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Jewish Journal

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October 25, 2011

Israel to send quake aid to Turkey [UPDATE]

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

Israel said on Tuesday it was launching an airlift of supplies to help Turkey cope with a devastating earthquake, following a request from Ankara, with a first shipment of prefabricated homes destined for shipment on Wednesday.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry said Ankara had sought the aid via the Israeli embassy there, after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered assistance in a telephone call to Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan after the quake struck on Sunday.

The humanitarian step taken as more than 400 were reported dead in the disaster that struck southeastern Turkey, was seen as possibly easing diplomatic strains between the allies over the incident involving the Gaza-bound flotilla last year.

A spokesman for Israei Defence Minister Ehud Barak said that “tomorrow (Wednesday) afternoon a first aircraft will fly from Israel to Turkey with several prefabricated homes,” suggesting the shipment would be followed by others.

Israeli Foreign Ministry Yigal Palmor said Turkey had “relayed a request to the embassy in Ankara for mobile homes” and that Israel was checking into the logistics of shipping these supplies.

“We are checking what we can do, and will do whatever we can,” Palmor said.

In Ankara, a Foreign Ministry official said Turkey had requested prefabricated housing and tents from more than 30 countries.

“We informed all countries who offered help, including Israel, of a request on specific items for post-emergency material, such as prefabricated houses, containers and tents,” the official said.

Israel, geographically close to Turkey, with each country situated on opposite sides of Syria and Lebanon, has sent equipment and rescue teams to Turkey after past earthquakes. Turkey sent fire-fighting planes last December to help Israel battle a brush fire that killed 41 people.

Turkey’s Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc denied on Monday that Ankara had declined an offer of aid from Israel.

Tensions between the two U.S. allies increased last month when Turkey expelled the Israeli ambassador after Israel refused to apologise for the Turks killed last year.

Israel said its marines acted in self-defence in clashes with pro-Palestinian activists aboard a vessel bound last year for Gaza, which is ruled by the Islamist group Hamas.

Additional reporting by Ibon Villelabeitia in Ankara and Dan Williams in Jerusalem; Writing by Allyn Fisher-Ilan; Editing by Michael Roddy

Israel to send quake aid to Turkey [UPDATE] Read More »

Surviving the darkest hours of grief: Eitan Fishbane talks about raising daughter without his wife

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

When it comes to writing about grief, perspective is often a liability.

Grieving is so smothering an experience that it’s almost impossible to conjure up from a distance. And yet so few people have the inclination or the presence of mind to document its intensity in real time. It’s no wonder that the best contemporary writing about grief — Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking” and Meghan O’Rourke’s “The Long Goodbye” come to mind — were begun before scar tissue had time to form.

Eitan Fishbane, an assistant professor of Jewish philosophy at the Jewish Theological Seminary, wrote most of his potent, poetic new memoir, “Shadows in Winter” (Syracuse University Press), in the five months after the death of his wife, Leah, who was 32. Leah, who was pregnant with the couple’s second child, died of an undiagnosed brain tumor just days after being rushed to the hospital with a debilitating headache. Their daughter, Aderet, was 4.

In a recent interview with the Forward’s Gabrielle Birkner, Fishbane discusses the decision to document his walk through grief, the books that provided solace in his darkest hours, parenting a daughter through the loss of her mother and finding happiness anew.

Gabrielle Birkner: What compelled you to compose a journal in the immediate aftermath of Leah’s death — and at what point did you begin to envision what you were writing as a book?

Eitan Fishbane: I was talking to an old friend at the shiva, and she knew that writing was always my outlet for processing emotion; she was already encouraging me to start writing about it. Initially, it was very much an emptying-out of the intensity of emotions. Then there was a growing desire to have other people read it. There’s power in witnessing — of having other people hold your trauma, hold your pain. Other people’s stories were very healing and comforting to me when I was in my weakest places. To know that another person has been to that unspeakable place is very powerful.

You write poignantly about how Aderet mourned her mother intuitively, through her words and her prayers, her songs and her artwork. What did bearing witness to a 4-year-old’s sorrow teach you about how children grieve?

A big part of how children process grief is through play and through their own artistic creativity — the drawing of pictures, the playing with sand tables. This imaginary world becomes a symbolic world for them. But I was, thankfully, able to see that children have, or at least Aderet has, an amazing emotional resilience. She is really able to savor joy in life in the same way that other little children do, while still processing the memories.

