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GAZA Vayeitzei • Nov. 16, 2018 • 8 Kislev, 5779 • Torah columns pages 18–19 • Luach page 18 • Vol 17, No 44

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Kristallnacht 80 years on Teddy Roosevelt’s great-grandson joins 2 5T rabbis to mark event

At the Five Towns’ Kristallnacht remembrance, at Kehillas Bais Yehudah, from left: Theodore Roosevelt IV and rabbis Yaakov Feitman and Ephraim Polakoff. Ed Weintrob / Jewish Star An Israeli bus traveling near the border with Gaza burns after being hit with Palestinian mortar fire on Monday. More than 450 rockets were fired into southern Israel from Gaza before a cease-fire took hold late on Tuesday. IDF Spokesperson

Avoidable war becomes inevitable ariel kahana Makor Rishon

T

he Fourth Hamas War, as this week’s conflagration may soon be called, comes as a surprise to no one. For the past six months, Hamas has been staging provocations and firing on Israeli communities at will.

Rather than taking out those who breach the border fence or launch incendiary kites, the Israel Defense Forces and the political echelon chose to let things slide, contain events, and show forbearance.

They decided on restraint and have been humiliated.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, like his predecessors Ariel Sharon and Yitzhak Rabin in their later years, has stated that he does not want “pointless wars.” To paraphrase Winston Churchill: Netanyahu was given the choice between war and dishonor. He chose dishonor — and he got war.

As was the case before the 2014 Gaza war, Hamas is not as sophisticated as Israeli intelligence officials think. It does not have geostrategic considerations, and its activities are not based on some long-term plan. It is much simpler than that: Hamas has power, therefore it shoots.

Hamas is all about killing Jews. Thus, when some-

one rubs it the wrong way — Egypt, the Palestinian Authority or Israel — its response is to fire on Israel.

Unfortunately, this is the only language Hamas speaks and the only modus operandi it has. That is why the protection Hamas gets from Qatar, in the form of cashstuffed suitcases, will not help prevent its unstoppable march to war.

However, rather than making sure that those who fire at it are held accountable, Israel has accepted the defense establishment’s convoluted explanations on how this is just part of the ongoing feud between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. This misguided approach has even led to Netanyahu assigning more blame to PA President Mahmoud Abbas than to Hamas. Abbas is no saint, but despite his many flaws he does not dispatch terrorists into Israeli territory. Hamas does.

Looking back, it is clear that a decisive Israeli response in the spring would have prevented war in the fall (and some observed this in real time). Netanyahu, the IDF chief of staff, and the Diplomatic-Security Cabinet should have sided long ago with the hawkish approach advocated by Education Minister Naftali Bennett, Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan and Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, who wanted to eradicate the threat when it was small.

Perhaps if Israel had taken this approach, the past eight months of frequent rocket warning sirens, incendiary kites and widespread fires would have looked very different. Moreover, the use of force earlier would have prevented or led to a scaled back military effort now.

By Ed Weintrob The Five Towns commemorated the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, last Wednesday evening at Kehillas Bais Yehudah Tzvi in Cedarhurst.

Rabbi Yaakov Feitman, the shul’s morah d’asra, said it was appropriate for the remembrance to take place in a shul because that is where the tragedy began.

“The Nazis tried at first to destroy the spirit and soul of Israel,” he said.

“They didn’t succeed, and the proof is that we are all here tonight.”

“The destruction began on Kristallnacht with the burning of shuls, yeshivos and Sifrei Torah, and since that’s how the destruction began, that’s how the rebuilding must begin,” said Rabbi

Ephraim Polakoff of Congregation Bais Tefilah of Woodmere, in whose shul the annual Five Towns commemoration originated some years ago.

“There’s no more fitting venue than a shul to hold a Kristallnacht event, no greater testament to the rebuilding of Judaism,” he said.

“Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, represents the spirit of the Jewish people,” Rabbi Polakoff said.

“The Jewish people have grown to be numerous like the sand by the seashore” — as Hashem promised Avraham — “yet we’re are also like metal,” which when “destroyed and broken can be melted down and reconstituted. As much as we’re shattered [and] See 80 years on page 6

Brafman teams with Dershowitz for JNF Two Zionists from Brooklyn — one a prominent Lawrence-based criminal defense attorney, the other a renowned constitutional scholar — came to Congregation Beth Shalom on Sunday to help kick off the Jewish National Fund’s Five Towns community campaign.

Attorneys Benjamin Brafman and Alan Dershowitz engaged in a wideranging discussion of global and Israeli issues. They kibitzed on how they were not the best yeshiva students, with Brafman posing questions to DershoSee JNF on page 6

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about Israel need to know that peace with the Palestinians requires more than just goodwill and has little to do with Netanyahu’s positions on West Bank settlements.

Abbas and Fatah seek to regain the control of Gaza, which they lost to Hamas in the wake of Israel’s withdrawal in 2005. But the reason Abbas is serving the 14th year of thw four-year presidential term to which he was elected after the death of Yasser Arafat is because he fears that another election will empower his Hamas rivals.

Abbas is too frightened of Hamas to sign even the most favorable peace deal with Israel — assuming, that is, that he actually wants peace. But if Trump’s attempt to create a two-state solution on the West Bank did succeed, it’s just as likely that it would lead to Hamas operating on the West Bank, or even running it. f Netanyahu’s approach to the peace process is generally supported by a majority of Israelis — and his opponents are heading towards the next elections pledged to carry out similar policies — it is because most Israelis understand that if their country withdraws from the West Bank, the situation they face with Gaza will be replicated in a far larger and more strategic territory.

Imagine a West Bank as armed and as dangerous as Gaza is now, and you are seeing what most Israelis think is the only logical outcome of a two-state solution under the current circumstances. Until the Palestinians resolve the conflict with Hamas — and until either faction demonstrates a willingness to end their long war by recognizing the legitimacy of a Jewish state, no matter where its borders are drawn — two states is a recipe for more bloodshed, not peace.

Americans who purport to care about Israel should focus on that reality, and realize that any effort to push Israel to give up more territory in its absence isn’t merely unfair, it’s a greater obstacle to real peace than any settlement.

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

Jonathan S. tobin

Jewish News Syndicate

D

oes it really matter what started the shooting at the border between Israel and Hamas-run Gaza?

To outward appearances, it looks like it was something of an accident when a routine security operation inside Gaza went awry and Israeli troops were fired upon, leading to bomb strikes to extricate them. That was followed by the largest barrage of rockets fired at Israel since the war that took place in the summer of 2014.

Hamas’s decision to launch hundreds of rockets, which resulted in the death of one man (a Palestinian working in Israel) and the wounding of more than two dozen as of Tuesday morning, is being discussed in the international media as just one more episode in an endless “cycle of violence,” in which the Jewish state is as guilty as the Islamist terror groups that rule Gaza.

But whether this episode leads to a further escalation or a return to relative quiet — as the government led by Netanyahu clearly hopes, agreeing to a cease-fire on Tuesday — the ongoing violence demonstrates that it would be utter folly for the Trump administration to push for a new round of peace negotiations with Palestinians anytime soon. he problem isn’t a lack of negotiations, it’s the lack of conditions that could possibly lead to a comprehensive peace that dictates that Trump’s foreign policy team will be wasting its time if it pushes ahead with plans to foster what Trump has called the “deal of the century.”

Far from seeking to provoke Hamas, the Israeli government has been doing its best to keep a lid on the situation. In the days before the

T

I

A house hit by a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon on Tuesday.

Hadas Parush/Flash90

flare-up, Netanyahu went so far as to allow $15 million in cash donated by Qatar to be driven into Gaza to pay the salaries of Hamas government officials. That was part of an effort to lessen the tensions that have risen this year due to the Palestinian Authority’s decision to cut off its financial support of Gaza.

What those who talk about the cycle of violence miss is that although Palestinian factions speak as if their sole focus is their century-long war on Israel, their true enemies are each other.

The goal of Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah Party is to wrest control of Gaza from Hamas, and it is willing to increase the misery of its poverty-stricken inhabitants in order to achieve it.

Since March 30, Hamas has orchestrated weekly attacks on the security fence alongside

Gaza in the name of the “right of return” — namely, the Palestinian hope of eradicating the Jewish state by advocating for some 5 million descendants of the 1948 Palestinian “refugees” to live there. But what Hamas wants now is to force Israel and Egypt to end the blockade that seeks to isolate a terrorist state that poses a threat to both nations. srael cannot allow an open border for Hamas; that would mean an influx of Iranian weapons that would strengthen the terrorists’ hold on Gaza. But it also wants a return to the quiet that reigned before Hamas’s and Fatah’s maneuvers led to violence, without having to launch an invasion that will lead to the loss of even more lives — and more missiles aimed at Israeli population centers.

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THE JEWISH STAR November 16, 2018 • 8 Kislev, 5779

Hamas rockets and failed idea of two states

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J Street’s fake numbers and impossible dream M

ore than three-fourths of American Jews want Israel to be reduced to just miles wide — narrower than Washington or the Bronx. How can that be?

The answer, of course, is that it can’t be.

But J Street is now making that claim anyway, and some media outlets fell for it.

J Street wants to see an independent Palestinian state established alongside the pre1967 armistice lines, which means that Israel would be a mere nine miles wide. It would

be very helpful to J Street’s efforts if it could claim that most Jews support it. But most Jews don’t. So what’s a J Streeter to do?

Simple. Take a poll. Word the question as non-threateningly as possible. Don’t say a word about making Israel nine miles wide. Pretend it will bring peace. And then presto! J Streeters have the “poll results” that they want.

Sure, it’s disingenuous. But this week, that’s exactly what J Street did.

The J Street poll began with a list of six points that supposedly would be part of any agreement creating a Palestinian state. The respondent was then asked whether he or she supports creating a Palestinian state. The six points have either been rejected outright by the Palestinian Authority or are simply wildly implausible.

“A demilitarized Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.”

Not only has the P.A. repeatedly refused this demand, it is already building an army.

The P.A. has the largest per capita security forces in the world. They are already the size of a de facto army. The P.A. will never dismantle them. And if those P.A. security forces decided that they needed to upgrade their “defensive” capabilities to include, say, armored vehicles or missiles, do you think the international community would do anything to stop them?

“Internationally recognized borders based on the lines that existed in 1967, with mutually agreed land swaps that allow for most Jewish settlers in the West Bank to be inside Israel while the Palestin-

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ians get comparable land areas in return.”

P.A. spokesmen have said time and again that they will not agree to any swaps, and that every Jew must be evicted from Judea and Samaria.

“Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem become part of the new Palestinian state while Israel retains control of Jewish neighborhoods and the Western Wall in Jerusalem.”

The P.A. has said over and over that all of the Old City of Jerusalem, including the Jewish Quarter and the Western Wall, is “occupied Palestinian territory.” The P.A. has said over and over that the Kotel is really the “Al Buraq Wall” and a Muslim religious site. Why pretend that they don’t mean what they say?

“International forces to monitor the new Palestinian state and border crossings.”

Israel has enough experience with international forces to know that they are a sad joke.

The international forces now in southern Lebanon have allowed Hezbollah to set up 150,000 rockets along the border with Israel.

In the lead up to the Six-Day War, the international forces in the Sinai packed up and fled in 1967 as soon as Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser demanded they leave.

“Financial compensation for Palestinian refugees while allowing a limited number of refugees to return to Israel if they meet specific family reunification criteria, and the Israeli government approves.”

“Limited number” is a clever way of making the number sound small without naming it. 10,000? 100,00? 250,000? By the time the number is picked, Israel will have been so cowed by international pressure that it won’t be able to say no.

“The Palestinians recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, and Israel recognizes the Palestinian state as the nation-state of the Palestinian people.”

How many times do P.A. leaders have to say that they will never recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people before they are finally believed?

And, most important of all, notice what’s missing from J Street’s description of a Palestinian state: Israel’s borders. Because J Street doesn’t want poll respondents — or anybody else — to know that what they are talking about is reducing Israel to borders so narrow that an Arab tank column could cut the country in half in a matter of minutes.

That’s how they got 78 percent of respondents to say they “support creating a Palestinian state.”

Now imagine if they were asked a question along these lines: “If a Palestinian state were established in the disputed territories, Israel would then be nine miles wide at its midsection, about as wide as Washington or the Bronx. Do you support a peace agreement that would establish such a state?”

How many American Jews do you think would say yes to that? Maybe it’s time some of our Jewish and Zionist organizations find out.

Stephen M. Flatow is the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian 990909 terrorist attack in 1995.

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o, how was your day? In southern Israel early this week, thousands of families had to spend the night in bomb shelters, after Hamas terrorists in Gaza rained down more than 450 rockets in the space of four to five hours.

That is more than one rocket every minute, representing the most number of rockets fired at Israel in one day — ever!

The bombardment was unrelenting Imagine if even one, just one, rocket was to hit an American city? How would the United States react?

The only reason there have not been more casualties is not because of lack of effort on the part of Hamas, but because whereas they invest millions of dollars in foreign aid for tunnels and rockets, Israel invests money in fortified bomb shelters and Red Alert advanced warning systems.

If you’re lucky, the Red Alert affords you the “luxury” of 15 seconds to find adequate shelter, though often even less, depending how close to the Gaza border you are.

So far, rockets have struck a number of homes, a bus and many residential areas, causing tremendous damage and destruction.

