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LVJF TRIBUTES
IN HONOR ALIETTE AND MARC ABO In honor of the birth of your granddaughter, Frankie Beth and Wes Kozinn
Vicki Wax SARA-JANE AND DAVID BUB In honor of your son Jack’s Bar Mitzvah
Vicki Wax LISA AND BARNET FRAENKEL In honor of being recognized at the Baum School of Art’s Fall Gala
Carol and Gary Fromer EYDIE AND NEIL GLICKSTEIN In honor of the B’nai Mitzvah of grandchildren Bradley and Shayna
Roberta and Robert Kritzer AARON GORODZINSKY AND JENNIE SCHECHNER In honor of your marriage
Barbara and Arthur Weinrach CAROLE AND HARRY ROSE In honor of the birth of your great-granddaughter, Oliva Rose
Wendy and Ross Born LENORE SCHARF In honor of your Special Birthday
Marilyn Claire
Diane Miller AUDREY SOSIS In honor of your Special Birthday
Bette Friedenheim Carol and Gary Fromer ARLENE AND RICHARD STEIN In honor of your granddaughter’s marriage
Aimee and Ozzie Stewart
IN MEMORY FATHER (Father of Miriam Pitkoff)
Carole and Michael Langsam SISTER (Sister of Susan Hyman)
Carole and Michael Langsam MIRIAM ALEXANDER (Mother of Audrey Nolte)
Wendy and Ross Born
Eileen Ufberg JAY APFELBAUM (Husband of Harriet Apfelbaum)
Carole and Michael Langsam BEV BLOCH (Wife of Lenny)
Carole and Michael Langsam IRA LEHRICH (Husband of Lucille Lehrich and brother of Henry Lehrich)
Dee and Arnold Kaplan HOWARD LISTWA (Husband of Sherree Listwa)
Carole and Michael Langsam JERRY MELAMUT (Husband of Ethel Melamut and father of Brenda Miller)
Jodi Eddy
Barbara and Arthur Weinrach LINDA MILLER (Wife of Mike Miller)
Dee and Arnold Kaplan REUEL (Rick) MUSSELMAN (Husband of Susan Musselman)
Eileen Ufberg and Family RENEE SCHWARTZ (Mother of Pam Silverberg)
Wendy and Ross Born
Margie and Jonathan Hertz
Evelyn and Jay Lipschutz STUART SCHWARTZ (Husband of Janice Schwartz)
Wendy and Ross Born
Marilyn Claire
Bonnie and Bobby Hammel
Alice and Mark Notis
Roberta and Alan Penn
Taffi Ney
Eileen Ufberg
Vicki Wax MARGIE ZIMMERMAN (Mother of Kathy Zimmerman)
Sandra and Harold Goldfarb
We gratefully acknowledge those individuals who have offered expressions of friendship through recent gifts to the Lehigh Valley Jewish Foundation. The minimum contribution for an Endowment Card is $10. Call 610-821-5500 or visit www.jewishlehighvalley.org to place your card requests. Thank you for your continued support.
Israel to build a museum dedicated to Albert Einstein at university he helped found
By Asaf Elia-Shalev Jewish Telegraphic Agency
An $18 million museum dedicated to the legacy of Albert Einstein will be built in Jerusalem.
The Israeli government approved a plan Sunday to establish a new home for Einstein’s extensive materials, including some 85,000 documents, on the campus of the Hebrew University, which Einstein helped found a century ago.
It’s the largest collection of papers and objects related to Einstein in the world and includes his Nobel Prize and the original notes he produced while developing the general theory of relativity in 1916, according to Benyamin Cohen, who is writing a biography of the physicist.
“Albert Einstein is an asset, the biggest brand name in the world for intelligence, science and genius,” Israel’s alternate prime minister, Naftali Bennett, said on Saturday, adding that he expects the museum to become “a pilgrimage site for anyone who wants to become familiar with Einstein, Jewish intelligence, and intelligence in general.”
A third of the funding for the museum will come from the Israeli government and the rest from the university and its donors, including art collector Jose Mugrabi.
Einstein was one of the earliest and most important champions of Hebrew University, using his profile as one of the world’s leading scientists to raise money for the institution. At a fundraising conference in 1954, a year before his death, he said in a speech that the university would be critical to Israel’s trajectory as a young country.
“Israel is the only place on earth where Jews have the possibility to shape public life according to their traditional ideals,” Einstein said. “We are all greatly concerned that its final shape will be worthy and gratifying. To what extent this goal will be reached will depend significantly on the growth and development of the Hebrew University.”
