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Jewish Journal

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May 13, 1999

Gemara Under the Sun

Leave a Comment / Old Stories /

A pair of students — a traditional chavruta study partnership — grapple with a tricky piece of Gemara. Their heavy tomes rest not on a classroom desk top but on freshly mowed grass. And the tiny letters of the Rashi and Tosafot commentaries are illuminated by a blazing summer sun instead of fluorescent bulbs.

This is Lishma, a new summer program at Camp Ramah in Ojai, where a group of college students will spend six weeks studying traditional Jewish texts in an egalitarian, yeshiva-type program.

“So many of our former Ramah campers and staff members were looking for something deeper and wanting to continue their studies, and they were heading into the Orthodox environment to satisfy that need,” says Brian Greene, executive director of Camp Ramah in California. “We very much wanted to provide a Conservative framework for serious Jewish study.”

The name Lishma is derived from the Hebrew phrase “Torah Lishma,” which means studying Torah for its own sake.

Eighteen students are currently signed up for Lishma this summer — about half of them from Southern California, and the other half from universities around the country. Participants will spend their days in chavruta text study and in classes in which those texts are discussed. Each day will also include three prayer times and an evening program dedicated to real-life applications of what the students studied during the day.

Faculty for the program includes a scholar from Israel, the chair of the religious studies department at Arizona State University, and a professor of Talmud from the University of Judaism’s Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies, which is co-sponsoring the program. Two rabbinic students from the Ziegler school will serve as mentors, helping the Lishma students appreciate their studies as a spiritual as well as an intellectual endeavor.

The program also includes a social-action aspect, in which students study texts that relate to social services, and devote the next day to a community-outreach project.

“Lishma combines the strengths that liberal Judaism has brought to the table with the commitment to Torah study and religious life that the right wing of Conservative Judaism and Orthodox Judaism have brought to the Jewish world,” says Lishma coordinator Daniel Greyber, a second-year rabbinical student at the Ziegler School.

The Covenant Foundation recently awarded Lishma a grant for $36,000 a year to go toward tuition and stipends through 2000. Tuition for Lishma is $1,500, and each student is awarded a $1,000 scholarship and another $1,000 stipend upon completion of the program.

“Providing a Jewish environment for college students, in many ways, is what we are all about,” says Ramah Director Greene. “We employ 150 counselors who are college students, and the Ramah environment really has an impact on them at a time in their lives when they need it. But being a counselor is not for everyone, and this is another way to bring strong, committed kids into that environment for the summer.”

Greene is excited about having the Lishma participants as role models and teachers for the younger campers.

“There will be a natural role modeling we expect to take place,” Greene says. “Campers will see them and wonder who they are and be impressed with the fact that these are college kids who are here to study Jewish texts.”

Greene expects Lishma to add a new depth to the already charged and passionate camp setting.

“The Ramah environment is this dynamic, exciting Jewish community,” Greene says, “the kind of place where everyone is committed Jewishly, where prayers and Hebrew and kashrut are part of the natural fabric of the place.”

Bringing college kids into this environment, for serious spiritual and intellectual engagement, could be a boon to the Conservative movement, Greyber says.

“The hope for this program,” he says, “is that we will develop committed and knowledgeable lay leadership for the future of Conservative Judaism.”

Gemara Under the Sun Read More »

If all rules were suspended, what would your child do?

Leave a Comment / Family, Old Stories, Parenting /

“Oreos for breakfast,” Danny, my 8-year-old cookie monster, advocates.

“No set bed time,” says Gabe, 12, the nocturnal son.

“Mountain bike-riding in place of school,” adds Jeremy, 10, the future triathlete.

These are my sons’ answers to the question I pose: If all rules were suspended, what would you do?

Zack, 15, rolls his eyes in quintessential adolescent fashion. He refuses to respond, but my husband, Larry, and I know that he’s thinking, “No more dumb parent questions to answer.”

Every child dreams of a world with unlimited freedom. A world with no math homework and no broccoli, a world with unrestricted television viewing, candy bar consumption and curfews.

But the truth is that all kids, however loudly they protest, crave rules. They want structure and routine, limits and laws, safety and security. They want to know that their parents, as well as their teachers, counselors and clergy, are in command, protecting them from harm. They want to be reined in and reprimanded when they test, tease and overreach.

You need read only the classic novel “Lord of the Flies” or recent newspaper accounts of the massacre in Littleton, Colo., to discover that kids denied limits establish their own. They form gangs, cults and cliques in a desperate and often dangerous search for boundaries and a sense of belonging.

And so, as we prepare for the holiday of Shavuot, we reflect on one of the world’s first set of rules, the original blueprint for moral and ethical behavior, which preceded the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence and even the more recent etiquette book “Tiffany’s Table Manners for Teenagers.”

Yes, according to the rabbis of the Talmud, it was 3,310 years ago on Mt. Sinai, on the sixth of Sivan, amid the awesome spectacle of lightning, thunder, a dark cloud and the sound of the shofar, that God handed down the Ten Commandments. It was a sublime and transcendent moment. A day that the rabbis deemed as important as the day of creation itself. A day that sealed the sacred covenant between God and the Jewish people.

Originally a harvest holiday, Shavuot was known as the Festival of the First Fruits. But as the ancient Jews moved from an agrarian to a more urbanized society, the holiday began to lose its significance. But luckily the Talmudic rabbis, with typical Talmudic reasoning, determined that Shavuot also marked “zman matan torateinu,” the time of the giving of the Torah.

