FEBRUARY 2016 l SHEVAT • ADAR 5776
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Shevat • Adar 5776 | SDJewishJournal.com 7
CONTENTS February 2016
Shevat/Adar 5776
35
ON THE COVER: Take a closer look at this year's Jewish Film Festival with interviews, critiques and schedules in a handy pull-out booklet to take with you on the go.
29
CAMPS: For Jewish athletes, Jewish summer camp is usually not an option. But what if sports camp and Jewish camp could be rolled into one? This summer, in California, there are two options for just that.
47
FEATURE: One podcast, 40 million listeners. Julie Snyder and Sarah Koenig, creators of Serial, talk about how their show's popularity was a surprise to everyone, even them.
56
FEATURE: Seacrest Village is getting technological with this year's Fund-A-Need initiative, offering new opportunities to combat isolation in old age.
8 SDJewishJournal.com l February 2016
DIVORCE-FAMILY LAW Compassionate Yet aggresive FamilY law experts
• Divorce • Child Custody • Mediation • Spousal Support • Child “Hire Them Support • Collabo Before •Your SpousePartnership Does” tive Practice Domestic • Dis solution • Divorce • Child Custody • Me• Divorce • Child Custody • diation • Mediation Spousal Support • Child Support • Spousal Support • Child Support • Collaborative Practice • Collaborative Practice • Domestic Partners Domestic Partnership • Dissolution • Dissolution • Divorce • Child Custody • Mediation • Spousal Support • Child Supp
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: 32 EDUCATION:
Truly individualized education at Fusion Academy.
51 FEATURE:
Andrea Feier ensures the art of dance is accessible to everyone.
54 FEATURE:
A look at Shalom Baby in honor of their Bar Mitzvah year.
58 BUSINESS:
With state regulations changing, now's the time to take a closer look at going solar in San Diego.
61 FOOD:
Chocolate cheesecake parfait for Valentine's Day.
73 SYNAGOGUE:
Temple Beth Shalom's historical committee takes a look back at the Chula Vista synagogue's storied history.
61
Monthly Columns 12 The Starting Line 20 Parenting 22 Israeli Lifestyle 24 Aging 26 Spirituality 76 Advice
858.720.1496 or 760.729.0941
2755 Jefferson Street, Suite 200 Carlsbad, CA 92008 www.frfamilylaw.com Myra Fleischer
Around Town 18 Our Town 70 Events In Every Issue 14 Mailbag 16 What’s Up Online 64 What’s Goin’ On 66 Shabbat Sheet 67 Diversions 68 News
Shevat • Adar 5776 | SDJewishJournal.com 9
You are going to have to make some choices, but you don’t have to make them alone.
www.sdjewishjournal.com February 2016 • Shevat/Adar 5776
Changing jobs can be difficult but we are with you every step of the way.
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92121. The San Diego Jewish Journal is a free and open forum for the expression of opinions. The opinions expressed herein are solely the opinion of the author and in no way reflect the opinions of the publishers, staff or advertisers. The San Diego Jewish Journal is not responsible for the accuracy of any and all information within advertisements. The San Diego Jewish Journal reserves the right to edit all submitted materials, including press releases, letters to the editor, articles and calendar listings for brevity and clarity. The Journal is not legally responsible for the accuracy of calendar or directory listings, nor is it responsible for possible postponements, cancellations or changes in venue. Manuscripts, letters, documents and photographs sent to the Journal become the physical property of the publication, which is not responsible for the return or loss of such material. All contents ©2016 by San Diego Jewish Journal. The San Diego Jewish Journal is a member of the American Jewish Press Association and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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As we approach our 100th year, Jewish Family Service has a new look! It’s an expression of the life-changing work we are doing in partnership with you. • Activating our compassionate community • Supporting individuals and families to achieve greater well-being and independence • Building and strengthening San Diego with healing, health, and hope
Self-Sufficiency | Aging With Dignity | Community Connection
Moving Forward Together Shevat • Adar 5776 | SDJewishJournal.com 11 JOAN & IRWIN JACOBS CAMPUS | Turk Family Center 8804 Balboa Ave., San Diego, CA 92123
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THE STARTING LINE by Natalie Jacobs
EDITOR’S LETTER editor@sdjewishjournal.com
“It’s About the Writing”
A
s we were working on this issue, I came across film critic Peter Bradshaw’s review of Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight” for The Guardian. It has tortured me ever since. I had seen “The Hateful Eight” the night before reading the review (I didn’t need anything to convince me to see a Tarantino film), and was still quite stuck on the movie – the writing, directing, acting and musical score so multidimensional and complicated in that totally Tarantino way, I was left with lots to digest. The problem with Bradshaw’s review is that it was too good. Maybe if I wasn’t writing and editing our Jewish Film Festival reviews around the same time as I read his, I would have had a different reaction. But I felt immediate panic after I finished his piece. Wow. That. Was. Good. Will our SDJJ reviews make people feel like I feel right now? To take words from Bradshaw, “it’s about the writing.” He’s talking about Tarantino, and he elaborates by describing him as “just a superlative movie writer, glorying in protracted dialogue scenes for which other film-makers don’t have the attention-span, in scenes unapologetically described as ‘Chapters.’ His writing delivers line-by-line pleasure and impact and he is also a master of structural audacity, with some superb flashback-rewinds and POV shifts.” Clearly, Bradshaw isn’t a bad writer either. Critique is its own genre of writing, and while we don’t often dance with this temptress here
at the San Diego Jewish Journal, it really is fun when we get the chance. Bradshaw obviously benefits from this genre being his primary area of expertise, but I believe the reviews in our Film Festival section will also do well to get you excited or thinking critically about the movies you can check out at this year’s 10-day festival. We didn’t love all of them as much as Bradshaw loved “The Hateful Eight” but we have argued our perspectives as best we could. Perhaps you’ll have different thoughts after you see the films – be sure to let us know, we’ll be happy to share your reactions with the community. This year, we’ve organized our coverage in a particular way – all of the Film Festival features wrap around our centerfold, so you can pull out the whole section and take the info with you as you attend films. That way, you’ll always know what’s playing next, and for the ones we’ve reviewed, you’ll already have someone to argue with. Kicking off that section is an interview with Menemsha Films founder Neil Friedman to get his ideas about why Jewish people love movies. To jump to another genre of writing, we have a feature on the creators of the hugely popular podcast Serial. Sarah Koenig and Julie Snyder have officially revolutionized an old form of storytelling, and an episodic audio program that gains the attention of 40 million people in a little more than two months is worth taking a closer look at. If you’re only just now hearing of the program, read “Serial Storytellers” first and then prepare your earbuds for some binge listening. If
Critique is its own genre of writing, and while we don’t often dance with this temptress here at the San Diego Jewish Journal, it really is fun when we get the chance. you already know and love the series, you’ll find yourself nodding along with the feature while you gain new behind-the-scenes perspective on the work that goes into this ambitious journalistic documentary. Later in the magazine, Pat Launer introduces us to Andrea Feier, a dancer and instructor whose upcoming city-wide showcase at Casa del Prado Theatre in Balboa Park is all about “real bodies” and the different kinds of movements they can handle. Plus, Tina B. Eshel takes a look back at Shalom Baby’s accomplishments as they settle into their Bar Mitzvah year. Eshel also explores the really interesting idea that Seacrest Village is hoping to raise enough money to support at its gala the end of this month. A
Save the Date
This year's Heart and Soul Gala for Jewish Family Service is March 13 at the Hyatt Regency La Jolla at Aventine. JFS will celebrate the contributions of the 2016 Mitzvah Honorees Claire and David Ellman, Benjamin Schulman, and its special partnership with U.S. Bank. They are expecting 600 people to attend. 12 SDJewishJournal.com l February 2016
LEFT TO RIGHT: Benjamin Schulman & Jan Davis, David & Claire Ellman, and Steve Stuckey.
an y.
SAN DIEGO CENTER FOR JEWISH CULTURE
26th Annual JewishFilm Festival SponSored by Leichtag Foundation FEBRUARY 4 – 14, 2016
26th ANNUAL
SAN DIEGO
FILM FESTIVAL MEMBERSHIP SPECIAL! SIGN UP NOW AND SAVE 15% on a JCC MEMBERSHIP This offer is good for new members only. Must be age 18 or older. May not be used toward Teen, Public Servant, or Corporate Memberships. Discount applies to initial annual membership contract only. Standard membership rates apply to future renewals.
Offer good through February 28, 2016.
Contact Gillian for information:
(858) 362-1115 or gilliana@lfjcc.org Shevat • Adar 5776 | SDJewishJournal.com 13
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Send us your comments: editor@sdjewishjournal.com 5665 Oberlin Dr., Ste 204, San Diego, CA 92121
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14 SDJewishJournal.com l February 2016
It’s MORE than just a magazine. It’s a LIfEstyLE CaLL Ronnie Weisberg 858.638.9818
p i h s r e d a e L g n u o Y l a n N a t i o i o n t o I s ra e l Miss July 4-11, 2016 Join the next generation of Jewish leaders from across North America in Israel This trip will give you a behind-the-scenes look at how our San Diego Jewish Community impacts Israel. Learn about innovative programs, visit sites where every day Federation is changing lives, and connect with like-minded young adults seeking to make a difference. From the city to the desert, experience Israel’s history, get inspired, and have the time of your life.
Subsidies Available!
Learn more at nextgen.org/nylm Shevat • Adar 5776 | SDJewishJournal.com 15
what’s up on sdjewishjournal.com BREASTFEEDING IN ISRAEL: In response to some recent dust-up of old breastfeeding-in-public arguments, SDJJ assistant editor Tina B. Eshel looks back at what she and her kids learned about breastfeeding from their two years in Israel. Even the Orthodox in Israel are more open about it than the whole United States.
JEWISH PRISONER IN CUBA: Alan Gross was imprisoned in Cuba for five years, after being arrested for setting up an Internet connection in a Jewish community. Gross speaks with Ron Kampeas about how he's adjusting and what he went through in isolation for all that time. The engrossing story is live on our website, in which he mentions "It Was Never About Me" is the working title of his forthcoming book.
PARADIGM SHIFT: Popular culture is working overtime to promote social change these days. At least that's how it seems, particularly with transgender issues. On our website, writer Avishay Artsy checks in on how the transgender Jewish community has changed since the release of Amazon Prime's award winning, and totally Jewish, show "Transparent." Facebook “f ” Logo
MAKING HISTORY: An Orthodox synagogue in New Jersey has hired the first Yeshivat Maharat graduate to go by the title “rabbi.” Mount Freedom Jewish Center, in Randolph, New Jersey, announced in a news release that Lila Kagedan is joining its “spiritual leadership team.” The news release did not use the word “rabbi,” instead referring to Kagedan as a “Yeshivat Maharat graduate.” But still, progress is progress. One of San Diego's former rabbis will work with her at the synagogue. His perspective in our web story. 16 SDJewishJournal.com l February 2016
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our TOWN LINDA BENNETT, BETSY BARANOV AND NATALIE JACOBS, PHOTOS COURTESY SCRIPPS HEALTH, BY BOB ROSS
Candlelight Ball
On Dec. 5, Scripps Hospital held its 86th annual Candlelight Ball with 440 guests at the Fairmont Del Mar. The event raised $1.8 million toward the Barbey Family Emergency and Trauma Center under construction at Scripps La Jolla. Funds from the Candlelight Ball go toward the project’s $15 million goal to double the size of the facility’s existing emergency and trauma center, which treats more than 30,000 patients each year. The expansion is expected to reach completion in the fall.
Birthdays...
Happy 89th birthday to Gene Siegel! Happy 90th birthday to Doug Selik! Happy 102nd birthday to Sam Weiss! Happy 8th birthday to Taliah Eshel, who celebrates for the second time on Feb. 29.
Anniversaries...
Happy 50th wedding anniversary to Avra and Barry Kassar!
Mazel tov...
Mazel tov to Tobey Brown on his Bar Mitzvah Jan. 2 at Temple Emanu-El. Tobey is the son of Elise and Scott Brown.
18 SDJewishJournal.com l February 2016
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP RIGHT: Bruce and Julie Breslau • Gail and Marty Levin • Eve and Gary Fybel • Bernie and Sharon Zeichner • Eliott and Lee Scott.
icism.” n y C t n u l B . r o m u h d e k c i W . e u ivewire Dialog P O RT OOD R E
“L
W – H O LLY
“Funny, ply e e d d n a g in t n u ha insightful.” E KLY – LA WE
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FEBRUARY 2 – 28
Written by
RAJIV JOSEPH Directed by
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Starring
BABAK
TAFTI
ARAYAN
MANU N
At morning’s first light, the soaring power of the empire will unveil the glorious Taj Mahal. But for the two hapless guards assigned to protect the palace, morning will set the wheels in motion for an existential crisis that will shake their faith in God, the King and each other. Guards at the Taj is a dark comedy about two average men swept up by the beauty, carnage and injustice surrounding one of the most famous wonders of the world. Warnings: Blood. Violence. 75 minutes, no intermission.
“Strikingly Original ” – VARIETY
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Shevat • Adar 5776 | SDJewishJournal.com 19
MUSINGS FROM MAMA
by Sharon Rosen Leib
PARENTING srleib@me.com
The Race Labyrinth
D
id Trevor Noah, the new South Africa-born host of The Daily Show, really say American racism makes him feel at home? I have a hard time believing that racism here is as bad as South Africa’s recent apartheid past. But I catch Noah’s drift. Our racism has a frightening, erratic, unintelligible randomness. For example, when an armed white man confronted an unarmed black teenage boy wearing a hoodie in a gated townhome complex and killed him with one shot. It’s true, as Trevor Noah points out, some Americans do harbor deep-seated prejudicial suspicions that assume all young black men engage in criminal behavior despite having no evidence of that in most face-to-face interactions. But when Noah portrays greater white America as being blatantly racist, even in a humorous way, does he advance the dialogue? Not really. Broad-brush generalizations paint our racial divide in strokes as wide as the Grand Canyon, making them appear unbridgeable. Until we become more forgiving and thoughtful when we discuss race, we’ll remain trapped in a hellish monocromatic maze of our own creation. I wanted to tell young Mr. Noah that he has more to learn about American racism – a complex labyrinth that ensnares most all of us, including relatively innocent bystanders like me. His commentary on young black men and crime dredged up two painful memories. As a sophomore at UC Berkeley in 1981, some girlfriends and I took a bus home from celebrating a 21st birthday at a bar on College Avenue in Oakland. We didn’t notice people following us off that bus. As we merrily walked back to our sorority house, I heard one of my friends scream. Then she dashed past me. I saw two to three black males behind her. Blood dripped from my friend’s body. One of the assailants had stabbed her leg from behind and stolen her purse. A police car and an ambulance came. The police found three people matching our description, apparently high on angel dust (PCP), not far from the crime scene. They said PCP can make people violent. But we couldn’t offer a positive identification so the police let them go. My friend’s leg healed eventually but our psyches never entirely did. Then one night in 1987, while working in Washington, D.C., and living in a mixed20 SDJewishJournal.com l February 2016
So how to reach past the fear and grasp for connection? Start by reading or listening to award-winning writer TaNehisi Coates. He made me understand his own racial fears, especially as the father of a black teenage boy who could be felled by making one wrong move. race neighborhood, my roommate and I took the subway home after having dinner with friends. As we walked back to our apartment, we noticed a group of three to four black teenage boys following us. My roommate said, “Run!” but I couldn’t run as fast as she could. One of the boys pushed me onto the icy street and grabbed my purse. I remember him looking young and almost as scared as I was. These two crimes made me afraid of having anyone walk too closely behind me, particularly young black men. Does this make me racist? I still struggle with trying to overcome my crimerelated PTSD and not leap to racial conclusions. Having worked as both a criminal appellate prosecutor and defender, I know the vast majority of young black men are not criminals. Most of the cases I handled involved white perpetrators. So how to reach past the fear and grasp for connection? Start by reading or listening to award-winning writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. He made me understand his own racial fears, especially as the father of a black teenage boy who could be felled by making one wrong move. February combines Black History month and Valentine’s Day – an ideal time to commit to learning and loving, to teaching and understanding. We’ve got to work harder at bridging the racial divide if we ever hope to lead our children out of the labyrinth. A
FYI
On March 2, the AntiDefamation League will host a conversation with former Skinhead Frank Meeink, widely considered to be the inspiration for the powerful film "American History X." Meeink will discuss his journey from America's Nazi underground to "triumph over hate and addiction." For more info and location details, contact Liran Braude at lbraude@adl.org.
TOSCA by GIACOMO PUCCINI Tosca takes us to the brink with politics, police brutality, betrayal, jealousy and murder. Puccini’s passionate arias and sensuous melodies perfectly accompany raw emotion and drama. Even today, you can walk in the footsteps of the characters in Rome, Italy and live a piece of opera history.
