Lchaim 0416

Passover MATZAH MADNESS!

WATER INNOVATION

How Israel survived the Mediterranean’s worst drought in 900 years

BUILDING BRIDGES

A Conversation with Nir Boms

KICKIN’ KOSHER

Fear not the Thai Curry

APRIL 2016

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L’CHAIM SAN DIEGO MAGAZINE • APRIL 2016

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DIVORCE-FAMILY LAW Compassionate Yet Aggressive Family Law Experts

“HIRE THEM BEFORE YOUR SPOUSE DOES”

858.720.1496 or 760.729.0941 2755 Jefferson Street, Ste. 200 Carlsbad, CA 92008 • www.frfamilylaw.com MYRA FLEISCHER

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April 2016 • www.lchaimmagazine.com

L’Chaim 12 A Thousand Words How Israel survived theMediterranean’s worst drought in 900 years

Passover 16 Passover Friendly Food How Coca-Cola led an industry Features 20 Was the Last Supper a Seder?

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24 Hi Tech Judaism at Tel Aviv

University

Food 30 Fear Not the Thai Curry

Green Curry with Fish Balls and Eggplant

Features 32 Building Bridges with Nir Boms 36 Cal-Israel Innovation Expo

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38 Camp Mountain Chai’s Dream Makers 42 Stand with Us in San Diego 44 Yale Strom

A Mutli-Talented Mensch

33 Hi Tech Expo

Columns

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My Comic Relief Op-Ed Guest Column Mazel & Mishagoss

COVER PHOTO BY Sam Litvin | Book Signing April 17th at Verbatim Books

PUBLISHERS Diane Benaroya & Laurie Miller EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Alanna Maya CREATIVE DIRECTOR Laurie Miller

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RANDOM RANTS l BY SALOMON MAYA “As a Jew, I feel we owe the world a huge apology for the advent of Matzah.”

my

comic relief Matza... Matzah... Matzo

P

assover. Never has a Jewish holiday been so loathed since Yom Kippur.

Yet the difference between holidays is that Passover likes to torture us slowly for an entire week whereas Yom Kippur packs all the abhorrence into a 24-hour cycle.

Challah is by far one of the best inventions made by Jews, next to the laser (invented by Jewish physicist Theodore Maiman on May 16, 1960) and vaccines for cholera and the bubonic plague. But Passover takes away this wonderful thing for one week and substitutes it with the material inside of every cardboard box, or as it’s called in the

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Torah, matzah. And if someone ever says oh I love matzah you have every right to never ever speak to this person again. Because they don’t truly love matzah, rather, they tolerate it. If they did love it, why don’t they make all their peanut butter and jelly sandwiches out of matzah? Because they don’t want to. Because no one likes eating crumbly shoe leather.

Before I get nasty letters stating I’m bashing Passover as a holiday (which you can always do by emailing my editor at editor@lchaimmagazine.com), I am not. I’m only stating that matzah tastes like what accumulates in the garbage disposal after a couple quick pulses. Nothing more.

I love our stories and history. It truly is what makes us one of the oldest and most culturally beautiful living religions in the world. And I truly hope that my son one day will learn the stories that were taught to me. But I know, as I’ve begun feeding him solid foods now that the moment he has to eat matzah will rival roughly the feelings he had when eating peas for the first time (please see above picture as evidence). I now know that my son, at the tender age of seven months, does not like peas. Which is fine. I, along with my wife, love broccoli.

I hope our genetic material transferred properly and my son will obtain his greens from broccoli.

But I digress … what I’m trying to equate with my ramble on my son liking peas is that there shouldn’t be any mammal alive

who likes matzah. As a Jew, I feel we owe the world a huge apology for the advent of matzah. And yes I know, we were in a hurry in Egypt running away from a crazy Pharaoh, but couldn’t we have packed better? The only thing worse than a week of Passover matzah is the thought of 40 years of matzah.

And I know I might get comments about my spelling of matzah. Is it Matza? Or how about Matzo or for the truly weird, matzus.

Whichever way you like to see it spelled, be sure to dump crazy amounts of maror to make this boat-deck-like bread palatable.

Lastly, the proof might literally be in the pudding. As I’ve attempted to explain myself, rather poorly I might add, matzah is by far one of the worst Jewish inventions ever. I put forth onto the floor for discussion this historical coincidence. At the end of World War II, the National Jewish Welfare Board produced V-shaped matzot signifying the unavoidable end of the war.

It’s not hard for one to ponder that these matzot might’ve fallen into the hands of the Nazi’s. Passover in 1945 fell on April 1st, Germany conceded defeat a mere 5-weeks later? Did these patriotic V-shaped matzot, and all their crumbly tastelessness, lead to the annihilation of the Third Reich? Only God knows.

SALOMON MAYA IS A LOCAL ACTOR AND PLAYWRIGHT. FOLLOW HIM ON TWITTER @SALOMAYA.

JOIN US FOR JCo’S

3RD ANNUAL COMMUNITY SEDER

WE WILL TELL THE STORY OF PASSOVER, AND YOU WILL EXPERIENCE IT AS WELL! Through Storahtelling (acting out historic scenes), Discussion, and Group Activities, we will travel through time & our story. This will be an experience for the entire family.

WHEN? Saturday, April 23rd at 4:30 P.M WHERE? Carlsbad (address will be given with your RSVP) BRING: One (or more) potluck items, a single flower, your Seder plate and kiddush cup.

DRESS: Dress to be comfortable. Children JCo has raised the Bar... are encouraged to dress up as their favorite and Bat MitzvahPrizes experience Passover character. will be given to all • Spiritual and Meaningful Ceremony those in costume.

RAISING

THE BAR!

• Tailored to your and your child’s vision • Memorable and fun!

Space is limited so RSVP now

www.signupgenius.com/go/10c0848a9a823aaf85-passover To find out how you can “raise the bar” Contact Rabbi Gabi at There iscantorgabiarad@gmail.com no charge for Seder!

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OP-ED l BY RON JAMES

op-ed:

soapbox

“Where were the voices of outrage 70 years ago?”

Where were the voices?

W

here Were The Voices?

My dad has been gone since 1996 but I’m reminded frequently of the number indelibly branded on his powerful right arm B2299. It’s when I hear a survivors

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story, wonder how I would have done in the same circumstances or hearing someone saying that it actually never happened.

It’s a reminder that something terribly wrong happened in a terrible place called Auschwitz as well as many other places

where the nazis employed systematic killing machines against 6 million Jews as well as the millions of others who survive, for the horrors.

It’s a reminder that my dad was tasked with a terrible job in a terrible place; so terrible that the nazis apparently vowed to never allow any from that unit to survive..... for the world would never be the same if they knew what they witnessed!

My mom, who I’m blessed to still have with me, was a child in hiding in Poland at the hands of righteous gentiles. Her story is no less horrifying except for the fact that they were experienced and seen from the eyes of a scared little child. Living without food in constant fear was the way she and my grandma remained in a hole under a cow barn in terrible conditions for what was way too long for any of us to imagine.

I guess this is all coming up for me now as I hear the news about a presidential candidate who wants to keep a group of people out of the country for what he believes is the safety & security of the lands inhabitants. And with his statement come the many voices of outrage from all races & religions.

Where were those voices of outrage 70 years ago when my family and all the other Jewish brothers & sisters were being marched to their deaths? Were they less deserving to live their lives the way Hashem wanted?

Where were the voices?

RON JAMES LIVES IN SAN DIEGO WITH HIS WIFE AND SEVEN-YEAR-OLD SON.

HAPPY PASSOVER! From L’Chaim Magazine! www.lchaimmagazine.com WWW.LCHAIMMAGAZINE.COM

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GUEST COLUMN l BY ELISA LURKIS

Elijah’s

“I was happy to witness the two separate parts of my life coming together at last.”

chair

Jewish Connections at a Catholic University

A

s a Jewish person who has worked at the University of San Diego (USD) for over 7 years, I sometimes like to joke that I am the “lone Jew on campus.” USD is a Catholic university and approximately 40% of all USD students are Catholic, as are many of the faculty members and administrators. While there are, of course, a handful of Jewish students, faculty and staff on the campus, we are very much in the minority.

From the time I began working at USD as the Director of Development for the Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies in early 2009, I have lamented that San Diego’s Jewish community was not more involved with campus activities. I felt the same when I moved to USD’s Shiley-Marcos School of Engineering in 2013. While I would occasionally bring a Jewish friend to campus for an event, it was not enough to build much connection to the broader Jewish community.

“Isn’t that a Catholic university?” my Jewish friends would ask, with thinly veiled skepticism. In spite of my positive testimonies, my Jewish friends and contacts seemed uninterested in USD as an institution where they could find a foothold.

That said, I have found USD to be the kindest, most supportive place I have ever

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worked. And with its dedication to issues of social justice and “changemaking” (something akin to tikkun olam), innovation and social entrepreneurship, I was convinced that once Jewish community members learned all that USD has to offer, they would be sold. But the opportunity hadn’t presented itself. Until now.

So when Yoram Dahan, Founder and Executive Director of the Cal-Israel Innovation Expo, reached out to me and asked if the School of Engineering would cosponsor the Cal-Israel Innovation Expo on March 8-9, 2016, I jumped at the chance.

Perhaps this would be our opportunity to broadcast to Jewish communities throughout San Diego and California and Israel, that USD was worth a second look.

And it delivered!

The School of Engineering, with its focus on “revolutionizing engineering education” to produce “changemaking engineers” was a great fit for Israeli and Californian entrepreneurs in the high-tech and renewable energy sectors.

“We were honored to host this premiere event that showcased emerging technologies to power the future and foster global innovation, cross-cultural education, and professional development worldwide,” said Chell Roberts, dean of the Shiley-

Marcos School of Engineering. “At USD, innovation is essential to our success, and the expo supports that connection.”

For me, however, it went beyond the intellectual synergies. I was so happy to witness the two separate parts of my life – my faith community and my place of employment – coming together at last.

(Read more about the Cal-Israel Expo on page 36.)

This comes at a good time, as USD is close to signing an MOU with Technion University in Haifa, to support international student exchanges. For years, USD has ranked between #1 and #3 in the nation for international student programs. However, up until now we have never offered programs in Israel. Hopefully, that will change soon.

Next year, we are hoping for increased student and faculty participation, from the entire campus, beyond the School of Engineering alone. We are already planning the next Expo, scheduled to take place in March 2017.

ELISA LURKIS IS THE DIRECTOR OF DEVELOPMENT AND ALUMNI RELATIONS AT USD’S SHILEY-MARCOS SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING. CONTACT HER AT ELURKIS@SANDIEGO.EDU.

