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Ki Savo • August 31, 2018 • 20 Elul, 5778 • Torah columns pages 22–23 • Luach page 23 • Vol 17, No 34

The Newspaper of our Orthodox communities

Rambam students helped give NY’s ‘last Nazi’ the boot

Sen. John McCain at the Kotel with Sen. Joe Lieberman in 2008.

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Israel loses an authentic friend

By Jackson Richman, JNS Sen. John McCain, who died on Aug. 25 at the age of 81, was a longtime friend of Israel. The Arizona Republican, a frequent visitor to the Jewish state, was a Vietnam War hero, two-time presidential candidate and 35-year member of Congress.

He first visited Israel in 1979, accompanying Washington Democratic Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson.

Jackson “had the special respect of the Jewish people — the kind of respect accorded to brave and faithful friends,” McCain told the American Israel Political Committee (AIPAC) Policy Conference in 2008.

McCain took Jackson’s mantle and never looked back.

“As the people of Israel know better

than most, the safety of free people can never be taken for granted,” McCain said at the conference. “And in a world full of dangers, Israel and the United States must always stand together.”

In July 2017, after McCain was diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tweeted, “Godspeed, @SenJohnMcCain. A hero.

A fighter. A friend. Israel is with you.”

“I am deeply saddened by the passing of John McCain, a great American patriot and a great supporter of Israel.

I will always treasure the constant friendship he showed to the people of Israel and to me personally,” Netanyahu posted on Twitter on Sunday. “His support for Israel never waivered [sic].

See McCain on page 12

By Jeffrey Bessen, Nassau Herald Rambam Mesivta High School in Lawrence has only 170 students, but these teenage boys have had a huge impact.

The school’s dean, Rabbi Zev Friedman, received a flood of emails from former students when it was reported that 95-year-old Nazi war criminal Jakiw Palij had been deported to Germany on Aug. 21.

For years, Rambam students, Rabbi Friedman and other administrators and teachers had protested outside Palij’s Jackson Heights home, calling attention to his history as a former SS guard at the Trawniki labor camp in Poland.

“Since the school was founded, we decided that it’s important to provide the kids with not just a classroom education, but one outside the classroom,” Rabbi Friedman said. “It’s very, very important for is to be involved in the community.”

That commitment began two years after the school was founded in 1992. Rambam students became involved in efforts to deport a native Lithuanian, Aleksandras Lileikis, who was accused of being a Nazi war criminal. A 1994 article in USA Today brought the story to students’ attention. Initially, Rabbi Friedman and the students rallied outside Lileikis’s house in Norwood, Mass.

“Unprecedented,” he called it.

The Rambam action caught See Rambam on page 16

The sound of Elul at Darchei

Rabbi Avrohom Moshe Heller, a second grade rebbi at Yeshiva Darchei Torah in Far Rockaway, blows the shofar of a kudu for his class on Tuesday, the first day of school.

Empire chicken alert A “public health alert” invoving raw Empire kosher chickens was announced by the Department of Agriculture “out of an abundance of caution due to concerns about Salmonella illnesses.”

The agency said it found “a potential link” between the Empire products and an “illness cluster” affecting “multiple” patients between last September and June.

The agency urged consumers who may still have raw products

from that period in their freezers “to properly handle” them.

An Empire spokeswoman emphasized that its chicken was not being recalled and “is safe to consume when stored, handled, and cooked properly.”

“You can remove all bacteria from raw poultry through proper cooking to a minimum of 165 degrees Fahrenheit as measured with a thermometer at the thickest part,” she said.

J.K. Rowling tweet-downs a Jew-baiting Brit J.K. Rowling, creator of the Harry Potter universe, went headto-head last weekend with a fellow British writer over his criticism of Jewish complaints about anti-Semitism in the Labour Party.

Simon Maginn, who has written five thrillers under his own name and satirical comedies under the name Simon Nolan, in a Sunday tweet called Jewish outrage over Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s 2013 comments that “Zionists” do not understand British culture “patently synthetic outrage.”

Maginn called on a Jewish tweeter to “Explain your deep and wounding sense of injury.”

Rowling, who is not Jewish, tweeted in response: “How dare you tell a Jew that their outrage is ‘patently synthetic’?

How dare you demand that they lay bare their pain and fear on demand, for your personal evaluation? What other minority would you speak to this way?”

Maginn called on Rowling to explain, noting that Corbyn has said that his comments did not refer to Jews but was “a rather complicated joke about the Palestinian Ambassador’s

J.K. Rowling at opening night of the Broadway show “Harry Potter and The Cursed Child” in New York on April 22. Bruce Glikas/FilmMagic

fluency in English.”

The opening salvos set up a back-and-forth that lasted throughout Sunday. Rowling tweeted several quotes from Jean-Paul Sartre’s essay “Anti-Semite and Jew” and lambasted Maginn for demanding that a British Jew explain how he feels under anti-Semitic attack “when there are literally hundreds of accounts currently online explaining how British Jews currently feel.”

Maginn accused Rowling of “libel” for publicly calling him an anti-Semite in one of her tweets, but tweeted that “I’m not going to mount a legal action against you because I haven’t got any money and you’ve got a lot, but false + defamatory = libellous. What a class act you are. What a nasty vicious little bully. Blocked.”

Early Monday morning he continued his harangue, opening with a tweet reading: “BREAKING NEWS: From today, any statement by Jeremy Corbyn or his supporters is now *auSee J.K. Rowling on page 16

White House dumps the Palestinian playbook Analysis by Ron Kampeas, JTA President Donald Trump wants to forge an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal, but he seems determined to reframe the conflict.

What’s unclear is if the radical changes in policy, spearheaded by senior adviser Jared Kushner, will bring Palestinians back to the table, or cripple any prospects for peace.

Since Trump assumed office, he has jettisoned orthodoxies that for years defined U.S. policy: He retreated from the two-state solution, recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and slashed funding to Palestinians.

Now his administration looks set to embrace a much narrower definition of Palestinian refugees than the one accepted by the U.N. agency that delivers aid to the Palestinians, UNRWA. “UNRWA is a failed mechanism. It violates standard international law on the status of refugees,” said Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton. “UNRWA’s program is the only one in history based on the assumption that refugee status is hereditary, and I think it is long overdue that we have taken steps to reduce funding.”

Bolton said perpetuation of refugee status was a mistake.

“Much of UNRWA’s expenses really go to perpetuating the refugee status of the Palestinian people, and I think that’s a mistake,” he said. “I think it’s a mistake from a humanitarian point of view … a perpetuation of an unnatural status.”

UNRWA defines Palestinian refugees as “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period between June 1 1946 and May 15 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict.” It serves some 1.5 million people in 58 recognized Palestinian refugee camps.

In a White House email in January, Kushner wrote that the UNRWA “perpetuates a status quo, is corrupt, inefficient and doesn’t help peace” and said it was necessary to “strategically risk breaking things” for a better outcome.

In another blow to the status quo, the Trump administration said it would cut $200 million from the $400 million it is mandated to deliver to Palestinians (a more recent law allows this). The administration has delivered only $60 million to UNRWA. Last year it delivered $368 million, by far the most generous donor.

Last December, Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and in May moved the U.S. embassy there. That drove Palestinians away from efforts to revive talks.

Jonathan Schanzer, a vice president of the hawkish Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said the Kushner team appeared to be

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Jared Kushner sits in on a meeting with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Baghdad on April 3, 2017.

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strategically reformulating the power dynamic in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Previous administrations had effectively recognized the sides as equals, which Schanzer said fed Palestinian recalcitrance.

“The Palestinians are often granted more power than they actually have; the Israelis are asked to relinquish power and it’s ended in disaster,” Schanzer said. “This is an attempt to shift the dynamic to give the Israelis more power and the Palestinians less in a way that affects the actual dynamic.”

Kushner is often driving the changes. In June, he derided Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in an interview with Palestinian newspaper, Al Quds.

“I don’t think the Palestinian people feel like their lives are getting better, and there is only so long you can blame that on everyone other than Palestinian leadership,” Kushner said. “I do question how much President Abbas has the ability to, or is willing to, lean into finishing a deal. He has his talking points, which have not changed in the last 25 years.”

Previous administrations have avoided blaming either side for the failure to make a deal, while criticizing individual acts.

Israeli leaders have welcomed some of the changes, but have mostly been silent at the cuts to UNRWA. In an op-ed for Haaretz,

Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, a former Israel Army spokesman, explained that while Israelis are frustrated with the Palestinians, sudden changes could portend chaos.

“When the Palestinian Authority collapses, who is likely to pick up the pieces? Israel?” Lerner wrote. “Israel has no interest in the international, financial or security burden of re-enforcing a civilmilitary administration over Gaza. Hamas? Hamas would love to gain full control and solidify its power over the West Bank.”

Radicals would be “empowered,” Lerner said. “Hardballing the Palestinians into submission is likely to blow up on Israel’s doorstep.”

It’s also not likely to bring the Palestinians on board, said Yousef Munayyer, the executive director of the U.S. campaign for Palestinian rights.

“When you want coercion to lead to a change of behavior, the actor has to see there’s something to lose,” he said. “In the case of the Palestinians they’re already the party living under military occupation. It’s a people that has lost faith in the ability of the United States to deliver anything for them. The threat of cutting ties or reducing aid to different agencies while it was have a real impact on real vulnerable people, as a political tool it doesn’t have much promise at all.”

Lara Frieman, the president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, said denying the Palestinians the multigenerational attachment to historical Palestine embedded in their refugee status was odd, considering the millennia-long Jewish attachment to the land of Israel.

“For folks who naively believe we’re simplifying the Palestinian issue, they are not taking seriously the power of narrative and grievances,” she said. “How long have Jews held fast to ‘next year in Jerusalem’?”

Trump’s latest moves, predictably, divided the pro-Israel left and right.

“The Trump administration’s moves to rescind the refugee status of millions of Palestinians and to massively cut U.S. humanitarian aid to the West Bank and Gaza further confirm that their real intent isn’t an ‘ultimate deal’ to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but to adopt as US policy the disastrous agenda of Israel’s far-right,” said J Street, the liberal Mideast policy group, in a statement.

Josh Block of the Israel Project welcomed the cuts, telling the New York Times that the Palestinian Authority “will continue seeing its international aid cut not only by the U.S. but others as well” as long as leaders support terrorism.

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Judea and Samaria housing market is booming

By Ben Sales, JTA Growing up in a Jerusalem apartment, Aaron Lipkin marveled at the two-story houses he saw on weekend drives with his parents. As a religious Zionist, it made little difference to him that the houses were in Israeli West Bank settlements. When he and his wife went house hunting in Jerusalem 19 years ago and couldn’t find anything in their price range, they ventured north.

A generation later, Lipkin’s children face the same problem.

They want to move back to Ofra — but now it, too, is unaffordable. Lipkin bought his house in 2000 for 550,000 shekels (about $200,000 in 2018 dollars). Now a similar house sells for at least 1.5 million shekels, or $411,000.

In less than 20 years, the price of housing in the settlement has doubled.

“We’re not sorry for a second when we think about the price of the house,” Lipkin, the spokesman for Ofra and a tour guide, told JTA. “Today we’re shaking from fear. We have five kids and we have no idea how our kids will buy their own house without becoming enslaved to a crazy mortgage.”

In 2000, there were fewer than 200,000 settlers in the West Bank, excluding eastern Jerusalem, according to Btselem, a left-wing Israeli organization. Now it’s closer to 400,000. Home prices are rising accordingly.

Many of the settlers are ideological — committed to the principle of living in Judea and Samaria. But others were drawn by the quality of life — larger houses, more green space and intimate communities. The Israeli government has built direct bus lines to the settlements and access roads that avoid Palestinian areas. Many settlers can live their lives avoiding contact with the Palestinian villages around them. Even relatively distant settlements like Ofra have the feel of a suburb.

But now the settlements are becoming more like Israel in another way: The country’s festering housing crisis is moving across the Green Line. The safer settlements feel, the more prices rise.

According to the Shoresh Institute, construction in the settlements has not kept up with population growth. Israel’s Center for Political Economics found that the number of average monthly paychecks needed to buy a home in the settlements rose from 87 in 2003 to 152 in 2015 — only 10 less than the national average of 162.

“There’s no concern that this investment is risky because of the location of our community,” said Miri Maoz-Ovadia, a spokeswoman for the Binyamin Regional Council. “The concern is that

A housing development in Efrat, a bedroom community outside JeBen Sales/JTA rusalem.

the longer we wait, the prices will only go up. It’s slower, but it’s happening and we can see it.”

Like Lipkin, Maoz-Ovadia has a professional and personal interest in talking up the settlement housing market. A year and a half ago, she and her husband bought a fixer-upper in Kochav Yaakov, an hour’s drive from Jerusalem, for 1.1 million shekels.

Now the same houses are selling for 1.5 million.

“Families want to buy,” Maoz-Ovadia said. “They want a house with a yard and they see potential here to get it.”

The housing market is booming in Efrat, a bedroom community for nearby Jerusalem. Right-wing politicians like Naftali Bennett, minister of education, have urged annexation of so-called consensus settlements like Efrat — those that most Israelis assume will remain part of the country under any future scenario — for years.

Israel’s right-wing government also has an impact on the market. As he walked through a townhouse for sale in Efrat, real estate agent Yaniv Gabbay said that as the prospect of a Palestinian state becomes more distant, Israelis feel more comfortable investing in West Bank property. Another townhouse in this development sold for 2 million shekels, about $550,000, before it was built. This five-bedroom unit on the corner was going for 2.6 million.

“They’re not as nervous about what’s going to happen to their money,” Gabbay said. “They know there are a lot of people putting money into this area, in terms of where Efrat sits today in the political climate.”

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According to Peace Now, a left-wing Israeli NGO, the number of construction starts in the settlements was 17 percent above the annual average in 2017. On Wednesday, Israel announced construction plans for 1,000 more housing units in the West Bank.

“There’s supply that’s started to catch up with the demand, but the demand hasn’t waned,” Gabbay said.

Meanwhile, Palestinians living in Area C, the area of the West Bank fully administered by Israel, have long protested that they can’t build any houses or infrastructure.

“Area C has been allocated for the benefit of Israeli settlements or the Israeli military, at the expense of Palestinian communities,” according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. “This impedes the development of adequate housing, infrastructure and livelihoods in Palestinian communities, and has significant consequences for the entire West Bank population.”

Hagit Ofran, who heads Peace Now’s Settlement Watch project, said the main problem facing any potential evacuation is the sheer number of residents in isolated settlements. She is less worried abut Israelis who move to the West Bank for quality-of-life reasons than the tens of thousands of ideological settlers who are committed to living deep in the West Bank.

“The challenge Israelis will have in a peace agreement is evacuating thousands of families and it will cost money, and take time, and pain the heart, even if people agree to fight the settlers in this,” Ofran said. “Most of the settlers will respect the Knesset’s decision.”

A few settlers in the northern West Bank said quality of life was the driving factor. When Miriam Shatsky and her husband sought to buy a home, a mortgage agent laughed when they revealed their salaries. A few months ago, they bought a five-bedroom apartment for slightly over $300,000 in Karnei Shomron.

“Real estate in the territories was really risky and we didn’t know we wanted to settle here,” Shatsky said. “As we got better jobs, the target kept moving farther and farther away.”

Lipkin said that after living in the settlements for a while, the differences between quality-of-life and ideology blur. With right-wing politicians frequently calling for annexation, Israel is doing more to absorb the settlements than to leave them. In the meantime, more Israelis keep moving in.

“You have people who come for quality of life, and after 18 years they’ll tell you ‘it’s the Land of Israel and we need to settle it,’” Lipkin said. “I don’t have a drop of worry about evacuation. I see that Judea and Samaria is part of the State of Israel.”

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Kids get a ‘time out’ from the unrest near Gaza

By Rachel Kontorovich, JNS For five months, since March 2018, Israeli communities bordering Gaza have sustained ongoing terrorism and arson from hundreds of rockets and incendiary devices, causing constant stress and chaos for the 50,000 people who call the region home. Residential and commercial buildings, along with some 10,000 acres of land, have been destroyed.

Just as the worst seemed to be over, this month more than 200 rockets struck the Eshkol and Sha’ar HaNegev Regional Councils, a vast area with a 37-mile border with Gaza.

There was no mistaking the targets: rockets landed within feet of the new JNF playground in Sderot, an Israeli town located less than a mile from Gaza that has been in the crosshairs for decades.

Jews from around the world have been sending prayers and thoughts to the families living amid the terror. But for Jewish National Fund-USA (JNF), the escalation of violence prompted a call to action.

“What can we do for these kids, right now?” asked JNF CEO Russell F. Robinson. In the span of a few hours, JNF took action by declaring a Yom Kef, or “day of fun,” for children in the Gaza-area communities.

