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March 26, 2014

Israel’s favorability: Back up to 72%

Leave a Comment / Rosner's Domain /

Last year, as we presented our J-Meter tracking of Israel’s favorability numbers in the US, we noted a decline that we felt was worth mentioning. In fact, Prof. Camil Fuchs and I, looking at the numbers on the eve of Obama’s visit to Israel, penned an article together for Haaretz (Hebrew) in which we presented the updated numbers, which showed a measure of decline in the “favorable” numbers for Israel. We did this because just days earlier, another poll, asking about Israel compared to the Palestinians, showed a markedly high support rate for Israel – the highest of all times. Yet, as we explained in our article, “favorability” numbers are more reliable than comparative questions from which one never knows if it is Israel that people truly like, or the other side that they dislike.

Apparently, all this was a false alarm. Gallup just published new “favorability” data, and Israel’s situation seems fine. Last year, with its 66% “favorable” and 29% “unfavorable” opinion of Israel, seems like an outlier; this year the numbers are back to where they were in recent years – in fact, even a little higher: 72% and 23%. That’s the lowest “unfavorable” rate since 1991 and the highest “favorable” rate since, well, 1991. That was the year of the first Gulf War, when Israel was under Iraqi missile attack and at its peak in favorability. But what it is that makes 2014 such a wonderful year is a mystery. Maybe it’s the overall disillusionment with “Arab spring” prophesies.

Here’s the updated graph by Prof. Camil Fuchs (followed by some analysis and details on the methodology of this graph):

 

The graph above presents the favorable and the unfavorable rates towards Israel for the entire period between the 1989 and the beginning of 2014.

It’s worth noting that there are several questions which are asked regularly and which are often used to assess US public opinion toward Israel. Our past ‘Israel Favorability Index’ presented the trends in three specific categories of American public opinion on Israel – categories that had been analyzed by combining the data obtained from the responses to relevant questions about public opinion, conducted between 1989 and 2012. Those three categories were:

1) Favorable versus unfavorable opinion towards Israel in general.
2) The extent to which Americans view Israel as an ally of the US.
3) Favorable versus unfavorable opinion towards the people of Israel.

The current index focuses only on the first of the three categories, i.e. “favorable versus unfavorable opinion towards Israel in general”, and presents the data from polls performed between 1989 and 2014. We have updated the graph with the results from a recent Gallup pollpublished on February 18, 2014. That’s the only new data from recent months that’s relevant to our current methodology of tracking.

The table below presents the dates, the sources and the wording of the relevant questions from the polls that include a question related to the question we’re interested in here. The wording in all the relevant polls is identical. The analyzed results are two sums: of “favorable” and “very favorable” and “unfavorable” and “very unfavorable”, which we denote as favorable and unfavorable, respectively.

The computation of the plotted results

Since the polls were conducted with uneven time intervals between them, we attempted to create comparable indices by statistical approximations as follows:

a) The time period between 1989 and the first half-year of 2012 was divided into half-year intervals, and for each of the first two aspects of public opinion towards Israel, we averaged the results of all the polls conducted in the same half-year period.

b) Whenever there were gaps of one half-year or more between two intervals with actual data, we fitted a model of linear imputation for the missing intervals. For example, in the question about opinion on Israel in general, there was no data for the second half of 2009. Since the average favorable rate for the first half of 2009 was 69%, and the average favorable rate for the first half of 2010 was 63%, we imputed the mid-value of 66% for the in-between interval, and so on.

c) The last two data points (from February 2013 and 2014) were exempted from the half-year rule, and we present them immediately following the previous year point (February 2012).

 

 

 

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Obamacare: At 29, covered and faithless

Leave a Comment / Is Featured?, Mobile, Mobile-Homepage, Opinion /

The disappointment, like so many others, began with a promise. “If you like the plan you have,” President Barack Obama told the nation on June 6, 2009 at the nadir of the economic downturn, “You can keep it.  If you like the doctor you have, you can keep your doctor, too. The only changes you’ll see are falling costs as our reforms take hold.”  

It was a promise that provided relief to Americans, many of whom feared the side effects of Obama’s new Affordable Care Act, and were, at best, cautious about its adoption. It assured them that things would continue as usual, that while things around them changed, they could stay the same.  

The only problem was, the promise was a lie.

I’m 29. I voted for Obama, twice. I believe that national health care is important, and I would have strongly supported a single-payer system in the mold of Canada or the United Kingdom. This is to say, I am not part of the crowd that believes the Affordable Care Act was evil, or that adopting a single-payer system would inevitably turn us into godless communists. But as the March 31 deadline for signing up for Obamacare approaches, I am, however, deeply disappointed with the gap between what was promised and what’s being delivered.

I’ve always been among the more responsible of my peers when it came to having health insurance. While many of my friends went uninsured through their early- and mid-20s, I always kept at least a catastrophic plan. When I moved to California, I purchased a plan from Aetna.  It wasn’t the world’s greatest plan —  there was a significant deductible, but it had the doctors I wanted in its network, and it wasn’t expensive.  

