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Deborah Ponn, ‘Ultimate Volunteer,’ to Head Fed

MARK ARNOLD
Jewish Journal Staff

The thing you notice right away about Debby Ponn is that she has no pretensions. She doesn’t try to impress, doesn’t use big words, doesn’t boast of her accomplishments. She is a natural, down-to-earth, upfront mid-westerner, who appears to be at ease with herself and her adopted community. But she knows how to push and she knows how to get a job done.

“You give her an assignment and you know she’ll complete it and she’ll do it right,” says Neil Cooper of Swampscott, a former executive director of Federation and one of her early mentors.

On Monday, Sept. 22, Ponn, 41, will be installed as president of the Jewish Federation of the North Shore, succeeding Stephen A. Baker, 54, who has held the post the past three years. Election and installation of new officers will take place at the organization’s 65th annual meeting, to be held at Temple Beth El, Swampscott, at 7 p.m. The public is invited to attend the event and hear Ponn and new Federation Executive Director Merritt Mullman provide what is being billed as a “Renewed Vision of the Future.” Dessert will be served.
Ponn grew up in a well-to-do household in downtown Chicago. She came to Boston to go to Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, met a young man from Peabody, returned home after graduation, then relocated here 1.5 years later to marry that suitor, David Ponn, whose family is in the industrial rubber business. The couple live in a spacious modern home in the Brooksby Farm area of Peabody and have two sons who attend Cohen Hillel Academy in Marblehead.

Ponn became involved in the Jewish community as a way of meeting people soon after moving to the North Shore in the late eighties. “This is not the most inviting community,” she says. It’s very tough to break in,” but by volunteering she says, “I was able to meet great people.” Her entry point was not Federation but the North Suburban Jewish Community Center, in Peabody, where she climbed the ranks to become president and managed, among other accomplishments, to get 100 per cent board participation in Federation’s annual fund-raising campaign. A chance phone call from a fellow transplanted Chicagoan later got her involved in young leadership circles at Federation, and she moved up rapidly on the strength of her ability to organize successful events and her refusal to say no to whatever was asked of her.

“There were alot of things I was asked to do that I felt intimidated by, but I just kept working at it and gradually became more comfortable. I kept meeting great people and they helped me grow,” she says. Ponn became active in the Federation’s Young Leadership Division, the Women’s Division, whose presidency she will leave — reluctantly, in the middle of her term — to lead the Federation, and the powerful Allocations Committee, which divvies up the resources from funds raised to help run the agencies that serve the North Shore Jewish community. These include such organizations as Jewish Family Service the community centers in Peabody and Marblehead, Holocaust Center, Jewish Historical Society, Mikvah, and others.

She was especially intimidated by Allocations: “I told Neil (Cooper) I didn’t understand finance, and he said he wanted me on that committee anyway because he thought I could take the numbers out of it and listen to the heart and soul of the community speaking. I did that and gradually got tutored by (then chair) Ed Snow and others so I eventually understand the numbers too.”

As Ponn talks about her career in volunteer work — rolling tiny balls out of a piece of paper with her fingers on a table in her rec room — she notes matter-of-factly that she is now operating on a national as well as a local level. She is one of 300 members of the National Young Leadership Cabinet of United Jewish Communities, the umbrella organization for local Federations. She is chair of those like herself in their fourth year with the group and also chair of a group working to find ways to apply the insights gained in Cabinet meetings and retreats on a local level.

Ponn was co-chair of the Federation Search Committee that hired Mullman in June. Of their partnership now, she says: “We think so much alike that we finish each other’s sentences.” The two will spell out their vision at the Fed’s annual meeting. Their goals, she says, will include increasing contributions to the community campaign, which has been lagging in recent years; helping to “keep our children Jewish,” grooming more young people for future leadership, and strengthening the community links between the Fed, community agencies, and the synagogues.

Those may be daunting challenges but Steve Baker, for one, thinks she is up to them. “Debbie,” he says, “has a wonderful Jewish heart. She’s a community activist. She can transition the leadership to the next generation. She is the ultimate volunteer.”

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North Shore Temples Welcome Trio of New Cantors

GARY BAND
Jewish Journal Staff

As the High Holidays approach, three temples — Beth El and Israel in Swampscott and Beth Shalom in Peabody — will have new voices leading their congregations in song and prayer when they usher in the new year.

Cantor Stacy Sokol will be at Temple Beth El; Cantor Ary Rothschild at Temple Israel, and Cantor Rosalie Tobus at Temple Beth Shalom.

Cantor Sokol, 27, grew up in Scarsdale, New York and attended SUNY Purchase and the Jewish Theological Seminary, where she graduated in May 2002.

Cantorial School is a five-year program, the first year of which is spent in Israel, followed by intensive study in Torah, Haftorah and holiday trope, Halacha, Bible, and Israeli history, to name just a few.

When students graduate the program, and become members of the Cantor’s Assembly of America, they register with placement services at the Cantor’s Assembly to see what jobs are available.

“Ever since I was 15 I knew I wanted to go in this direction,” Sokol says. Her inspiration was Cantor Mendhelson, who led a congregation she attended in White Plains.

Sokol says she was attracted to this area and Beth El was the kind of synagogue she liked. She will work with the Junior Choir, B’nai Mitzvah students, and of course lead the congregation in song.

She and her husband, a CPA, live in Swampscott.

At Temple Israel, Rothschild, 44, who was born and grew up in Alsace, France, came to America last summer and worked at Temple Beth El in Springfield, MA.

Born to a family of Chazanim (Cantors), Cantor Rothschild is also a lawyer specializing in trademark law. He worked in the field from 1990-2002 in France and taught for a brief time at the University of Strasbourg. Because Rothschild would have to attend law school here for another two years to qualify him to practice in America, he plans not to do so and dedicate himself full-time to his extensive cantorial duties.

“I have a long-standing tradition of chazanot to continue,” he says. His greatest nachas comes from singing. “Law was my job but singing is my passion,” he says. He hopes to attract young people to the synagogue and provide a quality education to the B’nai Mitzvah students.

The level of anti-Semitism in France is one of the main reasons he and his family, a wife and four children, left when they did. They now live in Marblehead.

Cantor Tobus, 36, is the new face at Temple Beth Shalom. Originally from Kansas City, she moved to this area in mid-August.
A graduate of the University of Michigan, she earned her master’s degree in music and psychology at Washington University in St. Louis, and attended cantorial school at Hebrew Union College.

Tobus was “invested” at HUC in May, and has worked as an assistant and substitute cantor at temples in the Boston area from 1994-99.
From her experience then, Tobus said she liked the Boston Jewish community and wanted to come back.

“The sense I got from Beth Shalom is that the children are a huge priority, and that’s very much in line with my own perspective. I love teaching, and anywhere I can inspire the kids to get more involved in Jewish life, that’s where I belong.”

Cantor Tobus will participate in every Friday night Shabbat service, teach music at the Hebrew school, lead the children’s choir and Tot Shabbat services, and tutor the B’nai Mitzvah students.

She and her partner and new-born daughter live in South Lawrence.

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Portrait of an Artist As a Young Girl — Jane Malinkovich

SUSAN JACOBS
Jewish Journal Staff

SALEM — When she was just 3 years old, Jane Malinkovich moved with her family from Belarus to our North Shore. After a decade of living in Lynn and Swampscott, the thirteen-year-old speaks perfect English and is a fully assimilated American teen with braces.

Yet the bright and poised eighth grader has not forgotten her roots, and she is very grateful that her family was given the opportunity to come to the United States. She recently expressed her feelings about being an immigrant in a painting that won first prize in her age division in a national poster art contest sponsored by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.

This is the ninth year that HIAS, the nation’s oldest resettlement agency, has sponsored the contest for first and second-generation immigrant children. The organization selected 12 winners. The victors, whose families hail from countries including India, China and Ukraine, received cash prizes and certificates of achievement. The grand prize (a $1,000 U.S. savings bond) went to Alina Arutyonova, an 11-year-old resident of Brooklyn, N.Y., whose painting depicted a colorful group of people dancing around a globe.

