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Beshalach • Jan. 18, 2019 • 12 Shevat 5779 • Torah columns pages 18–19 • Luach page 18 • Vol 18, No 2

Raising walls and blocking illegal entry

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Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, meets with General Ne Win, then-prime Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images minister of Burma, as it was called, in 1959.

Jews in Asia The border fence with Egypt in Eilat in southern Israel, on Oct. 18, 2017.

Yaniv Nadav/Flash90

•Good wall on Egypt border: p2 •In Germany, open borders presage trouble for Jews: p4 •Keep Israel off Trump’s wall: p5 •It’s not an ‘apartheid’ wall that divides Israel’s Route 4370: p7

Yiddishkeit in unexpected places. 1st stop: Myanmar This is the first article in a series about the Jews of Southeast Asia.

By Charles Dunst, JTA YANGON, Myanmar — There was a Chanukah party last month in this former capital city and enough guests — over 200 — to surprise an uninvited tourist. “There’re no Jews here anymore,” the tourist proclaimed, confused about the celebration at Yangon’s Chatrium Hotel. “Yes there are,” replied Ari Solomon, a guest from Australia. “No, they said there are 10 families,” the tourist responded. “Well, that’s not nothing — that’s 10 families,” Solomon countered. “That’s a lot. You go back to my hometown, Calcutta, and there are lucky to be 16

Jews, let alone 10 families.” Myanmar’s Jewish community has dwindled to about 20 people. Most of the Jews fled when Japan invaded the country in World War II, distrusted for their perceived political alignment. The majority who remained left in the mid1960s, when the new regime implemented a socialist agenda that would run the country into the ground. Still, Sammy Samuels, 38, the de facto leader of the nation’s remaining Jewish community, holds out hope for its future. His father, Moses, maintained the community, opening the door of Yangon’s sole synagogue daily in the hopes of welcoming tourists. Following his father’s death in 2015, Samuels took over. But Myanmar’s See Mayanmar Jews page 6

Fence on Egypt border Hands-On has transformed the Fun & Learning south of Israel By Yaakov Lappin, JNS This time six years ago, Israel completed its high-tech border fence with Egypt, marking the start of a transformation. With its network radars and cameras, the obstacle — dubbed “Hourglass” by the Israeli Defense Ministry — issues alerts to Israel Defense Forces units regarding suspicious movements. The barrier has almost completely stopped the mass movement of illegal migration from Africa, Dr. Ofer Israeli, a geostrategist and international security policy expert, told JNS. Israeli, who lectures at the Institute for Policy and Strategy at the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) in Herzliya, said the quantity of human trafficking “is almost zero now.” In addition, the fence has significantly boosted Israel’s ability to defend itself against Salafijihadist terror organizations that are active in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, he added. “The obstacle separates two entities: Israel and Egypt. Today, inside Egypt, there are groups that view Israel as a target for attack. Here, too, the fence has managed to decrease friction both because of the physical obstacle, which is difficult to overcome, and because of the sensors installed on it,” said Israeli. The setting up of dedicated IDF units to patrol the fence and prevent cross-border infiltration is a major part of the barrier’s success, he said. A positive side effect has been the decrease in narcotics smuggling. “The quantity of drugs coming has significantly dropped,” Israeli said. Professor Hillel Frisch, a political scientist from Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, and an expert in Middle Eastern affairs, said part of the barrier’s effectiveness comes from Egyptian-Israeli security cooperation. “There is likely a lot of Egyptian support for curtailing this immigration because it’s their problem as well,” said Frisch. “It’s also effective because it’s very sparse country, and there are no major population centers along either side of the border.” Frisch added that “the fact that there are no population centers nearby allows the barrier to be militarized.” The model of advanced border barriers is spreading. In May last year, Israel announced that it had completed a 34-kilometer border fence between southern Israel and Jordan. The structure towers 26 meters high, and is designed, among other things, to protect civilian aircraft at the newly built Ramon International Airport at Timna against the threat of missile attacks. “The fence along Jordan works because

there’s cooperation between the two sides. That is a very important variable,” said Frisch. According to Israeli, “in general, the State of Israel has adopted the model of border barriers. We are seeing similar fences expanding to other areas, including on the Lebanese border.” The primary goal of barriers on dangerous borders like Lebanon and Gaza is “not to stop civilians, refugees or illegal migrants, but to defend against hostile elements on the other side,” said Israeli. On the other hand, such obstacles have led Israel’s enemies to come up with creative ways to overcome them, such as the combat tunnels dug by both Hamas and Hezbollah. “We saw that on the Gazan border, Israel responded by developing an underground barrier that goes down to a depth of tens of meters, to deal with the tunnel threat,” noted Israeli. “But Hamas is trying to overcome the barrier with rockets. If we look at the north, we see that there, too, Hezbollah is working to get over the barrier with tens of thousands of projectiles. This is the negative aspect — the other side always looks for a way around the fence,” he said. Around the world, border barriers seem to be in vogue. Hungary built one on its borders with Serbia and Croatia in 2015 to deal with an influx of migrants. Turkey is barricading its troubled border with Syria with a wall and fence. And Saudi Arabia is building a massive 1,600-kilometer fence on its border with Yemen. Meanwhile, in the United States, President Trump has controversially cited the Israeli-Egyptian barrier as a model for the wall he wishes to build on the Mexican border — an issue that has led to a political feud with the Democrats, leading to an ongoing government shutdown. “The U.S. and Mexico are not hostile entities,” said Israeli. “There is a wish to prevent human trafficking from Mexico, where Latin American migrants, as well as migrants from other countries, pour into. If they set up a significant obstacle that is high-quality with sensors, it will be extremely costly because the border is over 3,000 kilometers long.” The great distances between the stations that monitor the barrier would mean that it would not be foolproof in stopping the migration flow, explained Israeli. “The question is whether the U.S. is willing to invest this huge sum.” Frisch agreed that such a barrier on the U.S.Mexican border would be far from being hermetic. “The migrants that would reach it are the most entrepreneurial kind of people,” he said. “The people who manage to cross it will be the best and the brightest.”

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Will migration pact endanger German Jews? Analysis by Orit Arfa, JNS On Dec. 10, the same day that the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) reported growing feelings of vulnerability among European Jews, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel led the signing in Morocco of a 34-page U.N.-sponsored document called the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. The non-binding pact was the subject of fierce debate in Europe, which has been embroiled in debate over the impact of Merkel’s decision to allow more than 1 million Muslim migrants into Germany since 2015. Analysts and critics have argued that it would sanction migration as a “human right,” providing migrants, largely from African and Middle Eastern countries, with generous benefits and protections regardless of their legality. Among Jewish advocacy organizations (such as the European Jewish Congress, which did not return comment), nary a word has been said about the pact, even as polls and experience show that Islamic anti-Semitism is a rising source of concern among Europe’s Jews. A leading Jewish critic of the pact, wellknown German writer, Henryk Broder, believes that the European Jewish establishment underestimates or denies problems that mass Muslim migration poses for Jewry. “CNN and the Americans and stupid German Jews and the German media have a very clear idea, definition and framework of antiSemitism, and it’s one word: the Holocaust,” he said. Broder, who has researched anti-Semitism since his book The Eternal Antisemite came out in 1986, is skeptical of polls that suggest traditional anti-Semitism is increasing. “At least two or three times a year, there is news saying anti-Semitism is on the rise,” he

said at an interview at a Berlin cafe. “That is absolutely not true. There is a constant antiSemitism, but what has risen is the coverage of it. What has risen, which is true, is the number of anti-Semitic incidents since our beloved chancellor invited half the world to come to Germany.” He says one must differentiate between anti-Semitic attitudes, reports and incidents. Not all incidents, at least in Germany, are tagged as anti-Semitic. For example, a German court ruled that a 2014 firebombing of a Wuppertal synagogue by Palestinians was just a protest against Israeli policies. Reported anti-Semitic acts with no known source are automatically labeled “right-wing.” “The main obstacle in this kind of intellectual exercise is that anti-Semitism is still being defined by the Holocaust and Auschwitz. And they defend the notion that everything else is ‘Israel-Kritik’ — criticism of Israel.” Following the E.U.’s recent FRA survey on anti-Semitism, the American Jewish Committee has again called on governments to do more to combat anti-Semitism. According to the AJC, anti-Semitism in Europe began to surge during the outbreak of the Second Intifada from 2000-2005, and is a manifestation of several factors. “There are incidents coming from the segments of the Muslim community, as well as anti-Semitism generated ever more frequently by the far-right and far-left, mixed in with conspiracy theories and old-fashioned anti-Semitic tropes dating back to age-old Christian stereotypes and to European racist theories of the 19th century, and we have today’s highly potent mix,” said Deidre Berger, director of AJC Berlin. “A more recent wave of migrants to Europe as of 2015 are coming from Muslim majority countries like Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan that

propagate deeply anti-Semitic stereotypes on all levels of society,” she continued. “There are understandable concerns in the Jewish community that the new immigration can further exacerbate rising anti-Semitism if the issue is ignored or glossed over. That is why we advocate that governments take the issue of integration and language classes more seriously in terms of the values that are being inculcated in the new arrivals. This includes knowledge of Jewish life in Germany and respect for the essential nature of the German-Israeli relationship, which Chancellor Merkel has declared to be raison d’état for the German government. Fighting anti-Semitism and promoting democracy requires a substantial boost in curricula development and teacher training in Germany, not just in programs for immigrants, but also for German schools in general.” Broder, on the other hand, is pessimistic about the successful integration of Muslim migrants, saying “all efforts to enlighten them, inform them, educate them — are failing.” He dubs polls on rising anti-Semitism as “job-creation machinery.” Appointing “anti-Semitism czars,” like Felix Klein, Germany’s recently minted commissioner on anti-Semitism, he said, is ultimately fruitless in the face of continued Muslim migration and suppression about the anti-Semitism they generate. As for the pact, said Broder: “There should be concern for the Jewish community, but not because of the treatment. Because they’re coming anyway.” Practical effects of the pact remain unclear. The United States, Australia, Austria, Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Israel are among those who voted against it, di-

minishing the chances that it will evolve into soft-law, said Yonatan Jakubowicz, executive director of the Israeli Immigration Policy Center (IIPC). (Brazil pulled out this month.) Jakubowicz ran a campaign urging Israel to vote against the pact, arguing that it would harm Israeli security, sovereignty and humanitarian conditions for citizens and migrants alike, given the death toll involved in increased illegal migration to Europe. “There are some clauses in the compact that are very radical, like Clause 17, which tries to regulate speech on immigration,” he said. “There are some additional clauses that we see as very problematic.” These include ones on family reunification, decriminalizing illegal immigration and minimizing detention. “All these are tools that are necessary to control irregular immigration,” said Jakubowicz. Case in point: Israel stemmed the tide of irregular African migration in 2012 using such methods, which has been a hot-button issue in Israel since the government crackeddown on illegal migration mostly from Sudan and Eritrea. Jewish views on the pact, he said, will invariably be divided along political lines. Some Jews fear that anti-Muslim sentiment will embolden the growing far-right, which may hold reflexive anti-Semitic attitudes. Jakubowicz argues that the pact would actually fuel farright actors. “If you have an irresponsible, uncontrolled immigration policy, putting aside anti-Semitism emanating from Muslim migrants, the direct affect of that is a rise of the far-right,” he said. “And the only way to stop the far-right is to have a balanced, responsible, fact-based, center-conservative discourse on migration, which is non-existent in Europe.”

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January 18, 2019 • 12 Shevat 5779 THE JEWISH STAR

Jonathan S. tobin

t may be that supporters of President Donald Trump and those who back the Israeli government led by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are now so closely aligned that the latter have no qualms about dragging the Jewish state into one of the most contentious American political debates in living memory. But as much as Trump is popular in Israel, it’s likely that most of its citizens would be just as happy if their border security policies were left out of the epic struggle over whether America should build what Trump has called “a big, beautiful wall” on its southern border. The pro-Israel community already faces challenges from supporters of the BDS movement, as well as advocates of intersectional theory that claims that the war against the Jewish state’s existence is morally equivalent to the struggle for civil rights in the United States. With a Democratic Party increasingly divided about the Middle East, the last thing Israel’s supporters need is for its practices to be used as a justification for Trump’s demands — demands that created the current standoff with congressional Democrats. he dispute over whether or not to extend the barriers in place along large sections of America’s southern border is rife with hypocrisy and hyperbole on both sides. Opponents who have supported funding for a barrier in the past — as long as it was not Trump asking for it — now deride his insistence as foolish or even immoral. Trump’s claims of a “crisis” at the border are more a matter of political expediency than a true “national emergency,” which, should he declare one, would be just as extra-constitu-

tional as President Barack Obama’s granting amnesty to illegal immigrants. Reasonable people can disagree about how best to secure the border, but as with everything else in contemporary American politics, Trump’s involvement turns the argument into an existential crisis. Trump’s rhetoric and the ensuing responses from those who despise him have turned what ought to be a technical question into an political struggle involving positions that are falsely identified as the moral equivalent of good and evil. Nevertheless, some of the rhetoric about barriers being ineffective is wrong, and Israel’s use of them provides some insight as to how they can be made to work. The plain fact is that the influx of tens of thousands of Africans who entered Israel illegally was ended by the erection of a fence along its border with Egypt. The security barrier that runs through parts of the West Bank and Jerusalem separating Palestinian Arab areas, and Israeli towns and neighborhoods, was similarly effective in stopping the wave of suicide bombers that poured into Israeli cities during the war of terrorist attrition known as the Second Intifada, which took more than 1,000 Jewish lives and the lives of many more Arabs. While the Palestinians and their supporters call the barrier an “apartheid wall,” its erection was an act of self-defense that saved human life. Various barriers also play a part in separating Israel from terrorist forces in Gaza and Lebanon, as well as the chaos in war-torn Syria. srael’s fences or walls aren’t foolproof. Hamas dug tunnels under them in order to facilitate cross-border kidnapping and murder raids. In recent months, the Israel Defense Forces discovered that Hezbollah has been digging its own network of tunnels into the Jewish state with similarly murderous intentions. Both Hamas and Hezbollah have also shown that they can fire rockets and missiles over any fence in order to spread terror inside the Jewish state.

The scale of Israel’s fencing projects is not as vast as any project to extend existing fencing between the United States and Mexico. Moreover, while some who cross into America illegally are involved in criminal activity, not since the U.S. Cavalry chased Pancho Villa back into Mexico more than a century ago has the issue there been primarily about defending the border from armed enemies, as it is for Israel. Just as important, Israel’s borders are not so much defended by fences or walls as they are by smart technology in areas where the integrity of the barrier is put at risk by the designs of its enemies. Instead of just focusing on construction, there’s a lot that America can learn from the way Israel uses high-tech expertise to monitor its barriers. But as long as support for any sort of border barrier or wall is identified with Trump’s attitudes about illegal immigration and opposition to it with those of his opponents, you can forget about a rational discussion about the merits of fences, whether in North America or the Middle East. The real danger for supporters of Israel is not so much that the Jewish state is being dragooned into justifying Trump’s plans as it is that the reaction to the president’s desire for a wall will wind up justifying those who attack Israel’s need for barriers. Whether or not you think the flow of illegal immigrants into the United States is a crisis, there should be no patience for claims that Israel built its security fences for ideological purposes or to harm those on the other side. While any country has a right, and a duty, to control its borders and determine who may enter, Israel’s barriers are not about politics. If you find yourself claiming that all walls are immoral in order to make a rhetorical point about Trump, you might do well to remember that Israel’s fences are a matter of life and death, and not a referendum on your least favorite politician. Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS.