FEBRUARY 13, 16, 19, 21(m) SAN DIEGO CIVIC THEATRE
Tickets start at $45
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LIVING ON THE FRONT PAGE by Andrea Simantov
ISRAELI LIFESTYLE andreasimantov@gmail.com
The Things We See
M
y favorite teacher once pointed out that we don’t only choose our battles, we choose where to show kindness. This lesson made a great impact on me because, despite having a mind like a sieve, I saw it in the relationships around me. If I loved someone who was a busy-body and spoke loudly, I’d say, “She’s the life of the party” and “She loves people.” But if someone I disliked possessed the same qualities, I might say, “What a yenta” and “She sucks the air out of the room.” Each person exudes the same qualities, so the reaction has less to do with the person than me. Someone recently sent me a YouTube video of an experiment where six photographers were assigned to create a portfolio of a man named Michael. The twist was that each photographer was told a different background story. Respectively, the bio-data they were given included self-made millionaire, lifesaving hero, ex-inmate, commercial fisherman, psychic, former alcoholic. The photographers were told to flesh out the essence of the subject. Still not knowing the truth – Michael is none of those things – they described their experiences as “really intense,” “intimidating,” “very open.” The powerful depictions that resulted appeared to be shots of different men. This skewing of vision based on our own
22 SDJewishJournal.com l February 2016
perceptions reminds me of how, during my teen years, I suffered pangs of jealousy toward the girls whose mothers smoked pot with them or accompanied them to the local women’s health clinic to have them outfitted with birth control. Why couldn’t my mother be that cool and tuned-in to what was really going on in the sex/drugs/rock-and-roll world that I inhabited? I yearned for the green-grass of hipper gardens where mothers and daughters could be giggling best friends instead of constant combatants. Decades later, having achieved 20/20 hindsight, my heart breaks for these same classmates who were denied the wisdom and moral certainty of a loving parent and would, in time, find themselves saddled with an elderly charge who was deeply in need of guidance. It only took me a few decades to see things differently, with sharper lenses, better-honed with age. Sometimes I forget to put on the objective perspective spectacles. The best example of this happens at 5:30 a.m. every morning when my husband and I observe our ritual of drinking coffee on the glassed-in patio. Even on winter’s bitterest days, I turn on an electric heater, light a small lantern and we talk about the day ahead. This routine is ironclad, ensuring that no matter what uncertainty awaits us “out there,” the day is already a winner. Aching joints and all, enveloped in trust, appreciation and prayer for the other’s
success, we can face a challenging world. Mountains, desert and minarets pepper the landscape but I often miss this. Instead, my eyes are drawn to a brightly lit kitchen in the building across the alley. For years I have only seen the hands and arms of the woman who, at that ungodly hour, lovingly prepares food for the day ahead; hands knead bread and dust flour on chicken cutlets. She is immaculate as she wipes the counter between each chore, washing her hands in the stainless steel sink. She is young because her arms and hands are firm. She is married and a mother, her crack-of-dawn kitchen routine rife with love. She is religiously-observant because she never missed a night of placing the Hanukkah candles at the window ledge. She is Sephardic and votes the same way I do. This is who she is because this is who I need her to be. Perspective is subjective. Someone else might observe the hands of a recent widow/ job-hunter, transsexual, newlywed, left-wing activist, Arab/Christian, etc. (My husband doesn’t know which window I’m talking about.) Is seeing what we want to see a bad thing? I think it’s just a thing. But ascribing holiness to our individual biases is where we may trip up. We’re responsible for choosing the slant of the “stories” we encounter. As long as we remember that, we can keep the rose-colored glasses on. A
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Writing Your Values
W
hen I was in high school, my grandfather handed me a copy of his biography, as soon as he finished it. I can remember the pride he exuded as he handed the book to each of his grandchildren. I thanked him for the copy, however, in full disclosure, the minute I got home, I stashed the book right next to the one on Jewish Folklore I had been gifted for my Bar Mitzvah. I still feel a bit guilty about pushing his book to the bottom of a pile, but I remember wondering what his motivations were in writing a book about himself, his family and his hopes for the future. At the time, I knew he was an incredible person, but I had little interest in fully reading and understanding his story. Until recently. I now consider myself a mature young man with a healthy interest in all of my ancestors. And while I didn’t have the appetite for it when I was younger, I am incredibly grateful to have my grandfather’s text to refer to, learn from and reflect upon. Long before my grandfather wrote his story, the idea to convey one’s wishes to future generations occurred in the book of Genesis. A dying Jacob gathered his sons to offer them his blessings and to request that they not bury him in Egypt, but rather Canaan so he could be buried with his ancestors. With this story is the first written example of an ethical will. An ethical will is a document designed to pass ethical values from one generation to the next. In writing an ethical will, the goal is to link a person to both his family and cultural history, to clarify her ethical and spiritual values, and communicate a legacy to future generations. An ethical will may clarify personal identity and help a person to focus on his or her life purpose. Ethical wills address one’s need to belong, to be known, to be remembered and to feel like one’s life made a difference in the world. Ethical wills are not restricted for those who are older. Recently, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, both in their early 30s, wrote a letter to their newborn daughter explaining to her why they decided to donate most of their assets to charity. President Obama and First Lady Michelle, in their 40s, wrote a beautiful legacy letter to their daughters 24 SDJewishJournal.com l February 2016
Long before my grandfather wrote his story, the idea to convey one’s wishes to future generations occurred in the book of Genesis. shorty after taking office. In it, they wrote of their intentions for their time as President and First Lady, as well as their personal hopes for their children in the future. While writing these sentiments as young people is great, I believe it is never too late to write down your story, values, thoughts or even just a quote for your heirs and others in your network to live by. Perhaps in doing this, one can develop even deeper convictions in the message. Early in January, I had the chance to play golf on a beautiful course during a rare sunny day. I can’t help but thank my grandfather for inspiring me to learn the game. Most importantly though, I realize how lucky I am to be playing golf. Just like many other modern Jewish American ancestral backgrounds, it was not too many generations ago that playing golf, especially in the middle of January, would have been literally laughable. All of my great-grandparents were Eastern European immigrants who had the courage and determination to leave their homes in search of a more safe and prosperous life. It was their perseverance that afforded me all the opportunities I have today. To be aware of their struggle and story helps me connect to my ancestors who have passed, and to live by a code of values and ethics that I hope would make them proud. As most poignantly said in his own ethical will, retired physician, father, and grandfather Robert Berk once said, “Truly we all stand on the shoulders of previous generations. It is critical that we remember as much as possible about just whose shoulders they were!” A
FYI
The San Diego Legends art exhibit will be on display at Heritage of the Americas Museum on the Cuyamaca College campus, located at 12110 Cuyamaca College Drive West in El Cajon. The exhibit, up through Feb. 23, features original paintings of San Diego Legends, including Jackie Gmach (pictured above, painting by artist Mona Mills) for "leading by example." The project is a collaboration between San Diego County Library and the county’s Aging and Independence Services.
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Shevat • Adar 5776 | SDJewishJournal.com 25
THE ARTIST’S TORAH by David Ebenbach
SPIRITUALITY ebenbach@netzero.com
Thunder, Lightning and Clouds
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evelation is at the heart of the Jewish story. We celebrate it during the holiday of Shavuot, sing about it at Passover (in Dayeinu, for example: ilu natan lanu et haTorah), dance about it at Simchat Torah, recite prayers and blessings about it throughout the week, and more: a key part of the Jewish idea is the notion that we have received (and continue to receive) divine wisdom. We are people who, through the Torah, are inspired. Of course, inspiration takes other forms in our lives, including the creative inspiration that leads to art and poetry and in fact most kinds of work done with fresh eyes and intentions. But maybe this primordial revelation of the Torah can teach us about the other kinds. Luckily, this month we read the portion Yitro. Among other things, this portion sees the Israelites reach Mount Sinai and gather around it to receive word from God. This is that moment when the Torah is given. But how exactly is it given? And what can we learn from the way it’s given? First of all, G-d tells Moses that, before revelation can take place, the people have to purify themselves. Moses passes this instruction along, and the people ready themselves. This is familiar to me; the creative process, too, often requires preparation. Many artists have pre-work rituals to clear their heads and get them oriented toward work. And in our age we sometimes need to purify technologically – phones and email off – before we can bring our full selves to a task. Second, we might come away from this story a little wary of teachers and advice (including, I suppose, the advice you find here!). Moses does convey the purification order accurately, but he also adds to it the gendered injunction come not near a woman (19:15) – not something G-d had requested. I am not the first to notice that the subsequent line in the text, perhaps an irritable
26 SDJewishJournal.com l February 2016
response to Moses’ audacity, describes thunder and lightning striking. And so we see that, while teachers have wisdom for us, they do not actually have Truth itself, but only a version of it. Sometimes their views reveal more about their personal issues than about what we need to do. And what about that thunder and lightning? Certainly these, too, are relevant to our own experiences of inspiration. It’s commonplace, after all, to talk about being struck by an idea. Sometimes creativity is like that – dramatic, flashy, exciting, even scary. Note that at this point, the Israelites trembled (19:16), and that’s before the ground starts quaking (19:18). Nobody leaves, though. If you’re going to live an inspired life, you have to deal with some thunder and lightning. You also have to deal with confusion and uncertainty. Along with the flashier weather comes a thick cloud (19:16) and plenty of smoke (19:18). Models for us, the Israelites again hang in there, and Moses does them one better: he, the (usually) most inspired of all the people, drew near unto the thick darkness (20:17). So must we. Finally, there’s what happens next: G-d begins talking, conveying to the people what they actually need to do in order to be a holy nation (19:6). The instructions start with the Ten Commandments and roll on from there. In other words, revelation isn’t just about the experience of revelation, whether it be electric or befuddling; it’s about doing. You live out inspiration through your work, and you do so whether you’re excited, scared, or uncertain that you even know what you’re doing. You find guidance where you can. Moses, though imperfect, is generally a great shepherd to the Israelites, and he helps them understand their purpose and obligations. But ultimately it begins with you standing at the mountain, ready for whatever will come. Ready to work.A
This
month’s Torah portions Feb. 6: Mishpatim (Exodus 21:1-24:18) Feb. 13: Mishpatim (Exodus 21:1-24:18) Feb. 20: Tetzaveh (Exodus 27:20-30:10) Feb. 27: Ki Tisa (Exodus 30:11-34:35)
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SUNDAY, MARCH 13, 2016 • 5:00Pm Hyatt Regency La Jolla
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CAMPS
CREATING DIVISION ONE HUMANS JCC Maccabi Sports Camp fills a void for Jewish athletes BY NATALIE JACOBS
Campers from JCC Maccabi's first two summers. TOP LEFT: Felix, Neel, Yoni (staff), Jonah and Jason; TOP RIGHT: Carly, Kayla and Tova.
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esearch has shown that kids who attend Jewish camp are “significantly more connected to their Judaism and Jewish values,” says Josh Steinharter, founder of JCC Maccabi Sports Camp. But, he continues, only about 15 percent of Jewish kids attend overnight camp each summer. One reason, he thinks, is that Jewish kids are choosing to attend specialty camps related to their personal interests outside of Judaism. His theory is, if Jewish camp can offer those specialties, more kids will have reasons to attend. He tested this idea with the Foundation for Jewish Camp’s specialty camp incubator. With a history in Jewish camp and athletics, Steinharter saw a void in the camps market and had the idea to blend sports camp into Jewish camp. His idea was accepted into the incubator program three years ago and it has been growing ever since. In year one, the JCC Maccabi Sports Camp had 91 campers attend its summer session from grades 4-9. In year two, they more than doubled that number with campers from California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Alaska, Oklahoma, Texas, Nebraska, Oregon, Washington and Colorado and internationally from Israel, Canada, Thailand, Singapore and China. This
summer, Steinharter expects continued growth, with about 300-325 campers. Campers choose from baseball, basketball, soccer, tennis, and this year softball or volleyball. They spend four hours each day working with high school- and college-level coaches while learning the Jewish values behind things like teamwork and sportsmanship. “Camp is about creating a Jewish community,” Steinharter says, “and using our Jewish values to help our campers see the meaning of being a good teammate and a hardworking athlete, how that impacts their life on and off the field, and how that translates into being a person of strong character on a sports team to being a person of strong character in life and in their community.” It’s a rigorous program, but it aims to be inclusive. “We’re not necessarily trying to cultivate Division 1 athletes at our camp,” he says, “but we are most definitely trying to create Division 1 humans who are going to go off and live in the world and interact with other people.” A JCC Maccabi Sports Camp is located in San Francisco and offers three sessions for Summer 2016. Find more information at maccabisportscamp.org. Shevat • Adar 5776 | SDJewishJournal.com 29
CAMPS
URJ 6 Points Sports Academy campers develop athletic skills through intensive training with top-level coaches, seen here at the camp in North Carolina. BELOW: Shabbat at 6 Points North Carolina. Similar traditions will be started at the California location this summer.
Summer 2016 marks year one for the Reform movement’s second specialty sports camp BY TINA B. ESHEL
T
he Union for Reform Judaism (URJ) will open its second specialty sports camp this summer in Southern California. Called The URJ 6 Points Sports Academy California, this camp will serve girls and boys grades 4-11. It is the URJ’s second sports specialty camp; the first is in North Carolina, and both are breaking ground by integrating sports, religion, academics and Jewish values. Campers will choose from basketball, soccer, swimming, tennis, baseball, cheerleading/dance, lacrosse, and softball, while also enjoying traditional Jewish camp activities such campfires, community building activities and Shabbat celebrations. Young Jewish athletes can expect to participate in top level sports training alongside beloved traditions of Reform Jewish camping, according to the group’s website. Throughout the past seven years, the North Carolina camp has grown to serve 700 children each season, and organizers expect about 200 kids to attend the Southern California camp’s inaugural year. Located on the campus of Occidental College, there are two-, four- and six-week sessions available. Miriam Chilton, vice president of youth for URJ, expects this camp to be transformative for the Reform Jewish community in Southern California. “For a long time, there was no camp that combined top-level sports training together with a Jewish values-infused environment. The URJ 6 Points Sports Academy, now on both coasts, offers the best of both worlds.” Alan Friedman, executive director of the URJ 6 Points Sports brand, is 30 SDJewishJournal.com l February 2016
relocating to California as founding director of the California camp. He explains that while the North Carolina locale will serve as a model, “the brand new California location will be totally unique, with special, creative opportunities that will equip our young athletes with both sport and life skills.” A Learn more about 6pointssports.org.
PHOTOS COURTESY URJ
URJ Opens SoCal Sports Camp
PHOTOS COURTESY URJ
Shevat • Adar 5776 | SDJewishJournal.com 31
EDUCATION
Unconventional Education IN SOLANA BEACH
Fusion Academy helps students find their stride
Students at Fusion Academy receive one-on-one instruction from teachers in office-like classrooms at two locations in San Diego.
F
usion Academy was founded in 1989, in Michelle Rose Gilman’s garage. The alternative school continued growing operations there until 1998 when it moved to its first location in Solana Beach. The school became accredited in 2006 and in 2008, Gilman partnered with the American Education Group to replicate her model at facilities across the country. There are now two locations in San Diego – Solana Beach and UTC – with 33 campuses nationwide. “We wanted to create a place where [kids] could find success,” Gilman says. She was initially focused on what traditional schools consider special education students. She had a background with that population from work in psychiatric facilities and public and private schools in the Tampa, Fla., area prior to moving to San Diego. Specifically, it was the one-on-one instruction that she brought into her school. Today there are 90 students in the Solana Beach campus, not just the developmentally disabled but also students with emotional issues, kids in recovery, and plenty of actors and athletes who need flexible schedules. “It works great for them,” Gilman explains, “because they don’t miss content. If you need to go on set for a week, the class just takes a break. The common thread is that [the students] don’t respond to one-size-fits-all model 32 SDJewishJournal.com l February 2016
of conventional education.” The logistics are at first a bit hard to imagine. Each student, in grades 6-12, works one-on-one with each subject-matter teacher in a private office. There are two “homework cafés” – where students congregate but continue to work individually – because all school-work is done at school (but use of the homework café costs $30 per hour, on top of the monthly per-course tuition). “Some students can finish faster than typical school,” Gilman says. “If a student can show mastery, we’re going to move straight on,” from lessons or units. Same goes for if students struggle with concepts, the teacher stays on the lesson until “mastery” is achieved. Despite its unconventional nature, Fusion still offers social and extracurricular activities for students to have the full school experience. There are 500 course offerings, field trips, proms, “student fun nights,” yoga and meditation and other wellness programs. The Solana Beach location also has a full recording studio and heavy emphasis on the performing and visual arts. “It’s impossible to fail because our teachers don’t give up,” Gilman concludes. A Learn more about Fusion Academy at fusionacademy.com.
PHOTOS COURTESY FUSION ACADEMY
BY NATALIE JACOBS
Come join the magic at 7,200 feet high in the majestic California mountains! Camp Mountain Chai is San Diego’s summer destination where Jewish lives are enriched though spirit, community, friendships and self-exploration. info@campmountainchai.com 858-499-1330 www.campmountainchai.com
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Save the Date
Camp Mountain Chai’s 10th Anniversary Gala
Sunday, May 15, 2016 from 6:00 -9 :00 PM Paradise Point Resort A Night of Humor and Celebration Shevat • Adar 5776 | SDJewishJournal.com 33
A New Way of Learning and Thriving in Israel – Powered by JNF Alexander Muss High School in Israel (AMHSI-JNF) is a program built on exploration and discovery. Students are inspired to live outside their books and to encounter new ideas.
T O D AY, S O M E A R E C A L L I N G I N SI CK J U S T TO B E A B L E TO DO W H AT YO U D O E V E R Y D AY. PITY THEM.
RETIREMENT IS ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPIER, FULLER LIVES. At l eas t t h at ’s t h e p h i l oso p hy h e re at T h e Pat ricia n — a co m m u n it y of 136 independent-living apar tment h o m e s . We ’ve c re a t e d a u n i q u e , v i b ra nt , at m osp h e re w h e re resid e nt s are always looking for ward to w h at to m o r row b ri n gs . S o j oi n us . A n d s avo r to m o r row. L O O K I N G G O O D TA K E S W O R K ! T H A N K S F O R YO U R PAT I E N C E A S W E U P DAT E O U R C O M M U N I T Y
patr cıan
“The heart of every session at AMHSI- JNF is a chronological, academic study of Israel and Jewish history from the early biblical period to medieval anti-Semitism to the modern Arab-Israel conflict and Israel’s future as a leader in technology.” On Monday, February 8, JNF is hosting an evening with David Mitchell, Dean of Israel Studies at AMHSI-JNF, at Congregation Beth Am (5050 Del Mar Heights Rd, San Diego, CA 92130). There will be a meet and greet at 6:15 PM, followed by dinner (dietary laws observed) at 7:00 PM, and program at 7:30 PM. Mitchell was born and raised in Northern California and made aliyah in 1975 after graduating from the University of California, Berkeley with degrees in History and Hebrew Texts. He became a teacher at AMHSI-JNF in 1984 while also serving as an Israel emissary for the Youth and Hechalutz Department of the Jewish Agency to the Pacific Southwest Region of USY. The evening will be a wonderful opportunity to hear from Mitchell, learn about the work JNF does in Israel, and receive a sampling of what life is like at AMHSI-JNF.
