the Savoy Hotel in Tel Aviv in March 1975.

Levy, who passed away in 2019, spoke Arabic and became the unlikely mediator between the terrorists, who were demanding the release of Palestinian prisoners, and IDF negotiators. A wife and mother, Levy had been at the hotel with her lover, Avraham Azikri, who was also married. Much of the film script is based on diary entries that Levy later wrote about that night.

Ultimately, both Levy

and Azikri

For more coverage of the arts from Israel, including a review of Chanshi , a new sitcom about an Orthodox woman who decides on impulse to make aliyah, visit hadassahmagazine.org/arts.

survived the attack, as did an injured hostage whom Levy helped evacuate. She convinced the terrorists to release the hostage and carried him out of the building to the surrounding IDF troops. She then returned to captivity, as she had promised her captors.

Savoy also depicts the aftermath of the attack and how the scandal surrounding her affair with Azikri overshadowed Levy’s heroism. An article in Time magazine mistakenly reported that she was a prostitute.

“There was and is a double standard for women,” Wagner said in an interview. “Both were married, both had kids, but Azikri was considered a hero and she was considered a hooker.”

Levy never got over the stigma of the affair, according to Wagner.

“Israel was, and still is, a very conservative place,” she said. “Throughout the movie, you feel Kochava’s concern about the shame she will bring to her husband.”

Savoy’s larger message, according to Wagner, is about gender inequality and stereotyping, but she also wanted to highlight the humanity of both captor and captives.

Indeed, exploring that humanity, as seen through the eyes of a wife or worried mother, bored soldier, religious Jew or Arab, is a part of what filmmakers like Wagner, Burshtein, Fouks Rotem and their peers bring to today’s film scene in Israel.

“When I was a film studies student, I missed seeing movies by female directors. I missed having women as mentors,” recalled Zamir, the documentary filmmaker.

“I wanted to enable current female students to get what I didn’t have,” she said of making In the Director’s Chair Sits a Woman. “To see different models of female creators and their body of work so that they understand that they are not starting from zero, that there are women who forged a path and did good work.”

Shoshanna Solomon is a freelance journalist and speaker. She has been reporting on the Israeli economy and tech scene for 30 years for outlets including Bloomberg, Reuters, The Times of Israel and Fortune

Daffi and Zohar on their way to an army outpost in ‘Zero Motivation’ FROM ‘ZERO MOTIVATION,’ DIRECTED BY TALYA LAVIE. CINEMATOGRAPHER: YARON SCHARF

Israel & Technion Partners In Innovation

Since the day it opened its doors in 1924, the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology has been the cornerstone of Israel’s remarkable advancements in science, technology, and education.

Together, the Technion and Israel have forged a partnership to advance the nation’s global prominence and thriving high-tech economy.

As we approach the Technion Centennial next year, we honor Israel’s 75th anniversary today, and celebrate the bright future we are creating together through groundbreaking collaboration.

#TechnionImpact

ats.org | 212.407.6300 | info@ats.org

Israel Through a Range of Prisms

New books unpack the Jewish state on its milestone birthday

|

By Alan D. Abbey

In israel, a city stroll or a mountain trek connects you to the past. Roads, towns and cities are named for figures from Jewish history. A glance at the ground can reveal pottery shards or other artifacts, even on paths trodden by thousands. Israel may be the only country where archaeology is a regular journalistic beat.

Israel is also where proponents of conflicting narratives cite historical facts to justify their positions on who has the right to be the dominant culture, what are the original names of towns and cities and who is appropriating whose heritage. This abundance of historical information figures into many of the controversies roiling Israel today.

Yet some historical tales still beg to be told, while others require reassessment and shibboleths need to be challenged. These are some of the goals of four books recently published to mark Israel’s 75th anniversary. Through a range of prisms—biographical, comedic, journalistic and persuasive—they seize

the opportunity to step back from the onslaught of news out of Israel to develop a clear picture of the country, analyzing how well it is living up to its aspirations and addressing its challenges.

Even as they note some of Israel’s flaws, missed opportunities and mistakes, each book illuminates the successes of the Zionist enterprise. Anti-Zionist detractors make few appearances. Military engagements and terror threats from Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas are conspicuous in their across-the-board absence, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict takes a back seat. Nevertheless, for those who wish to commemorate Israel, they provide an honest and mostly celebratory view of the country.

Israel and Zionism receive their highest praise from Rick Richman, a resident scholar at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles with a slew of books and essays about Israel and Jews on his resume. And None Shall Make Them Afraid: Eight Stories of the Modern State of Israel (Encounter Books)—the title a quote from

the prophet Micah—profiles Zionist and Israeli thinkers, activists and politicians in rough chronological order: Theodor Herzl, Louis Brandeis, Chaim Weizmann, Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Golda Meir, Ben Hecht, Abba Eban and Ron Dermer. All eight, except for Dermer (Israel’s former ambassador to the United States and newly appointed minister of strategic affairs), have been the subject of numerous biographies both complimentary and critical.

Richman writes that he selected these individuals to “illustrate the central ideological saga of the twentieth century—the struggle between free societies and their totalitarian enemies—and the relevance of that struggle to the emerging story of the twenty-first.” He wants to bring “seminal Jewish and American stories back into common knowledge, so they can do some work in the world.”

Richman exhumes Herzl’s earliest writings to illustrate that the infamous Dreyfus trial was not the starting point of his Zionism. In his coverage of his other subjects’ public careers and speeches, Richman similarly attempts to dismantle widely accepted opinions and stereotypes. He may make you rethink some of these familiar figures. For example, he made me more generous in my opinions of Meir and Eban, who are largely criticized or dismissed in Israel.

Citing their speeches and writings, Richman showed me that both were tougher than I had thought. Their statements and actions would put them nearer to today’s national-

A statue of Napoleon in Jaffa’s old city

ist camp in Israel than to the Labor Party—their actual political home. In 1974, Meir convened a conference of Socialist international heads of state and party leaders, and directly confronted her long-time associates about their lack of support for Israel during the Yom Kippur War. Their absence reinforced something she had learned in the pre-World War II Evian Conference: “Jews neither can nor should ever depend on anyone else for permission to stay alive,” she wrote in her autobiography.

