fbpx

GET HOME DELIVERY! CLICK HERE »

ADVERTISE
pick up locations
HOME DELIVERY
donate

Jewish Journal

Connect. Inform. Inspire.

April 24, 2003

Holocaust Programs Focus on Education

Leave a Comment / Education /

What do the Kurds have to do with Holocaust? More than you might think.

When Fran Lapides discusses the plight of this Middle Eastern minority group with her high school students, she notes the similarities to the way the Jews were persecuted during the Holocaust.

“Why do some people choose to treat the Kurds differently than other Iraqis?” the Milken Community High School social science chair asked her history classes. According to the educator, the rampant bigotry and racism is the same as the Jews faced in the Holocaust.

Using resources and teaching methods suggested by Facing History and Ourselves, an international educational and professional development organization, Lapides incorporates the Holocaust to illustrate stereotyping and hate connected with other significant historical and current events.

As Yom HaShoah approaches, thoughts of the Holocaust inevitably permeate the minds of Southland Jews. Faced with the challenge of communicating these horrors to children and hoping they can learn from it, various local educational programs strive to train teachers to teach this difficult subject matter.

Having participated in Facing History and Ourselves’ training several years ago, Lapides and her staff have used the organization’s resources for more than 10 years.

“First you look at the individual,” Lapides said. “You look at yourself and how ‘the other’ is created and why people sit back and don’t protest.” Using the Holocaust as a case study, Facing History and Ourselves addresses how the Jews became “the other” in Nazi Germany and why individual Germans responded to Hitler.

With offices in seven cities around the United States, Facing History and Ourselves offers a more than a dozen teacher training opportunities yearly. The Los Angeles office was established in 1994. More than 1,400 local educators use its resources, and more than 130 local public, private and religious schools use the Facing History and Ourselves program in their curricula. Through the training, the organization aims to teach children morals.

“We’re trying to get teachers to show their kids that it was habits of mind, people’s failure to make ethical decisions as citizens, that made the rise of the Nazis possible,” said Bernie Weinraub, a Los Angeles program associate.

Building on the idea that each person can make a difference, Facing History and Ourselves organizes a variety of events throughout the year. Currently, the organization is sponsoring a multimedia exhibit at the Los Angeles Central Library titled, “Choosing to Participate: Facing History and Ourselves.” The traveling exhibition features dramatic stories of ordinary Americans who took a stand in their own communities, and how their everyday choices affected the course of history.

Similarly, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is in its 20th year of conducting a Holocaust education workshop for teachers. The four-session program, which is offered each spring, includes lectures, a visit to the Los Angeles Holocaust Museum and a meeting with Holocaust survivors.

This year’s theme was “From Anti-Semitism to Genocide: Teaching Hope and Humanity in a World Threatened by Terrorism.” Classes were held in February and March.

“A Holocaust education model can be a very effective way to teach humanity and empathy to students,” said Marjan Keypour Greenblatt, associate director of the ADL’s Southwest Region.

The ADL and the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles are targeting local Catholic school educators in offering a new course, the Bearing Witness Summer Institute: Anti-Semitism, The Holocaust and Contemporary Issues, which will be offered June 23-25. The program will address issues of diversity, prejudice and bigotry in contemporary society.

Lapides recalled one year when she taught a Holocaust elective class at Milken, saying, “The change in the kids over the three months of in-depth study was evident. [Holocaust education] makes kids so much more aware of what they’re doing and how they’re treating others, and in our world today, it’s so important as we become a more diverse community.”

The “Choosing to Participate: Facing History and
Ourselves” exhibit is free and open to the public at the Central Library in
downtown Los Angeles through May 4. For more information, call (213) 228-7000 or
visit www.lapl.org .

Holocaust Programs Focus on Education Read More »

Baklava and Bombs

Leave a Comment / Worldwide /

Sami Michael, an Iraqi-born novelist who writes about the clash of Arab and Jewish cultures, knows what it’s like to be a part of a beleaguered minority. In Iraq, he was always labeled a Jew; in Israel, he is still known as a Jewish writer from an Arab country. The irony is hardly lost on him.

Born in Baghdad in 1926, Michael became active in the communist underground and was forced to flee to Iran in the first year of his university studies. In 1949, he was able to make his way to Israel, where he has lived ever since. To date, he has written nine novels, the latest of which is titled "Water Kissing Water" (Am Oved, 2001). Other books have included "Refuge," "A Handful of Fog," "Trumpet in the Wadi," and his best-selling novel, "Victoria," which depicted a family saga set in Baghdad and was translated into several languages. he writes all of his novels in Hebrew. In addition to three honorary doctorates, Michael has also been awarded numerous prizes, including the Ze’ev Prize, Kugel Prize and (twice) the Prime Minister’s Prize.

The following is excerpted from a recent interview, conducted in Hebrew in his apartment overlooking Haifa’s bay.