Except that wasn’t enough. JNF decided to turn one day of fun into two weeks, providing a much-needed respite for these kids — a chance just have fun, as all children should during their summer vacation.

Mobilizing its network of partners across Israel, more than 1,000 children and parents from the Gaza Envelope were bused to Ammunition Hill in Jerusalem to kick off the events.

A renowned historical site, the area boasts sprawling green lawns and a built-in recreational campus.

“This summer has been especially challenging,” said Einat Eliyashir, a mother of three

9/30/18.

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Israel children from the Gaza border region use a zip line at a crisis relief event in Jerusalem.

from Moshav Yesha. “To go out from the Gaza Envelope, suddenly these concerns fade away.

It warms our hearts to know that there are so many JNF supporters who are thinking about us and helping us to have such an incredible day of fun for the whole family. I don’t have enough words to explain how much this means to us.”

For Eliyashir’s 11-year-old daughter, Meitar, the break made all the difference in the world.

“This summer has been a little scary,” she said. “This is our summer vacation, and if I

JNF

want to go outside to play, I always have to be close to the bomb shelters.

“It is so important to all of us to be able to get out and have fun during our summer break, and it is amazing that there are people who care about us to give us this opportunity and understand our situation. It is so much fun to be able to come to a safe place and enjoy ourselves for a day.”

Clowns, balloons, games, climbing walls, obstacle courses, zip lines, live music, food and drink, and many other activities served as a way to relieve the stress these families face.

Kids were also offered a VIP tour through the site by Israel Defense Forces’ veteran soldiers who fought in the Ammunition Hill battle during the 1967 Six-Day War. With their faces covered in face paint and hands grasping balloon animals, the children had time to be … children.

“It’s fun to come out to a place like this,” said Shay Sagiv, one of the girls from Kibbutz Sufa. “I’ve known about donors supporting us in the past, but not like this. It’s just such a gift to us to have a day like today.”

Gal Beinart, a mom from Moshav Sde Nitzan, explained that she has four boys between 5 and 14, and moved to the region 12 years ago for its strong sense of community. “The only thing is that life can be stressful,” she acknowledges, “but we are so lucky to be out here on this beautiful day with our boys, and participating in all the activities and sports.”

Her 12-year old son, Roi, said, “Our summer has been fun, but there were a lot of alarms and bombs that have made it very difficult. We appreciated being able to come out to places like this to just have fun. This feels normal, and it’s awesome.”

Maayan Nochomovitz, a mother from Moshav Ein Hasof, said it’s not good for the kids “to hear the rockets all the time and to run for the shelters. The kids always ask if they are able to go outside or what to do in an emergency; it’s not an easy situation at all.”

Amid stories of what the families endured back home, the smiles on so many faces didn’t go unnoticed by the executives, staff and volunteers managing the event.

“This right here is the spirit of the Jewish people, of the Jewish nation,” said Eric Michaelson, JNF Chief Israel Officer, as he looked across the field packed with children.

“In good times and bad, we are there to stand with and support them.”

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The JEWISH STAR Wine & Dine Getting a jump-start on holiday preparation Kosher Kitchen

Joni SChoCkett

Jewish Star columnist

I

t’s time to get serious about cooking for the holiday. At the same time, school is starting, summer is ending and we really want to get those Labor Day barbecues in. And don’t forget primary election day right after Labor Day, and the day school starts and more chaos and scheduling stress.

If the weather is hot, no one wants to have an oven running all day. And, since most people do not cook on the holiday itself, early preparation is a must. But what foods can be prepared ahead of schedule, frozen and reheated to such perfection that no one knows the difference?

The truth is that lots of foods cook, freeze and reheat beautifully. Brisket especially freezes well, as do short ribs and flanken. I’m not a fan of freezing whole chickens, but I make a chicken and braised shallots dish that freezes beautifully because it uses boneless, skinless chicken thighs and breasts and has a rich sauce that covers the chicken to keep it moist.

You can also freeze stuffing casseroles and potato kugels — as long as you add a bit of oil to crisp the kugels when reheating.

Chicken stock freezes beautifully, as does chicken soup, but don’t add the veggies until the time when you will be refrigerating and reheating, as frozen carrots turn very mushy.

I always make beef stock before the holiday and reduce it from about 10 quarts to about 1-2 quarts. Then I freeze it and, when I need to use it, I add about 2 to 4 tablespoons per cup of water. It works perfectly. This method also controls the amount of salt you use as opposed to canned or bottled stocks, which tend to be high in sodium.

When it comes right down to it, you can make many dishes ahead of time and just make salads, veggies, and some potato dishes nearer to the actual holiday date. This year, the peaches have been phenomenal, so I am thinking of ways to incorporate them into my make-ahead dishes.

I already have a peach pie in the freezer. It’s my way of bringing the summer into the holiday.

A holiday, even one as important and celebratory as Rosh Hashanah, does not mean that we have to exhaust ourselves in the days leading up to the holiday. We need to plan for doahead dishes and then relax and enjoy our family and friends. That is what is most important as we welcome the New Year.

Shanah Tovah!

Brisket with Peaches and More (Meat) This recipe came to me from a friend, and then I saw similar ones in books, blogs, and friends’ tables! Each was a bit different, but all included garlic and peaches — an interesting combination. It incorporates summer’s best with the heat of garlic in the tradition of a holiday brisket. I roasted lots of garlic for this and it was delicious.

3 heads garlic, cloves removed Canola oil 1 double brisket, 4 to 5 pounds — single will also work 3 large onions, peeled, cut in half, and thinly sliced 2 to 6 carrots, peeled and sliced — as many as you like 4 to 6 cups beef stock, low sodium 1/3 cup brown sugar 1/3 cup apple cider vinegar 6 to 7 cups thinly sliced fresh peaches, firm but ripe, about 8-12 slices per peach

3/4 tsp. cinnamon 2 to 3 fresh or dried bay leaves Salt and freshly ground black pepper Roast the garlic by placing the cloves and enough canola oil to cover in a small, heavy saucepan. Heat over low heat until the cloves turn golden and are very soft. Stir often to keep the cloves from sticking. When done, remove from heat and let cool.

Heat a large, deep Dutch oven and add 2 Tbsp. of the garlic oil. Sear the brisket on both sides, 5 to 7 minutes per side. Remove to a platter.

Add a bit more garlic oil if needed and add the onions. Cook until golden brown, but not caramelized. Add the carrots and cook another 5 minutes to barely soften the carrots. Add all the cooked garlic cloves and heat through.

Add the beef stock, brown sugar, vinegar, bay leaves, and cinnamon. Stir well to loosen any browned bits. Add four cups of the sliced peaches and mix. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and carefully add the brisket. If the liquid does not cover the meat, add more. Bring to a boil and then reduce the heat to a medium simmer and cook until the brisket is very tender — 3 to 4 hours. Turn the meat often and add more beef stock if needed.

When done, remove the bay leaves and discard. Transfer the brisket to a cutting board and let rest. Press the liquid, with about half carrots and onions and all the peaches —use a spoon to capture them — through a coarse strainer (I used a colander) into a pot.

Bring the liquid to a boil and reduce the heat to simmer. Cook until reduced and syrupy. Taste and add vinegar, brown sugar or stock, salt and pepper. Add the remaining peaches and cook another 5 to 7 minutes to heat the peach slices.

If freezing, let cool and slice the brisket.

Place with the sauce in a freezer safe container. To serve, defrost in the refrigerator for two days, reheat in a tightly covered casserole in a 300-degree oven, adding some water if needed.

Serves 10+.

Chicken with Peach and Shallot Sauce (Meat) This freezes beautifully. The sauce will stay in the refrigerator for up to 1 week, so you can make this up to a week ahead, or freeze the sauce in a separate container.

4 to 5 fresh, ripe peaches, thinly sliced, skin

removed 3 to 4 Tbsp. Canola oil 1 large onions, diced 10 to 12 shallots, peeled and quartered 4 to 6 cloves garlic, finely minced 2 cups ketchup 1 cup peach preserves 1/4 to 1/3 cup dark brown sugar 1/4 to 1/3 cup unsulphured molasses 2 to 3 Tbsp. red wine vinegar 1 Tbsp. dry mustard 1-1/2 tsp. smoked paprika Salt and black pepper to taste 1 bunch fresh thyme, tied with 2 to 3 fresh chives 4 to 5 pounds boneless, skinless, chicken thighs, breasts or a mix cut into equal sized pieces. You can also use bone-in thighs or breasts cut in half.

OPTIONAL: Cooked jasmine or other rice for serving Heat a pot of water to boiling and place a large bowl of ice water in the sink. Add 2 to 3 peaches at a time to the boiling water. Cook for 1 to 2 minutes, until skin splits. Immediately immerse in the ice water. Repeat until all peaches are in the ice water. The skin should peel quite easily. Slice the peaches into about 8 to 12 slices each and place the slices in a bowl. Set aside.

Heat a large, heavy saucepan and add 3 Tbsp. of canola oil. Add the onions and sauté until golden brown. Add the garlic and cook another minute. Scrape into a bowl and add a bit more oil. Add the shallots and cook until golden, turning often. Add the onions and garlic back to the pan and mix.

Add the rest of the ingredients except the thyme and the chicken. Mix well and then add the bunch of thyme. Cook until bubbly, about 20 minutes, stirring often. Remove the thyme and discard. Taste and adjust the seasonings.

Place the chicken thighs in a bowl and add about 1-1/2 cup of the sauce. Toss to coat evenly. Add more sauce if needed.

Place on the prepared baking sheet and bake for about 15 minutes. Remove from the oven, add the peaches around the pan and more sauce if needed. Place back in the oven and continue to cook until internal temperature is 165 degrees.

If you want to freeze this, let it cool and place it in a freezer safe container with little air space.

Defrost in the refrigerator two days before serving, then reheat in a 300-degree oven covered tightly with foil. Add some water if needed.

When heated, Place on a platter and serve with the sauce and the peaches. If you like, you can serve over rice for a GF dish. Serves 10+.

THE JEWISH STAR August 31, 2018 • 20 Elul, 5778

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August 31, 2018 • 20 Elul, 5778 THE JEWISH STAR

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The JEWISH STAR

Wine & Dine

Hiding in plain sight Who’s in the Kitchen

JudY Joszef

Jewish Star columnist

T

wo weeks ago, Jerry and I attended the wedding of the daughter of our very close friends, Debbi and Jack Shafran. Jerry sat with Sam Zylberberg, with whom he always enjoys speaking and joking around. He really loves Sam’s sense of humor and perspective.

They both graduated Rambam and BTA. They are both children of survivors. And when they get together, they are the metaphorical “perfect storm.”

They were sitting together at the chuppah, chatting and watching the wedding procession.

An irate woman turned around and snapped at Jerry, “Stop talking, you’re disturbing me!”

Jerry, as he always does, felt really sorry. He apologized sincerely and told the woman that she was absolutely right. She immediately shook her head in disbelief. “Of course I’m right!”

“I’m really sorry for disturbing you,” he said.

“You should be sorry!”

But Jerry did feel sorry. He always feels sorry when he disturbs people, whether in shul, on the train, at a chuppah, or anywhere. He has a deep inner Jiminy Cricket conscience that manifests itself when he bothers others. At the same time, he is impulsive and is excited and happy to sit with and see his friends, and he loses all context as to where he is. So he felt sorry and sat quietly, introspectively promising himself to do better next time.

After a couple of minutes, the woman who had yelled at him began speaking to her husband. The conversation went back and forth like a tennis match, and Jerry missed none of it. Suddenly, I heard him begin to squawk in a Woody Woodpecker singsong: “Ah-ha-ha-ha ah-ahhh — you guys are talking now!”

She had violated Jerry’s internal rulebook, which retroactively abrogated his initial sincere apology. “You have just lost your no talking privileges,” he told her. Sam concurred.

Jerry has a hard time saying “no” to anyone who asks to speak with him, whether in the office or elsewhere. It doesn’t matter whether the asker is a professional or a colleague, or just someone seeking him out about personal problems.

This is the other side of his internal Jiminy Cricket: Jerry recently shared with me how he balances tax matters which he is directly responsible for with issues his peers inevitably “need only a minute to bounce off” him. Naïvely, he used to believe that all these encounters would actually take only a minute, but inevitably they turned out to be time-consuming. Once recognizing the pressures his colleagues faced, he couldn’t let them down.

But after many years, even he began to figure reality out. Whenever he was under heavy pressure and actually needed to get his own work done, he devised a foolproof plan to hide in plain sight. He would book conference rooms on different floors of his firm and set up office meeting scenes, replete with open documents, coffee or other soft drinks in front of multiple chairs, and keep the door wide open. His colleagues, if they walked by, would keep walking, respecting the “meeting” whose other participants must have

momentarily stepped out.

Of course, he still spends a considerable portion of his day, and his career, addressing the “just a minute” issues presented by his peers and colleagues.

I totally hear you Jerry, as do many that know you. They feel you and your pain. They’ve been in conversations or discussions that seem to last forever with no end in sight. They, too, have nowhere to hide … and G-d forbid the topic of the Holocaust comes up, because they’ll have to make plans to stay the night. But that’s OK, we love you anyway, Jerry.

Speaking of hiding in plain sight, here’s a great vegan recipe from thehiddenveggies.com for brownies with beets and zucchini. They are yummy without the frosting, but if you want to hide the tiny specks of veggies I suggest using the delicious frosting.

Veggie Brownies 2 cups zucchini finely chopped or grated 1 cup cooked beets pureed 1-1/4 cup vegan sugar

1/4 cup neutral flavored oil like vegetable or canola 1 Tbsp. vanilla extract 1/2 cup cocoa powder 2 cups gluten free flour mix or regular wheat flour 1 tsp. baking soda 1 tsp. salt 1 coat non-stick spray oil or any neutral oil to rub on the baking pan Fudge Frosting: 1/3 cup refined coconut oil 3 Tbsp. cocoa powder 3 Tbsp. powdered sugar (use a vegan variety) 1/8 tsp. salt 1/4 tsp. vanilla extract For Veggie Brownies: 1. Preheat oven to 350° F. 2. Chop zucchini in a food processor or with a cheese grater and place in a large mixing bowl.

3. Purée cooked beets and add them to the zucchini.

4. Sprinkle sugar over veggies and stir with a spoon.

5. Add remaining ingredients and stir slowly until mix well and it creates a thick batter.

6. Spray oil on a 9x13 baking dish or rub with a coating of any neutral flavored oil.

7. Pour brownie batter in the oiled pan and bake at 350° F for 30 minutes.

For Fudge Frosting: 1. Let the brownies cool completely.

2. Melt coconut oil and add cocoa powder, powdered sugar, vanilla, and salt.

3. Mix well with a fork or small whisk to make sure all the clumps are out.

4. Pour evenly over the brownies. Pick up the pan and rock it back and forth to make an even layer of fudge over the brownies.

5. The fudge will harden as it cools. Put in the fridge to firm up faster.

6. Cut into squares.

Peak season for Georgian-style stuffed tomatoes

By Sonya Sanford, The Nosher via JTA There can never be too many tomatoes. August heat is always made more bearable for me by peak tomato season. I love to eat them cut into thick rounds and topped on crusty well-buttered toasted bread, or chopped small in a simple Israeli salad alongside cucumber and herbs.

By this time of year, I end up with way more tomatoes from the garden and the market than I could possibly use up in sandwiches and salads alone. I’ll use the extra tomatoes to make sauce, but I also like to find a few more creative ways to take advantage of the bounty of summer.

Stuffed vegetables of all kinds were regularly made and eaten in our home, just as they are in many other Russian Jewish kitchens. Stuffed cabbage, stuffed peppers and stuffed mushrooms are regional staples.

As I’ve explored and learned to cook the food of the former Soviet Union and of my family, Georgian cuisine has always stood out for its uniqueness. Georgia’s food is an intersection of cuisines from the Caucasus, Eastern Europe and the Middle East, due to Georgia’s location on the eastern edge of the Black Sea, north of Turkey, and south of Russia. Ingredients like hot peppers and Ajika (a hot sauce made out of them), fenugreek, and pomegranate molasses, appear in Georgian dishes alongside more familiar Eastern European staples such as beets, cabbage, and mushrooms.

Georgian cuisine also benefits from its climate and terrain, which is extremely conducive to agriculture. The country is known for its wine and vast variety of food products including grains, melons, potatoes and much more.

Each region in Georgia has its own distinctive and rich cuisine.

One of my favorite books on Georgian cooking is Carla Capalbo’s Tasting Georgia, A Food And Wine Journey in the Caucasus. Capalbo offers an encyclopedic account of Georgian cuisine filled with detailed history and delicious recipes. I especially love her recipe for stuffed tomatoes.

With her recipe as a guide, and inspired by a few other Georgian stuffed tomato recipes, over time I’ve adapted the dish to my taste and simplified some of the steps.