When the Affordable Care Act’s first wave of requirements came into effect, I watched as my formerly inexpensive plan more than doubled in price. This was, I reasoned, a fair trade for obtaining godsends such as the banning of lifetime benefit caps, the elimination of pre-existing conditions as reasons for denying coverage, and mandating coverage for maternity care for women. If I was suddenly paying more than $250 per month for a plan that had once been $120, I reasoned that progress has a price. 

But in the spring of 2013, Aetna sent me a letter announcing that they would be canceling my plan, as they no longer wanted to sell insurance in California. How could this be? Obama had promised that if you liked your plan, you wouldn’t lose it.  I liked my plan, and I lost it.

I decided to give the state’s Web-based exchange, Covered California, a shot, figuring that maybe I’d at least save some money. But the site was a counterintuitive den of poor Web design and confusing language. Everything from the half-dozen required security questions to the bizarre way you had to report your income was cumbersome — and that was when the site was actually working, which it often wasn’t. Like many young people, my income varies from month to month as I don’t have a yearly salary; but Covered California didn’t provide me with an option to report my total yearly income, only my monthly income, making it nearly impossible to report what I earned.

Once I’d signed up for a plan, my work wasn’t done. I’d signed up well in advance of the deadline, but my card didn’t arrive on time. I tried calling, but I was greeted by a message saying call volumes were so heavy that they weren’t taking calls that day. Even though Covered California anticipated more than 1 million people signing up for new plans, it only hired 500 workers for its call centers, according to the Los Angeles Times, meaning one worker for every 2,000-plus customers.

My experience is hardly the worst I’ve heard about. I finally received a card in the third week of January, but my brother went uninsured until March 22, despite having signed up on time. He played by the rules, followed the government’s instructions, and yet still had to pay for medical care and antibiotics out of pocket during the first months of the year. And friends told me similar stories of impossibly long wait times on the phone, the loss of primary care physicians, cards that arrived late or not at all and, most galling, the loss of access to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, which can only be accessed through Covered California via one “bronze-level” plan with an extremely high deductible.

I do not, like my cousin George Will, believe that the Affordable Care Act is a disaster, nor do I wish for its repeal. But I do believe I was lied to by the president and his spokespeople, who claimed on no less than 37 different occasions, according to the Tampa Bay Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning politifact.com, that no American would lose access to their plan or to their doctor. 

I lost access, my friends have lost access, and we certainly haven’t seen falling costs. Yet I still believe health care reform is worth it. The false promises, however, made even small victories seem like defeats. The ill-timed, ill-planned, and just plain ill rollout of the health exchange system has left many young Californians wondering if aggravation, confusion and delays are all we have to look forward to. The president sold us change we could believe in, but delivered us changes that have left us faithless.

Jonathan Maseng is a frequent arts contributor for the Journal.

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Slaves then, slaves now: a Passover story from Congo

Leave a Comment / Blogs, Food, Holidays, Mobile, Recipes /

A couple of years ago, I found myself in a gold mine in a remote town in Eastern Congo the week before Passover. It was a horrific sight to see. Young children dressed in rags stood on top of each other's shoulders, passing buckets up steep walls of dirt. They all lived under the control of a warlord – who appeared to be straight out of central casting – dressed in an Armani suit with heavy gold chains around his neck. There are thousands of mines just like this all over Congo.

The horrific scene made a special imprint on my heart and soul. As I stood in the mine, the fact did not escape me that the next week I would be sitting with my family in Los Angeles remembering the history of slavery that stands at the core of our Jewish story.  As I left Congo and traveled home, I remember feeling a sense of both anguish and resolve.  I felt anguish that slavery, genocide, and the exploitation of women and children continue to tarnish our world in the 21st century; yet, I also felt resolve knowing that we could do something about the horrific scenes in the conflict mines of Congo. 

Jewish World Watch got to work supporting legitimate mining efforts in Congo, with the understanding that all of our electronic devices are made with minerals emanating from the country. Since that trip, we have brought Republican and Democratic politicians together in the U.S. to pass a law requiring all end-user companies to trace and audit their mineral supply chains – and successfully defended the measure in court.  We have certified more than a hundred conflict-free smelters, and watched as several of the worst mines in Congo were demilitarized. 

This year, we were overjoyed as Intel brought the first conflict-free product to market. The company has not cut-and-run from Congo to accomplish that goal; instead, it is using minerals from demilitarized or non-conflict zones inside the country. And by successfully tracing every mineral used in its production, Intel has shown the rest of the market that it is indeed possible to develop conflict-free products — a fact that most of the business community denied and challenged unsuccessfully in court.  Even more significantly, Intel has made its methods “open source,” providing a blueprint for all other companies interested in following its lead. 