The 12 pieces of art are currently being transformed into a 2004 HIAS calendar, with each winning entry highlighting a different month.
Malinkovich designed her watercolor entry around music, since she believes music is something that everyone enjoys. She painted different people from different cultures, each playing a different instrument. “They are all different, but they are all getting along, making music and harmony together,” she notes.

This is the second year that Malinkovich has entered the contest. She was a finalist in 2002 with an entry that featured a giant skyscraper with people from different countries hanging out of windows and standing on balconies waving the respective flags of their native countries. Last year she won a $50 cash prize and her painting highlighted the month of April.

Malinkovich takes an art class in Marblehead, and it was her teacher who originally inspired her to enter the contest. In addition to drawing, she takes a weekly dance class and plays tennis. She loves school and is an excellent student at Swampscott Middle School. Although she enjoys art as a hobby, the ambitious youngster yearns to be a pediatrician and wants to attend Harvard Medical School.

Her parents, Galina and Victor, both computer programmers, are very proud of Jane and her 18-year-old sister Anastasiya, a college freshman who wants to become a lawyer. They moved to America so that their daughters could have more opportunity to succeed, and the girls appear to be doing just that.

Although Malinkovich admits that it was sad to leave their extended family in Belarus, she would not want to move back there. Her adjustment to life in America has been easy. “When we first moved here, I thought it was the best thing in the world. My parents found jobs right away, and I made a lot of friends. I guess I’m an American at heart,” she concludes.

The non-profit HIAS distributes its calendars for free. They are currently being printed and will not be available until winter. Those interested in receiving a calendar can request one in late November/early December. E-mail to: public@hias.org or call 212-613-1378 and ask for Margarita Zilberman.

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Temples Agudas Achim and Ezrath Israel to Merge in Malden

MARK ARNOLD
Jewish Journal Staff

Two synagoguges in Malden are about to join forces: Congregation Agudas Achim, a 102-year-old congregation on the corner of Bryant and Harvard Streets, will merge with Temple Ezrath Israel. Both are Conservative and egalitarian and have suffered in recent years from declining membership as a result of the changing demographics of the area.

On Sun., Sept. 21, at 9:30 a.m. the two congregations will hold a joint Slichot service at Agudas Achim. It will be followed by a march of the eight Torah scrolls from Agudas Achim to their new home. Norman Rubin, president of Agudas Achim, said he expects about 30 to 50 people to participate in the procession from his synagoguge to Ezrath Israel on Bryant Street, a block and a half away.

“As a member of the temple for more than 50 years,” he said, “I have mixed feelings about this. It’s not easy. But we figure that by combining, it will make us stronger.” Temple Ezrath Israel has 110 families; Agudas Achim, 50 to 75. Other synagogues in Malden include Congregation Beth Israel (Orthodox), Tifereth Israel (Reform), and Young Israel of Malden (Orthodox).

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Harvard Still Mulling $2.5M Gift Despite Closing of Zayed Centre

BRETT M. RHYNE
Jewish Journal Staff

United Arab Emirate President Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan may have closed the allegedly anti-Semitic research institute that bears his name, but Harvard University officials will take a year to decide whether or not to return his $2.5 million gift to Harvard Divinity School (HDS).

The Abu Dhabi-based Zayed Centre closed last month, under international pressure to halt its promotion of Holocaust-denial and anti-American conspiracy theories. However, HDS, which accepted the money to endow a chair in Islamic religious studies in July 2000, said it would not announce its decision until Spring 2004.

"In view of the evolving situation, Harvard has decided to put the gift on hold during the coming academic year," HDS announced in a short written statement Aug. 29.

Harvard came under fire last spring when Rachel Fish, an HDS master’s student, brought the Zayed Centre’s activities to light. [See “Harvard Close to Rejecting Sheikh’s Gift,” Jewish Journal, July 4-17, p.1.]

“It proves my concerns were valid,” says Rachel Fish. “It justifies what I was thinking, researching and saying.”

Fish, who now works in the New York office of the pro-Semitic, educational David Project, remains dissatisfied with Harvard’s delaying its decision for a year. “Why does it take the president of a foreign country to make a decision before the dean or president of a university in America will?” she asks.

"The decision to hold off the decision was made in President [Lawrence] Summers office, not at Harvard Divinity School," says Wendy McDowell, HDS media relations officer. Harvard University Press Officer Lucie McNeil did not return Journal telephone calls.

Others in the Jewish community and beyond are also disturbed by Harvard’s indecisiveness.
“We’re very pleased the Zayed Centre has been shut down,” says Lawrence D. Lowenthal, executive director of the American Jewish Committee–New England chapter. “The Centre was a viper’s nest of vicious anti-Semitic publications, speeches and forums.
“It’s demise does not cleanse the gift of $2.5 million to Harvard Divinity School, however,” he adds. “Controversy will continue to simmer around this issue and trouble the Jewish community.”

“It certainly proved the money was tainted,” says Charles Jacobs, founder of the Boston-based David Project.

“The Zayed Centre’s closing would not clean the money alone,” Jacobs says. “Not without further clarification and a real effort on the part of the people who did this to acknowledge that hatred is the world’s largest weapon of mass destruction.”

“The central question still needs to be resolved,” says Joshua Rubenstein, Northeast regional director of Amnesty International USA. “If Harvard can confirm that the Zayed Centre really was involved in preaching intolerance — I’m using euphemisms here — it would be awkward to accept the donation.”

Rubenstein maintains the gift must be considered not only in light of the activities of the Zayed Centre, but in the context of the policies of Zayed’s U.A.E. as well. Amnesty has documented “widespread political arrests, torture, use of the death penalty and trafficking of Bangladeshi child slaves for camel races,” Rubenstein tells The Journal.

“If Harvard receives money from a government source outside the United States, “he says, “it has to establish standards about the human rights practices of those governments. Do their practices rise to the level of raising concerns?”

“Two things are still important to me about this,” says Rachel Fish. “First, I wonder why has Harvard Divinity School remained insensitive to anti-Semitism. And second, I want to make sure that not just students, but other people who are concerned, speak up — both Jews and non-Jews.”

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Life of an Educator: Jacobson Shares Her Knowledge, Love

GARY BAND
Jewish Journal Staff

Rachel Jacobson of Swampscott loves teaching. As one of 46 Jewish educators from across the country to receive the 4th Annual Grinspoon Steinhardt Award for excellence in Jewish education, her passion is now known both locally and nationally.

Presented in August, the award recognizes those who have made a career commitment to the field of Jewish education and contributed in some “outstanding way” to this school or community. As a Hebrew school teacher on the North Shore for the last 20 years, Jacobson has done just that.

“I’ve really shared my knowledge and experience with every school in the neighborhood,” she says.

Though modest and thankful for the opportunity to pass on the many aspects of Jewish heritage and culture, this warm and energetic sabra is not entirely sure of the impact she’s made on the lives of her students. Time will tell, she says.

Jacobson herself did not plan to be a Hebrew school teacher, but was inspired by a college professor who said, “I have big dreams for you.” And she has in turn transmitted that kind of belief and confidence to every student she has taught. “Every one of my students are my children, and I look for the good in each one,” she says.

Thanks to the words of encouragement expressed by that professor, Jacobson’s foray into American Jewish educational life began as a counselor at Camp Yavneh in New Hampshire, where she worked for five summers. She also taught Hebrew school at Congregation Kehillath Israel and Temple Sinai in Boston.

Born in Israel to a family of 12 biological and four adopted children, and a mother who was once Mrs. Israel, Jacobson, the youngest of 16, came to America at age 20 after serving in the Israeli army and air force. She attended Boston University and Hebrew College, earning a degree in education.

In 1976, Rachel married Nathan Jacobson, a builder who studied architecture at a university in Russia and came to America from Latvia at the same time as she did from Israel. The couple soon moved to the North Shore.

Of her homeland Jacobson says, “I love Israel (Ani ohavet Yisrael). My soul is there but my body is in America. I felt guilty at first, but soon realized I was here for a reason: to educate Jewish children.”

