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Avraham Ashkenazi, Israeli-American businessman, reflects on the war in Israel Stephanie Peck vraham Ashkenazi has lived in the United States for almost half of his life, but there is no disputing that he’s an Israeli, first and foremost. Forty years in this country has not altered his thick accent, nor has it diminished his love for Israel. Born in Bulgaria, Ashkenazi emigrated to Israel in 1948. The Federation of Jewish Communities in Yugoslavia organized Jewish emigration to Israel after World War II, and the Ashkenazis were on the first ship, along with 4,000 fellow Bulgarians and 1,000 Hungarians. His family began life in Israel in an immigrant camp in Haifa. Ashkenazi was only 10 years old. A graduate of Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Ashkenazi served in the Israeli army, fighting in all the subsequent wars. His last service was in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In the early 1980s, Ashkenazi travelled to the U.S. in his role as general manager for a precision mechanics factory. Shortly after his initial arrival, he met Stanley Peck, who worked with the Navy, and Ashkenazi started supplying parts. In 1983, Ashkenazi permanently moved to the U.S. to start his own business, promoting Israeli products in North America. Two years later, he founded IAT International, Inc., a company that works with governments, government-owned companies, and private businesses in all aspects of the railway industry. With offices and partnerships in Norfolk, Israel, and the Czech Republic, Ashkenazi says the business has not been directly impacted by the October 7 Hamas attack. Employees in Tel Aviv are older and will not be called into service, he says. Manufacturing occurs outside
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of Israel, and imports enter through Haifa. “So far, nothing prevents us from working normally.” Ashkenazi has strong opinions about the failures on October 7. “The government has a contract with the people, and something went wrong.” Israel’s complacency during the Jewish holidays of Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah left no second line of defense;
soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces were on leave to celebrate with their families. Ashkenazi says he believes that Israel underestimated Hamas’ readiness and their capability with modern weapons. And Israel underestimated their cruelty. “We teach our children music and art. They teach their children to hate and kill.” They care about the Greatness of God; nothing else matters, he says, including the lives of Arabs and Jews. While Ashkenazi expects an investigation after the war, he feels strongly that leadership must take responsibility. Israel needs technology at the border instead of tanks. Drones on both sides of the fence would deliver photos in real time. Similar to the West Bank, Israel should provide civil rule in Gaza, where police control the area without a military. Gazans can live and work in this territory, but Israel has the right to enter and take out suspicious citizens. This model is the only way to co-exist, he says. Ashkenazi and his wife, Karen, had planned to go to Israel this month, renting an apartment for one month in the same building as his family. Instead, they will go in March. His grandchildren now serve in the army. While his granddaughter is not on the front line, her boyfriend, a captain in a special forces unit, saw first-hand the grisly attacks at the Nova music festival and kibbutzim. “Hashem protects you, but still, for a young man, he probably saw a lot of horrible things.” “I never thought that my grandchildren would be in the military and active, and they are more active than we were.” Ashkenazi believes Israel will flourish. “If you don’t have a country, you are a refugee.”
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Orthodox Union certifies Israeli brand of lab-grown meat as kosher — but not pareve Jackie Hajdenberg This story originally appeared on Kveller. (JTA) — The Orthodox Union has granted kosher certification to a type of lab-grown meat, a decision that could signal an expansion of the options available under Judaism’s intricate dietary laws. The O.U., the most prominent kosher certifier in the United States, recognized poultry products from Israeli startup SuperMeat as kosher, the company announced last month. The startup is part of a growing industry that aims to provide an alternative to traditional meat by creating the food in a laboratory from stem cells. “This collaboration aims to bridge the gap between scientific understanding and halachic adjudication, setting unprecedented standards in the cultivated meat industry,” Rabbi Menachem Genack, the CEO of O.U. Kosher, says, using a term referring to Jewish law. The process of certifying lab-grown meat, a years-long quest for SuperMeat, demonstrated the complexity of applying Judaism’s age-old dietary laws to a culinary landscape where the range of foods, and how they are produced, is expanding rapidly — from lab-grown meat to plant-based alternatives and more. It may also represent yet another increase in the number of products kosher consumers can take off supermarket shelves. “This step represents our commitment to inclusivity and respect for diverse dietary needs, making our cultivated chicken