His support for the university and for Israel was so deeply appreciated that Einstein was asked to become the country’s president in 1952, but he declined.
After Einstein died in 1955, the Hebrew University inherited his papers, letters, medals and “all other literary property and rights, of any and every kind or nature whatsoever,” per Einstein’s will.
The announcement of the Albert Einstein museum adds to a spate of new and planned museums and other cultural institutions in recent years in Israel, which are being funded to a large extent by philanthropic dollars from Jews living in the United States.
In Jerusalem, it will join the new Museum of Tolerance and the nearly completed new home of the National Library of Israel. Meanwhile, Tel Aviv has seen a recent $100 million renovation that created the ANU Museum of the Jewish People, as well as the opening of the Israel Innovation Museum at the Peres Center for Peace and the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History.
Prime Minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, meeting with Albert Einstein at Princeton University, New Jersey. (Universal History Archive/ Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
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Author Dara Horn (second from right); Monika Rice (far right), moderator for Horn’s talk at Lafayette College on October 12 and assistant professor and Robert Weiner and Ilan Peleg Scholar in Jewish Studies at Lafayette; and three of Rice’s students who organized a book club to study Horn’s “People Love Dead Jews.”
By Carl Zebrowski Editor of Hakol
Dara Horn kept pointing at the cover of her 2021 book “People Love Dead Jews” throughout her talk at Lafayette College on October 12. Once you understand the argument she’s making in this collection of essays that won the National Jewish Book award, you realize the title is spot-on. And, yes, she deals with her serious subject matter with occasional biting humor.
Horn, a novelist, nonfiction writer and instructor of Yiddish and Hebrew literature at New York’s Yeshiva University and other colleges, told an audience of more than 100 in Lafayette’s Colton Chapel that immersion in stories about Jewish victims of the Holocaust, terrorist attacks and other atrocities through history makes people feel better about themselves.
“There’s a murdered, tortured Jew who absolves you of your sins,” she said (you were warned about the humor). People can tell themselves that whatever their own faults, they don’t inflict horror on other people.
The truth runs deeper than that, of course. And it’s troubling. It begs the question “Why do we care how these people died if we really don’t care how they live?” At the core of that not caring is antiSemitism, or at least a lack of action against antiSemitism.
Within the last few years, Horn said, she became “the anti-Semitism whisperer.” She traced it back to a late 2018 article she wrote for Smithsonian magazine about the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam — a museum established in memory of the Jewish girl who became the most famous victim of the Holocaust — banning a staff member from wearing a yarmulke to work.
Around that same time, she wrote an article for the New York Times on the shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh that killed 11. Suddenly she was a recognized expert. “I have now become the go-to person for the emerging genre of synagogue shooting opeds,” she said.
Horn said that antiSemitism has been buried in the American conscience. She offered the example of a myth that developed around Jews coming through Ellis Island on arrival in the United States. As the story goes, their surnames were often changed by government clerks who couldn’t spell.
The stories about the misspelled names serve a purpose, she said: “The myth buries the memory of American anti-Semitism.” America was supposed to be the exception. Anti-Semitism wasn’t supposed to happen here. Her book lays those notions bare.
To correct the continuing problem, she said, one of the things that needs to change is how we teach our youth about Jews. “When we say the reason that you shouldn’t hate these people is because they’re just like you and me,” she said, “we’re kind of saying that if they weren’t just like you and me that it’s kind of okay to hate them.”
She wondered, “Why are we not cultivating curiosity about human differences?” Teaching about differences and why they are important and worth nurturing should lead to improvement heading forward. Judaism is a counterculture, she explained, but one that’s been critical to the mainstream.
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How good is robotic surgery now? Maimonides’ president explains
Dr. Zach Goldsmith speaks to the Maimonides Society about robotic surgery.
For the first time in two years, members of the Maimonides Society of the Jewish Federation of the Lehigh Valley met for a Brunch and Learn event.
Dr. Zach Goldsmith of St. Luke’s Center for Urology and new president of this organization of medical professionals, spoke to the group in the Jewish Community Center on the topic of “Robotic Surgery: Are We Meeting Expectations for Minimally Invasive Surgery?”
The chief of surgery at St. Luke’s Hospital-Anderson Campus began his talk with the origins of the technology. Like many medical advances, robotic surgery began with war, with the US Department of Defense funding research on battlefield applications in the early 1980s. Stanford University picked up the mantel from there.
