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Jewish Journal

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October 14, 2004

Record Gift Given to Boston Day Schools

Leave a Comment / Education, Philanthropy, Worldwide /

Jewish educators hope one of the largest gifts ever for Jewish education in America will prompt other philanthropists to follow suit.

The $45 million donation from a group of anonymous families is intended to improve Jewish day school education in Boston. The money will be spent over five years, with $30 million divided equally among three schools, and the remaining $15 million designated for a tuition scholarship fund and grants for innovative educational projects.

Jewish community professionals hailed the move, announced Monday, as a historic investment. Jewish educators say they hope other philanthropists will now step up to transform day school education across the country.

“We’ve been dreaming about days like this,” Barry Schrage, president of the Combined Jewish Philanthropies (CJP), said at a news conference Monday in Boston. “The grant truly represents a change in the way the American Jewish community understands education.”

The pledge, called CJP’s Peerless Excellence Project, was announced at the annual conference of the Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education, held in Boston from Sunday through Tuesday.

The gift’s primary beneficiaries will be the Solomon Schechter Day School of Greater Boston, The Rashi School and Maimonides School. They are the Boston area’s three largest Jewish day schools, representing the Conservative, Reform and Orthodox movements, respectively.

Maimonides, the oldest and largest of Boston’s Jewish day schools, with approximately 625 students, is in the process of coming up with a plan to spend its $10 million — an amount equal to the school’s annual budget.

The executive director of the Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education, Rabbi Joshua Elkin, said the $10 million grants constituted the largest-ever gifts for operational use in day-school education. The $45 million total dwarfed even capital gifts and day-school endowments, he said.

“There’s been nothing quite at this level,” Elkin said. “It breaks the glass ceiling of how much it is possible to invest in a day school.”

“It presents an unprecedented opportunity that I believe will be something that encourages other communities and other donors to think about ways to invest in their day schools,” he added.

The money comes with some strings attached: Funds are not to be spent on capital improvements, and the goal is to use the money to institute permanent improvements at the schools, not merely give them a five-year boost, according to Gil Preuss, director of the Excellence Project.

“The idea is not just to have excellent schools for five years, but to shift the line and improve the schools permanently,” Preuss said.

Yossi Prager, North American executive director of Avi Chai, one of the Jewish foundation world’s biggest charities, said the schools’ challenge will be to build a system that will use the money effectively but also can survive once the funding period is over.

“Either they’ve got to build in an effective fund-raising program or find ways of creating programming that’s sustainable beyond the term of the funding,” he said.

Avi Chai has spent tens of millions of dollars on grants to Jewish day schools. It also operates an interest-free loan program for capital improvements at day schools that has doled out approximately $56 million over the past five years.

Prager said the $45 million gift should serve as a model not only for investment in day-school operations but because of the role Boston’s federation, CJP, played in brokering the deal.

“The role of the federation was not as a giver but as an ally or advocate for day schools,” Prager noted. “That should be a comfortable role for day-school education.”

There are 14 Jewish day schools in the Boston area serving a total of 2,600 students, 1,400 of them at the three schools slated to receive the gifts. Day-school enrollment in Boston has risen significantly in recent years together with the opening of several new schools. The area’s schools now have excess capacity.

One of the areas not addressed by the $45 million gift is teachers’ salaries, which educators say still fall short of the level needed to recruit and retain good teachers. None of the $15 million portion of the gift will go toward teachers’ salaries, though Peerless Excellence officials did not say whether or not the three primary beneficiaries would be able to include requests for salary raises in their $10 million spending plans.

The decision by the anonymous families to make the $45 million donation to day-school education — an amount rare even for gifts to universities and museums — came in a “magic moment,” CJP’s Schrage said.

Deliberations about a substantial gift for day-school education had been under way for about five years, Schrage said, but it wasn’t until one family decided to triple its intended pledge that the project suddenly reached record proportions.

Officials would not say how many families were involved, only that they were local.

“The prerequisite is a couple of passionate donors who believe they can change the world,” Schrage said. “We expect that many more donors will begin to see the schools as a positive place to make an investment.”

Philanthropist Michael Steinhardt, the real-estate magnate behind countless “Jewish renaissance” projects, such as Birthright Israel, called the Boston gift a “bright and shining example” for what should be happening around the country in Jewish education.

“We must do a much better job than we’re doing today,” he said, noting that the vast majority of Jewish parents still do not send their children to Jewish day schools.

About 91 percent of Orthodox children go to day schools or yeshivas, but less than 20 percent of Conservative children and 4 percent of Reform children go to day schools, according to the National Jewish Population Survey 2000-01.

Record Gift Given to Boston Day Schools Read More »

Breast Cancer Tips Doctors Don’t Share

Leave a Comment / Community, Food, Health, Personal Voice, Womans Voice /

My mother recently called me with a request: One of the moms at the elementary school she works at was newly diagnosed with breast cancer. Could I give her a call?

I immediately phoned Susan, a sweet, smart lady in her early 40s. She was weighing her options about surgery and doctors, and gathering information about her course of treatment. She was also terrified. I reassured her about the success of current cancer therapy, but what she really wanted to know were the little things, like does it hurt when your hair falls out? (No, but your scalp feels tingly, like someone pulled your ponytail too tight.) These are the questions that fall under “What you always wanted to know about having breast cancer but were too afraid to ask,” a category that is still too relevant.

This October marks the 20th anniversary of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. According to the American Cancer Society, an estimated 217,440 people in the United States, almost all women, will be diagnosed with breast cancer in 2004. Despite growing awareness and funding for this disease, the incidence of breast cancer has continue to rise since the 1980s, and while detection methods have improved, there is still no foolproof prevention method.

So, for all those out there who are or will be new members of the Breast Cancer Sisterhood — the sorority no one chooses to join but is, especially in the Jewish community, very popular — here is a list of what to expect during treatment:

Surgery

There are many choices when it comes to breast cancer surgery: lumpectomy, simple mastectomy, bilateral mastectomy. If you decide to opt for the “extreme makeover,” take comfort in the fact that, at least, both sides will match.

The reconstruction process can be uncomfortable and it takes a long time. Be patient.

There are advantages to not having nipples. Clothes look better on you, it’s harder to tell if your breasts are uneven and no one knows when you are cold.

Hair

The best hair substitute for nighttime: ski caps.

The good news, for those of us who have had a close relationship with Gillette since the seventh grade: by the time your hair returns, you will actually miss shaving.

Be prepared for people, especially kids, wanting to touch your bald head.

Wigs are itchy, but if you buy one that fits your appearance, you will look and feel more normal.

Scarves and hats are a lot more comfortable, but they tend to draw attention to you, especially if you are young. However, I’ve noticed on the days when I am wearing a scarf, more people go out of their way to be nice to me — which is a big boost when you’re feeling unwell.

Not-So-Glorious Food

Although it might be tempting to eat your favorite meal the evening before or the day of chemo, don’t. The associations between food and nausea are so strong you might never want that meal to cross your palate again.

Along those lines, the best advice from my nutritionist, Rachel Beller, was to avoid eating good-for-you foods, like fish, around chemo days. Spicy foods and anything too hot or too cold should also be off the list.

Chemotherapy tends to make people anemic, so think Atkins.

You will crave strange things, or only be able to eat a certain food after one chemo session and a different one after the next. (For me, it was the Caesar salad from Sharky’s, alternated with, of all things, pea soup.) If it’s legal and you can eat it, go for it.

Speaking of legal: not only is it a bad idea to fast on the designated holidays when you are undergoing cancer treatment, several rabbis advised me you are not allowed to do so. God will understand.

Emotional Rollercoaster

PMS has nothing on cancer. You will be moody. Forgive yourself for it.

It may sound cliche, but cancer really does give you the opportunity to examine your life and your relationships and make the changes you have been putting off for years.

