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Jewish Journal

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August 18, 2009

Berman Backs Obama’s Iran Strategy

Leave a Comment / Community /

Rep. Howard Berman (D-Van Nuys) says that though President Obama’s attempt to engage the government of Iran may not succeed, it is crucial to rallying international support for severe sanctions in the future .

As chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the veteran lawmaker is a key player in shaping U.S. foreign policy and one of Obama’s strongest backers.

“The Bush administration’s policy of trying to isolate Iran, coupled with military threats, simply didn’t work,” Berman said in an interview before an Aug. 14 briefing of community leaders at The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles.

Obama has tightened the screws by shortening the time limit for a positive Iranian response from the end of the year to late September.

Berman is not optimistic that the Iranian government, as now constituted, will respond to the U.S. overtures, but he is certain that subsequent sanctions will therefore be more severe.

“We will tell foreign companies that they have a choice of doing business either with us or with Iran,” Berman said.

On the Iranian nuclear program, Berman calculated that the country has the capability of reprocessing low-grade into high-grade uranium and to design for a warhead to deliver a nuclear payload.

“They’re not there yet, but they’re getting pretty close,” he said.

Despite reported frictions, Jerusalem and Washington see basically eye to eye on the long-range policy toward Tehran.

“In my conversations with Israeli officials, I found that they support our policy as long as three conditions are met,” Berman said. These are: a time limit on U.S. engagement efforts, a willingness to ratchet up the pressure when needed, and the possibility of exercising the military option.

Berman also praised George Mitchell, Obama’s special envoy to the Middle East.

“It may look at times as if Washington is pounding on Jerusalem, but Mitchell has made it quite clear to the Arab states and the Palestinian Authority that they must accept Israel as a Jewish state and stop their incitements against Jews,” Berman said.

— Tom Tugend, Contributing Editor

BJE Changes Name … to BJE
The Bureau of Jewish Education of Greater Los Angeles is undergoing a name change. Beginning in September, it will be known simply as BJE.

“The name of the agency is going to be BJE, like TRW and KFC,” said Gil Graff, BJE’s executive director. “The tagline is ‘Builders of Jewish Education.’”

The decision to update and contemporize the BJE brand came in June after a visibility committee concluded an 18-month review of the agency as part of a strategic plan launched in 2007.

“Identification as a ‘bureau’ no longer reflects who we are and incorrectly suggests that we are a department of a larger organization. At the same time, research indicated positive associations with the BJE name, warranting the preservation of that moniker,” BJE President Marc Rohatiner explains in the organization’s next newsletter.

In addition to soliciting outside opinions, the agency hired two external consultants to work with the committee — Innovation Protocol assisted with the name change, while PRAD Communications helped design the new logo.

— Adam Wills, Senior Editor

College Students Learn Ways to Counter Anti-Israel Bias
Seven college students from Southern California attended the first session of the Legacy Heritage David Project Campus Fellows Seminar, held Aug. 2-6 in Boston, Mass., learning skills and techniques for confronting campus hostility.

This year’s seminar marks the largest outreach to the West Coast since the Boston-based David Project started in 2002 as a response to anti-Semitic and anti-Israel sentiments on campus. Among the Southland students attending the seminar were Channah Barkhordari, Matthew Lavi, Neelie Milstein, Jasmin Nikzad, Neuriel Shore, Mira Simon and Niloo Rivani.

Milstein, a UC Irvine student, said her campus can be a hostile environment.

“Every year we have Israel hate week,” Milstein said. “[The Muslim Student Union] puts it on and they bring an apartheid wall displaying images we see in the media; horrific pictures and a blood-stained Israeli flag.”

This year’s Campus Fellows Seminar was the largest to date, educating 110 campus leaders on ways to respond with pro-Israel messages. Students review key historical facts of the Arab-Israeli conflict, analyze case studies significant to individual campuses and engage in debates.

“What distinguishes this seminar from others is that we have invested in these students and they are really working hand in hand with campus coordinators,” said Ann Kolodner, David Project’s executive director.

“The seminar opened my eyes to see the different experiences everyone is dealing with on their campuses,” Milstein said.

Lavi, programming director for CSUN Students for Israel, said he came away from the conference with worthwhile advice.

The strongest message was “try to be on the offense without being on the offensive,” he said.

— Rebecca Steinberger, Contributing Writer

Berman Backs Obama’s Iran Strategy Read More »

Oren Navigates Waters Among Israel, U.S. Government and American Jews

Leave a Comment / United States /

Tweeted, a diplomat’s job would look something like this: Explain home abroad, explain abroad home.

In recent weeks, it’s seemed as if the job description for Israeli envoys would encroach on the 140-character limit: Explain home abroad, explain abroad home, explain Jews abroad home, explain home to Jews abroad, explain, explain, explain.