What Hamas is doing is essentially committing a double war crime: It is indiscriminately firing at Israeli civilian areas while hiding be-

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hind Palestinian civilians and using the Palestinian people as human shields, with Israelis hostage to their terror.

No one should tolerate even one rocket fired at them, let alone more than 450!

Yet one of the most striking observations is the lack of outrage from the international community, which showed barely a whimper as Israel was bombarded with rockets.

Only two weeks ago, on Oct. 27, a gunman entered the Tree of Life Or L’Simcha Synagogue in Pittsburgh and murdered 11 Jews, shouting “all Jews must die.”

In essence, Hamas is no different. It is a genocidal terrorist organization sworn not only to the destruction of Israel, but to the murder of all Jews.

All those who, rightfully so, condemned the Pittsburgh shooting without reservation must now also condemn Hamas.

Although Hamas, a jihadist terror organization, and the Pittsburgh shooter, a neo-Nazi, might follow different ideological paths, they are united in their bloodthirsty unrestrained hatred of the Jewish people and the Jewish state. To suggest otherwise would be not only a display in gross hypocrisy and naiveté, but an insult to the 11 victims of Pittsburgh and those killed at the hands of Hamas. srael, like any sovereign nation, has the inalienable right and duty to take whatever steps necessary to defend its citizens.

But the international community also has a role to play.

The fact of the matter is that attacks like this do not occur in a vacuum. With the exception See Lessons on page 6

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THE JEWISH STAR November 16, 2018 • 8 Kislev, 5779

The world must hold Hamas accountable

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In Baldwin, survivor recalls past to face future

JNF...

Continued from page 1 witz whose responses showed that he, like Brafman, is at the top of the legal game.

Dershowitz emphasized that Israel is a “lawfully created country … defended by the sword, but created by the pen,” noting the Balfour Declaration and multiple UN resolutions.

Dershowitz said that he works to insure that support for Israel remain bipartisan, noting that he supported President Obama even though he disagreed with the Iran nuclear deal and Obama’s failure to denounce anti-Israel resolutions at the UN. He supports President Trump’s move of the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Dershowitz said that he’s advised presidents on Israel since Clinton.

The program was cut short because Dershowitz’s mother-in-law died. She was 99, and

way of life and a boycott of Jewish businesses ensued that ended in the suicide of 300 Jews.

Reich’s family left Berlin for Yugoslovia, where they thought they would be safe.

At the start of the Holocaust, Reich’s mother (their father died in 1940) placed him and his sister with separate families. He was safe for some time, but was caught and arrested by the Gestapo. An officer beat him during questioning.

“He did that for a couple of hours,” Reich said.

He was eventually sent to a prison in Austria, where one day he looked out the window and saw his mother with a group of women — the last time he saw her. “I don’t know what happened to her,” he said. “I’m not interested in knowing what happened to her because I do not want to picture that.” he had to leave for South Carolina.

“The Jewish National Fund is so important, no organization is more important in building Israel,” he said.

Recognized during the program were Mark and Sharon Ingber, parents of University of Michigan student Abigail Ingber. Abigail created a national stir after UM Professor John Cheney-Lippold declined to write her a letter of recommendation to study in Israel. The university disciplined Cheney-Lippold.

Both parents said they were not surprised that Abigail stood up to the professor because of her strong Jewish background that includes her maternal grandmother, Molly Eichler, who was first woman synagogue president in New Jersey.

Founded in 1901, the Jewish National Fund has planted more than 250 million trees, built more than 250 reservoirs and dams, developed over 250,000 acres, created more than 2,000 parks and provided the infrastructure for more than 1,000 communities in the land of Israel.

—Jeffrey Bessen, Nassau Herald

80 years...

Continued from page 1 broken, as much as occasionally we’re melted down, we can always be rebuilt into something stronger and greater and more beautiful than before.”

The evening’s guest speaker, Theodore Roosevelt IV — great-grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt — said that “the Holocaust was not created by one maniac who hypnotized everyone else [but] was a collaboration among people who chose to forget and in so doing surrendered their best selves to their worst.”

“Remembering is one of the most moral actions we can undertake,” he said.

Roosevelt recalled that in the years preceding Kristallnach and World War II, his grandfather, Theodore Roosevelt Jr., the eldest son of

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the president, “became increasingly concerned about anti-Semitism in the United State and spoke out against it.”

“It must never happen again,” he said.

Rabbi Feitman said this year’s event had extra meaning because of what happened in Pittsburgh, where “we lost 11 holy, beautiful souls, kedoshim.”

Rabbi Polakoff concluded, “May the Jewish people never witness such destruction ever again and may we continue to rebuild our institutions and the fabric of our faith to even greater and greater heights.”

David Klein, son of survivor Cecile Klein, read his mother’s poem, Promise. “We must be remembered, all must know,” she wrote.

The annual event was organized by The Jewish Star’s Kosher Bookworm columnist, Alan Jay Gerber, and by Judith Greenberger, in tribute and memory of Rabbi Binyomin Kamenetzky, Andrew Parise, Joseph Ash, and Cecilie Klein.

community is doing the same.

Human Rights Watch is nowhere to be seen because for them, the rights of Israelis are seemingly not a priority. Meanwhile, Linda Sarsour, the darling of the progressive left and best friend of notorious hate-monger Louis Farrakhan, who only a week before the Pittsburgh shooting called Jews “termites,” is also conspicuously absent.

Enough is enough!

Even as a cease-fire took effect late on Tuesday, the situation on the ground remained incredibly tense.

Unless the international community and the true champions of human rights start to hold Hamas to account, they will only further embolden and empower this terror group, becoming complicit in every rocket and mortar fired at the Jewish state and Israeli citizens.

In the meantime, as I was writing this article, another 25 rockets were fired at Israel from Gaza. So again, I ask you, “How was your day”?

Arsen Ostrovsky is an international human rights lawyer.

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Continued from page 5 of the current US administration, they are the direct result of the international community’s ongoing refusal to hold Palestinian terror groups like Hamas to account.

How can it be that there is a supposed “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza when clearly Hamas has enough money to fire off hundreds of rockets at Israeli civilians in one day?

International leaders cannot say they truly care about peace when they continue to single out the Jewish state for special opprobrium, while repeatedly turning their backs to the rocket attacks from Hamas and the funneling of foreign aid intended for the welfare of Gazan civilians to build a growing terrorist infrastructure.

However, it is not just lawmakers from Europe and the diplomats at the United Nations who are turning their backs; the human-rights

Just as the Holocaust didn’t begin with Kristallnacht, it did not end with Victory in Europe Day. Jews who survived the Shoah were persecuted in their home countries, some dying upon return.

Asked if he sees similarities between attacks on Jews in Europe and hate crimes committed in the United States today, Reich said no. The biggest difference, he said, is that people in Germany did not speak up against the government’s actions, whereas people in America do. “I have great faith in Americans and I have great faith in America,” he said.

Royi Shaffin, spiritual leader of the SBJC, said it was important to hear Reich’s speech.

“It is so important to remember the past as we face the future,” he said.

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Reich was sent to numerous camps, eventually to Auschwitz. Some who were sent to Auschwitz were immediately killed, but others were kept for weeks before sent to gas chambers. “I still hear their crying, and screams and begging because they knew what was going to happen,” he said.

He and the other prisoners were fed roughly 400 calories a day, the equivalent of two pieces of white bread with butter. It wasn’t until late December 1944, when he was transferred to Mauthausen in Austria, that he had something warm to drink — the water that fell off a train wheel.

“It was the best thing I had in my entire life,” he said. “I don’t think I will ever forget that.” Mauthausen was liberated in May 1945.

Those who were still alive were fed military rations by US troops.

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By Anthony O’Reilly, Baldwin Herald For Werner Reich, the tragedy began in 1933, five years before Kristallnacht, when his father was stripped of his job and he was banned from going to school. “When Jews were deprived of livelihood, safety and school, that’s when my Holocaust started,” Reich, of Smithtown, said at the South Baldwin Jewish Center on Nov. 11.

The Berlin native has spoken all over the world about surviving the Shoah and the persecution Jews faced in the years leading up to it.

He said he will return to Germany at the end of this week, a trip he said is important to him even though he is not looking forward to it.

“I don’t want to die with hate in me,” he said.

Within his first six months of power, Hitler implemented laws that stripped Jews of their

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November 16, 2018 • 8 Kislev, 5779 THE JEWISH STAR

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Firefighters battle a blaze at a Salvation Army camp in Malibu on Nov. 10.

Nearly 500 miles to the south, residents of Malibu, Thousand Oaks, Oak Park, Calabasas, Westlake Village and other nearby towns are waiting to find out if they still have a home. As of Sunday afternoon, fire had taken two lives, destroyed some 177 homes and burned 83,400 acres. With a “Red Flag Warning” in effect and heavy winds expected over the next 36 hours, the danger is far from over.

“Most people are in total shock right now,”

Torah scrolls are rescued The spiritual leader of a Reform temple in Thousand Oaks, California, risked his life to save the Torah scrolls in his synagogue, snatching them before they were burned in one of two massive wildfires that have claimed more than 6,800 homes and killed more than 40 people.

When a neighbor roused Barry Diamond from sleep to let him know that their neighborhood was under a voluntary evacuation order, instead of putting his personal effects together to escape, he drove 20 minutes to Temple Adat Elohim in one of the areas most threatened by the fires.

When he arrived, he found fire approaching the building.

“There’s a hill right across the street from our temple — it was fully engulfed — and there was a raining down of sparks onto our property,” he told JTA on Monday.

But that didn’t deter Diamond, 56, from dashing into the building to save his congregation’s holiest objects. Setting off an alarm, he entered the sanctuary and grabbed two of the congregation’s Torah scrolls — one had survived the Holocaust, the other was dedicated only six months earlier.

He then ran in a second time and, with the help of the synagogue president, Sandy Green-

stein, brought out the remaining two scrolls as well as the Megillat Esther.

“I would say I was a cross between nervous and determined to get these out,” Diamond said. “Sometimes you just have to put your head down and do the work and worry about your feelings later.”

As he loaded the Torahs into his car, Diamond looked back and saw that plants behind the sanctuary were ablaze. A photo shows a wall of red-tinted smoke behind a nearby stand of trees.

Diamond and his wife, as well as most of his congregants, have had to evacuate their homes.

As far as he knows no one has been hurt, but the congregation’s building sustained damage.

The fires hit the community at an especially trying time: Only a day earlier, congregants learned that a deadly shooting at a nearby bar left 12 people dead. Diamond said two congregants were at the bar at the time of the shooting and know people who were killed.

Diamond is trying to be there for congregants affected by either or both tragedies.

“There are people who lost their homes, there are people who are displaced, and we have to acknowledge and recognize them and be there and support them,” he said.

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said Rabbi Levi Cunin. “It takes just a few minutes for a house to be completely burned down.”

Rabbi Cunin himself hasn’t been home in days. He and his family left on Friday after a mandatory evacuation order, taking the congregation’s Torah scrolls with them. He and his family have been staying at Chabad of Pacific Palisades a few miles down the road.

“It’s really devastating, but we are praying for the best,” said Cunin. He had just come from visiting a city councilman who was hospitalized for smoke inhalation and was in the ICU. Rabbi Yitzchok Sapochkinsky, co-director of Chabad of Westlake Village, said his family was evacuated at 2 am on Friday morning, just hours after hosting a conference call for teens in the area to give them support and guidance after the Thousand Oaks shooting. Though people can’t understand why the massacre happened

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or why the fires are burning, Sapochkinsky told the teens: “G-d is in charge of the world, and our concern needs to be love and tolerance. I encouraged the kids to show indiscriminate love.”

Rabbi Sapochkinsky and his family are staying with family in Rancho Mirage, 140 miles away.

Shula Bryski, co-director of Chabad of Thousand Oaks, said that dark times highlight “the most beautiful parts of human nature.”

“It is almost a cliché to say we are supposed to fight darkness with light,” she said, “but we when we think about it, our job is to uplift the people around us with goodness. It’s an incredible antidote to pain and despair.”

With the mandatory evacuation order for their neighborhood lifted, the Bryskis went home to lend a hand to those in need.

That they returned so quickly isn’t a surprise to Thousand Oaks resident Cathy Cole, who works as an oncology nurse.

“I’ve known Rabbi [Chaim] Bryski for 18 years and rely on him every day,” she said. “I don’t think he’s slept in days.”

She said the last few days have been extremely tough on people in her town. Still, like others, Cole said she’s seen good come from the bad. “Everyone is asking, whether you are in a store trying to buy groceries or at work, ‘How are you? Is your house OK? Do you need anything? Everyone is going out of their way to help strangers.”

Despite the devastation, Rabbi Bryski feels G-d is watching out for people. For instance, he said, the Ventura County fire chief, Mark Lorenzen, put on tefillin for the very first time in his life just hours after the deadly massacre and just hours before the start of the fire.

“I feel like G-d set it up that he should have success and that no lives should be lost here,” said Rabbi Bryski, adding that in the last few days, he’s seen “how much goodness there is in this country.”

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By Faygie Levy Holt, Chabad.org Rabbis across California made clear their determination to help people in need while dealing with the ongoing devastation that uncontrollable blazes have brought to their hometowns.

“Paradise is a part of our community,” said Rabbi Mendy Zwiebel of the Northern California town where more than 30 people have been killed as the Camp Fire decimated structures in its path. “We had people over for Shabbat who lost everything. This wasn’t expected.

On Thursday morning, we woke up and heard [about the fire]. In just a few hours, the whole town was wiped out.”