The road to freedom is long for so many people in Congo and around the world, who remain exploited by warlords, militias and corrupt governments. Our collective voices can make a tremendous difference in their struggle. Together, we can save lives and change the world. As you make your plans to sit around the Seder table and remember our people’s history of slavery, I hope that you will remind your family and friends about those still living in bondage and oppression today. Jewish World Watch has developed a number of items to help guide that discussion, including our special Passover discussion cards, “>Walk to End Genocide, and breathe life into the truth that each of us has the power to make a difference … one step at a time.

Janice Kamenir-Reznik is the Co-Founder and President of Jewish World Watch. 

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No more Jewish loyalty oaths

Leave a Comment / Opinion /

Mostly we talk with those with whom we agree. There is a palpable satisfaction in seeing those sitting beside us nod happily, finishing our sentences, relishing the movement of our minds. Those, in stark contrast, who react by questioning every statement — I know some such people, I suspect you do, too — these we tend to slip away from except, perhaps, at Passover seders, weddings and the like where the wages of kinship or obligation make such encounters unavoidable.

How much less likely is it to seek out conversation — or, as some might call it, dialogue — with those with whom we disagree about those matters that cut the deepest, those that most define who and what we are? 

For me, there is no issue that cuts deeper than Israel. (I was raised in the religious Zionist youth movement; most of my closest high-school friends live on the West Bank, with several of them leading figures in the settler’s movement.) Bush and Cheney I dislike, Karl Rove and Marco Rubio as well, but with nothing comparable to the white heat, the immediacy that I feel still for Yitzhak Shamir, decades after he stepped down from Israel’s helm, or the tightness deep in my belly that I experience when contemplating the prospect of Avigdor Lieberman or Naftali Bennett as Israel’s prime minister. This intensity has an undeniable physicality about it, a ferocity born in intellection, maybe, but that has, long ago, gone far beyond mind, resting unmistakably in heart and intestine. 

And, of course, no other feature of Jewish life has so surfaced, in recent years in particular, comparable to Israel as the ultimate test of Jewish credibility. Indeed, no other potential litmus test even compares. Graze on whatever you want, on the street, on Yom Kippur deep in the afternoon just outside a synagogue immersed in plaintive, hunger-induced supplication — gastronomic slippage will do nothing to obstruct your election to the board of your local Federation or your university’s Jewish studies advisory board. And if Spinoza were around today, he’d never be cut off because of something so paltry, so abstract as disbelief in the immortality of the soul — probably he’d be named to a chair in Jewish studies. But if that same brilliant, asexual ascetic agreed to speak side by side in a public forum with someone sympathetic to BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions), his Hillel chapter would drop him like a hot potato for fear of losing funding.

This situation, which feels like something imagined by Larry David, cries out for pluralism; for open, unfettered dialogue, if you will. And yet how can we demand such pluralism — as we must — when so many of us are, in truth, anything but pluralistic? Writing the first draft of these remarks, I found myself sitting on the patio of a Berkeley cafe within earshot of a congenial, and also resolute, clutch of activists in their late 60s, petitions on their laptops. Among these good-hearted people, nearly every statement, it seemed, was normative, packed with judgments more than merely emphatic, better described as gospel-like.  I listened as one of them related — in some detail — the one and only conceivable way in which to effectively brush one’s teeth. “Doing it any other way makes no sense,” the activist said.  I jotted these words down in my notes for this talk, feeling they somehow got to the heart of the matter.  

Donors might, at times, bludgeon with fiscal threats. A student leader from J Street’s campus arm, for instance, recently wrote how members of his organization typically hear such threats relayed to them by Hillel leaders. 

“If I support the work you’re doing around Israel, we could lose a major funder,” Jacob Plitman, the president of the J Street U national board, wrote in the New York Jewish Week in December 2013. “It’s either you or $50,000 that will benefit all your peers.”This is intolerable. Some of us — armed with a far larger storehouse of ideas than worldly capital — know how to bludgeon, too, however. There is no symmetry between the two, certainly, but there is a typological resemblance.   

It behooves us, I know that it well behooves me, too, to recognize this. When speaking about my own views on Israel — on the interplay, for example, between democracy for all, human decency for all but also security for all — I try to recognize that all that I and anyone else (including most of Israel’s leading security experts, who have famously come out on the side of concerted negotiations) can provide, in truth, are reasonably educated guesses. The best scenario is, at best, the one that stands out amid a medley of fraught alternatives. This ought to militate against unabashed dogmatism, against the inclination to declaim, against the predisposition to live, as do so many us, in political echo chambers like the one that I watched with such fascinated unease at the Berkeley coffeehouse. 

An age of mutually incompatible certainties, this sometimes is how it feels, the one begetting the other, infecting the other with some of its own toxins. Yet, as Chekhov once remarked, “Only fools and charlatans know and understand everything.” The rest, you might credibly say, is dialogue.

