Keep passing. Keep passing.\” It\’s 6 a.m. on a Monday morning in March, and students from Milken Community High School, wearing hairnets, plastic aprons and gloves, are dishing out hot cereal, sugar, applesauce, milk and a muffin assembly-line style onto blue trays.
In between the prayers at the Pinto Shul in the Pico-Robertson area, people who only speak English might feel a little lost.
Hot on the heels of the Jewish Community Center closings, YMCA of Metropolitan Los Angeles announced in late June that it would close the saunas and steam rooms in seven of the eight centers that still had them. (The Hollywood-Wilshire Y will leave its sauna open on a 90-day trial basis with increased monitoring.) The announcement sparked anger and protest from YMCA members who have used the facilities for years.
Five months ago, Beatrice Ballageure was struggling to make ends meet as a single, 47-year-old Jewish woman living in the capital city of an economically depressed Argentina. She had lost her job several months earlier, but she owned her own apartment and had enough money in the bank to afford basic expenses. She had friends with jobs, and she knew she could rely on her family if real trouble ever came. Then the bottom fell out of Argentina\’s economy.
On a brisk night in early January, hundreds of American Jews from throughout the United States, still jet-lagged from their arrival in Israel that morning, are filing into a large airplane hangar at Hatzor, an isolated air force base near Ashkelon.
I had been living vicariously for three months. First there were the attacks on the High Holy Days, the desecration of Joseph\’s Tomb. A few days later, Israeli hikers were stranded under fire for hours near Schem-Nablus. The Internet had brought the daily conflict straight to my office: bus bombs, daily shootings in Jerusalem, assault on holy sites. I felt that I could no longer sit so far away in comfortable California, feeling secure and well-protected. I felt that I must go to Israel and share the fate of my brothers and sisters who were, and still are, facing one of the greatest challenges of the past 50 years.
Maybe something positive will come out of the current crisis in Israel after all. Perhaps the arrival of many groups from communities all over the world will help further the understanding between Israelis and Diaspora Jews and lead to greater cooperation.
My daughter flew home for Thanksgiving with two college friends in tow. At the dinner table, the conversation revolved around computers and the antics of the Stanford Band. At some point in the course of that whirlwind four-day visit, Hilary informed me that, though she\’s been diligently studying Hebrew since she started college, a Junior Year Abroad at Hebrew University is no longer part of her plans. It\’s not that she\’s changed her mind about someday returning to Israel, where she spent an amazing summer two years ago. But she\’s convinced that, given the stringent requirements of the high-tech major she seems to have settled on, even a semester in Jerusalem would derail her progress toward her degree.
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