The last official airlift of Ethiopian Jews was scheduled to land in Tel Aviv on Tuesday, bringing to an end a state-organized campaign that began nearly 30 years ago and brought in some 120,000 immigrants from the east African nation.
The Jewish Agency for Israel said its emissary to Addis Ababa had been recalled, though Jerusalem officials could still be sent out to help an estimated 1,400 Ethiopian crypto-Jews, apply to immigrate as part of efforts to reunite them with relatives already in Israel.
“But we will no longer be seeing anything on the scale of Operation Moses or Operation Solomon,” Jewish Agency Chairman Zeev Bielski told Israel Radio, alluding to major missions to bring in Ethiopians by air and sea in the 1980s.
He called on the government to reinvest its energies in helping the Ethiopian community in Israel, many of whose members live in poverty and complain of inadequate social integration.
U.S. Revokes Visas for Palestinian Fulbrights
The United States revoked the entry visas of three Palestinian students who won Fulbright scholarships.
The State Department announced Monday that the three Gazans would not be admitted to the United States after “new information” was received about them. U.S. officials declined to give further details.
In June, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice came out in support of the three Fulbright scholars after Israel, citing security concerns, refused to give them permits to leave the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.
Four other Palestinians who won Fulbrights were allowed to leave Gaza.
Israel ‘Knows’ Where Shalit Held
Israel knows where Gilad Shalit is being held captive, the Israeli armed forces chief said.
“We know who is holding Shalit, and where,” Israel Radio quoted Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi as saying Monday in an address to new military draftees.
The remarks stirred speculation that Israel could be preparing an operation to rescue Shalit, a tank crewman who was abducted to the Gaza Strip by Hamas-led gunmen in June 2006 and has been kept mostly incommunicado since.
But Internal Security Minister Avi Dichter told the radio station that there has been no change in Israel’s intelligence gathering on Shalit or policy of holding Egyptian-brokered negotiations on his return.
Hamas has demanded that Israel free hundreds of jailed Palestinian terrorists in exchange for Shalit, but Jerusalem has balked at the asymmetry of the proposed swap. Israel Radio quoted Ashkenazi as saying that retrieving Shalit is crucial so that all those serving the Jewish state know they will not be abandoned on the battlefield.
Israeli Family Leaves Girl, 3, at Airport
A 3-year-old girl was found wandering at Ben-Gurion International Airport after the rest of her family boarded a plane to Paris.
Police accompanied the girl to the boarding gate but the plane already had taken off with her parents and four siblings aboard. The girl was flown to Paris later Sunday, and her family met her at the airport.
Police will question the parents upon their return to Israel.
Last week, the Israeli daily Ha’aretz reported that an 8-year-old boy traveling alone was flown by El Al Israel Airlines from Ben-Gurion Airport to Brussels instead of to his destination in Munich.
The only U.S.-born Jew on Israel’s Olympic team has been kicked off after failing two drug tests.
Swimmer Max Jaben, 22, who was slated to compete in the 200- and 400-meter freestyle events in Beijing, tested positive for the anabolic steroid boldenone in separate tests.
Jaben, a native of suburban Kansas City who made aliyah last summer, denies ever taking the drug.
“I’m extremely upset,” he said after his second test came back positive. “I cannot believe that this happened. There has obviously been a mistake somewhere.”
If you wanted to start a worldwide revival of Moroccan Jewish customs, where would you base your operations? Probably where there’s already a high concentration of Moroccan Jews, like, say, Israel, Montreal or France. But right in the heart of trendy Westwood?
Maybe there’s a disconnect there, but don’t say that to Rabbi Mordechai Lebhar. He’s very happy in Westwood.
For one thing, he’s happy wherever his books are. On a recent Sunday afternoon in his cozy Westwood apartment, he showed me some of these books, arranged in high piles on his dining room table. He picked up each one like a watchmaker with a fragile watch. The books contain teachings of the great Moroccan sages going back several centuries.
They are rare books seen by few people, fragile and precious.