You dedicate the book to Aderet with the words “I will remember for you.” Does the responsibility of being your daughter’s memory, her link to her mother, weigh heavily on you?

In some ways, that dedication reflects the weight of what it is to parent a little child through loss. I am one of the primary bearers of those memories that, inevitably and tragically, she has only preciously few of. So it’s a heaviness and it’s also an incredible gift. I’m grateful that we live in a digital age, that we have some video that survived all this, that she’ll almost be able to see and hear her mother.

Did the works of other writers who have tackled life after loss provide any comfort or inspiration for you?

For a long time, those kinds of books were the only ones I had any real desire for. I found Earl Grollman’s “Living When a Loved One Has Died” to be very authentic to the emotion of it; I found Donald Hall’s short book of poems, “Without” .…and Mark Doty’s book of poems, “Atlantis,” to be very powerful. C.S. Lewis’s “A Grief Observed” and Joan Didion’s book “The Year of Magical Thinking” were very significant. But I connected more to Hall and Doty, because of their attempt to connect the power of emotion through lyricism.

Leah died in March 2007. How long after that did it take for your appetite for other reading, for other intellectual pursuits, to come back?

It was a very powerful experience to come back that fall to teaching — to stand again before a group of students and try to enter back into that world of spirituality and ideas that drew me into teaching and writing, and still sustain me. It was a slow process of transition, but teaching was able to reconnect me to those ideas. And I actually have another book coming out this fall, called “The Sabbath Soul,” about Hasidic mystical reflections on Shabbat. My father made the observation that “Shadows in Winter” was my Kaddish for Leah, and “The Sabbath Soul” was an attempt at a kol mikadesh [spiritual sanctification], or a Kiddush — representing a return to my spiritual and theological creativity.

“Shadows in Winter” is about your walk through grief — and only in the afterword do you write about your life since those initial dark weeks and months. But you’re now remarried [to Rabbi Julia Andelman]. Was it difficult to give your heart over again, after experiencing such a sudden, tragic loss?

Giving your heart over again is very uplifting, but it’s also a very vulnerable thing. It’s a great blessing to find love again, and still that doesn’t mean that the past is erased. All of it makes me the person that I am. Julia has, in a deeply loving way, embraced Aderet, and Aderet is a happy little girl who is well adjusted to a new family structure. Part of what I hope is communicated in the afterword is that there is survival and there is hope and there are positive new beginnings after very dark times.

Gabrielle Birkner is the director of digital media at the Forward and edits the women’s issues blog, The Sisterhood, on forward.com.

Surviving the darkest hours of grief: Eitan Fishbane talks about raising daughter without his wife Read More »

22-year-old Dies in Car Accident

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The 22-year-old son of a teacher at Valley Torah High School died in a car accident on La Cienega Boulevard near Rodeo Road Monday afternoon.

Shimon Grama, the son of Rabbi Daniel and Ruth Grama, was heading home from the airport when he was involved in a major accident. He was brought to a nearby hospital where he was pronounced dead, according to the LAPD.

Grama was eulogized at a service at Beth Jacob Congregation on Tuesday afternoon and will be flown to Israel for burial, according to Yeshiva World News.

Rabbi Daniel Grama previously taught at YULA boys school and now teaches at Valley Torah High School for boys in Valley Village.

According to Yeshiva World News, Shimon Grama was invovled in various charitable organizations and volunteered last summer for Kids of Courage, which takes terminally ill children on week-long vacations.

 

22-year-old Dies in Car Accident Read More »

Declaring a place to call home

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“Up until 1948, the Jewish nation had no one at the other end of the 911 call, we were a nation without a home.” So explained the guide at the Israel Independence Museum in Tel Aviv as he described the situation of Holocaust survivors post-WWII.  “How do you know the war is over? When you can pack and go home.  The U.S. packed and went home.  The British packed and went home.  The Jews had nothing to pack and no home to go to.”