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L’CHAIM l BY ALINA DAIN SHARON | jns.org

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L’CHAIM

A THOUSAND

WORDS HOW ISRAEL SURVIVED THE MEDITERRANEAN’S WORST DROUGHT IN 900 YEARS

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sraeli water experts say that a combination of water from rainfall, recycling of wastewater, desalination of seawater, and a large-scare water conservation campaign has made Israel nearly drought-proof.

That assessment might be more regionally relevant than ever amid a new National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) study, released earlier this month, showing that a drought from 1998-2012 in the eastern Mediterranean was the area’s worst drought in 900 years.

Today, more than half of the water supplied in Israel for all uses is self-generated, says Uri Schor, a spokesperson for the Israeli government’s Water Authority.

“That makes us a country that can pass a [severely dry] year and even a series of drought years without worrying too much,” Schor says.

The Jewish state’s ability to create a sufficient water supply is particularly noteworthy in light of an assessment by Dr. Ben Cook, lead author and climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory at New York’s Columbia University, that “climate change on average will be making this particular region in the world dryer in the coming decades and over the next century.”

“That means we need to be much more careful with how we use and conserve water,” Cook says, citing his familiarity

with Israeli water conservation methods such as desalination.

NASA’s latest research reconstructed drought history in Levant region — encompassing Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and the disputed Palestinian territories — by studying tree rings. Dry years are indicated thin tree rings, while relatively wet years are indicated by thick rings.

Trees, Cook says, tend to “put on one ring of growth every year. We can look at the alternating patterns of wide and narrow rings and reconstruct drought variability and wetness for these previous centuries.

And then we can look at the magnitude of those growths to tell us the magnitude of the drought or the magnitude of the wetness that would have occurred.”

Samples of tree rings collected from the Levant region were converted to an index and used to determine that the drought between 1998 and 2012 was about 20 percent worse than the previously driest period over a 900-year span. This was confirmed by comparing the gathered data with droughts reported in historical documents.

If “you look at the bible,” the Israeli Water Authority’s Schor explained, it is evident that Israel has always had a scarcity of water. But today’s scarcity, which has grown during the past 20-25 years and was especially severe over the past decade, was caused largely by a yearly decrease in

rainfall as well as growths in population and quality of life that led to higher demand for water.

According to Jack Gilron, head of the Department of Desalination and Water Treatment at the Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Be’er Sheva, Israel, when it comes to natural water sources — like the Sea of Galilee, for instance — depletion is measured through red and black lines.

If an aquifer depletes below a red line, Gilron says, “it may cause damage … but it’s damage that’s considered reversible. If you then refill it, you counteract what was done.

If you go below the black line…you will cause irreversible damage to the aquifer.”

The water in the Sea of Galilee — known as the Kinneret in Hebrew — has at times depleted to levels precariously close to these line limits.

Schor likes to compare the scarcity of water in Israel over the past two decades to a bank account. “We reached a certain point that we earned much less than what we spent,” he says.

Gilron explained that the winter of 20078 was especially dry, bringing only about two-thirds of the region’s expected rainfall, leading Israel to ramp up its “large-scale seawater desalination program even more quickly than it had planned.”

Desalination is the process of converting seawater into potable water. Among the WWW.LCHAIMMAGAZINE.COM

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nation’s five desalination plants, the world’s largest seawater desalination plant, Sorek, is located about 9 miles south of Tel Aviv and became operational in October 2013.

It produces about 624,000 cubic meters (roughly 164 million gallons) of potable water a day. The plant was built by IDE Technologies, an Israeli water desalination company named by MIT Technology Review as one of the world’s 50 smartest companies for 2015, and the same company that co-designed the Western Hemisphere’s largest desalination plant, a Californiabased facility that is expected to provide the U.S. state with roughly 200 thousand cubic meters (50 million gallons) of drinking water daily.

The Sorek plant desalinates water using a process known as reverse osmosis, in which pumps create pressure that removes salt from seawater through a semi-permeable membrane. As the water passes across the membrane, only the residual salt brine is left behind. This is then released back into the Mediterranean Sea in a controlled manner.

The sea is large enough to absorb back this salt brine without its overall salt levels being affected. In Israel, reverse osmosis is “definitely the workhorse,” Gilron says.

But desalination has not been Israel’s only method of producing much-needed water.

Schor noted that Israel is a world leader in the recycling of sewage water, treating “more than 86 percent of all of [its] sewage.”

According to a newly released quality of life report for the 34-nation Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the proportion of Israelis not hooked up to wastewater recycling fell from 7.7 percent in 2000 to 2.2 percent in 2014, giving Israel the best percentage in the OECD. Schor added that on the side of water consumption, Israel has been able to “cut down very severely the quantities of water budgeted for agriculture,” in addition to undertaking a large-scale advertising campaign as well as visits to institutions like schools in order to advocate for water 14

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conservation.

Further, along with saving water in agriculture through Israel’s famed drip irrigation technology, the Jewish state has also conserved water in homes with devices reducing the amount of water coming out from taps and showerheads. In such home devices, says Schor, air is mixed with water “in such a manner that you get an impression of a very strong stream of water.

This saves approximately a third of the water that you use.”

Schor says Israel’s water conservation campaign led to an 18-percent reduction in home and city water usage. The Israeli government also stopped subsidizing the cost of water and reduced by 9 percent municipal water loss caused by leaking pipes.

Using these various measures, Israel has been able to supply itself with the 2 billion cubic meters (about 528 billion gallons) of water it requires a year. That includes the approximately 57 million cubic meters (15 billion gallons) of water per year that Israel provides to Palestinians living in the West Bank, which is nearly double the amount that was agreed upon in the Oslo Accords, as well as the 55 million cubic meters (just under 15 billion gallons) that Israel provides annually to Jordan.

Israel also transfers water to Gaza, which is ruled by the Palestinian terror group Hamas, at a price equal to the cost of desalinating water and transporting it. A supply pipeline extending to Israel’s border with Gaza was laid out for this purpose.

“Several years ago, we laid the line near the [Gaza border] fence on purpose in order to give the Palestinians the increment. With the rise of Hamas, contact was cut off, and only recently have conditions become ripe to supply them the water,” Avraham BenYosef, vice president of engineering for the Israeli national water company Mekorot, told Yedioth Ahronoth in June 2015.

In March 2015, Israel announced plans to double the amount of water it delivers to Gaza to 10 million cubic meters (2.6 billion

gallons) per year in an effort to mitigate the major water crisis affecting the Palestinian coastal enclave.

Most recently, in February 2016, the Israeli government signed a major agreement with Jordan and the Palestinian Authority regarding a plan to desalinate and share approximately 120 million cubic meters (about 32 billion gallons) of water from the Red Sea. The leftover salt brine from the desalination process will be transferred to replenish the Dead Sea. A new desalination plant in the Jordanian city of Aqaba will be built for this purpose. The project is expected to cost about $800 million.

Miriam Faigon, director of IDE Technologies’s Solutions Department, told NBC’s Bay Area affiliate station KNTV in September 2015 that when Israeli policymakers decided to increase desalination efforts, “they understood that we cannot depend on the weather. We cannot depend on rain anymore.”

In line with NASA’s new findings, recent climate models from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change at the United Nations predict that by around the year 2030-2050, temperatures in the Middle East and central Asia will increase by 1-2 degrees Celsius, with the higher temperatures likely to cause greater water evaporation.

“We are starting to see these events that push outside the range of natural variations that we would except,” the NASA Goddard Institute’s Cook says Schor says that while Israel currently has the capability to produce additional water that could be exported outside its borders, that is a costly process. For other countries in the Mediterranean region, purchasing and transferring water from Israel is possibly more expensive than selfproducing the water those nations need.

Other countries, argued Schor, “should do exactly what we did [in Israel]. They should recycle sewage, reduce tremendously their water losses, and desalinate seawater.”

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PASSOVER l BY ALINA DAIN SHARON | jns.org

PASSOVERFRIENDLY COMPANIES How Coca-Cola promted the advent of an industry 16

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FAMILY

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n the 1930s, Rabbi Tobias Geffen of Atlanta began to investigate the hidden ingredients inside mass-produced foods and to evaluate whether those ingredients conflict with kosher laws. He then set a precedent by getting The Coca-Cola Company to make a kosher-for-Passover version of its soft drink, convincing the company to substitute the grain alcohol used in the processing of its drink to alcohol derived from molasses.

Geffen’s achievement was a response to the fact that in the 1920s, “Coke became an incredibly popular beverage in America,” and “Jews adopted a custom of making it available to children during the Passover seder in lieu of wine,” historian Roger Horowitz—whose book, Kosher USA: How Coke Became Kosher and Other Tales of Modern Food, will be published

by Columbia University Press this April— says.

This step by Coca-Cola stood out at a time when few mainstream food manufacturers were making kosher-for-Passover products.

“Coke was an enormous consumer product in the 1930s, and jealously guarded its formula,” Horowitz says. Much of the company’s decision, he explains, rested on its confidence in Geffen that he would not reveal the drink’s secret ingredients, and the episode was “an enormous asset in persuading other conventional food firms to secure kosher certification.”

Geffen personally issued a kosher-forPassover certification on Coke, eventually passing the baton to another rabbi.

Meanwhile, the founder of the Orthodox Union (OU) and its kosher-certification labeling, Abraham Goldstein, was another figure dedicated to the science of figuring out what’s inside foods and whether those ingredients are acceptable for Passover as well as for kosher-observant consumption year-round. He was particularly interested in ice cream, surveying its manufacturers to determine what they were putting inside their products and ultimately deciding that Breyers ice cream, for instance, is acceptable to eat during Passover.

But Goldstein was simply reviewing foods as they existed at the time. The fact that Coca-Cola chose to make a distinct version of its drink for Passover, therefore, was a big exception.

Rabbi Moshe Elefant, Chief Operating Officer of the OU’s kosher-certifying arm, says that subsequently, the OU began to certify Coke for Passover around 1989-1990, after the company removed high fructose corn syrup from its Passover drink and replaced it with sugar. These bottles are known today for their distinct yellow caps.

When the OU certifies a product as generally kosher, it is typically sufficient for rabbinical supervisors to make occasional visits to a company to make sure that the product is being produced in accordance with kosher standards. When it comes to Passover, however, making a product that is kosher for the holiday requires full-time rabbinical supervision. One other food that illustrates this situation is quinoa, a type of grain that was only in recent years certified as both kosher and kosher for Passover by the OU. “One of the staples of the kosher diet now is sushi. But there’s a problem with sushi on Passover because sushi is made with rice, and Jews of Ashkenazi descent don’t eat rice on Passover. How are you going to survive eight to nine days without sushi? You make it with quinoa,” Elefant says.

After many public requests for the OU to certify quinoa, rabbis needed to make their decision based on ancient texts and rules that were written in an era when quinoa did not exist.