meat accessible to audiences around the world,” Ido Savir, CEO of SuperMeat, says. “We believe this historic initiative with the Orthodox Union not only broadens the options for kosher consumers worldwide but will also set clear guidelines for other companies in the cultivated meat industry seeking kosher certification, opening new avenues for the Kosher food industry.” The lab-grown meat industry is in its infancy and may appeal to consumers who enjoy eating meat but oppose slaughtering animals for food. It remains to be seen whether lab-grown meat produced at a mass scale will be cheaper or more environmentally sustainable than regular beef or poultry. The U.S. Department of Agriculture granted its first approval for cell-cultured meat in late June, and SuperMeat first plans to roll out its products in the United States. The company is also looking into halal certification. “The vast majority of the vegan-vegetarian movement is very supportive,” SuperMeat’s co-founder and CEO, Koby Barak, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in 2016. “And we thank them for really supporting us.” On the surface, kosher certification for lab-grown meat doesn’t appear to herald a revolution for observant Jewish
eaters, especially in places where traditional kosher animal products are already easy to find. As with regular chicken, the O.U. has certified the labgrown variety as kosher meat, meaning that it can’t be eaten with dairy products. That separates it from recent plantbased meat alternatives such as Impossible Foods or Beyond Meat, many of whose products are certified as pareve — neither meat nor dairy — meaning that they may be eaten together with all kosher foods. Plant-based meat has provided a pathway for observant Jews to eat imitations of some archetypal non-kosher foods, such as cheeseburgers or pizza with a meat topping. SuperMeat will not offer those kinds of possibilities. But Genack says that for Jews who keep a stringent form of kosher laws, SuperMeat’s certification will be a boon. “Theoretically, the impact on prices and availability should be significant,” he says. That’s because the company’s chicken products are categorized as Mehadrin kosher — the strictest form of kosher supervision. And if the O.U. moves to certify lab-grown beef as kosher, which it has yet to do, it could lead to an increase in the supply of meat that is “glatt” kosher, a term that refers to meat slaughtered from an animal whose lungs are smooth. The kosher seal of approval came after SuperMeat hosted two rabbinic delegations, and kosher authorities held a series of conversations on Jewish law surrounding the science used in the company’s technology, according to a Times of Israel report. Obtaining kosher certification for lab-grown meat is complicated because the process of cultivating meat from stem cells requires the use of living animals — and kosher law bars the consumption of any part of a living animal. Founded in 2015, SuperMeat’s lab-grown poultry avoids this dilemma by acquiring stem cells from eggs rather than from the living birds themselves. And because the eggs are at an early stage of fertilization, there’s no concern that blood will end up in the product, which would also be prohibited by Jewish law.
“We were looking for something that can be universally accepted as Mehadrin, completely kosher, and that’s what taking the stem cells from the eggs represents,” Genack says. The cells are planted in a meat fermenter that simulates a bird’s biology. In the fermenter, the cells are provided with heat, oxygen, and plant-based liquid nourishment. They then mature into meat tissue and grow quickly, doubling in mass in just a few hours. When the meat is ready to harvest, the liquid feed is removed. Other Orthodox rabbis, such as Israeli Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi David Lau, have ruled that some lab-grown meat labeled as a meat alternative could be considered pareve. Genack says that at the Orthodox Union, there were different opinions on how lab-grown meat should be classified. But the agency decided to mark it as meat because it’s derived from an animal and looks exactly like meat. Leading rabbis in the Conservative movement came to the same conclusion in 2018, ruling that lab-grown meat of kosher animals would be kosher but that disputes over its status and possible confusion meant it should be considered meat. “Cultured meat should be designated as ‘meaty according to the rabbis’ even though there will be no need for kosher slaughter, inspection for injury, deveining, soaking or salting to remove blood,” wrote Rabbi Daniel Nevins, the author of the legal opinion on the topic that was accepted almost unanimously by the movement’s law committee. Genack notes that lab-grown pork will remain off-limits because it is derived from a pig, which is not kosher. (The O.U. also declined to give certification to Impossible Pork, even though it is plant-based, because of what Genack called “sensitivities to the consumer.”) “Anything which you derive from something non-kosher itself is not kosher,” he says. “If you milk a non-kosher animal, the milk is also non-kosher, because it derived from a non-kosher source. So, this doesn’t open that opportunity.”
The lab-grown meat industry is in its infancy and may appeal to consumers who enjoy eating meat but oppose slaughtering animals for food.