By Jackson Richman, JNS The Democratic National Committee has dropped its partnership with the Women’s March over anti-Semitism concerns, amid accusations of anti-Semitism in the movement’s leadership. DNC Deputy Communications Director Sabrina Singh told JNS that although it will not participate, “the DNC stands in solidarity with all those fighting for women’s rights.” In recent weeks, some local marches have been cancelled, and a number of progressive groups have withdrawn their support, including the National Council of Jewish Women, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations, the Human Rights Campaign, Greenpeace and Coalition Against Gun Violence. Jewish organizations such as the Jewish Democratic Committee of America applauded the groups that have scrapped their affiliation. “JDCA supports the objectives of the Women’s March and stands with sister marches across the country this weekend,” executive director Halie Soifer told JNS. “At the same time, we welcome the DNC, SPLC, Emily’s List and other organizations’ decision to not sponsor and participate in the Women’s March and take a principled stand against anti-Semitism.” Women’s March co-leader Tamika Mallory denied accusations of anti-Semitism. On ABC’s “The View,” in response to host Meghan McCain’s asking if she condemns Louis Farrakhan’s statements, Mallory said: “It’s not my language. It’s not the way that I speak; it’s not how I organize. And I think it is very clear over the 20 years of my own personal activism, my own personal track record, who I am, and I should never be judged through the lens of a man.”

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THE JEWISH STAR January 18, 2019 • 12 Shevat 5779

Israel should stay off Trump’s wall Dems dump the march

January 18, 2019 • 12 Shevat 5779 THE JEWISH STAR

A sign outside the Jewish cemetery and a monument inside. Over 20 years ago, the country announced that it would move the cemetery out of the capital Yangon, where it’s hidden on a hill.. It’s still there. Charles Dunst

Yangon’s Musmeah Yeshua Synagogue dates to the 19th century.

Charles Dunst

Mayanmar Jews… Continued from page 1 fraught politics — notably the crimes perpetrated by its military against the Rohingya Muslims — are putting his gains at risk. “[Everyone] thinks that we’re small community [and that there’s] nothing going on,” Samuels said at the Dec. 7 Chanukah celebration. “But we have this kind of event, the government people come — the embassy, friends and family, too.” The Jewish community here grew rapidly from the mid-1800s through 1942. At its peak, when it was known as Burma, 3,000 Jews called Myanmar home. Jewish restaurants, pharmacies and schools once marked the city’s streets. Stars of David still adorn some buildings. “My great-grandfather came to Rangoon around the mid-19th century,” Samuels told JTA. A Jewish community soon began to flourish, with many, like the Samuels family, coming from Baghdad, Iraq, in search of prosperity. Today, the 19th century Musmeah Yeshua Synagogue in Yangon sits solitary in this land of golden pagodas, unguarded in the city’s main Muslim neighborhood. “People [here] would not understand what is ‘anti-Semitism,’” said Samuels. The owners of the shops surrounding the synagogue — mostly men wearing traditional Burmese and Muslim clothing — are not hawking Judaica but superglue and paint, among other utility products. “Five buildings away, we have a mosque. And then right in front of us is the Buddhist temple,” Samuels said.

State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, the head of Myanmar’s government. Ore Huiying/Getty Images

Samuels credits this respect across ethnic and religious groups as directly tied to Israel. Burma was Israel’s “first friend” in Asia, as both countries secured independence from the British in 1948. Burma’s first prime minister, U Nu, had a “soft spot for Israel” and was close with his Israeli counterpart David Ben-Gurion. U Nu was the first prime minister of any country to visit the Jewish state. “The Burmese population, if you tell them ‘Judaism’ they don’t know, but if you tell ‘Israel,’ they feel like Israel is a religion,” Samuels said. “They fully respect Israel.” But Yangon’s religious diversity, which has long bestowed Jews with safety, is not reflective of Myanmar at large. The majority of the country remains off limits for tourists due to raging ethnic conflicts; Jews historically lived mostly in Yangon and Mandalay. In 2016, the Myanmar military ramped up its long-running persecution of the Rohingya, whom most Burmese regard as outsiders and terrorists. The military’s barbarism includes torching villages, throwing babies into fires, decapitating young boys and mass rape. Some 1.1 million Rohingya have fled; thousands are believed to have been killed in what a United Nations investigator called ongoing genocide. People in Yangon are disconnected from if not outwardly antagonistic toward the Rohingya. Burmese social media is awash with anti-Rohingya posts. Samuels, perhaps due to his Western education and Jewish understanding of ethnic scapegoating, speaks more empathetically. He even uses the word “Rohingya,” although the Israeli government, in line with Myanmar’s government’s preference, refuses to do the same. Israel allowed its arms firms to sell weapons to Myanmar’s military through the fall of 2017. In an interview, Israeli ambassador to Myanmar Ronen Gilor declined to comment. “It’s an unfortunate event,” Samuels said cautiously, likely because of Myanmar’s limited freedom of speech. “We really sympathize with them.” Samuels opts not to comment on Israel’s arming of Myanmar’s military. He does say, however, that the military’s campaign has caused a decline in tourism. “A lot of people start to boycott traveling to Myanmar, but when we

Sammy Samuels, second from right, sings at a Hanukkah event with Burmese leaders. Israel’s ambassador to Myanmar, Ronen Gilor, is third from left; between them is Phyo Min Thein, the chief minister of the Yangon region. Charles Dunst

say tourism, it’s not just about us, a tour company, or the hotel or airline. It involves the tour guide, taxi driver, hotel bellman,” he said. “They should not be punished for what happened. When you come here as a tourist, you see things different.” Even when Myanmar was a pariah, Moses Samuels had long helped Jewish tourists interested in visiting, answering their queries regarding accommodations, flights and restaurants. Father and son eventually turned it into a business: Myanmar Shalom Travel and Tours. “Thank G-d, since 2011, the country start[ed] changing unbelievably” and business began “booming,” the younger Samuels said. This increased business corresponded with a series of reforms pursued by Myanmar’s military junta. The junta even released from house arrest Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Prize-winning human rights advocate who spent nearly 15 years in some form of imprisonment and now runs the country’s civilian government. (She has since drawn criticism for her unwillingness to stand up for the Rohingya, although she has no control over the military.) A photo of Samuels and his family with Suu Kyi is on display outside the synagogue. Samuels says that since 2011, social media has played a key role in strengthening his community. “We have a WhatsApp group, ‘Yangon Jews,’” he said. While others in Myanmar have used WhatsApp to encourage violence, Samuels has used the platform for good. Beyond social media, he praises the Israeli Embassy for contributing to Yangon’s Jewish community. “The Israeli Embassy and us — I would even say it’s a family,” he said. Gilor echoes those thoughts. “It’s a very good thing to have collaboration with Sammy and the Jew-

ish community,” the ambassador told JTA, calling the community “a bridge” between Myanmar, Israel and the Jewish world. Gilor was among the Chanukah celebration’s guests, as was Phyo Min Thein, the chief minister of Yangon. Other leaders, including those from local Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, Baha’i, and Hindu communities, were on hand, too. Two Myanmar Shalom tour groups — one of Israelis and one of Jews with familial histories in Myanmar — accounted for the overwhelming majority of the night’s Jewry. Solomon, the Australian guest who appeared to be in his 60s, told JTA that his mother was born in Burma. During the Japanese invasion she fled to Kolkata, India. No one from their immediate family had ever returned to Burma. “My father forbade us from coming back because of the military junta,” Solomon said. Solomon’s mother is 90, so his father finally conceded — partially due to the Samuels-organized tour. “This my last chance to come and take back videos and pictures while she can still appreciate them,” Solomon said. “This is my only chance. … She came alive once I arrived in Burma and rang back.” Her caretakers “wheeled her around to Dad’s iPad, and we spoke and she was so happy.” Samuels once pursued opportunities beyond Myanmar’s borders, attending Yeshiva University and working for the American Jewish Congress in New York City. A Jewish visitor to Yangon had helped him get into Y.U. and obtain a full scholarship. Samuels would have been unable to obtain such an education in Myanmar, as universities were closed intermittently for years as part of a military effort to bulwark repeated student revolutions. “I could’ve moved to U.S. and lived

a better life,” Samuels said, explaining why he returned home following his father’s 2015 death. “But our main mission here is very simple: We don’t want any Jewish visitor coming to this country to be a stranger.” By that measure, the Chanukah event was a coup for Samuels. “Things change,” he said, recalling years when he celebrated with fewer than 20 people. “A few years ago, no Burmese people knew of Hanukkah. Now the Buddhists wish me on Facebook ‘happy Hanukkah Sammy!’” And while the synagogue is ranked third on TripAdvisor among Yangon’s “things to do,” there is no minyan without tourists. Another sign of decay is Yangon’s Jewish cemetery: It is neither computerized nor indexed. In 1997, the government announced its intentions to move the cemetery out of Yangon but never followed through. It remains hidden on a hill that some stray dogs have clearly claimed as their territory; a sign outside proclaims it to be only accessible “with permission from Myanmar Jewish Community.” Samuels gives me such permission by jotting down a phrase in Burmese on a business card, which I hand to the elderly woman who guards the cemetery and appears to live on its grounds. Modernity pokes through the cemetery’s historical veneer: A TV satellite protrudes from the caretaker’s home, and her assistant, who smiles and casually watches as I wander the grounds, plays pop music from his smartphone while smoking a cigarette. Instead of stones placed by visitors, debris comprised largely of shattered gravestones sits atop the few intact graves. As Samuels creates a modern community in Myanmar, the memory of its Burmese predecessor continues to crumble.

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partheid? Segregation? Not even close. .“Segregated Highway Opens in West Bank,” The Washington Post headline blared this week. “Israel Opens ‘Apartheid Road’ in Occupied West Bank,” announced Al Jazeera. Like so much of what pretends to be news reporting about Israel these days, this latest “Israeli racism” allegation is just another cheap attempt to smear the Jewish state. The newest prop in the Palestinian Arab propaganda war is a highway called Route 4370, northeast of Jerusalem. There is a physical barrier down the middle of the highway. Israeli traffic goes on one side, Palestinian Arab traffic on the other. Is that apartheid? Apartheid means separating people on the basis of their race. Jews, of course, are not a race; and neither are Arabs. On both sides of the divider, there will be drivers of various hues. Dark-skinned Ethiopian Jews alongside light-skinned Russian Jews. Darkskinned Arabs alongside light-skinned Arabs. How about religion? Is the traffic divided according to religion? On the Israeli side, Israeli Jews, Muslims and Christians are all permitted to drive. On the Arab side, Palestinian Muslims and Palestinian Christians drive. How about ethnicity? Is it divided according to ethnicity? Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs both drive on one side. Palestinians of Egyptian origin, Palestinians of Syrian origin and Palestinians of Lebanese origin are all driving on their side. So, it’s not “apartheid.” And it’s not racial, religious or ethnic “segregation.” Simply. it’s a division based on citizenship. Israeli citizens — of all races, religions and

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ethnicities — are permitted to drive on one side. Non-citizens — of all races, religions and ethnicities — must drive on the other. And for good reason. Because on Israeli roads in Judea-Samaria where non-citizens have been permitted access, there have been numerous drive-by shootings by Palestinian non-citizens. There have also been stonings in which Palestinian non-citizens threw rocks from cars, their deadliness greatly increased by the speed of the automobiles. That’s how American citizens Asher Palmer and his infant son, Yonatan, were murdered in 2011. The presumption in Israel is that those who are citizens of Israel — whether Jew, Muslim or Christian — generally can be trusted to be loyal to the state and not likely to engage in terrorism. Obviously, there are exceptions. But by and large, that presumption is accurate. By contrast, Palestinian Arab non-citizens are engaged in anti-Jewish violence at an alarmingly high rate. There is no reason to give them the benefit of

Yonatan Sindel/Flash90

the doubt and assume that they will be kind or even simply non-violent; they are, after all, citizens of a regime that regards itself as Israel’s enemy. More than that, the Palestinian Authority has, for 25 years, fed its citizens a daily diet of antiJewish hatred and glorification of anti-Jewish violence in their schools, television, radio and newspapers. It is a society drenched in anti-Semitism. It is the one society most likely to produce hostile and violent people. Why in the world would Israel expose its citizens to such dangers on its roads? Every country in the world has different rules for citizens and non-citizens. That’s not apartheid. It’s not segregation. It’s rule of law. What would be the point of citizenship if non-citizens were governed by the same regulations? The fact that Israel spends millions of shekels building roads for Palestinian Arabs is a remarkable act of generosity. The international community should be heaping praise on Israel, not harassing the Jewish state with lies about “apartheid.”

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THE JEWISH STAR January 18, 2019 • 12 Shevat 5779

The ‘apartheid’ wall that isn’t

January 18, 2019 • 12 Shevat 5779 THE JEWISH STAR

The JEWISH STAR

Wine & Dine

Delighting in Asian food Kosher Kitchen

Joni SChoCKeTT

Jewish Star columnist

merican Jews have always loved Chinese cuisine. Once Jewish immigrants to New York discovered it, they adopted it wholeheartedly. The history of how that happened is interesting. When the great influx of Jews came to New York, many established fine restaurants did not welcome the new immigrants. Some openly turned Jews away, and others were too expensive. For those who gave up kashrut, Chinese food was the answer. Chinese restaurants welcomed the newcomers, were open on Sundays and Christian holidays, and the food was plentiful, served family style and relatively inexpensive. By the middle of the 20th century, Jews made up about 60 percent of the white patrons of all Chinese restaurants in New York City and its environs. In addition, those who kept kosher now had their choices of kosher Chinese restaurants throughout the city and beyond — into Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago and more. Kosher cookbooks included Asian recipes, and some were even totally devoted to Asian cuisine. The love affair with Asian cuisine only intensified with this new ability to make these dishes at home. Kosher cooks bought woks, and production of these strangely-shaped vessels ramped up dramatically. Today, that love continues. Many Asian food companies have products that are certified kosher, and kosher markets have Asian sections that grow larger each year. There are even kosher for Passover products that can help cooks create Asian dishes with the leftover chicken from Passover soup! Yes, you can order your food from a local kosher Chinese restaurant, but it’s also fun to make some in your own home and have the kids help with the meal prep. Sesame Scallion Pancakes (Pareve or Meat) 2-1/2 cups unbleached flour 1/2 tsp. salt 1/2 tsp. onion powder 1 Tbsp. toasted sesame oil 1 cup boiling water 2 Tbsp. corn oil or warmed schmaltz, if you like 2 cups finely minced scallions Canola oil for frying Stir the flour, salt, and onion powder in a bowl. Add the sesame oil and boiling water and stir with a wooden spoon until blended and coarse dough forms. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and knead for 5 to 6 minutes or until smooth. Add up to 1/4 cup more flour as needed. Cover with a cloth and let rest for an hour. Lightly flour the work surface and cut the dough into 8 pieces. Roll each piece into a thin circle, about 8 to 10 inches. Brush with melted schmaltz or corn oil and sprinkle with about 1/4 cup of scallions. Roll up the circle away from you into a thin cylinder and coil the cylinder. Place on a rimmed baking sheet and continue with the rest of the dough. Let the coils rest for 15 minutes. Dust the work surface with flour and roll each coil into a 5 to 6 to inch pancake. Stack them with a piece of parchment between each pancake. Heat a skillet and add one Tbsp. of canola oil. Fry each pancake, adding more oil as needed, about 3 to 4 minutes per side until deeply golden, flipping often as needed to keep the scallions from burning. Serve with Soy Ginger Dipping Sauce. Makes 5 scallion pancakes.