Eban was snubbed first by his Labor Party colleagues and then by Yitzhak Rabin, the incoming prime minister in the wake of Meir’s resignation after the Yom Kippur War, despite his career of soaring speeches and diplomacy. In 1948, Eban said at the United Nations: “The sovereignty regained by an ancient people, after its long march through the dark night of exile” will not be “surrendered at pistol point.... If the Arab States want peace with Israel, they can have it. If they want war, they can have that, too. But whether they want peace or war, they can have it only with the State of Israel.”

American israeli comedians

Joel Chasnoff and Benji

Lovitt provide timely slices of Israeli life in Israel 201: Your NextLevel Guide to the Magic, Mystery, and Chaos! of Life in the Holy Land (Gefen Publishing House). Divided into eight themed chapters, their assemblage of articles and interviews can be read in any order depending on which sub-

jects appeal to you (the Israeli psyche, the Hebrew language, government, the Israel Defense Forces, etc.) Well researched and laugh-out-loud funny at times, their reports of conversations with Israelis provided me with smiles of recognition:

“Joel called the customer service department of his new Wi-Fi provider. Here’s an actual snippet from that conversation:

JOEL: I’m having trouble connecting the Wi-Fi to my smart TV.

REP: Why would you buy a smart TV if you’re not smart enough to use it?”

They praise Israeli directness by comparing how Americans and Israelis would respond after a business meeting presentation: “Americans would make indirect and passive aggressive comments such as, ‘Let me think about it.’ ‘There’s a lot of really great stuff in here.’ ‘It was (dramatic pause to choose words carefully)…interesting.’ To each of these responses, here’s what an Israeli would have said: ‘I don’t like it.’ ”

Chasnoff and Lovitt don’t shy away from describing what they see as Israel’s failings, such as the ultra-Orthodox state rabbinate’s restrictive view of Jews and Judaism. But they also wisely steer clear of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, instead focusing on what comedians do best: observing and commenting wryly on the wonders and quirks of Israeli life.

Jerusalem-based New York Times correspondent Isabel Kershner, in contrast, mines both Israel’s past and present to delve into some of the country’s current challenges in The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel’s Battle for Its Inner Soul (Alfred A. Knopf). Divided into 11 chapters, she covers topics such as the Ashkenazi-Sephardi-Mizrahi divide, the complexities of Arab Israeli life and

contemporary Israeli culture. Through outstanding writing, she introduces us to a diverse cast of characters, many of whom she had interviewed previously for the Times, and the settings in which she meets them. Her portrait of Negev desert dweller Assaf Shaham, for example, describes the drive to Ein Yahav, where he lives, in ways that help readers better understand the man. “It was still another hour’s drive along Route 90 to Ein Yahav through the moonscape-like Great Rift Valley abutting the Jordanian border,” she writes. “The

MAGAZINE DISCUSSION

Join us on Thursday, May 18 at 12:30 PM ET for a special conversation on “Israel at 75: Israel’s Successes and Challenges.”

Moderated by Hadassah Magazine Executive Editor Lisa Hostein, panelists will include prominent American Israeli writer Yossi Klein Halevi, author of The New York Times best-selling Letters to My Palestinian Neighbo r; Isabel Kershner, New York Times correspondent in Jerusalem and author of The Land of Hope and Fear ; and activist and influencer Hen Mazzig, author of The Wrong Kind of Jew: A Mizrahi Manifesto , whom Klein Halevi calls “one of the seminal voices of his generation.” This event, presented in partnership with Hadassah’s Education and Advocacy Division, is free and open to all. Register with this QR code or online at hadassahmagazine.org .

wind-sculpted cliffs tapered out into a monotonous plain broken only by flat-topped, thorny acacia bushes, providing dappled patches of shade. In this harsh, inhospitable terrain, the Zionist enterprise had been boiled down to its essence.”

The book provides tantalizing historical nuggets, such as letters David Ben-Gurion wrote to national poet Haim Gouri and Menachem Begin, the second of which shows Ben-Gurion’s growing appreciation for the future prime minister.

Kershner notes an important truth when she writes that old grudges run deep in Israel and past slights get “retold like the Passover Haggadah.” Her narrative makes clear that the splits in Israeli society and politics aren’t new, but go back to its earliest days, even to pre-state debates between Jabotinsky’s Revi-

ONE BOOK, ONE HADASSAH

Join us on Thursday, June 15 at 7 PM ET for an interview with award-winning author Elizabeth Graver about her new novel, Kantika . Taking readers from Turkey to Spain, Cuba to the United States, the multigenerational saga explores the complexities of faith and identity, exile and belonging through the lens of a Sephardi Jewish family and the tenacious Jewish woman at its core. With special guest, Ladino singer and composer Sarah Aroeste. Free and open to all.

Read a review of the book at hadassahmagazine.org/books , where you can also register for the event, or use the QR code here.

CITYSCAPES

From Dizengoff to Bialik (above), 50 of Tel Aviv’s Most Intriguing Streets , by Miryam Sivan and Ellin Yassky with photographs by Ziv Koren, showcases some of the city’s most noteworthy and picturesque byways. The coffee-table book also delves into the lives of the historic figures for whom these streets were named.

sionists (and later Begin’s Herut) and Ben-Gurion’s Mapai Socialists.

The most ambitious of these four new works is Daniel Gordis’s Impossible Takes Longer: 75 Years After Its Creation, Has Israel Fulfilled Its Founders’ Dreams? (Ecco), the title a reference to a slogan used by the United States Army Corps of Engineers during World War II. Following on the heels of his 2017 National Jewish Book Award-winning Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn, Gordis, Koret Distinguished Fellow at Shalem College in Jerusalem, seeks to understand the degree to which Israel has met the aspirations of its Declaration of Independence. (An excerpt begins on page 26.)

First, he marshals data, primary sources and anecdotes to examine the Declaration’s goals, such as equality and human rights for all. A keen student of Israeli history, Gordis tells a fascinating story of how the document evolved beyond early drafts that echoed the American Declaration of Independence to reflect the competing agendas of Israel’s founders.