What makes this stuffed tomato unique is the addition of the herb fenugreek, which adds a complex and almost curry-like flavor to the tomatoes. You can find fenugreek at most Middle Eastern and Persian markets, or online. The stuffing is made of earthy

garlicky sautéed mushrooms, rice, and fresh parsley and dill. The tomatoes are nestled into a simple aromatic sauce, and then each one is topped with mozzarella that gets melty and burnished in the oven.

This dish is substantial enough to be served as a vegetarian main course, but it is not too rich and could easily be served as a side dish to a heartier meal. Like any good stuffed food, these taste even better when they are reheated the next day.

Ingredients: 8 large firm tomatoes Olive oil or sunflower oil, as needed 1 medium yellow or white onion, diced fine 1/2 tsp. dried fenugreek 1/2 tsp. ground coriander 1/2 tsp. dried red hot pepper or red pepper flakes, or to taste 1/2 cup water, or as needed 14 to 16 ounces crimini/oyster/maitake mushrooms, diced small 2 large cloves garlic, minced fine Salt and pepper, to taste 1 cup cooked rice 3 Tbsp. chopped fresh parsley

2 Tbsp. chopped fresh dill 4 ounces mozzarella, sliced to cover the top of the tomatoes, about 1/2-inch thick Directions: 1. Preheat the oven to 375 F. 2. Start by hollowing out the tomatoes: Cut off the top fifth, then run a small knife around the interior of the tomato. Carefully scoop out the inside. Finely chop up the remaining tops and what has been scooped out of them. Reserve.

3. To make the sauce: Add 2 Tbsp. of oil to a large pan over medium heat. Add the diced onions to the oil and sauté until softened and translucent. Add the fenugreek, coriander and hot pepper to the onions and sauté for 1 to 2 minutes, or until fragrant. Add the reserved scooped-out and chopped-up tomato mixture to the pan and 1/2 cup of water and bring the mixture to a simmer. Depending on how much liquid you have from your tomatoes, you may need to add more or less water. You want the sauce to resemble a thick tomato sauce in consistency. Simmer on low for 10 to 15 minutes to allow the sauce to reduce slightly while you prepare the filling. If desired, you can blend the sauce with an immersion blender or blender, although I prefer to keep it with its small pieces of tomato intact.

4. To make the filling: Add 2 Tbsp. of oil to a large pan over medium high heat. Add the mushrooms to the pan and season with salt and pepper. Sauté the mushrooms until their liquid has been fully released and the mushrooms have begun to brown. During the last 2 minutes of cooking, add the minced garlic to the pan and sauté until the garlic is fragrant. Transfer the mixture to a medium bowl. Add a cup of cooked rice, the chopped parsley and the chopped dill to the mushroom mixture. Taste and season with salt and pepper, if needed.

5. To assemble: Add the sauce to a baking or casserole dish that can snugly fit all of the tomatoes. On top of the sauce, place the hollowed out tomatoes. Generously fill each tomato with the mushroom mixture, and top with slices of mozzarella.

6. Bake the tomatoes for 30 to 40 minutes, or until hot, bubbly and with the cheese beginning to brown. Serve warm. Leftover tomatoes can be reheated in either an oven or microwave the next day. Serves 6 to 8.

Sonya Sanford is a chef, food stylist and writer based out of Los Angeles.

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August 31, 2018 • 20 Elul, 5778 THE JEWISH STAR

12

Why we still need heroes like McCain Jonathan S. tobin

Jewish News Syndicate

A

nybody who pays attention to the sorts of things honored by contemporary popular culture knows that stories about heroism are passé. But why then do we still long for them?

In March 1920, Arab gangs attacked the Jewish settlement of Tel Hai in the Upper Galilee. Josef Trumpeldor led the defense, a rare Jew who had served in the Tsar’s army, fought against the Turks in World War I, returned to Russia, organized Jewish self-defense against pogroms, and then headed back to Palestine. Mortally wounded during the exchange of fire at Tel Hai, he was reported to have consoled his companions in Hebrew, saying: Ein davar, tov lamut be’ad artzeinu — “Never mind, it’s good to die for our country.”

As was fitting for a secular Jew, his words echoed those of the Roman poet Ovid’s Odes — dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (“it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country”) more than any traditional Jewish text. But his sacrifice inspired generations. He was embraced as a hero by both the Jewish right — the Beitar national youth group founded by Ze’ev Jabotinsky and later led by Menachem Begin was named for Trumpeldor — as well as by their rivals on the left.

But to future generations of Israelis, the authenticity of Trumpeldor’s final utterance was

called into question. He may have just cursed in Russian about his bad luck. His shaky command of Hebrew might not have enabled him to say something so eloquent. More important, many came to doubt the validity of the sentiment behind those noble words.

To the cynics of the 20th and early 21st century, the idea of there being something glorious about bloody sacrifice for the sake of a national ideal was the sort of talk that starts wars.

To some, patriotism was not just old-fashioned, but dangerous.

That is especially true for Americans who came of age after Vietnam, Watergate and other scandals that have robbed the nation of its patriotic idealism. t is in this context that we should think about the life of Sen. John McCain, who passed away on Saturday at 81 after a battle with brain cancer.

McCain was a central figure in American politics for a generation. An independent spirit, he was often unpredictable, taking up causes regardless of whether they fit in with his generally conservative approach.

Sadly, in his final years, he was subjected

I

to a torrent of abuse because of his feud with President Donald Trump, who called into question McCain’s status as a war hero. Some on the far right, especially on social media, continued to call McCain a “traitor” after his death, demonstrating their ignorance and lack of grace. It

W

echoed the abuse he had gotten from the far left, which viewed his unswerving support for Israel and belief in a strong foreign policy with equal contempt.

But what is important about McCain is that he lived his life in the spirit of Trumpeldor’s famous quotation. There is no denying his bravery in enduring imprisonment and torture at the hands of

McCain: ‘Stalwart friend’ of Israel…

Continued from page 1 It sprang from his belief in democracy and freedom. The State of Israel salutes John McCain.”

McCain blasted Israel’s treatment under the administration of former President Barack Obama — to whom McCain lost the presidential election in 2008 — and foresaw the nuclear deal with Iran that he, and many others, spoke against.

“There’s a real crisis going on. And that is these negotiations with Iran, which many of us believe are fatally flawed,” McCain told CNN ahead of Netanyahu’s visit to the United States in March 2015, which Obama boycotted, including the prime minister’s joint address to Congress.

Regarding the relationship between Obama and Netanyahu, McCain did not mince words.

“It’s poor, as we know,” he said in the CNN interview. “It’s the worst that I’ve ever seen in my lifetime, and that in itself is a tragedy because it’s the only functioning democracy in the entire Middle East.”

“I think [it’s] because the president had very unreal expectations about the degree of cooperation that he would get from Israel, particularly on the Palestinian issue, as well as the nuclear issue with Iran,” he added. “No other president has had such difficult relations with the State of Israel since it became a country.”

The previous year, McCain stood with Israel’s military against Hamas launching rockets from Gaza into Israel. “It’s a matter of capabilities, rather than intent, to say the least,” he said, pushing back on the narrative of more deaths among Palestinians than Israelis.

McCain continued that the lower number of Israeli casualties is because of the “Iron Dome, which is an Israeli-U.S. cooperation result, [not because] Hamas, a terrorist organization, hasn’t tried.” In fact, the senator added, Hamas is “indiscriminately targeting civilians, while Israelis are going so far to warning the people in Gaza of impending strikes.

There’s a dramatic difference here.”

Additionally, McCain blasted the Obama administration’s decision to abstain from U.N. Security Council Resolution 2334 in 2016, which condemned Israeli neighborhood building in the West Bank activity. He said the U.S. decision to not veto the resolution made America “complicit in this outrageous attack” against Israel.

Sen. John McCain with Sen. Joseph Lieberman at the Munich Security Conference in Munich on Jan. 31, 2014.

Joerg Koch/Getty Images

Despite the frosty relationship between McCain and Donald Trump, the senator applauded the president for his strategy to combat the Iranian threat. “I did not support the nuclear deal at the time it was proposed, and many of its specific terms will make it harder to pursue the comprehensive strategy we need,” he said in October 2017. “In that sense, I agree with the president that the deal is not in the vital national interests of the United States.”

However, McCain gave a lukewarm response to Trump relocating the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

“I have long believed that Jerusalem is the true capital of Israel. However, issues surrounding the final and permanent status of Jerusalem must ultimately be resolved by Israelis and Palestinians as part of an internationally supported peace process,” McCain said. “Any future relocation of the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem should be part of a comprehensive diplomatic strategy in coordination with regional partners to achieve peace and security between Israelis and Palestinians.”

McCain’s support for Israel encompassed his lifelong friendship with former Connecticut Democratic-turned-Independent Sen. Joe Lieberman, whom McCain regretted not picking as his running mate in 2008, according to McCain’s new book. McCain called Lieberman “the finest man I have ever known in my life.”

his Vietnamese captors. And whether you agreed with him on the issues or not, the fact that he continued serving his country through the rest of his life was a legacy based more on character and patriotism than anything else.

McCain mattered because unlike most politicians, his claim to office was based not so much on ideology as it was on biography. Not many U.S. presidents have been truly great men. While we can’t be sure that McCain would have been a good president, the reason he came so close to that goal was because so many thought he deserved the honor. In that sense, he was a throwback to earlier times in American history, when the presidency was seen more as a reward for meritorious service than a mere political contest. e may not need presidents to be heroes, but the founders of the American republic believed that civic virtue was essential to the survival of their experiment. The manner in which Israel’s founding generation lived was a testament to the same sentiment.

Cynics often dismiss patriotism and the idea of sacrifice for the nation. We no longer engage in the hero worship that produced generations of Americans who thought George Washington never told a lie. We’re right to keep leaders’ feet of clay firmly in view. But we still need heroes, because they are essential to perpetuating the ideals that are the foundation of American society.

Nations like the United States and Israel are, after all, based on ideals more than other considerations. That’s why we need the Trumpeldors and McCains. They point the way for the rest of us, towards the values to which we aspire but so often fall short.

May the senator’s memory be for a blessing.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS.

At the 2014 AIPAC Policy Conference, McCain recalled addressing a dinner crowd at the Israeli embassy in Washington, celebrating Lieberman before his retirement from the Senate in 2013, with “speaker after speaker after speaker extolling virtues and record and wonderment, beauty of Joe Lieberman.”

“All was true. And I was the last speaker,” McCain continued. “So, I said, ‘Look, I’m not going to tell you about Joe Lieberman, you’ve already heard. But I have an announcement: I have spent all these years with Joe Lieberman, eating salmon, riding the Shabbat elevator, not being able to ride in a car on Saturday. I’ve had to go through this all these years and I’ve got none of the benefits, so I’m announcing my conversion to Judaism.

“And Joe said that was great. Only I had to have a bris,” McCain joked. “So I’ve changed my mind.”

In a statement late Saturday, Lieberman said that “America has lost one of the greatest patriots and public servants in our history. And I have lost a dear friend.

“I was lucky to know him and work with him, and am comforted now by great memories of our times together and by the words he spoke to me last summer when he was recovering from the brain cancer surgery: ‘I want to live as long as I can, but if my life ends soon as a result of this cancer, I will have been blessed to have lived a great life. So I am going to go forward with a lot of gratitude and joy every day I can’.”

Condolences from other prominent members of the Jewish community poured in following the news of McCain’s passing.

“I didn’t agree with John McCain [on] every issue, but he was a great and good man who loved his country more than life itself,” Democratic strategist Mark Mellman told JNS. “Every American should be grateful to him. He earned the respect and admiration of all of us.”

“Senator McCain was a statesman and a national treasure — and an avid supporter of Israel, an ally he first visited nearly 40 years ago,” said American Jewish Committee CEO David Harris. “He lived a life of dignity and honor. He will be sorely missed.”

The Jewish Democratic Council of America

wrote in a statement: “We honor Sen. McCain’s remarkable legacy and principled leadership, especially on issues related to national security and foreign policy. During his 60 years of service to our country, Sen. McCain rose above politics and represented his values. He was a true giant in the Senate, and he will be deeply missed. Our prayers are with the Sen. McCain family tonight.

May his memory be a blessing.”

“Amongst his many virtues were his strong support of the State of Israel, especially related to its security, and his dedication to strengthening the special U.S.-Israel relationship. He was a steadfast advocate for a strong response against Iran’s aggression and nuclear aspirations,” said Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations chairman Arthur Stark and executive vice chairman and CEO Malcolm Hoenlein on Monday.

“His presence within the halls of the Senate and his strong voice for justice and freedom throughout the world will be sorely missed,” they added. “May his memory be a blessing for his family, our country, and all who share his values.”

“When Israel needed a strong, supportive voice in the Senate, Senator John McCain was always there. When the U.S. armed forces needed a strong, supportive voice in the Senate, Senator John McCain was always there,” ZOA president Mort Klein said on Monday. “Senator John McCain’s passing is a great loss to America, Israel and the world.”

“He worked tirelessly to support democratic values abroad, strengthen relations with U.S. allies around the world,” the Jewish Policy Center said.

“Always mindful of Israel’s security needs, he supported Israel’s missile defense and other defense programs and believed American security was enhanced by cooperation with the Jewish State.”

“Throughout his congressional career, Senator McCain stood with Israel because throughout his life he stood up for America’s allies and our shared democratic values,” AIPAC said in a press release. “As chairman and longtime member of the Armed Services Committee, Senator McCain consistently worked to ensure that Israel had the critical resources to defend herself. In times of crisis, his eloquent voice could always be counted on to speak out in solidarity with the Jewish state.

“The pro-Israel community has lost a stalwart friend, and our country has lost one of her bravest heroes,” AIPAC added. “May his patriotic life inspire us all.”

The Rosh Hashanah custom of dipping apples in honey had its start among Ashkenazi Jews.

index than bee honey and is a great source of antioxidants.

Finkel, who grew up outside Chicago but moved to Israel in 2013, first tasted date honey while studying at a yeshiva in the Jewish state after finishing high school. Silan, as the product is known there, is a popular ingredient in cooking and baking, and as a dip.

The entrepreneur had a self-described “eureka moment” when he thought to introduce it to American consumers.

Last year, Finkel and his business partner, David Czinn, launched D’Vash Organics. Since then, Finkel said, they have sold hundreds of thousands of bottles of date honey, in stores across the United States and through the com-

Flash90

pany’s website.

The product is produced in a U.S. factory that is not certified kosher, but Finkel said he is looking to produce a kosher version so that observant Jews can have it around the holidays — and year round.

“I think it goes great with apples, it goes great with challah,” he said. “I definitely encourage people to use it on those things, around the holiday time, to make the new year that much sweeter.”

Making the New Year sweeter is the whole point of the custom. Some trace it to Nechemiah 8:10, where the Jews of the Second Temple period celebrating what would eventually become Rosh Hashanah are told to “Go your

way, eat the fat, and drink the sweet.”

As for the apple, the custom was started among Ashkenazi Jews in medieval Europe, when the apple as we know became more accessible, said Jordan Rosenblum, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies food and Judaism.

Apples are in season and plentiful in the fall, when the holiday of Rosh Hashanah occurs. In 14th-century Germany, the Jewish sage known as the Maharil described the custom of dipping apples in honey as long-established and rich with mystical meaning.

Dates did not grow in Europe, but bee honey was available, so that became the topping of choice, said Leah Hochman, an associate professor at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion who researches religion and food.

“You have all these Diaspora communities that are adapting to their new environments, and over time people used substitutes that had some sort of relationship to the seven species to honor the ever-longed-for return to Zion,” Hochman said.

When many European Jews left for the United States in the 19th century, the custom traveled with them. Many settled in the Northeast, where apples grow well.

“That further cements it,” Rosenblum said.

Hochman said that as apples and honey became associated with Rosh Hashanah, the combination gained a symbolic meaning.

“Over the course of time, the tradition became crucially important for understanding our wishes for a new year, that they’re sweet,” she said.

It also helped that bee honey is kosher, even though the bee itself is not. Unlike milk from a non-kosher animal, which may not be consumed, bee honey is derived from the nectar of a flower and not from the bee’s body.

986374

By Josefin Dolsten, JTA There is no commandment to dip an apple in honey on Rosh Hashanah. But what would the Jewish New Year be without the custom?

It’s a question that bedevils vegans, many of whom won’t eat honey because it’s an animal product.

So what’s a mock chopped liver/seitan brisket/vegetarian stuffed cabbage kind of Jew to do?

Jeffrey Cohan, executive director of Jewish Veg, explains all the ways that honey production is problematic. In order to produce as much honey as possible, many honey producers manipulate bees’ natural living patterns, including clipping the queen’s wings to prevent her from flying away, and replacing the honey produced with sugar water, which animal rights activists say is less nutritious. Some vegans regard the whole process as cruel and exploitative.