Soy Ginger Dipping Sauce (Pareve) 1/2 cup tamari or soy sauce 1/3 cup Chinese black vinegar or rice wine vinegar 1/2 cup scallions, green parts only, thinly sliced 1 to 2 tsp. finely grated ginger, to taste 1 to 2 cloves garlic, finely minced, to taste 1/2 tsp. red pepper flakes, or to taste 2 to 3 tsp. sugar or honey, to taste Combine all ingredients and stir until sugar dissolves. Adjust seasonings, but wait a bit before adding more pepper flakes, as their flavor intensifies with time. Makes 1 cup. Traditional Fried Rice (Parve) 4 Tbsp. canola oil, divided 2 eggs, beaten 1 small onion, finely minced 2 Tbsp. minced garlic, more to taste 2 to 3 Tbsp. grated or minced ginger 1 cup finely diced celery 1 cup mung bean sprouts 1 bunch scallions, thinly sliced 3 to 4 Tbsp. tamari or soy sauce 1/2 to 1 tsp. sesame oil

4 to 6 cups cold cooked white, brown or fragrant (jasmine or basmati) rice OPTIONAL: 1/2 to 1 cup baby peas 1/2 cup medium shredded carrots Heat a wok or large deep skillet. Add 2 Tbsp. of the oil and then add the beaten eggs. They will puff up. Let them set about 5 to 10 seconds, and then, with a wooden spoon or spatula, push the uncooked egg toward the middle. Continue until all the egg is cooked. When done, slide the egg onto a plate and cut into tiny pieces. Add the rest of the oil to the pan and add the onions. Stir until translucent and then add the garlic, ginger and celery. Add the sprouts and any optional veggies you like and stir-fry for 2 to 3 minutes or until the veggies are hot and crisp-tender. Add scallions, and the rice and stir until hot, 2 to 3 minutes. Add the soy sauce, sesame oil, and minced egg and heat

through. Add more sesame oil or soy sauce if needed. Serves at least 8. Spicy Chinese Long Beans (Pareve) 1 lb. green beans or long beans, trimmed, cut into 2- inch pieces if desired 2 Tbsp. Canola oil 1/2 tsp. toasted sesame oil 2 to 3 Tbsp. dark brown sugar 1/2 to 1 tsp. hot red pepper flakes 1 to 2 cloves garlic, minced 3 tsp. sesame seeds for garnish Place the beans in a bowl and add the oils. Toss to coat. Heat a wok and add the beans, stirring, 2 to 4 minutes, until they become bright green. Add sugar, pepper flakes, and garlic and toss to coat. Stir another 1 to 2 minutes, add the sesame seeds and stir. Serves 4 to 6.

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January 18, 2019 • 12 Shevat 5779 THE JEWISH STAR

The JEWISH STAR

Wine & Dine

Brussels sprouts deserve better Kosher Kitchen

Joni SCHoCKett

Jewish Star columnist

n 2008, Heinz took a survey of thousands of Americans and discovered that Brussels sprouts were the most hated vegetable in America, even more hated than broccoli. Who can blame them? Brussels sprouts can be bitter, and the texture is often unappealing —especially to kids. So why is this cabbage relative suddenly turning up on restaurant menus everywhere? I’ll get there in a minute. First, some history. The Brussels sprout was probably first cultivated somewhere around the early 13th century in, of course, Belgium, for which it is named. It is hypothesized to have originated in or near Iran. The vegetable is part of the Brassica family and is closely related to broccoli, cabbage and kale. The sprouts are actually buds that will flower if left alone. For centuries, Brussels sprouts were more medicine than food. They were thought to be good for digestion and illnesses as they contain a lot of vitamin C, fiber and anti-cancer phytochemicals. In European folk medicine, boiled sprouts were wrapped in cabbage leaves as a poultice for all kinds of ills and injuries. When the sprouts came to America, they were reviled by immigraants. They stank up the kitchen and the entire tenement as women boiled them to a mushy consistency that ensured no one would enjoy them. This singular method of cooking persisted into the 20th century — I clearly remember my mother doing

exactly that in the 60s. Ugh! Fast-forward, and a change in cooking methods suddenly changed this lowly globe from reviled to beloved. People discovered that there were other ways to cook the little cabbages. You could roast them, fry them and bake them. You could peel off the leaves and oven-fry them into crunchy, healthy chips. You could make a Caesar salad, or drizzle them with maple syrup or sweet vinegars and add pastrami, cranberries, nuts and more. These exciting new recipes enticed restaurants to add Brussels sprouts to their vegetable offerings. They first showed up on restaurant menus in the second decade of the 2000s, often roasted with bacon. The American public loved them, and kosher restaurants needed a way to compete. Fake bacon was unimpressive, so other meats were chosen: kosher sausages, corned beef and pastrami. An entire industry revolved around kosher recipes that used sprouts! Now they are commonly seen in kosher restaurants and are offered in many different forms by kosher caterers everywhere. Brussels sprouts are now my favorite vegetable. They are healthful and versatile, and even my 2-year-old grandson loves them! Try these recipes out. You might find one you really like that will help you forget that stinky mush of your childhood. Roasted Brussels Sprouts with Maple Glazed Pastrami and Shallots (meat) 2 lbs. Brussels sprouts, washed, trimmed and cut in slices 2 to 3 Tbsp. Extra-Virgin Olive Oil 1/2 tsp. salt 1/2 tsp. black pepper 3 to 5 shallots, peeled, thinly sliced 1/3 to 1/2 pound pastrami, cut into 1/2inch pieces 1/4 cup pure maple syrup, dark amber 1 Tbsp. dark brown sugar, slightly rounded and firmly packed Optional: A tiny pinch of red pepper flakes or cayenne pepper. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Line a large rimmed baking sheet with foil. Set aside. Place sprouts in a large bowl and toss with olive oil, shallots, salt and pepper. Place in a sin-

gle layer on the baking sheet. Roast in the oven until charred spots appear, about 20 minutes. Remove from the oven. While the sprouts are roasting, cut the pastrami and place in the bowl the sprouts were in. Mix the brown sugar into the maple syrup in a small bowl until well combined. Pour over the pastrami and toss to coat. Set aside. Remove the sprouts from the oven and spread the pastrami mixture evenly over them, mixing into the sprouts as you go. Scrape out all the syrup, drizzling over the sprouts. Place back into the oven and roast for 10 to 15 minutes, scraping once or twice to loosen from the pan. When the pastrami is sizzling and the sprouts are charred in lots of places, remove from the oven. Let cool a bit and scrape into a serving bowl. Serves 6 to 8. Roasted Brussels Sprouts with Butternut, Balsamic and Cranberries (Pareve) 1 to 2 lbs. Brussels sprouts, sliced in 1/4 inch slices 1 to 2 lbs. butternut squash, cut into 1/2inch cubes Salt and pepper to taste 1/2 to 3/4 cup dried cranberries 1/2 cup pine nuts, or chopped walnuts or pecans 2 to 3 Tbsp. extra virgin olive oil 1/8 to 1/4 cup excellent quality, thick balsamic vinegar 1 tsp. to 1 Tbsp. honey (optional) You can substitute pure maple syrup for the balsamic vinegar if you like. For a kick, add a tiny pinch of cayenne. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Line a large rimmed baking sheet with foil. Set aside. Slice the Brussels sprouts (or buy them presliced) and place in a large bowl. Cut the butternut squash and place in the bowl. Add olive oil and toss to coat evenly. Pour onto the prepared pans and spread evenly. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Place in the oven and roast until charred in places and the squash is fork tender, 20 to 30 minutes. Remove from the oven and sprinkle evenly with the cranberries, pine nuts or other nuts. Place back in the oven for 5 to 7 minutes. Remove from the oven and scrape into a serving bowl. Meanwhile, mix the balsamic vinegar with the honey for a sweeter taste, if desired. Drizzle with the Balsamic vinegar, toss and serve. Serves 6 to 12, depending on amounts used.

Ginger and turmeric chicken soup By Emanuelle Lee, The Nosher Along with the start of a new year comes long, tiring days and withdrawal symptoms from holiday excess. We can all use a little refresh when it’s time to step back into reality, and this soup is all I ever want to eat on a winter’s day or night. The ginger and turmeric add a spicy kick to it, keeping up energy levels and helping the immune system ward off anything that might be going around. The lemon takes classic chicken soup to another level with a burst of freshness. And perhaps the best part of this soup is that it’s made with a remaining chicken carcass, so you can take bones from a chicken you have cooked and upcycle them into an entirely new dish. You can also roast a whole chicken and remove meat to add back into the soup later, or make into chicken salad. Please note that roasting time will be longer for raw chicken. Make a big batch for yourself, family and friends to keep you all going through the week. Ingredients: 1 chicken carcass

3 chicken giblets 3 large white onions, quartered 2 cloves garlic 2 large carrots, chopped 2 stalks celery, chopped 1/4-inch piece fresh ginger 1/2-inch piece fresh turmeric (can substitute with 1/4 tsp. dried turmeric)

Juice of 1 lemon (keep the lemon after squeezing) 3 bay leaves 1 spring onion, finely chopped (for serving) noodles of your choice chili flakes (optional) Directions: 1. Preheat the oven to 400 F. Place the carcass and giblets on a roasting dish and roast for 20 minutes, or until they start to brown. 2. Transfer them to a large pot with any of the residual liquid. Add the remaining ingredients, along with the squeezed lemon. Cover all of the ingredients with cold water and bring to a boil. 3. Once boiling, cover and reduce the heat to low and leave to cook for 5 to 6 hours. Season with a pinch of salt, if needed. Drain the soup through a colander, catching the broth in another pot. 4. To serve, add another squeeze of lemon juice, some of the carrots (if you prefer your carrots more firm, you can cook some freshly chopped ones in the soup 10 minutes before serving), a handful of noodles, and a sprinkle of spring onion and chili flakes. Serves 4 to 6.

Roasted Brussels Sprouts on the Stalk (Pareve) 1 stalk Brussels sprouts 1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil 1 clove garlic, finely minced Salt and black pepper, to taste Optional: Smoked paprika, regular paprika, and any other spice you like Line a large, rimmed baking sheet with foil. Set aside. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Mix the minced garlic with the olive oil in a small bowl and set aside. Wash and dry the stalk of Brussels sprouts. Place on the baking sheet. Brush the sprouts evenly with the oil, sprinkle with the salt, paprika and pepper and place in the oven. Roast for 20 to 30 minutes, until the sprouts are charred in many places. Remove from the oven, carefully turn the stalk (I use a folded dish towel and an oven mitt) and return to the oven. Roast another 15 to 30 minutes, until the second side is charred in places. Remove from the oven and cut the sprouts from the stalk, or let the family cut as they like. They will easily cut right off the stalk. Serve with a simple dipping sauce, such as ranch dressing or Caesar. Homemade Caesar Dressing (Dairy)

1 to 2 small garlic cloves, finely minced 2 to 3 Tbsp. freshly squeezed lemon juice, to taste 1 tsp. Dijon-style mustard, to taste 1 tsp. Worcestershire sauce, to taste 1 cup good quality mayonnaise, regular or low-fat Optional: 1 tsp. anchovy paste 1/2 cup freshly grated Parmigiano cheese Freshly ground black pepper Note: You can substitute Greek yogurt for some of the mayo for a tangier dressing. Place the garlic, anchovy paste and lemon juice in the bowel of food processor and pulse to blend. Scrape down the bowl and add the mustard, and Worcestershire sauce. Pulse to blend. Add the rest of the ingredients and pulse just once or twice to blend. Scrape into a bowl and mix to blend. Add the cheese and mix and season with pepper to taste. Taste and adjust flavors as desired. Makes about 1-1/2 cups.

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January 18, 2019 • 12 Shevat 5779 THE JEWISH STAR

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School News

Send news and hi-res photos to Schools@TheJewishStar.com • Deadline Monday 10 am

SKA raises $4K for soliders

From left: Talia Wein, Devorah Schreier, Tammy Aryeh, Aliza Strauss; Risa Harris and Gavi Goldsmith.

In an effort to recognize the chayalim who are away from home fighting, the Israel Action Committee and G.O. of the Stella K. Abraham High School for Girls joined forces for a wonderful Chanukah campaign. The two committees set out to raise money for Standing Together, a tzedakah founded by Ari Fuld z”l, over Chanukah; the funds would enable Chanukah packages to be sent to lone Israeli soldiers. The campaign kicked off with an inspiring video made by IAC member Tammy Aryeh on Monday. Throughout the Chanukah week, tzedakah was collected through the SKA Chanukah Auction.

All proceeds from tickets purchased went toward the tzedakah campaign. It was very meaningful being able to donate tzedakah to show IDF soldiers we care. Some students went one step further by writing letters to the soldiers, which would be delivered with their gifts. To end the campaign, Tehillim stickers with the tefillah for chayalim, and a picture of a lone soldier who was an SKA graduate, were distributed to the entire school to place in their siddurim. Over $4,000 was raised. Yasher Koach to SKA’s Israel Action Committee and GO!

From HAFTR, final mitzvah is performed

Shulamith volunteers at JCC

Shulamith eighth-graders graders headed to The Shop in Maple Plaza to volunteer for the Marion & Aaron Gural JCC. The Shop give people in need the chance to shop for food and clothing with dignity. The food pantry is set up like a standard grocery store, and an array of clothing is available to patrons. The girls were thrilled to donate their time to help sort winter coats and other clothing so that those in need will be able to benefit from this very special resource in the Five Towns community. Pictured: Gitty Sharf, Ora Zeitlin, Noy Edery, Rebecca Schoenfeld, Tamar Pilevsky, and Anat Ebbin.

Several HAFTR high school students were privileged to perform an incredible mitzvah when it was brought to the school’s attention that Leah bat Shlomo Margalit a”h, a Holocaust survivor and member of our community, had passed away. Only one relative was able to attend her funeral. HAFTR students jumped into action. Liel Amenu, Daniel Bengelsdorf, Isaac Greenstein, Corey Listman, Matthew Macanian, Ethan Rabinowitz, Adir Rauchwerger, Harrison Schwartz, accompanied by HAFTR parents Mrs. Liz Shwartz and Mrs. Sima Greenstein, attended the funeral and joined the minyan to recite Kaddish in her memory. This true chesed shel emet was an amazing kiddush Hashem and tribute to a survivor. HAFTR could not be more proud of our students and their incredible middot.

Chumashim for HAFTR 2nd graders HAFTR welcomed family and friends to the second grade Chagigat Chumash. Almost 100 students sang about their love of Torah and pride in becoming the next generation of talmidei chachamim and chachamot. They beamed with pride as they received their first Chumashim, engraved with their name. “It was a really nice introduction for the children to become engaged in learning Chumash,” said HAFTR parent Sara Macanian. “It was clear that the faculty worked hard preparing our kids not only for this wonderful program but for a lifelong connection to Torah learning.” Together, students excitedly recited Shehechiyanu. Later, they and their families played games, per-

sonalized Chumash covers, decorated picture frames, and looked inside a Sefer Torah. “It was wonderful to see our children reach such a big milestone in their lives,” said HAFTR parent Chani Kammerman. “We truly feel proud to watch them take on more advanced learning each year.” Second grade students were also treated to the Tzivos Hashem Sefer Torah Workshop, where they learned about the intricate process of writing a Sefer Torah. They helped sand parchment and mix the special ink, and then each student used a quill to write his or her name in the special print of a Sefer Torah. Thank you to all the families who helped sponsor the event.

