“You must promise me that you will tell this story, what happened here,” the rabbi said to the bar mitzvah boy, Joachim “Yoya” Joseph. They had just finished the ceremony in a small barrack in Bergen-Belsen, where they covered the windows so the Nazi guards would not see them. The rabbi, Simon Dasberg, a community rabbi from Holland, pressed a little Torah scroll in the young boy’s hands as he spoke to him.
Jewish Vocational Service (JVS) celebrated its 80th anniversary on Jan. 29 with a gala at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel to honor its past board presidents. Among the 500 guests were Stanley Dashew, who received the agency’s Tzedakah Award, and emcee Keith Erickson, a former L.A. Laker and longtime CBS sports broadcaster. Thirteen board presidents attended the event as well as family members representing JVS board presidents who had passed away.
Speaking at UCLA’s Royce Hall on May 4, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, whose planned Islamic cultural center in Lower Manhattan — the so-called Ground Zero mosque — ignited a firestorm of protest last summer, said that the killing of Osama bin Laden gave him hope. “This signifies the end of an era of terrorism,” Rauf told the largely supportive and diverse audience of about 600 students, activists and community members.
American Jewish World Service (AJWS), a nonprofit that provides humanitarian assistance to developing countries, recently signed a lease for office space in Los Angeles, and on May 6, a ceremony marked the organization’s move into the office. At the ceremony, Ruth Messinger, president of AJWS, affixed a mezuzah to the doorpost of the new Los Angeles office, and Rabbi Sharon Brous of IKAR recited a blessing.
The Santa Clarita Valley could become home to the world’s largest falafel ball on May 15, when local chef Dawn Walker tries to craft and cook a deep-fried chickpea patty that will outweigh the 24-pound falafel ball that set the record a year ago in New York. Part of the third annual Santa Clarita Valley Jewish Food and Cultural Festival, Walker’s attempt will be documented for the Guinness Book of World Records. If a test run held two weeks before the event is any indication, the ball could end up weighing as much as 50 pounds.
More than half the students in Los Angeles Jewish day schools receive financial aid to pay tuition, which runs between $12,000 and $30,000 per year. And with both tuition and the number of students requiring aid expected to continue climbing, BJE: Builders of Jewish Education is partnering with local donors and national organizations both to alleviate the immediate crisis and work toward long-term solutions for lowering the cost of Jewish education.
Dvora Weisberg doesn’t think she’s had any unfair advantages over her fellow rabbinical students graduating from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR) this month. Well, maybe a few. “I do have a considerable number of years over most of the other students,” Weisberg, 51, admitted recently. That, and she’s also the director of HUC-JIR’s School of Rabbinical Studies.
Letters to the editor
The Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) held a press conference last week, the day after President Obama’s announcement of Osama bin Laden’s dispatch. The briefing seemed to deliver a hopeful message: Now that bin Laden is dead, perhaps there will be the “dawn of a new era” in the relationship of American Muslims to their fellow Americans. MPAC’s leadership was joined by a bevy of local pols who echoed the theme of “can’t we all just get along?”
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