F.M. Black : As a Jewish writer born and brought up in Iraq who now lives in Israel, how do you see the situation today?

Sami Michael: It’s very bad. It’s quite dangerous, especially since we are emphasizing that we are bringing European culture to the Middle East when the Middle East has suffered so much from colonialism and they really see us like a part of the Crusaders. The two sides have really been poisoned by a century of conflict, of bloody conflict. We look at them as monsters and that’s the same way they look at us.

F.B.: Have you gotten used to this, to both sides pummeling each other?

S.M.: The truth is that it’s not a matter of my getting used to it. I foresaw it 50 years ago. If I took out articles that I wrote in Baghdad in the mid-’40s, it’s like I wrote them today. The Middle East is not ready yet, not ripe yet to accept both a Jewish and a democratic state at the expense of some of its territory. I knew it long ago. It’s not a surprise for me.

F.B.: How do you deal with it?

S.M.: I’m not in a good frame of mind. I’m not a youth anymore. I already have children here. I have a house here and this is my homeland today. We’ve created a lovely country, a delightful place, and there’s a danger that it will all be lost, if not through warfare, then through an economic collapse because of the conflict.

F.B.: Do you think that the writer has an obligation to take a political stand?

S.M.: That would be a disaster. That’s what happens in the Arab countries; it kills literature. As soon as a writer writes out of an obligation, he becomes a politician, not a writer. I think that the only obligation of a writer is to be honest with himself and to obey the unknown masters and not the known masters. The known masters are the prime minister, the secretary of the Communist Party, Arafat and so on. But, on the other hand, one can’t be divorced or disengaged from the place where one’s living.

F.B.: Tell me, do you feel part of the majority or the minority in Israel?

S.M.: I’m not only part of the minority, I’m alone.

F.B.: How’s that?

S.M.: Because the Israeli left is ridiculous. The Israeli left talks for the television cameras and radio, but it has no roots among its own people. It always claims that it’s part of European culture and there’s nothing that Arabs hate more than European influences. From Europe came the Crusaders and the British, French and Italian imperialists who committed atrocities in the Middle East. And we proclaim morning, noon and night that we’re part of Europe, knowing what the fate was of the Europeans who came to the Middle East.

F.B.: So you don’t feel a part of the left?

S.M.: I can’t define myself as a part of the Israeli left because it’s a left of cliques and salons. After a month in Israel, I said to myself that I’m going to establish a country of one.

F.B.: Of one?

S.M.: I have my own personal opinions and I say to every party when it puts on a show, "Bravo." I’m very glad that my wife, Rahel, has joined my country of one. It’s a small island, very small.

F.B.: What’s holy to you?

S.M.: Human life. That’s the holiest thing. Life itself. And, unfortunately, human life is the cheapest thing here in the Middle East.

F.B.: You’ve written that you’re both inside and outside of the Israeli reality at the same time.

S.M.: That’s right. Because I came from another place, from across the border of the war. Once I saw the war between Israel and the Arabs while I was on the Arab side, as a Jewish Iraqi citizen; and now I’m in Israel and see the war from the perspective of the Jewish Israeli.

F.B.: Does it look different from here?

S.M.: I see how idiotic both sides are.

F.B.: How so?

S.M.: This is one of the richest parts of the world — in oil and minerals and quarries and what are we fighting over? Over the most idiotic things. It’s as though we’re living in the past and want to reestablish former empires — from Saddam Hussein to the rebuilding of the Second Temple, and back again. It’s the stupidest thing that could ever be. Under conditions of peace, this could be one of the most flourishing places in the world.

F.B.: Do you think that the Israeli, the sabra, is a ‘new’ Jew?

S.M.: That’s the disaster of the so-called ‘new’ Israeli and the ‘new’ Arab. The new Arab is an Arab whose ideal is a Muslim who existed 1,500 years ago and the ideal of the new Jew is the Maccabees from 2,000 years ago or 1,500 years ago. There is no such thing as a ‘new’ Jew.

F.B.: But doesn’t being a ‘new’ Jew or an Israeli mean, in part, that Jews now have the means to defend themselves? That Israel will be a refuge from anti-Semitism?

S.M.: Is it possible? Is it possible? I think that the Israeli experience shows more than anything else that this is impossible. Why? Because you are not living alone in the world. Our security doesn’t depend on our mightiness, on our force or on our ability to defend ourselves, but it … depends on our relations with our neighbors.

F.B.: So Israel has failed to provide a place of refuge?

S.M.: I think that we achieved the exact opposite of what we said, of what the founders were trying to achieve: the most dangerous place for a Jew to live today is in Israel. The difference is that here you have the freedom to die proudly! But a secure place here? That’s the biggest lie.


F.M. Black was a reporter in the Jerusalem bureau of The New York Times from 1988-1991. He now contributes to The Los Angeles Times, The Forward, Chicago Tribune and Archaeology Magazine, among other publications.