“Tzaar baalei chaim is a core Torah mandate, so to start the new year right away by violating tzaar baalei chaim does not get the year off to the best start,” he said, using the Hebrew term for the prohibition against causing unnecessary harm to animals.

One of the more common substitutes is honey made from dates, according to Cohan.

Date honey is not only vegetarian but has its roots in the Bible. Dates are one of the seven species of the land of Israel mentioned in the Bible. Scholars say that the description of “a land flowing with milk and honey” actually refers to date honey, not bee honey. “[B]ecause date syrup is actually in the Torah, it makes the most sense from a Jewish perspective,” Cohan said.

Proponents of date honey cite its health benefits. Brian Finkel, the co-founder of an organic date honey company, says the product has 25 percent less sugar and a lower glycemic

THE JEWISH STAR August 31, 2018 • 20 Elul, 5778

Dipping apples in honey — to vegans, it’s a problem

13

Calif. parole board urges release for Jewish lifer

By Maya Mirsky A Jewish inmate serving life in prison without parole took a step toward freedom last week, and while his supporters are hopeful, “he’s not out till he’s out,” said Rabbi Mendel Kessler, a Chabad shliach who knows the prisoner, James A. White Jr., through his work as a prison chaplain. “But I’m 99 percent sure.”

White credited the local Jewish newspaper, J. The Jewish News of Northern California, for the turn of events.

White was sentenced in 1981 for the murder of his wife’s ex-husband. California’s Board of Parole Hearings unanimously voted to recommend commutation of his sentence after 37 years, in part because of his work establishing a community college program for fellow inmates.

The newspaper gave that program wide publicity in an article by Alix Wall.

“There’s no doubt in any of our minds that it was your article that was the impetus that forced them to deal with my case,” White told Wall last week in a phone call. “Your article changed my life.”

White, a decorated Vietnam veteran, is credited with establishing the program, which allows inmates to work toward an associate’s degree, at Ironwood State Prison in Riverside County. (He has since been moved to the California Medical Facility prison in Vacaville, in Northern California’s Solano County.) Some 1,500 Ironwood prisoners have graduated since its start in 2001.

A 2013 study by the Rand Corp. found that inmates who participated in educational programs were 43 percent less likely to return to prison within three years.

The next stop for the case is the state Supreme Court; after that, it is expected to reach Gov. Jerry Brown, who has the power to commute White’s sentence. But the hearing was the main hurdle.

One of the inmates White helped was Ryan Lo, who was released in 2014 after serving 23 years for a murder he committed as a juvenile. Lo now runs a project documenting the experiences of former inmates. He was one of 13 people who attended the board hearing in Sacramento.

“This crazy, old, Jewish guy came by my door and introduced himself, and said, ‘I’m James White,’” Lo said.

White insisted Lo take college courses. Lo completed six

James A. White, who is serving a life sentence in prison in Vacaville, J. The Jewish News of Northern California Calif.

associate degrees in prison and says White changed his life. In return, he made a promise.

“If I ever do go home, I promise you I will do everything in my power to bring you [White] home with me,” Lo said he told himself.

Rabbi Kessler, who was a chaplain at Ironwood and is now the director of Chabad of Sedona, Arizona, also spoke in favor of White. Calling himself the “odd one out” among a group of speakers that included mainly ex-inmates and veterans, Rabbi Kessler told the board that while crimes must be punished, White’s mentorship of other inmates should be recognized.

“From that sense of responsibility that creates civilization, we also have to have the responsibility to rehabilitate all these guys,” he said.

White spoke about the college program’s success during a 2014 TEDx talk at Ironwood. He also started a veterans or-

ganizations and held charitable fundraisers while serving his sentence.

“What he’s done, and how he’s turned so many lives around,” said Shad Meshad, the president and founder of the National Veterans Foundation, who has been working on White’s case for decades. “If you could have heard the testimony of these men.”

White was born in London in 1939 or 1940 and adopted by James and Margaret White, a wealthy Jewish couple in Connecticut who later moved to Texas. After three years at Texas A&M, White served 10 years in the Army and the Marines, earning the rank of sergeant, and was decorated for his service.

In 1972, White went to Southern California, where he met his wife, Nancy Napoli, and settled in Sunnymead, near Riverside. According to White, Napoli’s ex-husband began threatening White and Napoli, ignored a restraining order, and then molested one of his former stepdaughters. White went to the man’s office and shot him dead. In 1981, he was sentenced to life without parole. White was later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder; his friends say that nowadays his sentence would not have been as severe, because PTSD is more well known.

Although the hearing was a major step, White is not free yet.

Due to the circumstances of his case, the California Supreme Court also must weigh in, but his friends are hopeful.

The Board of Parole Hearings, which is comprised of 15 fulltime commissioners, was unanimous in its vote, and Lo said the number of people who spoke at the hearing was unusually high. (Wall also spoke there).

Rabbi Kessler also said that the chief commissioner told him afterward that the number of speakers made a difference.

“Basically she said it was very helpful that all those who came to testify came to testify,” he said.

White has touched many lives during his nearly four decades in the prison system, but if and when he’s released, Meshad said, White will keep doing the same work on the outside: he’s promised to come work for Meshad’s foundation to keep helping the population he’s already helped so much.

“This wasn’t a hard decision,” Lo said. “This is a special case. This is a person with a phenomenal record.”

This article was published by J. The Jewish News of Northern California and distributed by JTA.

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Continued from page 1 the eye of Eli Rosenbaum, a Westbury native who was then acting director of the Office of Special Investigations, the U.S. Justice Department’s Nazi-hunting unit, which brought civil charges against Lileikis, then 87 and a retired manager at a Lithuanian encyclopedia publishing company. Officials said he headed a Gestapo-like force in occupied Lithuania that handed over Jews to Nazi execution squads from 1941 to 1944.

With Lithuania unwilling to accept Lileikis, Rabbi Friedman said, Rambam students went to work. Using old-fashioned research skills, as Google had yet to be invented, they unearthed an extradition treaty between the U.S. and Lithuania and met with Lithuanian officials.

The experience was to be repeated through the years — in the Palij case, and in 2000, when Rambam members spoke to Australian officials about reputed Nazi war criminal Konrad Kalejs, who had fled there. Latvian authorities charged Kalejs with war crimes in September 2000. He died in November 2001.

Once Lileikis’s past life became known, the District Court of Massachusetts determined that “tens of thousands died under his command,” and ordered his denaturalization in May 1996. One month later, he returned to Lithuania on his own. Despite the legal wrangling, he was never tried for war crimes and died in 2000, at age 93.

Rosenbaum is now the director of Human Rights Enforcement Strategy and Policy for the Department of Justice. In his remarks at the White House the day Palij was deported, he

cited Rambam’s role in bringing attention to this case.

“Deserving of special mentions are the several generations of high school students at Rambam Mesivta, in Lawrence, Long Island, who, under the leadership of their revered teacher, Rabbi Zev Friedman, himself a child of Holocaust survivors, never stopped crying out publicly for justice in this case,” Rosenbaum said.

Avi Posnick, 33, who graduated from Rambam in 2003, not only learned the lessons, but has been using them professionally. Today, he is the managing director of StandWithUs Northeast, and executive director of StandWithUs New England. StandWithUs is a pro-Israel education and advocacy organization.

“In addition to learning how to organize a successful rally and stand up for the Jewish people, it inspired me to work for StandWithUs,” said Posnick, who took part in a number of demonstrations as a Rambam student, including those outside Palij’s home.

“It taught me that when you see something wrong, you cannot just talk about how bad it is, you must act.”

Hempstead Councilman Bruce Blakeman is one of several local elected officials cited by Rabbi Friedman for their support of Rambam’s actions through the years.

“Rabbi Friedman and the students have always been at the forefront of being against anti-Semitism,” Blakeman said. “I’m delighted they were successful and happy the students have that spirit of activism that really could make a difference in the world.”

J.K. Rowling...

Continued from page 1 tomatically antisemitic*, unless cleared by a panel comprising Dan Hodges, J K Rowling, Stephen Pollard and (wild card entry) David Baddiel.”

Dan Hodges is a columnist for the Daily Mail who has accused Corbyn supporters of overt anti-Semitism. Pollard is the editor of London’s Jewish Chronicle newspaper, and Baddiel is a British comedian and activist who campaigns against anti-Semitism in British soccer matches.

Maginn called on Rowling to apologize for “a sickening personal accusation against a complete stranger who disagrees with you politically,” also tweeting that “your followers surely deserve better than this kind of behaviour from you. So do I. I deserve an apology.”

Rowling, who has 14.4 million followers on Twitter, did not respond.

Maginn has tweeted against Jews in the past. In July, in response to the Labour Party’s rejection of the international definition of anti-Semitism, he wrote, “Astounding isn’t

it, that a group which claims to be silenced, oppressed, powerless manages to keep the story running day after day, week after week, month after month, in every Tory paper and on the Tory BBC. Must be terrible to be so oppressed, so silenced.”

It is not the first time that Rowling has debated anti-Semitism on Twitter. In April, she posted a screen grab of a non-Jew attempting to explain what Judaism is — “Judaism is a religion not a race” — and explained why this is hardly relevant to defining anti-Jewish bias.

She tweeted: “Most UK Jews in my timeline are currently having to field this kind of crap, so perhaps some of us non-Jews should start shouldering the burden,” she said. “Antisemites think this is a clever argument, so tell us, do: were atheist Jews exempted from wearing the yellow star? #antisemitism.”

She also responded when someone argued that Arabs can’t be anti-Semitic because they are Semites. “The ‘Arabs are semitic too’ hot takes have arrived,” she tweeted. —JTA

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By Cnaan Liphshiz, JTA Come autumn, hundreds of men and their children stream out of the dozens of synagogues of Antwerp’s Jewish quarter and walk quietly to its main park.

When they reach City Park, they gather around its vast pond and perform the ancient tashlich ritual, the symbolic casting of breadcrumbs onto a body of water. Performed on Rosh Hashanah, it represents the shedding of sins and the turning of a new leaf.

As the men perform the ritual, children excitedly wait for the fish and ducks that rush over for a piece of the action.

Whereas tashlich can be performed pretty much anywhere — including, in a pinch, a fish bowl — it has a special place in Antwerp as a cherished social activity uniting this city’s small and insular haredi Orthodox community.

Which is why many here lament the dry summer and construction that have left City Park’s pond dry, suspending one of the city’s defining Jewish moments.

“It’s definitely a loss, especially for my wife and kids,” Ahron Spencer, a 42-year-old father of eight, told JTA last week. He stood outside one of the many small synagogues that dot Diamant, a triangle comprising about 15 streets at the heart of Jewish Antwerp. “You can do tashlich alone just like you can pray alone, but it’s more respectful to G-d when we do it united as a community.”

Spencer moved to Antwerp 12 years ago from London, part of a growing community of haredim who are settling in Antwerp because it is far cheaper than the United Kingdom.

With 14 Jewish schools, Antwerp is arguably the only place in continental Europe where the amenities enjoyed by the local haredi population match those of London, New York or Jerusalem. Diamant has dozens

Two Jews walking down a street in Antwerp on Aug. 22.

of kosher shops, each carrying products with certification recognized by the range of strict sects.

The city also has several kosher restaurants, although they are popular mostly with visitors and the community’s Modern Orthodox contingent.

Antwerp’s haredi community is one of the world’s most international. Yiddish, English, Hebrew, Dutch and French are universally spoken, and taught extensively at Antwerp’s Jewish schools. (Famously, high school students here have their own bizarre dialect unintelligible to Jews in Brussels, 40 miles away — a linguistic vichyssoise featuring all those languages.)

Cnaan Liphshiz

Municipal authorities in Antwerp, where some 20,000 Jews live and vote, are not indifferent to the tashlich ceremony. Several plans have been discussed, including replenishing some of the pond, but refilling it was ultimately deemed too ambitious in a time of drought, said Pinchas Kornfeld, a rabbi and leader of the local Machzikei Hadass congregation. Residents have been instructed for the first time in decades to reduce water consumption.

The solution will probably be municipal approval for placing water tanks in the park or elsewhere, an amenity employed regularly by several synagogues in Antwerp.

In the late sunsets of Elul, the streets around the synagogues echo with the sound

of the shofar, adding to the cacophony around City Park, where haredi children scamper about on scooters alongside picnicking students and Arab teenagers.

“I think it’s a good solution,” Michael Freilich, editor-in-chief of the Antwerp-based Joods Actueel Jewish newspaper, said of the water tanks plan. “When the city just lost one of its most popular ponds, when the country’s nearer to a water shortage than it’s been in ages, it’s not a good message if that pond is filled for the needs of the Jewish community.

“Like the rest of Antwerp’s population, we will also make do without the pond and hopefully it will be refilled before long.”

Despite the drought, Antwerp still does have large bodies of water within walking distance of the Jewish quarter. The Schelte River, for example, is about one mile away.

But in a country where four people were killed at a Jewish museum in 2014, allegedly by an Islamist, “it would be for security reasons unadvisable for large groups of Jews to walk together or gather” outside the Jewish quarter, Kornfeld said.

Anti-Semitic attacks are relatively rare in Antwerp, partly thanks to the quick intervention of the local Shomrim volunteer guards.

Still, in February this year, an Arab man was filmed ripping mezuzahs off doorframes in Antwerp, and another was suspected of trying to drive his car into a man and his son on their way to synagogue on Shabbat.

Not everyone in the city’s haredi community is lamenting the suspension of communal tashlich.

“Personally, I really don’t care,” Izzy Gottlieb, 40, said. “Tashlich is not about a social outing, it’s a time of solemn reflection about one’s sins, a purification. It’s a lonely moment actually and for me, experiencing it in my bathroom is fine.”

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THE JEWISH STAR August 31, 2018 • 20 Elul, 5778

Europe’s heat wave puts Belgium tashlich on ice

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August 31, 2018 • 20 Elul, 5778 THE JEWISH STAR

18

Israel and White House through 13 presidents

President Reagan with Prime Minister Beginin 1981.

Yaakov Saar/GPO via Getty Images

JTA’s veteran Washington reporter Ron Kampeas describes the U.S.-Israel friendship through portraits of 13 of presidents, from Harry Truman to Donald Trump. This is part 2 of a 3-part series.

Gerald Ford: Backing Soviet Jews, and pressuring Israel to give back the Sinai Gerald Ford, who succeeded Richard Nixon as president after Nixon’s resignation in 1974, was an anomaly: a president for less than a thousand days who had never been elected as president nor vice president. In 1973, he had replaced Vice President Spiro Agnew, who resigned.

Ford was president at a pivotal time. The movement to free Soviet Jewry in 1975 scored two critical victories: the passage of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which denied “most favored nation” trading status to countries with restrictive emigration policies, and the signing of the Helsinki Declaration, requiring the Soviet Union to respect human rights, including freedom of religion.

Ford was the right executive at the right time. An early backer of the movement to free Soviet Jews, he was Republican minority leader in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1971 when he spoke at a Madison Square Garden rally for Soviet Jewry.

“His administration’s signing of the Helsinki accords, which established a clear link between international relations and human rights, was the most important step in the struggle to win the Cold War,” former prisoner of conscience Natan Sharansky told JTA when Ford died in 2006.

Ford inherited Nixon’s secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, who grew frustrated with what he perceived as Israeli intransigence in talks with Egypt. Kissinger wanted Yitzhak Rabin to pull back from a portion of the Sinai Peninsula captured from Egypt in the Six-Day War. In March 1975, Kissinger said that the Ford administration was “reassessing” U.S. Middle East policy, including assistance to Israel.

Ford said he was “profoundly disappointed” in Israel’s reluctance to cooperate. He put a hold on critical arms sales for six months, but could not face down congressional pressure to relent. The pro-Israel lobby garnered 76 signatures on a Senate letter to Ford “to be responsive to Israel’s urgent military and economic needs.”

Jimmy Carter: Unpopular force behind the Camp David Accords Jimmy Carter, the Democratic governor of Georgia, defeated Ford to become president in 1976. The devoutly Christian farmer was the only figure at the 1978 Camp David peace talks who was unflaggingly committed to the outcome.

Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president, was unsure how much he could sacrifice while maintaining his leadership in the Arab world. Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin emerged from a political strain that did not give up land for anything. Aides to all three advised them to save face, cut losses and give up.

Carter was the engine of the talks that brought a peace to Israel’s southern flank that has lasted until today, even through rule by the Muslim Brotherhood. For nearly two weeks, he kept the Israeli and Egyptian leaders at Camp David, shuttling between their cabins to work out each nuance.

