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April 25, 2012

A Celebration Needed More Than Ever: The Force Behind LA’s Celebrate Israel Festival

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Los Angeles is home to more Israelis than many Israeli cities. And yet, last year the Israeli Festival was cancelled after falling on financial ruin, and a lack of general community support. It seemed that this most Israeli of American cities, was going to let Israeli Independence go by without a peep.

Then came Naty and Debbie Saidoff to the rescue.

“> Celebrate Israel

___________________

Follow Rabbi Yonah Bookstein on Twitter ” title=”Facebook” target=”_blank”>Facebook

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Survivor: Jack Adelstein

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“Raus, raus!” (Out, out!) Jack Adelstein — then Janek Eidelstein, 4 years old — was abruptly awakened by a dozen SS soldiers and Polish farmers. He was sleeping in a cave in a dense forest outside Krasnik, Poland, where he was hiding with his father, brother and an older sister. His siblings had ventured out earlier on that bitterly cold November night, as they often did during the six months they spent in hiding, stealing food from a nearby farm. This time, however, the farmer tracked them back to the cave, following their footsteps in the snow, and reported them. The captured family was trucked to the nearby Budzyn labor camp.

Jack was born on April 15, 1936, to Mordechai and Gertrude Eidelstein; he was the fifth of six children. The family lived on a farm, in a house with a straw roof and straw floor. They weren’t rich, but they had food. And Jack had a pony. “I went to the river and swam with it,” he said.

Everything changed after Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. By the following spring, Nazi soldiers showed up at the family’s farm and confiscated all the animals and most of their belongings.

Jack’s parents decided their best chance at survival was to split up, so Gertrude and three of their four daughters went to the Krasnik ghetto; Mordechai took the other children — Jack, their other son and their other daughter — and hid in the forest.

At Budzyn, Jack was given a uniform “10 times too big” and assigned to a barracks with his father and brother; his sister was housed in a women’s barracks.

During the days, he stayed in the kitchen, where he hid under piles of potato peelings. “I was afraid Feix would see me and kill me,” he said of the Oberscharfuhrer (Nazi overseer), Reinhold Feix, who was, according to Jack, “the devil himself.” At roll call, Feix rode on his horse, a German shepherd at his side. Sometimes at night, or on weekends when he was drunk, he walked into a barracks with a small machine gun and sprayed bullets. At those times, Jack’s father hid him under a straw mattress.

After three months, Jack was assigned a job feeding chickens, rabbits and geese. He also had to report to Feix at roll call. One day, in front of 10,000 prisoners, “out of nowhere,” Jack said, Feix drew his revolver, cocked it and pointed it at Jack’s head. It jammed. But Feix, enraged by the malfunction, began beating Jack’s head with the gun, creating a gash “two fingers” deep. Jack bears a 3-inch scar to this day.

But Jack had already reached a point where “it didn’t matter anymore,” he remembers. His brother and sister had been murdered, taken to a large ditch outside the camp with a group of 500 prisoners and shot. And on the camp’s row of gallows, “At least 10 to 50 people were hanging every day — by the neck, the feet and every which way,” Jack said. Also, he and his father had heard that Gertrude and the three girls had been taken to Auschwitz.

After two years, as the Russian army advanced, Jack and his father were moved to the Plaszow labor camp. Jack was tattooed with a number, but his father sucked out the ink, fearing it was poison. Jack worked in the Nazi offices, delivering papers to different barracks and cleaning the machines and wood floors. “I had no childhood. I thought life was like that,” he said.

After six months, Jack and his father were transferred to Flossenburg, a concentration camp in Bavaria, which was, according to Jack, “cold as hell.” While his father worked on planes for Messerschmitt AG, Jack was assigned to clean the Nazi offices. A highlight was stealing bread and cheese for his father, supplementing the plain bread and watery soup they were given once a day.

The camp became unmanageably overcrowded, and the crematorium, working round the clock, could not keep pace. The Nazis piled bodies in stacks, sometimes 20 feet high, pouring gasoline on them and igniting them, Jack recalls.

As the Allies began bombing in January 1945, the Germans loaded the prisoners on trains. Jack and his father were put in a cattle car, but, fearing the train would be bombed, Jack’s father, standing on dead bodies, pulled himself up to the car’s roof and climbed out. He then hauled Jack up. As the train was departing and they jumped off, Jack was shot in the foot. Still, they escaped into the nearby woods.

But they were soon captured and returned to Flossenburg, a few weeks before liberation. There was no food, and thousands of prisoners were walking around, “skeletons with their eyes bulging,” Jack said. Then, on April 23, 1945, the U.S. Army liberated Flossenburg. Jack believes that at age 9 he was the camp’s youngest survivor.

Jack and his father were eventually sent to a DP camp in Frankfurt. For the first time, Jack said, “I saw what life was like.” He attended Jewish school and learned Hebrew. Then, in summer 1947, his father died of a brain tumor.

Two years later, Jack came to the United States on an orphan visa. He was adopted by a cousin in Los Angeles, Anne Gorrin, the woman he calls “Mother.” Jack attended school, graduating from Fairfax High School. In 1954, he began working for a shower curtain company. After 30 years, he opened his own shower curtain company, Pavilion Products, retiring in 2007.

Jack met Natalie Wiener when he was 19 and she was 16, and they married in August 1957. Son Martin was born in 1959, Gary followed in 1962, and daughter Cheryl in 1964.

