The Jewish Star by The Jewish Star

The JEWISH Bo • Jan. 11, 2019 • 5 Shevat 5779 • Torah columns pages 18–19 • Luach page 18 • Vol 18, No 1

Achiezer Man of the Year Michael H. Goldberg, executive director of Northwell Health’s Long Island Jewish Medical Center, and his wife Alyson. The Jewish Star / Ed Weintrob

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By Ed Weintrob Achiezer, the Five Towns-based resource center, brought the community together on Sunday night for its 11th anniversary gala. Under the banner “CommUnity,” the event drew an estimated 1,800 people to the Sands Atlantic Beach. It provided chizuk and funds to an organization that “spearheads and coordinates the many different aspects involved in assisting individuals and families confronted by challenges, from start to finish” — including medical, financial, emotional and more. Attendees and speakers recounted individual stories of help provided, quietly and discreetly, by Achiezer, which coordinates with organizations that provide guidance and tangible assistance in many specific areas of need. See Achiezer on page 23

When last Shoah survivors are gone, how will we explain their ‘choiceless choices’? By Ben Cohen, Columnist magine that you are a Jewish doctor in a Nazi concentration camp. About 100 of your fellow inmates suffer from diabetes, and you only have a limited supply of insulin, with no guarantee of more on the way. Do you give each patient the same amount regardless of individual need, knowing that all of them will likely die within a month?

Or do you reserve your supply for those with a greater chance of survival, meaning that those with severe diabetes will die much sooner as a result? Or imagine that you are a Greek Jewish teenager who’s picked up enough German that when you are eventually deported to Auschwitz, your linguistic abilities land you a low-level clerical job instead of a spot in the

gas chamber. In the administrative office, you have access to the index card system that assigns each prisoner to a different slave-labor brigade — most of which involves punishing physical work in the freezing outdoors, with the risk of frostbite, pneumonia, beatings and even execution for those deemed by the guards to be slacking off. One of your fellow prisoners, who is near

death, begs you to sneak his card into the box of a different brigade, one with lighter duties. As long as your Nazi overlords don’t catch you, it’s in your power to do that. But if you decide to help your friend, then you have to switch his card out with that of another person from the same brigade, and then that person spends his or her days facing snow, ice and death from See Shoah on page 2 starvation.

In MidEast, Worry after Belgium bans shechita a new order By Yaakov Lappin, JNS The era of chaos in the Middle East is drawing to a close, and a new phase with its own dangers is taking shape, a senior former intelligence official has told JNS. Brig. Gen. (res.) Eli Ben Meir, former head of the Assessment Department at the Israel Defense Force’s Military Intelligence Directorate, said the period of the “Arab Spring,” marked by tectonic instability and dramatic changes, is just about over. The Arab Spring period featured large-scale civil wars, uprisings and the involvement of external elements in failed states, as old orders fell apart. See New MidEast order on page 12

By Cnaan Liphshiz, JTA Antwerp’s Jewish community was still recovering from its Holocaust-era devastation when Wim van den Brande’s grandfather opened one of Europe’s largest kosher slaughterhouses. Since its establishment in 1966, the Kosher Poultry factory grew together with the local Jewish community, which numbered only a few thousand people after Nazis and their collaborators murdered most of the Jews in Flanders, the Belgian region whose capital is Antwerp. By the end of last year, van den Brande’s factory was processing 80,000 chickens a month — a testament to how the region’s Jewish population has more than quadrupled since 1945. But all that ended last month, when a law banning methods used in ritual slaughter went into effect, forcing

of moving his factory to Hungary. For van den Brande, 42, and hundreds of meat industry professionals, it means “an attack on traditions and on an entire industry,” he told JTA. It has less immediate implications for Antwerp’s Jews — who can simply switch to importing customs-free kosher meat from elsewhere within the European Union trading bloc. Yet many of them view the law both as a declaration that they are not wanted in Belgium, and as the opening Belgium has banned ritual slaughter practiced by Jews and Mus- shot of further hostile action. “On the ground, it makes little lims. Paula Bronstein / Getty Images difference. We still have meat,” van den Brande, who is not Jewish, to fire his said Nechemiah Schuldiner, a leader of the 10 employees and close up shop in the hope See Belgium on page 12

Shoah... Continued from page 1 What do you do? And how did you end up in this position? he above documented examples are what many Holocaust scholars and educators like to describe as “choiceless choices” — appalling moral dilemmas faced by a people systematically dehumanized by the Nazi regime, and who knew that they faced death at any second. They formed part of an intense, enriching four days that I spent with a small group of other writers and journalists at Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust commemoration museum, memorial and institute. We were there to study and discuss many aspects of the Holocaust — from “choiceless choices” to archive management to Holocaust art — but we did so from a starting point that the way we teach younger generations about the Nazi attempt to destroy the Jews of Europe and North Africa is changing radically. Holocaust survivors have all reached advanced ages, meaning that within a few years there will be no firsthand testimonies (even if we are left with their accounts captured on film). Since 1945, countless other genocides have wreaked havoc in the Balkans, Africa, Asia and the Middle East, while a few of those that occurred before — the Herero nation slaughtered by German colonists in southern Africa, the Armenians annihilated by Turkey — to this day remain under-recognized. Is the Holocaust, it is often asked, any more important than these other demonstrations of inhumanity in the world? And there’s more. In countries like Lithuania and Ukraine, wartime collaborators are now lionized as anti-Communist heroes. The Israeli government walks an undignified diplomatic tightrope with these states, balancing present-day bilateral relations with guardianship of the Holocaust’s truths. Elsewhere, some Holocaust commemorations are so fixated with a universalist approach that basic facts about the genocide — like the young diarist Anne Frank having been Jewish, and being deported because she was Jewish — are buried in a bid to make them “meaningful” to “everyone.” Meanwhile, in Western Europe and the United States, social protest movements, like the Yellow Vests

in France and the Women’s March in America, have been penetrated by Holocaust deniers, anti-Semitic conspiracy-mongers and advocates of Israel’s elimination. And that’s not including those who don’t deny the Holocaust, but who do delight in invoking Nazism as a metaphor for Israeli policies towards Palestinians. n the recent past, perhaps the key Holocaust debate has been why the Allied powers did so little to stop it. During our group’s exchange with Avner Shalev, the chair of Yad Vashem, he related the story of guiding President George W. Bush around the institute’s impressive museum. When they reached the exhibit about President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s response to the Holocaust, Bush turned to his then-national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and asked: “Why didn’t FDR bomb the camps? He should have.” But that burning question has been superseded by an even more vexing one: Why should we seek to educate about the Holocaust in a world where the phrase “Never Again” sounds farcical to many people? There are many answers, and to my mind, there are three key ones. First, there are still some survivors of the Holocaust. I think specifically of Albert de Leeuw and 150 other former child laborers in the Amsterdam ghetto, who have still not received proper compensation from the German government, and who continue fighting for that recognition in the twilight of their lives. To abandon them now would be shameful. Second, however much people believe politics has changed with the rise of populism on left and right in the last several years, the Holocaust remains a truly foundational moment of our era and the source of many of the international institutions that, for good or ill, manage international relations today. The Holocaust changed a good deal more than we realize — for example, how we look at art and music, or our relationship with technology and our agonizing about inclusiveness in our society. As we prepare in 2019 to mark the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II, expect much more reflection on all that. Thirdly, if we are to teach our children the basic facts of the Holocaust, they can be boiled down to this: Six million Jews died because they were dehumanized for being Jews. Many of them resisted, in a variety of ways. And far too many were faced with the “choiceless choices” that symbolize the reality of the Holocaust.

Yad Vashem tackles new anti-Semitism By Deborah Fineblum, JNS American teachers like Lori Fulton are poised to hold back a tidal wave of anti-Semitism. Their tools come from a hillside in Jerusalem, thousands of miles from her classroom in Mattawan, Mich. Fulton, a high school English teacher, spent two weeks last summer at Yad Vashem, where she learned how to bring these terrorfilled years alive for her students. “I thought I knew about the Holocaust, but I realized I was missing something,” she says. “Sure, we can read Wiesel’s Night and watch ‘The Pianist,’ but only when you have the human stories — what it was really

like to live through that hell — does everything change.” Yad Vashem’s International School for Holocaust Studies hosts 7,000 teachers annually, and its programs train thousands more in 50 countries. It provides online teacher resources, including survivor testimonies, photos, film footage and lesson plans in 20 languages for classrooms around the globe, in addition to resources for adults. These offerings could not be more timely, given the uptick in anti-Semitism in Europe and around the world. The Holocaust’s lesson: The unimaginable horror born See Yad Vashem on page 16

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January 11, 2019 • 5 Shevat 5779 THE JEWISH STAR

By Josefin Dolsten, JTA It hasn’t been an easy year. From shootings that claimed many innocent lives, including at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, to political turmoil in the United States and abroad, there have been many moments of sorrow. But there were bright spots too. As 2018 comes to a close, JTA looked back at some of the heartwarming stories we reported on this year, from a group of German volunteers who are fixing Holocaust survivors’ houses to an Iranian refugee who raised money for Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue. Here are some of the highlights. A 95-year-old Holocaust survivor teaches summer campers Yiddish There’s one teacher at Camp Kinder Ring in upstate Hopewell Junction, who keeps kids captivated with his stories: Mikhl Baran, a 95-year-old Holocaust survivor from Lithuania. “I ask them to call me Mikhl,” Baran told JTA, noting that the name is the Yiddish form of Michael. “That’s already, in a sense, imbuing the idea that Yiddish is a great national treasure of the Jewish people.” Camp Kinder Ring, started in 1927 by the Workmen’s Circle, was originally a Yiddishlanguage camp, but today the mamaloshen isn’t heard quite as often. That’s why Baran’s lessons — both about Yiddish and the world in which it was spoken — hold a special significance. “I worry a great deal because my generation is passing already,” he said. “It’s almost gone. And we are the remnant. If we will not tell the story, who will?” A Florida congressman’s kids use hamantaschen to help end gun violence Gabby, Serena and Cole Deutch wanted to do something after 17 people were killed in February at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High

School in Parkland, Florida. Since Purim was around the corner, the college-aged trio — whose father Ted Deutch is a Democratic congressman representing the district where the shooting took place — came up with the idea to bake and sell hamantaschen, the traditional pastry eaten during the holiday. They started recruiting friends at campuses around the country to do the same and urged them to donate the proceeds to groups fighting gun violence as well as the families of the Parkland victims. Gabby Deutch, a student at Yale University, said she was happy to make a difference. “I was feeling disappointed by a lack of response, at least on Yale’s campus,” she told JTA, “and a lot of people since this has become public have come up to me and really expressed gratitude that something is happening about it, which makes me feel like there are people who care about this issue.” J.K. Rowling uses Twitter to fight anti-Semitism The Harry Potter author, who is not Jewish, has taken it upon herself to fight Jew hatred online. Amid debates about anti-Semitism in British politics in April, J.K. Rowling used Twitter to define the term for her 14-plus million Twitter followers. “Most UK Jews in my timeline are currently having to field this kind of crap, so perhaps some of us non-Jews should start shouldering the burden,” she said in response to a user arguing that “Judaism is a religion not a race.” “Antisemites think this is a clever argument, so tell us, do: were atheist Jews exempted from wearing the yellow star? #antisemitism,” Rowling continued. But she didn’t stop there. In August, she called out a fellow British writer on Twitter over his criticism of Jewish complaints about antiSemitism in the Labour Party. And her latest

book, “Lethal White,” which came out in September, comments on the dangers of anti-Semitism by including a character whose obsessive anti-Zionism morphs into anti-Jewish hatred. A German group renovates Holocaust survivors’ homes for free The Saxon Friends of Israel brings volunteers from Germany to Israel to fix the houses of Holocaust survivors living there. The group’s efforts drew publicity in October when a rabbi met one of its volunteers on a flight and posted about it on Facebook. Rabbi Zalmen Wishedski described his meeting with a 54-year-old house builder named Roland who had been traveling to the Jewish state twice a year for around five years to help Holocaust survivors. “I cannot change or repair the whole world, I cannot repair all my people did 70 years ago,’” the rabbi recalled Roland telling him. “All I can do is painting. It’s what I’m doing, bringing a little bit of good to the world.” In a promotional video, one volunteer explains that both of his parents were avid Nazis and that he is the only one in his family who wants to “deal with the issue.” 10 American baseball players become Israeli citizens to help country make the Olympics Ten American baseball players became Israeli citizens so they could play on the country’s national team in international competitions leading up to the 2020 Olympics. The Jewish athletes made aliyah in October. They want to represent Israel in 2020 in Tokyo. Some of the players also represented Israel in last year’s World Baseball Classic, where Team Israel shocked followers by reaching the quarterfinals. “These players showed great enthusiasm for working in Israel to reach the Olympics in particular and to develop the game in Israel in general, and the players who played in the World Championship were exposed to Israel and saw

how they can help the country become a force to be reckoned with in international baseball,” Israel Baseball Association President Peter Kurz told Ynet. An Iranian refugee raises over $1.2 million for the Pittsburgh synagogue Khashayar “Shay” Khatiri was moved to action shortly after hearing about the shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue that left 11 dead in October. So the Iran native and Washington D.C. resident, who is not Jewish, started a fundraiser through the GoFundMe website. Donations started pouring in, quickly reaching more than $1.2 million. Khatiri, who is seeking political asylum due to his activism against the Iranian government, says that he was happy to see people coming together to aid the synagogue. “It was nice to see that people really cared and wanted to help the survivors,” he said. Rabbi saves 4 Torah scrolls from being burned in the California wildfres At 3 o’clock in the morning, a neighbor roused Rabbi Barry Diamond from sleep to let him know that their Southern California neighborhood had been given a voluntary evacuation order due to the wildfires ravaging the state that November. About 20 minutes later, the rabbi arrived at Temple Adat Elohim, the Reform synagogue in Thousand Oaks where he works, to see fire surrounding the area by the building. But that didn’t deter Diamond, 56, from dashing into the synagogue to save his congregation’s holiest objects. He ran in twice, grabbing four Torah scrolls, one of which had survived the Holocaust, as well as the Book of Esther scroll traditionally read on Purim. “I would say I was a cross between nervous and determined to get these out,” Diamond told JTA. “Sometimes you just have to put your head down and do the work and worry about your feelings later.”

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THE JEWISH STAR January 11, 2019 • 5 Shevat 5779

7 heartwarming Jewish stories from 2018

January 11, 2019 • 5 Shevat 5779 THE JEWISH STAR

News service’s top Jewish stories from 2018 By Sam Sokol, JNS The year 2018 was a hectic and often bewildering one for the global Jewish community. From the U.S. Embassy move to Jerusalem to the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, the past 12 months brought surprises and shocks, and in ways that often divided Jewish opinion. Here are the stories of 2018, selected by the JTA news service, with perhaps the longest-lasting repercussions. The Pittsburgh shooting On Oct. 27, gunman Robert Bowers walked into Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue during morning Shabbat services and opened fire. Shouting “All these Jews need to die,” he sprayed the sanctuary with bullets, killing 11 worshippers and injuring six. It was the worst attack on a Jewish community in U.S. history and was seen as part of a wave of anti-Semitic incidents that shook American Jews. Hate crimes against Jews spiked by 37 percent in 2017, while hate crimes against all groups rose by 17 percent, according to the FBI. Critics charged that the attack was connected to the increasing anti-immigrant rhetoric heard in the White House and beyond since the 2016 election. Prior to the attack, Bowers posted online screeds against the Jewish refugee agency HIAS, writing that it liked to “bring invaders in that kill our people.” Many Jews were heartened, however, by the outpouring of sympathy from politicians and neighbors of all faiths. The U.S. Embassy move In May, the Trump administration officially moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, designating the already existing consulate in Israel’s self-declared capital as the official seat of American representation in Israel. President Donald Trump had already recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in late 2017, setting the United States apart from the international community. Several presidents had promised to make the embassy move and reneged. Trump’s action prompted praise from Jerusalem and Jewish officialdom, and harsh condemnations from Ramallah, Gaza and the Arab world. Despite grim predictions, large-scale violence did not break out in Jerusalem and the West Bank, although Hamas continued to send incendiary devices into Israel and rioters to the border fence — it had started doing this several months earlier following the move. Since Trump’s recognition, Russia and Australia have recognized West Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, while Honduras, Brazil and the Czech Republic were among the nations to indicate interest in moving their respective embassies. Trump later said that Israel would have to pay a “high price” for the embassy move in a future peace deal. The Parkland shooting Another shooting that shook America was the Feb. 14 killing of 17 students and staffers at a high school in Parkland, Florida. While not an anti-Semitic attack, five of the victims at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High were Jewish, and gunman Nikolas Cruz had previously posted online about his hatred of “jews, n----rs [and] immigrants.” The attack, one of many mass shootings in the United States in recent years, was the cause of a renewed national debate about gun control. Among the teenage survivors taking a leading role in advocating for more stringent restrictions on firearms ownership was a Jewish student, Ryan Deitsch. Fred Guttenberg and Andrew Pollack, Jewish dads who each lost a daughter in the attack, have taken opposing views in the debate, each becoming a symbol for their respective side. Michael Cohen turns on Trump Michael Cohen once said he would take a bullet for Donald Trump — but stuff happens. The president’s longtime personal attorney turned on his former client this year, testifying in federal court that Trump had directed him to pay off two women with whom he allegedly had extramarital affairs. Cohen’s assertion that

11 worshippers were killed in the Tree of Life synagogue shooting, on Oct. 27.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, flanked by U.S. Ambassador David Friedman, speaks at the opening of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, on May 14. Lior Mizrahi/Getty Images