“One woman told me that she grabbed her siddur and her Chumash, and drove through the flames” to escape, the rabbi said.

As many as 8,000 firefighters were reported to be battling the wildfires as of Monday, when the death toll surpassed 40, with 200 people still missing. More than 250,000 evacuated in the past few days. As of Tuesday morning, a reported 6,800 homes had been destroyed by the fires.

“The city of Chico opened their doors to their neighbors, and everyone who evacuated found places to stay at friends’ house. People donated clothing and food, and the Red Cross is helping out. For the time being, people’s needs are being dealt with,” said Rabbi Zwiebel.

“They can’t move back home tomorrow; there’s nowhere to move back to,” he said.

THE JEWISH STAR November 16, 2018 • 8 Kislev, 5779

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November 16, 2018 • 8 Kislev, 5779 THE JEWISH STAR

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Wine & Dine

Prep for Thanksgiving with do-ahead recipes Kosher Kitchen

Joni SCHoCkeTT

Jewish Star columnist

W

hen I was very young, I always got excited when Thanksgiving came around.

This was the most fun holiday. We got to eat turkey, all my cousins came over and my grandparents spent the whole day at our house, not just a few hours. And, in addition, I was not missing school for a Jewish holiday that required going to temple. It wasn’t that I did not like going to temple, but I liked school a lot more and I hated finding that folder of makeup work when I got back.

For years, I thought Thanksgiving was a Jewish holiday, without the praying — it was a holiday that I celebrated with family, and we did that on Jewish holidays. We had a big meal and we had no school. But by the time I was five or six, I knew that this was a holiday for all Americans to celebrate, until my grandmother told me that every day was Thanksgiving for Jews.

My grandmother had a knack for connecting things in a way that my child’s mind could understand. She connected Sukkot to the vegetables from my father’s garden. We were giving thanks for the bowls of tomatoes and piles of zucchini on the kitchen counter and the refrigerator filled with blueberries. I got that. The harvest was a time to thank G-d for the warm weather and the rain that helped the vegetables grow so beautifully.

But the connection she made that I understood the most as I grew older was her connection to Thanksgiving. For her, and for all Jews, every day was a Thanksgiving. She explained that American Jews had to be grateful that they did no live in Europe, that something terrible had happened to Jewish people there before I was born. She said that she was thankful every day that she lived in a building with heat that did not come from a fire pit. While she never told me much about her childhood, she did tell me that she loved being warm in the winter and having hot water come right into her house so she could take long hot baths. I guess life in Belarus was much different in the late 1800s.

I was too young to ask more about her life.

By the time I was old enough to want to know, she was in the middle stages of dementia and couldn’t tell me.

For my grandmother, every day was Thanksgiving. I didn’t understand when I was 6 or 7, but I did figure it out, sadly, long after she was gone.

We need to remember to be thankful every day for what we have and, while this American holiday is a single day set aside to celebrate, I much prefer my grandmother’s wisdom. Every day is Thanksgiving and we should remember to thank G-d for all that we have.

If you want to get started on your feast, these do-ahead recipes will all freeze well and save you time on the big day.

Perfect Turkey Broth for Gravy (Meat) 3 turkey thighs 8 to 10 turkey necks 3 to 4 turkey wings 3 onions, unpeeled, cut in quarters 4 to 6 stalks celery, leaves included, if you like, cut in thirds 4 to 5 carrots 2 to 3 bay leaves 1/2 to 1 tsp. whole peppercorns 3 to 4 qts. water Salt to taste Rinse the turkey parts and place in a large soup pot. Add the rest of the ingredients and bring to a boil. Let boil for about 10 minutes, re-

duce heat and let simmer, partially covered, for several hours, skimming foam and adding more water as needed. When done, remove turkey and vegetables with a slotted spoon. Save turkey parts for salad or Chinese egg rolls and discard veggies. Makes about 2 quarts. Freezes well for up to 4 months.

NOTE: For gravy, defrost stock and bring to a boil, simmer to reduce to 1 quart. Add some of the turkey drippings and a flour roux, some sautéed mushrooms and white wine.

Roasted Butternut Squash Soup with Fresh Herbs (Meat or Pareve) This freezes beautifully and is as delicious as freshly made. I add frizzled leeks or shallots as a garnish when I reheat it.

2 Tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil 1 large onion, finely diced 2 carrots, peeled and finely chopped 2 stalks celery, finely chopped 2 leeks, white part only, cleaned and thinly sliced 1-1/2 to 2 lbs. butternut squash, roasted 2 garnet yams, peeled and cut into small cubes or thin slices cut in half 2 sprigs fresh thyme 7 to 9 cups chicken broth or vegetable broth 1/2 to 1 cup orange juice (optional) Salt and pepper to taste 1/8 cup chopped fresh parsley Cut the butternut squash in half lengthwise.

Line a rimmed cookie sheet with nonstick aluminum or a silicone sheet. Lightly rub the cut side of the squash with olive oil and place, cut side down on the cookie sheet. Roast at 400 degrees until the squash is easily pierced with a fork. Remove from oven and set aside to cool.

Heat a large soup pot and add the olive oil.

Add the onion, carrots celery and leeks and sauté until softened, about 3 to 4 minutes. Stir often.

Add the thyme sprigs and the chicken broth and bring to a boil. Add the orange juice if using. Add the yams. Reduce the heat to simmer. Scoop the cooled squash out of the shell and discard the skin and the seeds. Add the squash to the pot and simmer about 20 minutes, until the yams are soft.

Use an immersion blender or transfer to a blender and process until the soup is smooth.

Season with salt and pepper and serve hot, garnished with minced parsley. Serves at least 8.

This soup freezes well for about 3 months.

To serve, defrost in the refrigerator for two days.

Reheat. Garnish with frizzled leeks or shallots, made by frying thin rings of shallots or leeks until deep golden and crispy. Drain on paper towels.

Pecan or Chocolate Chip Praline Pie (Dairy) This is simple, freezes well, and uses prebought crust. 15 minutes to make!

1-1/2 cup white corn syrup 1-1/2 cup dark brown sugar, firmly packed 3 tsp. pure vanilla extract 3 Tbsp. melted butter or pareve trans-fat-free margarine 4 extra-large eggs 1-1/2 cup pecans, shelled OR

1-1/2 cups chocolate chips OR 1-1/2 cups coarsely chopped walnuts OR 1-1/2 cups mixed nuts and chips or even toffee pieces for a dairy meal 2 deep-dish 9” frozen pie shells, unbaked, or your own piecrust recipe, baked until lightly golden.

For pecan pie: Combine the syrup, sugar, butter and vanilla in an electric mixer and mix well.

Add the eggs and mix until thoroughly blended.

Pour half the mixture into each of the piecrusts.

Arrange the pecans in any design you like over the top. Bake at 350 degrees for about 45 minutes, until top mounds and cracks, but still jiggles a bit when moved. If the pecans begin to

brown too much, place a piece of foil over the top until done.

For chocolate chip pie: Follow the above recipe, except leave out the pecans and add 1-1/2 cups of chocolate chips to the filling. Mix with a fork and pour into the two shells and bake as above.

Variations: Mix the nuts and chips together and pour half in each piecrust. Substitute walnuts or hazelnuts for pecans. Use white chocolate chips instead of semi-sweet. Use toffee bits and pecans for a toffee nut pie.

To freeze, let cool completely and wrap tightly in plastic wrap and then foil. Will freeze for up to 3 months. To serve, defrost overnight in the fridge and heat at 325 degrees until warm. Serve warm or at room temperature.

THE JEWISH STAR November 16, 2018 • 8 Kislev, 5779

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November 16, 2018 • 8 Kislev, 5779 THE JEWISH STAR

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Wine & Dine

Discovered treasure! Egyptian golden potato soup

By Sonya Sanford, The Nosher via JTA Egyptian Jews comprise one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world. There have been waves of Jewish immigration to Egypt over centuries: Sephardic Jews arrived during the Inquisition, Ashkenazi Jews fled there from Eastern Europe during the pogroms of the 19th century, and Jewish traders from the Ottoman Empire settled after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869.

In the 1950s, Egypt began to expel its Jews following the creation of the State of Israel. Like many stories of Diaspora cuisine, Egyptian Jews brought their dishes with them to new places.

In middle school, one of my good friends was the daughter of an Egyptian Jew. I remember my first time at her house and the incredible smells coming out of their kitchen. Everything was new to me — their food was made with spices I had never even heard of. It sparked a lifelong interest in Egyptian Jewish food with its North African, Middle Eastern and European influences.

Spices like turmeric, coriander, fenugreek and cardamom are all common in Egyptian cooking, and there are dishes of stuffed vegetables, vibrant salads, and beautiful soups and stews.

I came across a recipe that jumped out at me in the Copeland Marks book “Sephardic Cooking.” Bata Bel Lamoun (Golden Potato Soup) is a soup that the Egyptian Jewish community commonly prepared for Shabbat. I have found only a few other recorded recipes for this soup, but each one includes a small list of simple everyday ingredients: potatoes as the base, turmeric for its golden color, and aromatics like onion, celery and garlic.

The most surprising part of the soup comes from fresh lemon juice that is added at the end.

The soup becomes even sunnier, the acidity and freshness complement the creaminess of the potatoes and make the turmeric-stained golden color seem even.

Some of the recipes call for chicken stock as the base of the soup, but it is easy and delicious to make this with just water for a vegan/vegetarian version. These simple ingredients simmered together result in something much greater than their individual parts. Batata Bel Lamoun is a golden silky soup, filling without being too rich, full of flavor and deeply aromatic, and it’s a great dish for a cold night after a long week.

Ingredients: Olive oil, as needed 2 medium yellow onions, chopped 3 ribs celery, chopped 2 carrots, chopped 3 to 4 cloves garlic, minced 1 Tbsp. ground turmeric 3 lbs. (6 to 7 medium large) Yukon Gold potatoes, peeled and cubed in about 1-inch pieces 8 cups water or chicken stock (if using water, you can add a vegetarian bouillon cube) Juice of 1 large lemon, abt 1/4 cup, or to taste Salt and pepper, to taste

Directions: 1. Add a few Tbsp. olive oil to a large pot over medium heat. Add the chopped onion, celery and carrot to the pot. Sauté until very softened and the onions are completely translucent and starting to get golden, about 10 to 12 minutes.

2. Add the minced garlic and sauté for an additional 2 to 3 minutes, or until the garlic is softened and fragrant but not beginning to brown.

Add the turmeric and a generous amount of salt and pepper, and sauté for an additional minute or until all of the vegetables are well-coated in the spice.

3. Add the peeled and cubed potatoes, and the water/stock to the pot (if using water, you can also add a vegetarian bouillon cube for added flavor). Bring the liquid up to a simmer, then lower the heat and simmer for 30 to 40 minutes or until the potatoes are tender and fully cooked. Remove the soup from the heat.

For a smooth soup, use an immersion blender or blender at this point and purée the soup.

4. Off the heat, add the lemon juice, stir and taste. Add more lemon juice, salt and/or pepper to your liking. Soup can be made in advance and freezes well. Serves 6 to 8.

Savor season with Libyan Jewish pumpkin spread

By Emily Paster, The Nosher via JTA As much as Americans truly love pumpkin in autumn, we are sometimes guilty of typecasting this nutritious vegetable as sweet and forget that pumpkin has a savory side, too. Happily, Sephardic cuisine abounds with savory pumpkin dishes to remind us of this fall vegetable’s versatility. My favorite of these is chershi karaa, a tangy, spicy pumpkin spread created by Libyan Jews and now a favorite among Israelis.

Chershi (sometimes spelled chirshi or tershi) are spicy, highly flavored condiments or dips that are typically served as part of mezze, the spread of hot and cold dishes that precede the main meal in the Middle East and North Africa. Pumpkin chershi is among the most famous.

I first learned about pumpkin chershi when I attended an event hosted by the Israeli Consulate in Chicago. The event featured leading Israeli food personality Gil Hovav making some traditional Sephardic dishes from his childhood, one of which was pumpkin chershi. One taste of

Hovav’s savory, spicy chershi and I was hooked.

As is often the case in Jewish cuisine, there are many ways to make pumpkin chershi. In his dish, for example, Hovav mixes pumpkin with carrot and potato. Others use only pumpkin. But everyone seems to agree that chershi karaa should be spicy and tangy, with lots of garlic and lemon juice.

One of the best things about pumpkin chershi is how easy it is to make. Using canned pumpkin puree, this recipe comes together in a few minutes.

The only ingredient you might not have on hand is harissa, but these days it’s easy to find at the grocery store. (Hovav argues that powdered caraway seed is essential to chershi, but I have seen plenty of recipes without it, and since few Americans have this spice in their pantries, I omitted it.)

My goal with this pumpkin chershi recipe was to create a nice balance of sweetness, heat and acid. I guarantee that it will change how you think about pumpkin.

How best to eat it?

Chershi makes a fantastic dip alongside some warm pita with a dollop of cool yogurt on top.

But don’t stop there. Chershi also works as a sandwich spread, and it has traditionally been eaten as a garnish for couscous.

This fall, take a break from pumpkin bread and pumpkin spice lattes and make something new and especially Jewish with pumpkin.

Note: The spread will keep in the refrigerator for a week.