More than three millennia ago, this epiphanic event endowed a primitive and wandering people with a concise, absolute and universal moral code, a “true North” of right and wrong. And today, as we approach the end of the world’s most technologically advanced but most horrifically violent century, as we struggle to reach interplanetary destinations as well as the deepest recesses of the human mind, as we debate moral relativists, bioethicists and secular semanticists, we continue to need this same universal code to guide us.

In one story in the Midrash, the compilation of rabbinic commentaries on the Torah, God asks various nations in the ancient world if they want the Torah. Each nation refuses. Then God offers the Torah to the Jews. They accept unquestioningly, unanimously and simultaneously. “We will do and we will listen,” they say.

Today, what self-respecting lawyer would verbally agree to a contract without even reading it? And what child would agree to a new family rule without first hearing it, first refusing to honor it and then trying to renegotiate its scope and its consequences?

But the 603,550 Israelites who stood at Mt. Sinai, with no questions, debate or plea-bargaining, welcomed these divine commandments on their own behalf and on behalf of the future generations of Jews, down to the thousandth generation. And on each Shavuot, as we symbolically stand on Mt. Sinai, we renew and reaffirm this commitment to God.

“It’s a free country,” my son Jeremy proclaims when I oppose something he wants. “I can do what I want.”

Yes. We may all try to stretch the boundaries and reinterpret the ethical implications of the Ten Commandments, the most important of the 613 mitzvot, or commandments, found in the Torah. On a lesser level, we may also try to eat cookies for breakfast and play hooky from school or work.

But, ironically, for our children as well as ourselves, it is within laws and limits, curfews and boundaries that we find freedom and integrity. That we balance our natural and harmful inclinations with a need for a greater safety. That we live as solid, productive and helpful citizens in our families and our communities.

As the Jewish rabbi and sage Maimonides said, the purpose of the laws of the Torah is “to promote compassion, kindness and peace in the world.”

Jane Ulman lives in Encino with her husband and four sons.

If all rules were suspended, what would your child do? Read More »

The Return of Poogy

Leave a Comment / Entertainment, Israel, Music, Old Stories /

The fabled Poogy, Israel’s most celebrated rock band, is reuniting in the United States next month for a three-city tour, billed as their “final reunion.” It’s worth watching the reviews to see how they’re received. The results will offer data on the state of Jewish identity and Israel-Diaspora relations. Israel’s soul will be on display. Will American Jews come listen?

The last time they toured here was 1976, shortly before they broke up.

“We played 20 cities, and every concert was sold out,” says the band’s drummer, Meir “Poogy” Fenigstein, now a Los Angeles-based impresario. “Every place we performed, from Winnipeg to Phoenix, audiences knew the words and sang along. And it wasn’t Israelis. It was American Jews.”

“I don’t know how they learned it. Maybe because we came out at the time of the Yom Kippur War, when American Jews were closer to Israel. A lot of American kibbutz volunteers probably heard Poogy on the radio, and brought back the memories. I think we became a sort of bond between them and Israel.”

The Return of Poogy Read More »

The Way We Live Now

Leave a Comment / Israel, Old Stories /

Two items in the news caught my eye this week. One of course was the wind-down of the bitter intramural elections in Israel, which has only nominally been concerned with the peace process and the next door Palestinians; voters go to the polls Monday, May 17. The second was the announcement by Sotheby’s New York that journalist Joyce Maynard was putting up for auction the 14 letters — some of them love letters — J.D. Salinger had written her in 1972. In a curious and perhaps anachronistic way, my mind seems to have linked the two. I know, it’s a long reach.

Maynard as some will remember was a freshman at Yale who had written a fresh-faced account in 1972 of how America looked to her and, by implication, to her generation. The essay appeared on the cover of The NY Times Magazine and readers were drawn both to the writing (which was quite good) and the appealing pixie face of 18 year-old Joyce Maynard that adorned the magazine’s cover. Women had only recently entered Yale. And I can attest that many writers — male and female — were drawn to the article and her photo, and experienced considerable envy of the attention she was drawing.

One reader who apparently was attracted to the voice of the writer, as well as to her innocent look, was J.D. Salinger, author of the novel “The Catcher in the Rye,” and the stories “Franny and Zooey”; at that time Salinger was one of America’s most famous writers, all the more celebrated because he had secluded himself in New Hampshire, shunning interviews, television and celebrityhood. His last published work had come out in 1965. He had become a touchstone for teenagers as well as adults. And Catcher had become our contemporary version of Huck Finn: Fierce in its attitude towards child-like innocence, and zealous in its stance against the materialism and vulgarity that seemed to be swamping 20th century America.

Not totally zealous,however. He, at age 53, was attracted to this young virginal 18 year old and began to correspond with her, first as an older mentor, and then as a hopeful suitor. They met; she dropped out of Yale; and then joined him in New Hampshire, where they became lovers — her first experience — for part of a year. At which point, presumably, her innocence, her teen age identity, her barely formed personality began to grate on his nerves and he dumped her.

In Salinger’s life this was all perhaps a footnote. In hers, a dazzling and disastrous beginning that cast a long shadow.

Today Salinger is still a recluse at 80, while Joyce Maynard, 45, is a divorced mother of three children. With two of them still to send through college, she has decided to sell the letters Salinger wrote her, and in the process make his correspondence public. Sotheby’s New York has said they should fetch $60,000- $80,000. It’s a safe bet that Salinger is unhappy, probably furious over this incursion into the privacy he has spent a lifetime protecting. I would also wager that Joyce Maynard probably is feeling some satisfaction — at least a little, I hope — at getting her own back, even though 27 years have elapsed.

