August 8, 2012
Russian basketball team, coached by Israeli-American David Blatt, reaches Olympic semis
The Russian Olympic men’s basketball team, coached by Israeli-American David Blatt, has advanced to the semifinals.
The Russians will play Spain in Friday’s semifinals after defeating Lithuania, 83-74, on Wednesday in London. Russia has not won an Olympic medal in basketball since the fall of the Soviet Union.
Blatt has helped rebuild the Russian national team since being brought on as head coach in 2006, Sports Illustrated reported. Under Blatt, the Russian national team won the 2007 European Championship.
He played for Princeton University from 1977 to 1981 and on the gold medal-winning U.S. team in the 1981 Maccabiah Games. Following the Maccabiah Games, Blatt joined an Israeli Super League team. He played for several Israeli teams until he was injured in 1993 and took up coaching.He is currently the coach of the Maccabi Tel Aviv team.
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Major fire under control in Jerusalem area
A major fire in the Jerusalem area believed to be arson is under control.
More than 40 firefighting squads and two firefighting planes came together to put out the fire on Wednesday near the Hadassah Ein-Kerem Medical Center. Some hospital visitors were evacuated, according to The Jerusalem Post.
Four West Bank Palestinians found nearby were arrested in connection with the blaze, which started in several places. Police believe the fire was set intentionally but have not ruled out the possibility that hikers accidentally set the blaze.
A smaller fire, requiring 20 fire crews and two firefighting planes, was contained in the Carmel Mountains.
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El Al dithers on honoring cheap fares
An El Al spokesperson said the airline had not decided whether or not to honor round-trip tickets to Israel that were offered erroneously for prices as low as $330.
On Wednesday afternoon, the airline issued the following statement via Twitter: “Thanks for your patience. Details/decisions re incorrect fares that were briefly sold on Monday are not finalized. We will update tomorrow.”
The announcement came two days after El Al codeshare flights from several U.S. cities to Israel went on sale for bargain-basement prices due to an error by a subcontractor handling El Al’s winter promotional fares. The round-trip tickets ranging from $330 to $460, including all taxes and fees, were for travel between November and March and included layovers in Europe.
Thanks for your patience. Details/ decisions re incorrect fares that were briefly sold on Monday are not finalized. We will update tomorrow.
— ELAL USA (@ELALUSA) August 8, 2012
On Monday, El Al said via Twitter that it would honor the tickets, which reportedly numbered in the thousands.
“An outside company posted incorrect fares on travel websites, so all tickets sold will indeed be honored,” the company wrote at around 6 p.m., once the inexpensive prices were no longer available.
But on Tuesday, the airline appeared to backtrack, suggesting in a comment to The New York Jewish Week and later in emails to JTA that El Al had not decided conclusively whether or not to honor the purchases.
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How Jewish is relativity?
“If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world,” Albert Einstein quipped in 1922. “Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German, and Germany will declare that I am a Jew.”
Steven Gimbel, author of “Einstein’s Jewish Science: Physics at the Intersection of Politics and Religion” (Johns Hopkins University Press, $24.95), puts Einstein’s self-effacing joke in context: “Sometimes even the cynics aren’t cynical enough.” Thus begins Gimbel’s lively, intentionally provocative and wholly compelling inquiry into the Jewishness of Einstein himself and the world-changing scientific revolution that he set in motion.
Einstein’s theory, of course, was proved to be correct long before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the Nazis and their supporters in the German scientific establishment dismissed it as “Jewish science.” Scientific truth, as they saw it, belonged exclusively to the master race: “In reality, as with everything that man creates,” wrote the German physicist Philipp Lenard, who won a Nobel of his own in 1905, “science is determined by race and blood.”
But Gimbel, a professor of humanities and philosophy at Gettysburg College, is not prepared to write off such assertions as “sociopathic nonsense.” Rather, he reminds us that Einstein himself argued that Jewish scholars can be discerned by the “Jewish heritage in their intellectual work,” and he dares to entertain a volatile idea: “Maybe relativity is ‘Jewish science’ after all,” Gimbel writes. “In fact the question, ‘What is ‘Jewish science’?’ turns out to be a very Jewish question.”