Ingredients:

2 Tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil 7 cloves garlic, minced 1 tsp. cumin 1/2 tsp. smoked paprika Pinch red pepper flakes 2 cups pumpkin puree (canned or homemade) 3 Tbsp. harissa 1 Tbsp. honey Juice of one lemon Directions: 1. Heat the olive oil in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Add the garlic, cumin, paprika and red pepper flakes. Season with salt and stir to combine. Cook just until garlic begins to turn golden.

2. Add pumpkin, harissa and honey; stir to combine. Cook gently, just until pumpkin is warmed through.

3. Remove from heat and stir in lemon juice.

Taste and adjust seasoning. Dip should be tangy and spicy. Serve with Greek yogurt and warmed pita, or as a garnish for couscous. Serves 6 to 8.

The ultimate stuffed cabbage hack

By Chaya Rappoport, The Nosher via JTA My mother’s stuffed cabbage is one of my favorite dishes. She makes it with ground beef and rice, and simmers the stuffed cabbage leaves in a rich, savory tomato sauce. I could eat trays of it.

My late grandmother used to make a vegetarian version that included rice, mushrooms and barley. The sauce was sweeter than my mother’s, leaning a little more to the Polish side of tradition, where sweet foods are more prevalent. I could also eat trays of her stuffed cabbage, and I savored the scent of her cooking it up on special days before Sukkot and Simchat Torah.

There are countless delicious ways to make stuffed cabbage, with influences ranging from Eastern Europe to Asia, but all of them are undoubtedly a patchke (a bit of work). The leaves need to be boiled or frozen to become pliable enough for stuffing and wrapping, and the process from start to finish can take a good couple of hours.

It wasn’t until Sukkot of last year when I helped one of my aunts make kraut lokshen, or cabbage noodles, an Ashkenazi cabbage dish made of sautéed cabbage and egg noodles, that

I thought of making unstuffed cabbage. Inspired by my aunt’s simple but delicious dish, I realized that instead of stuffing each cabbage leaf separately, I could cook everything together in one big pot, eliminating most of the work but none of the taste.

These unstuffed cabbage noodles combine the best elements of each dish — the cabbage and egg noodles from kraut lokshen, the meat and tomato sauce from stuffed cabbage — for a dish that’s hearty, savory and delicious. Smoky, salty beef bacon adds a layer of savory flavor to the dish, a tablespoon of sugar perks up the tomato sauce, and the flavorful sauce is simmered and thickened before being combined with the noodles.

These noodles could never replace stuffed cabbage; what could? But this dish is an easy, tasty twist on tradition for when you don’t have hours to spend stuffing little bundles. Serve them on a chilly fall night, in a cozy sukkah or simply when you need a comforting dinner.

Ingredients: 8 oz. beef bacon, chopped into 1-inch pieces 1 large yellow onion, finely chopped

2 cloves garlic, finely minced 1 medium cabbage, core removed and chopped 1 lb. ground beef 1 28-ounce can crushed tomatoes 1 Tbsp. tomato paste 1 Tbsp. sugar 1/4 tsp. crushed red pepper flakes 2 dried bay leaves 12 oz. uncooked egg noodles Salt and pepper, to taste Dried or fresh parsley, for garnish Directions: 1. In a large skillet over medium heat, fry the chopped “bacon” until crisp and browned. Remove and place on a paper towel-lined plate.

2. Add the onion, garlic and chopped cabbage to the same skillet with the bacon fat and cook for 7 to 10 minutes on medium heat, until the onion is lightly browned and softened and the cabbage is wilting. Transfer the mixture and set aside.

3. Turn heat up to high and add the ground beef to the skillet. Cook, breaking up the beef with a wooden spoon as you go, until browned.

4. Add the crushed tomatoes, tomato paste, sugar, crushed red pepper flakes and bay leaves to the skillet. Stir to combine with the beef, cabbage and onion.

5. Add the beef bacon back to the pan, bring to a simmer, then turn down to medium so it bubbles gently. Cook for 10 minutes uncovered, then simmer for another 10 to 15 minutes, covered. Remove the bay leaves.

6. Meanwhile, cook the egg noodles according to package directions. Drain and set aside.

Taste the beef and cabbage mixture and season with salt and pepper as desired.

7. Combine the beef and cabbage sauce with the noodles. Garnish with parsley. Serves 6.

Chaya Rappoport is a pastry sous chef at a Brooklyn bakery.

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5 things about Trump honoree Miriam Adelson Backgrounder by Ron Kampeas, JTA WASHINGTON — Miriam Adelson, best known for being married to one of the world’s richest men and leading benefactor of the Republican Party, Sheldon Adelson, was named as a Presidential Medal of Freedom winner.

“Miriam Adelson is a committed doctor, philanthropist, and humanitarian,” the White House announcement said. “She has practiced internal and emergency medicine, studied and specialized in the disease of narcotic addiction, and founded two research centers committed to fighting substance abuse. With her husband, Sheldon, she also established the Adelson Medical Research Foundation, which supports research to prevent, reduce, or eliminate disabling and life-threatening illness.”

The couple is also well known for their Jewish and pro-Israel funding. Sheldon Adelson is the preeminent funder of Birthright Israel, the program that flies young Jews to Israel for free. He also gives to Holocaust remembrance and the Israeli American Council.

Here are five things to know about Miriam Adelson: She’s hands-on at her methadone clinics.

Adelson, 73, who grew up in Haifa, earned her medical degree from Tel Aviv University’s Sackler Medical School. She later attended Rockefeller University in New York on an exchange program, focusing on treating drug addiction.

Adelson routinely drops in at her treatment clinic by a nondescript strip mall in Las Vegas. She launched the clinic in 2000, seven years after opening one in Tel Aviv — which she also visits when the couple is in Israel. She will don a white coat and personally treat patients.

She couples treatment with research through Rockefeller University, where she worked in the late 1980s and is a board member. Her mentor there was Mary Jane Kreek, who developed methadone as a treatment for heroin addiction.

“From the beginning, the clinic was doing treatment and research,” Adelson told JTA in a 2016 interview at her Las Vegas clinic.

“I can add more to the knowledge of addiction and we can save lives.”

Adelson’s research has explored genetic components to behavioral addictions.

She liked Ted Cruz.

By all accounts, the Adelsons are close partners in both philanthropy and politics. (They married in 1991 following her divorce from fellow physician Ariel Ochshorn.)

However, the couple had a friendly and sometimes public dis-

Miriam Adelson at a Friends of the Israel Defense Forces gala in 2014.

Tiffany Rose/WireImage/Getty Images

agreement over which of the establishment Republican presidential candidates they preferred in 2016. Sheldon Adelson leaned toward Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, while Miriam Adelson preferred Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. Before they settled on Trump, however, Miriam appeared to be winning the argument — they maxed out in individual donations to Cruz’s campaign.

The Adelsons didn’t quite crown Trump the nominee — Trump, in fact, clashed with Sheldon Adelson for a period. But Adelson consolidated Trump’s frontrunner status with a May 2016 appeal to his fellow Jewish Republicans to back the presumptive nominee and make it easier for him to defeat Hillary Clinton.

She modeled a Vegas Jewish school on her Israeli HS. In describing the Adelson Educational Campus, a Jewish day school in Las Vegas, Adelson explains how her education at the famed Hebrew Reali School in Haifa helped shape its educational vision.

There are no morning prayers on the campus, just as there are no prayers in Israel’s secular school system.

“We don’t force the kids to pray, we don’t force them to wear a yarmulke,” she said. Instead, the students sing “Hatikvah,” Israel’s national anthem. “Be proud of what we are” was her philosophy in the school, she told JTA. In the upper classes, students are expected to have a major, just as Adelson majored in biology when she was a student at

Reali decades ago. She also insists on mandatory drug tests for everyone — students and staff.

“I don’t want a situation where one of the people on our campus is selling drugs,” Adelson told JTA. “I wanted to show the kids we are all being tested in order to find one or two that would never come forward in the early stage. We want to find them, to help them. It’s like a cancer, addiction. It’s much easier to treat it in earlier stages.”

She wants American Jews to be more like Israelis.

Injecting Israeli Jewish sensibilities into the American Jewish body politic is what drives a lot of what the Adelsons fund, including Birthright, the Las Vegas school and the Israeli American Council.

Much media coverage of the IAC focuses on how Sheldon Adelson wants it to supplement — perhaps even replace — the American Israel Public Affairs Committee as the preeminent pro-Israel voice in the United States. Sheldon Adelson’s politics tack well to the right of AIPAC’s, and so do those of the IAC. But attend an IAC conference, and the biggest takeaway one gets is that its agenda is overwhelmingly about making Israelis feel more at home in an American Jewish community that does not always share Israeli sensibilities. Israelis prefer to coalesce around food and culture, American Jews around the synagogue.

Those “how do we integrate?” side sessions bear Miriam Adelson’s imprint, and she often engages in them, in Hebrew and in English.

Adelson told JTA that American Jews could learn a lot from Israelis, especially in how to be pro-Israel.

“The Israeli Americans can help Israel,” she said. “The Jews, as we know from all the history, have many enemies, suffering a lot of hatred, sometimes within our own people. I think the Israeli Americans, the majority of them, love Israel, respect their homeland, many of them served in the Israeli army. Altogether if we are united we can be a major force to help Israel.”

She loves scouting.

Adelson, a member of the Tzofim, the Israeli scouting organization in her youth, is on the board of its American branch and has dedicated resources to expanding its reach not just to the children of Israeli Americans, but to American Jewish kids.

“If you talk about the Israeli community, you should talk about the Israeli scouts,” she told JTA. “This is really causing attachment between the Israelis” in America and those in Israel.

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and sentenced to 10 to 20 years in prison. (Federal records show that he was released last year. Ohm blum. Nuttie, as everyone knew him, was three apparently was killed years my senior. Growing up together in Toronin 1991 in a traffic acto, we used to play hockey on the street outside cident in a car driven by his house. His mother was my kindergarten Tielsch.) His prolific rap teacher. sheet includes drug trafNuttie married a girl from Pittsburgh and ficking, tax evasion and had just arrived in town to spend Passover with homicide. Bowers follows her family. Walking home that evening from in the footsteps of an a different synagogue in the neighborhood — equally bad seed. and cutting the recognizable figure of an OrRacists like Tielsch thodox Jew — he was hailed by two men, Tiel- Outside the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh two days after the mass and Bowers are motisch and Kevin Ohm, in a black Corvette looking shooting inside.

Matthew Hatcher/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images vated by pure hatred. In for directions. When Nuttie approached the Sixteen years and four trials later, Tielsch the case of Tielsch, who bragged in 1991 that vehicle to render assistance, Tielsch took out a was finally convicted of third-degree murder he “wacked some Jew,” the district attorney de.40-caliber pistol and shot him in cold blood. clared plain and simple that “Rosenblum died because of his religion.”

It would be a mistake to think that Bowers and his ilk are motivated by any kind of rational impulse. Their antipathy blinds them. How else to explain why Bowers, who claims to despise York City!

President Trump, would target American Jews, with bonus circulation in New 75 percent of whom actually oppose Trump and his policies?

Robert Wistrich, the late historian, referred to anti-Semitism as “the longest hatred.” Misfits have always taken refuge in its shadows. To them, it’s always the fault of the Jews: liberal and conservative, communist and capitalist, assimilated and apart — all simultaneously. It seems that there’s always a “made-to-order” The JEWISH STAR Jew whom anti-Semites can hold responsible for their own personal failings.

The scourge of Jew-baiting exists indepen5 Towns conferenc e told: Deliver Tor with joy to sustai ah dently of politics. But their interface becomes n the next genera tion toxic when leaders demonstrate tolerance — or worse, sympathy — for anti-Semitic tropes R A T and violence. Trump’s dismal response to the H IS W J he E August 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, where protesters chanted “Jews will odmere as HALB Wo in joy ’s ere Th not replace us,” is a case in point; celebrating celebrates “very fine people on both sides” empowers fanew home naticism. Politicians who would continue to embrace Louis Farrakhan after his recent comSuper Speci alS parison of Jews to termites are no less culpable. rhurst da Ce et’ is The JEWISH • Print edition is welcomed into more than 12,000 The hearts of all civilized people go out to remembers YU prez: ‘Torat emSTAR core valuee school’s top titur the Squirrel Hill victims and their families. The inves al form households in Orthodox communities in Nassau, follows ‘InvestFest’ fair attack opened a gaping hole in the fabric of Queens, Brooklyn, the Upper West Side, and Riverdale America’s most treasured values, and it will not At declaration’s centennial,

including the Five Towns (Lawrence, Cedarhurst, Hewlett, Woodmere a source of joy and derision easily mend. This needs to be an urgent time of

and Inwood) and Far Rockaway (West Lawrence), plus Atlantic Beach, To British, Palestine To Abbas and Hamas, introspection and healing. Americans on both just another colony it was ‘original sin’ Baldwin, Bellmore, East Meadow, Flushing, Forest Hills, Great Neck, sides of the political debate must stop pointing Kew Gardens Hills, Kew Gardens, Little Neck, Lido Beach, Long Beach, m o ah.cB’four event kkboycotts F Merrick, New Hyde Park, Oceanside, Plainview, Rockville Centre, Roslyn, I fingers at each other and join hands to defend LIsuCorbyn Valley Stream, Westbury, West Hempstead, and more. the core freedoms of all their fellow citizens.

