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September 14, 2011

Jerusalem through fresh eyes

Leave a Comment / News, Travel /

Many of us who travel frequently to Israel risk becoming jaded. Obsessed by realpolitik, the peace process, internecine and ultimately unproductive Jewish political polemics, philanthropic hype or just plain business concerns, we lose sight of Israel’s true significance.

Last month, my friend Robert Fagenson asked me to accompany him on a four-day whirlwind trip to Jerusalem to participate in the Western Wall bar mitzvah ceremony of his partner’s grandson. Robert is a prominent Wall Street executive, a former vice chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, and a life-long member of New York City’s Temple Emanu-El. He had been to Israel twice before, the last time in 1968.

As our plane flew over the Israeli coast on a Wednesday afternoon, Robert was amazed at the urban Tel Aviv sprawl the rest of us have come to take for granted. He remembers a far less developed landscape, dominated by sand dunes rather than skyscrapers and industrial complexes.

That evening in Jerusalem, we walked through the pedestrian Mamilla Mall, from the foot of King David Street to the Jaffa Gate. The old and new cities, two separate universes for decades, are now intrinsically linked by a succession of stores, art galleries and cafes that put the spotlight on the exigencies of daily life.

The Thursday morning service at the Western Wall was simultaneously moving and more than a bit chaotic. The plaza was filled with different family groups, each calling a 13-year-old to the Torah for the first time. Ashkenazic and Sephardic melodies vied with one another to create a mostly atonal yet authentic blend. As Avi, the bar mitzvah, was wrapped in his tallit, there were tears in his grandfather’s eyes. Marty Vegh’s journey, from a Displaced Persons camp in Germany to Staten Island, New York, and now to Jerusalem, epitomized the globalization of the Jewish people in the aftermath of World War II. Robert received the first aliyah. He is now part of not so much a historical chain as an infinite tapestry.

A few hours later, we were welcomed at the Israel Museum by its director, James Snyder. Robert’s uncle and aunt, Joseph and Sylvia Slifka, donated some of the museum’s major works, including a magnificent Joan Miró and exquisite Jean Arp and Max Ernst sculptures. As we see them in the midst of an impressive, world-class collection of Impressionist and contemporary art, we could just as easily be in the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan or the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Until, that is, we walk a few steps farther and find ourselves in synagogues that have been relocated from different countries in Europe, North Africa and elsewhere. Somehow, they put the Pissarros, Monets and Chagalls in perspective.

From left: Robert Fagenson and Menachem Z. Rosensaft at the Western Wall Plaza.

We were then shown a collection of works of art and craft created in Jerusalem at the Bezalel Academy between 1906 and 1929, which Robert’s cousin, Alan Slifka, had given to the Israel Museum. Shortly after the turn of the 20th century, Boris Schatz, a Lithuanian-born Jewish artist, undertook to implement in Palestine a new decorative craftsmanship, along the lines advocated by John Ruskin in England but rooted in Middle Eastern folk styles and infused with an often intangible, elusive Jewish spark. We were suddenly conscious of a time before the Holocaust, before the world went utterly mad, when the forging of a modern Jewish nation required not just Zionist ideology and political philosophy, not just building cities and kibbutzim in a hurry and training idealists to become soldiers, but the creation, indeed the invention, of a new Israeli, as opposed to simply Jewish, culture.

On Friday morning, we visited the museum at Yad Vashem, Israel’s national memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. I watched Robert absorb the testimonies of both the dead and the survivors. Warsaw Ghetto cobblestones. A model of the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Reflections and echoes of murdered Jewish children whose ghosts haunt the galleries and, henceforth, our subconscious. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad regularly threatens the State of Israel with genocidal annihilation. Perhaps every world leader, every United Nations diplomat, every journalist who covers Middle East political developments should walk through Yad Vashem to grasp why Ahmadinejad, Hamas and Hezbollah are little more than reincarnations of blind, implacable Nazi evil. Emerging into the sun-lit Judean hills, we have a new appreciation of Israel’s critical role as a haven for any Jew threatened by persecution anywhere in the world.

