November 19, 2014

Analysis: Why the Temple Mount is at the heart of Jerusalem strife

Leave a Comment / Worldwide / Jewish Journal

The murders of four rabbis on Nov. 18 during morning prayers at a Jerusalem synagogue — a police officer also died of his injuries — could throw a wrench into the results of the Nov.13 summit in Amman that brought together Secretary of State John Kerry, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Jordan’s King Abdullah to discuss arrangements for visitors and worshipers on the Temple Mount. The summit, as least in the immediate, resulted in an easing of Israeli restrictions on Muslim access to the Al-Aqsa mosque, permitting thousands of younger Palestinians to participate in Friday prayers at the Noble Sanctuary, or Haram Al-Sharif in Arabic, for the first time in months.

There is a long history of Jordanian oversight of the Temple Mount, and by allowing Muslim men under 50 to attend prayers at Al-Aqsa, Israel had hoped to reassure King Abdullah that there was no change in the status quo affirmed by the 1994 peace treaty between Israel and its eastern neighbor that Jordan, and not the Palestinians, is the legally binding administrative authority over the Temple Mount.

“I think that when King Abdullah of Jordan says he was happy with what he heard from Netanyahu, that is not only passed down as general news to the public but also gets conveyed as an instruction to the waqf [the Muslim religious endowment],” a Foreign Ministry official in Jerusalem told the Jewish Journal.

“To some extent, the waqf officials can turn on and off the clashes which have occurred there.”

However, soon after the news of the Jerusalem attack on Tuesday, Israel’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement linking the latest incidents to the Temple Mount strife:

“Palestinian incitement is continuing despite the Nov. 13 talks in Jordan with Kerry, King Abdullah, Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas and Netanyahu. The parties were supposed to act to calm the situation in Jerusalem. Israel did; Abbas most certainly did not. While Israel acted to restore calm and reaffirmed its commitment to the status quo on the Temple Mount, the Palestinians incited to terrorism and carried out murders. Israel ended the temporary security restriction on younger Muslims praying on the Temple Mount on Nov. 14. The PA’s official media called for a ‘Day of Rage’ on Friday. Instead of calming the situation, Abbas exploited Sunday’s suicide to inflame it.”

Public tensions between Israel and Jordan have mounted since October, when Jordanian officials went public with their finding that Israel was restricting Haram Al-Sharif access for Muslims, even as religious Jews were increasing politically motivated visits to the Temple Mount. In a speech to his parliament, Abdullah equated “extremist Zionism “ to the Islamic State movement and called on “stakeholders to acknowledge there is extremism in all camps.”

Tensions between Jordan and Israel reached a crisis point on Oct. 30 after Israeli police ordered a complete closure of the Temple Mount, following the assassination attempt in Jerusalem of right-wing activist Yehuda Glick.

Glick was shot minutes after concluding a seminar, “Return to the Temple Mount,” at the capital’s Menachem Begin Heritage Center. Several members of Netanyahu’s governing coalition were in attendance.

“I am always leaving my phone on, so that if they inform me that we have permission to build on the Temple Mount, I will leave immediately, so I really apologize in advance,” Glick told the seminar, as recorded in a video. In the shooting, Glick sustained multiple gunshot wounds and is recovering at Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem; the pro-settler Arutz Sheva website reported Nov. 17 that he has been removed from the intensive care unit. The alleged shooter, 32-year-old Islamic Jihad member Moataz Hejazi, was killed after exchanging gunfire with Israeli police outside his home in the religiously mixed Abu Tor neighborhood in South Jerusalem.

After the assassination attempt, Deputy Knesset Speaker Moshe Feiglin went to the Temple Mount, ignoring Netanyahu’s call for restraint and vowing to “change the reality” of a ban on Jewish prayer at the site. Feiglin’s previous attempts to enter the Dome of the Rock had resulted in a warning from the Jerusalem Police that the MKs actions could provoke Muslim rioting at the Haram Al-Sharif.

Feiglin, the leader of the ultranationalist Jewish Leadership caucus inside the Likud Party, has repeatedly slammed Netanyahu for “transferring the sovereignty on the Temple Mount to Jordan in practice” after the government failed to replace the Mughrabi Bridge used by non-Muslims to enter the Al-Aqsa compound from the Western Wall plaza.

Jordanian concerns

Jordan’s royal family, the Hashemites, first became guardians of Al-Aqsa, the Dome of the Rock and other Jerusalem Islamic institutions in 1919, after the retreat of the Ottoman Turks. As a result, Wasfi Kailani, director of the Hashemite Fund for the Restoration of Al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock, said in an interview prior to last week’s summit, “Jordan is more provoked than any other party in the Muslim world because of his majesty’s custodianship of the mosque.

“If something bad happens to the mosque, his majesty will be held responsible. Jordan is responsible for the site even more than the Palestinian Authority or any other Muslim nation,” said Kailani, who studied contemporary Jewish temple movements while attaining his doctorate in sociology and anthropology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Kailani believes Israel and Jordan have different understandings of what defines the religious status quo at the site. “For Jordan, status quo is the pre-occupation, pre-1967 status quo at Al-Aqsa. For Israel, status quo is something ongoing, something dynamic, and this is unacceptable to Jordan and the Muslims.”

Proposals to allocate Jewish ritual space and devotional time periods, similar to arrangements at the Tomb of the Patriarchs and Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, pose ongoing concern to officials of the Jerusalem waqf, which reports directly to the Ministry of Awqaf and Religious Affairs in Jordan’s capital of Amman.

“It’s clear that Israeli society has changed because of the extremist influence; they dominate the cabinet, and I think it is the most powerful group now in Israeli politics,” said Kailani, who worries that Temple Mount activists will escalate their demands from intermittent “prayer access” to an ongoing presence at the Haram Al-Sharif.

“[The temple movements] were encouraged to frankly speak of crazy ideas, such as altering the shape of the mosque, and there were many calls by ministers, by Knesset members, to change the status quo, to make a space and temporal division to this structure of the mosque, and these plans are now articulated in the media and are no longer in the closed circles of the Jewish denominations,” Kailani said.

“For Israel, I think it should be easy, more than for any time, to understand that it is better not to go too far in ideological goals of speeding up the messiah and God’s will on Earth because this is not different actually from the thinking of Da’ash [the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State movement],” Kailani added.

ISIS and challenges to Muslim religious triumphalism

Mordechai Kedar of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University sees the rise of ISIS, not the temple movements, as the formative factor in Jordan’s urgent rhetoric about the status quo at the Haram Al-Sharif.