Steven J. Zipperstein, Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University, is currently Kronhill senior scholar at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York. A version of this essay was delivered on March 2 at a forum on pluralism marking the 40th anniversary of the San Francisco Bay Area Lehrhaus Judaica.

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Survivor: Idele Stapholtz

Leave a Comment / Culture, Survivor /

The dining room of the Jewish orphanage in Dinslaken, Germany, suddenly went dark. Idele Stapholtz — then Ida Steuer — heard shouting and breaking glass as strange men began hurling tables and chairs through the windows lining the back wall. She and her friend Katie Kohn, both 12 years old, grabbed hands and ran. Seeing a partially opened pantry door, they slid inside and huddled terrified in a corner. A teacher later coaxed them out, leading them back through the demolished dining room and outside to the large playground, where the other children were waiting in the cold. They walked with the orphanage staff to their nearby one-room schoolhouse. It was Nov. 9, 1938, the night that came to be known as Kristallnacht. 

The next morning, the children returned to the orphanage to collect their belongings. The building had been gutted, and furniture, bedding, clothing, personal items and even a piano lay broken and strewn across the playground. Somehow, amid the wreckage, Idele found her photo album and some of her loose photographs scattered about. “They were my identity. I had nothing else to prove I existed,” she said. 

Idele was born on Aug. 13, 1926, in Chemnitz, Germany, to David and Sara Ida Steuer, Polish émigrés who had met and married in Germany. Sara died two days after Idele’s birth, and her hospital roommate, a Mrs. Emerling, whose baby was stillborn, took Idele home with David’s permission and nursed her. 

David visited Idele every week. Her earliest memory is accompanying him to a park, which she later realized was the cemetery where her mother was buried. 

When Idele was 4, her father, a teacher, was offered a new job in Recklinghausen, in North Rhine-Westphalia. Idele was still living with the Emerlings, who by then considered her like a daughter, and to bring Idele with him, her father had to steal her away and quickly board the train. 

In Recklinghausen, Idele lived with the Jacobsohns, a German-Jewish family. She was well cared for by the parents, whom she called Mutti and Oncle, and treated as a little sister by their four teenage children. David joined the family daily for meals.

The Jacobsohns were poor. The mother was a caterer for the Jewish community center, and the father a disabled World War I veteran. They were also secular, celebrating Easter and Christmas.

After Hitler became chancellor in 1933, David was deported to his native Poland. His plan was to secure exit visas to New York for Idele and himself, where three siblings had immigrated before World War I. “I wasn’t heartbroken. I knew we were going to the United States,” Idele recalled. 

Idele remained with the Jacobsohns. But later, as her schoolmates joined the Hitler Youth, they began to throw rocks and call her “dirty Jew.” The first time that happened, Idele ran home to the Jacobsohns, crying. “I didn’t know what a Jew was. I thought it was a disease.” 

The Jacobsohns believed they would be safe in Germany, as Mr. Jacobsohn had fought for the Kaiser. But in fall 1937, the Recklinghausen Jewish community decided that Idele, for her own protection, should be sent to Dr. Leopold Rothschild’s kinderheim (orphanage), in Dinslaken, 25 miles away. 

After Kristallnacht, Idele and the other children were taken to Cologne, where they joined 600 children from across Germany on a kindertransport to Middelkerke, a Belgian town on the North Sea. 

Idele was transferred to Brussels, where Germaine Goossens picked her up on Jan. 5, 1939, taking her to the three-story home she shared with her mother, Marie. The two women owned a children’s clothing store that occupied part of the first floor.

Idele called the women Tante Marie and Tante Germaine. Communication was difficult at first, as the Goosens spoke French and Flemish, while Idele spoke only German. But Idele became fluent in French after only a couple of months in school, thanks in part to a kind teacher who provided extra help. She also quickly made friends, who were always welcome at the Goossens’ home. And on Sundays she accompanied her Catholic Tantes to church.

“I was terribly spoiled,” Idele said.

Then, on May 10, 1940, Germany invaded Belgium, and by 1941, life became more restricted and more dangerous.

When Idele needed a tonsillectomy, going to the hospital was out of the question. Instead, the Goossens’ family doctor, who knew Idele was Jewish, came to the house and performed the surgery on the kitchen table. “I only remember waking up to ice cream,” Idele said.

In the summer of 1941, when Idele turned 15, Germaine took her to City Hall to register as a Jew. But the clerk, probably a member of the underground, advised Germaine against it, and Idele became a child “hidden in plain sight.” She obtained a false ID, with the name Idele Steuer, and a vacant lot for her address. 

In late 1941, when Jews were no longer allowed to attend public school, Germaine enrolled Idele in a Catholic high school, a branch of the Dames de Marie order that Germaine had attended. The dean, Madame Eulalie (also known as Sister Judith), welcomed her — knowing she was Jewish — and kept her status secret.  