From Yad Vashem, we returned to the Western Wall, where Rabbi Jay Marcus, a Staten Island rabbi who settled in Israel a few years ago, guided us through the tunnels that have been excavated alongside what had been one of the retaining walls of the Temple Mount in Herodian times. We proceeded underground for more than 1,500 feet, all the while feeling stones that stand as silent witness to a Jewish presence here centuries before the birth of Muhammad ibn Abdullah.

Of course, Jerusalem is sacred to Christians and Muslims as well as to Jews. But the city is central only to Judaism. It is also far too often forgotten that during close to two decades of Jordanian rule, from 1948 until 1967, Jews were forbidden to set foot in the Old City of Jerusalem and much of the Jewish Quarter was destroyed and desecrated. Today, Muslims, Christians and Jews worship here freely.

Sometime soon, I hope to see Jerusalem through the eyes of our twin grandchildren, now almost 3 years old. In the meantime, as our plane lifted into the sky several hours after the end of Shabbat, I was grateful to Robert for enabling me to remember that both Israel and Jerusalem must be experienced, not just visited, to be absorbed and understood.

Menachem Z. Rosensaft is adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School, lecturer in law at Columbia Law School, distinguished visiting lecturer at Syracuse University College of Law, and vice president of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants.

Jerusalem through fresh eyes Read More »

Never enough of Calvin Trillin

Leave a Comment / Books, Entertainment, Judaism /

Calvin Trillin, as we are reminded in “Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin: forty years of funny stuff” (Random House: $27), has long served as a polestar in the American literary firmament. He is best-known and loved for his witty contributions to The New Yorker, but he has also displayed his acerbic good humor and powers of social observation on the off-Broadway stage, in a series of comic novels (including “Tepper Isn’t Going Out”), in “deadline poetry” for The Nation and in a heart-tugging memoir about his late wife, “About Alice,” among many other efforts.

Trillin may be an emblematic New York writer, but his origins and interests are not limited to the inner boroughs. Born in Kansas City, Mo., and educated at Yale, he quips that “T.S. Eliot and I constitute the Missouri school of poetry.” Although he has written only sparingly about his Jewish background, he affirms that “in Kansas City, where I grew up, Calvin Trillin is a very common Jewish name.” And he can be credited with a leading role in the invention and improvement of American food journalism, a specialty that was inspired by his voracious appetite and all-consuming curiosity: “Now that it’s fashionable to reveal intimate details of married life,” he once wrote, “I can state publicly that my wife, Alice, has a weird predilection for limiting our family to three meals a day.” 

Trillin talked to The Jewish Journal from his New York City home shortly before embarking on a national tour that will bring him to Los Angeles on Sept. 21 for a conversation with “Saturday Night Live” alum Kevin Nealon, at an event sponsored by Writer’s Bloc at the Writers Guild Theater.

Jonathan Kirsch: The first stop on your author tour is an event at the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side. What does the venue mean to you personally?
Calvin Trillin:  It’s where my family didn’t go. My family came to America in the period when a lot of people lived in tenements on the Lower East Side, but my family went to Galveston, Texas, instead.

JK:  The headline on The Journal’s story about the passing of Amy Winehouse was “Jewish Chanteuse Dies.” A close reading of your book — but it takes a close reading — suggests that you would be entitled to a similar eulogy. What does your Jewish background amount to, and what does it mean to you?
CT:  I grew up in what most people would call a typical middle-class, Midwestern neighborhood. I sometimes say that it’s like being in an episode of “The Brady Brunch” as played by actors who just got off a yearlong tour of “Fiddler on the Roof.” My father was born in the Ukraine, but he was brought as an infant to St. Joseph, Mo., so he spoke like Harry Truman and used phrases like: “I haven’t had so much fun since the hogs ate Little Sister.” So it was an astonishment to me to hear him speak Yiddish, which was probably his first language.

JK: Did you pick up any Yiddish in Kansas City?
CT: I picked up a lot of words, but not words that would do me any good in a conversation — unless the conversation was in a locker room. I can have long conversations on the difference between a shlimazel and a paskudnik, but I couldn’t say, “Pass the salt.”