At least one friend will not be able to handle what you are going through.

Unexpected people will come out of the woodwork to support you. Outside of my family, my two best friends through this whole process have been Ronette K., who teaches at my mom’s school, and Linda C., my brother’s girlfriend’s mother. Ronette sent me funny get-well cards after every chemo (I had 10 courses) and kept me in mystery books during my recovery from surgery; Linda ended her chemotherapy the day I got my diagnosis and was my mentor through the whole treatment process. I wouldn’t have made it without either one of them.

All in the Family

Husbands/significant others are the greatest unsung heroes in this battle. Remind people to check on them instead of you every once in a while.

As with friends, some family members will handle your situation better than others.

Kids can be your greatest allies. For little ones, you don’t have to tell them much, just what they might need to know. Like that Mommy will be living in the bathroom for the next three days.

Beam Me Up, Scotty

Compared to chemo, radiation seems like a cakewalk. Some people do get exhausted from it, so while you may be feeling better, this is not the time to take up lacrosse.

Yes, you will be asked to get tattooed. If this freaks you out, there are alternatives, but a tattoo provides the best record for any possible future radiation. The tattoos are tiny, not the big, rosy “Mother” ones found on certain bikers. Your doctor can give you a note for the chevra kadisha (burial society) if you feel the need.

Know that, even if you do get the tattoos, the radiology staff will draw on you. With a big marker. In dark, purple ink. As if you needed one more thing to make you look strange.

Words to remember: body lotion. Some people swear by aloe vera; I like Aveeno with the colloidal oatmeal (which, by the way, doesn’t mean any kind of special oatmeal — it’s just minced up really fine so they can get it in the lotion).

The machinery used during radiation emits a loud, annoying whine that makes it difficult to lie still. Find a “theme song” you can run through your head to distract you. (Mine is the overture from “Star Wars.”)

Recovery

Just when you start getting good at dealing with the chemo and radiation, it’s over. Thank God.

Wendy J. Madnick was diagnosed with breast cancer in December 2003. She awaits the return of her hair with growing anticipation.

Breast Cancer Tips Doctors Don’t Share Read More »

American Red Cross Seeks Image Rehab

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

Howard Parmet is on a mission.

Parmet, community outreach consultant for the American Red Cross (ARC) of Greater Los Angeles, wants to build bridges to a Jewish community that has largely shunned the organization because of a belief that it is anti-Israeli at best and anti-Semitic at worst. Parmet wants to rehabilitate the organization’s image, dispel misperceptions and recruit legions of local Jewish volunteers.

He has his work cut out for him.

For more than 50 years, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, the ARC’s parent, has excluded Israel from the world body while counting among its members Iran, Syria and other countries considered by many as state sponsors of terror.

The low esteem in which many local Jews hold the International Red Cross has colored their perception of the ARC, even though it has proven far more friendly to Israel. Because of those suspicions, Parmet said, the L.A. Red Cross has only a handful of Jewish volunteers, attracts little Jewish financial support and has but a single Jew on its 39-member board. Few, if any, Southland synagogues, Jewish day schools or Jewish community centers have made themselves available to the Red Cross as shelters in the event of an emergency.

Parmet, who worked in Jewish organizations for 32 years before accepting the newly created Jewish outreach position, aims to change all that. The former executive director for the American Red Magen David for Israel (ARMDI), Pacific Southwest region — the fundraising wing of the Magen David Adom, (MDA) Israel’s emergency response and disaster service — said his first order of business was to dispel “misinformation” about the ARC. Toward that end, Parmet has run a series of ads in the Jewish media, including The Journal, to underscore ARC’s close ties with MDA.

“You may have heard otherwise, but during the period when the Jewish community makes a point of examining relationships, the American Red Cross of Greater Los Angeles wants you to know the facts about our relationship,” a full-page ad that ran in The Journal in Sept. 17 said. “…We wanted you to know that we are the best friend the Magen David Adom has.”

Indeed, the ARC unilaterally recognized MDA as a Red Cross sister society in 1989. A year later, the ARC established the national Holocaust and War Victims Tracing Center, which has documented the fates of 9,000 missing Jews and reunited more than 1,200 family members. The ARC has also withheld $25 million in administrative dues since 1999 to the International Red Cross to protest the world body’s continued exclusion of MDA.

“The American Red Cross should not be punished. It does great work in the United States and is the MDA’s greatest champion in the international forum,” said Susan Heller Pinto, director for Middle East and International Affairs for the Anti-Defamation League in New York. “Still, there are a lot of misperceptions out there…. We won’t be satisfied until the MDA becomes a full-member of the International Red Cross.”

In his six months on the job, Parmet has assembled a committee of prominent Jews to improve the local Red Cross’ standing in the community. The group, which includes Rabbis Harvey Fields and Robert Gan, president of the Board of Rabbis, holds its first meeting Oct. 27. Eventually, Parmet said he envisions local temples and Jewish organizations offering the community CPR, first-aid classes and other training in their facilities, as well as opening them up to the public in emergencies such as fires and earthquakes.

Eric Book, a member of the local Red Cross’ new Jewish committee, said he thought Parmet could succeed where others have failed. Book, a past regional president of ARMDI who worked alongside Parmet for several years, said his former colleague had the expertise, knowledge and ties to the local community to rehabilitate the U.S. Red Cross’ image and garner Jewish support.

Book said Parmet proved himself an able executive at ARMDI, winning kudos for his creativity and effectiveness. He said Parmet helped put together golf tournaments at El Caballero Country Club that raised thousands for ARMDI; he produced a cable television program that promoted awareness about the organization, and Parmet helped win approval to place a MDA ambulance at the Zimmer Children’s Museum to educate young people about MDA’s importance.

In his first five years at ARMDI, Parmet said he helped boost fundraising by 400 percent. Over his 14-year tenure, he said he developed a broad range of relationships with Jewish philanthropists, synagogues and Jewish day schools, ties he hopes to leverage in his new position with the local Red Cross.

Parmet will need all the help he can muster to rehabilitate the L.A.-agency, even if its attitude toward MDA is far more enlightened than its parent’s.

During World War II, the International Red Cross failed to rescue or assist Jews in Nazi concentration camps, although the organization knew of the atrocities, experts said. The international body has barred Israel’s admittance on the grounds that the MDA uses a religious symbol, a red Shield of David, as its official emblem, even though the Red Cross employs the cross and Islamic crescent. Like the United Nations, the International Red Cross has attacked Israel, most recently for the construction of its security barrier, while remaining largely silent about suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks on the Jewish state.

Despite the negative view many Jews have about the International Red Cross, Parmet said he thought his work would make a difference for the local chapter of the American Red Cross.

“This is a slow process of building a relationship and developing trust and spreading information,” Parmet said. “It’s going to take a significant amount of time, but it’s going to be done.”

American Red Cross Seeks Image Rehab Read More »

Cohen Jockeys for Position in Racing

Leave a Comment / Community, Sports, United States /

What’s a nice Jewish boy doing in a profession where he can’t eat? If his name is David Cohen, he is making the mealtime sacrifice to break into the ultra-competitive Southern California jockey colony at Hollywood Park.

Although his diet could place him at the same table as Gandhi or Twiggy, Cohen knows that overweight and underemployed go hand in hand in the horseback profession.

Cohen, 19, launched his career during Memorial Day weekend, one year after graduating from Laguna Beach High School. He is the son of Morry Cohen, a longtime owner and breeder who races under the name 5 C Stable.

“Because my father owned horses, I pretty much started from the ground up,” said Cohen. “I groomed horses for six or seven months for our trainer, Jorge Gutierrez, and learned everything from feeding to medication with the vets. I did most everything with about 20 horses last summer at Del Mar.”