Trump ordered the payments is seen as creating legal and political jeopardy for the president. The judge in the case said the president had instructed Cohen to commit a felony, leading pundits to wonder if Trump would be listed as an unindicted co-conspirator. Cohen, who was sentenced to three years in prison, denounced Trump, saying that “my weakness was a blind loyalty to Donald Trump” and that “I felt it was my duty to cover up his dirty deeds.” According to reports, the attorney’s decision to turn on his one-time patron was partly motivated by a conversation with his father, a Holocaust survivor. Maurice Cohen reportedly told his son that he did not survive the Nazi genocide to have the family name dragged through the mud by Trump. Trump is reported to have treated Cohen badly, publicly embarrassing the attorney at his son’s bar mitzvah by showing up late and delaying the ceremony. When Trump did arrive, he was said to have told guests that he had only attended because Cohen had begged him to come. Jewish Democrats ride the blue wave The 2018 midterm congressional elections saw the fortunes of several Jewish Democrats rise as a blue wave swept the House. More than three quarters of American Jews cast their bal-

lots for Democratic candidates, compared to only 19 percent who supported Republicans. Jews figured disproportionately in Democratic upsets. Eight Jewish candidates entered the House, Jews won governorships in Illinois and Colorado, and Jacky Rosen won her Senate race in Nevada. All are Democrats. The next House of Representatives will have 28 Jews, and there will be nine Jewish senators. The number of Jewish Republicans in Congress remains at two: Reps. Lee Zeldin in New York and David Kustoff in Tennessee. Several Jewish Democrats are now in line to lead powerful House committees, including three from New York: Jerrold Nadler, the Judiciary Committee; Nita Lowey, Appropriations; and Eliot Engel, Foreign Affairs. Rep. Adam Schiff of California also looks to be the new head of the Intelligence Committee. Anti-Semitism allegations roil the women’s march It was a tough year for the Women’s March, an organization founded in the wake of President Trump’s 2016 electoral victory to fight for women’s issues and against the new administration. While it initially galvanized millions of women, two years on the national organization is in disarray, with its leaders facing allegations of mismanagement and local chapters seeking

JTA collage

to go their own way out of either political or logistical self-interest. For Jewish women there is an added layer of anguish: Top leaders of the main organization have been accused of engaging in or condoning anti-Semitism, and failing to heed the concerns of its thousands of Jewish backers. The controversy surrounding the march arose from organizer Tamika Mallory’s ties to anti-Semitic Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Earlier this year, Mallory was criticized for not speaking out after she attended an event during which Farrakhan said “the powerful Jews are my enemy” and accused “Satanic Jews” of having a “grip on the media.” Organizers said they are heeding the complaints of Jewish women, but their statement satisfied few in the wake of new reports that Jewish women leaders had been sidelined. Women’s March co-chair Linda Sarsour, meanwhile, earned widespread Jewish ire for her comments that American Jewish liberals are putting their support for Israel ahead of their commitment to democracy. Local chapters were dismayed that critics on the left and the right are seemingly taking advantage of the controversy to discredit an important voice for women and the Trump resistance. Natalie Portman snubs Netanyahu A-list American actress Natalie Portman made waves in Israel this April when she announced that she would not attend a prize ceremony in Israel because of her feelings about its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and “atrocities” committed on his watch. The Jerusalem-born Portman, also a director, in explaining her decision not to accept the $1 million Genesis Prize said she was not joining the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel. In the wake of her decision, the Genesis Prize Foundation said it would distribute the $2 million for the so-called Jewish Nobel to women’s rights groups as Portman intended — an Israeli philanthropist, Morris Kahn, had given another $1 million to the foundation in honor of the 2018 laureate — but to recipients of its choosing. A Democratic candidate sparks a debate on Jewish identity Julia Salazar, a progressive candidate for a State Senate seat in New York, prompted a heated debate over the nature of Jewish identity this year after journalists suggested that she had embellished her claims to Jewish roots. Family members denied that the Latina candidate had such roots, and reports cast doubt on See 11 top Jewish stories on page 5

11 top Jewish stories from 2018…

Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former personal attorney and fixer, exits federal court in New York after his sentencing hearing, on Dec. 12.

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner attend a White House summit, on May 18.

tions of overly chummy relations with the Saudis (the crown prince is reported to have bragged that he had Kushner “in his pocket”); and having his security clearance downgraded from top secret to secret. Liberal critics were disappointed that he and his wife, Ivanka Trump, were either unwilling or unable to temper the president’s policies or moods, but Kushner ended the year on a high note when he proved instrumental in helping pass much-needed criminal justice reform. Ivanka Trump elicited harsh criticism in the media, both Jewish and general, after it emerged that she had used personal email for government business, despite her father’s re-

Alex Wong/Getty Images

peated calls for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to be jailed for the same offense. Kushner’s brother Joshua, meanwhile, lit up the gossip pages when he married model Karlie Kloss, a Jew by choice. Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘existential threat to British Jewry News reports suggested the depths of Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s apparent antipathy toward Israel and the Jewish community, stoking fear and bewilderment among British Jews. Britain’s three Jewish newspapers, usually vigorous competitors, united in publishing a front-page editorial warning of the

“existential threat” to British Jewry that a government led by the far-left Corbyn would pose. Over the course of 2018, it emerged that Corbyn had laid a wreath at the graves of Palestinian terrorists; accused the BBC of having “a bias towards saying that Israel … has a right to exist”; met with a terrorist group’s leader several weeks before his men carried out a deadly attack in Jerusalem; claimed that Israel controls speeches made by British lawmakers; and said that “Zionists” don’t understand British culture. Prior to this year he had called Hezbollah and Hamas officials “friends” whom he was “honored” in 2009 to host in Parliament, and is widely accused of tolerating or ignoring anti-Semitism disguised as anti-Israel speech, among other forms of Jew hatred. Britain’s former chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, labeled Corbyn an “anti-Semite” and warned that Jews are making plans to leave Britain over fears of an anti-Semitic backlash precipitated by him.

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THE JEWISH STAR January 11, 2019 • 5 Shevat 5779

Continued from page 4 her claims to have converted to Judaism while at Columbia University, while a number of friends from her college days vouched for her Jewishness. Salazar won her election, but the debate over who gets to claim Jewish peoplehood — and who gets to be Judaism’s “gatekeeper” — remained unresolved. The demonization of George Soros Hungarian-American financier and philanthropist George Soros ended 2018 by being named Person of the Year by the Financial Times, which noted that his liberal agenda made him a legitimate target on the right but that too often criticism of the Jewish billionaire traded in conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic dog whistles. A Holocaust survivor who struck it rich in the United States and went on to fund democratization projects around the globe, Soros has long been a bugbear of the far right and the subject of debunked conspiracy theories alleging that he had collaborated with the Nazis as a child. President Viktor Orbán of Hungary ran a public campaign demonizing Soros that many considered obliquely anti-Semitic. In the U.S., organizations and figures including President Trump, Rudolph Giuliani, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, the National Rifle Association and a Facebook PR firm have all taken verbal shots at Soros, accusing him of everything from pushing an “elitist agenda on Americans” to being the “anti-Christ.” The rhetoric appeared to have an effect on at least one extremist — in late October, a bomb was found in the mailbox of Soros’ New York home. Jared and Ivanka oin the hot seat Jared Kushner, Trump’s Jewish son-in-law and a senior White House aide, had a busy year, working on a much-anticipated but undelivered Israeli-Palestinian peace plan billed by the president as “the deal of the century”; fighting allega-

Sephardic converts give Brazilian communities a new lease on life By Cnaan Liphshiz, JTA RECIFE, Brazil — Preparing to leave this city’s main Jewish community center, Sabrina Scherb peeks beyond its blast-proof gate into a quiet street strewn with branches and shredded mango fruits. The debris, left over from an overnight tropical storm, is not what’s worrying Scherb, a 22-year-old university student and volunteer dance instructor. “I’m looking to see if it’s safe,” she said, walking briskly to a friend’s parked car after giving an Israeli folk dance class. “I’m afraid all the time of robbery, or worse. I plan my life so I spend the least amount of time on the street. We all do.” It’s a way of life that Scherb, whose mother was robbed and who had witnessed a robbery on the street once, shares with many residents of this city. Recife, Brazil’s fourth-largest metropolis with a population of some 1.55 million, was ranked this year as the world’s 22nd most violent city. It has a murder rate 18 times higher than New York and double that of Sao Paulo. Like many young Jews from Brazil’s predominantly Ashkenazi Jewish community, Scherb says she does “not see a future” for herself here because of crime and the effects of this South American nation’s 2014 financial crisis. Coupled with government corruption and political instability, these factors are prompting record numbers of Brazilian Jews to leave their country. Such crises, along with assimilation, have depleted many South American Jewish communi-

rs 35 Yeagrity e Of Int

ties in recent years — especially the smaller ones outside capital cities. Yet unlike many counterpart communities, Recife is not in decline — partly thanks to the embrace of Judaism by hundreds of locals whose Sephardic ancestors came here centuries ago from Spain and Portugal amid persecution in those countries. Since 2015, at least 400 people with Sephardic ancestry have undergone Orthodox conversions to Judaism in northern Brazil, where their ancestors first arrived from Europe. In the state of Pernambuco, whose capital is Recife, they established two Jewish congregations that operate their own synagogues and feature holiday events, including Passover seders. In 2015, one group, the Recife-based Sephardic Association of Pernambuco, published its own Haggadah, an 80-page book in Hebrew and Portuguese. Its cover features an illustration of people of various races attending a seder, some wearing traditional Amerindian costumes. “Twenty years ago, the return to Judaism was a dream. Now it’s simply our reality,” said Jefferson Linconn Martins dos Santos, president of Recife’s Aboab de Fonseca synagogue, one of the two new congregations. Over the past decade, more than a dozen congregations like it have been established across Brazil’s north, each with its own spiritual leader and ritual slaughterer. This development is unfolding in parallel to record levels of emigration by Jews. In Israel,

Many of those who have converted to Judaism in Brazil did so under the supervision of Gilberto Venturas, an Orthodox rabbi, shown here with his wife, Jacqueline. Courtesy of Sinagoga sem Froteiras

the number of Brazilian immigrants has more than doubled, from an average of 249 per year from 2005 to 2014, to 619 over each of the past four years. ‘Children of the converted’ Members of the new communities call themselves bnei anusim, Hebrew for “children of the forcibly converted” from Judaism to Christianity. It’s a reference to the Inquisition, which spread to Portugal after its adoption as state policy by Spain in 1492, and to their colonies. Pernambuco had been a haven for many Portuguese and Spanish Jews because it was controlled by the relatively tolerant Dutch from 1630 to 1654. But when the Dutch left, their colony was taken over by Portugal, which enforced the Inquisition. Many Sephardic Jews fled with the Dutch to the Netherlands.

They even brought along with them furniture from Recife’s Kahal Zur synagogue — the oldest in the Americas — which they installed at Amsterdam’s Portuguese Synagogue. The Jewish presence in Recife, a sprawling seaside metropolis crisscrossed by brackish canals, is so old that it may have even given the city its name. According to one theory, it originates in ratsif — the Hebrew word for wharf. The city, with 1,500 Jews, also boasts Brazil’s oldest Jewish school, the 100-year-old Moyses Chvarts school. Some of the Jews fleeing Recife arrived in New Amsterdam, where they founded the first Jewish community of what later became New York City. Whereas many Jews left by 1655, many others stayed and braced for life under the Inquisition’s yoke. See Brazil on page 7

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Continued from page 6 At first, those who remained continued to practice Judaism in secret, but their families became Catholic as the centuries passed. Still, in villages in northern Brazil, some customs have prevailed, including spring cleanings and covering mirrors for seven days at a deceased person’s home. Some bnei anusim were prompted to investigate their ancestry because of these peculiar family customs. Others, like Daury dos Santos Ximenes, president of the Association of Sephardic Jews of Pernambuco, discovered their Jewish origins through genealogical research. Many families in northern Brazil for generations have known of their Sephardic roots, said Haim Amsalem, an Orthodox rabbi and former Knesset member from Israel who has converted many bnei anusim. “But the advent of the Internet and social media changed everything, it lifted the taboo.” Some, like 55-year-old Simone Azoubel, learned of their Jewish ancestry from a dying grandparent. Her grandmother, Raquel, asked on her deathbed in 1999 to be buried with her ancestors at a Jewish cemetery — disclosing a secret that had stayed under wraps for two generations. Her grandmother’s funeral at Recife’s Jewish cemetery led to Azoubel’s conversion. Azoubel says her family first fled Portugal to Turkey, arriving in Brazil in the 19th century. She and some of her relatives are now active members of the Jewish community of Recife. Seeking recognition Since 2016, Amsalem, a former leader of the Orthodox Shas movement, has traveled five times to Brazil, converting about 100 people on each visit. Amsalem’s converts completed a conversion process in Brazil under the supervision of Gilberto Venturas, another Orthodox rabbi. Many others have undergone Reform or Conservative conversions in northern Brazil. The Amsalem conversions were the first largescale series of conversions ever performed in Brazil. They followed decades of outreach work by the

The facade and interior of the Kahal Zur, once a large Orthodox shul, which hosts a Yom Hashoah comWikimedia Commons memoration and other special Jewish community events.

salem puts the number “at least a few hundred thousands.” Clashing backgrounds But the gulf separating Recife’s bnei anusim congregations and its Ashkenazi ones is not due exclusively religious. Recife’s tightly knit Ashkenazi Jewish community is made up predominantly of well-to-do businesspeople and professionals. Bnei anusim communities are more diverse socioeconomically. Yosef Manuel, who completed his conversion earlier this year, runs a small pet food store in Prazeres, an impoverished suburb of Recife. He decorated it with pictures of himself in Jerusalem and a large flag of Israel, which he regularly brings to soccer matches, even when neither team is Israeli. Manuel said he “always knew the family had a Jewish identity.” But the need to convert arose 10 years ago, during his first visit to Israel and Jerusalem. “I felt I knew I had come home, and needed to do some things to make it really my home,” he said. He has no immediate plans to leave for Israel. Among the guests at the ceremony celebrating his conversion to Judaism was his friend Evania Margolis, a local Ashkenazi Jewish businesswoman and member of the Chabad congregation.

“He was beaming. It was so moving it brought me to tears,” Margolis said of the ceremony. “They say they are Jewish,” she said of bnei anusim. “I’m neither a rabbi nor a genealogist, but I think we should embrace the people who truly want to belong to our people.” Manuel and his wife joined the Jewish Center of Pernambuco, where they attend services and events regularly, including the annual Yom Hashoah commemoration for Holocaust victims. The community holds the commemoration and other special events at the historic Kahal Zur synagogue, which ironically is located on Good Jesus Street. Once a large Orthodox establishment, Kahal Zur slowly disintegrated before being restored in 2002 as a museum that also contains a small egalitarian shul. For all the things that set them apart, Recife’s Jewish communities are nonetheless growing closer together over time, said Sonia Sette, the president of the Jewish Federation of Pernambuco. “We don’t know the consequences of this phenomenon,” she said of the coming-out of the bnei anusim, “because we’re still seeing it unfold.” But amid assimilation, emigration and apathy by many local Jews in the Jewish community here, “I wouldn’t be surprised if in the future, the majority of the Jews here will be made up of bnei anusim.”

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Shavei Israel group and by Isaac Essoudry, a Recife Jew who died last year and served as spiritual leader to many seeking to reconnect to Judaism. Yet although the converts were recognized as Jews by Amsalem, Israel’s Chief Rabbinate does not recognize them as such because he “isn’t on the Rabbinate’s list of judges that may preside over a conversion,” a spokesperson told JTA. Unfazed, Amsalem cited a 2016 High Court precedent in Israel that forced the state to naturalize under its Law of Return those Jews whose conversions were not recognized by the Chief Rabbinate. “Their recognition is meaningless,” he said of the Chief Rabbinate. Neither Amsalem nor the Chief Rabbinate are aware of any of his Brazilian converts seeking to immigrate to Israel to date, the rabbi and the spokesperson said. Recognition for the bnei anusim remains an issue in Brazil’s Jewish communities, too. They do not come to the city’s Chabad synagogue, where some converted bnei anusim say they would feel unwelcome. Nor do they integrate easily with other communities, including the relatively receptive Reform one. “Generally we’re at a phase where many bnei anusim feel most comfortable in communities made up of people like them,” said dos Santos Ximenes, the Sephardic association president. Jader Tachlitsky, the spokesman for the Jewish Community of Pernambuco and coordinator of the Jewish Center of Pernambuco, which has a Reform leader, confirmed that the “situation is complex.” “Various rabbis are converting bnei anusim and we don’t feel certain about all of them,” Tachlitsky said. These complications and others “are to be expected given the magnitude” of the bnei anusim phenomenon, said Ashley Perry (Perez), president of the Israel-based Reconnectar organization, which assists people in reconnecting with their Jewish ancestry, the Jewish people and Israel. Despite the challenges, Perry said, bnei anusim populations generally “and especially in northern Brazil represent a development that can alter the history of the Jewish people.” There are many millions of potential bnei anusim in South America, Perry asserted. Am-

January 11, 2019 • 5 Shevat 5779 THE JEWISH STAR

The JEWISH STAR

Wine & Dine

Food can help save our planet Kosher Kitchen

JOni SChOCKETT

Jewish Star columnist

s we enter 2019, I think more and more about ways in which the food choices we make impact our planet. We are the guardians of the earth, and it is our job to treasure it and protect it from destruction. The land, the trees, are our responsibility. Today, our planet is sick and hurting. Global warming is destroying so much of what is vital and beautiful and necessary for us to sustain life on this orb that circles the sun in a vast, never-ending universe. Species are dying off every day and our oceans will soon be unable to provide the fish we crave. So what can we do? Not much as individuals, but as a group we can do a lot. We can reduce our carbon footprint — the amount of greenhouse gasses we emit every day from the energy we use — in many ways. If millions of us do this, we can change this road to destruction. Of course, the earth is not going to die in our lifetimes, or even in our greatgreat-grandchildren’s, but unless we each do our part, they will have a much harder life. How does this connect to the kosher kitchen? Food production in America is one of the largest consumers of energy and one of the largest producers of greenhouse gasses that contribute to global warming. It takes millions of gallons of water to can vegetables and fruits, and millions more to grow them. But that is miniscule in comparison to the amount of water and energy used to process meat and poultry. The production of meat is costly to the environment. It takes tremendous amounts of energy to produce and process the meat and poultry we eat. According to the Earth Day Organization, if the entire US skipped meat for just one day a week, it would be the equivalent of not driving 91 billion miles or taking 7.2 million cars off the road. Imagine how that decreased use of energy and greenhouse gas emissions could impact the planet! And what if we did it for two days a week? Or even three? I am not here to turn anyone into a vegetarian. I am not a vegetarian myself. But I think that as someone involved in the world of nutrition and cooking, it is my responsibility to provide options for my readers and to bring up important food issues when they arise. So, if you are inclined, make at least one day a week a meatless day. It will help preserve our planet. Baby Eggplant with Caramelized Onions, Sun-Dried Tomatoes and More (Pareve) 6 to 8 baby eggplants, each about 6 to 8 inches 1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil, divided 2 to 3 large onions, thinly sliced 1 to 6 cloves garlic, finely minced 4 to 6 ripe Roma tomatoes, seeded and chopped, liquid and seeds discarded 1/4 to 1/2 cup chopped, oil-packed sundried tomatoes 3 to 6 Tbsp. freshly squeezed lemon juice 1 tsp. sugar Kosher salt Freshly ground pepper 1/4 cup fresh parsley, finely chopped 1/3 cup water 3 to 4 cups cooked faro, lentils or wild rice mix Optional: 1/4 cup fresh basil, finely chopped Fresh or dried oregano to taste

Fresh breadcrumbs Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Lightly grease a large roasting pan. Set aside. Cut the eggplants in half lengthwise. Place each half, cut side up, in the roasting pan. Brush the cut side generously with olive oil and cover lightly with foil. Roast for about 20 to 25 minutes, or until the eggplants are softened but not mushy. Remove from the oven and let cool. Cook the faro according to directions and set aside. Peel and slice the onions. Heat a large skillet and 2 to 3 Tbsp. olive oil. Add the onions and cook over medium-low heat for 20 to 30 minutes or until deep golden brown and caramelized. Add the garlic, chopped tomatoes and sun-dried tomatoes and heat 3 to 4 minutes. Add half the sugar and 1-1/2 tablespoons of lemon juice. Add the parsley and, if you like, basil and/or oregano. Season with salt and freshly ground black pepper. Mix well. Taste and adjust seasonings. Set aside to cool. Mix 4 Tbsp. of the remaining olive oil with the rest of the sugar and the lemon juice. Set aside. Scoop out some of the eggplant from each half, leaving a shell about 1/3 to 1/2 inch thick.