A MERRILL GARDENS COMMUNITY
T H E PAT R I C I A N L A J O L L A . CO M 1. 85 8 . 217.55 4 8 4 025 Pulit zer Place, San Diego, CA 9212 2 34 SDJewishJournal.com | February 2016 111615a_Patrician_SD_Jewish_Journal_Savor_Renovation_CMYK_U_A.indd 1
According to Mordechai Cohen, head of AMHSIIsrael, “For the past 43 years, 24,000 alumni later, AMHSI-JNF has provided students from North America and around the world with the knowledge and tools to forge their own sense of Jewish peoplehood and connection to the land of Israel.
1/13/16 9:55 AM
For more information, please visit facebook.com/JNF.SanDiego and to RSVP, please contact Amy Hart, San Diego Director, at ahart@jnf.org or 858.824.9178 x988.
SAN DIEGO JEWISH 2016
ON THE RISE
Shevat • Adar 5776 | SDJewishJournal.com 35
FILM FESTIVAL
SAN DIEGO JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL HIGHLIGHTS FILMS IN A GROWING GENRE BY NATALIE JACOBS
T
Neil Friedman of Menemsha Films
here are 110 Jewish film festivals running in North America. Neil Friedman wants his films in all of them. But Friedman isn’t a screenwriter or a director, he’s a theatrical film distributor who started his own company, Menemsha Films, in 2003 after working on the business side of the film industry as an agent and business lawyer. In 2010, after growing confident in his ability to identify films that would be successful, and enjoying his work on the more creative side of the industry, Friedman decided to focus his distributions exclusively on work with a Jewish theme. By his definition, this is any film that contains a significant Jewish plot line, either cultural, historical or social in nature. “A good example of that is ‘Gloomy Sunday,’” Friedman says in a loud and excited voice. “Gloomy Sunday” was his first film distribution, in 2004, and it was a surprise hit. It was “a film about a café in Budapest just before the War and during the early years of the War. The owner of the café was Jewish. So did the issue of being Jewish come up on a constant basis throughout the film? No. But he did get taken away by the Nazis because he was Jewish. That’s not the main theme of the film, but it is a significant chord.” At the time of “Gloomy Sunday’s” release, Menemsha wasn’t solely focused on Jewish films in the way that it is now, but the fact that his first film was so successful and so Jewish was something Friedman held onto as he grew the business. Friedman has seen an increase in Jewish stories in film, along with a rise in the number of Jewish film festivals that pop up to showcase them – San Diego’s being one of the longest-running. He posits that this is largely because Jewish people love to go to the movies. That’s one guess as to why there are so many movies with Jewish themes. He offers a few others too: “There are a lot of immigrant stories and [stories of] assimilation,” he says. “It applies to every immigrant group and Jews are an immigrant group.”
On the whole, Holocaust stories also remain enticing foundations for films. “There hasn’t been any diminishment of films with Holocaust themes for one reason only that I can think of,” Friedman says, “that is because the stories related to the Holocaust are so uniquely dramatic and there are so many varying stories. By virtue of that historical event, a lot of films get made because that experience is uniquely a setting for so many varying stories about survival, such an unlimited list of possibilities that took place for people and how they survived during that period.” Since they decided to focus solely on Jewish films, Friedman and Menemsha have experienced annual growth, measured by the number of films they add to their roster and how many festivals they make it into each year. For the 2015-2016 film season (bookended by big film festivals and award shows) Menemsha is currently distributing 15 films and continuing to add more in the months ahead. “We’re not going to acquire a film that we don’t think is up to a certain standard,” Friedman explains, “but there are a lot of Jewish-themed films out there. If you’re thirsty for finding different cultural and historical films with some sort of Jewish theme, you’re picking among a large group.” He estimates there are between 75 and 100 films made annually that fit into his definition of films with a Jewish theme. In this year’s San Diego Jewish Film Festival, four of the 39 features are distributed by Menemsha Films. In the following pages, you will find reviews on three of those four – “Dough,” “Natasha,” and “To Life!” – along with three films that belong to other distributors – “A Blind Hero,” “Carvalho’s Journey,” and “The Law.” Also included in this section is a full schedule of Festival screenings (at four theaters throughout the county) and call-out boxes for special programming on deck throughout the 10-day festival. Tickets and more information can be found online at sdcjc.org/sdjff. A
If you’re thirsty for finding different cultural and historical films with some sort of Jewish theme, you’re picking among a large group.
36 SDJewishJournal.com | February 2016
FILM FESTIVAL
KNEADING A NEW TAKE ON
THE CLASSIC IMMIGRANT STORY “Dough” is enjoyable but “Flix Mix” tag might be deceiving BY NATALIE JACOBS
“A
ll of my regulars are either dead or moving away,” says the 70-something Kosher bakery owner Nat in an opening scene of the movie “Dough.” Nat is an old-guard Jewish baker whose family business, Dayan and Son, is being squeezed out by a new corporation that moved in next door. The new company not only wants Nat’s business, it wants the building where Dayan and Son is located, in order to turn it into a parking lot. Aside from the corporate encroachment, the bakery is also struggling as the Jewish community that once supported it has, as Nat notices in that early scene, diminished for one reason or another. Nat remains vigilant in his desire to keep the bakery open but a series of events keep making that goal harder to obtain. Worlds collide when an African Muslim woman wanders into the shop looking for work as an after-hours cleaner. When Nat’s baker leaves Dayan and Son for the corporation next door, the Muslim woman sees an opportunity for her son, a lost boy who’s first seen buying marijuana and barely escaping arrest by climbing out of a nightclub’s bathroom window. “Work with a Jew?” he says when his mother presents the job to him. “I heard they bake with blood.” This is a joke – even the boy, played wonderfully by Jerome Holder, smiles as he says it, but it is indicative of the subtle, ingrained racism that each character eventually must overcome. “Dough” is enjoyable because it takes the classic Jewish immigrant story and gently flips it. The Jewish man is not the immigrant here, in fact, his family goes back three generations in the English town where the film is set. The Muslim is the immigrant, in the physical sense. But Nat is still something of a stranger in a strange land. Although his roots are firmly established, it’s clear that he is of a different time and place.
It’s funny that the movie is the San Diego Jewish Film Festival’s In the Mix Young Adult selection, meaning that the committee thinks this one will be best suited for audiences in their 20s and 30s. Marijuana does create the story’s central conflict, but the film is actually about an old man in a new world who tries to hold onto tradition while everything that he’s used to slips slowly away. Plus, it’s not as if everything related to marijuana is connected to young people, especially not in this film. The people in “Dough” who enjoy the pot – kneaded unbeknownst to them into their baked goods – are the older people. Nat’s best friend, with whom he watches “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” incessantly, notices that his arthritis pains go away after eating Nat’s new challah, baked by the Muslim boy, Ayyash, one Friday afternoon. The next week, the friend and his wife enjoy the new challah together. They dance around the living room until the wife furtively calls the husband into the bedroom for an “early night.” Nat’s love interest, Joanna, a widow and the bakery’s landowner, brings pot brownies (again, she doesn’t know there’s pot in the brownies, neither does Nat) to her bridge club where the ladies are seen laughing and smiling in a way they haven’t been seen before. Later, when the truth about the brownies comes out, Joanna, played by Pauline Collins, whispers to herself in awe, “Best bridge club we’ve ever had.” The pot products do help the bakery expand its market beyond Jewish customers, and there are the requisite young hipsters and goth girls who become new regulars, but that’s really only a tertiary story line. The point is, if older adult audiences let the “Flix Mix” tag talk them out of seeing this film when it shows at the Film Festival this month, they’ll be missing out on a touching story that they will likely find highly relatable.A Shevat • Adar 5776 | SDJewishJournal.com 37
FILM FESTIVAL
Yiddish Cabaret Elevates CONTEMPORARY GERMAN DRAMA
“To Life!” is fun but misses opportunities to be original
BY MICHAEL FOX
R
uth Weintraub has mastered the art of keeping her Jewish past at bay. But now, evicted from her beloved Berlin apartment of 35 years and placed in ugly, unwelcoming public housing, she opts to stop struggling. Jonas is nearly half a century younger, and less skilled at evading the future (and his girlfriend). So he happens to be Jonas-on-the-spot to rescue Ruth at a crucial moment, reluctantly initiating an odd and unexpected friendship. It’s the movies, so we’re inclined to accept the unlikely sequence of events that sets the German drama “To Life!” (“Auf Das Leben”) in motion. Even more, we yearn for these good yet troubled people to bond across the generations. Part of that yearning has to do with our desire to see the Polish-born Ruth (played with grit, wit and gravitas by the formidable Hannelore Elsner) no longer tormented by the losses she suffered during the Holocaust. That’s a familiar theme in films, of course, to the point of cliché. However, the ways in which younger Germans confront the Holocaust and respond to anti-Semitism is endlessly compelling (to this observer, at least) yet rarely examined in movies. Consequently, that’s the path one wishes “To Life!” had chosen to explore with greater commitment instead of opting for a more superficial and routine story of strangers altering each other’s lives. Screening in the San Diego Jewish Film Festival, “To 38 SDJewishJournal.com | February 2016
Life!” is a good-looking, well-acted and engaging movie that proves more successful at skirting difficult questions than evading potholes of predictability. The great pleasure of “To Life!” is the Yiddish tunes that the gifted actress and singer Sharon Brauner performs in flashbacks as Ruth. We relish these expertly arranged musical numbers while savoring the talent, charm and devoted love that Ruth possessed in her 30s. Along with Brauner’s terrific musical numbers, Hannelore Elsner pulls us through “To Life!” by powerfully conveying Ruth’s unblinking self-awareness as well as her zero tolerance for self-pity (in herself as well as others). Readers with long memories will recall Elsner from “Go For Zucker,” a provocative German comedy from 2005. As Ruth, Elsner is totally convincing as a woman who was required to rely on herself from an early age, and takes it in stride without resentment (though not without regret). Elsner’s performance evokes the depth of wisdom, courage and common sense Ruth has to offer. Jonas (played by Berliner Max Riemelt), who’s sleeping in his van as “To Life!” begins, has also had to make his way in the world without his parents. That accounts for the tenuous bond between he and Ruth – they’re both loners – and their respectful appreciation for each other’s integrity. “To Life!” boasts a good heart and good intentions. It’s a shame it doesn’t evince a bit more wisdom and courage. A
FILM FESTIVAL
A
Taboo
Topic in Film
“The Law” introduces an historically important figure to new audiences BY TINA B. ESHEL
“T
he Law,” a French film directed by Christian Faure, stars Emmanuelle Devos as Simone Veil, the health minister of France who was the leading voice behind the fight to legalize abortion in that country in 1975. The film is a beautifully crafted reenactment of the real events that took place during that contentious time. It’s all politics and tactical maneuvering that creates tension up to the end. Simone Veil, age 89 this year, is a Holocaust survivor who lost her parents and brother in the War. Her sister survived with her. Veil went on to become a tenacious force in French politics. Devos does well in the commanding role, showcasing Veil’s steadfast resolve and sharp, unapologetic tongue with expert skill. Veil’s argument for what would be called the “prochoice” stance in the United States today, is that repression of abortion is cruel not because women should have soveriegnty over their bodies, but because women in France at that time were getting abortions anyway, and dying as a result. Those were the days of Bloody Mondays, when women who received illegal abortions, some self-administered, on weekends, were admitted to hospitals to horrific results. Poorer women, the film is careful to note, were
disproportionately at risk for irreperable harm and death. The Jewish element is strong in “The Law.” When Veil is presented with anti-Semitism along her journey, it’s clear that being a Holocaust survivor imbued in her a specific kind of courage in the face of such challenge. In the film, one character outwardly suggests this. In interviews that have taken place outside the scope of “The Law,” Veil credits her personal fortitude to her mother. During the worst of the anti-Semitic attacks lobbed upon her as she pressed forward to legalize abortion in France in the 1970s, Veil is quoted in Jewish Women’s Archives as saying, “I’m often asked what gave me the strength and will to continue the fight. I believe deeply that it was my mother; she has never stopped being present to me, next to me.” As Veil, Devos remains unflappable. The whole story is edgy, creative and fascinating, enhanced by a cast of characters including actress Flora Bonaventura as Diana Riestrof, a plucky rookie photographer turned reporter who brings a human vulnerability to the story as it unfolds. At the Film Festival screening on Feb. 13, professor Alyssa Sepinwall, an expert in French Jewish history, will offer insights into the time period and Veil as an important historical figure. A Shevat • Adar 5776 | SDJewishJournal.com 39
FILM FESTIVAL
Careful Not to Jump to Conclusions About Seemingly Familiar Holocaust Story Love, mercy and cunning distinguish “A Blind Hero”
BY MICHAEL FOX
O
tto Weidt, like Oskar Schindler, was a German factory owner with military contracts who employed – and protected – Jews during the Third Reich. But that’s pretty much where the similarities between these two characters end. Weidt’s workers made brooms and brushes, items significantly less essential to the war effort than Schindler’s munitions. And his Berlin operation, as depicted in Kai Christiansen’s unusual and deeply engrossing drama, “A Blind Hero: The Love of Otto Weidt,” consisted of only a dozen or so employees. The key personal difference is that Weidt’s ceaseless efforts to shield his staff, many of whom were blind and deaf, from deportation sprang from genuine affection and compassion rather than the financial self-interest that (at least initially) motivated Schindler. Weidt’s devotion to one female employee in particular gives this fine film its unique arc and appealing ambiguity, as does its title. “A Blind Hero” alludes to yet another of Weidt’s defining characteristics: He was nearly blind himself. The most compelling aspect of Edgar Selge’s marvelous performance, though, isn’t the tentative way in which Weidt walks (even in the familiar confines of his office and home) but the unhesitating decisiveness with which he moves when a crisis threatens the Jews in his employ. Weidt’s weapons against the Gestapo who periodically raid his establishment are charm, bribes, bluster and cleverness. At a certain point in “A Blind Hero” we are given a demonstration of Weidt’s fearlessness, a turning point that exposes the degree to which both we and the Nazis underestimate this polite, middle-aged and slightly decadent man. Our spoiled, erstwhile hero is considerably annoyed that his comfortable life is jolted by the Nazis’ ratcheting extermination campaign, especially as it coincides with his increasing infatuation with a pretty and much younger worker. Alice Licht is similarly taken with her kind and 40 SDJewishJournal.com | February 2016
resolutely married boss, though the movie is discreetly oblique (old-fashioned, you might say) about the level of physical intimacy the couple enjoys. Weidt’s wife has a pretty good idea, and the frustrated acceptance with which she carries on suggests not only her attitude toward her husband but a recognition of the vulnerability and difficulty she’d face on her own in chaotic wartime Germany. Indeed, much of what makes the movie so intriguing is trying to suss out the feelings and motivations of the female characters. We are helped by the on-camera recollections of nonagenarian Inge Deutschkron, who worked alongside Alice in Weidt’s office and managed to survive with her mother in hiding. Deutsckorn became a journalist in Germany and Israel (she was the editor of Maariv in the 1970s and ’80s) and has written extensively about her experiences during the war and Weidt’s heroic actions. It’s a tricky thing to integrate an interview with a real person into a drama with actors and sets, but Deutschkron’s presence proves to be the difference-maker that elevates “A Blind Hero” beyond well-intentioned Holocaust saga. She serves as a recurring reminder that real lives were lost and saved, and – along with the black-and-white archival footage of Berlin street life that’s stitched into the film – grounds us in a desperate time and place. The Nazi net eventually closes around Alice and her parents, inspiring Weidt to concoct his most creative, crafty and improbable plan yet. Deustchkron’s writings and testimony led to Yad Vashem’s recognition of Weidt as Righteous Among the Nations in 1971. Oskar Schindler wasn’t acknowledged until 22 years later. That said, “A Blind Hero” doesn’t end with a sprawling, smiling line of descendants of survivors. Weidt’s legacy is a great deal smaller, but he is served exceedingly well by this excellent film. A
FILM FESTIVAL
A Mother and Daughter Struggle for Freedom in Wide-Open Landscape “Wedding Doll” achieves moral high ground BY MICHAEL FOX
S
ara and Hagit, mother and daughter, live in an unceasing, tension-filled equilibrium of negotiation, argument and parental proclamation. Sara’s priority is protecting her willful child, while Hagit (an endearing Moran Rosenblatt) is continually asserting her independence. The kicker in Israeli writerdirector Nitzan Gilady’s heart-tugging “Wedding Doll” is that 24-year-old Hagit has a mental disability, and can’t accurately gauge risks to her safety. Just as crucial, she’s unable to discern a gap between her dreams and illusions, and the real world. It’s this latter condition, which manifests itself as an unfair fight between Hagit’s innocence and other people’s cruelty, which the exhausted Sara (Assi Levy) finds increasingly dififcult to manage. Gilady sets his intimate story in an unpopulated town in the middle of nowhere (the Negev, to be exact) where Hagit presumably faces fewer threats. She takes pleasure in the landscapes and vistas, but we see the cruel irony
in her furious desire for freedom amid all this open space: She’s not allowed to go anywhere without Sara, the lone exception being the toilet-paper factory where she’s worked for years. And that tiny, family-run operation is in the process of closing down, so Hagit’s world is about to shrink even as she’s clamoring for greater autonomy. “Wedding Doll” isn’t a message film; it evinces no point of view about the availability of social services or the economic prospects of southern Israel. This is a movie about people trying to do the best they can under tough circumstances, and ultimately having no one they can depend on but each other. Indeed, we’re so engaged with Hagit and Sara’s plight that the flurry of plot contrivances in the late-going hardly matters. “Wedding Doll” makes no bones about playing on the audience’s empathy, but it has the integrity not to generate cheap shocks and/or low blows from the chronic shortage of human kindness. A
TEENS AND YOUNG ADULTS: THEIR NAMES IN LIGHTS Featuring short films by students from the Ma’aleh School of Television, Film and the Arts SUNDAY, FEB. 7, 1:30 P.M. EDWARDS SAN MARCOS “Cheftzi on Air” A bittersweet romantic comedy about the neverending search for love. “Persian Lullaby” A single mother searches for her father’s approval in time for her son’s brit.