“After much deliberation and discussion, we determined that quinoa is not part of that legume family. Then we sent a rabbi to the mountains of Peru, where quinoa grows and is packaged,” where he needed to see if “the quinoa is packaged or processed in the same machinery or equipment as non-kosher for Passover products, [which] would for lack of a better word contaminate the quinoa,” Elefant explains.

As a result—and similarly to how kosherfor-Passover Coke is produced—about once

a year, producers of kosher-for-Passover quinoa make a certain amount of quinoa specifically for Passover. It is labeled “OUP,” with full rabbinical supervision of the production process. Then the rabbis go home, and come back later for the next production round.

Today, many food ingredients, as well as the final food product, are often made far away from the grocery shelves, particularly in the Far East, Elefant says. Therefore, the OU has become a highly global operation, with a presence in 80 countries. In addition, “the equipment used to manufacture food is all obviously new equipment that didn’t exist in the time of the Talmud,” he says.

In the current era of mass food production, the OU has needed to find out how to make production equipment kosher without the guidance of original source material with instructions on the issue.

Contemporary rabbis need to be “extremely knowledgeable in understanding the machinery that manufactures food,” and in knowing how to conduct the koshering process without breaking “a piece of equipment that costs millions of dollars,” Elefant says.

One issue that comes up with regard to Passover and food, according to Roger Horowitz, involves oils that may be used during the holiday. For instance, corn oil cannot be used, so rabbis must figure out how to control the oil while it is being shipped in trucks across long distances in order to make sure the oil is not contaminated. All tankers need to be washed and sealed by rabbis before they can be reloaded, and any holding tanks must also be monitored by rabbis. Then, inside the factories, sophisticated control systems are also in place.

“You have to embed kosher requirements into the very food system, and what’s remarkable is how successful Orthodox Jews have been in embedding those requirements in our industrial food system,” Horowitz says.

Elefant cites another example of a product the OU has certified for Passover— WWW.LCHAIMMAGAZINE.COM

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PASSOVER

PHOTO BY MARK H. ANBINDER VIA FLICKR.COM

The cover of Roger Horowitz’s forthcoming book, “Kosher USA: How Coke Became Kosher and Other Tales of Modern Food.” Credit: Columbia University Press.

canned tuna. “Over the years, we have made [specialized Passover] runs of tuna for Chicken of the Sea, Bumblebee, etc.,” he says.

“The tuna fish itself as a fish is inherently kosher for Passover. But all the other ingredients to make the tuna, [like] the vegetable broth that they sometimes put into the tuna … are not necessarily kosher for Passover,” adds Elefant.

In yet another illustration, coffee doesn’t always require an OUP label to be considered as kosher for Passover. The OU also recommends one-ingredient foods that are considered kosher for Passover without requiring the foods to be labeled with an OUP. Decaffeinated coffee, however, can only be consumed on Passover if the decaffeination process does not involve an alcohol made out of grains or corn.

Brands that the OU deems appropriate for Passover include Nescafe’s Taster’s Choice and Folgers.

“We had to review the entire decaffeination process to make sure there’s no issue,” Elefant says, noting that in these cases, the products were deemed appropriate for the Jewish holiday as they are. Yet in the case of Bosco chocolate syrup, which has also been labeled OUP, a 18

L’CHAIM SAN DIEGO MAGAZINE • APRIL 2016

separate version of the syrup needed to be made for Passover.

Statistics compiled by Lubicom Marketing Consulting (an agency working with kosher food producers) for last year’s Kosherfest trade show revealed the production of 600 new products for Passover, and that 40 percent of annual kosher food sales came during the roughly month-long period including and surrounding Passover.

Passover is the “most widely observed holiday on the Jewish calendar,” says Lubicom President Menachem Lubinsky, with an estimated 70 percent of all U.S. Jews attending at least one Passover seder.

Lubinsky added that making special Passover runs of products does not stop at food.

Aluminum foil companies producing kosher-for-Passover foil “have to use cleaning agents that are [suitable] for Passover. They do a special run and they have an OUP on them. The amount of those products that is consumed for Passover is enormous…[and] it’s good business [for the company to produce them].”

On the marketing side of the issue, Lubinsky sees a growth in the advertising of kosher-for-Passover products.

“You see a lot of supermarket ads that

highlight Passover specials. There are also a lot online apps with Passover products. I see technology being used in a big way,” he says.

When a mainstream, non-Jewish company approaches Lubicom with an interest in marketing a special kosher-forPassover version of its product, Lubinsky first determines if the product is unique, and if it is, he suggests that the company “be very user-friendly in teaching consumers how to use the product” through recipes, meal ideas, and tie-ins with other products that are also kosher for Passover.

As for Coca-Cola, when it had removed high fructose corn syrup from its ingredients in 1990, it did so in response to Passover consumers’ demand. But in more recent years, Elefant noted, consumers “are actually trying to stay away from high fructose corn syrup” for health reasons, prompting a growing number of food producers to remove the substance from many products and use natural sugars or fruit sugars as substitutes. This makes such products easier to certify as kosher for Passover.

In the end, Elefant says, “it always boils down to dollars and cents.”

Wishing You a Healthy and Happy Passover!

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An illustration of the Last Supper.

The Last Seder?

Was Jesus’ Last Supper a Passover Seder?

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early every year around the time of the Jewish holiday of Passover and the Christian holiday of Easter, theologians and historians start to ask the same question: Was Jesus’s Last Supper a Passover Seder?

“It is all very mysterious,” says Rabbi Raymond Apple, rabbi emeritus of the Great Synagogue in Sydney, Australia.

Let’s start with the facts: There are four accounts in the New Testament that refer to the Last Supper with any reference to the Passover holiday. Those are Mark 14:12-31, Matthew 26:17-30, Luke 22:1-19, and John 13:1-30. But Mark, Matthew, and Luke are synoptic Gospels, which means they are closely related and best studied together, making the three Gospels—according to Jonathan Klawans, a professor in Boston 20

L’CHAIM SAN DIEGO MAGAZINE • APRIL 2016

University’s Department of Religion—“one testimony, which was then copied twice.”

“Mark…fashioned and inserted a single ‘Passover’ paragraph (14:12-16)…between what we identify as 14:11-17,” explains author Michael J. Cook, a professor of Judeo-Christian Studies at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. “So the entire problem resides with Mark’s text.”

According to Mark’s text, Jesus prepared for the Last Supper on “the first day of Unleavened Bread, when they sacrificed the Passover lamb.”

We know that the Passover lamb was sacrificed on the 14th day of the Hebrew month of Nissan, and consumed by Jewish families either on that night or the onset of the 15th day of Nissan.

Klawans notes that there are those who

can cite no less than 14 parallels between the account described in Mark and the modernday Passover Seder. These include the bread and wine, the hymn or blessings that were recited, and the reclining diners. Jews at their Seders discuss the symbolism of the Passover meal; Jesus at his Last Supper discussed the symbolism of the wine (“This is the blood of my covenant”) and the bread (“Take, eat; this is my body”).

Nonetheless, scholars Klawans, Apple, and Cook all do not believe that Jesus’s Last Supper was the Passover Seder, for several reasons.

For starters, the parallels that can be drawn seem to be those that are too general, rather than decisive. It would not be uncanny for Jesus to eat a meal with his disciples in Jerusalem. During that meal,

VICENTE JUAN MASIP VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

PASSOVER l BY MAAYAN JAFFE-HOFFMAN | jns.org

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they would have reclined, broken bread, drank wine, and possibly even sang a hymn.

“Such behavior may have been characteristic of the Passover meal, but it is equally characteristic of practically any Jewish meal [at the time],” says Klawans.

Some key Passover elements are missing from the Last Supper: the Passover lamb, references to matzah (unleavened bread), the bitter herbs, charoset, the four cups of wine, the recitation of the four questions, and the narrative retelling of the Passover story.

Moreover, the parallels drawn between the Last Supper and the Passover Seder ritual we celebrate today assume that the Seder as we know it was celebrated in Jesus’s day. But this was not the case. Nearly all scholars agree that the modern Passover Haggadah and the rabbinic accounts of Passover traditions all emanate from after the destruction of the first Jewish Temple in the year 70 C.E. The Gospels date Jesus’s ministry from around 26 C.E. to early 37 C.E., with Jesus’s death coming between 30 and 33 C.E. “At that time, the core element of the Passover observance had been Jerusalem’s sacrificial cult, from 621 B.C.E. up until 70 C.E.,” says Cook. “Jewish families brought lambs for sacrifice on the Temple altar as biblically prescribed.…For the ceremony, the kohanim (Jewish priests) conducted the sacrificial rite. Then families retrieved and consumed their meat as part of their Passover meal, which also included unleavened bread and bitter herbs. The Passover meals Jesus experienced in his lifetime would have had to be along these Temple-centered lines.”

Klawans says many people assume that Jesus ate matzah at his Last Supper because Catholics eat wafers as their Eucharist bread.

The custom of using wafers, however, does not date back as far as one might think, but rather only to Medieval times. The oldest customs in Orthodox Christian churches involve bread, and the New Testament describes bread—not unleavened bread.

“There is no reason to think the bread was matzah unless that was specified,” Klawans says.

Additionally, Klawans says it is impractical for Jesus’s crucifixion to have

taken place on Passover, as the Sanhedrin (Jewish High Court of 70 elders) would not have worked on the Yom Tov holiday, which was already one of the Israelites’ most important pilgrimage festivals.

“It is possible the priests broke the rules?

Yes. We don’t really know and maybe they felt this was really important,” says Klawans. “But it is not just that Mark depicts the priests doing these things.…The Gospel doesn’t even seem to realize that it is imagining the priests violating their own rules.…If this really went back that far, to the early stages of Christianity, people would have cried foul, ‘How can the priests do that?’”

In the Gospel of John, it is understood that the Last Supper was not a Passover Seder, though John does draw a parallel between Jesus and the Passover sacrifice.

John, likely for theological motivations, claims Jesus was executed on the day of the preparation of the Passover sacrifice. Jesus, according to John’s theology, was sacrificed like the lamb—and his death heralds a new, spiritual redemption, just as the Passover offerings recall an older, physical redemption.

Why would ancient Christians have wanted to draw parallels between Passover and Jesus’ Last Supper? In a 2014 article for Biblical Archaeology Review, Klawans cites three ideas. One is that within a few years after Jesus’s death, Christian communities—then largely made up of converted Jews—began to ask when, how, and even whether they should celebrate or commemorate Passover. Encouraging Christians to celebrate Easter on Passover might have made sense to emphasize that Jesus celebrated Passover with his disciples before he died.