Cohen envisions a long-range future in racing as a trainer but wants to ride for the next decade or longer. To make that adjustment, he reduced from 122 to 109 pounds.

“I was lifting weights and balanced my diet out,” Cohen said. “I started to eat less quantity and take more vitamins.”

His limited diet nevertheless has a Jewish flavor.

“I start each morning with a wheat matzah and tea,” he said. “Sometimes the matzah is flavored apple, sometimes cinnamon, sometimes peach. A big square is about 100 calories.”

For breakfast, Cohen will eat a small portion of scrambled eggs, for lunch a small salad, for dinner a little chicken with vegetables.

Cohen also has been forced to sacrifice socially.

“I wake up at 3:30 in the morning and am at work at 4:45,” said Cohen of his routine of galloping horses for several trainers. “I haven’t gone out at night in four years.”

Cohen lives with his father in Arcadia, near Santa Anita, and had been exercising horses for about two years before acquiring his apprentice license in May.

He won his first race at Del Mar on Aug. 11 with a bold come-from-behind victory along the rail aboard Quiten Boy, a 45-to-1 long shot. Cohen scored his sixth victory from 87 mounts during the Oak Tree meet at Santa Anita on Oct. 1 with Holy Request, another longshot at 47-to-1 odds, for trainer Barry Abrams.

Jewish jockeys are a rarity. Walter Blum, who rode primarily in New York during the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s before becoming a racing official at Florida tracks, is the only Jewish rider to have earned a spot in the Racing Hall of Fame in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.

In California, the most successful Jewish jockey has been Bill Harmatz, a contemporary of Bill Shoemaker who won several major stakes during the ’50s and ’60s. Harmatz, a scholastic gymnastics star from East Los Angeles, won the 1959 Preakness Stakes aboard Royal Orbit. He later became a successful businessman in Vista and remains nearly as fit in his 70s as during his riding years.

Cohen has a long way to go to be mentioned in the same breath as Blum or Harmatz. His apprenticeship is considerably different than that of Duddy Kravitz. As a neophyte jockey, he is allowed to ride with a 10-pound weight concession from what his horse is assigned to carry until he wins five races. The weight concession is dropped to seven pounds and later to five until he wins 45 races or one year passes, whichever comes last.

Cohen has ridden most of his early races for his father’s stable.

“I wouldn’t use him if I didn’t have total confidence in him,” Morry Cohen said.

David Cohen will continue to ride at Santa Anita through the conclusion of the Oak Tree meet on Oct. 31 before shifting to Hollywood Park for a meet beginning on Nov. 3.

Steve Schuelein is a freelance sports writer based in Playa del Rey.

Cohen Jockeys for Position in Racing Read More »

Five Jews Nab Nobel Science Wins

Leave a Comment / Education, Old Stories, Science & Technology /

When David J. Gross, a winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in physics, was asked whether he was Jewish, he told a reporter, “What do you think? Of course!”

The same affirmative answer applied to five out of six 2004 science Nobel Laureates. Two are Israelis, three are Americans — all from Southern California universities — and two of these Americans have close ties to Israel.

The Israeli winners, Avram Hershko and Aaron Ciechanover of the Technion in Haifa, shared the $1.35 million prize in chemistry with Irwin A. Rose, professor emeritus at UC Irvine.

They were recognized for their research on the regulatory process taking place inside human cells, a discovery leading to the development of drugs against cancer and degenerative diseases.

“The practical applications are too numerous to mention,” said Rose, generally addressed as Ernie, who was quick to give major credit for the prize-winning work to Hershko.

In the typical research collaboration between professors and their graduate students, Rose became Hershko’s doctoral thesis adviser when he spent part of his 1972 sabbatical year at Israel’s Hadassah Medical Center.

“I took my wife, four children and mother-in-law and we settled in Jerusalem,” he said.

Ciechanover, in turn, became Hershko’s graduate student and over the next 19 years, the two Israelis spent the summers at Rose’s lab at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia.

Ciechanover is director of the David and Janet Polak Center for Cancr Research and Vascular Biology, a project of the Southern California chapter of the American Technion Society.

The two Technion researchers are the first Israelis to receive Nobel Prizes in a scientific discipline and their work has been supported for many years by the New York-based Israel Cancer Research Fund.

Jubilant Israelis liked the Nobel award to the Olympic gold medal won by Israeli windsurfer Gal Friedman. The prize was also seen as a telling answer to some European academicians who have called for a boycott of Israeli scholars.

Rose was born in Brooklyn, attended Hebrew school, but became a “confirmed secularist” at age 10. Now 78, he and his wife live in Leisure World in Orange County, are active in the retirement community’s Concerned Citizens group and express their Jewish identity mainly through their ties with Israel, he said.

For the Nobel prize in physics, Gross, director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara, shared the award with professor H. David Politzer of Caltech and professor Frank Wilczek of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Nobel Foundation recognized their development of quantum chromodynamics, the study of the mysterious “strong force” that holds the nuclei of the atom together, even as the protein’s electrical charges try to blow them apart.

The development is seen by many scientists as a major step toward a “Theory of Everything” — a single set of equations to explain all phenomena from the force holding atoms together to the gravitational fields that hold planets in orbit.

Colleagues confirmed that Politzer is Jewish, but he did not respond to an interview request, and former Los Angeles Times science editor Irving Bengelsdorf described the Caltech physicist as unusually shy and sensitive.

Politzer affirmed this description by refusing to attend a press conference in his honor, despite the pleading of Caltech President David Baltimore.

Gross, who previously taught at Princeton, was more outgoing. As a teenager and young man, he lived for eight years in Israel, while his father served as economic adviser to the government and founded the business administration school at the Hebrew University.

The younger Gross received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the Hebrew University.

“For one day, until Hershko’s and Ciechanover’s award was announced, I was considered the first ‘Israeli’ scientist to have won a Nobel Prize,” Gross said.

For five years, he directed the Jerusalem Winter School at the Hebrew University’s Institute for Advanced Studies and will be back in Israel in April to participate in a symposium on Albert Einstein.

The figure for the total number of Jewish Nobelists varies slightly, depending on the strictness of the “Who’s a Jew?” definition. But the figure cited most frequently is 161, or 22 percent of Nobel Prizes in all categories awarded between 1901-2003. With the 2004 additions, the total apparently stands at 166.

Five Jews Nab Nobel Science Wins Read More »

Garden of Eden Now a Paradise Lost

Leave a Comment / Israel, Worldwide /

Diving among coral reefs, lounging on colorful pillows by the sea, taking in views of rose-colored mountains, ordering plates stacked high with honey-drenched banana pancakes — Israelis have long made Sinai a favorite vacation destination.

However, the coordinated bombings on Oct. 7 targeting Israeli holidaymakers transformed the getaway spot Israelis longingly refer to as the Garden of Eden into a Paradise Lost, forever tarnished by the blood, mayhem, confusion and fear borne of the deadly attacks.

At least 32 people were killed and 120 wounded in the attacks on Taba and Ras Satan, resorts on the Sinai coast. Among them were at least 12 Israelis, including a mother and her two young children. Six Egyptians and several European tourists were also among the fatalities.

Officials said that at Taba, a town close to the Israeli border, which Israel gave to Egypt in the 1980s, a suicide car bomber blew off a wing of the Hilton Hotel. About 30 miles south, two car bombs were detonated at the Ras Satan site, popular with backpackers.

Thousands of Israelis made their way across the border to Egypt for Sukkot, despite security officials’ warnings of terrorism threats in Sinai. After earlier, repeated Sinai terror alerts amounted to nothing — and convinced that staying home in Israel they were also terrorism targets — many Israelis said they became immune to the warnings.

“Sinai for me meant a certain escape from urban Israel,” said Eitan Einwohner, 33, founder and CEO of a Tel Aviv software company. “There is no [concept of ] time in the desert, and when you see the red mountains and see the scenery, intense in its minimalism, it reduces everything to the simplest.”

