February 11, 2009

Two thousand people showed up at Temple Beth Am this past Shabbat, and not just to see Shifrah Harris become a bat mitzvah.

That’s why I went — Shifrah and my daughter went to school together.

But a large portion of the assembly came to hear Rabbi Adam Kligfeld, or, as several people had taken to calling him that morning, The Contestant. After months sifting through resumes and conducting interviews to fill the venerable shul’s post of senior rabbi, the rabbinical search committee had narrowed the field to three. Now each finalist was to spend a Shabbat with the congregation at La Cienega and Olympic and engage in a kind of rabbinic decathlon so members could assess them in action.

It was this ultimate event — the Saturday sermon to the assembled congregation — that drew the largest crowd.

“This is the talent portion of the competition,” one temple humorist — there is no shortage of them at Beth Am — whispered to me. “You missed the bathing suits.”

Yes, in the era of “Survivor” and “Apprentice,” the day was rife with references to reality TV.

“Actually, it’s terrible casting,” said a member there for the judgment. “Did you notice all the contestants are Jews?”

The humor helped diffuse the day’s innate drama.

This is a shul that grows attached to its senior rabbis, and vice versa. Rabbi Joel Rembaum announced his retirement just over a year ago, after serving 25 years. He had taken the helm from Rabbi Jacob Pressman, who served 50 years.

Rabbi Pressman, now 88 years old, came for the tryout, along with his wife, Marjorie, the ur-rebbetzin.

As one woman said of her shul and its rabbis, “We mate for life.” That had to weigh on the mind of Rabbi Kligfeld as he stood on the pulpit. Kligfeld is a youthful looking 38-year-old, a father of two. He leads Congregation Eitz Chaim, a community of 150 families in Monroe, N.Y. He knows the e-mail addresses of every active member of his shul, he told people the night before. Now, staring out into a huge, packed sanctuary, he had to be asking himself: What do they all want of me?

I sat in the balcony. In the row before me sat Rabbi Elliot Dorff, rector of the American Jewish University and a Temple Beth Am stalwart. He was there with a large group of family and friends. Rabbi Dorff is Adam Kligfeld’s father-in-law. If he was nervous, he hid it well.

By then, I was nervous. I came to shul that morning to hear 13-year-old Shifrah, but found myself sucked into the day’s high drama. Shifrah had completed most of the service — flawlessly, movingly — in the downstairs Library Minyan. Then, because it was Judgment Day, the hundreds of people in the downstairs minyan joined the temple’s other congregants in the main sanctuary, so that everyone could have a chance to hear Kligfeld.

(Rabbis Neil Zuckerman and Jeremy Kalmanofsky will have their turns in the coming weeks).

As search committee chair Mark Wolf explains on the temple’s Web site, each candidate will spend two days at Beth Am. They will attend the daily minyan; meet with staff of the synagogue and its school, Pressman Academy; observe classes in Pressman’s pre-school, elementary and middle schools; conduct a “Rap with the Rabbi” for teens; participate in Friday evening services and give a brief word of Torah; and speak about a current topic before a communitywide Shabbat dinner. And that’s just Friday.

“On Saturday,” Wolf continues, “the candidates will teach Mishnah before davening in the morning, present a formal drash to the whole community in the sanctuary after Musaf and lead the teaching at Seudah Shlisheet in the afternoon. Additionally, synagogue leadership will have the opportunity to spend some time with each candidate in more formal settings.”

More formal settings?

Kligfeld arranged his sheaf of notes to speak, and I thought of the unreal demands the modern shul puts on its rabbi. In how many other jobs are you called on to be a scholar, a teacher, a fundraiser, an administrator, an inspirational speaker, a personal counselor? You must relate to the sick, the single, the elderly and even teenagers. You better be spiritually attuned and financially astute, up-to-date on every burning issue from stem cell research to Israeli politics — and have a great sense of humor.

And, that’s not all. At a time when members are scarce, competition is fierce and dollars are tight, synagogues rely on their senior rabbis to be their brand, to carry the institution’s name and identity into the marketplace. So it couldn’t hurt to be telegenic, charismatic, and an activist.