JK:  Thanks to your long association with The New Yorker, I tend to think of you as a quintessential New Yorker, and yet you disclose that you keep a famous line from “The Wizard of Oz” on your bulletin board: “Toto, I don’t think we’ re Kansas anymore.” Have you been fully Manhattanized?
CT: That’s still on the bulletin board right in front of me, and I still think of myself as a resident out-of-towner. I’ve lived here permanently since I came up from the South in 1961, but there are still subway lines I’m unfamiliar with, and I don’t know in which car to stand in the way my daughters do. I think there are things that real New Yorkers keep secret from the rest of us.

JK: Did you personally do the work of selecting the various pieces that appear in your new collection, more than 130 in all? Did you work from your own archive of your writing?
CT:  Yes, I did, but “archive” would be much too serious a word for what I have. I have some stuff in the computer, some stuff that I asked people for, but there is also some stuff that I didn’t have and couldn’t get. I’m not organized enough to even use words like “archive.”

JK:  Larry David and Sarah Silverman are willing to make jokes about the Holocaust, and you are able to write comically about the Shoe Bomber. As a humorist, do you think there are any subjects that are beyond humor?
CT:  Not really. You know that they ought not to be joked about if they’re not funny. It’s self-selecting. You know whether you can make a joke about something because otherwise it wouldn’t be funny. Zero Mostel used to say about the Romanian-Jewish restaurants in New York that Romanian-Jewish cooking has killed more Jews than Hitler. Well, I thought that was funny, but I’m not sure I’d feel that way if I were the son of a Holocaust survivor. 

JK: One of your couplets refers to the Rodney King beating and invokes the Viet Cong (“If I done right or I done wrong/I’d sooner be held by the Vietcong”), which prompted me to wonder: What is the expiration date of a good joke? 
CT:  Most humor depends on specificity. It’s funnier to say that a cheese steak tastes better when you’re leaning up against a Pontiac than when you are leaning up against a car. People have still heard of the Viet Cong, but at some point, it may not be funny anymore. I don’t think the humor changes, but the references change.

JK:  You devote one section of your new book to “Twenty Years of Pols.” Do you think that American politicians are getting better or worse?
CT:  Well, they’re not getting better, for sure. But that only makes them better targets for people in the small-joke trade.

JK:  You have written that “the average shelf life of a book is somewhere between milk and yogurt.” Do you think that the advent of electronic publishing means that books will have an even shorter shelf life, or perhaps a longer one?
CT:  I’ve heard all sides of that argument. What’s going to happen? I don’t know. The last people who know about that are writers. But I expect that people are going to keep reading books in some kind of format for a long time.

For tickets, contact Writers Bloc at {encode=”reservations@writersblocpresents.com” title=”reservations@writersblocpresents.com”}.

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is book editor of The Jewish Journal. He blogs on books at Never enough of Calvin Trillin Read More »

The gift Poland once offered

Leave a Comment / Books, Entertainment, Judaism /

The long history of the Jews in Poland has been almost wholly eclipsed by the Holocaust. Fully half of the victims of German mass murder were Polish Jews, who numbered approximately 3.5 million on the eve of World War II. But the fact remains that Poland was the seat of a vibrant and enduring Jewish civilization that survives on the printed page and, in a real sense, in many of our own ideas about what it means to be Jewish.

The point is vividly and memorably made by Hava Bromberg Ben-Zvi in the pages of “Portraits in Literature: The Jews of Poland, An Anthology” (Vallentine Mitchell: $74.95), an extraordinarily rich collection of more than 50 excerpts from fiction, reportage, poetry, memoir, correspondence, folklore and humor, all touching in one way or another on the Jewish experience in Poland.

“My Jewish ancestors resided in Polish lands for approximately 1,000 years,” affirms the author, who shares a Polish-Jewish heritage with millions of American Jews. “This book is a saga of Jewish life in Poland as reflected in the mirror of literature.”

Ben-Zvi has selected some of the most affecting and enlightening passages from her remarkably diverse source material, and she makes them even more meaningful by providing her own annotations and illuminations.  For example, she begins with a passage from Sholem Asch’s novel “The Rebel,” and she introduces the once-revered Yiddish writer to a new generation of readers who know little or nothing about him or his work. She points out that his novels about the life of Jesus, intended to show “the common roots of Judaism and Christianity and to bridge the gap between them,” resulted in a charge of apostasy. “Misunderstood, he defended himself for the rest of his life,” she points out, “mostly without success.”