It was not just rank-and-file Israelis who were lured to Sinai by the scenery, tranquility and affordable prices. Some high-ranking former and current government officials also ignored the travel warnings and vacationed there. Among them reportedly were reserve Maj. Gen. Ilan Biran, former Foreign Ministry director general, and several Knesset members. The newspaper Ha’aretz reported that Liat Cahanim, National Security Council deputy legal counsel, was wounded in the attack. Two vacationing U.S. Embassy officials were also reportedly lightly wounded in the bombings.

In the aftermath of the attacks, there were heartache and frustration in Israel that the security warnings were ignored. Parts of the media and some members of the government had even scoffed at the alerts.

A fiery debate has arisen over whether a free country should let its people disregard such warnings, or if more drastic measures — such as closing the border — should be taken. At an emergency Cabinet meeting it was suggested that Israel consider adopting a U.S.-style system of color-coded warning levels.

Avi Dichter, Israel’s Shin Bet director, toured the wreckage of what was once the Taba Hilton lobby and had harsh words for those at the official level who did not take the warnings more seriously.

“To my dismay, there were officials who treated the warnings lightly and leveled criticism at us” in the security community, he was quoted as saying in the Ma’ariv daily newspaper. “There is no doubt that this influenced the public, which in turn did not take the warning seriously.”

David Aramin from Herzliya, a 35-year-old who works in the high-tech sector, visited Sinai as often as he could. In the last two months alone he was there six times.

On Oct. 7, he and friends were lounging at their camp when they heard the blasts on nearby Ras Satan beach and saw a ball of fire burst into the night sky. Hysteria ensued, Aramin said, adding that some people followed the Bedouins toward the mountains, others rushed for the sea.

He said Israelis were just recently starting to come back to Sinai after staying away during most of the intifada. The relaxed atmosphere helped people forget any potential dangers, he said.

Ha’aretz columnist Gideon Levy tried to capture the special magic of the Sinai experience in an article Sunday headlined “Goodbye Sinai.”

“For a growing number of Israelis, a vacation in Sinai was a singular experience that had no substitute,” he wrote. “Something happened to Israelis when they entered Sinai.”

“For the veterans of the place, being in Sinai was much more than a holiday,” he continued. “It was the only place of refuge, a haven from day-to-day troubles, from the terror that is all around us, and an escape from Israelis and from Israeliness, too. Something in the atmosphere of the place created a sense of relaxation that couldn’t be found elsewhere.”

It was also a rare example of interaction between Bedouins and Israelis, a place where friendships and connections were forged.

About 30,000 Israelis went to Sinai over the recent holidays. Some of them did not return to Israel after the attacks, insisting they would not let terrorism scare them away from living their lives.

“You would go and you would not think too much about warnings, because it is not any less scary being in Israel,” Aramin said. “Recently, especially, you did not pay attention to warnings, because there are always warnings.”

Einwohner, who was also staying at a beach near Ras Satan, said Israelis had become complacent about the warnings.

“Looking back,” he said, “I think most Israelis and I fell into this trap a little bit of saying, ‘If there are 30,000 people doing it, how could it be that dangerous?'”

Eran Reinisch, 37, who runs a Tel Aviv financial services business, has been going to Sinai for vacations since he was a child. He has traveled up and down the area, diving its waters and exploring its beaches. It is, he said, his favorite place to unwind. Reinisch describes it as “magic” and touts its “totally different atmosphere.”

He wanted to visit Sinai with his family again this Sukkot. But, concerned by the warnings, they, along with a group of other families traveling together, decided to go to Taba instead of staying further down the Sinai coast as they usually do.

Taba, they told themselves, would be safer. After all, they thought, it was so close to the Israeli border.

When the blast shook the hotel, he and his friends were eating at an Italian restaurant on the beach. Reinisch immediately realized that the explosion was a terror attack and raced to the children’s disco one flight down from the hotel’s lobby, where he had dropped off his 7-year-old son, Roy.

He quickly found the child, who was covered in a layer of blood and soot. His head had been slghtly injured by falling debris.

Reinisch scooped Roy into his arms and was among the first to cross the border for the hospital in Eilat. A large photograph of Roy, his head bandaged and T-shirt and shorts stained with blood, made the front pages of the Yediot Achronot daily newspaper.

“I was supposed to go diving next month in Sinai, and now I will not,” Reinisch said. “Clearly I have no desire to go.”

by Leslie Susser

The coordinated terrorist attacks on Israeli tourists in Sinai may have some significant, unintended consequences: a deepening of anti-terrorism cooperation between Israel and Egypt and greater Egyptian readiness to guarantee security in the Gaza Strip after Israel’s planned withdrawal next summer.

At first glance, the Oct. 7 attacks were a blow to Middle Eastern rapprochement. It could take years before Israeli tourism to Sinai — one of the few signs of people-to-people normalcy in Israel’s relations with the Arab world — returns to anything like the dimensions of this holiday season.

There was a symbolic blow to peace too: Israeli reporters recalled that the Hilton Taba hotel, targeted by the terrorists, had hosted hundreds of hours of peace talks over the years between Israelis and Egyptians and Israelis and Palestinians.

With one wing of the hotel reduced to rubble, one reporter said the shattered building suggested a scarred monument to failed visions of peace. But some noted another image: Israeli and Egyptian rescue workers sifting through rubble together.

Behind the scenes, top Israeli and Egyptian officials discussed intelligence and other cooperation against the common threat of Islamic terrorism. Avi Dichter, head of Israel’s Shin Bet security service, visited the site of the Hilton attack and met with Egyptian counterparts.

Soon afterward, Israeli field agents were allowed to scour the scenes of the Sinai bombings for evidence. They worked closely with Egyptian security agents and were given information from Egyptian interrogations of suspects and eyewitnesses.

This constituted cooperation of an unprecedented nature for Egyptian authorities, who have been wary of cooperating with security agents of what many Egyptians still consider the “Zionist enemy.”

According to initial Israeli intelligence estimates, the three coordinated bombings, one on the Hilton Taba and two at the Sinai resort of Ras Satan, were carried out by Global Jihad, a network of radical Islamic groups directed by Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda organization.

Alhough Israeli tourists were targeted, some Israeli counter-terrorism experts believe the attackers’ primary goal was to destabilize the Egyptian regime.

“Global Jihad’s main aim is to topple moderate Arab and Muslim regimes, like that in Egypt, and bring like-minded Islamic radicals to power,” said Boaz Ganor of the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center.

The attacks were designed mainly to hit Egypt’s tourism industry, weaken the economy and destabilize the regime, Ganor said. If that’s indeed the case, Egypt has an obvious interest in cooperating with all intelligence services, including Israel’s, that can supply advance warning of planned attacks and help target would-be perpetrators.

For most of the 25 years that Egypt and Israel have been nominally at peace, such cooperation would have been unthinkable. A former Egyptian foreign minister, Boutros Boutros Ghali, coined the term “cold peace” to describe how Egypt had resisted normalizing relations even after signing a peace treaty.

Still, despite strong Egyptian criticism of Israel’s handling of the Palestinian intifada, ties had been warming for several months before the Sinai attacks. The most significant upgrading came in late May, when President Hosni Mubarak affirmed Egypt’s readiness to help keep the peace in Gaza after Israel’s planned withdrawal.

Mubarak agreed to beef up Egyptian forces to patrol the border between Egypt and the Gaza Strip, prevent the smuggling of weapons from Sinai into Gaza and send Egyptian instructors to train Palestinian Authority security forces.