“The Hashemites today are under immense pressure because of [ISIS] in Iraq and Syria, which threatens the entire kingdom,” Kedar said.

“They are afraid that some Islamists in Jordan will use the issue of Jerusalem in order to incite against the Jordanian Hashemite kingdom, and they charge that the king does not do anything in order to save Jerusalem from the Zionists.”

Kedar notes that pro-ISIS demonstrators recently staged a protest in the town of Maa’n — just 30 miles southeast of Petra — Jordan’s most significant tourist attraction.

“People are demonstrating there without any cover on their faces, which means they are not afraid of the Mukhabarat” — the secret state intelligence service — said Kedar, who dismisses the significance of the Temple Mount movements.

“I know Yehuda Glick — he’s one of a handful of lunatics who represent nobody but themselves,” Kedar said.

By contrast, Kedar claims PA President Mahmoud Abbas has engineered the unrest in Jerusalem, citing a condolence letter the Palestinian president sent to the would-be Glilck assassin’s family.

A PA spokesman last week confirmed the text of the note, which reads in part, “[Your] son Mu’taz Ibrahim Khalil Hijazi will go to heaven as a martyr defending the rights of our people and its holy places.”

“The Temple Mount activists are not violent,” Kedar said. “They are not going to kill anybody … unlike those thugs. They just work on the Jewish right to pray at the Temple Mount. Did Yehuda Glick attack somebody?”

Kedar said Muslims see Israel as a religious challenge to Islam, whose doctrine teaches it came into the world to replace both Judaism and Christianity.

“This is why Jerusalem, as the pinnacle of Jewish revivalism, is something that hurts [Muslims] religiously, before anything connected to national, political, legal or territorial issues,” Kedar said.

Empowered messianic religious Zionism

Mordechai Inbari, an Israeli expert on Jewish fundamentalism, sees attempts to assert worship rights on the Temple Mount as a risky trend powered by fear among settlers and their supporters that the Jewish state has embarked on a journey of territorial compromise that endangers their messianic vision.

“Temple Mount activists are saying that since the State of Israel is leading the Jewish redemption astray by returning territory, signing peace accords, [being] willing to compromise, this would mean that their dreams would never be able to be fulfilled,” said Inbari, an assistant professor of religion at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.

“Therefore, action is required by the people who believe in this scenario, and they need to go straight to the Temple Mount and push to put the messianic project back on track. “

The Machon HaMikdash, or Temple Institute, focused on establishing the Third Temple, has completed reconstruction of all 93 sacred vessels required for halachically kosher resumption of the sacrificial rites in Jerusalem with a golden menorah displayed alongside one of the most the highly trafficked lanes in the Jewish Quarter.

Inbari holds that the campaign led by Glick and others at organizations such as the Temple Institute have made inroads in the larger populace in Israel by shifting from messianic arguments to making a case for religious equality at the Temple Mount.

According to the Jerusalem pluralism group Ir Amim, Temple Mount movements have benefited from direct funding by the state, receiving support from the education and culture ministries, an average equivalent of $108,000 per year.

Inbari believes Netanyahu is attempting to balance the value of a solid security and diplomatic relationship with Jordan against substantial pressures from the messianic Zionists and the religious West Bank settler communities.

“When you consider that all the commentators believe that Israel is going to elections soon, Netanyahu needs to strengthen his base from the right,” Inbari said.

“Maybe he allows things to happen that were not part of the plan, but now he needs Feiglin supporters in his own political party — so they are allowing things to take place.”

Inbari noted that advocates of a Third Temple recently posted a video on Facebook and YouTube that uses computer-generated graphics to illustrate a reconstructed shrine on the Temple Mount.

The video then links to an Indiegogo crowd funding campaign that has generated more than $100,000 toward the construction of the temple, without directly saying that it is the messianic people who are running the campaign, Inbari said.

“Since the activists for the Third Temple were able to convince more and more religious leaders of the legitimacy of their demand to go on the Temple Mount, to pray there, the next step will be to build a synagogue. That is the second stage of their plan. And the third stage will be to build a temple,” Inbari said.

“You don’t see any mosques on the Mount” in the video — perhaps the most ominous aspect — he added.

“The clip suggests that the temple replaces the mosques on the Mount. This can explain why Muslims are nervous.”

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L.A.’s Jews and Muslims partner in ‘twinning’ events

Israel approves 78 new settler homes in East Jerusalem

Leave a Comment / Israel, Mobile, Mobile-Homepage, News / Jewish Journal

Israel on Wednesday approved the construction of 78 new homes in two settlements in the West Bank, likely to aggravate Palestinian anger at a time when violence has flared, including a deadly attack on a synagogue.

Jerusalem's municipal planning committee authorised 50 new housing units in Har Homa and 28 in Ramot, a municipal spokeswoman said. Israel describes those two urban settlements as Jerusalem neighbourhoods.

Jerusalem has seen unrest in the past few weeks over access to the city's most sacred and politically sensitive site, holy to both Jews and Muslims. On Tuesday, two Palestinians killed four rabbis and a policeman at a Jerusalem synagogue, the worst attack in the city since 2008.

The Palestinians have also been angered by a recent slew of plans Israel has advanced for about 4,000 housing units on West Bank land annexed to the city.

The Palestinians want to establish a state in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, territories captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East War. They fear the Israeli enclaves will deny them contiguous territory.

Nabil Abu Rdainah, a spokesman for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said of the latest announcement: “These decisions are a continuation of the Israeli government's policy to cause more tension, push towards further escalation and waste any chance to create an atmosphere for calm.”

Israel's settlement activities have drawn criticism from the European Union and from the United States, which like most countries views settlements as illegal.

U.S. State Department spokesman Jeff Rathke stressed Washington's “clear and consistent opposition to construction activity in East Jerusalem” and said: “During this sensitive time in Jerusalem, we would see such activity as inconsistent with the goal of lower tensions and seeking a path toward peace.”

Israel, citing Biblical links to Jerusalem, says Jews have a right to live anywhere in the city. It regards Jerusalem, including parts of the city captured in 1967, as its “indivisible” capital. U.S.-brokered peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians broke down in April.

Additional reporting by Ali Sawafta in Ramallah, Writing by Ori Lewis; Editing by Jeffrey Heller and Peter Graff

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Israel blows up home of Palestinian who rammed car at Jerusalem tram stop

Leave a Comment / Israel / Jewish Journal

Israel on Wednesday destroyed the home of a Palestinian who last month ran over and killed two people at a Jerusalem tram stop, a day after two militants killed four rabbis and a policeman at a synagogue in the city.