Baklava and Bombs Read More »

Commemorating the Warsaw Uprising

Leave a Comment / Worldwide /

On April 19, 1943, heavily armed Nazi troops penetrated into the Warsaw Ghetto with a grim goal: the liquidation of the ghetto and the deportation of the last remnants of Warsaw’s Jews — some 40,000 men, women and children.

The German forces were met by something unexpected: a fierce attack by some 750 young Jews fueled by desperation and armed with a few machine guns, homemade grenades and makeshift Molotov cocktails. The battle between the scrappy Jewish fighters and the mighty Nazi army has been described as a contest between an ant and an elephant.

But the Jews held out for a month before the ghetto was finally overwhelmed and burned to the ground, leaving a handful of survivors and a lunar landscape of devastation.

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the uprising.

On Saturday, as they do every year, Poland’s tiny Jewish community marked the anniversary with a small ceremony at the Ghetto Monument on the secular calendar date on which the uprising began.

The Polish government is hosting high-level official commemorations on April 29 and 30, to coincide with Yom HaShoah. During the past 60 years, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising has come to symbolize both the horrors of the Shoah and the struggle against Nazi tyranny.

Five years to the day after the first shots were fired, a huge memorial designed by sculptor Natan Rapaport to commemorate both heroism and annihilation was erected on the site of the ghetto.

And in the 1950s, the Israeli government designated the 27th of Nisan, a date that was about halfway through the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, as Yom HaShoah — Holocaust Memorial Day. (This year it falls on April 29.)

"The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was the first time in occupied Europe that civilians put up armed resistance against Nazi occupiers," said Marek Edelman, 82, the only surviving commander of the revolt.

"We wanted to show that the Jews, who were considered subhuman, were people like any other," Edelman, a cardiologist and human-rights activist who still lives in Poland, told the Warsaw Voice newspaper last week.

"There was no talk about victory or avoiding extermination," he recalled. "It could only be about surviving with dignity, with arms in hand, for a few more days.

"We showed that you could fight against the occupier," he said.

"This was the first brick yanked out of the wall of Nazism in Poland. After our struggle, there were rebellions in the Treblinka and Sobibor extermination camps, in the ghettos of Bialystok and Czestochowa. We shook the conscience of the Polish underground army and international opinion. We started a process that later led to formulation of the idea of the fight for human dignity and rights included in the U.N. Charter," Edelman added.

Commemorating the ghetto has also became an international event.

Poland’s President Aleksander Kwasniewski, Israel’s President Moshe Katsav and other dignitaries, including the president of the European Jewish Congress, Michel Friedman, will take part in the ceremony later this month, and the last living participants in the uprising will receive high state honors.

"Sixty years ago, young men and women from the Jewish Fighting Organization here in Warsaw, in the Warsaw Ghetto, grabbed their arms and, creating an organized resistance movement, fought to defend their dignity and honor," Kwasniewski said in announcing the events. "In the face of the crushing power of the Nazis, a handful of Jewish young people by their desperate, three-week-long fight gave testimony to enormous heroism."

The official events, which will be nationally televised, include wreath-layings April 30 at the massive memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto heroes on the site of the ghetto, as well as a gala concert.

On April 29, Kwasniewski and Katsav will join thousands of teen-agers at Auschwitz for the culmination of the annual March of the Living Holocaust commemoration, which is always timed to coincide with Yom HaShoah. Memory of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising has cast a long shadow in a country where, under communism, discussion of Jewish issues was practically taboo and where anti-Semitism festered.

Poland was home to 3.5 million Jews before World War II, and Warsaw was Europe’s biggest Jewish city: Its more than 300,000 Jews made up about one-third of the city’s population. The Nazis forced more than 500,000 Jews into the cramped ghetto in Warsaw’s old Jewish quarter. At least 3 million Polish Jews, including almost all of Warsaw’s Jewish population, were killed in the Holocaust.

In his 1945 book "The Ghetto Fights," Edelman described what was going on behind the ghetto walls: "The sea of flames flooded houses and courtyards," he wrote. "There was no air, only black, choking smoke and heavy burning heat radiating from the red-hot walls, from the glowing stone stairs. The omnipotent flames were now able to accomplish what the Germans could not do. Thousands of people perished in the conflagrations. The stench of burning bodies was everywhere."

Commemorating the Warsaw Uprising Read More »

Iraq’s Defeat Raises Fears of Iran Threat

Leave a Comment / Worldwide /

On the face of it, the U.S. military victory in Iraq has significantly enhanced Israel’s national security, removing a threat from weapons of mass destruction and opening new chances for peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

However, there is a downside: Israeli leaders are concerned that Iran could emerge strengthened from Iraq’s defeat and continue to promote terror, while developing nuclear weapons that could pose a threat to Israel’s very existence.

One worry is that the defeat of Iraq could lead to a fundamentalist backlash in the region spearheaded by Iran, using its close ties with Syria and the Lebanon-based Hezbollah to wage a campaign of terror. Another is that Shiite Iran could build close ties with a new Shiite-dominated Iraq, projecting fundamentalist influence across the region.