Since then, the Egyptians have been trying to mediate a cease-fire involving all Palestinian organizations, including terrorist groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

In late May, Mubarak and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon agreed to set up political, security and economic committees to upgrade all aspects of the countries’ bilateral relationship. The move coincided with the conclusion of the biggest deal ever between the two countries: a contract worth $2.5 billion for Egypt to supply Israel with natural gas for 15 years, beginning in 2006.

Israeli analysts attribute the change in Egypt’s attitude to Sharon’s plan to disengage from the Palestinians. They say the Egyptians are motivated by fear that after Israel’s withdrawal, Hamas will seize control of the Gaza Strip and make it a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism that could spill over into Egypt.

Now, after the Sinai bombings, Egypt has far more reason for concern. There is a palpable danger that Global Jihad would see a Hamas-controlled Gaza as a golden opportunity to establish a land base against Cairo. That gives Egypt added incentive to cooperate with Israel.

Giora Eiland, head of Israel’s national security council, summed up Israeli expectations: In the past, he said, the Egyptians had been lax about cracking down on criminal activities and weapons smuggling in Sinai, and had allowed “hostile elements” to get too close to the border with Israel.

Eiland said he hoped the Egyptians now would clamp down as strongly as they did against radical Islamic groups in Egypt in the 1990s.

But it won’t all be clear sailing. Egypt still sees itself as competing with Israel for regional hegemony, a perception that may lead Cairo to continue its efforts to compel Israel to give up its nuclear capability. And the sharp, often vitriolic, criticism of Israel’s response to Palestinian violence will almost certainly continue, at least in the press and on the Egyptian street.

Eventually, ties between Cairo and Jerusalem could mirror those Israel has with Jordan and Turkey — where, despite abiding popular hostility toward Israel, the regimes work closely at the highest strategic levels.

Leslie Susser is the diplomatic correspondent for the Jerusalem Report.

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Jewish Militia: Fact or Ficton?

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In Paris on Sept. 28, two-dozen men armed with clubs and wearing motorcycle helmets stormed the Pays de Cocagne bookshop on the Rue Vieille du Temple to the cries of Israel vaincra! (Israel will be victorious.) Six people were slightly injured.

The men disrupted the book-signing event of Alain Soral, the self-proclaimed agitator, anti-feminist, anti-gay, pro-Palestinian philosopher and boxer. The men broke windows, knocked over bookshelves and sent fans of the writer running out the back door of the bookshop into a courtyard, some of them bleeding. Neither Soral nor his bodyguard were hurt in the incident.

Witnesses claimed the attackers had tear-gas bombs and that they got away within minutes before the police arrived. A video of the attack is posted on the French Islamic Web site www.oumma.com.

Soral, who is well known for his anti-Zionist opinions, said he had received death threats after a recent controversial appearance on the television station France 2. In that interview, he said that “certain Jews never autocriticize,” hinting that Jews always blame others for their woes.

Soral said Sept. 20, “If you tell a Frenchman, a Zionist Jew, that maybe some of your problems come from you, that maybe you’ve made some mistakes, it’s not systematically everybody else’s fault if no one can stand you anywhere you go, because really, that’s their history [the Jews’] for the last 2,500 years. Everywhere they put their feet in, they get kicked out after 50 years — you have to admit it’s bizarre; everybody’s always wrong except for them.”

For his appearance at the book store signing, he had asked for police protection and it was denied.

The reaction of French Jews to the attack is mixed. French Jews are grappling with a wave of anti-Semitic hate crimes committed by young Arab men to cries of “Allah akbar.” The attack committed by young Jewish men to cries of “Israel vaincra!” has disturbed some but thrilled others.

Paris Mayor Bernard Delano sensibly condemned the assault, saying, “Violence never moves anything forward.” Leaders of the Jewish community were also quick to condemn the assault and called for calm and dialogue over violence.

In contrast, the talk on the Internet in Islamic chat rooms is heated and predictably paranoid. Participants are blaming the attack on an “extreme black-shirt Zionist organization.” They also see the attack as part of a pattern of violence against anyone who speaks out against the “Nazi occupation of Palestine.” The chat room visitors (whose user profiles all place them in their 20s) write in French cyber slang about their outrage at how “the French government is always protecting the Jews, and how the Jews are the biggest threat to world peace.”

“I was there,” posted one participant. “I saw the whole thing. I saw them [the Jews] getting ready minutes before it happened. One guy said to not only go after the men, but to go after the women, too. I called the police, but they took their time. What do you think that means? They’re in on it.”

To these people, Soral is just articulating what they believe: That you can’t say you are against Israel without being labeled an anti-Semite. In other words, it’s getting harder to wear your Jew hatred on your sleeve, like the Nazis did — literally.

I entered a French Islamic Web site using a male Arab name and chatted with JMENfou (slang for I don’t give a s–t) who wrote, “These [Jewish] militias are beating people up all the time, and the police don’t do anything about it. It’s Betar, and they are very good at breaking heads open. They train in Israel. They’re Likud, extreme right wing.”

“Sharon is a murdering piece of filth,” wrote zazoo.

Ahmed332 wrote, “I wish I had been there. I would have remade their skin. They’re always hanging around the universities, looking for a fight. Next time I see one, I’m going to give him a new face.”

On more than a dozen French Islamic Web sites, the chat rooms were abuzz with the same word: Betar. It’s Betar, Betar, Betar, those Zionist extremists who are poisoning all of France.

The unanimous blaming of Betar by the anti-Israel set made me curious. The Web site www.betarfrance.org looks harmless enough, with music and pictures of Begin, Jewish calendar information, Hebrew lessons and organized trips to Israel. There is a fund drive, and there are self-defense lessons indicated by a cartoon character in a judo outfit — a flash animation of a comical little guy swatting at the air.

Deeper reading of the site reveals a Zionist bent, but there is no call for violence, only self-defense. The Betar mission statement is about knowledge of Israel and about how to become a responsible Jew, aimed primarily at boys ages 8 to 18. The site encourages a trip to Israel to express solidarity and pride in the Jewish state.

I found it hard to imagine a group of cute little French boys in kippahs going on a field trip to the Third Arrondissement to beat up people in a bookstore.

I called Betar in Paris to find out what their response was to the sacking of the bookstore. Within minutes, I was given a cellphone number for Arnaud Sayegh, the director of Betar de France.

When I reached Sayegh, he was in Israel. He was a bit defensive at first but no more so than the little cartoon guy on the Betar Web site.

When asked about the violence that took place at the bookstore, he said, “They are always blaming us. We’re used to it. We don’t have a militia. We had nothing to do with this.”

“I always encourage dialogue, but you can see how the way things are right now, that sometimes people think you have to put dialogue on the side,” he continued. “It gets to be too much after a while. Have you heard the way people are talking lately? It’s out of control.”

I asked Sayegh what he thought of Soral.

“He’s a virulent anti-Semite, and things he has said have wounded some people very much,” he responded.

Talking to Sayegh gave me the feeling of talking to a Boy Scout leader, not the leader of a paramilitary Zionist army ready to take arms against anti-Semitism in France. But maybe I was being naive.

Someone e-mailed me a picture of a Betar demonstration. I saw some very big, beefy guys standing around, wearing yellow T-shirts emblazoned with a big, black fist rising out of a Star of David. It didn’t look to me like it was an incipient Hebrew lesson or tree planting.

I asked some Jewish friends who live in Paris about Betar, and I was told that there is also an older boy’s unit of Betar called Tagar.

“It’s a militia,” said Michael H., a Paris lawyer, “and none of our friends would ever send their kids there. Can you imagine sending your boys for paramilitary training in the middle of Paris?”

In July, when tensions in France between Jews and Muslims were at a boiling point, I interviewed an angry young Jewish man, whom I’ll call David, in the back of his shop in Paris. He told me of the militias and his words were tough.

