Even 56 years later, Irving Gelman recalls precisely the day of his U.S. arrival and exactly the contents of his pockets: April 19, 1947, and $5.60.
The date marked a miraculous fresh start for a man whose generosity would later ignite dramatic changes within Orange County\’s Jewish community.
Guests at one of Heidi Kahn\’s Passover potlucks stepped into a desert oasis. That year, her Irvine tract home was transformed with a Bedouin makeover achieved by suspending a tent inside. Another year, guests, who always contribute to the feast, were also asked to bring household goods and were put to work assembling care packages for Jews trying to flee the former Soviet Union.
Typically, the amphibian plague, one of many inflicted on ancient Egypt in the biblical story of Exodus, gets a star turn at Kahn\’s seder. Plastic frogs croak unexpectedly at arriving guests, who can fold origami frogs while waiting for latecomers. Some guests even don frog masks.
\”When you\’ve sat through a lifetime of tedious seders and create your own tedious seders, and then go to Heidi\’s place and play, no seder will ever compare,\” said friend and past guest, Gail Shendelman, of Irvine. \”I\’m spoiled for life.\”
As some 20 teens beat 18-year-old Rashid Alam with golf clubs and baseball bats in Yorba Linda on Feb. 22, they allegedly yelled \”White Power!\” The attack, which Alam\’s friends said was unprovoked, left the recent high school graduate hospitalized with a fractured jaw and broken bones in his face.
Unable to speak because his jaw is wired shut, friends and family despair that he might have suffered permanent brain damage from the 65 blows he endured.
Police call the attack a hate crime, but have said that it began as a face-off between two rival groups that had fought in the past. Others said it was fueled solely by ethnic hatred.
Ahmed Alam, publisher of the Arab World newspaper in Anaheim, said his son\’s beating underscored the vulnerability now felt by many Arab Americans.
Passover is my favorite Jewish holiday, and although cooking for Passover requires a lot of preparation, I look forward to it each year. It is a time when our family and close friends join together to share thoughts and exchange ideas as we participate in the seder.
There is something about baseball, war and commanders-in-chief that eternally binds us to our national pastime. Presidents want the baseball teams to play, and the fans want to take their minds off of wars, economic problems and domestic troubles. So it\’s a win-win situation.
Such is baseball, where hope springs eternal. It is FDR throwing out one of his 11 first pitches on opening day during the Great Depression and later during World War II. A confident JFK in 1963 — just six months after the Cuban Missile Crisis and seven months before his assassination — is seen smiling in a famous photo tossing out the first pitch in Washington.
No matter how intense world affairs are, there is something comforting and consistent about baseball, and it even gives the president a moment of relief from pressing issues.
About six months ago, Gregory Rodriguez, a contributing editor to the Los Angeles Times opinion section, phoned his friend, Rabbi Gary Greenebaum, West Coast regional director of the American Jewish Committee (AJ Committee). Rodriguez had attended events purported to promote intellectual fellowship among diverse Angelenos, but had found them not-so-diverse. \”There\’s a lot of lip service paid to crossing barriers in this city, but many gatherings are organized around political or ethnic lines,\” Rodriguez said.\n\nTo mix things up a bit, the two friends went on to launch a program, co-presented by the Los Angeles Public Library. The series, Zócalo, which means \”public square\” in Spanish, will gather Eastsiders and Westsiders for private discussions and public lectures on crucial civic issues. It kicks off at the downtown Central Library\’s Mark Taper Auditorium on April 9 at 7 p.m., when the Economist\’s Washington correspondent Adrian Wooldridge, co-author of \”The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea,\” will describe his take on the corporation as \”an engine that can work for the public good as well as ill,\” Greenebaum said.
Thousands of screaming girls. Packed nightclubs. Love-crazy fans. Ron Gartner has seen it all.
That is, on television, of course.
In real life, Gartner is an up-and-coming singer who, while not exactly drawing the sorts of crowds that come to Eminem shows, is packing the social halls of senior centers across the nation singing the tunes of Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett and other big-band and Motown standards. His fans may be closer in age to Bob Hope than Britney Spears, but Gartner is quickly becoming the newest big thing in the senior-home entertainment circuit.
Originally a denizen of what he calls the shmatte business — the garment industry — Gartner, 58, is building a second career by singing big-band favorites in nursing homes, senior centers and gated retirement communities all over the country. Now, on the eve of the release of his first CD, \”Someone Like You,\” Gartner is bringing his show to Southern California for two performances, on April 10 at Leisure World, a gated community in Laguna Woods, and on April 13 at the Indian Ridge Country Club in Palm Desert, where Gartner is playing the Desert Cancer Fund Dinner Dance.
On Nov. 15, 2002, filmmaker Larry Cohen should have been at the multiplex, gauging opening day reaction to the film he wrote, \”Phone Booth,\” about a man who must outwit a sniper while trapped in the eponymous telephonic cabin. But the Washington Sniper changed all that.\n\nNo, Cohen was not the target of a hit. But his movie was, last October, when 20th Century Fox postponed the release because of the snipers (who were ultimately apprehended after killing 10 people and critically wounding three).\n\n\”Phone Booth,\” directed by Joel Schumacher and starring current \”it boy\” Colin Farrell, opens in theaters April 4. \n\n
It was this relationship — these two boys, total strangers now bound forever by one horrible deed — that was the initial inspiration for \”Levity.\”
In researching the movie, I spent time with a lot of people who had committed murder when they were kids. I met some through youth groups, others through church and community programs. Some I interviewed extensively, others I just followed around for a while. They were all different ages, yet each had in common that he was trying to come to terms with the consequences of what he\’d done. Some (those who believed in God) were trying on a spiritual level, others (those who didn\’t) on a secular level. For all of them it was a kind of obsession.
Rabbi Elli and Dinah Horovitz z\”l, Murdered by Palestinian Terrorists, Sabbath Eve, March 7, 2003.
Like most people these days, I keep close tabs on the news. On Friday morning, March 7, when I read on the Internet that a couple was murdered in Kiryat
Arba, my ears perked up because my cousins live there.
But so do about 7,500 other people. We were out all Saturday afternoon, and came home for a short time before setting out for an evening concert. But before leaving I had to check the news once again. There it stared me in the face. The murdered couple was identified. I screamed for my husband. \”Look, it\’s my [dad\’s] cousin Leah\’s son, Elli [Elnatan], and his wife, Dinah [Debbie]. They murdered my cousin.\”
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