And the burdens of leadership don’t just fall on rabbis. In our complicated times, it seems we push every tough problem off our shoulders and up the chain, waiting for someone, somehow to make it right. Whether it’s a rabbi or an Obama — at a time when leaders seem in short supply, we have a bottomless need and fantastical expectations.

Finally, just as the scent of food from the social hall wafted into the sanctuary, Kligfeld spoke.

“It’s 12:30, the Jews are hungry, and now it’s my time to speak,” he said, and the first of many rolling laughs burst forth from the crowd. The man was funny, erudite, composed. He spoke of the need to balance the Jewish compulsion to break free, to revolutionize, to change, with our desire to remain rooted, “in context,” part of tradition.

Afterward, in the social hall, everyone — shock! — had an opinion.

“You should have heard him Friday night,” said one woman. “He brought me to tears.”

“He didn’t hit it out of the park,” a man— not even a member, mind you — shrugged.

“I like that he’s young,” another woman, well into her 80s said. “He’ll grow with us.”

For several decades now, one of the most dreaded words in the Jewish community has been the A word: assimilation. How often have we heard rabbis, pollsters and Jewish leaders remind us that America has “loved Jews to death,” to the point that high intermarriage rates and other forms of assimilation have threatened the future of our little tribe in an ocean of loving gentiles?

Thankfully, though, if you look around our community, you will see numerous examples of assimilation of a whole other kind — one that shines a more hopeful light on the Jewish future.

This is the assimilation between Ashkenazim and Sephardim.

After centuries of mutual distancing, these two culturally distinct Jewish communities now represent one of the great stories of the ingathering of exiles, a story of maintaining and sharing traditions in the midst of a long-delayed family reunion. And there’s no better place in the Jewish world to see this reunion than in Los Angeles.

Recently, I witnessed two examples of “Ashkefardic” assimilation, one in a school and the other in a shul.

The school is Yeshivat Ohr Letzion, and it was started a year ago by a Sephardic Orthodox rabbi named David Toledano. In the Sephardic world, the name David Toledano is like Hershel Greenberg for the Ashkenazim. You look at Rabbi Toledano, you hear his accent, and you might as well be transported to the Golden Age of Sephardim in the early Middle Ages.

You would think that such a proud and knowledgeable Sephardic Jew would open a Sephardic school and teach Sephardic tradition. But, in fact, instead of focusing on the uniqueness of ethnic tradition, Rabbi Toledano has opened a school that highlights the uniqueness of each individual student.

Currently a preschool for Jewish kids ages 2 to 5, the school plans to add one new grade each year right through high school. Jewish studies are all done in Hebrew. Every kid gets assessed individually. Teachers are trained to deal with the unique quirks of each child, reflecting the fact that each kid learns differently. I spent a full morning observing their classes, and I saw teachers — Ashkenazim and Sephardim — engage in the delicate balancing act of dealing with individual kids, as well as their whole class. It helps that classes are kept small, just 10 to 15 students in each, and that there are up to three teachers per class.

One of the people instrumental in helping Rabbi Toledano start his “boutique” school is Tamar Andrews, an Ashkenazic woman who runs a Reform preschool at Temple Isaiah on Pico Boulevard. She volunteered to help him navigate through the maze of red tape and regulations to obtain accreditation and to help him hire the best educators. She did this, she says, because she really “believes in the school.”

Imagine that. An Ashkenazi educator from a Reform school helping a strictly Orthodox Sephardic rabbi create a cutting-edge pre-school. This is not your grandfather’s neighborhood.

The location of the school itself is perfectly Ashkefardic. It’s inside the venerable Congregation Mogen David, an old-time Ashkenazi institution on the western edge of Pico-Robertson that has recently seen a minirevival, thanks to the addition of a large Sephardic minyan led by Rabbi Yehuda Moses.

My second recent experience of Ashkefardic immersion came at a bat mitzvah last Shabbat that will surely go down as a first in multicultural assimilation.