“We can’t take it anymore,” David said. “The government does nothing. I swear, we are ready. If I see something — if something happens in front of my eyes — I’m going to lose it. I’m going to do something. You see what’s going on? Jews are getting stabbed and they do nothing. It’s going to explode here soon.”

Clearly, the buzz on the street was that a Jewish militia was forming, yet today, all the leaders of the French Jewish community deny the existence of a militia.

In Jewish chat rooms like www.Feujworld.com (Feuj means Jew backwards in Verlan, the argot of the under-30 generation), the bookstore incident is the only topic of conversation.

“What a bunch of dumbasses — taking it out on books! These guys should be given to the courts to deal with” said one chat room participant.

Another warned everybody to “watch out for these guys. They’re face breakers.” But he added, “Soral got what he deserved.”

And still another participant was feeling cocky behind his keyboard in cyberspace: “If I had been there, I would have killed that Soral for what he did. I wouldn’t have just smashed windows.”

What is Feujworld, I asked.

“The center of the world 😉 ” was the reply. “LOL” (laugh out loud).

Kalthoum S., a Muslim who has rejected her faith for feminist reasons, told me that she thinks it is understandable that there are Jewish militias in France.

“It’s fact. There are militias,” she said. “Don’t you know that? So what? Everyone has a right to defend their own apples. It’s all-out war now.”

I have conflicting feelings about “l’affaire du bookstore. First, that Soral is a first-class jerk who is himself a bully and deserved to get punched in the nose. Second, that Soral, despite being intellectually repulsive to me, is a jerk who has every right to express his opinions. And lastly, whoever these tough guys were who raided the bookstore, they had no right to beat up people and destroy property.

I’d like to be thrilled about a Jewish militia breaking up the book-signing of an anti-Semite and breaking heads, but I know it’s wrong, and the Jewish community knows it’s wrong. They’re uncomfortable with the idea of a Jewish militia. And that’s because Jews are people of the Book — people of the law. And a militia is by definition extralegal.

Militias are really just vigilantes. The problem is that it’s only when Jews become vigilantes and stand up for themselves and fight back that anti-Semites suddenly develop a distaste for vigilantism. How many of these aggrieved anti-Semites would be just as enraged if the situation were a little different?

Imagine the incident in another way. Imagine a white racist writer signing books for his followers at a Barnes and Noble in Los Angeles. Imagine him saying the same things about African Americans that Soral said about Jews — that their history, black history, for hundreds of years was to always blame others for their problems; that blacks are not capable of autocriticism. Just take Soral’s own words and replace the word “Jew” with the word “black”:

“If you tell a black man, a militant black, that maybe some of your problems come from you, that maybe you’ve made some mistakes, it’s not systematically everybody else’s fault if no one can stand you anywhere you go, because really, that’s their history [the blacks] for the last 2,500 years. Everywhere they put their feet in, they get kicked out after 50 years — you have to admit, it’s bizarre; everybody’s always wrong except for them.”

You have to admit it sounds ugly. And what would you make of his racist fans, who line up for his autographed book?

I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a riot. And if there were a riot, who would feel sorry for a bunch of racists who got smacked around a bit? Who would be defending this guy’s right to his opinions? I’ll tell you who: the Ku Klux Klan and maybe a lawyer from the ACLU — probably a Jew.

I can understand why some people are gladdened by rumors of a Jewish militia in Paris. After years of government inaction in response to stabbings, synagogues being destroyed, tombs desecrated and Jewish women and children being beaten up, Jews are fighting back.

I just wish that they would use their muscle to protect a synagogue or an elementary school, not to break the law and storm a bookstore. Israel Vaincra is a good idea, but this is not the way to achieve it.

Carole Raphaelle Davis lives in Los Angeles and Nice, France. She can be reached at cdavis6029@aol.com.

Jewish Militia: Fact or Ficton? Read More »

Rocket Threat Casts Shadow on Kibbutz

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Kibbutz Nir’am, which is slightly closer to the Gaza Strip than Sderot, seemed dead that morning. The air was hot, harsh and still. Hardly anybody was outdoors.

Ofer Lieberman, whose office and van are plastered with stickers for Guinness, the beer he soaks up at the kibbutz’s Green Pub, had shown us the yard-wide, four-inch-deep crater in a road near the fields where the Kassam rocket landed the previous morning.

Sitting in his cramped office upstairs in the kibbutz garage, the laconic, goateed Lieberman, who runs Nir’am’s farm and handles the kibbutz’s media relations, was complaining about how Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz had visited Sderot the previous day but, typical for an Israeli politician, had canceled his scheduled stop at the kibbutz.

It was the day before Sukkot, two days before Dorit Aniso, 2, and her cousin, Yuval Abebeh, 4, were killed by a Kassam in Sderot. At 10:55 a.m., a muffled boom sounded in the near distance and rattled the windows.

“That,” said Lieberman, perking up and pointing in the air, “was a Kassam.”

As we hustled down to his van, he got a call on his cellphone from the contractor building his new house. The contractor said that the Kassam had fallen nearby. But when Lieberman pulled up to the construction site, he found no sign of a rocket, so he called the contractor.

“I don’t see anything,” he told the contractor.

But there had been a misunderstanding.

“It fell near the house I live in?” Lieberman asked.

Cursing, he floored the van’s gas pedal. Nobody was at home, but three of his four daughters were in the school right near their house.

A crowd had already gathered, staring at the scorched, broken-off wings and engine of the Kassam sticking out of the dirt about 25 yards from Alon Elementary School. The school had already started the holiday, but about 30 children were there for activities. Another dozen preschoolers were in kindergarten nearby.

Shrapnel from the Kassam had flown through the windows of a cottage used as a sewing room and over the head of a seamstress sitting inside, leaving her unharmed. Many children in the school and kindergarten had screamed, cried and run out the door, but physically they were untouched.

Lieberman stood with his daughters and watched as soldiers trotted past, police cordoned off the missile site, parents hugged their children and everyone was buzzing about where they’d been and what they’d been doing when that ugly metal thing crashed on the ground.

“We were playing right over there,” said Aviv Revivo, 12, standing with two friends and pointing to a spot on the nearby lawn. “The Kassam from yesterday I saw in the air before it landed. I heard the whistle, and I looked up and I saw it flying over my house.”

Since the Kassams started shooting out of Gaza nearly two years ago, more than 100 have landed on Kibbutz Nir’am — almost as many as have fallen on Sderot. Nobody has been physically injured at the kibbutz, although one Kassam destroyed a trailer that, luckily, was unoccupied at the time, and another landed near a preschool. Now there was this latest close call.

The psychological toll has been heavy on both parents and children, who number about 300. Kassams land in their midst and Israeli army helicopters blast away at Gaza from over their heads.

“Nobody knows what’s going on here,” Lieberman said. “The press and the politicians are only interested if there’s blood. They all go running to Sderot, and not one single Cabinet minister has visited Nir’am since the Kassams started,” (On the following Sunday, Deputy Defense Minister Ze’ev Boim made up for Mofaz’s cancellation.)

“If that Kassam had fallen 30 yards away, and we’d had three dead children and 30 injured at the school,” Lieberman added, “the whole government would have shown up by now.”

Inside the school, the children were seated in a circle around Tali Simchi, who had come to the class that day, planning to lead a drama lesson, at the insistence of her daughter, Michal, 9, who was still scared from the Kassam the previous morning.

“We’re trying to make peace with the Palestinians,” Simchi told the children, “but everywhere there are extremists, and now we’re facing Hamas, who think God gave them the right to all of the land, and that’s their goal, to take it all, and that’s why they fire those missiles at Nir’am.”

“And our job, as people who live on the border,” she continued, “is — that’s right — to live with it, to live with the fear, which is natural, and to talk about how we’re afraid and to keep believing that all this will pass.”

A middle-age soldier in red paratrooper’s boots came in the door.