Mix the scooped eggplant into the onion mixture, chopping the pieces if needed. Mix well. Add the faro, lentils, or rice to the onion/eggplant mixture and mix well. Season with salt and pepper, to taste. Fill each eggplant shell and then drizzle with the lemon juice/olive oil mixture. If you like, top with breadcrumbs. Pour the water around the edge of the pan, not over the eggplants. Cover tightly with foil and place in the oven. Let roast for 15 to 20 minutes. Uncover and baste with the liquid in the pan. Add more water if needed. Uncover and roast an additional 10 to 15 minutes, checking to avoid burning. If tops begin to burn, lower heat to 375 and tent lightly with foil. Serves 6 to 12. Serve with a salad that has some chickpeas in it for more protein and fiber. Great Lasagna Roll-Ups (Dairy) 1 package lasagna noodles 2 packages (10 to 12 ounces each) frozen chopped spinach, thawed and squeezed dry 1 large jar of your favorite tomato sauce 3 cups ricotta cheese 1 cup grated Parmesan cheese 16 oz. mozzarella cheese divided in half 2 extra-large eggs 1 to 3 cloves garlic, finely minced 1/2 to 1 tsp. salt, to taste 1/2 to 1 tsp. pepper, to taste OPTIONAL: freshly sliced mushrooms, sautéed diced onion, sautéed fresh basil leaves torn into bite-sized pieces Cook the lasagna noodles according to directions until “al dente.” Drain, rinse with

cold water and place on a clean towel to dry. Mix the ricotta, Parmesan and 1 cup of the mozzarella cheese, eggs, garlic, salt and pepper together. Squeeze the spinach as dry as possible and add to the cheese mixture. Mix well. Place a generous amount of cheese in a thin line along the first 3/4 of a lasagna noodle. As you gently roll up the noodle, the cheese will squeeze out to the sides and to the end of the roll. Continue until all noodles are used. Pour about 1 cup tomato sauce in the bottom of a deep casserole dish. Spread evenly. Place the rolls seam side down in the sauce. Cover with the remaining sauce and sprinkle the remaining mozzarella cheese over that. Sprinkle with Parmesan. Bake for 30 to 40 minutes or until bubbly. Serves 8 to 12. For kids, I use a half noodle and make smaller rolls-ups. Serve with a great salad and some garlic bread. Low-Fat Cottage Cheese Pancakes (Dairy) My kids loved this for an occasional light supper. 1-1/2 cups low-fat cottage cheese 6 eggs 1/2 cup whole wheat flour 1/2 tsp. baking powder 1-1/2 tsp. pure vanilla extract 2 to 3 Tbsp. honey or pure maple syrup Butter or canola oil for frying OPTIONAL: blueberries, chopped apples, chopped dates, diced strawberries Combine the cottage cheese, eggs, flour, baking powder and vanilla. Mix well. Add the sugar and honey and mix thoroughly. Add any optional fruit (about 1 cup) and mix well. Place butter in a frying pan and add spoonfuls of the batter. Let cook through and then flip to brown the second side. Makes about 12 pancakes.

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I had sunstroke. I shocked even myself by announcing that I was going to try it. We looked around and discovered that the younger adults were there to accompany preteens and teens to the arena, not to trapeze themselves. What were we thinking? We were the only ones over 15 on the line. We looked at each other, but refused to embarrass ourselves by quitting. The trapeze instructor went first, swinging back and forth a few times, lifting his feet above the bar and hanging upside down, anchored only by his feet. He then put his hands back on the bar, did a backwards somersault flip and landed on the cushioned platform. I laughed and said, “Could you imagine if they expected us to do that?” I soon learned that we were expected to do

Who’s in the Kitchen

JudY Joszef

Jewish Star columnist

few weeks ago, my husband Jerry and I left for a cruise to the Eastern Caribbean. One day, as we perused the calendar of activities, Jerry noticed something called “circus school,” and we agreed to give it a try. We got on a line with a bunch of young adults, mostly in their 30s, and the ship’s sports crew assembled a full-size trapeze arena. I thought I was there to witness Jerry play “the daring old man on the flying trapeze,” but perhaps

just that. One by one. each kid climbed a tall ladder that seemed to go on forever. Once on top, many decided to climb back down. But if they decided to continue, they were hooked onto a safety belt and told to reach out, grab the bar and swing out. It soon became evident that no one was going to be able to replicate the professional’s routine. Many couldn’t hold their grip and fell to the safety foam below. Some lasted a bit longer, but no one could perform like he had. Good, I thought. Less pressure on me. Suddenly it was my turn. I climbed the endless ladder to the top. I held my breath, reached out and grabbed onto the bar. And just like that, I soared across the vast expanse. Swinging back and forth to build up momen-

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“Torat Emet ,” the first is shiva University Truth.” in to an Star — we believe investiture speech By The Jewish in of Yeshiva UniversiDelivering his at YU’s Wilf Campus The fifth president on Sunday Berman, said assembly of 2,000 on Heights, with many ty, Rabbi Dr. Ari values that personify Ye, Washingt in by livestream that of the “five more listening spoke of the Rabbi Berman the five central or Torot, “Five institution.” teachings, of our believe in Tor“We do not just Chayyim — Torat at Emet but also and values must that our truths he said. world,” live in the teachings, YU’s other central Adam,” “Torat he said, are “Torat Tziyyon, the Chesed,” and “Toraton.” Torah of Redempti formal cereFollowing the community parmonies, the YU st” street fair at an “InvestFe Am- tied Amsterdam Avenue. t” street fair on 11 was a along at the “InvestFes See YU on page ceremony, YU’s new president, after the investiture for a selfie. sterdam Avenue who happily posed sought-after celebrity

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• Vol 16, By Ron Kampeas, JTA Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, page and 19 WASHINGTON — For 17 years, the then the wildfires inlah 9:15 • Luach pm, Havda northern California. Israeli NGO IsraAID has been perform- ng 8:07 Polizer recalls that he was wrapping elighti Candl ing search and rescue,Towns purifying water, up a visit to IsraAID’s new American 5777 • Fivemedical assistance headquarters providing Tamuz, emergency in Palo Alto on Oct. 8 and 2017 • 20 and walking victims of trauma back to was on his way to a flight to s • July 14, Mexico to psychological health in dozens of disas- oversee operations after a devastating Parsha Pincha ter-hit countries. earthquake there when he got word of But no season has been busier than the wildfires. “I literally had to do a Uthis past summer and fall, its co-CEO Yo- turn,” he said this week in an interview tam Polizer said in an interview — and at the Israeli embassy in Washington. nowhere more than in the United States. Polizer spoke with the exhilaration “The last few months have been un- of an executive whose team has come believable,” he said, listing a succession through a daunting challenge. “We’re of disasters that occupied local staff and the people who stay past the ‘aid festiNiveen Rizkalla working with IsraAID in Santa Rosa, Calif., in volunteers since August: Hurricane Har- val’,” he said, grinning, describing the the wake of deadly wildfires there. vey in Texas, Hurricane Irma in Florida, See IsraAID on page 5

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Britain Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn— who in 2009 called Hezbollah and Hamas his “friends” — said he would not attend a dinner commemorating the centennial of the Balfour Declaration. Prime Minister Theresa May she would attend “with pride” and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu would be her guest. “We are proud of the role we played in the creation of the State of Israel and we will certainly mark the centenary with pride,” May said. “I am also pleased that good trade relations and other relations that we have with Israel we are building on and enhancing.”

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t was a minor news story when it broke in the summer of 2016. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas announced he was suing Great Britain over the Balfour Declaration, issued on Nov. 2, 1917. But as we observe the centennial of the document this week, it’s important to understand that although his lawsuit was a stunt, Abbas was serious. More than that, the symbolism of his See Tobin on page 22

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or the Palestinians, the year zero is not 1948, when the state of Israel came into being, but 1917, when Great Britain issued, on Nov. 2, the Balfour Declaration—expressing support for the establishment of a “Jewish national home” in Palestine. So central is the Balfour Declaration to Palestinian political identity that the “Zionist invasion” is officially deemed to have begun in 1917—not in 1882, when the first trickle of Jewish pioneers from Russia began arriving, nor in 1897, when the Zionist movement held its first congress in Basel, nor in the late 1920s, when thousands of German Jews fleeing the rise of Nazism chose to go to Palestine. The year 1917 is the critical date because that is when, as an anti-Zionist might say, the Zionist hand slipped effortlessly into the British imperial glove. It is a neat, simple historical proposition upon which the entire Palestinian version of events rests: an empire came to our land and gave it to foreigners, we were dispossessed, and for five generations now, we have continued to resist. Moreover, it is given official sanction in the Palestine National Covenant of 1968, in which article 6 defines Jews who “were living permanently in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion” as “Palestinians”—an invasion that is dated as 1917 in the covenants’ notes. As the Balfour Declaration’s centenary approached, this theme is much in evidence. There is now a dedicated Balfour Apology See Cohen on page 22

Island Jonathan S. Dealer on Long Largest Sukkah toBin

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At declaration’s centennial, a source of joy and derision

To British, Palestine just another colony

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Star the loss, By The Jewish to remember Cedarhurst pausedmiracles of 9/11, at the the on Sunday. the heroism, and commemoration Schachter village’s annual , Rabbi Shay In his invocationthe Young Israel of Woodof the Master and (top right photo) pray that G-d, all the strength mere said, “we world, grant us Creator of the to stand firm together against of and the fortitude of extremism, of bigotry, all forms of terror, and of all evil that can be hatred, of racism, forms in our world.” who found in different obligation to those “We have a solemn on Sept. 11th to never injured Benjamin died or were ,” said Mayor forget what happened“We saw evil, but we also (bottom). Weinstock America.” saw the best of n (middle), a 9/11 survivor Ari Schonbur Fate of 78,” re“Miracle and was waitand author of es that day. He called his experienc on the 78th floor when elevators ing to change hit. nt Chief the first plane st Fire Departme Lawrence-Cedarhur during the playing of saluting David Campell, 9/11 victims. names of local Taps, read the

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wante her long unity, repeated she said. “we’ve always comm g aliyah with 7:57 pm, Cedarhurst, Gardens Hills said now?” way, makin Havdalah rob ulamith in 8:58 Luach of Far Rockato the question, “Why of Kew By Ed Weint Newm•an time.” page r Danit TayriTheJ ewishStar.c For Chani • Vol n, the answe31 joinnow it’s finally she said. 16,ofNoWoodm 20 ere, and childre om to go, but husband s. “We’re Jewish!” rg The Newsp magic ah Feinbe July 3rd aper of our was obviou B’Nefesh’s r-old Elishev Orthodox communities Thirteen-yeaolim on board Nefesh ing 201 other

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Back from cruise, into the kitchen

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tum was a bit terrifying, but to my surprise, I wasn’t that bad. My only issue was my herniated disc — it was hard for me to reach my feet up over the bar and hang upside down. But I was able to swing back and forth and do a backflip. Not bad! All in all, we had a great trip. Until, that is, Jerry left his carry-on, with all my favorite things in it, outside the port. How, you may ask, did this happen? As we left the port, dragging our suitcases and extra bags, it began to pour. Since we had to wait about six minutes for our Uber, we found a spot protected from the rain, not far from the curb. I was about 15 feet behind Jerry. Just as the Uber arrived, his daughter from Israel called to wish him a good Shabbos. I stepped out into the rain, dragging my luggage, and shouted at him to hang up. He kept on talking as. Eventually he started walking towards the Uber, still talking on the phone. I handed my luggage to the driver and ducked into the car to get out of the rain. Jerry handed the driver his phone and said “Here, talk to my daughter while I put my luggage in the car.” Jerry is Jerry, and I normally give him a little more leeway, but for the life of me I couldn’t understand why he was handing his phone to a man who clearly didn’t speak a word of English. nce home, I wanted to unpack and do laundry. It was then that I realized Jerry’s carryon was missing. He had left it at the curb and only loaded the big suitcase into the trunk. “Great,” I said. “Because you couldn’t hang up for five minutes, you’re missing all of your important stuff!” Serves him right, I thought — and then it hit me. I had put a bag in his carry-on with all my really good costume jewelry, my favorite pair of shoes and a few other things that hadn’t fit in my bag. Now I didn’t want to teach him a lesson — I wanted to find that carry-on. I called the port in Bayonne, reached the person in charge of missing items, and gave her a description of the carry-on and a few items that would be inside. A few hours later, I was told that the luggage was not found yet, but that I had to give a detailed description of a few items in the suitcase so that they could identify it without a luggage tag. I described the costume jewelry, shoes, a small CVS prescription bottle with Jerry’s number and address on it. I told them about Jerry’s books, his new sunglasses and a Giants shirt. Jerry, overhearing this, told me to let them know about the book Tevya the Dairyman, by Sholem Aleichem. Before he could continue I turned around in annoyance and said, “If they find a black carry-on that has all my costume jewelry and my favorite shoes along with a Giants shirt and CVS meds with your name on them, and they can’t figure out that it’s your carry-on, I’m guessing they’re not going to figure it out with the rest of the items in there either.” (When reading, raise your voice to an intensifying crescendo of anger for the full effect.) Ten days later, there has been no sighting of the bag. The inquiry is about to be closed. I would just love to be a fly on the wall in the pawnshop when the finder tries to sell a few pieces of diamond jewelry only to realize that it’s all costume! Might this article reflect Paradise Lost or Paradise Gained by John Milton? Once home we decided to eat healthy to make up for all the ice cream we had on the ship. This is a great recipe made with Cooper’s Crumbs — amazingly delicious gluten free crumbs. Low Carb delicious Breaded Cauliflower 1 egg, beaten Salt and pepper to taste 1-1/2 cups of Cooper’s Crumbs, Original Four Spice Salute 2 heads of cauliflower, broken into florets 1 Tbsp. Olive Oil Preheat oven to 375 and line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Whisk eggs, salt, and pepper together in a bowl. Place Cooper’s Crumbs in another bowl. Dip each cauliflower floret in egg mixture to coat, then dip each floret into Cooper’s Crumbs to coat. Place on prepared baking sheet. Bake in oven until tender and lightly browned, turning once, about 40 minutes. Cooper’s Crumbs are gluten-free and delicious. They can be found at I & D Glatt in West Hempstead, Cedar Market in Teaneck, The Cheese Store in Cedarhurst, Aron’s Kissena Farms in Queens, and Columbus Natural Foods in New York City.

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January 11, 2019 • 5 Shevat 5779 THE JEWISH STAR

Gap-year students eye their futures in Israel Here Next Year, in partnership with Nefesh B’Nefesh, hosted its fifth annual Israel Fair on Saturday night in the center of Jerusalem. The fair is designed to help young potential olim who are currently in their gap year learn about their options for service in the Israel Defense Forces, Israel National Service (Sherut Leumi), ulpan and higher education in Israel. “We were so pleased to welcome nearly 500 people who attended this event and to have helped these students explore their futures in Israel,” said Yael Engelhart, director of Here Next Year. “With advisers from across the country, and specialty food vendors like Crave, Urbun and Muffin Boutique, these students

both enjoyed themselves and learned a lot about the options open to them if they choose to stay in Israel.” The goal of the fair is to give these students an opportunity to best learn about their options in order to choose different career paths in Israel. At the Dec. 23 fair were organizational representatives, as well as those from universities and colleges from throughout Israel. There were also recent olim in attendance to share their own personal experiences and act as peer resources for the gap year students. “It is an incredibly special night at the Here Next Year Israel Fair,” said Marc Rosenberg, di-

rector of Pre-Aliyah at Nefesh B’Nefesh. “To be with nearly 500 young people, together exploring future options in Israel, is just an amazing

sight to behold. We are proud to partner with Here Next Year on this event, and see more and more young people interested in aliyah.”