Michael Oren, the new Israeli ambassador to Washington, has had a busy six weeks, and he acknowledges that some of his difficulties have had to do with a debate within his government about whether to even engage with liberal American Jews.

“There is a debate, I won’t say there isn’t,” Oren said.

He also made clear which side he is on: “I am committed to reaching out to several groups, Jewish and non-Jewish, that I feel have drifted away from Israel,” he said. “It’s important we reach out and try and bring them back.”

Oren’s criterion: Groups must be committed to Israel’s right to “exist as a free and Jewish state.”

Reports have emerged that some influential officials around Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu favor dealing only with organizations sympathetic to the government’s line on settlements and peace-making. Others counsel engagement with the community’s broad spectrum, with a focus on what unites Israel and the Jews.

Oren would not confirm reports that he has told friends and colleagues that he especially wants to engage Jewish groups widely viewed as being on the liberal end of the Jewish political spectrum such as J Street, or that in general he wants to reach out to forces on the American left. In fact, he would not utter the word “progressive.”

Such an explicit recommendation of engagement with progressives, coupled with a warning that Israel’s posture was eroding U.S. Jewish support, earned the consul general in Boston, Nadav Tamir, a formal reprimand last week when his memo was leaked.

Oren, 54, makes it clear such an outcome is unlikely in his case. He is a historian by training and he is fresh to diplomacy, but already he is committed to professionalism.

“It’s like going from free verse to writing rhymed haiku” is how Oren described his transition from opinionated historian to diplomat.

Still, Oren conveys real joy in his job. He likes recounting how as a 15-year-old from New Jersey, he was part of a youth group that met then-ambassador Yitzhak Rabin in Washington. Oren recalls telling himself that one day he’d love to be Israel’s top envoy to the United States.

Meeting last week with journalists from the Jewish media, Oren would not be drawn into comment on his pre-appointment writings in which he favored unilateral withdrawal from Gaza — a position directly at odds with that of Netanyahu, who has described its effects there as disastrous.

“My opinions I had before I came into this job are irrelevant now,” he said.

It can’t make his job any easier that much of the leaking about U.S.-Israel tensions — and tensions between Israel and some U.S. Jews — appears to be emanating from Oren’s own government. (He won’t comment, saying he doesn’t know the provenance of the leaks.)

Oren found himself scrambling last month to put out such a fire: Ha’aretz had reported that Netanyahu was prone to describe Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s chief of staff, and David Axelrod, the president’s top political adviser, as “self-hating Jews.”

“Here’s an unattributed flying quote,” Oren said, shaking his head. Netanyahu was “furious” and asked Oren to reach out to Emanuel and Axelrod and reassure them that the prime minister had never said those words.

And yet the claim resurfaced again and again — twice on the op-ed page of The New York Times.

“It’s like the end of ‘Fatal Attraction,’”  Oren said. “It keeps coming back.”

Oren acknowledged that Israel should have been more aggressive in countering the notion in the press. He added that the embassy is, along with the U.S. State Department, more proactive in countering misimpressions.

“We are together working to dispel any attempt to fabricate any sense of a crisis,” Oren said.

A State Department spokesman did not return a call from JTA.

For instance, it has been reported that Oren was twice “summoned” to the State Department to discuss Jewish settlements in Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem.

Oren insisted that he was never “summoned,” an invitation that implies a crisis. The first conversation, he said, took place during a courtesy call that covered a range of issues. The second was a “soft-spoken” phone call from Jeffrey Feltman, who runs the Near East desk.

Oren says everyone at the Foreign Ministry predicted a hard time for him, from its upper reaches “to the guy who signed off on my cell phone.”

“I came expecting significant tensions, if not a crisis,” he said. “By and large it’s business as usual, if not better than usual.”

Obama and Netanyahu get along “like two intellectual men educated in Cambridge, Mass.,” a reference to the leaders’ respective stints at Harvard and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Their last conversation, Oren said, suggested two men who had just had a beer.

“There was an ease with one another,” he said.

Israel is especially relieved that the United States has toughened its posture on Iran, moving up a review of its engagement policy from December to September.

“Iran was a potential for disagreement,” he said. “It’s not now.”

Appearing Sunday on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS,” Oren dismissed claims that Israel is planning to strike Iran, a reassurance that was aimed as much at the Obama administration as it was to Sunday talk show viewers.

“We are far from even contemplating such things right now,” he said on CNN. “The government of Israel has supported President Obama in his approach to Iran, initially the engagement, the outreach to Iran.”

The Iran issue nonetheless begs a question: Given that Israel for nearly two decades has named Iran as its gravest potential threat, why would its government complicate a relationship with a sympathetic White House by not doing more to avoid friction with the administration over settlements and peace talks with the Palestinians?