The home of Abdel-Rahman Shaloudi, 21, was blown up before dawn, police and the military said. East Jerusalem resident Shaloudi was shot dead by police as he tried to flee after mowing down commuters at a light railway stop on Oct. 22.

A three-month-old baby, a U.S. citizen, and a 22-year-old tourist from Ecuador were killed when he rammed the tram stop with his car. Seven other people were injured.

Shaloudi's home in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Silwan, adjacent to the old walled city, has been a scene of confrontations since the incident, which his family has said was a traffic accident.

Violence in Jerusalem and other areas of Israel and the Palestinian territories has surged since July when a Palestinian teenager was burned to death by Jewish assailants, an alleged revenge attack for the abduction and killing of three Jewish teens by Palestinian militants in the occupied West Bank.

Israel's army has blown up or demolished militants' homes for decades but stopped the practice in 2005, saying it was counterproductive in their effort to discourage attacks. Court-sanctioned demolitions resumed earlier this year.

Tuesday's attack at a Jerusalem synagogue where the four rabbis and a policeman were killed was the worst in the city since 2008 when a Palestinian gunman killed eight people at a religious school.

Tension has deepened in Silwan and other areas of Arab East Jerusalem in recent months, with almost nightly clashes between Palestinians throwing rocks and setting off firecrackers and armed Israeli police firing stun grenades and tear gas.

The unrest has grown since the July-August war in Gaza and the movement of dozens of Jewish settlers into Silwan in recent weeks.

A push by Orthodox Jews to be allowed to pray at an Old City site that is holy to both Muslims and Jews, in defiance of a decades-long ban agreed by Israel, has also fuelled anger.

Palestinians seek Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza – lands captured and occupied by Israel after the 1967 war – for their future state.

Citing historical and Biblical roots, Israel regards all of Jerusalem as its capital and has annexed it in a move that is not accepted internationally.

Writing by Ori Lewis; Editing by Jeremy Laurence

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‘House’ showcases the art of futuristic Israeli dance

Leave a Comment / Culture / Avishay Artsy

Longtime Israeli collaborators Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar first met when Behar was throwing legendary underground raves in Tel Aviv, and Eyal was a performer with Batsheva Dance Company. She went to the parties to let loose and dance.

“At one point, we just fell in love,” Behar recalled over the phone from Tel Aviv. “She told me that she’d like me to see a rehearsal. I’d never seen a rehearsal of a dance performance before in my life. I came to the studio, and, you can imagine, I was shocked and amazed by what I saw. It was a piece she’d created for Batsheva. I told her what I think; she asked for my opinions, we talked about it. She said it’d be nice if I came the day after. And that’s it. From this moment we started working together.”

“It’s a nice story, no?” he added with a laugh.

Eyal, 43, and Behar, 37, founded L-E-V in 2013. The company’s name spells out the Hebrew word for “heart.” Their choreography is more emotional than narrative — there is no story to tell, only feelings to express. L-E-V’s Los Angeles debut will be a performance of their new show, “House,” which runs Nov. 20-23 at REDCAT. It’s a sensual, experimental fusion of dance, light and music.

The work’s title could be a reference to the style of techno music that Behar played at his parties, or to the home they’ve created through their dance company, or to their own family. They have two children, ages 6 and 13. Eyal, however, dismissed all of those interpretations. “We have deadlines, and we have to give names,” she said by phone from Ottawa.

“These names for pieces, it’s a bit like giving names for kids,” Behar said. “The piece is so emotional and comes from such a deep place, it’s really like giving birth. And the funny thing about giving a name to a kid, somehow the name fits him later on. It’s really a mysterious fact, but it’s a fact.”

“House” appears as if it would be just as at home in a Hollywood nightclub as in a theater. The movements are fluid yet precise, the dancers are incredibly — almost inhumanly — flexible, and the choreography manages to be both sensual and robotic, the performers pushing against each other, animalistically or synchronously, in large packs.

The dancers wear skin-tight, flesh-colored costumes that leave little to the imagination. All of L-E-V’s performances have used equally minimal outfits.

“The decision of the nude is something that connects to the place that you want to see. And you connect to the dance because of the inside, and not the color of the shirt or the pants,” Eyal said. “I love to see the body of the dancers.”

The show changes from one performance to another. It began as 40 minutes long and has now been extended to an hour. The movements are choreographed but leave the dancers some freedom to play within those boundaries.

Even the music changes slightly. Ori Lichtik, a DJ and childhood friend of Behar’s (Lichtik said they met when they were 2 years old; Behar insisted it was at 1), has been performing with Eyal and Behar since 2006. The dancers rely on his musical cues to stay in sync, but the work still allows him some room for improvisation.

“I’m not really doing anything that touches the timeline and the flow of the work, but I do color it and put some effects and dynamics that are a bit different every time,” Lichtik said over the phone from Vancouver.

The music is a mix of electronic, tribal field recordings and Stravinsky. It’s a unique form of collaboration, with Lichtik working with the dancers from the inception of a piece until the end.

“I’m in the studio with my equipment, and I just start shooting out ideas and tunes and samples and stuff I’m working on, and they can bring the stuff that they want to get inspiration from, and I will mix it in,” Lichtik said. “We play a lot at the studio, and record everything, and then during the process we just pick up what we like. Much of the process is just cleaning it out and shaping the piece.”

Eyal danced with the Batsheva Dance Company from 1990 until 2008 and began choreographing during that time. She also served as the associate artistic director of Batsheva from 2003 to 2004, and as house choreographer from 2005 to 2012. She brings much of Batsheva’s distinctive style — which she helped develop — with her to L-E-V.

“It was something that came because it had to come,” she said of her decision to leave Batsheva. “It’s just growing up from an amazing place to a different place. But all my love and what I learned is from Batsheva. It’s like a continuation for me.”

Batsheva’s trademark style stems from a dance technique called Gaga, developed by Ohad Naharin, artistic director of the company since 1990. It encourages creative exploration by tapping into a dancer’s childhood ignorance of the body’s limitations. Batsheva dancers cover the dance studio’s mirrors during practice to encourage the ensemble’s imagination.

“I adore Gaga,” Eyal said. “I think it’s one of the most amazing tools that dancers can have, and people can have. We use it every day with our company. This is our warm-up and our classes, and I will always believe in it. It’s something that cleans you from the inside. It brings the potential of dancers to a different level. It gives you freedom to be yourself.”