However, of most concern by far is that, according to some Western experts, Iran is barely two years away from producing a nuclear bomb.

Israeli officials maintain that the two prongs of the Iranian threat — nuclear weapons and terrorism — are related. Ra’anan Gissin, a senior aide to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, declared that Iran uses terror to "create deterrence as it builds a nuclear weapons capability that has not yet become operational." In other words, the threat of Iranian-inspired terror is intended to make the United States or other would-be aggressors think twice before taking military action to stop Iran’s nuclear program.

Over the past few months, Sharon has been urging visiting U.S. legislators and administration officials to take action to stop Iran from going nuclear. The message seemed to be getting through: After mid-March meetings in Jerusalem, U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton announced at an Israeli-American strategic forum in Washington that "the U.S. will focus on stopping Iran getting nuclear weapons."

But it could be too late.

Over the past few years, undetected by the world’s most vaunted intelligence agencies or the United Nations’ watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran developed two sites capable of producing the fissile materials from which nuclear bombs are made.

One, near the desert town of Natanz, 200 miles south of Tehran, will be able to produce weapons-grade uranium. The other, farther west at Arak, will be able to make plutonium from heavy water.

The tip-off on the two sites came last August from an Iranian dissident group, the National Council of Resistance. Until then, the Iranians had claimed that the Natanz site was for "desert irrigation."

Satellite photos released in December by the American Institute for Science and International Security proved otherwise. When Mohammed Baradei, an Egyptian who heads the International Atomic Energy Agency, visited the Natanz site in late February, he counted 160 new centrifuges capable of producing weapons-grade uranium, as well as parts for assembling 1,000 more.

Baradei’s Iranian hosts acknowledged that by 2005, they planned to have 5,000 centrifuges fully operational at the desert site. Experts say that would enable Iran to produce enough enriched uranium for at least two nuclear bombs a year from 2005 onward.

Experts believe Iran had some help from Pakistan in developing the Natanz technology, but the centrifuges are unique in shape and clearly were engineered by the Iranians themselves. Moreover, Iran has begun mining its own uranium ore in the Yazd area, 400 miles southeast of Tehran.

Taken together, these two facts mean that Iran has passed the point of no return: Its nuclear program can no longer be stopped by getting third parties to withhold materials or technologies.

The same is true of Iran’s missile technology.

"The Iranians cannot be stopped anymore," said Uzi Rubin, former head of Israel’s Arrow anti-missile defense program. "They have their indigenous capability now, and they will continue their programs, regardless of what the international community thinks."

One of the Iranian-developed missiles, the Shahab-3, has an estimated range of nearly 800 miles, able to reach targets in Israel from western Iran.

What makes the Iranian threat most chilling is that Iran’s fundamentalist leaders remain formally committed to Israel’s destruction. For example, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former Iranian president who retains an influential post, in December 2001 called publicly for the Muslim world to develop nuclear weapons in order to annihilate Israel.

Iran also has shown a marked capacity to act against Israeli interests. According to Israeli intelligence, Iran was behind the 1992 and 1994 terrorist attacks on the Israeli Embassy and a Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires; regularly supplies Hezbollah with weapons, including long-range rockets, through Damascus, and in 2002, tried to sell arms to the Palestinian Authority for use against Israel.

Israeli experts say it was the January 2002 interception by Israel of the Karine A, a vessel loaded with Iranian arms for the Palestinians, that led President Bush to include Iran in the "axis of evil" in his State of the Union address later that month.

So what can be done to contain or assuage the Iranian threat? First, Israeli experts say, Israel must enhance its defensive and deterrent posture.

The Arrow, which could intercept incoming Shahab missiles, does both. Moreover, according to foreign sources, Israel has mounted special launchers on its submarines that are capable of firing nuclear warheads. This would give it a "second-strike" capability, hopefully deterring potential enemies from contemplating a first strike.

To weaken Iran’s terrorist capacity and ability to spread its fundamentalist message, Israeli experts propose putting pressure on Syria, rather than Iran. Syria, they maintain, is more susceptible to Western pressure and also has the power to disarm Hezbollah relatively quickly.

Once Hezbollah is disarmed and Damascus distances itself from Tehran, Iran’s scope for terror and political influence will decline, the argument goes.

No one in the Israeli establishment believes that after the war in Iraq, the United States will be in any mood for a far more difficult military campaign against Iran. Moreover, many are convinced that it is too late to stop Iran from going nuclear; therefore, they argue, the best way to neutralize a nuclear Iran is to promote regime change from within.

David Menashri of Tel Aviv University’s Dayan Center proposes a dialogue with young reformist forces in Iran, while hanging tough with the conservative clerics who run the country today. That way, in case of regime change, at least the weapons would be in more enlightened hands.