The Lannoo family, friends of the Goossens, also protected Idele’s identity, and their daughter Annie, five years older than Idele, became her close friend and surrogate older sister. Idele spent summer vacations at the Lannoo’s home in Ghent, where she learned to ride a bike and swim. 

On Sept. 3, 1944, British troops liberated Brussels, resulting in three days of celebration. “The world stopped,” Idele recalled. Worries about her father and the Jacobsohns soon followed, though she was still unaware of the Holocaust’s full horror. 

In 1945, Idele visited a maternal cousin who had been hiding in Holland, hoping to receive news of her father. But the cousin had heard nothing. “I remember being very, very sad,” Idele said.

Idele then located the four Jacobsohn children, who had immigrated to the United States and England. She learned their parents had been deported in 1942. Gerda, a daughter, had heard that Idele’s father had joined the Polish resistance, but had been captured and sent to an extermination camp that same year, though Idele has never been able to validate this. 

Meanwhile, Idele contacted her father’s siblings; they invited her to visit New York, and she arrived in July 1947 on a six-month student visa. The family treated her well, and she took classes at New York University. In October, she met Benjamin Stapholtz, a U.S. Army veteran born in upstate New York. The two became engaged on May 8, 1948, and were married on June 12, 1949. In April 1950, they traveled to Belgium for a two-month visit with the Goossens.  

Their daughter, Yvette, was born in January 1951 and daughter Deborah in December 1953. The family moved to Lancaster in 1955 for health reasons, and to Los Angeles 18 months later. Benjamin became a CPA and Idele took classes in special education. In 1971, she became a special-education assistant at Palms Elementary School, where she worked until retiring in 1991. 

Through the years, Idele has stayed in close contact with all the righteous gentiles who risked their lives to save her. And in 1993, she traveled to Yad Vashem, where she unveiled three plaques to be displayed at the museum, naming Marie and Germaine Goossens, Madame Eulalie, the Lannoos and their daughter Annie as Righteous Among the Nations. 

Now 87, Idele is a member of three book clubs and is relearning German at the Culver City Senior Center. “I find it very healing,” she said. She also enjoys her family, which now includes three grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Over the years, she has spoken about her experiences at various Catholic and private schools and continues to speak at Chapman College and Wilshire Boulevard Temple. Her focus is always on the righteous gentiles, especially her Tante Marie and Tante Germaine.

“The whole world was going crazy, and these people put their lives on the line,” she said.

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Two TV specials look at Jewish history’s darker days

Leave a Comment / Entertainment, Hollywood, Is Featured?, Mobile, Mobile-Homepage /

The mass killing of 6 million Jews ended nearly 69 years ago, but almost every month we discover a new aspect of the Holocaust, its aftermath and its impact on future generations.

Witness, for example, two new television specials scheduled to air in the next few days: “Treblinka: Hitler’s Killing Machine” uncovers new scientific evidence on the existence and mechanism of the death camp. “Sosúa: Make a Better World” is an offbeat teen musical recalling a barely remembered footnote to the plight of Jewish refugees fleeing Germany and Austria.

While Auschwitz has become shorthand for the Holocaust, as well as a pilgrimage site for more than a million visitors each year, very few pay homage to the victims at the other death factory, Treblinka.

The reason is simple: The camp was destroyed.

The complex, 65 miles northeast of Warsaw, consisted of Treblinka I, primarily a forced-labor camp, and Treblinka II, the site of the killing machine, closed in 1943 after 24 months of operation.

During that timespan, its 10 gas chambers asphyxiated 900,000 men, women and children. The grisly work done, the Nazis went to extraordinary lengths to erase every trace of the camp’s existence.

SS chief Heinrich Himmler’s men destroyed all structures, filled in and leveled the earth above, and even installed a Ukrainian “farmer” in a newly built farmhouse.

Viewed from the ground and from the air, Treblinka appeared as peaceful farmland and forest, without barracks or gas chambers, and marked later only by a stone monument.

Given the absence of visual evidence, Holocaust deniers around the world focused on Treblinka to claim that it was really a transit camp rather than a killing ground.

Six years ago, Caroline Sturdy Colls, a young British forensic archaeologist from Staffordshire University, arrived at the site, determined to dig underneath the placid surface.

The documentary “Treblinka” (airing March 29 at 8 p.m. on the Smithsonian Channel, Direct TV and various cable channels) follows the painstaking work of Colls and her small team, whose task was to pinpoint the most promising excavation sites. Through sophisticated aerial photography, which created a picture of the landscape without foliage, the team detected faint imprints on the ground that pointed to the original foundation of the camp.

Inch by inch, the team carefully dug two trenches that yielded no evidence. Finally, in a third trench, Colls found human bones and, more importantly, broken tiles imprinted, incongruously, with the Star of David.