Gimbel, in fact, is out to tweak Jewish sensibilities by writing provocatively about the single most celebrated Jew of the 20th century, a man so iconic in the Jewish world that he was offered the presidency of Israel. “There is great delight in pointing out that Dinah Shore, Abe Fortas, William Shatner, Marc Chagall, Felix Frankfurter, not to mention both Simon and Garfunkel, all three Stooges, and all four Marx Brothers are Jewish,” he writes. “But among famous Jews, Einstein is in a category unto himself.”
The author is even willing to question in what sense Einstein can be regarded as a Jew since he was raised in a secular home, attended a Catholic school in Munich, and was more interested in mathematics and science than “the God of Abraham” as presented in the Torah. “I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures,” Einstein famously wrote, “or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves.” Still, Gimbel finds himself compelled to conclude that Einstein might not have been “an observant or theistic Jew, but he clearly was a cultural Jew” because, among other things, “[h]e loved Yiddish humor” and embraced Zionism.
Yet Gimbel presses the point. “Judaism seems to me to be concerned almost exclusively with the moral attitude in life,” Einstein declared. But Gimbel insists on cutting through what he calls “Einstein-speak” in order to scrutinize the great man’s private life. He concludes that Einstein was “a terrible husband and father, distant, moody, and at times cruel,” and a serial adulterer “who often served his own needs and desires before those of the people who cared for him.”
Above all, Gimbel insists that Einstein’s Jewishness, whatever it amounted to, did not shape his science in the way the religious backgrounds of Newton and Descartes influenced their work. “[N]one of the intellectual ammunition Einstein fired had come from Jewish suppliers,” he writes. “The content of Einstein’s work was in no way influenced by Torah, Talmud, or anything Judaic at all.” In that sense, “the Nazis were wrong.”
Yet Gimbel finally concludes that there is a “Jewish style” in Einstein’s work, an approach that he likens to the traditions of talmudic study and disputation. “The heart of the talmudic view is that there is an absolute truth, but this truth is not directly and completely available to us,” he explains. “In our search for deeper meaning, we must try to understand how that limited view of the truth fits together with seemingly contrasting views of the truth from other different perspectives and contexts. It turns out that exactly the same style of thinking occurs in the relatively theory. …”
Significantly, Gimbel is not himself a scientist, but he possesses a gift for hot-wiring hard science to the moral, cultural and political environment in which it is practiced. He reaches all the way back to Plato for his points of reference, and draws readily on 20 centuries of Western intellectual history, but he could not have chosen a more appropriate case study than Albert Einstein. And he rewards the reader of “Einstein’s Jewish Science” with a new way of seeing Einstein himself and where he fits into the Jewish world.
Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. He blogs at books@jewishjournal.com.
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‘Women and War’
Growing up in Beverly Hills, Marissa Roth remembers her father and mother, both European refugees, as parents who repressed their emotions and personal suffering, and forbade their children to cry.
So there is some irony, or perhaps compensation, in the title of Roth’s one-woman photo exhibition, opening Aug. 16 at the Museum of Tolerance, titled “One Person Crying: Women and War.”
The exhibit consists of 88 gelatin silver prints, culled from some 27,000 photos taken over 28 years in a dozen countries torn by fighting, massacres and natural catastrophes.
Almost all the subjects of Roth’s lens are women, in order “to reflect on war from what I consider an underrepresented perspective,” she said. “The project brought me face-to-face with hundreds of women who endured and survived war and its ancillary experiences of loss, pain and unimaginable hardship.”
There are photos so eloquent that no explanations or commentaries are needed, such as the picture of Sara Duvall, holding a flag and a photo of her Marine Corps son killed in Iraq.
Or the two fully veiled Afghan women, who make Roth wonder what lies under the burqa. Also, the 12-year-old Pakistani girl, her head completely shaved, who, Roth said, “implored me to continue my project and kept me going.”
Los Angeles Times international correspondent Carol J. Williams, who has seen her share of wars, commented, “Marissa Roth’s images of women who’ve survived war are alternately disturbing, inspiring and illuminating of the staggering burdens borne by those fighting with their hearts and minds to protect home and family.
“The battle to restore normalcy drags on for years after the shooting stops, and women’s forced roles as provider and protector forever transform their relationships and family status when the men, whether victorious or vanquished, stagger back home.”
Marissa Roth Photo by Iris Schneider
Over nearly three decades, Roth and her 35mm Nikon FE2 camera have portrayed women’s lives amid war and the aftermath in Serbia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Albania, Japan, Northern Ireland, Germany, Cambodia, Bosnia and The Philippines.