Moreover, Menashri adds, if the reformists come to power, the once-flourishing ties between Israel and Iran might even be renewed.

Iraq’s Defeat Raises Fears of Iran Threat Read More »

Yeladim

Leave a Comment / Kids & Teens /

Grieving in Silence

In this week’s parsha, a very tragic thing happens. Aaron’s sons, Nadav and Avihu, die when they try to bring a sacrifice to God. A fire comes out and consumes them. Aaron does not get angry at God; he just grieves in silence. The rabbis try to think of all sorts of reasons why Aaron’s sons deserved to die – because it seems so unfair.

This coming week, April 29 is Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. Sometimes, I think of the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust in the same way that we think of Nadav and Avihu. Why did they have to die? What possible reason was there for them to suffer? The answer: there is none that we humans can understand. We can only grieve in silence.

Remember Anne

In addition to the 1.5 million Jewish children who were victims of the Nazis, hundreds of thousands of other children – including Gypsies, black children, Slavs, Jehovah’s Witnesses and the disabled – were also murdered.

The most famous child Holocaust victim was Anne Frank. Her family had to go into hiding. Can you bring the answers to these questions out of hiding:

Book Corner

"One Eye Laughing, the Other Weeping: The Diary of Julie Weiss, Vienna, Austria to New York, 1938 (Dear America)," by Barry Denenberg (Scholastic Trade, 2000).

This is a fictional diary for readers 9-12 that captures the life of Viennese Jews before and during the Holocaust.

Yeladim Read More »

Your Letters

Leave a Comment / Letters to the Editor, Opinion /

Women Suffer Blow

I write to express my hurt and outrage at your recent article, “Women Suffer Blow on Praying at the Wall,” (April 11). To which women, exactly, are you referring? Surely not the thousands of women, secular as well as religious, who come year round to pour their hearts out to the Almighty at all hours of the day and night.

I have never been to the Kotel without being overcome by emotion — partly because I am praying in a spot so drenched in sanctity, but also, invariably, because of the sight of my fellow daveners. No matter what time of day or what season of the year at the Kotel, any Jewish woman can experience a sublime connection to our foremothers — we watch all around us the devotion of living embodiments of our Mother Rachel, weeping for her children. These are the real Women of the Wall, and they come to worship and beseech God’s mercy every day, not once a month with fanfare and advance press releases.

Nowhere in your article do I sense any concern for the sensitivities of these women who are hurt and offended by the strident, politically based activities of Women of the Wall, which disturb their prayers and marginalize their devotion to the peace and holiness of the site. Please, the next time you choose to address this issue, take into consideration the feelings of the real Women of the Wall.

Shana Kramer, Director Creative Learning Pavilion of Torah Umesorah Los Angeles

Rome and Baghdad

Reuven Firestone’s article on Islam modernization through defeat oversimplifies the issue. Islam did lose many wars, and its confidence was shaken (“Rome and Baghdad,” April 11). The losses to the Turks and Mongols were the greatest of such disasters. These did not just fade the caliphate away, but brutally overwhelmed it in worse ways than the American victory over Baghdad. That which Firestone claims did not happen happened.

The reason why a “softer Islam” did not emerge after such debacles is because the invading hordes took up the religion and even infused it with new fervor. Islam did soften somewhat during various periods in history, and often when its confidence had been high for centuries.

It was the defeats, upheavals and ease of interpreting the Koran in belligerent ways that seems to have always led to a new wave of fundamentalist Islam. Professor Firestone generously praises the value of humble pie to Islam, but his historical analysis of cause and effect in this case entitle him to a slice.

Andrei L. Doran, El Segundo

A Letter of Thanks

This is a note of a sincere, warm “Thank you.”

We are residents in a retirement facility, which has a number of Jewish residents. Receiving The Jewish Journal each week keeps us in touch with what’s happening locally and internationally within the Jewish communities. While physical conditions don’t permit being active anymore, as we once were, just reading and seeing photos as to what is going on helps keep our interest “upbeat.”

To enjoy all of this and not say, “Thank you,” would be remiss on my part. My wife and I wish you and your entire, so capable staff a very happy Passover holiday.

Jack and Cecily Flamer, Chatsworth

The War at Home

Just wanted to let Rob Eshman know that he wrote a great article on “The War at Home” (April 18). Three-hundred and fifty people killed in one year in Los Angeles alone? It is amazing how many problems go unreported by the major news media.

Thanks for reporting on the extremely high murder rate here in Los Angeles, which has been invisible by the major news media. Your article helps create the first step — awareness. Hopefully, enough people read it.

What’s the next step? Your suggestion for individuals — community leaders and anyone who is willing to make contact with L.A. leaders — was that speaking out is key. I hope your message is heard.

Mike Cohen , Sherman Oaks

Between 1997 and 2001, a total of 5,960 Los Angeles County residents were killed by guns. Where is the outrage? “The War at Home” echoes a message we at Women Against Gun Violence try hard to share.