Gordis then assesses how well

Israel’s actions over the next 75 years matched those early goals. He counts as successes Israel’s achievements in providing a home where Jews can live freely as Jews; in turning Jews into active participants in the making of their own history; and the flourishing of Israeli culture, particularly the restoration of the Hebrew language. As for Israel’s shortcomings, Gordis is critical of the West Bank settlement enterprise, Israel’s treatment of its Arab citizens as well as the West Bank’s Palestinian residents and the state rabbinate.

One interesting idea Gordis sets forth is that Israel is an “ethnic democracy,” rather than a Western-style, liberal democracy. The former concept has been popularized among political scientists with the pioneering work of Israeli sociologist Sammy Smooha, (whom Gordis does not credit). Smooha says such a

democracy is built around the ethos and values of its dominant “tribe”— an ethnic or religious group—while remaining committed to defending minority rights.

Gordis does not sufficiently tease out how the tribalism inherent in an ethnic democracy differs from the individualism of a liberal democracy, as practiced in the United States. Comparing these models could have provided a framework for understanding the growing divide between Israeli and American Jewry as well as among Israelis. It could also be helpful as a guide for identifying ways of reconfiguring Israeli politics to address the strife of the past few months, when hundreds of thousands of Israelis joined rallies to protest the current ultranationalist government, which has advanced legislation to curb the Supreme Court’s independence, among other pushes.

But none of these books makes predictions or offers solutions. Though Kershner claims that Israel “seems to have lost its internal compass,” the portraits she draws don’t offer a path to regaining it. Gordis, like the rabbi he is, asks more questions than he answers. The comedians’ look at Israel gives a street-savvy view of the country, and Richman brings us inspiring words, but both veer away from connecting them with current challenges.

One might wish that these authors had been willing to dig deeper into Israel’s psyche, but these are largely celebratory, after all, and on the 75th anniversary of its founding, Israel deserves them.

Alan D. Abbey is a research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute with a 40-year career as a journalist, teacher and media professional in both the United States and Israel. Born in Brooklyn, he moved to Jerusalem in 1999.

ON YOUR SHELF: THE LATEST JEWISH READS

By Sandee Brawarsky

Professor Schiff’s Guilt by Agur Schiff. Translated by Jessica Cohen (New Vessel Press)

This provocative novel raises urgent questions about family legacy, human trafficking, atonement and memory. Full of unexpected twists and humor, the story of an Israeli professor whose ancestor was a slave trader in Africa is told in narratives that alternate between his home in Tel Aviv and a fictional country in Africa where he is being put on trial for his ancestor’s sins. The author, Tel Aviv-born Schiff, was awarded the Prime Minister’s Prize for Hebrew Literary Works in 2010.

Hotel Cuba by Aaron Hamburger (Harper

Perennial)

Set in Havana in the 1920s and inspired by the immigration story of author Hamburger’s grandmother, this historical novel follows a pair of Jewish sisters who flee their shtetl on the Russian-Polish border in the hopes of immigrating to America. Instead, they are diverted to Cuba. The award-winning novelist richly captures the atmosphere of Cuba in pre-Castro times as well as the sisters’ distinctive sensibilities and their emotional journeys. It’s a story of displacement, creativity and hope.

To Die Beautiful

by Buzzy Jackson (Dutton)

While streets and memorials in Holland are named for Dutch resistance fighter Hannie Schaft, few in the United States know of her heroic role during World War II. Based on extensive research, Jackson’s debut historical novel highlights the courage and moral integrity of the law student turned armed fighter who risked everything to defy the Nazis. In Holland, Schaft became the most wanted woman by the Nazis. She was eventually captured and executed just a few

weeks before the Third Reich surrendered. Jackson, a historian and author of nonfiction works, learned about Schaft in a 2016 visit to the Verzetsmuseum-The Resistance Museum in Amsterdam.

Sing, Memory: The Remarkable Story of the Man Who Saved the Music of the Nazi Camps by Makana Eyre (W.W. Norton)

Beginning with its perfect title, this nonfiction work is an astonishing chronicle of musical resistance. Eyre, an American journalist based in Paris, describes an unlikely friendship born in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp between a Jewish conductor, Rosebery d’Arguto, and a Polish political prisoner, Aleksander Kulisiewicz, an amateur musician who understood that music was a force for life. In Sachsenhausen, Jewish prisoners took part in a secret choir organized by d’Arguto, who had been a prominent musical director in Berlin. Kulisiewicz was asked by his friend, who died in the camp, to save the musical heritage of the victims, including the conductor’s own compositions. Kulisiewicz, who survived the war, devoted his life to the task.

Elie Wiesel: Confronting the Silence by Joseph Berger (Yale University Press)

In the first biography published since the Nobel laureate’s death in 2016, Berger draws on Elie Wiesel’s own writings, research and new interviews with family members and scholars to portray the man who lent his eloquent and powerful voice to preserving the memory of the Holocaust and standing up for human rights around the world. Berger, a longtime journalist for The New York Times , addresses the question of how this soft-spoken Hungarian-born survivor of Auschwitz became a towering world figure.

Sandee Brawarsky is a longtime columnist in the Jewish book world as well as an award-winning journalist, editor and author of several books, including 212 Views of Central Park: Experiencing New York City’s Jewel From Every Angle.

NONFICTION We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel By Eric

Alterman (Basic Books)

In the introduction to We Are Not One, Eric Alterman explains what his latest work is not about: “Israel itself, U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East, or the fate of the Palestinian people inside or outside Israel’s borders.” Rather, he writes, his purpose is to explore the discourse around those topics in the American Jewish community.

Histories are never purely objective, and this book is no exception. Alterman, an historian, journalist and a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College,

approaches this topic from a left-ofcenter perspective and buttresses his judgments with a mountain of primary resources; there are 61 pages of footnotes.

According to Alterman, the 1967 Six-Day War caused a tectonic shift of the Jewish community away from an America-centric agenda toward a hyperfocus on Israel advocacy and Holocaust remembrance.