Other selections are meant to remind us, quite literally, of the rhythms, sounds and tastes of Jewish life in Poland. A charming memoir by Nina Luszczyk-Ilienkowa, for example, evokes the experience of a modest little store that was, in the eyes of the writer, nothing less than a place of wonder. “Look, ladies and gentlemen, what we have here. Hats of Vilnius milliners, from Zamkova Street, slightly out of fashion, but at convenient prices. Christmas ornaments and colorful tissue paper, laces, beads, pins, ribbons, clasps for girls’ braids. Tooth-combs, side combs, and gloves of fabric and wool, or lightly knit and transparent. On the other side, on little shelves, choice morsels galore.”  Even now, the writer confesses, “I swoon at the memory of the aromas long forgotten, not experienced for sixty years.” And so do we.

Of course, Ben-Zvi feels an obligation to remind us that the victims of the Holocaust were flesh-and-blood human beings and not merely numbers.  Aliza Melamed recalls the unspeakable sights that she saw in the Warsaw Ghetto, but she also gives us a glimpse of the famous ghetto fighter Mordecai Anielewicz at an unguarded moment: “He always wore a gray coat, sports trousers and golf-socks; he had a thin face and greenish eyes with daring in them, which would sometimes smile, and then they looked so fatherly and forgiving.”

Another intimate view of Anielewicz is given in an essay by the ghetto documentarian Emanuel Ringelblum, who recalls how the young man would borrow books on history and economics. “Who was to know that this quiet, modest, pleasant youth would, three years later, be the most important person in the ghetto, and that his name would be spoken of with veneration by some and with fear by others?” Anielewicz himself, who died in combat during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, speaks for himself in a brief letter: “The last aspiration of my life has been fulfilled,” he wrote in the last moments of his heroic life. “Jewish self-defense and Jewish revenge are a reality.”

“Jewish literature and culture did not perish from the face of the earth,” Ben-Zvi concludes. “Inherited and transformed by a new generation of writers, it was reborn, changed and enriched, finding new configurations, images and expressions.” Ben-Zvi’s beautiful and stirring book is a superb example of the same phenomenon.

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is book editor of The Jewish Journal. He blogs on books at The gift Poland once offered Read More »

Jerusalem lodging boasts refined eatery, spa

Leave a Comment / Is Featured?, News, Travel /

JERUSALEM — It had been years since I’d ventured any farther than the lobby of the Inbal Hotel in Jerusalem, so when I received an invitation to tour its spa and one of its restaurants, it was hard to say no.

Built in the 1980s, the Inbal is one of the city’s top hotels and its facilities reflect this. Its staff is helpful and pleasant, and its health club and spa, which were refurbished two years ago, are top-notch.

One of the nicest things about the Inbal is its location in tony Talbieh. It’s within distance of the Old City and Western Wall, the many shops and restaurants on bustling Emek Refaim Street and the center of town. It adjoins Liberty Bell Park, which boasts a fantastic kids’ playground, outdoor exercise equipment, basketball courts and places to barbecue. In other words, a taste of the real Israel.

We began the tour at Sofia, the Inbal’s dairy restaurant. Adjoining the flower-filled terrace, the restaurant’s floor-to-ceiling windows provide the feel of outdoor dining without having to sacrifice much-needed air-conditioning.

Sofia specializes in pasta and fish dishes that can be tailored to individual tastes. When I inquired whether some of the dishes could be prepared without dairy products — I’m lactose intolerant — the answer was a resounding “yes.” This was a welcome surprise; Jerusalem restaurants are rarely this flexible.

The menu includes champignon mushrooms filled with goat and parmesan cheeses, pine nuts and spinach stir-fried in butter and thyme; and melanzana: smoked eggplant, roasted peppers, pesto, diced tomatoes and mozzarella cheese in a baked phyllo shell in cream and white wine sauce. The fresh herb salad featured finely chopped herbs combined with breadsticks, with smoked mozzarella cheese shells, red onion, sliced olives and smoked salmon.