Those who protest the war in Iraq need also to turn their energies to protesting this war at home. Support Sheriff Baca and Chief Bratton’s request for resources.

Ask them, and all law enforcement, to focus their attention on where the guns are coming from. How do they so easily get into the hands of young people and those with criminal records? Are there enough resources in programs which trace confiscated guns to help identify gun dealers who sell out the back door? Do legal gun owners lock up their guns so that they cannot be stolen?

By all means send support to the sheriff, and for moreinformation and ways to get involved, contact us at info@wagv.org, or phone (310) 204-2348 and checkout our memorial Web site, with pictures and tributes to victims of gunviolence, at www.wagv.org . Those stories should be enough to help you feel the outrage.

Ann Reiss Lane, Women Against Gun Violence

The Challenge of Pluralism

In Julie Gruenbaum Fax’s piece, “The Challenge of Pluralism in Israel” (April 11), Ehud Bandel is quoted as saying, “The sad reality about religious life in Israel is this unholy alliance between the Orthodox and the secular that says that Judaism is a matter of everything or nothing at all.”

While I agree entirely that Jews are best searching for spirituality “at home,” I find it difficult to understand how Bandel sees Orthodoxy as monolithic or “everything or nothing.” It is clear that no Jew, no matter how righteous or pious, is “all”; no one has reached perfection. Even Moses was denied entry to the Holy Land for his lack of perfection.

Judaism teaches that each and every adherent should strive to the best of his or her ability and to make the greatest possible use of the unique gifts that God has bestowed upon him or her. An Israeli Jew can go to a Sephardi, Azhkenazi, Charedi or Mizrachi community to find like-minded strivers and together create a better Israel, and a better Jewish people.

Manny Saltiel, Los Angeles

Birthright Continues BirthrightIsrael

I was excited to read the features on Birthright Israel in your April 4 issue (“Birthright Continues Despite Setbacks”). As an alumna of the winter 2000-2001 trip, the articles brought back wonderful memories. Birthright Israel provided me with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to visit Israel (free of charge) with people my age, all experiencing the same wonder and excitement together.

I went on my trip with peers from all over the United States, but when I returned, I was anxious to meet people locally that had shared in my experience. The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles is helping to make this possible. The Federation is currently planning ways for Birthright Israel alums to stay involved and connected through social gatherings, and give back to the community through tzedakah and tikkun olam.

When you hear about the generous financial support The Federation provides for these trips and others like them, you think “Dayenu.” But it’s when you really begin to take advantage of these programs that give you an opportunity to be part of a community, you realize The Federation is doing much, much more.

I hope people will call The Federation’s Israel connections/experiences department at (323) 761-8342 to learn more and get involved.

Kimberly Gordon , Birthright Israel alumna

Helluva Ball Club

I had no idea that baseball Hall of Famer Hank Greenberg was also an outstanding executive in his chosen sport until I read Richard A. Macales’ informative and entertaining article, “Helluva Ball Club.” (April 4). Greenberg’s work in the front office was sadly omitted from the acclaimed documentary film on his life The Journal reviewed some time back.

After I read Macales’s article, I checked the record of Greenberg’s Cleveland and Chicago teams. In 10 years as general manager and/or part owner, his clubs finished first three times and second five times. They never had a losing season and won a then-league record 111 games in 1954.

His son, Steve Greenberg, was deputy commissioner of baseball. It is too bad, as Macales correctly writes, that Greenberg didn’t get the Angels franchise. The Dodgers should have never moved out of Brooklyn. Shame on you for what you did to Brooklyn’s loyal fans and to the Angels team, Walter O’Malley!

Dr. Melvin Myers, Chatsworth

Defining Moment

Your cover story referring to “The American Empire” (“War Marks Defining Moment for Jews,” April 4) was highly inappropriate. An empire as defined by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary is “a major political unit having a territory of great extent or a number of territories or peoples under a single sovereign authority.”

Has The Jewish Journal now joined the Arab propaganda machine (along with some naive members of the political left wing) in suggesting that the United States plans permanent sovereign rule over the Iraqi people?

I could not have imagined a more inflammatory cover page feeding into the misplaced rage of those who really wish to hurt us all. What’s next? Perhaps a cover story with an expose detailing the Zionist conspiracy behind the empire?

Edith Ellenhorn , Beverly Hills

Your choice of headlines, “Will the American Empire Be Good for the Jews,” on the April 4 issue disturbs me. Without question, I want what is best for the Jews throughout the world, but to put it on the front cover in reference to this war and show concern only for the Jews is wrong. What about Christians and Muslims, will it be good for them? I am fearful that this type of headline will only bring out more anti-Semitism.

Phoebe Reff , Tarzana

Correction

In the Friday listing for the April 4, “7 Days in the Arts,” the “Strange Fruit” songwriter adopted the sons of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.