Belgium...

lims in unregulated slaughterhouses. In Western Europe recently, animal welfare and child welfare activists have found unlikely allies in individuals and politicians critical of the impact of mass immigration to Europe by Muslims. Jewish customs, similar to Muslim ones but ignored or tolerated for decades, have become collateral damage. In the Netherlands, a fringe animal welfare party in 2011 submitted a bill proposing a ban on all slaughter performed without stunning. It passed in the lower house, largely thanks to the support of the anti-Islam Party for Freedom. The Dutch senate reversed the ban in 2012. In 2013, Poland’s parliament passed a similar ban amid growing discontent in the predominantly Catholic nation over the arrival of millions of Muslims into the European Union. The Polish High Court reversed the ban in 2014. Meanwhile, Denmark’s parliament is preparing to vote on a resolution calling to ban nonmedical circumcision of boys. The resolution began as a petition started by a small group of activists but gathered tens of thousands of signatures in the kingdom, whose government has one of Western Europe’s most restrictive policies on Middle East immigration. In this context, the law passed in Belgium “is clearly only the beginning,” said Ari Mandel, an Antwerp Jew who in 2011 opened Kosher4U, an online store that specializes in shipping kosher

products to remote European Jewish communities, such as in Sweden and Norway. “We’re talking about a domino effect. Kosher slaughterhouses can move, but moving appears to be a temporary solution, a stay of execution,” he added. Mandel also noted that Antwerp’s Orthodox communities have some of the world’s strictest kashrut standards, making their rabbis and congregants distrust foreign labels. Ritual slaughter of animals is allowed in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Ukraine and Russia, where the vast majority of Europe’s Jews live. Five European Union member states — Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Lithuania and Slovenia — have blanket bans on ritual slaughter. So too do three other non-EU countries in Western Europe: Norway, Switzerland and Iceland. In Belgium, it is currently illegal only in Flanders, or the Flemish Region, one of three states that make up the federal kingdom. Another region, Wallonia, will impose a ban in September. Austria and Estonia also enforce strict supervision of the custom that some Jews there say makes it nearly impossible. No country in Europe currently forbids nonmedical circumcision of boys. If Europe is seeing a domino effect where Jewish customs are collateral damage, then communities should consider adapting some of

those customs to weather the storm, suggested Michael Freilich, the Jewish paper’s editor. “There is halacha, and Jews are beholden to it,” he told JTA, referring to rabbinic law. But some kosher practices also stem from “customs and rabbinical politics” and can be adapted or reformed. Notably, some Orthodox rabbis permit post-cut stunning – a technique in which animals’ necks are cut almost at the same time as they are knocked unconscious. Another potential concession may come from modern stunning methods, including carbon dioxide, that do not injure the animal in ways prohibited by Jewish law. “Honestly, I’ve not been able to get rabbis to give me very compelling explanations as to why some of these solutions aren’t halachically acceptable,” said Freilich, who is Orthodox and who opposes government restrictions on ritual slaughter. But some of the rabbis, he said, “told me that they couldn’t sanction certain solutions because doing so would expose them to attack from hardliners.” These talks “changed my way of thinking about the kosher meat issue,” Freilich added. As more and more European governments restrict kosher slaughter, Freilich said “the need to adapt Jewish customs to the new reality will grow, and I think we’ll see movement.”

Continued from page 1 Shomre Hadas Orthodox Jewish community of Antwerp. “The problem is the message it sends. It tells Jews: We don’t want you here.” Schuldiner fears the law is a “prelude to a ban on importing kosher meat,” and a move heralding “new restrictions, be it on milah [circumcision] or other elements of Jewish life.” The new law requires that all animals be stunned before they are slaughtered. Jewish and Muslim religious laws require animals be conscious at the time of their slaughter. Jewish leaders also fear the same political forces — animal and child welfare activists, in league with anti-immigration groups — will move to ban ritual circumcision, performed by Jews and Muslims. Michael Freilich, editor-in-chief of the Antwerp-based Joods Actueel Jewish magazine, disagrees. The Flemish authorities, he said, have paid “a great deal of attention to the Jewish community and its needs.” But, he added, the methods for ritual slaughter are “too unpopular” in Flanders for the government to ignore. The Flanders law was born of a 2014 public debate about the slaughter of animals by Mus-

New Mideast order… Continued from page 1 “In recent years … one would get up in the morning and didn’t know who controlled Syria, or what was happening in Iraq and Yemen,” said Ben Meir, who headed the strategically vital Assessment Department in 2015 and at the start of 2016. “This was a period in which frameworks broke apart, and the old order underwent change. But from 2018 onwards, those states that were a mess have begun stabilizing. The assessment is that this will continue in the coming year.” This trend has proven true for Syria, Iraq and even Yemen, where the Saudis and Shiite Houthi rebels — warring enemies — are discussing ceasefires and seeking new understandings. States that worried about “being next” to suffer instability due to a regional domino effect, like Jordan and Saudi Arabia, have remained stable, and now understand that they are not about to crumble, according to Ben Meir. The time of popular uprisings, mass protests and social networks fueling regime change has vanished, he said. “Even in Syria, which experienced the biggest mess, [Syrian President Bashar] Assad has remained.” This does not mean that rebel assassins can’t try to target Arab leaders in any country in the region, but regime change won’t happen through “the streets or Facebook, like the events of Tahrir Square [in Egypt],” affirmed Ben Meir. The newfound stability in the Middle East is

unfortunately not a guarantee for calm; rather, it most likely increases the potential for unpredictable conflict. In Syria, according to foreign reports, Israel conducted a large number of airstrikes against developing Iranian threats, taking advantage of the lack of a capable regime and military. “Now, however, the state and military are slowly coming back to Syria. A sovereign state has military capabilities. It can retaliate or go to war. It didn’t do those things when it was busy defending itself,” said Ben Meir. Israel took advantage of the lack of a centralized Syrian regime to take preventative action, but it remains unclear how much longer it can do this without sparking an inter-state conflict. In addition, the new order taking shape in the region includes the Shiite Iranian-Hezbollah axis. This axis remains highly active in Syria, and is attempting to gain dangerous accomplishments, like the deployment of precision missiles and the building weapons factories, Ben Meir assessed. The new order taking shape is prone to “disruption and influence,” he said, “whether it is [Israel’s], the U.S., Russia or because of the influence of events.” In the Gaza Strip, he noted, fundamental problems that could lead to conflict have not been solved. The Strip remains locked in an economic crisis, and Hamas could end up going to war if its cash flow runs out. Referring to the arrival of Qatari suitcases filled with assistance money, Ben Meir noted that

Hundreds of gap-year students in Israel attended the fifth annual Israel Fair in Jerusalem.

Yonit Schiller

Hyman noted that in Lebanon, Hezbollah possesses an arsenal of unguided projectiles, and that as of now, it “lacks an industrial ability to convert [unguided rockets into accurate ones] and manufacture precision weaponry.” In Syria, the Assad regime is stabilizing, Hyman said, and the Shiite axis is entrenching itself. Israel, he warned, is committed to the goal of pushing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Security Cabinet members get a tour with the North Front Command in the Golan Heights, on Feb. 6, Iran and Hezbollah away from the Golan 2018. Kobi Gideon/GPO Heights region. Within Iran itself, “when those $15 million run out, either another suitcase with 15 million arrives, or we will face a dispute has broken out within the leadership rockets. In principle, we gained time, but we have over the price of the Islamic Republic’s attempt to entrench itself in Syria. “As a result, we recognize not solved the problem.” On Dec. 11, the recently appointed Military a trend in which [the Iranian entrenchment] has Intelligence Directorate chief, Maj. Gen. Tamir stopped, and it has been reduced on the ground Hyman, offered his assessment to the Knesset’s by tens of percentages,” said Hyman. Yet the Dec. 25 airstrike in Syria, reportedly Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. While many of his comments were classified, the Knes- targeting a depot containing Iranian rockets, set publicized some of them, including his view appears to be a sign that the Israeli-Iranian that the current period is one of “disruption, shadow war in Syria is far from over. As the Middle East enters a new order, deinfluence and [a new order] taking shape.” It is an opportunity “to act in all sectors,” as part of cision-makers across the region will likely be Israel’s campaign to interfere with enemy force aware that the margin for miscalculation has build-up processes. become smaller.

HANC remembers Rabbi Gottesman Rabbi Gottesman was an advocate for each of his students, working closely with them to ensure their success. It is no wonder that many students remained in touch, and that he regularly participated in their smachot, sometimes even as a proud mesader kiddushin. Rabbi Gottesman’s support extended beyond HANC students, as he also was a loyal supporter and friend to the HANC faculty and served as an inspiration to innumerable HANC parents. Rabbi Gottesman inspired all those around him to embrace Torah learning and values. Alumni memories of Rabbi Gottesman are legend. His pushup challenges, his joy-filled visits to early childhood classes, his encouragement of students to pursue freedom for Soviet Jewry, his Friday morning bowling excursions with students, and his greeting each person

THE JEWISH STAR January 11, 2019 • 5 Shevat 5779

From the Hebrew Academy of Nassau County HANC continues to mourn the loss of our beloved former dean, Rabbi Moshe Gottesman z”l, Moshe ben Asher Zelig. The occasion of Rabbi Gottesman’s shloshim is a time to reflect on his legacy at HANC and throughout our community. Rabbi Gottesman was an integral part of HANC for 60 years — as a teacher, assistant principal, principal, dean, and member of our Board of Directors. During his tenure, following the example of our founder Rabbi Meyer Fendel, HANC developed its educational programs, expanded its campuses and solidified its well-earned place as a premier educational institution for Torah and general studies on Long Island. Under the direction of Rabbi Gottesman, HANC students grew to be valuable contributors to Jewish and American life. But Rabbi Gottesman’s true impact runs much more deeply than a recitation of his impressive resume. Rabbi Gottesman personified HANC’s core values, tirelessly infusing thousands upon thousands of students, faculty and parents with his heartfelt and infectious love of Torat Yisrael, Eretz Yisrael, Medinat Yisrael and Klal Yisrael. Rabbi Gottesman ensured the transmission of Torat Yisrael by hiring high caliber limudei kodesh faculty who brought a new level of excellence to the Torah learning at HANC. He led by example, radiating a fervor for learning and sharing Torah that was evident in his beaming smile when a student offered a dvar Torah or reached a milestone in learning. This enthusiasm reverberates through generation upon generation of HANC students who proudly count themselves among Rabbi Gottesman’s disciples. Academic excellence was not enough — one also had to practice sterling middot and character, which Rabbi Gottesman exemplified. His central oft-stated credo was hakarat hatov — appreciation for the good in our lives. HANC students were reminded of this precept at nearly every assembly and event as Rabbi Gottesman thanked others for their contributions, often for work done behind the scenes. Rabbi Gottesman’s love, devotion, and passion for Eretz Yisrael, cultivated in his youth, was intertwined with his dedication to Medinat Yisrael. We eagerly learned from Rabbi Gottesman’s retelling of the history of Zionism, from Israel’s early settlements to its flourishing in our modern day. He continued to bond with many of his HANC students in Camp Sdei Chemed in Israel or on his other frequent trips. In his unceasing love for Klal Yisrael — for every Jew and, indeed, every person — Rabbi Gottesman was second to none. He served as a fierce advocate for all students to receive a Jewish education, whether or not they had the money or the background. Rabbi Gottesman worked tirelessly behind the scenes to raise tuition funds for those who could not afford to come to HANC. If a prospective student lacked a yeshiva background and now wanted to learn, Rabbi Gottesman ensured that HANC’s New Opportunities Program would find room and provide a welcoming introductory platform for a yearning student to study and achieve. Special-needs children also found a home at HANC, in the Sunday Smile Program. This weekly program was Rabbi Gottesman’s signature project. His goal was to ensure that all students had the opportunity to be exposed to Torah learning, in a Torah environment.

with his earnest smile and full attention — the common thread running through all their vivid recollections is that he sought to instill in them his love of life and his love of Torah. In Parshat Shemot (3:9), Hashem declares, “And now, here, the cries of B’nei Yisrael have come to me.” In all that he did for HANC and the larger Jewish community, it is clear that Rabbi Gottesman understood the importance of these words. He was deeply moved by the needs of so many throughout his nearly 60 years at HANC, and worked tirelessly to address and resolve them. We are grateful, we publicly express our hakarat hatov, for all that Rabbi Gottesman has given to HANC throughout many generations. We all have benefited from his wisdom, caring, and his unflagging sense of mission. May his soul be bound in the bond of everlasting life.

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Bar-Ilan, Harvard find immune Israel water tech faces system advance in cancer war algal bloom challenge More than 200,000 Israelis are battling cancer, and each year an additional 29,000 are diagnosed. A group of senior researchers from Bar-Ilan University and Harvard Medical School has discovered a mechanism that allows the immune system to attack cancer cells better than ever before. The discovery shows promise for lung cancer and skin cancer (melanoma), according to a published this week in the medical journal, Nature. The study was led by Prof. Nick Haining, of Harvard Medical School, and co-authored by Prof. Erez Levanon, Prof. Erez Levanon of the Mina and Everard Goodman Faculty of Life Sciences at Bar-Ilan doctoral student Ilana Buchu- University. mansky, of the Mina and Everard Goodman Faculty of Life nism is blocked, the immune system and Tasuku Honjo, who discovered Sciences at Bar-Ilan University, and is much more sensitive. When the the key genes of this mechanism. an international team. mechanism is deactivated, the im- Despite this achievement, the curThe focus of the study is a mecha- mune system becomes much more rent generation of drugs helps only a nism that routinely serves the cell by aggressive against the tumor cells,” small number of patients, while most marking human virus-like genes in or- said Levanon. of the drugs fail to cause the immune der to avoid identifying them as virusIn recent years, a new generation system to attack the tumor. It is es. Now, Prof. Levanon, together with of cancer drugs has been developed hoped that the new discovery will althe Harvard team, has discovered that which blocks proteins that inhibit low enhanced activity of the immune when inhibiting this mechanism, the immune activity against malignant system to attack cancer cells. immune system can be harnessed to tumors. These drugs have shown A number of companies have alfight cancer cells in a particularly ef- remarkable success in several tumor ready begun research to screen for ficient manner, and most effectively in types. drugs that will operate on the basis lung cancer and melanoma. This year’s Nobel Prize in Medi- of this discovery. “We found that if the mecha- cine was awarded to James Allison Source: Bar-Illan University

By Jacob Kamaras Water is the essence of life. Increasingly, Israel is the essence of innovation. It’s only natural, then, that a scientist and entrepreneur from the “Startup Nation” is pioneering a solution for the growing worldwide problem of harmful algal blooms. When it comes to Israel’s global leadership in water technology, we’ve mostly read about desalinization and drip irrigation. But the next water-related challenge that’s thirsting for Israeli ingenuity is algal bloom — a dangerous infestation of harmful algae affecting the surface of fresh water bodies such as lakes, ponds and rivers. It also affects saltwater bodies. The phenomenon is particularly acute in the United States, China, Brazil and India, but it knows no borders. The microorganism blocks sunlight and oxygen, causing loss of aquatic plants and fish. The algae are also toxic to humans, limiting precious water for drinking, irrigation and recreation, as the toxic scourge can cause cancer and purportedly Alzheimer’s disease. In the American Midwest and other regions, algal bloom has caused water-treatment plants to close. More than 700 square miles of Lake Erie were covered by algal bloom in 2017. A young Israeli microbiologist, Dr. Moshe Harel, who earned his

Ph.D. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has developed a treatment that is revolutionizing the approach to algal bloom. His startup, BlueGreen Water Technologies, has produced a technology called Lake Guard, which has secured the approval of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as well as the prestigious NSF60 standard for drinking water. It floats on the water, kills the cyanobacteria in the top layer of the water and dissipates into the environment. Depending on the size of the body of water and extent of the problem, the water is again ready for use in just a few days. The product has been used in Israel since 2018. BlueGreen Water’s products are now available in the United States, in addition to China, Russia, South Africa and other countries. So far, it has only been tested in freshwater bodies, but Harel plans a pilot to treat saltwater bodies soon. Israel, once again, to the rescue.

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January 11, 2019 • 5 Shevat 5779 THE JEWISH STAR

15 THE JEWISH STAR January 11, 2019 • 5 Shevat 5779

At an event heralding the inauguration of a Lokomat Robotic Treadmill at the Hadassah Hospital Rehab Center, from left: Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, Dalia Itzik, Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Lion, Hadassah Hospital Director General Ze’ev Rotstein, and Director of Hadassah Hospital Mount Scopus Tamar Elram.