“The Arabs’ pre-war threats [to destroy Israel] terrified American Jews and put them in mind, once again, of the Holocaust, with its ensuing feelings of trauma, guilt, and helplessness,” he writes. As support for Israel came to dominate American Jewish life, he laments that resources were diverted from local Jewish

identity-building initiatives such as “Jewish education, community service and the Jewish tradition of social justice known as tikkun olam.…”

Alterman acknowledges that no Israeli government has ever been immune from criticism. Indeed, he points out, there has been strident and routine criticism of Israeli policies from international human rights groups, the United Nations, liberal Protestant denominations and parts of the mainstream media. Yet, he argues, Jewish establishment organi-

zations, first among them the highly influential AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, as well as neoconservative intellectuals and their publications, including Commentary magazine and its former chief editor Norman Podhoretz, and evangelical Christians have largely succeeded in discrediting public criticism of Israel. The effort to mute criticism has played out in various spheres, he notes, particularly in politics, where elected officials who dissent from the party line, such as Illinois Senator Charles Percy, the Republican who, in the 1980s, voted to approve an arms sale deal to Saudi Arabia and suggested that Israel open negotiations with the Palestinian Liberation Organization, are framed as hostile to the Jewish state.

Thus, Alterman contends, a succession of United States governments has been reluctant to act on what he calls American national interests to restrain Israel’s settlement activity in the West Bank, which has made the achievement of a two-state outcome almost impossible. In addition, he observes that as Israel’s harsh treatment of the Palestinians and more than half century “occupation of the West Bank grinds on”—a situation for which he does not hold the Palestinians blameless—American Jews have grown increasingly distant from Israel. That observation, Alterman notes, is backed by data from the Pew Research Center.

Alterman also points out that while American Jews have steadfastly remained loyal to the Democratic Party, most Israelis “now consider themselves to be ‘right-wing.’ ” The result: a schism between the world’s two largest Jewish communities.

Much of Alterman’s analysis is well founded. That said, there are some significant omissions. For

example, he expansively describes a campus environment that swings between virulent anti-Zionist supporters of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement and hardline right-wing Jewish groups, such as Campus Watch and Canary Mission. However, he fails to mention Hillel, the premier organization that addresses Jewish student affairs. In recent years, Hillel has made concerted efforts to deal with difficult Israel-related issues forthrightly and in a way that would open a path for liberal Jews to embrace the country of Israel even as they criticize its government.

The book is well worth reading both for beginners and experts. Those who agree with Alterman will

find much to reinforce their views. And those who disagree, assuming they approach the book with an open mind, should be challenged by it.

—Martin J. Raffel

Martin J. Raffel is former senior vice president at the Jewish Council for Public Affairs.

Pow! Right in the Eye! Thirty Years

Behind the Scenes of Modern French Painting By Berthe Weill. Translated by William Rodarmo r (University of Chicago Press)

Berthe Weill was a prickly Jewish Parisienne who suffered no fools and had an extraordinary eye for contemporary art.

“I have a difficult personality,” the

KING DAVID JERUSALEM. DAN TEL AVIV.

Proudly

part of the “Leading Hotels of the World”

art gallerist wrote about herself in her 1933 memoir, Pow! Right in the Eye!, recently published in English for the first time.

Her claim met no opposition.

Picasso biographer John Rich ardson described Weill, a critical character in the Spanish painter’s life, as a peppery and “homely Jew ish spinster with spectacles thick as

Crossword Puzzle

on page 51

goldfish bowls.” One who nonethe less launched many of modern art’s big names at her namesake gallery, Picasso included.

Weill is an underrecognized fig ure in art history, until now largely a footnote in the accounts of the over 300 artists whom she helped discover.

“All of my ‘children,’ or nearly all, have succeeded!,” Weill boasted in Pow! Right in the Eye! “But here’s the thing, I’m now the old mother that people are ashamed of, the one you don’t want to bring out in pub lic.” Once successful, these artists soon left her for dealers and galleries with greater prestige.

Born Esther Berthe Weill in 1865 to a big Jewish family, she appren ticed at a young age to a distant cousin who dealt in antiques. Weill then opened her own antique shop that she transformed into an art gal lery in 1901—Galerie B. Weill. The name was meant to conceal her gen der at a time when she was the only female gallery owner in Paris.

Over the next 40 years, and despite rising antisemitism in France, she bravely promoted new talent such as Henri Matisse, Diego Rivera and Amedeo Modigliani, hosting the only solo show in the Jewish artist’s lifetime. She also pointedly exhib ited female artists such as Suzanne Valadon and Meta Warrick Fuller; almost a third of her exhibitions in‑ cluded women and one in every five

Berthe Weill (seated, center) surrounded by artists whose work she promoted in her gallery CÉSAR ABIN, ‘LEURS FIGURES: 56 PORTRAITS D’ARTISTES’ (PARIS: IMPRIMERIE MULLER, 1932)

solo shows centered around a woman.

The translation and publication of Weill’s memoir were the passion project of late New York gallerist Julie Saul, who also helped arrange exhibitions about Weill that will take place at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 2024.

—Karen Chernick

FICTION The Marriage Box

By Corie Adjmi (She Writes Press)

A foray into the world of Syrian Jews in America, The Marriage Box is a welcome change from the Ashkenazi context in many books written about the American Jewish experience. Author Corie Adjmi has mined her own Syrian Jewish upbringing for this debut novel; her previous book was the award-winning collection of short stories, Life and Other Shortcomings.

Readers first meet Cassandra “Casey” Cohen as a secular Jewish 16-year-old living in 1970s New Orleans. When the rebellious teen starts hanging out with the wrong crowd, her parents decide to move back to the Northeast and the Orthodox Syrian Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn where they had grown up, hoping that being closer to her roots will be good for Casey.

At first, she is uneasy with the unfamiliar, opulent world in which she finds herself, filled with extravagant parties and expensive fashion—her peers receive furs from

PERPETUAL YAHRZEIT

Kaddish will be recited annually for your loved one in perpetuity in the Fannie and Maxwell Abbell Synagogue at Hadassah Medical Center beneath Marc Chagall’s iconic stained glass windows.