Another reason, proposed by New Testament scholar Karl Georg Kuhn, is the opposite: In order to encourage Christians not to celebrate Passover. Jesus says he has eaten the last paschal lamb and drank the last cup of wine until his second coming, “until the kingdom of God comes” (Mark 14:25).

Lastly, perhaps it is because Jewish Christians who were attempting to maintain the Jewish character of early Easter celebrations had an easier time calling the

Last Supper a Passover meal.

Apple believes it is a lot less complicated.

He purports that the Gospels were simply adding “a little bit of color” and some emotion to their stories, as a good writer would do, by referencing the time of year.

Further, Apple, like Klawans, points out that one must separate between history and theology.

“We who are looking at the past have to recognize that that we are doing history, understanding the past, while our sources are doing theology, belief,” says Klawans.

Apple notes that today, most Christians don’t focus on this question anymore, while Jews continue to find it fascinating for antiquarian reasons.

Demonstrating the device of the Passover Seder has furthered Jewish-Christian dialogue, according to Cook, “making what used to be the most dangerous time of year for Jews now the best.”

“In recent times, Jews welcomed an astonishing pivot when Christians began to deem Seders splendid vehicles for experiencing a taste of what Jesus’s Jewish life has been genuinely all about,” writes Cook in an article published by ReformJudaism.org. “Responding in kind, Jews were now thrilled to invite Christians to local synagogues or Jewish homes to experience Seders themselves.”

On the other hand, he says, Christians who have co-opted the Seder for church programming are trespassing on Jewish prerogatives, and have somewhat reverse this positive trend, according to Cook. In his ReformJudaism.org article, he writes that perhaps “the pendulum swung too far.” He notes that some Christians will today photocopy Passover haggadot and repackage them with insertions of a Christological nature, such as assertions that death of the firstborn foreshadowed Jesus’s death, the lamb’s blood on the doorpost anticipated Jesus’s blood on the cross, and that the parting of the Red Sea heralded the sacrament of baptism.

Cook concludes, “Jesus never practiced the kind of Passover meal that many churches stage today to reenact the last supper. Nor could this meal have been a Seder.”

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PHOTO COURTESY AMERICAN FRIENDS OF TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY

PASSOVER l BY DEBORAH FINEBLUM l jns.org

Tel Aviv University’s robotic locust.

Hi-Tech Judaism

The lowdown on high-jumping robotics locusts

T

his is not your bible’s eighth plague.

Passover story, welcome to the 21st century — and meet the robotic locusts.

Exodus 10:13-15 states, “So Moses stretched out his staff over Egypt, and the Lord made an east wind blow across the land all that day and all that night. By morning the wind had brought the locusts; they invaded all Egypt and settled down in

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L’CHAIM SAN DIEGO MAGAZINE • APRIL 2016

every area of the country in great numbers.

Never before had there been such a plague of locusts, nor will there ever be again. They covered all the ground until it was black.

They devoured all that was left after the hail — everything growing in the fields and the fruit on the trees. Nothing green remained on tree or plant in all the land of Egypt.”

Imagine Moses’s surprise if he knew that generations later, his descendants would

invent a small machine that, in nearly every detail, is a dead ringer for the kind of locust that devoured everything left standing in Egypt after the hail (seventh plague of 10) had done its damage.

From conception to birth, the new robot — announced in January — was a collaborative affair. Prof. Amir Ayali of the Department of Zoology at Tel Aviv University’s (TAU) Faculty of Life Sciences teamed up to create

PASSOVER

it with Dr. Gabor Kosa of TAU’s Faculty of Engineering and Dr. Uri Ben-Hanan of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at ORT Braude College in Karmiel, Israel.

The body of the bio-inspired robot, nicknamed “TAUB” (for Tel Aviv University and Ort Braude College) was produced by a 3D printer using the same plastic Legos are made of. Its legs are fashioned of carbon rods, its springs of steel wire.

A single lithium battery can power up to 1,000 jumps of more than 11 feet (unlike drones, they say, which have limited time in the air). And with its energy efficiency, it can reach up to 1,000 jumps with only one battery loading. Remarkably despite its power, TAUB weighs less than an ounce and measures a mere four inches long. It is also easy and cheap to produce, projected to cost around $100.

But the robotic locust is not a parlor trick.

TAUB is designed to play an important role in everything from surveillance to entering dangerous places humans should avoid, such as toxic oil spills.

No one should be surprised that this puny-but-powerful new robot is from Israel. This tiny Mideast country with the highest per-capita rate of medical patents in the world is the source of countless lifechanging inventions, including much our cell phone technology, Intel processors, USB flash drivers, electric car and firewall technologies, drip irrigation, the pill video camera, community-based navigation (Waze), and the lifesaving Iron Dome missile defense system.

Indeed, technology — regardless of its origins — continues to enhance not only security and the quality of life around the world, but Jewish practice as well. Consider Shabbat elevators, Shabbat wheelchairs, Shabbat ovens, and even DNA testing, the latter of which has interesting things to add to the discussion of who is a Jew, tracing the regional roots of a Jewish family, and determining which genetic diseases pose a risk to a Jewish couple’s offspring. Not to mention the elephant in the room: the Internet, which has spawned such gamechangers as online matchmaking services as well as long-distance Jewish learning and High Holiday services.

“Technology has virtually erased the

borders that separate us,” says Rabbi Jason Miller, owner of Access Computer Technology in Detroit and a popular blogger on the convergence of technology and Judaism. “Now you can live anywhere and order matzo on Amazon.com, Skype into your nephew’s bris in Brooklyn from your living room in Iowa, and discover new Passover recipes and songs from Jewish communities thousands of miles away.”

Rabbi David Aaron, dean of Isralight — a provider of “innovative educational solutions that empower Jews to experience the relevance, wisdom, and joy of Jewish living” — agrees that “technology is taking us more and more beyond the limitations of time and space, which divides us. It allows us to connect in amazing ways.”

In fact, like countless other contemporary commentators, Aaron and his colleagues greatly extend Isralight’s reach to the thousands who regularly visit its website or receive its weekly “Sparks” or “Small Tastings” email distributions. The emails carry words and ideas that travel vast distances from Isralight’s Jerusalem headquarters. Yet the rabbi warns that we should be cautious about the convenience of the Internet.

“The technical connection could become a substitute for real relationship,” he says.

Miller also acknowledges the dangers of technical connecting, chief among them isolation.

“Nothing is perfect,” he says. “[The ability to communicate virtually] is maybe 92-percent positive, but there is a dark side when someone only connects when he’s on his computer sitting in his basement, because there is something powerful and very Jewish about the concept of a minyan, of physically being together.”

In her 2015 book, “Digital Judaism: Jewish Negotiations with Digital Media and Culture,” Heidi Campbell takes an analytical view of the impact technology has on Jewish life.

“People think that religious people reject technology but we found otherwise,” she writes. “As each monotheistic religion goes through its own negotiation between religious law and tradition and modernity, each one decides what is comfortable to its particular culture.”

An example: Jews who needed to ride up many floors invented the “Shabbat elevator,” which automatically stops on each floor, to resolve the tension between law and necessity. What’s unique about Jewish life in modern times, Campbell argues, is the emerging technology Jews tend to adopt.

“These are mostly those [technologies] that embrace and protect life,” she notes. Included in this category are advances such as artificial insemination, which was rejected by many forms of Christianity. Though some haredi Jews eschew computers, most segments of the Jewish world have employed pioneering techniques in spreading Jewish learning through the Web, an approach Campbell calls “innovative and embracing.”

And many a creative compromise has been struck, she adds.

“Rabbis who understood how important cell phones are these days worked with the cell phone companies to restrict access, creating together the technology within tradition now known as the kosher phone,” writes Campbell.

The tech revolution — robotic locusts included — shows no sign of relinquishing its hold on Jewish life. Next up, Miller predicts, is virtual and augmented reality.

This means that very soon, when Jewish law confines someone to their own home while they recite the kaddish prayer during shiva (the first week of mourning for an immediate family member), that person will be able to feel as if he or she is standing in the middle of the brick-and-mortar minyan a few miles away, seeing 360 degrees all around to take in everyone and everything there.

But is that mourner, while observing virtually, counted as part of the minyan?

“We may need to take another look at the halacha (Jewish law),” says Miller.

“Judaism has always been a fluid religion that grows with the times. It’s going to be very interesting.”

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PASSOVER l BY JUDY LASH BALINT l jns.org

MATZAH MANIA!

Who knew that mixing flour and water could be so nuanced?

H

ow hard can making matzah be?

Mix flour and water, and bake.

Actually, there are various ways that one can go about producing matzah— and the results are all a little different.

When you’re standing in the supermarket just before the holiday trying to choose matzah, it might help to know what you are looking at. It’s not just the orange box versus the blue box, or even hand-made versus machine-made. According to leading kashrut supervisors at the Star-K and Orthodox Union (OU) kosher-certification providers, there can be differences between the flour, the baking process, and even the time it takes for the matzah to be produced.

THE FLOUR

Rabbi David Stein, head of the Star-K in 26

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Israel, says the differences between matzah start even before the wheat is harvested.

There are three types of flour: shmurah mi’sh’as k’tzirah (made from grains that have been supervised from the time of their harvesting until the actual baking of the matzah), shmurah mi’sh’as techina (made from wheat guarded from the time it is milled into flour), and shmurah mi’sh’as lisha (watched from the time the flour is mixed with water).

In all three cases, the “watching” aspect (“shmurah” in Hebrew) is meant to ensure that the wheat does not get wet and transform into chametz (a leavened product). The longer the grains are watched, the more kosher — and generally, the more expensive— the matzah will be.

HAND VS. MACHINE

The most obvious difference between types of matzah is how the matzah is produced: hand and machine are the two most common types. Rabbi Moshe Elefant, chief operation officer of the OU’s kashrut department, says hand-made matzah precisely reflects that description.

“This is the way it was always done before the advancement of machinery, and the way it is still done in many communities,” Elefant says.

The reason that many people still opt for hand matzah is for the intention behind the process, explains Elefant. Not only is it a Torah commandment to eat matzah on Passover, but according to some opinions, the Torah requires us to perform the act of making matzah “l’shmah,” for the sake of

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Finally, there are those who hold that the matzah eaten at the seder must be made in the afternoon on the same day Passover starts. The holiday begins on the 14th day of the Hebrew month of Nissan, when the Passover sacrifice was brought to the Jewish Temple. The matzah being baked that afternoon models the time of the sacrifice.

Such an enterprise requires great care.

“People who do this will start at chatzot (mid-day),” says Stein, who does this himself in his synagogue in Rehovot, Israel.

ALTERNATIVES

the mitzvah.

“Many people prefer hand matzah for the seder because the baker has to have that intent of making matzah and a machine does not have the ability to have intent,” says Elefant.