L-E-V also uses no stage design or props. “It’s very minimalistic. There’s the movement and the music and the lights and the spirit of the piece,” Eyal said. “It’s about the clean feeling, without extra.”

And although the company is based in Tel Aviv, Behar downplayed the effect of their Israeli roots on the creative process.

“We don’t think about it at all, if it’s Israeli or not. A lot of our dancers are not Israelis, and the dancers are a huge inspiration for the creation. And we travel a lot,” he said. “It is Israeli, but it’s also everything else that influenced us.”

Still, Behar said, he’s happy to offer audiences a different association with Israel than what is often presented in the news.

“It’s not only about the negative or positive, it’s also just to have a different perspective,” he said. “For people who are for Israel or against Israel, it’s always one thing — it’s about the war. Especially for us, we don’t create in a political way. We just create.”

L-E-V performs “House” Nov. 20 at 8:30 p.m. Through Nov. 23. Tickets are $25-30 (general), $20-25 (REDCAT members, students) $12-$15 (CalArts students). REDCAT, 631 W. Second St., Los Angeles. (213) 237-2800. redcat.org.

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Beit Shemesh residents protest for more police presence

Leave a Comment / Israel / Jewish Journal

Approximately fifty Beit Shemesh residents came out early Wednesday morning, the day after the terrorist massacre in the shul in Har Nof, to protest the lack of police presence at the Resido building intersection, where Arabs routinely wait to be picked up for day labor jobs.

The Resido building (a large unoccupied complex, unfinished due to conflicts regarding its opening several years ago) sits across the intersection from the Orot Girls School, where tensions ran high as the new elementary school building opened three years ago. At that time residents protested near this same intersection, demanding more police protection for the girls attending the school, and rallying against the opposition to the school’s opening from some members of the haredi community. The incident of a haredi “zealot” spitting on one of the schoolgirls took place here.

Now, the residents are asking the police again to increase their presence in Beit Shemesh. The Resido intersection was targeted, as this is where Arab and other foreign workers typically wait to be picked up for day labor jobs.

“Since the Resido building is vacant, Arabs working in construction just moved in a bunch of mattresses, and started sleeping there,” explains Sara, a Beit Shemesh resident attending the demonstration. “Then the ‘vaad ha–tsniyut’ (the modesty committee) that was against populating Resido in the first place (since who knows what could go on at a mall) took action and threw out all the mattresses. Now Arabs are not allowed to sleep there, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some still do.”

“I’m not comfortable seeing them here,” says Chaya, a Beit Shemesh resident who came out to the rally. “We feel threatened having Arabs on our streets. Our safety is being compromised. Listen, if an Arab who worked at a makolet in Jerusalem could butcher the people he saw every day, then how can we feel safe around these workers who are transients, who don’t even have any connection to us? I’d be happier if they weren’t here at all. Let them get picked up on Route 10, away from a populated neighborhood.”

A woman from the nearby Kiriyah Ha-charedit neighborhood walked past the demonstration pushing her stroller, but she did not stop to participate. “We won’t come out to demonstrate,” she said. “But I personally have called the police many times about the Arab workers walking around in our neighborhood.”

One of the organizers of the rally is Barak Schechter, originally from West Orange, New Jersey, now in Ramat Beit Shemesh. Schachter stated, “We want to have a unified voice to tell the police force that we need more police presence in the streets of Beit Shemesh to act as a deterrent to prevent any violence or burglaries. We need more protection! In just the past two weeks we’ve had one apartment that was emptied (by Arabs) and two incidents of door knobs being violently shaken by would-be intruders.

Yissachar Ruas, co-organizer of the rally, is originally from the Lower East Side, and now resides in the Sheinfeld neighborhood of Beit Shemesh, adjacent to Resido. He wants to keep up the momentum. “We want to do these demonstrations once a week, to get the police presence up,” Rus stated. “There are at least a hundred Arabs, on both sides of the street, every morning. I see them when I drive my kids to school. And I see lots of school kids walking right past where those Arabs are waiting, and those kids and their parents are petrified. The Beit Shemesh police station sits outside of Beit Shemesh on the highway, and we need them close by – in case G-d forbid anything would happen. We saw what happened in Jerusalem yesterday. If something would happen here, chas v’shalom, the victims would be much younger and much more vulnerable. We don’t like to remember the case of Lipaz Chimi, and eight-year-old girls who was raped and murdered by an Arab construction worker who didn’t have a work permit in 2006. We don’t want anything like to ever happen again. We believe that having a strong police presence will really make a difference.”

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Do Jews need more chutzpah? Does Judaism?

Leave a Comment / Books, Culture / Michael Berenbaum

I began reading Rabbi Edward Feinstein’s “The Chutzpah Imperative: Empowering Today’s Jews for a Life that Matters” (Jewish Lights) with two conflicting emotions — admiration and skepticism. Every time I have been in the presence of Feinstein, I have learned something — large or small. It is not only his mastery of Jewish tradition, but also his ability to tell a story, his understanding of contemporary American Jews, and his willingness to ask important questions and demand significant answers, even for the unanswerable. Valley Beth Shalom in Encino is blessed to have him as a rabbi; the Los Angeles community is enhanced by his presence, enlarged by his vision.

And yet, as I approached this book, I thought the last thing the Jewish community needs is more chutzpah. I grew up in New York, where chutzpah is expressed in every conversation, whether by the titans of Wall Street or the taxicab drivers stuck in traffic wondering aloud just how close their cab can come to a jaywalker. And one of the pleasures of L.A. is that we encounter some courtesy and consideration from one another. We mask our chutzpah.

“Chutzpah” is a Yiddish word and a Jewish trait. American Jews may have many faults, but meekness is not one of them.

But I had underestimated Feinstein, as he soon demonstrated he had something larger in mind, something bolder. Shaped by three of the greatest Jewish religious teachers born before World War II — Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg, Rabbi David Hartman z’l, and Feinstein’s mentor, predecessor and colleague Rabbi Harold Schulweis — Feinstein wants Jews to have the chutzpah to ask tough questions of themselves, their God, their lives and their Judaism, and to not be satisfied with less than suitable answers.

The virtues of this book are many. One is the clarity of Feinstein’s writing. Example: I am currently teaching a course on 20th-century Jewish thought and the great existentialist thinkers Martin Buber, Abraham Joshua Heschel and Joseph Ber Soloveitchik. In 10 short pages, Feinstein captures the essence of their thought — Buber’s sense of the personal and the intimate, his critique of modernity’s depersonalization, Soloveitchik’s distinction between the majestic man of power and the covenantal man of faith, and Heschel’s awe-inspiring and inspired radical wonder. Concise, precise and learned, Feinstein engages their thinking, and yet he brings it forward to our day, our time and applies it to our questions.