“The Rabbi’s Daughter” Stories of four women who have chosen different paths from their parents. “Tesefa” At the end of an ordinary day, an Ethiopian immigrant finds a child in hiding. Shevat • Adar 5776 | SDJewishJournal.com 41
FILM FESTIVAL
A Sephardic Jewish Photographer Shoots the Old West “Carvalho’s Journey” chooses convention and leaves much to be desired BY MICHAEL FOX
T
he colorful history of Jews in America is replete with astonishing accomplishments and notorious exploits. If we’re talking about brushes with immortality, though, it’s hard to top the marriage of adventure travel and artistic endeavor that Solomon Nunes Carvalho embraced in the mid-19th century. His fateful journey through prestatehood Kansas, Colorado and Utah comprises the remarkable heart of the disappointingly conventional documentary, “Carvalho’s Journey.” But even before the lifelong urbanite hit the dusty, snowy trail, he had made his mark as the progenitor of every Bar Mitzvah and wedding shooter to come. Aiming to expand his income beyond that of a gifted portrait painter, Carvalho was an early adopter of the French technology of daguerreotypy. To put it in the prosaic language of “Carvalho’s Journey,” he was the first professional Jewish photographer. This was in Baltimore in the early 1850s, where Carvalho and his wife and children had moved from his native Charleston, South Carolina. The observant, well-educated son of a prominent Sephardic Jew, Carvalho was nonetheless more New World than Old. He happened to be in New York on business in 1853 when the well42 SDJewishJournal.com | February 2016
known explorer John C. Frémont, acting on a recommendation from Matthew Brady, requested a meeting. A practiced self-promoter eyeing a future run for the Presidency, Frémont wanted daguerreotypes made on his next expedition. Improbably, the 40-year-old Carvalho agreed (after a half-hour conversation and without consulting his wife) to accompany Frémont and his passel of experienced outdoorsmen and Indian guides just a couple months later in their search for a passable transcontinental railroad route through the mountains. Perhaps Carvalho was having a midlife crisis. Maybe he was awed and impressed by Frémont’s confidence and character. Or perhaps he simply recognized a once-ina-lifetime opportunity that would also allow him to hone his skills and presumably advance his reputation as a daguerreotypist. Either way, Carvalho sounds like a fascinating fellow. Unfortunately, filmmaker Steve Rivo filters Carvalho’s story through on-camera interviews with contemporary historians rather than make the most of the man’s letters. While we get a snippet or two of the daguerreotypist’s prose, it’s hardly enough to get the flavor of his voice, personality, and the times. In particular, we’re left to wonder how
he came to be so positively perceived and received, given his adherence to the tenets of Judaism during the expedition. Carvalho was rigorous in his practice, apparently, even after delays and setbacks pushed Frémont’s journey from fall to the brutal winter. At a crucial juncture, the men were compelled to kill and eat their horses – a meal that Carvalho reluctantly partook of, after much hard thought – to avoid starving to death. Eventually, Carvalho found refuge and care among Mormons in Salt Lake City before returning home. The film invites us to imagine the conversations he had with Brigham Young. Ultimately, though, “Carvalho’s Journey” can’t bridge the decades and transport us to 1853, despite the engaging efforts of present-day daguerreotypist Robert Shlaer. He follows Carvalho’s trail, seeking to create images in the exact same spots as his predecessor, albeit in more hospitable conditions. Carvalho’s life after Frémont was productive, respectable and gratifying. He eventually compiled his recollections of the expedition into a book, but his daguerreotypes reverted to the explorer. Along with everything else in Frémont’s New York storage locker, they were destroyed in a large fire in 1881. Only one survives today. A
FILM FESTIVAL
A Summer of Love and All its Discontents
BY MICHAEL FOX
“Natasha” teaches a Toronto teen a thing or two about life
D
avid Bezmozgis’ matter-offact coming-of-age saga, “Natasha,” depicts a Toronto teen’s slow-motion fall from the cliffs of fantasy onto the sharp rocks of reality, in harrowing detail. Beautifully adapted from the title tale of Bezmozgis’s acclaimed 2004 collection of interlinked, autobiographical short stories about a family of RussianJewish immigrants, the movie is both distanced and desperate, restrained and sordid. Sixteen-year-old Mark (a terrific Alex Ozerov) is going through the motions of an undemanding summer, innocuously bicycling the deserted streets of his luxuriant suburb delivering weed for a dealer just a few years older than himself. He’s the quintessential teenager: Half-listening to the dreamy, angsty pop songs on in his earbuds, half-reading the books of philosophy and literature that line his shelves, halfwatching the Internet porn that’s the sole apparent function of his laptop and half-listening to his parents’ chitchat and his father’s motivational cross-examinations. Mark speaks Russian with his parents at home and English in public, and his bilingualism feeds a false notion of autonomy as well as the illusory sense that his illicit pursuits are his own secret domain. Although he’s plainly a good kid at heart, and incapable of
intentional cruelty, he requires pursuits that aren’t provided or approved by Mom and Dad. So Mark is less than thrilled when they assign him the obligation of acclimating 14-year-old Natasha, the daughter of his uncle’s newly immigrated wife, to Canada. Mark and Natasha are both Russian yet they’re from different planets – planets that, for dissimilar reasons, adopt a tight orbit around each other. While the clandestine relationship between Mark and Natasha (disarmingly and disturbingly played by Sasha K. Gordon with a veneer of naiveté that masks a chilling ruthlessness) drives the plot, Bezmozgis is acutely interested in upending and undermining certain perceptions of immigrants, and the presumably wonderful First World lives that await them. As a fully assimilated Canadian, Mark adopts the role of Natasha’s guide, with condescention and displeasure. He thinks he has a comfort level and status that Natasha (or anyone else) aspires to, and he isn’t afraid to let her know it. At this point, the film has already painted Mark’s spoiled suburban existence as something of a decadent bore. His parents presumably left Russia to give him a safer, more secure life with better opportunities, but instead of a young man driven
to maximize his potential he’s a nonproductive, underachieving slug. Natasha, we come to learn, has had to grow up much faster than Mark, and has a clearer fix on where she wants to go and how to get there. Her street smarts – and female figure – easily trump Mark’s book smarts. “Natasha” offers some uncomfortable truths about the lack of power of vulnerable women, and the tools and techniques they employ to balance the scales. The movie is infused with a nasty undercurrent of exploitation, from the mysterious circumstances culminating in the rapid wedding of Mark’s uncle and Natasha’s mother, to Natasha’s too-young experiences in Russia, to the events that reveal Mark’s inexperience and immaturity to himself. By this next point, the earbuds have slipped from Mark’s ears (a contemporary metaphor for scales dropping from his eyes). Thrust faceto-face with the empty artifice of his constructed existence, he is stunned and pathetic. Right now, at his age, the trauma makes him feel like he’s reached the end of the world. The good news, which Mark won’t be able to appreciate until some weeks after the credits have rolled, is that he has his whole life ahead of him. A
Shevat • Adar 5776 | SDJewishJournal.com 43
FILM FESTIVAL
SAN DIEGO JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL SCHEDULE WEDNESDAY, FEB. 3
7 p.m.; JCC “Dealing with the Devil”
11 a.m.; Edwards San Marcos “Wondrous Oblivion”
THURSDAY, FEB. 4
1:30 p.m.; Clairemont Reading 14 “A Blind Hero: The Love of Otto Weidt”
FRIDAY, FEB. 5
1:30 p.m.; JCC “The Last Cyclist Part 1”
7 p.m.; Clairemont Reading 14 “The Price of Sugar
10:30 a.m.; JCC “Imber’s Left Hand” 1:30 p.m.; JCC “Carvalho’s Journey”
2 p.m.; Clairemont Reading 14 “Plastic Man: The Artful Life of Jerry Ross Barrish”
7:30 p.m.; JCC “The Caborca Jew: A Mexican Story” 8 p.m.; Edwards San Marcos “Chagall-Malevich”
TUESDAY, FEB. 9
11 a.m.; Clairemont Reading 14 “The Singing Abortionist” 1:30 p.m.; Clairemont Reading 14 “Summer Solstice”
2 p.m.; Edwards San Marcos “The Singing Abortionist”
2 p.m.; Clairemont Reading 14 “Partner with the Enemy”
3:10 p.m.; JCC “The Last Cyclist Part 2”
5 p.m.; Clairemont Reading 14 “To Life!”
6 p.m.; Clairemont Reading 14 “Mountain”
4:30 p.m.; Clairemont Reading 14 “A Life for Football”
5 p.m.; Edwards San Marcos “A Life for Football”
6:30 p.m.; Clairemont Reading 14 “Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict”
4:30 p.m.; Edwards San Marcos “Backgammon”
6 p.m. and 7 p.m.; Clairemont Reading 14 “Rock in the Red Zone”
8:30 p.m.; Carlsbad Village Theatre “Plastic Man: The Artful Life of Jerry Ross Barrish”
5 p.m.; Clairemont Reading 14 “The Prime Ministers: Soldiers and Peacemakers”
7:30 p.m.; JCC “Righteous Rebel: Rabbi Avi Weiss”
9 p.m.; Clairemont Village Theatre “Natasha”
5 p.m.; Edwards San Marcos “The Polgar Variant”
8 p.m.; Edwards San Marcos “The Prime Ministers: Soldiers and Peacemakers”
9:30 p.m.; Clairemont Reading 14 “Hill Start”
7 p.m.; JCC “Dough”
WEDNESDAY, FEB. 10
SUNDAY, FEB. 7
7:30 p.m.; Clairemont Reading 14 “Imber’s Left Hand”
SATURDAY, FEB. 6
6 p.m.; Carlsbad Village Theatre “A Blind Hero: The Love of Otto Weidt”
10:30 a.m.; Edwards San Marcos “Sapir/Sha’ar HaNegev High School” 10:30 a.m.; Clairmont Reading 14 “Dealing with the Devil” 10:30 a.m.; JCC “Flory’s Flame” 11 a.m.; Clairemont Reading 14 “Autobiography of a Jeep” 11 a.m.; Clairemont Reading 14 “Projections of America” 44 SDJewishJournal.com | February 2016
7:30 p.m.; Edwards San Marcos “Carvalho’s Journey” 8 p.m.; Edwards San Marcos “Victor Young Perez” 8:15 p.m.; Clairemont Reading 14 “Valley”
MONDAY, FEB. 8
5 p.m.; Edwards San Marcos “Imber’s Left Hand”
10:30 a.m.; JCC “Flory’s Flame”
11 a.m.; Clairemont Reading 14 “A Life for Football” 1:30 p.m.; Clairemont Reading 14 “The Muses of Bashevis Singer” 2 p.m.; Clairemont Reading 14 “Chagall-Malevich” 4:30 p.m.; Clairemont Reading 14 “Autobiography of a Jeep” 4:30 p.m.; Clairemont Reading 14 “Projections of America”
FILM FESTIVAL
5 p.m.; Edwards San Marcos “Rock in the Red Zone” 5 p.m.; Clairemont Reading 14 “A Blind Hero: The Love of Otto Weidt”
SATURDAY, FEB. 13 6 p.m.; JCC “Wedding Doll”
6 p.m.; Edwards San Marcos “Once in a Lifetime”
7:30 p.m.; Clairemont Reading 14 “Partner with the Enemy”
6 p.m.; Clairemont Reading 14 “The Law”
8 p.m.; Clairemont Reading 14 “Encirclement”
6:30 p.m.; Edwards San Marcos “The Last Cyclist Part 1”
8 p.m.; Edwards San Marcos “The Price of Sugar”
6:30 p.m.; Clairemont Reading 14 “Chagall-Malevich”
THURSDAY, FEB. 11
8:10 p.m.; Edwards San Marcos “The Last Cyclist Part 2”
11 a.m.; Clairemont Reading 14 “The Polgar Variant” 1 p.m.; Clairemont Reading 14 “The Prime Ministers: Soldiers and Peacemakers” 2 p.m.; Clairemont Reading 14 “The Law” 4 p.m.; Clairemont Reading 14 “The Price of Sugar”
9:30 p.m.; Clairemont Reading 14 “Valley”
SUNDAY, FEB. 14
5 p.m.; Edwards San Marcos “Autobiography of a Jeep”
10 a.m.; Clairemont Reading 14 “The Muses of Bashevis Singer”
5 p.m.; Edwards San Marcos “Projections of America”
1 p.m.; Clairemont Reading 14 “Encirclement”
7:30 p.m.; Clairemont Reading 14 “Mountain”
1:30 p.m.; Clairemont Reading 14 “Dying to Know: Ram Dass & Timothy Leary”
FRIDAY, FEB. 12 10:30 a.m.; JCC “Flory’s Flame”
1:30 p.m.; JCC “Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict”
PROGRAM #1 ALL THESE VOICES Monday, Feb. 8; 11 a.m. Featuring: “Women in Sink,” “Good Business,” “Picking Up the Pieces,” and “Wandering Rabbi”
9 p.m.; Clairemont Reading 14 “Summer Solstice”
9:45 a.m.; JCC “Shalom Sesame: Be Happy, It’s Purim!”
8 p.m.; Edwards San Marcos “Summer Solstice”
@ Archlight Cinemas UTC
9 p.m.; Edwards San Marcos “Mountain”
5 p.m.; Clairemont Reading 14 “Hill Start”
8 p.m.; Clairemont Reading 14 “Rockin the Red Zone”
THE JOYCE FORUM SHORTS SCHEDULE
PROGRAM #2 OUT OF THE BOX Monday, Feb. 8; 2 p.m. Featuring: “A King’s Betrayal,” “Blue Like Me,” “Curt Lowens: A Life of Changes,” “Life & Art of David Labkovski,” “What Cheer?” “This is Joe,” and “Two Landscapes”
PROGRAM #3 DISCLOSURES Monday, Feb. 8; 5 p.m. Featuring: “Bringing the Wind,” “Dear G-d,” “The Divorce,” “Incognito”
4 p.m.; Clairemont Reading 14 “To Life!” 4:30 p.m.; Clairemont Reading 14 “Victor Young Perez” 7:30 p.m.; Clairemont Reading 14 “Sabena Hijacking – My Vision”
PROGRAM #4 CURATOR RAVES Monday, Feb. 8; 8 p.m. Featuring: “Bernice,” “Ave Maria,” “A Tale of a Woman and a Robe,” “Haovdan (The Loss),” and “The Tailor” Shevat • Adar 5776 | SDJewishJournal.com 45
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46 SDJewishJournal.com | February 2016
FEATURE
SERIAL Storytellers Forty million people listened to one podcast last year. Meet the journalists who made it. BY NATALIE JACOBS
T
he creators of the record-shattering podcast Serial will be the first to tell you that the kind of storytelling they’re doing on their episodic audio program is not new. Reporter/ host Sarah Koenig and executive producer Julie Snyder did not invent the idea to tell one narrative non-fiction story across a series of episodes but they have updated the form with such expertise and devotion that you would be forgiven for forgetting that anything of its kind existed before. The duo had been producers on another groundbreaking audio program, the public radio show This American Life, for years – Koenig for 10 and Snyder for 18 – when they began working with that show’s creator Ira Glass on podcast ideas for This American Life to get behind. By some estimates, podcasting can trace its roots back to the 1980s but it really took hold in the early 2000s, most officially when Apple released a podcast section into iTunes in 2005. Today, it seems everyone from comedians, writers and actors to long-distance best friends, techies-who-can-explain-it-all and motivational speakers have podcasts. It’s a form of non-fiction, journalistic storytelling that takes liberties and relies heavily on the charisma of its host. Podcasts have earned a reputation as hip ways to reach young, mobile audiences that have come to expect on-demand entertainment, with edgy, thoughtful stories. The medium is gaining tremendous popularity. By 2014, the number of people who had ever listened to a podcast reached 30 percent, up steadily from 11 percent in 2006, according to Edison Research. That report found 39 million people had listened to a podcast in the last month. Since Serial was something of a This American
That last part – Koenig’s honesty Life spinoff, its first episode was about her struggle to parse out broadcast in that show’s spot truth and innocence versus lies on National Public Radio “It’s not just and guilt – is perhaps one affiliates across the reason why Serial season country. Then it caught a schtick you do,” one was so hard to stop fire. After four episodes Koenig says. “If it serves thinking about. in October, 2014, the “I don’t think it [has] podcast had reached the story and is useful, ever been hard for me one million downloads then sure. But yeah, it to admit confusion or per episode on iTunes [that] I don’t have a crisp, alone. took me a while to clean understanding of this In an interview thing and I’m not sure I can with another podcast, get there.” figure it out,” Koenig says in a called Longform, Ira Glass phone interview between sips of mentions that it took This soup and her next interview for season American Life – which topped the two, currently in progress. “I don’t think that’s podcast charts since there were podcast charts – four years to reach that same number of listeners. necessarily so hard to admit because I’m literally By the end of November, 2014, Serial was up living in a continual fog of confusion, basically.” But she was initially uncomfortable with how to 5 million. Since podcasts can be downloaded from multiple sources, not just iTunes, it is often she had to explain that confusion in season estimated that season one of Serial had 40 million one. “That’s something that my partners, like Julie downloads by the end of 2014. Like with anything that gets so popular so [Snyder] and Ira [Glass] and Dana [Chivvis], fast, it’s hard to explain exactly why, except to that’s something that they kind of made clear to say that season one was riveting. Koenig, Snyder me. Like, we need you to tell us what to think, and producer Dana Chivvis investigated – as otherwise we don’t care.” Even if what we, the audience, are told to journalists, not detectives – the curious case of Adnan Syed, a Muslim boy (now a man) from think is honest uncertainty. “It’s not just a schtick you do,” she says. “If it Baltimore who is serving time for the murder of his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee. Each of the 12 serves the story and is useful, then sure. But yeah, episodes follows Koenig and her tiny team as they it took me a while to get there.” Listeners are literally sifting through the facts unpack thousands of pages of documents and case files, conduct hours of interviews with people of the case with Koenig, or at least she makes us associated with the case (including Adnan Syed feel that way, when she carefully and explicitly himself, from prison), actually re-trace Syed’s outlines what we know, who we’re curious about, steps on the day of the murder, and wonder aloud who we’d really like to talk to, why we’re back at about the difficulty of determining the truth. the Best Buy parking lot, and what really doesn’t Shevat • Adar 5776 | SDJewishJournal.com 47
make sense. It would be like if Detective Stabler from Law and Order SVU came into your living room and started talking to you about his case, saying that it’s weird there’s these 20 minutes that are unaccounted for, or sharing interview tape of the convivial conversation between him and the suspected perpetrator. He’d stop just short of asking if you think the guy’s guilty. The podcast form itself creates an incredibly personal connection between the host and the listener, but the way Koenig continuously breaks that third wall (or maybe in audio stories it would be considered the second wall) in season one adds another layer of direct personalization that makes audiences feel required to pay attention. This is a conversation and you wouldn’t want to be rude. “I’ve always thought that radio is an incredibly intimate medium because it is one voice that feels like they’re talking directly to the listener,” Julie Snyder says. “I think it’s even heightened with podcasts, because of the delivery method. A lot of people are listening in headphones. … You’re choosing it as opposed to it’s the default … It’s more intimate, it’s more direct. I think the listeners feel like we’re thinking of them as we’re making it. And we are.” By the end of season one, when nothing really was solved but nuggets of doubt were firmly implanted, listeners hoped for a re-trial or some tangible change to come in Syed’s case after all of this work was done to expose its cracks. In November, 2015, a Baltimore City Circuit judge agreed to grant Adnan Syed a hearing with the opportunity to present new evidence. Is that what Koenig and Snyder were after? “What you’re working on, you want to make sure that the story that you’re doing feels like there’s a justifiable reason for it to live in the world,” Snyder says. “For any story, you feel a pressure as to why it should exist. Especially for 48 SDJewishJournal.com | February 2016
these stories, we’re really going to invest a lot of time into them. Both our time, but also the listener’s time. We’re asking a lot, so I think in that way it is a little different where you say, does this have a point? Is there a point that you want to be making?” And they have to live in this world for a long time too, Snyder says. Unlike their This American Life stories, Snyder says they worked on Serial season one for about seven months. On the day I spoke with them, in separate phone calls, episode four of season two was released. Snyder says she got home at 11 the night before. “We finished last night for this morning’s episode.” “I’m spazzing out,” Koenig says when I ask if things feel easier for season two. “We’re crazy behind, for reasons that are not interesting. … It doesn’t have to be this way. It’s just bad planning on my part.” Aside from the show still having the same name and the same host, things are very different in season two. This season’s Serial explores the much-talked about though scarcely understood case of Bowe Bergdahl, the American soldier who left his base in Afghanistan and was held captive by the Taliban for five years. The U.S. government eventually traded five detainees from Guantanamo Bay in exchange for his release, in May of 2014. Up until Serial season two episode one, it was unclear to the public why Bergdahl left his base in the first place. He hadn’t been heard publicly until this podcast. The episodes have been longer by almost two times, and the subject matter is literally foreign to a lot of people, including Koenig. “Any story you do in this scope is going to be really challenging,” she says, “which is good, that’s what I want, that keeps it very interesting.