But there’s one book in those piles that is not so rare. This is a book the rabbi himself wrote three years ago, “Magen Avot” (“Shield of our Fathers”). The book distilled many of the Moroccan customs discussed by the sages, and it has caused a mini-stir in Moroccan circles around the world because it challenges Moroccan Jews everywhere to reclaim their long-forgotten traditions.
Lebhar’s got this mad love affair with tradition. At one point, he choked up as he spoke of a certain Moroccan custom which I also recall from childhood: Before the final evening prayers of Shabbat, and in front of the congregation, the best voices of the shul would sing these beautiful Tehilim melodies. Why did they do that?
Our Moroccan ancestors, the rabbi explained, were Torah romantics. They were so in love with Shabbat that they didn’t want it to end. So they sang these soulful melodies at the twilight of the holy day, as a way of soaking up and deepening the Shabbat experience, longing against all odds that it would never end.
The rabbi thinks that if Moroccan Jews would become more aware of the reasons behind their traditions, they would be more likely to honor them.
And those reasons are not always romantic. For example, at Shabbat meals, Moroccans have a tradition of saying certain brachas over food, between the Kiddush and the blessing on the bread. Why? Not because our salads are so amazing that we can’t stand to wait another minute, but because Torah-observant Jews have an obligation to recite 100 brachas a day. Since Shabbat prayers have fewer brachas than weekday prayers, our ancestors used the Shabbat meal to help them fulfill that obligation.
Lebhar’s got hundreds of those customs. He can go on for hours on even silly customs, like, say, why Moroccan Jews kiss each other in shul. A few years ago, the great Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef, who hails from Iraq and often makes rulings that differ from Moroccan customs, ruled that kissing was not allowed in synagogue. He interpreted a talmudic teaching differently than the Moroccan sages, who allowed this traditional greeting between men, based on their own talmudic interpretation.
The point that Lebhar keeps making is that all those Moroccan traditions, silly or not, have good reasons behind them, many of them talmudic reasons driven by a deep respect for Jewish law.
“A lot of Moroccans treat these customs like grandmothers’ folktales,” he told me. “They don’t take them seriously. But you can’t just throw 500 years out the window.”
Since he published his book, he says he’s been getting calls from Moroccan Jews around the world who are gaining a new appreciation for their own customs. That’s why he’s planning to write three more volumes.
Still, for someone so obsessed with reviving his ancestors’ customs, Lebhar has some explaining to do.
Like, for starters, why did he leave his Moroccan community in Montreal when he was in his early 20s to study for more than 10 years in some of the world’s most hard-core Lithuanian yeshivas? And then become fluent in Yiddish?
And why did he become a key player in a whole other Torah revival, one run by Ashkenazi Jews out of Westwood Kehilla, where Lebhar heads a busy outreach kollel?
He doesn’t get defensive when I confront him with these contradictions. He wanted to learn in the best yeshivas, he says, and immerse himself in Talmud. As far as his role with Westwood Kehilla and their program LINK (Los Angeles Intercommunity Kollel), he loves that they’re creating another “Torah hood” on the Westside.
The person who brought him out here a few years ago, Rabbi Asher Brander, who runs Westwood Kehilla and LINK, has built a portable center of Torah outreach where, Lebhar says, “there’s always serious learning going on.”
That’s the word, I think, that might explain Lebhar’s seeming contradictions: Serious. He takes his Torah seriously, and so do the rabbis and students at Westwood Kehilla and LINK. Lebhar’s a funny guy, but get him going on a piece of Talmud, and he’s in another world.
Seriousness might also explain the bond he feels with his Moroccan ancestors — those holy men of Fez, Meknes, Marakkesh and Casablanca who took their traditions very seriously, and whose words live on in the books on Lebhar’s dining room table.
When I asked him what compels him to continue working on this dream of a Sephardi Moroccan revival — while immersed in an Ashkenazi community — he told me that when he lived in Jerusalem, and studied at the Litvish Yeshiva, he would visit this holy man every week.
The man was the former chief rabbi of Morocco, Rabbi Chalom Essas. After a few years, Lebhar was so impressed with the chief rabbi’s knowledge of Moroccan tradition that he suggested to Rabbi Essas that he should write a book on the subject.