Jack regrets that he cannot recall the faces of his mother and five siblings. He has no photographs. He also regrets that he missed getting an education.

These days, Jack enjoys being with his family, including his seven grandchildren. He is working up to telling his story at the Museum of Tolerance.

“I feel blessed in one way, but so much was also taken away,” he says.

Survivor: Jack Adelstein Read More »

Lemon Verbena

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When I was in my mid-20s, I fought a long, messy and entirely internal struggle over whether to move to Israel.

Many young Jews living in the Diaspora — more than you think — face this choice. We spend some time there, either as part of an organized program, or, as I did, on our own. Then we have to choose. 

Israel, small as it is, exerts a strong pull. 

I was 25 in 1985. I had lived in Israel for a year; worked hard to learn Hebrew, find a job and an apartment; built the beginnings of a life. I had a girlfriend, Miki, and a group of Israeli friends — Jews, Arabs, South Africans, French, Australians, Angelenos — whose company inspired me. We worked or went to school, then spent the evenings visiting, drinking really bad Carmel Hock wine or powdered Turkish coffee, arguing, laughing, dreaming.

None of us had money, and the country itself was simple and poor compared to the States: no cell phones, two brands of beer, two TV channels.

Maybe it’s the same with all 25-year-olds. At that age, you enter a kind of second childhood, you sponge up whatever culture you happen to find yourself in. I have friends from Encino who spent those post-college years in London and returned with full-on English accents, never quite able to lose them.

In any case, Israel felt like my new home, and I wrestled with whether I could separate myself from my family and make a career there. 

Because I tend to relate to the world through food, my memories of those years are tied to foods I discovered for the first time there. One day, Miki and I befriended an elderly man named S.E. Yardeni, who lived in a simple home on a relatively large plot of land in Jerusalem. Yardeni was a pioneer who had come to settle the land. His agile mind invented the locks that still bear his name. He founded his company in 1947, a year before statehood, and by the time we met him, he was retired and devoting himself to his garden. He had the money to live anywhere in the world, in style, but he was rooted, like his fig, olive and pomegranate trees, to the land.

One hot summer day, he showed us how he made pomegranate wine. It was served cold and was mildly alcoholic, the color of rubies. To this day, I’ve never tasted anything quite so perfect. He made us a salad of the lettuce and tomatoes he grew, and he poured tea for us that was unlike any I’d ever tasted: sweet, lemony, minty.

“What is it?” I asked him to show me.

In his yard, he ran his hand over a bush with elegant, soft green spiked leaves. “Louisa,” he called it. As his rough hands stroked the leaves, that fragrance filled the warm air. How could I ever leave Israel?

In winter, we visited Yardeni again, and he made another tea, this time from sage leaves.

“The Arabs drink louisa in summer, sage in winter,” he explained. “It warms you up.” It did.

By spring, I was back in Los Angeles. I can’t say I ever really definitively decided whether to stay or to leave. Miki and I were breaking up, and I thought it would be a good thing to get a bit of distance between us for a bit, like 10,000 miles. Not that we were married, but in the separation, she got the country.

And me, I ended up like a helluva lot of other middle-aged men and women I know. We look back on the years we spent in Israel and can’t help wondering: What if? How close did we really come to taking a leap that, in the end, so few successfully take? Instead, we raise our kids speaking a bit of Hebrew, stay involved in the life and politics of the country from a distance, make a point to befriend Israelis here (and let’s face it, a lot more of them follow their hearts to us than vice versa).

It’s not a chapter that ever seems to close. And as the years tick by, as our kids grow up and move on, and a part of us — of me — can’t help but think: If the right opportunity were to arise … if the right job offer came through. But of course, a real leap doesn’t require a great opportunity; it starts with the courage to sacrifice for possibility, for a dream, for what if.

In my garden in Venice, I planted two pomegranate trees. The large one yielded more than 100 pounds of fruit last year. I never learned to make Yardeni’s wine, but I do make a pretty good vodka after I pick, seed and crush the fruit.

I looked for a year for louisa in the local nurseries, until I learned that it has a common English name, lemon verbena. I planted five plants in the back garden, one in the front.

Louisa goes dormant in the winter. Three months of the year, it looks dead. At the peak of spring, light lime-colored leaves sprout along the branches, and the plant begins a new cycle of spindly growth.

On a beautiful spring morning last week, I decided to drink my coffee by the garden. I sat and took in the peaceful morning, the beauty of where I live, the good fortune of my life. Unknowingly, I brushed my hand along the newly formed louisa leaves, and their fragrance released and enveloped me.

And I began to cry.

Lemon Verbena Sorbet

This is adapted from The Herbfarm Cookbook, by Jerry Traunfeld.

Nothing but vibrant and refreshing it’s lemon heaven.

Makes 1 quart, 8 servings

1 1/2 cups (gently packed) fresh lemon verbena leaves

1 cup superfine sugar

1/4 cup freshly squeezed Meyer or Eureka lemon juice

3 cups cold water

Grind the lemon verbena leaves and sugar together in a food processor until the mixture turns into a bright green paste, about 30 seconds; stop to scrape down the sides as necessary. Add the lemon juice and process for 15 seconds longer, then add the water. Strain the resulting liquid through a fine sieve to remove any bits of leaf. Freeze in an ice cream maker according to the manufacturer’s directions.

Lemon Verbena Tea

I serve this at the end of just about every meal beginning in early summer, when our verbena plants… leaf out.