Israel, Oren answered, must be “mindful of the basic needs of our citizens and the security of the state as a whole. You don’t want to railroad through a Palestinian state.”

Furthermore, he said, advancing the efforts to shut down Iran’s suspected nuclear program was not incompatible with disagreements over settlement policy.

Oren Navigates Waters Among Israel, U.S. Government and American Jews Read More »

Demolitions Central to Jerusalem Fight

Leave a Comment / Israel /

Deep in a valley below Jerusalem’s Old City, a narrow alleyway leads to the remains of three bulldozed Arab homes in an area slated to become an archeological park.

The homes, now just slabs of collapsed concrete, are in the eastern Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan. Despite international protests — including from the U.S. secretary of state — the remaining 85 or so houses there, which were built without permits, are to be demolished to make room for a park the city hopes will be a major draw for tourists.

The dispute over the area, together with recent evictions in the Arab neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, are the most recent markers in the battle over Jerusalem. Israel seeks to cement its control over the city in part by altering the demographic character of its eastern, Arab neighborhoods.

“Our sovereignty over it cannot be challenged,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his Cabinet in July, in comments aimed at rebuffing U.S. criticism over plans for turning a hotel in Sheikh Jarrah into a Jewish housing project. “This means, inter alia, that residents of Jerusalem may purchase apartments in all parts of the city.”

Critics claim the government is purposefully boosting the Jewish presence in traditionally Arab eastern Jerusalem, creating “facts on the ground” in order to make it difficult to ever divide Jerusalem as part of a two-state solution to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Palestinians demand eastern Jerusalem as part of a future Palestinian state.

But the Israeli government insists that a series of development plans for the city’s eastern part are not driven by a political agenda. The plans, in an area in and around the Old City called the Holy Basin because it is dotted with holy sites, call for more green space, better parking and repaved roads. Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah are both in that area.

“Government policy is governed by one overriding principle: that it is important to continue developing the city for the benefit of all inhabitants of Jerusalem,” Netanyahu spokesman Mark Regev said. “The position is that Jerusalem will remain a united capital and the government wants to see all its communities flourish.”

Maher Hanoun sees things differently. He was evicted from his home in early August after the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the land on which it was built belonged to Jews, according to documentation dating back to the Ottoman era.

Hanoun’s family, refugees from the fighting in Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, lived in a house built in Sheikh Jarrah by the United Nations in the 1950s, when the land was under Jordanian rule. Now homeless, Hanoun and his family have opted to stay on the sidewalk across from their old house, sleeping on mattresses and passing their days under the shade of a small olive tree.

The house’s new residents are Jewish. An armed guard watches the front gate, which is locked. A small Israeli flag flaps in the wind from the rooftop. Across an adjacent valley, more Israeli flags are visible on other homes.

Israel captured eastern Jerusalem, along with the entire area known as the West Bank, in 1967 during the Six-Day War. When Israel later annexed eastern Jerusalem, the state offered Israeli citizenship to Arabs living there. Most refused, instead becoming permanent residents of the city with some of the same rights as Israelis, including Social Security payments.

The Jerusalem municipality says all eviction orders in Jerusalem are lawful, and that the law is applied to both Arab and Jew. But critics say evictions and demolitions are pursued aggressively in Arab parts of the city and only rarely in Jewish parts of the city, and that Arab Jerusalemites are forced to build illegally because their requests for building permits are regularly rejected.

“This is a proxy war carried out by the government of Israel by means of agents: the extreme right-wing groups active in east Jerusalem,” said Daniel Seidemann, founder of Ir Amim, an Israeli organization that advocates the equitable sharing of Jerusalem between Jews and Arabs. “Virtually every government organ from the Prime Minister’s Office on down is involved and the goal is, No. 1, territorial. This is a conscious effort to ring the historic basin with messianic settlements.”

The city rejects such charges.

“The mayor and the municipality apply the law equally,” Stephen Miller, a spokesman for Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat, said of demolition orders. “Anyone is free to build, expand and live as they desire as long as they follow the law.”

American Jews are among the main supporters of increasing the Jewish presence in eastern Jerusalem, donating $25.4 million over the past five years to purchase and build homes there, according to IRS filings reported by Bloomberg News.

The City of David Foundation, which in recent years built an elaborate visitor’s center in Silwan, where King David is believed to have laid the foundations for Jerusalem, is one of the Jewish groups involved in buying Arab homes in eastern Jerusalem. Known by its acronym, Elad, the group has helped settle 500 Jewish Israelis in those homes beginning in the 1990s.

Demolitions Central to Jerusalem Fight Read More »

Most Jews Support Health Care Reform

Leave a Comment / United States /

Even as polls and heated rhetoric suggest opposition to Democratic health care reforms is mounting, Jewish organizational support appears to be holding steady.