Fundraiser for Meorot, studies program in Great Neck In a community as diverse as Great Neck, a community-wide campaign is always heartwarming. Such was the case during a recent fundraiser for a new Great Neck special education school: Meorot at North Shore Hebrew Academy. Meorot, which opened in September 2017 and currently hosts a K-1 and 2-3 class, is an innovative after-school Judaic studies special education program for elementary school students with

learning or language difficulties. Students attend public school during the day and join Meorot two afternoons a week for Judaic and Hebrew studies. Individualization and integration are core to Meorot. Tailor-made curricula for each student build on their strengths and support their areas of weakness. Students immerse themselves in Torah, prayers, and holidays; study Hebrew with an emphasis on reading and comprehension; and

receive the foundation for a strong Jewish identity. In a true act of unity, Meorot is supported by four local yeshivas: North Shore, Har Torah, Silverstein Hebrew Academy and Long Island Hebrew Academy. With the goal of raising awareness and funds, the campaign to sell 200 boxes of Chanukah candles at all four schools began. The project snowballed to include other Great Neck institutions,

and over 600 boxes were ultimately sold. “We are so grateful. This campaign exceed our wildest expectations and we are humbled by the support of the Great Neck community,” said board member Ronnie Shemesh. Using the hashtag #candlesformeorot, people across the community are posting pictures in support of the school. Information and admission criteria can be found at www.meorotgn.org

By Dylan Broder, 11th grade, assistant captain of the DRS JUMP Team

Students at DRS were joined by their fathers for a very special Yom Iyun on January 1st, run by DRS’s very own NCSY JUMP Team and titled, “Sanctifying Jewish Life in the 21st Century.” The morning began with Shacharis, where fathers had the opportunity to daven with their sons. Before Ashrei, JUMP members addressed their respective minyanim about the goal of the day. Following davening, breakfast with cookies and pastries was served. The first of two sessions began. Students and fathers — along with siblings, uncles, and grandparents — chose two thirty-minute shiurim of the options offered. Shiurim were delivered by DRS rebbeim on Kedushat HaZman: Making the Most of Every Moment, Kedushat HaDibur: Sanctifying our Speech, kedushat haguf, kedushat einayim, and other related topics. The morning was rounded off by an inspirational keynote speaker, Rav Moshe Weinberger, the Mora D’Asra of Congregation Aish Kodesh. His address, entitled, “Kedusha: Is it Within our Reach?” left the audience uplifted and inspired. “Today’s event gave us a platform and an opportunity to discuss inyanim which are seldom discussed in the classroom/educational setting,” said

JUMP captain and DRS senior Yaakov Fuchs. “It is our hope and our goal to start a kedusha movement; nobody is ever too young to strive for a real connection with Hashem.” NCSY JUMP (Jewish Unity Mentoring Program) is a nationwide program that inspires high school students to become future leaders of the Jewish people. Each participating school’s team is challenged to create unique and inspiring programs for their community. This year’s JUMP Team, run by captains Yaakov Fuchs and Dovi Flug and assistant captain Dylan Broder, and mentored by Rabbi Ephraim Polakoff, chose to focus on the topic of kedusha, specifically areas of kedushas haguf and kedushas einayim which are not addressed in the educational setting. JUMP is tackling the issue head-on. The DRS JUMP Team plans to roll out a kedusha curriculum soon and has scheduled a Yeshiva League Shabbaton for the first week of March, which will focus on the same topic. The team is also continuing last year’s tefillah publication, Avodah Sheb’leiv. DRS’s initiatives allowed it to win the NCSY JUMP National Championship last year. With programs like the Yom Iyun, the JUMP team hopes to defend its title and, more importantly, inspire Jews in the Five Towns and in communities around the country.

HANCsters in Israel

HANC High School Menahel, Rabbi Shlomo Adelman, along with Girls’ Israel Guidance Director, Mrs. Linda Nathan, and Rebbe, Rabbi Yisrael Weingot, at a reunion with HANC alumni learning in Israel for the year.

3D at Silverstein Silverstein Hebrew Academy students practice with 3D printing, producing their own self-designed rubber band gliders. As part of a STEM-based module, students previously learned how to use Tinkercad, a browser-based 3D modeling tool, to design their gliders. Students had to become wellversed in the physics of flight in order to design the best wings.

CAHAL learns at Darchei Research has shown that learning is most effective when it is engaging and fun. In Yeshiva Darchei Torah, Mrs. Yael Sara Rendler’s 1st-2nd grade CAHAL class has been experiencing learning in just this way! The boys have begun a reading log and are growing their reading tree, with a new leaf added for each book completed. In math class, they are using manipulatives to explore three-digit numbers. In science lab, where the students are mainstreamed with their buddy class, they are exploring different kinds of clouds and have constructed their own cloud viewfinders. They are hoping for lots of cumulus cloud days! Rabbi Binyomin Jacobs and assistant teachers Mrs. Batsheva Flaum and Miss Chaya Sara Fishfeld help inspire a love of learning in the boys every day.

HALB melava malka HALB hosted a beautiful winterthemed Melava Malka last month. The fifth grade choir did an outstanding job performing, the eighth grade carnival was a hit and the dancing was phenomenal.

THE JEWISH STAR January 18, 2019 • 12 Shevat 5779

JUMP Team at DRS runs a father-son yom iyun

Chavruta-infused Talmud craze sweeps S. Korea By Tim Alper, JTA SEOUL, South Korea — In 2014, Kim Hye-kyung found herself staring into an educational abyss. The mother of two lives in study-mad South Korea, where parents fork over $17 billion on private tutoring every year. Children start early — 83 percent of 5-year-olds receive private education — and the pace intensifies until, at age 18, students take the dreaded eight-hour suneung university entrance exam. Flunk the suneung and your job prospects nosedive. Pass with flying colors and you may land a coveted spot at a top-ranked university. “I hated the idea of sending my children to private academies, where teachers cram information into young heads with no thought for nurturing creativity,” Kim Hye-kyung said. “When my kids were younger, I read them books or took them out instead of sending them to academies. But as they grew older, I started worrying that their school results would suffer as a result of my decisions.” By chance, she came across a book by a Korean author about a novel study method: chavruta, a method used by Talmud scholars in which pairs of students debate and ask one another questions based on ancient rabbinic texts. “When I read about chavruta, I immediately felt an emotional connection,” Kim Hye-kyung said. “It was the educational path I’d been dreaming of. I thought my heart was about to burst with joy.” Most South Koreans have never met a Jew. Aside from a small Chabad house in this capital city and a few informal groups of mostly secular expats, South Korea’s Jewish community is virtually nonexistent. South Koreans know next to nothing about how Jews live, what they do and don’t eat, or what they believe. However, there is one fact about Jews that every South Korean can recount. “Jews account for just 0.2 percent of the world’s population, but 23 percent of Nobel Prize winners have been Jewish,” Seoul-based student Choi Jae-young related. “And despite all the time and money we spend on education, only one Korean has ever won a Nobel award. That irks many Koreans. It makes us want to learn Jews’ secrets.” Some South Koreans think the key to unlocking such “secrets” is in the Jewish approach to education.

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Pictured left: A South Korean woman and her child read Talmudthemed books at a Seoul bookstore. At right, a Korean-language translation of the Haggadah. Tim Alper

“Koreans don’t have to emulate Jewish belief systems,” educational researcher Seol Dong-ju said, “but we do need to copy the way Jews teach their children.” The result is dozens of private chavruta-themed academies, with busy branches in major cities throughout the country, catering to everyone from toddlers to adults. Some make use of Korean-language Talmudic texts, while others follow entirely secular curricula. Kim Jung-wan, who directs one such academy — the Havruta Culture Association — explains that South Korea’s Jewish education quest is over 40 years old. It began in the mid-1970s, when Korean translations of Talmud-inspired stories by Rabbi Marvin Tokayer, an American military chaplain stationed in Japan, first arrived in Seoul bookstores. Tokayer’s stories were a runaway success. The Talmud effectively went viral in South Korea: In the decades since, hundreds of Korean versions of the Talmud have appeared,

mostly derived from English-language translations and commentaries. These range from picture storybooks for children to thicker, more ponderous volumes for adults. But South Korean Talmud fever also sparked a highbrow fascination with Jewish knowledge — one that has spawned remarkable publications, including a Korean translation of the Haggadah, the book Jews read at the Passover Seder. And, as Kim Jung-wan explains, interest in the Talmud eventually led Korean academics to explore how Jews study religious texts. They began to learn about yeshivas, and South Korean consultants paid visits to some of Israel’s busiest Talmud study centers. What they discovered sent their hearts aflutter: vast halls resonating with the clamor of heated student discussion, teachers’ voices nowhere to be heard. Pairs of Talmud students — chavruta comes from a Hebrew root meaning See Talmud craze on page 16

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in early 2017 that essentially rebuked the Obama administration for allowing through a U.S. Security Council resolution condemning Israel’s settlement policies. She supported the Iran nuclear deal, although she was not a senator in 2015 when Congress voted on it, and is on the record opposing the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement targeting Israel. Harris also digs Israel’s Supreme Court building. “The beauty of the architecture and spirit of design left a lasting impression — the straight lines in the building represent the immutable nature of truth, while the curved glass and walls were built to represent the fluid nature of finding justice,” she told the J. The Jewish News of Northern California in 2016. “The Court, like Israel, is a beautiful home to democracy and justice in a region where radicalism and authoritarianism all too often shape government.” She’s big on tackling hate crimes Harris created a hate crimes unit as San Francisco District Attorney and made hate crimes a focus of her work as the state’s attorney general. (Harris reported that in 2012 anti-Jewish hate crimes were the most commonplace religionbased hate crime.) One of her first successful Senate actions was to get passed a non-binding Senate resolution that named religious institutions as possible targets of hate crimes, and urged better hate crime reporting, a key demand of Jewish civil rights groups over the years. Her big sisters are Jewish Well, in political terms, anyway. In October 2016, she got key endorsements from the state’s two Jewish senators — Barbara Boxer, who was retiring and whom Harris would replace, and Dianne Feinstein, the state’s senior senator. This was important because in California’s “jungle primary” system the two top vote-getters in the primaries get on the November ballot even if they are of the same party. Harris was facing a popular Democrat, Rep. Loretta Sanchez, in the general election.

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Kamala Harris, the junior senator from California, is reportedly set to announce her bid for the Democratic presidential nod.

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THE JEWISH STAR January 18, 2019 • 12 Shevat 5779

By Ron Kampeas, JTA WASHINGTON — Kamala Harris, the junior senator from California, is reportedly set to announce her bid for the Democratic presidential nod. Harris, 54, is a progressive on most issues who draws some ire from the left for her toughon-crime posture when she was California’s attorney general. She pleased Democratic hearts, meanwhile, with her tough treatment of President Donald Trump’s second Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, during his Senate confirmation last year. The daughter of a mother who immigrated from India and a father who immigrated from Jamaica, Harris has some Jewish nuggets in her history. She smashed a glass at her wedding She met her Jewish husband, Douglas Emhoff, on a blind date in San Francisco, arranged by friends. They married in 2014 — Harris’ sister Maya officiated — and smashed a glass to honor Emhoff’s upbringing. It was her first marriage and his second — Emhoff has two children from his first marriage. You thought Jews can be parochial? “Most eligible Indian American bachelorette marries fellow lawyer” is how one Indian American media outlet reported the story. Emhoff took the Washington, D.C. bar exam in 2017 so he could work in the same city. Emhoff’s Twitter feed is pretty much “I love my wife” all the time (take that, Kellyanne and George Conway). She did the blue box thing “So having grown up in the Bay Area, I fondly remember those Jewish national fund boxes that we would use to collect donations to plant trees for Israel,” she said at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in 2017. “Years later when I visited Israel for the first time, I saw the fruits of that effort and the Israeli ingenuity that has truly made a desert bloom.” No mention why Harris was a blue box girl growing up, and Google was no help. JTA has put a query into her office. She’s more AIPAC than J Street Since her election in 2016, Harris has spoken twice at the annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Her 2018 speech, with the California delegation, was off the record (itself not unusual, although critics of Israel were unnerved), but she gave a good picture of where she stands in her 2017 speech. She’s for two states — so is AIPAC, although, sometimes less than emphatically — but she doesn’t believe in big-footing either side. “I believe that a resolution to this conflict cannot be imposed,” she said. “It must be agreed upon by the parties themselves.” More than half of the Democratic caucus in the Senate gets the endorsement of J Street, the Jewish liberal lobbying group that believes pressure is necessary to start peace talks. J Street did not endorse Harris. Her only association with the group was in November 2017, when she was one of 17 local and federal politicians on the host committee (i.e., “yes, you can stick my name on the invitation”) of a party thrown by J Street’s Los Angeles chapter. She also met a year ago in her office with the group’s director, Jeremy Ben-Ami. Harris also co-sponsored a Senate resolution

Continued from page 14 “friend” or “companion” — locked horns in lively debate over texts, parsing logic and debating a series of written questions posed by teachers. For many South Korean thinkers, this was the “secret” they had been after: a learning methodology that added dynamism to book-based learning and removed the teacher as the focal point. Kim Jung-wan’s own long chavruta journey began in 2001, when an academic acquaintance suggested he use the Talmud as a teaching tool for his son, then just a year old. “I kept exploring the subject. I was fascinated,” he said. Kim Jung-wan went on to study Hebrew at the Israel Culture Center, an affiliate of the Embassy of Israel in Seoul. “Eventually I began attempting to translate parts of the original Talmudic text into Korean using the Schottenstein English-language translation as a reference,” he said. “This month, I am heading to a yeshiva in Israel, where I’ll study for

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a month. It wasn’t easy for a non-Jew like me to gain admission, but I managed somehow.” Most Orthodox yeshivas tactfully dissuade nonJews from pursuing Talmud study. South Korean academics, however, appear undaunted. Skeptics urge caution, noting that South Korean education fads tend to come and go, especially in the ultra-competitive world of private academic institutions. While advocates now sing chavruta’s praises on TV talk shows, the phenomenon may prove to be a flash in the pan. But the evidence suggests otherwise. The methodology is gaining mainstream acceptance fast, moving from private academies into conventional public classrooms. In December, one of the largest teachers’ trade unions in the country, the Korean Federation of Teachers’ Associations, struck a memorandum of understanding with the Havruta Culture Association. The resulting partnership will see scores of regular schoolteachers learn how to initiate chavruta-style learning sessions. “Many newfangled educational trends have come and gone here,” Lee Hyo-sang of the teachers’ federations said. “Most fall out of fashion after about five years after failing to deliver on their proponents’ promises. But chavruta is different. It has a history that goes back centuries. “KFTA experts visited numerous chavruta academies and found that, rather than being overly quiet like most typical Korean classrooms, they all thronged with noisy discussion and debate. It’s a breakthrough in Korean classroom culture. It could find applications in schools, households and even businesses.” Even preschoolers are getting in on the action. Yoojung Kindergarten, a preschool in northern Seoul, recently added chavruta modules to its curriculum. Children listen to stories from the Talmud and then embark on chavruta-style peer discussions. “We wanted to find a fun, lively classroom activity that would promote creativity, but also help with moral education,” principal Jung Geum-sook said. “Chavruta seems to tick all of these boxes.” Parents also believe they can play a part. As she began to read more about the way Jewish scholars practice chavruta in yeshivas, Kim Hye-kyung started thinking of ways to adapt the same methodology at home. She began with family readings of picture storybooks, encouraging her husband and children to ask one another chavruta-style questions at every step of the way. “It opened up a whole world of unexpressed thoughts and feelings,” she said. “We discovered that the questions we asked had no right or wrong answers. The whole process became both enlightening and fun.” Kim Hye-kyung has gone on to apply her home-chavruta methodology to a range of secular subjects including math, languages and science, and has ended up writing two popular manual-style books outlining her methods. “Chavruta discussion-based learning is even effective for children preparing for exams,” she said. “It helps them form an emotional attachment to impersonal-looking study materials that would otherwise bore them to tears.”