Yet making matzah is an inexact science, Stein says, explaining that not all machine matzah or all hand matzah is made the same. “If you don’t know where you are getting your hand matzah, it is better to get machine matzah,” he says.

There are three types of machine matzah as far as the level of kashrut is concerned, but much more variation in hand matzah practices. Stein says the Jewish sages teach that it takes at least 18 minutes for matzah dough to become flour. The kashrut level of matzah changes depending on how careful the factory is about these 18 minutes.

In the most lenient factories — the socalled “regular” machine matzah factories — the matzah-making machine isn’t cleaned almost all day long.

“Some regular factories will have someone standing there with a vacuum cleaner that will clean the dough as it falls off,” says Stein. “Some don’t, and the machine goes straight through the cycles without cleaning. Really, anything that falls would be botul (‘insignificant’ in Jewish law), but this is not the best situation.”

The next level of machine matzah is 18-minute matzah. This is matzah produced in a factory where the machinery is designed to be dismantled and thoroughly cleaned every 18 minutes.

In either case, there is always a team of dough kneaders who ensure the dough not being fired is constantly needed; as long as the dough is being kneaded, it will never become chametz.

A final and strictest level is matzah “chabura.” According to Stein, in this situation, all dough must make it into the oven within 18 minutes, whether or not it’s being kneaded. After 18 minutes, the machinery and all of the tools, bowls, and other materials are thoroughly cleaned.

“These people make sure there is no chametz left over,” says Stein. “The price of this level — and each different level — is significantly different.”

Today, most machine matzah consumed around the world is imported from Israel, where there are dozens of matzah factories.

Only one machine matzah factory—the facility of Manischewitz—exists in the United States, according to the OU. NON-TRADITIONAL TRADITIONS

There are some smaller communities, especially variant sects of Hasidim, that add extra levels of stringency to their matzah baking practices. For example, according to Stein, there are those who mill their matzah by hand.

“This is not a very popular chumra (stringency),” says Stein, noting that today this is mostly practiced by the Sanzer Hasidim of Kiryat Sanz, in the Israeli city of Netanya.

Another stringency is “kefirah shel yad,” hand-reaped matzah.

Today, there is a growing community of gluten-free individuals who cannot eat matzah made of wheat flour and water. For those people, oat matzah is produced. Stein says he knows of no hand-made oat matzah factories, but that the product is becoming plentiful on the grocery store shelves.

“It is very difficult to eat oat matzah if something isn’t done to take the bitterness out,” says Stein. “The oat matzah is very expensive.”

Sephardim eat a softer version of Ashkenazi matzah. There is “nothing theoretically wrong with this,” says Stein.

“Ashkenazim don’t eat it because we are afraid. The Ashkenazi minhag (custom) is to eat only matzah that is crisp and thin,” he says.

Egg matzah — which is no longer made with eggs, but rather with apple juice or grape juice, according to Elefant — is another type of matzah that Sephardim love and Ashkenazim should stay away from, unless there are extenuating circumstances.

“The halacha (Jewish law) says that other liquids mixed with chametz make the flour rise quicker,” says Elefant. “Avoid it, if you don’t have to have it.” The same goes for chocolate-covered matzah.

“On Pesach, we try to avoid foods that are chametz or can become chametz with one exception: matzah,” Elefant says with a chuckle.

He continues, “Pesach is a holiday of customs and traditions. Each family and community has its own traditions that are passed down from generation to generation.

One thing remains consistent: matzah. The matzah we eat is forever.”

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KICKIN’ KOSHER l BY MICHAEL GARDINER

Fear Not the Thai Curry GREEN CURRY WITH FISH BALLS AND EGGPLANT

I

like to think of myself as fearless in the kitchen. It’s not true though. Not, at least, when it comes to Thai curries. Oh, I’d made them before. I’d gone to the Thai aisle in the Asian markets and picked out a pre-made rainbow (red, yellow, green, etc.) curry paste. The results were acceptable— recognizable as Thai curry—but definitely not great. The curry was spicy, yes, but salty and neither bright nor round. There had to be a better way.

The shortcut, it occurred to me, might 30

L’CHAIM SAN DIEGO MAGAZINE • APRIL 2016

have been the problem. Sure, that long list of ingredients needed to make a curry paste seemed intimidating, but it was more of a shopping issue than one of cooking. Other than toasting the spices it really was just a matter of putting all of the ingredients in a food processor. How difficult could that be?

The answer: not very.

There was, however, another problem: fish sauce. Because fish sauce is primarily fermented anchovies there ought to be certified kosher fish sauce products.

Unfortunately, I have found no such product available in the United States (I’ve caught wind of a UK product looking for an American distributor). My choices seemed to be: (1) use kosher salt or soy sauce as a clearly inferior substitute or (2) develop a concoction that would mimic the funky flavor profile of fish sauce. I went with the later approach; breaking anchovies down in a slow steep, then adding garlic, dry mustard soy sauceand Worcestershire sauce before straining the final product.

KICKIN’ KOSHER

While it may not work as well in the context of a recipe in which fish sauce is a more prominent ingredient, it works perfectly well in this curry.

For the fish balls I visited Catalina Offshore Products (www.catalinaop.com) for some monchong, a delicious deep sea pomfrot from Hawaii. If monchong isn’t available, mahi mahi, ono or opa make excellent alternatives. Get whatever is best and freshest. Making the fish balls was easier than the curry paste: everything into the food processor. If you can make a hamburger you can make a fish ball.

The resulting dish is a much brighter, less saline and far more subtle and wellrounded Thai curry than commercial pastes produce. And, remarkably, it was not much more difficult than using those paste. It was enough to make a guy fearless in the kitchen.

GREEN CURRY WITH FISH BALLS AND EGGPLANT Serves 4-6

INGREDIENTS: FOR THE GREEN CURRY PASTE

2 teaspoons coriander seeds 1 teaspoon yellow mustard seeds 1 teaspoon cumin seeds 1 teaspoon anise seeds 1 teaspoon black peppercorns 10 serrano chiles, chopped 6 garlic cloves 1 red onion, roughly chopped 1 inch piece of galangal, sliced (ginger can substitute in a pinch) 1 teaspoon chopped kaffir lime leaf 1 teaspoon grated lime zest 2 lemongrass stalks, white part only trimmed and thinly sliced 1 teaspoon kosher salt

FOR THE FISH BALLS

½ lb. skinless, boneless filet of monchong (or mahi mahi, ono, opah, halibut or sea bass), cut into ½ inch pieces 1 teaspoon kosher salt, plus more to taste 4 teaspoons cornstarch ½ teaspoon brown sugar ⅛ teaspoon ground white pepper

FOR THE GREEN CURRY

½ cup coconut cream 1½ cups coconut milk 4 small Thai eggplants, quartered (or 1 small Japanese eggplant, cut into 1½” pieces) 1 tablespoon Kosher Fish Sauce (recipe below), strained 1 tablespoon grated brown sugar 12 fresh Kaffir lime leaves cut in thirds 3–4 fresh Thai chiles, stemmed and halved (preferably red or orange) ½ cup packed Holy basil leaves (western basil will do as a substitute) 1) MAKE THE GREEN CURRY PASTE.

Heat the coriander, mustard, cumin and anise seeds in a sauté pan over high heat until they just begin to pop. Remove the pan from the heat immediately and transfer the seeds to a spice grander, adding in the peppercorns. Pulse until finely ground.

Transfer the ground spices along with the rest of the curry paste ingredients (except the coconut milk) to the bowl of a food processor and pulse until roughly chopped.

Add in the coconut milk and process until smooth.

2) MAKE THE FISH BALLS.

Combine the fish and kosher salt in a food processor fitted with the “S” blade and pulse to combine. With the motor running, slowly add 2 tablespoons of water and process into a smooth paste. Add cornstarch, brown sugar, and white pepper; pulse until combined. Transfer the paste to a bowl and refrigerate for 30 minutes.

3) COOK THE FISH BALLS.

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil over high heat. Using wet hands, roll the fish mixture into 16 balls, each about 1 inch thick. Cook until tender for a total of about 6–7 minutes. Beginning after the first minute, occasionally nudge the balls with a slotted spoon. When the balls are cooked through transfer them to a plate (using the same slotted spoon) and allow them to cool completely.

4) MAKE THE CURRY.

Heat coconut cream in a large wok or sauce pan over medium heat. Continue to cook the coconut cream, stirring occasionally, until the oil separates, about 8–10 minutes. Add

½ cup of the curry paste (reserving the rest) to the coconut cream and cook, stirring, until fragrant and slightly browned, about 4 minutes. Add the coconut milk and 1 cup water and bring to a boil. Add the fish balls and eggplant, reducing the heat to medium-low. Cook the curry, stirring occasionally, until the eggplant is tender, about 20 minutes. Stir in fish sauce, brown sugar, lime leaves, and chilis. Remove from heat and stir in basil.

5) PLATE THE DISH.

Ladle the curry onto the plate with cooked jasmine rice on the side.

KOSHER FISH SAUCE

Kosher Fish Sauce Ingredients: 1 tin anchovies in oil 2 tablespoons olive oil 1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil 1/2 teaspoon dry mustard 3 tablespoons soy sauce ½ teaspoon Worcestershire sauce 1 clove garlic, crushed 1) STEEP THE ANCHOVIES.

Warm the oils gently in a small saucepan over low heat. Add the anchovies and let them simmer until they break down naturally, about 15 minutes. It is acceptable – but not desirable – to break up the anchovies manually, with the tines of a fork.

When they are nearly fully broken down remove the anchovies from the heat and let the oil cool fully.

2) COMBINE THE REMAINING INGREDIENTS.

When the anchovies and oil are fully cooled, whisk in the powdered mustard.

When the mustard and the anchovy oil are fully combined, add the soy sauce and Worcestershire sauces and whisk to combine.

3) BLEND THE SAUCE.

Pour the sauce into the bowl of a high speed blender and blend to fully combine.

Start the blender on the lowest setting and gradually turn up to high. Depending on how you plan to use the sauce either strain the sauce or not.

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FEATURE STORY l BY SHARON RAPOPORT

BUILDING BRIDGES IN AN INSANE WORLD A CONVERSATION WITH NIR BOMS

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FEATURE STORY

I

t was a cold November night and the Publisher for L’CHAIM and I met with Dr. Nir Boms at The French Gourmet in Pacific Beach. It had been a little under a month since the French terror attacks, and the after the non-stop media coverage the world seemed to have turned sour.

Newscasters recommended that people watch out for stray packages in malls on Black Friday. Nations were reconsidering allowing entry of countless Syrian refugees, and social media was abuzz with satirical memes depicting every Muslim as a potential suicide bomber.