R A T Anti-Semitism must be combated resolutely, H S IsraAID brings relief I to U.S. disasters W • Targeted circulaton in Brooklyn (Midwood, Marine Park, J he E whether it emanates from the right or the left. l Downtown Civic Center), Upper West Side, and Riverdale. h Isrchaareter it w And enhanced law enforcement will be imperain ll a o LIers1 olgim on Nefesh B’Nefesh’s 56th tive in order to ensure that criminals are pros• Dynamic website, social media engagement, Join 20 ecuted and law-abiding citizens are protected. eblasts and marketing campaigns.

Too many historical precedents have taught us that anti-Semitism will likely persist as a The JEWI feature of our society. Sadly, I don’t expect the SH STA tragedy in Pittsburgh to change that. But that R • Earliest distribution — published on Wednesday!

Yerushala hab ups doesn’t mean good people can’t put up a fight. $10M ER re role et y rg im Israel’s 3, fo 5T she weacahn’at 000 year-o If they don’t, the integrity and future of the ReSt. John’s • Every ad is seen, no ad is “buried.” ld capiHtae’l s 93, anld z v toasts 50 years unite public are as good as doomed. And the memod • Quality reporting, local orientation. ries of Nuttie and the 11 souls taken at Tree of Life will be defiled.

• Campaign coordination with TheJewishStar.com, social Shalom Lipner is a senior fellow of the Center media, digital and direct mail marketing, and secular media. for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institu• In-house commercial printing and promotional tion.

By Shalom Lipner, JTA WASHINGTON — The outpouring of grief over last month’s massacre at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue has sparked a degree of counterintuitive hope. Just maybe, the eternal optimists among us believe, this will prove to be the watershed event that sends all the craven anti-Semites crawling back into their caves for good. I doubt it.

The alleged shooter, Robert Bowers, is now a household name around the world. Maybe that’s what he wanted. But Bowers is not the first lowlife to murder an observant Jew in Squirrel Hill. That dubious distinction belongs to Steven Tielsch.

On a Thursday night in April 1986, when Bowers was still a teenager, Tielsch murdered my childhood friend and neighbor Neal Rosen-

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

Rabbi Weinberg d’asrah of Congregaer, founding morah tion Aish Kodesh Woodmere and in mashpia at YU, the parents and reminded that Torah will educators in attendance not be received if it’s not

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passed down according to the middah the time, emphasiz of ingredent needed ing that the primary in today’s chinuch simcha. is Twenty-six speakers, rebbetzins, educators including rabbis, , community ers and lecturers leadsue that challengeeach addressed a key isfamilies and schools frum communi in ties. The event, the Young Israel hosted at of Woodmere, was orgaSee 5 Towns hosts on page 15

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While Torah is way for the mesorahforever true, the ideal to be conveyed children — and how an everlastin to our of Torah and g love Yiddishkeit is embedde their beings — d in changes “You’re still talking over time. about what for you in 1972 and insisting thatworked what should work that’s Moshe Weinberg for your kid,” Rabbi er, Shila”a, said in key-

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

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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

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TheJewishStar.com

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Star the loss,

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

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ceremony, YU’s new president, after the investiture for a selfie. sterdam Avenue who happily posed sought-after celebrity

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“Torat Emet y,” the first is shiva Universit Truth.” in to an Star — we believe investiture speech

By The Jewish in of Yeshiva UniversiDelivering his at YU’s Wilf Campus The fifth president on Sunday Berman, said assembly of 2,000 on Heights, with many ty, Rabbi Dr. Ari values that personify Ye, Washingt in by livestream that of the “five more listening spoke of the Rabbi Berman the five central “Five Torot, or institution.” our of , teachings 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 “Toraton.”

Torah of Redempti formal cereFollowing the community parmonies, the YU st” street fair tied at an “InvestFeAvenue.

Amon m Amsterda t” street fair 11 was a along at the “InvestFes See YU on page

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

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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.”

• Vol 16,

By Ron Kampeas, JTA Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, page and 19 WASHINGTON — For 17 years, the then the wildfires inlah 9:15 • Luach pm, Havda northern California.

Israeli NGO IsraAID has been perform- ng 8:07 Polizer recalls that he was wrapping elighti Candl ing search and rescue,Towns purifying water, up a visit to IsraAID’s new American 5777 • Fivemedical assistance headquarters providing Tamuz, emergency in Palo Alto on Oct. 8 and 2017 • 20 and walking victims of trauma back to was on his way to a flight to s • July 14, Mexico to psychological health in dozens of disas- oversee operations after a devastating Parsha Pincha ter-hit countries. earthquake there when he got word of But no season has been busier than the wildfires. “I literally had to do a Uthis past summer and fall, its co-CEO Yo- turn,” he said this week in an interview tam Polizer said in an interview — and at the Israeli embassy in Washington. nowhere more than in the United States.

Polizer spoke with the exhilaration “The last few months have been un- of an executive whose team has come believable,” he said, listing a succession through a daunting challenge.

“We’re of disasters that occupied local staff and the people who stay past the ‘aid festiNiveen Rizkalla working with IsraAID in Santa Rosa, Calif., in volunteers since August: Hurricane Har- val’,” he said, grinning, describing the the wake of deadly wildfires there. vey in Texas, Hurricane Irma in Florida, See IsraAID on page 5

SEE PAGE 27

Parsha Bamid

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Viewpoint

or the Palestinians, the year zero is not 1948, when the state of Israel came into being, but 1917, when Great Britain issued, on Nov. 2, the Balfour Declaration—expressing support for the establishment of a “Jewish national home” in Palestine.

So central is the Balfour Declaration to Palestinian political identity that the “Zionist invasion” is officially deemed to have begun in 1917—not in 1882, when the first trickle of Jewish pioneers from Russia began arriving, nor in 1897, when the Zionist movement held its first congress in Basel, nor in the late 1920s, when thousands of German Jews fleeing the rise of Nazism chose to go to Palestine.

The year 1917 is the critical date because that is when, as an anti-Zionist might say, the Zionist hand slipped effortlessly into the British imperial glove. It is a neat, simple historical proposition upon which the entire Palestinian version of events rests: an empire came to our land and gave it to foreigners, we were dispossessed, and for five generations now, we have continued to resist. Moreover, it is given official sanction in the Palestine National Covenant of 1968, in which article 6 defines Jews who “were living permanently in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion” as “Palestinians”—an invasion that is dated as 1917 in the covenants’ notes.

As the Balfour Declaration’s centenary approached, this theme is much in evidence.

There is now a dedicated Balfour Apology See Cohen on page 22

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By Jeffre On the occasi anniversary ula t jump al on the Rybsztajn. his story continues.

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1986 Pittsburgh shooter murdered my friend

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By Ben Sales, JTA After a mass shooting in a heavily Jewish area shocked the nation, Rabbi Yakov Saacks felt like his Dix Hills congregation was at risk.

So the rabbi installed 17 cameras on the shul’s exterior that can zoom in to read numbers on license plates, and indoor cameras at each entrance. He began covering the windows with Kevlar, at around $800 each. And he hired armed security guards to protect the Hebrew school and Shabbat services.

When the sanctuary is especially crowded — on the High Holy Days, for example — up to three guards patrol the building carrying guns and communicating by radio.

That was after the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, nearly nine months ago. Following the attack last month on a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Saacks said he feels vindicated.

“What can we do? What can we do?” said Saacks of Chabad synagogue the Chai Center.

“This doesn’t make me happy. It doesn’t warm your heart. We still try and maintain its openness, but what happened in Pittsburgh can happen anywhere.”

The added measures have changed Saacks’ budget, of course. He estimates that all the physical protections will cost $150,000 in total.

That does not include some of the window and camera costs, which he paid for partly out of a $50,000 grant from New York State. The armed guards, contracted from a private security company, cost about $360 per week.

It’s a cost more synagogues are considering after a gunman entered the Tree of Life Congregation in Pittsburgh two weeks ago and killed 11 worshippers. Since then, the risk of a violent attack has felt all too real for synagogues.

Thomas Ruskin, who runs a private security company, already provides security for a handful of Jewish institutions in the New York City area. Since the shooting, he says, dozens more have inquired.

The Chai Center in the Suffolk County community of Dix Hills.

“Part of this has to do with the religious organizations’ budgets,” said Ruskin, a former New York police officer who is Jewish. “They’ve never put money aside or had a fund for just this purpose. ... We never really had to worry about this.”

For more than a decade, the federal government has provided funding to help synagogues bolster security. The Nonprofit Security Grant Program and a related program run by the Department of Homeland Security have provided more than $269 million to secure houses of worship and other institutions.

The money has gone largely to Jewish institutions, according to the Orthodox Union Advocacy Center. In addition, in October 2017, New York state announced $25 million in grants to help secure private schools and other nonprofits. Rounds of funding awarded this year in Brooklyn and Long Island went largely to Jewish organizations.

Since 2004, Jewish institutions have received resources and guidance from the Secure Community Network, an organization co-founded by the Jewish Federations of North America that oversees the community’s security needs and liaises with law enforcement. Paul Goldenberg, the network’s former chief, cautioned against

Dovid Weinbaum

turning houses of worship into fortresses, noting that many synagogues in Europe have an intense security presence along with tight restrictions on who can enter and exit.

“Security has come with a tremendous cost to the Jewish community, not only here but abroad,” he said. “Our institutions should not be surrounded by copper tin wire and bars.”

Some synagogues are opting for private security. Union Temple, a Reform synagogue in Brooklyn, decided to increase its security after it was vandalized with anti-Semitic graffiti this month. It has hired a second security guard and is requiring visitors to sign in and show ID. It is also making its windows shatterproof.

“We want to be warm and welcoming, we don’t want to live in a police state, but that’s the line you have to find,” said Union Temple President Beatrice Hanks.

Other synagogues have opted for volunteer security guards recruited from their own pews.

The Community Security Service has trained 4,000 volunteer security guards for synagogues, teaching them how to spot and respond to threats. Jason Friedman, its executive director, estimates that 75 trainees are actively guarding

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15 THE JEWISH STAR November 16, 2018 • 8 Kislev, 5779

The cost of synagogue safety

their synagogues on any given week.

“Everyone in the Jewish community is thinking about security now,” said Friedman, who has also received a flurry of inquiries since the Pittsburgh shooting. “That couldn’t be said a few weeks ago.”

Romemu, a Jewish Renewal congregation in Manhattan, has gone all in on security since the shooting. It has tripled its security budget and plans to apply for the state and federal security grants. However, the congregation makes sure its guards dress in business-casual attire, don’t conspicuously show their weapons and greet regulars as an usher would.

“They are not menacing. They are very friendly people,” said executive director Jeff Cahn. “They welcome everybody with a hearty ‘Shabbat shalom’ and know everybody’s names.”

Even without armed guards, Ruskin said, there are basic steps a synagogue should take to secure itself, from locking the doors to having an evacuation plan. If a shooter encounters a locked door — let alone an armed guard — he may decide to go somewhere else.

Many were put off by President Donald Trump’s initial comments on the shooting at the Pittsburgh synagogue, which did not have a guard.

“If they had an armed guard inside, they might have been able to stop him immediately,” Trump told reporters. “Isn’t it a shame that we even have to think of that, inside of a temple or inside a church? But certainly the results might have been far better.”

Those who are hiring the guards see security as a threshold issue.

Rabbi Tuvia Teldon, director of Chabad Lubavitch of Long Island, is spearheading a $1 million campaign to provide armed guards for 30 Chabad congregations on Long Island. After the Pittsburgh shooting, he wants to make sure one of his affiliate synagogues isn’t next.

“They want to know there’s someone there who’s going to be watching out for them,” he said. “You need to have someone there who’s on the ground. We want to put up a sign in every Chabad house that this is not a soft target. There are armed guards here.”

November 16, 2018 • 8 Kislev, 5779 THE JEWISH STAR

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17 THE JEWISH STAR November 16, 2018 • 8 Kislev, 5779

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November 16, 2018 • 8 Kislev, 5779 THE JEWISH STAR

18

Lavan’s peace: being left alone Parsha of the week

Rabbi avi biLLet Jewish Star columnist

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hen Yaakov first arrived in Haran, he encountered shepherds waiting at a well. It might have been the same well where his mother met Eliezer 97 years earlier. And if it was, things had certainly changed. Whereas once upon a time the girls of the town had come on their own to draw water, now some kind of pact had led to a large stone being placed atop the well, so all the shepherds can draw water and keep each other honest.

Wanting to find out about his uncle, Yaakov asked the shepherds a few questions, to which they provided very terse answers.

“Where are you from?” “From Haran.”

“Do you fellows know Lavan?” “We know.”

“Does he have shalom?” “Shalom.” t seems that they follow this response with “And his daughter Rachel is coming with the sheep,” though that statement can also be read as part of the narrative, not the shepherds giving Yaakov new information. Only when Yaakov asked why they were hanging around the well did they open up and answer

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in complete sentences: “We cannot [water the animals] until all the flocks gather, and we all roll the stone off the top of the well, then we water the sheep.”

That they are more talkative when Yaakov asks them about themselves than about Lavan might speak to their personalities. But why do they not even respond to the question about the shalom of Lavan’s home with a complete answer?

And if they introduced Rachel, why did they offer that information when they weren’t even asked?

Let’s look at the second question first. A number of Midrashim suggest that these guys were not talkative and weren’t interested in playing Haran Geography. When they saw Rachel coming, they saw an opportunity to get this nudnik off their case. Of course, as Yaakov was an experienced shepherd, talking shop opened them up to a conversation, and when Rachel arrived, they were still chatting (29:9). he Baal Haturim notes that they did not respond to his last question about shalom with a full response as “there is no

peace for the wicked” (Yeshayahu 57:21).