It’s a jump I know, but (the jump will be clear later) Monday is election day in Israel and I have to admit the shape of the campaign for prime minister has taken me by surprise. I expected the peace process and the Palestinians to dominate the political race. Instead internal conflicts and divisions among Israelis have been at the forefront, and political life seems to be fueled by animosity, one Jew snarling at another.

There are battles between religious and secular voters for the way democracy or theocracy will be played out; between newer Russian immigrant supporters of Natan Sharansky and the earlier religious immigrant followers of the Shas party; between the old line Ashkenazai Europeans and the Middle Eastern and North African Sephardi voters, in what looks like class warfare. Think 19th century German American Jews and their relationships with East European Jewish immigrants who arrived on American shores between 1890 and 1920.

In short, the cross cutting conflicts between different Israeli interest groups resembles nothing so much as a slightly out of focus version of American politics, complete with campaign managers from the U.S.

Given this resemblance, why are many Jewish Americans reportedly turned off by Israeli politics? Why are they today less concerned with the twists and turns, the changes, in the evolving national culture in Israel? It cannot all be layed at the door of the Who is a Jew controversy.

My view is that while we delight in, and are consumed by, our own rapid fire culture — tv gossip, celebrityhood, the internet, high and low art available everywhere and at the click of a mouse, constant change, constant conflict, the instant playback (tv sports) and the instant analysis of everything from the president’s latest speech to Columbine High — we long for Israel to personify our steadfast, unchanged icon. Israel for us is best appreciated when it is seen as the land of the pioneers, the families raising children communally on the kibbutz; the citizen soldiers united against a hostile outside world. We yearn for the days of the 6-day war triumphs, of Entebbe, and of course Paul Newman and the heroic passengers on the Exodus.

Israel, I think, often serves for us, Jewish Americans, as an equivalent to the myth of the west, which forever remains fixed and unchanged in the U.S., complete with those tall men: Gary Cooper, John Wayne, James Stewart and Clint Eastwood. We are stuck today, though, with our present reality, where America is the land of illegal finance contributions and grubby political sleaze; of a culture where fame and celebrityhood and personal revelations define much of our society. We have low rent confessions on daytime talk shows; the sharing of personal experiences with casual acquaintances in men’s and women’s groups; and a thousand and one intimacies with strangers on the internet. We have memoirs about incest, child abuse, drug and alcohol addiction; and of course we have Joyce Maynard.

We do not want this mirror image of ourselves in Israel. What is Israel, this messy, loud abrasive nation of 6 million, with Jew pitted against Jew, doing to us? Their current gunslingers — Netanyahu, Barak, Mordechai, Sharon — are a far cry from the purity of Cooper and Wayne. The Jewish nation ought to return to the Israel of old, the one we seem to feel meets our needs. We do not want to celebrate a society that reflects back to us political incivility and violence, that projects an image of Jew against Jew, that features all those titillating but mawkish confessionals. They ought to conduct their election privately, out of the glare of television and the public eye.That would certainly make us feel better. — Gene Lichtenstein

The Way We Live Now Read More »

Starting Over

Leave a Comment / Old Stories, Worldwide /

On March 22, Aca Singer, 70, thin and silver-haired, picked up the telephone in his Belgrade office and dialed a number in Budapest, where he was connected with Gusztav Zoltai, a man 10 years his junior.

Speaking in Hungarian, Singer told Zoltai that the plan they had laid out the previous October was ready to be implemented. Zoltai jotted down a few details, hung up the phone, and set the plan in motion.

When the history of the war in Kosovo is written, the plan these two men initiated will barely earn a footnote. Still, Singer and Zoltai have written a short, remarkable chapter in post-Holocaust Jewish history.

For the first time in half a century, a Central European Jewish community has taken the lead in helping to rescue a neighboring Jewish community in desperate need.

The work was spearheaded by two Holocaust survivors, both of whom had lost their entire families. These men wanted to be sure the words “Never Again” had meaning in their communities.

The first bus rented by the Serb Jewish community pulled up to the Hungarian border at Szeged just after noon on March 23 and found a representative from the Budapest community waiting for them. More buses came in the days to follow, transporting a total of 160 Jews by week’s end. By mid-April, that number had doubled again.

Jews say that they are not fleeing Serbia because of anti-Semitism. They say it is simply a matter of self-preservation during the constant NATO bombings.

In Budapest, the entire Balint Jewish Community Center on Revai Street had been turned into makeshift dorm rooms, a soup kitchen and lounges in anticipation of the Serbian Jews’ arrival.

But as the numbers grew, the facilities were strained, and a hotel on the outskirts of town was used. It, too, proved inadequate. Now the Serbian Jews, most of whom are children, women and elderly, are being housed in the Park Hotel in the central part of the city.

The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee has been working with the Hungarian community and the Yugoslav Jewish Federation to care for the Serbian Jews.

“We’ve set up kindergarten and school classes for around 50 children,” said Israel Sela, the JDC’s country director for Hungary. “Many of them — especially from border cities like Subotica and Novi Sad — already speak Hungarian, so they fit in rather easily.

“Two of these parents are teachers from Serbia, and they are creating a curriculum that will keep these children current at home as well as translate for them on a daily basis.” Jewish youth in Budapest who speak Serbo-Croatian are volunteering to take families for shopping and visits to doctors.