As sort of a recipe for Jewish pride, observance and continuity, Jacobson believes that parents must talk about and practice Judaism in a positive way, such as having Friday night dinners, holiday gatherings with family and friends, and telling stories. In a word, “consistency.”

“Although Jewish people are a very small percentage, we try hard to find each other,” Jacobson says. “We are fortunate to live in a community where there are Jews everywhere. By sending kids to Israel and Europe, establishing a connection between Israeli, European and American Jews, teaching the history and showing the importance of our religion, we keep our traditions alive.”

Jacobson attributes her passion for Jewish education to her love of Jewish culture and history. And her educational philosophy — though somewhat in contrast to the memories many have of Hebrew school — may be summed up in one word: fun.

“Homework and tests are not everything,” she says. With the amount of regular school homework, family time and extracurricular activities many kids participate in, Jacobson feels Jewish educational institutions need to understand that “kids can’t do everything.”

Of Chabad’s religious and educational philosophy, Jacobson says they are not here to “convert you” but to “take you where you are and keep Judaism alive.”

In addition to Chabad, Jacobson also teaches the Junior Congregation at Temple Beth El, and taught at North Shore Hebrew School for more than a decade. She has a great appreciation and respect for Rabbi Edgar Weinsberg and the temple, which she calls “a second home.”

And in addition to teaching second grade at Chabad, Jacobson also teaches the high school kids (pictured) conversational Hebrew and holds an Ulpan (Hebrew immersion) with the Y2I kids. “The Israeli kids could not believe how much they knew,” she says of the recent North Shore trip to Europe.

As for future plans, Jacobson has no intention of pursuing any administrative positions. “This [in the classroom] is where I belong,” she insists. “I love teaching, I love volunteering. It’s a dream come true to see my students growing up.”

Jacobson, herself a mother of three, overcame a very difficult time five years ago when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. After treatment here, she went to Israel to see family and friends and came back believing it was behind her. “God gave me a second chance to do more,” she said.

In the last three years, Jacobson says she has seen an “awakening” in the community with “many more people getting involved” in Jewish life. She believes that the more parents get involved, and the more positive Jewish experiences kids have, the more likely they will be to get involved when they grow up.

“When I see a 30-year-old at the JCC that I had as a student come up to me and say, ‘Mrs. Jacobson, I remember those years at Hebrew school,’ then I know I’ve had an impact.”

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Peabody Gets Its Own Chabad Rabbi

MARK ARNOLD
Jewish Journal Staff

The young bearded man answering the door of a trim white house on Lowell Street in Peabody holds up a finger on his left hand beckoning to his visitor, but he says not a word of greeting. His head is tilted to one side, cradling a hands-free land phone between head and shoulder. He talks into it, while his hands work a palm pilot to set up a meeting with his caller. Hanging from his right hip is his cellphone.

This is Rabbi Nechemia Shusterman, Peabody’s new Chabad rabbi. Just three weeks after moving with his wife Raziel and the couple’s two small children from Marina del Rey, California, their new home is all set up, boxes put away. The spacious living room/dining room is dominated by a long table and wall-to-ceiling bookcases filled with leather-bound Hebrew-language religious books.

“I wanted a place where people could gather. I think we can fit maybe 22 here for Shabbat dinner,” he says, noting that in the Chabad movement, Shabbat dinner is usually a time of open house at the home of the rabbi. “Everyone is welcome,” he explains.

Why Peabody? “Rabbi Yossi (Lipsker, of the Chabad Educational Center in Swampscott) invited us to come and take a look, and we liked what we saw,” he explains. He is 27 years old, a second-generation Chabad rabbi from Long Beach, CA, brimming with enthusiasm. He will hold High Holy Day services at the Spring Hill Conference Center on Route 1 North in Peabody. He has no idea how many people will turn out. “But the hotel has folding doors. The first room has seats for 50, but we can accommodate several hundred if need be.

Obviously, I hope for several minyans,” he says.

Peabody has 1,500 identified Jewish households; an estimated several hundred more are unaffiliated. Since Rabbi Lipsker founded Chabad of the North Shore in 1992, his synagogue has drawn support from more than a dozen North Shore communities. Today his synagogue, now located on Burrill Street in Swampscott, draws congregants from throughout the area. Its religious school enrolls 180 children, including 60 in Peabody who attend a separate facility now housed in the McCarthy Elementary School.

The Hebrew schools and a new Chabad Hebrew High School, which started up this month in Swampscott, are run by Rabbi Moshe Cohen, an Israeli-born educator, with help from Rabbi Lipsker, his wife Leah and a staff of energetic teachers. Rabbi and Mrs. Shusterman will be actively involved in the school, as well as in the community. The Peabody operation is an affiliate of the Chabad of the North Shore, which will provide initial funding for the Peabody venture.

The new rabbi and his wife “will add a new dimension to our activities in Peabody,” says Rabbi Lipsker. “The style of Chabad is to feel the pulse of the community first hand and then respond in a way that fills a need and fills a void. We have both in Peabody.”

Rabbi Shusterman says his main challenge is to “reach out to find the unaffiliated, and when I do, to light a spark that will ignite their interest.” He says he hopes to channel that interest into attending a Friday night dinner, a service or becoming “part of a new Jewish Learning Institute that Rabbi Yossi and I are starting.” The institute, premiering Oct. 27 in Salem’s Hamilton Hall, includes three eight-week programs in Talmudic Ethics, Kabbalah, and “Seasons of the Soul.”

A second challenge, he says, is reassuring the existing Jewish community, which includes four Peabody synagogues, that “we are here to help, to expand Jewish awareness, not to steal their membership.” He adds:

“There are more than enough Jews to go around. I can affect one or two souls a day and never finish my work without affecting any other synagogue.”

For more information, contact Chabad of Peabody at 781-977-9111 or chabadpeabody@aol.com.

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‘Advocate’ Gets Another New Editor

BRETT M. RHYNE
Jewish Journal Staff

The revolving door that is the Jewish Advocate editorship turned again this week, when David Nathan left the Boston-based newspaper and was replaced on Sept. 8 by Richard Asinof.

Prior to joining the Advocate, Asinof served in a succession of editorial and managerial positions at newspapers throughout New England and as editor of Environmental Action Magazine in Washington, D.C.

“Every editor brings new talents, new visions, new creativity,” Advocate publisher Grand Rabbi Y.A. Korff told The Journal. “We’re looking forward to seeing what Mr. Asinof can do to improve the Advocate and expand it.”

Asinof is the weekly’s fourth editor in three years. Nathan, editor since September 2002, left for a public relations position at Regan Communications. His predecessor, 22-year-old Jacob Horowitz, served 17 months before enrolling in Suffolk University Law School.

Swampscott native and current North Shore resident Steven Rosenberg edited the paper from 1998-2001; he now writes for the Boston Globe.

When asked about the high turnover rate, Rabbi Korff said, “There’s a high degree of burnout. It’s a high pressure job. It’s very difficult to serve the Jewish community. Others move on to greater challenges.”

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New Book Tells North Shore Jewish History in Pictures and Text

MARK ARNOLD
Jewish Journal Staff

It’s called “The Jewish Community of the North Shore” — a 128-page album illustrating the history of the North Shore Jewish community.
The book, based largely on the archives of the Jewish Historical Society of the North Shore, contains 190 photos that trace the development of Jewish communities in Lynn, Salem, Peabody, Beverly, Marblehead, Swampscott, and Saugus from 1895 to the mid-sixties.

“It’s not the whole North Shore,” says Alan S. Pierce, a Salem attorney and one of the book’s two compilers. “But we couldn’t stay within the page limit and include all the communities, unfortunately.”

Pierce and fellow society board member Avrom J. Herbster of Peabody, also an attorney, worked nights and weekends from May to August to winnow down more than 1,000 photos in the Society’s archives into a manageable number to fill the volume in a way that would represent the scope and depth of North Shore Jewish activity.