“Look who’s here,” Simchi told the children, grinning extra widely for effect.

It was Col. Itzik [commander of the 101 Paratrooper Battalion].

“What heroes you are,” he told the children with a similar large grin. “Everybody OK? I’m going to bring all my soldiers here to learn from you how to be heroes. Keep on protecting us, and we’ll keep on protecting you.”

“Well, I came here to give encouragement, and I leave here encouraged,” the colonel said and strode out the door.

I asked Michal how she slept at night.

“Not so well,” she said. “I’m afraid the Kassams will fall on me all the time.”

When this latest Kassam fell, she said, “All I saw was like gray in front of my eyes.”

Completely unashamed, Tom Ben Odiz said, “I cried. I’m 13, but I cried.”

When the Kassam fell, a birthday party had been in progress. Or Rabin, 9, had her arms around the birthday girl, Neta Amar, who was turning 7.

Like the other children, Neta had spoken with her parents. She didn’t seem to want to talk.

“She was in shock at first,” Or said, “but now she’s started to cry.”

Other kibbutzim near Gaza have been hit by Kassams, but none so badly as Nir’am. The kibbutz is broke; it hasn’t paid its bank debts for two years, and the water utility has threatened to cut off its water.

Like most kibbutzim, it has been struggling financially for many years, and now the Kassams have driven away its weekend bed-and-breakfast trade and summer campers, as well as many of its outside pupils and cutlery works customers.

Yet Nir’am has not been granted “confrontation-line” status such as Sderot was in July, which means it gets none of the financial breaks, like a 13 percent income tax reduction, that go to residents in that town a few hundred meters away.

Following the Kassam deaths of the young cousins, the prime minister’s office announced an aid package for Sderot neighborhoods, schools and businesses. Nir’am wasn’t mentioned.

“Everybody talks about Sderot, Sderot,” said Arianna Amar, an assistant teacher at Nir’am’s kindergarten. “I live in the Mem 3 neighborhood, the [most badly hit neighborhood] of Sderot, but the Kassams haven’t fallen here any less.”

When this last one fell so close by and the children started screaming and crying, Amar put on a brave face, hugged them and said that even though the floor had shook, the missile had actually landed far away in the fields. But she was shaking herself and tears were falling.

“I wanted to go home, but it’s no better there,” she said, adding that if there was anyway of selling their apartment, she and her family would already have moved far away from the Gaza border.

This has also been on the mind of Emma Segev. Now 31, she came to Nir’am as an 18-year-old volunteer from Brighton, England, met a young kibbutznik named Gil and married him. Now he’s an agronomist on the farm; she’s head of purchasing at the cutlery factory. They have two sons — Yuval, 5, and Ben, 2 — and today, Segev said, was “too much already.”

Standing outside the cow shed near the factory, her arms folded as if for protection, comfort or both, Segev reflected on the day and the days before.

She said, “I saw the [factory] manager go white while he was on the phone. ‘Where? It was next to the kindergarten.’ My knees buckled, I welled up. I phoned the kindergarten teacher, whose voice was shaking with fear. I heard the kids’ voices. Yuval said it had made him jump.

“Today,” Segev continued, “it went way beyond saying everything’s OK now, and going back to normal. It became so clear to me that I really feel quite irresponsible for being here with my kids. I couldn’t concentrate any more; I couldn’t get any work done. I was thinking about what we’re going to do, because I don’t think we can go on like this.

“And it absolutely breaks my heart when we hear the helicopters firing into Gaza,” she said. “I can’t imagine what a mother there is going through. I’d go back to England tomorrow, but my husband’s an Israeli — he’d agree to live in England if it wasn’t for the weather. So I think the thing to do is find a quieter, more peaceful place somewhere in Israel. Tonight we’re going to stay with Gil’s brother in Ashkelon.

“Enough,” she said, “enough for one day.”

During the nearly two-year onslaught of Kassams, none of Kibbutz Nir’am’s families had moved out. But on the Friday after the Kassam landed by the school and after another Kassam killed the two cousins in Sderot, the Segevs informed the kibbutz that they had leased a house in a desert moshav and would be moving in a week

or so.

They were taking a year’s leave of absence; after a year, they’d see if it was safe to go home.

Rocket Threat Casts Shadow on Kibbutz Read More »

Heading Toward Normal in Bosnia

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Jakob Finci, longtime leader of the Bosnian Jewish community, took a swallow of local draft beer and gestured at the mellow crowd enjoying dinner in an upscale new restaurant not far from the city’s synagogue.

The tables were full, and, Finci said, there were probably Serbs and Croats among the diners as well as Bosnian Muslims, known as Bosniaks.

“We all look alike, and we all are using the same language, even though today it’s called by three different names, Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian,” he said. “It’s not easy to distinguish here in the restaurant who is who.”

Nine years after the Dayton Agreement put an end to the devastating Bosnian War, the relaxed dinnertime clatter was a positive sign of recovery in Sarajevo.

But the good food and easy atmosphere masked a host of physical and psychological scars that the city, its people, and all of Bosnia and Herzegovina are still struggling to sort out.

The jobless rate is more than 40 percent, and salaries are low. Despite extensive rebuilding, bombed-out buildings, mass graveyards and other stark war damage are visible throughout the country. Thousands of foreign soldiers are still stationed in Bosnia to keep the peace. And there is still considerable distrust and separation between the ethnic groups.

“You know, after each war, it is the winners who are writing the history,” Finci said. “But the Bosnian War was stopped with the Dayton Peace Accord, without winners and losers.

“All three sides are preparing their own history,” he said. “Our education system is strictly divided by ethnic lines, and we are teaching our children that our neighbors are our enemies.”

During the Bosnian War, the tiny local Jewish community and its social welfare arm, La Benevolencija, won international renown as a key conduit of nonsectarian humanitarian aid to all ethnic groups involved in the conflict. They ran a soup kitchen, medical and communication services, and organized exit convoys for refugees from besieged Sarajevo.

“We have just 700 members, among them 180 survivors of the Holocaust, so we are an aging community,” Finci said. “At the same time, during the war we succeeded in helping at least 10,000 people.”

Finci and other Jewish leaders transformed themselves from middle-aged, white-collar professionals into daring coordinators who juggled identification papers and navigated checkpoints, often risking death in the process.

“It was really like a James Bond movie,” Finci recalled. “But if you ask me now if I would be ready to repeat it, the answer would be no. Because it’s only now that I realize how dangerous it was. At the time, it was a strange feeling of responsibility.”

The war is over, but Bosnian Jews still feel a sense of commitment to help their fellow citizens as they strive to rebuild their country.

“Now we have a different fight, the fight for the normalization of life for everyone,” Finci said. “After nearly 10 years, we still need a lot of help, and thank God it’s arriving.”

Aided by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) and other international bodies, the Jewish community and La Benevolencija continue to sponsor programs that help needy members of society at large as well as local Jews.

These include the distribution of aid donations, largely channeled to la Benevolencija through the JDC, which range from used clothing to toiletries to a recent shipment of nearly 22,000 pairs of reading glasses, which La Benevolencija donated to an association of retired people.

A home care program, meanwhile, begun immediately after the war ended, provides assistance to more than 600 needy elderly people in Sarajevo, of all ethnicities.

Also in collaboration with the JDC, La Benevolencija established a training program to help local people set up small businesses. And, with the help of the World Bank, it runs a micro credit institution to provide small loans to the new businesses that are created.

Be My Friend, a project started three years ago, enables about 30 local children to attend a Benevolencija summer camp on Mount Igman, outside Sarajevo. There, they learn core values of civil society as well as have fun.

“They are really our friends,” said Finci, “which is the main idea. It is not that they should become Jews, but that they should become normal human beings and understand that religion and ethnicity make no difference in anything as long as you are human.”