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Residential real estate can be a boon for investors Stephanie Peck ooking for an investment in residential real estate? Opinions vary as to whether or not this is a good time for a non-owner-occupied buyer to purchase a house or duplex to rent or flip. Mortgage rates are at a 20-year high, and inventory is low in Tidewater. Linda Fox-Jarvis, marketing director and listing specialist at The Linda Fox-Jarvis Team, says yes, the market is still good. In fact, Fox-Jarvis says she is seeing a lot of investors, both for flipping homes and for buying properties as a longerterm investment to rent out. “The rental market is very strong, as is the sales market,” she says. “High rates impact investors, except for cash buyers,” says Nancy Evans, a realtor with Howard Hanna. “There are not a lot of investment properties out there, although there are a lot of buyers.” She says that, while the bidding wars have decreased from recent years, it’s still a competitive market. “A buyer with cash tends to win.” The website, walletinvestor.com, however, has some Linda Fox-Jarvis good news for an investor in Virginia Beach. For buyers looking for a five-year investment, the site suggests that the profit is expected to be around +2.64% by 2028. In Norfolk, however, the market has slowed, according to Shirley Stein, a realtor and relocation agent with Howard Hanna. Where a few years ago, people were overbidding by $50,000; today, she says, buyers are only willing to overpay if they plan to live in the home for 10 to 20 years. Stein says that the numbers must work for an investor. As an example, she cites a distressed house she found for a contractor – he purchased low, spent a large sum renovating, and then sold the property immediately for a good profit. In Florida, the trend is similar. Steve Jason of All Access Realty specializes in the counties of Southern Palm Shirley Stein Beach and Northern Broward. He also sees a slow market, though listings are up 20% over last year. Prices remain firm, he says, even with investors bargain hunting. “Sellers are not interested in moving for a lower price,” Jason notes, as investors try to negotiate. Whereas there were once five buyers for every property, now there is only one. Susie Edmunds, a realtor with Howard Hanna who specializes in neighborhoods from the Bay Bridge Tunnel to the North End/Oceanfront and inland through the Great Neck corridor, says that rental prices have increased, so investors are buying regardless of the higher interest rates. “The population is increasing in general. Inventory is low for buyers looking for a home to live in, so people are sticking to renting.” Whether you invest in a property to rent or to flip, the potential for success exits. Just be certain to know the laws, Steve Jason have a strategy, and work with a professional.
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Economics Nobel awarded to Claudia Goldin for work on women in the labor market Ron Kampeas (JTA) — Claudia Goldin, a Jewish scholar at Harvard University, won the Nobel Prize for Economics for her work tracking the disparity in earnings for women in the labor market. “Claudia Goldin has trawled the archives and collected over 200 years of data from the U.S., allowing her to demonstrate how and why gender differences in earnings and employment rates have changed over time,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in its release. Goldin, 77, shattered a glass ceiling in 1989 when she became the first tenured woman professor in Harvard’s Economics Department. “I think it will be very good for Harvard to have a tenured woman, and I’m pleased to be that woman,” Goldin said at the time, speaking the campus student newspaper, the Crimson. Her seminal work, Understanding the Gender Gap — An Economic History of American Women, published in 1992, sought to prove that opportunity for women in the labor market was less a function of changing social mores or economic growth than it was susceptible to a variety of factors, including a woman’s age, her education, and expectations of mothers. “Goldin showed that female participation in the labor market did not have an upward trend over this entire period, but instead forms a U-shaped curve,” the Academy said in its release, referring to the 200-year scope of Goldin’s research. “The participation of married women decreased with the transition from an agrarian to an industrial society in the early nineteenth century, but then started to increase with the growth of the service sector in the early twentieth century,” it said. At the press conference announcing the award, Jakob Svensson, the
chairman of the prize committee, said Goldin helped elucidate why women remain “vastly underrepresented” in the labor market despite being better educated. “Understanding women’s role in the labor market is important in society, not the least because if women do not have the same opportunity as men, or they participate on unequal terms, labour, skills and talent go wasted,” said Svensson, a professor of economics at Stockholm University. “Thanks to Professor Goldin’s groundbreaking research we know much more about the underlying facts driving women’s labor market outcomes and which barriers may need to not to be addressed in the future.” An attempt by the Nobel committee to reach Goldin by phone at the press conference failed. Prize organizers said they had spoken with her earlier and that she was “surprised and glad.” Goldin’s most recent work, Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity, published in 2021, discusses “why true equity for dual career couples remains frustratingly out of reach,” according to Goldin’s Harvard University biography pages. “Antidiscrimination laws and unbiased managers, while valuable, are not enough,” says Goldin’s precis of her book. Career and Family explains why we must make fundamental changes to the way we work and how we value caregiving if we are ever to achieve gender equality and couple equity.” Goldin, a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science in New York City, has also looked into the historic role of Jews in the marketplace. The authors of a 2003 Boston University paper, “From Farmers to Merchants: A Human Capital Interpretation of Jewish Economic History,” consulted with Goldin. A 2001 paper she cowrote for the National Bureau of Economic Research,
on the tendency of women to retain their surname when married, was based in part on an analysis of wedding announcements in the New York Times in 1991. A third of the religious ceremonies were Jewish, the authors noted, “not surprising given the location” of the newspaper. Religious ceremonies for Jews and for others, they found, were likelier to correlate to women changing their name. Goldin devotes two pages on her Harvard University biography site to her golden retrievers: Prairie, who
died in 2009, and Pika, who is 13. She lists his distinctions, as a therapy dog and as a winner of the Excellent Title in Performance Scent Dogs. Her most recent posting marks his “bark mitzvah.” Also distinguished is her husband, Lawrence Katz, who is a professor of economics at Harvard. According to one tally, 37 Jews have won the Nobel in economics, including one of last year’s recipient, Ben Bernanke, the former chairman of the federal reserve.