In parallel, she had covered on-the-spot news stories across the globe for major publications and was part of the Los Angeles Times photo team that won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
And, particularly in the early 1980s, there was Roth, the commercial photographer, who shot high society fashions and red carpet Oscar receptions, as well as the Olympic Games in Los Angeles.
By inclination and family background, Roth seemed fated to become a roving witness to history in the making.
Both parents separately fled the gathering European storm clouds in late 1938, her actress mother from Budapest, and her father from Novi Sad, then part of Yugoslavia and now Serbia.
They met during a trans-Atlantic voyage aboard the Queen Mary, but then lost sight of each other after landing in New York. Five months later, they bumped into each other in — where else? — Times Square, and the shipboard meeting eventually culminated in marriage.
Roth’s paternal grandfather had been a textile manufacturer in the old country and her father followed up in the new California home by establishing a clothing line in West Hollywood.
Another member of the family was Roth’s uncle, violinist Feri Roth, founder of the famous Roth Quartet.
Born and raised in Beverly Hills, Roth went through the city’s renowned public school system, augmented by private finishing school classes.
At 10, she was given a Brownie camera and started snapping pictures of family and friends and taking photo classes in school. At 17, she got her first 35mm camera, “instantly taking to it,” she said, and set up her own darkroom.
“Afghan Kite,” Los Angeles, California 2002
However, showing an early rebellious streak, she said she “loathed Beverly Hills as soulless and phony, the whole status thing. I was conscious of the civil rights movement and very aware of Vietnam and the woman’s movement. I yearned to be a hippie. I was wild inside but a good girl outside.”
Another factor was the impact of the highly popular illustrated magazines of the time, such as LIFE, Look and National Geographic. Through them, she said, “I began to understand visual language, and the magazines’ coverage of world events probably turned me into a journalist, rather than an artist.”
After high school, she left “phony” Beverly Hills for the real world and people at the University of Colorado, but after two years found Boulder a bit too “small townish.”
She transferred to UCLA and launched her future career as a staff photographer on the Daily Bruin, covering the campus but also the Hollywood film and rock scenes.
Twice married and divorced, Roth is quite open about her age (55) and personal relationships.
“Photography saved me when I was in my early 20s and I met a lovely guy, who was killed in a plane crash,” she recounted. “That event changed my life and shattered my innocence. It pushed me to live my life flat out, to seize life’s moments.”
Among Roth’s emotional impressions during her career, a few stand out.
“In late 1984, I went with my father to his birthplace of Novi Sad, and we found the house where he grew up,” she recalled.
“Beckie Dixon.” Beckie Dixon’s son Christopher was the youngest Marine killed in Iraq in August 2005. He had just turned 18 a few months earlier. Photographed on Veteran’s Day, Nov. 12, 2005, at the moment that she found his memorial flag, in Columbus, Ohio.
That was also the house where her grandfather and great-grandfather were killed by rampaging Hungarian troops, who staged their own pogroms of Jews and Serbs in January 1942, dragging bodies across the ice and dumping them into the Danube.
A few years later, she traveled to Afghanistan and met some of the 100,000 women widowed during the nine-year war (December 1979 to February 1989) between their country and the Soviet Union.
“Something happened to me there,” Roth said. “I found a completely different world, where women were completely segregated.”
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Roth photographed the bombing of Kosovo, wedged between Serbia and Albania, and atom bomb survivors in Hiroshima.
After reading the book “A Woman in Berlin,” which described the mass rapes by Soviet troops immediately after the conquest of the city in the spring of 1945, Roth traveled to Germany in 2008 to meet and photograph some of the victims.
“I had seen Warsaw and Auschwitz, and it was hard for me to go to Berlin. I kept seeing the ghosts of the past, but I tried to be as nonjudgmental as possible,” she commented.
The Museum of Tolerance also hosted Roth’s 2005 photographic exhibit of 70 Holocaust survivors serving as volunteer guides and lecturers.
“One Person Crying: Women and War,” curated by Howard Spector, opens Aug. 16 and is scheduled to run through Oct. 18 at the Museum of Tolerance. For more information, call (310) 553-9036 or visit jewishjournal.com.