In the 2000s, private industry took up the effort, building on what the federal government and university researchers had established. The groundbreaking da Vinci robot featured two joysticks for control by the surgeon and a camera view for each eye to provide a three-dimensional image that showed depth.
Robots have been proliferating since then. “When I came here in 2016,” Goldsmith said, “St. Luke’s had one robot in one hospital. It currently has seven robots in four different hospitals.”
His talk threaded through various specialties, describing specific robotic surgeries in each. With photos blown up on the screen behind him, he detailed pelvic, abdominal, lung, head and neck, and orthopedic procedures.
He spoke with special expertise on prostatectomy, removal of the full organ, a procedure he has done robotically numerous times. “With open prostate surgery,” he explained, “much of it was done by feel. To be able now to do this with perfect imaging, perfect magnification, is amazing.”
There are at least a few clear benefits to robotic surgery. One is less blood loss. “I’ve never seen so much blood as a prostatectomy done the oldfashioned way,” said one of the doctors in attendance. There’s often less pain too. And rates of infection are, Goldsmith said, “quite low.”
Amount of time the patient spends in the hospital is shorter. “Decreasing length of stay is a big goal,” said Goldsmith. “Hospitals look at that when considering robotics.”
Of course there are criticisms of robotic surgery to consider. Most important is that there aren’t enough statistics available yet to determine trustable success rates. “There are very, very few trials for robotic surgery compared to manual surgery,” he said.
There’s also the possibility that the high cost of surgical robots — in the neighborhood of $2 million each — could give hospitals the incentive to push robotic surgeries when they may not be the most reliable option. “The best way to recoup that investment is to use the robot more and more.”
Still, robotic surgery is here to stay. Training is critical. Inevitably, perhaps, the conversation turned to video games and the hours of “training” kids often accumulate on them.
“Everyone has learned a lot here today, especially to buy your kids a PlayStation 5,” joked Aaron Gorodzinzky, the Federation’s director of campaign and security planning, who oversees Maimonides.
But Goldsmith, a father of three, got the last laugh: “I’ll tell you we don’t have any video games in our house.”
RABBI ALLEN JUDA
Congregation Brith Sholom Emeritus The choices we make every minute of every day can contribute to making someone’s life a little bit better or worse even without intending to. — Chikamso Efobi
Our lives are filled with choices, large and small. And didn’t many choices become more complicated after COVID-19 became a dark shadow over our lives in 2020? For those who eat out, before COVID one had to choose a restaurant and then a menu offering. Dessert or no dessert? Once COVID hit, eating out at restaurants disappeared from most of our lives. Of course, we still had to decide what to eat for dinner. That daily decision led to choices about how to obtain the ingredients. Should we risk entering the supermarket or do curbside pickup or maybe Instacart?
After the vaccines became available, the debates began about choosing to get them or not. Moderna, Pfizer or Johnson and Johnson? And then came the boosters: 1-2-3.
Battles were fought over masks. Should we each have the choice to wear one in public or not? I wonder if we want to give surgeons that choice in the operating room. The synagogue world is still grappling with masks. Sanctuaries? Yes. Kiddush? No.
But synagogue and religious life has been impacted in far more profound ways. Whether we want to examine the phenomenon or not, the nature of community appears to be changing. Of course, the nature of community has been changing for some time. I remember a former shul-goer who traded in the synagogue community for a Facebook one. And why not? After all, the people in her new community, most of whom she had never met in person, were her “friends.”
I have found something comforting and meaningful in being part of a davening shul community since I was a child. But I must admit, praying on my own at home for over two years was an enlightening experience. After many decades of praying at a communal pace, I could daven as fast or, mostly, as slowly as I wanted. Especially on Shabbas and holidays, I was no longer zipping through the psalms that are an early part of the morning service. “Or Hadash,” Rabbi Reuven Hammer’s commentary on the weekday prayer book, notes, “We are … told of those who would begin each day with the recitation of the entire Book of Psalms. The siddur has adapted this practice by picking psalms and verses of psalms.” Always there are choices. That doesn’t even include the choice of a specific prayer book, which may impact which psalms are included.