What was the significance of this strange discovery? Two of the few living Treblinka survivors testified that the Nazis disguised the front of gas chambers to resemble a mikveh, or ritual bathhouse, complete with tiles bearing the Star of David.

Colls breaks down at times at the horror of her discoveries, but the film’s emphasis is on the scientific approach she brings to the project. Indeed, the Smithsonian Channel is presenting “Treblinka” as part of its monthlong “Women in Science” series.

There is one jarring note in the film’s attempt to hype Colls’ quest as a kind of detective thriller, breathlessly questioning: Will she ever find the evidence?


Jewish refugees en route to Sosúa in a scene from “Sosúa: Make a Better World.”  Photo courtesy of Willow Pond Films

“Sosúa: Make a Better World” (on PBS, airing locally April 1 at 9 p.m. on KLCS) has elements of “West Side Story,” Jewish refugees in a strange land and civics lessons on American diversity, all rolled together into one sweet film.

It’s set in Manhattan’s Washington Heights, a neighborhood whose current population consists mainly of Latino immigrants from the Dominican Republic and their descendants. Back in the early 1940s, however, the area became the destination of so many Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria that it was labeled “Frankfurt-on-the-Hudson.”

The two ethnic groups now live side by side but rarely interact. The self-imposed separation bothered Victoria Neznansky, program director of the local Y (Young Men’s & Young Women’s Hebrew Association) community center, who looked for ways to bring together the teenagers from the two communities.

From this sprang the idea of a full-fledged musical on a theme linking the histories of both communities.

Flash back to 1938, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt convened the international Evian Conference to find countries of refuge for the German and Austrian Jews fleeing Nazi persecution.

After many high-flown declarations by leaders of 32 nations in attendance, 31, including the United States, expressed regrets that they would be unable to absorb any Jewish refugees.

The unlikely exception was the Dominican Republic, whose ruthless dictator, Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo, had murdered 25,000 Haitians during the previous year.

Trujillo offered to admit up to 100,000 Jews to his Caribbean country and to settle these former professors and businessmen in Sosúa, a former banana plantation abandoned by the United Fruit Co.

The dictator’s noble gesture was part of his plan to “whiten” his country’s population through hoped-for intermarriages between the native residents and the “white Jews.”

However, with the outbreak of World War II, only some 500 to 750 Jews made it to Sosúa, where, with the help of kibbutz experts from Palestine, they established thriving meat-, butter- and cheese-processing plants.

Taking the Dominican-Jewish link as the backbone of the musical, Y officials enlisted the talents of Broadway director and composer Liz Swados to put the show together.

With a cast consisting of 20 youths, ages 12 to 17 and evenly divided between Dominican Latinos and Jews, the musical slowly took shape. In the process, the actors on both sides shared stories of racist slurs (mainly against the Latinos), as well as against their home life and religious holidays (mainly Jewish).

In the process, barriers were broken and friendships were made, but, perhaps fortunately, filmmakers Peter Miller and Renee Silverman managed all this without the distraction of budding adolescent romances.

On opening night, we witness proud Latino and Jewish parents applauding enthusiastically as the show brings down the house.

For more information on “Treblinka: Hitler’s Killing Machine,” go to smithsonianchannel.com. 

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Israelis pay to send deported African kids to school in Uganda

Leave a Comment / Is Featured?, Mobile, Mobile-Homepage, News, Worldwide /

Among the 1,000 students who attend two brightly painted boarding schools in Kampala, Uganda, is a group of 72 South Sudanese children who speak perfect Hebrew on the playground.

“It is unbelievable,” said Alex Gumisiriza, head of academic programs at the Trinity Schools Uganda primary and secondary schools. “For us in Uganda, we thought the Jews are the only people who can speak Hebrew, and we were told that Hebrew is the most difficult language in the world. So we were very much surprised to see African children speak Hebrew with ease.”

The phenomenon was born when hundreds of South Sudanese asylum seekers, who had previously settled in Egypt, began to flee to Israel through the Sinai Desert in 2005. (According to activists working with this community, they fled after Egyptian police killed dozens of South Sudanese nationals at a protest against the United Nations’ refugee agency in Cairo.)

As the first small group of African asylum seekers to reach Israel, the families received a warm welcome, and their children quickly integrated into the Israeli school system. Over seven years living in Israel, they adapted to the Israeli way of life.

“The kids are Israeli — in all of their being, they’re Israeli. In the way that they talk, in the way they express their opinions, in so many things,” said Israeli corporate attorney Lea Forshtat, 48, co-founder of Come True South Sudan, a program that sends the South Sudanese children to school in Uganda. She runs the program with Rami Gudovitch, 44, an adjunct philosophy professor at Haifa University and the Interdisciplinary Center, who devotes hours each day both to checking up on the students in Uganda and assisting the African asylum-seeker community still in Israel.