Yet here was this man, whom we knew little about, referencing metaphorical bridges building toward our Middle Eastern brothers and sisters. About tolerance, and assisting Syrian refugees … ideas which usually make sense, but in the wake of another radical Islamic terror attack, seemed awkward at best.

To better understand how we arrived at this moment, sipping coffee at a café in PB discussing the Middle East, we should rewind the story a bit. Yaron Lief, a friend of L’CHAIM, had requested we set up this interview. With full transparency, we knew little about Boms, truly not many people did.

Lief had gone on to state that there might be a lot of information that Boms just couldn’t or wouldn’t share due to confidentiality and possibly even national security. Honestly there was something exciting and hushhush about this interview, reminding me of a good James Bond movie. After assuring all parties that we just pursued the truth and whatever information could be given to us in these turbulent times, Boms gracefully accepted our invitation, even though he was clearly not a fan of the media.

Upon sitting with Boms I knew immediately he was a compelling speaker who had given conferences around the world, to be honest I was impressed yet a tad intimidated. In the hour we shared, drinking coffee at the busy restaurant, he kept us enthralled. The Israeli-born Boms went to school at the University of Maryland. During that time, he worked at the Israeli embassy in Washington, where WWW.LCHAIMMAGAZINE.COM

33

FEATURE STORY East things get complicated fast, and the Arab Spring quickly turned into an Iranian Winter. I discovered that dissidents could not bring freedom overnight across the ocean, just as the Internet by itself is not magic. It can serve the dissidents just as much as it can serve ISIS or Al Qaeda.

destroy a hundred bridges. It´s like when the fool of the village throws a stone into a lake, and a thousand wise men cannot get it out. You can´t blame Europe for now saying: We have to think differently now; we have to consider our security.

Should European countries should change their policies towards Syrian refugees?

N.B.: The main challenge here is not about absorbing more or no. Europeans will soon have more than a million new refugees in their midst. The big issue is what kind of communities are they going to create, who is going to influence them, and will each country be able to empower the right leaders? Are those leaders going seek integration? Or are they raising another generation prone to hate and terror?

L’CHAIM:

L’CHAIM: Why do you do this?

N.B.: Well, number one, I do it because

he met many people from the Middle East.

“I had some experiences where many a person from Syria wouldn’t shake my hand [knowing I was from Israel],” he said.

But other Syrians did, and were interested in hearing his perspective and finding out mutual ground. Eventually, some of those Syrian, Iranian and Egyptian expatriates became his friends, and shared dramatic stories from their home countries. Boms collected and wrote around 150 testimonies of people whose voices were silenced for being dissidents, who were forced to flee, imprisoned or killed for wanting change, democracy and freedom.

A short time after September 11, Boms helped create the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), a Washington thinktank that addressed two urgent questions: What are we fighting against and what are we fighting for?

L’CHAIM MAGAZINE: So, what are we fighting against?

NIR BOMS: Well, that’s something that has been—unfortunately—on our psyche since 9/11 and now again, and that is the challenge of Terrorism and radical Islam.

L’CHAIM: And, what are we fighting for?

N.B.: Democracy, freedom, of human

rights and the long-term antidote for radicalization, which should create a more tolerant world.

LCHAIM: What is the role of the expatriates

in all of this?

N.B.: When I was writing their stories, I

realized they were a part of something larger. So I made it my task to study the influence of expatriate communities in politics, and to understand how those moderate voices could foster change in the Middle East. The influence of expatriate lobbies has certainly helped bring change in other places. But of course, in the Middle

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it is interesting. And also, because of the realization, once you meet some of these people, that perhaps there is a way to build a bridge. Broadly speaking, the Middle East is a lot of insanity, but this insanity has to do with the perceptions we have of others. We see people through the prism of ideological convention, of religious convention, of education. Those ideas have become a part of the DNA of a large chunk of the Middle East population. But when you are able to break through those, you can start doing something more constructive”.

L’CHAIM: Can you be optimistic, with the changes occurring in the Middle East, and the rise of ISIS? N.B.: I am Israeli: my national anthem is hope. If we were not able to have hope, then what are we left with? Hope is a state of mind. I´m not arguing things are getting better, but there are some points of light.

The millions who marched in the Arab Spring, people from Egypt, Lebanon and Syria are not dead. Lots of them are refugees, but that spirit is alive. Our challenge is to figure out how to help these moderate groups. There are no magic bullets.

L’CHAIM: Is that the official position of

Israel?

NB: No, this is my position as an academic.

Official positions have to do with safety.

Israel cannot allow this war to be a cover for Hezbola to get weapons, and we don´t want to get the war to get close to our borders.

It´s a tough balance: protecting our security while keeping up the humanitarian aid. But we have to help Syrian refugees. First and foremost, because it´s the right thing to do.

L’CHAIM: Do you believe currently things in the Middle East may be moving backwards instead of forward?

N.B.: If you ask Muslims in the Middle East what are they most afraid of, the vast majority will say: the radicalization of the Islamic State. One guy from ISIS can

Time had flown by and soon we had realized we had been sitting at our table for hours. Our server, Christian, came up to us, signaling our empty coffee mugs and said: “Guys, are you having anything else?

We need to pay the rent,” a lighthearted joke regarding our long stay at the busy restaurant.

After our meeting with Dr. Boms, I left with the feeling of having achieved a new understanding, however frail that understanding could be. I learned that bridges could be built, perceptions could be altered… the world, after all, was not all sour as the media had drawn it to be postParis.

A couple of weeks later, the ISIS inspired shootings at San Bernardino happened, then the attack on Brussels…proving once again how frail the world truly is.

Dr. Boms is a research fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University and at the International Center for Counter Terrorism in Hertzliya. He is a member of the board of the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in Schools and the Co-Founder of CyberDissidents.org, a network of bloggers from the Middle East that focuses on freedom of expression in the region. Prior to his return to Israel in 2004, he served as the Vice President of the Washington based Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD).

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35

FEATURE STORY l BY SHARON RAPOPORT

PHOTO BY ALON DAVID PHOTOGRAPHY

Yoram, Melissa, Elisa, Dot and Chell at a private reception for Cal-Israel Innovation Expo

TWO DAYS OF BRILLIANCY

The Cal-Israel Innovation Expo at USD

T

he first Cal-Israel Innovation Expo was the place to be in for anyone interested in cutting edge technology, startups and inventions, and certainly, for anyone who cares about the exciting economic and technological synergies between California and Israel. Everyone in San Diego seemed to be there, from Mayor Kevin Faulconer to Mr. Gary Jacobs, founder of Jacobs Investment Company LLC., and the environment was abuzz with the exciting air of innovation and learning.

“We share so many opportunities,” said Mayor Faulconer, at the inaugural address, “we share so many technologies, as we are moving forward on a lot of things in cyber-security, wireless technologies, desalinization, a lot cross-synergies in terms of technologies that are helping in Israel and helping here as well”.

The event took place on March 8 and 9 at USD and was hosted by the Shiley-Marcos School of Engineering. The Expo featured the latest and greatest products and services from more than three-dozen technology companies based in Israel and California.

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Here is a sampling of some of the most exciting technologies seen on the show: THE DRONE OF THE FUTURE: TOP GAN

Drones are a popular favorite in every tech expo, but Top Gan´s drones are something else.

The advanced drone technology includes thermal imaging, LIDAR sensors, precise 3D mapping, and the capacity to navigate large expansions of any terrain. Their ability to collect data for commercial construction sites, natural resources, environmental studies, and infrastructure and disaster recovery is unparalleled.

TopGan Drones are made and manufactured in the U.S.A. MEMORY LANE: SAFEBEYOND AND KEEPY

Two exhibitors in the show had technologies geared toward preserving memories, once again disproving the notion that technology makes us less human. If anything, these startups aim at keeping our humanity alive, even after we are grown – or gone.

SafeBeyond has been described by The

New York Times as “Dropbox for the hereafter.” SafeBeyond allows you to leave farewell messages on social media, “location messages,” which your heirs can access once they reach a specified geographical location, say Jerusalem or New York City, and much more.

Keepy is an app that allows you to organize, save, privately share, enrich, and treasure your kids’ memories as they grow.

This is a dream come true for anyone who has ever agonized about throwing away a toddlers piece of art. You can keep artwork, schoolwork, an award, or a photo digitally, and look back on them without sacrificing precious storage space.

YOUR NEW FASHION STATEMENT: HEALTHWATCH

A mannequin wearing a vest with sensors drew a lot of attention. It was presented

by HealthWatch, a pioneer in harnessing textile technology to produce fashionable, smart-digital garments with interwoven sensors unobtrusively measuring vital signs of hospital-grade quality. A monitor and control device attached to the garment allows users to get personals alerts and 24/7 remote monitoring from medical experts without affecting their lifestyle. This technology is a potential lifesaver.

Also seen at the expo were energy and water conservation, agribusiness, computer, mobile and cyber technologies.

The seminars boasted a stellar lineup of speakers, including Mr. Gary Jacobs, who talked about the business incubator NGT, or Next Generation Technology, which reaches out to Arab scientists with the goal of bringing new medical and life science products to market for both social and financial gains.

Also featured were seminars by Jeff Wolf, of RCC Wolf Management Consultants, who gave a seminar on leadership; Tina Beranbaum of Centauric, who talked about the foundations of success; and Ilana Golan of Stya´s, who discussed start-up do´s and don´ts.

All in all, Cal-Israel Innovation Expo was a big success, and certainly reached its goal of bringing together companies, governmental entities, USD students and faculty, with the purpose of creating enduring relationships between California and Israeli leaders. Dates for a second Expo in San Diego will be announced soon, stay tuned for more information.

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37

FEATURE STORY l BY SHARON RAPOPORT

SAN DIEGO DREAM MAKERS Ed and Rae Samiljan, founders of Camp Mountain Chai

I

t began with a dream … a dream to establish San Diego’s very own Jewish Summer Camp. Now, 11 years later, Camp Mountain Chai has provided thousands of our community’s youth with life-changing experiences, developing their Jewish identity, self-confidence and personal growth.

But many families who’ve sent their kids to the pristine campgrounds in San Bernardino, Calif., don’t realize that Camp Mountain Chai exists because of the likes of Ed Samiljan — and the thousands of bagels his wife, Rae, provided Ed and his team while they raised funds and developed plans for the camp. It is because of his perseverance and passion that Camp Mountain Chai has established itself as one of the premier overnight Jewish Summer Camp experiences in the nation.

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RESEARCH, WORK AND BAGELS

Samiljan, a retiree who spent over 30 years working in the photographic industry was motivated to create Camp Mountain Chai by his love of faith and tradition and a desire to ensure their continuity.

“Rae and I have been always interested in finding mechanisms to keep kids engaged in basic Jewish values,” he has explained.