It was the bat mitzvah of Rabbi Daniel Bouskila’s daughter, Shira, at his large and elegant synagogue in Westwood — Sephardic Temple Tifereth Israel.

Bouskila, like Toledano, is as Sephardic as baklava and Turkish coffee. Since he married a woman who’s as Ashkenazic as kreplach and matzah ball soup, they have children who are going through, if not an identity crisis, then at least a pleasant overdose of ethnic variety. With Sephardic and Ashkenazic family members in the audience, what’s a sweet bat mitzvah girl with a beautiful voice to do to keep everyone happy?

This was the Bouskila solution: Sing the first half of the haftarah in the Ashkenazic melody and the second half in the Sephardic melody. It was like a slice of gefilte fish with horseradish followed immediately by my mother’s spicy Moroccan fish balls. A perfect and delicious solution.

Of course, it was more than a solution. It was a celebration. Throughout the ceremony, Rabbi Bouskila interspersed traditions from both his Sephardic roots and his wife’s Ashkenazic heritage. Even the Sephardic chazzan mixed up the flavors.

What was weird was how not weird it was. Jews with dark skin and one eyebrow who look like Arabs praying with Jews with white skin and two eyebrows who look like Swedes, and it all felt so … normal.

I’m sure that every day throughout Los Angeles we can witness hundreds of delightful encounters between Jews of different traditions. Some might lead to starting a new school, others to a beautiful marriage and still others simply to interesting conversations that arouse one’s curiosity.

At the Bouskila bat mitzvah, I had one of those conversations with a dear Ashkenazic friend, a rabbi whose roots trace to Russia and Poland. His Ashkenazic background didn’t stop him from offering me a suggestion for a class I will be giving at LimmudLA on President’s Day weekend: “Ten Uniquely Sephardic Traditions that Belong to Every Jew.”

He told me about an ancient Moroccan custom that married couples would follow after the lighting of the Shabbat candles to help keep peace in the home. It turns out I had never heard of it before. So I’m researching it now.

Assimilation works in mysterious ways.

David Suissa, an advertising executive, is founder of OLAM magazine, Meals4Israel.com and Ads4Israel.com. He can be reached at {encode=”dsuissa@olam.org” title=”dsuissa@olam.org”}.

The Republican Party once had a real shot at winning the support of Jewish voters. The cosmopolitan wing of the party led the way, in Northeastern states like New York and New Jersey, and in California. Now that element of the party is in desperate straits.

While Jews generally register as Democrats, they have often voted for moderate Republicans. Growing up in New Jersey, I remember Republican Sen. Clifford Case and New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller. California Jews will listen to moderate Republicans, too, as shown by Jews who voted for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and, before him, Mayor Richard Riordan in Los Angeles. But Republican moderates in Democratic states are now the first casualties of the national shift to the Democrats.

The Republicans became dominant when their moderate cosmopolitan wing absorbed Southern white conservatives. But now, moderates have become marginalized, and the Republican Party as a whole is in danger of becoming more like a regional third party tied together by ideology than a real second party ready to build a governing majority. 

The Republican Party, on public view during the economic stimulus debate, is moving further and further away from the party that once appealed to Jews. Despite the recent smashing electoral defeat, which was largely fought on economic issues, every House Republican voted against the stimulus plan.

This disconnect has been years in the making. Newt Gingrich, in the 1990s, and Karl Rove, a decade later, created a Republican base that watches its own cable news network, listens to right-wing talk radio and thinks the rest of us are crazy. House Republicans recently called on Joe the Plumber to advise them on the economic stimulus. Polls show that independent voters, a reliable barometer of winning majorities, now resemble Democrats much more than they do Republicans.

The party’s strength is now in the South and in the nonindustrial Midwest. Where unions are weak, Republicans still do well. But the states where Republicans today are strong are places where there are few Jewish voters. In the areas where Jews live, Democrats are moving from strength toward dominance. 