I shudder thinking about it.  I’ve lived in four states and a different apartment every day since I left home to go to college, and yet, I always had a home base, a permanent address, a place to call in a crisis, a place to return.  I’ve had apartments that became a home, and rooms that remained foreign.  But no matter where I slept at night, I always knew I had a home with my family as a safety net.  Hence the unbelievable meaning the David Ben Gurion’s declaration of the state of Israel in 1948.  A Jewish Homeland.  Not a land filled with housing and aid, but a land to call their own.  Home.  It’s where we are supposed to be safe and protected, cherished and loved. 

Without a home lies only fear and vulnerability, isolation, and loneliness.  So for the first time I get a glimpse of how Israel must have felt like the national parent for desperate immigrants.  The replacement for a home destroyed and life erased.  I get it a bit more, get a touch of the Zionist bug, understanding a little more why so many kiss the soil upon arriving in Israel. 

Its the same reason why I kiss my parents when I go home to visit.

Declaring a place to call home Read More »

Shalit is facing obstacles on road to recovery

Leave a Comment / Gilad Shalit, Is Featured?, Israel, News /

Gilad Shalit’s release from more than five years of isolated captivity marked the end of a national trauma for Israel, but for the 25-year-old it’s only the beginning of his road to recovery.

While Shalit is suffering from sun deprivation and minor untreated shrapnel wounds, the ailments are likely to heal long before the psychological scars that may be lurking beneath the surface.

Hostages often show symptoms analogous to victims of severe trauma, according to Nancy Zarse, a professor of forensic psychology and an expert on hostage situations.

“He might have trouble connecting with people,” she said. “He might have a sense of hyper-vigilance. He might always be on guard.”

Other symptoms that former hostages often suffer are withdrawal, numbness or irritability, trouble concentrating or intrusive thoughts and nightmares.

A 1991 study in the American Journal of Psychiatry found that as many as nine out of 10 of Korean War prisoners of war suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, and other trauma-related mental disorders more than 35 years after their release.

A follow-up study found that POWs suffer a “much greater risk of developing PTSD than combat veterans.”

While Shalit’s circumstances are somewhat unique, given the length of his captivity and the conditions in which he was held, media outlets have turned to former Israeli POWs to make sense of what he is likely to face now that he is free.

“He will look fine on the outside,” Amos Levital, who spent two years in an Egyptian prison during the War of Attrition that followed the 1967 Six-Day War, told Haaretz. “The problem is the emotional scars. This is a prolonged process.”

Some experts have suggested that Shalit’s fame could pose barriers.

“If he can achieve some sort of normal routine engaged in some purposeful activity amid strong familial roots, he may be OK,” Solly Dreman, a psychology professor emeritus at Ben-Gurion University, told the Forward newspaper. “But if everybody feels he’s part of their family, he becomes public property.”

Shalit will be undergoing rehabilitation, his father, Noam, has said. Also crucial, said Zarse, will be social support from friends, community and even his former military unit to prevent a sense of alienation.

Zarse added that it is also important to keep Shalit away from the ongoing debate in Israel over the ramifications of the deal that secured his freedom—1,027 Palestinian prisoners were exchanged for Shalit, and that could awaken unwarranted second-guessing or survivor’s guilt.

“Particularly with this case, where I’m seeing some backlash about the deal and the imbalance of the exchange and the ramifications on the PA, I think there needs to be an effort to protect him from those larger political issues,” she said.

Even if Shalit initially seems to recover, Zarse warns that it is possible that he will begin to suffer symptoms much later, within six months to a year.

“Someone comes home from a long captivity, there might be a honeymoon phase where they feel encouraged and supported,” she said, “and then these feelings start to surface.”

Shalit is facing obstacles on road to recovery Read More »

Turkey requests Israeli aid in earthquake’s wake

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I read in a ” title=”The Jewish Journal”>The Jewish Journal says that Turkey requested aid and Israel is sending it.

An excerpt:

Israel’s Foreign Ministry said Ankara had sought the aid via the Israeli embassy there, after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered assistance in a telephone call to Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan after the quake struck on Sunday.

The humanitarian step taken as more than 400 were reported dead in the disaster that struck southeastern Turkey, was seen as possibly easing diplomatic strains between the allies over the incident involving the Gaza-bound flotilla last year.

A spokesman for Israei Defense Minister Ehud Barak said that “tomorrow (Wednesday) afternoon a first aircraft will fly from Israel to Turkey with several prefabricated homes,” suggesting the shipment would be followed by others.