“In the United States, kids grow up in a very accepting society, which challenges our continuity, and regardless of your heritage you have some desire to see it, and what you think are the basic core values you’ve been exposed to, continue.”

It took a few years of dedicated teamwork, extensive research and plenty of bagels to turn the idea into reality, but the results have been gratifying. On its first summer, CMC received 125 kids, mostly San Diegans.

In summer 2016, the camp’s 11th year, a staff of 75 people will be handling 500 children and teens, from all over California and many other states.

MASS-MARKETING JEWISH CONTINUITY

Samiljan was raised in a ghetto of Boston by a single parent and his grandparents, in a community of tenement houses with an overwhelmingly Jewish population.

No one had a high income, and going to camp would’ve been considered frivolous in that environment. It was parents and grandparents who “made Jewish continuity.

It was a very solid Jewish environment,” he said.

The idea for Camp Mountain Chai grew from a conversation with a Jewish mom during a meeting at the United Jewish Federation of San Diego. At the time,

FEATURE STORY

Samiljan was running a program, Pathways to Judaism, which was designed to provide support and educational opportunities to interfaith couples, but the program was expensive to sustain and was only reaching 15 to 20 families at a time.

“One morning, a young woman was complaining that she wanted to send her kids to a Jewish camp, but she couldn’t because they were all filled up,” he recalls.

“We never had a Jewish camp in San Diego, so I kind of had an epiphany — that camping might be a great way of mass marketing Jewish continuity. We would have a way of handling hundreds of kids at a time, putting them through the program.”

IMPORTANT ENOUGH TO TAKE HOME

Through their research, Samiljan, along with CMC´s two other “founding fathers,” Todd Kobernick and Jack Bark, discovered that Jewish camp has an impressive track record of promoting Jewish life, values and culture. Kids are placed in an environment that is warm and friendly and exposed to Jewish “stuff” in a manner they readily accept.

Where formal programs struggle for a child´s attention, camp´s informal approach succeeds. Samiljan recalls the story of two

grandchildren of a personal friend who had virtually no religious training, and after just a few weeks at camp helped conduct a Friday night Shabbat service.

“We established Camp Mountain Chai to replicate these life changing experiences with hundreds of children every day.” As a result of their time at camp, “these young people discover that Jewish values and culture are important enough for them to take home.”

At camp, youngsters come from homes with a wide range of Jewish experiences, from the more observant to children who have had very little exposure to Judaism.

They all participate in traditional camp activities such as archery and kayaking, along with prayer, singing, Israeli dancing, and Friday night Shabbat services. All of these are performed in a fun, casual (though respectful) and enjoyable way. “We’ve made Jewish values highly palatable and absorbable. We’re building continuity but we’re also building San Diego community.”

Another very exciting benefit of camp is that it allows kids who live in Del Mar or Carlsbad to get to know kids who live in Chula Vista or San Diego proper, as they come together for a common experience.

In recent years, Camp Mountain Chai has

also been hosting children from all over California, Arizona, Nevada, New York, Texas, Rhode Island, Tennessee and Israel.

NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND

Running a camp like Mountain Chai is expensive, and the tuition can be, too. But Samiljan, along with a group of generous sponsors and supporters, have worked tirelessly to ensure that no child is ever turned down for a camp experience because of financial need.

In looking forward to celebrating the camp’s first major milestone, its tenth anniversary, Samiljan’s hopes for its future to remain focused.

Camp Mountain Chai´s tenth Anniversary Gala honoring Ed and Rae Samiljan will take place on May 15, at 5:30 pm in Paradise Point Resort. It will be a night of “Camp, Comedy and Celebration,” with a special guest comedian. All proceeds will benefit the Camp Mountain Chai Scholarship Fund.

Reservations and more information can be found at www.campmoutainchai.com/gala or at (858) 499-1330.

WWW.LCHAIMMAGAZINE.COM

39

THE GROWTH OF HALUTZA Watching it Take Form

L

ocated in the northwest Negev on Israel’s borders with Egypt and Gaza, the Jewish National Fund (JNF) community of Halutza was founded in 2005 by a group of families evacuated from the Gush Katif communities of Atzmona and Netzarim during Israel’s disengagement from Gaza. These pioneers chose to move to this remote corner of the desert—which had never been inhabited or farmed—because they saw the development of the Negev as Israel’s next national mission and wanted to participate in building their nation.

A few weeks after the evacuation from Gaza, temporary housing was put up in the moshavim surrounding Halutza and preparation for agriculture began. Just months later, with the help of partners like JNF, hundreds of greenhouses were up and running and desert fields were filled with crops. Today, the rapidly expanding agricultural region, which contained nothing but sand dunes a short time ago, attracts new residents from throughout Israel and boasts beautiful homes, successful organic farms, and numerous public buildings, schools, and community facilities. This 21st century pioneering spirit serves as the engine to bring new olim to

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L’CHAIM SAN DIEGO MAGAZINE • APRIL 2016

Southern Israel to begin new lives, jobs, and to start families.

As part of JNF’s Blueprint Negev campaign to sustainably develop the Negev Desert and increase its population, JNF has supported Halutza’s growth from the beginning by clearing land for housing and farming, purchasing temporary prefabricated homes, laying basic infrastructure, and paving roads. To date, three communities have been established in Halutza: Naveh, Bnei Netzarim, and Shlomit.

As the communities expand, JNF is helping residents re-establish their social and educational institutions, construct public buildings, and create green spaces.

A new yeshiva, beit midrash (study hall), synagogue, kindergarten, park, and playground have been established with JNF’s support, and many more facilities are on the drawing board.

Transforming the desert into viable, vibrant communities takes commitment, resources, and people who are willing to blaze a trail for others to follow. People like Rabbi Eli Adler, Neve’s community leader, and his wife, Hagit. They moved to Gush Katif as a young married couple. “Frankly,

we saw our future there. While it was complicated at first, it was a life with a lot of meaning,” Adler shared.

Ayelet Bashari, a teacher and mother of three, says that there is something incredibly special about Halutza that reminds her of home in Gush Katif: “The symbol for me that this was the right choice came when I stood outside one evening. It’s very hot here during the day, but the heat breaks and dew begins to fall around 10:00 p.m. I breathed in the air outside, and it felt like home. It was a good sign.”

The magic of Gush Katif may be physically impossible to experience for those who were not a part of it, but its spirit definitely lives on through the residents of Halutza. Although the pain, anguish, and anger are often still present, these pioneers have found a beautiful way to channel their determination and enthusiasm through settling the desert frontier, which for them, is a huge, blank canvas of endless possibilities. Every day is one more step forward in the realization of their dream to pioneer and protect their beloved land of Israel.

JNF Halutza Liaison Yedidya Harush will be in San Diego April 12-13, 2016. As a true pioneer of his generation, Yedidya is a visionary whose family relocated to Halutza in 2005. He was recruited to play basketball in the United States for the last two years of high school. After graduation, he was offered college scholarships, which he did not accept. Instead, he returned to Israel and joined the Israel Defense Forces elite Paratrooper Brigade.

To find our where you can hear Harush and his inspirational story, please contact Amy Hart at ahart@jnf.org or call 858.824.9178 x988

WWW.LCHAIMMAGAZINE.COM

41

FEATURE STORY

CONNECTING PEOPLE StandWithUs Brings People Together to Support Israel and Overcome Discriminatory Boycotts

O

n April 9–11 in Los Angeles, StandWithUs held its second annual International Counter-BDS Conference, a two-day, groundbreaking interactive seminar focused on understanding and defeating the BDS Movement’s newest strategies and tactics.

BDS, which stands for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, is a global campaign to isolate Israel culturally, politically, and economically with the ultimate goal of pressuring it to collapse as a Jewish state.

As an organization that strongly opposes

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all efforts to deny Jewish rights to selfdetermination and undermine hopes for a just peace, StandWithUs organized the anti-BDS Conference to bring together a diverse group of experts, partner groups, and activists. Together we shared our work with the pro-Israel community, fostered strategic cooperation, and empowered proIsrael activists on the ground.

StandWithUs is a non-profit education organization, founded in May 2001. It began when Roz and Jerry Rothstein, and Esther Renzer brought together Los

Angeles Jewish and lay leaders who shared their grave concern about the media’s antiIsrael bias during the 2nd Intifada. Israeli citizens were being physically attacked, and the media was maligning Israel. Just two weeks earlier, Koby Mandell and Yosef Ishran had been murdered by terrorists.

Their bodies were so mutilated they could only be identified by their dental records.

The tragedy was bad enough, but the media coverage was unfathomable. The children were being blamed for their own murder.

Fifteen years later, StandWithUs has

FEATURE STORY

gone international with our mission to educate people of all ages, backgrounds, and beliefs about Israel, and combat the extremism and anti-Semitism that often distort the issues. We believe that education is the road to peace and that knowledge of the facts will correct common prejudices about the Arab-Israeli conflict. In order to promote this vision, StandWithUs is energetically empowering an army of educators around the world. Through print materials, speakers, programs, conferences, missions to Israel, campaigns, social media and internet resources, we ensure that the story of Israel’s achievements and ongoing challenges is told on campuses and in communities around the world.

StandWithUs has become a household name as a resource for accurate information about Israel.

Based in Los Angeles, StandWithUs now has nineteen offices and chapters across the U.S., UK, Canada, and Israel, including a chapter right here in San Diego. StandWithUs educates teens, college students, and community members around the world in multiple languages. The proIsrael community also takes the tools offered by StandWithUs and uses them to educate their peers. Our numbers tell the story of our impact – analytics on the StandWithUs Facebook page show that we are reaching up to 100 million people per week with pro-Israel content.

Regarding BDS, StandWithUs believes this campaign of hate is one of the defining challenges we face as a Jewish and proIsrael community today, and that we have a responsibility to stand up for our rights against those who seek to deny them. We are committed to empowering activists who want to stand up for the rights of the Jewish people in their homeland, tell Israel’s story and counter misinformation in compelling ways, strengthen the US-Israel relationship, and support a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians. We believe that if we work together as a community, we have the

power to not only prevail in this struggle but come out even stronger than we were before. This is why we held our CounterBDS Conference last year, and why we decided to do it again earlier this month.

The conference hosted several hundred participants and was unprecedented in its diversity of experts in the fields of pro-Israel advocacy and counter-BDS strategy. Our campus panel featured leaders from the Israel on Campus Coalition, Hillel, AEPi, and CUFI on Campus, along with Max Samarov - our own Director of Research & Campus Strategy. Craig Dershowitz of Artists 4 Israel, public relations expert Philippe Assouline, and former world debate champion Yoni Cohen Idov also shared their insights on the campus fight, along with four standout student activists who discussed their experiences on the ground.