Feinstein is writing for liberal Jews, not liberals in the narrow political sense, but Jews who have accepted the terms of modernity with its individuation and its empowerment, with its loss of a sense of absolute authority. These Jews ask the question why — not just how — and are willing to confront God and their rabbis as God’s symbolic exemplars. Successful pulpit rabbis know their Jews, they listen to them, and Feinstein has the wisdom to elevate those Jews’ needs and deepen their questions before he responds.

He begins by celebrating not the Wise Child of Passover who asks how to observe, but the seemingly Wicked Child, who is looking on as an observer before committing to asking why? What, Feinstein asks, does this mean to you?

For a thinker who is advocating chutzpah, Feinstein is naturally attracted to Abraham, who argues with God over the fate of Sodom, and not to the submissive Abraham, who hastens to offer up his son in sacrifice. Feinstein admires Job, who contends with God, but he is disappointed that, in the end, Job is so overwhelmed by the revelation of God’s power that he ceases to question. When he cannot understand God, he ceases to try.

My understanding of Job is a bit different. In the end, God’s presence is manifest — with presence there is the possibility of an answer, without it the universe is moot, devoid even of the possibility of meaning.

Feinstein also offers a marvelous understanding of the politics of Purim, the situation of the exilic Jew with limited power. His takeaway reinforces his ethics. Evil will find a way to power unless people of good are sufficiently aggressive, resourceful to stop it and committed heart, soul and body to the fight — not a bad reading of the megillah.

Feinstein is a rabbi, through and through. He presents the wisdom of the vision of rabbinic Judaism that, in the aftermath of destruction of the Temple and expulsion from the land, created a Judaism that was portable and did not depend on geography, and that was prepared to place the Torah at the center of the synagogue, the house of study and the community and willing to give authority to the rabbis who found a means of interpretation that enabled the Torah to sustain Jewish life and advance Jewish integrity for centuries.

He also understands the price that they — and we — paid. Power was ceded. Jewish political aspirations would await divine action, and in the interim, Jews were dependent on the power and good will of the sovereign. Modern Jews rebel at that passivity; Zionists and supporters of Israel have rejected it, but according to Feinstein, its effectiveness as a survival tactic cannot be denied.

The Holocaust scholar Richard Rubenstein would challenge its effectiveness as a tool of survival. Post-Holocaust Jews and Greenberg, Feinstein’s teacher — and mine —would also reject it, even while he challenged the rest of Rubenstein’s thought.

It is remarkable that in this entire work on chutzpah and the modern Jew, there is a curious omission — the State of Israel, which may indeed have exercised it to excess. But let us ponder Feinstein’s goal. Perhaps his omission is saying something quite important: For some Jews — perhaps even many — Israel, however important to them personally and politically, may not be central to their quest for a life that matters.

Like his teacher Hartman, Feinstein turns to Maimonides, the greatest of our Jewish philosophers, seeking a religious life that integrates mind and body, philosophy and Judaism, reason and revelation, and a religious life that embraces truth. Similarly, he writes with clarity of the Jewish mystical tradition and turns to the teaching of Rabbi Isaac Luria to understand the urgent task of tikkun — mending, healing, reuniting — in the aftermath of destruction.

Feinstein’s interpretation of “Fiddler on the Roof” transforms the great musical into an exploration of the challenges of modernity. For Tevye, tradition is authoritative; it gives him roots and provides substance to his meager existence. Yet, that world is falling apart. Tevye’s oldest daughter, Tzeitel, refuses the matchmaker and chooses to marry for love — one nail in tradition’s coffin. Her sister Hodel chooses a world of social activism that ripped through Eastern Europe — Zionism, socialism, communism or Bundism, each of which offered a strange but recognizable path to the moral idealism of tradition — the second nail. The youngest daughter, Chava, uses freedom to intermarry and set out on her own. Whether Judaism can survive freedom is the inescapable question of 21st-century Jews.

For many Jews, most especially the Jews Feinstein embraces, Anatevka no longer exists, even though one can catch a glimpse of that world in pockets of Jewish life even in L.A.: Chabad has very successfully appealed to that return. Secular, non-observant Jews regard it as an authentic — perhaps the authentic — expression of that tradition. And still, Chabad is deeply American and radically contemporary in its marketing strategies and even in its form of succession, as the charismatic leader has been replaced by institutional management.

What, then, is the chutzpah that Feinstein so admires? We are called upon to embrace Judaism’s conception of creation, the divine human partnership to bring creation forward to redemption or at least toward it.

We were in Egypt, therefore we know that evil is real and undeniable, but so, too, is redemption. He writes, “Only when we know the brutality of suffering will we be consumed with the divine demand for justice.” So it was for the generation that journeyed from Egypt into the desert and their children who made it to the Promised Land; so too, for the generation now passing from the scene, who saw not slavery but mass murder, and survived to enter lands of freedom.

For Feinstein, the chutzpah of the Torah is the unyielding faith in the power of human transformation. Each mitzvah is a step from Egypt and Eden, and the Sabbath a foretaste of Eden. And every Jew must demand of Jewish tradition and of Jewish religious leadership that they bring us forward.

Abraham Joshua Heschel once spoke of that chutzpah with a smile. “I am an optimist,” he said, “against my better judgment.”

Michael Berenbaum is professor of Jewish studies and director of the Sigi Ziering Center for the Study of the Holocaust and Ethics at American Jewish University. Find his blog at jewishjournal.com/a_jew.

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Getty symposium considers a ‘New Walled Order’

Leave a Comment / Culture / Avishay Artsy

Walls are erected to keep people out, to keep people in or to keep people apart.

From the Berlin Wall to the West Bank separation barrier to the Mexico-United States border, walls can simplify complex problems, and often do more harm than good. And they only add to people’s desire to get around and over them.

These were some of the conclusions of the noted architects, scholars and photographers who gathered for a one-day symposium called “New Walled Order: The Aesthetics and Politics of Barriers,” organized in connection with the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the opening of “Josef Koudelka: Nationality Doubtful” at the J. Paul Getty Museum.

While the Berlin Wall looms over much of the discussion of the political and social impact of barriers, it fails to accurately represent the many reasons why modern walls are built — to keep out suspected terrorists, undocumented immigrants, drug traffickers and others. Instead, the Berlin Wall was created to keep residents of communist-controlled East Berlin from crossing into West Berlin.