PHOTO COURTESY STEVEN BARCLAY AGENCY
Julie Snyder (left) in a rare face-to-face working session with Sarah Koenig (right). Snyder works from New York City while Koenig is based in Pennsylvania.
But this one, the learning curve for me is huge. I didn’t know anything about the military, I didn’t know about the war in Afghanistan, I don’t know anything about the historical problems between Afghanistan and Pakistan. So it’s really just a big learning curve for me, which is great, I’m so interested in everything I’m learning, it just, you know, takes time.” Snyder estimates they have about 70 hours of interviews so far for season two, not including the one Koenig conducted as soon as she got off the phone with me, and all the others since then. In mid-January, Serial announced season two episode one was downloaded more than 3.3 million times, with about the same number of downloads per episode so far. In thinking back on the beginnings of Serial, Koenig tells me, “I was hoping to do an underthe-radar experiment. That’s why we did it as a podcast because we were like well, if it sucks no one will really be the wiser. I’m very cautious that way. I’m very like, nobody look at me, nobody look until I’m ready.” Ready or not, Serial season two releases new episodes bi-weekly. They won’t say how many episodes will make up season two, but in midJanuary they announced it will be extended beyond what they originally “mapped out.” Sarah Koenig and Julie Snyder will be in San Diego on Wednesday, March 2 to give audiences a backstage view on the making of Serial, at the Balboa Theatre. San Diego is the first stop on a California tour for the duo. Snyder says they’ll talk about how Serial came to be, and how their intentions “were not exactly what ended up happening.” A Tickets for “Backstage with the Creators of SERIAL” start at $30 and can be purchased at sandiegotheatres.org.
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Shevat • Adar 5776 | SDJewishJournal.com 49
February 27, 2016 Hyatt Regency La Jolla
Join us for an evening of glitz, glamour and giving in the tradition of Grand Hollywood. 2016 Gala Co-Chairs Esther Fischer and Linda Platt Master of Ceremonies Dan Cohen Morning Anchor at KFMB-TV, CBS San Diego For tickets and sponsorship information, call 760.516.2003. Advance ticket pricing available before January 13, 2016 at seacrestvillage.org.
Media Sponsor
Proceeds from this event benefit the residents of Seacrest Village Retirement Communities
50 SDJewishJournal.com | February 2016
PHOTO COURTESY HADASSAH
PHOTOS BY KEN WALSH
FEATURE
Andrea Feier (instructing in the top right photo) manages dance classes for San Diego’s Parks and Rec department all across town. This month, her work will culminate in a city-wide production at the Casa del Prado Theatre in Balboa Park.
Staging Transformation San Diego Civic Dance benefits from Andrea Feier’s energy and expertise BY PAT LAUNER
“I
was a pretty shy kid, but onstage, I could do anything.” That’s an inspiration to any aspiring performer. And it makes Andrea Feier the perfect person to serve as Dance Specialist for the San Diego Civic Dance Arts programs, which has been providing high quality, affordable dance education for 73 years, under the aegis of the City of San Diego Parks and Recreation Program. Every year, Feier helps to teach, oversee and coach thousands of students, from 3 year olds to seniors of 90 and older as they
study various dance forms at rec centers around the county. Feier herself began dancing at age 2. She was born into a “culturally Jewish” family, emphasis on culture (they attended dance performances and played show tunes at home). Her mother, who died in 2014, was “a Lower East Side New Yorker.” Her father, born in Vienna, was on a Kindertransport train to England at age 5, winding up in Edinburgh boarding schools. When he was 12, he was reunited with his parents in Israel. Andrea grew up in Andover, Mass. At age 3,
she’d “go next door and dance for the neighbors,” she recalls, “and they’d give me things. I guess that was my first paid gig!” By age 5, she was enrolled in a ballet class. Soon after, she began a lifetime of studying tap, jazz, baton, Hawaiian, acrobatics, creative movement and Musign Dance (a discipline that combines sign language with dance movement). “I performed all the time,” Feier says of her early years. “At malls, theaters, even for Senator Paul Tsongas. I always liked to perform. I liked to be able to literally become someone else.” Her aim had always been to dance on Shevat • Adar 5776 | SDJewishJournal.com 51
Broadway (one of her role models was celebrated actor/dancer/choreographer Anne Reinking). In high school, she was cast as the comically hypchondriacal danceuse, Miss Adelaide, in a production of “Guys and Dolls.” Her math teacher wrote her a letter saying, “Never, in all my years, have I seen such a transformation.” Although Feier insists that she was always shy, she “wasn’t shy about dancing.” And though she says she was never gregarious, she’s an articulate speaker who exudes passion about dance. She might have been reserved, but she admits to being “competitive and setting high standards” when it came to dancing. “I wasn’t selling myself,” she asserts. “I just did what I did.”
husband, who “has a gorgeous voice and perfect pitch,” often sings and emcees for the major Civic Dance Arts shows; he also writes and does technical work for the group’s big productions. There’s a huge June recital, and every February, a “Collage” that features the four advanced performing level companies.
DANCING HER WAY TO SAN DIEGO
stressful. But in 2005, I took the job. This March will mark 11 years in the position. Bonnie did it for 10. Her husband, Don, was the first Dance Specialist for Civic Dance Arts, in the late ’50s.” So Feier carries on a long and venerated legacy. She oversees a staff of 19, along with 200 weekly classes at 22 sites all over the county. That amounts to 3,000 students per year. She coaches, teaches and choreographs, in addition to the extensive administrative work the job requires. “I really like working on developing artists, as opposed to just dancers,” Feier says. “Showing them how to dance with intention. That’s hugely important. Drawing on my work with a mime group at Juilliard, I help students answer the question: How are you communicating through movement what you’re trying to say?” Feier’s philosophy is, “If you demand it, they’ll live up to and exceed it.”
Feier earned a BFA in dance from The Juilliard School, where she won the José Limon Award and the Rockettes Award. Then she obtained a full scholarship to the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center. She danced with the Paul Taylor Dance Company. She even took a class with Baryshnikov. She served as artistic director of American Dance Theatre of the Deaf, and as a performer, she helped found several performing arts companies. But, in between gigs, she had the usual array of place-holding jobs: waitress, personal trainer, yoga instructor, teacher trainer, Bar Mitzvah kidwrangler and stand-up comic/performance artist (she balanced 14 plastic spoons on her face, and got to meet David Letterman as a result). Her parents moved to San Diego in 1985. She came out here from New York and auditioned for Starlight Musical Theatre. While appearing in “Evita,” (“my absolute favorite musical at the time”), she met her husband, Alan, a musical theater performer named for Alan Alda. They met in rehearsal, then did “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” together, and then carried out a long-distance, bicoastal relationship for a while, before marrying in 1991. Now they have three children (ages 8, 12 and 17), two of whom are into dance. Andrea’s 52 SDJewishJournal.com | February 2016
PUTTING A TOE IN THE WATER In 1996, Feier was brought in to teach a master class by local dance legend Bonnie Ward, who held the position of Dance Specialist at the time. “The next year, in 1997,” Feier recollects, “Bonnie convinced me to hire on. I think she always thought I’d be a good replacement for her. I wasn’t interested in the position; it seemed so
CREATING A COLLAGE The Collage 2016 performance (2/5-2/21) with its theme of “Change,” includes 85 professionally trained dancers. “People are blown away by the quality of the Collage performance,” says Feier. The production won a Bravo Award for Best Dance Show in 2014 and 2015 (the first group to win in the same category two years in a row). The dancers in the four performance-level companies
(divided by age: 8-12, 12-19, 20-35 and 36-74) demonstrate advanced level dance skills. They sign a year-long contract, committing to classes, rehearsals and volunteer work. The elaborate production is presented for 13 performances in the 600-seat Casa del Prado Theatre in Balboa Park. “We have spectacular costumes, imaginative set pieces, a magnificent professional lighting design, we build a stage extension, so we’re closer to the audience and the stage is enlarged to 37 feet deep and 42 feet wide,” Feier enthuses. “And I’m proud to say that the dancers come in all shapes and sizes; they’re not all twigs! They have real bodies, they eat well and they menstruate when they should” (a developmental stage that
is notoriously absent in many self-deprived, overextended ballet dancers). Feier’s daughter and son will be in the show, parts of which will be choreographed by high-profile guest chorographers. One piece was created by internationally recognized choreographer Mark Morris for his New Yorkbased Mark Morris Dance Group. A wide range of dance styles will be on display, including tap, jazz, hip-hop, lyrical, modern and musical theater. The grand finale will include excerpts from big Broadway production numbers from “Aladdin,” “The Producers” and “Billy Elliot,” among others. “I really love dance – all different styles,” Feier says. “And I love people who are passionate about the arts. It’s fun to have a job that allows me to be involved with both those things every day. And I get to share that with the community at large during Collage productions. What I hear over and over again from attendees is their awe at the caliber of the dance, the commitment of the company, and how joyful it all is.” A The San Diego Civic Dance Companies “Collage 2016: Change” runs at the Casa Del Prado Theatre in Balboa Park on weekends, from February 5-21. Tickets ($5-$15) and information are at 619796-3657; civicdancearts.org or collage2016. brownpapertickets.com.
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-The New York Times
By JOHN PATRICK SHANLEY Directed by TODD SALOVEY
“ ... You will walk out of the theater realizing you’ve barely breathed for the duration of this astonishing musical and theatrical transmigration of souls.” -The Chicago Sun Times
From the Pulitzer, Oscar and Tony winning writer of Doubt and Moonstruck, an Irish Valentine to the wonder and weirdness of love.
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Shevat • Adar 5776 | SDJewishJournal.com 53 1/25/16 3:16 PM
FEATURE
Shalom Baby’s Bar Mitzvah Year The Jewish community for new mothers reaches maturity milestone BY TINA B. ESHEL Mothers and their babies gather outside for a Shalom Baby mommy-and-me play date.
I
t’s been almost eight years since I first learned about Shalom Baby and PJ Library. About to deliver my second child, I looked with anticipation to what I thought of as a Jewish mommy-andme group. I hadn’t had that kind of communal support during the birth of my first child, and the second time around, I wanted to avoid some of those early highs and lows that come with taking care of a newborn. Connecting with other new moms was going to be my salvation. It’s no exaggeration to say that I looked forward to each gathering, our gaggle of moms included first-timers and seasoned parents collectively cooing over our little ones. In the beginning, there was no shortage of volunteers to host our get-togethers. Our fun extended into taking classes, like infant massage and baby sign language, often on the advice of Judy Nemzer, the coordinator for the Shalom Baby group program. As our infants grew into toddlers, we celebrated first steps and Shabbat dinners together. Back then, Judy Nemzer ran the program by herself. She began in 2001 with a simple idea – deliver welcome baskets to new Jewish moms and dads. The baskets included things like baby blankets, Shabbat candlesticks, lists of local synagogues and even mohels. Since then, the program has grown considerably. “Of course we [still] deliver our Shalom Baby baskets,” Nemzer says. “We make sure we deliver within a week of hearing of the baby being born. We are conscious of getting things done right away.” But now Nemzer has a small team and they’ve 54 SDJewishJournal.com | February 2016
expanded into what they call concierge services. “Our concierge service is huge,” and starts soon after a child is born,” she says. Once a family has settled down for a few weeks, they are contacted by Nemzer or her co-coordinator in North County, Vivien Dean, who assign the new mothers to a playgroup, Shalom Baby’s most popular program. “Moms are thrilled because they want to get out and meet moms with babies of similar age. We keep in touch to find out when they need. The response is amazing because moms want to get out of the house, but it’s not just for the moms. “We feel it’s important for dads to be included,” she continues. “Some of our dads have formed soccer teams, played golf together, done business together. It’s a great connection for them.” Beyond the playgroups, parents can expect to find programs such as infant massage, music classes, mommy-and-me yoga, baby book club, sleep workshops, parenting workshops and more. This past year, they added Little Mensches to their programming, which gives preschoolers the chance to engage in tikkun olam. The motto of the program is making the world a better place one mitzvah at a time. Kids, typically older siblings ages 9-11 are welcome too. “We have a lot of out-of-state families that hear about us and call. They hear about our Shalom Baby and want to join when they are moving to San Diego. Whatever they need, if they ask, we help,” Nemzer says. The furthest call came from Australia.
Shalom Baby has helped families find doctors, become synagogue members, even locate the city’s challah bakeries, Nemzer and Dean say. In 13 years, Nemzer estimates that Shalom Baby has served more than 4,000 families and that PJ Library in San Diego, run by Alma Hadash Geiger, has sent out 145,288 Jewish books since 2007. Funding for Shalom Baby comes Federation, Leichtag Foundation, Viterbi Family Fund, and private donors, while the Harold Grinspoon Foundation is a primary sponsor for the PJ Library program. The specialty toy store chain, Geppetto’s Toys of San Diego, has donated items in-kind as well. A group of about 15 volunteers helps to deliver Shalom Baby baskets from as far south as Chula Vista up to as far north as Camp Pendelton. Along with the basket drop is a quick check on the status of the new mother. “If [volunteers] report that the mom was quiet or needs help, they let us know and we will be in touch with that family,” Nemzer explains. Both women say they’d like to bring in Shabbat dinners and expand their outreach to the community, especially the unaffiliated and interfaith families who make up a large percentage of Shalom Baby participants. “We just keep growing and growing and meeting the demand of our young families.” A Know a family about to have a baby? Tell them about Shalom Baby and PJ Library by sending them to the website at lfjcc.org/shalombaby.
PHOTO COURTESY SHALOM BABY
celebrate celebrar festeggiare International festeggiare celebrate célébrer celebrar BLACK and festeggiare celebrar WHITE celebrate ´ Soiree célébrer comemoro festeggiar celeb comemorocelebrarcelebrar 36th
AN EVENING CELEBRATING THE ANNIVERSARY OF SAN DIEGO JEWISH ACADEMY
Saturday, February 27 WITH A SPECIAL TRIBUTE TO EDNA YEDID
7 UNTIL MIDNIGHT
Tickets and information CROWNAIR PRIVATE HANGAR, MONTGOMERY FIELD AIRPORT
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36th Anniversary Chairs
TAMARA AND DAVID KLEIN, SONIA AND GAVIN MANDELBAUM, HEIDI AND RUSSELL SILBERSTEIN
36TH YEAR EVENTS GENEROUSLY UNDERWRITTEN
by the Posnock Family
Shevat • Adar 5776 | SDJewishJournal.com 55
On Air with Seacrest Village Residents will soon have their own internal tv network, thanks to anticipated Women’s Auxiliary Gala fundraising BY TINA B. ESHEL
Seacrest Village Television (SVTV) will air on both Seacrest campuses, in Encinitas and Rancho Bernardo. In addition to original programming developed by Seacrest residents, SVTV will show video streams of events from around the campuses, including synagogue services, as pictured above.
