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Jewish Journal

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July 17, 2008

What’s so good about Israel? Let me tell you!

Leave a Comment / Israel, Letters From Israel, Opinion, Wandering Jew, Worldwide /

It took me six years of living abroad to love Israel as passionately as I do. As soon as I returned from two months of living in China, two years of high school in Italy and four yearsof college in the United States, I became convinced that there is simply no better place than Israel for Israelis.

You see, Israelis have this inexplicable urge — a genetic disposition perhaps — to want to live abroad: “Israel is too small,” “Israelis are too nervous,” “life under terrorism is unbearable.” They just need to get out.

Israeli youths drool over the possibility of getting a European passport from their deceased, Holocaust-surviving great-grandmother and leaving the Middle East behind, wrapping it with a cloud of dust. If not to Europe, Israelis fancy winning the green card lottery or marrying an American stranger in the midst of Manhattan, just to be able to live and work legally in the United States.

Against the common view that life elsewhere is better, and with a bag loaded with juvenile experiences abroad, I confess to you that life in the heart of the Middle East is 10, if not a hundred times better for Israelis than anywhere else in the world.

What’s so good about Israel?

The question by no means seeks to undermine the quality of life elsewhere. As my Chicago friend says, “It is what it is.”

What I intend to do is argue that there are phenomenal things about Israel that Israelis often tend to overlook, forget or maybe are genuinely unaware of. I’ll explain precisely what I mean.

Let’s start with how real everything in Israel is. I personally think there is something charming about how Israelis always tell you the truth, whether you like it or not. If you’re fat, they won’t call you “big.” If you are stupid, they won’t say you are “cerebrally challenged.” If they’re upset with you, they won’t pretend you have just made their day.

The absence of the politically correct allele from the Israeli genome might be considered rude in the eyes of a foreigner. But the fact is, that it creates a culture of openness that melts down interpersonal barriers and ultimately makes Israelis feel and behave as though they were all brothers and sisters.

Camaraderie is indeed another forte of Israel’s society. In Judaism we say, “All of Israel are responsible for one another,” and “All of Israel are brethren.”

Nowhere else in the world have I found the same level of genuine concern about a total stranger as I have in my own country. Here, if you fall off your bicycle in the middle of the street or in a dark street corner, be sure that within seconds you will be surrounded with at least five absolute strangers who will be there to offer you a hand and put you back on your feet (without actually stealing your bike).

Whether it is the imprint of the Israel Defense Forces’ unit cohesion, the Jewish sense of a shared destiny or the remnants of a socialist system, Israelis strongly — and genuinely — care about each other. It’s simply lovely to know there is always someone who’ll be there to help you out and that you’re never truly alone.

Beyond the realness and the camaraderie that characterize Israel, Israelis indulge in one of the most exotic and enjoyable lifestyles found anywhere in the world. It takes a Manhattan-based investment banker to appreciate the fantastic work-life balance struck in the Holy Land.

While Sundays aren’t off, Fridays recently have become half workdays, thus leaving the average Israeli employee with no more than 60 hours of work per week, at the very most.

The rapidly urbanizing society has become a cradle of the cafe culture. Whereas Starbucks startlingly went bankrupt here several years ago, local Israeli coffee chains are bustling with young, as well as old chaps, who enjoy both the indoor air-conditioned ambience and the outside, sunny street corners, chatting heartedly with friends and co-workers.

Add to that the incredibly yummy and healthy Mediterranean diet, largely based on fruit, vegetables and olive oil, and you get a bunch of Jews who are relatively fit and absolutely handsome. And conclude with long beaches and a never-setting sun, and you get something like California, but holier.

For years, some of my friends have tried to convince me to make the most reasonable decision by staying abroad. I would be lying if I told you that the temptation wasn’t there, usually quite dormant, but at times, vibrantly itching. But after living by myself on three continents for six years and retuning home at the age of 25, I doubt it that I will consider such an idea seriously ever again.

Israel is the only place that is right and truly fun for Israelis. Leaving Zionism, brain drain and religion aside, there is no better place for Israelis other than our very own country.