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business Jewish food celebrities hold a bake sale for Israel, raising $27K for food relief efforts Rachel Ringler (New York Jewish Week) — Earlier this month, Adeena Sussman had been gearing up for a Chelsea Market stop on her tour promoting her new cookbook, Shabbat, which she’d traveled from her home in Tel Aviv to the United States to launch. But after Hamas attacked Israel on Saturday, Oct. 7, that didn’t feel right. “There was no way I was going to do an event built around me at a time like this,” Sussman said. So, she and Rachel Simons, the owner and founder of tahini brand Seed + Mill, who had been planning to host the signing, joined forces with members of the Jewish Food Society, a non-profit organization that celebrates Jewish culinary
heritage from around the world, to plan a different sort of event. The result, what they called a “community hug and bake sale,” brought dozens of Jewish food influencers and their followers and friends to a Chelsea Market event space. Even though the event wasn’t advertised widely out of security concerns, the line to enter stretched down the block as attendees pledged donations to ASIF, the Jewish Food Society’s partner organization in Tel Aviv where staff have been preparing meals for displaced families and hospital workers in Israel. Donations were traded for yellow tickets which then could be redeemed inside for treats, sweets, cookbooks, and swag. The tables were manned for the most part
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by food influencers themselves. New York Times bestselling cookbook author Jake Cohen baked and brought 100 of his signature date-studded brownies. Restaurateur Einat Admony, whose falafel shops Taim were an early arrival to the city’s Israeli food scene, stood behind towers of her cookbooks while selling cupcakes donated by BCakeNY. Food blogger Chanie Apfelbaum was toting hawaij gingersnaps that had come out of the oven just moments before she had to head to the sale. She’d barely had time to bake but said she made room for one more activity because of the pain she felt in the wake of the attack, which left thousands of Israelis dead, wounded, and held captive. “I felt like I had to be part of this,” Apfelbaum says. “I had to see people and be amongst the food community.” Lior Lev Sercarz, who recently opened La Boite, a spice atelier, had his books and spices on hand. And the team at Seed + Mill prepared and distributed 100 tahini brownies, a recipe from Sussman’s previous cookbook, Sababa, a celebration of Israeli cuisine. “Food is obviously really important to us as a culture and as a nation,” says Chaya Rappoport, the Jewish Food Society’s culinary manager, who came up with the bake sale concept. “Food helps people connect in times of happiness and times of sorrow and times when we need to come together. … Everybody pitched in on a moment’s notice.” About 400 people attended the bake sale, raising $27,000 for ASIF’s relief work. The first donations would support 2,000 meals for families who have evacuated to Eilat, in Israel’s south, the Jewish Food Society says. Max Aronson, who works at local restaurant Carbone, says he came because he has friends and family in Israel. Columbian cookbook author and food stylist Mariana Velasquez came to show support for Jewish Food Society’s founder
Naama Shefi and the Jewish community. And Maria Zalewska, editor of the cookbook Honey Cake & Latkes, a compilation of recipes from survivors of Auschwitz, was there, too. Since the war began, Zalewska has been reaching out and checking up on the Holocaust survivors featured in her book to see how they are. Zalewska had planned to attend Sussman’s book signing when she received an invitation to the sale — along with an exhortation to keep its location and existence a secret. “I think it is horrifically sad that this event needs to be private, and we can’t talk about it on social media for security reasons,” says Zalewska. “It is a reflection of the scary time that we are in.” The event felt to her like the “community hug” it was planned to be. “A lot of people, especially non-Jews, feel helpless and they don’t know what to do,” Zalewska says. “This gives people an opportunity to donate a little bit of money, come together and show their allegiance to the Israelis and their Jewish friends.” Simons says the bake sale is only the first effort by a local Jewish food community; further planning, she said, “is ongoing.” Already, Ben Siman-Tov, who goes by BenGingi, is collaborating with Breads Bakery to make heart-shaped challahs to raise money for Magen David Adom, Israel’s version of the Red Cross. New York Shuk, which makes Middle Eastern pantry staples, is donating 100% of its proceeds this month to Israeli children who have lost parents in the attack and subsequent conflict. And Miznon, the chain of restaurants operated by Israeli chef Eyal Shani, is inviting customers to round up their purchases with a donation toward humanitarian aid in Israel. Simons says she found catharsis in the bake sale event. It “was about solidarity, support and our community’s mental health,” she says. “I hugged and cried with friends and strangers — Jews and nonJews alike.”