12 fresh large lemon verbena leaves

1 T. sugar

4 cups boiling water

Steep leaves in boiling water.  Add sugar to taste.

Rob’s Pomegranate Cordial

Wash ripe pomegranates.  Submerge in a large bowl or tub of water.  Cut open and with your fingers pry out the seeds.  They will fall to the bottom of the bucket while the pith will rise to the top.

Scoop off and discard pith, drain all the water, then re-rinse seeds, drain well..

Using your hands, squeeze the seeds to extract the juice.  Strain through damp cheesecloth, squeezing well.

Make a simple syrup by boiling water and sugar 1:1.  Let cool.

Fill a clean bottle half way with juice. Add 1/8-1/4 syrup and the rest vodka.  Shake and taste.  Add more juice, syrup or vodka to balance flavor.  It should be sweet, tart and juicy with a slight alcohol kick.

Seal and refrigerate a few days to mellow the flavors.  Serve in cordial glasses, well chilled, or mix with Prosecco, champagne or white wine.

Lemon Verbena Read More »

Letters to the Editor: Dennis Prager, kosher hot dogs, chewable Xanax

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Left, Right and the Definition of Evil

Mr. Prager has stated he has had an obsession with fighting evil (“A Man and a Book,” April 20). He falsely accuses the left from its inception as combating something other than evil, and that is material inequality. Where, Mr. Prager, on your idea of the political continuum, does the right end and the left begin? Was the New Deal of FDR not fighting evil when he set up agencies to help desperately poor people during the Great Depression? Was FDR not fighting evil when he led our nation against Hitler? Was LBJ not fighting evil when he got Congress to pass to the Civil Rights Acts, making Jim Crow illegal? Was Obama not fighting evil when he got regulations back to stop the excesses of Wall Street and the banks that brought on the terrible Bush recession? Mr. Prager, in practically every one of your columns, you rail against the left. This, sir, is your obsession, and as a self-proclaimed fighter of good against evil, your obsession with the left is not good.

Leon M. Salter
Los Angeles

Dennis Prager responds:

When FDR fought the terrible effects of the Depression, he was fighting tragedy, not evil. There is a robust debate among today economists whether FDR’s massive government spending helped or hindered recovery from the Depression. His own treasury secretary said in 1939 that it didn’t help. Yes, of course, fighting Hitler was fighting evil, and after Pearl Harbor, Republicans and Democrats alike fought Hitler. But the preoccupation of the left (not liberals, as I repeatedly note) has been economic inequality, not evil. That is why the left celebrated the Soviets until Stalin made a pact with Hitler in 1939. That is why the left mocked Ronald Reagan when he called the Soviet Union an evil empire. That is why the left mocked George W. Bush when he labeled North Korea a country-prison camp, and the Holocaust-denying Iranian regime, with its promise to wipe Israel off the map, an “axis of evil.” That is why the left opposed anti-communists far more than they opposed Mao (murderer of 75 million), Ho Chi Minh, Castro and other murderous communist tyrants. As for racism in America, more Republicans than Democrats voted for civil rights legislation, and it was Republican President Dwight Eisenhower who sent troops to integrate Little Rock High School in 1957. It was racists in the Democratic Party, not conservatives or Republicans, who blocked civil rights for blacks. American history’s most conservative candidate for president, Barry Goldwater, was a founder of the Arizona NAACP. And the roots of the current recession lie in policies put into place long before George W. Bush. It was largely brought on by Presidents Carter and Clinton, whose legislation and financial industry regulation coerced banks into giving home loans to minorities and other people with low incomes thought to be “underrepresented” as homeowners. Finally, Mr. Salter, outside of the Muslim world, virtually all the attempts to delegitimize Israel come from the left. Is that worth being “obsessed” about?

Something’s Not Kosher in Dodger-land

I was stunned to read in Michael Berenbaum’s opinion piece (“Time for a (Kosher) Hot Dog, a Beer and Dodgers Baseball,” April 20) that Dodger Stadium, of all places, does not sell kosher hot dogs, although it is located in such a large Jewish market. It’s also sad that a petition may be necessary to change that reality.

As a New Yorker and lifelong Yankees fan, I believe that there are two ballparks whose beauty elevates the already spiritual nature of the game of baseball – Yankee Stadium and Dodger Stadium. Yankee Stadium has glatt kosher food stands where hot dogs and other goodies are available. What are the Dodgers waiting for?

Even as the new ownership of the Dodgers spends millions on the team and keeping the stadium looking like new at the age of 50, it should use the vast resources of the Los Angeles Orthodox community to bring a shomer Shabbos glatt kosher food emporium to “The House That O’Malley Built.”

Stephen Steiner
Director of Public Relations
Orthodox Union

Take a Chill Pill, Mom

Teresa Strasser’s son does not need chewable Xanax (“Chewable Xanax and the Shoe Debacle,” April 20). He needs his mother at home and no daycare. My heart goes out to this little boy. My advice to Ms. Strasser: You should take the chewable Xanax! 

Barbara Joan Grubman
Woodland Hills

CORRECTION

The article “$20 Million Gift to L.A. Federation Is Its Largest Ever” (April 20) neglected to state that in addition to funding Brawerman Elementary School West at Wilshire Boulevard Temple in 1998, Geri and Richard Brawerman provided the naming gift for the school’s east campus, which opened in fall 2011 at the temple’s historic building on Wilshire Boulevard.