Included are photos of Purim plays at the old Jewish Community Center on Market Steet in Lynn; of the Jecomen Club in 1931; a Jewish Boy Scout troop in Peabody in the early 1950s; an early automobile with the proud sign: Chorover Tailor; local boxer, Jake Zeramby, sporting a star of David on his trunks; kosher butcher shops in Peabody and variety stores in Peabody and Lynn; a Bar Kochba play from 1918 in Peabody; and confirmation classes and ground breaking ceremonies in Swampscott, Peabody, and Marblehead. The photos are black and white, the cover sepia toned.

Chapter titles provide a sense of the book’s contents: The Early Years, Where We Lived and Worked, Service to Country (the war years), Religious Life, Civic and Professional Life, Organizations, and Recreation and Social Life.

Actively assisting the compilers on the project were society president Alan Radack, past president Richard Winer, and executive secretary Sandy Weinstein. “If you have roots in the North Shore Jewish community,” says Pierce, “you probably have a relative in the book.”
The book is one of a series of “Images of America” published by arcadiapublisher.com, a division of Tempus Publishing. There are 16 other books of Jewish communities around the country, Pierce said, including The Jews of Rhode Island, published by the Rhode Island Jewish Historical Association in 1998.

To order The Jewish Community of the North Shore, call The Jewish Journal at 978-745-4111 or contact the Society at 781-631-0831. The initial price of the book is $19.95. Contributions are tax deductible. Beginning in October, the book will be offered at retail prices in area book stores, including Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Waldenbooks.

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Calls Grow for Exiling Arafat

LESSLIE SUSSER

JERUSALEM (JTA) — After the resignation of Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, several key Israeli officials have reached the same conclusion: The time to expel P.A. President Yassir Arafat is fast approaching.
They argue that Arafat deliberately undermined Abbas and that he will do the same to any new Palestinian prime minister who tries to act against terrorism or make progress toward the “road map” peace plan.

Bush administration officials seem to agree with the Israeli analysis but are wary of the diplomatic and regional fallout of expelling Arafat. They prefer to give Arafat another chance and see how things develop under the Palestinian Prime Minister-designate, Ahmed Qurei. In Israel, frustration with Arafat has intensified in recent months.

When the expulsion idea was bounced around earlier this year, most Israeli Cabinet ministers and senior defense officials were against the idea. They argued that an Arafat gallivanting around the world would be more dangerous to Israel than an Arafat confined to his headquarters in Ramallah, in the West Bank.

But now most Cabinet ministers favor expulsion, and key defense people also are changing their minds.

Perhaps most significantly, Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon, Intelligence Chief Aharon Ze’evi and Maj. Gen. Amos Gilad, who is Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz’s chief political adviser, all now openly speak out in favor of Arafat’s “departure.”

Several months ago, all were strongly opposed to the idea.

Gilad, who is considered the intelligence community’s expert on Arafat, claims that there is a growing understanding in the United States and Europe that Arafat’s “departure from the region is a precondition for progress towards peace.”

A few months ago, the Americans were vehemently against expulsion. But now, says Dov Weisglass, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s bureau chief, there has been a significant modification of the American position.

Just back from talks with high-ranking U.S. officials in Washington, Weisglass says the Americans no longer reject outright the idea of expulsion.

Clearly, however, the Americans do not yet think the time for Arafat’s expulsion is nigh.
In a weekend television interview, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice described Arafat as an “obstacle to peace,” but said “no good would be served” by expelling him.

In another television interview, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, while warning against Arafat’s expulsion, implied that Washington’s position could change depending on Arafat’s behavior. Powell said the United States did not support expulsion “at this stage.”
Meanwhile, one of the most ardent advocates of expulsion, Mofaz, is going to Washington next week to convince the Bush administration of the need to expel Arafat sooner rather than later.

When Mofaz returns to Israel from Washington and Sharon returns from a state visit to India, the expulsion issue is set to top the Cabinet agenda.

The American position at that point will be crucial. Sharon is unlikely to go ahead without a green light from Washington.
The logic behind Israeli policy post-Abbas is based on the removal of what Israel sees as the main obstacles to peace: Arafat and Hamas.

The Arafat problem would be eliminated by expulsion or by forcing Arafat to change course under the threat of expulsion, and the Hamas problem would be eliminated by targeting the group’s political and military leaders.

Israeli leaders believe the policy of striking at Hamas’ leadership — which began before Abbas stepped down — is working.

They say a combination of factors has combined to make Hamas particularly vulnerable:
• Since the Aug. 19 Hamas bus bombing in Jerusalem, which killed 22, American criticism of Israel’s targeted killings — including Saturday’s failed strike on Hamas’ spiritual leader, Sheik Ahmed Yassin — has been muted.
• The European Union has declared both the military and political wings of Hamas a terrorist organization.
• The Palestinian Authority has confiscated Hamas funds.
• Hamas terrorism is coming under increasing criticism in the Palestinian-populated territories because of Israel’s military responses.

All this leads Israeli planners to believe that although they can’t destroy Hamas as an ideological movement, they can smash its terrorist infrastructure and help clear the way to peace talks.

Labor opposition leaders are less sanguine. They contend that fighting terrorists is an insufficient bulwark against terrorism and that what the government needs in the post-Abbas era is a new peace strategy.

Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak argues that the Abbas experience proves there can be no genuine peace partner on the Palestinian side. Therefore, he says, Israel should withdraw unilaterally behind a security fence while putting a detailed peace plan of its own on the table as a basis for negotiation whenever the Palestinians are ready.

But the Sharon government still is hoping for a negotiated agreement along the lines of the road map.
Much could depend on how expelling Arafat affects Palestinian politics, or, if Arafat stays, whether Qurei is able to maintain better ties with the Palestinian Authority president than Abbas did while meeting basic Israeli and American conditions for fighting terrorism.

The botched assassination attempt on Yassin was a warning to Arafat that no Palestinian leader is immune from Israeli action and that, if he doesn’t cooperate with the new prime minister, Israel will take drastic measures against him.

Some right-wing Israelis even have called for Arafat’s assassination.

So far, however, Israeli and American pressure has left the Palestinian Authority president unfazed. He has ignored the expulsion threats, which he read as a ploy to persuade him to reappoint Abbas.

But with Abbas gone, it seems that Qurei is now the key player.

An Arafat loyalist, Qurei also is a pragmatist with the interpersonal skills and political ties that the more reticent Abbas lacked. Qurei used his expertise to good effect in negotiating the 1993 Oslo accords with Israel.

The key question now is whether Qurei will be able to use his skills to gain the political power that Abbas lacked, and then use that power to move the peace process forward.

Leslie Susser is the diplomatic correspondent for the Jerusalem Report.

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Centers of Jewish Life
GARY BAND
Jewish Journal Staff

My father always said that wherever I go in my travels I should look for the temple. I can’t recall if he ever said exactly why, but over the years the answer has become clear: Quite simply, that’s where the Jews are. Whether I was new in town and wanted to meet people, attend a Shabbat or High Holiday service, or just to find a friendly place in unfamiliar territory, the temple was the place to go.

While I was in the Navy, I never expected to find a temple in such far off places as Honk Kong or Tokyo or Sydney, Australia. But during the High Holiday season of 1991, there in Hong Kong with my best friend Rich, I found not one but two temples, one Orthodox and one Reform.

We attended the Orthodox shul for one (extremely) long Yom Kippur service. Then on the way back found a Reform congregation which we gratefully attended over the next two days along with some 300 hundred British and American Jews. We took part in services, sing-alongs and discussion groups led by a rabbi from Cincinnati and a cantor from Delaware. Then a year later we found a temple/Jewish community center near where I lived in Japan and attended a Passover seder for 400 people and later took Israeli folk dancing lessons. And on another trip, we met the head rabbi in Sydney and spent the next three days in the company of Australian Jews.

Upon arriving in Boston in 1995 and on the North Shore in 1999, finding centers of Jewish life proved quite a bit easier. In my capacity here, I certainly knew of and had been to most of the area temples. But not until recently did I go in search of every one in an attempt to show how much Jewish life there is in our neck of the woods. A full 33 temples dot the landscape from Chelsea, Revere and Winthrop in the south to Newburyport, Andover and Haverhill in the North.