Hadassah Hospital Mount Scopus laid the cornerstone for a vastly expanded rehabilitation center on the north slope of the Mount Scopus Campus and witnessed the inauguration of the Lokomat, Israel’s most sophisticated robotic treadmill gait therapy machine. A time capsule marking the date was buried, and those assembled sang “If I Forget Thee Jerusalem.” For decades, the Hadassah Hospital Mount Scopus Rehabilitation Department has helped tens of thousands of patients, including survivors of terrorist attacks, rescue and security forces, and those injured in road accidents and from disease. The new rehabilitation center will address the growth in Jerusalem’s population, including the longer life spans of Israeli citizens. The modular design by architect Arthur Spector harmonizes with the campus’s desert landscape and gives adequate space to patients and therapists with enlarged pools and training areas. The treadmill was donated by the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (IFCJ) whose founder and president, Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, stated, “I have a strong connection to Hadassah Hospital, Hadassah the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, and to the city of Jerusalem. In a world in which people talk about ‘branding,’ there is no greater ‘brand’ for healing than the word ‘Hadassah.’ “The IFCJ is proud to support this work, to help soldiers and civilians get back their ability to walk. Jerusalem is not only the capital of Israel, but the center of the world for the world’s major religions. The Fellowship will continue to support Hadassah Hospital in its sacred work.” Rabbi Eckstein said he was strongly influenced in bringing the Lokomat project to the IFCJ by Dalia Itzik, the former Knesset speaker who chairs Hadassah International Israel. Moshe Lion, making his first visit to the hospital as Jerusalem’s mayor, added, “Mount Scopus is one of the most important places in the history of the Jewish people. I am proud to inaugurate the Hadassah Hospital Mount Scopus Re-

habilitation Center that will serve the residents of Jerusalem, regardless of religion, race or gender — over a million people. I am also proud of the work in health and the spreading of Zionism by the women of Hadassah.” Hadassah Director General Prof Ze’ev Rotstein stated, “I am a believer that rehabilitation needs to be built into the program of acute care.” “We take our ability to walk for granted until we lose it and our independence,” said Mount Scopus Hospital Director Dr. Tamar Elram. Dr. Isabella Schwartz, head of the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, observed that “most of our patients come in wheelchairs, and there’s that great moment when they walk out of here.” She said, “The Lokomat will play a major role, together with our devoted therapists. There is a video game that not only distracts the patients, but which moves them through virtual landscapes, not with a joystick, but interactively through the patient’s own leg movements. That’s a challenge for those who can barely move their legs.” The new Lokomat simulates the natural flow of movement better and provides feedback on the progress of training, adjusting the regimen to move the patient ahead. The computer-aided electric motors are attached to the patients’ legs and stabilize them. Whatever the patients cannot do yet, such as lifting their legs, can be done by the robot. Sensors record the exertion and the independent movements of the patient. Robotic support and weight relief can be reduced to promote or extend existing residual movements. Demonstrating the Lokomat was Dvir Teitelbaum, a soldier who came down with a debilitating neural disease during training and who was suddenly paralyzed. He was treated in the neurology department at Hadassah Ein Kerem and later transferred to rehabilitation, where he has worked for the last four months with the physical and occupational therapists. In recent weeks, he has begun using the Lokomat, and has already improved his ability to move his legs. Source: Hadassah

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Hadassah steps up its rehab operation with a robotic treadmill

January 11, 2019 • 5 Shevat 5779 THE JEWISH STAR

Yad Vashem programs tackle new anti-Semitism Continued from page 2 when “garden-variety” anti-Semitism is permitted to fester and turn murderous while the world’s global powers turn a deaf ear. And that puts Fulton and thousands of other teachers on the front line, armed with weapons supplied by Yad Vashem. ‘Something they will take with them’ The 1 million visitors each year who visit the powerful structure — that seems to close in on the viewer, conveying the feeling of being hunted down — may not realize that the adjacent school is a beehive of activity. In the last two decades, 50,000 teachers from 12,000 schools have returned home inspired, impacting more than 5 million students over the years. “Our job is to tell the historical truth based on documentation,” says Avner Shalev, Yad Vashem’s chairman. “And the most important thing we do here is train teachers.” “My students have no clue what Yad Vashem is, but after hearing survivor testimony and reading about their lives and the world they lived in, each one is going to own someone’s story,” says Fulton. “There’s nothing like looking over my football player with tears in his eyes watching Schindler’s List.” Braxton French says learning about the Holocaust in Fulton’s class changed the way he sees the world. “We read books and watched videos, and we visited a survivor. I don’t know what it’s like to be in her situation, but it’s crazy to think about how this could have happened,” he says. “I’m a Christian, but when my friends say history isn’t important, I say, ‘Yes, it is’ or ‘It could happen again.’” One of the tools Fulton and her fellows use is Echoes and Reflections, a curriculum Yad Vashem created with the Anti-Defamation League and the USC Shoah Foundation. “We’re helping teachers convey the important truth that the Holocaust is both an historical event and the result of human factors

— something that can happen anywhere and anytime,” says project director Sheryl Ochayon. The course introduces concepts like stereotypes, propaganda, dehumanization, hate crimes and anti-Semitism, along with real-life stories. “We also invite them to look carefully at the role of the bystander in anti-Semitism and other forms of hate, and in the unit on contemporary anti-Semitism, at their own culture for signs of these things. Stereotypes like ‘Jew you down,’ when they see what it really means, they won’t be as likely to perpetuate it. Something they will take with them when they get to campus or out in the world.” “When my students go online to research Holocaust topics, they find lots of sites saying it never happened,” Fulton says. When they return to class confused, she tells them, “Yes, there are Holocaust-deniers, and there are people who think the world is flat … And when they ask why the Poles didn’t realize what was going on, I say, ‘Of course they knew: The stink of burning bodies 24-7, the ashes, the trains full of people.” That, she says, leads to a discussion of the innocent bystander. In addition to teens, Yad Vashem raises the consciousness of adults, too. “It’s not enough to have students learning the lesson of the Holocaust in school,” says Shulamit Imber of Yad Vashem’s International School for Holocaust Studies. “Anti-Semitism can be fundamental to a culture. “The Holocaust demonstrates clearly what anti-Semitism taken to the extreme becomes. And I do believe that when people see the connection words have on actions and what those actions can lead to, it can inspire a greater awareness of the potential danger of hate both personally and communally.” Yad Vashem offers a free online course, Anti-Semitism From Its Origins to the Present, exploring how and why anti-Semitism rears its

Mengele twin survivor Eva Kor is surrounded by, from left to right, co-teacher Erinn Hess, students Ben Thurston and Braxton French, and Lori Fulton, one of the thousands of teachers trained at Yad Vashem to give their students an understanding of the Holocaust that is both powerful and accurate.

head in every generation. The course features 50 of the world’s top experts’ insights into antiSemitism from ancient times to today. ‘The last generation who will see survivors alive’ “My students are very much aware that they are the last generation who will see survivors alive,” says Fulton. That’s why they write books and spend hours reliving their experiences on videos, adds French. “And they leave their memories to ensure it won’t happen again. I want my children to

know this so they can pass it on, too.” “Once there is no one left to tell, it’s going to be harder to convince people,” says Joseph David Farkas, 84, who remembers German soldiers knocking on the door of his family home on the Romanian-Hungarian border. “My father offered them a drink, and they told him that the SS was coming the next day, and we would all be killed.” Within hours, the family fled. “I was 10, and I remember it all,” says Farkas. “But when we are not here to tell about it, how will anyone understand?” It’s something that drives much of what is done at Yad Vashem, says senior historian Dr. Robert Rozett. But, he cautions, Holocaust history alone cannot protect the world from the dangers of anti-Semitism. “Anti-Semitism hasn’t really gone away, and though awareness of the Holocaust demonstrates where anti-Semitism and racism can lead, it doesn’t inoculate people by itself. It’s part of a toolbox.” The other piece of the formula is planting in each heart “the value of how we respect people different from ourselves and make room for them in our world,” says Rozett. But when a school district has three hours a year to teach the Holocaust, he asks, how can educators possibly give students a true sense of what happened, and why it’s so important to avoid hate speech? “Parents and teachers need to say again and again: ‘Racism, anti-Semitism and hating those who are different, these are not our values. We can be better than that. We must be better than that.” Fulton understands that well. “I believe education is the only way to stem anti-Semitism in the world today,” she says. “It’s unfortunately quite easy for those who do not understand a different culture or religion to feel prejudice. But when students show real emotion because of the stories of real humans who lived and died at the hands of the Nazis, they have an epiphany about others unlike themselves.”

Why recent immigrants aren’t considered Jewish By Sam Sokol, JTA JERUSALEM — For the first time, Israel announced that Jewish immigrants to Israel were outnumbered by non-Jewish immigrants. The headline might suggest that Christians and perhaps Muslims have been moving to the Jewish state in significant numbers, but the truth is more complicated: According to numbers released Monday by Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, 17,700 of the 32,600 migrants who moved to Israel in 2018 came under the Law of Return but were listed as “having no religion.” Such immigrants, hailing largely from the former Soviet Union and Baltic states, count Jewish ancestry but are ineligible to marry as Jews, for example, under the state-controlled rabbinic court system. In 2017, there were 11,400 such immigrants out of a migratory population of 29,100. The result is a heated debate over Jewish identity, the country’s strict Orthodox standards for converting to Judaism and how to best integrate new immigrants into the life of a Jewish state. All told, there are already some 400,000 people, mostly from the former Soviet Union, living in Israel who are not considered Jewish by the Chief Rabbinate. Such immigrants and their children are “caught in a bureaucratic void, unable to marry in State-sanctioned weddings, and to partake in other basic rights of Jewish citizenry,” according to Itim, an advocacy group that works to help Israelis navigate the country’s religious bureaucracy. Itim calls the situation “unacceptable, particularly given the dysfunctional and inadequate State conversion system, which converts a mere 2,000 Israeli citizens to Judaism each year.” The Law of Return grants near-automatic citizenship to those with at least one Jewish grandparent. The Chief Rabbinate only recognizes them as Jews under the standards of halacha, or

Jewish law: They must have a Jewish mother or have been converted to Judaism under Orthodox authorities approved by the Chief Rabbinate. For the past several years, immigration from the former Soviet Union has been on the rise, edging France and other Western European nations as the source for the largest number of new immigrants. Russians, many with Jewish roots, are fleeing their country’s economic stagnation. Many Ukrainians have fled the Russia-backed military conflict convulsing the east of their country. According to Israel’s Ministry of Immigrant Absorption, more than 30,000 people emigrated from Ukraine between 2014 and October 2018. According to a 2014 report by Vladimir Khanin, the chief scientist of the Israeli Ministry of Aliyah and Immigrant Absorption, the proportion of non-Jews among those arriving from the former Soviet and present-day Baltic states has been increasing for decades. While only between 12 and 20 percent of immigrants were considered non-Jews when immigration started in earnest following the Cold War, their numbers rose to between 40 percent and half in the late 1990s. By the first decade of the 2000s, the share of those designated as non-Jewish was between 56 and 60 percent. In a country where demographic arguments carry political weight from everything to issues of religion and state to the peace process, accurate numbers are critical, said Israeli demographer Sergio DellaPergolla. He said the new figures stand at odds with some of the rhetoric being employed in Israel’s public policy debates. “Considering that Jews compose 75 percent of the total Israeli population, the growth of the non-Jewish components was faster and therefore the Jewishness of Israel diminished — in spite of the triumphalist declarations by certain political circles that the Arab fertility rate has dimin-

Berta, who immigrated to Israel from Ukraine, Miriam Alster/Flash90 seen in Jerusalem in 2012.

ished,” he said. Itim’s founder, Rabbi Seth Farber, said the numbers suggest the need to loosen Israel’s cumbersome process for converting to Judaism. While some three-quarters of Israel’s current population is considered Jewish to one degree or another, “if we were to take out from that [total] all the people who made aliyah who aren’t halachically Jewish, the number of Jews would go down to less than 65 percent,” Farber told JTA. “It would essentially destroy the Jewish State of Israel. “Israel is doing a decent job of bringing people here but a terrible job of bringing these immigrants fully into the fold of the Jewish people. Because the only way to do that is to guarantee their full rights here in Israel and particularly to be married. And the only way to do that is to

provide a system of conversion that would be accessible and traversable and unquestioned down the road. The Rabbinate is putting its head in the sand regarding a demographic time bomb for the people of Israel.” Farber insists that given their Jewish ancestry and desire to become part of the Jewish collective in Israel, it would be immoral to deny the newcomers entrance in the first place, as some among the haredi Orthodox have suggested. “It’s not reasonable from a moral and family perspective,” he said. “A lot of these people suffered as Jews and have firm and strong Jewish identities, not necessarily religious identities, but they are part of the body of the Jewish people.” Rabbi David Stav of Tzohar, an Israeli Modern Orthodox rabbinical organization, also seeks an overhaul of the country’s strict conversion process. “I think that we know already as a fact for the last two to three years that most of the immigrants that arrived from Ukraine are not halachically Jewish,” he said. In Ukraine, his organization opened an office several years ago to help prospective immigrants to Israel prove they are Jewish. “The change should be simple,” Stav said. “We offered this years ago: Convert the kids while they are minors.” However, without an overhaul, interfaith marriage and assimilation will increase significantly, he warned. For his part, Farber said that his organization had been working outside the official rabbinical court system to convert children, who, unlike adults, are not required to accept religious observance as part of the process. This year would mark the 1,000th such conversion his organization has facilitated, he said. “Our goal,” Farber said, “is [for this] to become the policy of the State of Israel.”

5 Jewish facts about Elizabeth Warren

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THE JEWISH STAR January 11, 2019 • 5 Shevat 5779

and the American Israel Public Affairs CommitAn evaluation, by Ron Kampeas, JTA WASHINGTON — In the waning days of tee vigorously opposed. She did not show up to 2018, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., for- listen to Netanyahu’s controversial March 2015 mally declared her interest in running for the speech to Congress aimed at shutting down the emerging deal. presidency. Warren was not the first to do so — former …but she will defend Israel against Maryland Rep. John Delaney has for months her base. Warren faced down an angry progressive at been canvassing for Democratic votes in Iowa, the first caucus state — but Warren is the first an August 2014 town hall in Cape Cod. The man “much discussed” Democrat to formally enter was furious that Warren had voted for additional funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile the 2020 stakes. Warren on Friday defense system during Israel’s Gaza was headed to Iowa. war with Hamas the same summer. Why “much discussed?” The for“When Hamas puts its rocket mer Harvard Law professor is known launchers next to hospitals, next to as a champion of consumers, having schools, they’re using their civilian established the Consumer Financial population to protect their military Protection Bureau in 2011 under Presassets. And I believe Israel has a ident Barack Obama. That boosted right, at that point, to defend itself,” her profile and helped propel her to Warren said. retake her state’s Senate seat in 2012. Warren joined a congressional She claims Native American ancesdelegation visiting Israel the same try (although she has acknowledged that it is short of tribe membership), Sen. Elizabeth War- year. She showed up for Shabbat and has tussled over the issue with ren on Jan. 3. After an anti-Semitic gunman President Donald Trump, who calls Zach Gibson/Getty Images gunned down 11 worshippers in her “Pocahontas.” (She gives as good as she gets, having called Trump, among other a Pittsburgh synagogue on Oct. 27, Warren joined a national Jewish initiative to “show up things, a “small, insecure money-grubber.”) She’s known as a relentless questioner in for Shabbat” and spoke at Temple Emanuel in committee hearings, earning herself a Kate McK- Newton, Massachusetts. innon “Saturday Night Live” parody. Warren in She led the “Prayer for Our Country,” the 2017 read a letter on the Senate floor from the Boston Globe reported. “This act of pure evil was an attack on the late widow of Martin Luther King Jr., Coretta Scott King, describing Jeff Sessions, then a nomi- Jewish community not just in Pittsburgh, but all across our country,” Warren said. “Anti-Semitism nee for attorney general, as a racist. The Republican leader, Sen. Mitch McCon- is at the root of so many vile and hateful acts. The nell, R-Ky., invoked a little-known rule barring danger anti-Semitism poses is real and tangible.” Warren also decried the vandalism in 2017 of the impugning of fellow senators (Sessions was still at the time the senator from Alabama), and a Boston Holocaust memorial. in one of the most outstanding political own She thinks the “alt-right” is all wrong Warren has been outspoken in criticizing goals in recent times, he handed liberal feminists a slogan for the decade, when he chided what she sees as white supremacist influence Warren, saying he warned her to desist, but on the Trump administration. “The President of the United States should “nevertheless, she persisted.” Warren, 69, also occupies the same populist, condemn bigots, @realDonaldTrump,” she said income equality territory staked out by Sen. Ber- on Twitter in November 2016 when Trump annie Sanders, I-Vt., in the 2016 election, when he nounced that Steve Bannon, who is close to the mounted a surprisingly strong challenge to the alt-right, would be a senior adviser. “Not give eventual nominee, Hillary Clinton, becoming the them a West Wing office to decide our counfirst Jewish candidate to win major-party nomi- try’s future.” (Bannon was out within a year, in part benating contests in the primaries. If Sanders, who will be 79 in 2020, declares in the next month cause Trump’s Jewish daughter, Ivanka, objected or so, expect a food fight on the party’s left and to his far-right associations.) She’s down with Jewish advocates among its New Englanders. Warren has a close relationship with Mas- for immigration Congress, separate from the executive, does sachusetts’ organized (and substantial) Jewish not suffer from government shutdowns, and so community. Here are some highlights: lawmakers often will pledge their salaries to Warren is a progressive on Israel… Warren accepted the endorsement of J Street, worthy causes during the period. Government is shut down now because the liberal Jewish pro-Israel policy group, and has joined Sanders, who has become a lead critic Trump does not want to sign a funding bill of its current government’s policies, in some of until Congress earmarks $5 billion to build a his initiatives. She was one of 10 senators to write wall with Mexico to stop the flow of migrants. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to Warren pledged this week to give up her wages and chose an immigration advocacy group that demolish Palestinian villages in the West Bank. At the launch of at times violent Palestin- opposes Trump’s immigration restrictions as ian protests on Israel’s Gaza border, she urged her beneficiary: HIAS, the lead Jewish group Israel to show restraint. dealing with immigration issues. “I am deeply concerned about the deaths and “Over 7,000 people in Massachusetts have injuries in Gaza,” Warren said. “As additional been sent home or are working without pay protests are planned for the coming days, the during the #TrumpShutdown,” Warren said Israel Defense Forces should exercise restraint Tuesday, New Year’s Day, on Twitter. “Until @ and respect the rights of Palestinians to peace- realDonaldTrump re-opens the government, fully protest.” I’m donating my salary to @HIASrefugees, a Warren voted for the 2015 Iran nuclear deal nonprofit that helps refugees and makes our that J Street championed and that Netanyahu country stronger in the process.”