Ohr Hachaim argues that their incomplete answer stemmed from their understanding of Yaakov’s questiom: Is Lavan shalem (whole) in body and financially? Were they, the shepherds, at peace with him? Their simple response, “Shalom” was vague enough to cover both: we’re not in a fight with him, and he’s doing OK. In fact, his daughter is coming — she’s safe.

On the other hand, Ohr Hachaim continues, the shalom didn’t inform him whether Lavan was doing well financially. It didn’t say “Everything is great.” But it led into the assertion that Rachel is coming, alone, with all her father’s sheep — meaning that Lavan’s assets are nothing to write home about, or that he is very cheap and doesn’t care about his daughter, who has been raised to be the shepherd.

Alternatively, as the Torat Moshe puts it, there is peace with him because no one wants to associate with him. Since no one wanted to have anything to do with him, he couldn’t hire any shepherd but his daughter. He did his own thing! He didn’t bother anyone and

He didn’t bother anyone and no one bothered with him.

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no one bothered with him.

It’s the simplest ingredient for peace: leave each other alone. Even if it is a cold peace because we have nothing to do with each other, at least we’re not fighting. And if every now and then we need to cross a border to go into town or take care of our sheep, we can send an emissary who is not scary or dangerous, whom no one will bother. hen fighting and rockets flare up out of Gaza, as it does every couple of years, this is all I can think of. Though some elements of Hamas culture will never rest until all Jews are dead, I cannot understand the society that refuses to say, “Let’s make the best of our situation. We don’t need military; we need creativity! We will create, export, make jobs, bring out the best of our people. We need education for our children, hope for our people — and we have the power to create it!”

I thought a Hundred Years’ War was a thing of the past. And while I don’t want to be pessimistic, when I am blessed with grandchildren one day, they too will watch with sadness as the war continues.

The prophet Yeshayahu says, two verses prior to the one quoted by the Baal Haturim, “‘I create the speech of the lips; peace, peace to the far and to the near,’ says the Lord, ‘and I will heal him.’ But the wicked are like the turbulent sea, for it cannot rest, and its waters cast up mud and dirt.”

Sad but true. As we learn about Lavan through the parsha, we see why he had no friends, and why peace remains distant.

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Luach Tears make us uniquely human Fri Nov 16 / 8 Kislev Vayeitzei Candlelighting: 4:18 pm Havdalah: 5:26 pm

Fri Nov 23 / 15 Kislev Vayishlach Candlelighting: 4:13 pm Havdalah: 5:22 pm

Fri Nov 30 / 22 Kislev Vayeishev Candlelighting: 4:10 pm Havdalah: 5:19 pm

Sun Dec 2 / 24 Kislev Chanukah begins tonight First candle

Mon Dec 3 / 25 Kislev Second candle

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Wed Dec 5 / 27 Kislev Fourth candle

Orthodox Union

Rabbi DR. tzvi heRsh weinReb

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hen I was studying for my doctorate in psychology, we had a number of fairly strict requirements in addition to our courses in psychology. For example, we were expected to possess a reading knowledge of two foreign languages, and Hebrew was then not one of them. We were also required to study statistics and to take several courses in what was called “the biological bases of behavior.” These courses were designed to provide us wouldbe experts on the mind with some understanding of the workings of the body.

The instructor was a specialist in human physiology who only lectured sporadically. Instead, he had each of us choose a topic of interest to us, research it thoroughly, and present our findings to the class.

I still remember some of the topics I selected. One was the physiology of sleep, and another, the effects of physical exercise on

Leah’s tears are the tears of a ba’alat teshuvah.

Thurs Dec 6 / 28 Kislev Fifth candle

Fri Dec 7 / 29 Kislev

emotions. My third talk was entitled “Shedding Tears: A Uniquely Human Behavior.”

It amazed me at how little was known about tears back then. Not much more is known today. What we do know is summarized in the dictionary definition: “A tear is a drop of the clear salty liquid that is secreted by the lachrymal gland of the eye to lubricate the surface between the eyeball and the eyelid to wash away irritants.” We know little about the physiological explanations for the correlation between tears and mood, and why women tear up more easily than men.

We know why onions stimulate tears, or why our noses run when we cry. We remain in the dark when we attempt to understand that emotional tears seem to be unique to humans. Crocodiles shed tears, but not because they are upset or inspired. he connection of human tears to this week’s Torah portion, Parshat Vayetzei, is in these verses: “Now Laban had two daughters; the name of the older one was Leah, and the name of the younger was Rachel. Leah had weak eyes; and Rachel was beautiful in form and appearance.”

Many find it curious that the Torah accentuates Rachel’s physical beauty. There is, however, ample precedent for that. Her predecessors Rivka and Sarah are both described as exceedingly beautiful.

But why is Leah’s physical appearance denigrated? Why do we need to be told that her eyes were soft? Is this a virtue or a blemish?

Why mention it?

Rashi comments, “Leah supposed that she was destined to marry Esav, hence she shed tears. She heard people say that Rivka had two sons and Lavan two daughters; surely the older daughter would marry the older son,

Sat Dec 8 / 30 Kislev Seventh candlee

Sixth candle Shabbos Chanukah / Miketz Candlelighting: 4:09 pm Havdalah: 5:18 pm

Sun Dec 9 / 1 Tevet

Continued in next column

Five Towns times from White Shul

Eighth candle

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and the younger daughter the younger son.”

This assumption that she was destined to spend her life with Esav troubled her greatly, and she cried until tears disfigured her beautiful face.

Chassidic masters have interpreted this seemingly superficial difference between Rachel’s pristine beauty and Leah’s imperfect appearance as symbolic of two types of moral heroines. Rachel represents the perfect tzaddeket who encounters no challenges to her moral perfection. Leah, on the other hand, exemplifies the person who overcomes obstacles and experiences setbacks in her struggle to achieve the status of tzaddeket. Leah’s tears are the tears of a ba’alat teshuvah, one who has known disappointment and failure and whose tears are an essential component of her triumph.

Leah’s weak eyes are not a physical defect. Her tears are not signs of weakness or cowardice; quite the contrary, they encompass her strength of character, and we would be well advised to learn from Leah how and when to cry.

I conclude with this Talmudic teaching, found in Tractate Berachot 32b: “Rabbi Elazar also said: Since the day the Temple was destroyed, the gates of prayer were locked, as it is said: ‘Though I plead and call out, He shuts out my prayer.’ (Lamentations 3:80) Yet, despite the fact that the gates of prayer were locked, the gates of tears were never locked, as it is stated (Psalms 39:13): ‘Hear my prayer, Lord, and give ear to my pleading, keep not silence at my tears.’ ”

From heart of Jerusalem

Rabbi binnY FReeDMan

Jewish Star columnist

Rabbi Freedman is off this week

Kosher bookworm

AlAn JAy geRbeR

Jewish Star columnist

R

ecently the Rabbinical Council of America (RCA), together with Koren Publishers, released a new prayer book titled Siddur Avodat Halev, the third time the RCA has published a siddur under its name.

What makes this volume so unique is its methodology. The translation of the Hebrew text is based upon the original Rabbi David de Sola Pool edition of 1960. The siddur text is in the font of Koren Publishers, and the commentaries and essays are from the RCA, 2018.

Among the essays featured in this volume is one by Rebbetzin Rookie Billet of the Young Israel of Woodmere, where her husband, Rabbi Heshie Billet, has been the rabbi for close to 40 years.

Rebbetzin Billet has an enviable career in spiritual service to our community. Currently, she is the principal of the Shulamith Middle School and was previously at Ma’ayanot Yeshiva High School,

SKA, and Central. Since 1980, she has served the Young Israel of Woodmere as a kallah teacher, yoetzet halacha, public lecturer and mentor.

The excerpt that follows is from Rebbetzin Billet’s essay in the new siddur, and is titled “Concrete Steps To Find More inspiration From Prayer.” e each must seek to find our unique way to make our tefilla experience more personal and inspirational. These might include: Choosing a siddur that works for you.

Choose one with a better translation, or an interlinear translation, or an inspirational commentary.

When using the siddur during the week, make your own notes in pencil in the margin of your siddur.

Think of something that uplifts you that relates to a particular paragraph in the service. Study the prayers when you are not praying so you can better understand the words when you do pray.

Like the Hasidim of old, prepare for engagement

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with G-d with study, with introspection, with an uplifting story, with a beautiful nigun. Dress as if you are going to meet royalty. Wash your hands.

Close your eyes; visualize yourself as an integral and everlasting part of the Jewish people. Concentrate on the One before Whom you stand. Set goals to reach even higher levels of intensity in prayer. Make yourself vulnerable: imagine yourself yet again in the fragile situation in which you did feel moved to pray powerfully.

When praying with others, see your prayer not only as a commandment between man and G-d, but also as an interpersonal mitzva, since our sincerity at prayer can contribute to a better ambience for everyone else’s tefilla and inspire others as well. Make a careful list of all the people in your life and community who need G-d’s help and concentrate on their needs when you pray.

Many women find particular meaning in praying Kabbalat Shabbat with their daughters

Prepare for engagement with G-d with study and introspection.

if they are not going to the synagogue on Friday nights. Make your tefilla time sacred and do not relinquish it no matter how pressed you are for time. Feel as if the welfare of the entire community depends on your passionate prayer.

Take pride in your ability to balance the humility required to acknowledge our dependence on G-d with the confidence required to address Him directly and personally, with a deep understanding of the myriad needs and complex solutions required to help us mortals confront the challenges of everyday life in an ever-more challenging world. rayer then, is a multifaceted halakhic event as well as a very personal, challenging religious experience. It is objective and subjective, both bounded by parameters and flexible at the same time.

R. Soloveitchik once observed that the beit knesset is the home of the collective prayers of Knesset Yisrael. Perhaps that is precisely what the prayer experience is — a blending of the thought and experience of the timeless efforts of the Jewish people to communicate with G-d, and an opportunity for Him to hear the harmony of the voices of His children.

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Erecting ladders that will take us to heaven Torah

RAbbi dAvid eTengoff

Jewish Star columnist

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ur parasha begins with the famous words, “And Yaakov left Beersheba, and he went to Charan” (Bereishit 28:10). Yaakov’s departure is a direct response to his mother Rivka’s wishes, and his father Yitzchak’s earlier two-fold statement.

Rivka told Yitzchak, “I am disgusted with my life because of the daughters of Cheth [Esav’s wives]. If Yaakov takes a wife like these, from the daughters of the land, of what use is life to me?” (27:46) Yitzchak called Yaakov and told him, “Do not take a wife of the daughters of Canaan. Arise, go to Padan Aram, to the house of Bethuel, your mother’s father, and take yourself from there a wife of the daughters of Lavan” (28:1-2).

Yaakov fulfills his filial responsibility with alacrity, and arrives “at the place and lodged there because the sun had set, and he took some of the stones of the place and placed [them] at

his head, and he lay down.” Rashi identifies the place cited in this verse as Mount Moriah, the location of both Akeidat Yitzchak and the future Beit HaMikdash. Little wonder, then, that a miracle took place.

“And he dreamt, and behold! A ladder was set up on the ground [sulam mutzav artzah] and its top reached up to heaven [v’rosho magia hashamaimah]; and behold, angels of G-d were ascending and descending it. And behold, the L-rd was standing over him, and He said, ‘I am the L-rd, the G-d of Abraham your father, and the G-d of Yitzchak; the land upon which you are lying, to you I will give it and to your children’” (28:12-13). he verse contains the sole instance in Tanach of the term “sulam.” Such an unusual word naturally captured the imaginations of Torah commentators throughout the ages.

Thus, we find the following gematria-based interpretation of Yaakov’s dream by the great Mishnaic thinker Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai: “[G-d] showed [Yaakov] Mount Sinai. [How do we know?] The letter samech in Sinai equals 60, the first and last yud(s) equal 10, and the nun is equivalent to 50. This adds up to 130 — the numerical value of the word ‘sulam.’ In

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addition, in our verse, we find the expression, “its top reached up to heaven,” and in reference to Mount Sinai we find, “the mountain burned with fire up to heaven” (Midrash Tanchuma Parashat Vayatze VII).

For Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, based upon the relevant numerical equivalents of the Hebrew letters and the linguistic parallels in the verses he quotes, the sulam is Yaakov’s prophetic on-ramp to a vision of the future Revelation at Mount Sinai.

We are not surprised, therefore, when Yaakov proclaims: “How awesome is this place!

This is none other than the house of G-d; this is the gate of heaven” (28:17). ike Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, the 14th-century Torah scholar Rabbi Yaakov ben Asher (the Tur) was a master of gematria. In his commentary on the Torah, he notes that the word “sulam” is also the numerical equivalent of kol, voice, and cites the first volume of the Zohar, section 266: “The voice of the righteous in

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prayer is the ladder upon which the angels ascend.” Shortly thereafter he states: “Everyone, therefore, who has true kavanah and heartfelt dedication in their prayers has a ladder with complete rungs upon which the angels will be able to ascend [to Heaven].”

According to the Tur’s interpretation of the Zohar, it appears that tzaddikim, by definition, have the ability to imbue their tefilah with deeplevel kavanah. Moreover, their prayers are so powerful and of such great import to G-d that they serve as a vehicle for the angels.

We are neither prophets like Yaakov nor tzaddikim like those referenced in the Zohar. Nonetheless, with Hashem’s help and our most heartfelt desire, we can invest our tefilot with kavanah and a sense of awe and wonder that we, too, are ever standing before the Holy One blessed be He. May we, too, build ladders upon which the angels will be able to ascend.