Your Letters Read More »

Henry Droz

Leave a Comment / Old Stories /

Henry Droz, one of the record industry’s most respected and innovative figures, known as "the architect of modern music distribution," died March 27 in Los Angeles due to complications of a cardiac arrhythmia. He was 76.

A music industry leader spanning six decades, Droz was chairman emeritus of Universal Music & Video Distribution (UMVD), the sales and distribution arm of the Universal Music Group. He joined Universal in 1996 as president and became chairman in 1999. He retired from UMVD in 2000.

Prior to his tenure at Universal, Droz was president and CEO of Warner Elektra Atlantic (WEA) of the Warner Music Group for 16 years. While head of WEA, Droz established an effective nationwide distribution system of branch offices, which became a standard template for the entire music business.

Born in Detroit in 1926, Droz was an Army technical sergeant in the Criminal Investigation Division under Gen. Douglas MacArthur following World War II. After his tour of duty, Droz attended Wayne State University in Detroit, where he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in business administration. After college, he began his career in the music business at the Detroit warehouse of Decca Records. He soon struck out on his own in 1954 as founder of Arc Distributing Co., an independent record distributor.

He continued to run Arc until 1972, when he started at WEA in its Burbank headquarters. He was promoted to vice president of sales a year later, and, in 1975, was named executive vice president. He became president of WEA in 1977 and held that post until retiring in 1993 to become a senior adviser to the Warner Music Group.

Droz received a plethora of awards during his career, but was most proud of receiving the T.J. Martell Foundation’s Humanitarian Award and the City of Hope’s Spirit of Life Award, both in 1989, and the National Association of Record Manufacturers’ Presidential Award in 2000.

He is survived by his wife, June; daughter, Kathy (Mark) Droz Amstock; grandchildren, Nigel, Graham and Ayrton Amstock; and several nieces and nephews.

Donations may be sent to the T.J. Martell Foundation for Leukemia, Cancer and AIDS Research, (212) 833-5444. — Kenneth Droz

Henry Droz Read More »

60th Anniversary Reunites Orphans

Leave a Comment / United States, Up Front, Worldwide /

When Miriam Weichelbaum and Henri Dybnis were married on March 26, 1943, their future did not look promising. Their wedding took place in wartime France, where the two young educators — he a refugee from Russia, she from Germany — ran a home for displaced Jewish children. Ten orphan teenagers formed their minyan, and they gave the rabbi a live chicken for performing the ceremony. Six months later, the young couple fled to Switzerland, one step ahead of the Nazis. With them came 22 children they didn’t dare leave behind.

In those bleak days, the Dybnises could not have imagined the long, full life that awaited them. They had two children of their own, one born in Switzerland and the other in France, where they returned post-war to run another orphanage. In 1952, the family immigrated to California, pouring their energy into founding Jewish nursery schools. As their 60th wedding anniversary approached, it seemed time for a party.

The Dybnises knew daughter Monique was bringing her own family from Israel for the celebration. And they knew that son Sacha and daughter-in-law Bunni had asked close relatives to share in the day. But they weren’t aware invitations had also gone out to the orphan children of long ago. So they were astounded to see 60 men and women, who had gathered from around the globe in their honor. A commemorative album was crammed with tributes in French, German, English and Hebrew from others who couldn’t make the trip.

Annette Safatty flew in from Paris to tell the Dybnises, “Thank you for my life. Thanks to you, I was able to marry and have a life of my own.”

Miriam Dybnis, vivacious at 83, insists she and her husband never expected to be honored for their deeds. Still, she’s deeply gratified that so many of the young orphans have thrived as adults:

“It really showed us Hitler did not succeed,” she said. “This is the biggest satisfaction.”

60th Anniversary Reunites Orphans Read More »

Kosher Pig-Out

Leave a Comment / Israel, Philanthropy, Up Front /

Imagine if hitting the restaurants was a mitzvah. For one day, at least, it will be. Finally, the guilt-free excuse to overeat you’ve been looking for. On May 4, the Sunday before Yom HaAtzmaut (Israel Independence Day), Eat-4-Israel, a campaign created by yeshiva high schoolers, will do just that — encourage people to patronize participating kosher restaurants. The restaurants will donate 10 percent of the day’s gross receipts to their choice of seven Israel-based humanitarian organizations that are endorsed by the campaign: Hatzolah, Bet Ashanti, Ezer Mizion, Save Our Soldiers, Yad Eliezer, Yad Sarah and ZAKA.

Eat-4-Israel was the brainchild of Monique Grunberger, a high school senior at the Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto, who developed the idea with two local Yeshiva University of Los Angeles students, Yitz Novak and Zvi Smith.

“I was getting fed up,” said Grunberger, who in March was frustrated by the underwhelming response to a pro-Israel letter-writing campaign she aimed at senators on Capitol Hill.