‫כוכב של שבת‬

SHAbbAT STAR

January 11, 2019 • 5 Shevat 5779 THE JEWISH STAR

What if Pharaoh accepted a different opinion? Parsha of the week

Rabbi avi biLLet Jewish Star columnist

ne of the most revealing moments in the beginning of Parshat Bo comes when Pharaoh’s officials say to him, in advance of the pending plague of locusts, “How long will this [man] continue to be a menace to us? Let the men go, and let them serve G-d their Lord. Don’t you yet realize that Egypt is being destroyed?” (10:7) Imagine if he had listened to another opinion! Imagine if he took their collective voice into consideration! Not only would he have avoided the last three plagues, and saved all the firstborns of his nation, but there is a good chance the Israelites would have left for the three-day journey they had been asking for, to worship G-d in the wilderness, and they would have returned to Egypt! It is incredible to consider what the consequences are when the attitude is “my way, or the highway.” here is a tremendous quality that defined the Jewish people forever: Being receptive to opposing ideas and innovative thought, and coming to conclusions through processing as much readily available information as we can.

One of the early challenges to Moshe takes place in Bamidbar 11, when Eldad and Meidad prophesy in the camp. Yehoshua, ever the protector of his master Moshe, declared “My Master, Moshe, imprison them!” And Moshe’s response is, “Are you jealous for my sake? I only wish that all of G-d’s people would have the gift of prophecy! Let G-d grant His spirit to them [all]!” (Bamidbar 11:26-29) What a refreshing thing for a leader to say! Dissent is good! Disagreement is powerful! Sharing prophecy is good for the Jewish people! Hearing different voices is a strength for our community! Demographics of communities often reflect this. In towns where there is always one shul, and the rabbi rules with an iron fist, shutting down any attempts at a new shul opening, one of two things happen. The first possibility is that the rabbi lives and dies by the sword. The shul/community doesn’t grow, and when the rabbi retires or dies, the community falls apart. The other result is that people eventually ignore the rabbi, and the community grows despite the rabbi’s objection, and the rabbi loses support from people who disagreed with his “my shul or bust” approach. The most successful rabbis and leaders are comfortable in their skin, are cognizant of how a community grows, appreciates and

Orthodox Union

have long believed that all conflicts could be settled if the parties would simply sit down together and talk. There are, of course, times when I have wondered whether it is wishful thinking; I have been forced to admit that some disputes are intractable. But by and large, I still adhere to this longheld belief and try, in both my personal life and various professional roles, to put it into practice. I attempt to get even the most stubborn opponents to sit down face-to-face and discuss their differences. I had the good fortune during my training in the practice of marital therapy to learn from a master marriage counselor, Ruth G. Newman. I have forgotten much of what she taught me, but I remember her insistence that the role of the marriage counselor was not to counsel. Rather, it was to get the husband and wife to talk to each other and to truly listen to each other. I witnessed her work many times, and was amazed at how even her most stubborn clients were able to overcome their stubbornness, engage in true dialogue, and achieve understanding of the other person’s point of view. In this week’s parasha, Parashat Bo, we encounter arguably the most stubborn person in the history of mankind: Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, who refused to release the Jewish people from their enslavement even after an array of miraculous plagues. His obstinacy was part-

The result of the change in leadership was that 400 or 700 benches were added to the Academy, and Torah study became accessible to many more students than ever before. It took time, and perhaps several doses of humility, before Rabban Gamliel reconciled with Rabbi Yehoshua, realizing that there is room for different voices and different understandings of law. He was subsequently reinstated. ndeed, any practice relating to the human experience may have different opinions and voices. Until recently, that kind of dissent was welcomed under what many people referred to as the “big tent.” Now more than ever, some of us are so rigid, our attitude is no different than Pharaoh or the stubborn rabbi: “My way or the highway.” Moshe Rabbenu taught us that even previous “nobodies,” Eldad and Meidad, can become prophets. Yehoshua had no more right to silence their voices than he had to silence Moshe’s. Silencing opposition is contrary to Judaism. In fact, the opposite is true. When we open our ears and our minds to different opinions, and have the opportunity to process new information for ourselves, we only grow from the exposure to ideas we had never heard before, even and especially as we draw our own conclusions. All of us benefit from our newfound knowledge when, unlike Rabbi Eliezer and Rabban Gamliel, we are able to listen to dissenting voices and bend our own thinking in response to our newly acquired knowledge.

a lesson about the power of dialogue. He writes: “Moshe knew that the recent plague of hail frightened Pharaoh and his people very much. He reasoned that the fear of a deadly famine, which would inevitably result from the plague of locusts, might bring even Pharaoh to soften his heart. And so, without so much as asking Pharaoh for permission to leave, he summarily departed before Pharaoh could say yes or no. He did this to allow Pharaoh and his courtiers to discuss the matter and take counsel from one another. “Indeed, this is exactly what happened. The courtiers said to Pharaoh, ‘Are you not yet aware that Egypt is lost?’ In the words of our rabbis of the Midrash, ‘Moshe observed that they were turning to each other, taking this threat seriously. So he left abruptly, so that they would indeed advise each other to repent’.” lthough Moshe was already familiar with Pharaoh’s stubbornness, refusing to comply even after seven devastating plagues, and despite the fact that the Almighty himself had told Moshe that Pharaoh’s heart would remain hardened, Moshe still held out hope that Pharaoh would talk things over and might relent. In Moshe’s judgment, repentance is always a possibility, and what makes it possible is conversation and dialogue. Rabbi Simcha Z. Brodie uses this passage as the cornerstone of his theory about the importance of dialogue and of its power to change people. He goes so far as to argue that true spiritual greatness cannot be achieved without such dialogue. To illustrate this point, he relates a story he heard from a disciple of the famed 19th-century moralist, Rabbi Yisrael Salanter. Rabbi Salanter was once told about a uniquely spiritual individual, one who had attained rare levels of piety. Rabbi Salanter refused to believe it. “If you would have told me this about one of the three saintly men from the town of Reisen (three famed early 19th century Pietists), I would believe you. Each of them had the others to help

him ascend the ladder of holiness. But the man you just described to me lives in utter solitude. No one can achieve sublime spirituality alone.” Ramban and Rabbi Brodie are teaching us two useful and important lessons, lessons Moshe knew well. First, dialogue and the readiness to talk things over can soften even the hardest of hearts. Secondly, solitude may have its occasional value, but only a life of dialogue with others can foster moral and psychological growth.

‘Let G-d grant His spirit to them all’

Let’s talk it over Rabbi DR. tzvi heRsh weinReb

understands how demographics move, adjust and change, and they respond to the needs of evolving times. wo of the greatest scholars of the Talmudic era were rigid in their approaches to Torah study. Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, one of the great students of Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, was described by his teacher as “a plastered cistern that does not lose a drop, like a flask covered with pitch which retains its wine.” Using more modern imagery, we might say his mind was like a steel trap. But his creativity in thought (certainly as compared to Rabbi Elazar ben Arach, the favored student of Rabbi Yochanan) was unimpressive (see Sukkah 28a). In time, due in part to his inability to bend to see other views, he was excommunicated (Bava Metzia 59b). Rabban Gamliel of Yavneh conducted himself in a manner which essentially silenced voices of dissent. Without going into too much detail, he aimed to destroy Rabbi Yehoshua on a number of different occasions due to Rabbi Yehoshua’s having a different view (Mishnah Rosh Hashana 2:8-9; Talmud Brachot 27b-28a). Rabban Gamliel played a significant role in deposing his own brother-in-law, Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus! And, in time, Rabban Gamliel himself was replaced as Head of the Academy by 18-year-old Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah.

ly his own but was reinforced by the Almighty’s commitment to “harden his heart.” Already in last week’s Torah portion, Va’era, Moshe was put on notice to “speak to Pharaoh to let the Israelites depart from his land,” but not to expect great success. He was forewarned that G-d would “harden Pharaoh’s heart, that I may multiply My signs and marvels in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 7:2-3). y the time we read this week’s parasha, Pharaoh and his people have already undergone no less than seven plagues, with an eighth in the offing. But the very first verse tells us what to expect: “Go to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart and the hearts of his courtiers…” Surely, if there was ever one person for whom the counsel of others was out of the question, Pharaoh was that man. Nevertheless, Moshe persists. He and Aharon go to Pharaoh and confront him in the name of the Lord: “How long will you refuse to humble yourself? … Let My people go … For if you refuse … I will bring locusts on your territory … They will devour the surviving remnant that was left to you after the hail … They will eat away all your trees … Something that neither your fathers nor fathers’ fathers have seen from the day they appeared on earth to this day.” Having delivered this dire threat, Moshe then does something unprecedented. He does not wait for Pharaoh’s response. He simply leaves. What are we to make of this sudden departure? Rabbi Moshe ben Nachman, the Ramban, suggests an answer that gives us an insight into Moshe’s thought processes and teaches us

The most stubborn person in the history of mankind.

Luach Fri Jan 11 / 5 Shevat Bo Candlelighting: 4:30 pm Havdalah: 5:40 pm

Fri Jan 18 / 12 Shevat Beshalach Candlelighting: 4:37 pm Havdalah: 5:48 pm

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Fri Feb 1 / 26 Shevat Mishpatim Candlelighting: 4:54 pm Havdalah: 6:04 pm

Five Towns times from White Shul

Kosher bookworm

AlAn JAy geRbeR

Jewish Star columnist

e call it yichus — the legacy of generations of the past. Rabbis, scholars, talmidei chachamim, community leaders who were ancestors to those we now look up to. All the above, Rabbi Shlomo Freifeld, of blessed memory, was not to have. Yichus was to begin with him. He was born in 1925 into a minimally observant family. His given name was Seymour, but even at an early age he felt the pull of his G-d and his people. By his passing in 1990, he had left a mark upon those whose lives he touched in a manner rarely witnessed in our time. This is the story of his life written using examples of his deeds and teachings as the narrative

of his life’s journey. Titled simply Reb Shlomo: The Life and Legacy of Rabbi Shlomo Freifeld, by Rabbi Yisroel Besser, we have over 300 pages of stories of Reb Shlomo’s impact upon the Jewish youth of his time, mid-20th century America. It was an era that witnessed the devastation of the Holocaust, the founding of the State of Israel and the coming of age of the power and position of American Jewry in world affairs; yet, there was something amiss. This era soon evolved into a drug culture with rampant promiscuity that enveloped the best of our youth. Through music, poetry, song and dance, our young people of that era, even from the finest of frum homes, with yichus that would impress the best shadchanim, were swept away from their faith, many forever. Rabbi Shlomo Freifeld entered into this cultural fray. The term baal teshuvah (which Reb Shlomo disliked), was hardly known until the 1960s. Yet this phenomenon was to come forward through the hard work and tireless efforts of Reb Shlomo,

Reinforcing closeness to Hashem Torah

RAbbi dAvid eTengoff

Jewish Star columnist

n that day, you must tell your child, ‘It is because of this that G-d acted for me when I left Egypt’.” (Shemot 13:8). This is one of the best known pasukim of both our parasha and the Passover Haggadah, and is used by Talmud Bavli, Pesachim 116b as the source text for the well-known concept: “In each and every generation an individual is obligated to view himself as if he went out of Egypt.” This interpretation underscores the concept that Yetziat Mitzrayim is not some long-ago historical event; rather, it is a constitutive element of our people’s identity that we are obligated to re-experience during the Passover Seder each and every year. So much emphasis has been placed upon our verse’s interpretation in the Talmud that its direct meaning has been nearly lost. Yet, we must ever remember our Sages’ statement: Ein hamikra yotzai m’yidei peshuto — the simple

and direct understanding of the Torah text must never be ignored. This mode of analysis was championed by the Rashbam, who analyzes our pasuk in the following manner: “It is because of this that Hashem performed miracles for me in Egypt. Therefore, I am performing this sacrificial service. So, too, do we find in the case of the verse: ‘This is the day that Hashem created for me for I was on the highest of heights; let us rejoice and let us celebrate” (Tehillim 118:24). The Rashbam strongly emphasizes the terms “for me” and “I,” and urges us to focus upon the personal salvation experienced during Yetziat Mitzrayim that helped forge a powerful relationship between the Almighty and every member of the Jewish people. As the celebrated verse in the Song at the Sea proclaims, “This is my G-d and I will extol Him, the G-d of my fathers and I will raise Him up” (Shemot 15:2). he closeness of our relationship with the Master of the Universe is underscored by King David in Sefer Tehillim. These verses

reflect his passionate belief in Hashem’s nearness to us: “You are near, O L-rd, and all Your commandments are true.” (119:151) “The L-rd is near to the broken-hearted, and He saves those of crushed spirit.” (34:19) “Truly, His salvation is near those who fear Him, so that His glory dwells in our land.” (85:10) “The L-rd is near to all who call Him, to all who call Him with sincerity.” (145:18) A careful reading of these pasukim reveals a fascinating pattern. 119:151 teaches us about G-d’s status; He is, by definition, “near.” This is parallel to 34:19, where Hashem is close to a Jew simply because he or she is broken-hearted. This, too, is a matter of status. In contrast, 85:10 and 145:18 clearly indicate that Hashem’s nearness is partially contingent upon our behaviors toward Him. This raises a simple and direct question: If it is Hashem’s nature, so to speak, to be close to mankind, why are our actions important? My rebbi and mentor, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik zt”l, poses a similar type of question

Why are our actions important?

young man upon his return can serve as a stellar example of ahavas Yisrael for all of us. His love definitely preserved this lad’s link to his people in the many years to come. Another story details how he dealt with the grief that befell another boy when he learned of the passing of his “hero,” Jimi Hendrix, a great rock singer of the era. Reb Shlomo invited the boy to his house that night, asking him to bring a Hendrix record. Together they listened intently to the compositions. Afterward, Reb Shlomo played a classical recording, a rousing symphony designed to lift up one’s spirits, which it did. The contrast was obvious to both. Afterward, Reb Shlomo gave his evaluation of the recording. “Now I understand why Jimi Hendrix is so popular; the music defined a generation in turmoil,” he said. “You should know that it is disturbing music, indicative of struggles and discontent.” The boy’s reaction was telling: “That was all he said, but his message penetrated.” That was See Freifeld on page 22 in his analysis of Friday night Kiddush. He asks: “If Shabbat is sanctified since the very moment of Creation, why is it necessary for us to say the words of the Kiddush? What can we possibly add to that which G-d has already sanctified?” He explains that although the essential kedushah of Shabbat is a constant and endures eternally, when we recite Kiddush, we bear testimony to Hashem as the Creator of the Universe, and thereby join Him as partners in the act of Creation. As such, our words of Kiddush add to the holiness of Shabbat, and raise it to an entirely new level. I believe that the reasoning inherent in Rav Soloveitchik’s analysis of Kiddush provides us with an answer to our earlier question: “If it is Hashem’s nature, so to speak, to be close to mankind, why are our actions important?” It is true that, by definition, Hashem is close to us. Yet when we call upon Him in heartfelt sincerity, we reinforce our relationship with Him, just as Yaakov Avinu did when he declared, “Ma norah hamakom hazeh” (“How awe-inspiring is this place,” Bereishit 28:17). Moreover, when we recognize Hashem’s awesome nature, our personal relationship with Him achieves new and more profound levels of meaning. With Hashem’s help, may we ever strive to call upon Him in sincerity and awe. Then may we merit to grow in our closeness to Him, so that we may each proclaim, “This is my G-d and I will extol Him, the G-d of my fathers and I will raise Him up.”

Darkness that leads to enlightenment Angel for Shabbat

RAbbi mARc d. Angel

abbi Yitzhak Shmuel Reggio, a 19th century Italian Torah commentator, offers an interesting insight concerning the plague of darkness in Parashat Bo. The Torah states that Egyptians spent three days in deep darkness while “all the children of Israel had light in their dwellings.” Rabbi Reggio opines that the plague of darkness did not befall the land of Egypt — but rather the eyes of the Egyptians. Egypt itself was full of light; but while the Israelites continued to enjoy that light, the eyes of the Egyptians were blanketed in darkness. If an Egyptian stood right next to an Israelite, the Egyptian would be unable to see — but the Israelite would see clearly. Rabbi Reggio notes that after the plague of darkness, the Torah reports that “the man Moses was very great in the land of Egypt, in the eyes of Pharaoh’s servants and in the eyes of the people.” It seems that the Egyptians did not

recognize the greatness of Moses until after they had experienced darkness. This plague somehow caused a transformation within them. They started to see things differently, more clearly. It took darkness to make them see the light! For many years, the Egyptians did not think twice about their enslavement of the Israelites. It was a normal fact of life, not to be questioned. They did not see anything morally wrong with the status quo. They had grown so accustomed to their pattern of thinking that they did not question the validity of their assumptions and their lifestyle. When they were plunged into absolute darkness, they began to realize how wrong they had been. They came to understand that their assumptions and patterns of behavior were immoral. When they “saw the light”, they then recognized the greatness of Moses. He was, after all, telling the truth! He — not Pharaoh — was the agent of truth. The transformation within the minds of the Egyptians may also be evidenced by the Torah’s later statement that the children of Israel found favor in the eyes of the Egyptians, so that the Egyptians gave them presents. The Egyptians no longer saw the Israelites as slaves, as objects to be exploited; rather, they saw the Israelites as

fellow human beings who had been cruelly mistreated. Egyptians felt empathy toward the Israelites, whom they had previously treated so callously and viciously. They wanted to give them presents, to demonstrate human solidarity. abbi Reggio’s insight might be extended to relate to human life in general. People live with assumptions, values, and patterns of behavior typical of their societies. They do not necessarily self-reflect: are these assumptions true? Are these values moral? Are these patterns of behavior ethical? It is highly difficult to rise above one’s milieu and judge one’s reality in a dispassionate, honest manner. Professor Daniel Kahneman, the Israeli Nobel Prize winner in Economics, has coined the phrase “illusion of validity.” He points out that we tend to think that our own opinions and intuitions are correct. We tend to overlook hard data that contradict our worldview and to dismiss arguments that don’t coincide with our own conception of things. We operate under the illusion that our ideas, insights, intuitions are valid; we don’t let facts or opposing views get in our way. The illusion of validity leads to innumerable errors, to wrong judgments, to unnecessary confrontations. If we could be more open and honest, self-reflective, willing to entertain new

ideas and to correct erroneous assumptions — we would find ourselves in a better, happier and more humane world. The ancient Egyptians had the illusion of validity, believing that their murderous, slaveryridden society was fine. They did not question their lifestyle, opinions or worldview. It took the plague of darkness to make them think more carefully about the nature of their society — and the nature of their own humanity. Once they “saw the light,” they were able to make positive adjustments. Although Pharaoh and his army continued to foster the pre-darkness views, the people as a whole seem to have re-oriented their way of thinking and acting. The plague of darkness might symbolize the need for each of us to periodically clear our minds, re-evaluate our assumptions, and see where we might have fallen victim to the illusion of validity. In the darkness and quiet of our inner selves, we can try to shed light on our opinions, values, attitudes and behaviors. We can try to rise above ourselves, as honestly and objectively as we can. An old proverb has it that “no one is so blind as the one who refuses to see.” We might offer an addendum: “no one sees so clearly as the one who has experienced darkness.”