According to Boston’s Combined Jewish Philanthropies, the 1995 Jewish census puts our numbers in the Greater Boston area at close to 250,000. And in all of Massachusetts, there are some 200 synagogues and seven federations.

Like the Temple in Jerusalem, the temples in the Diaspora are places where the essential elements of Jewish life take place: prayer, funeral services, Hebrew school, B’nai Mitzvot, weddings and holidays. And because of the diversity here, Orthodox, Chabad, Reform or Conservative, a house of worship is available for anybody who may want one.

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JTA News Briefs

Six Israelis Die in Attack
JERUSALEM (JTA) — At least six people were killed, including a suicide bomber, in an attack near an Israeli military base. Tuesday’s attack occurred at a bus stop near the Tzifrin military base in Rishon le-Zion. Some 30 people were wounded in the bombing.

Karia Wants Mutual Cease-Fire
JERUSALEM (JTA) — Incoming Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei wants an Israeli-Palestinian cease-fire. Qurei also told the Israeli daily Ha’aretz on Tuesday that in order for him to be successful as prime minister, Israel must halt its assassinations of Palestinian terrorists, freeze settlements in the West Bank and end its isolation of Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat. But Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz said Israel would not cooperate with a prime minister who followed Arafat’s orders. Arafat selected Qurei this week to succeed Mahmoud Abbas, who resigned over the weekend following a power struggle with Arafat.

Annan Blasts Israeli Strike
NEW YORK (JTA) — U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan blasted Israel’s airstrike against Hamas’ spiritual leader, Sheik Ahmed Yassin.
Through a spokesman, Annan said the attack, which failed to kill Yassin, both violated humanitarian law and was a disproportionate use of force in a populated area.
No one was killed in the attack, though several people were injured.

E.U.: All of Hamas is Terrorist
JERUSALEM (JTA) — The European Union will designate all branches of Hamas as parts of a terrorist organization, including its political wing.
The decision was taken Saturday at a two-day meeting of E.U. foreign ministers in northern Italy.
The move will block funding to Hamas-run political organizations, charities and social welfare associations, in addition to its military wing, which the European Union already had branded as terrorist.
“A consensus emerged to decide on putting Hamas on the list of terrorist organizations,” French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin told reporters.
The ministers also deplored the resignation of Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas.
The E.U.’s foreign affairs chief, Javier Solana, arrived in Israel on Saturday for scheduled meetings with Israeli and Palestinian leaders.

Netanyahu Presents Budget
JERUSALEM (JTA) — Israeli Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has presented a draft of Israel’s 2004 budget.
About $2.25 billion in spending cuts are expected, and reports say the deficit target will be 4 percent.

New Israeli Envoy in Jordan
JERUSALEM (JTA) — Israel has a new ambassador to Jordan.
Yacov Hadas, who has served as head of Israel’s trade mission to Qatar, will soon present his credentials to Jordanian King Abdullah.
Hadas replaces David Dadonn, who has been appointed Israel’s ambassador to Mexico.

Leni Riefenstahl Dead at 101
NEW YORK (JTA) — Leni Riefenstahl, known for her documentary film that depicted a 1934 Nazi rally at Nuremberg, died Monday night at the age of 101. Critics said Riefenstahl helped promote a Nazi aesthetic of beauty and purity in Triumph of the Will and other films that she made during the Hitler era. But Riefenstahl denied that she was a propagandist, saying her films represented a search for beauty. She also denied any romantic link with Hitler. Boycotted after the war, Riefenstahl made a comeback in the 1960s with films of the Nuba people of Africa and of underwater life.

Poll: More Jews Voted Republican
WASHINGTON (JTA) — The percentage of U.S. Jews who voted Republican in the 2002 midterm congressional elections is up by 9 percent to 14 percent, according to an analysis of exit polls.
The analysis by Voter News Service said 35 percent of Jews backed Republican candidates in 2002, as opposed to 21 percent to 26 percent in congressional elections during the last decade.
The executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, Matthew Brooks, said the data “simply confirms what we have been saying all along” — that more Jews are voting Republican.
The National Jewish Democratic Council said it would wait to see the full data before commenting.

Israeli Jets Fly Over Auschwitz
NEW YORK (JTA) — Israeli fighter jets flew over the site of the Auschwitz death camp.
Despite protests from officials affiliated with the camp’s museum, three American-built, Israeli-modified F-15s flew over the camp Sept. 4.
The crews in the Israeli planes carried the names of those killed in Auschwitz on Sept. 4, 1943, and included descendants of Holocaust survivors. The Israeli jets, which had been invited by the Polish government to help celebrate the 85th anniversary of the Polish Air Force, were supposed to do the flyover with two Polish fighter jets, but the Poles dropped out due to poor weather conditions.
One of the Israeli pilots, Avi Levevich, said the flyover was particularly poignant for him because his father survived Auschwitz. “I had been invited to come visit the death camps before, but I didn’t want to,” Levevich said. “But when they suggested I come in an F-15, I decided to come this way.”

Annan: Terror Must be Stopped
NEW YORK (JTA) — In a message to a pro-Palestinian conference, the U.N. secretary-general called terrorism “unjustifiable.” Kofi Annan delivered the message via an aide Sept. 4, the first of a two-day U.N. International Conference of Civil Society in Support of the Palestinian People.
“Palestinian civil society must speak loudly and clearly to point out that terrorism is not only unjustifiable, but harmful to the Palestinian cause,” Annan said. Anti-Israel maps were on display at the conference, whose theme was “End the Occupation.”
Last week, the Anti-Defamation League asked that Annan not participate because of the potential for anti-Israel vitriol.

Claims Deadline Extended
NEW YORK (JTA) — The deadline for Holocaust-era insurance claims was extended until the end of the year.
The International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims will announce today that they have extended the deadline from the end of September to the end of December to give more time to publish policyholder names and allow for individuals to file claims.
More than 450,000 Holocaust victims and survivors who had unpaid life, education and dowry policies have been published thus far, with 12,000 more names expected within the next two months.

O.U. Backs Marriage Act
NEW YORK (JTA) — The Orthodox Union is backing congressional action to define marriage as between a man and a woman. In a letter sent Sept. 3 to Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), chairman of the Senate subcommittee on the Constitution, O.U. leaders urged Congress to “venerate the values held by most Americans on the issue of marriage.”

Ukrainian Rabbi Attacked
KIEV (JTA) — Rabbi Uri Feinstein was attacked outside Kiev’s Brodsky Synagogue.
Rabbi Moshe-Reuven Azman told JTA that Feinstein was first verbally abused and then physically beaten to unconsciousness on Aug. 28 by two men, just a block away from the synagogue.
Feinstein was taken to a hospital, treated and released.

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Levi Strauss Celebrates 130 Years

RUTH E. GRUBER

Photo by Ruth E. Gruber/JTA Portrait of Levi Strauss at the entrance to the Levi Strauss Museum in Buttenheim, Germany..

BUTTENHEIM, Germany (JTA) — This year marks a century and a half since a young German Jewish immigrant named Levi Strauss settled in San Francisco, became an American citizen and opened a dry goods store.

It also marks 130 years since Strauss and an associate, Jacob Davis, took out a joint patent for “riveted waist-overalls” — heavy-duty work pants reinforced with metal rivets at the corners of pockets, the base of the fly and other stress points.

Today, we call their invention jeans.

A century after his death, Levi Strauss is a household name around the world. His invention has evolved from work trousers to fashion icon, becoming a symbol of freedom, youth, independence, pioneering spirit — and sometimes more than that.

It all started in Buttenheim, Germany, a sleepy market town in northern Bavaria near Bamberg where Levi Strauss was born on Feb. 26, 1829.

Today, in the blue-trimmed, half-timbered house where he was born and raised, a museum honors Levi and what the museum calls “the most famous pair of trousers in the history of mankind.”