B’nai B’rith International is providing fresh fruit every day, along with city transport and telephone cards.

British Jewish organizations such as World Jewish Relief and Connections have also made substantial contributions, much of monies earmarked for health insurance and health care. The European Council of Jewish Communities is also helping, and the European Jewish Congress transferred $20,000 to the Hungarian community to help.

While the younger children are settling into their temporary living arrangements, the college-age youth are having a more difficult time.

“I was three weeks away from my degree in theater,” Stefi, a Belgrade university student, said in mid-April as she sat softly playing jazz on the piano in the Balint center.

“Now I’m considering my options. It isn’t likely that I’ll be going home.”

Whether Stefi will go to Israel remains open. The Jewish Agency for Israel has quickly processed between 15 and 20 Jews who have already emigrated to Israel, said Joszi Croitoru, a Jewish Agency representative.

He said that 80 young Serbian Jews are taking a complimentary 12-day “pilot trip” to Israel, and another 80 have signed up.

Still, many of these university students are anguishing about their choices.

Students such as Olga Izrael said, “Don’t call us refugees. We are just here visiting.” She paused. “And thinking about our future.”

While they’re thinking, they watch CNN’s coverage of NATO’s bombing runs. They wring their hands while they lay awake at night and try to come to terms with the fact that, for many of them, the lives they led in Serbia are over.

Milica Afar and her sister-in-law, Lydia Afar — they married brothers — sat calmly as their children, David, Sara, Theo and Michael, scrambled around them, playing.

“My husband is a biochemist, and Milica’s is a property manager for a film production company,” Lydia said. “But thinking about the future for our children, I think Israel becomes more and more attractive.”

A week later, the two women and their families had already left for Israel.

All this began to take place in Budapest during the first days of Passover. In 1992, several of these Jews had opened the Belgrade community center’s seder to Sarajevo’s Jews, who were fleeing that war. Now they themselves are on the run, or at least waiting out what history will bring them.

One thing is clear: The post-Holocaust Jewish community of the former Yugoslavia was small and poor, yet these 6,500 Jews created one of the most lively small communities in Europe.

Beginning with the war in Croatia, in 1991, and the war in Bosnia, in 1992, many of the younger Jews in each of these communities made their way to the United States, Canada, Israel and elsewhere. Sarajevo’s Jewish youth will never return.

Now it appears as though Belgrade’s Jewish community is beginning to empty out as well.

Jews Thrived in Belgrade

Before WWII

Before the Holocaust, Serbia served as a European crossroads, and its Jewish population, with a mix of Sephardim and Ashkenazim, reflected this fact.

Belgrade’s community swelled to nearly 11,000 in the 1930s — around 5 percent of them refugees from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia.

Serbia’s Jews were always tied to its cities. Indeed, in a country where 40 percent of the population lived in small villages or on farms, more than 70 percent of the Jews lived in major cities.

Jews gravitated toward the professions in Serbia and made up a large percentage of Belgrade’s intellectual elite.

During World War II, Yugoslavia was quickly overrun by the Germans. Croatia became a Nazi puppet state, set up its own concentration camps and killed a great many Jews as well as Serbs.

The vast majority of Serbia’s Jews were killed by Germans, who found no friends in the Serb government of Gen. Milan Nedic.

After the Holocaust, 15,000 Jews were left in all of Yugoslavia from a prewar total of 76,000. Many who survived left after the establishment of Marshal Tito’s one-party state, leaving some 6,500.

The community was not particularly religious, but after the 1967 Six-Day War, many younger Jews reclaimed their Jewish connections and communities.

When Yugoslavia disintegrated into war in the 1990s, the Jewish communities in the successor states remained in contact as best they could.

Serbia’s Jewish community long had a reputation for generosity — having helped German Jews in the 1930s and Sarajevo’s Jews in the 1990s — and worked hard to stay out of politics. — Edward Serotta

Starting Over Read More »

Lessons From the Front

Leave a Comment / Old Stories, Worldwide /

Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak fought side-by-side a quarter of a century ago in some of the most intrepid exploits of Israel’s crack anti-terrorist unit, the Sayeret Matkal. They freed a hijacked Sabena airliner on a runway. They wrought havoc, on separate commando raids, in Beirut. But Barak ended his military career as a general, Netanyahu as a captain.

The difference showed in their four-month war of attrition. Barak, the Labor challenger, waged a strategic campaign. He identified his targets — the Russian immigrants, the disappointed, mainly Sephardi, instinctive Likud voters in the depressed “development” towns and big city slums — and pounded away.

Netanyahu, by contrast, was constantly groping for the theme, the grievance, the soundbite that would kickstart his campaign, discredit Barak and bring the defectors back to mother Likud. He assailed the “Ashkenazi elite.” He evoked the trauma of the Palestinian bus bombings that turned the tide against Shimon Peres in 1996.

The trouble was that his audience had seen it all before. The TV magician had lost his touch. He ran up more and more flags, but no one saluted. He looked jaded, isolated and increasingly desperate. In an election fought on personalities rather than issues, he could no longer count on team loyalty. Only his wife, Sara, who held his hand at late-night Likud strategy sessions, kept faith.

By the beginning of May, Barak was pulling steadily ahead, while the defending champion was floundering. As Hanoch Smith, Israel’s most experienced pollster, noted, this was the first time in six national elections that the late swing was to the left. The Likud waverers were not coming home. Not yet, anyway.