19 THE JEWISH STAR January 11, 2019 • 5 Shevat 5779

The Freifeld legacy

and this book is his story. y 1967, the hippie culture was reaching its nadir, threatening to engulf even our most sacred institutions and families. This was the year that Reb Shlomo established his famous yeshiva, Sh’or Yoshuv, in Far Rockaway, far from the turmoil of urban New York. Within a short amount of time, it evolved into a haven for young boys who, in their eyes and those of others, were castaways from normative Jewish educational institutions. Reb Shlomo would have none of this. No boy was rejected, no boy was given up on. All “his” boys were given a fair chance to reach their potential no matter how long the road, regardless of the effort required. This book is as much the story of their lives as it is a living tribute to their rebbi’s mesiras nefesh on their behalf. Within the pages of this biography, we have the story of a young boy who “just had to” go to Woodstock on that famous Labor Day weekend of 1969. How Reb Shlomo confronted that

January 11, 2019 • 5 Shevat 5779 THE JEWISH STAR

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With Bolton’s Israel trip, a dramatic change Politics to Go

JEff DuNEtz

Jewish Star columnist

hat a difference two years makes. In December 2016, President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry abandoned the Jewish State by directing UN Ambassador Samantha Power to abstain rather than veto an antiIsrael resolution in the UN Security Council. Twenty-five months later, national security advisor John Bolton began a Middle East trip in Israel to assure the Jewish state and Gulf allies of the U.S. that the withdrawal from Syria would not be like Obama’s 2011 abandonment of Iraq, which led to ISIS forces taking much of the country. Bolton told reporters on his plane to Ben-Gurion Airport that the date of the American withdrawal would be determined by the destruction of ISIS and other facts on the ground. Bolton also told reporters that President Trump would not abandon the Kurds to Turkey, and would “make sure that the defense of Israel and our other friends in the region is absolutely assured.” And he would “take care of those who

have fought with us against ISIS and other terrorist groups.” Even after achieving the conditions for leaving, Bolton said the U.S. would maintain a presence in southeastern Syria, most likely to prevent Iran from gaining a land bridge for Tehran to run fighters and weapons through it. efore meeting with Netanyahu on Sunday, Bolton sent a message to the world with a visit to the Old City of Jerusalem, the Kotel and the tunnels beneath it. What made the visit significant is that joining Bolton’s tour were senior Israel officials: National Security Adviser Meir Ben-Shabbat, and Israel’s ambassador to the US, Ron Dermer. Usually, Old City visits are made without Israeli officials as not to upset the Palestinians and other opponents of the Jewish State. After their first meeting, the Prime Minister and Trump’s national security advisor had the traditional between-meetings press conference. Netanyahu started with the usual pleasantries, followed by a review of Trump’s pro-Israel policies. He thanked Bolton for Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, moving the

U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, allowing Israel to defend itself from the Iranian presence in Syria and defending Israel at the United Nations. He finished with an official request that America recognize the Israeli annexation of the Golan Heights: “If weather permits we’ll go up to the Golan Heights … The Golan Heights is tremendously important for our security. And I think that when you’re there you’ll be able to understand perfectly why we’ll never leave the Golan Heights and why it’s important for that all countries recognize Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, I’ve discussed this with the President and I hope I have a chance to show it directly to you tomorrow on our visit.” olton responded with remarks presented by many previous administrations, but with a twist. Instead of empty words about friendship and unbreakable bonds, Bolton explained why friendship with Israel was necessary for the security of the US, and ended with a warning to those who would doubt the alliance. “Jerusalem is such a fascinating city, such a historic city and is now known among its other

Bolton sent a message to the world.

attributes as the home of the American Embassy to Israel. As you said, what a remarkable achievement that you and President Trump worked out to actually bring the embassy to the capital of Israel; it was one of President Trump’s campaign promises and he was determined to make it a reality and work so closely with you to achieve it. “I think, in fact, Prime Minister, under your leadership with President Trump, we now have the best US-Israel relationship in our history. And on our side, we’re certainly determined to continue that, because the leadership that’s necessary and what is increasingly a very critical time for security here in the Middle East and for us around the world, requires that strong bond and strong leadership that you and the President provide. “We’ve got the continuing threat of Iran’s quest for deliverable nuclear weapons. And despite getting out of the Iran nuclear deal despite the sanctions, we have little doubt that Iran’s leadership is still strategically committed to achieving deliverable nuclear weapons. The United States and Israel are strategically committed to making sure that doesn’t happen.” Bolton continued with a discussion of Syria, raising many of the same points he had told reporters on the plane. See Bolton on page 22

‘Sand and death,’ or an opportunity knocking? Viewpoint

BEN COHEN

and and death.” With a strangely poetic phrase, President Donald Trump prophesied what lies ahead for the armed forces of the United States should this country maintain a military presence in Syria indefinitely. Given Trump’s past utterances on the same subject, these off-the-cuff remarks in the White House Cabinet Room on Jan. 2 were hardly shocking, but what came right after was, shall we say, unexpected. Iran’s experience of sending its troops into Syria had left the Tehran regime with a similarly bleak perception of its neighbor, Trump suggested. “Iran is no longer the same country. Iran is pulling people out of Syria,” the president said. “They can do what they want there, frankly, but they’re pulling people out, they’re pulling people out of Yemen. Iran wants to survive now.” That last point should not be dismissed as out of hand, even if it was as part of a stream of consciousness on foreign policy that also contained preposterous claims (e.g., that the So-

viet Union, which invaded Afghanistan in 1979 to prop up the Communist regime in Kabul, did so “because terrorists were going into Russia”). rump is correct — as he made sure to remind us — that Iran’s economy has suffered severely since he became president. The reimposition of tough sanctions has come at the same time that Tehran has invested massively in its regional proxies stretching from Yemen to Lebanon, and cutting through Iraq and Syria. Iran’s regime has also been experiencing the only pushback it really understands in the form of frequent Israeli airstrikes on its military convoys and facilities in Syria. In terms of its relationship with their subjects, Iran’s rulers are also experiencing a degree of turmoil. When Trump said there were “riots every week in every country,” he likely meant the student-led anti-regime demonstrations that ebbed and peaked in 2018, and which have picked up again in the last two weeks following a horrible bus crash in which 10 students from Azad University were killed and 27 injured. And even within the regime, there are some clerics who are talking up the notion that Iran is in the midst of a “crisis.” Arguably, the most interesting of these figures is Hassan Khomeini — grandson of the Islamic Republic’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini — who spoke on Dec. 29 of the “continuous fragmentation of society” under the Islamist regime, “spreading hatred, grudges,

hypocrisy, double standards and dishonesty.” Hassan Khomeini’s anxiety is based on his fealty to the governing concept of velayat-efaqih (“guardianship of the jurists”) introduced by his grandfather. At the same time, given that his family has been marginalized under the present ruling clique, Khomeini Jr. is also engaging in political maneuvering, so it may suit him to present the Islamic Republic as facing collapse. But as far as the Iranian regime itself is concerned, where others see “sand and death” and imminent collapse, they also see opportunity knocking. In a speech in Tehran on Jan. 3, Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, painted a rosy picture of a multipolar world in which “it is a big mistake to think that there are superpowers.” As a real-world example, Zarif boasted of Iran’s enhanced status in Syria, alongside Russia and Turkey. But he also cast a broader eye over the opportunities presented by a world composed of multiple powers, advocating the efficacy of propaganda as a means of inspiring “resistance” among one’s rivals. “The factor that brings about victory is creating public hatred of the invaders,” noted Zarif, in a nod to the trusted method of propaganda merchants since Josef Goebbels. That is a clear message that even if we assume Iran is presently retreating, it’s not going to do so

quietly. And once the United States is out of the way, it is quite conceivable that the surge of power that Tehran has enjoyed over the past decade will be reinvigorated. hat’s the inherent problem with dividing the world (as both Trump and Zarif do) into zones of influence based on geographic proximity. As is depressingly usual in the Middle East, the Kurds will again be the first victims of this new shift in the power balance; in order to ward off a threatened genocide at the hands of Turkey, Syrian Kurds may have to turn to Russia, to the Assad regime in Damascus, and ultimately, to the Iranians for military and political assistance. When you realize that assistance would come from a power that, even now, is repressing its own Kurdish minority of more than 6 six million people, you get some sense of the political price America’s Kurdish allies will have to pay for yet another abandonment. It’s often said that Jews are a civilizational equivalent of the canary in a coal mine, and that is true of the Kurds as well. In a region that has seen the periodic mass slaughter of thousands of Kurds during the last 30 years — from Saddam Hussein to ISIS — their fate is intimately tied to that of the region as whole. The tremors of Trump’s decisions now, if they are actually implemented, will be felt long after he has departed the White House.

andrea leVin

he New York Times’ 4,700-word story on the death of a young Gazan woman during border riots in June 2018 is a powerful reminder of the depth and breadth of bias at the paper. The hagiographic Dec. 30 account spans a remarkable three and a half pages, tracing Rouzan al-Najjar’s personal life and sad end. Yet it manages, in all the words and images (and online videos), not to report the nature of the violence in which she was entangled, nor of the murderous and implacable hatred of Israel fueling it. The rioters hurling fire bombs, rocks, burning tires and flaming kites — some embellished with swastikas — and ripping down the fence wherever they can are not termed “rioters” by the Times, but “protesters.” The rants of “death to Israel” and threats that the “army of Muhammad” is coming delivered by Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh to chanting mobs are excluded. The riots are termed instead a “kind of nationalist circus,” which they may be, but genocidal bigotry fuels this circus and its frenzy week after week to overrun the fence and invade Israel.

Palestinian protesters during clashes with Israeli security forces on the Gaza-Israeli border on Sept. 14, 2018. Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto via Getty Images

he Times has a longstanding aversion to reporting straight-on demonization of the Jewish people, so there is also no mention of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar vowing last April before the death of the young medic: “We will take down the border, and we will tear out their hearts from their bodies.” The effort broadly to obscure Palestinian violence against Israel also includes blurring the most serious threat: the chronic rocket and missile fire from Gaza into Israel. The Times’ David Halbfinger and his colleagues relay that

the young medic had hoped to study medicine abroad, observing, “But then came the rockets, the blockade, the wars.” The blockade and wars resulted from thousands of rockets and missiles from Gaza. The onslaught has also necessitated bomb shelters, and concrete-protected schools and public spaces throughout Israel’s south; safe rooms in every home; and elaborate anti-missile systems to protect against the bombardments. No mention is made of the millions of Israelis who live under missile threat from Gaza.

2018, the year of the weekly “March of Return” riots along the Gaza border, saw a sharp upsurge of rockets, with 1,000 fired into Israel. In comparison, a total of 71 were fired in the previous three years. Halbfinger likewise wrote: “Before 2005, Gaza residents could work in Israel. But rocket attacks and bombings after the Second Intifada erupted in 2000 prompted Israel to cordon off the strip and eventually abandon its settlements there.” “Rocket attacks and bombings”? By whom? From where? And this tiny, odd reference to modern Gaza history, including an Israeli withdrawal that might have allowed better lives for Palestinians but for the tyranny of Hamas, is all there is in the 4,700 words. In the Times’ rendition, it’s trigger-happy Israelis who are the issue. They’re depicted as crouching in the dunes and shooting harmless protesters. A huge two-page diagram depicts sniper sight-lines striking al-Najjar. And this, too, is deceptive — the characterization of al-Najjar’s actual fate. For 80 percent of the story she’s reported to have been killed by a bullet “fired by an Israeli sniper into a crowd,” implying she’s struck directly by rifle shot. And there’s commentary on targeting protesters and rules of engagement. Only near the end do readers learn the womSee NY Times on page 22

Is it OK for Congress to target Catholic groups? In the United States, the organization dates back to the 19th century and spoke out in favor of religious freedom at a time when discrimination against Catholics was widespread. Its stands were staunchly pro-immigration, but also — reflecting the views of its members — strongly antiCommunist, as well as socially conservative. In other words, its positions are in keeping with the beliefs of the Catholic Church on marriage, contraception and abortion. Most Americans may no longer agree with them on those issues, but it is one thing to advocate for gay marriage, free access to birth control and abortion, and quite another to label all those who disagree as unfit for public office because of their religious convictions. Yet this is increasingly the case for some members of the United States, who have taken to treating membership in the KofC as a reason to disqualify candidates for the judiciary and other government posts. That’s what happened recently when Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and Mazie Hirono (DHawaii) sought to grill Brian Buescher, a federal district court nominee from Nebraska, by submitting questions for the record that singled

him out as a member of the KofC and labeled the group’s members as “extremists.” Nor is this the first time that questions for a judicial nominee crossed the line into religious tests. At a September 2017 judicial confirmation hearing for Amy Comey Barrett, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) told the nominee that she was troubled by her religious beliefs because “the dogma lives loudly with in you, and that’s a concern.” There are other examples of senators questioning Catholics or KofC members in this fashion in recent years, but a troubling aspect of this story is the relative silence of the organized Jewish world. The point is that you don’t have to agree with the KofC or the Church. But no one who pretends to believe in religious freedom and the rights enumerated in the Constitution can stand by quietly while confirmation hearings are used to debate whether adherents of a mainstream faith — or any faith — should be allowed to hold office. This is part of a “free speech for me but not for thee” attitude that is increasingly prevalent on the left. The American Civil Liberties Union

that once prided itself for defending anyone’s right to free speech, even Nazis, now only defends people liberals agree with. Even Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan openly worried last year about whether political conservatives are “weaponizing the First Amendment.” Imagine if senators quizzed Jewish nominees about their memberships in Jewish philanthropic groups like Community Relations Councils, federations or denominational groups like the Reform, Conservative or Orthodox synagogues because of the fact that some of them take stands on social issues. It wouldn’t take long for the Anti-Defamation League and every other Jewish group to blow a gasket. Yet when Catholics face such questions, the same organizations are silent. Members of the KofC might not seem like an oppressed minority, but if you deny them rights you wouldn’t withhold from others, then you are condoning bigotry. This shouldn’t be a liberal or conservative issue any more than it should be considered a Catholic, Protestant, Muslim or Jewish one. We either believe in free speech and religious liberty for all in the United States, or we don’t. If the latter is only true for faiths that share our social views, then freedom really is in peril. Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS.

Can you hear my voice?

raeli Air Force pilot, reaching space, but as a Jew ascending with thousands of years of our past upon his shoulders. He was not religious, but he understood that he was representing an entire nation. He determined what time Shabbat began in space. He insisted on kosher food. He brought along a Kiddush goblet. He brought the Israeli flag. He even went so far as to ascend to space with a tiny Torah scroll, one that had survived the Holocaust. For 16 days, we lived the elation. While he was floating in space, we were walking on air. Like so many others, I watched the live broadcast of the Columbia’s landing. I thought the worst that could go wrong was in the launch and that the shuttle was out of danger. I expected Ilan Ramon’s return.

And so did the rest of Israel. The news anchor was reporting live from Florida. Ilan’s dad was being interviewed. It felt like we were all one family, when suddenly, the anchor said: “We lost contact with the Columbia.” He said it so matter-of-factly that I didn’t think much of it. Then the minutes were drawing out. There was no news. Then CNN took over. We heard an American in the newsroom quietly say, “We lost them,” but I took it to mean they had lost contact. There was a sense that something had gone wrong, when suddenly the somber words came on: “ha-ma’abara hitparka, the shuttle fell apart.” Tears began streaming down my face. The whole country was gripped in mourning. It was See Voice on page 22

Jonathan S. tobin

here may be no membership organization with a more politically incorrect name than the Knights of Columbus. Calling its members “knights” is bad because it reminds us of Medieval Europe and all the awful things that were committed there in the name of the church. But it’s also named for the man who discovered the Americas for Europe — the natives already knew it was there before Christopher Columbus steered the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa Maria to what is now the Dominican Republic on Oct. 12, 1492 — and therefore conjures up all the horrors of colonialism that have caused the day to be renamed “Indigenous Peoples Day” in many jurisdictions. But whatever we think about the horrors of the Crusades or whether Columbus did more harm than good, the Knights of Columbus (KofC) are not the advance guard of a new Spanish Inquisition. They are a Catholic service organization with 2 million members that has raised more than $1.5 billion for charities in the last decade.