Letters to the Editor: Wilshire Boulevard Temple, world hunger and editorial cartoons
Beyond the Temple’s Walls
The Wilshire Boulevard Temple expansion is going to have many vital impacts, not only for our Jewish community but for the larger Los Angeles community as well (“History Renewed,” Aug. 3). The project obviously is going to make a profound difference to the temple congregation and enrich the lives of its many families for generations to come. In addition, it will create for the greater community a place to meet, to learn and to build bridges. By way of an open door to all in the neighboring community and beyond, the enlarged temple grounds are poised to bring people together, allow the diverse people of Los Angeles to share opportunities, help each other, and come together not in theory, not through leadership-level convocations, but on the ground, people-to-people, program by program.
It is what Jews do so often and so well. We build bridges between communities through our actions, through our belief that tikkun olam embraces everyone, that it is our Jewish responsibility to treat no one as the “other,” to remember that we ourselves were once strangers in a strange land. Wilshire Boulevard Temple is leading this valiant effort, but it is not alone.
Bet Tzedek sends its lawyers every day into the diverse communities of our city, representing all who are in need. Jewish Family Services and Jewish Vocational Services do the same. A group at Stephen S. Wise Temple has launched a summer Freedom School branch that gives low-income young people from nearby communities a unique educational opportunity. The Breed Street Shul is turning a historic Boyle Heights temple building into a monument to our past and our future as well as an invaluable community center for a largely Spanish-speaking neighborhood in the Shul’s home community.
In short, through the not-always simple acts of showing up, being present and opening doors, the Jewish community is quietly building bridges, enriching our finest traditions and reaching into our city’s collective futures to build a lasting tapestry of diverse people that honors us all.
David A. Lash
via e-mail
Addressing the world hunger issue
As a volunteer with the American Jewish World Service (AJWS), I want to express my gratitude toward U.S. Representative Howard Berman for standing up for hungry people worldwide and supporting international food aid reform. By signing on to a recent “Dear Colleague” letter to the House Agriculture Committee Leadership, Rep. Berman’s support for a more flexible, cost-efficient and effective food aid delivery system in the next Farm Bill demonstrated crucial leadership in fighting to improve the lives of millions of people.
International humanitarian aid is a profoundly Jewish issue. According to Jewish law, feeding the hungry is not simply a nice thing to do: we are commanded to “leave the corners of your fields” and the “gleanings of your harvest” for “the poor and the stranger.” (Leviticus 19:10). That is why AJWS has made the reform of international food aid its highest legislative priority this year, as part of its worldwide Reverse Hunger campaign.
The United States is the world’s largest food aid donor, yet we currently employ an outdated model that contributes to an average 14-week delivery delay, wastes more than half of every food aid grain dollar and distorts local markets. Rep. Berman’s signature helped move our country toward a better system, one that would include local procurement and the ability to use cash instead of food to pay for program expenses and thus would allow us to reach up to 17 million more people worldwide without costing taxpayers an additional penny.
Although the Federal Agriculture Reform and Risk Management (FARRM) Act passed by the House Agriculture Committee last week rejected these important food aid reform provisions, the Senate’s bipartisan farm bill included them: Rep. Berman’s actions demonstrated important support for reform in the House as the bill moves toward a conference committee. I urge him to continue to support programs that will help reach more hungry people worldwide.
Jonathan Zasloff
Professor of Law
UCLA School of Law
Cartoon’s Offensive Stereotype
Steve Greenberg’s disgusting July 20 cartoon portraying Orthodox Jews as bloated, obese, non-working, military exempt, separationist Charedim crushing the weight of the Israeli chair, is deeply offensive and demonstrative of the self-hating-Jewish anti-Orthodox animus that permeates The Jewish Journal. The menacing, black, faceless, grotesque Orthodox behemoth threatening Israel’s existence is reminiscent of anti-Semitic caricatures of Jews in Nazi Germany’s Der Stürmer. If the point of Greenberg’s cartoon was to show how the Orthodox population has increased from 400 to tens of thousands, then he could have drawn the second panel of his cartoon of the increased masses. Instead, he stooped to the gutter, and portrayed Torah scholars as caricatures of evil. It is simply shameful.
Baruch Cohen
Los Angeles
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Healthy, kosher hot lunches rare in L.A. Jewish schools
On a Thursday this past March, at around 11:40 a.m., the alluring scent of chicken schnitzel – freshly breaded and pan-fried — wafted through the parking lot of New Community Jewish High School (NCJHS) in West Hills.