“What worries Bibi,” said Shmuel Sandler, a political science professor at Tel-Aviv’s Bar-Ilan University, “is not the gap, but the trend.” The daily leaks from the Likud bunker suggested that the Prime Minister’s colleagues were already honing their knives and polishing their alibis.

If Barak made mistakes, he quickly corrected them. When Tikki Dayan, a popular entertainer, dismissed Likud voters as “rabble,”he denounced her. When Netanyahu beat him to the punch by running television ads with Russian subtitles, Barak followed suit the next day. When Likud cited the Russian translation of his biography, in which he was said to have declined to buy property in East Jerusalem 30 years ago because it was “Arab,” Barak proved that the passage was a forgery (it didn’t appear in the Hebrew original or the approved translation).

Yet he never let these diversions deflect him from his course. Likud charges were countered briskly by press release or answers to reporters, but Barak’s campaign stayed on target. The voters, TV ads slammed home night after night, could trust Israel’s most decorated warrior not to sell its security short. Even the Likud mayor, Ehud Olmert, had said on camera that Barak would “not divide Jerusalem,” and Labor mercilessly screened the footage.

Netanyahu, the ads insisted, had failed his own constituency. “If 100,000 lost their jobs, why should this man keep his?” asked one slogan.

The 500,000 Russian immigrant voters who arrived in the 1980s and ’90s represent about 14 percent of the total electorate. In the tribal society of Israeli elections, they are the least calcified in their allegiances. In 1992, they put Labor’s Yitzhak Rabin in power; four years later, they tipped the scales for Likud’s Netanyahu. They threaten to do the same for Barak in 1999.

“If Bibi doesn’t get at least 60 per cent of the Russian vote,” Hanoch Smith predicted, “he’s in trouble.” Another leading pollster, Mina Tzemach, reported: “At the start of the current campaign, 70 percent of the immigrants were on Netanyahu’s side, 30 percent for Barak. In the past four months, Barak has pulled level.”

A Labor advertising blitz in the rightist Russian-language media penetrated the shell of immigrant ignorance about just who Barak was. According to Tzemach, 25 percent of them were learning of his military record for the first time. But it was a Russian party, Natan Sharansky’s Yisrael B’aliya, that turned the tide with a blistering assault on Shas’ control of the Interior Ministry.

The Sephardi Orthodox party is the immigrants’ bete noire. Under its rule, the ministry has challenged the Jewish residence rights of partners, children and dependent relatives of the multitude of Russian mixed marriages. With other religious parties, it denied them civil marriage and divorce, pegged conversions to a radical change of lifestyle, tried to banish pork butchers from the Jewish state. Shas retaliated by calling the Russians church-going pimps.

Sharansky demanded the Interior Ministry for his own party. Netanyahu, the darling of Shas voters and ally of its convicted leader Aryeh Deri, hedged. Barak announced that he would not give Shas the ministry if he formed the next government, and hinted that it would go Yisrael B’aliya.

The response to Sharansky’s attack was electric. Semiyon Goldin, a recent Russian immigrant who teaches history at the Hebrew University, confessed he was “shocked” by the intensity of the hatred it unleashed. “The Russians respect Bibi,” he said, “but they see him as too close to the religious.” The mud is sticking.

The tilt among blue-collar Likud supporters is more an erosion than a swing, but in Israeli elections every vote counts. Peres lost by 30,000, less than 1 percent, in 1996. “The days when we voted Likud without thinking are over,” said Yossi Gozlan, a disaffected Likud activist in Beersheba who is backing Barak. “We’ve started asking who is good for us economically.”

With unemployment up to 8.7 percent nationally, and redundancy pushed into double figures by factory closures in development towns like Beersheba, Gozlan’s answer is emphatically not Netanyahu. “Bibi’s economic performance has been catastrophic,” the 45-year-old building contractor told me. “Everything we achieved here has gone backwards.”

Yehiel Zohar, the Likud mayor of Netivot, another neglected southern development town, has come out for Barak — and sent a carload of Netanyahu posters back to party headquarters. The chairman of Likud’s Tel-Aviv branch, Bentzi Mordov, has also switched sides.

Daniel Ben-Simon, the Moroccan-born author of “Another Israel”, a best-selling study of the 1996 election, detects widespread apathy in traditional Likud strongholds. “There is a lack of passion,” he argued. “And without fire and enthusiasm, Likud is a dying machine. Netanyahu will lose not because people there will vote Barak, but because his own people will stay away.”

Efraim Inbar, a right-wing Bar-Ilan University political scientist, put a rueful face on it. “What surprised me,” he confided, “is that Bibi still has a chance.”

The

Third Man

The most disappointed man in the Israeli elections has to be Yitzhak Mordechai, the Center Party’s candidate for prime minister. By the last week of the campaign, his ratings had fallen so low — barely 7 percent — that his own colleagues were begging him to pull out and give Labor’s Ehud Barak a clear run against Binyamin Netanyahu.

The party chose the former Likud Defense Minister because a private poll showed he had a better chance than another ex-general, Amnon Shahak, of unseating Netanyahu. As a Sephardi, born in Iraqi Kurdistan, he was touted to bring in disgruntled Likud voters.

Pollsters insisted that Mordechai would be more certain than Barak to beat Netanyahu in a second-round runoff. The trouble was that he never looked like getting beyond the first round on May 17.