The news images of Germans taking sledgehammers to the Berlin Wall and celebrating unification are still clear in our minds, but not the many deaths associated with the Wall. And contrary to public opinion, the Wall did not come down quickly and immediately. Even the terminology of walls and borders and barriers and fences is fraught with difficulty.

“Growing up in [East Germany], if you said the word ‘wall,’ you were sent straight to the principal’s office,” said Ines Weizman, an architect and theorist based in London, and the editor of “Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence.”

People have re-created the Berlin Wall numerous times, according to Julia Sonnevend, assistant professor of communication studies at the University of Michigan, out of dominoes, out of illuminated balloons, even out of people holding hands and stretched in a long line. “Why do people rebuild the Berlin Wall?” she asked. “Because you can’t tell its story if it’s not there.”

The focus of Sonnevend’s research is the way people recall the Berlin Wall, not just in Berlin but around the world, and “how it gets recycled through contemporary reference points, even if they’re not totally accurate,” she said.

For example, segments of the Wall now stand in cities around the world, including 10 panels on display on Wilshire Boulevard across the street from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Together, the local installation by the Wende Museum forms the longest stretch of the Berlin Wall in the United States. The remnants of the Wall are often seen as tributes to the fall of communism and closed economic systems. But, asked artist Christof Zwiener, “Are pieces of the Berlin Wall really symbols of peace?”

The fall of the Berlin Wall did not quench the desire to erect walls between people or along borders. The difference between a wall and a border, explained Alexandra Novosseloff, author of “Walls Between People,” is that walls are unilateral constructions and borders are the result of a bilateral agreement.

“This means that there’s always a good side and a bad side of the wall,” Novosseloff said. “A good side that has built the wall, that minimizes its effects, and a bad side that suffers from its effects and tries to denounce its mere existence.”

The Berlin Wall panel discussion was followed by a conversation about the West Bank separation barrier and the impact it has had on both sides of the border.

The panel included Gilad Baram, a photographer, video artist and filmmaker, whose film “Koudelka: Shooting Holy Land” was screened as part of the discussion. Baram served as assistant and adviser to Koudelka, the acclaimed Czech photographer who memorably captured the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague, while Koudelka worked on the book “Wall: Israeli and Palestinian Landscape.”

For several decades, Koudelka has been documenting landscapes affected by human activity around the world. In 2008, he was invited to Israel to see the separation barrier. He’d said he never imagined he would ever again become involved in photographing conflict zones, let alone Israel and Palestine, but seeing the separation barrier changed his mind. In one scene of the film, Koudelka rests in front of a particularly beautiful area where the wall abruptly cuts through the terrain.

“The landscape can’t defend itself,” Koudelka lamented as he steadied his camera. “The dream about this beautiful landscape is not valid anymore.”

In one scene, Koudelka photographed an Arab man standing atop the rubble of his home, which he claimed had been bulldozed by Israelis. He looked forsaken amid the mess of concrete and rebar. In another scene, the photographer shot three lone panels of the separation barrier, standing forlornly in the middle of a desert and pockmarked with scars, drawing an undeniable parallel to the Berlin Wall.

The next speaker, Eyal Weizman, asked the audience to think of walls not as objects, but as forms of practice, suggesting that their construction and removal should be thought of as “walling” and “unwalling.”

He is an architect, professor of visual cultures and director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College, University of London. The author of “Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation,” he co-runs the Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency with Palestinian architect Sandi Hilal and Italian architect Alessandro Petti.

In his talk, Weizman recounted a courtroom scene in which Palestinian farmers, human-rights lawyers, Israeli military officials and judges crowded around a 3-D model of proposed routes for the wall, with Palestinian activists advocating for “the best of all possible walls.” It was “a curatorial moment,” he said, as the Palestinians argued successfully to push the wall back 400 meters. Thus, he said, “The community is asked to participate in designing the very mechanism of its incarceration.”

The wall is often the site of protests and demonstrations, and sometimes those uprisings turn deadly. In several cases, the families of Palestinian activists who were shot and killed at the wall asked Weizman to help them reconstruct the shooting and determine who was responsible. In 2009, Weizman and his team of “forensic architects” used closed-circuit television recordings and 3-D models of the site to determine who was responsible for the death of a 17-year-old Palestinian boy.

“At the time of the war in Gaza, so many people died around us that we felt that the kind of care we could give in investigating the killing of one child is important,” he said. “Nothing should just be left as if nothing has happened.”

Walls can also be seen as permeable, he argued, as in the case of Israeli soldiers bulldozing homes or dynamiting through walls to surprise suspected Hamas militants. Weizman played a video interview with an Israeli commander, who explained how soldiers move through people’s living rooms to avoid being trapped in streets or alleys.

“Walking through walls is part of the practice of ‘walling,’ in a sense,” he said. “This is what allows what he calls ‘the reinterpretation of space.’ ”

Weizman was followed by Miki Kratsman, the head of the photography department at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. He showed a photo of a European landscape painted onto the wall, as if to offer a window to another place.

Still, Kratsman said, “It’s impossible to take photos of the wall and not show the brutality of the wall.”

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Local Iranian-Jewish banker and leader acquitted of federal fraud charges

Leave a Comment / Blogs, California / Karmel Melamed

Family members said they watched tears of joy and relief run down the face of Shokrollah Baravarian, an 82-year-old Iranian-Jewish former banker and community activist, on Oct. 31 after a jury in a downtown Los Angeles federal court acquitted him on four charges of conspiring with his clients to defraud the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) of tax revenue.

“For the last 2 1/2 years during the investigation of this case against me and the trial, I have had no peace of mind — I’ve maintained my innocence the entire time because I never did anything illegal, and I never conspired with anyone to do something illegal,” Baravarian told the Journal. “In my case, I believe that in the end, justice prevailed.”

In April, the government’s indictment alleged that Baravarian, a former senior vice president at the Los Angeles branch of Israel-based Mizrahi Tefahot Bank, conspired with three of his Iranian-Jewish clients in the United States to conceal the existence of undeclared bank accounts in Israel. It accused him of opening new accounts for them under pseudonyms and helping them access the funds overseas through loans from the Los Angeles branch of the bank.

Baravarian’s attorney, Marc Harris, said the government’s case against his client was weak from the start because there was no evidence to show any wrongdoing by Baravarian — who has a doctorate in economics from the University of Tehran — and the bank’s clients all admitted during the trial that they never conspired with him.