Forshtat said she first became aware of this transplant population when her son, Uri, formed a close friendship with a South Sudanese boy named Wayi in his class at the Magen School in far-north Tel Aviv. “He joined my son’s class in third grade, and they almost instantly became friends,” she said. “Actually, my son didn’t even mention the fact that this child was different than him.”

From there, Forshtat said, Wayi “came over many times to our house. He’s a very intelligent, polite, nice child — very well-liked in his class.”

But when tens of thousands of asylum seekers from Eritrea and Sudan proper began flooding into Israel due to hardships in their own countries, government officials decided they had to crack down on both the newly arrived and long-settled Africans. Wayi and about 500 other South Sudanese kids living in Israel, along with their parents, were forcibly deported in 2012 when Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai ruled that no danger awaited them in South Sudan.

South Sudanese students, joined by Come True South Sudan co-founder Rami Gudovitch, take a school bus back to their boarding school in Kampala, Uganda, after a short break in September.

That summer, a total of 900 asylum seekers left for the airport in a series of tearful goodbyes from Tel Aviv’s Central Bus Station. Gudovitch posted photos online of South Sudanese children crying in their bus seats, holding up goodbye notes they had written in Hebrew for their Israeli classmates to read. 

Forshtat, too, described the farewell at the bus station as “terrible.”

“It’s always sad to part with someone you love, but usually people are going because they want to go,” she said. “I’ve never escorted anyone who left against their will. This was a first for me, my child and, of course, for them.”

Within the first few months back in South Sudan, seven of the children died from malaria. Many had left South Sudan at a very early age, and had no recollection of their homeland — nor immunity to local diseases, Gudovitch explained.

And in the long term, he said, there were limited options to continue their education. According to a 2012 report on post-independence life in South Sudan by the Overseas Development Institute, “The new Constitution guarantees the right to an education, but implementation of this is a major challenge, with currently less than 2 percent of the population having even completed a primary school education.”

Seeing how dark the future looked for their South Sudanese friends, Forshtat and Gudovitch felt they must intervene.

“So we decided to send the children back to school,” Gudovitch said.

In 2013, the two Israelis created Come True South Sudan. Through the program, funded almost entirely through donations from average Israeli families, 72 of the deportees are now attending the Trinity Schools in Uganda, where annual costs for each child are about $1,375 for education and boarding.

“Of course they are missing Israel, but we are trying to give them the best education we can,” said Gumisiriza, head of academic programs at Trinity. “With education, they can do anything.”

The attorney and the professor later moved their program under the Israeli umbrella organization Become, which had already been helping young students in Kenya.

Organizers hope to keep sending more students to Trinity, and also to eventually build a school in Juba, the capital city of South Sudan, “that would serve not only the deportees, but other children from the community,” Gudovitch said.

Israeli activist Rami Gudovitch, right, visits 15-year-old South Sudanese student Achol Malut, left, at her new school in Uganda. The two met while Gudovitch was volunteering for an after-school program in South Tel Aviv. Photo courtesy of Rami Gudovitch.

A recent fundraiser for Become’s initiatives in Africa was held at the indie Cinematheque Theater in Tel Aviv. The organization screened the film “A Small Act,” a true story about a Holocaust survivor who, as a schoolteacher in Sweden, donated about $15 a month to an anonymous Kenyan child who could not afford to go to high school. In her old age, the survivor found out that the child not only went on to work for the United Nations, but also started a new scholarship fund for more generations of Kenyan children in the survivor’s name.

The highlight of the event, though, was a short film clip from an upcoming documentary on the Come True South Sudan project — set to air on Israel’s Channel 2 on March 31. In one surreal scene, a group of South Sudanese children sing a round of “Eretz Israel Sheli” (“My Land of Israel”) while riding on their Ugandan school bus. 

Like many in the crowd, Gudovitch, dressed in a black blazer and his signature newsboy cap, had to choke back tears when talking about the kids he helped bring to Uganda. He arrived and exited the theater surrounded by children from the remaining African refugee community in Israel, who shouted his name and tugged at his clothes to get his attention.

Neither of the founders of Come True South Sudan run with the usual Israeli activist groups — and perhaps for their different mindset, are getting more done on their own, without salary, than many nonprofits do with full staffs.

Their resolve was put to the test in December 2013, when, after one year at the Trinity boarding schools, the kids returned home to South Sudan to spend summer break with their families. 

“Then the war broke — and we found ourselves engaged in a very different thing,” Gudovitch said.

In a home video Gudovitch made on one of his many trips to visit the kids at Trinity, a young South Sudanese girl (who he prefers remain nameless, due to ongoing conflict in the region) described escaping from the current civil war zone in her home country, which has claimed more than 10,000 lives so far.

“We ran to a really far place — to a forest,” the girl said in Hebrew. “And we slept on the ground with blankets. … There also wasn’t enough food [or water]. Kids would cry, and also the grown-ups would worry and cry. We cried every day. We thought that we won’t be in a good place again, and we will be in the forest forever.”