Letters to the Editor: Dennis Prager, kosher hot dogs, chewable Xanax Read More »

Opinion: Agreements with Israeli schools a turning point for UC Irvine

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Few universities have garnered as much international attention and Jewish communal concern over student-led, anti-Israel and sometimes anti-Semitic activities on campus than the University of California, Irvine (UCI).

A history of incendiary demonstrations demonizing Israel; a revolving door of speakers sympathetic to Hamas and Hezbollah; accusations of harassment of, and threats to, Jewish students, and a pattern of unsatisfactory responses by campus administrators — at least until the 2010 suspension of the Muslim Student Union (MSU) for its role in the Michael Oren debacle — led this writer in a Jewish Journal cover story that year to wonder if UCI was safe for Jews. Some in the community had even accused the university itself of being anti-Semitic.

That’s why UCI’s new agreements with four Israeli universities are nothing less than historic.

During a momentous academic mission to Israel in March, Chancellor Michael Drake signed memoranda of understanding with Hebrew University, Ben-Gurion University and the Technion — Israel Institute of Technology, as well as a letter of intent with Tel Aviv University. These agreements recognize shared areas of academic interest and expertise and open the door to collaborative research, faculty and student exchanges, conferences and other initiatives.

Drake calls Israeli universities “natural partners” with which UCI shares a “synergistic series of competencies and approaches to problems.” Speaking with leaders of the Rose Project, Jewish Federation & Family Services’ program established in 2008 to create a comprehensive and proactive approach to addressing challenges at UCI, the chancellor cited the schools’ cultural and demographic similarities that help build strong relationships among faculty and administrators. He was clearly excited about the potential of these agreements for UCI and Israeli scholars and students.

The university is wasting no time getting started. While in Israel, UCI deans of physical science, medicine and engineering who accompanied Drake laid the groundwork for short- and long-term programs, some of which will launch this summer. Among these are student and faculty exchanges in electrical, civil and environmental engineering; visiting medical rotations, post-doctoral fellowships in the physical sciences; virtual conferences for medical school faculty; and a workshop on water resources. UCI also announced plans to establish “Communications 2025,” a major conference in Israel to explore the technologies needed for IT and communications in the next decade.

The notion that more positive discourse on college campuses can be generated through academia has fueled a number of initiatives by pro-Israel organizations, including the rapid growth in North America of multidisciplinary Israel studies programs. Embracing this approach, Rose Project leaders in 2008 began engaging the UCI administration in dialogue regarding the value a wider academic lens on Israel would have for building a civil campus climate. Significant steps with measurable progress have been achieved: Top pro-Israel speakers and Israeli officials regularly address the UCI community; Israeli journalists and academics are frequent guests in classes dealing with Israel and the conflict; the Israel Fellows Program of the Jewish Agency for Israel has added an important educational and advocacy component to the UCI Hillel agenda; and the Schusterman Family Foundation — in cooperation with the Rose Project — has established a visiting Israeli professor program that brings a scholarly, pro-Israel voice to campus to engage in broad education inside and outside the classroom.

The Orange County Jewish community has seen time and again the transformative effects of Birthright Israel, Hasbara Fellowships, Hillel and StandWithUs Israel programming – all of which are supported by the Rose Project — on participants’ understanding and perception of Israel. Now that UCI’s administration is actively seeking Israeli partnerships, a growing cadre of faculty and students are unequivocally empowered to have the kind of direct interaction with Israel and Israelis that we know will leave a lasting imprint on how they will view the country, its people and their contributions to society. Let’s hope they take up this mantle of opportunity and responsibility.

With the MSU’s notorious “Palestine Awareness Week” assumed to be three weeks away, anti-Israel speakers and their supporters will once again assemble on Ring Road to lambast Israel. And while that small but vocal group may continue to call on the university to divest from companies doing business with Israel, the UCI leadership has outright rejected calls for an Israeli academic boycott. Instead, it has set in place a positive path and vision regarding Israel that will have a profound impact on the campus climate for years to come.

Lisa Armony is a former Jewish Journal Orange County correspondent and now director of the Rose Project of Jewish Federation & Family Services.

Opinion: Agreements with Israeli schools a turning point for UC Irvine Read More »

Opinion: They said it couldn’t be done

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They said it couldn’t be done; that the rebirth of an ancient nation would be like growing fish in the desert. But, 64 years later, Israel has accomplished both. Just ask Dotan Bar-Noy, CEO of Israel’s Grow Fish Anywhere Advanced Systems, which develops innovative water technologies for arid fish farming that can help feed millions around the world. 

With a population of only 7.8 million, less than that of Los Angeles County, Israel is breaking ground in so many areas, and the world is finally taking notice. Israel is exporting wine to France, durum wheat for pasta to Italy and water technologies to nations with an abundance of water. 

In the last six months, Israel won its 10th Nobel Prize; Apple inaugurated its first-ever research and development center outside California, in Haifa; Intel announced a $3 billion upgrade to its southern Israeli research and development center producing its most innovative chip; information systems company EMC announced a new cloud technology development center in the Negev; and IBM, Google and Microsoft launched Israeli high-tech incubators. Meanwhile, Cornell University partnered with the Technion, winning an international bid to build a world-class science and engineering campus in New York City.

This year, Israelis also made strides in unlikely places. With Israel’s 10th Academy Award nomination and 11 television formats in development for the United States, Israel is becoming a permanent fixture in Hollywood. “Homeland,” the Israeli-inspired Golden Globe-winning drama, will be filming several episodes in Israel. Madonna is launching her global tour in Tel Aviv this summer, while Waves, an Israeli company creating audio technologies, has become a music industry standard. 