ENHANCED PERPETUAL YAHRZEIT

Kaddish will be recited for your loved one daily for 11 months after burial, after which Kaddish will be recited annually.

ADVANCE YAHRZEIT

A reservation to ensure Kaddish will be recited for you and your loved ones upon their death. Available in standard and Enhanced Perpetual Yahrzeit.

Karen Chernick is an art historian and writer living in Tel Aviv who specializes in arts, culture, food and travel.

Bergdorf Goodman, Judith Leiber handbags and Tiffany jewelry—as well as unfamiliar religious observances and circumscribed roles for women. Many of her new female yeshiva schoolmates expect to get married before they turn 20. But

Casey wants college and a career in the arts and bristles at her new community’s expectations.

And then there is the Getaway Beach Club on the Jersey Shore, “where members of the Syrian community come to mingle” during

CHARITABLE SOLICITATION DISCLOSURE STATEMENTS

HADASSAH, THE WOMEN’S ZIONIST ORGANIZATION OF AMERICA, INC.

40 Wall Street, 8th Floor – New York, NY 10005 – Telephone: (212) 355-7900

Contributions will be used for the support of Hadassah’s charitable projects and programs in the U.S. and/ or Israel including: medical relief, education and research; education and advocacy programs on issues of concern to women and that of the family; and support of programs for Jewish youth. Financial and other information about Hadassah may be obtained, without cost, by writing the Finance Department at Hadassah’s principal place of business at the address indicated above, or by calling the phone number indicated above. In addition, residents of the following states may obtain financial and/or licensing information from their states, as indicated. DC: The Certificate of Registration Number of Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, Inc. is #40003848, which is valid for the period 9/1/2021-8/31/2023. Registration does not imply endorsement of the solicitation by the District of Columbia, or by any officer or employee of the District. FL: A COPY OF THE OFFICIAL REGISTRATION AND FINANCIAL INFORMATION FOR HADASSAH, THE WOMEN’S ZIONIST ORGANIZATION OF AMERICA, INC. (#CH-1298) AND HADASSAH MEDICAL RELIEF ASSOCIATION, INC. (#CH-4603) MAY BE OBTAINED FROM THE DIVISION OF CONSUMER SERVICES BY CALLING TOLL-FREE 1-800-HELP-FLA, OR ONLINE AT www.FloridaConsumerHelp.com. KS: The official registration and annual financial report of Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, Inc. is filed with the Kansas Secretary of State. Kansas Registration #237-478-3. MD: A copy of the current financial statement of Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, Inc. is available by writing 40 Wall Street, 8th Floor, New York, New York 10005, Att: Finance Dept., or by calling (212) 355-7900. Documents and information submitted under the Maryland Charitable Solicitations Act are also available for the cost of postage and copies, from the Maryland Secretary of State, State House, Annapolis, MD 21401 (410) 974-5534 MI: Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, Inc. MICS #13005/Hadassah Medical Relief Association, Inc. MICS # 11986/ The Hadassah Foundation, Inc. MICS #22965. MS: The official registration and financial information of Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, Inc. may be obtained from the Mississippi Secretary of State’s office by calling 1(888) 236-6167. NJ: INFORMATION FILED BY HADASSAH, THE WOMEN’S ZIONIST ORGANIZATION OF AMERICA, INC. AND HADASSAH MEDICAL RELIEF ASSOCIATION, INC. WITH THE NEW JERSEY ATTORNEY GENERAL CONCERNING THIS CHARITABLE SOLICITATION AND THE PERCENTAGE OF CONTRIBUTIONS RECEIVED BY THE CHARITY DURING THE LAST REPORTING PERIOD THAT WERE DEDICATED TO THE CHARITABLE PURPOSE MAY BE OBTAINED FROM THE ATTORNEY GENERAL OF THE STATE OF NEW JERSEY BY CALLING (973) 504-6215 AND IS AVAILABLE ON THE INTERNET AT www.njconsumeraffairs.gov/charity/chardir.htm. NC: FINANCIAL INFORMATION ABOUT HADASSAH, THE WOMEN’S ZIONIST ORGANIZATION OF AMERICA, INC. AND A COPY OF ITS LICENSE ARE AVAILABLE FROM THE STATE SOLICITATION LICENSING BRANCH AT 919-8145400 OR FOR NORTH CAROLINA RESIDENTS AT 1-888-830-4989. PA: The official registration and financial information of Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, Inc., Hadassah Medical Relief Association, Inc., and The Hadassah Foundation, Inc. may be obtained from the Pennsylvania Department of State by calling toll free, within Pennsylvania, 1(800) 732-0999. VA: A financial statement of the organization is available from the State Division of Consumer Affairs in the Department of Agriculture & Consumer Services, P.O. Box 1163, Richmond, VA 23218, Phone #1 (804) 786-1343, upon request. WA: Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, Inc., Hadassah Medical Relief Association, Inc. and The Hadassah Foundation, Inc. are registered with the Washington Secretary of State. Financial disclosure information is available from the Secretary of State by calling 800-332-GIVE (800-332-4483) or visiting www.sos.wa.gov/charities. WV: West Virginia residents may obtain a summary of the registration and financial documents of Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, Inc. from the Secretary of State, State Capitol, Charleston, WV 25305. WI: A financial statement of Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, Inc. disclosing assets, liabilities, fund balances, revenue, and expenses for the preceding fiscal year will be provided to any person upon request. ALL STATES: A copy of Hadassah’s latest Financial Report is available by writing to the Hadassah Finance Dept., 40 Wall Street, 8th Floor, New York, New York 10005. REGISTRATION DOES NOT CONSTITUTE OR IMPLY ENDORSEMENT, APPROVAL, SANCTION OR RECOMMENDATION BY ANY STATE. Charitable deductions are allowed to the extent provided by law. Hadassah shall have full dominion, control and discretion over all gifts (and shall be under no legal obligation to transfer any portion of a gift to or for the use or benefit of any other entity or organization). All decisions regarding the use of funds for any purpose, or the transfer of funds to or for the benefit of any other entity or organization, shall be subject to the approval of the Board or other governing body of Hadassah. The Hadassah Foundation, Inc. is a supporting organization of Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, Inc. September 2022

the summer months. Casey is appalled by the titular Marriage Box, an apt tongue-in-cheek term for an area at the club where teenage girls display themselves in the hopes of attracting a husband.