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a record 33.9 percent. Jean-Luc Melenchon, an anti-Israel lawmaker from the far-left Unbowed France, won 19.5 percent in the first round. It was the first time in post-World War II French history that half the voters chose far-left or far-right candidates. Many French celebrated Macron’s election as a triumph over extremism. “But did you think the extremists would give up?” Lévy asked. “No, they were plotting their revenge. And the Yellow Vests movement is it. This is why there is such xenophobia, racism and also anti-Semitism in its midst, because it’s a collection of extremists.” French Jews overwhelmingly voted for Macron. They credit him with keeping up security around potential Jewish targets, a policy begun under his Socialist predecessor, Francois Hollande. Macron is the first French president to de-

clare anti-Zionism a form of anti-Semitism, provoking protests by the far right and the far left. “The government provides security and encouragement for the Jewish community, but the government and police can only do so much,” said Frank Semama, Lolita’s husband. “They can’t be everywhere. Sadly, our problem is with parts of French society, not its government.” There is ample evidence of the presence of far-right agitators in the Yellow Vests movement, including neo-Nazi activist Hervé Ryssen. Remarkably, they protest shoulder to shoulder with far-left supporters in a movement that has no coherent political strategy. Yellow Vests rallies feature calls to reduce taxes, bring down the government and even stage a revolution. Despite the prevalence of extremism, the movement still has the backing of some centrists,

including Marianne Esquit, a middle-aged supporter of the small Solidarity and Progress party. “I abhor the violence and racism, but globalization has ravaged the countryside,” Esquit said. “I understand this rejection of the heartless corporate agenda of Macron. It comes from a place of great pain.” Back at the HyperCacher commemoration, Frank Semama points at his kippah and speaks of his pain living as a Jew “in a country and city that has whole areas where I can’t go.” The bloodbath at the market was a “trauma” that scarred his family, he said: Lolita had left the store 10 minutes before the killings started. But French society, he said, seems indifferent. “Look at this crowd,” he said. “There are 300 Jews here, and that’s it. Sadly, we’re so isolated that we have come to think of this as normal.”

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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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in secmom Leah urst. ere (with of Woodm Girls in Cedarh on Feinberg photos School for Elishevah the Shulamith said. More now t at n-year-old there,” she The Jewish Star / Ed Weintrob trip” and out. Thirtee had been a studen came from year-long home. sh’s magic “on a 30 as olim, to come ond photo) love for Eretz Yisroel Jonay Nefesh B’Nefe s left Israel of my rs who flew the promised land.to fulfill “Part Her parent h her family’s journe 16. Long Islande ,” she said. El Al’s charter was for a aliyah to enough throug flight page the smiling in” and making he’s waited long it’s time, d to do this ne will follow NBN’s to Israel some of g the first “all said , friends, “Hopefully, everyo ent of boarding she’s wante the move Here are on July 3, going s Hills (left)July 1 and was boardin land, said ed through family excitem for others Shed ride page 16 , Garden the on carpet While olim on emerg the promis ua of Kew from teaching of the olim, and her school See. 201 carpet to Her love of Israel than Yehosh le for many holy land, — he retired time. d palpab visits to the the dream

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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

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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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By Cnaan Liphshiz, JTA PARIS — Four years ago, a heartbroken Bernard-Henri Lévy found solace in more than a million Frenchmen marching through the city to protest extremism. The march took place on Jan. 11, 2015, amid national mourning after Islamists gunned down 12 people at the Charlie Hebdo magazine and, two days later, four people at a kosher store. The march was “something we have never seen before in France, and perhaps anywhere,” Lévy, a Jewish philosopher and author, said at the time. “It’s a kind of miracle, this national unity, this feeling of fraternity, this willingness by Parisians to go down to the street.” He hoped it would be a watershed moment for French society, he told JTA four years on. Change “alas did not come” and the march’s “spirit and promise have been betrayed,” he said. What started in the fall as protests against fuel prices has been mired in violence against police and anti-Semitic hate speech. “Instead of a million people in the street, today we have thousands of homophobes, xenophobes who are anti-republican, anti-journalist and sometimes anti-Semitic. For these demonstrators, it’s as if the bloodbaths never happened,” said Lévy. Anti-Semitic incidents during protests by Yellow Vests, named for their reflective safety vests, have included signs and slogans describing French President Emmanuel Macron as a “whore of the Jews.” There have been many cases of protesters performing the quasi-Nazi quenelle salute, created by comic Dieudonné M’bala M’bala. Dieudonné, a Holocaust denier who has been convicted of hate speech, now delivers his weekly hate sermons online while wearing a yellow vest. These cases, as well as anti-Semitic graffiti and chants, are on the “margins” of the Yellow Vests movement, according to the National Bureau for Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism. But nonetheless they have been a feature of the movement since its inception, the bureau’s founder, Sammy Ghozlan, told JTA. “According to all the indicators at our disposal, the prevalence of anti-Semitism in French society has only gotten worse since 2015,” said Roger Cukierman, a former president of the CRIF umbrella group of French Jewish communities. Violence against police, meanwhile, has become a hallmark of Yellow Vests protests. Hundreds of police officers have been wounded in confrontations, nearly 50 on Dec. 1 alone. That Saturday, multiple cars were set ablaze in the Champs Élysées area. On Dec. 11, several officers were wounded in confrontations that turned streets into war zones. Some protesters flung paint on police, causing eye injuries. In response, police used water cannons. Attacks on police are particularly troubling to French Jews, who for the past 15 years have depended on security forces for the protection of their schools, neighborhoods and synagogues. But the emergence of anti-Semitism as a characteristic of the protests is more terrifying, Lolita Semama, who lives opposite the HyperCacher market, told JTA at the fourth annual commemoration of the killings there. About 300 people attended the ceremony, most of them Jewish. Candles were lit for the victims. The official ceremony ended with the singing of “La Marseillaise,” the French national anthem. Then, in a defiant move, rank-and-file participants began singing “Hatikvah.” “We’re used to anti-Semitism showing itself in discussion and protests about Israel,” Semama said. “But this Yellow Vests business shouldn’t have anything to do with Jews. It shows that anti-Semitism is just below the surface, ready to spill out at any disturbance, to blame the Jews.” More broadly, Lévy said, the protests have exposed the polarization in French society. In the 2017 presidential elections, Macron, an independent centrist, defeated establishment candidates from the Republican and Socialist parties. A selfprofessed globalist running on a platform of economic reform, Macron’s popularity galvanized opponents on the far right and the far left. Marine Le Pen of the anti-immigrant National Front party progressed to the second round, winning

THE JEWISH STAR January 18, 2019 • 12 Shevat 5779

‘Vest’ anti-semitism demoralizes France’s Jews

‫כוכב של שבת‬

SHAbbAT STAR

January 18, 2019 • 12 Shevat 5779 THE JEWISH STAR

Forging a path of their own — together From heart of Jerusalem

Rabbi biNNY FReeDMaN

Jewish Star columnist

ay 1948. Tough times for the Jewish people, particularly for Jews struggling to claw out a place for themselves in a land they hoped to claim as their own. A few months after the United Nations voted to partition the British Mandate for Palestine and allow the creation of a modern Jewish state, six Arab armies were poised to attack. They were waiting for the British to leave, so as not to attack British sovereign territory. The Arabs already in country, however, had no such dilemma, which was why the Jordanian legion was on the offensive. Even as the Jews celebrated the partition plan, the Jordanians were on the march. The Jordanian Legion, commanded by Abdullah Tell, was without a doubt the best fighting force in the Middle East. Thirty-two hundred strong, three full brigades, Britishtrained and French-armed, they had no equal at the time. Despite its strategic insignificance, they had set their sights on the heart of the Jewish people: the Old City of Jerusalem. For six bitter months, Jordanian legionnaires laid siege to the Jewish Quarter. There were 1400 civilians trapped inside the walls. The Jewish command had to do something. And so it was. In the middle of the night, May 3 and 4, 1948, 22 fighters of the Palmach

found themselves slowly climbing up the hill below the Old City walls under the noses of the Jordanian soldiers. Taking cover behind the ruins of a Crusader fortress, the irony was not lost on them: These same crusaders who had massacred the Jewish communities of Europe a thousand years earlier had built a wall to protect Jewish fighters in their quest to redeem the ancient city for the modern State of Israel. As they neared the final stretch of path that would bring them to their objective of the Zion Gate, they were literally right under the guards’ positions on the walls. They had to advance the last hundred yards one at a time so as to minimize the noise and avoid detection. And as they all waited, each fighter advanced a hundred yards, one at a time, all alone. It must have been terrifying. It was nearly 3 am, and they had to maintain total silence. If even one Jordanian soldier happened to look down, they would have had nowhere to run or hide. There is a comfort to being part of a unit, moving with men with whom you have become one and having each other’s backs. But all alone? his week we read the portion of Beshalach, most famous for the dramatic splitting of the sea and destruction of the Egyptian Army. And amidst the powerful spectacle we often miss the details. The Torah tells us (Exodus 14:22) that “the water was a wall for them on their right and on

their left.” And the Talmud (Yoma 4b) explains that the water did not simply recede, leaving dry land. Rather, it literally split, leaving a path for them to pass through. One wonders why it happened in this way, and moreover, why the Torah takes the time to share this detail with us. Rav Baruch Halevy Epstein, in his Torah Temimah, suggests that this way, the miracle was even greater. No one would say it was simply a coincidence, that the sea had dried up. But that does not seem to answer the question. Besides, the fact that the sea suddenly dried up just when the Jewish people needed it most and then came crashing down again just as the Egyptians were closing in was not a big enough miracle? Perhaps there is a deeper idea here. Interestingly, the Talmud compares the Jews’ entering a path into the sea with walls on both sides to Moshe’s entering the cloud at Mt. Sinai, suggesting that the identical language implies that Moshe forged a path through the cloud. He wasn’t just walking through it; he was walking on a path. To receive the Torah, to discover meaning, to be imbued with a sense of purpose, is to be on a journey. Indeed, the redemption only began when Moshe, alone in the desert in Shemot 3, saw a burning bush and turned off the path to see it, recognizing the need to change direction. Perhaps a path signifies a direction, and a journey. In fact, one opinion in the Midrash

They would have had nowhere to run or hide.

Can wealth buy Judaism? Parsha of the Week

Rabbi avi biLLet Jewish Star columnist

n a whim, I checked out the website of a renowned Judaica store to see what’s available these days. That the only Judaica I really buy these days are books, and I felt a little out of touch when I clicked on the “garments” section. Of course, size will change the price a little. But after going through the “Talis Wizard,” I found that a basic tallis with no trimmings would set me back $160. Once you start throwing in hand-tied strings (especially techeiles), and a simple atarah, you are in the realm of $300 to $400. Throw in a silver or crystal atarah, and the price is anywhere from an additional $250 to $1000. And the decisions! Do I want a weekday tallis? A Shabbos tallis? Cashmere? Texture? Summer wool? Winter wool? Non-slip? Traditionally slippery? Then I moved onto kittels. While the cheap ones were $60, an elegant and ornate kittel cost as much as $250. Challah boards: the low end cost $20. The highest? $460! More decisions — wood, glass, tempered glass, artistic, metal, silver? With a salt dip, with a place for the knife, with a builtin challah cover? Candlesticks? $13 to $690! do not begrudge the store for giving people options. I do not begrudge those who can afford the higher-end items, who would like

to beautify their Shabbos table. Similarly, for some, a beautiful tallis and kittel will enhance their davening and connection with G-d. More power to you! However, let us not fool ourselves into thinking that the only reason we spend this kind of money on “things” is to glorify G-d. In Beshalach, the second verse of Az Yashir (15:2) includes the phrase “Zeh Keli v’anvehu” — this is my G-d, and I will glorify Him. Rabbi Yishmael, the son of Rabbi Yochanan ben Berokah, asked “Is it possible for a person to glorify G-d? Rather, glorify Him through the performance of mitzvos.” Have a beautiful lulav, a beautiful sukkah, beautiful tzitzis, beautiful tefillin (Pesikta). The Talmud (Shabbat 133b) adds a few more items: a beautiful shofar, a beautiful Torah scroll. Shabbat 25b makes the following comment: “Who is wealthy? Anyone who takes pleasure in his wealth. These are the words of Rabbi Meir. Rabbi Tarfon says, ‘Anyone who has a hundred vineyards, a hundred fields, and hundred servants.’ Rabbi Akiva says, ‘Anyone who has a wife beautiful in deeds.’ Rabbi Yose says, ‘Anyone who has a bathroom close to his table.’” The teaching of Rabbi Yishmael at the splitting of the sea is that the people essentially pointed to G-d and said, “Zeh Keli!” This is my G-d! “V’anvehu,” and I will glorify Him! Today, it seems that many people forget that “Keli” (my G-d) is actually not the correct pronunciation of G-d’s name, which we do not want to say in vain. The word “keli” usually means “vessel.” As a result, it sounds like we

They are the means for better serving G-d.

are saying “Zeh keli v’anvehu” – this is my vessel and I will glorify it! When men come hours late to davening on Shabbos, then pull out their tallis with its 7-inch silver atarah, throw it over their heads in a fitting display of ostentation, then sit engrossed in catching up, the focus is on the keli, the vessel, and not on G-d. he people at the sea were so enamored by their G-d that all they could do was point and say “I want to glorify HIM.” It’s not about me; it’s about how I can use the gifts He has given me to enhance my relationship with Him! Rabbi Meir and Rabbi Tarfon remind us that those who are blessed with financial wealth are only truly “wealthy” when they can use the money to glorify G-d, whether through charitable or philanthropic work. Rabbi Akiva reminds us that true wealth can be found at home, if we only let the best of others bring out the best in ourselves. Rabbi Yose reminds us that wealth can be described as making good choices for one’s health and hygiene. Rabbi Yishmael’s view focuses on physical items. But he never recommends that the items become the goal. They are the means for better serving G-d, and not for showing off. Buy the fancy tallis, the fancy kittel! But be the most humble and inspiring mispallel in the synagogue. Have the fancy candlesticks, the silver challah board, esrog box, sukkah, and so on. But make sure that their observance is elevated. That the Shabbos table is holy. That the mitzvah experience becomes a source of inspiration to others. When one uses wealth to properly glorify G-d, without glorifying the wealth itself or the vessels it buys, one truly reaches the heights of

suggests each Tribe had its own path, so that there were thirteen paths through the sea in total. Another Midrash suggests that each Jew had his or her own path! Redemption, it seems, comes when a person is ready to take his or her own journey; when a person sees the path they are meant to take. Just before the sea splits, Moshe holds out his staff over the sea, pointing forward. Think about it: The Torah tells us there were six hundred thousand men, terrified by the sight of six hundred chariots. A thousand men were afraid of a chariot? They were stuck. When the sea split, they finally realized that they needed to take their own steps to leave Egypt behind. ver three thousand years later, a small band of Jewish fighters, carrying the Jewish people on their shoulders, each alone with his or her thoughts, stepped out on a path all alone, determined to bring us home. Many of those fighters did not survive that battle; indeed, the Jewish quarter fell to the Jordanian legion some four weeks later, on May 28, 1948. But walk through the Shaar Tzion today and you will see a monument to the memory of those fighters and the courage with which they carried themselves on that day. “With no armor nor artillery, with their own bodies, they sacrificed themselves on the walls of the ancient city of Jerusalem. Let he who walks through this gate remember them.” Each of us has our own Egypt that constricts us. The question is whether we are ready to forge the path that will leave it behind. Shabbat shalom from Jerusalem.

