Sometimes life presents us with challenges so arresting, so shattering that they change everything. This is the tale of a series of such moments, which began with my son’s diagnosis with autism, sending me into a tailspin and sundering my conventional ideas of God and Torah.
A Holocaust survivor and Palestinian rights activist and a public radio program on relations between Muslim and Jewish students at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) kicked off the university’s “Israeli Apartheid Week” sponsored by its Muslim Student Union (MSU) on May 10 on a day that saw more members of the pro-Israel community on campus than Palestinian supporters.
Signs posted at the entrance to the 62nd Israel Independence Day Festival at Woodley Park on April 25 apologized for a last-minute increase of entrance fees — from $5 per person to $8. Even so, the increase was not enough to cover the cost of an unexpected $43,000 bill from the City of Los Angeles for police, fire and other city services — expenses provided at no cost to the festival for the past 19 years. The city’s current budget crisis forced a policy change, and organizers of the annual festival, which this year drew approximately 20,000 attendees, got the bill three weeks before the event.
Congregation Talmud Torah, better known as the Breed Street Shul, was founded nearly a century ago. On May 16, hundreds of supporters will trek to Boyle Heights to put their money and enthusiasm on the line to assure that after decades of abandonment and neglect, the shul will come to life once again.
Within three days of the massive earthquake that struck Port-Au-Prince last Jan. 12, Dr. Ofer Merin and his 230-member crew from Shaare Zedek hospital in Jerusalem arrived in the battered Haitian city on an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) medical mission.
The state of Arizona has unleashed a firestorm with its new law to make undocumented status a state crime and to give the police wide powers to identify and detain those for whom there is “reasonable suspicion” of illegal status. Police will have the power to demand that anyone they suspect must “show their papers” and furthermore empowers citizens to sue local governments if they are not vigorous enough in implementing the law.
Hyman H. Haves, community leader and activist, died May 3 at 94, with his family by his side.
Ernest A. Goldenfeld passed away on April 27 at 89.
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