Fish courses include salmon filet cooked either in olive oil (on special request) or served with creamed peas, polenta, thyme sprouts, Parmesan and sautéed vegetables; and filet of trout marinated in fresh garlic, with diced potatoes, mushrooms, marinated in olive oil, capers, celery and red onions.

The apple pie, which was the only dairy-free choice, was creamy and delicious, but not as decadent as the Magic Meringue, a baked meringue filled with mascarpone cream, passion fruit, coconut sorbet and honey cream.

Satisfied and full, we headed to the health club, which includes a semi-Olympic pool that is covered and heated in the winter, a gym, a dry sauna and a spa.

The health club offers Pilates, aerobics, body sculpting and water exercise classes. The gym, which features all the equipment you would find in a well-equipped American fitness center, is large and modern. There are three personal trainers.

Health club director Dr. Ran Bibi, who holds a doctorate in sports management from the Wingate Institute, Israel’s National Centre for Physical Education and Sport, said the facility is “very successful because the staff is experienced and highly trained.”

Before receiving a massage, Rachel, the young immigrant from New Jersey who would be kneading the tension out of my body, asked me to fill out a medical disclosure/permission form. The room we entered was sleek, serene and spacious, with an exceptionally comfortable massage table, a bathtub-whirlpool and a separate shower.

Again, the staff responded well to special requests. When I asked Rachel whether she had some unscented oil (as opposed to aromatherapy oils), she searched high and low until she located a bottle of almond oil, whose scent is very subtle. When she learned that I had come straight from a big lunch, she started with reflexology to ease my digestion.

The Inbal’s spa offers a wide range of massages, including Swedish, deep tissue, Oriental, four-hand, hot stone and aromatherapy, as well as facials, body peeling and Dead Sea body wrapping. Prices for a massage range from $90 (Swedish, deep tissue) to $165 (four-hand). A hot-stone facial costs $130, and mud wrapping costs $115. 

Refreshed by the massage, I showered and headed to the pool, located right outside the health club. There I found a poolside café that prepares light meals, a sun-protected wading pool and the beautiful main pool, which is large enough for laps.

The few guests I saw that afternoon were seated on lounge chairs or doing laps. A swimming instructor was coaching a 7-year-old on her breast stroke.

Thoroughly relaxed, I entered the pool, where jets froth the water and massage the muscles. I knew I should go home and help the kids with their homework.

But I didn’t.

Inbal Hotel, 3 Jabotinsky St., Jerusalem, Israel, 92145. (972) 2-675-6666. For more information, visit inbalhotel.com.

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Jewish Agency chairman discusses Palestinian statehood bid

Leave a Comment / California, Community, Is Featured?, News /

No one knows exactly how things will play out next week when Palestinian leaders make a bid for statehood at the United Nations, but Natan Sharansky, chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, believes the impact will be more rhetorical than practical and that it represents no threat to Israel.

“I think it’s unfortunate. I don’t think it’s as tragic as some people try and present it,” the former Soviet dissident and prisoner said. “The only real consequence, then, is it will be much more difficult for both sides to come to direct negotiations.”

Sharansky’s comments came during a brief visit with reporters Sept. 13 at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley prior to a lecture he gave on faith and America’s 40th president. The event was co-sponsored by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation Centennial Celebration and Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy.

Sharansky explained that peace will not come unilaterally and that it must be a grassroots effort.

“I believe that peace cannot be … imposed,” he said. “Nobody can be forced. Peace can be brought from the bottom up.”
Part of that, he said, must be democracy, including a Palestinian society that is built with a free economy, education, open political discussion, and security forces that fight terrorism.

Sharansky, the author of several books, including The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom, believes this can be achieved.

“I believe that democracy can come to the Arab world,” he said. “There are enough Palestinians who are interested to do it.”

Then Sharansky pointed to the Israeli model and how it didn’t happen overnight.

“Israel was created because for 30 years Jewish leaders of the community living in Palestine were building their democratic state. They were building the institutions of the state,” he said.

“We must have patience,” he concluded.

That’s something Sharansky knows something about. A human rights activist who was born in Ukraine, Sharansky was accused in 1977 of collaborating with the CIA and sentenced to 13 years in prison.

In 1986, he became the first political prisoner ever released by Mikhail Gorbachev, thanks to intense political pressure from Reagan. (Sharansky is featured at the president’s Simi Valley museum as part of its “Voices of Freedom” display.)