Carter’s was also a human rights presidency: he made the implementation of the Helsinki Declaration, requiring the Soviet Union to respect human rights, a hallmark of his presidency; spoke out on behalf of Natan Sharansky; and launched the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

To the pro-Israel lobby, the flip side of Carter’s doggedness was arrogance. Carter was the first president to unequivocally declare Israel’s settlements in captured lands to be illegal. He launched secret contacts with the Palestine Liberation Organization. And he forged ahead with plans to sell Saudi Arabia F-15 combat aircraft. In 1980, he became the first Democratic presidential nominee since 1924 not to garner a majority of

President Gerald Ford meets with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in the White House in 1975. Yaakov Saar/GPO via Getty Images

President George H.W. Bush in 1993.

Jewish Chronicle/Heritage/Getty

Jewish voters. (He won a plurality, but lost the election.)

Carter remains a popular former president, but with American Jews, his relationship has become more fraught. In a 2006 book, he predicted that Israel was on a path to apartheid if it did not advance toward peace with the Palestinians. He met with leaders of the Hamas terrorist group.

“He is flawed, he’s got an obsession with Israel, a biased obsession that borders on anti-Semitism,” Abraham Foxman, then director of the Anti-Defamation League, said in 2012.

Those present at Camp David say Carter, who as governor of Georgia visited Israel and was outspoken on behalf of Soviet Jews, should be remembered for making peace.

“You could argue with positions that President Carter took over the years on this or that aspect,” said Elyakim Rubinstein, a member of the Israeli delegation to Camp David, “but what he did then was the combination of his being an engineer and a religious man, believing religiously in peace and in the bettering of human life.”

Ronald Reagan: Cold warrior who cared — and sold spy planes to the Saudis When Ronald Reagan cowed the Soviet Union into winding down the Cold War — his successor, George H.W. Bush, formally ended it — a key component of his animus toward Moscow was its treatment of Jews.

“He was someone who was truly committed to overturning the Communist system and gaining freedom for all people, but he had a particularly soft spot in his heart for Soviet Jewry,” Mark Levin, a longtime advocate for Soviet and Eurasian Jewry, told JTA in 2004, when Reagan died.

When Theodore Mann, the chairman of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, returned from a visit to the Soviet Union in 1981, the first call he received was from Reagan, wanting to know all about the trip.

On Reagan’s watch, in 1986, the Soviets released Natan Sharansky, who had spent nine years in Soviet prisons. Reagan’s ties to the pro-Israel community extended back to his Hollywood days. As California governor in 1967, he headlined a pro-Israel rally at the Hollywood Bowl.

Reagan won over the wary with his avuncular affect.

“This man cared,” Shoshana Cardin, who led a number of Jewish organizations, once said of Reagan, but his persuasive powers could also be a sharp-edged weapon.

In 1981, AIPAC lobbied hard against a proposed sale of AWACS spy plans to Saudi Arabia. Reagan met Jewish senators one-on-one and threatened to unleash dual-loyalty charges if they voted against him.

“It is not the business of other nations to make American foreign policy,” the president said. In 1981, the administration joined a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israel’s bombing of Iraq’s nuclear reactor.

After Israel’s Christian allies in Lebanon massacred Palestinians in 1982, Reagan sent U.S. troops into Lebanon — against advice from Israel.

He and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin exchanged barbs, and Begin famously chided him for treating Israel like a “banana republic.” Reagan secretly planned to surprise Begin with a peace plan that would have pulled Israel out of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Under pressure from Reagan, Israel allowed PLO leader Yasser Arafat to leave Lebanon.

On Reagan’s watch, authorities arrested Jonathan Pollard, a civilian Navy analyst who was a spy for Israel. Israeli figures were caught up in Reagan’s efforts to trade arms to Iran for the release of U.S. hostages in Beirut. In his final months in office, a lame duck beyond political pressures, Reagan established ties with the Palestine Liberation Organization.

To the chagrin of even his allies, in 1985 Reagan visited Germany’s Bitburg cemetery, where 40 members of the Nazi Waffen SS were buried.

“It is precisely because you have so impressed us in the past with your deep understanding of the need to keep the meaning and memory of the Holocaust alive that we have been so keenly disturbed by your plans,” Elie Wiesel said in a telegram to Reagan.

George H. W. Bush: The patrician advocate for Jews in distress and the Madrid peace talks George H.W. Bush had been involved in advocacy for Soviet Jewry since his days as ambassador to the United Nations under Nixon. As Reagan’s vice president, his responsibilities included efforts to free Jews in distress — not only in the former Soviet Union, but in Ethiopia and in Syria as well.

Bush quarterbacked Secretary of State George Schultz’s confrontation with the Soviets over Russia’s captive Jews and was instrumental in persuading Syrian dictator Hafez Assad to allow young Jewish women to immigrate to the U.S. so they could marry. As president, he gave the nod to the Marxist Mengistu regime in Ethiopia that led to Operation Solomon, the mass airlift to Israel in 1991.

Following his success in the 1991 Gulf War, Bush convened the multilateral Arab-Israeli peace conference in Madrid. It was marked by tensions with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, but in retrospect, Bush was as tough on the Arab interlocutors, and just the fact that Saudi Arabia, Gulf states and North African countries sat at the table with Israel led to Israeli diplomatic inroads.

Pro-Israel activists will never forget — or forgive — Bush’s comment that he was “one lonely guy” facing off against “thousands of lobbyists on the Hill,” referring to AIPAC, which pushed back against his pledge to suspend loan guarantees to Israel unless it froze settlement building. The patrician Bush couldn’t get away with tough-guy talk, and instead sounded self-pitying and mildly anti-Semitic.

His chief of staff, James Baker, didn’t help things when he reportedly dismissed the prospect of Jewish protestations by saying, essentially (but much more crassly), “They don’t vote for us anyway.”

After Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, the Iraqi strongman pelted Israel with missiles. Israel itched to respond, but Bush insisted that Israel take it on the chin so he could assemble a broad coalition to oust Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Israel complied, and its leaders were stunned when in the war’s aftermath, Bush used American actions to protect Israel during the war as leverage to get Israel to Madrid. It was galling, because Israel had been reluctant to accept the assistance in the first place.

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The European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative (ESJF), together with the Chabad-Lubavitch movement and Geder Avos Jewish Heritage Group, held a historic unveiling ceremony on Aug. 26 of a new preservation project at the Jewish cemetery in Lubavitch, Russia, the small village where Chabad Chassidism were based for more than 100 years, and where some of its major rabbis and historical figures are buried.

“Initiatives like these are vital because of neglect, economic and agricultural development, and vandalism,” said Rabbi Isaac Schapira, chairman of the ESJF board. “Around a quarter of all Jewish cemeteries in Eastern Europe were already destroyed in these regions during the Nazi and Soviet periods. Most of those that have remained lie neglected principally because their communities were wiped out in the Holocaust, and are open to the elements and at risk of industrial, domestic or agricultural encroachment or destruction.”

The preservation is the first undertaken by the ESJF in the Russian Federation, following the completion of numerous fencing projects in Ukraine, Poland, Serbia, Moldova, the Czech Republic and Belarus. It has been made possible thanks to the generous support of Joseph Popack, whose grandfather studied at the Tomchei Temimim Talmudic College, the first of many branches of Chabad yeshivahs around the world bearing the same name.

Founded in 2015, the ESJF has preserved and built fences in more than 100 Jewish cemeteries in seven countries in Central and Eastern Europe, mostly in towns and villages whose centuries-old Jewish communities were destroyed in the Holocaust. Often, the Jewish cemetery is the last testament to a once-flourishing Jewish community. Preservation is both a religious and moral imperative for Jews, as well for the maintenance of the memory of the Holocaust and its lessons for future generations.

The ESJF project in Lubavitch included the preservation, fencing, lighting and construction of a new access road and bridge at the cemetery, which was founded in the early 19th century.

The ceremony was attended by numerous guests from the United States and Israel, in addition to leading rabbis of the Chabad movement, including Rabbi Yehuda Yaroslavsky, general secretary of the Chabad Bet Din in Israel and rabbi of Nachlat Har Chabad in Kiryat Malachi; Rabbi Yitzchak Kogan, director of Bronnaya Synagogue Agudas Chasidei Chabad in Moscow; and Eduardo Elsztain, philanthropist and activist from Argentina.

“It is my honor and privilege to be able to facilitate this project,” said Popack. “The impact that this small town had has on the entire world is tremendous, and to me, personally, it means everything. My family’s destiny had been intertwined with that of Lubavitch. The spirit and flame of Lubavitch lives in our family.” —JNS

19

The JEWISH STAR

Health MInd & Body

Tick sightings are on the rise on Long Island Avid hiker Chrissy Hirsch of East Meadow said that

By Brian Stieglitz, Nassau Herald Local doctors and entomologists, who study insects, dealing with ticks is second nature for her. “I’ve been are warning residents about a spike in Long Island’s tick hiking since I was a kid,” she said. “I still remember my population, brought on by this year’s warmer tempera- first tick attachment. Left knee, deer tick.”

Hirsch often spends time at local parks and hiking tures and increased rainfall.

“Ticks dry out in the sun,” said Jim Skinner, an asso- trails with her children, Zoe, 7, and Elliot, 5. “Ticks that we find when we come home from a hike, ciate certified entomologist and the owner we burn,” she said, which she finds more of A&C Pest Management in East Meadow. effective. “I don’t recommend putting Leaf litter and tall grass give them a moist them down the drain, because there’s a place to hide, Skinner added, but after a chance they can crawl back up.” rainstorm, ticks can survive elsewhere.

According to Paul Pipia, president of Hirsch brings a pair of tweezers on Nassau University Medical Center in East every hike to pluck ticks from clothes or Meadow, this year’s “unusually short and skin. She has saved ticks in Ziploc bags to warm winter” allowed ticks to reproduce have them tested for diseases, a practice quicker than in previous years. that Skinner recommends in the case of Pipia and Skinner are among experts a bite. debating whether the discovery of two It takes time for a disease to transmit tick species — the lone star tick and longafter a bite, but the risk is greater if the horned tick — should be cause for alarm. tick is discovered engorged. Skinner urged The lone star tick was identified on victims to monitor their health and see a Long Island for the first time two years doctor if they experience any symptoms.

A deer tick ago, migrating from southern states. LongLou Russo, 47, of East Meadow, is a dehorned ticks have been found this year in Westchester molition worker who spends most of his days in grassy County and parts of New Jersey. backyards. He was bitten by a tick in May 2017, and 10 “[It is] only a matter of time before they start coming” days later developed flu-like symptoms. He was immeto Long Island, Pipia said, adding that the ticks travel in diately diagnosed with Lyme disease and his symptoms swarms, attack livestock and can reproduce asexually. subsided after two months on an antibiotic called doxy“We’re starting to see different species of insects in cycline. the U.S. that are not indigenous and bring with them Only certain ticks carry Lyme disease, although New different diseases,” Skinner explained. In recent years, York State has the highest number of Lyme cases in the the lone star tick generated headlines by supposedly country — 95,000 since 1986. causing hosts to develop a “meat allergy.” According to “Just be vigilant,” Skinner said. “You have to go the Centers for Disease Control, it could transmit alpha- ahead and check your whole body each time you go into gal, a complex sugar to which some mammals are al- the woods.” lergic.

Alexandra Dieckmann contributed to this story.

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LIer recalls bout with Lyme Two weeks after she was unknowingly bitten by a tick while hiking near Bear Mountain in the spring of 2016, Casey Brunner noticed the first symptoms of what turned out to be Lyme disease.

Brunner recalled vomiting for a month straight, but after treatment for what was diagnosed as a stomach virus, she felt healthy again. “I started going back to the gym and everything, but then I started having these burns up and down my back,” she said. She thought she had pulled a muscle.

That summer, Brunner’s condition worsened. She was treated for rheumatoid arthritis. In June 2017, she had chronic migraines that kept her from coming to work, and sometimes from leaving her bed. “I couldn’t do much of anything, and I was 22,” she said.

In February, nearly two years after she was bitten, Brunner saw a doctor at Winthrop University Hospital, now NYU, and was diagnosed with Lyme disease. She took doxycycline for a month and was back at work by May.

2 kinds of ticks American dog tick: One of the most common Long Island ticks, most often sighted in spring and early summer. They are not known to transmit Lyme disease, but could transmit Rocky Mountain spotted fever and a similar disease called tularemia.

Deer tick: Also known as the blacklegged tick, these are abundant in the fall and can transmit Lyme disease, among others. Younger deer ticks, which are most likely to transmit the disease, are often seen in the middle of summer.

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By Naomi Pfefferman, JTA Ask Ben Kingsley why he was keen to portray Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann in the new film “Operation Finale,” and he describes the traumatic childhood incident in which he first learned about the Holocaust.

The 74-year-old British actor was then in grammar school and home alone when he turned on a documentary about the liberation of Bergen-Belsen.

“I remember my heart stopped beating for a while,” Kingsley, who is not Jewish but believes he may have some Jewish relatives on his mother’s side, said in a telephone interview. “I nearly passed out. And I have been indelibly connected to the Holocaust ever since.”

He asked his grandmother about the atrocities, and she said “Hitler was right” to have killed Jews.

“I went into deep shock and was unable to counter her,” Kingsley said. “But something must have clicked in my innermost soul that said ‘Grandmother, I will make you eat your words. I will pay you back for that. You have not distorted or poisoned my mind.’”

Kingsley went on to portray Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal in the HBO film “Murderers Among Us,” the Jewish accountant Itzhak Stern in “Schindler’s List,” and Anne Frank’s father in a 2001 ABC miniseries. He also won an Academy Award for his turn as the titular Indian independence leader in 1982’s “Gandhi.”

During research for his Shoah-themed films, Kingsley became close friends with Holocaust survivor, activist and author Elie Wiesel. Not long before Wiesel’s death in 2016, the actor vowed to him that “the next time I walk onto a film set that is appropriate to your story, I will dedicate my performance to you.”

So when Kingsley was offered the Eichmann role in “Operation Finale” after Wiesel’s

rs 35 Yeagrity e Of Int

Ben Kingsley stars as Adolf Eichmann in “Operation Finale.”

death — a film that debuts Aug. 29 — he jumped at the chance. Just as he famously carried a picture of Anne Frank during the filming of “Schindler’s List,” he carried a photo of Wiesel during the filming of “Operation Finale.” “[E]very day as promised, I looked at a picture of Elie that I carried in my pocket and said ‘I’m doing this for you,’” Kingsley said.

“Operation Finale” tells the story of Peter Malkin and other Mossad agents who covertly hunted Eichmann in Argentina and brought him to Israel for trial in 1961, where he was executed. The heart of the story is the cat-andmouse game between Malkin (played by Oscar Isaac) and Eichmann, both of whom were master manipulators, according to the film’s director, Chris Weitz (“About a Boy” and “A Better Life”).

“Each one is trying to convince the other

Valeria Florini / Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures

of something,” Weitz said. “Malkin wanted to convince Eichmann to sign a paper indicating that he was willing to go to trial in Jerusalem.

And Eichmann is trying out various defenses that he will eventually use in Israeli court. So in that regard there is the subterfuge of the escaped war criminal and also the subterfuge of the spy as he’s trying to turn a source.”

As for Eichmann, Weitz said, “I think the evidence shows a very chameleon-like figure who is constantly trying to serve his own ends and ambitions.”

Kingsley unabashedly sees his character as evil.

“What other adjective can you use?” he asked. “Not only did he commit these crimes as an architect of the Final Solution, he went to his grave proud of what he had done — utterly unrepentant.”

Yet Kingsley said he chose not to portray Eichmann as “a B-movie, cartoony, comic strip villain.”

“That would have done a terrible disservice to the victims and the survivors I know and love,” he said. “It’s important for us to accept, to stomach and to swallow that the Nazis were men and women — ‘normal’ people. Twisted people, but they didn’t come from Mars.”

Weitz, 48, had a personal connection to the material. His father, fashion designer John Weitz, escaped Nazi Germany in 1933 at the age of 10. Nine years later he arrived in the United States and later became a spy for the OSS, the precursor of the CIA, interrogating Nazi war criminals and helping liberate Bergen-Belsen, “which forever changed him,” his son said.

The filmmaker grew up with his father’s war stories and ultimately helped the patriarch write multiple books about Nazi war criminals.

As research for the film, both Weitz and Kingsley relied in part on the expertise of former Mossad agent Avner Abraham, who has curated a now-touring exhibition about Eichmann. Weitz eschewed photographing the famed glass booth in which Eichmann spent his trial — a part of the exhibition — because he feared that might be “blasphemous.”

The director also said he had “endless trepidations” about depicting images of the Holocaust, and so chose to do so through the lens of the Mossad agents’ memories.

“The agents’ memoirs indicate that they all found it deeply unsettling to be so near the person who had taken part in the murder of their families,” Weitz said. “Some of them were disappointed that all this evil could have the face of this rather unprepossessing man, which felt terribly out of scale to all the damage that had been done.”