Only one group — the Republican Jewish Coalition — is voicing opposition. The RJC has been urging its members to oppose Democrat-backed health care legislation, sending out an action alert last week warning that the measures, which the group dubs “Obamacare,” will result in massive spending and debt, widespread loss of jobs and health care coverage. In its alert, the RJC warned that Obama’s plan will result in a “government takeover of health care.”

However vigorous RJC’s opposition, it appears to represent the lone voice among Jewish organizations speaking out against Obama’s plan. Liberal groups, including the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism and the National Jewish Democratic Council, have been staunch supporters of health care reform. Both have taken to the Internet in recent days, creating Web sites advocating comprehensive health care reform.

The NJDC launched RabbisForHealthCare.org, a site featuring a sign-on letter to Congress asking rabbis to lend their support to health care reform. The RAC started JewsForHealthCareReform.org, a nondenominational Web site featuring fact sheets on the health care system, Jewish texts on health care mandates and action alerts containing pre-written letters to Congress in support of reform.

“For the sake of our democracy, and for the sake of a health care system that is so clearly dysfunctional, we cannot, we dare not, stand on the sidelines,” Rabbi David Saperstein, the RAC’s director, said in a statement surrounding the debate around health care reform. “It is time to get in the game, to reclaim the agenda and to demonstrate that concerned Americans will not be cowed.”

Several other prominent nonpartisan Jewish organizations, including the United Jewish Communities and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, have come out for universal health care and expressed support of a public insurance option advocated by the Obama administration and many congressional Democrats.

Though the Republican Jewish Coalition has not directly criticized other Jewish organizations by name, its action alert last week included a sample letter to Congress asking legislators to be wary of organizations “purporting to speak for Jewish Americans.”

Mark Pelavin, associate director of the Reform movement’s action center, downplayed the suggestion of any real schism in the Jewish community over health care.

Pelavin stressed that despite claims to the contrary, there is “a strong consensus in the Jewish community that we need to fix the health care system.”

Most Jews Support Health Care Reform Read More »

Muslim activist Salam Al-Marayati joins the Huffington Post

Leave a Comment / Uncategorized /

Salam Al-Marayati, the head of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, wrote his first piece for the Huffington Post last month. It’s focus: A defense of what it means to be American Muslims.

He concludes:

America is a home for Muslims. Muslim extremists and Muslim-haters agree on one thing, that America is alien to Islam and vice versa. On the contrary, Muslims regard America as a home for them and for their religion. One scholar defined Dar al-Islam (the House of Islam) as the place where Muslims gain security. In many ways, Muslims are more secure in America and can practice their faith freely in America than any other country in the world, including any Muslim country. I am an American.

Read the entire piece here.

Muslim activist Salam Al-Marayati joins the Huffington Post Read More »

Custom Chuppah Creations

Leave a Comment / Culture, Special Sections, Weddings /

Contemporary, traditional, basic, extravagant, artistic, religious — the choices seem endless when deciding what style of chuppah to be married under.

This seemingly simple decision can be one of the most heartfelt and personal the couple makes during the wedding preparations.

The chuppah, or bridal canopy, is the ceremonial representation of the home and is comprised of four poles, either self-standing or held by family or friends, with a cloth covering under which the bride and groom become husband and wife. The chuppah often becomes the centerpiece of the ceremonial design and therefore deciding which style to have can be more of a challenge than one might expect. 

Many companies in the business of making chuppahs were started as a result of the owner’s personal experience in selecting their bridal canopy. Below are four such companies with different, personal approaches to the wedding chuppah.

I Love Chuppahs
For brides and grooms who consider themselves more contemporary than traditional, I Love Chuppahs may be the answer to ceremonial dreams. Started by newlyweds Dina and Roy Benmoshe more than two years ago, I Love Chuppahs offers modern design twists.

Dina, formerly in fashion design, and Roy, who maintains a home construction business, were in awe of the unique and fashion-forward chuppahs they saw during a trip to Israel before their wedding. They searched for such chuppah suppliers in Los Angeles and were shocked to find little to no resources. The contemporary chuppah they ultimately ordered for their ceremony was a disaster, the couple said. To make sure brides and grooms did not experience their disappointment, Dina and Roy launched I Love Chuppahs to fill this seemingly glaring void with customized chuppahs.

The Benmoshes enjoy the challenge of working with unusual elements in the creation of glamorous and extravagant designs, from lighting to bamboo to crystals.

“My ideal client is a couple that is creative and thinks outside the box,” Dina said. “Someone who is open to something modern and different.”

For more information, contact (310) 529-3363 or {encode=”dina@ilovechuppahs.com” title=”dina@ilovechuppahs.com”}. ” title=”www.henrylevine.com” target=”_blank”>www.henrylevine.com.

