A chapter is about to close for the Reform movement. After 30 years, Rabbi Allen Freehling is retiring from University Synagogue. As of June 30, Freehling, 70, will turn over the Brentwood synagogue\’s spiritual leadership to incoming Rabbi Morley Feinstein from Temple Beth El in South Bend, Ind.\n\n
When the Jewish Community Centers Association (JCCA) of North America convened its April 21-24 Biennial 2002 convention in Los Angeles, delegates from all over the continent assembled to discuss the challenges facing the JCC system: security issues, the direction of early childhood education and camp components, a lack of financial resources and the breakdown of the nuclear family.\n\n
The mission\’s organizer, Rabbi Mark Diamond, executive director of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California, called the journey a \”rabbinic version of the March of Living.\”
On April 1, Los Angeles County children\’s social worker Jules Weingart sent the Los Angeles Times a letter protesting its predilection for calling Palestinian suicide-bombers \”militants.\” As a courtesy, Weingart attached a list of normative definitions of the terms \”militant,\” \”terrorism,\” \”terror\” and \”extremist.\”
On April 18, Weingart received a response from Times Readers Representative Jamie Gold. \”The word terrorist is not applied to combatants in Israel,\” Gold informed Weingart on behalf of the newspaper, \”because it is considered a politically loaded word.\”
That this is some perverse form of political correctness, few can doubt. But as Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center has asked repeatedly over the last year, \”Political correctness for whom — suicide-bombers?\”
When I write a screenplay, I start out with an agenda. I decide who my hero is first and who is the villain. Then I fashion scenes to build my dramatic case and make it believable. That is, I believe, exactly what occurred with regard to at least two reporters, Sheila MacVicar of CNN and Tom Miller of the Los Angeles Times, on Tuesday, April 16 in the Jenin refugee camp.
I was there. I saw everything they saw, I heard everything they heard, I smelled everything they did not smell. And the truth is there was no smell of death on that day, despite what Miller wrote in his feature article of April 21.
So what does it take to get a charity started in Los Angeles? How can a project be incubated just enough to get people excited so that they will one day open their checkbooks and start signing?
Dear Soldier,
Thank you for protecting Israel. I hope you and your family are safe. I hope one day I visit Israel. I love Israel. Sincerely,
2nd Grader
You want media bias? I\’ll give you media bias. Here\’s one big city newspaper\’s account of the Israeli incursion into the Jenin refugee camp: \”Jenin camp looks like the scene of a crime. Its concrete rubble and tortured metal evokes another horror half a world away in New York, smaller in scale, but every bit as repellent in its particulars.\”\n\nThat\’s from the London newspaper The Guardian. The Los Angeles Times, in contrast, ran a long, two-page investigation into what happened in Jenin. It reported the evidence of terrorism that led to Israel\’s decision to go in. It documented the precise and risky manner by which the Israeli army chose to carry out its operation. It recounted the fear of the soldiers and refugees, the killing of innocent Palestinians (that\’s part of the story) and it investigated the wildly inflated stories of Palestinian propagandists and found them lacking.\n\n
Next Thursday, May 9, the 27th of Iyar, we will celebrate Yom Yerushalayim. During the Six-Day War, Israelis recaptured Jerusalem from the Jordanians. Israel instituted a day of celebration for this event, calling it Jerusalem Day. Although Jerusalem is a source of bitter contention these days between Israelis and Palestinians, we still celebrate this day, one that reminds us that Jews are finally able to visit the Western Wall.
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