What’s more, Roberto Cavalli launched the first-ever Tel Aviv Fashion Week; Tel Aviv was voted one of the top three world destinations and most gay-friendly city; Tel Aviv Museum of Art won Travel & Leisure’s Best Museum Award for its new Herta and Paul Amir Building; and Israel’s Recanati Winery won the highest prize at the Oscars of the wine world. 

It should be no surprise, then, that tourism to Israel is shattering records, approaching 4 million visitors a year.

Maybe these tourists know something that world headlines aren’t revealing. 

Maybe it’s worth taking a fresh look at Israel. 

It’s not just about accolades; it’s about real solutions to real problems, such as the environment, world hunger and humanitarian issues. Israel has become a world leader in responding to these challenges. 

Eco-innovation may be the new buzzword, but Israel has vast experience with solar and alternative energy, waste treatment and recycling innovations. It’s not just the Better Place electric car. Israel is a super-power in all things water-related, a pioneer in drip irrigation while recycling 10 times more water than most countries. Is that important? Just ask any water expert here in Southern California, a region facing severe water challenges.

And last week, the United States and Israel signed another agreement to cooperate on food security in Africa. 

Organizations such as IsraAID, Israel Flying Aid, Magen David Adom and Save a Child’s Heart are all components of Israel’s “global first responders.” These are volunteers constantly on call, providing assistance in some of the most difficult disasters around the world. Israeli doctors and relief workers were among the first on the ground after earthquakes struck Haiti, Turkey and Japan. And, they are still there.

Closer to home, there has been a strengthening of academic ties and more scientific exchanges, as USC President C.L. Max Nikias and UC Irvine Chancellor Michael Drake both led high-level delegations to Israel, with faculty and deans. Both signed a host of agreements with several Israeli universities.

You may be skeptical about all this good news, and argue Israel faces multiple security and societal challenges, and you would be right. There are certainly very serious challenges: continued rocket fire from Gaza aimed at our southern cities, the unraveling of the entire Middle East, the rise of extremist Islam, political stalemate with the Palestinians, uncertainty in Syria, and the growing threat of a nuclear-armed Iran with severe implications for the region and the world.

Internally, social, economic and religious challenges are difficult to resolve. But Israel’s civil society is vibrant and makes its voice heard. These debates are very real and should be embraced as part of a robust and diverse democracy.

Regional conflict does not hinder our drive, alter our identity or define our purpose. The spirit of Israel is broader than that. But with the conversation about Israel being almost exclusively focused on the narrow confines of conflict and crises, it comes as no surprise that other aspects of Israel are unknown.

This year, let’s commit ourselves to a broader conversation, not one solely limited to the “gevalt” narrative.

Don’t just take my word for it. Go to Israel and see for yourself. If you want to learn more, “like” my Facebook page at facebook.com/CGDavidSiegel, and stay informed about Israel.

Here’s to 64 years of our Jewish homeland. Yom HaAtzmaut Sameach!

David Siegel is Consul General of Israel in Los Angeles.

Opinion: They said it couldn’t be done Read More »

Opinion: Living with Holocaust ghosts

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Ed Asner, aka Lou Grant, walked slowly to the front of the stage at the Museum of Tolerance on Sunday night, and in his familiar growl — this time with a Latvian accent — he softly spoke: “Thank you for the help that is not only material, but also moral. A person lives through hope, and I hope it will get better.”

Asner was channeling the voice of a Holocaust survivor, one of what comedy actress-producer Zane Buzby, founder of the Survivor Mitzvah Project, calls “the unluckiest generation” — the now-elderly Jews of Eastern Europe who were born into pogroms, revolution and social upheaval, then lost their entire families during the Holocaust, went on to endure the strictures of communist rule only to face the depletion of social services of the post-Perestroika era and now are living out their final days destitute.

Despite all that, Asner’s words displayed how these survivors-beyond-reason have retained their dignity and, somehow, the ability to hope.

Via an all-star cast that also included Valerie Harper, Lainie Kazan, Frances Fisher, Elliott Gould, Alan Rosenberg and others, Buzby brought to life the letters she has received from hundreds of people the Survivor Mitzvah Project has helped — letters telling their stories, letters of gratitude for the small amounts of cash and gifts of Judaica and medicine and trinkets of love they’ve received from the project.

Through the Survivor Mitzvah Project, Buzby is also creating an archive of these once-forgotten lives that, in a small way, rivals the work of the much-wealthier Shoah Foundation. To hear these actors read memories of people whose mothers were buried alive, who hid from Nazis and lived only to find their world destroyed, whose thriving Jewish neighborhoods are now only a memory, the reality is overwhelming — but Buzby offered us all a way to help: “If everyone gives a little, and asks five others to do the same, we can do so much,” she said. At this moment, the Survivor Mitzvah Project is helping more than 1,500 Jews in seven countries, but there are many more in need.

I walked out of the museum’s theater with one searing question on my mind: How could a civilized world so brutally destroy so many lives, then leave these people with nothing — less than nothing, given the pain they still carry? And yet, in letter after letter, they offered not only gratitude but also gifts of dignity: “Yours are noble actions,” Rosenberg read from one letter.

If ever giving has its own rewards, this event, and the Survivor Mitzvah Project’s work, reminds us of that.