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

Fri Jan 25 / 19 Shevat Yitro Candlelighting: 4:46 pm Havdalah: 5:56 pm

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

Fri Feb 8 / 3 Adar 1 Terumah Candlelighting: 5:03 pm Havdalah: 6:13 pm

Fri Feb 15 / 10 Adar 1 Tetzaveh Candlelighting: 5:11 pm Havdalah: 6:21 pm

Fri Feb 22 / 17 Adar 1 Ki Tisa Candlelighting: 5:20 pm Havdalah: 6:30 pm

Five Towns times from White Shul

RAbbi dR. Tzvi heRSh weinReb Orthodox Union

ewish history is a series of encounters with evil rulers. Pharaoh, whom we have been reading about up until this week’s Torah portion of Beshalach, was just the first tyrant who persecuted us. He was followed by Nevuchadnezzar, Haman, Antiochus, Titus, Hitler, Stalin, and others too numerous to mention. Each of those men, without exception, did not act alone. Rather, they represented a culture, an ideology, which opposed the Jewish people and its religion. They enlisted the help of huge constituencies who believed their teachings and who followed their example. Without the support of the masses, they could not have wrought destruction. An excellent illustration of this is the book Hitler’s Willing Executioners by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. The author demonstrates that only because Hitler had the cooperation of so many followers, all of whom believed as he did in the need to exterminate our people, was he able to be so tragically successful. Pharaoh at the beginning of our history, and Hitler in our more recent past, were able to create belief systems that pervaded their societies and enabled them to execute their heinous schemes.

The enemy is never a single king or dictator. Rather, it is an entire culture that opposes everything we stand for. One lesson of our history is that just as the individual leaders were vanquished, so too did their ideologies fall into oblivion. This is the meaning of the statement of our Sages: “The Holy One, blessed be He, does not bring about the downfall of the enemy until He first defeats its gods.” The gods of a nation, and in some versions its ministering angels, represent what we would call today a nation’s culture, its weltanschauung. Where is this idea expressed in this week’s Torah portion, Beshalach? Long ago, I heard a lecture from the late Rabbi Aharon Soloveitchik. He based it on a phrase from the beginning of the Song of the Sea (Exodus 15:1): “I will sing unto the Lord, for He is highly exalted; the horse and his rider hath He thrown into the sea.” What is the significance of the horse being thrown into the sea? Why do the Israelites, led by Moshe, open their song of praise to G-d by singing of the horse’s downfall? Rabbi Soloveitchik answered that the horse was the symbol of the culture of Egypt. When the Israelites sang of the downfall of horse and rider, they were expressing their appreciation of the fact that not only were Pharaoh and his slave masters being removed from the scene, but so

too was the culture of Egypt coming to an end. Throughout the Bible, we find the culture of Egypt identified with the horse. The horse is a symbol of militarism, of “might makes right.” It is also a symbol of arrogance and pride. When G-d brought down Pharaoh, He also in effect removed from the world a belief system that justified crushing and enslaving other human beings. The removal, not only of the dictator but of his doctrine, and not only of the tyrant but of his theology, is part of the pattern of history from a Jewish perspective. On Purim, we do not just celebrate Haman’s hanging, but the triumph over a culture that arbitrarily planned a genocide. On Chanukah, we honor a victory over Hellenism, not just a victory over an alien occupier of our land.. n more modern times, the triumph over Nazism was not just the defeat of brutal and sadistic men and women. It was a triumph over a racist and bigoted worldview, and for a while, many believed that triumph was permanent. An excellent example of the horse and the rider both being thrown into the sea is the fate of Communism. True, the communist foe was personified in Joseph Stalin and his henchmen,

Pharaoh was just the first.

Kosher Bookworm by Alan Jay Gerber will, B”H, return next week.

Looking up to the heavens Torah

RAbbi dAvid eTengoff

Jewish Star columnist

he concluding section of our parasha, Beshalach, contains the account of our ancestors’ mortal combat with Amalek, the marauding desert tribe that sought to destroy us after our departure from Egypt. The narrative begins with a pasuk that reverberates until our own historical moment: “Amalek came and fought with Israel in Rephidim” (Shemot 17:8). Moshe immediately recognized the gravity of the situation, and quickly responded to this existential threat against our fledgling nation. He told Yehoshua to go out and fight, while he stood at the top of the hill watching (17:9-10). His reaction was swift and immediately understandable. The next verse, however, is difficult to comprehend: “It came to pass that when Moshe would raise his hand, Israel would prevail, and when he would lay down his hand, Amalek would prevail.” Why would Moshe raising or lowering his

hand have anything to do with our people’s success or failure in their battle against Amalek? Unsurprisingly, parallel versions of this question have been asked by our Sages of blessed memory, in both the Mechilta d’Rabbi Yishmael and Mishnah Rosh Hashanah III:8. The answer given by the Mechilta is particularly pertinent: “And is it possible that Moshe’s hands could make the Jewish people victorious, or could they destroy Amalek? Rather, whenever Moshe would raise them toward Heaven, the Jewish people would look upon him, and believe in the One who designated Moshe to act in this manner. At those times, the Holy One blessed be He would perform miracles and mighty deeds for them” (Mechilta d’Rabbi Yishmael, Mesechta d’Amalek I, s.v. v’hayah ka’asher). In my estimation, the Mechilta is teaching us that Moshe’s hands pointing heavenward were teaching devices to instruct our ancestors in belief in Hashem and impress upon them that “not by military force and not by physi-

cal strength, but by My spirit, says the L-rd of Hosts” (Zechariah 4:6). After all, there appeared to be no way an untrained and inexperienced band of Jewish guerrilla fighters could win a battle against Amalek’s impeccably skilled soldiers, whose trade was murder and mayhem. Yet, when they looked toward the heavens and focused upon the immanent presence of the Almighty in their lives, they won! Moshe wanted the Jewish people to realize that there is one place, and one place only, from which authentic salvation will come. As David Hamelech proclaimed: “I shall raise my eyes to the mountains, from where will my help come? My help is from the L-rd, the Maker of heaven and earth” (Tehillim 121). lthough, thank G-d, the actual tribe of Amalek no longer exists, its successors continue to infect humanity with their vitriolic hatred. This idea was given powerful voice by my rebbe and mentor, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik zt”l, in his synopsis of the dark forces that con-

Could Moshe’s hands make the Jewish people victorious?

Praying together, praying apart Angel for Shabbat

RAbbi mARc d. Angel

he late Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach founded a synagogue in Berkeley during the 1960s in order to reach out to the many young Jews who had drifted away from Jewish tradition. He named it the House of Love and Prayer. In the summer of 1967, he was asked to explain his vision for this synagogue. He answered: “Here’s the whole thing, simple as it is. The House of Love and Prayer is a place where, when you walk in, someone

loves you, and when you walk out, someone misses you” (Quoted in Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach: Life, Mission and Legacy, by Natan Ophir, Urim Publications, 2014, p.119). In these few words, Rabbi Carlebach expressed a profound insight worthy of immortality! He offered a vision not just for the House of Love and Prayer … but for all places of Jewish worship. When we come together to pray, we are vastly strengthened spiritually if we feel harmony and love among our fellow worshipers. The value of each individual is measured by whether he or she is missed after leaving the synagogue. Do people really care about each other? Do they relate warmly to each other? Do they share a spiritual quest? Some synagogues strive to achieve the goals

and his several successors. But what eventually came about was the sudden total abandonment of the communist approach to economics, to the organization of society, and to the religious and spiritual aspects of humankind. It is instructive to read the writings of men who were once avowed communists but later abandoned that philosophy when they realized its corruption. There is a book edited by Arthur Koestler, who had Jewish roots, entitled The God That Failed. He and the other famous thinkers who contributed essays all saw Communism as a kind of god. Long before their god met his final defeat, they foresaw that defeat was not far away. When our Sages say that the Holy One, blessed be He, first brings about the downfall of the gods of our enemies, they are already using a term for a failed ideology that Arthur Koestler and others used centuries later. Our Sages spoke of the downfall of the enemy and of its gods, and in this week’s Torah portion, the Bible speaks of the downfall of the rider and of the horse. Different metaphors, but the same idea. Today, we confront not only “evil kings” and “evil kingdoms,” but evil ideologies. Systems of belief masquerading as sacred religion, calling for murder and mayhem, torture and genocide. We pray to witness both horse and rider cast into the depths of the sea.

articulated by Rabbi Carlebach. They devote great effort to maintaining a harmonious community, to appreciating the uniqueness of each member, to creating a spiritual environment where people can feel a sense of the Divine Presence. Other synagogues are characterized by political infighting, individuals seeking to assert their importance, by prayer that is not genuinely serious. Some synagogues have an impersonal feeling, so that no one cares if you come or go, and few bother to welcome a visitor. In some synagogues, the harmony of love and prayer is diminished by excessive chatter, by people reading books other than the prayer book, by irreverent drollery. In this week’s parasha, we read the Song sung by Moshe and the children of Israel after

tinue to drive the Amalek way of life: “At a Mizrachi convention I cited the view expressed by my father, Rav Moshe Soloveitchik zt”l, and master of blessed memory, that the proclamation, ‘The L-rd will have war with Amalek from generation to generation’ (Exodus 17:16) does not only translate into the communal exercise of waging obligatory war against a specific race but includes as well the obligation to rise up as a community against any people or group that, filled with maniacal hatred, directs its enmity against [the Jewish people]. “When a people emblazons on its banner, ‘Come, and let us cut them off from being a nation: that the name of Israel may be no more in remembrance’ (Psalms 83:5) it becomes, thereby, Amalek. In the 1930’s and 1940’s the Nazis, with Hitler at their head, filled this role. They were the Amalekites, the standard-bearers of insane hatred and enmity during the era just past” (Kol Dodi Dofek, pages 65-66 from the English translation Fate and Destiny). We must never forget that anti-Semitism, and the denial of the existence of Hashem, are the principles — by which and for which — Amalek lives. Moreover, Amalek has one undeniable goal: to destroy each and every one of the Jewish people so that G-d’s name would be obliterated from the world. We must ever be vigilant, and stand shoulder to shoulder to ensure the physical and spiritual safety of our fellow Jews, wherever they may be they miraculously crossed the Red Sea and witnessed the destruction of their Egyptian pursuers. “Then sang Moshe and the children of Israel this song unto the L-rd, and they spoke, saying: I will sing unto the L-rd, for He is highly exalted” (Shemot 15:1). The verse informs us that Moshe and the Israelites — in the plural — sang a song of praise to the Almighty. But when the song actually begins, it shifts to the singular — I will sing. This verse is alluding to a vital truth relating to prayer. When praying as a congregation, we are a community. We are plural. Yet we are also individuals who have different thoughts, feelings, talents and sensitivities. We come together as a “we,” but when we begin praying, we do so as an “I.” The spiritual reality is created when the “we” and the “I” are in harmony, when the entire community senses oneness among themselves and in their relationship with G-d.

THE JEWISH STAR January 18, 2019 • 12 Shevat 5779

Drowning the horse with its rider

January 18, 2019 • 12 Shevat 5779 THE JEWISH STAR

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Low-crime immigrants? Don’t believe liberals Politics to Go

JEff DuNEtz

Jewish Star columnist

fter the president’s border security speech in the Oval Office last week, the freshman Democrat from Queens and the Bronx, Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, accused him of lying. She said that “immigrants commit crimes at a far lower rate than native-born Americans.” It is a standard liberal talking point that illegal aliens commit fewer crimes than both American citizens and legal immigrants. But it’s not necessarily true. The federal government does not record national crime statistics by immigration status; it does not release data that isolates illegal aliens who commit crimes. The closest they come is to break down crime by citizenship or non-citizenship. “Non-citizens” is not a good benchmark, because it includes legal immigrants who are not yet citizens, illegal aliens, and visa holders. In other words, any study claiming that illegal immigrant commit fewer crimes is flawed. (Logically, one can claim that in total illegal aliens commit fewer crimes than citizens, because there are

many more American citizens than there are illegal aliens.) Additionally the federal government reports federal crimes: terrorism, kidnapping, tax fraud for example. Most of the offenses discussed with regard to illegal immigration are state and local crimes such as rape, burglary, murder, and vehicular homicide. ome states, such as Texas, do record immigration status in their crime data, in cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security. The Texas Department of Public Safety informs us that “in Texas, PEP [Priority Enforcement Program] begins at the local level when an individual is arrested and booked by a Texas law enforcement officer for a criminal violation of Texas law. The arrested individual’s fingerprints are submitted to the Texas DPS and subsequently to the FBI for criminal history and warrant checks. This same biometric data is also sent to DHS’ IDENT database so that ICE can determine the person’s immigration status and whether the individual is a priority for removal, consistent with the DHS enforcement priorities.”

BEN COHEN

f I had to pick the most repugnant image of 2018, it would be the video from last September featuring Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro sitting down to a sumptuous meal. As Venezuelans starve because of the policies of his illegitimate regime, Maduro was pictured in one of Istanbul’s top restaurants, a fat cigar dangling from his mouth and his portly frame stuffed into a luxurious chair. Turkish celebrity chef Salt Bae expertly sliced juicy cuts of prime steak onto a plate for the dictator to consume with a gusto that was obscene, given that ordinary Venezuelans struggle to find basic ingredients to make arepas, the maize flour cakes that are a staple of their diet. aduro was not on vacation, of course. His lavish dinner at Bae’s restaurant was part of his third visit to Turkey last year, while in December, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was feted in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital. Much as there was a special place in the

ence with the wall in Judea and Samaria have taught us that barriers work. housands of people in Texas might not have been raped, killed, or become drug addicts if there was a wall or fence on our southern border. Perhaps they should thank the politicians who are fighting it. Politicians like New York’s own Chuck Schumer voted for the Secure Fence Act in 2006 and supported the “Gang of Eight” immigration bill in 2014 that included the same 700 miles of double-layered fencing promised in 2006. Their fight against a border barrier may have more to do with who is president than any real objection to a wall. Nobody claims that a border fence will stop everyone, but it will cut down number of illegal border crossings. Fewer illegal immigrants will lead to fewer crimes committed by them. In Texas, which accounts for about 9% of the country, there have been at least 1,600 homicides and 4,800 sexual assaults committed by illegal aliens. If a wall prevented only half of them, would 800 saved lives and 2,400 prevented rapes be worth it? How many murders are acceptable? How many prevented deaths make a border wall worthwhile to Pelosi and Schumer? In the end, the crisis at the border amounts to saving lives.

reputation for being the most “stable, and therefore boring” in Latin America. In nearly 20 years of rule by Chavismo — an ideological culture of Bolivarian nationalism, socialism and political paramilitaries fostered by Chávez, a former army officer — the oil-rich country became Latin America’s Zimbabwe, a potentially prosperous nation ruined by a gangster president. othing symbolizes that ruin better than Venezuela’s hyperinflation. In the 12 months leading up to November 2018 — a period that included Maduro’s dinner in Istanbul — hyperinflation reached a breathtaking 1.3 million percent. By the end of the year, prices of basic goods doubled every three weeks on average. Come Christmas, the vast majority of Venezuelans were unable to find the one month’s wages necessary for a ham bread, a traditional holiday dish. As a new year begins, the vast majority cannot afford to purchase food, toiletries and clean water in a country that, at the height of Chávez’s rule 10 years ago, boastfully presented itself as an alternative model to corrupt, U.S.-dominated capitalism. In a harbinger of what was to come, under Chávez, Venezuela’s Jewish community of

20,000 shrank to less than 7,000, harassed out of their homeland by the anti-Semitic, “anti-imperialist” rhetoric of a regime that presided over the community’s economic immiseration at the same time. Over the last five years, 3 million Venezuelans — about 10 percent of the population — have fled the country, creating a painful humanitarian crisis in our own hemisphere. The majority of refugees have gone to Colombia, as well as Ecuador, Peru, Chile and Brazil. The fate that awaits them consists of unemployment, dubious legal status, exploitation by criminals and a hostility from the locals that increases as the number of Venezuelans seeking refuge swells. How terrible can it be inside Venezuela when this bleak existence is regarded by so many of its citizens as preferable to remaining at home? In terms of U.S. policy, we have at least reached a point where the Obama administration would never have ventured. U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has abhorred Maduro’s power seizure by stigmatizing his regime as an illegitimate one. On Jan. 8, the United States imposed sanctions on seven individuals and 23 entities involved in a corruption scheme that took generous advantage of Venezuela’s dubious currency-exchange practices. “By rigging the system in their favor,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement, “these individuals and entities stole more than See Venezuela on page 23

Some crimes would not have happened if the borders were secured.