In true Jewish fashion, the chief rabbi, probably having no clue that Lebhar would soon be living in trendy Westwood, replied: “That’s a great idea. Why don’t you do it?”
David Suissa, an advertising executive, is founder of OLAM magazine and Ads4Israel.com. He can be reached at dsuissa@olam.org.
I never imagined that there would be an African American presidential nominee of a major party in my lifetime. Now that the Democrats are on the verge of nominating Sen. Barack Obama, I’m only just beginning to absorb how different it is. Most of what we know about black candidates comes from mayoral races in big cities. Quite a bit of that experience is useful, but some of what we’re experiencing now is uncharted territory.
Since 1968, Republicans have wielded the race card to divide Democrats and elect presidents. From Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy to George H.W. Bush’s Willie Horton, Republicans have lovingly cultivated the racial reservations of working-class white Democrats, while at the same time appearing reasonable and above the battle to moderate white voters. The strategy has largely failed with one group of white voters, Jews, who have mostly stayed with the Democratic candidate.
Democratic candidates have struggled to find an approach that will cross racial boundaries and keep African American and white voters in the same tent. Again and again, Republicans have smashed Democrats with unanswered personal attacks on racially and ideologically charged issues.
The most successful Democrat of the era was Bill Clinton. Clinton could speak to hard-edged white audiences and leave them feeling that he understood where they were coming from. He could also deliver an attack against the Republicans without appearing negative. He liked to call his charges “comparative,” rather than negative.
After flirting with an ineffective high-road strategy, Sen. John McCain has now loosed the traditional Republican attack machine. It’s working much better than his original strategy. He managed to inject the race issue into the debate and get Obama blamed for it.
Obama is suddenly in rough waters, with the attacks sticking, his polling dropping and his party worried. McCain is having fun. Nobody is asking him any hard questions anymore about the difference between Shiites and Sunnis or about birth control policy. Now they only ask about his ads, and he’s delighted to talk about them.
Minority candidates — especially when they are running for the first time — carry the burden of their whole people. When we get to know them better, we are embarrassed by what we initially believed.
How many Angelenos in 1969 decided that Tom Bradley was a closet Black Panther because Sam Yorty said so? How many thought in 2001 that Antonio Villaraigosa was a friend of drug dealers?
Charges stick against Democrats, and they stick like glue to a new minority candidate. How many otherwise attentive and politically informed Jewish voters believe whatever anonymous e-mailers say about Obama, including the false charge that he’s a Muslim?
The question about Obama, one that is of deep concern to anxious Democrats, is whether he is more like those nice Democrats who show up every four years to get their lunch money stolen by the Republicans or like the tougher, quicker Bill Clinton. It’s so utterly obvious that Obama has to get off the defensive and go on the attack that it makes one wonder what’s been taking so long.
The purpose of attacking is not to be negative for its own sake but to recognize that an election is a choice between two paths and two leaders, not just a referendum on whether the Democratic candidate has passed a threshold to replace a discredited administration. An aggressive campaign does not have to be angry or ugly. It can be funny. It can be positive. It just has to be clear, simple and devastating.
But an African American candidacy is different. Obama can’t easily be the racial middleman as Clinton was. And being aggressive carries its own special dynamics. It may be that the timing is different for a black candidate.
First-time black candidates often confront evidence that their attacks on white opponents generate some voter backlash. One possibility is that Obama has been waiting for McCain to show his hand and chose to absorb the first attacks, thereby making it easier for the black candidate to be aggressive. Perhaps he feels that McCain’s harshness will weaken the Republicans among his media worshippers, and some of that has happened.
It’s also possible that the Obama people are only now coming to see that they need to change their strategy. The Obama campaign may be doing what it does magnificently well — grass-roots organization — and avoiding what it does poorly — campaign messaging. His recent burst of ads on energy is a promising beginning.
Obama has a few advantages over African American mayoral candidates. Big- city mayors can’t do much about the economy or the economic needs of working-class whites. The president can do a lot.
Obama can present a strong economic message — say by borrowing Sen. Hillary Clinton’s last several months of speeches — and pound it home and link President Bush and McCain in the process. He has a whole party of allies, many of whom are white, who can go on the attack for him. Surrogates are far more important for a black candidate, and they can go places and say things that he can’t. He can pick a tough vice presidential candidate.