South Sudanese asylum seeker Achol Malut, 15, departs on a bus to the Tel Aviv airport in summer 2012 after her family was ordered to return to South Sudan. “When the deportation order was issued, Achol asked me to promise her that I shall not forget my promise: to make sure that she and her siblings and friends go back to school,” Gudovitch said. Photo courtesy of Rami Gudovitch.

Her older brother, sitting next to her, went on to describe the horrors of the newest clashes in South Sudan: “Each time you see someone dead on the street,” he said, “you think you will die, too.”

But then, his little sister said in the video, “Rami helped us to get here [to Uganda] with a plane. And now we are happy that we are in a better place.”

Said Gudovitch: “We made a grand operation to rescue them — first to trace them, then to transport them to Kampala, where I was waiting for them.”

He and Forshtat both said they are often accused of putting the needs of foreigners ahead of people in need in their own community.

“People don’t take it very well,” Forshtat said. “The most common reaction we get is: ‘The poor people of your country should come first.’ But I don’t think it’s contradictory.”

And anyway, according to the program leaders, these South Sudanese kids deported from Israel became as Israeli as most Israelis.

“They are just a bunch of very naughty Israelis, full of chutzpah,” Gudovitch said. “The first week in school was so funny, because right away, they had some problem, and they saw the big sign over the manager’s door, so they knocked on the door and complained. Their complaint was the first time ever a student dared to knock on the door of the headmaster.”

To sponsor a child or donate to the Come True South Sudan project, visit rami@become-world.org.

Editor's note: Certain quotes describing the current civil war in South Sudan have been omitted from this article to protect the children who were quoted.

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Science and Mysticism.

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In my second year of Medical School, during cadaveric dissections, I was struck by how limited our brains are.  We tease apart the dead to unravel the mysteries of life.  How odd!  Friends are shocked to see a physician with background in microbiology drawn to mysticism.  Trying to explain the mystic experience is much like killing a frog and cutting up its parts to uncover life.

Take out a white paper and on it write “1+2=5”.  Look at the equation.  Now, walk back until the numbers merge into each other and become a single dot on the page.  Walk further back until you can no longer see the writing.  Walk closer.  So close that the numbers become blurred, one amalgam again.  Now close your eyes.  Go inside the numbers.  See the smaller parts, the ink on the paper, the molecules, the atoms, the electrons, the sub-particles.

From far, what actually exists cannot be perceived by our brains.  A little closer and all becomes one.  Very close, and truth becomes blurry.  Deeply close, and all sub-particles are one again.  Our senses detect a very narrow range.  Like a radio, we can tune into one station or another, but not all stations instantaneously.

Now imagine a Mind that perceives all frequencies on an infinite continuum, at once- everything far and near, unlimited by time, unencumbered by space, and not subject to rules such as 1+1=2.  To the mystic, that is God.  The transient experience of that Mind or that Force is the mystic experience.

If all is one, unraveled by time and space in limited dimensions so that we can understand reality, then we too must have been part of One once!  Mystics believe that we were once part of God and we carry within us a drop of the Infinite.  The purpose of the mystic’s life becomes searching for The Beloved and reuniting with Her.  Although we are a dot in this enormous universe, our spirit connects with The Infinite, and is infinite.  The ultimate tool of the mystic quest and the mystic experience is love, deep love.  Love that is not limited to us but that embraces all diversity under the sun.  The more passionately we love, the more diversely, the closer we come to oneness.

Mysticism insists that the unseen, the intangible, is far more important than what can be experienced through the faulty senses.  It is a surrender of our reality to something larger, more eternal.  What physical cage this body forms around the free bird of our spirit is shed in the moment of the mystic experience.

To the mystic, both science and faith inspire awe, each strengthening the other, evoking deep gratitude, oozing love.  The mystic sees subject over object, thrives on the unknown, and has limited fear inside God.  The mystic knows that although his heart is small, it can hold a world and thirst for even more.

Perspective is the gate to happiness. Some people read the Bible and see a cruel god who punishes little beings for wrongdoings, while others read the same Book and see a kind God that tries to protect from harm His beloved people through a free world which must allow for random cruelty. Some summarize history as destruction, mass killing, hatred and disease, while others look back and discover miraculous art, music, science, medicine emerging despite suffering.

To enter this world with a cry, to search for the Beloved, to experience temporary bursts of love and union, that is the purpose of life.  Our goal should be to love so deeply and passionately, that at the time of our departure from earth and return to The Beloved, the stars would gaze in awe and wonder if they have enough strength to hold the universe in balance. 

Despite entropy, we have envisioned and painted a world of great beauty.  Despite plagues, we have added years to lives.  Despite natural disasters, we have built monumental highways. We are more than the sum of our parts.  Some think we are food for warms, but not me.  And still, we are worth more than we can ever imagine!

The currency of the mystic is intangible, not backed up by gold, but by God!

 

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