Finci, whose own family roots in Sarajevo go back more than 300 years, is involved in numerous activities aimed at fostering interreligious and interethnic reconciliation in his homeland.

For several years he has lobbied for the formation of a national Truth and Reconciliation Commission modeled on the commission that was active in South Africa after apartheid.

Individuals would be encouraged to detail, in public, what was done to them during the Bosnian War — and by whom.

A major campaign to have such a commission established by Parliament, he said, is getting under way this month.

“The whole idea is based on the fact that we have not just been victims of the war, but also victims of propaganda,” he said, “and we don’t know that our brave guys who defended us also committed crimes on the other side.”

Getting everything out in public would have a cathartic effect, but the facts and figures expected to emerge through the commission’s work would also provide historians with the basis for writing one history of Bosnia free from ethnic bias.

“I know that history is changing every 50 years,” Finci said. “But at least you’ll have the facts in one place and be able to agree about the facts.”

The object, he said, would not be to equalize the crimes of the various ethnicities, but to inject some shades of gray into a black-and-white scenario.

“Unfortunately, everyone knows that the Muslims were the biggest victims and the Serbs were the biggest perpetrators,” he said. “But at the same time it doesn’t mean that there were no Serb or Croat victims, or that there were no Muslim perpetrators.

“Saying all this openly, in front of the media, will, I think make it much easier to reconcile, at least with yourself,” he said. “People can say, ‘OK, yes, I suffered a lot, but they suffered also. And we are in the same boat and we should go together or we’ll disappear.’ Europe is unifying and only Bosnia is trying to divide itself in small pieces.”

“This is not acceptable,” he said.

Heading Toward Normal in Bosnia Read More »

Has the State Got a Proposition for You!

Leave a Comment / California, Community, Elections, Politics, Science & Technology /

The wind grows colder, the days shorter and a 165-page, gray book of propositions arrives in everybody’s mailbox. Welcome to the election season — for Californians.

In national politics, California has been mostly ignored by both presidential candidates as a foregone conclusion. There is hardly a single close congressional race in the state. Between war in Iraq, violence in Israel and the swing states to the East, California is not on the agenda in Washington.

But to California voters, the one-inch-thick volume of propositions is a huge chance to reshape state government. Jewish leaders and activists are staking out their positions on a few of the 16 ballot initiatives.

Prop. 71, in particular, enjoys more open Jewish support than any other measure on the ballot this fall. It would authorize the state to sell $3 billion of bonds to finance research on embryonic stem cells, which could possibly help provide cures for such chronic diseases as diabetes, Alzheimer’s and cancer.

Jewish support for Prop. 71 includes Rabbi Janet Marder, president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis; Rabbi Elliot N. Dorff, professor of philosophy at the University of Judaism; Rabbi David Ellenson, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion president; Hadassah; the Women’s Zionist Organization of America; and others.

“Jewish tradition strongly encourages scientific research, including the use of stem cells, to find new cures for diseases,” wrote the Progressive Jewish Alliance, which also supports Prop. 71, in its proposition policy statement. “If such cures were found, millions of lives could be saved, and health-care costs could be cut by billions of dollars.”

After pressure from religious conservatives several years ago, President Bush imposed strict limits on embryonic stem-cell research that uses federal dollars, requiring all work to be done on only a handful of existing cell lines and with only a trickle of funds. That prompted Californians to collect over a million signatures to put Prop. 71 on the ballot.

But interest must be paid on bonds, and the $3 billion Prop. 71 bonds could actually end up costing about $6 billion.

“I am a very strong supporter of stem-cell research, but I don’t think that issuing a $3 billion general obligation bond is a fiscally responsible measure at this point in time,” said Assemblyman Keith Richman (R-Granada Hills).

Supporters say that making California the world’s leader in stem-cell research would create jobs and tax revenue.

In other financial matters, Proposition 1A would greatly limit state power over local property taxes and force Sacramento to reimburse local governments anytime it imposes a new rule or regulation.

“If we funded state government properly, we wouldn’t have to guarantee this funding, but when budgets are in bad shape [the state] steals from local government,” said Howard Welinsky, former head of the Jewish Community Relations Committee and a longtime Democratic activist.

“Imagine yourself as the mayor of a city,” Welinsky said. “You don’t know on July 1 what your revenue is until the state finishes its budget deliberations — and sometimes they wait until August to figure this out. So how are you going to manage your resources?”

Welinsky called the state budget “woefully underfunded” due to low taxes (held over from the boom years of the 1990s) that Republicans have refused to raise.

Though Republicans say that Democrats’ runaway spending is actually to blame for the state’s budget problems, both parties are supporting Prop. 1A’s ban on the state’s grab of local funds. Some opposition to Prop. 1A has questioned whether local government spends money more responsibly than the state.

Several of the propositions on the ballot are directly related to California’s faltering health-care system. Prop. 63 would impose a 1 percent surcharge on state income taxes for those earning more than $1 million a year. That money would go directly to county mental health services.

Assemblyman Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento), former head of the Jewish Community Relations Committee in Sacramento, is one of Prop. 63’s biggest supporters. He’s called it an opportunity to fix the broken promise California made to its counties in the 1960s, when the state emptied its mental health hospitals.

But why tax only the very wealthy?

“In a perfect word, or even a better world, this is not the way to fund government,” Steinberg told the San Francisco Chronicle.

Opponents say depending on such a narrow tax base to fund partly effective programs is too risky. But supporters point to the hundreds of thousands of Californians who are either homeless or in prison today, because they could not get the mental health services they needed.

Another health-care measure, Prop. 67 would add a 3 percent surcharge on telephone use — both land line and cellular — mainly to reimburse California hospitals for the care they provide to poor patients.

About 70 hospitals have closed in California over the past decade, including six in Los Angeles County, partly due to uninsured patients needing expensive emergency care.

“If a nearby emergency room closes, the extra time it takes for an ambulance to travel to a more remote facility could literally mean the difference between life and death,” the Progressive Jewish Alliance wrote.

Richman opposes Prop. 67, calling it a Band-Aid solution. “Half the hospitals in the state of California are losing money because of uncompensated care,” he said. “I think it’s critical that we address the fundamental issue of the uninsured.”

Richman, for his part, is most passionate about supporting Prop. 62, the “modified blanket” primary. It would change California’s electoral system so that only the top two vote-getters from a district in any election — House of Representatives, Assembly, State Senate, etc. — could run in the general election.

After a primary election, each party is currently guaranteed a spot for its own top vote-getter in the general election. Prop. 62 would change that by putting the emphasis on the top two candidates, regardless of party. That means a Democrat could run against another Democrat in the general election or a Republican against a Republican.

“It will result in representatives in both Sacramento and Washington who are more moderate and will work to solve problems with common sense solutions,” Richman told The Journal, adding that the power of the parties today pushes candidates to the ideological extremes.

However, opponents of Prop. 62 claim that it will simply allow independently wealthy candidates to buy political power. Under the current system, challenging an incumbent for either federal or state office is difficult, even with a slew of money, because there are so many other candidates that split the vote.

Under Prop. 62, though, a wealthy challenger who manages to place second in the primary would have no other competition to worry about except the incumbent and could bring all his money to bear in the run-up to the general election. Groups such as Common Cause oppose it, along with both major parties.

Other propositions on the ballot include Prop. 66, which would limit the “three strikes” law to violent crimes; Prop. 64, which would restrict lawyers’ abilities to sue corporations; and Props, 68 and 70, the Native American gambling initiatives.

“It’s always hard to say what’s a Jewish issue,” Welinsky said.

This November, California Jews can decide for themselves.

Proposition 71 will be among the issues discussed at “A Jewish Perspective on Stem Cell Research,” with leading rabbis and doctors, Oct. 19 at Temple Beth Am. Free. For more information, call (310) 652-7353.

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