In two months time, the trio of 18-year-olds enlisted a roster of North American restaurants, mostly Los Angeles-based businesses, including Pico-Robertson area destinations — Jeff’s Gourmet, Nagila Pizza and Chick ‘N Chow — and Pizza World and Mr. Pickles Deli in greater Los Angeles.

The high schoolers partnered with several organizations — including StandWithUs, UCLA Hillel, the Zionist Organization of America, Far West United Synagogue Youth, West Coast National Council of Synagogue Youth, HaBonim Dror and the Coalition for Jewish Concerns-AMCHA — to promote the event. Smith also noted that the Bureau of Jewish Education, a Jewish Federation beneficiary agency, will contribute a $1,000 Israel Teen Leadership Seminar Grant, which will go toward advertising costs.

Grunberger, Novak and Smith — all of whom will be studying together in Israel next year — have short-term and long-term goals for Eat-4-Israel.

“Other than raising at least $10,000 for Israel,” Grunberger said, “I would like to see Jewish communities where this event is taking place come together, no matter what denomination, to help Israel. I would like to see this as an annual event.”

“The most basic reward of putting this together has been the experience of working with the community,” Smith added. “But it’s also very fulfilling to represent Israel. It’s nice to see that no matter where we are, we can stand with Israel.”

Eat-4-Israel will take place on Sunday, May 4. For a complete list of participating restaurants, go to www.mobilize4israel.org/eat4israel .

Kosher Pig-Out Read More »

Athens and Baghdad

Leave a Comment / Opinion /

The legacy of Athens was not only the glory of Western democracy. It was also the brutality of Roman tyranny. And the legacy of Baghdad is not only Wahhabi obscurantism and viciousness. It is also religious tolerance and a this-worldly spirituality.

Islam may have been born in Mecca and Medina, but it matured and flowered under the civilization that issued from noble Baghdad. Civilization is never static. It changes with the seasons of history. An inward-looking America of a century ago would hardly be recognizable to a student of American foreign policy since World War II.

Civilizations wax and wane but never stop evolving. Since this is so clearly the case, I can’t understand why so many self-appointed pundits of Islam are convinced that Islam and democracy don’t mix.

Who would have thought in 1945 that Japan would become one of the world’s most powerful, liberal democracies only two decades later? Centuries of militarism and despotic rule there were turned around in a generation. It is hard to conceive of a return to the collective mentality of imperial Japan in my children’s or their children’s generation.

It is true that Islam is not a "democratic" religion. But then, I know of no religion that is. Certainly not Christianity, with its divinely appointed hierarchy. And not Judaism, which derives its legal tradition from God — not from the Sanhedrin.

The bottom line of democracy is the freedom of every individual to vote one’s conscience, and that tenet is missing equally from Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It has been argued that democracy in the West required that people experience the repeated and violent failures of feudalism to prove its worth, and the subsequent catastrophes of fascism and communism to confirm its value.

I don’t believe it’s a stretch to point out that the Muslims of the Middle East know very well how feudalism, fascism, communism and theocracies have failed them miserably. So what is to prevent Arab Muslims from diving enthusiastically into democracy?

The answer is their taste of the bitter fruits of democracy itself. Democracy has worked best in tandem with capitalism, and capitalism has always required expanding markets, greater supplies of resources and cheap and dependable labor.

These requirements have convinced many in the business world to exploit less-developed areas for their resources, their labor and their purchase power. There is nothing wrong with exploitation — but there are two meanings to the term. One meaning is utilization, development and management. The other is abuse, mistreatment and manipulation.

In the search for a fast and easy buck, our capitalists have too often read exploitation the wrong way. The amazing thing about this is that we have managed to remain largely immune from the effects of our grand schemes.

Sept. 11 was our wake-up call. It hit us hard and it hit us where it really hurts. So as any nation would, we responded. With our superior technology and firepower, we managed to destroy two threats to our immediate security. First, it was the theocracy of Afghanistan, and now, the secular tyranny of Iraq.

We must now follow our display of military prowess with a responsible demonstration of our conviction that democracy works. We need to teach the Iraqis, as we did the Japanese, that we will accept nothing less than full capitulation and reversal from tyranny and violence.

But as any teacher knows, effective teaching fails when students can see the disconnect between teaching and personal example (and students can always see when there is a disconnect between teaching and example). This is the root failure of European colonialists. They educated indigenous elites on the principles of democracy and social justice, but set personal examples of racism, negative exploitation and autocracy.

Which message was the one that was learned?

We can teach effectively only by example. That means that America must demonstrate to the Iraqis and the entire Muslim world that our war was not a clash of civilizations or just another excuse for exploitation, but rather a demonstration of what American values are all about.

We need to prove that democracy can work for everybody; that it is not only a Christian or a Western experience. It may mean a slightly poorer bottom line for our businesses in the short term, but the long-term results will more than make up for it.


Reuven Firestone is professor of medieval Judaism and Islam and the director of the Edgar F. Magnin School of Graduate Studies at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institue of Religion in Los Angeles.

Athens and Baghdad Read More »