Chuppaz by Shira
Living on a kibbutz in Israel, one often becomes a Jack (or Jill) of all trades. In the case of Shira Miller, who has a background in pattern design from Tel Aviv’s Shenkar College of Textile Technology and Fashion, she became a seamstress.

One of Miller’s duties was to sew bridal canopies for young betrothed couples living on Kibbutz Afik. The chuppahs were fairly simple coverings at first, but as time passed, her designs became more intricate.

When her own daughter became engaged, Miller found herself wanting to create a more elaborate and personal design. She asked family and friends to write wishes for the couple on fabric squares, which she then sewed together to create the bridal canopy. Friends began asking her to create similar chuppahs for them after the wedding, and Chuppaz by Shira was born. 

For Miller, it is very personal. “I love to connect with people and help them design their own chuppah,” she said. “I love working with them and watching the whole chuppah come together.”

Miller works with couples in the United States through the help of the Internet. Once a couple answers a few questions on her Web site, a consultation is conducted and Miller presents them with pre-set designs or original sketches based on the couple’s personal stories and desires. She uses all different types of fabrics and accent pieces to create unique bridal canopies, and her exquisite designs range from traditional to contemporary to religious and everything in between.

For more information, contact 011-972-4-6761258 or {encode=”shira.m@chuppaz.com” title=”shira.m@chuppaz.com”}. ” title=”www.myownchuppah.com” target=”_blank”>www.myownchuppah.com.

Custom Chuppah Creations Read More »

The Tragic Figure

Leave a Comment / Torah /

What makes for a good tragedy? What ingredients need to go into a play or story for it to evoke strong emotion from the audience? This topic dates back to the times of the ancient Greeks, who invented the word “tragedy” and who considered it a very important form of entertainment. This Greek word actually translates as “goat song,” and scholars suggest that either a goat was the reward for a good tragic performance or that a chorus would sing around a goat before its sacrifice after a really good play.

While the ancients were debating the proper ingredients for theatrical tragedy, the Torah was concerned about tragedy in real life. In creating an Israeli army, Scripture says that the draft board should exempt certain potentially tragic figures. For example, any man who has just constructed a new home and has not had a chance to live in it for the first year is exempt from the draft. The same applies to a man who has just gotten married and hasn’t had a chance to live with his wife for the first year.

The tragedy of these events is that a man invests so much effort and resources into building a new house. All his dreams and aspirations are wrapped up in his new home. That he won’t enjoy the fruits of his labor is tragic enough, but what’s worse is that another man will move into his home and enjoy all that he so painstakingly immersed into the endeavor. As the Rashi commentary states: “This creates great agony for the soul.”

The Gerrer Rebbe (Rabbi A. M. Alter, d. 1948) once commented that there’s a deeper tragedy here. The last thoughts of a Jewish soldier on the battlefield, as his last sparks of life are ebbing away, should be about meeting his Maker, making peace with his life and repenting one last time. Instead, this poor soul can’t stop thinking about his new patio deck. “Oh, my beautiful patio,” he’s thinking. “Some lucky stiff is going to enjoy sunsets from that patio instead of me.” A Jew thinking about his material losses a moment before his death is a tragedy indeed.

But there is one person who is even more tragic. The final exemption listed by the Torah is the man who is “fearful and of soft heart,” who is exempted from serving in the armed forces “lest he soften his brethren’s hearts like his own” (Deuteronomy 20:8).

What is he so scared of? The p’shat (simple understanding) is that he’s simply yellow, afraid of violence and warfare. But if we look at the context of this exemption, we find that it is listed after all the people who have taken the initiative to be productive with their lives: There’s the person who’s built a new house, who’s planted a new vineyard, and who’s just gotten married. What these people all have in common is that they have taken risks. Clearly, investing in a new home or a new marriage involves the risk that things might not work out.

Perhaps the man who is fearful is the one who has never done any of these things out of fear of failure. What if I prospect on a house and the deal falls through? What if I court a beautiful young lady and she spurns me? Or worse, what if I build a house and get married, and then I die soon after?

These are legitimate fears for the cautious, risk-averse individual. But in the end, one cannot properly live his life without taking risks. The fearful individual never truly lives, and that, too, is a tragedy.

This is what led the early-20th century inventor William Hoskins to state: “To me, there is only one really tragic figure in life, and that is the man who never makes a start.”

Life is full of risks and it is full of tragedies. One cannot lose his fortune without first making one. Nor can one lose a spouse without first marrying one, or become estranged from a child that he never sires. The fearful individual is exempt from army service “lest he soften his brethren’s hearts like his own.” We can’t have that kind of fear in Israel or we’ll never flourish and grow as the people we’re destined to be.

The person who allows his life decisions to be controlled by his fears will never reach his potential. And that is the greatest tragedy of all.