He has credited Reagan’s faith and moral clarity in helping Russian immigrants flee to Israel, where Sharansky founded the political party Yisrael B’Aliya and served as deputy prime minister, among other positions. He received the Congressional Gold Medal in 1986 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2006.

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Republican Bob Turner wins Weiner’s former seat

Leave a Comment / Is Featured?, Lead Story, News, Politics, United States /

In a blow to Democrats, a Republican candidate captured the heavily Jewish New York City congressional district previously represented by Rep. Anthony Weiner.

The Republican candidate, Bob Turner, beat his Democratic opponent, New York State Assemblyman David Weprin, in Tuesday’s special election. The Associated Press called the race for Turner shortly after midnight, with the Republican leading Weprin by a margin of 53 percent to 47 percent and more than three-fifths of precincts reporting.

The race was closely watched as a measure of attitudes toward President Obama, with the Jewish vote a particular focus of attention. Former New York City mayor Ed Koch, a Democrat, urged voters to support Turner in order to send a message of dissatisfaction to President Obama over his policies toward Israel.

Weprin, an Orthodox Jew, initially led in pre-election polls. But Turner, a retired television executive who was a creator of “The Jerry Springer Show,” pulled ahead during the past month.

Turner’s victory came despite the Democrats’ strong advantage in voter registration in the middle-class Brooklyn and Queens district, which is 57 percent Democratic and only 19 percent Republican. Observers, however, have noted that the district votes more conservative than the registration numbers seem to suggest.

The Republican’s tenure in Congress, however, could be short-lived. New York state is losing two congressional seats due to decennial reapportionment, and many expect that the seat, which has been vacant since Weiner’s scandal-induced resignation, will be eliminated.

New York’s 9th Congressional District has the fourth-largest Jewish population of any congressional district, with some 173,000 Jews, according to a 2009 report from the Mandell L. Berman Institute-North American Jewish Data Bank. Jerry Skurnik, a partner at the political consulting firm Prime New York, told The New York Times that about a third of the district’s active voters are Jewish.

However, the district’s Jewish demographics are somewhat atypical, with sizable concentrations of Orthodox Jews and Russian Jews, who tend to lean more conservative in their voting behavior than Jews in general.

During the race Weprin tried to distance himself from the president, highlighting his criticisms of the president’s policies toward Israel.

According to a September poll from the Siena Research Institute, 54 percent of the district’s likely Jewish voters said they had an unfavorable view of the president, with only 42 percent viewing him favorably—figures that almost exactly matched the views of the district’s likely voters overall.

The Siena poll, conducted Sept. 6-8, showed Weprin trailing Turner by six percentage points but leading among Jews by an equal margin.

While the Israel issue has garnered much of the media attention, in the Siena poll only 16 percent of the district’s Jewish voters said that a candidate’s Israel stance would be the most important factor in determining their vote. That is roughly half the proportion (30 percent) who identified the candidate’s position on the economic recovery as their key issue and slightly fewer than the proportion (20 percent) who chose Social Security, Medicare and other entitlement programs as the top issue.

Republican Bob Turner wins Weiner’s former seat Read More »

The Shop Around The Corner: Local Merchants

Leave a Comment / Culture, News /

I had an ink stain on a silk cocktail dress.  My fancy neighborhood cleaner wanted twenty dollars, with no guarantee that the stain would come out.  Since I had only paid two bucks for the dress at a rummage sale, I decided to shop around.  I tried another local place, and they assured me ink stains are impossible to remove.

I left my neighborhood and drove 10 minutes to a dry cleaner in a less gentrified area.  They removed the stain on the spot, and charged me eight bucks.  I also discovered that their tailor charges half of what I pay to my local seamstress.  Location, location, location.

We have found this same location rule to be true of auto mechanics: prices are lower in blue-collar neighborhoods, and the quality of the work can be excellent.  Of course, it takes a little time to get there, and I sometimes succumb to laziness and pay extra for the convenience of nearby shops.

SERVICE CALLS
I do stay local when it comes to household services like heating and plumbing: the big chains charge a lot more than small independent companies.  I needed to change the locks on two doors.  The large chain would have charged $45 for the visit, plus $86 for each lock.  The local guy came for $35, plus $64 for the locks.