The states with the largest Jewish populations are New York, California, Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Illinois, Maryland and Texas. Obama carried nine of those 10 states. He swept the Northeast and the industrial Midwest. Norm Coleman, Jewish Republican of Minnesota, is about to be replaced by Al Franken, a Jewish Democrat. (Coleman has already been hired as a consultant by the Republican Jewish Coalition.) Obama picked up three outer Southern states: North Carolina and the increasingly cosmopolitan Florida and Virginia.

The Southern base’s power to control the party was shown in the Senate vote on the auto bailout late last year. Southern Republican senators from “right to work” states led the charge against saving the auto industry and prevailed over an alliance of the Bush White House and Democrats. Ten Republicans voted for the bailout, most from outside the South, deepening the schism. Yet the Republican abandonment of the more moderate heart of the industrial Midwest is going to cause severe long-term damage to the party’s national future.

With a Democrat now in the White House, only a handful of Republicans are so far willing to break party ranks. Four Senate Republicans (Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and George Voinovich of Ohio) voted against a Republican amendment that would have stripped virtually all spending out of the proposed stimulus bill and substituted tax cuts. Only three of the four (minus Voinovich) pledged to vote for the economic stimulus plan itself. Two Republican governors spoke up for the stimulus: Schwarzenegger of California and Charlie Crist from Florida, governors of two big cosmopolitan states. Four Southern Republican governors announced their opposition to the plan. Sarah Palin played it both ways, first lobbying for Alaska’s share of the stimulus and then joining the Republican governors in opposition.

While Republicans feel surrounded by victorious Democrats, the even tinier moderate wing of the party is itself surrounded by angry conservatives. If it is tough to be a Republican in D.C., it is even harder to be a Republican moderate in the party ranks. The cudgel of a conservative primary opponent causes heartburn. When the shrewd Specter, who had nearly been defeated by a conservative in the 2004 Republican primary, was worried about a primary opponent a month ago, he attacked Attorney General nominee Eric Holder. When he heard that his primary opponent had backed out, he was again free to move back to the center to protect his flank in a general election with an electorate that is highly supportive of Obama.

For most congressional Republicans, primary threats are more unnerving than anything Obama or the Democratic leadership can say or do. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who had joined the centrist negotiations on the stimulus bill, has to consider the real threat of a Sarah Palin primary challenge in 2010. John McCain’s all-out assault on the Obama economic plan may have been incited by rumors of a primary opponent in Arizona in 2010. And nobody wants to annoy Rush Limbaugh, as shown by one congressman’s groveling to the radio host after mildly criticizing him. So Democratic alliances will have to be with Republicans who do not fear a primary challenge and need to consider Democratic voters in the general election.

In short, the remnants of the Jewish-friendly wing of the Republican Party are pretty nervous. Those Republicans who have the best chance nationally face an uphill struggle in the party. Take Crist, for instance. Here is what he told The New York Times Magazine: “I do support [stem cell research]. I think it is common sense to pay attention to what is happening in science. My father is a physician, my sister is a physician, and I try to be enlightened on things that might extend and create productive life.” Sounds like a good vice presidential pick in 2008, as Collins or Snowe would have been. But all would have had trouble with the base.

There is no way to know whether these trends will continue, or if the entropy of the Republican Party will be reversed. For the near future, though, we are likely to see an ascendant Democratic majority dealing with a largely unified, aggressive and at times effective ideological opponent whose determination and intensity mask a profound electoral weakness in national politics.

Raphael J. Sonenshein, a political scientist at Cal State Fullerton, is the 2008 Fulbright Tocqueville Distinguished Chair in American Studies at the University of Paris VIII. He writes a monthly column for The Journal.

On Oct. 29, 2008, the Israeli Supreme Court rendered a unanimous decision permitting the Simon Wiesenthal Center to resume construction on its Museum of Tolerance project on the site of a municipal parking lot in the heart of western Jerusalem. The court denied the contention of the project’s chief opponent, Sheik Raed Salah, a notorious anti-Semite and Hamas supporter, that the parking lot was a Muslim cemetery and allowed construction to resume even on the small portion where bones were found.