Their prayers are so powerful that they serve as a vehicle for the angels.

Confronting our enemies: Thoughts for Vayetzei Angel for Shabbat

RAbbi mARc d. Angel

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nd Yaakov went on his way, and angels of G-d met him. And Yaakov said when he saw them: ‘This is G-d’s camp.’ And he called the name of that place Machanaim” (Bereishit 32:2-3).

These concluding verses of this week’s Torah portion raise several questions. The angels that met Yaakov are not reported to have said or done anything, only to have appeared. What was their mission? Yaakov acknowledged that the visit made this spot “G-d’s camp;” why then did he name the place Machanaim, camps, in the plural?

This strange episode occurs at a particularly stressful time in Yaakov’s life. He had just concluded a treaty with his hostile father-in-law, Lavan and might well have wondered whether he could trust Lavan to keep his side. Would Lavan and his men sneak up and attack Yaakov;

would Lavan kill Yaakov and take the entire family back home?

While worrying about Lavan behind him, Yaakov also was worried about what lay ahead: his brother Esav. Would Esav murder Yaakov and family? Could he possibly assuage Esav’s longstanding antagonism? Yaakov must have been extremely unsure of his family’s future.

“Angels of G-d met him.”

These angels did not have to say or do anything. Their very presence served to reassure him of G-d’s providence. He realized he would be able to overcome the challenges that threatened him because he was in G-d’s camp — and G-d would protect him.

Yaakov named the place Machanaim, in the plural, because the camp served to protect him from two dangerous enemies. avan and Esav represent two different sorts of enemies.

Rabbinic literature depicts Lavan as the archetypal cheat. He seeks to out-maneu-

ver others; he may appear sweet and generous while planning to destroy his victims. He is a smiling backstabber who preys patiently, uses many ruses to disarm, and harms when his opponents least expect it. He lies, cheats, flatters … he does whatever is necessary to achieve his ends.

Esav is ruthless in a different way. He is not subtle and cunning like Lavan. Rather, he is described as a violent and boorish thug. Esav is ready to confront his enemies directly, with physical strength. Although he is surely a dangerous opponent, one can easily detect his malice and can try to develop means of defense.

Yaakov’s Machanaim symbolized the need for G-d’s help in fighting both of them. The angels’ presence gave him confidence in his ability to survive the challenges he faced.

Today, we confront both Lavan and Esav enemies. Among the Lavans are those who speak softly and self-righteously, as though they are being intelligent and objective in their

The angels did not have to say or do anything.

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views, and yet promote anti-Semitism and antiZionism in scurrilous ways. The Lavans of the media and academic left pose as supporters of human rights — for everyone except Jews, especially Israeli Jews. These are dangerous and insidious enemies, ruthless in their denigration of Jews and Israel — denigration that encourages violence.

As the Lavans seek to dehumanize Jews and Israelis, the Esavs seek to perpetrate violence.

The Esavs are terrorists blinded by hatred.

They train their children to hate and to murder.

They glorify and honor murderers of Jews and Israelis. The violent Esavs and their supporters are dangerous; their “moral universe” is vastly different from ours. They promote and justify hatred and murder; they rejoice at the shedding of Jewish blood.

How nice it would be if angels would appear to give us encouragement at a time of crisis.

Absent a miraculous visit, we ourselves need to combat the Lavans and Esavs of our time.

We need to maintain our own Machanaim that will defend us from the constant propaganda of media; we need to be strong and smart enough to defeat the violence of our generation.

THE JEWISH STAR November 16, 2018 • 8 Kislev, 5779

New RCA siddur traffics in prayers from heart

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November 16, 2018 • 8 Kislev, 5779 THE JEWISH STAR

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n the summer of 1993, I found myself at one of the most unsettling dinner engagements that I have yet experienced. I was a young journalist writing about the war in Bosnia, and a friend of mine in London who was working as an aide to Haris Silajdžic, the Bosnian foreign minister, called with an invitation to sneak into a private dinner Silajdžic was attending that same evening.

“Sure,” I enthused. “Where?”

“South Kensington,” my friend laughed.

“The Iranian Embassy.”

I went along. Under a huge portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini, I sat silently at the opposite end of the dinner table, glued to the stiff conversation between Silajdžic, who wore a perpetual frown, and his Iranian hosts. As a waiter served a hefty-looking sponge cake for dessert (“Look, they didn’t even defrost the bloody thing!” my friend whispered,) the am-

bassador began talking about the supposed commonalities between the war in Bosnia and the “struggle in Palestine.”

I don’t remember the precise words of Silajdžic’s response, but I do remember being profoundly moved by what he said. Bosnia was home to a “precious Jewish community that has been with us for 500 years,” he reminded the Iranian envoy, and he was not prepared to alienate Bosnia’s Jews by pronouncing on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; in any case, it was hardly the most pressing matter facing his ravaged country. recalled that evening after reading the script of “Looking for Europe,” the oneman play performed in New York earlier this week by well-known FrenchJewish public intellectual, Bernard-Henri Lévy. While it is a sharply-written reflection on the current state of politics in America and Europe, the Bosnian war of two decades ago, which was a seminal experience for Europe as, looms large.

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Much as with the Kurds now, back in the 1990s Lévy was an outspoken advocate of decisive action to stop the genocide in Bosnia, becoming a regular thorn in the side of a Franco-British-Russian alliance that effectively shored up the gains of the Serbian separatist militias.

Lévy is also known for writing on Judaism’s intellectual achievements through the ages, as well as his stalwart opposition to anti-Semitism and his deep love of Israel (if not its current government). So Judaism and the challenges faced by Jews globally also loom large. t various points in the play, Lévy speaks about the symbiosis between Bosnia — a resolutely multicultural society with a largely secular Muslim majority — and its Jewish community, who fled the Inquisition in Spain for a country that at the time was a province of the Ottoman Empire (my maternal grandfather, incidentally, was born in Travnik, which served as the Ottoman re-

Lévy does not believe in ideological purity over pragmatism.

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gional capital for two centuries.) For anyone who was in besieged Sarajevo during the war, Lévy’s emotional plea to heed “the bells … the voices … the prayers” of that great city, accompanied by the sounds of Christian, Jewish and Muslim supplications, is extraordinarily haunting.

Echoing Haris Silajdžic’s words at that monstrous dinner in London, in Act 3 of the play, Lévy remarks wryly that “Sarajevo offers another non-negligible advantage: You encounter fewer anti-Semites here than in France and in the United States.”

Although that observation can be critically scrutinized — as my surviving relatives told me, Bosnian Jews feared the local Ustaše and Handžar collaborators sometimes more than the Germans, and the present-day community is tiny — Lévy is correct that hostility to Jews continues to plague the larger nations on both sides of the Atlantic. t this juncture, Lévy attacks President Donald Trump in terms that will outrage his supporters. “Baby Trump,” as he calls him, has “set loose” the demons of far-right anti-Semitism in America, and with See Levy on page 22

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There was ‘Jewicide’ in the 2018 midterm vote Politics to go

JEff DuNEtz

Jewish Star columnist

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ccording to exit polls conducted by Pew Research Center and CNN, in last week’s midterm election, 79 percent of Jewish voters chose a Democratic candidate, and only 17 percent voted for Republicans.

Thus, by helping to elect at least 35 Democrats to the House of Representatives, Jewish America decided to significantly expand the power of the anti-Israel Democratic Party, putting many of the worst offenders in key leadership positions. With their heavily Democratic vote, Jewish America may have committed Jewicide.

New York’s 14th district, the eastern Bronx and parts of north central Queens, elected Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who claims that Israel is “occupying” Palestine, saying, “I also think that what people are starting to see at least with the occupation of Palestine is the increasing crisis of humanitarian condition.” She has said Israel deserves to defend herself, but of the weekly Hamas attempts to storm the Gaza border tweeted, “This is a massacre. I hope my peers have the moral courage to

call it such.” Ocasio-Cortez has also claimed not to understand the geopolitics of the area.

The new congressional representative for the Hudson Valley and Catskills regions is Antonio Delgado (NY-19). He was supported by J Street and stated in a debate that Israel was not a democracy, “given the fact that we have settlements currently in the region. It is not deemed a nation of Jewish democracy until we deal with the settlements.” Delgado obviously misses the fact that all citizens of Israel have the right to vote no matter what their background.

The winner in Michigan’s 13th district, Democrat Rashida Tlaib, is also no fan of the Jewish State. After her primary win, she told “In These Times” that she no longer believed in the two-state solution. To celebrate her win, at her victory party, Tlaib wrapped herself in a Palestinian flag.

The winner in Minnesota’s 5th Congressional district is Democrat Ilhan Omar, who in 2012 tweeted that Israel had “hypnotized the world” to ignore its “evil doings.” Defending that tweet during the 2018 election season, she said that calling attention to the “Israeli apartheid regime” was not anti-Semitic. But her de-

scription of Israel as apartheid is anti-Semitic, and so is her support of the BDS movement. ow that they have the House majority, Democrats will occupy powerful chairmanships of congressional committees.

Many of these new chairmen have anti-Israel or anti-Semitic tendencies.

Adam Smith, Armed Services Committee (WA-9): His 2018 platform supports the UN resolution demanding an end to Israeli settlements in the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza.

He also introduced a one-sided bill to “prohibit U.S. assistance to Israel from being used to support the military detention, interrogation, or ill-treatment of Palestinian children in violation of international humanitarian law.”

Maxine Waters, Financial Services Committee (CA-43): Earlier this year, a video was released of Waters embracing Louis Farrakhan.

Asked multiple times whether she still supports the anti-Semitic Nation of Islam leader, Waters refuses to answer. At a 2012 luncheon, she said she won’t take money from AIPAC because AIPAC runs Congress.

Jim McGovern, Rules Committee (MA-

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Their public silence gives the impression of consent.

2): Supported Obama’s 2017 abstention from a U.N. resolution condemning Israeli settlements, and wants Israel to negotiate with Hamas despite its continued terrorism and refusal to recognize Israel. He also claimed that Netanyahu’s March 2015 speech to Congress in protest against the Iran deal was meant as a deliberate slight to Barack Obama.

Other reelected Democrats whose seniority will place them in positions of power include: James Clyburn (SC-6), who is part of the Democratic caucus leadership, shared a stage with Louis Farrakhan in 2011. After Jewish organizations criticized Clyburn taking part in an event with Farrakhan, the South Carolina Democrat brushed off their criticisms. Clyburn told “Final Call” — a Nation of Islam publication — that he was “not bothered in the least bit” by the objections.

Danny Davis (IL-7) received 88 percent of the total vote in his district despite being a friend of Farrakhan. The Daily Caller reported that “Davis went on the record twice to defend and praise Farrakhan.” He called Farrakhan an “outstanding human being,” and says he regularly visits him, including at home. Davis has also said he wasn’t bothered by Farrakhan’s answer to “the Jewish question” — in other words, his anti-Semitism.

See ‘Jewicide’ on page 22

View from Central Park

tehilla r. golDberg

Intermountain Jewish News

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henever election season rolls around, especially Election Day itself, I get that feelgood democracy vibe. If I was making a “These Are a Few of My Favorite Things” list, I would add “voting” right alongside “schnitzel and noodles.”

My grandmother, who was born in 1916 to a feminist mother, ingrained in me the holiness of the having the privilege and ability to vote.

Her pride in exercising the 19th Amendment was palpable. Whether she was ill or the weather was terrible, even in very old age, she always cast her ballot!

I remember approaching my first election and the conversations surrounding it. My grandmother and parents made me feel like a million bucks for being able to exercise this rite of passage into young adulthood.

There were many stimulating discussions about the goals of the Democratic and Republican parties and their differences.

I remember feeling torn, and honored, like the decision was monumental, as if my registering to vote would really mean something (which of course it does). Ultimately, with a deep appreciation and respect for America’s Founding Fathers, for their wisdom, their system of checks and balances that is in large part what makes America the great nation that it is, I registered as an independent. he first time I voted, my father accompanied me. I had been inside the topsecret voting booth before, having been taken along as a child.

This time, however, the occasion was imbued with a sense of importance. You would think I was about to announce my candidacy for political office.

Since then, my father has gone to great lengths to ensure that me and my siblings, some of whom are still registered in Colorado, would receive absentee ballots with more than enough time for us to send them in.

I always value my father’s political guidance and opinions; he is so thought-out. One by one,

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we combed through the issues on the ballot as he explained the purposes of each.

Over the years, so many times we have sat around the dining room table together, ballots unfurled, talking it over, choosing and marking squares according to our preferences.

There were years I voted from Manhattan, and years I voted from Jerusalem. In New York City, it’s always a perfect fall day, lines of people winding around the block, framed by gold and orange-tinged trees.

In Jerusalem, I remember one election in particular, where in my mind I felt an added sense of importance to exercising my right to vote. he year was 2000. The tension in the air — you could cut it with a knife, if you ventured outside for anything other than the absolute basics.

It was right at the beginning of the intifada, though it wasn’t formally called that yet. It was right after the grisly lynching of two Israelis in Ramallah, with the sickeningly iconic bloodied

I remember feeling torn, and honored, like the decision was monumental.

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Pittsburgh, politics and Trump Fiamma NireNsteiN

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nti-Semitism hovered like a ghost, especially after the Pittsburgh massacre, on the midterm elections. It has unexpectedly become a keyword for all of November.