Opened in 2000, the Levi Strauss Museum, which has won several awards, is subtitled “Jeans and Cult.”

In less than three years it has attracted some 30,000 visitors from as far away as China to an out-of-the-way village of just 3,000. The only other attractions here are a pair of breweries, a baroque church and a rundown manor house.

“We are very surprised at the number of foreign visitors we get,” said the museum’s director, Tanja Roppelt. “Two days after we opened we already had visitors from Japan. There is nothing else in Buttenheim, so if people come here they are coming for this museum.”
The popularity of the museum bears vivid witness to the way jeans have conquered the world, Roppelt said.

“I would say that 95 percent of our visitors are wearing jeans,” she said. “Most of them come because they have worn jeans all their lives and want to see how they came into existence, how it all began.”

Pretty much no one in Buttenheim had any inkling that Strauss had been born here until 20 years ago, when a woman in Milwaukee organizing a festival about German immigrants wrote to the former mayor asking for information.

Local officials searching through Jewish birth and death records and emigration documents discovered that Strauss indeed had been born and lived his childhood in one of the oldest houses still standing in the village.

Town authorities purchased the dilapidated building, which dates from 1687, and eventually restored it as close to its original form as possible. A huge portrait of Strauss now looms out of an alleyway to mark the entrance, and a big Levi’s shop stands a few yards down the street.

The museum uses audio-guide headsets, videos and wall panel displays to recount the history of jeans and how they are made and marketed. It also includes a room full of glass cases exhibiting vintage Levi’s dating back decades.

Just as importantly, however, the museum traces the personal story of Levi Strauss himself, using an audio narration that presents much of the story as if seen through Strauss’ own eyes.

It tells the fascinating and little-known tale of 19th-century rural Jewish life in Bavaria as well as the epic saga of immigration to the United States.

Jews settled in Buttenheim in the 17th century. A synagogue was built there around 1740, and by 1810, Jews made up one-fifth of Buttenheim’s population. A Jewish cemetery was established on a low hill outside of town in 1819.

Strauss came from a typical Jewish family.

His father, Hirsch, was born in Buttenheim in 1790 and, like many other rural Jews, was a peddler, traveling house to house selling clothing and dry goods. Strauss’ grandfather, Jacob Strauss, was a cattle merchant — also a typical Jewish trade — and he too lived in the village.

Strauss — whose original first name was Loeb — was one of Hirsch Strauss’ three children by his second wife, Rebekka, who was the daughter of another Buttenheim cattle merchant.

By the time Strauss was born, poverty and restrictive legislation had prompted local Jews to begin to emigrate to the United States. The Jewish community, in fact, dwindled steadily until it dissolved in the 1890s — the synagogue went out of use in 1892 and has long since been incorporated into one of the local breweries.

Hirsch Strauss’ death in 1846 from tuberculosis prompted Rebekka to move to America the next year.

After an arduous voyage, she, Levi Strauss and his two sisters joined two of Strauss’ older half-brothers who already had emigrated and ran a dry goods business on New York’s Lower East Side. Strauss followed the lure of the California gold rush and founded the clothing business that made him both a wealthy man and a household name.

Today, the Levi Strauss Company employs some 20,000 workers in 69 countries.

As the museum puts it, Strauss “discovered his personal vein of gold — not the precious metal, but cloth.”

Strauss died in San Francisco in 1902, but he never forgot Buttenheim.

Toward the end of his life, he sent money back to maintain the town’s Jewish cemetery. The little walled graveyard still lies on a hill outside town amid lush, rolling farmland — and weathered tombstones there still mark the graves of Strauss’s father and a brother.

For more information on the Levi Strauss Museum, visit www.levi-strauss-museum.com.

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People in the News

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Arts & Entertainment

An Evil Man, Who Happened to be a Rabbi

WILLIAM WALLEN
Special to the Jewish Journal

The Rabbi and the Hit Man, by Arthur J. Magida. Harper Collins, New York, 2003, $24.05.

“The Jews,” Sholom Aleichem famously observed, “are like everyone else, only more so.” So one would be tempted to expect that The Rabbi and the Hit Man — an account of the first American rabbi convicted of murder ‘the murder of his wife’ — would not be an ordinary piece of crime non-fiction, but somehow different: more compelling, more suspenseful, more thought-provoking, just generally more so. But it is not.

The book is decidedly less than the average piece of crime non-fiction. It’s the story of Fred Neulander, a Queens-born graduate of Trinity College who became the founding rabbi of the largest Reform congregation in Cherry Hill, NJ, a sprawling, upper-middle class suburb of Philadelphia.

As the author tells it, Neulander became a rabbi not out of heartfelt dedication to Judaism or a calling to the pulpit, but because he, like many other college students of the early 1960s, wanted a steady job that paid well. Neulander soon discovered, his dedication to the religion notwithstanding, that his personal traits were well-suited to the leadership of a large suburban congregation. A compact but powerfully-built man with considerable charisma and personal charm, he gave Friday-night sermons that were often the talk of South Jersey.

But the talk of South Jersey included persistent rumors that Neulander was conducting a series of extra-marital affairs. As Magida tells it, Neulander, father of three grown children, chafed at the strictures of rabbinical life and alleviated his boredom through dalliances with similarly alienated women, some of them congregants. Many in the community openly expressed pity for Neulander’s wife Carol, the popular proprietress of a local bakery.

On the early evening of Nov. 1, 1994, Neulander made an unscheduled appearance at his congregation, making sure to be seen by the congregation’s cantor and choir. When he returned to his home soon after, he found Carol lying on the floor of their living room, her head bashed in. Neulander calmly called 911 to report the murder. He did not embrace his slain wife or try to revive her, a fact not lost upon the jury in his second murder trial, which proved to be his undoing. In a macabre twist, Neulander’s oldest son Matthew, then working as a paramedic, heard the dispatcher send an ambulance and the police to his parents’ house.

When Magida begins to describe the investigation of Carol Neulander’s murder and the rabbi’s two trials, the author’s unfamiliarity with police procedure, criminal law, and the craft of crime writing begin to show. Magida reports that the prosecutors thought they had a good case for first-degree murder against Neulander, when in reality their case against him was largely circumstantial, and weak.

The case against Neulander was based mostly on the testimony of Len Jenoff. Jenoff met Neulander at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting held at Neulander’s synagogue, and so valued Neulander’s friendship that when Neulander engaged him to arrange the murder of his wife, “an enemy of Israel,” in exchange for the promise of $30,000, Jenoff felt he could not refuse. With such shaky evidence, it is not surprising that the jury in Neulander’s first trial failed to reach a verdict.

Magida does a better job when describing Neulander’s second trial. The rabbi was sentenced to life in prison, with the first opportunity for parole in 30 years. Jenoff and his accomplice, the actual murderers, were sentenced to 23 years in prison for manslaughter.

The Rabbi and the Hit Man provides few of the satisfactions that crime-book readers have come to expect. Major characters appear in the text with little introduction. The judge for both trials is named but never described. Len Jenoff’s motivations for performing the murder, and then for admitting to it, remain murky. The difficulties of investigating and assembling the case against Neulander, which led to a four-year gap between the murder and Neulander’s indictment, are never mentioned.

The result is a book that, despite the presence of a murderous rabbi, says little about the rabbinate or Jews. Fred Neulander is ultimately emblematic of nothing more than an evil man, an evil man who happened to be a rabbi. His story, rather than having some deep meaning for American Jews, is simply tawdry.

William Wallen is a lawyer. He lives in Swampscott.

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Editorial

President Summers: Reject Harvard’s Tainted Gift

Harvard President Larry Summers took a principled position a year ago when he challenged signers of a Harvard-MIT petition who called for divestment from Israel. While noting that there are aspects of Israel’s policy that deserve to be “vigorously challenged,” he said: “Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect, if not their intent.”

What bothered Summers then was the double standard used by many academic critics who denounce the Jewish state for its faults while turning a blind eye to much worse faults in other countries.