I will admit I got a little nervous when the neighborhood electrician arrived.  He was so old and frail that I had to help him up the front steps.  Then he forgot a tool in his van, so I had to help him down the front steps and back up again.  These maneuvers were very time-consuming but, fortunately, he was not charging by the hour.  He ended up doing a swell job.  This was no surprise, as he had ninety years of experience.

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Fogels’ killer sentenced to five life sentences

Leave a Comment / Israel, News /

A Palestinian man was sentenced to five consecutive life sentences for the murder of five members of the Fogel family in a West Bank Jewish settlement.

Hakim Awad, 18, was sentenced Tuesday in a West Bank military court. He had admitted guilt in the March 11 murders in Itamar, which is near his home in the West Bank town of Hawarta, and refused to express regret. The judges called the attack “an atrocious, bone chilling and terrifying act.”

Israel does not have a death penalty, though the judges said in their decision that they had deliberated on sentencing Awad to death.

“A case such as this tempts the use of such a punishment,” the judges wrote in their decision. “The imprisoned criminal, whose life would be taken after being sentenced to death, might turn into a martyr, a shaheed in their terms, with all the meanings that are attached to it.”

The five consecutive life sentences are equal to 130 years in prison.

Awad and his cousin, Amjad Awad, 19, murdered Udi Fogel, 36, and Ruth Fogel, 35, and their children, Yoav, 11; Elad, 4; and Hadas, 3 months, in a Shabbat eve attack on their home in the northern West Bank. Amjad Awad has been convicted of the murders and is awaiting sentencing.

Three of the Fogel children survived the attack: Two were sleeping in a side bedroom and were not discovered, and a daughter was out of the house at the time of the killings. She came home to discover the bodies.

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JFNA criticizes jobs bill for targeting tax deduction

Leave a Comment / News, United States /

The Jewish Federations of North America criticized how President Obama proposes funding his jobs bill, although it has praised other elements of the bill.

The jobs bill introduced last week would cut write-offs for charitable donations from 35 percent to 28 percent for those earning $200,000 a year or families earning $250,000 as a means of funding in part its other proposals, which include payroll tax cuts and increased hiring of teachers, first responders and others.

“Limiting the itemized deduction would certainly lead to a significant decrease in charitable contributions,” William Daroff, the Washington JFNA director, told the Chronicle of Philanthropy in a story that appeared online Tuesday. “If charities have less resources, they’ll be forced to choose between laying off employees or cutting needed services. Nonprofits employ almost 10 percent of the work force nationwide, and in many states nonprofits are the largest employers. In our view, cutting the deduction is like cutting your nose to spite your face.”

JFNA had praised the bill for the proposed payroll cuts and subsidies for hiring the long-term unemployed.

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Egypt extends detention of American-Israeli Ilan Grapel

Leave a Comment / News, Worldwide /

Egypt reportedly has extended by 45 more days its detention of Ilan Grapel, the dual U.S.-Israeli citizen arrested in Egypt on spying charges.

The remand of Grapel, 27, who was arrested in June on suspicion of being a member of Israel’s Mossad spy agency, was reported Wednesday by the Egyptian Al-Ahram newspaper.

The U.S. Embassy in Cairo reportedly requested that Grapel be free on bail for the duration of the investigation, which has lasted three months, but was denied after Egyptian prosecutors said Grapel posed a flight risk.

Originally from New York, Grapel moved to Israel after his graduation from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, joined the army, served as a paratrooper during the Second Lebanon War and was wounded in Southern Lebanon in August 2006.

Egyptian security officials said he entered the country shortly after the start of the Jan. 25 uprising that led to the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak, during which Grapel allegedly posed as a foreign correspondent.

A law student at Emory University, Grapel allegedly said he was Muslim on the visa application he filed with the Egyptian Embassy in Tel Aviv and then entered Egypt using his American passport.

Grapel denies he is a spy. He says he came to Egypt to intern for a nongovernmental organization that assists refugees from Sudan and elsewhere. Friends of Grapel told The Jerusalem Post that Grapel was an Arabist and liked spending time in Egypt.

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