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Parsha Mishpatim • February 24, 2017 • 28 Sh’vat 5777 • Candlelighting 5:23 pm, Havdalah 6:24 pm • Luach page 19 • Vol 16, No 8
Friedman, 5 Towns hero, faces Senate
Ambassador-designee David Friedman testifying at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last Thursday.
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Andrew Harrer/Pool/Getty Images • February 15 in the White House
Five Towners rooted for a hometown hero last Thursday, as the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held its confirmation hearing for ambassador to Israel-designee David Friedman, a Woodsburgh resident. During testimony in response to questions that ranged from hostile to softball, he calmly addressed the senators’ concerns. WCBS TV sent a crew to Rambam Mestivta in Lawrence to record the reaction of students as they watched the hearings. Friedman appeared contrite when called to account for the coarse nature of comments he directed at critics of the Jewish state before and during the presidential campaign. He had refered to members of J Street, the Washington policy group hostile to Israeli policies, as “worse than kapos” and to the Anti-Defamation League as “morons,” and he likened Sen. Charles Schumer to Hitler-appeaser Neville Chamberlain. “These were hurtful words and I deeply regret them,” he told the senators. Senator Marco Rubio criticized those feigning horror over Friedman’s J Street descritiopn, pointing out that the group had invited to its conference Saeb Erekat, a senior Palestinian official “who has justified the murder of Jews as self-defense.” The ZOA urged the Senate to confirm Friedman, referring to J Street as a “radical, extremist” group and praising Friedman’s “realistic and flexible approach to achieving peace.” North Woodmere resident Cindy Grosz, who’s known Friedman for nearly 50 years, said that “David will be a great ambassador because he is real. … David’s first loves are just like his mom and dad and his siblings and their families. Their love of traditional Judaic values and customs, their time together with close friends and family, their belief in charity, and love of Israel.”
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Trump rips anti-Semitism
After a week in which he declined to directly condemn an apparent rise in anti-Semitic hate crimes in America, President Trump said on Tuesday, that “the anti-Semitic threats targeting our Jewish community at community centers are horrible and are painful and a very sad reminder of the work that still must be done to root out hate and prejudice and evil.” See story on page 10.
Yiddishkeit lives in book for dementia patients By Lisa Keys, JTA The book is large and fits comfortably on a lap. The color photographs nearly fill each page. Each image depicts real people doing everyday Jewish things — a young girl eating matzah ball soup; a bubbe and her grandchildren lying in the grass; a man wearing tefillin, praying. The sentences are in large print; they are simple (“Mother says the blessing over the candles”) and easy to read. But the book is not for young children learning how to read, nor is it for parents to introduce Judaism to their preschoolers. Rather it is designed for those suffering from dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, a progressive type of dementia that causes a slow decline in thinking, memory and reasoning. The book — a series of independent pictures and captions — requires no memory to read and follow along, allowing
Eliezer Sobel’s mother, Manya, reading his first book for adults with memory loss, “Blue Sky, White Clouds.”
those with memory-loss issues to enjoy and engage with each image on its own terms. “L’Chaim: Pictures to Evoke Memories of a Jewish Life,” by Eliezer Sobel, is probably the first book of its kind — a Jewish-themed book created explicitly for adults with dementia. “There’s such a richness to Jewish content and imagery and history and culture,” Sobel, 64, told JTA. “There are so many Jewish people in Jewish nursing homes, and Jewish families with loved ones who have dementia.” Sobel’s family is among them. The author took inspiration from his mother, Manya, 93, a refugee who fled Nazi Germany and has suffered from Alzheimer’s for 17 years. As her memory deteriorated, her language slowly disappeared with it, Sobel said. Eventually, a few years ago, it seemed gone for good.
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However, “One day I walk into the living room, and she was thumbing through a magazine, reading the big print headlines aloud, correctly,” he recalled. “Mom can still read!’” Sobel said he headed to the local Barnes & Noble to get her a picture book for dementia patients. “It seemed like the most obvious thing in the world,” he said. Instead, he learned that such a thing didn’t really exist. After unsuccessful trips to bookstores and searches online, Sobel called the National Alzheimer’s Association. He said the librarian he spoke with on the phone was stumped at first — she said that while there were more than 20,000 books for caregivers, she didn’t know of anything for the patients themselves. See Yiddishkeit on page 16