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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Achiezer gala touts real unity
Young Leadership Award recipients Leah and Shalom Jaroslawicz.
The Jewish Star / Sue Grieco
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?
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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