For half a century, hundreds of Jews, Christians and Muslims parked their cars every day on the site, with no protest whatsoever from any Muslim groups, religious leaders, nongovernmental organizations or professors.

As the court noted, “for almost 50 years, the compound has not been a part of the cemetery, both in the normative sense and in the practical sense, and it was used for various public purposes.”

It also said, “During all those years, no one raised any claim, on even one occasion, that the planning procedures violated the sanctity of the site or that they were contrary to law as a result of the historical and religious uniqueness of the site.” And, “for decades, this area was not regarded as a cemetery by the general public or by the Muslim community.”

“No one,” the court said, “denied this position.”

In 1964, the highest Muslim authority, the Muslim Religious Council, even ruled that the adjacent Independence Park (Mamilla Cemetery) was a mundras, an abandoned site where building is permissible. Today, mundras is a widely relied-upon categorization and sanctioned throughout the Arab world — in Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian territories.

While traditional Judaism does not have such a concept, the court noted that “in practice, where public needs required this, an agreed Jewish law solution has usually been found, and this allowed the building to be carried out in a way that minimized … the violation of the graves.”

Since the Israeli government and city of Jerusalem gave us the land eight years ago, the Wiesenthal Center has endured many checks and balances — planning and architectural meetings, City Council hearings, displaying the Frank Gehry model at Jerusalem City Hall, placing ads announcing the project in Hebrew, Arabic and English newspapers. During all these years, while tens of millions of dollars were being spent, not a single protest was heard. No scholar, ordinary citizen or government official argued that the site was a cemetery.

Why? Because they agreed with the court that “the area has not been classified as a cemetery for decades.” The bones found during the excavation process were between 300 and 400 years old, unaccompanied by a single marker or monument identifying any individual name, family or religion.

Under the supervision of the Israel Antiquities Authority, the bones discovered will be treated with the utmost dignity and will be re-interred in accordance with Muslim tradition.

Jerusalem is more than 3,000 years old. Hardly a street or neighborhood is without relics or bones. We could declare it a cemetery, off limits to everyone — a city of the past with no future — or we could find a better way to revere the past without choking off the future.

Some recent critics, such as Americans for Peace Now and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, argue that the museum should set a higher standard. We have. Even though our opponents deliberately watched our project move forward without protesting, our lawyers still attempted to meet with Sheik Salah but were rebuffed. The court’s own mediator tried but fared no better. We offered practical solutions to build on top of the bones without disturbing them — also rejected. We offered to restore the virtually abandoned nearby Mamilla Cemetery — they were not interested.

The sheik had one objective — to declare this site in western Jerusalem a Muslim site. He himself chose the venue of the Supreme Court but is unwilling to accept and abide by its unanimous decision. The Museum of Tolerance will not allow itself to fall victim to intimidation and intolerance.

Fortunately, many Israeli and Jewish leaders have endorsed our project: Prime Minster Ehud Olmert; former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations; Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz; Irwin Cotler, former Canadian justice minister; Howard Friedman, chairman of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee board; respected journalist Ehud Ya’ari; and Eitan Haber, a former adviser to the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. (Visit http://www.wiesenthal.com to see all videotaped endorsements.)

It is important to understand that the court’s findings clearly indicate that its decision was moral, as well as legal.

“The importance and benefit of … the plan to build the Museum of Tolerance in the center of the city of Jerusalem are very great,” the court said. It said the museum “embodies an ideal of establishing a spiritual center that will spread a message of human tolerance between peoples” and that the location “has special significance” in a city “for three religions and an ancient history, which is unique to human civilization.”

The museum site has been a public facility since 1960. It will never return to what it may have been 300 years ago. Seeing millions of people, young and old, Jews and non-Jews, arriving there to immerse themselves in the principles of mutual respect and social responsibility is the very best kind of public-use facility that Jerusalem and the State of Israel needs at this time.

Rabbi Marvin Hier is the founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and its Museum of Tolerance.

If one were intent on undermining Israel’s claim to Jerusalem, there would be no better way to accomplish this goal than to build a Jewish museum atop a historic Muslim cemetery in the heart of the city.