“From the beginning, we maintained there were no facts to support the charges laid against Dr. Baravarian,” Harris said. “The paperwork showed, and the clients admitted, that these were legitimate loans that Dr. Baravarian’s clients needed and received to increase their lines of credit for their businesses. Several of the clients took out these ‘back-to-back’ loans secured by collateral held at the bank in Los Angeles, and most of them paid off the loans with U.S. funds, which proved that these were legitimate loans, not some mechanism or device to access hidden foreign accounts.”

Harris said federal prosecutors relied heavily on the testimony of three of Baravarian’s Iranian-Jewish former clients, to whom they had offered leniency if they testified against Baravarian and the bank. One witness had been criminally prosecuted and two others were awaiting final sentencing for tax fraud, Harris said.

“These witnesses admitted that they lied on their taxes by not disclosing their foreign accounts,” said Harris. “The government’s key witnesses agreed to plead guilty to a conspiracy charge — to implicate the bank and Dr. Baravarian in their criminal conduct — to avoid going to jail. On cross-examination, however, each of the government’s witnesses admitted that they had not conspired with Dr. Baravarian to cheat on their taxes. In fact, the government’s very first customer witness admitted that he did not believe Dr. Baravarian did anything wrong and did not think he deserved to be prosecuted.”

Officials at the U.S. Department of Justice in Los Angeles did not return calls for comment on the Baravarian case. In April, a Justice Department press release indicated that prosecutors had been investigating “the use of undeclared bank accounts globally.”

Harris said at the close of the trial, the court room was tense as everyone waited to hear the jury’s verdict and that as soon as the jury’s “not guilty” verdict was read aloud, Baravarian’s friends and supporters that had packed the courtroom burst out in loud cheers.

Baravarian said the IRS investigation broke his heart because he had established a reputation for himself as an honest individual during his career spanning more than 50 years while working in senior management positions at major banks in Iran, England and in the U.S.

“From a very young age, I was taught that honesty is the best policy, and I have never, ever gone against that belief in my work or personal life,” Baravarian said. “In my life, because of my conservative nature, I have tried never to do anything illegal, and I’ve always tried to do the right thing to help people. Therefore, it was very difficult for me to understand how this difficult situation would befall me.”

Baravarian got his start doing accounting work at the National Iranian Oil Co. at age 17 as part of a program that allowed him to study for his bachelor’s degree in accounting and work part-time simultaneously. He went on to receive a law degree and a doctorate.

At one time in Iran, Baravarian was president of a major private bank overseeing more than $1 billion in funds, he said. His multiple language skills, education, excellent reputation with clients, as well as extensive work experience in finance, became his salvation when he immigrated to the U.S. in the early 1980s. By 1983, he had gained a senior management position at Mizrahi.

“For many years, it was easier for my Iranian-Jewish clients to come to me for their loans or banking needs because I speak Farsi. They were more comfortable with my background in banking from Iran, and they were familiar with my integrity to help them get good loans for their business,” Baravarian said.

Baravarian said he worked full-time for 25 years at Mizrahi’s downtown Los Angeles branch and then two years part-time at the bank following his 2009 retirement.

A statement released to the Journal by the West Hollywood-based Iranian American Jewish Federation (IAJF) expressed the community’s long-standing support for Baravarian throughout the ordeal.

“The Iranian-Jewish community welcomes the great news of Dr. Baravarian’s acquittal,” the organization said. “He is a pillar of our community, very well-respected, and we are glad that he is now able to move beyond this.”

Many community leaders said Baravarian also has a stellar reputation among Iranian Jews in Southern California because of his extensive volunteer work within the community. Most notably, he has served on the board of the Iranian-Jewish nonprofit Magbit Foundation, which offers interest-free loans to college students, and volunteered as the president of the IAJF from 2002 to 2006.

Those who had worked with Baravarian said many in his community did not believe the allegations of fraud levied against him by the government but instead gave him encouragement to remain positive during the case.

“There was a strong feeling of surprise and disbelief that lingered in the community about these charges,” said Shahla Javdan, past president of the IAJF. “Both Dr. Baravarian and his wife have played and continue to play essential roles in our charitable organizations.”

Baravarian’s family members praised his close friends for their continued encouragement.

“I don’t know how we could have gone through this ordeal without having the full support we received from the family and friends around us,” said Baravarian’s daughter, Haleh Baravarian Shooshani.

Despite all of the difficulties he encountered with his case, Baravarian said he harbors no ill will toward his former clients who testified against him in this case or the federal prosecutors who brought the criminal charges against him.

“I have no hatred for them because I’ve learned in my life that hatred only hurts the person with the feelings of hate in his heart, and forgiveness gives a person calm and peace,” he said. “After the trial, I went over to the government’s attorneys, shook their hands and told them I had no ill feelings for them and wish them all the best in life.”

The case against Baravarian came on the heels of other criminal cases against local Iranian-Jewish businessmen who in recent years had been convicted of various federal criminal fraud charges and had defrauded community members of millions of dollars through Ponzi schemes.

In May, Shervin Neman, also known as Shervin Davatgarzadeh, a Century City Iranian-American man, was convicted in federal court of defrauding two people — one of them a former NBA and NFL executive — out of $3 million in a Ponzi scheme.

In March 2013, John Farahi, a popular Iranian-Jewish radio talk-show host and investment adviser, was sentenced by a U.S. District Court to 10 years in federal prison for operating a multimillion-dollar Ponzi scheme against local Iranian-Americans. Farahi was ordered by the court to pay more than $24 million in restitution to close to 60 victims.

Prior to that, Ezri Namvar, a longtime leading Iranian-Jewish businessman and philanthropist in Los Angeles, was sentenced in October 2011 to seven years in federal prison for stealing $21 million from four clients. Namvar also was ordered by the court to pay back $21 million in restitution to his victims, yet he allegedly bilked investors — who put money into his $2.5 billion real estate portfolio before the 2008 market crash — out of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Iranian-Jewish community leaders and victims have kept quiet about Namvar and other Iranian-Jewish investors charged in recent years with running Ponzi schemes, in keeping with a long-standing community taboo against publicly discussing potentially embarrassing incidents.

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How an Ohio girl became one of the first female cantors

Leave a Comment / Judaism / Jewish Journal

Perryne Anker did not set out to be one of the country’s first female cantors. It just sort of happened, the result of years of hard work, a passion for Jewish music, a knack for diplomacy and no small amount of talent. On Dec. 7, the Academy of Jewish Religion, California (AJR-CA), a 14-year-old “transdenominational” school on Wilshire Boulevard that offers cantorial, rabbinical and chaplaincy programs, will honor the Sherman Oaks resident at an afternoon concert and tea. Proceeds from the event will establish a Jewish music scholar-in-residence program at the school in Anker’s name.