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‘Eichmann’ star Kingsley carried Elie Wiesel photo

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August 31, 2018 • 20 Elul, 5778 THE JEWISH STAR

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Ki Tavo: Fulfilling final instructions Parsha of the Week

Rabbi avi billet Jewish Star columnist

A

fter Moshe’s very long speech concludes at Ki Tavo, the last few chapters of the Torah consist of his final messages to the people, including detailed instructions for their early days in the land of Canaan/Israel: “On the day that you cross the Jordan to the land that G-d is giving you, you must erect large stones and plaster them with lime. When you then cross over, you shall write on them all the words of this Torah. … When you cross the Jordan, you shall set up the stones that I am now describing to you on Mount Ebal … There you shall then build an altar to G-d … on this [altar] that you shall sacrifice burnt offerings. You shall also sacrifice peace offerings and eat there, rejoicing before God your Lord. On the stones, you shall write all the words of this Torah in a clear script.”

In Yehoshua, we find two narratives about stones. In Chapter 4, the text describes two sets

of stones, one taken by representatives of each tribe from the bottom of the river and set up in Gilgal (4:20), and the other set “Yehoshua erected … in the midst of the Jordan, in the place where the feet of the priests who bore the Ark of the covenant stood” (4:9).

In Chapter 8, after defeating Ai, “Yehoshua built an altar to the G-d of Israel on Mount Eival. As Moshe, the servant of the Lord, commanded the children of Israel, as it is written in the book of the law of Moshe, an altar of whole stones, upon which no (man) has lifted up any iron … There was not a word of all that Moshe commanded, which Yehoshua did not read before all the congregation of Israel” (8:30-35). he idea that Yehoshua did not veer from Moshe’s instructions is a powerful message.

The only problem is that he was supposed to do this first thing after crossing the river!

The easy answer is that it was impractical, as Jericho and Ai stood in the way. They could not simply prance into the middle of the country

without meeting resistance.

However, the Tosefta in Sotah (8:6) says that is indeed what happened! They went straight from the Jordan to Mounts Gerizim and Eival, a distance of 60 mil, and no one stood in their way!

On the other hand, Rabbi Yishmael states that the stones were set up right away, but the blessings and curses took place at a reunion 14 years later (Yerushalmi Sotah 7:3).

These last views suggest that, like the Torah, the book of Yehoshua is not necessarily recorded in chronological order. Perhaps they serve to remind us that some instructions can only be fulfilled when reality allows it. The 14-year delay, for example, follows the timeframe that it took the Israelites to conquer and settle the land. They could not move forward until the mission had been accomplished. n a totally different plain, in the Oz Va’Anavah on Yehoshua, Yigal Ariel notes the parallel between Yehoshua 8 and Shemot 24. In both cases, an altar is built at the bot-

Some instructions can only be fulfilled when reality allows.

T

O

Our personal mountains and valleys From Heart of Jerusalem

Rabbi biNNY FReeDMaN

Jewish Star columnist

W

hen you are on top of a mountain, it becomes much easier to see where you are going. Everything seems so clear, and often the view is breathtaking.

In the valley, on the other hand, the slopes of the mountains obscure where you really are, and it is much easier to get lost.

In the army, when studying navigation, you learn very quickly to navigate valleys. It would make sense to stay up on mountaintops, keeping your eye on the distant destination and never getting lost, but the amount of effort and exhaustion resulting from the climb would mean you would never get there. Your distance would be multiplied tenfold, and you would pass out

long before reaching your goal. Mountaintops are beautiful, but they are exhausting.

Sometimes we are privileged to experience the joy of life’s mountains, like the birth of a healthy baby. The wonder of meeting such a new little person fills one with awe. You realize that there are great things at play in this world, that we are not alone, that we are part of something much greater.

Many are the mountains we are blessed to experience.

Some of them are towering giants, like one’s wedding day or the achievement of a lifelong dream, and some of them are hilltops, like getting an A+ on a paper or successfully asking a girl on a date. Whenever we experience these peaks, they are a chance to see life a little more clearly and take stock of our direction.

And then there are the valleys, life’s low

points, where things seem so confused and you wonder whether you are so lost that you are walking in the wrong direction.

Some are deep ravines surrounded by cliff walls, like the painful breakup of a marriage or the cold lonely emptiness of a hospital waiting room.

And like the mountains, we navigate as we best we can, hoping and praying to reach the mountain top and see clearly again. am not suggesting that this is the answer to the age-old question of why good people suffer. Moshe himself could not fathom the answer to this question (Berachot 5a), and it would be extreme arrogance to presume understanding of the unfathomable.

But sometimes we are blessed to see the people of the valley who succeed not just in climbing

They are a chance to see life more clearly.

I

History’s greatest relationship torah

Rabbi DaviD eteNgoFF

Jewish Star columnist

O

ur parasha, Ki Tavo, contains two terms that are not found any other place in Tanach: “Today you have declared allegiance [he’emarta] to G-d, making Him your G-d, walk in His paths, keep His decrees, commandments and laws, and to obey His voice. G-d has similarly declared allegiance to you [he’emircha] today, making you His special nation” (Devarim 26:17-18).

Rashi notes the unique character of these two words, then suggests his own explication: “It appears to me that [he’emir] denotes separation and distinction. From all pagan deities, you have set apart G-d for yourself, and He separated you to Him from all peoples on

earth to be His treasured people.”

Onkelos suggests an intriguingly different understanding. In his view, these terms connote the Jewish nation’s and the Almighty’s declaration of love for one another.

He translates he’emarta as “chatavta” and he’emircha as “chatvach,” both of which stem from the Aramaic word “chativah,” an object of love. This would render the verse “Today you have declared singular love to G-d … [And] G-d has similarly declared His singular love today to you.” e find many instances in Sefer Devarim of the mitzvah to love Hashem: “And now, O Israel, what does the L-rd, your G-d, demand of you? Only to fear the L-rd, your G-d, to walk in all His ways and to love Him” (10:12). “[Therefore] you shall love the L-rd, your

G-d...” (11:1). “And it will be, if you hearken to My commandments that I command you this day to love the L-rd, your G-d…” (11:13).

“For if you keep all these commandments which I command you to do them, to love the L-rd, your G-d, to walk in all His ways, and to cleave to Him” (11:22).

So while our obligation to love Hashem is clear, His love for us appears to be elusive.

Yet if we sensitize ourselves to the words of the daily tefilot, we can readily hear His message. For example, the second bracha before the morning Shema begins with the phrase, “ahavah rabbah”: “With an abundant love have You loved us, Hashem, our G-d…” and concludes, “Blessed are You, Hashem, Who chooses His people Israel with love.”

Significantly, the text does not state “Who chose His people Israel with love,” which would

Hashem’s love for us appears to be elusive.

W

tom of a mountain. Ariel compares the 12 monuments at the bottom of Sinai to the 12 stones taken from the Jordan.

In both, burnt offerings and peace offerings were brought. In both, attention was paid to two halves: Moshe sprinkled half the blood on the people and half on the altar, while Yehoshua stationed half the people on one mountain and half on the other. Moshe read the book of the Covenant to the people, while Yehoshua wrote all of the Torah on the stones. In Moshe’s case the people cried out “We will do and we will listen,” while in Yehoshua’s case they answered “Amen” to the blessings and the curses.

On the one hand, the fulfillment of Moshe’s instructions served as a lesson for the people in following mesorah, heritage. On the other hand, in a sense, it was a reenactment of Sinai, shortly after the splitting of a waterway and the formal receiving of the Torah.

What are our lime-covered stones? How do we reconnect to these events? How do we feel the gravity of our connection to the Almighty?

How do we see His mighty hand directing our lives? How do we find strength in the most special relationship we have with Him? Selichot begin this Saturday night, and Rosh Hashana will follow eight days later. If we are prepared, we should be blessed to know the answers to these questions. mountains, but also in raising the valleys with them. Maybe the first stage of changing who we are, the goal of Rosh Hashanah, is whether we can call out to Hashem even from the depths.

Can we harness our deepest pain to allow Hashem into our lives?

Christopher Reeves, the movie superstar who played Superman, was paralyzed from the neck down in a tragic riding accident. In a Larry King Live interview, he was asked how he manages.

He was once Superman, and now he would never teach his son to catch a ball.

I will remember forever Reeves’ answer: “It’s not about what you do; it’s about who you are.”

I wonder if, when we stand before the open ark reciting Shir lamaalot mimaamakim, we are not really asking G-d. We are telling Him that we are willing to call out to Him, even from the depths, and we need help.

And I wonder if perhaps we might consider that these depths, for each of us, contain the most fertile ground of all, if we could only find the strength to dig deeper.

Ketivah v’chatimah tovah, and Shabbat shalom from Jerusalem.

This column was originally published in 2011. reference an ancient historical choice, all but lost in the sands of time. Instead, our Sages formulated the prayer in the present tense, i.e., Hashem continuously chooses us in love.

Moreover, two explicit statements of Hashem’s deep connection to us are found in Shemoneh Esrei. In the very first bracha, we encounter the phrase, “l’maan shemo b’ahavah” (“for His Name’s sake, with love”). In Retzei, we find the phrase “u’tefilatam b’ahavah tikabel b’ratzon” (“and their prayer accept with love and favor”).

In sum, if we listen to what we are saying in our daily tefilot, we will sense Hashem’s loving presence enveloping us.

Little wonder, then, that Shir HaShirim is the ultimate metaphor for the relationship between Hashem and the Jewish people. It teaches us that we are never alone, for no matter how difficult our daily struggle may be, Hashem is our beloved soulmate who continually searches for us in love. In a world often frightening and alienating, this is a powerful message.

May we grow in our love and devotion to Him, and may we continue to be deserving of His everlasting love.

Angel for Shabbat

RAbbi mARc d. Angel JewishIdeas.org

I

n his essay “Fate and Destiny,” Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik delineates two aspects of Jewish peoplehood: the camp and the congregation. “The camp is created as a result of the desire for self-defense and is nurtured by a sense of fear; the congregation is created as a result of the longing for the realization of an exalted ethical idea and is nurtured by the sentiment of love.

Fate reigns in unbounded fashion in the camp; destiny reigns in the congregation….”

The camp is concerned with physical survival. We join together to fight our enemies.

We mobilize resources to defend ourselves from attack. The camp is a means of maintaining existence in a hostile world.

The congregation is concerned with spiritual survival. Yes, we need a camp to protect us from danger; but we also need to know the purpose and meaning of our community. Why are we fighting? What are our goals? Survival is not enough; we need to survive in order to fulfill our role. Rabbi Soloveitchik notes: “The congregation is a group of individuals possessing a common past, a common future, common goals and desires, a common aspiration for a world which is wholly good and beautiful and a common unique and unified destiny.”

This week’s parasha includes the passages recited by farmers when they brought their bikurim, first fruits, to the Temple. They review our history: our ancestor was a wandering Aramean; we were slaves in Egypt; we overcame obstacles and suffering. The text reminds us of our history as a camp. We were endangered;

we were afraid; we were victims of a negative fate.

But then it continues by expressing gratitude to G-d for bringing us to the land of milk and honey. It puts life in context of the Divine promises to Israel, and the many blessings enjoyed by the people of Israel. The Torah makes it clear that we are a congregation with a destiny, not merely a camp forced to defend itself. “This day the Lord your G-d commands you to do these statutes and ordinances; you shall therefore observe with all your heart and with all your soul. You have chosen the Lord this day to be your G-d and to walk in His ways, and keep His statutes, and His commandments, and His ordinances, and hearken unto His voice” (Devarim 26: 17-18). hroughout history, the people of Israel has had to act as a camp. The State of Israel and the Jewish people are constantly under physical and political attack, our survival threatened by tyrants and pundits, extremists and bigots, missiles and potential nuclear attack.

First and foremost, we need to strengthen ourselves as a camp, as a strong and determined people dedicated to defending ourselves from vicious enemies. Not one of us is safe unless we ensure the safety and security of all our camp.

Yet, throughout our history, we have understood our nature as a holy congregation.

We have stood tall and strong in promoting the great vision of the Torah; the messianic idea that teaches peace for all people; dedication to G-d and kindness to our fellow human beings. We have known why we survive; we have been a people with a revolutionary and

powerful devotion to righteousness, compassion, respect for all human beings.

Just as we need to devote tremendous energy and strength to maintaining our camp, so we need to devote energy and strength to maintaining ourselves as a congregation. Our physical survival is a primary responsibility; our spiritual flowering is equally vital.

Some Jews are “Jewish” only in response to anti-Semitism or anti-Israel attacks. They are “camp” Jews. Some Jews are “Jewish” only in their fulfillment of our religious tradition. They are “congregation” Jews. We each need to play our role in both domains — to fortify our camp and activate our congregation. ome years ago, Gush Katif was forcibly evacuated as a gesture on the part of the Sharon government. One family, whose son had been murdered by Palestinian terrorists, left its home, but the father asked to return to his house to retrieve two items. The army officer gave him permission to do so. The man returned with two items: an Israeli flag from above the front door; and the mezuzah which had been on its doorpost.

The Israeli flag: a reminder of our need for a camp, a powerful state that can defend itself from its enemies. The mezuzah: a reminder of our need to be a congregation, a spiritually vibrant, compassionate and idealistic Torah community.

May the camp of Israel forever be strong in defending our nation. May the congregation of Israel forever be a beacon of light, illuminating ourselves and others with the ideals of a compassionate, righteous and meaningful Torah.

We are not merely a camp forced to defend itself.

T

S

luach

THE JEWISH STAR August 31, 2018 • 20 Elul, 5778

On physical and spiritual survival

23

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Julia Salazar: Is she or isn’t she?

Politics to Go

JEff DuNEtz

Jewish Star columnist

N

ew York’s 18th Senate district covers the northern Brooklyn communities of Bushwick, Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Cypress Hills, East New York, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Brownsville. Its Sept. 13 primary for the Democratic Party nomination has come into the spotlight, thanks to candidate Julia Salazar.

Salazar’s strategy mimics that of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who won a June Congressional primary in Queens and the Bronx: run to the left of an established Democratic Party incumbent. In her case, that incumbent is Martin Malavé Dilan, who has been in the state senate since 2003.

Because of Ocasio-Cortez’s success and similarities between the two, Salazar has received much press coverage. Her claim to be a Latina Jew is interesting, and her professional success appeals to the young voters in her district.

Ha’aretz describes Salazar as embodying the new breed of far-left “Jewish resistance” politics. This includes the endorsement of the Democratic Socialists of America’s support of the BDS movement against Israel. An extreme

leftist, Latina, religious minority, professional woman — Salazar seems to cover all the bases for many of the district’s voters. ut while Salazar claims to be Jewish, something doesn’t seem to be kosher.

In mid-July, Salazar told the Forward that she “came from a unique Jewish background. She was born in Colombia, and her father was Jewish, descended from the community expelled from medieval Spain. When her family immigrated to the United States, they had little contact with the American Jewish community, struggling to establish themselves financially.”

She said her Jewish identity had “propelled her into politics,” and that she opened a J Street chapter at Columbia University and wrote for the anti-Israel website Mondoweiss.

But an article in the Tablet last week exposed her real background, reporting that Salazar was actually born in Miami, neither of her parents was Jewish, she was a practicing Catholic until six years ago and used to be a pro-Israel conservative. She was a registered Republican until 2017.

After the Tablet piece appeared, Salazar doubled down: “Some have attempted to question whether I am Jewish,” she wrote in a statement on her campaign website. “I have never demanded or expected that everyone recognize and accept my Jewish identity. My religious and spiritual life have never been a focus of my cam-

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paign for State Senate. I can only point out that the article that provoked this is clearly politically motivated, seeking to discredit my conversion and my Jewishness in a misguided attempt to attack my credibility as a progressive candidate.”

She claimed that attacks on her Jewishness reflected racist views of “Who is a Jew?” by rejecting both Jews of color and patrilineal descent. f course, no one cares about the pigment of Salazar’s skin; she is being attacked because it appears that she is misrepresenting herself. Even if one follows the one-parent definition of Reform Judaism, neither of Salazar’s parents are Jewish. According to Tablet, her father was a practicing Catholic until the day he died (and his funeral service was held in a Catholic church), and her mother is an ItalianAmerican and a practicing Christian.

When Salazar was 21, she “had both the politics and religious beliefs of a conservative Christian,” Tablet reported. “In a series of tweets preserved by pro-Israel activist Hen Mazzig, Salazar quotes a pastor at Apostles Church in New York in a tweet that includes the hashtag #John13, referring to a chapter in the New Testament. … One acquaintance who knew Salazar during her time as Christians United for Israel activist said that she wasn’t shy about her religious faith, dropping the occasional ‘praise Jesus’ into casual conversation.” She even appeared on the Glenn

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Beck show as a representative of Christians United For Israel.