“The Marriage Box is a ropedoff section behind the pool where young girls lounge on display in animal-print bikinis adorned with fringe or spotted with sequins,” Adjmi writes. “They pose in flattering positions, lying on their backs to keep their stomachs flat, flaunting their freshly waxed, tan legs, hoping to attract their naseeb, their God-given intended.”

Casey’s attitude toward her new community changes after she meets brash, overconfident Michael, who single-mindedly pursues her. She must determine if the devotion and sense of belonging he provides are sufficient to lure her away from her previous aspirations for her future.

While there’s a lot of telling rather than showing in the book, Adjmi brings 1970s and 1980s Orthodox Syrian Jewish culture to life. Readers will enjoy being swept up in a somewhat unfamiliar culture—as well as the question the book poses of just how much one should sacrifice for love and community.

—Jaime Herndon

The Woman Beyond the Sea

By

Journalist-turned-novelist Sarit Yishai-Levi’s new book begins with a

Jaime Herndon is a writer and avid reader. Her work can be found at Book Riot, Undark, Kveller, Motherly and other places.

Sarit Yishai-Levi. Translated by Gilah KahnHoffmann (Amazon Crossing)

marriage that is ending. The dramatic opening scene features an Israeli writer leaving his Israeli wife in a Paris cafe—making it clear to her that he no longer loves her and has moved on in a manner that she feels as “a direct blow to the face, the heart, the soft underbelly.”

That’s the start of a spiral of grief that leads to the unraveling of a complex family story and ultimately to new understanding, forgiveness and beginnings. Readers may recognize Yishai-Levi as the author of The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem, a multiaward-winning best seller that has been adapted into a hit Netflix television series. In The Woman Beyond

the Sea, she again showcases her talent as a storyteller whose prose spans generations of a family and decades of Israeli history.

Eliya is the young woman whose heart is broken in Paris. She is the only child of Lily, who was orphaned as an infant in Mandatory Palestine, and Shaul Zoref, whose Sephardi parents had emigrated from Monastir, once home to the largest Jewish community in Macedonia. The well-paced story unfolds in short chapters largely told from the points of view of these three characters. Only the voice of Eliya—named for her paternal grandmother’s brother, Eliyahu, who was murdered in the Holocaust—appears in the first person.

The alternating chapters take

readers deep into the family’s secrets and truths, its history and strained relationships. In particular, the book explores the fragile, fractured, yet powerful links between mothers and daughters. The way to mend what was broken, as Eliya’s paternal grandfather, a jeweler like his son, remarks, is “one link at a time.”

The aftereffects of the Yom Kippur War are very much felt in the novel’s present tense, while its past evokes the years of the British Mandate. Born in Jerusalem to a Sephardi family that traces its presence in the city back eight generations, Yishai-Levi, who published her first novel at age 65, is skilled at capturing the rhythms of language, atmosphere and telling details.

—Sandee Brawarsky

It is September 1939. War has just begun. The Nazis have begun an extermination program: against their own children.

In Peter Clenott’s new mystery thriller, THE UNWANTED, 14-year-old Hana Ziegler is being driven by her grandfather and her psychiatrist to a euthanasia center; 16-year-old Silke Hartenstein graces the covers of Nazi propaganda magazines; Avi Kreisler is a Munich police detective condemned to Dachau; David McAuliffe’s patrician father wants his son elected first Catholic president of the United States.

Available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Level Best Books

In THE UNWANTED, in the aftermath of war, revenge brings these four people together in ways unimaginable. www.PeterClenott.com

G uide to Jewish Literature

M

eMory SpaceS:

ViSualizing i dentity in J ewiSh woMen ’S g raphic narratiVeS

Victoria Aarons

Jewish identity, memory, and place are deftly revealed through the lens of Jewish women’s graphic narratives. An exploration of the work of Jewish women graphic novelists and the intricate Jewish identity is complicated by gender, memory, generation, and place—that is, the emotional, geographical, and psychological spaces that women inhabit. Victoria Aarons explores Jewish identity, diaspora, mourning, memory, and witness in the works of Sarah Lightman, Liana Finck, Anya Ulinich, Leela Corman, and others. 252 pages; paperback ($38.99) and hardcover ($94.99) editions available. Order at wsupress.wayne.edu or by calling 800-978-7323.

ShadowS we carry Meryl Ain

In this eagerly anticipated sequel to The Takeaway Men, the Lubinski twins struggle with their roles as women and coming to terms with their family’s Holocaust legacy at the same time as political and social upheaval roils through the US. Their peers, including a Catholic priest and the son of a Nazi guard at Auschwitz, also struggle with family genealogy and its influence on their lives. The book explores the experience of navigating deeply held family secrets, confusing religious identities, antisemitism, and the scars of WWII in the wake of revolutionary social changes. Available on Amazon.

the wind KnowS My naMe

Isabel Allende

This powerful and moving novel from the New York Times bestselling author of A Long Petal of the Sea and Violeta weaves together past and present, tracing the ripple effects of war and immigration on one child in Europe in 1938 and another in the United States in 2019. The Wind Knows My Name tells the tale of these two unforgettable characters, both in search of family and home. It is a testament to the sacrifices that parents make and a love letter to the children who survive the most unfathomable dangers—and never stop dreaming.

Available wherever books are sold.

n ight Bird

Fredric Shernoff

Amazon bestselling Author fulfills a promise to tell the tale of a family torn apart by war and the resilience of the human spirit. Based on a true story that began after a violent pogrom devastates a small Jewish community in rural Ukraine, the surviving two siblings of a broken family, each make a choice; one will stay to rebuild, the other will leave for a new beginning in America. Two decades later, an ocean apart and against the backdrop of one of humanity’s darkest moments, we follow Mulya, Frank and their family’s story of survival, faith, and love.