It may sound completely bizarre at first. It may take years of living abroad to realize that. My recommendation, however, is to check out for yourself the validity of my argument. If you find yourself back in the Jewish heart of the Middle East after a long journey abroad, let us all know.

And more importantly, don’t forget to remind us why you came back.

Shira Kaplan is a Harvard student. She is currently completing her thesis on Iran’s crisis behavior in the post-revolutionary era. She served in the Israel Defense Forces for two years before enrolling at Harvard.

What’s so good about Israel? Let me tell you! Read More »

The L.A. Times ‘frames’ the Presidential race

Leave a Comment / Opinion, Politics, Power, Raphael Sonenshein /

image
Last Sunday (July 13), the Los Angeles Times ran an article on the 2008 campaign that I feel bound to comment upon. It was in the right hand column, front page, prime location. It was a perfect example of something called framing. The title: “” title=”his own take on the Times”>take on the Times and owner Sam Zell

The L.A. Times ‘frames’ the Presidential race Read More »

Defending Identity

Leave a Comment / Opinion, Rob Eshman /

Natan Sharansky’s previous book, “The Case for Democracy,” changed the world. It inspired a generation of U.S. policymakers and influenced President GeorgeW. Bush in his decision to go to war against Saddam Hussein.

So when Sharansky’s second book, “Defending Identity,” came out this month, I thought I’d better read it, quick.

I did last Saturday, so that by Sunday, I could sit down with Sharansky and ask him about it.

I met Sharansky at his hotel on the Westside. The former deputy prime minister of Israel, who is now director of the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, had just arrived from Israel and was napping when I knocked on his door. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes, grabbed my hand and pulled me inside. Sharansky is half my height and twice as commanding, a pierogi body with basset hound eyes.

A mutual friend offers to call down for coffee.

“Yes,” Sharansky says, “a cappuccino.”

That a man who spent nine years in a Soviet gulag might one day find himself in a sumptuous hotel room, specifying a foamy hot coffee drink, vindicates, if not God’s eternal justice, then at least Her dark sense of humor. And Sharansky’s. He takes a moment to tell how he once excused himself from wearing a tie to meet then-President Bill Clinton.

“I told him, Mr. President, in Israel we have a law. Anyone who spends nine years in the Soviet gulag doesn’t have to wear a tie. And he said, ‘That makes sense.’

“So, later, Putin says to me, ‘Why no tie? Is that a protest?’ And I say, ‘No. First, in Israel we have a law that anyone who spends nine years in the Soviet gulag doesn’t have to wear a tie. And besides that, the president of the United States said it was OK.'”

Sharansky is awake now, and it’s time to talk identity.

In “Defending Identity,” Sharansky argues against the idea, popular among some of the intelligentsia and on many college campuses, that a strong sense of identity among social groups is the source of friction and war. As Sharansky explains “post-identity” thinking: “Identity causes war; war is evil; therefore, identity is evil.”

Sharansky’s book is an extended argument against that premise. Although identity can be “used destructively,” he writes, it is also a force for good.

Strong identities, Sharansky argues, “are as valuable to a well-functioning society as they are to secure and committed well-functioning individuals. Just as the advance of democracy is critical to securing international peace and stability, so, too, is cultivating strong identities.”

Sharansky co-authored the book with Shira Wolosky Weiss. But the source of its deepest insights are drawn from Sharansky’s own life.

“I have been extremely lucky — twice lucky in fact,” Sharansky writes. “I was deprived of both identity and freedom, and then I discovered them both simultaneously.”

The first third of Sharansky’s life was spent as a loyal Soviet citizen in a state that had outlawed and crushed expressions of cultural and religious identity. “The only thing Jewish in my life,” he writes, “was anti-Semitism.”

The Six-Day War awakened Sharansky, as it did so many others, to his Jewish identity. “I started realizing I was part of a unique history … that carried a unique message of community, liberty and hope.”