I
t’s fitting that Seacrest Village’s gala on Feb. 27 is an evening of glitz, glamour and giving in the tradition of grand Hollywood – this year’s Fund-A-Need project is for an ambitious ongoing effort called Seacrest Village Television (SVTV). SVTV will be a dedicated tv channel for residents at both campuses, in Encinitas and Rancho Bernardo. The service, which is estimated to cost $200,000 for initial setup, will allow video cameras to stream live and curated content. “If we create the environment properly for SVTV, the residents will have their own broadcasting station,” explains Kim Fuson, vice president of operations at Seacrest Village. She says that staff will be able to broadcast on SVTV, but what is most exciting is that people living at Seacrest will create most of the broadcast programming. “Imagine a news desk, where they could announce what kind of programming is happening that day. SVTV will be resident-based, resident-
56 SDJewishJournal.com l February 2016
focused, and resident-driven, on both campuses. “SVTV is really going to connect all residents to all residents in ways that we have only imagined,” Fuson continues. One primary goal is to give added meaning to seniors’ lives, regardless of how mobile they are. Fuson explains that Seacrest’s frailest seniors will be able to connect to a wider world through programming about music, art, lectures, comedy and even Jewish spiritual endeavors. For example, those who are confined to bed for great periods of time and therefore unable to attend synagogue services – as well as other on-campus activities – will be able view their location’s service on SVTV. As people age, one concern is figuring out how and if they still matter, explains Fuson. She thinks SVTV will help more of Seacrest’s seniors maintain their sense of purpose, and find new motivation in their daily lives.
PHOTOS COURTESY SEACREST VILLAGE
FEATURE
PHOTOS COURTESY SEACREST VILLAGE
L-R: Seacrest Village Women’s Auxiliary Gala co-chairs Linda Platt and Esther Fischer.
“They are creating campus life,” Fuson says of SVTV and other large Seacrest endeavors. “[These] volunteer opportunities will give their lives meaning. If you know other residents are counting on you, that creates a sense of responsibility to something bigger than yourself.” Most residents in both Encinitas and Rancho Bernardo have flat screen televisions in their rooms and individual pillow speakers, which means at least some of the groundwork to install SVTV on both campuses has been laid out. The next challenge is to select the telecommunications and broadcasting system that will best allow for this upgrade, something the Seacrest Village IT department is currently working on. “We are narrowing our choices and want something that can grow with us,” Fuson says about the specific considerations. The SVTV initiative is an exciting technological endeavor, at least for one donor. Irwin Jacobs, co-founder of Qualcomm, says of he and his wife, Joan, “We’ve been supporters of Seacrest Village for years and have always enjoyed attending the Gala. This year, we are especially pleased to support Seacrest in its goal to implement new technology to improve the lives of residents. We believe deeply that technology can be used to create a more connected and meaningful life and we want this to be a reality for the residents at Seacrest.”
GETTING THERE The Silver Screen fundraiser, hosted for another year at the Hyatt Regency La Jolla, is the 38th annual Women’s Auxiliary Gala. Each year in preparation for the fundraising effort, the Seacrest Office of Philanthropy meets with the Operations team to determine a list of top needs from across the organization. Last year, the Fund-A-Need initiative raised money for highly sophisticated beds for Seacrest’s most physically challenged residents. Prior to that, they raised funds for a deluxe bus to use on outings. Once Operations and Philanthropy have come up with a short list of needs, they take it to the Women’s Auxiliary Board, led by Mary Epsten for more than two decades, who collectively make the final decision based on what they think the community will be most excited about for the year’s Fund-A-Need effort.
Both Fischer and Platt recognize the value that Seacrest brings to the community, and that SVTV is something a younger, more tech-savvy generation can get excited about. Esther Fischer and Linda Platt serve as the Gala’s co-chairs for the first time this year, but they’ve both been involved with Seacrest and the Women’s Auxiliary for a long time. Esther and her husband Bud funded The Esther and Bud Fischer Aquatics and Fitness Center, which opened in 2011. Linda Platt has been part of the Auxiliary for decades as well, since moving to San Diego in 1958. Currently, Platt is the co-chair for the capital campaign as well as for the Gala. Both women expressed devotion to helping seniors and are encouraging younger members of the community to get involved. “The population is aging. We have to be very aware of that,” Platt says. “So many people have worked hard all their lives and may not have family. Other cultures have great respect for the aging, such as Chinese and Japanese. They have special days for ancestors. With my family, we always were very close with the grandparents. [Getting involved with Seacrest] seemed logical – part of my upbringing.” Both Fischer and Platt recognize the value that Seacrest brings to the community, and that SVTV is something a younger, more tech-savvy generation can get excited about. “Something that was started by a small group of people many years ago is now state of the art. That’s a wonderful, wonderful thing. We set standards,” Fischer and Platt explain of Seacrest as a whole. They see SVTV as an extension of those standards. “Another thing I’d like to see is that we want it to be a fun event,” Platt, whose 19-year-old grandson may attend, says. “We want younger people, the whole gamut, to attend the Gala.” “When we were [young], we were involved. Today, it’s a different generation. What we are starting to see is that people on the Board are in their 50s and 60s, and their parents need the facilities … so it’s important to get involved.” A The 38th Annual Women’s Auxiliary Gala is Feb. 27 at the Hyatt Regency La Jolla. For tickets and more information, visit seacrestvillage.org. The San Diego Jewish Journal is pleased to serve as the media sponsor for this event.
Shevat • Adar 5776 | SDJewishJournal.com 57
business
Eliminate Your Electric Bill and Still Keep the Lights On Ecosolar says this isn’t in some far-off future, it’s possible now BY TINA B. ESHEL
J
onathan Sherr launched Ecocentric Solar in 2011 when he recognized the need for more affordable and better household solar electric systems. Since then, the company has grown to become a local industry leader offering significant savings to consumers. How much? Sherr says the typical electric bill is cut in half, though that varies from home to home. “Each homeowner uses a different amount of energy, therefore needing a custom-tailored system to fit their own energy needs.” Solar systems are old in terms of cost per watt, he explains via email. To help people get a better idea of costs, he explains that the average cost after federal tax credits is about $20,000 with other vendors. Because of their business model, a better-quality system will cost the consumer about $14,000 from Ecocentric Solar. “I suppose you can say the average cost from us would be about … about 30 percent less than the competition.” Installment costs have gone down in the past several years, but that trend isn’t likely to continue, so Sherr encourages consumers who are considering going solar to invest now. “While the cost of solar panels has seen a dramatic decrease in the past three years, industry analysts expect the cost to actually increase in the next few years [because of ] simple supply and demand economics.” The industry gained traction, creating a huge increase in demand and leading to fly-by-night operations flooding the market with lower quality products, says Sherr, who expects those businesses to close as their models won’t allow for sustained growth as prices heat up. “Ecocentric Solar has always used – and will only use – the best solar panels from the best companies in the world,” which means high quality products and services, even as new regulations are set to come into effect. “There are some major changes taking place in regulations within the next few months that will indeed adversely affect a household’s solar investment. Fortunately, however, the California solar industry just dodged a major bullet.” He’s referring to when the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) rejected most of the proposed changes that would have decreased the payback rates for solar owners selling energy back to the utilities. But soon there will be higher interconnection fees and monthly taxes for new solar customers. Interconnection fees are paid by consumers going solar when they connect their systems to the utility grid. The process can be complex and expensive, and a barrier to bringing a solar energy system online, explains the Solar Energy Industries Association website. “There is real urgency for people thinking about going solar, to pull the
58 SDJewishJournal.com l February 2016
“There is real urgency for people thinking about going solar, to pull the trigger in the first quarter of 2016 to get ‘grandfathered-in’ to the current NEM structure.” trigger in the first quarter of 2016 to get ‘grandfathered-in’ to the current NEM structure,” Sherr says. NEM stands for Net-Metering Program and refers to how solar customers connect their systems to the local utility company, selling the energy back to the utility at the retail rate. However, utilities have been pushing back on this program, he says. With Ecocentric Solar systems, the average homeowner can expect an return in about three and a half years, after which the homeowner will generate most, if not all, of the energy the home consumes. Sherr’s systems have an expected life of 20-30 years. Sherr is also helping nonprofit organizations go solar with “Chai Solar Legacy” discounts. “It’s truly amazing that most people are not even aware of just how attainable solar is for their organization. … By reducing our margin significantly and working with State-backed financing programs that allow these organizations to go solar with no out-of-pocket expenses, we are able to offer a custom-tailored solar system … in the long-term we are talking literally hundreds of thousands – and in some cases millions of dollars in savings.” Two local synagogues have already taken advantage of this program. “We are thrilled to announce that we have just completed a solar installation for Chabad of University City and are near completion for Chabad of Poway,” Sherr says. Find more information about what it takes to go solar at myecocentric.com. A
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Shevat • Adar 5776 | SDJewishJournal.com 59
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60 SDJewishJournal.com l February 2016
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T w r a t w
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FOOD
in the kitchen WITH
TORI AVEY
CHOCOLATE CHEESECAKE PARFAITS
H
istory has woven quite a collection of folklore, mythology and superstition around the romantic nature of food. If you look hard enough, you’ll discover that pretty much every food has been touted as an aphrodisiac at one point or another in history. The connection makes sense on a certain level – eating is a primal need associated with pleasure. While most aphrodisiac mythology stems from foods
with symbolic colors or shapes, certain foods do contain properties that stimulate pleasure centers in the brain. Whether or not these foods can actually enhance amorous feelings is up for debate. However, nobody can deny that sweet, sultry chocolate sparks a passionate response in those who deem themselves “choco-holics.” To those who love its flavor, chocolate is simply irresistible.
Tori Avey is an awardwinning food writer, recipe developer, and the creator of the popular cooking website toriavey.com.
PHOTOS BY TORI AVEY
She writes about food history for PBS Food and Parade. com. Follow Tori on Facebook by searching for “Tori Avey” and on Twitter: @toriavey.
IKWTA Shevat • Adar 5776 | SDJewishJournal.com 61
Throughout history, chocolate has played many roles, most notably as a symbolic aphrodisiac. Cacao bean pods, the source of chocolate, grow on Theobroma cacao trees, which translates to “cacao, food of the gods.” The Aztecs and Maya used the beans found within the pods as a form of currency. The Aztec emperor Montezuma is rumored to have consumed 50 cups of chocolate each day in order keep his many wives happy. Anybody who has read the memoirs of the notorious Italian heartthrob, Casanova, can’t help but notice his addiction to chocolate. He starts each day with a cup of chocolate for breakfast; it is comical to see the number of times chocolate is mentioned during his escapades. So what are chocolate’s passion-inducing qualities? Scientists have narrowed it down to two key components – phenethylamine and tryptophan. The former is a stimulant that is released in the brain when we fall in love, while the latter helps to produce serotonin, a brain chemical associated with elevated moods and romantic desires. In addition to all of this, chocolate makes for a very satisfying dessert. On Valentine’s Day, sweet and decadent chocolate reigns supreme. These simple, elegant and tempting Chocolate Cheesecake Parfaits are a perfect way to set the mood. Make them with lowfat ricotta and Greek yogurt to lighten things up, or use full fat dairy for a more luscious treat. Serve this dessert to your special someone and see if sparks fly for you!
INGREDIENTS 1 ½ cups dark chocolate chips 7 tbsp sugar, divided ¼ cup whole or lowfat milk 2 tbsp amaretto or Grand Marnier (optional) Generous pinch of salt 15 oz ricotta cheese (lowfat ok) 8 oz Greek yogurt (lowfat ok) ½ tsp vanilla extract 1 cup heavy whipping cream 2 cups chocolate cookies, crushed Chocolate shavings or sliced strawberries for garnish 1 cup sliced almonds for garnish (optional) You will also need: double boiler, stand mixer or hand mixer, mixing bowls, food processor or plastic storage bag and rolling pin, 8 parfait cups Serves: 8 Total Time: 3 hours 20 min (includes chill time) Kosher Key: Dairy
62 SDJewishJournal.com l February 2016
In a double-boiler combine chocolate chips, 6 tbsp sugar, milk, almond liqueur and salt. Cook over medium heat, stirring regularly until the mixture is smooth. Combine ricotta, Greek yogurt and vanilla in a stand mixer or large mixing bowl and whip until thoroughly combined. While the chocolate mixture is warm, but not hot, slowly pour it into the cheese mixture while whisking. Beat until everything is incorporated, stopping to scrape down the sides of the bowl as needed. Crush the chocolate cookies in a food processor or place them in a plastic storage bag and crush with a rolling pin. In a medium mixing bowl, whip together heavy cream and 1 tbsp sugar until stiff peaks form. To assemble: Place 2 tbsp of the cookies in the bottom of 8 parfait cups. Evenly distribute the chocolate cheesecake mixture between the cups. Top with an additional 2 tbsp of the crushed cookies. Divide the whipped cream evenly between the 8 cups to top the parfaits. Garnish each parfait with chocolate shavings, sliced almonds, a sliced strawberry and/or any fruit of your choosing. Chill for at least 3 hours before serving. A
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1/19/16 2:51 PM
NOW EXTENDED THRU FEB 21st
“CRITIC’S CHOICE!” San Diego Union-Tribune
by Larry Shue directed by Robert Smyth Larry Shue's brilliant comedy about an architect stuck in a rut, whose life is suddenly, hilariously upended by the unexpected appearance of an old army buddy. ONE OF THE FUNNIEST PLAYS OF THE LAST 40 YEARS! cast photos by Ken Jacques
LAMB’S PLAYERS THEATRE 1142 Orange Ave, Coronado 92118
LAMBSPLAYERS.ORG • 619.437.6000 Shevat • Adar 5776 | SDJewishJournal.com 63
? GOIN '?ON ?? WHAT 'S BY EILEEN SONDAK
San Diego Opera kicks off its season with Puccini’s “Tosca,” at the Civic Theatre. The sensuous melodies and dramatic story take aficionados to the brink with politics, brutality, betrayal and jealousy – all the emotions we love to see in a grand opera. You can immerse yourself in this operatic masterpiece (conducted by Massimo Zanetti) Feb. 13-21.
La Jolla Playhouse is featuring “Guards at the Taj” on the Potiker Stage Feb. 2-28. The black comedy is about two hapless guards charged with protecting the glorious Taj Mahal. What follows is a ghoulishly funny existential crisis. Manu Narayan
Broadway San Diego
PHOTO COURTESY LJP
La Jolla Playhouse
San Diego Opera
Broadway San Diego will start off the month on Feb. 2 with “The Realish Housewives,” a clever and funny send-up of the Real Housewives reality tv show. This sarcastic romp will remain at the Civic Theatre through Feb. 7. On Feb. 23, “The Book of Mormon” moves in. That hilarious spoof will keep audiences in stitches through March 6.
The Old Globe launched this winter season with “The Metromaniacs,” a “translaptation of a classic French farce,” directed by the legendary stage director Michael Kahn (in his local debut). This witty piece abounds with mistaken identities, playful poetry, and delicious plot twists. It will be ensconced on the Globe’s Main Stage through March 6, and it promises to be an uproariously funny romp into 18th century farce. The Globe’s White Theatre will bring Anna Ziegler’s “The Last Match” to life in its perfectly suitable theater-in-the-round setting Feb. 13-March 13. The play explores the minds of two extraordinary tennis players, as they volley on the court. It promises to be a funny and visceral look at the sacrifices it takes to stay on top.
Vantage Theatre
Vantage Theatre will present “Rasheeda Speaking,” a dark comedy about two co-workers – one black, the other white – who are driven apart by their manipulative boss. Written by Jewish playwright Drake Johnson, “Rasheeda Speaking” will run at the La Jolla Commons Theatre, 1216 Cave Street, Feb. 19-March 6. Running in repertory with “Rasheeda Speaking,” is “Duck Variations,” presented by Different Stages, which follows two men of different races as they muse on the complications of life. Discounts are available for purchasing tickets to both shows.
Welk Theatre
Cygnet Theatre
Cygnet launches audiences to the year 2039 in “When the Rain Stops Falling,” an award-winning drama by Andrew Bovell. This unsettling play, directed by Rob Lutfy, unfolds with powerful dramatic thrust, surprising humor, humanity, and hope. The show will inhabit Cygnet’s Old Town Theater through Feb. 14.
North Coast Repertory Theatre
Milena Philips and Dori Salois, photo by Marti Kranzberg.
Welk Theatre is reviving the ever-popular musical classic, “Fiddler on the Roof.” You have from Feb. 5 to April 24 to take the family to see this masterwork. The Welk also offers “Next to Real Neil: The Neil Diamond Experience” Feb. 10, 17 and 24.
64 SDJewishJournal.com l February 2016
PHOTO BY NIL NOYAN
The Old Globe Theatre
North Coast Repertory Theatre unveiled the world premiere of “Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Great Nome Gold Rush” in January and it will happily reside at the Solana Beach Theatre through Feb. 7. NCR will present the West Coast premiere of “Now You See It” on Feb. 24. This outrageously funny farce is a dizzying escapade fueled by jealousy, a philandering husband, and a scandalous discovery. The farcical bauble will delight audiences through March 20.
Inaugural Theatre Week
For the first time ever, performing arts organizations are coming together to collaborate on and promote theater in San Diego, in conjunction with the San Diego Performaning Arts League. Taking place Feb. 22-28, San Diego Theatre Week offers performances from several San Diego companies, including many already listed here, with tickets available at deep discounts or special offers and events surrounding performances. Visit sandiegotheatreweek.com for a full list of dates, times and offers.
Manny Fernandes and Carla Harting.
San Diego Repertory Theatre continues “Outside Mullingar” at its Lyceum Space through Feb. 14. The play, by the multi-awardwinning author of “Doubt,” was described as “a Valentine to the wonder and weirdness of love.” Todd Salovey staged the play about a 40-something pair living in a tiny village in rural Ireland. A funny family-feud erupts that challenges the pair’s quest for happily ever after, but these eccentric souls prevail in the end.
J*Company
J*Company will introduce the sequel to “Annie” at the La Jolla JCC Feb. 26 through March 13. Like the original, “Annie Warbucks,” is a family-friendly musical.