According to pollster Hanoch Smith, some of the Likud Sephardim who had deserted to Mordechai used him as a stepping stone to go one further. They swallowed their inbred resistance to casting a ballot for Labor, the party that patronized their immigrant grandparents.

When they vote for the Knesset in the current two-tier system, Israelis indulge themselves and vote for sectarian parties — religious, ethnic, single-issue. But when it comes to electing a pri
me minister, it seems they like a clear choice.

The other also-rans have fared even worse than Mordechai. Polls showed Benny Begin, a far right protest candidate, taking only 3 percent and Azmi Bishara, the first Arab to run for prime minister, barely 4 percent. Both may well drop out before Monday’s ballot.

This has been the least ideological campaign since Begin’s father, Menachem, ended Labor’s unbroken 29-year hegemony in 1977. By agreeing to two evacuations, however small and grudging, of West Bank land, Netanyahu took the sting out of the Palestinian issue. There are still differences, but they are of spirit and emphasis rather than principle.

“Israelis have resigned themselves to a Palestinian state,” said Efraim Inbar, a political science professor at Tel-Aviv’s Bar-Ilan University, who sports the knitted kippah of the hawkish National Religious Party. “So the election revolves around personalities, who can do the job, who is the more reliable. It’s between my shmendrick or their shmendrick.”— Eric Silver

Lessons From the Front Read More »

Unprecedented Election Choices

Leave a Comment / Israel, Old Stories, Politics /

Israel appears poised to embark on a two-week period unprecedented in its political history.

As befits a political culture drawing at least part of its mode of discourse from the Talmud, hypotheses regarding what will happen during those two weeks run the gamut of speculation.

When Israelis go to the polls next week, they will cast two ballots — one for the incoming Knesset and one for prime minister.

One of those votes, for the candidates who will fill the 120 seats in the 15th Knesset, will result in a list of clear winners soon after the balloting.

But with five candidates running for prime minister, it appears that none of them will win the requisite 50 percent of the vote to be immediately proclaimed the next premier. Instead, the results will necessitate a June 1 runoff between the two top vote-getters, whom all the polls agree will be incumbent Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Labor Party leader Ehud Barak.

A runoff may not be needed if one or more of the other three candidates drop out of the race before the May 17 elections. But Center Party leader Yitzhak Mordechai was this week resisting pressure from Barak supporters and from members of his own party to step aside — a move, polls show, that could give Barak a first-round victory over Netanyahu.

The two other candidates for the premiership — the head of the right-wing National Unity bloc, Ze’ev “Benny” Begin, and the first Israeli Arab to run for the premiership, Azmi Beshara — were conditioning their withdrawal on Mordechai’s decision.

The likelihood of a runoff prompts the question that Israel has never confronted before: How will the election of the Knesset on May 17 affect the election of the prime minister on June 1?

It is important to note that the Israeli prime minister is far more answerable to the Parliament than, for example, the president of the United States is to Congress.

While Israel reformed its formerly British-based system to allow for the direct election of the prime minister for the first time in the 1996 elections, it has still retained much of the British doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty.

The prime minister needs a working majority in the Knesset in order to set up and sustain a stable government — and this could well affect voters’ decisions when they cast their June 1 ballots.

There are those pundits who argue that if the leftist One Israel does well in the Knesset election, that will trigger a contrary reaction among the electorate and create better prospects for Netanyahu.

The logic here is that most people crave consensus, unity and moderation. They will reason to themselves — not consciously, but instinctively — that the best way of balancing a leftist victory in the Knesset is to elect a rightist premier, and then sit back while he goes about the thankless task of cobbling together a working coalition.

But the opposite thesis is articulated with just as much conviction. This holds that if, in the same example, the voters find they have elected a left-leaning Knesset, they will follow suit with the left-leaning candidate for prime minister, Barak, since they will reason to themselves that the alternative spells paralysis — and eventually the new government’s collapse and early elections.

Quite possibly, both theses, though opposed to each other, will be in play among the voting public during those critical two weeks between the two rounds of voting.

The two candidates will each, in their campaign propaganda, press the thesis that best suits his own circumstances in the wake of the May 17 results.

Whatever logic they try to articulate in easily digestible sound bites, there is no doubt that they will spend that period immersed in ceaseless and frenetic politicking.

The special-interest parties — especially the Orthodox, the Arabs and, to a lesser extent, the immigrants — will seek to offer their support to either of the two candidates, their leaders claiming that they can deliver large blocs of voters in return for specific promises of Cabinet portfolios and other positions of importance in the next government.

But are these vaunted promises of delivering blocs of votes credible? This is a question on which the June 1 election could very well hinge.

Can the rabbis or the sheiks or the immigrant leaders truly guarantee a high turnout among their constituencies when their respective parties are no longer on the ballots as they were for the May 17 Knesset vote?

Earlier in the campaign, it was believed that the Israeli Arab turnout in a runoff would be relatively low — which would hurt Barak, who is depending on their support for a victory.

Later the theory was floated that the Russian immigrants turnout, too, would be low — and that this would hurt Netanyahu.

Even later, it turned out that the immigrants were not nearly as overwhelmingly for Netanyahu as perhaps the premier himself had believed. Which prompts the question of which candidate would be hurt if they do indeed register a low second-round turnout?

Similarly, regarding fervently Orthodox voters, observers are wondering whether they will turn out in force on June 1 to vote for the avowedly non-religious Netanyahu, however supportive he has been toward the Orthodox parties during his tenure.