Now comes another opportunity for Summers to take a principled position. As detailed in this newspaper (See page 4) and other publications, Harvard Divinity School two years ago accepted a $2.5 million gift from Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, president of the United Arab Emirates, to endow a chair in Islamic religious studies at Harvard.

After Rachel Fish, a graduate student at the school, discovered that the sheikh also funds anti-Semitic and Holocaust-denying research at the Zayed Centre for Coordination and Follow-up, based in Abu Dhabi, Harvard announced it would reconsider its acceptance of the grant. Under international pressure since the disclosure, the Zayed Centre has closed its doors. And Harvard has announced that it will take a year for Summers to decide whether to return the money.

Why a year? Are the sheikh’s hands clean now? Some stains can not be washed away; they penetrate the skin. Anti-Semitism is such a stain. We say: Mr. Summers, speak up for principle once again. Reject the tainted gift — now.

The Problem is (Still) Arafat

Our editorial last issue said that Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas had lost the struggle with his one-time mentor, Yasser Arafat. “He is lost,” we said, “a figurehead with no power.” Ten days later, he resigned. Now a new prime minister has been appointed: Ahmed Qurei, the speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council.

Can he make a peace treaty with Israel? Can he stop suicide bombers who strike almost every week against Israeli civilians? Will he command any more authority than Abbas? The answers we think are no, no, and no. Explained a senior official of the Palestinian Authority: “(Qurei) will consult with Arafat on every step, and on a daily basis.”

The main problem, the intractable problem, the biggest obstacle to peace between Israel and the Palestinians, always has been and remains Mr. Arafat. As long as he is in control, you can forget about the road map, security, progress, and peace. Mr. Bush: Stop kidding yourself and trying to fool the nation. You need a strategy to overthrow Yasser Arafat.

MARK ARNOLD
Jewish Journal Editor/Publisher

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Local Columnists

Eight Bucks vs. $50,000/Hour: Road to Trouble?

DOV BURT LEVY
Jewish Journal North of Boston

Dov Burt Levy is a Salem, MA based columnist. He can be reached at dblevy@columnist. com..

Ari Fleischer, the former presidential press secretary, plans to travel around the country earning $50,000 a speech,

No big deal. Fleischer is only a “Moshe-come-lately” to the high-priced speech circuit. Ronald Reagan, just months out of the White House, got $2 million for several days of appearances in Japan. Henry Kissinger, in the $100,000 per speech bracket, has been at it since the 1970s.

Bill Clinton cashed in handsomely over the past two years (he got a reported $60,000 at Salem State College in his first post-White House venture on the speech-making circuit). Then there are all the lesser lights whose one-night speech fees are high enough to pay cash for a new car.

Put what some say are private inconsequential matters in context with other economic events and we are presented with serious social and political consequences, just around the corner.

From bitter historical experience, we Jews know a country is a safer and better place when social justice is high and social conflict is low.

Not perfection but direction is the key, and we are heading the wrong way.

Is my pessimism misguided? You decide. But note the following:

The annual minimum wage stands at $10,500 a year. Figure it like this: the minimum wage earner must work a 40-hour week for four years and 10 months to earn what Fleischer wants for a 45-minute speech. Ten years of work for Clinton’s one-night pay. Even two bucks above the minimum wage — what a lot of people you see every day in the supermarkets, retail shops, and gas stations earn — produces a gross annual salary of $14,500. Is that a living wage?

Consider the salaries of corporate CEOs and their top staffs. The drug industry, just one of many examples, gives the highest paid CEO $74 million a year. Is that not criminal when at the same time, seniors and working people are cutting pills in half or skipping them altogether?

Kenneth Lay, the Enron gang and all the other corporate executives we thought were headed for trial are nowhere to be seen while their stockholders, retirees, and former employees bleed from the wounds. My nightmare is that all the robber barons will get full pardons on the last day of the Bush administration.

Proposed national work rules on overtime exclude many workers from the overtime pay they now receive.

The president has reduced the federal employee pay raise scheduled to take effect in January. To lose a one percent raise is not a gross tragedy, but the president’s letter to Congress, stating the pay raise would “threaten our efforts against terrorism or force deep cuts in discretionary spending,” is about as convincing as the idea that the last major tax cut would benefit the poor.

The Bush administration plans to contract out to private firms almost half of the 1.8 million federal civil service jobs. A really bad joke to think that private companies like Enron, World Com, Polaroid, Halliburton and perhaps Walt Disney will in effect be managing the country. They will, of course, pay lower wages, reduce benefits and create a working situation designed to minimize organizational loyalty, leaving the door open for, you guessed it, terrorists.

Some readers may remember the report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Kerner Commission) in 1968 that concluded the nation was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal.”
The next Presidential Report on Civil Disorder will likely begin with the sentence: “Our country is divided into two classes: one rich and one poor.”

High will be the bill in social conflict when the last straw breaks the back of elementary social justice. Let’s just hope that Ari Fleischer’s 50 grand an hour is just too obscure to be that straw.

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Munching Potato Chips and the Rain Forest Within

ELLEN GOLUB
Jewish Journal North of Boston

Ellen Golub teaches journalism at Salem State College. She may be reached at elkele@attbi.com

I am embarrassed to tell my children why the books accumulate on my night table. “Did you finish it yet?” Zoë wants to know, pointing to what has mesmerized me during the previous week.

“Almost,” I tell her, but I am sure she has heard me say this a bit too often. “I’m going to finish it soon. I’m on the last few pages.”
Zoë seems to complete books at a furious pace. “I finished another one,” she says with great pride and happiness almost daily.
Little does she know that completing books, for me, is like a trip to the cemetery. As a young woman, I blew through several novels in a week, shared hundreds of lives and looked into multitudes of souls. That was called graduate school, a time when I was content to have the lives of fictional characters growing in me like foliage in a rain forest. Books were like potato chips, with each one fanning my hunger for more.

In my youth, a bookstore was, to me, the most fetching delicatessen. On days when the rent was due, I was careful to stay away. But on payday, I always celebrated by bringing home a new friend. I cared little for wealth — which is why I became a professor. All I wanted was time to read and enough money to bring the books home that called to me from the shelves in bookstores.

“How the mighty have fallen,” I want to lament to my young reader. Only it’s not the Philistines who have lopped off my head and hung it on my sword. It is the passage of time, the sense one gets after having lived a number of years, that its motion is dizzyingly swift.

My Aunt Lottie always tells me she is increasingly surprised at how quickly a day goes. I concur. Young and single, I wondered what I would do with that lengthy weekend stretching lazily ahead of me. Middle-aged and much too busy, I grieve that time has become my nemesis. Need I remind you of how old Einstein looked — and was — after he had wrestled with time?

Fifty short years ago, Abraham Joshua Heschel told us in his revolutionary book, The Sabbath, that time is what Jews hold sacred, far more than space. We can all live in a Yerushalayim of the mind if we set aside a sacred time to be there. Place bows to time, as does all life. As do I.

So I accumulate my lovely friends on the night table. A Holocaust survivor’s gentle son, the bonesetter’s daughter, a bouquet of ideas redolent of the Talmud’s relationship to the Internet. And methodically, I keep these books alive by never finishing them. “Reader, I married him,” writes Charlotte Bronte in Jane Eyre — only, not in my world. If I don’t finish the books, their stories are suspended in time, still ongoing, ever alive.

The Torah doesn’t end, the Talmud doesn’t begin. Jews have a great idea here of living undaunted in the text to the consternation and frustration of time. But this is something one comes to understand later in life, perhaps like the esoteric mysteries of the Kabbalah.
“Mommy, I finished another one,” the voice of youth calls.

“Great,” I shout, savoring the company of friends, who meet and greet perpetually in my mind.