Now, 76, Anker is known to many simply by her distinctive first name (the story goes that she was expected to be a boy named Perry, and her father, off the cuff, came up with the female variation Perryne). She has taught at AJR-CA since its inception and holds the title of associate dean, specializing in repertoire, helping students to hone songs until they are seamless, beautiful and compelling. On a recent morning, she offered a reporter a chance to sit in on a private lesson with third-year cantorial student Lily Tash at Anker’s home studio.

The lesson started with vocalizations. Anker played her Gulbransen upright piano while Tash stood next to her singing “Tu Amore” over and over again. They did the same with “me, may, ma, mo, moo.” All the while Anker listened intently, keeping up a steady stream of banter.

“Beautiful!”

“You have to think when you vocalize constantly. You have to be a machine.”

“Whatever you did, do it again. Couldn’t be better.”

“I don’t like that last note.”

“I don’t think you are being hard enough on yourself when you vocalize.”

“Good, babe! That’s singing. Woo! I really like that.”

“Be careful here. You’re getting into [a] danger zone.”

Together they spent the second half of the lesson working on a Hebrew and English song Tash planned to sing at an upcoming concert. Anker sang a line, and Tash repeated it. To hear them work in tandem in such an intimate setting, their voices clear and sweet and strong, was a huge treat.

Neither of Anker’s parents was a musician. Her dad was a salesman, her mom a homemaker. But, Anker said, “We always had music in our house. I grew up listening to all kinds of music.”

Nor was her family particularly religious. They attended synagogue on major holidays, but at the age of 14, Anker started singing at their conservative, Cleveland synagogue, Temple on the Heights B’nai Jeshurun. It didn’t take long for the temple’s legendary cantor, Saul Meisels, to recognize the young singer’s potential. Soon, Anker was performing with the adult choir during Friday night services and singing solos. Never mind the fact that at the time, she couldn’t read Hebrew.

“In those days, girls didn’t study Hebrew,” she said.

Even though Anker didn’t understand all of the music she was performing, she fell in love with it. “I loved the minor keys,” she said, “the sensitivity of it. I was singing in Yiddish and singing in Hebrew, and I just felt it. It just came out of me.” However, she added, “I never had a dream of being a cantor, because women didn’t do it.”

When Anker was 15, Meisels encouraged her to attend a summer music program at Indian Hill Music Workshop in Stockbridge, Mass. This, she said, marked “the most significant change musically in my life. … It was for kind-of-prodigy young musicians. That opened the door to … my whole professional career. It changed my life. My emphasis turned to classical music.” she said. Anker attended two summers in a row. Meisels then arranged for her to audition for the Juilliard School in New York, arguably the country’s most esteemed music conservatory, and the result was a full scholarship. But she still had to find a way to pay for her living expenses. So, once again, Anker started singing in synagogues on Fridays and Saturdays, as well as at area churches on Sundays, to make money.

Anker had planned to pursue a master’s degree following her graduation from Juilliard, and from all appearances, she was on her way to a successful music career in New York, already cast as the lead in an upcoming opera premiere. But she had also planned a trip to visit her parents, who had moved to Los Angeles. And there, instead, she ended up falling in love, getting married and settling down.

Shortly after Anker and her then-husband had their first child, Anker heard about a new temple being formed, to be named for Stephen S. Wise. “So I went to meet with the rabbi, Isaiah Zeldin,” she said. “That was the beginning of my real Jewish singing career.”

Although her intentions were modest — she just wanted to sing in the temple’s choir — slowly but surely she ended up doing quite a bit more: teaching in the Sunday school and singing duets during Friday night services with Cantor Richard Silverman, who even began writing music for her.

It was at this point, Anker said, that she decided she needed to up her game. “Having been a serious music student at Juilliard, you don’t just do things by the seat of your pants. I was wanting to be authentic, to really study the music and start to study Hebrew.” She began attending cantorial workshops with William Sharlin, Leo Baeck Temple’s cantor, but not yet with the intention of becoming a cantor. She was the only woman in the class at first. But, she underscores, “I never set out to break the barrier,” a claim she admits, “might be anti-feminist.”

Then one day, Rabbi Zeldin and Cantor Silverman sat down with her. “[They] said, ‘You have been doing this a long time. This has become your life, and you should pursue it. You should know more, and we want to give you the opportunity to learn more.’ ” Anker started conducting services on her own at Stephen S. Wise.

She recalls the first time she had to sing the Kol Nidre, on the eve of Yom Kippur. “The night before Kol Nidre, I was at a rehearsal. I suddenly felt like I had no voice. My parents were baby-sitting. I said, ‘I can’t do this.’ I felt like I was getting laryngitis. My father said to me, ‘That’s because you don’t have a role model. That’s because you never heard a women sing Kol Nidre.’ ” That acknowledgement was all Anker needed.

In 1980, she became the sole cantor at Beth Sholom Temple, now Beth Shir Shalom, in Santa Monica, and, by then separated from her first husband, it is also where she met her current husband, now-retired Judge Robert Schnider. She remained in this position until 1992. She never received a formal cantorial degree, in part because there were no cantorial schools on the West Coast at the time; AJR-CA has the first. By now, she has gone on to mentor many more women in the field, helping to make it as diverse as the rabbinate.

Today, Anker is happy to own her achievement. And at the December event, she will receive her honorary master’s degree, “after having half of it my whole life, practically,” she joked. It’s certainly a new world. According to Anker, more female clergy than male are graduating.

And does Anker have any plans to slow down?

“I don’t think I’ll ever stop my work,” she said. She does cherish time spent with her four grown sons and seven grandchildren, all of whom are local. And she and her husband do a lot of traveling. But she loves teaching, as well as the “life cycle stuff” she does, like performing at weddings, funerals and baby namings.

“The joy of this profession for me, and the privilege, is being involved in people’s lives from birth to death, helping them to weave their way through joy and tragedy,” she said. “I really consider it an honor and a privilege. As a result, I know I am part of so many people’s lives, even though my children would make fun of me, when we were in public places, and someone would say, ‘Oh I remember you were my bar mitzvah teacher,’ or, ‘You married me.’ It’s just wonderful.”

For tickets to the event, contact Lauren S. Goldner at (213) 884-4133, ext. 119, or lgoldner@ajrca.org

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How an Ohio girl became one of the first female cantors

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