The leaders of the Orthodox parties will be studying the arithmetic of the Knesset election results with the utmost care after May 17 to discern whether a coalition is likely to shape up without their participation.

Shas, the National Religious Party and the United Torah Judaism bloc have all benefitted enormously from their years in government and are loath to contemplate retiring now to the opposition benches.

That calculation may feature prominently in their rabbis’ decision on whom to support in the second round, and how vigorously to support him.

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‘Enigma’ Brilliance

Leave a Comment / Entertainment, Old Stories, Theater /

Novelist Abel Znorko, a Nobel laureate, has lived in solitude for 12 years on a remote Norwegian island, so close to the Arctic Circle that there are only two seasons — six months of day and six months of night.

His self-exile is broken only occasionally by a ferry that unloads his basic needs — namely, food, liquor, books and women.

At the winter solstice’s twilight, Erik Larsen, a reporter from a small-town newspaper, arrives. Contrary to his hermitic lifestyle, the writer has mysteriously invited Larsen for an interview. The ostensible reason is to discuss Znorko’s latest book, “The Unconfessed Love,” which, departing from the philosophical and metaphysical themes of his previous 20 novels, consists of love letters to and from an unnamed woman.

So opens the American première of French playwright Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s “Enigma Variations,” at the Taper Forum. To reveal any more of the plot twists and turns would rank as a crime against potential patrons, second only to missing this play entirely.

“Enigma Variations,” directed by French Canadian Daniel Roussel and starring Donald Sutherland as the author and Jamey Sheridan as the reporter, is that rare work in which every prospect pleases. It has wit and depth, love and hate, mystery and frankness, superb acting and direction, and elegant set designs and music.

Edward Elgar’s composition, from which the play takes its title, consists of 14 variations on a melody that sounds familiar, but is never fully exposed or identified.

So it is with the enigma of love, ponders the playwright, in its many permutations and intensities. “There is no love without lies,” proclaims Schmitt, and he proves it by hiding the truths in his play beneath a web of lies.

Schmitt is also a master of the Wildean epigram. Are you ever bored? asks the reporter, Larsen. “Of course, not,” responds the novelist, haughtily. “I am living with me.”

Sutherland and Sheridan are on stage in every one of the play’s intermission-less 90 minutes, talking and parrying, exploring the peaks and valleys of human emotion, and their performances deserve, for once, the over-used term tour de force.

“Enigma Variations” continues through June 13 at the Taper Forum. For tickets, call (213) 628-2772, or access online www.TaperAhmanson.com.

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The Changing Face of Fairfax High

Leave a Comment / Education, Old Stories /

Sitting shiva for public high schools has recently become a national pastime. In the wake of Littleton, schools are alternately pitied and blamed as the breeding ground for a generation of violent and disenfranchised youth.

Now comes Fairfax High School’s 75th anniversary to remind us that it was not always so. For several generations of kids — a large percentage of them Jewish — Fairfax was the springboard into a world of culture, achievement and ambition.

Hamilton, University, Palisades and Birmingham high schools can all lay claim to renowned Jewish alumni. But “Fax City” was there early on, at the corner of Melrose and Fairfax avenues, smack in a neighborhood that was once the epicenter of Los Angeles Jewry. Over the years, Fairfax High has overcome everything from rural beginnings to urban traumas, building a reputation that rests on its spectacular alumni contribution to education, art, entertainment, sports and politics. On Saturday, May 22, the school, along with the City of West Hollywood, will sponsor a daylong Diamond Jubilee festival that commemorates its remarkable history.

Fairfax High School was erected in 1924 at a time when Los Angeles was the nation’s largest agricultural county. Originally dubbed an Agricultural & Mechanical school, the 28-acre campus focused on landscape gardening, forestry, architecture, agronomy and arboretum. The Beverly-Fairfax area, now residential and commercial, was largely rural.

At that time, a migrational shift of Los Angeles’ Jewish population evolved. As other parts of town developed and Jews prospered financially, families abandoned Boyle Heights (a Jewish immigrant mecca since 1913) and set down roots in the Fairfax area, the Westside and Beverly Hills (the cultivation of the Pico-Robertson area followed in the 1940s). Across the school’s first decade, Los Angeles’ Jewish population nearly doubled, and Beverly-Fairfax caught much of this westward flow. Brooklyn Avenue businesses such as Canters Delicatessen and Solomon’s Book Store now sprouted up on Fairfax Avenue.

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To Give and Now Receive

Leave a Comment / California, Community, Old Stories, Philanthropy /

He was a boy from the Bronx, born below the Third Avenue El. She was a girl from Brooklyn, born near the famed “Tree Grown in Brooklyn.” Both had immigrant, working-class parents who initially opposed their marriage.

Almost 55 years, three children, 10 grandchildren and, in June, one great-grandchild later, Ozzie and Dorothy Goren are progenitors of a philanthropic dynasty that will be honored May 23 at Jewish Family Service of Los Angeles’ annual Fammy Awards dinner.

It isn’t an honor that either of them sought, Dorothy said during a recent breakfast interview at the Hillcrest Country Club.

“I had to convince Ozzie to do it,” she said. “My feeling is it’s not for us; it’s for what Jewish Family Service does. To me, [JFS is] what Judaism is all about. I owe it to them.”

It’s also a way of showing off her children and grandchildren, she conceded.