Israeli Foreign Ministry Yigal Palmor said Turkey had “relayed a request to the embassy in Ankara for mobile homes” and that Israel was checking into the logistics of shipping these supplies.

“We are checking what we can do, and will do whatever we can,” Palmor said.

Read the ” title=”JPost”>JPost.

Turkey requests Israeli aid in earthquake’s wake Read More »

Not Human Enough to Live: The Murder of Kelly Thomas and Effort to Bring his Murderers to Justice

Leave a Comment / Blogs, News /

The facts are horrific. Video capture the brutal attack on the side of a busy street. Onlookers and passerby don’t come to the victims aid. Eventually, the bruised, bleeding half-dead body is attended to by medical personal, but it is all but too late. The victim dies.

No, I am not talking about the tragic hit and run of a two year-old Chinese girl – I am writing about the death of Kelly Thomas of Fullerton, California.

Kelly Thomas, a 37-year-old mentally ill homeless man, was brutally beaten by six Fullerton police officers on July 5. Yes, on-duty police. They then tried to cover up the murder. Thomas was beloved, not abandoned, but mental illness kept him on the streets.

Kelly’s beating at a bus stop was done in public. No one came to his aid. Cars and passersby watched. The investigators interviewed 151 witnesses — yes, that is 151 people stared, watched and did nothing — viewed seven surveillance videos and two videos recorded by witnesses on their cellphones. In addition, a recording device attached to leader of the assualt, which all Fullerton officers wear, recorded the murder in vivid detail. Two officers are being charged in his death, four others that took part have not.

Ron Thomas, Kelly’s father, is waging a relentless battle to raise awareness about Kelly’s murder, the police cover-up, and ultimately about the fate of the mentally ill on our streets. And it’s working. Residents of Fullerton are taking their city council to task and the FBI is now investigating the crime. Fullerton just set up a task force in the wake of the murder to look for ways to improve the plight of the homeless in Fullerton.

Paul Orloff, a Fullerton resident, has launched a Change.org campaign to bring the four Fullerton police officers who have yet to be charged in the Kelly Thomas murder case to justice. In just a few days, more that 14,000 people signed a petition for justice in the murder of Kelly Thomas. 

While the world gasped in horror at the death of the Chinese girl, in America we walk by the legions of homeless who lie motionless on the side of the street every day.

We are numb to the facts: hundreds of thousands of them call the streets their home every night. They sleep over subway grates, in alleyways and doorways. As the economy worsens, the numbers on the street are increasing.

Those who call the street home are mostly ignored as if they do not exist. From time to time a passerby will show compassion, offering food, money, a kind word. Yet, most of us find ways to harden our hearts to their plight. We dismiss them as junkies, bums, beggars, or mentally-ill. Cities create laws to banish them from our sight. Yet, each homeless person, no matter their mental, physical, or hygienic condition, is a human being endowed with the same soul as anyone else.

In addition to their plight living on the streets of America, literally under our feet, the homeless are also targets of random murders across the country. Kelly Thomas’s murder is just the latest to make the papers. Just in the last week, these cases made the news:

On October 23rd, Allen Harrell Hunter, from West Palm Beach man was arrested for the 2008 murder of a homeless man David Roland Ulmer

On Oct. 19th, in Butte, Montanta, Shane Hans, 35, was charged with deliberate homicide in the killing of a homeless man, Teddy James Hildebrant, in Butte overnight Tuesday. 

On October 13th, Casey Daniel Brown was sentenced Wednesday by Sacramento County Superior Court for the second-degree murder of 68-year-old Bernice Nickson, a homeless woman who approached him at a bus stop.

Why are homeless people targeted for such random killing? Often because they are regarded them as less than human, murderers wrongly believed no one would miss these creatures of the streets. Some of the murderers have ready admitted that they calculated that no one would miss these people.

Kelly Thomas’s tragic life and death are causing one city to move forward and continue the soul-searching needed to work on the issue of homeless on their streets. Hopefully it will not take more grizzly videos of a homeless person being bludgeoned, run-over, or stabbed and left to die by the side of the road for America to start taking notice.

Not Human Enough to Live: The Murder of Kelly Thomas and Effort to Bring his Murderers to Justice Read More »

Buddhist monks burn themselves in protesting Chinese oppression

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