San Diego Symphony
The San Diego Symphony will start its busy month with singer and pianist Ben Folds on Feb. 6. His program of pop hits includes his new concerto for piano and orchestra. Balletomanes will want to catch the Moscow Festival Ballet on Feb. 9-11. The ensemble will dance a different full-length ballet each evening. Vocalist Dianne Reeves will jazz things up on Feb. 19, with Gilbert Castellanos on trumpet. The younger set will enjoy “Symphology: The Science of Sound” on Feb. 20. The event is part of the Family Festival Series. The Band of the Royal Marines and The Pipes, Drums, and Highland Dancers of the Scots Guards is headed to Symphony Hall on Feb. 21, followed on Feb. 26-28 by Symphonie Fantastique. Guest conductor Joshua Weilerstein will be on the podium, and Rose Lombardo will handle the flute solo.
La Jolla Music Society
La Jolla Music Society will keep the music playing in various venues this month, starting at Sherwood Auditorium on Feb. 6, when The Montrose Trio performs. Aaron Neville will feature his new album of New Orleans R&B/funk on Feb. 11 at the Balboa Theatre, followed on Feb. 21 by violinist Ning Feng, who brings her musical gifts to the Auditorium at TSRI. On Feb. 26, the Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Jeff Edmons, will feature Feng on a three-piece program at Sherwood. The Society will round out the month on Feb. 28, when pianist Daniil Trifonov performs at Sherwood.
Mainly Mozart
Mainly Mozart will showcase the music of the Szymanowski Quartet and the Attacca Quartet in three locales – La Jolla, Rancho Santa Fe, and Carlsbad – Feb. 27-28.
PHOTO COURTESY REUBEN H. FLEET
PHOTO BY DAREN SCOTT
San Diego Repertory Theatre
Reuben H. Fleet Science Center
In late January the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center launched four new exhibitions in its Main Exhibit Gallery. “Super Cells: The Power of Stem Cells” immerses viewers in the world of stem cells through four high-tech, interactive zones, up until May 1. “Art of Science Learning” also launched in late January and runs until May 1 to showcase how an understanding of the intersections between art and science can help people learn and address today’s biggest challenges. The exhibit focuses on how artists, scientists and educators address the challenge of water. “Taping Shape” features hundreds of rolls of packing tape, bound together to create a translucent maze of rooms and tunnels, which visitors can climb through until June 12. To round out the new science adventures, “Zoo in You: The Human Microbiome” explores the adaptable and delicately balanced ecosystem inside the human body. It will be on display through May 8.
Museum of Contemporary Art
The Museum of Contemporary Art has a lot going on in both venues. The La Jolla location features “Ed Ruscha Then & Now” and “Alvaro Blancarte” through April 24. Inigo Manglano-Ovalle’s “Juggernaut” will be ensconced at the downtown facility through March 13. “Robert Irwin: Light & Space” will be on view through Feb. 21, as will “Judith Barry: Voice Off,” and Ernesto Neto’s monumental installation.
Mingei International Museum
Mingei is also closing a show this month. “Made in America: Craft Icons of the 50 States,” which includes jewelry, pottery, baskets, and textiles, will be on view only until Feb. 21. Both “In the Realm of Nature” (a retrospective on the careers of Bob Stocksdale and Kay Sekimachi) and “Three on the Edge” (focusing on three San Diego architects) will remain at the Mingei through March 15.
Shevat • Adar 5776 | SDJewishJournal.com 65
CANDLELIGHTING IN JERUSALEM 4:44 P.M.
DOWN 1. Staves (25:13) 3. Table (25:28) 5. Curtain (26:31) ACROSS 2. Heart (25:2) 4. Fifty (26:11) 5. Flower (25:34) 6. South (26:18) 7. Candle (25:37)
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© 2015 The Famous Abba
www.thefamousabba.com
P
Find the bold italic words on this sheet. The unused letters spell a secret message!
HaShem said "they shall make Me a sanctuary and I will dwell in thier midst" and directs Moshe to collect donations for the building of the Sanctuary, its vessels and the priestly garments, including: • Aron: Made of acacia wood, covered with gold, with rings on both sides permanently inserted. • Kaporet: Two kruvim of gold, hammered out on the cover with wings spread upward. • Shulchan: Table made of acacia wood, covered in gold and a gold crown all around, with dishes for the lechem panim (show bread). • Menorah: Made of pure gold, hammered out, with six branches and knobs, flowers and lamps. • Y'riot: Ten curtains made of twisted lines with turquoise, purple, and scarlet wool, woven with a design of kruvim. • Krashim for the Sanctuary: Planks made of acacia wood, standing erect, covered with gold. • Parochet: A partition made of turquoise, purple and scarlet wool, placed up on four pillars of acacia wood to be a separation for the Holy of Holies. • Altar: Made of acacia wood with horns on four corners and covered with copper. • Chatzer: The courtyard to the Sanctuary surrounded by curtains 100 cubits long by 50 cubits wide.
4 ADAR 1 5776 PARSHAT TERUMAH
Building a shed Opening a folding chair Knocking a nail into a wall Locking a door
spot the difference
GOLD
SCARLET
SILVER
CINNAMON
COPPER
gematria
לו ÷ו
א ע + א- סה
Two items used to build the Sanctuary:
ח ש ט x ה ÷ י+ יא
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weekly chinuch podcast - over 100 posted! parsha + chinuch < 5 minutes www.thefamousabba.com/podcasts
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1
א ב ג ד ה ו ז ח ט י כ ל מ נ ס ע פ צ ק ר ש ת
מט ÷ז
• Someone ate the whole dessert that you made. • A parent forgot to give you a healthy snack for lunch.
Can you judge these situations favorably?
you be the judge
SPICES
Which one is different? (Hint: Contributions to the Sanctuary)
• • • •
The act of building on Shabbat is called boneh and is forbidden. Are the following examples of boneh?
SHABBat
• The construction of the Aron. (25:10) • The construction of the Altar. (27:1)
Act out these scenes with friends and family:
PARSHA SKIT ideas
SUPER SHABBat SHEET
good trait OF THE MONTH Humility: The next time you do something really great, be careful not to brag about your accomplishment.
WHAT DATE AM I?
CROSSWORD
Jews fast on me. The walls of Jerusalem were breached before the destruction of the Holy Temple on me, as was the destruction of the tablets with the Ten Commandments.
2
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Complete the crossword by translating each English word into Hebrew. Use the parsha reference for help. 1
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GENEALOGY
• Half-brother of Yitro, full brother of Dan and nephew of Rachel. • Niece of Yehuda, grand-daughter of Leah, inlaw of Yitro.
DMLNAO
(scramble)
SEBA
WORD CMRLESAB SONBK
(Hint: Menoarh, Parshat Terumah, Ch. 25)
Check your answers at: www.thefamousabba.com/TERUMAH
66 SDJewishJournal.com l February 2016
DIVERSIONS By Natalie Jacobs
“Son of Saul” If you still need a film fix this month, head over to Hillcrest Landmark Cinemas to see the Golden Globe winner for Best Foreign Language Film, “Son of Saul.” The film quickly became iconic after its 2015 showing at the Cannes Film Festival and it will stay in San Diego for an openended showing. This Holocaust story, in Hungarian, follows Saul Auslander, a prionser at AuschwitzBerkenau who is a begruding member of the Sonderkommando group that is forced to cremate the bodies of fellow prisoners. Saul, played by first-time actor and devout Orthodox Jew, Géza Röhrig, reaches his breaking point when he recognizes his dead son in one corpse, motivating him to stage a rebellion with the other Sonderkommando men. He vows to save the child’s corpse from the flames and to find a rabbi to say Kaddish at a proper Jewish funeral. “Son of Saul” also marks the first feature film for director László Nemes.
“And Then I Danced” A dramatic memoir by pioneering LGBT activist Mark Segal.
“An Undisturbed Peace” A Jewish immigrant on the Trail of Tears.
“Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” Sometimes the difference between critical acclaim and popularity is striking. Ok usually that’s the case, and it couldn’t be more true with this wacky show from the CW network (yes, a real cable channel). “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” is the brainchild of Jewish actress and comedian Rachel Bloom, and it’s a musical based on this premise: Rebecca Bunch, played by Bloom herself, leaves her successful life as a lawyer in New York City in order to follow her ex-boyfriend to a small town in California. Nevermind that the former beau has a new lady. The episodes are chock-full of Jewish hilarity and even some Yiddish. Bloom is so good, in fact, that she was awarded the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Television Comedy in January. The show returned to the tube on Jan. 25 for the second half of its first season and if you’re just deciding to tune in, you can catch the last five episodes on cwtv.com.
“Uncovered” Another personal tale of leaving the Hasidim.
Shevat • Adar 5776 | SDJewishJournal.com 67
news Peace Index Poll Finds Differences Between Jewish and Arab Israelis on Treatment of Terror Suspects
The Israel Democracy Institute of Tel Aviv University conducts a monthly Peace Index Poll to gauge the differences between Jewish and Arab residents of Israel with different questions each month. December’s poll focused on the question “Should Jewish terror suspects be interrogated with less hard methods than Palenstinian suspects?” The results suggest that many Israelis believe Jewish terrorists should be treated differently than Palestinian terrorists. More than one-third (36 percent) said that less harsh interrogation methods should be used with Jews while 56 percent say the same methods should be used regardless of background. Thirty percent said Jews should be given lighter punishments. The study also found that fear of being harmed by terror was up to 70 percent, and support for two states was down among Jews to 52 percent. Also according to the December poll, 80 percent of Arab Israelis still support a two-state solution.
CJC Launches New Jewish Parenting Course
The San Diego Center for Jewish Culture has launched a new adult education initiative aimed at Jewish parents. Feb. 7 marks the first session for the Foundations of Jewish Family Living, hosted at Temple Solel for eight sessions that run until May 1. Classes are led by Jennifer Meltzer. Dr. Ilana De Laney, director for Adult Jewish Education at the CJC, developed the curriculum – intended for parents, or grandparents, of children aged 0-15 – to help parents feel comfortable raising their children Jewishly. She explains the three goals of the course are: Raise parents’ confidence in talking about Jewish values; help parents with their own Jewish learning; and give parents opportunities to create “meaningful relationships” with each other. “When we look at pre-teens and teens,” De Laney, who developed a Jewish school for teenagers in Connecticut, says, “they always said their parents were the building blocks for their [Jewish] education.” The program is “heavily supported” by the Leichtag Foundation, which funds causes that seek to expand Jewish life in North County. Cost is $70 for JCC or Temple Solel members, $90 for nonmembers, and course materials are included. Sessions begin with time for “breakfast nosh and schmoozing” and childcare is available for free. “Hopefully when [parents] come for the first session,” De Laney says, “they will see it as a gift of time for themselves,” to enrich their own Jewish learning in order to more comfortably pass Jewish tradition along to their children. Find more information and register at sdcjc.org/foundations.
San Diegan Helps Team USA Soccer Win Gold in Chile
Through the last week in 2015, the Pan American Maccabi Games took place in Santiago Chile. Team USA, along with local San Diegan Gabby Dubick (back row, fourth from left), won the gold medal for soccer. Dubick, the team’s goalie, played soccer for La Jolla High School and Columbia University, and became Bat Mitzvah at Congregation Beth Israel, where her parents have been members for 35 years. In an interview with her college’s sports website Go Columbia Lions, Dubick said it was an “amazing experience to represent the U.S.A. ... The U.S. Team won the last couple of Maccabi games, so we definitely had big shoes to fill.” Team U.S.A. played four different countries in five matches to obtain the medal. 68 SDJewishJournal.com l February 2016
“Refugee Kids” Film Screens in SD
Jewish Family Service, the Leichtag Foundation and Human Relations Commission will screen “Refugee Kids,” a documentary that follows children seeking asylum from the world’s most volatile conflicts. The film presents an emotional account of the students’ stories of escaping war and conflict and resettling in America, chronicling their triumphs and setbacks through the course of one summer. The film will be shown on Thursday, Feb. 18, 5:30 p.m., at the Jewish Family Service campus on Balboa Ave., and again on April 19, 7 p.m., at the Leichtag Ranch. Panel discussions and guest speakers will follow. Learn more at jfssd.org.
Brenda Bothel-Hammond, Katey Lindley, Howard Kugler, Stephanie Keith, Anna Ritter, Marilyn Greenblatt at the celebration for JFS’s 250,000th ride given as part of their senior transportation program On the Go, in late January.
Rady MBAs Spend 10 days in Israel
The UC San Diego Rady School of Management, in conjunction with its U.S.-Israel Center, took a group of 25 MBA students to Israel (pictured above) for a 10 day immersion in mid-December. With a focus on Israel’s reputation as the “start-up nation,” the group visited social innovation organizations, finance companies which focus on funding start-ups, Google Tel Aviv, water companies, and the Israel Supreme Court, among other destinations on their agenda. Susan Lapidus, executive director of the U.S.-Israel Center on Innovation and Economic Sustainability, notes that only one student on the trip was Jewish and the origins of students ranged from China, Japan, France, India and the United States. “All they really knew about Israel was BDS,” Lapidus says, referring to the boycott, divest, sanction movement that is a polarizing issue on University of California campuses. This month, the Rady School of Management will welcome 25 Israeli MBA students to San Diego for a week of programming to “experience our side of business, innovation, and culture,” Lapidus says. Read more about the students’ perspectives on their Israel trip on the Rady blog at storify.com/usisraelcenter/israel-immersion-trip.
Anti-BDS bill introduced in California Legislature
Travis Allen, a Republican assemblyman from Orange County, has introduced a two-part bill, identified as AB 1551 and AB 1552, into the California Legislature aiming to counter the antiIsrael movement known as boycott, divest, sanction (BDS). The measure will forbid the state government from contracting with companies engaged with boycotts, based on a variety of factors including religion and nationality. Allen stated that the BDS movement uses “false, demonizing and delegitimizing propaganda against the state of Israel” as a “pretext for the expression of anti-Jewish bigotry.” The bill is awaiting a hearing by committee, scheduled for early February. San Diego’s state senator, Marty Block, is a founding member of the state assembly’s Jewish Caucus. When asked for comment, his office said he is reviewing the bill and was unable to comment on the record at the time. More information about the status of the Senate bill can be found at legislature.ca.gov. Shevat • Adar 5776 | SDJewishJournal.com 69
HAPPENINGS by tina b. eshel
F
ebruary is a short month but that doesn’t mean it’s short on fun for all ages and interests. And remember, it’s also Valentine’s Day on Feb. 14, so there are romantic suggestions sprinkled in here as well. First, fitness enthusiasts, don’t let the rain keep you from a good run. The Annual 5K Kiss Wine Run takes place on Saturday, Feb. 6, at 10 a.m. through the beautiful vineyards of Mount Palomar Winery in Temecula. There are several run and wine tasting packages including an option for love birds to enjoy a romantic lunch, live music and more. This event sold out last year, so be sure to register now at 5khr. com/#5khrhome. Closer to home, the Mermaid Half Marathon San Diego is set for Saturday, Feb. 13. Run or walk this scenic course for women only; there are 5K, 10K and half marathon options, and even shorter mermaid dashes for girls ages 6-8 and 9-12. Women and girls are invited to cross the finish line at mermaidseries.com. Show the love by taking your valentine on a Be My Valentine Beer and Food Walking Tour with San Diego Beer and Wine Tours throughout the month of February. Advance purchase is required, and they are hosting events all the time. Create your own tour at lajollawinetours.com. Want something a little more highbrow? Then “embrace romance,” with the San Diego Museum of Art at the Valentine’s Day at the Museum. Your after-hours lovethemed tours on Feb. 14 include a picnic basket, champagne, chocolates and more. Tickets are $90 per person, and tours are scheduled 5:30-7:30 p.m. Make a date at sdmart.org. Fans of vintage and repurposed pieces may like the Junk Bonanza Vintage Market happening at the Del Mar Fairgrounds Feb. 19-20. Expect to find antiques, decore, vintage clothing, jewelry and more. Tickets for all Del Mar Fairground events are at delmarfairgrounds.com. The California Center for the Arts in Escondido is bringing Ladino Soul to town, Feb. 28 as part of the Intimate Classics Series. Your tickets are waiting at artcenter.org/event/ ladino-soul. Finally, it’s Macy’s Museum Month in February which means your admission to 45 San Diego attractions is half off. Why not plan a family outing to the San Diego Children’s Discovery Museum, or take your valentine to the Women’s Museum of California, followed by a romantic dinner at one of the restaurants at Liberty Station? Details of specific events and participating venues can be found at sandiegomuseumcouncil.org/events. A
70 SDJewishJournal.com l February 2016
BEST BETS
Mark your calendar.
FITNESS EVENTS Feb. 6, 10 a.m. 5K Kiss Wine Run in Temecula 5khr.com/#5khrhome Feb. 13, time depends on race entered Mermaid Half Marathon, San Diego mermaidseries.com
VALENTINE’S DAY AT THE MUSEUM Feb. 14, 5:30 p.m. San Diego Museum of Art 1450 El Prado, San Diego, CA sdmart.org
LADINO SOUL: INTIMATE CLASSICS SERIES Feb. 28, 3 p.m. California Center for Performing Arts in Escondido 340 N. Escondido Blvd., Escondido, CA artcenter.org/event/ladino-soul
JUNK BONANZA VINTAGE MARKET Feb. 19-20, all day Del Mar Fairgrounds 2260 Jimmy Durante Blvd, Del Mar, CA delmarfairgrounds.com
SENIOR CENTERS Lawrence Family JCC 4126 Executive Drive, La Jolla Contact Melanie Rubin (858) 362-1141 AARP Smart Driver Initial Course Wednesdays, Feb. 3, 10 (must attend both days), 10 a.m. Cost: $20, $15 for AAA members. R.S.V.P. required. Technology Tutoring by Teens Thursdays, Feb. 11, 25, 4 p.m. Bring your charged device and questions to this free service. Bus to Tosca at the San Diego Opera Tuesday, Feb. 16, 4:45 p.m. bus departure Purchase your own tickets through San Diego Opera at (619) 533-7000 or at sdopera.com and call the JCC Senior Dept. at (858) 362-1141 to reserve your bus seat. Cost: $20, JCC member $15. Bus seating is limited. North County Jewish Seniors Club at the Oceanside Senior Center 455 Country Club Lane, Oceanside Contact Josephine at (760) 295-2564 Sherry Fusco, Director of Aging and Wellness, JFS Thursday, Feb. 18, 12:30 p.m.; Light refreshments served. Veterans Association of North County 1617 Mission Avenue, Oceanside CA 92058. Contact Marc Poland (858) 232-1645 Jewish War Veterans meetings Second Sunday of each month, noon. San Diego North County Post 385. JFS University City Older Adult Center 9001 Towne Centre Drive, La Jolla Contact Aviva Saad for details or to R.S.V.P. (858) 550-5998. Celebrate Love and Friendship Thursday, Feb 11, 10 a.m. Cost: $27. Caregiving Essentials: Skills for Communication, Behavior Management, and Self-Care Wednesday, Feb. 24, 12:30 p.m. Practical techniques for caregivers to help with communication, and managing difficult behaviors and personality changes. Preregistration required. To register call Alzheimer’s San Diego at (858) 492-4400. On the Go excursions A program of Jewish Family Service, On the Go provides transportation to events throughout the county for homebound seniors. For information, please call Jo Kessler at (858) 637-7320.