Both Gorens have been involved in Jewish leadership roles for many years. Ozzie has chaired the United Jewish Fund campaign and served as Jewish Federation president, and currently chairs the Los Angeles Holocaust Museum and the Martyrs Memorial. Dorothy was the first woman to chair the UJF campaign and has held myriad other Federation posts, including Western region president and Women’s Division campaign chair. But her most heartfelt leadership role has been at JFS, where she is a past president, board member and serves on all key committees.

“Their involvement and dedication to the community is really a model for everybody,” said Lisa Brooks, director of development and marketing at JFS. “They’re not just leaders in name. They give money; they give time; they’re always there when you need them…. They give to everything they believe in. Fortunately for us, they believe in a lot.”

For both Gorens, their parents provided models of charitable giving. Ozzie tells a story of his early years in the furniture business in Los Angeles, when he was making about $50 a week and already had a wife and child to support. A rabbi walked in and asked for a donation for a yeshiva in Jerusalem. The young entrepreneur gave the rebbe $18.

“I thought he was going to drop dead on the spot because he usually got a quarter or a half a dollar,” Ozzie said.

When word got around, other needy rabbis started to come into the store. One day, when Ozzie was on the phone with his father, a rabbi came into the shop and asked for a donation. Ozzie became upset. “Dad, there’s a rabbi who’s just come in here. There was one here in the morning, and now they’re coming twice a day.”

“I don’t care how many times they come,” his father said, in his Yiddish-shaded English. “If a man comes to you with his hand outstretched, you put something in it.”

“My father said to me over and over, ‘There’s only one thing that you can leave behind — and that’s your good name,'” Ozzie said.

Ozzie’s father came to the United States at age 19 after fleeing the Communists or Cossacks (Ozzie isn’t quite sure) in a small town in the Ukraine. He started out as a blacksmith, then became a peddler. In 1925, he went bankrupt, but within two years had paid all his creditors back.

“That was the kind of man he was, a man of stature and ethics and morals,” Ozzie said. “My father worked his butt off. And of the six of us, five of us went to the university.”

Dorothy’s father emigrated from Lithuania, arriving at 18 after fleeing the draft in his country. He left behind his whole family, and, with the exception of two sisters who went to Argentina, they all perished in the Holocaust. In Brooklyn, he owned a hand laundry on Fifth Avenue. When his crooked partner ran off with all the money, the family moved to Massapequa, Long Island, where her dad ran several gas stations.

“We always had a lovely house and enough food, but we weren’t wealthy,” she said. “That’s why, every morning, I wake up in my house in Pacific Palisades and…when I walk out of my bedroom, I think, ‘I can’t believe little Dorothy from Brooklyn is living in this house.'”

Unlike Ozzie, who lived in a Jewish neighborhood, Dorothy’s family was one of three Jewish households in Massapequa. Even though they didn’t belong to a synagogue, her mother, who was born in Poland, was conscious of being Jewish and did volunteer work in both the Jewish and non-Jewish communities.

Ozzie’s success in business has allowed the Gorens to become generous philanthropists, as well as lay leaders. Beginning with a half interest in a furniture business, Ozzie moved on to real estate and shopping centers, and now heads Portland Investment Co., running his business from a comfortable sixth-floor corner office in a Westwood office building.

For the Gorens, their children and grandchildren are their most important contribution to the world and the Jewish community.

Several of them are carrying on Ozzie and Dorothy’s legacy. Daughter Carol, a free-lance photographer and mother of three, is a volunteer at JFS in Denver. Her husband is president of the board of a local Jewish day school, and the entire family volunteers at the Colorado Humane Society, visits the elderly in nursing homes and volunteers on Christmas at Children’s Hospital.

The Gorens’ oldest son, Jerry, who is about to become a grandfather, volunteered at a reading program in West Oakland and San Quentin during his UC Berkeley days in the 1960s. He and his partner, Julia Coley, started a law and public school magnate at Dorsey High School and now teach in Los Angeles.

The youngest son, Bruce, met his wife, Susie, on a Federation Young Leadership mission to Israel. The couple has four children, most attending Jewish day school. Bruce, a successful businessman, is a past board member of JFS of Santa Monica. Susie is president of Stephen S. Wise Nursery School and Day School, an active member of the Jewish Federation and is completing the Wexner Heritage Program.

Ozzie says that he has found God and immortality in the eyes of his children and grandchildren, and hopes to pass on a legacy of Jewish compassion and memory not only to them but also to future generations through the Los Angeles Holocaust Museum. The museum reopened in an expanded and more visible incarnation last month. Its sole mission, Ozzie said, is to commemorate the Holocaust and educate people of all creeds and colors about it.

At a Holocaust commemoration on April 18, Ozzie told a crowd of survivors that he was one of them, even though he was never in a concentration camp or a refugee during World War II. Still, it was only by chance that he wasn’t buried in Babi Yar, as his father’s brother, sister, father and mother had been.

“I’m a survivor. We’re all survivors. We’re a nation of immigrants who all survived,” he said. “The wonder of it all is you have families, and you have immortality. I have the pleasure of my immortality sitting right there: Zach, Sheera, Jake and Nikki, they are my immortality, my grandchildren.”

The Jewish Family Service Fammy Awards dinner will take place Sunday, May 23, at the Ritz Carlton-Marina del Rey. Tickets are $250, and proceeds will go to support JFS services. Journal ads paying tribute to honorees are also available at a range of prices. For dinner reservations or to place an ad, contact Janice Pitler at (323) 761-8800, ext. 210.

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