The source was a truck from Alex Felkai’s kosher catering company, Kosher on Location. Though the company does the majority of its business over the weekends, catering elegant weddings and bar and bat mitzvahs, to keep his core staff busy during the week, Felkai had been selling lunch at NCJHS – every day except Friday – since the school opened 10 years ago.
But when NCJHS’s approximately 370 students (including one of Felkai’s children) return to school this fall, the kosher lunch truck won’t be there.
“We tried,” Felkai said, explaining that the cost of preparing and serving sandwiches and salads, burgers and burritos to the approximately 80 students, faculty and staff who bought lunch from the truck, was prohibitive.
“It was a difficult decision, but I never really made money on it,” Felkai said. “I kind of did it hoping that things would grow.”
In Jewish day schools across Los Angeles, Felkai’s story is a common one. With the first day of classes less than a month away, NCJHS isn’t the only high school that may not offer an in-school alternative to bringing lunch from home.
The Yeshiva University of Los Angeles (YULA) Girls School’s caterer is going into his third year, but the campus of the boys school on Pico Boulevard doesn’t have a kitchen or a cafeteria, nor is the school planning to build one anytime soon. At Shalhevet, a Modern Orthodox high school located on the corner of Fairfax Avenue and San Vicente Boulevard, the caterer who had been cooking in the kitchen during the last academic year just left.
“We’re busy interviewing caterers for next year,” Robyn Lewis, the new executive director at Shalhevet High School, told the Journal on Aug. 6.
On the whole, elementary schools seem more committed to providing a hot lunch program for their students, even if only a minority of students opts into the program.
Schwartz Bakery is about to start its third year providing food at the Yavneh Hebrew Academy, an Orthodox day school in Hancock Park.
“After working with our nutritionist, and after working with the school on a number of issues, we are very happy,” Yavneh Executive Director Lev Stark said.
According to Stark, about one-third of the approximately 470 students are signed up for the school lunch program.
At Yavneh, lunches can be bought in advance on a semiannual basis or purchased for $6 per day. The hot lunch program at Valley Beth Shalom Day School (VBSDS) in Encino offers parents and students more flexibility, to the point that students can choose to eat as few as two meals each month, or eat a hot lunch every single day.
“Overall, the parents appreciate the program,” said Gabrielle Baker, a mother of two students at the school who has been coordinating the hot-lunch program with another volunteer parent.
In addition to the flexibility, Baker said that parents appreciate the convenience of not having to make lunch for their children every day and feel that the food prepared by the synagogue’s in-house caterer, Starlite Catering, is reasonably nutritious.
“The only complaint is the cost,” Baker said. While it’s cheaper to purchase meals in advance, students can pay a little over $7 for a day’s lunch. “But there’s only a very limited amount that we can do to bring cost down.”
That’s because, Baker said, the food at VBSDS has to be certified kosher, and kosher food – and kosher meat in particular — is expensive.
Yavneh’s Stark also said cost was a hurdle to overcome.
“The big problem is the combination of trying to get a fantastic meal for $5. No one wants to pay $10 a meal,” he said. “This is where we worked very hard with Schwartz to make sure that it’s a viable business for them,” and that students still get a healthy and tasty meal that’s affordable.
Or, at least somewhat affordable. While Yavneh students pay $6 for lunch if they buy it that day (less if they sign up at the beginning of each semester), elementary school students attending schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District this fall will, by comparison, pay $1.50 if they buy lunch at school.
That lower price is due in part – but only in part — to the lower cost of non-kosher ingredients. It’s also a result of the subsidy (27 cents this year) the district receives from the United States Department of Agriculture for every meal it serves. The district receives more when it serves meals to the 80 percent of its students who qualify for free and reduced-price lunches.
But the low prices also undoubtedly stem from the district’s being able to work on a massive scale. Compared to the LAUSD, which has more than 640,000 students in about 1,100 locations, each of Los Angeles’s private Jewish day schools is a boutique-sized operation.
“It just doesn’t work when maybe 80 kids eat,” said Felkai, who said that if NCJHS had been willing to charge all the students a lump sum of money (he said about $800 per year), he would have been able to feed everybody and make a profit.
“You have to make enough money to cover all the costs,” he said, “and if you only have a small volume, you just couldn’t do it.”