NEW AT SEACREST VILLAGE
Seacrest Village has opened an adult day center for individuals with early stage dementia. Contact Danielle White, director of the day center at Seacrest, for more information: dwhite@seacrest.org. A full feature on the new program will appear in the March issue of San Diego Jewish Journal.
Muses of Bashevis Singer, San Diego Jewish Film Festival Wednesday, Feb. 10, bus departs 12:45 p.m. Cost: $29 by Feb. 3. Ladino Soul, Cal. Center for the Arts Escondido Sunday, Feb. 28, bus departs 2 p.m. Cost: $48 by Feb. 18 Fiddler on the Roof, Welk Resort Theatre Sunday, March 13, bus departs noon. Cost: $67 by Feb. 29. JFS No. County Inland Center at Adat Shalom 15905 Pomerado Road, Poway Contact (858) 674-1123 for details. Most Activities are free to members, and lunch is $7 with reservations. Being Positive and Creating Happiness Mondays, Feb. 8, March 14, April 11, 11 a.m. A six week discussion series led by Lindsay Wagner looking at ways to be positive and collectively create formulas to generate ideal happiness with just the right amount of choice. JFS Coastal Club at Temple Solel 3575 Manchester Ave., Cardiff by the Sea Contact (858) 674-1123 for details. R.S.V.P. for lunch by Monday at 12:30 p.m. All activities are free and lunch is $7. Call for this month’s schedule. JFS College Avenue Center 6299 Capri Drive, San Diego, CA 92120 Contact Sara Diaz (858) 637-3270 for details on any events or to R.S.V.P. Fascinating Facts about our Presidents with Richard Lederer Thursday, Feb. 25, 12:45 p.m. Richard Lederer is an American author, speaker, and teacher. He is best known for his books on the English language and on word play such as puns, oxymorons, and anagrams.
Shevat • Adar 5776 | SDJewishJournal.com 71
SHABBAT EVENTS
SYNAGOGUE LIFE SPECIAL EVENTS Tifereth Israel Community Orchestra Tuesday, Feb. 2, 7:30 p.m. 6660 Cowles Mountain Blvd.; (619) 697-6001 Jewish Cooking: Ethical-Eco Kashrut with Temple Adat Shalom Sunday, Feb. 7, 9:45 a.m. 15905 Pomerado Road; (858) 451-1200 R.S.V.P. to outreach@adatshalom.com Vision Series and Speakers at Congregation Beth Am Saturdays Feb. 13, 20, and 27, 9 a.m. 5050 Del Mar Heights Rd.; (858) 481-8454 Dedication of New Sanctuary Artwork at Ohr Shalom Synagogue Sunday, Feb. 21, 11 a.m. 2512 3rd Ave.; (619) 231-1456 Lunch reception and screening of a biographical film about Lou Dunst, zâ&#x20AC;?l. Freud and the Jewish Question w/ Congregation Beth Israel Wednesday, Feb. 24, noon 9001 Towne Centre Drive; (858) 900-2501 Cost: $5 Club 1318 Gulls Game with Congregation Beth El Saturday, Feb. 27, all day For families with teens 13-18 and siblings under 12. Registration required: cbe.org/event/club1318-gulls-game-feb-27-2016.html
Barry Friedman
RETREAT Chai Anza Borrego Camping Trip with Congregation Beth El March 4-6. Camping trip for young adults, 20s and 30s. Registration required. Cost is $15 per person, and space is limited. cbe.org/event/chai-anza-borego-camping-trip.html. Super Bowl Shabbaton Weekend with Chabad La Costa Feb. 5-7 at Omni La Cost Resort & Spa Weekend culminates in Super Bowl BBQ. R.S.V.P. chabadatlacosta.com/ retreat; make lodging reservations at (760) 438-9111.
MAZEL TOV Congratulations to Barry Friedman, the new executive director of Temple Solel. Prior to coming to the North County synagogue, Friedman directed the marketing and fundraising for the San Diego Jewish Academy and Navy Academy. He is a graduate of Yeshiva University and has an MBA from the Wharton School of Management. *Interested in having your event featured? Contact tinamarieb@sdjewishjournal.com. Submissions are due by 15th of the month for the next issues.
72 SDJewishJournal.com l February 2016
FEATURE
A Walk Through Time Temple Beth Shalom takes a moment to remember its history SUBMITTED BY TBS HISTORICAL COMMITTEE
PHOTO COURTESY TEMPLE BETH SHALOM
M
ost synagogues in the United States have a lifecycle that eventually results in the sale of their original location due to the reality of a changing Jewish demographic in the area of their original location. Many synagogues have relocated in order to accommodate an expansion or reduction in the size of a congregation. Yet this has not been the case with Temple Beth Shalom of Chula Vista (TBS) which has withstood the test of time at its current location at 208 Madrona St. TBS is presently the oldest and only functioning synagogue in Chula Vista.
HISTORY Temple Beth Shalom has been serving the Jewish community for almost 60 years. In 1958, the Chula Vista Jewish community purchased the land and buildings from St. John’s Episcopal Church for $40,000. Master artisans constructed the original Sanctuary in 1924. More than 90 years later, the original floor is still level; its walls remain sturdy; its woodwork is integrated with concrete walls that support the original ceiling and its roof is still elegantly intact, and has never leaked. The Sanctuary represents the best of Spanish and stucco style construction. Partnered with the old rectory, completed in 1925, the physical appearance from the street is timeless. Recently, our 100-year-old Torah was repaired with additional restoration to be completed in 2016. Our mini-museum artifacts include an engraved enamel silver Torah pointer of Russian origin estimated to have been manufactured prior to the Russian Revolution.
FOUNDERS Many of the synagogue’s founding fathers and mothers were Holocaust survivors and veterans that looked to establish a synagogue in a location that
was free from anti-Semitism. For information about the founders of Temple Beth Shalom, one has only to look around the buildings and take note of the numerous plaques, naming donors and those for whom the donation was given in honor of or in memoriam. Of the many names, Shapov, Vener, Moskowitz, and Cornell, are but a few. Indeed, the numerous plaques scattered throughout the synagogue buildings bear witness to the founders and beginnings of Temple Beth Shalom.
ENHANCEMENT PROJECTS FOR THE FUTURE Currently, TBS is in the process of procuring Historic Site Designation from the City of Chula Vista and the Historic Preservation Commission. This undertaking is a slow process, but worthwhile given the historical significance of Temple Beth Shalom in the Chula Vista community. In our modern day, the importance of the preservation of Temple Beth Shalom is essential for generations to come. Many people of Spanish descent have rediscovered Jewish ancestors, and TBS provides an opportunity for them to experience the beauty of their religious and cultural heritage. Temple Beth Shalom is a symbol of hope and promise to the community. The current location is central for all who need to find a place to worship, learn, perform acts of charity, to honor Jewish traditions, and to be part of the living history of Chula Vista. We encourage all in the Jewish community, and those interested in historical preservation, to join in our effort to ensure that Temple Beth Shalom of Chula Vista remains a gathering place for the Jewish Community. A For more info contact the office (619) 420-6040, Arlene LaGary (858) 344-5632 or bethshalomtemple.com.
Shevat • Adar 5776 | SDJewishJournal.com 73
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ASK MARNIE
by Marnie Macauley
ADVICE asksadie@aol.com
For the Love of the Arts Not only have we Jews played a prominent role in the development of Hollywood and Broadway, but from the Catskills to our local shuls, we’re born entertainers. In tribute to film and the arts, we look at “What they’ll do (or have to do) for love.” TO BE OR NOT TO BE
Dear Marnie: I want to be an actress. What do I do? I am 18 and not close to Hollywood at all. Please Help! - Macbess MARNIE SAYS: Your delightful moniker suggests you have the soul of an actor. “To be or not to be” one who eats, however, requires the courage of the Biblical Barak and the hide of a Presidential one. First, act! Yes, my thespian, study your craft by doing. School plays, community theater, shul, camps, wherefore there “art” a stage, make it your world. Get educated. True, many of our finest, didn’t go to university. And yes, great acting schools are an alternative. But in my 100 years of experience in “the biz,” the best and brightest know more than “The Method.” My dear late friends, Sir Nigel Hawthorne and Charles Keating were fountains of knowledge about literature, history, geography, language, music – and finance. You are still debating Stage Left vs. Right. Passions turn, as do fortunes. Be brave. Don’t be dumb. To turn “pro” contact a local manager or agent. Films are shot everywhere today, as are print ads, voice-over work, trade shows, and commercials for Beads ’R Us on your Main Street, so can agents be far behind? Warning! There’s no business like show business for attracting scoundrels and charlatans. Make sure your agent/ manager has come recommended, actually has clients (and what kind?), doesn’t try to schmooze you into a “package” of “lessons and expensive photo sessions.” The only thing you should pay for are head shots (photos) with a photographer of your own choosing. Finally, you. If you’re not quite willing to risk: famine, failure, rejection, criticism, shlepping to
76 SDJewishJournal.com l February 2016
cattle call auditions with 300 other hopefuls, you may wish to reconsider your choice. Otherwise, in my book, daring to dream is the highest, the noblest, the most profound thing we humans can do. That...and the ability to sweat, starve, and endure holes in your ego the size of moon craters...just for the privilege of trying.
WASP IN SON’S NEST
Dear Marnie: Our son David, 26, is an aspiring screen writer. The problem is his girlfriend Hannah, also a writer. They’ve been dating seriously for three months. First, I’m not a “stereotypical” Jewish mom who wants to “hold onto her son.” I’ve always gotten on well with David’s girlfriends prior but Hannah is extremely opinionated and controlling. When David is with her he is withdrawn (very unlike him) and bows to her viewpoint which she expresses with great arrogance (her eyes roll, and the sarcastic, “Puhlease!”). We have an old friend who’s a famous producer. He’s always said when David has something substantial to show him, he’d be glad to see it. After a great deal of work, David made a small, excellent film which he put online. When we discussed sending it directly to this producer, Hannah insisted things “aren’t done that way.” Even David was perplexed. This is just one example of her dissuading him with her rigid points of view. My husband says we shouldn’t interfere, but Marnie, the very thought of this woman terrifies me! - To Speak or Not to Speak MARNIE SAYS: Actually you are “typical” – using your contacts. Thank G-d for that. Now, if you saw your son headed for a wasps’ nest, what would you do? Say, “If he’s willing to risk a little anaphylactic shock, hey...he’s 26?” If your instincts are roaring – heed, mamala. Act. Or I’ll do it for you.
When not to butt in: When mom wants to turn umbilical cords into bow ties for sonny. When to butt in: When the girlfriend could be a little stinger. BBM (Bad Buttinsky Method): You could be direct. You could tell him how you feel. Text him about her vilda chaya qualities and give it a “jealousy among writers” finale. But direct is risky. He may defend, deny, then condemn you – when they break up. MJBM (Marnie’s Jewish Buttinsky Method): A better way is to allow our Davidala to drink from his own reservoir of suspicion. All you need do is gently nudge the suspicion from his hormones to his head to help him arrive at his own scary conclusions. You (in the basic neutral tone): “Hannah sure was adamant over not sending that film. What was that all about?” Him: “ ...Not sure... You: “You think our pal, Big Producer, meant his offer to see it?” Him: “ ...I guess so...” You: “And you believe your film was worthy?” Him: “You know I do!” You: “Hmm. If you’re good, the film’s good, the offer’s good...what could possibly be the reasons Hannah thinks this is no good?” Him: [thinking thinking thinking] You: “Hard to find someone who understands creativity and can be truly trusted. Essential, if an artist is to survive longer than – I don’t know – the life cycle of the wasp...” (OK, improvise.) Repeat same, obviously modifying with the nature of her “zetz” often. See it? Not one accusation, tonal twitch or the word “witch.” With mazel, David will “get” the dialogue, change the cast…and maybe even ask you why you didn’t offer up a review. A
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4300 Imperial Ave., San Diego, CA 92113 GreenwoodMemorial.com | 858.633.8657
FD #843
Call 858.633.8657 for a free Preplanning Guide.
SAN DIEGO JEWISH COMMUNITY OBITUARIES Arrangements by Am Israel Mortuary
David Weinrieb-San Diego 4/16/1920-10/23/2015 Survivors: wife, Irene Weinrieb; daughters, Diana Weinrieb and Rosalyn Hegler; and two grandchildren Aaron Shear-San Francisco 6/15/1977-11/03/2015 Survivors: parents, Hillel and Esther Shear Joan Kurland-Lemon Grove 8/16/1955-11/05/2015 Survivors: brother, Larry Kurland Bernard Greenberg-San Diego 5/06/1921-11/08/2015 Survivors: daughter, Donna Landie; son, Larry and Bruce Greenberg; seven grandchildren and 11 greatgrandchildren
ALL SERVICES ALREADY HELD Florence Jacobs-El Cajon Marshall Raffelson-San Diego 11/01/1926-11/10/2015 9/08/1929-11/21/2015 Survivors: husband, Alfred Jacobs; Survivors: daughters, Michelle daughters, Olga Worm and Rhonda Silverman and Cheryl Berger; and Jacobs; son, David Jacobs; five five grandchildren grandchildren and four greatLillian Genison-La Jolla grandchildren David Gulko-San Diego 8/12/1921-11/21/2015 1/20/1998-11/10/2015 Survivors: daughters, Roben Gerson Survivors: parents, Peter and Marina and Caren Perilman Gulko; and brother, Anton Gulko Maria Bercovici-La Jolla Janathin Miller-San Diego 2/13/1913-11/21/2015 6/20/1949-11/11/2015 Survivors: daughter, Susana Deicas Survivors: mother, Lillian Miller; partner, Carol Sachs; and sister, Meg Loraine Stern-San Diego 7/31/1921-11/22/2015 Miller Survivors: daughter, Roberta Anna Hollander-Oakland Stern; son, Joel Stern; and three 5/15/1929-11/14/2015 grandchildren Survivors: grandchild, Nikki Butler Jack Beim-Del Mar George Wergeles-San Diego 11/09/1921-11/22/2015 5/31/1925-11/16/2015 Survivors: wife, Adele Beim, Survivors: wife, Florence Wergeles; daughters, Gloria and Eva Beim; son, daughters, Phyllis Fogel and Carol Steven Beim; and five grandchildren Greenhut; son, Jeff Wergeles; and four grandchildren
Ruthe Rogow-San Diego 7/24/1936-11/24/2015 Survivors: husband, Murray Rogow; daughters, Robin Goldbarg and Sheri Johnson; sons, David, Mark and Scott Rogow; and six grandchildren Lea Melden-San Diego 5/05/1941-11/25/2015 Survivors: daughters, Michelle Melden and Monica Rosado; and son, Mark Melden Isaac Winterman-San Marcos 8/28/1937-11/27/2015 Survivors: sister, Barbara Wexler Louis Zuckerman-San Diego 7/03/1918-11/29/2015 Survivors: daughter, Linda Zuckerman; and son, Bob Zuckerman Abe Perel-Encinitas 5/27/1916-11/29/2015 Survivors: daughters, Debra Seid and Trudy James; and two grandchildren
Shevat • Adar 5776 | SDJewishJournal.com 77
Shiver with ANTICI... PATION!
RICHARD O’BRIEN’S
Photo by Ken Jacques
THE ROCKY HORROR SHOW
BOOK, MUSIC & LYRICS BY
DIRECTED BY
RICHARD O’BRIEN
SEAN MURRAY
MUSIC DIRECTION BY
CHOREOGRAPHY BY
PATRICK MARION
DAVID BRANNEN
78 SDJewishJournal.com l February 2016
PRODUCTION SPONSORED BY
ELLEN CHERIN
MAR 10 MAY 1
THE HIT MUSICAL COMEDY
From the Producers of MY MOTHER’S ITALIAN, MY FATHER’S JEWISH & I’M IN THERAPY!, RESPECT: A MUSICAL CELEBRATION OF WOMEN!, & YOU SAY TOMATO, I SAY SHUT UP!
Playhouse Productions Inc. Presents
Alan Jacobson’s
“The Audience Eats The Show Uerpal!d” - Miami H
FEBRUARY 24 - MARCH 27 “Be Prepared To Laugh Off A Few Pounds!” - BroadwayWorld.com
SAN DIEGO JEWISH JOURNAL EARLY BIRD DISCOUNT $10.00 OFF Our Best Seats
SHOWTIMES: Wed 2 & 7, Thur 2 & 7, Fri 8, Sat 2 & 8, Sun 2pm
Must Use Code: SDJJ2. Order by February 25th. Not valid with previously purchased, discounted or group tickets. Limit 6 tickets per order. Subject to Availability.
TICKETS: $45 - $65
Lyceum Theater 79 Horton Plaza, San Diego 92101 Tickets: 619-544-1000 • Groups (12+): 1-888-264-1788 www.PlayhouseInfo.com
Shevat • Adar 5776 | SDJewishJournal.com 79