Rabbi N. Daniel Korobkin is rosh kehilla of Yavneh in Hancock Park, director of community services for the Orthodox Union West Coast Region and a community mohel.

The Tragic Figure Read More »

Obituaries August 21, 2009

Leave a Comment / Obituaries /

Nasser Banayan died April 14 at 79. He is survived by his wife, Maliheh; sons, Koorosh and Kambiz; daughter, Lida; brother, Masoud (Parviz); sister, Pari; and five grandchildren. Chevra Kadisha

Helen Rose Breier died June 6 at 98. She is survived by her daughters, Marlene and Audrey; six grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren. Home of Peace

Michael Alan Cohen died June 12 at 49. He is survived by his parents, Terry and Arthur; sisters, Jodi and Lori; and four nieces and nephews. Sholom Chapels

Joshua Dybnis died June 5 at 30. He is survived by his parents, Bunni and Sacha; and two brothers. Sholom Chapels

Mary Eisenberg died June 10 at 93. She is survived by her son, Harvey (Sharon). Mount Sinai

Esther Gad died June 10 at 83. She is survived by her husband, Peter; and sons, David and Dennis. Mount Sinai

David Gola died June 9 at 82. He is survived by his daughter, Candace; sons, Jeffrey Jake (Rachange) and Michael Steven; two grandchildren; and one great-grandchild. Mount Sinai

Evelyn Adele Greenspan died June 10 at 94. She is survived by her sons, Arthur (Gloria), Bob and James (Deanne); nine grandchildren; and one great-grandchild. Mount Sinai

Adele Heller died May 30 at 97. She is survived by her sisters, Ethel Regan and Bettie (Mel) Lichtman;  brother, Alvin (Elaine); eight nieces; four nephews; 10 grandnieces; 12 grandnephews; three great-grand nieces; and three great-grandnephews.

John T. Kalman died June 9 at 82. He is survived by his daughter, Iris (Moses) Nadir Ekaireb; and stepson, Allan (Amy Rosenbaum) Nadir. Mount Sinai

Jeffrey Ira Lampke died June 11 at 62. He is survived by his sister, Geraldine Bass. Sholom Chapels

Sara Maldonado died June 8 at 74. She is survived by her husband, Lizardo; daughter, Sandra; and grandson, Damian Rodriguez. Chevra Kadisha

Donald Nachman died June 9 at 52. He is survived by his father, Victor; and brothers, Mark (Angel) and Roy. Mount Sinai

Miriam Phillips died June 9 at 84. She is survived by her daughter, Chris Tenzer; sons, Eric (Sandra) and Jeffrey; five grandchildren; sister-in-law, Kathryn Ciment; and nephew, Jack Ciment. Mount Sinai

Molly K. Ray died June 7 at 87. She is survived by her daughter, Bonnie Ray Finegood; son, Jeffrey (Julie); two grandchildren; and sister, Doris Kaplan. Mount Sinai

Jerry Rogoway died May 31 at 76. He is survived by his wife, Janice; daughters, Sheri (Paul Robbins), Cindy (Joe Goldberg) and Tami; four grandchildren; one great-grandchild; and brothers, Bert (Jessica) and Paul (Debbie). A memorial service will be held on Sunday, Aug. 23 at 2 p.m. at Congregation Kehillat Ma’arav, 1715 21st St., Santa Monica.

Robert W. “Bob” Somers died June 12 at 85. He is survived by his wife, Carol S.; daughter, Janet; son, Bruce; three grandchildren; and brother, David. Mount Sinai

Jane Beth Wasserman died June 8 at 58. She is survived by her brother, Ira. Sholom Chapels

Soll Yanover died June 5 at 93. He is survived by his wife, Ethel; and nephew, Neill (Margaret) Sachs. Mount Sinai

Obituaries August 21, 2009 Read More »

Israelis hunting million-dollar mermaid

Leave a Comment / Uncategorized /

Israel’s northern costal community is in the grips of mermaid fever. For several months, people from Kiryat Yam, near Haifa, have reported sightings of a young girl frolicking in the Mediterranean, jumping out of the water like a dolphin and doing other tricks.

The Kiryat Yam municipality of is offering a $1 million reward to anyone who can prove it’s a publicity stunt that the mermaid exists.

Arutz Sheva reports:

Shlomo Cohen, a former IDF career soldier, was one of the first to have claimed to have seen the mermaid some two weeks ago.

“I was with friends when suddenly we saw a woman laying on the sand in a weird way. At first I thought she was just another sunbather but when we approached she jumped into the water and disappeared. We were all in shock because we saw she had a tail. At least five of us saw it and we all couldn’t believe it.”

From SkyNews:

“Many people are telling us they are sure they’ve seen a mermaid and they are all independent of each other,” [Kiryat Yam] council spokesman Natti Zilberman told Sky News.