For all their previous success, Republicans are playing a declining hand by not expanding beyond white voters. Obama’s success with Latinos so far means that the Republicans have no margin for error. Obama will win the overwhelming share of African Americans in a very high turnout.
If Republicans can’t dominate with whites, Obama wins. If Obama can stay above the race issue and win on the economy, he will prevent a wholesale white defection.
With Jewish voters, Obama has to deal with the whole baggage of the complex relationship between African Americans and Jews, a mixture of close alliance and bursts of conflict. That one is still very much a work in progress.
A presidential campaign isn’t a graduate seminar — it’s more like a street fight.
Most of the anti-Semitic mail I get these days doesn’t concern Israel, Hollywood or even the threat of a nuclear war in the Middle East — it’s about meat.
The largest supplier of kosher meat in America, Agriprocessors Inc., has been the subject of ongoing public investigation and criticism for two years now.
An undercover investigation in the Forward newspaper first revealed inhumane treatment of cows at the company, located in Postville, Iowa.
A further investigation brought charges of exploitative labor practices.
Then, on the morning of May 12, 2008, in what officials called, “the largest single-site operation of its kind in American history,” 900 agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement executed a raid of Agriprocessors.
They rounded up hundreds of illegal immigrants, who comprised some 75 percent of the company’s workforce.
A subsequent story by New York Times reporter Julia Preston found that 20 of the employees were underage, some as young as 13.
The article reported on several sickening incidences, including one, documented by an company report, in which a worker holding a knife was kicked by a rabbi, cut himself, was sent for stitches, then ordered back on the line.
Agriprocessors has refuted, fought or attempted to make right on these charges. The company brought in animal expert Dr. Temple Grandin to advise on raising the company’s animal treatment standards.
Agriprocessors owner Aaron Rubashkin denied he has engaged in unethical labor practices and blamed the failure of U.S. immigration policy.
“Everything is a lie,” Rubashkin told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
The company has taken out full-page ads in the Jewish press, including this paper, offering a point-by-point rebuttal of the charges.
Last week, it hosted a group of 25 Orthodox rabbis from the United States and Canada on a one-day visit to the plant.
“It’s a different picture than what’s been portrayed,” Rabbi Dovid Eliezrie of Chabad of Yorba Linda told me. “We roamed the plant for hours, talked to anybody we wanted to. The working conditions, the safety benefits, I found them above par. It’s not the reality the unions are telling.”
The trip may have served to calm concerns among some kosher consumers, but judging by my mail, the damage is far more widespread.
Bambi trailer (1942)
“What will The JEWS Think of Next?!?!?” read a letter I received this week. Inside, the author had considerately attached a folded copy of Preston’s New York Times article.
Of course, the image of bearded, black-hatted rabbis abusing farm animals and poor Guatemalan workers is red meat to the scattered anti-Semites out there, but this isn’t a problem of anti-Semitism.
Kashrut is a legal system rooted in morality, and the problems at Agriprocessors occurred because we chose to look away from the messy business of killing animals for food.
Now, like the rest of America, we are looking. There is great unease with our food supply and our factory farm system, a system created by market forces that places profit and efficiency above sustainability, kindness and flavor. The Jews, to our discredit, have simply followed the market’s lead — it’s called Agriprocessors, after all, not Moishe’s Kindly Kosher Cow Farm.
But just as Americans in general are taking control of their food supply — “locavore” was the Oxford American Dictionary’s 2007 Word of the Year — there is a broad consensus that the kosher “brand” should stand for something more than the most narrow and utilitarian interpretation of kosher practice. We can’t blame the system without changing our personal behavior.
That’s why another common e-mail I get these days is also about meat — about whether there is a source in Los Angeles for kosher, organic, humanely raised and slaughtered meat.
My search led me to Musicon Farms, a mail-order source for venison.
That’s right, deer. Kosher Bambi.
Norman Schlaff runs Musicon Farms, the only kosher venison farm in the United States.
