Category
July 21, 2005
Twenty-Nine Days to Make Mitzvot
Aryeh Green and Yosef Abramowitz were sipping tea in a Bedouin tent last year in Sde Boker, a kibbutz in Israel\’s Negev desert, when they had an idea. Participants at a conference of Kol Dor, an organization that seeks to revitalize Jewish activism and unity across the globe, the two were discussing how the group could promote Jewish identity and peoplehood.
Getting Kids Into Charity Pays Off Big
Getting kids involved with giving isn\’t just for wealthy families. On the contrary, middle-class kids tend to have much more than they need — and can benefit from the values and insights they will get from charitable activities. It\’s up to parents to get them going, and to figure out the best structure for the entire family\’s charitable activities
A Student Oasis on the Rise
Entering university can be a tough transition, especially for Israelis, who have probably spent the previous decade of their lives prepping for the army, serving in the army and recovering from the army.
\”Once you get out of the army, everything you used to study, to stand for, is gone; religiously, Zionistically –any kind of idealism,\” says Tzvicka Deutch, a Ben Gurion University (BGU) grad student who won third place in the popular Israeli reality show, \”The Ambassador,\” in which young Israelis competed to represent the Jewish state in its worldwide public relations efforts.
The Final Frontier
Professor Ron Folman leads me down a few staircases of the science building of Ben Gurion University (BGU) in the southern Israeli city of Be\’er Sheva to show me his million-dollar, state-of-the-art nanotech laboratory.
It feels like we\’re descending to some basement bomb shelter of an old Israeli building. Actually, we are. Very recently, the laboratory was a bomb shelter. And despite the double doors leading to a white, clean room with an air-pressurized system to keep the expensive equipment immaculate, there is still a feel of the makeshift here, in the wall coverings, in the tiled ceilings, in the fact that it was formerly a bomb shelter before Folman came along.
\”Building a lab was the condition for me to do my high-tech here,\” said Folman, a scientist in his 40s who is darkly handsome in a 1970s professorial way. Sometimes it\’s \”frustrating,\” added the head of the Atom Chip Laboratory, to make do with a lab that\’s been improvised into a basement bomb shelter, \”but in the big picture we\’re doing more than science. We\’re helping the Negev and making a difference. These are not just words for me.\”
Eviction of Jew and Non-Jew Going to Trial
A federal court trial, alleging that the Orthodox Jewish owners of a Pico-Robertson building evicted a tenant because he shared his apartment with a non-Jew, is scheduled to open in Los Angeles next week.
The suit by Lawrence \”Chaim\” Stein alleges that he was evicted in 2004 by the board of Torat Hayim, a nonprofit that is best known for its Pico-Robertson school and synagogue, but that also manages a handful of apartments.
Stein\’s central piece of evidence in the suit is a voice mail left on his phone answering machine by Michael Braum, one of the suit\’s defendants and the pro bono manager of the apartment in the 8800 block of Alcott Street.
\”I can\’t believe you rented to a goy,\” says the voice on the tape, which Braum has acknowledged as his in a deposition.
\”Two days after that, we get an eviction notice,\” Stein said.
Rejecting tenants based on religion is illegal. Braum noted in an interview that Torah Hayim\’s tenants include non-Jews. He insisted that the issue was not religion, but that Stein unilaterally changed terms of the lease.
The Way of Madness
The idea of one Jew killing another is shocking. Most of us think it never happens — but the truth is that it does. It happens this week in the Torah with Pinchas. After seeing a Jew apparently enticed by a Midianite prostitute, Pinchas runs them both through with his spear.
It happened when the Macabbees saw a Jew publicly bowing down to a statue of Zeus in the town of Modin. It happened during the American Civil War, World War I and when the State of Israel was founded. Most recently, as most of us painfully recall, it happened when a young, deranged Orthodox Jew named Yigal Amir assassinated then Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin. Ironically, it was this week\’s Torah portion and the character of Pinchas that some of the most extreme Jews used as a justification for the assassination
Defy Gravity
Dan Brodsky-Chenfeld and I shook hands 20 minutes before we were to jump out of an airplane together at 12,500 feet. It would be my first solo jump. Dan has made some 23,000 — he\’s stopped counting except by the thousands.
Singles – Poetry in Motion
In one night, I had dinner at an all-you-can eat salad bar in Arcadia, met my father\’s first girlfriend in 25 years and weathered a nearly disastrous poetry emergency.
Sound the onomatopoetic sirens; this thing was a relationship 911. Free verse was about to cost my father the best relationship of his life. And it was my fault. What rhymes with \”Zero tact\”?
So there I was, sitting across the table from dad\’s new girlfriend, trying to impress her, using my best table manners, eating forkfuls of canned beets on my self-consciously dainty salad and thinking to myself: \”This is just weird.\”
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