In 1978, five years after Sharansky applied for a visa to immigrate to Israel, the promising mathematician was arrested by the Soviets, tried for treason and spying and sent to the gulag. He spent 16 months in prison and nine years in a forced labor camp in Siberia. Throughout this ordeal, Sharansky became both leader and symbol of the Jewish immigration movement and the Soviet dissident movement.

A massive international protest on behalf of all Soviet dissidents led to Sharansky’s release in 1986. Upon his release, he flew to Israel, reunited with his wife, Avital, and has lived the third part of his life as an activist, writer and politician.

It was, Sharansky writes, his deep sense of identity that enabled him to fight the Soviet empire.

“I discovered that only by embracing who I am … could I also stand with others,” he writes. “When Jews abandon identity in pursuit of universal freedom, they end up with neither. Yet when they embrace identity in the name of freedom, as Soviet Jews did in the 1970s, they end up securing both.”

While Sharansky’s biography makes his case especially compelling, others have made the same point. Consider the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, in which all the people spoke the same language and therefore couldn’t see their own sinfulness. Judaism has long held to the now-subversive belief that difference needn’t be divisive. Most recently, the chief rabbi of England, Jonathan Sacks, in “The Dignity of Difference,” wrote that “universalism can also be deeply threatening.”

Where Sharansky goes further is in alloying identity with democracy. When I point out to him that Muslim extremists don’t suffer from a lack of identity, he leaps forward in his chair.

“Exactly!” he says. “Their identity is not bad; what is bad is their lack of devotion to democracy.”

In that sense, this book on identity follows naturally Sharansky’s now-classic one on democracy.

“Identity, if it is not connected to democracy, it becomes fundamentalist, totalitarian,” he says. “But freedom and democracy without identity means freedom becomes decadent, powerless, meaningless, without any commitment. Exactly what John Lennon said. Let’s have a world in which there would be nothing to fight for. And then a small group, with a strong identity and without any obligations to democracy, can destroy this wonderful world of freedom.”

I am finding myself nodding as one of my heroes — Sharansky — trashes another — John Lennon. But if Lennon sang — with a bit of irony — about utopia, Sharansky is explaining the real world.

“The free world is in a big, big danger,” he says, “because we are in a conflict with fundamentalists, and what they are saying is they have something to fight for, and we don’t.”

Defending Identity Read More »

Dating dramas

Leave a Comment / Blogs, Singles /

I’ve decided to embark on an acting career, so I signed up for acting classes. Given that acting is such a competitive business, I comfort myself in the idea that I can also treat acting class as a form of therapy and thus gain added, nonprofessional value. So far, playing characters in difficult situations has allowed me to reflect on my own feelings and behaviors.

For my first assignment, I was asked to recreate, on stage, a personal environment (whether my bedroom, office or living room) — and engage in an activity I like (whether painting, cooking or playing music). The point was to get us actors to feel comfortable on stage so that we could react naturally when the phone rings with an imaginary crisis. The audience doesn’t have to know the identity of the crisis — it’s the reaction, not the story, that’s important.

Eager to do a good job and impress the teacher, I recreated my living room in Israel and thought of a crisis all too sadly familiar to me: A terrorist attack in my neighborhood. When the phone rang, I jumped from my easel, where I was drawing a horse, and went into crisis mode. I immediately began to call friends to find out who was hurt, to check the news on TV and online for casualty updates. I was frantic.

Then the teacher stopped me and said: “Orit! Just sit on the sofa.”

I followed his instructions. On the sofa, I contemplated, without words, the horror of the moment. And the teacher said that’s where I was effective and convincing. In that moment I wasn’t acting. I wasn’t trying to say the right things. I was being.

At my next rehearsal, at a cafe for a scene in which I play a woman trying to seduce an old flame, I repeated the same pattern. As my scene partner hinted to me, my reading was stiff, unnatural and predictable. I only worried that I uttered the lines in the right way. I didn’t capture the emotion of the moment by allowing the part of me who relates to the character influence my delivery of the lines. Then, when we put the script down and just talked, I reconnected with my natural way of speaking and gesturing and sought to bring that into the role.