The nautical nymph is only seen in the evening at sunset, according to media reports, drawing crowds of people with cameras hoping for a glimpse.

“People say it is half girl, half fish, jumping like a dolphin. It does all kinds of tricks then disappears,” Mr Zilberman said.

Asked whether a dolphin or large fish could be a more rational explanation, he insisted: “They say it is a female figure, it looks like a young girl.”

The council denied its offer of a reward was a publicity stunt, but said it hoped to nurture the mermaid as something which could bring in more tourists.

Capturing a mermaid is not necessary, a verifiable photograph will do, Mr Zilberman said.

Asked if the council can afford the payout, he told Sky News: “I believe, if there really is a mermaid, then so many people and tourists will come to Kiryat Yam, a lot more money will be made than $1 million.

As far as the mermaid’s origin, look no farther than GreenProphet blogger Karin Kloosterman for an explanation:

My guess is that the toxic pollution in the Haifa Bay – some of the worst in Israel – has created some mutant form of dolphin.

And hey, if you do manage to get proof of the creature, consider donating the prize booty to cleaning up the Bay.

Israelis hunting million-dollar mermaid Read More »

Revenge of the Jews, Tarantino Style

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Quentin Tarantino is bouncing up and down on a couch in a suite at the Four Seasons Hotel, waving his arms and talking at torpedo speed about “Inglourious Basterds,” the fantastical World War II film he both wrote and directed, which opens Aug. 21. Dressed in black and clutching a plastic wine glass, the filmmaker who burst into the zeitgeist with the uber-violent “Reservoir Dogs” is eager to talk about his “basterds” — a squad of Nazi-slaying American Jews led by hillbilly Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt). These reservoir dogs-of-war parachute behind enemy lines to wage a blood-splattering campaign against the Nazis, alternately scalping them, crushing their skulls or carving swastikas into their foreheads.

Meanwhile, an intertwining story spotlights Shosanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent), a French Jew passing as the non-Jewish owner of a Paris cinema, who succeeds in getting revenge for the murder of her family by incinerating Hitler, Goebbels and his henchmen alive in her theater.

Since “Inglourious Basterds” had its premiere in May at the Cannes International Film Festival, a number of reviewers have criticized Tarantino’s brazen rewriting of history, calling it potential fodder for Holocaust revisionists. Others dismissed the movie as the latest in a recent line of films using Nazis as all-purpose villains, such as the Norwegian Nazi-zombie thriller “Dead Snow.” Still others have worried about the image of Jews seeking over-the-top revenge against the Reich. As the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg asserted, engraving swastikas into human flesh doesn’t seem like the “Jewish” thing to do.

Confronted with these criticisms, Tarantino, still bouncing on the couch, brushes them off, saying he wasn’t about to check in with Jews or anyone else for his storyline. “I’m not going to go and kiss ass and curry favor,” he said. “This movie is about my imagination. I’m the one making the decisions as far as writing my characters. It’s my job to be everybody; that’s what I do. And when my characters are Jewish, what I say is correct for them.”

Tarantino insists the movie isn’t a Holocaust film, although it opens with Shosanna watching the machine-gunning of her family, which the director calls “a stand-in for the entire Holocaust.”

But it also goes against a convention that has defined most Shoah films since the 1980s, Tarantino said, focusing almost exclusively on Jews-as-victims. “If you go back to earlier decades, there was no crime against making a World War II picture as a thrilling adventure story,” he said.

“‘The Great Escape’ takes place in a f—-ing concentration camp, and it’s one of the most entertaining movies you’re ever going to see,” he said. “Even Billy Wilder, in ‘Five Graves to Cairo,’ does as much revisionist history as I do, all in the service of a very exciting story. When it’s my turn to throw my hat into a genre, and the genre I’m talking about here is a guys-on-a-mission movie, I want to expand it and go beyond it. But I still want to enjoy the pleasures inherent in that genre.”

So, he is asked, if “Inglourious Basterds” is a guys-on-a-mission World War II movie, in the tradition of, say, “The Dirty Dozen,” why couldn’t the guerrillas have been escaped POWs, or members of the French resistance? Tarantino’s eyes gleamed as he answered with relish: “It was really important for them to be Jewish, and it’s a big deal that they are American Jews.”

Not all of the heroes are Jews, however. Pitt’s character, nicknamed “Aldo the Apache,” is not, and is actually part Cherokee. “He’s been fighting fascism since he got into the war,” Tarantino explained; “Nazis, Kluxers, they’re all the same to him. But he’s a war-history nut, so he knows all about Geronimo’s battle plans and the idea of doing an Apache-style resistance against the Germans. Now he’s using Jewish soldiers for two reasons: One is because he feels that they will turn the mission into a holy war — while Gentiles in the military have the luxury of being soldiers, the basterds are fighting a foe that wants to wipe them off the face of this earth.