View from Central Park

tehilla r. goldberg

Intermountain Jewish News

ith the death of Rona Ramon, a blanket of great sadness fell upon all of Israel. It all came rushing back … the heartbreaking news after a euphoric two weeks of witnessing Ilan Ramon in space. The past few days, I haven’t been able get out of my head the 1970s Israeli song Hatishma Koli, “Can You Hear My Voice?” After Ilan Ramon sang and played it for his wife from space, it became the family’s theme song. And it became

‘No religious test shall ever be required’

a theme song for all of us who, as a nation, fell in love with Ilan Ramon, and then lost him as we awaited his return to earth. Maybe it was because of the intifada that was raging at the time. Israel was gripped with terrible pain, fear, anxiety and loneliness. Suicide bombs, exploding cafés and buses, everywhere. Then within the darkness, a stream of light arose. Ilan Ramon. Even before lift-off, he had emerged as a source of inspiration. The Columbia shuttle became our obsession. Israeli news followed the story closely. Of course, it was historically significant for Israel, but it was so much more than that — because Ilan Ramon made it so much more than that. We were proud to be represented by him. He saw his role as not only an Israeli, or even an Is-

While he was floating in space, we were walking on air.

THE JEWISH STAR January 11, 2019 • 5 Shevat 5779

NY Times ends year with an epic Israel smear

January 11, 2019 • 5 Shevat 5779 THE JEWISH STAR

Freifeld...

Continued from page 19 the genius of Rabbi Freifeld. According to one former rebbi of the yeshiva, Rabbi Freifeld was venerated by his students, and he in turn never gave up on them. He was a disciple of Rav Yitzchok Hutner of blessed memory, yet he was a devoted fan of the writings and teachings of Rav Avraham Yitzchok Kook zt”l. He was an avid reader of the New York Times, especially its book review section, and had a deep appreciation for the teachings of Chabad. Yet despite everything, the center of his life and his mission was his holy work with baalei teshuvah. Nothing was to come between him and his boys. In our own community he was the inspiration for Rabbi Moshe Weinberger to establish Aish Kodesh in Woodmere, whose devotion to the teachings of Rav Kook echo that of Reb Shlomo. The awesome presence of the yeshiva, on its sparkling campus in Lawrence, is eloquent testimony to the continued legacy of Reb Shlomo’s activism. On a personal note, I met Reb Shlomo on Sunday morning, June 22, 1986, after davening at his beis midrash on Central Avenue in Far Rockaway. We were introduced by one of his devoted followers, Robert Dornbush of Bayswater, who knew that I wanted to meet him. We talked for a while, much of our conversation centering upon the national tragedy that had engulfed our nation a few months before. On a cold winter morning in January at Cape Canaveral, the Challenger shuttle exploded upon liftoff, killing seven astronauts, among them Dr. Judith Resnik, a cousin of Rabbi Freifeld. This book is not a biography, in the traditional sense. It is a story, a series of stories, each designed to teach us the important lesson of ahavas Yisrael. I hope and pray that it will be a lesson well learned by all who read it and share its message. BOOK EXCERPT One of the most interesting episodes in Sh’or Yoshuv history is the much-discussed encounter between the celebrated secular singer Bob Dylan and Reb Shlomo. There was a young baalas teshuvah who had grown close to Rebbetzin Freifeld, and when she found her match, the yeshiva hosted a sheva brachos for her. Among the guests that she invited were two colleagues from her previous life, Bob Dylan and the poet Allan Ginsberg. The way that Reb Shlomo dealt with the visit of the pop music icon to his Yeshiva taught his boys much about his outlook on that world. One of those talmidim recalled that day. “To us, Bob Dylan was more than just a celebrity. We lived with his music; he was larger than life and Reb Shlomo knew that. Yet Reb Shlomo called me in before the sheva brachos and informed me in no uncertain terms that there would be no adulation or admiration for the singer whatsoever. “‘This is a yeshiva,’ he said, ‘and here we give respect to talmidei chachamim, not rock singers.’ “Reb Shlomo told me that, as a big, strong boy, I was in charge of ensuring that no reporters would be allowed in. He also instructed the bachurim that they were not to approach Dylan for an autograph. He told us that we should all say hello, we should all be polite, but nothing that smelled of hero worship would be tolerated.” The participants in that sheva brachos will never forget the evening. There, in the hot, crowded yeshiva dining room, they sat for hours: Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg, two Yiddishe neshamos who had been swallowed up by the decadence and hedonism of American culture. They were mesmerized as they listened to Reb Shlomo’s speech and were moved by the stirring music of R’ Shmuel Brazil. R’ Shmuel recalls how Reb Shlomo told him to play the niggun to Libi Uvesari Yeranenu L’Kel Chai, composed by R’ Meir Shapiro. The guests joined the bachurim in spirited dancing and ate the simple yeshiva fare. For one glorious night, the complications of their lives were left outside in the winter night as they encountered true Yiddishkeit. In the days that followed, Dylan came to speak with Reb Shlomo. One frosty evening, he left Reb Shlomo’s home and commented to a re-

porter that “it may be dark and snowy outside, but inside that house, it’s so light.” According to the testimony of some who were involved at the time, the singer offered to host a concert to benefit the yeshiva, an offer that Reb Shlomo refused. He then told Reb Shlomo that he planned to purchase a home in nearby Long Beach and join the yeshiva as a talmid. Reb Shlomo received his idea warmly, but gently told him that the way to become a talmid would be to join the yeshiva completely. “First spend three months in the dormitory, and then, if you still want to, you can purchase a home in the neighborhood.” Dylan had trouble accepting the plan. To a close confidante, Reb Shlomo explained, “He is struggling to find himself, and the only way that the yeshiva experience won’t just be another transitional stage for him will be if it’s done with true ratzon; for that, it has to be difficult for him. The only way this will work is if he has a genuine resolve to make it work; he has to invest something in it, too.” Ultimately, it proved too much of an undertaking for the singer, and he moved on. To Reb Shlomo, Bob Dylan was the same as any other Yid who wanted to learn. All he needed was ratzon and he would be welcome. A version of this column appeared in 2008.

Bolton...

Continued from page 20 He closed with backing Israel’s right to selfdefense, another statement we heard from the previous administration. The difference, however, was that Bolton’s words weren’t followed by a “but.” Two years ago, the right to self-defense would be qualified with a warning not to defend itself too well, or with moral equivalency between Israel’s self-defense and terrorist acts. Instead, Bolton’s statement was unequivocal. “For the United States, a sovereign nation’s ability to defend itself is the ultimate mark of sovereignty. And President Trump has said repeatedly that he backs Israel’s right to selfdefense. He says it proudly and unequivocally. I would just say to any nation, whether in this region or not in this region, that has any doubt about America’s support for Israel’s self-defense — they better think about it again.” o much can happen in two years. Whether one agrees or disagrees with President Trump’s policies, one cannot dispute the fact that this president has executed a dramatic reversal of the Israel policies of the previous administration. This reversal can be substantiated with the actions Netanyahu pointed out — Jerusalem, the Iran deal, and the UN — but the most significant substantiation was that lack of a qualifying “but” to Israel’s right to selfdefense. The United States now recognizes Israel as an ally with a need to defend itself, rather than a vassal state that can only protect itself at the whims of a president who believes it is always wrong.

NY Times...

Continued from page 21 an was killed when a bullet struck the ground a distance from her and ricocheted, with fragments striking three people, the others injured but not fatally. That is, despite the elaborate diagrams, online videos and poignant portrait, alNajjar wasn’t targeted by a sniper but was victim of an unintentional ricochet. Though the Times’ story is exceptional in its dramatic length, its tropes featuring romanticized Palestinian victims of hard-bitten Israelis have long graced the pages of the newspaper. In myriad similar stories, one-dimensional, victimized Palestinians with no agency of their own are acted upon by Israelis. Their families and communities are opaque and unknown, defined only in relation to Israel and only as victims. Halbfinger, who is relatively new to the post, also offers up a thread-worn insight regarding the death of the medic: “It also shows how each

side is locked into a seemingly unending and insolvable cycle of violence.” What is shown is the Times drifting ever further into a seemingly unending cycle of bias where Israel and Jews are concerned, as recent weeks underscore. An uproar over the paper just weeks ago featuring an anti-Semitic book recommended by Alice Walker has fueled intensifying dissatisfaction with the publication. The continuous hectoring of Israel, in a region where vast cruelties have been inflicted on peoples who need the light of journalistic attention but are ignored, can be weighed in the context of the Times’ greatest past professional failure. “The century’s bitterest journalistic failure” is how former New York Times executive editor Max Frankel described his publication’s coverage of the extermination of 6 million Jews in World War II. The characteristics of that “staggering, staining failure” included obscuring the horror befalling the Jewish people by blurring the singular Nazi aggression against them, burying reports of their slaughter in the millions deep in the paper to minimize public awareness and rarely ever giving front-page attention to the catastrophe. It’s notable that back then, when European Jews were under assault and largely helpless to save themselves, the publisher and editors essentially ignored the story of their plight and denied them the publicity that might have spurred action on their behalf. Today, as the Jewish state comes under grotesquely hypocritical propaganda attack in the world arena, often by blatantly biased and bigoted forces, the Times is once again denying full, honest and serious coverage of the threats to the Jewish people, instead itself stigmatizing the nation through its incessant bias. Andrea Levin is executive director and president of CAMERA.

Voice... Continued from page 21 personal. It was Ilan Ramon who we had all fallen in love with. We all felt the pain of the Ramon family. Rona, the children — our broken hearts went out to them all, and to Ilan’s dad, whom we had just seen on television. Hatishma Koli played on the radio as we all grieved this national loss. Rona would never hear Ilan’s voice again. With that, Rona Ramon took on the identity of “Ilan’s wife.” In an interview for Ilan’s fifth yahrtzeit, she spoke of choosing to live life fully, of rising each morning with joy in her heart. She spoke of Ilan being her rock and her strength, of living by his ideals. She spoke of his journal from space miraculously found in the rubble. With a smile, she said, “I am still in contact with Ilan. I will always be in contact with Ilan.” hen, a year later, six years after Columbia, the unthinkable happened. Lightning struck twice. Ilan and Rona Ramon’s eldest son Assaf, a newly minted Israel Air Force pilot, a young man with tremendous promise, was killed in a flying accident. How much pain could be visited, and so publicly, upon such an incredible family that had already given the Jewish people so much? Two precious loved ones, twice taken by the heavens. It was a terrible blow to the country all over again. If until that point Rona had been “Ilan Ramon’s wife,” now she was also “Assaf’s mother.” While the crushing pain would have debilitated anyone, Rona transformed her tragedy into action and emerged as a persona in her own right. After Assaf’s death, she somehow picked herself up and initiated joint projects in both Ilan and Assaf’s memories, wrote an MA thesis about coping with loss, and worked with thousands of Israeli youth. In 2016, at a class on the Biblical Job, she shared: “We are constantly living in a process of longing and of missed opportunities. Within this dialectical tension one must maintain constant balance between what was, what is gone, and what is present, to choose to somehow grow from within the darkness, to remember that the pain is forever; and at the same time to realize that there is also a path forward to be found from a place of emptiness, of absence — to live life to the fullest.”

CAlendar of Events Saturday January 12

Tanach Shiur: Community-wide Motzei Shabbos Tanach program, hosted by Young Israel of Lawrence-Cedarhurst. Rabbi Avraham Bachrach will be learning perakim 54-55 of Tehillim. 7 pm. 8 Spruce St, Cedarhurst.

Sunday January 13

Dinner at the Yeshiva: Yeshiva Darchei Torah honors Mr. & Mrs. Dov & Esther Karfunkel; Mr. and Mrs. Meir & Malka Fried; Mr. & Mrs. Pinny & Tamar Heskiel; and Harav Shmuel & Rebbetzin Chaya Feldman. 257 Beach 17th St, Far Rockaway. Dinner@ darchei org; 718-868-2300 ext. 301.

Tuesday January 15

Haftarah Shiur: Three-part series for

women at Shaaray Tefila, exploring the messages of the week’s haftarah with Mrs. Vivienne Chaya Frank. 1 pm. 25 Central Ave, Lawrence. Power Parenting: Raise your kids without raising your voice! Presented at the Jewish Early Learning Center of Merrick by certified life and parenting coach Brocha Hertzel. Dessert buffet. 7:30 pm. 2174 Hewlett Ave, Merrick. 516-833-3057 ext 103. $15. Chinese Auction: To benefit Chasdei Chashie L’Kallah, providing basic furniture to hundreds of needy couples every year. 7:30 pm. 570 Cedarhill Rd, Far Rockaway. 718253-1627.

Tuesday January 22

Haftarah Shiur: Three-part series for

women at Shaaray Tefila, exploring the messages of the week’s haftarah with. Vivienne Chaya Frank. 1 pm. 25 Central Ave, Lawrence. Emunah Luncheon: The Esther Phillips Chapter of Emunah invites you to their annual Teach-A-Child luncheon at Traditions Restaurant. 12:30 pm. 302 Central Ave, Lawrence. Pricing from $25 to $52. Contact Alice, 718-868-3853.

Sunday January 27

Film Screening: The Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County presents a screening of “Who Will Write Our History” on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The film tells the story of historian Emanuel Ringelblum and his secret archive in the Warsaw ghetto. 1 p.m. 100 Crescent Beach Road, Glen Cove. 516-5718040. $18 suggested donation.

Sunday Feb. 3

Super Sunday: Sixth annual Super Bowl

Sunday concert, presented by the Park East Day School Grandparents’ Circle. Ticket purchase includes performance by the Maccabeats, tailgate lunch, and meet-and-greet. 11 am. 164 East 68 St, Manhattan. $25 in advance, $36 at the door. Deborah@parkeastdayschool.org

Last week, after Rona died, it was hard to hear that she had asked to be cremated. Harder still was her reason, “to prevent her children from needing to endure a third funeral for a member of their nuclear family.” None of us who have not walked in her shoes can understand. A friend of mine commented that perhaps since her husband had no burial place, she felt guilt at having one when he did not. Her legacy and memory of Ilan and Assaf will never be stilled, and the legacy of Ilan Ramon, one of Israel’s greats, will live on in the annals of Jewish history. We will never forget this dear family. “Hatishma koli?” Ilan and Rona, we will always hear your voice. Copyright Intermountain Jewish News

Continued from page 1 This year’s gala was dedicated in memory of Dr. Richie Friedman a”h, medical director of Chevera Hatzalah and a supporter of Achiezer, who was niftar after being hit by a car in while walking home from shul on motzei Shabbat. With the installation of the Edith Lowinger A”H Achiezer Volunteer Network, the evening recognized a life devoted to others. Michael Goldberg, executive director of Northwell Health’s Long Island Jewish Medical Center, was presented with the Man of the Year Award. He said that “when you talk about community and you talk about Achiezer, what’s

really important is to recognize how much of an impact is being made not only here in this community — it’s being felt across the entire world.” Goldberg said that while Northwell Health serves many communities — it operates 23 hospitals and more than 700 outpatient physician practices and, with 68,000 employees, is the largest private employer in the state — “one of the communities that we have really connected with” has been Five Towns and Far Rockaway, with President and CEO Michael Dowling meeting with leaders, including Rabbi Boruch Ber Bender, founder and president of Achiezer, to discern their needs. Rabbi Bender said that Goldberg is “a hos-

pital executive who runs a massive institution, but somehow, when there’s a particular person that’s in need, he’s there.” Shalom and Leah Jaroslawicz received the Young Leadership Award; Dr. Martin Kessler and Dr. Ari Hoschander, partners in KH Plastic Surgery, were Excellence in Medicine Awardees; and Yossy and Miriam Lea Ungar were given the Pillars of Chesed Award. A surprise honor was presented to Daniel Younger, who exemplifies Achiezer’s core value of giving service whenever and wherever it’s required (the Achiezer team is available 24/7). Confined to a wheelchair, he respond-

ed immediately when Achiezer sent out a text alert that several men were needed right away to provide kavod acharon. “He was going to make sure that person was not going to be buried alone,” Rabbi Bender said, relating how Younger mobilized several friends and rode to the cemetery. Unable to do so himself, Younger asked that someone put dirt in his hand so he could complete the entire mitzvah. His “devotion to chesed and his drive to help another Jew in need is truly inspirational,” Rabbi Bender said. “You are a complete and total inspiration to all of us.”

From left: Flanked by Achiezer President Rabbi Boruch Ber Bender, Brucha and Ronald Lowinger represent the Lowinger, Keilson, Rosenman and Zafir families in dedicating the Edith Lowinger A”H Achiezer Volunteer Network; Rabbi Bender presents a citation to Daniel Younger for his devotion to chesed; and Dr. Martin Kessler and Dr. Ari Hoschander receive the Excellence in Medicine Award. The Jewish Star / Sue Grieco

From left: Among the staff of many hospitals and other medical institutions at the Achiezer gala were these representatives of NYU Winthrop Hospital — Dr. Martin Weinblatt, Dr. Tovia Marciano, Dr. Abraham Peller, Dr. Marc Adler and Bruce Cohn; Rabbi Rabbi Anchelle Perl of Chabad of Mineola and Achiezer board member Michael Krengel; John and Jenny Katz and Melissa and Joshua Mitgang. The Jewish Star / Sue Grieco

From left: Seven-year old Levi Horshander, son of an awardee, samples focaccia bread; Charles Meisels and Lloyd Keilson browse the selection at the charcuterie table; Yossi Riesman, Aaron Guttman, Harry Swambart and Dovid Barkinay browse the gala’s journal, filled with 900 pages of ads placed by Achiezer supporters; and for Jay Gelman and David Davor, there was a moment to chat. The Jewish Star / Sue Grieco

An awardee lineup, from left: Rabbi Yossy Ungar, pillars of chesed; Dr. Ari Hoschander and Dr. Martin Keller, excellence in medicine; Ronald Lowenger, who participated in the dedication of the Edith Lowinger A”H Achiezer Volunteer Network; Rabbi Boruch Ber Bender with Shalom Jaroslawicz who, with his wife Leah, received the young leadership award. Center photo: Rabbi Bender presents Yossy Ungar with the Pillars of Chesed Award. At right: A poster honors Dr. Richie Friedman a”h, the medical director of Chevera Hatzalah in whose memory the Jan. 6 Achiezer gala was dedicated. The Jewish Star / Sue Grieco

THE JEWISH STAR January 11, 2019 • 5 Shevat 5779

1,800 turn out for Achiezer ‘CommUnity’ gala…

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