Alex Salazar, the candidate’s older brother, told Tablet that one of their father’s brothers was a Jesuit priest, and “there was nobody in our immediate family who was Jewish. … My father was not Jewish, we were not raised Jewish.”

Their mother, Christine Salazar, indicated in a public September 2012 Facebook post that she planned on attending services at the Brooklyn Tabernacle, a nondenominational evangelical church in downtown Brooklyn.

“I went through a conversion process with a Reform rabbi at [Columbia-Barnard] Hillel in 2012,” the candidate told JTA, although “I don’t really bother to consider it a conversion because many people don’t respect Reform conversion.”

Whether one believes Reform conversion is valid or not, based on Salazar’s tweets, she was still “praising Jesus” in September of 2012, but sometime in the next three months had an epiphany and decided to become a card-carrying Jew. Maybe she went to a Rosh Hashanah dinner and decided that any faith that can combine brisket and one million carbs is the one for her.

But who cares? Why is this important?

The image Salazar has constructed — that of an extreme leftist, sometimes immigrant, Jewish Latina, professional woman who supports the anti-Semitic BDS — seems to be a paper tiger.

She is not an immigrant. She is not Jewish. Her left-wing positions are as new as her Democratic Party registration.

Whatever the positions she holds today, the real question is whether or not you can trust her.

New York’s last Nazi is deported to Germany Viewpoint

BEN COHEN

Jewish News Service

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uring my formal interview for U.S. citizenship not long ago, the interviewing officer looked me in the eye and asked if I’d ever had any affiliation with the Nazi regime.

“Um … no,” I said awkwardly.

“I’ve gotta ask,” she replied, shaking her head gently.

But 70 years ago, that was a deadly serious question — and yet it wasn’t taken very seriously by authorities. At a time when thousands of Holocaust survivors were denied entry to the United States, thousands of Nazis and their allies — from leading regime scientists to petty (relatively speaking) local collaborators — gained entry to this country.

Something of a line was drawn under that scandal this week, when the 95-year-old man known as “the last living Nazi in New York” was removed from his home in Queens by FBI officers, who carried him by stretcher onto the plane that deported him to Germany. The Ameri-

can sojourn of Ukrainian-born Jakiw Palij began in 1949, when he arrived in this country falsely presenting himself as a “Polish farmer.” Granted citizenship in 1957, it was finally revoked in 2003 after U.S. investigators established that Palij had served as an armed guard at the Nazirun Trawniki slave labor camp in Poland. But deportation did not follow because no country was willing to take him — until, that is, Germany stepped up to the plate this week. y 1943, when Palij was deployed at Trawniki, the place had evolved from a training and prisoner of war camp into a slave labor center, producing mattresses and furs for the German company F.W. Schultz and Co. The SS criminals running the camp even set up a holding company to manage their contracts with Schultz and other “clients.”

But later that year, an uprising of Jewish prisoners in the Sobibor death camp accelerated the murder of Jewish inmates in other parts of Nazioccupied Poland. On Nov. 3, 1943 — in what the veteran U.S. Justice Department pursuer of Nazis, Eli Rosenbaum, this week described as “a daylong killing spree of unfathomable ruthlessness and horror” — 6,000 Jewish women, men and children were massacred at Trawniki by the Germans and their local auxiliaries.

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There is, on one of the many small Holocaust commemoration sites on the Internet, a list of the SS men and their Ukrainian allies at Trawniki.

The list begins with the leading personnel at the camp — SS officers like Franz Bartezko and Karl Streibel—and ends with the names of more than 50 Ukrainians who served as guards alongside the Nazis, including Jakiw Palij. He may have been low down in the camp hierarchy, but he was present when, to cite Eli Rosenbaum again, that “ghastly paroxysm of genocidal mass murder occurred.”

Did Palij, during the 15 years he spent stripped of his citizenship, ever show remorse? In his view, he was just as much a victim as the Jews in whose deaths he assisted. “I know what they say, but I was never a collaborator,” he told the New York Times in 2003. Had he not worked in Trawniki, he insisted, the Germans “would [have] kill[ed] me and my family. I did it to save their lives, and I never even wore a Nazi uniform.”

Ten years later, Palij was saying much the same.

“I am not SS, I have nothing to do with SS,” he told the New York Post in November 2013. He even played the sympathy card. “My wife, she passed away two months ago,” he said. “She told me not to blame these children coming here and calling me a Nazi. They are just doing what they are taught to do. But the grown men? They talk nonsense.”

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alij’s excuses, of course, have been heard hundreds of times from other Nazi collaborators in Europe, who say that their complicity in the murder of Jews was the price of staying alive under Nazi occupation. More recently, governments in the region, including Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, have publicly honored certain Nazi collaborators on the grounds that they were also heroic anti-Soviet resistance fighters.

Through this revision of history, the murder of 6 million Jews becomes just one of many examples of inhumanity during the Second World War, rather than the obsession and goal of the Nazi regime.

Hence the significance of what looked, on the surface, like a pointless delivery of justice to an old man who will likely not live much longer. One of Palij’s neighbors in Queens, Jason Quijano, said, “I’m not somebody that wishes anybody any harm, but if he has to face justice now, I think it’s something that has to happen.

You can’t hide from anything in this world. It will come back to you.”

In Germany, Palij will be treated humanely and given all the attention that a person his age requires to maintain their comfort and dignity.

That, most probably, will be the last lesson this monster receives in the merits of the civilization that he fought in the name of barbarism.

rabbi aVi weiss

Jewish News Service

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he High Holidays are approaching. It is a time when Jews worldwide join together in the spirit of camaraderie, pouring out their hearts for a good new year.

But the lead-up this year has been different.

Rosh Hashanah 5779 arrives with the passage of legislation declaring that Israel is a Jewish state, with the right of Jewish self-determination. Supporters and detractors have characterized each other in explosive language. Too many have called the law’s supporters “racist”; too many have called its detractors “anti-Zionist.”

Such language must stop. It fans the flames of conflict, potentially leading to hatred — even violence. While a word is a word and a deed is a deed, words lead to deeds. As the rabbis declare, wise people must be careful with language.

Rather than call names, each side should listen to the other, allowing them to influence their own thoughts. Listening is at the core of Rosh Hashanah’s shofar blowing. The ritual is not only about sounding the shofar, but, as its blessing proclaims, listening, lishmoah, to its sound. upporters ought listen to issues raised by detractors. With the one-state solution gaining traction among Jews, will Arab citizens be denied an equal vote? Does a Jew-

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ish state mean a theocratic state, where religious law will be imposed against the will of many?

Recent events have increased these fears. A Conservative rabbi was picked up by police for performing a marriage outside the jurisdiction of the Chief Rabbinate. I, an Orthodox rabbi, have also felt the sting of the Chief Rabbinate.

Letters I’ve written attesting to the Jewishness of my longtime congregants have been denied.

Detractors, too, must take into account questions raised by the law’s supporters. Too many Israeli Supreme Court decisions have alienated Jews living in Israel. The Supreme Court has allowed Arab communities to exclude Jews, while forcing Jewish communities to include Arabs. Because of the importance of free speech, some borderline treasonous rhetoric by Arab members of the Israeli parliament has been permitted on the Knesset floor.

I have long felt that the founders of the state should have been more decisive and named the country the Jewish State of Israel in 1948, proclaiming its identity from the outset. Among other matters, this would have clearly declared “Hatikvah” Israel’s national anthem, Hebrew its official language, the Israeli flag its national banner and the Law of Return as applying exclusively to Jews.

I support the nation-state law, even as I insist

View from Central Park

tehilla r. goldberg

Intermountain Jewish News

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wasn’t ready. I opened Facebook and began reading a friend’s status that appeared on my screen: “As I do every fall, I double-checked the emergency box in my car today…”

I couldn’t continue reading. Fall? It’s still August! Let’s not rush summer away too fast, let’s take it until its last moment.

But the truth is that the end of summer is an interesting mash-up of seasons: juicy ripe fruits, languid outdoor nights, the sea.

But it’s Elul, too.

Even without the famous Lithuanian yeshiva tradition — on the first of the month, a klap on the lectern by the dean of the yeshiva with an accompanying call of “Elul,” the one word embodying an alarm bell — there is a subtle but perceptible shift in the atmosphere.

ruth be told, supporters and detractors of the new law have more in common than not. Too many politicize the issue and paint their opponents as extremists. The center, including supporters and detractors of the law, recognize that Israel is a hybrid: a Jewish democratic state.

There are many democracies in the world. No two are the same. Israel is not simply a Western democracy that happens to be in the Middle East. It is a unique Jewish democracy — with all its beauty and complexity.

No democracy faces the challenges that Israel does. Despite threats on all its borders, and even within, Israel tries to do all it can to adhere to democratic principles. It’s difficult to imagine that other nations facing similar threats would do the same.

This Rosh Hashanah, supporters and detractors should remember the pause between the sounds of the shofar, giving participants time to listen and incorporate each note’s meaning into our hearts and souls.

This, I believe, is our mandate, our tzav hasha’ah. Rather than demonizing, the two sides in this debate each must listen to the other. Each much see the other as an ally in the common goal of strengthening Israel as it was originally created to be: a Jewish state with inextricably built-in democratic values of individual equality for all of its citizens.

Avi Weiss is founding rabbi of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale and founder of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah and Yeshivat Maharat.

gap between dreams and reality in. Somehow the distance between us and G-d seems to shrink a bit.

Like a gentle twilight, when we might put a child to sleep, we do it with softness and kindness — we tuck the day in with a lullaby. The day peaks in its intensity, and then just like that, night comes, a time to sing.

In a sense, Elul is that gentle twilight of the year. We lay this year to rest with Selichot and prayers, our annual Jewish lullaby. As each night turns into a hope for a wonderful new tomorrow, we turn to the approaching New Year with optimism.

How do we straddle this transitional time? With change, repair, repentance: teshuvah.

We increase our good deeds and make an effort to mend broken fences. For forty days, we add a psalm unique to the rhythm of this time, L’David Hashem ori. ccording to the tradition of 19th-century Kelm Mussar, its founding elder, Rabbi Simcha Zissel Ziv, could not prepare for Rosh Hashanah without a particular teaching, which he pasted to the door of his mussar house

as if to say: don’t bother entering if this teaching does not underlay all your emotional and spiritual work.

The message on the door was, “Ve’ahavta le’reiacha kamocha, love your neighbor as yourself.”

It went on to provide textual and philosophical reasons why entering Rosh Hashanah without this philosophy amounted to a failure to grasp the essence of G-d’s kingship, but that is beyond the scope of this column.

So while Kelm was known for its intensified Elul concentration on ethics, down to accounting for every moment on the clock, its foundational criteria was a basic mindful kindness, and unity in community.

You literally couldn’t walk through the door without this reminder.

You never quite feel ready for Elul or for fall, but ready or not, here it is.

With that piercing klap: ELUL!!

A month to be paved with mindful, mussarlike kindness.

Replete with the prayerful cadence of melting twilight; only instead of a lullaby to the day, it’s a slow farewell to a year, looking forward to a hopefully renewed, healthy, better tomorrow.

It’s that time again. It’s Elul alchemy.

Supporters and detractors have more in common than not.

The alchemy of Elul

Even without the verbal prompt to arouse the masses to repentance, something is different.

One day, there’s a change in the brightness of summer daylight, a certain autumn fragrance, and you just know: Elul has arrived. f you’ve missed the subtle signs of nature, the Sephardic Selichot usher in Elul with visceral inspiration and musical prayers of repentance, leaving no room for doubt.

Every year I am caught off guard, and perhaps that’s the point.

But it’s not just the temperature that shifts during this time. The content of our words. The volume of our speech. The songs we listen to.

They all change and soften.

So much hard build-up accumulates throughout each year.

There are endless blessings to be grateful for, but so many disappointments and failures and worries.

With Elul, we start making peace with the

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that all citizens of Israel be treated equally. I believe strongly in reaching out to our Arab brothers and sisters. I visited the mosque in Yasuf that was desecrated in 2009, and reached out to the father of Mohammed Abu Khdeir, the Palestinian teenager who was murdered in 2014 after three Jewish boys were kidnapped and murdered. I did this because of my passionate belief that all humanity, regardless of religion or race, is sacred, and that every human is created in the image of God. For me, Jewish identity does not contradict universal consciousness, but is a prerequisite to it.

I have little doubt that the architects of this new law believe that it does not discriminate.

They would insist that equality for all is legislated in other Basic Laws that fully protect Arabs and other non-Jews living in Israel.

But with nationalism on the rise both in the U.S. and around the globe, the timing of the legislation is suspect.

It very well may be that lawmakers are using it to score political points.

Because of these concerns, I believe that the new law should be amended to include a phrase from Israel’s Declaration of Independence: “[Israel] will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.” These rights are central Jewish values. Such an amendment would win over many of the naysayers.

Every year I am caught off guard.

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Israel-Hamas deal an escape from Oslo gershon haCohen

IDF Maj. Gen. (res.)

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ne of Israel’s supreme interests is extricating itself from President Bill Clinton’s December 2000 “peace” parameters. Ironically, this goal is being made feasible by the crystallizing deal with Hamas over the Gaza Strip.

Both domestic and external opponents of the deal between the Israeli government and Hamas view the new agreement as antithetical to the two-state solution. Both uphold that all of Gaza’s affairs, including security, must be handled by the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority.

In contrast, Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Lieberman deem the preservation of the decade-long split between the P.A.-

ruled West Bank and the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip to be in Israel’s best interest.

Why, then, should they keep their strategic goal hidden? They wish to exploit the strategic advantages of ambiguity. Astute strategy has always been built on craftiness, the hidden dimensions more important and significant than the overt. Real cunning is often manifested in a deal whose open dimension ostensibly involves unnecessary concessions, but contain massive gains beneath the surface it. In the words of the ancient Jewish sages: “There is no blessing except for what is hidden from sight.”

To be sure, due to the need to disguise hidden objectives it is often difficult to respond effectively to criticism that focuses exclusively on the overt dimension of things (out of ignorance of their ulterior motives). This is the position in which Netanyahu and Lieberman find themselves.

Opposition leader Tzipi Livni has been attacking the Egyptian-brokered Israel-Hamas deal

for bypassing “moderate” P.A. leader Mahmoud Abbas. This is how things appear to those who stubbornly adhere to the Oslo process, which will mark its 25th anniversary next month.

But from the moment of its introduction some 80 years ago, the two-state solution did not have an unequivocal Jewish majority — and was rejected by Palestinian Arab leadership from Hajj Amin Husseini to Abbas. The decade-long split between Gaza and Ramallah may be an obstacle to the realization of Oslo, but it is an opportunity for those who wish to extricate themselves from it. hose who adhere to the Oslo logic, as outlined by Clinton and accepted by former prime ministers Barak and Olmert, describe the potential threat of failing to withdraw to the 1967 lines: Either Israel will not remain a Jewish state or it will not remain a democratic state. But there have been major developments that have put a question mark on this assertion — notably, the transfer of 95 percent of the West Bank’s

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Palestinian residents, and the entire Gaza Strip’s population, to P.A. and Hamas rule.

It is possible that Israel will find itself confined to the narrow coastal strip, which will endanger its existence — not merely because of the military threat, but also because of the suffocation of its rapidly growing population. Even if today’s IDF is able to defend Israel from within the 1967 lines as Oslo acolytes promise, how can they be sure it will always be able to do so?

It is worth listening to Abbas, who identifies the Israel-Hamas deal as an opportunity to restart the Oslo process. If such an eventuality is not favorable to him — or to Muhammad Baraka, head of the Monitoring Committee of the Israeli Arabs, which rejects Israel’s Jewish identity — then there must be something in it that holds hope for those seeking a new path.

Maj. Gen. (res.) Gershon Hacohen, a senior research fellow at Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, served in the IDF for 42 years.

THE JEWISH STAR August 31, 2018 • 20 Elul, 5778

Listen to each other on the nation-state debate

25

Josh Shapiro, Jewish AG who probed PA churches

By Ben Sales, JTA The first days of November 2016 were a tense time for America, for Pennsylvania and for Josh Shapiro, a Democrat running for attorney general in a state that looked like it might go red.

Looking to succeed a corrupt member of his own party who had resigned in disgrace, Shapiro might have been expected to spend every second of the campaign’s final days trying to get out the vote. But on the Friday before Election Day, he was in a second-grade classroom at the Perelman Jewish Day School in suburban Philadelphia talking to the students about civics and supervising a mock election that pitted kazoos vs. rockets.

Five days later he narrowly won the attorney general race, even as the state went for Donald Trump, the Republican, for president.