Don’t forget Venezuela Viewpoint

Because individuals identified as being illegally present in the country may have had a Texas criminal history before their immigration status was being known to law enforcement, DPS publishes criminal history data for an illegal alien’s entire criminal history. Texas records a total of 238,000 crimes leading to a conviction committed by people in the U.S. illegally. Illegal aliens in Texas have been convicted of 1,601 homicides, 25,401 assaults, 9,672 burglaries, 34,839 drug-related offenses, 426 kidnappings, and 4,810 sexual assaults. Texas does not record similar data for all criminals who are legal immigrants or American citizens. Therefore, anyone who tells you they can compare crime statistics by immigration status, either in Texas or nationally, is not being honest. Even though criminal comparisons are not available, Texas’s numbers are all crimes that would not have happened, or at the very least would be significantly lower, if the US borders were secured. Border protection and ICE officials, fenced areas in the US, and Israel’s experi-

heart of Hugo Chávez, Maduro’s predecessor, for the former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, so it is with Maduro and Erdoğan. Last July, the bromance heated to the point that Maduro hailed Erdoğan as “the leader of the new multi-polar world.” The occasion was Erdoğan’s swearing-in ceremony for a second term as Turkey’s president, but this time with vastly expanded powers. In Venezuela, Maduro has accumulated similar powers, but with a gangster-like brazenness that makes even Erdoğan look subtle. Reelected as president in 2018 in an election boycotted by the fragmented Venezuelan opposition — a good part of which was barred from participating in the first place — Maduro’s victory was the crowning moment of a power theft that he launched the previous year, when he replaced the country’s elected parliament with a stooge assembly composed of his own supporters. A Venezuelan friend once told me jokingly that he missed the days before Hugo Chávez’s seizure of power in 1999, when his country had a

Maduro’s victory was the crowning moment of a power theft.

andrew SilowCarroll

great American Jewish jurist once argued against the idea of a “hyphenated American.” He said there was no place in America for immigrants and their children to hold on to differences based on “race or creed.” “[T]o keep alive difference of origin or to classify men according to their religious beliefs are inconsistent with American ideas of brotherhood, and are disloyal,” he argued. A few years later, a great American Zionist leader argued that there is nothing more American or patriotic than holding “multiple loyalties” — to God, to country, to your land of origin. “Multiple loyalties are objectionable only if they are inconsistent,” he wrote. “Every Irish American who contributed towards advancing home rule was a better man and a better American for the sacrifice he made. Every American Jew who aids in advancing the Jewish settlement in Palestine, though he feels that neither he nor his descendants will ever live there, will likewise be a better man and a better American for doing so.” Of course, it was the same leader who said both things: Louis Brandeis, the Supreme Court

theoretical notion that loyalty itself is an admirable and fungible quality, like honesty or sobriety. And it assumes, as Brandeis did famously, that American values, Jewish values and Zionist values are fully aligned. effrey Rosen explained in his biography of Brandeis, the jurist envisioned the Jewish state “as a secular, liberal democracy ruled by ethical values of equality and social justice, and not by Jewish law.” Brandeis did not have the last word, of course, and in almost every decade since he defended the hyphen, the loyalty of Jews has been called into question — whether for their support of a Jewish state, for Jews being persecuted under the Nazis or for Jews trapped behind the Iron Curtain. It’s not clear whether or not Rep. Rashida Tlaib knew or forgot this history in her tweet this week suggesting that backers of a series of pro-Israel bills “forgot what country they represent.” Jews quickly called her out, saying the new congresswoman from Michigan seemed to be leveling the despicable “dual loyalty” charge: that Israel’s supporters put its interests ahead of the United States. (Critics of the legislation, which would make it easier for states to legislate against those who back BDS, say it violates the Constitution.) When backers of the bill, like Sen. Marco Rubio, R-FL, complained that the “dual loyalty See Tlaib on page 23

Rep. Rashida Tlaib, right, with Rep. Gwen Moore, leaves a meeting of the House Democratic Caucus in the Capitol, on Jan. 4. Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call

justice and Zionist leader of the first half of the 20th century. Brandeis’ contradictory views on “dual loyalty” represent his own evolution (the first comment was in 1905, the second in 1915). But they also hit on a tension that American Jews

still deal with more than 100 years later. The Brandeisian notion that “multiple loyalties” make you a better American has guided and justified Jewish activism for Israel even before its founding in 1948. It’s based partly on Brandeis’

‘Dr. Death’: An apology is just not enough View from Central Park

tehilla r. goldberg

Intermountain Jewish News

here is a great weight of expectation on our doctors’ shoulders. We have a certain trust in members of the medical profession. As patients, when we sit across from the doctor, we are in a very vulnerable position. There is a sense that our fate rests in their hands. In many ways, they are thought of as G-d’s emissaries, G-d’s healers, here on this earth. Sometimes, if there is a medical error, even an unintended error such as a misjudgment by a competent and kind doctor, it can be consequential to the point of loss of trust in the doctor-patient relationship. Seeking medical treatment is a serious and sensitive matter. I’ve been blessed to know wonderful doctors, doctors who go above and beyond. But everyone has heard about a Dr. X or Y whose bedside

manner leaves a lot to be desired. It happens. Lara Kollab, a medical resident at Cleveland Clinic, was recently exposed for an online comment she had shared in 2012, and that she had never taken down. The comment begs the question as to whether this opinion is reflective of her current point of view. It reads: “Haha ewww … i’ll purposely give all the yahoods [Jews] the wrong meds…” Clearly, it’s appalling — and also surprising, considering that Kollab’s medical degree in osteopathic medicine is from Touro College, a Jewish institution. Once exposed for her onrecord homicidal intent, she issued a letter of apology in which she asked for the forgiveness of the Jewish community. To me, her letter reads as more of an attempt at damage control. Her regret sounds more for being caught than anything else. The letter reads as a catchphrase-filled effort to save her medical career, imperiled future, and student loans.

While the letter reads more like a justification than true contrition, I nonetheless take her apology at face value. I forgive Lara Kollab. Forgive, but do not trust. outh brings with it headstrong opinions and influences of those around us that impact our thinking and personalities. As we evolve, we may not necessarily agree with what we once said or did. And regardless of youth, of course we all make mistakes. To err is human. Usually, I believe in second chances. But the issue here is not Kollab’s egregious and heinous anti-Semitic opinion. The issue here is the well-known obligation of a doctor: “first, do no harm.” It’s not about punishing Kollab for her hateful rhetoric. It’s about not putting her in a position to execute that rhetoric and engage in medical homicide of Jews. I don’t trust Lara Kollab to be in a position to dispense medication or to treat patients. She expressed a desire to exploit her role of access to patients, and to harm them.

Forgive, but do not trust.

To me, that is not a doctor. Without upholding “first, do no harm,” I don’t care what someone’s training is. A doctor they are not. And what of the ethical issue? Should she be reinstated as a doctor, given her expressed intent? If she were reinstated, and then did in fact intentionally harm someone, what, in retrospect, would be the ethical standing of her reinstatement? Medicine is one of the most serious professions. Life and death can be in the hands of a doctor. At the very least, a basic level of maturity — if not gravitas — is required and expected. Of all professions, medicine is the one that symbolizes humanity and the equal treatment of all. Often, a true apology can serve as powerful and even transformative moment, proving to be a necessary change agent in a healing process. But in the case of Lara Kollab, her apology cannot serve to revive her medical career. Her medical license ought to be revoked for life. The stakes are simply too high. Would you place your life in this doctor’s hands? Copyright Intermountain Jewish News

The media’s ongoing anti-Semitism problem Sean dUrnS

dolf Hitler was a genocidal dictator who unleashed the most destructive war in the history of humankind and perpetrated the Holocaust. He was also a lover of animals and art who, initially anyways, brought Germany’s economy out of the doldrums. Life is complicated. A version of this tortured logic made an appearance in a Jan. 4 op-ed by Los Angeles Times columnist Robin Abcarian titled “Can you admire Louis Farrakhan and still advance the cause of women? Maybe so. Life is full of contradictions,” an apologia for the antiSemitic dispositions of several leaders of the Women’s March movement. Abcarian lament-

ed that three of the founders praise of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan despite “his abysmal record of anti-Semitism, homophobia, transphobia and sexism.” But the columnist insisted that the “bigger picture” demands that “everyone involved in the Women’s March can take a bow,” regardless of which leader said “what to whom about Jewish people when, and the merits of a noted anti-Semite.” Abcarian omitted and obfuscated on the antiSemitic tendencies of several of the Women’s March founders, which have been extensively documented by Tablet Magazine, among others — and which go way beyond the conference call praising Farrakhan that Abcarian highlighted. Would a major U.S. news outlet be so casually dismissive of other prejudices? Doubtful. The LA Times column is emblematic of a troubling trend: the media’s unwillingness to treat anti-Semitism seriously.

n Dec. 13, 2018, The New York Times interviewed the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Color Purple, Alice Walker. Walker has previously promoted anti-Semitic material, like the poem “It’s Our (Frightful) Duty to Study the Talmud,” which advised readers to look to the ancient text to find the root and source of evil. She has frequently compared Israelis to Nazis, which meets the widely used working definition of anti-Semitism. In the New York Times interview, Walker recommended a book by Holocaust denier David Icke who, as Tablet’s Yair Rosenberg has noted, peddles anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and, like some Women’s March leaders, argues that Jews were responsible for the slave trade. The Times failed to challenge Walker’s book recommendation, or to provide any information about either her or Icke’s disturbing views. While noting that it was a “missed opportunity,” the deputy Washington, D.C., editor of The New

York Times tweeted: “I don’t blame The New York Times interviewer for not knowing Alice Walker had recommended an anti-Semitic tract. Heck, I didn’t know David Icke, and I wrote a book about rising bigotry.” The lack of self-awareness is unsurprising. As the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) documented, in September 2015 The New York Times published an online chart listing which members of Congress voted on the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, and whether or not they were Jewish — invoking the anti-Semitic dual-loyalty canard. It’s not just Walker and Icke who are receiving free advertising from major U.S. news outlets. The Washington Post has opened up its opinion pages to anti-Semites as well. On Nov. 8 2018, The Post published a piece by Mohammed Ali al-Houthi, the leader of an antiAmerican, Iranian-backed militia. The Houthi See Media on page 23

THE JEWISH STAR January 18, 2019 • 12 Shevat 5779

Rashida Tlaib and the history of ‘dual loyalty’

January 18, 2019 • 12 Shevat 5779 THE JEWISH STAR

Shoah history in Dutch couple’s countryside home By Cnaan Liphshiz, JTA AMSTERDAM — Despite its rustic charms, the dream home that Roxane van Iperen and her partner bought nearly ruined their marriage. Van Iperen, a 42-year-old novelist, underestimated the amount of renovating needed on the countryside estate east of Amsterdam. She bought the place in 2012 with Joris Lenglet as a home for the couple and their three children. “We almost separated by the time it was done,” she recalled in an interview on the NPO1 television channel. But amid “the arguing, misery and work,” the couple discovered that during the Holocaust, their new home had been the center for one of Holland’s most daring rescue operations. Recounted in a best-selling book published last year, the story generated strong media interest. In bookstores, The High Nest stayed for weeks on the top 10 list of locally produced nonfiction. “Many Jews resisted, but of most of them we know very little,” said Jewish filmmaker Willy Lindwer, who produced several documentaries on the Holocaust in his native Netherlands. He said the High Nest story “shows not all Dutch Jews went like lambs to the slaughter.” But to readers, part of the book’s appeal lies in the characters of the people who did the rescuing: sisters Janny and Lien Brilleslijper and their families. Daring anti-fascist activists — Janny fought in the Spanish Civil War — they used connections to hide from the Germans in the house in Naarden, 10 miles east of Amsterdam. At great personal risk, they opened their home to Jews and others in need. Van Iperen found evidence of the sisters’ ingenuity as soon as renovations began: double walls, secret doors and walled-off annexes concealed so well that they went undetected for decades. Dozens of Jews passed through the safe house, which is “perfectly located, near Amsterdam but in the middle of nowhere,” van

Iperen said. The operation’s secrecy kept it out of the history books even though it was a rare case in which Dutch Jews not only escaped the genocide, but helped others avoid capture. Even as they were making these discoveries, van Iperen and her partner did not register their significance. “The discovery story sounds romantic but the truth is, we just weren’t aware of the findings,” she said in the interview. “It was an old house — that’s also what drew us to it — and so you naturally discover things. We talked about it. But then we just closed the hidden space and installed a new floor on it.” The renovations coincided with major developments in attitudes to the Holocaust in the Netherlands, which built its first national Holocaust museum only in 2016. This year, the city and The Hague paid millions of dollars in restitution to victims from whom it had unjustly collected taxes. In November, the national railway company announced it would look into compensating victims its workers helped transport. That triggered similar action last month by Amsterdam’s GVB transportation company. Amid these developments, which were accompanied by a steady stream of news reports and books on the Holocaust, the secrets of van Iperen’s house beckoned. They put her on a sixyear journey of discovery through interviews, studying archive material and cross-referencing information with survivors’ testimonies. The Brilleslijper sisters, intellectuals from a Liberal Jewish family, arrived at the estate in 1943, amid deportations to death camps and growing awareness of annihilation. By then, the Nazis had killed 75 percent of the Netherlands’ prewar Jewish population — the highest death rate in occupied Western Europe. “Everyone who could was in a panic to find

From left: The cover of Roxane van Iperen’s book “The High Nest.” Roxane van Iperen, whose home was once the center for one of Holland’s most daring Holocaust rescue operations. Jan Willem Kaldenbach. Lien Brilleslijper with her daughter Jalda in Berlin in the 1970s. Brilleslijper family.

a hiding place,” van Iperen said. And yet at the Brilleslijpers’ house, there was “music and lust for life during that time, which makes it different to the typical survivalin-hiding story we know in this country,” van Iperen said. She found sheet music that the sisters and their guests composed and performed. There were worldly debates and garden dinners amid the laughter of children. One was Robert Brandes, the 5-year-old son of Janny and her husband, Bob Brandes. Robert Brandes, now 79, gave van Iperen a yellowing photograph taken at her home in 1943. He is seen splashing in a metal tub on a sunny day in the backyard, flanked by his cousin, Lien’s daughter Kathinka Rebling, and another child. But in June 1944, Eddy Musbergen, one of hundreds of Dutch gentiles who betrayed Jews in hiding, reported his suspicions to the authorities. The sisters had planned for this, according to Rebling, Lien’s daughter. During the Gestapo raid, her mother removed a vase from a windowsill overlooking the access path — a sign to tenants that the house had been compromised. Janny was out, but saw the vase as she returned. She attempted to catch up to Robert,

who was skipping ahead of her, but the Germans saw them and they were arrested. The sisters and their families were sent to Westerbork, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. At Bergen-Belsen, Janny met the family of Anne Frank. “She was concealed in a blanket,” Janny, who died in 2003, recalled in a 1988 documentary. “She had no more tears to cry. They had run out a long time before.” Janny went to check on Anne a few days later and saw Anne’s sister, Margot, lying dead on the floor. Anne died shortly thereafter, Janny said. Both Brilleslijper sisters survived the Holocaust, partly because they were persons of interest to the Nazis due to their anti-fascist credentials. This prevented them from being sent directly to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Robert Brandes was spared deportation because he was deemed by the Nazis to be only half Jewish. Rebling, who was 3 and whose parents were both Jewish, was spirited away from a detention facility by a resistance fighter and survived the war in hiding. “That we are still alive,” Rebling said, “can only be explained by an unbroken chain of miracles.”