That’s when it hit me. What applies to acting also applies to dating.

For instance, if I meet a really good-looking and charming guy at a party whom I want to impress, I go into acting mode. I ask myself: How should I behave? Should I walk up to him and say “Hi”? Should I stand there nonchalantly and wait for him to make the first move?

When I e-mail him, I overthink the timing and wording of the letter. I become a playwright. Should I think of a creative subject line or keep it casual? Should I open it with “Hey” or “Hi”? And how should I sign it? With “Best regards”? With just my first initial?

I know I’m really infatuated in a bad way when I actually think of implementing the advice of that lame book “The Rules,” such as: “Don’t stare at men or talk too much” or “Don’t call him or rarely return his calls” or “Don’t accept a Saturday night date after Wednesday.”

Then, if we go out on a date, I try to be, or at least act, put together, cool, perfect. I don’t allow myself to become vulnerable. I don’t honestly share my likes and dislikes, my strengths and insecurities. I worry too much about what the guy wants to hear rather than what I truly want to say. In short, I’m not myself. I’m acting.

Contrast this behavior with a guy I’d consider only as a friend. I can chat it up with him for hours and talk about whatever concerns me, without worrying about what he thinks of me. I write whatever I feel like in an e-mail without proofreading it 10 times. I complain about my day, my problems, my hopes, my dreams. Strangely, my guy “friends” are those who end up falling in love with me.

I think it’s because when I’m myself with the opposite sex, I create real moments — the Oscar-worthy moments that light up a screen or a stage because the audience sees the real character — her pain, joy, uncertainty, triumph. I let go of the script and show what’s between the lines — and what’s inside my heart.

So I’m learning to change my approach — not only in acting class, but in the real-life drama of my dating life. I think part of the challenge is finding the right “scene” partner — the supporting male who can bring out my true character, who doesn’t make me feel the need to read from a script or follow rules.

Maybe by learning to be more natural and hence creating authentic moments not only stage, but also over coffee or dinner with the men I date, I’ll earn my real Oscar — a shining golden man to take home.

Orit Arfa is a Jewish Journal contributing writer based in Israel who is spending the summer in Los Angeles. She can be reached via her Web site: www.oritarfa.net.

Dating dramas Read More »

The sins of our fathers

Leave a Comment / Torah /

While many people shower in the morning, I have always preferred bathing at night. Although somewhat unconventional, it makes more sense to go to sleep clean and relaxed after being out all day. Moreover, God created His days beginning in the evening, and I adhere to the notion that a new day commences at dusk rather than dawn; washing at this time initiates a fresh start.

Evening baths, along with all my justifications for them, are part of me being who I am: namely, someone who tends to diverge from mainstream behavior with a slew of spiritual reasons to explain why.

But the truth is that I bathe at night simply because my mother does — and that is how she raised me. She passed this routine down to me in the same way her mother conveyed it to her. And as for why my grandmother bathed at night? In her house in Israel, the solar heater needed all day to produce water sufficient for filling the tub — she didn’t have a shower.

Evidently, I am perpetuating a daily hygiene schedule three generations and a continent removed from the conditions that originally inspired it; I inherited an irrational behavior and the added pattern of seeking validation through Judaism because of it. I say these practices explain who I am — but really, they explain more about whom I come from.

Pinchas is in the same boat (or more fittingly, bathtub).

“God spoke to Moses, saying: ‘Pinchas, son of Eleazar, son of Aaron the Kohen, turned back My wrath from the children of Israel with his zealotry for My sake … Therefore … I grant him My covenant of peace….'” (Numbers 25:11-13).

Pinchas, like the rest of us, is a product of his lineage; who he is seems most significantly distinguished by whom he has descended from, and only after he is recognized as grandson of the high priest do we learn something about his independent character (specifically, that he killed two people — Zimri and Cozbi — who betrayed God’s commandments). This antecedent information about his holy homicidal tendencies may clarify his personality for us, but they are likely as much reactionary inherited predispositions as are my skills for rationalizing idiosyncratic bathing customs.