And during the pandemic and perhaps beyond, there arose the question of how one “attends” services. Go to an indoor sanctuary masked and socially distant? Go to an outdoor service, with or without masks? How about a Zoom service or streaming? What does it mean to be a part of community? I “participated” in Zoom and streamed funerals and shiva services. Except for immediate family, will family and friends living at a distance ever again drive or fly to a funeral? Can anything virtual replace for the mourners a firm handshake (if you are still shaking hands during the flu season) or a warm embrace?
Are we part of a community when sitting at home in our jammies watching a screen? Does it make a difference if we are watching “our” synagogue’s service or a service in another city, state or even country? I know there are those who find it difficult to move around freely, so attending a service in person is an enormous or impossible challenge. But that is not the reality for most of us. For two years we bemoaned social isolation. Now we don’t want to leave our homes to be part of a shul community?
A younger generation is even having a tough time choosing to be publicly Jewish. After Rosh Hashanah, I listened to a couple of sermons online. They were recommended to me and both happened to be delivered by Reform colleagues. I encourage you go to YouTube and search for Rabbi Angela Buchdal, Central Synagogue, Rosh Hashanah I, 5783 (about 20 minutes), and Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, Stephen Wise Free Synagogue (about 54 minutes — you can split it into multiple viewings). Many college students are confronting campus Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movements and anti-Semitic expressions. There are tough choices to be made.
Robert Frost, wrote the poem “The Road Not Taken.” The last stanza reads:
COVID, Zoom, staying home and the tough decisions we still face
I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.
Adidas breaks ties with Kanye West amid mounting pressure over his anti-Semitic comments
ON VIEW IN THE UPSTAIRS GALLERIES ARTIST TALK ON NOVEMBER 12
w/ member meet and greet
By Philissa Cramer Jewish Telegraphic Agency
The athletic wear company Adidas is ending its relationship with Kanye West, days after the rapper boasted that he could “literally say antisemitic s— and they cannot drop me.”
The brand had faced growing criticism of its continued relationship with West, who is known as Ye, as other brands affiliated with West broke ties with him. Adidas reportedly brings in $2 billion a year through its Yeezy brand, accounting for about 10% of the company’s revenue.
Now, the brand will stop making Yeezy products and stop all payments to West and his companies, Adidas announced in a statement on Tuesday. The company said it expected to lose up to $250 million in revenue in the next three months, in part because of the onset of the holiday season.
“Adidas does not tolerate antisemitism and any other sort of hate speech. Ye’s recent comments and actions have been unacceptable, hateful and dangerous, and they violate the company’s values of diversity and inclusion, mutual respect and fairness,” the company said in the statement. “After a thorough review, the company has taken the decision to terminate the partnership with Ye immediately.”
The decision came shortly after a U.S.-based marketing executive at the German company criticized her employer for not acting in response to the antiSemitism espoused by West, who vowed on social media to “go death con 3 on Jewish people” earlier this month. It was the latest in mounting public pressure on the company, whose founders were Nazis and which produced weapons for the Nazis during World War II.
The brand had announced weeks ago that it was putting its West ties “under review” but had said nothing publicly since. Pressure increased after West seemed to revel in his imperviousness last week on the podcast.
A number of other major brands have cut ties with West since his original posting and in the wake of subsequent tirades against Jews. Twitter and Instagram shut down his accounts. The fashion tastemakers Balenciaga and Vogue have announced they will no longer be working with him. Hollywood talent giant CAA has dropped him, and a planned documentary about him has been scrapped. His ex-wife and the mother of their children, the major influence Kim Kardashian, took to social media to condemn antiSemitism, albeit without naming West,
Neo-Nazi groups used West’s words to go after Jews, unveiling an anti-Semitic billboard in Los Angeles that was condemned by the White House Monday.
Camhi wrote that Adidas had not addressed West’s anti-Semitism internally to employees either.
“We have dropped adidas athletes for using steroids and being difficult to work with but are unwilling to denounce hate speech, the perpetuation of dangerous stereotypes and blatant racism by one of our top brand partners,” she wrote. “We need to do better as a brand. We need to do better for our employees and we need to do better for our communities. Until adidas takes a stand, I will not stand with adidas.”
Camhi, whose LinkedIn account says she has worked at Adidas since June 2019, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Adidas said in its announcement that it expected the decision to result in a short-term loss for the company, which has already been struggling. It also said that it retains ownership over past designs in the Yeezy line and would share more in a call with company stakeholders next month.
Former Adidas CMO Eric Liedtke, left, and Kanye West, right, at Milk Studios in Hollywood, June 28, 2016. (Jonathan Leibson/ Getty Images for ADIDAS)