Available on Amazon.

thiS l aByrinth of darKneSS and light

Randy Grigsby

Drawing on Henrietta Szold’s letters and diary entries, and extensive research and historical sources of that time in Germany and Palestine, This Labyrinth of Darkness and Light is a powerful narrative and spellbinding rescue story, that brings to life one of the darkest and yet most inspirational chapters in Jewish history. Paperback, 278 pages. $24.95. Available on Amazon.

Moe fieldS: the Special Bond Between fatherS and SonS

Stuart Z Goldstein

A five-decade story of a teen in Brooklyn who becomes a boxer in the 1932 Golden Gloves, fights in WWII, marries his sweetheart, overcomes anti-Semitism to build a plumbing business – and saves his family when his wife at 44 is crippled by a drunk driver. Recipient the U.S. 2022 National Literary Award for excellence in Memoirs– and ranked a “bestseller” on Amazon’s Jewish book list. Hardcover, Paperback 386 pages or eBook, available on all book platforms. Inscribed copies from author at zach950@gmail.com.

BuBBie’S BaBy: 15th anniVerSary e dition

Elaine Serling

A musical story celebrating and honoring the special relationship between grandparents and a grandchild. This new redesigned hardcover edition features fresh lyrics, a toe-tapping memorable melody and colorful illustrations that mirror moments of joy this special bond brings. Use the digital download code printed inside the book to download the song. Reading, listening and singing together will create memories that will last a lifetime!

Available from www.elaineserling.com. 800-457-2157; $19.95 + $3 shipping.

She’S a M enSch!: ten a Mazing J ewiSh woMen Anne Dublin

From the poorest neighborhoods in Kenya to the streets of New York City to the halls of the Canadian Supreme Court, the contemporary Jewish women found in these pages have accomplished remarkable feats. Some survived the horrors of the Holocaust while others had more peaceful childhoods, but all of them saw unfairness in their world and decided to do something about it. You may have not heard their names before, but you will remember them! For ages 9-12. Paperback, 112 pages, $22.95. Available from your favorite bookseller.

thieVeS of pariS

Helen Schwartz

Max St. Denis, raised on a Rothschild estate, vows to steal back a well-loved family portrait from Nazi art looters. As spy and thief, he uses disguise and lies, winning help from two brave women, Rose Valland, the only French person in the depot for Nazi loot, and beautiful Hannah Kiesler, a Hungarian Zionist who recruits him to snatch Jews from their SS hunters.

Available on Amazon.

o n 174th Street: the world of willie M ittleMan

Mel Weiser

Days are bad in the Great Depression of the 1930s. But for little Willie Mittleman and the Mittleman clan in their Bronx, NY neighborhood, life is still good, proving that laughter and love will always be the lifesaving forces to rescue us from adversity and pain. A big-hearted gem. Funny, touching and insightful. For readers of all ages. Available on Amazon.

how to M aKe a life

Florence Reiss Kraut

An award-winning and riveting historical novel of four generations of an immigrant family. When matriarch Ida escapes a pogrom in Ukraine determined to save her family, she cannot foresee the struggles of her descendants. Through war, mental illness, secrets and betrayal, each generation’s actions impact the lives of the next, as love and loyalty is tested by secrets and betrayal. You will recognize these family members and grieve and rejoice with them. Readers cannot put the book down. Gift it. Pick it for your book club and author will Zoom with you for a lively conversation. Available in paperback, audio, and e-book on Amazon, or wherever you buy books on author website www.florencereisskraut.com.

Gathering at the Kibbutz

A collective of Hebrew terms | By

Joseph Lowin

Raise your hand if your heart was bursting with pride the first time you visited an Israeli kibbutz—that unique experiment in commu nal living and working the land.

Stories about the root צ-ב-ק (kuf-bet-tsadi Zionist’s heart to flutter as well. While each of the two biblical nouns for “col lective settlement,” ץוּבִּק (kibbuts) and הָצוּבְק ture, the source of our root is not the Hebrew Bible. According to etymologist Ernest Klein, the term kibbutz was borrowed from an annual Hasidic תוּצְבַּקְתִה

the tomb of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, founder of the Breslov Hasidic move ment, called ha-kadosh

prophesy that “your groups,” of pagan idols will not avail you. Ezekiel compares fellow Isra elites to base metals that one day will be smelted into ףֶסֶכּ תַצוּבְק (kevutsat kessef esis, Joseph offers Pharaoh his services as director of economic planning for the coming famine, suggesting, וּצְבְּקִיְו (ve-yikbetsu during the seven good years and save it for the following seven bad years. The Book of Proverbs offers more modest wisdom, yad yarbeh), “One who gathers little-by-little increases wealth.”

Our root shows up in a host of Hebrew words, from the return to Israel that is תוֹיוּלָגּ ץוּבִּק (kibbutz galuyot), “the ingathering of the exiles,” to a (kovets), collection, of essays about the proverbial Jewish panhandler. Today, a medical chart at one of Hadassah Medical Organization’s two hospitals will include the patient’s םָד type, while news reports about hardball Israeli politics will often focus on ץַחַל תוֹצוּבְק (kevutsot lahats), pressure groups.

In 1941, religious German Zionists built vutsat Yavneh) using in its name both terms derived from our root. This year, Hadassah proudly celebrates—alongside Israel’s 75th anniversary—the 50-year jubilee of making the desert bloom at הָר by a group of Young Judaea graduates.

It’s Friday afternoon, erev Shabbat at the kibbutz, and the visitor imagines a ץַבְּקִמ (mikbats), cluster, of kibbutz women, each dressed in a white תֶצֶבֻּקְמ (hatsa’it mekubbetset), pleated skirt, heading together to synagogue.

If you will it, as Theodor Herzl might have taught, etymology is not merely a story about words.

Joseph Lowin’s columns for Hadassah Magazine are collected in the books recently published Hebrew Matters, available at gcrr.org/product-page/hebrew-matters

ISRAELI WINE DIRECT PRESENTS

AGUR WINERY

AGUR WINERY LIES ADJACENT TO ELAH VALLEY, IN THE BEAUTIFUL JUDEAN HILLS. THE WINERY’S VINEYARDS, IN MATA, GIVAT YESHAYAHU AND EIN KEREM, PRODUCE A LIMITED NUMBER OF WINES WHICH ARE THE CREATIVE WORK AND ART OF A GROWER, A WINEMAKER AND A VINEYARD. EACH WINE IS AN EXPRESSION OF A PERSON AND A PLACE.