When a Jewish high school approached Brenda Walt to prepare lunch for its 200 female students, Walt, who runs her catering company from a synagogue’s kitchen, turned them down.
“It’s very, very hard because they really want it [the food] for nothing,” Walt said. The modest student volume also limits her ability to hold down per-meal costs.
Stark said Yavneh doesn’t mandate all of its students participate in its hot-lunch program, and that he didn’t know of any Jewish schools in Los Angeles that did so.
“But I do know if they did, it would solve the hot-lunch problem,” Stark said.
To keep their school-based caterers in business, small private Jewish schools at least should consider ways to protect them against the challenge of competition from other food vendors.
Randy Fried owns R House Foods, the catering company that recently left Shalhevet after occupying the school’s kitchen for a bit less than one year. Fried said he decided to leave the school in part because too few of the school’s approximately 200 students and faculty bought lunch at school for him to make a profit.
“By the time we got there,” Fried said, “the culture that existed was that 20 percent ate at school.”
Most students, Fried said, ordered food to be delivered to Shalhevet, and the most popular choices appeared to be fried chicken and pizza from kosher restaurants nearby.
Nancy Schiff, the school administrator at YULA Girls High School said that they specifically don’t allow students to order food to be delivered to the cafeteria.
“That would take away from Dudu,” the in-house caterer, who serves a made-to-order breakfast and a variety of set-meal and a la carte options for lunch, including sushi, wraps and various “kid-friendly foods” like lasagna, grilled cheese and quesadillas.
Students at YULA Girls School are allowed to bring their own lunches from home, of course; a few years ago, the overwhelming majority of the students at Harkham Hillel Hebrew Academy did just that, leading the school to seek out a new caterer, who is going into her second year at the Orthodox elementary school in Beverly Hills.
Every Friday is pizza day at the Orthodox elementary school; getting the crust right took some tweaking.
“At the beginning of the [2011-12 school] year, we tried out all whole wheat [pizza crust],” the school’s principal, Jeffrey Tremblay, said last May. “Didn’t go so well there. The kids were picking off the cheese, and that’s about it.”
That Friday, a few minutes before their lunch period ended and the middle school girls entered the cafeteria, a few boys headed back to the kitchen window for another slice.
“After the seconds,” Tremblay explained, “then they can, if they’re still hungry, they can pay for a third if they want to.”
To Tremblay, that sixth-grade boys want a bit more pizza at lunchtime is a sign that the school’s caterer is doing her job well – better than the previous caterer, who served only canned fruits and vegetables. But nutritionists see second helpings as problematic.
“It’s not like in the Los Angeles Unified School District, where there are certain nutrition standards,” said Leeann Smith Weintraub, a registered dietician in Los Angeles who works with children enrolled in private Jewish day schools and in public schools. At private Jewish schools, she said, “there tend to be a lot of issues with portion sizes and not really getting a good balance between the food groups.”
The menu, Tremblay said, is still a work in progress. This fall, Hillel students who buy lunch at school will be able to serve themselves from a salad bar that has improved from last year, when the only vegetables were mixed greens, cucumbers and tomatoes.
“Now, we’ve added onions, sprouts, garbanzo beans for protein,” Tremblay said. “And low-fat and nonfat dressings only.”
Still, nearly everyone — nutritionists, parents and even school administrators — agrees that bringing a homemade lunch could be the healthiest choice for any student.
“My friends’ children take their food to school,” said Maryam Maleki, a registered dietician who works with Jewish and non-Jewish clients. “They would rather their children take their food to school because it’s healthier, and they’ll sparingly allow their children to eat the food at school.”
That perfectly describes Chavi Wintner, a mother of two young students at Hillel. “I like to know what’s in the food that I make,” Wintner said, over a late-morning breakfast of oatmeal and unsweetened decaf iced coffee.
Her children don’t participate in Hillel’s hot lunch program; instead, Wintner packs lunches that always include some fresh fruit and might feature some roasted vegetables or a sandwich of melted cheese on bread.
Still, Wintner was very vocal in the push to eliminate the vending machines selling Gatorade at Hillel. “I think that nutrition is part of the school’s responsibility to teach,” she said.
Healthy, kosher hot lunches rare in L.A. Jewish schools Read More »
Private schools chalk it up to federal dollars
It’s not unusual for elementary school students at Sinai Akiba Academy to walk into class and be greeted with the following message: “Dear scientists, today we’re going to look at our mealworms under the microscopes.”