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Slice of Life
My Take on the High Holidays

PHYLLIS DINERMAN
Jewish Journal North of Boston

@Phyllis Dinerman 2003. Phyllis Dinerman is a resident of Marblehead and Boynton Beach, FL. She may be reached at phyllis@dinerman.com

I love to be in Temple for the Shofar blasts. Don’t you just kvell when the individual delegated to blow the shofar stands up and holds the shofar to his lips? The ram’s horn is so difficult to blow, and you hold your breath until he’s through with the final tekia. There have been years when I was more exhausted than the one blowing the shofar. I was praying and holding my breath through those nine staccato notes of the terua hoping he’d get them out without a problem. Do you know that in some synagogues the total number of shofar blasts is one hundred? That is one exhausted “bluzer”(blower) at the end of the service.

Do you know that wearing leather apparel on Yom Kippur is banned? It is considered a pleasurable activity and not to be enjoyed on the sober day of Yom Kippur. Sorry, ladies, put those leather suits back in the closet; and leather shoes are not to be worn either. That is why sneakers should be worn. That’s fine with me. I can’t walk in high heels anyway. Three other activities are banned as well ,according to the holy books: bathing, eating and sexual intercourse. Bathing? Sorry but I intend to bathe before coming to temple for the sake of my fellow congregants. Eating? It’s not so terrible if I lose a little weight by abstaining for one day. Sexual intercourse? “I take the fifth.”

Do you know one of the reasons the Kol Nidre prayer is chanted three times is so that latecomers will have a chance to hear it. I guess if you’re late, you listen to it in the foyer through the audio system, but at least you hear that magnificent melody.

Herring, salty herring, is supposed to be served at the conclusion of Yom Kippur’s fast to induce thirst. Let’s be honest, do we have to be persuaded to be thirsty after fasting 24 hours? By the end of the service, I feel like I’ve traveled through the Sahara Desert, parched throat and all, and my head is pounding with a miserable headache.

And, at the end of the Neila service (the fifth and final), the shofar blower is called upon again to blow one long, long, long blast to signify the end of fasting and to express the feeling that the congregants are exhausted enough and have looked within themselves to want to reach out and to want to make the coming year a better year. Sounds good to me……..

Happy New Year…May it be a healthy, peaceful, and prosperous year for one and all……...

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Op-Ed

Advice to Dr. Laura: Come Back When You Grow Up

JONATHAN S. TOBIN

Jonathan S.Tobin is executive director of the Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia. He can be reached via e-mail at jtobin@jewishexponent.com

Laura Schlessinger was just what America needed: a no-nonsense, tough-talking lady who was ready to tell us all to live up to our responsibilities and stop whining about them.

And she was, seemingly, just what American Jewry needed, too: a famous personality who — though she herself came from an interfaith marriage — publicly embraced Judaism as a personal faith and helpful guide for a useful and fulfilling life.

But it turns out that the ever-popular radio maven isn’t exactly the tough guy we thought she was. And, interestingly enough, her inability to stick with her Jewish faith may be a better guide to her own flawed makeup than anything else about her.

Schlessinger, whose advice show is heard on more than 300 stations around the country, shot to fame in the 1990s and, at one point, exceeded the ratings of even political talk-star Rush Limbaugh and shock-jock Howard Stern to claim the title as the No. 1 mouth on the airwaves.

Her draw and appeal went down a bit after a nasty controversy in 2000, when gay and lesbian groups protested her saying that homosexuality was a “biological error.” That prompted a boycott of potential sponsors for a Dr. Laura television show then in production. The failure of her TV show had a lot more to do with her obnoxious personality — so perfect for radio but not so appealing on the small screen — than it did with gay outrage. Schlessinger also had to weather the embarrassment of having a former lover and mentor display nude pictures of her on the Internet. A widely publicized rift with her mother, who recently died, didn’t help her image either.

But she is still the No. 3 radio personality in the country, heard by an estimated 8 million people every day. And none of Dr. Laura’s setbacks stopped her from plugging along as a successful personal cottage industry. She still hawks her books and videos, telling parents to put their children’s needs first; teenagers to practice abstinence and give up their babies for adoption rather than to raise them as single mothers; and women not to let men abuse them.

But along with all of this, Dr. Laura has been, next to Sen. Joseph Lieberman, probably the most publicly observant Jew in America. With a chai dangling around her neck, she was open about her embrace of her father’s faith. She underwent an Orthodox conversion, as did her husband, and was honored in 2001 by the National Council of Young Israel for her championing of “traditional American values.”

But Dr. Laura’s public Judaism did not cut much ice with many American Jews. She alienated many when she insulted Reform Judaism (and just about everyone else) at an appearance sponsored by the Jewish Federation of Greater Dallas in 1997. And her pop psychology (she is a licensed therapist, but her doctorate was in physiology) earned her more fan mail from Christians than it did from her co-religionists.
On Aug. 5, Dr. Laura told her audience that she was no longer practicing Judaism, though she still considered herself a Jew.

“My identifying with this entity and my fulfilling the rituals, etc., of the entity — has ended,” she said.

Schlessinger complained that feedback from Christians was great, but that Jews tended to spurn her.

“By and large … Christians have been very loving, very supportive. From my own religion, I have either gotten nothing, which is 99 percent of it, or two of the nastiest letters I have gotten in a long time. I guess that’s my point — I don’t get much back. Not much warmth coming back.”

She even added that she had been moved by the many stories from listeners who told her they had “joined a church, felt loved by God, and that was my anchor.” Did that mean that she might become a Christian? As a feature story on her in the Forward speculated last month, such a move might be a major boost to her ratings. Business implications notwithstanding, what does any of this tell us about Dr. Laura, Judaism or American Jewish life?

Given her nonstop public whining about the abuse she has taken from her detractors in the last three years, it turns out that Dr. Laura is just as needy as her most pathetic listeners, who called in to be verbally horsewhipped for their shortcomings and stupidity. She wanted Jews to love her, but what has that got to do with personal faith, or the acceptance of a tradition and an identity that has bridged the generations for thousands of years?

American Jews are opinionated and not generally receptive to those who claim, like Schlessinger, to have all the answers to tough questions. She may have seen herself as a new queen of the Jews, but the mere fact of her observance did not entitle her to anything more than a respectful hearing.

Judaism has, after all, never been the religion of choice for the faint of heart. And unlike Dr. Laura, it does not offer easy answers. That it did not, in her own words, fulfill her “personal journey” tells us a lot more about Dr. Laura’s desperate need for a personal identity than anything else.

Judaism didn’t give Dr. Laura the cold shoulder. She just couldn’t understand the fact that with observance must come understanding of the complexity of a world that she can only see in black and white.

Advice to Dr. Laura: If you aren’t prepared to be a Jew who loves other Jews no matter what they think of your show, then the problem is yours — not ours. Come back when you’ve grown up a little more.

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Mideast is Now the Great Divide, Between Liberals, Conservatives

DANIEL PIPES

Daniel Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is director of the Middle East Forum and author of Militant Islam Reaches America (W.W. Norton).

“I have developed a habit,” writes Richard Ingrams, a columnist for The Guardian, a far-left British newspaper, “when confronted by letters to the editor in support of the Israeli government to look at the signature to see if the writer has a Jewish name. If so, I tend not to read it.”
This shameful passage raised a small storm in the United Kingdom over anti-Semitism. But what about Ingrams’ implicit assumption that Jews uniformly support the Sharon government?

At first glance, this might seem accurate. Israeli Jews voted Ariel Sharon into power and the leading diaspora Jewish organizations generally take their cues from Jerusalem. But a closer look reveals the assumption to be nonsense, as Jews are among Sharon’s (and Israel’s) most vehement and vocal critics.

The academic campaign to delegitimize Israel presents a striking example of this, for Jewish faculty have led the effort. Noam Chomsky started and other Jews picked up the pressure on American university administrators to withdraw investments from Israel. In Britain, Steven and Hilary Rose initiated an academic boycott against Israel; John Docker had a similar role in Australia. Among Middle East specialists, Joel Beinin, Ian Lustick, Sara Roy, and Avi Shlaim lead the anti-Sharon charge.

Authors such as Norman Finkelstein, Thomas Friedman, Michael Lerner, Arthur Miller, and Susan Sontag are outspoken critics. Lawyer Stanley Cohen specializes in representing the enemies of Israe