Kibbutz Gan Shmuel in 1953

Alice Shalvi

Pioneering Israeli feminist takes stock |

By Lisa Hostein

Alice shalvi, often called the mother of israeli feminism, grew up along with the modern State of Israel. She emigrated from England to the nascent Jewish nation in 1949, the year after independence was declared. Her life, like the country that became her home, took some unexpected twists but she achieved tremendous stature as a longtime professor of English literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; the principal of Pelech, a prestigious and progressive high school for Orthodox girls in Jerusalem; and as founding chair of the Israel Women’s Network, which became Israel’s leading advocacy group on women’s issues.

Now, at the age of 97, the 2007 recipient of the Israel Prize for Lifetime Achievement has a rare perch from which to assess the country’s achievements, and its challenges. Extolling her blessings as the matriarch of a large family—six children (one deceased), 21 grandchildren and 26 great-grandchildren—Shalvi spoke in a Zoom interview from her home in Jerusalem. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

What has been Israel’s greatest accomplishment?

Raising up generations of children, including my own, who never suffered from fellow pupils calling them “dirty Jew” the way I did. And they were free to be Jews in any manner they wanted to be.

Did you ever imagine that you would become the mother of Israeli feminism?

No. I didn’t think that feminist activity was needed for a long time because at Hebrew University, where I taught, we were blessed with a head of department who was totally egalitarian. But I came to learn that there was inequality in wages, in the military and elsewhere. We set out to revolutionize the status of women in Israel through consciousness-raising, lobbying, legislation and litigation.

What was the most significant achievement of the Israel Women’s Network?

Our most significant achievement was in drawing women’s attention to the anomalies in pay between women and men and other forms of discrimination. And the fact that women no

longer felt ashamed of the term “feminist.” They no longer believed we already had equality. Even on the kibbutzim, where everything was supposed to be equal, the women were doing on a grand scale what any housewife was doing—they were in the children’s homes and in the kitchen.

What are the biggest challenges that remain for women?

There’s still a lot more to be done—look at the few women in the government today. There’s been enormous progress, all over the world, with women doing significant work from which they were excluded in the past. But we are still very much professionally divided along gender roles. As long as women are the ones who bear the children, that’s not going to change. Unfortunately, society doesn’t sufficiently value the child carers and how much they are contributing to the economy by raising the children.

What worries you most about the country today?

That Israel is an occupying power; we’ve been corrupted by ruling over

another nation. There won’t be a solution until the Palestinians have a state of their own and I wish Israel would realize that and stop building in the West Bank.

We’ve also become very materialistic as a society. One tends to idealize the past, but I think it was better when we didn’t have all these luxury goods, which enables the distinctions between one set of income earners and another.

What is your hope for Israel over the next 75 years?

I want the country to be a truly Jewish state, with everything that implies as far as moral values are concerned. As the Torah says: Ve’ahavta le’reyacha kamocha (“Love your neighbor as yourself”) whether your neighbor is Ashkenazi or Sephardi or Palestinian or Ethiopian.

I’m distressed that there is so much internal division. If I were a fairy godmother and could do one positive thing, it would be to eliminate sinat chinam (baseless hatred) among Israelis.

Lisa Hostein is the executive editor of Hadassah Magazine

Supporting the innovative and life-sustaining work of Hadassah Medical Organization (HMO) in medical research and treatment is deeply important to Merry and Richard Slone, which is why they have

established several charitable gift annuities with Hadassah. It is a win-win gift. They will receive fixed monthly payments for their lifetimes and the remainder of their gifts will support the medical breakthroughs of tomorrow.

Free Personalized Example

The payments you will receive depend on your age and the amount of your gift. Contact us for a personalized example or to learn about ways to include Hadassah in your estate plan.

1.800.428.8884

NEW OPTION! You may be eligible to fund your CGA using your IRA. This option comes with special rules, so contact us to see if you qualify.

*Rates as of Jan. 1, 2023. Rates are fixed when annuity is established. Rates are also available for two-life gift annuities. If you reside in New York, please contact us directly as your rates may vary slightly. Minimum age: 65 | Minimum contribution: $5,000

The information and content contained herein are intended for educational purposes only and are not intended to provide legal, tax or other professional advice or to be relied upon. For such advice, please consult an attorney, tax advisor or accountant. References to estate and income taxes include federal taxes only and are subject to change. State income/estate taxes and/or other state laws may impact your results.

The solicitation disclosure on page 60 is incorporated in this advertisement. Charitable deductions are allowed to the extent provided by law. Hadassah shall have full dominion, control and discretion over your gifts (and shall be under no legal obligation to transfer any portion of a gift to or for the use or benefit of any other entity or organization). All decisions regarding the transfer of funds to or for the benefit of any other entity or organization shall be subject to the approval of the Board or other governing body of Hadassah.

California residents: Annuities are subject to regulation by the State of California. Payments under such agreements, however, are not protected or otherwise guaranteed by any government agency or the California Life and Health Insurance Guarantee Association. Oklahoma residents: A charitable gift annuity is not regulated by the Oklahoma Insurance Department and is not protected by a guaranty association affiliated with the Oklahoma Insurance Department. South Dakota residents: Charitable gift annuities are not regulated by and are not under the jurisdiction of the South Dakota Division of Insurance.

HADASSAH, THE WOMEN’S ZIONIST ORGANIZATION OF AMERICA, INC.

“Hadassah Medical Organization’s cutting-edge research brings hope to people with neurological and other diseases. The Slone Family is proud to support this wonderful endeavor.”

—Merry Slone, Old Westbury, New York

Because of you, new discoveries are transforming lives.

Merry and Richard Slone

©2023 Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, Inc., Hadassah, the H logo, and Hadassah the Power of Women Who Do are registered trademarks of Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, Inc.