The idea is that by identifying kids as writers, readers and scientists, they actually take on that role. It’s part of a classroom philosophy called “Responsive Classroom” that has transformed the school in recent years, according to Shelley Lawrence, lower school director at Sinai Akiba.
The message greeting pupils at the private day school could easily come with an asterisk: “Made possible, in part, by public tax dollars.”
The Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which became known as No Child Left Behind, allows faith-based schools to receive services funded by federal dollars. Local Jewish education leaders said they tend to benefit most from its provisions for professional development and supplemental instruction for students in need of academic improvement in core curriculum areas.
A third item that allowed private schools to upgrade technology ended after last year. Some local schools used it to add iPads, SMART Boards and video cameras to their schools.
BJE: Builders of Jewish Education worked with 20 area Jewish day schools to secure more than $1 million worth of services through this law, said Miriam Prum Hess, BJE’s director for the Center for Excellence in Day School Education.
“Our goal has been to maximize and make sure that our schools can get the full amount of the funds. In the last four years, we have really been successful in doing that,” she said.
Public dollars for private schools?
“One of the provisions of the act was the equitable participation of kids regardless of what school they were in, whether they were in public school or private school,” Prum Hess explained. “The funding never goes directly to the private schools, but the services go to the students and the teachers in private schools.”
Here’s how it works.
The amount of assistance a school receives for professional development is based on a per capita allocation related to its student population. BJE pools those funds for its schools to offer workshops and other training that would be too expensive for any single day school to provide. Individual schools can do things on their own as well.
Things get more complicated when it comes to improving academic achievement. Funds for the added assistance are generated based on the number of students whose families and home public school districts are below certain poverty levels. Those pupils who actually receive the services must live within the boundaries of a poor school and test at a certain level to determine eligibility, Prum Hess said.
Officials at Los Angeles Unified School District, which handles the money for any services rendered — as well as the educators for much of the supplemental instruction — said the value in these two areas is about $12 million for all of the private schools, Jewish and non-Jewish, with which it works.
Erica Rothblum, head of school at Beth Hillel Day School in Valley Village, said she considers the help in professional development to be “one of the most instrumental things that has impacted our school.”
Instead of having to send teachers to the East Coast to learn about Responsive Classrooms at a cost of $700 each, she was able to have all of her instructors attend training sessions here through BJE. And the school also has been able to adopt Singapore Math, which requires a heavy dose of professional development.
After three years in the new math program, the results have been tangible. “Our test scores in terms of math are very high,” Rothblum said. “With the sixth-graders, they’re all placing in the highest math classes. … They’re very well prepared for middle school.”
At Sinai Akiba, Responsive Classrooms, in which kids also gather for morning meetings to start the day, has had a similar effect.
“It’s had a profound impact on our school in the way we look at children and the way that we teach children and talk to children,” Lawrence said. “Without that funding, we would never have been able to get that type of teacher training.”
Administrators at both schools said they had fewer than 10 students who qualified for the academic help and counseling last year.
One catch to all of this is that the funds cannot be used to provide services related to Judaism. The teaching of Hebrew is permitted because it is a foreign language, Prum Hess said.
That’s important, according to Eugene Volokh, a professor of First Amendment law at the UCLA School of Law.
“There have got to be assurances that it’s not going to be used for religious purposes,” he said.
As for the issue of tax dollars making their way to private schools, Rothblum said it’s simply a matter of money following the child.
Prum Hess went further, stating that while the parents of students at Jewish day schools are making a choice to leave the public system, in many ways they may be sacrificing tremendously financially to pursue an education grounded in the values of the Jewish community.
“Forty-six percent of kids in day school are on financial aid, and it’s really important to recognize that not all kids in Jewish day school come from wealthy families,” Prum Hess said. “It is called No Child Left Behind — regardless of what school is best for that child. The ultimate goal is helping the child attend the school that best suits their need.”
One LAUSD official agreed that the point is to work together to raise the overall level of education and that these provisions and services benefiting Jewish day school students help with that.
“They’re all students in our community,” said Vivian Ekchian, chief human resources officer for the district. “It’s in the best interest of our state to elevate education [to] the highest level, regardless of where they are getting instruction. We do not compete with schools. We all have one goal, which is to deliver the best instruction possible for the youth in our state.”
Private schools chalk it up to federal dollars Read More »