That the legacy of evil can take many forms was the message of a second Holocaust commemoration event at the same Museum of Tolerance the following night.

Claudia Sobral, a Brazilian-born Angeleno, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, traveled to Berlin to watch a soccer tournament with her family several years ago and found herself obsessed with the Germans around her. Who was once a Nazi? Who committed crimes and got away with it? How does the younger generation, her contemporaries, deal with the legacy? All these thoughts raced through her mind then, and she has attempted to answer those questions through her riveting new documentary, “The Ghosts of the Third Reich.”

Sobral’s film focuses on three descendants of Nazis, all of whom, though born after the end of the war and without any complicity in its horrors, have borne the guilt and shame of the Nazis by association.

Bettina Goering, one of the interviewees, is the great-niece of Hitler’s second-in-command, Hermann Goering, the architect of the “Final Solution.” Another, Ursula Boger, is the granddaughter of Wilhelm Boger, one of the most brutal overseers at Auschwitz. And a third, Bernd Wollschlaeger, is the son of a highly decorated Nazi tank commander. Each of these descendants’ bloodlines haunt them — and their painful attempts to describe their own disgust with their Nazi heritage is juxtaposed in the film with horrific images of the concentration camps and contrasted with loving family pictures. If the juxtaposition of humanity and its antithesis is chilling to us watching the film, how must it feel to be born into this history?

The film also includes stories of conciliation.

Wollschlaeger, for one, rejected his unrepentant father, traveled to Israel and converted to Judaism. He is now a doctor living in Florida, father to two Jewish children, and in the film is shown participating in the March of the Living at Auschwitz with his kids — still seeking resolution but also sharing his struggle as an offering of peace to others.

The film also shows the work of another Jewish doctor, Samson Munn, whose parents both survived the Holocaust, albeit with horrific stories. Munn now juggles his work as a leading radiologist in Boston with a project he’s established called The Austrian Encounter, which brings together descendants of survivors with descendants of the Nazis in an effort toward reconciliation. Wollschlaeger and Munn (the latter via Skype) joined Sobral for a Q-and-A at the museum after the screening.

With all these images of people trying to find existential peace in a post-Holocaust world swirling in my mind, I found myself overhearing a conversation outside the auditorium: “I’m not going to waste any of my time feeling sorry for them,” one woman confided to a friend about the Nazi’s descendents.

And it is those private words that worry me the most. If we don’t have it in us to feel sorry for these innocent descendants — born of evil, but with no history of evil of their own — how can we commit to seeing others, all others, as people?

Isn’t the lesson of the Holocaust that we need to value humanity first? To salvage and preserve hope, and to understand another’s hell?

Survivors come in many shapes.

Opinion: Living with Holocaust ghosts Read More »

Opinion: Shepherding the Bible

Leave a Comment / David Suissa, Is Featured?, Mobile, News, Opinion /

It’s common knowledge that the Bible is the “greatest book ever written.” No other book can match its power or wide appeal; no other book has been as studied, analyzed or debated. It’s the literary gift that keeps on giving, the book of books, the book for all eternity.

And yet, despite this extraordinary pedigree, in much of academia — particularly in the “non-biblical” fields of rational philosophy and political theory — the Bible is the Rodney Dangerfield of books: It gets little respect.

In part, this attitude can be traced to the influential German philosophers of the early 19th century, who generally dismissed the Bible as “superstition” and “revelation” in favor of the rigorous and classical Greek school of thought, which worships “reason” above all. While other philosophers, such as the English, did pay homage to the Bible in their philosophical works, the German school focused on rational thought and, to this day, this approach has dominated the halls of academia.

This is a missed opportunity that needs to be corrected, says Yoram Hazony, a scholar from Jerusalem who spoke recently at a Jewish Journal salon about his upcoming book, “The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture” (Cambridge University Press).

Hazony, the founder of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, believes the Bible has earned its rightful place at what he calls “the table of big ideas.” If you dig deep enough, he says, you’ll see that the Bible is more than a book of revelation or even a book of ethics — it is, in fact, a brilliant book of reason.

He gave an example of how the Bible can enhance classical Greek philosophy. One of the big ideas of the Greek school, from the likes of Plato, Aristotle and Socrates, is that man is nothing without the “state.” In this view, the state is the rational instrument that defined human identity and dignity — the instrument that spelled out the rules of civilized life. Socrates himself once said that he “would rather be dead” than find himself outside this cocoon of structure and reason.

But Hazony showed us that if you delve into biblical stories, like that of Cain and Abel, you find a more nuanced and independent view of civilized man and human identity. When God banishes the sinful Adam — the symbol of humanity — to toil in the fields, it is a curse for all future generations. Adam’s first son, Cain, accepts this banishment without question and follows in his father’s footsteps, doing the hard work of the land.

But the second son, Abel, decides he won’t accept God’s curse and chooses the much more idyllic life of the shepherd. That doesn’t stop him from showing his gratitude to God by bringing a sacrifice, just as his brother Cain does.

Now, you would think God would be more pleased by the sacrifice of Cain, as he is the one who respected God’s banishment.

But God is more pleased by Abel’s sacrifice. How could that be?

Hazony’s insight is that Abel is humanity’s “first dissident,” the precursor to epic moments in Jewish history in which other shepherds will challenge authority — most notably Moses, who takes on not only Pharaoh but even, at Sinai, God himself. There is something about this “Abel model,” Hazony suggested, something about this idea of man taking a risk, of embracing personal responsibility, of going his own way — and yet, still finding time to thank his Creator — that must have pleased God.