Situated on 100 acres in Goshen, in upstate New York, the farm slaughters about 25 deer every six weeks. Customers include high-end restaurants in New York, such as Le Marais and Levana; mail-order customers nationwide, and Tierra Sur, the exceptional Oxnard restaurant headed by chef Todd Aarons.
If you Google Musicon, you’ll find some nasty comments from the folks at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. They sent undercover investigators there who took footage of the slaughter, and I gasped watching Bambi’s throat cut — but I didn’t look away.
Schlaff, in a phone interview with me, maintained that his animals are treated with care — they roam freely, and there is music playing to reduce noise level and stress in the loafing barns. They’re raised without steroids and chemical additives and are fed an organic diet of hay, grains and fruit.
Schlaff, a New York native, made his money in sound engineering — his technology is installed in Shea Stadium, at the U.S. Open and on either side of movie house ticket booths around the country. He’s not getting rich selling a few dozen deer for between $5.50 and $30 per pound, plus pricey, specialized shipping.
And he understands slaughtering — kosher or not — isn’t pleasant.
“It takes a day to get it out of your system,” he said.
And so, putting my money where my mouth is, I ordered.
The package arrived overnight from UPS. Inside, beneath several high-tech layers of insulation and packing ice, were 10 pounds of individually wrapped and freshly butchered venison steaks, chops and stew meat.
The next day, I turned the cute deer I’d seen on Musicon’s Web site into cholent.
It was delicious, and morally challenging, and discomfiting — but I didn’t look away.
Summer Venison Cholent
This makes a lighter, more broth-y cholent that is perfect for warm summer days. If you don’t have any dead deer handy, you can substitute beef, or for a vegetarian version add 1 cup pearl barley.
2 medium onions, peeled and cut in quarters 6 cloves garlic, peeled 2 cloves garlic, peeled and smashed 2 bay leaves 1 cup dried white beans, rinsed very well 8 sundried tomatoes 1 large carrot, peeled and cut in 1 inch chunks 1 stalk celery and leaves, cut in1 inch slices 1 sweet potato, peeled and cut in1 inch chunks 2 Yukon Gold potatoes, peeled and cut in1 inch chunks 1/4 cup olive oil 6 eggs, washed very well 1 1/2 pounds venison stew meat 1/4 cup brandy or cognac (optional) 1 t. sweet paprika venison bones salt and pepper
Preheat oven to 200 degrees F.
Choose a large dutch oven or casserole pan with a tight fitting lid, the kind you can use on the stove and in the oven.
Heat the olive oil until hot, add the stew meat and bones and quickly brown on all sides.
Remove the meat and bones. Add the onion, garlic and paprika and brown for 5 minutes. Deglaze the pot with brandy or cognac (or, if you prefer, skip this step).
Add all the other ingredients, including the meat and bones, placing the eggs on top carefully.
Add water 3/4 of the way to the top. Increase heat to high and bring to boil. Cover the pot with the lid and place in the oven for 6 hours or overnight.
To serve, carefully remove the lid, give each person a whole egg, some meat and vegetables and plenty of broth. And say a little blessing for the deer.
That’s an absurd question, I know. But the Montauk Monster, though apparently dead, is killing jewishjournal.com.
GeekHeeb and The God Blog have each posted twice during the past week about the alien creature or pit bull or raccoon or whatever it might have been or still be that was found on the shores of Long Island. Adam introduced Monty the monster with this post and followed up on it today with a report that the motive for leaking the photo was money all along. I argued Saturday that the monster was simply a dead dog; yesterday I changed direction, thanks to some solid scientific insight, and shared that it might be a raccoon.
We know little but speculation about the creature. But that hasn’t stopped cable news channels and newspapers and bloggers galore from pontificating about Monty. News searches for “Montauk Monster” are going crazy. Though not on the Google Hot Trends, interest in the monster kicked jewishjournal.com off-line for about six hours last week when GeekHeeb was flooded with 13,000 hits in an hour or two, and each of the subsequent posts have slowed our website to a crawl at times because the Monty pages are getting so much traffic.
So apologies if you’re having trouble visiting The God Blog or if it seems to be running extremely slow. This will all be over soon, though I don’t suppose this post will help the situation.