Pinchas exemplifies the fact that we are shaped into being by family history. The estimation of our characters is based on what was bequeathed by our predecessors much the same way our appearances are determined by genes they transmitted. Along with eye color and height, the majority of qualities by which we define our dispositions are passed on, as well — even if they are nonsensical by the time we adopt them. Nearly all the attitudes, ideals, lifestyle preferences, doubts, stressors, resentments and suspicions we unquestionably accept and struggle with as being part of our essential nature have, in fact, very little to do with us. They exist in our psyches because they originally promoted the survival of our forbears in the face of danger, much in the way our toes are a vestige of climbing trees.

Systems of adaptation that ensured our ancestors’ endurance begin repressing our autonomy with the first brain cells we develop during infancy that form in response to stimuli in our immediate environment. Our demeanors are prescribed by uncritical absorption of beliefs and actions prevalent in the limited reality of our parents’ homes long before skills of reason and evaluation enable us at age 5 to begin individuating; concepts of what is “normal” become deeply embedded in our unconscious — regardless of how dysfunctional they might actually be.

We mature into warped facsimiles of those who came before us — acting upon or reacting against the ghosts of an ancient past, while God waits here for our surrendered return.

He issues instruction that “the sum of all the congregation of the children of Israel … by their father’s house” be tallied and reported to Him (Numbers 26:2), followed by 48 verses of Torah list names upon names of relations. Not for the sake of perusing a numerical count, but rather, for the exercise of generational mapping do we read these names. By recollecting them, the long shadow of hereditary transgressions are brought to light; in recognizing the dysfunctional transmissions of our lineage, we begin distinguishing ourselves from them.

Understanding where we come from helps us return to ourselves, whole and intact. Like Pinchas, we can slay the distortions and restore ourselves. Armed with forgiveness, we can trace the cycles of victimization and perpetration in our ancestry, and accept that they were simply doing the best they could. Whether abusive, addictive, absent, subtly critical, shaming or doubtful, the people who ignorantly transgressed before us are healed by our healing as we name our past and separate from it enough to see its illusory nature.

We can identify who we are not, and thus become present to who we are: beings of goodness and light capable of recounting with gratitude and wisdom how we came to exist.

Be it with morning showers or evening baths, we can use this Torah to help us wash away the sins of our father’s house and re-emerge into a new day prepared to fulfill our part of the covenant of wholeness and peace everlasting.

Rabbi Karen Deitsch works as a freelance officiant and lecturer in Los Angeles. She can be reached at karendeitsch@yahoo.com.

The sins of our fathers Read More »

Can tolerance extend to China exhibition?

Leave a Comment / Uncategorized /

One photo in the exhibition at the Museum of Tolerance shows Mordechai Olmert, founder of China’s Betar and father of Israel’s prime minister Ehud Olmert. Another is of students at the famous Mir Yeshiva, which relocated from Europe after the community fell to the Soviets. Many more capture the flood of Jewish refugees who poured into Shanghai’s port as they escaped Nazi persecution.

“Like ‘Schindler,’ ‘Wallenberg’ and ‘Sugihara,’ the name ‘Shanghai’ has now become synonymous with ‘rescue’ and ‘haven’ in the annals of the Holocaust,” states a placard accompanying the exhibition.

The show, titled, “The Jews in Modern China,” focuses on the century of peaceful relations for nomadic Jews in the Orient, from the 19th-century immigration of Russian and Sephardic Jews to the Cultural Revolution in 1966 that marked the end of an era.

Opening this week, the display highlights the better portion of China’s historic humanitarian aid to Jews in need and avoids the darker human-rights record of the People’s Republic. It comes to the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance, courtesy of the Chinese government, as the country continues preparing for the Summer Olympics and as human rights organizations say abuses in that country have increased.

Not surprisingly, museum officials have been sensitive about perceptions that they’re assisting the Chinese public relations machine. Without being asked, both Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s associate dean, and Liebe Geft, museum director, told The Journal that politics played no role in the exhibition’s content or timing.