Religious women solve social problems through tech By Sam Sokol, JTA JERUSALEM — Sitting side by side in an open office in the tech giant Cisco’s headquarters, Roni Ashkenazi and Ayelet Ganot sat staring at lines of code on a monitor checking their work before launching a demo of their latest project — a tablet app they are calling “What Should I Do.” Designed for autistic children, the app helps role-play common scenarios, minimizing the disruption caused by visits to the doctor and other changes to routines that might cause distress. “They aren’t comfortable with changes and even the slightest change in schedule makes them scared,” Ashkenazi explained, noting research that found that “if a parent or caretaker sits with them before going to an unfamiliar activity and explains step by step what are they going to do, they will have more confidence.” The project, she said, will help autistic children “feel psychologically prepared.” Israel is home to numerous technology firms. What makes Ashkenazi and Ganot unique is that both programmers are 18, and their app is being designed pro bono as part of Carmel 6000, a new national service program intended to “harness the power of tech for social purposes.” The program focuses on women, mostly religious, who take part in Israel’s national civilian service rather than the military. Organizers say the program is also an attempt to narrow the gender gap, which sees women underrepresented as coders, engineers and entrepreneurs. Carmel 6000 is modeled after the army’s Unit 8200, an elite signals intelligence unit that serves as something of an incubator for future tech gurus and startup founders. The new program is intended to “take the prestige of top intelligence and high-tech units in the IDF and brings the same status to social tech, particularly in the

Ayelet Ganot, left, and Roni Ashkenazi, participants in the Carmel 6000 national service program, work on an app intended to help autistic children cope with change. Sam Sokol

fields of education, welfare and health care.” Some 30 young people are taking part in Carmel 6000 this year after a successful pilot in 2017. Following an intensive six-week programming boot camp, the participants — all but one are religious women — are assigned projects developing applications for nonprofit “clients” and learning with mentors from various tech firms including Cisco, Intel and MobilEye. For two years, the participants will “use existing technologies to help people” such as the elderly, the disabled and other at-risk groups, according to program head Yossi Tsuria, a mathematician and retired high-tech executive. “I want to turn Israel into a leader of this domain,” Tsuria said. “The same way Israel leads in cyber, I want it to lead in social high-tech.” As part of that, he said, “one of the first mis-

sions is to grow leaders who will have this passion to use high-tech for good.” The students, whom Tsuria described as the top 1 percent of students entering national service, are designing products for prominent institutions such as Yad Vashem. One app, designed for disabled children, featured a digital dreidel that spins as long as you keep a finger on the screen, allowing youngsters lacking the fine motor control to spin a physical top to play the popular Chanukah game. “I saw the power of technology to change how people behave and I wanted to use that for good,” Tsuria said. Sponsored by AMIT, an American Zionist group, Carmel 6000 is recruiting from the periphery. The Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs has put 2 million shekels into the program.

Some industry partners are looking at the program for potential recruitment, AMIT’s Limor Friedman said, though “we are hoping that some of the girls will choose to develop the concept of social high-tech in Israel and not just for profit.” Back in the office, which was donated by Cisco for a period of three years, Ashkenazi told JTA that she felt that she had “donated a lot to society and did something meaningful.” At the next desk, Avital Weisinger stared intently at another screen working on her own project. A 21-year old from Teaneck, New Jersey, she immigrated to Israel after attending a gap-year seminary program. Weisinger studied programming while in high school, and when a friend told her about a new technically oriented national service program, she immediately got in touch with the organizers. Weisinger became one of two women to take part in last year’s pilot. Now, in her second year, she is helping mentor some of the participants. “I’m inspired by these girls who are so incredibly talented and motivated,” she told JTA. “It’s a beautiful thing to get people so ambitious and smart and driven to create something so crucial for this society.” AMIT’s CEO, Dr. Amnon Eldar, agreed. “We believe that female students that have outstanding scientific and technological skills can help repair the world while developing their skills and abilities,” he said. “Numerous Israeli social service organizations are thirsty for technological development that will help improve the services provided to people with special needs. Amit Carmel 6000 gives religious girls who chose not to serve in the IDF the opportunity to further develop their technological abilities while bettering Israeli society by helping the most disadvantaged amongst us.”

By Nakeem Grant, Herald Community News West Hempstead native Yitzchak Milworn decided long ago that he wanted to serve in the Israel Defense Forces. During his senior year at Rambam Mesivta in Lawrence, he took part in a two-week volunteer program for a nonprofit organization that supports the IDF. After he graduated, he moved to Israel to learn more about his family’s home country. “It’s an interesting society here in Israel. I fell in love with the land and the people,” he said. Now 22, Milworn, who began his service last March, is an infantryman in the 932nd battalion of the IDF’s Nahal Brigade. He underwent eight months of training, including battle tactics, weapons and group dynamics. “I always saw it as a responsibility to serve my homeland,” Milworn said. He is known as a lone soldier, a serviceman who does not have immediate family in Israel. Milworn said that thanks to the Friends of the IDF organization, he stays in touch with his family. The organization provides a 24-hour call center and covers airfare for lone soldiers. His parents, Stuart and Corrine Milworn, visited twice since he enlisted. In May, they attended his swearing-in at the Kotel in Jerusalem, and in October, they were there for his beret ceremony. In December, he came home for a month. “We had extended family come in from Connecticut,” said Milworn’s mother. “We spent a day in the city. We walked on the Brooklyn Bridge, and we had a wonderful time together.” When Milworn told his family of his decision to serve, they were proud, and unsurprised. “I don’t think he would be doing [it] if he wasn’t happy,” his mother said. “It’s difficult being a soldier anywhere. Your time is not your own, your life is not your own. “I don’t know many other 19- and 20-yearolds who are able to move to another country and handle all of the bureaucracy, the army system and ultimately make a life for himself.” As of last September, there were 946 lone soldiers from the United States, according to FIDF. Of those, 208 come from New York. “A lone soldier is really remarkable because they leave the comfort of their home and support of their family to go serve in the army,” said Felicia Solomon, Long Island director of FIDF. In 2017, FIDF sponsored over 900 flights for lone soldiers to see their families. “They’re an extraordinary group of young people, and every single of them is remarkable in their own way,” she said. “They’re young, brave and passionate people that we’re all lucky to have for the State of Israel, and they protect Jews all over the world.” Milworn said his biggest challenge has been learning Hebrew. He spoke it before he began his service, but wants to become more fluent. “I’m also working on understanding the culture,” he said. “It’s different from the community I grew up in, but every day I try to improve.” Milworn added that he hopes to go to college for theological study after his service.

Correction

Continued from page 20 $2.4 billion as the Venezuelan people starved.” The United States is also calling on those Venezuelans still loyal to Maduro “from everyday employees getting by on food subsidies to the Venezuelan security forces sworn to support the constitution, to stop enabling repression and corruption, and to work with the National Assembly and its duly elected leader, Juan Guaido, in accordance with your constitution on a peaceful return to democracy.” By the standards of the last two decades, that is an admirably clear and precise goal. But unlike Ukrainians, Egyptians and Syrians, among others, Venezuelans have not erupted in sustained mass riots and demonstrations to bring down the government, in part because they know that the outside world, which means chiefly America in this case, is unlikely to intervene in their favor. That is not to demean the thousands of Venezuelans who have lost their lives confronting this regime, but merely to note the understandable caution that Maduro and his cohorts have mercilessly exploited to their benefit. That Maduro’s regime will collapse, there is no question. How rapidly this happens partly depends on the degree of regional and international support that Venezuelans can expect once the regime is tottering. As Zimbabwe learned repeatedly under Robert Mugabe, outside indifference can sustain a dictator’s grip on power at just the point when it appears to be slipping away. Nicolás Maduro should not be afforded the same indulgence.

Tlaib... Continued from page 21 canard is a typical anti-Semitic line,” Tlaib returned to Twitter to insist that she hadn’t directed her comments at Jews. “Sen. Rubio, it’s clear my earlier tweet was critical of U.S. Senators like yourself, who are seeking to strip Americans of their Constitutional right to free speech,” she wrote. That may be, but she is either uninformed or being disingenuous about the history of a phrase like “forgot what country they represent.” As the Anti-Defamation League pointed out, “Though the legislation discussed is sponsored by four nonJewish Senators, any charge of dual loyalty has special sensitivity and resonance for Jews, particularly in an environment of rising anti-Semitism.” Suggestions that the pro-Israel camp works against American interests is a staple of pro-Palestinian activism, given a scholarly veneer by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer in their 2007 book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. Pro-Palestinian media also track the ways that Jews are sensitive to the dual loyalty charge, and defend the right to criticize the pro-Israel lobby’s influence without being called anti-Semites. y point is that even if she didn’t aim her tweet at Jews, Tlaib should have been aware of the toxicity of her formula and avoided it. Progressives, in making their case against President Trump, will note how he traffics in dog whistles — and say that whether or not he does so on purpose is beside the point.

In last week’s coverage of the Jan. 6 Achiezer gala, two award winners in this photo were misidentified. Those pictured are, from left: Rabbi Yossy Ungar, pillars of chesed; Dr. Ari Hoschander and Dr. Martin Kessler, excellence in medicine; Ronald Lowinger, 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. The Jewish Star

Media... Continued from page 21 motto — “Death to Israel, Curse the Jews” — is openly hateful and anti-Semitic. The National, a U.A.E-based publication, said that Karen Attiah, The Washington Post’s global opinions editor, defended the paper’s decision to publish the op-ed. Attiah claimed that her publication has “given space to Saudis, Emiratis, Qataris, Turks, Iran … all sides of many of these debates roiling the region.” The Post, she claimed, had an obligation to publish all viewpoints — including the “abusive ones.” Yet, if the Post were to provide a platform the Ku Klux Klan, itwould be condemned — and rightly so. Somehow, a different standard exists when it comes to anti-Semitism. hen they’re not getting a press pass, antiSemites are getting coddled. When the Post interviewed Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad on Sept. 28, 2018, the newspaper failed to inform readers — much less confront Mahathir himself — about his blatant anti-Semitism. In a 2003 speech before the Organization of the Islamic Conference, Mahathir said that “Jews rule the world by proxy. They got others to fight and die for them.” In 2012, he wrote, “I am proud to be labeled anti-Semitic.” The interviewer was well aware of Mahathir’s anti-Semitism, having written about it in 2016. But he said nothing when he was face to face with someone that the Post called a “venerable statesman.” The day before the prime minister’s interview, another Post journalist spoke with Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian Authority’s Permanent Observer to the United Nations. As CAMERA has documented, Mansour — once a guest on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” — has claimed that the Jewish state harvests the organs of terrorists, a modern-day incarnation of the blood libel. But yet again, an anti-Semite’s beliefs went unmentioned and unaddressed by the “guardians of truth.” The late historian Robert Wistrich called antiSemitism “the oldest hatred” in the world. Its purveyors should not be handed a microphone. Sean Durns is a senior research analyst for CAMERA.

CAlendar of Events Thursday January 17

Trees’ New Year: Join Jewish Women’s Circle for a pre-Tu B’Shvat event. Taste the 7 fruits of Israel and learn their significance, create a pomegranate floral arrangement. 7:30 pm. 22 The Pines, Old Westbury. 516-484-3500, Chaya@ ChabadRoslyn.com Suggested donation $18; sponsor $36.

Sunday January 20

Glittering World of Chessed: Rabbi Paysach Krohn visits Chazaq & Roslyn Torah Ohr Academy on his new release book tour. Special Tu B’Shvat refreshments. 7:15 pm. 68 Mineola Ave, Roslyn. 718285-9132. Free admission. Tu B’Shvat Q&A: With Rav Elya Brudny and Rav Aaron Lopiansky, on the challenges we face at home and in the workplace. Hosted by the White Shul. Email questions to office@whiteshul.com. For men and women. 8 pm. 728 Empire Ave, Far Rockaway.

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. 516571-8040. $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

Tuesday Feb. 5

Evening with PEYD: Learn how to take your family on vacation using miles and points, and how to best use credit cards for business success. Program to benefit the Levi Yitzchak Library. Space is limited. 8:15 pm. 564 Central Ave, Cedarhurst. $36.

Wednesday Feb. 6

Networking Event: At the Young Israel of Kew Gardens Hills, with special guest speaker Ambassador Dani Dayan. Hosted by the Queens Jewish link and the Bukharian Jewish Link. Free parking available. 7 pm. 7011 150th St, Flushing. 718-880-2622. $15 in advance; $20 at the door.

Saturday Feb. 9

Chai Dinner: Chofetz Chaim Torah Center of Cedarhurst-Woodmere holds its 18th anniversary dinner at Lawrence Country Club, paying tribute to dedicated members and friends. 101 Causeway, Lawrence. CCTCdinner@gmail.com

THE JEWISH STAR January 18, 2019 • 12 Shevat 5779

W. Hempster Venezuela... fulfills dream in the IDF

A dog whistle is a dog whistle. If Tlaib was unaware of the dual loyalty debate, which I doubt, she should at least acknowledge the ways that words like hers have been used against Jews and, yes, Palestinians and Muslims. The American Jewish Committee tried to make that point in a tweet, but stumbled. Sharing a photograph of Tlaib embracing a fan wrapped in a Palestinian flag, AJC wrote, “Tell us more about dual loyalty, @RashidaTlaib.” Not helping! The point is not that if Jewish Americans are disloyal, so are PalestinianAmericans. The point is this: It is not dual loyalty or unpatriotic for an American to love her homeland and lobby for its people. And Tlaib, of all people, should know that. And then there were critics of Tlaib who were completely off base, like the foreign policy pundit who shared the AJC photo and complained that Tlaib, as a candidate for Congress, “covered herself in the flag of a foreign people, not the American people.” Again, no. Israeli flags hang in nearly every American synagogue — and I bet in not a few congressional offices. Tlaib’s support for the Palestinian cause is no more un-American than American Jewish support for Israelis. Brandeis’ defense of what Rosen calls “the value of group differences for preserving American ideals” has benefited any ethnic or religious group that advocates for its causes overseas. It has allowed Irish Americans to back independence for Ireland and Cuban Americans to lobby over U.S. policy toward the island. It also made it safe and fully American for Rashida Tlaib to be sworn in as a United States congresswoman wearing a thobe, a Palestinian embroidered dress. Anyone who celebrated that image should also celebrate the history and legacy of American diversity that owes no small credit to Brandeis, the Jews — and yes, Zionists.

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