“The second reason,” Tarantino said, “is the effect the Jews are going to have in the psychological warfare against the Germans, which is the way the Apaches were able to fight the Mexicans and the Spaniards and the U.S. cavalry for years and years. When you see the boys ambush that German squad, it’s not about the seven guys they kill; it’s about the other guys who are going to see them scalped and ripped apart and degraded and disemboweled. So the Germans are going to know there are killer Jews out there, and it’s the f—-ing American Jews. The basterds are like, ‘Our European relatives could do nothing when the Hun pounded at their door, but we’re the American sons, and we don’t have to endure pain — we can inflict it. We’ve got the right to do that, because we’re f—-ing Americans!’

Nor is Tarantino Jewish. Like Aldo, he is part Cherokee, and he grew up in a born-again milieu in Tennessee where people imagined revenge against the Ku Klux Klan, not the Nazis. He said the film is not a Jewish revenge fantasy, though he admits that “Whether you’re Jewish or just tired of seeing the ‘Holocaust victim’ portrayal in cinema, there is a knee-jerk, fun, fantasy revenge aspect to the movie, all right? But that’s not all there is. I muddied it up.”

As an example, he points to a scene where Sgt. Donny Donowitz (Eli Roth), nicknamed The Bear Jew, bludgeons a Nazi officer to death with his baseball bat. Tarantino said he pointedly gave the German the “last cool line” in the sequence. “Under any criteria of war, that German sergeant is a brave motherf—-er. He doesn’t give up his soldiers; he knows he’s going to die, and he takes it. And when Eli comes out and touches his Iron Cross and says, ‘So you get this for killing Jews?’ he answers that he has received it for ‘bravery’ — and then he proves it.”

Tarantino said it might have been simpler to make him “a cringing coward,” because “it would’ve been even more fun to watch him get it. But things don’t go quite that easy. Whether I was writing Jewish or German characters, I kept trying to have a very expansive viewpoint and to look at things from as many different sides as possible.”

About two years ago, while writing “Inglourious Basterds,” Tarantino asked Roth whether Jews believe in the concept of absolution. “The idea of mercy or forgiveness, not in the religious sense, but in a human sense — that’s where my humanity tends to go,” Tarantino said. “When whites held blacks in slavery, they both were in bondage, and both needed to be freed from the system, so that’s where I was coming from in a way.” But, he said, Roth told him “Absolution is a Catholic concept. F—- that. There is no sorry, no forgiveness possible.”

A good friend of Tarantino, Roth (see story on Page 12) is best known as the director of the ultra-violent torture-porn films “Hostel” and “Cabin Fever.”

“I told Quentin I didn’t care if his Nazis were going to be like ‘real’ human beings, I would still kill every last one of them,” Roth said in a separate interview. He invited Tarantino to a seder, to show him how Jews view their historical persecutors. So, in 2007, Tarantino sat at Roth’s Passover table and listened to a discussion of how the Exodus relates to the Holocaust and other world events.

“It was a moving experience for Quentin to see how we think, what we say and how we were discussing things.”

Actress Laurent, born and raised in Paris, is just as passionate about her role. “When I read the script I thought, ‘My God, I am so like Shosanna in a certain way,’” she said, in a quiet, intense voice, pausing only to exhale her cigarette. Laurent, 26, is Jewish; her grandfather survived Auschwitz as a teenager, after losing his entire family. “I had terrible nightmares about the camps all my childhood,” she said. “I had a very happy life, but I would think that if I had been born 60 years ago, I would have been killed in a gas room. Since I [was] 4, it was my dream to kill Hitler, so I completely understand Shosanna’s desire for revenge.”

After Laurent’s brother translated the script for both herself and her grandfather — at the time she did not speak much English — grandpère insisted she go after the role, telling her she must kill Hitler, if only in a movie, because that also had been his dream. He told her of a knife he carved out of wood in the camps, planning to stab a Nazi had he been selected for the gas chambers.

Laurent’s grandfather was at her side on the set in Berlin as she filmed her most challenging scene, in which her face appears giant onscreen at her cinema, laughing maniacally as she tells her Nazi audience that she is the face of Jewish vengeance that is going to burn them alive.

Laurent said she doesn’t understand why people object to a fictionalized killing of Hitler.

“I think it’s just a dream, and one can say nothing against a dream,” she said. “So if people say you can’t do that — of course you can, it’s a movie.

“What I especially love about Quentin’s movie is that [while] in the Nazi regime, like typical dictatorships, Hitler first kills the artists, the poets, the moviemakers, in ‘Inglourious Basterds,’ it’s like, ‘You want to kill movies — no, the movies are going to kill you.’”

“Inglourious Basterds” opens Aug. 21.

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