Incredibly, the Simon Wiesenthal Center — a Los Angeles-based organization that combats anti-Semitism and advocates for Jewish rights around the world — has undertaken to do just that. It has begun construction of a Museum of Tolerance on the grounds of the Mamilla Cemetery located in the downtown area of western Jerusalem. Mamilla is an 800-year-old site that was an active Muslim graveyard until at least the 1930s.

The Wiesenthal Center is a worthy and admirable institution, but in this case, it has lost its way. In a city that is sacred not only to Jews but to more than 2 billion Christians and Muslims, Israel’s legitimacy as a sovereign power rests on its sensitivity to the religious concerns of its sister faiths.

As critics have noted, if Muslims were uprooting Jewish graves in order to build an Islamic museum on the Mount of Olives, Jews in Israel and throughout the world would respond with outrage. Muslims can be expected to respond similarly to the Wiesenthal museum and, indeed, have begun to do so.

No one claims that Wiesenthal set out to offend Muslim sensibilities. Awarded the site by the municipality of Jerusalem, only later did the Wiesenthal Center realize that the museum would be erected on a graveyard.

Instead of agreeing to build elsewhere, however, its leaders chose to fight in Israel’s Supreme Court for the right to continue construction. Last October, they won their case, largely on technical grounds. The court noted that planning had been completed, a permit issued and construction had commenced. It also pointed to evidence, which was far from conclusive, that some Muslim authorities no longer saw the site as sacred.

Yet while winning the legal argument, Wiesenthal has lost the moral one. What is legally permissible may be ethically questionable and religiously offensive. Indeed, there is something perverse and ironic about building a monument to tolerance that will be a permanent source of tension in the region and that undermines the mutual respect and trust that tolerance requires. Furthermore, constructing the museum in Mamilla sets a dangerous precedent that will undermine Jewish efforts to preserve abandoned Jewish cemeteries and sacred sites in Eastern Europe and the Muslim world.

A large and growing number of responsible, mainstream Jewish voices have spoken out against the museum, including the Reform movement’s Israel Religious Action Center. Rafi Greenberg, a prominent archaeologist at Tel Aviv University, has argued that Mamilla is one of the few surviving Islamic sites in western Jerusalem and therefore must be left intact.

Especially important has been the criticism of the former rector of the Hebrew University, professor Yehoshua Ben-Arieh, who is perhaps Israel’s most prominent expert on the geographical history of Jerusalem. Ben-Arieh has cast doubt on the claim that Muslim authorities permitted construction on the grounds of the graveyard in the past and has asserted that building the museum will cause damage to Jewish-Muslim relations that will last for generations.

It is true that radical Islamic voices, within and outside of Israel, have attacked the museum, and not a few of these voices are motivated by hostility to Jews and the Jewish state. Sadly, Wiesenthal spokespeople have attempted to portray all criticism of the museum as the rantings of Israel bashers and left-wing fanatics. They have gone as far as to suggest that those who attack the museum are serving non-Zionist ends and delegitimizing the Jewish state.

Such claims, however, are absurd.

The cries of Islamic fanatics cannot discredit critics of the museum any more than the appearance of black radicals could discredit the drive for black equality in America. What is important here is what Israel and the Jewish people do to promote human dignity and true tolerance, and understanding the religious concerns of our non-Jewish neighbors is the essence of enlightened Zionism. It strengthens rather than weakens Israel’s cause.

This is an uncertain time in the Middle East. The war in Gaza, waged by Israel to defend its citizens in the south, has unsettled the area. The Obama administration is considering what role it will play in the Arab-Israeli conflict. The last thing that Israel needs now is a religious crisis that can easily be avoided.

Let’s admit the simple truth: There is something profoundly disturbing about the idea of putting a Jewish Museum of Tolerance on a plot of land where Muslims have been burying their dead for most of the last 800 years.

I have great respect for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and I would like to see its museum built — somewhere else in Jerusalem.

Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie is the president of the Union for Reform Judaism.