Indeed, in the Jewish tradition, this is the model that ended up defining the essential relationship between man and God: the model of partnership.

In this partnership, man certainly honors God’s authority but also reserves the right to challenge and wrestle with God, which deepens the relationship and makes it dynamic, even unpredictable. God accepts the notion of being challenged, and we, in turn, accept the consequences of this challenge.

And, just as in real life, we’re never sure how things will turn out.

Clearly, this is a more compelling view of civilized man than the Greek view of man beholden to an all-encompassing state. The God of the Bible, in all His glory and complications and mystery and wrath and loving-kindness and legalisms and threatening exhortations, is still a God that gives man a little space. Space to dissent, to try to repair, to mess up, and, yes, even to show God a thing or two.

While the authority in Greek philosophy is a state, the authority in Hebrew scripture is a state of being.

Thus, from the biblical story of Cain and Abel, we can draw a more complex and refined view of man’s relationship to authority. Hazony says the Bible is full of such “big ideas,” ideas that can enrich not just the world of philosophy, but other academic areas, among them political theory, sociology and psychology.

In essence, Hazony is on a mission to put the greatest book on earth at the heart of academic study. He knows the obstacles — the Bible has suffered from the stigma associated with religion in general: blind faith, supernatural stories, strict obedience, fanaticism and the absence of intellectual rigor.

But he’s undaunted. You might say Hazony is a modern-day Jerusalem shepherd who is challenging authority — and has no idea how things will turn out.

David Suissa is president of TRIBE Media Corp./Jewish Journal and can be reached at davids@jewishjournal.com.

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Friends with Baby Boomers

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I’ve reached the age when I can relate to my parents’ friends as much as my own friends.

My parents are still friends with the same crew they rolled with in Pittsburgh, and now a slew of South Africans in San Diego where they’ve lived the last ten years. My parents are pick-up artists. At parties they run game, get numbers and set calendar dates to experience Ethiopian cuisine with other baby boomers who tuck in their shirts.

For every Maxine and Richard, there is a Steve and Suzie and a Diane and Howard. Then you throw Rick and Elyse into the picture or Marissa and Paul and you best believe you’ve found someone to bring a bowl of orzo to a party at your house like the party my parents threw last weekend for their friends to meet my baby niece, Dylan. I was meeting some of their new friends for the first time.  My mom told me Greg was coming with his wife to the party.

“Since when are you friends with a Greg?” I asked.

Greg from Mexico came to the party wearing a sport coat and also a hearing aide. I guess he didn’t hear that the party was casual.

Maxine and Richard were early arrivals. Maxine and Richard are like doppelgangers of my parents, Judy and Marc. Maxine and Judy dress similarly and Richard and Marc tell the same corny jokes.

Last summer the furious foursome met me for dinner at Cha Cha Cha in Silverlake. Maxine asked me to tell my best joke. I told a joke about Israel. Maxine smiled politely. Breaking the silence, Richard told a joke which made the table laugh. Maxine followed with a funny joke of her own. I’ve performed at the Hollywood Improv and the Comedy Store, but how many comedians have opened for Maxine and Richard?

“I have to tell you. I loved your blog about your mother,” shared Maxine. “And congrats on the promotion. That is so wonderful!”

“That’s nice of you to say,” I shared.

Because of Maxine’s excitement, news of my recent promotion spread like wildfire around the party. Diane, my mom’s close friend, also from South Africa was the next to congratulate me. “Great news! Congratulations.”

“Thanks, Diane.”

Most of the others heard the news, except for Greg.

Our family friend Larry attacked the veggies with great fervor. It was a pleasure seeing Larry, one of our first friends in San Diego. In 2002 my mom launched her personal errand service “Mission Accomplished” and began preparing large quantities of vegetarian chili for a Spanish woman who lived in the neighborhood. Sara enjoyed my mom’s chili so much that she mentioned that her husband, Larry was looking for someone to help do some landscaping in the backyard. Unequipped for physical labor, my mom offered my services, “Shleps for Less.”

I met Larry in his garage where he was listening to doowop, the music of his youth. Incidentally, I preferred doowop to hip hop, the music of my youth.Larry explained to me that I would start out making minimum wage. If I worked hard and proved my worth I could make a tiny bit more than minimum wage. Under Larry’s scrutiny I learned the proper way to wax a car.

“Elliot, you must understand the value of precison,” he exclaimed as he pointed to a speck I missed on his Jaguar’s rear bumper.

While I borrowed one of Larry’s bathing suits to clean his pool, Larry was out at the pool with me telling me about his childhood in Jersey, and his travels to Spain where he met his wife Sara. Larry taught me how to use a chainsaw and a tree trimmer, and the two of us built a fence that still stands to this day.

“Elliot,” he said to me one day. “You are such a good kid. I’d love to meet your father.”

I didn’t know how well of a match Larry’s intensity would be for my easy going dad. Larry invited my dad to a bull fight and the two have been friends ever since.

At the party Larry invited my dad to see the Three Stooges. I told Larry about my blog and Larry told me about his son losing his virginity.

I ate some carrots and watched the Pens give up some tough goals to the Flyers. Richard sat next to me and asked me about my dating situation. I told him that I was starting to see someone, and we were having a lot of fun together.

“That’s great,” he said. “You just want to make sure you have common interests. Some women are great in the bedroom, but outside of the bedroom they don’t have anything interesting to say.”