While campuses are often at the center of attention when it comes to BDS, StandWithUs aimed to be as comprehensive as possible. Other panels and speakers covered the fight against BDS in academia, culture, churches, communities, businesses, the legal arena (featuring StandWithUs San Diego advisory committee member Mitch Danzig), state and federal governments, and social media. Participants also had the opportunity to hear from experts about the shadowy sources of funding driving BDS campaigns around the world. All told, the audience heard from 28 different organizations and independent experts.* The keynote speaker for the conference was former Harvard Law professor, author, and political commentator Alan Dershowitz. As always, he captivated the crowd with his insightful remarks on the illegitimacy and immorality of BDS, and what our community must do to fight back.

Aside from the diversity of organizations and speakers, the most impactful aspects of the conference were the strategy sessions held at the end of each day. These sessions allowed participants to have in depth

interactions with the experts they heard from earlier in the day, and engage in forward-thinking discussions about how to overcome BDS in all of its forms. After three days of speakers and strategy sessions, attendees left the conference informed, inspired, and empowered with strategies to overcome BDS in their communities.

StandWithUs is proud to bring so many people together to stand up for Israel and oppose discriminatory boycotts, not only at our conference but through all of our other activities as well. We invite you to join our cause by sharing our educational materials with your friends and family, hosting events in your community, encouraging your children and grandchildren to get involved with our high school and campus programs, and donating to StandWithUs so we can empower even more supporters of Israel around the world.

*Organizations: Israel on Campus Coalition, Hillel, AEPi, CUFI on Campus, Artists4Israel, American Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, AMCHA Initiative, IDC Situation Room, Talk Israel, California State Assembly, The Israel Project, Brandeis Center, the Emergency Committee for Israel, Israel Allies Foundation, Israel Action Network, Presbyterians for Middle East Peace, Divest This!, NGO Monitor, JLens, ELNET, Daniel Pearl Foundation, and Creative Community for Peace.

Individual experts: Alan Dershowitz, Philippe Assouline, Yoni Cohen Idov, Andrew Pessin, Edwin Black.

Special thanks to the StandWithUs San Diego Advisory Committee: Nina Brodsky, Daniella Lewis, Mitch Danzig, Sara Miller, Jenny Josephson, Linda Church, Michael Leeman, Yoram Dahan, Nancy Calderon, Varda Levy, Nicole Bernstein, Audrey Jacobs, Anthony Berteaux WWW.LCHAIMMAGAZINE.COM

43

FEATURE STORY l BY MIMI POLLACK

A MULTI-TALENTED MENSCH

Y

ale Strom may be a multitalented man and a well known musician both locally and internationally, but he is also refreshingly down to earth and modest, answering my questions at his rustic, comfortable home in Mission Hills with his loving dog, Olive, snuggled on his lap. Strom is a musician, composer, writer, historian, photographer, and filmmaker. He has also been an artist in residence at SDSU for the last ten years, a position created specifically for him. He has 15 CD’s, 14 books, and nine films under his belt.

He was born in Detroit 55 years ago to a strongly socialist family. Although his parents were not musicians, music was always present in the house growing up.

The family moved to San Diego when he was child, and he graduated from SDSU with a bachelor’s degree in both American Studies and in Furniture Design. He went on to get his Masters from Colombia University in Yiddish Studies with an emphasis on Klezmer music. Thus, his talent in many areas started young.

His interest in Klezmer music was social, historical, and musicological. This led to

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him to a fascination with Roma or Gypsy music, the connection between Eastern European Jews and the Roma, and one of many memorable trips to Romania, Moldova and other countries in Eastern Europe. One connection they had is that both minorities had been marginalized, and quite a few of the Roma moved into former Jewish areas.

They also had stereotypes about each other, but many ultimately bonded through their music, and sometimes played in each other’s bands. Unfortunately, they were the only two ethnic groups targeted in the Holocaust.

As Strom mused, “The DNA of Jewish music comes from the Middle East or the ancient scales of the ‘Ites’, and Roma music also has similar ties.”

Today, Strom has several Roma friends and a Roma accordionist in his Klezmer band, Hot Pstromi. He actually has a San Diego version of Hot Pstromi and a New York City version. Strom proudly states that there are very talented musicians in both bands, and some play both coasts.

However, the two constants are Strom and the lead singer, his wife and muse,

Elizabeth Schwartz. They have an 18-yearold daughter who studies at UCSD. Strom made me smile when he told me that his father’s students used to call him, “Mr. Pastrami,” an inspiration for the band’s name. Yale’s father, David Strom, is a retired professor from SDSU, and one of the founding members of Chabad in San Diego.

Father and son are very close.

Yale’s interest in music, history and culture led him to receive a grant from San Diego [Creative Catalyst Grant] to write musical pieces, incorporating the music of recently arrived immigrants. So far, he has written two pieces, incorporating Somali and Chaldean music to a more western form.

On April 12, Hot Pstromi will perform at SDSU to celebrate the release of Strom’s latest CD, “City of the Future,” with traditional Yiddish Russian songs. On April 17 at Temple Solel in Encinitas, The Hausmann quartet will perform Strom’s “Somalian Quartet,” and Hot Pstromi will present, “The Chaldean Jazz Quintet.”

Other exciting projects he has coming up are a documentary on the founder of the Socialist Party in America, Eugene Victor Debs. He is also working on an upcoming musical play on the life of painter Marc Chagall. This play is the collaboration between Strom, his wife, and choreographer, John Malashock. For Strom, Chagall is the man who inspired the play Fiddler on the Roof because of his painting. Strom has the blessing of Chagall’s granddaughter, Bella.

Strom is a master juggler as he can work on several projects at once, doing them all meticulously, as well as his teaching.

Despite his success as a musician, composer, writer, filmmaker, and photographer, he keeps his feet on the ground, never resting on his laurels. There is always the next exciting project!

For more information, visit www.yalestrom.com

BY STEPHANIE LEWIS l HUMOR

mazel &

mishagoss

Fiddler on the Roof Couple’s Counseling THERAPIST: Before we begin, I’d like to

remind you that anything discussed here stays in strict confidence.

GOLDA: Do you hear that, Tevye? No sharing with the big guy upstairs.

GOLDA: You tell him Anna. Or do you prefer Ms. Tevka?

THERAPIST: Anatevka is just fine.

GOLDA: Anatevka, underfed, overworked --

TEVYE:

As the good book says, “He who allows God into every aspect of his marriage…”

THERAPIST: Never mind that right now. I

GOLDA: Ugh, you can die from such a man.

GOLDA: That’s right. For 25 years, I’ve lived

TEVYE: Golda, you’re hurting my feelings.

GOLDA: Why should today be different?

TEVYE: Hey that’s my line. You stole my

line. Straight outta the dinner scene before we sing The Sabbath Prayer.

THERAPIST: Hold up, folks. Why don’t we

think we’re getting closer to identifying the real problem.

THERAPIST: Okay, okay. Clearly we’re at an

your problem.

GOLDA: Oh my prophetic Joseph, you big

fat Dreamer, you.

GOLDA:

GOLDA: Do I love you? With our daughters

getting married and this trouble in the town. Maybe it’s indigestion. Go lie down.

TEVYE: If I try and bend that far, I’ll break.

TEVYE: Precisely. You never dream. That’s

TEVYE: Like you don’t care about me. Golda, do you love me?

Tevye. Speak directly to your husband.

GOLDA: And now you won’t even speak to our little bird, our Chavala. She’s dead to you.

Tevye: No! No! There is no other hand!

THERAPIST: We don’t name call in this

THERAPIST: Yes, Golda. But turn and face

TEVYE: Let’s just skip through the first act.

The real disaster comes toward the end when our third daughter marries a gentile.

with him, fought with him, starved with him. Even milked his cow! But I never dreamed we’d be in therapy right now.

back up. Tevye, tell your wife how that makes you feel.

GOLDA: Do I what?? Do I love him?

THERAPIST: Wow, that didn’t even rhyme.

room.

You think I haven’t figured out that’s how you get your own way?

Embellishing Fruma Sara to be some largerthan-life scary bully. In reality, the butcher’s dead wife was only 4ft. 8.

TEVYE: Golda, never forget that I’m the

master of the house and I get to have the final word. And I want to see Motel’s sewing machine right now. And don’t give me your, “after supper, you’ll faint” shtick.

TEVYE: See that? That’s her typical M.O. Never answers my questions. If I had a dollar for every time she was evasive, I’d be a …

THERAPIST: Tsk, control issues. Perhaps it’s

THERAPIST: Again with the Rich Man? Money is the world’s curse.

GOLDA: Ha! And who does mama teach to

time to talk about equal divisions of power and labor. What do you do all day, Golda?

mend and tend and fix?? So Papa’s free to read the holy books!

THERAPIST: On the other hand . . .

impasse. And looking at the time, I think we must stop our session now.

TEVYE: C’mon Golda, let’s go have a drink.

I told you this psychobabble is for the birds.

A bird could love a fish but where would they build a home?

THERAPIST: In a pet shop?

TEVYE: Oy, it was rhetorical.

RECEPTIONIST: Anatevka, your next clients

are here . . . a Fanny Brice and a Nicky Arnstein?

THERAPIST: Show them in. At least she’s a

Funny Girl.

STEPHANIE D. LEWIS IS A REGULAR WRITER FOR THE HUFFINGTON POST AND PENS A HUMOR BLOG AT ONCEUPONYOURPRIME.COM. FOLLOW HER ON TWITTER @MISSMENOPAUSE.

WWW.LCHAIMMAGAZINE.COM

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Each patient’s care plan is individually tailored to meet his or her needs and the needs • Dedicated Medical Directors of the family.

• Registered Nurses • Social Work Services • Dedicated Medical Directors • Home Health Aide Services • Registered Nurses • Transitional Care Services • Social Work Services

BRANCHING OUT OF THE BOX • Check out local upcoming events on JNF San Diego’s Facebook page at facebook.com/JNF.SanDiego • Mark your calendars to hear Knesset Member, Merav Michaeli on April 18 at 7pm at San Diego Jewish Academy.

• Register now for the complimentary 5th Annual Love of Israel Brunch on May 1 with Consul General Ido Aharoni at jnf.org/sdloi • For more information, to drop off a blue box, or to get involved, contact Amy Hart at ahart@jnf.org or 858.824.9178 x988.

• Home Health Aide Services • Transitional Care Services For more information

please call:

(858) 751-0315

For more information please call: www.avalonhospice.com (858) 751-0315 JCAHO Accredited www.avalonhospice.com JCAHO Accredited 46

L’CHAIM SAN DIEGO MAGAZINE • APRIL 2016

jnf.org • 800.JNF.0099

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