“The interest is completely educational and cultural,” Geft said. “The discussions on this exhibit began years ago. There is absolutely no intent for a political message. It is the story of two groups.”

To be sure, China’s human rights record has improved significantly since the days of Chairman Mao Tse-tung. But as the Aug. 8 opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics approaches, China has been under increasing criticism.

Human Rights in China reported last week an uptick in abuses “under the banner of the official ‘Olympics Stability Drive,'” citing suppression of government criticism for school collapses in the Sichuan earthquake, harassment of those wanting to commemorate the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre and ongoing oppression of Tibet.

In 2001, China promised that hosting the Olympics would improve its commitment to human rights.

“They have not delivered on that,” said Phelim Kine, Asia researcher for New York-based Human Rights Watch.

He added that the government has been shipping out of Beijing both unwanted voices and undesirable faces, such as the people who make a living digging through the garbage for recyclables.

“For the principles that the Wiesenthal Center stands for, they should not be complicit in this airbrushing of history,” Kine said. “China is a country in which there are severe and ongoing human rights abuses. To not mention those in any regard is a serious omission.”

However, when the question of the exhibition was raised with Rabbi Harold Schulweis, founder of Jewish World Watch, he argued that while it is important for the world to continue pressuring China, the Museum of Tolerance made a pragmatic and “even morally wise” decision in broadening a channel between itself and the Chinese government.

“For the sake and possibility of peace for the future,” Schulweis said, “one has to take advantage of any openness on the other side, whatever the motivation may be.”

The exhibition, which unofficially opened June 17, is scheduled to run through Sept. 2, to be followed by a showcase of a Mexican diplomat in the south of France who helped 40,000 Spanish Republicans and Jews flee the fascists.

It is based on the research of Pan Guang, dean of the Center of Jewish Studies Shanghai. Cooper met Pan in 1989 and said he was dumbfounded by the scholar’s appreciation for Jews — so astonished that when Cooper visited Pan’s home, he searched for a photo of a Jewish grandparent, anything to explain his academic interest. Cooper couldn’t find one, but in Pan he found an important ally, whom he has been working with since.

Jewish immigration to China began in the mid-19th century with Sephardic Jews in search of trade with the British Empire. Persecuted Russian Jews, like Mordechai Olmert, who later left for Palestine, followed five decades later. They settled in Harbin, Shanghai and Tianjin, established their own organizations and newspapers and built schools and synagogues and cemeteries.

Life was modest for most, but a few, like Silas Aaron Hardoon, the richest Jew in the Far East, and Sir Elly Kadoorie, president of the Shanghai Zionist Association, lived affluent, influential lives.

The greatest influx began in 1933, after Hitler’s rise to power. At the end of 1941, Shanghai was home to more than 20,000 densely packed Jewish refugees — more than Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand and South Africa combined.

The communist ascension created tension throughout China, the Jewish communities included, and by the 1950s, most Jews had migrated again. Few Jews — about 1,000, according to the World Jewish Congress — remain in the most populous country in the world, but philo-Semitism is more visible than it’s been in decades, Cooper said.

“Mao’s iron-clad anti-Israel stand couldn’t stop this,” said Cooper, who has taken numerous Chinese officials to Israel during the past decade. “It created a black hole in history, but it couldn’t stop this underlying affinity.”

Can tolerance extend to China exhibition? Read More »

Briefs: Comedy writer Ross endows UCLA Yiddish chair, Hadassah official focuses on fundraising

Leave a Comment / California, Community, Philanthropy /

Veteran comedy writer and producer Michael “Mickey” Ross has donated $4 million to endow an academic chair in Yiddish language and culture at UCLA.

The university’s Center for Jewish Studies announced that the gift by Michael and Irene Ross will provide support for an “outstanding scholar of Yiddish culture,” as well as for faculty and graduate student research, academic conferences and lectures for the general public.