Richard told me how he and Maxine were high school sweethearts who lost touch, moved across the country from one another with spouses they eventually divorced.

“After emailing for a year she finally agreed to meet me half-way,” Richard told me. “I was in San Diego and she was in New York. Half-way was Philadelphia.”

“My second wife wanted me to be someone I wasn’t. Maxine loves me for who I am.”

“You need to find someone who likes you for you,” Maxine chimed in.

Baby boomers are among my favorite people. Not just because I have some grey hairs and they do too. And not just because I, too, wear Land’s End. They are the kind of people who share wisdom and are genuinely happy that you have a good job and are sleeping with somebody. And who else brings the banana bread?

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Opinion: The pragmatists

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Yehuda Avner arrived in Israel in 1947 from his native Manchester, England, as an idealistic religious Zionist. His keen intellect landed him a post in the foreign service, and his English proficiency almost guaranteed that he would be the designated note taker as he traveled with four prime ministers from the earliest days of the State to the aftermath of the Lebanon War. 

He scribbled those notes in an invented shorthand and rounded them out with the occasional observational adjective. And, fortunately for us, he kept those notes. 

The result is “The Prime Ministers,” a 700-plus-page book that you will read in a single gulp. The book, like Israel itself, is a great story.

On Monday morning, I phoned Avner, who will be in Los Angeles shortly to speak publicly about his book. He was at his home in the Rehavia neighborhood of Jerusalem. 

His voice, like that of his book, is enthusiastic, engaging and, considering he is closing in on 84, vibrant. It doesn’t hurt that he has a charming British accent: From Abba Eban to Mark Regev, we American Jews are suckers for Israelis who speak British and think Yiddish.  

Avner is quick to set one thing straight: “The Prime Ministers” is not the work of a historian. It is a memoir. But as someone who has stood by the side of four Israeli leaders during times of dire crisis and triumph, Avner has earned the right to offer his perspective.

The heroes in Avner’s telling are not the usual suspects. Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, the Yiddish-speaking shtetl Jew who inherited the reins of power after the great David Ben-Gurion, comes across as a leader of pivotal importance for Israelis — and Americans. 

“He was the Harry Truman of Israel,” Avner told me.

In the tense days before the Six-Day War, Eshkol exerted his steel will to resist calls for preemptive military action against the Egyptians, even as his top generals and ministers, and the entire country, lined up against him. In the meantime, he worked to convince President Lyndon Johnson that Israel’s — and America’s — interest would be served by American support for an eventual Israeli attack. When Johnson gave the yellow light, Israel pounced — defeating its enemies while retaining the superpower support Eshkol knew was critical. 

“I saw a situation where persuasion actually worked,” Avner the diplomat told me. “Eshkol got through to Johnson. That relationship marked a major historic turning point between Israel and America.”

Another hero is Menachem Begin. Often caricatured in the West as an irredentist right-winger, the Begin that emerges in Avner’s anecdotes is a man of supreme erudition and deep concern for all Jews, with a willingness to join forces with his ideological opponents for the good of the country.  

As for Yitzhak Rabin, Avner recounts several conversations that show what a concentrated and analytic intellect the general brought to bear on existential issues. 

How, I asked Avner, do today’s leaders compare? 

“They were made of much flintier rock,” he told me of the men and woman he served. “The circumstances forged them in that furnace of Eastern Europe, with its constant state of social and political turbulence. Also, all of them were literate Jews. They took it for granted they would breed a generation of literate Jews. It didn’t work out that way.

Olmert, Barak, Bibi — none of them have been put to the test. When was the last war of survival Israel had to fight? The Yom Kippur War. But maybe it’s Bibi’s turn with Iran.

The private deliberations Avner recounts do shed light on what made the great Israeli leaders great. There is a cocktail of Zionism that has to be mixed with just the right proportion of realism and idealism, of messianic fervor and pragmatic compromise. And these leaders understood that. They were, in Avner’s words, “intensely pragmatic.”

Despite Israel’s longstanding public policy not to negotiate with terrorists, in private Rabin, and even Begin, both were willing to do so to save lives. Rabin also saw how Israel’s long-term security depended not just on winning wars, but also on compromise. 

“You can’t just ignore it,” Avner said about the demographic problem that Rabin understood confronts Israel. “At the end of the day, it is two states for two people.” 

Looking back from his considerable vantage point, Avner marvels at his country’s sweeping progress.

“I can’t recall a time that has been better than it is now,” he said. “There’s no war. The borders are quiet despite some acting up, and the country is flourishing.”

But his optimism is tempered by the awareness that the story of struggle and crisis he so aptly tells is far from over. 

Avner himself was wounded fighting in the siege of Jerusalem in 1948; his son was wounded in the Yom Kippur War, and his daughter was severely injured in the 1992 terrorist bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires.

“It has taken quite a lot to defend Israel,” he said. “We actually have fought two Wars of Independence. The first was in 1948, the right to defend ourselves in our own land. The second war is not yet over. We are still surrounded by enemies on every side.”

I asked Avner if during ’48 or ’67, in the years of hardship and fear, he ever envisioned the kind of state Israel would be at 64.

“No, never,” he said. “You live in the present.”

And you take notes.

Yehuda Avner will speak about his book “The Prime Ministers” at Congregation Beth Jacob on May 18 and 19. The public is invited. For details, visit this column at jewishjournal.com.

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