Perhaps the community’s continued haunting by the murder of 6 million Jews explains why American Jews continue to prefer voting Democratic, even as candidates move more and more to the left, and expressing anti-Israel views.

It’s a preference linked to the liberal tradition of the American Jewish community. But it has assumed a clearly paradoxical character after the pro-Israel positions taken by President Donald Trump in favor of Israel, which includes pulling the United States out of the Iranian nuclear deal, transferring the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and cutting off aid to the Palestinians. Trump also has family ties to the Jewish world.

It’s paradoxical, but it expresses a phenomenon that is hard to exaggerate: the new, wide-

spread, dangerous divisions between the Jews of that Diaspora and Israel. e still don’t know exactly how American Jews voted in the midterm elections, but 71 percent chose Hillary Clinton in 2016, and today at least 75 percent identify as Democrats.

The deep divisions with Israel are evident: According to a survey conducted by the American Jewish Committee, 77 percent of Israelis approve of Trump’s handling of U.S.-Israel relations, while only 34 percent of Americans do.

Moreover, 59 percent of Americans favor the establishment of a Palestinian state, but only 44 percent of Israelis support the idea.

Immediately after the murderous attack on Jewish worshippers in Pittsburgh, Trump was essentially blamed for causing it. We have heard that he is responsible for creating a climate of violence, and encouraging white supremacy.

Liberal American Jews have promoted this interpretation, but they have seemingly forgotten the anti-Semitic reality in America, including the left-

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Dror eyDar Israel Hayom

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t is nice to see German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron hugging one another 100 years after the Great War. But we must not forget that between the end of that war and today, another, far more terrible world war raged.

As iconic British Prime Minister Winston Churchill saw it, World War I and World War II were both part of one great war that lasted from 1914 to 1945; the calm that pervaded from 1918 to 1939 was nothing more than a temporary ceasefire. In his mind, this great war was a newer version of the Thirty Years’ War that tore Europe apart and established a new world order.

No true victor emerged from this war, which left both sides left bloodied and defeated. Then came the “crazy years” of 1920s’ France, which pushed the impending danger back across the

wing brand espoused by the continuous, violent propaganda of Louis Farrakhan, head of the Nation of Islam, who compares Jews to “termites.”

No local dignitaries went to greet Trump upon his arrival at the Pittsburgh airport to pay his respects to the 11 victims of the synagogue massacre. And more than 82,000 signed a letter of reproach penned by Bend the Arc, a national organization of progressive Jews: “President Trump, your words, your policies, and your party have emboldened a growing white nationalist movement. The violence against Jews in Pittsburgh is the direct culmination of your influence.” his hysteria is linked to the growing divide between American Jews and Israel.

The American Jewish world, focused on its social rituals of liberalism and kindness, cannot accept the Middle Eastern conflict. The Obama period has Europeanized it. It doesn’t matter if their president is the friendliest ever seen towards Israel, which today is besieged by Iran on the Syr-

ian border, threatened by Hezbollah’s missile arsenal in the north and Hamas in the south, daily tormented by terrorism against its citizens.

When they dismiss Trump’s foreign policy, American Jews show their lack of interest for a real possibility of a Middle Eastern-U.S. guided new balance. They are jeopardizing a future peace plan that could meld the Sunni Arab world to Israeli interests and also those of the Palestinians.

Michigan Democrat Rashida Tlaib — initially endorsed by J Street, the nonprofit advocacy group of American left-wing Jews — became the first Palestinian American to be elected to the U.S. Congress on Tuesday, despite being openly anti-Israel. Others also newly elected to the U.S. House of Representatives have shown animosity towards Israel or a misunderstanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

This is a peculiar situation. Trump may be suddenly wondering if the Jews are his friends or foes. Jews have always enjoyed, all over the world, national respect for their young state. But lately, it seems as though they are watching from opposite shores while the rest of the world shows bias against it. The United Nations. The Obama administration. And now, some who are making their way to Washington.

Fiamma Nirenstein was a member of the Italian Parliament from 2008 to 2013. She is a fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.

encounter a more determined enemy army that knows its weaknesses and will they will necessarily endure further periods of conflict.

Another lesson that is much more self-evident in our region than in Europe: Bloody conflicts cannot be resolved merely by entering negotiations and signing a piece of paper that is destined to lay abandoned in an archive; a silent witness to the folly of our leaders.

One must relate to the cultural framework, the religious differences, beliefs, myths and founding stories of the nations that seek to resolve the conflict. One must examine the extent of the hatred and incitement, the strength of the claims being made in the various cultural spaces, whether in the literature, the education system, the media, against the very existence of the nation, and in contrast with the conciliatory statements being made by the leaders to a media thirty for some kind of gesture from the enemy.

Does any of this sound familiar? hen it came to an end 100 years ago, World War I left behind it a critically wounded Europe. Having lived through the destruction of what they saw as a war, leaders and military commanders in Europe in the 1930s were afraid to confront Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

They also mistakenly assumed that Germany was tired of war. Those who laid down their

swords and assumed their enemies could be reasoned with and that they, too, wanted nothing more than to work and live in peace, were in the end forced to sharpen their swords even more when World War II broke out, this time, at home.

Europe has yet to recover from its fatigue. Now, 100 years later, it must contend with a national and religious problem the likes of which it has never encountered before. Christian Europe, its spirit broken and its hands shackled in the chains of political correctness, is moving toward a confrontation with Islam 70 years after waging an intellectual war on the nationalist idea. Does Europe have the necessary strength to rise to the occasion?

And one more thing: In the historical perspective of our nation, this world war broke apart the Ottoman Empire and liberated the Land of Israel.

During the campaign to liberate the land, the Balfour Declaration on the establishment of national homeland for the Jewish people in the land of Israel was issued. Out of the great darkness of that period, a small light emerged that signaled for many Jews the great salvation that would give rise to the Third Commonwealth after World War II. “For, behold, darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the peoples; but upon thee the Lord will arise, and His glory shall be seen upon thee” (Isaiah 60:2).

Dror Eydar is a columnist for Israel Hayom.

The hysteria is linked to the divide between American Jews and Israel.

A war without a winner

border. While France appeared to dictate the humiliating conditions of the Versailles Treaty, the country itself was already tired and defeated.

And when it came time for Round 2, otherwise known as World War II, the country collapsed and continues to collapse to this day.

In retrospect, the peace conference held in Paris in January 1919 and the treaties signed there seem ridiculous. There is a lesson to be learned from the end of World War II—one that can be found in the blood spilled by tens of millions of soldiers and civilians across the world along with another 6 million of our people in World War II. peace agreement or diplomatic treaty is not the end of the story. Italian philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli saw war as the “natural state” of nations, within which each nation tries to swallow the other alive. Limited resources combined with the insatiable desire to obtain them births permanent societal and political tension that manifests in war.

You don’t need to accept Machiavelli’s opinion, but you do need to take it into account.

Those who dismiss it will, in the second chapter,

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palms-at-the-window seared into our psyches.

Bombs were everywhere. The air was thick with fear. There was an eerie feeling of terrible possibility in the air.

I was still in my twenties and hadn’t voted in that many elections; this time, I decided, I was going to forgo the dangerous trip to the post office to send my absentee ballot.

But voting was the type of thing we were nudged about. My parents and my grandmother asked me about my ballot, reminding me to take care of it. It gnawed at me.

Of course, had they known my conflict they would have told me to forget about it and not go to a busy part of the city — always a target. But as the deadline neared, with my heart nervously beating so loudly that I could hear it, I gathered my courage and went ahead to the post office mail my ballot.

In my young mind, it was a risk to be taken for the sake of American freedom.

Of course, many throughout history truly have sacrificed for our right to vote. And many have had to cross very real barriers in order to cast a vote. But I still always think of that ballot I cast in 2000 as the time I overcame fear in order to do everything I could to ensure that I voted.

Copyright Intermountain Jewish News

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THE JEWISH STAR November 16, 2018 • 8 Kislev, 5779

A long, winding road: Honoring the right to vote

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November 16, 2018 • 8 Kislev, 5779 THE JEWISH STAR

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Levy…

‘Jewicide’...

Continued from page 20 it the devastating massacre of 11 Jews at prayer in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue on Oct. 27.

The French philosopher is not the first to have expressed that view, but in this case, he does so as a warning to his fellow Jews not to be seduced by Trump or other populist politicians — like new Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, a fervent supporter of Israel, but also a man who said that he would rather his son die than come out as gay.

Lévy does not believe in ideological purity over pragmatism. If the Jews are to thrive, he says, they must absorb what he says are two “golden rules” crystallized by Jewish history.

First, facing externally, “strategic prudence …

To save his brothers, Joseph may forge an alliance with Pharoah. But only if he does not forget that a new Pharoah is always around the corner in Egypt.”

Second, looking inwards, “a metaphysical rule. … We are the descendants of a people who survived across the centuries for a single reason. We held fast to a body of thought.”

Faith in our political skills, confidence and pride in our intellectual and spiritual heritage, and cognizance that not every place in the world can be a “Sarajevo” — this is Lévy’s message to Jews and by extension, non-Jews.

At a time when many European intellectuals depict Israel as a reincarnation of Nazi Germany and dismiss accusations anti-Semitism as a political smear whose goal is to further empower “the Zionists,” the significance of that message cannot be overstated.

Continued from page 20 aking matters worse is the attitudes of the Democratic Party leaders. I’m not suggesting that the Democratic Senate Leader, Chuck Schumer, or the probable next Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, support the anti-Semitic or anti-Israel positions held by many in their caucuses. But they haven’t rebuked those who have them. They were silent during the eight years of the Obama administration, and have not criticized today’s anti-Israel or anti-Semitic members of Congress. Their public silence gives the impression of consent.

Jewish organizations in America will tell you that it is important not to make Israel a wedge issue, but most of those organizations put their allegiance to progressive politics before their loyalty to the Jewish people. How can support of Israel not become a wedge issue when one party is laden with anti-Semites and people who do not support the Jewish State?

Obviously, there are many other policy reasons this conservative writer is not happy with the vote that put Democrats in power.

But from a strictly Jewish perspective, putting the Democrats in power, electing new Israel haters, and placing supporters of Louis Farrakhan in key chairmanships, American Jewry’s support of the Democratic Party is just as bad as the silence of Schumer and Pelosi.

When those newly powerful Democrats start exercising power, perhaps the 79 percent of American Jews who supported them will realize that with their 2018 vote they committed Jewicide.

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The JEWISH STAR CAlendar of Events Send your events to Calendar@TheJewishStar.com Deadline noon Monday • Compiled by Rachel Langer

Thursday November 15

Delacroix Revealed: Art historian Vivian Gordon will discuss the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s landmark exhibit of one of the greatest French artists of the 19th century at the Peninsula Public Library. 1 pm. 280 Central Ave, Lawrence. 516-239-3262 x 216.

Explore Aliyah: Nefesh B’Nefesh Open House covering the aliyah process, including job market, community search, education, healthcare and financial planning. 7 pm. 859 Peninsula Blvd, Woodmere. NBN.org.il/explore.

Saturday November 17

Event of Season: Sisterhood of Young Israel of Woodmere performance by Ronnie Baras, comic hypnotist and mentalist. Raffles, dairy buffet, prizes. 8 pm. 859 Peninsula Blvd, Woodmere. $36. RSVP at yiwoodmere.org/sisterhood.

Motzei Shabbos: Yeshiva Tiferes Moshe invites the community to an evening with Charlie Harary. 8:30 pm. 2 Dogwood Rd, Great Neck.

Sunday November 18

Chanukah: Five Towns Chanukah shopping at Ateres Nechama Liba including giftware, jewelry, toys, wigs, accessories, clothing and more. Live food demos by Sarah Lasry. 11 am. 613 Beach 9th St, Far Rockaway. $10 per family. 732-598-6081.

Pre-Chanukah Show: Uncle Moishy at Aish Kodesh. Dreidel giveaway at the door. Two shows, 11 am and 2:30 pm. 894 Woodmere Place, Woodmere. AishKodesh.org/unclemoishy.

Chofetz Chaim dinner: Rabbinical Seminary of America hosts its 85th annual dinner and chag hasemicha at Terrace on the Park. 5 pm. 52 11 111th St, Flushing. $350. 718-268-4684.

Monday November 19

Paint Night: Get creative at Fall Paint Night with Joan Lazarus at the Peninsula Public Library. Ages 18 & up. 1 pm. 280 Central Ave, Lawrence. $10; registration required. 516-2393262 x 216.

Heights of Courage: Medal of Valor honoree Brig. General Avigdor Kahalani will share his experiences in the Yom Kippur War. Autographed books available. 8 pm. 140 Central Ave, Lawrence. 516-569-6733. $20.

Tuesday November 20

Jewish Migration: Michael Chaplan presents the story of 1.5 million East European Jews who were processed at Ellis Island. 2 pm. 159 Bayview Avenue, Great Neck. Free admission.

JCC Lecture: A thought-provoking discussion of post-war theological responses to the Shoah with Rabbi Moshe Cohn of Yad Vashem. 7 pm. 207 Grove Ave, Cedarhurst. 516-569-6733.

Thursday November 22

Thanksgiving Kollel: Shiurim by Rabbi Menachem Penner on tefillah and Rabbi Moshe Tzvi Weinberg on miracles, open to men and women. 9:30 am, 10:30 am. 859 Peninsula Blvd, Woodmere. YUlongisland@ YU.edu.

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