This month, Shapiro made a name for himself nationally, compiling the extensive report on sex abuse in Pennsylvania’s Catholic churches. The 18-month investigation names at least 300 priests accused of child sex abuse, includes testimony by more than 1,000 victims, and accuses senior church officials in Pennsylvania and at the Vatican of a “systematic cover-up.”

But even as a global spotlight has swung his way, he’s at the Jewish day school giving lectures or watching his kids play soccer and basketball.

Friends and acquaintances of Shapiro say he remains rooted in a Jewish community that helped shape his values and sense of service.

Shapiro has stayed in touch with classmates from his own days at day school. He married his high school sweetheart, and two of his four children attend his alma mater in suburban Philadelphia, the Jack M. Barrack Hebrew Academy.

“He cares very much about the people he grew up with,” said Jennifer Groen, a friend from childhood and now a senior administrator at Barrack.

“Everything he’s doing now is a continuation of what he’s been.”

Shapiro, 45, has caused reverberations globally with the 900-page report on the Catholic Church.

Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro.

It has sparked calls for reform in the Pennsylvania church and beyond. Fallout from another sex scandal in the Catholic Church has even led to demands for the resignation of Pope Francis.

“I put the full force of our office into this investigation,” Shapiro told the New York Times on Monday. “The notion this is just something that happened a long time ago, and that we need to move on, is exactly the wrong response. Child rape is child rape, whether it happened in 1970 or it happens in 2018. There is no excuse for allowing it. And there is no excuse for covering it up.”

Shapiro had an early start in politics and activism. His mother was active in the movement to free Soviet Jewry, and he followed her lead, setting up a pen-pal program with Soviet Jewish teens when he was in the seventh grade. He flew to Cleveland to speak to the Jewish community there about the cause.

In high school, at what was then the Akiba Hebrew Academy, Shapiro also took a leading role in the mock 1988 Democratic convention and was active in Students Against Drunk Driving. His

one political setback as a teen — the only election he ever lost — was as Akiba’s student president.

(The winner, who campaigned on bringing an ice cream machine to school, was Ami Eden, the CEO of 70 Faces Media, JTA’s parent company.)

“He’s honest, he’s genuine, he’s smart, he’s competent, he’s all the things you wanted to see in a student leader — which he was — and even more in this day and age we want to see in the leadership of government,” said Sharon Levin, now Barrack’s head of school, who had Shapiro as a student in three history classes.

Shapiro would take various jobs on Capitol Hill while earning his law degree at Georgetown at night. After moving back to the Philadelphia area, he was elected in 2004 to the Pennsylvania House, flipping the seat from red to blue. Against the backdrop of the state’s reputation for corrupt government, he campaigned on transparency, a moderate image and promises to pass legislation.

They remained dominant themes throughout his career, down to the clean-cut image he presents. Shapiro’s parted hair, smooth face and rimless glasses looked so formal that Neil Oxman, his former political consultant, would call him a “bar mitzvah photo.”

Two years after his election, he engineered a coup, recruiting a moderate Republican to be the speaker of a statehouse with a slim but fractious Democratic majority. Shapiro took the newly created position of deputy speaker. From there he was elected commissioner of Montgomery County, in suburban Philadelphia, and then to the attorney general’s office.

Shapiro’s focus on fighting corruption may be why criticism of him appears relatively muted. Alawyer for Catholic officials named in the report on sex abuse told JTA that he had no comment on Shapiro’s personal conduct in the case but rather was focused on its content.

Shapiro has consistently taken liberal positions. In 2005, he publicly supported same-sex marriage. In the 2008 Democratic primary, he

was an outspoken supporter of Barack Obama, defending the candidate from criticism over his relationship with the controversial Rev. Jeremiah Wright. He recently obtained an injunction in federal court to stop the 3-D printing of guns.

As attorney general, Shapiro has gone up against President Trump multiple times. He got an injunction against Trump’s order that birth control not be covered under the Affordable Care Act. During the waves of bomb threats against Jewish centers last year, he attended a meeting with Trump and other attorney generals; it was Shapiro who told the media that Trump suggested the bomb threats were a false flag effort to “make others look bad.”

“I really don’t know what he means, and I don’t know why he said that,” Shapiro told a reporter at the time.

“There’s a lot the president does that I disagree with, but I’m not some congressman that just opines all day about stuff,” he told the Times. “My job is to adhere to the rule of law and make sure the law is being followed.”

And in a climate where Democrats are becoming more critical of Israel, Shapiro is vocally supportive. Last year he spoke at a gala dinner for StandWithUs, a pro-Israel group that regularly defends Israel from criticism from the left. He spent part of his senior year of high school in Israel with his class, and his daughter is doing the same thing now.

That history may be one reason why his friends in the Jewish community want to see his career keep advancing. Like nearly any politician, Shapiro has been coy about his ambitions. But if he does run for office — perhaps governor of Pennsylvania — there’s at least one constituency he can count on.

“I would love to see him as our next governor,” Levin said. “I would love to see him as the first Jewish president of the United States. …

I and everyone else here would sign onto his campaign.”

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August 31, 2018 • 20 Elul, 5778 THE JEWISH STAR

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27

ox communities in PLUS prime Modern Or thod

The JEWISH

Parsha Chukas

• June 30, 2017

• Five Towns Candle

lighting 8:11 pm,

Havdalah 9:20

• Luach page

19 • Vol 16, No

TheJewishS

24

The Newspaper

facts

tar.com

of our Orthodo

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sustain the next generation note remarks that nual Five Towns opened the fourth antive Conference Community Collaboraon Sunday.

“What is the Torah the kids need now?” he asked. “What necessarily work worked in 1972 won’t today.”

Rabbi Weinbe d’asrah of Congrerger, founding morah Woodmere and gation Aish Kodesh in mashpia at YU, the parents and reminded that Torah will educators in attendance not be receive d if it’s not

passed down accord the time, empha ing to the middah of ingredent neededsizing that the primary in today’s chinuch simcha. is

Twenty-six speake rebbetzins, educato rs, including rabbis, rs, community ers and lecture leadrs sue that challen each addressed a key isge frum communities. families and schools in The event, hosted the Young Israel at of Woodmere, was orgaSee 5 Towns hosts on page 15

2017 • 24 Elul

5777 • Five Towns

candles 6:46 pm,

Havdalah

Photo by Doni

The JEWISH

Rabbi Moshe Weinberger, of Kodesh in Woodme Congreg re, delivered keynote ation Aish speech.

s pages 7:53 • Torah column

28–29 • Vol 16,

No 34

TheJewishS

The Newspaper

of our Orthodox

tar.com

communities

dmere as HALB There’s joy in Woo celebrates new home ch • Sept. 15,

Nitzavim-Vayeile Presenting their topics, from left: Baruch Fogel of Rabbi Touro College, “Motivating our children to motivate themselv es”; Reb-

STAR

Kessler

By Celia Weintr Photos by Doni ob Kessler

While Torah is way for the mesora forever true, the ideal children — and h to be conveyed to our how an everlas of Torah and ting love Yiddishkeit is embed their beings — ded in change “You’re still talking s over time. about what for you in 1972 and insisting thatworked what should work that’s for your kid,” Moshe Weinbe Rabbi rger, Shila”a, said in key-

betzin Shani Taragin, Tanach coordina and mashgicha ruchanit at Midreshe tor rah V’avodah, t To“Miriam: Meyaled et, Mei-

nika, and Morah”; Rabbi Ephraim Congregation Polakoff, Bais Tefilah, “Teens and technology: What you know and what you

don’t”; Rabbi Jesse Horn of Yeshivat kotel, “Helping Hachildren balance and pleasure”; Esther Wein, “Howideology to rec-

The Jewish Star is the fastest-growing Jewish newspaper on LI and in prime Modern Orthodox communities in NYC.

ognize your bashert”; Rabbi Kenneth of Congregation Hain Beth Shalom, “When it’s A-OK to say yes.”

Photos

by Doni Kessler

Star

By The Jewish joined the Hebrew The Five TownsBeach on Sunday in Long at its new Academy of chanukat habayit Avenue in celebrating a on Church elementary school

Reuven Taragin, Woodm andere. beginnings that director Yeshivat Hakotel founder Eytan Feiner of the ofhumble Commun a small “From in The ity Educatio Conferences, White Shul, “When years ago “Torah tips on had overn 50Yitzchak 8 met Rivkah: on page HALB how to build celebr and maintain Torah’s ation a strong marriage HALB tion of martial love”; Michal first menSee ”; Rabbi Horowitz, “Ahavas Yisrael: In theory of YI Lawrence- or in pracYaakov Trump e director From left: Rabbi Shenker, executiv k; Cedarhurst; MarvinWeitz; Dr. Herbert Pasterna of YILC; Dr. Mott Lance Hirt; and Rabbi Aaron / Theresa Press HALB Board Chair The Jewish Star Fleksher of HALB.

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tice?”; Rabbi Moshe Teitelbau d’asra, Young m, Israel of Lawrenc mora darhurst, “Raising e-Cesuccessful children” Rebbetzin Lisa ; Septimus, yoetzet hala-

cha of the Five Towns and of the Neck Synagog ue, “Where do Great come from — addressing grown babies ters with children. up mat”

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BALFOUR Vayera • Friday, November 3, 2017 • 14 Cheshvan 5778 • Luach page

21 • Torah columns pages 20–21 • Vol 16, No 41

TheJewishStar.com

Kessler

Cedarhurst remembers

‘InvestFest’ fair

Emet the first is “Torat shiva University,”Truth.” in to an — we believe investiture speech s in Delivering his at YU’s Wilf Campu assembly of 2,000gton Heights, with many Washin in by livestream, more listening spoke of the Rabbi Berman the five central “Five Torot, or 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. live in the world,” teachings, YU’s other central Adam,” “Torat he said, are “Torat Tziyyon, the Chesed,” and “Torat tion.”

Torah of Redemp formal cereFollowing the community parYU the , monies Fest” street fair tied at an “Invest Avenue. on AmAmsterdam est” street fair 11 was a along at the “InvestF See YU on page

Star iBy The Jewish nt of Yeshiva Univers The fifth preside on Sunday Berman, said ty, Rabbi Dr. Ari values that personify Yethat of the “five

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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

The Jewish Star

YU

Island Jonathan S. Dealer on Long Largest Sukkah toBin

Viewpoint

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

932193

To Abbas and Hamas, it was ‘original sin’

t, ny, YU’s new presidenafter the investiture ceremo for a selfie. sterdam Avenue who happily posed sought-after celebrity

Ben Cohen

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.”

STAR rael s I h t i w n i l LIersoligmoonaNelfesh B’Nefesh’s 56th charter

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Arthur James Balfour

IsraAID brings relief to U.S. disasters

19 • Vol Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico,h page • Luac and then the wildfires alah 9:15 pm, Havd in northern California.

Polizer recalls that he was wrapping ting 8:07 s Candleligh ing search and rescue,Town Five purifying water, up a visit to IsraAID’s new American z, 5777 • providing • 20 Tamu emergency medical assistance headquarters in Palo Alto on Oct. 8 and 14, 2017 and walking victims of trauma back to was on his way to a flight to Mexico to has • July psychological health in dozens of disas- oversee operations after a devastating Parsha Pinc 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

By Ron Kampeas, JTA WASHINGTON — For 17 years, the Israeli NGO IsraAID has been perform-

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in secmom Leah rhurst. mere (with in Ceda erg of Wood s on ol for Girls evah Feinb Shulamith Scho More photo ob Weintr now ar-old Elish ,” she said. at the Star / Ed trip” and Thirteen-ye been a student from there The Jewish c out. el came year-long home. ) had fesh’s magi ond photo love for Eretz Yisro l “on a 30 as olim, to come Nefesh B’Ne land. Jonamy ey ts left Israe “Part of ised who flew Her paren gh her family’s journ said.

Islanders aliyah to the prom enough to fulfill 16. a Long charter wasl for g page throu g follow,” she do this time, makin ’s El Al’s the smilin waited longing the first flight some of wanted to y, friends, it’s efully, everyone willt of boarding NBN the move to Israe “all in” and said he’s Here are on July 3, going s said she’s was board famil “Hop Hills (left) emen gh and land, ens 1 excit for other Shride page 16 throu ised l, Gard on July carpet While the olim on emerged the prom of the olim, teaching shua of Kew and her schoo See. 201 carpet to Her love of Israel than Yeho — he retired from holy land, ble for many the to palpa time. long ted visits the dream ys wanted

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Parsha Bam

Weintrob

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

To British, Palestine just another colony

• Print edition is welcomed into more than 12,000 households in Orthodox communities in Nassau, Queens, Brooklyn, the Upper West Side, and Riverdale

Star the loss,

By The Jewish to remember Cedarhurst pausedmiracles of 9/11, at the the n on Sunday. the heroism, and commemoratio village’s annual ion, Rabbi Shay Schachter In his invocat the Young Israel of Woodof the Master and (top right photo) G-d, that pray h all the strengt mere said, “we world, grant us Creator of the to stand firm together against e of bigotry, of and the fortitud of extremism, all forms of terror, and of all evil that can be hatred, of racism,t forms in our world.” who found in differen obligation to those “We have a solemn on Sept. 11th to never injured Benjamin died or were ed,” said Mayor forget what happen). “We saw evil, but we also Weinstock (bottom America.” survivor saw the best of (middle), a 9/11 78,” reAri Schonburn Fate of “Miracle and of was waitauthor He and nces that day. called his experie rs on the 78th floor when elevato ing to change hit.

Chief the first plane Fire Department rhurst Lawrence-Ceda the playing of l, saluting during victims.

David Campel 9/11 names of local Taps, read the

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Presenters at Sunday’s confere from left: Elisheva nce, director of religious Kaminetsky, SKA guidance, limudei kodesh, “Empow ering choices” ; Rabbi

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, repea with her said. e alwa ng aliyah now?” communityCedarhurst, she said “we’v pm, Havd trob ens Hills away, maki alah 8:58 ulamith in of Far Rock to the question, “Why of Kew Gard ”

By Ed Wein i Newm •an Luac h pageer y time.

Danit TayriThe finallishS For Chan it’sJew joinren, the answ 31 • Vol tar.com go, but now 20 dmere, and child Jewish!” she said. 16,ofNoWoo husband The c to us. “We’re Elishevah Feinberg fesh’s July 3rd magiNewspaper of was obvio our Ortho sh B’Ne ear-old dox comm Thirteen-y olim on board Nefe unities other 201 ing

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ing 70th wedd ie ted on the Bonn s ’s Epish Star repor Shoah survivors ’s 93rd munity New ago and St. John the Far and h, The Jewis ztajn sula, Herald Com Last Marc Woodmere residentsion of Jack Rybs five years ey Bessen, Hospital closed the Rockaway Penin in patients ry of occas

By Jeffr . . On the anniversa sula nt jump ital on Rybsztajn his story continues 35 perce When Peninbecame the hosp and Jack to get rienced a ital million on July 12, desperate copal Hosp medical center expe a $10.15 birthday ztajn was located. trob Rybs were Wein obtaining to help complete ives d, Jack Rockaway y services.

By Celia celebrated g which war ende e a few relat emergenc Health ing primaryiAfter the to Brussels, wher cargo trains, durin using its ’s officials last weekDepartment of creat legal de given on gart ately St. John York State that will also inclu 111-year-old hosp g voyages from Stutt then ultim e sister-in-law the New ns The two darin away Turn arrested, futur grant from services renovatio across the street. sels Through vered and y at 275 Rock le and their ed to Brus emergenc in a building right ry center he was discoBrussels, the coup They had head had left for in ey. page 14 ay ite ambulato the peninsula. space on off-s dism ’s care an residence leted the journ on ates sites who to their See St. John tal also oper ence and similar finally comp ’s sister Cyla, ed. er restauJack e they arriv ate at a kosh g that a pike in Lawr to meet one day beforthe Rybsztajns wall statin Palestine Brussels, a placard on the looking for anyone While in was e to this e they saw address, ztajn wrot had been rant, wher with a Brooklyn ved. Rybs who bs, , survi ztajn Mr. Jaco ZTAJN who of Yechiel Rybs age containson s, a pack plus named RYBS after ward g he is the Brussels, man, sayin nephew. Not long was received in s. in Mr. Jacobs’ and a pair of tefill to the United State ,” Rybsztajn l years ing a tallis orizing his trave which ium for five were so nice, d. So papers auth “we stayed in Belg Brussels Polan However, gentile people of went through in Shaydels, we the “The d led. what tione recal s into their ” He men a relief after was such coming to America.omed the Rybsztajn on page 7 h d welc See Shoa we stalle couple who , Isaac. a well-to-do -grandson

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Teach our childre n well 5 Towns confere nce told: Deliver Torah with joy to • 6 Tamuz, 5777

THE JEWISH STAR August 31, 2018 • 20 Elul, 5778

d n la Is g n o L x o d o h t r O o t y e k r u o y is r a t S h …

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