Born Isidore Rovinsky, Ross grew up in a Yiddish-speaking home, permeated, he said, by “the essence of Yiddishkayt.” After graduating from City College of New York, he served as an Army pilot during World War II and was shot down over Nazi-occupied France.

His first professional television job was as stager-director for “The Gary Moore Show.” He hit his stride in the 1970s as an Emmy-winning writer and executive producer for three groundbreaking and immensely successful sitcoms, “All in the Family,” “The Jeffersons” and “Three’s Company.”

Yiddish has been taught at UCLA for 30 years, and the Ross gift “will allow us to move forward to our goal of becoming a center of international distinction in Jewish and Yiddish studies,” said David N. Myers, director of the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies.

“Renowned for its wide range of expression, from the comic to the tragic, Yiddish was the language of great rabbis, authors, entertainers, scientists and political activists,” Myers added.

“The fact that the overwhelming majority of the world’s Yiddish-speaking population was murdered in the Holocaust makes the study of Yiddish an especially urgent and necessary task,” he said.

— Tom Tugend, Contributing Editor

Hadassah Official Focuses on Fundraising

“There’s a difference between my husband and myself when we decide to support a cause,” Andrea Silagi observed. “He’ll simply go ahead and write a check. I’ll also write a check, but I’ll certainly consult him first.”

Silagi is a Hadassah vice president and coordinator of development for the 300,000-member women’s organization and, therefore, an expert on women’s fundraising.

In the case of Hadassah fundraising, we’re talking serious money. The organization raised $100 million from large and small donors last year and is in the home stretch of a special $210 million capital campaign for a major addition to the Hadassah hospital in Ein Kerem.

Besides the two Jerusalem medical centers in Ein Kerem and on Mount Scopus, Hadassah supports the Hadassah College, also in Jerusalem; three youth villages; Youth Aliyah; Young Judaea; breast cancer awareness programs; youth-at-risk projects; and a leadership academy.

While Hadassah gets some huge grants — one couple gave $75 million for the hospital addition — the day-by-day fundraising is the job of members and 13 professionals in the United States.

“Our slogan is, ‘No money, no mission,'” said Silagi, who attended this week’s national Hadassah convention in Los Angeles.

To carry out the mission, she oversees a continuing education program among the membership, including a convention workshop titled, “Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway (Overcoming the Fear of Asking for Donations).”

“It’s not always easy to ask people for money, even for the best of causes, and the training program serves as a kind of desensitizing workshop,” Silagi said.

“We run through different scenarios of how to ask for money and point to success stories,” she added. In most cases, members serve as “door openers” for follow-up by professional fundraisers.

Serving as auxiliary fundraisers are Hadassah International chapters in Europe, South America and Australia (though not in Israel) and the men’s Associates, with a membership of 30,000.

Silagi lives in Encino, and before taking on her volunteer responsibilities with Hadassah, she worked as a Hebrew teacher at Los Angeles-area synagogue schools.

“I went to Israel as a youngster, studied and worked there, met my husband there and just fell in love with the country,” she said. “My Hadassah work is one way to continue the connection.”

— TT

Arrested Agriprocessors Workers Get Aid

A New Jersey-based Jewish charity helped provide for families affected by the raid on Agriprocessors. The Good People Fund, in cooperation with Temple Israel-Ner Tamid and Gleaner’s Food Bank, both of Ohio, delivered 24 pallets of food and humanitarian relief — enough to fill a 53-foot truck — to a food pantry in Postville, Iowa.

Nearly 400 workers were arrested in a May 12 raid in Postville at the country’s largest kosher meat producer, leaving many families without income and dependent on outside assistance to meet their basic needs.

“The undocumented workers arrested during the raid included mothers and fathers who were later released on humanitarian grounds to care for small children,” said Naomi Eisenberger, the fund’s executive director.

“But these people cannot work and have no way to pay rent or put food on their tables,” she said. “Since Agriprocessors is the largest kosher slaughterhouse in the country, we felt it was particularly appropriate for the Jewish community to step in and help.”

— Jewish Telegraphic Agency

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