Two weeks in Israel in 5 minutes
A whirlwind two week trip to Israel condensed to a 5 minute highlight reel.
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January 5, 2015
Maher Hathout: ‘What we say and don’t say’
Over the weekend, Maher Hathout, one of the leaders of inter-faith dialogue in Los Angeles and the titular head of the Muslim community died. He succumbed to cancer at the City of Hope.
Last fall, this “>op/ed he co-authored with Salam al Marayati in The Wall Street Journal. As we wrote at the time,
The op/ed is as straight forward and unambiguous a statement of principles as one could ask for. It is courageous and could cost them support within their community; support they are, clearly, willing to lose in order to assert what they believe.
Community Advocates has communicated our admiration to al Marayati and Hathout and received a warm acknowledgment with the observation that “It needed to be said.” Salam and Maher had the courage to say what “needed to be said” and should be applauded for it.
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Bess Myerson, only Jewish Miss America, dies at 90
Bess Myerson, the only Jewish woman to be crowned Miss America, has died.
Myerson, who also was a spokeswoman for the Anti-Defamation League and donated $1.1 million to help found the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, died on Dec. 14 at her home in Santa Monica, Calif., The New York Times reported. She was 90.
After being crowned Miss America in September 1945, days after the close of World War II, Myerson went on to have a career in public affairs. She led two New York City departments — consumer affairs and cultural affairs — before becoming a spokeswoman and national commissioner for the ADL. Myerson also served on various boards and commissions under presidents Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.
Throughout the late 1970s, Myerson became one of the faces of Ed Koch’s mayoral campaign. She appeared on his posters and was often seen holding hands with him in public.
In the late 1980s, Myerson became romantically linked to wealthy sewer contractor Carl Capasso and subsequently was involved in a series of legal controversies, or what was known as the “Bess Mess.” In 1989 she was acquitted in the bribery of a New York judge. A year earlier she had been caught shoplifting.
Following the bribery acquittal, Myerson stayed out of the public eye for the rest of her life.
Myerson was born in the Bronx in 1924 to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents. She lived in the Shalom Aleichem Co-operative with a few hundred other Jewish families and attended the High School of Music & Art. As a talented piano player and performer, she went on to play at Carnegie Hall and appear on television shows such as “I’ve Got A Secret.”
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Joseph Samuels: Exposing crime against Iraqi Jews
His voice cracking with emotion, his eyes welling with tears, Joseph Samuels, 84 and a retired Jewish real estate developer, recalled the pogrom’s angry Muslim mobs in Baghdad that his Iraqi family and the Jewish community there faced during the Holocaust. Known as the “Farhud,” this violent pogrom was carried out against the Jews in early June 1941 and has rarely been spoken about publicly by those who survived the massacre.
Samuels is one of a small remaining group of survivors of the Farhud, and during the past decade he has begun to write about and speak publicly about this dark chapter to various groups in Southern California.
“I was 11 years old when the Farhud broke out in Baghdad against the Jews,” said Samuels, who now lives in Santa Monica. “It was a horrible massacre of Jews for two days straight, with mobs of Muslims slaughtering the Jewish men, raping the Jewish women and throwing the little kids in the Tigress River.”
Samuels said Jewish homes and businesses in Baghdad also were looted during the Farhud, which was incited by the pro-Nazi regime in control of Iraq and by daily anti-Semitic radio broadcasts made by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husayni. “My two uncles had their homes looted but escaped the mobs by jumping from the different roofs of homes in Baghdad’s Jewish quarter,” he said. “I was so frightened as a child — we brought furniture to reinforce the door in our home, which was located just outside the Jewish quarter. I saw Muslims looting outside, and I still remember them saying, ‘We’ll come back for you!’ since they knew which homes were Jewish because of mezuzahs.”
Although official records of the massacre claim nearly 180 Jews were killed and a few hundred injured, Samuels said the Iraqi Jewish community long has believed the number of Jews killed is closer to 1,000. He said he and his family survived the Farhud because British forces invaded Baghdad and stopped the violent mobs. Still, the memories of that pogrom haunted Samuels for nearly six decades, along with the painful memories of his escape with his brother from their homeland in 1949 due to the constant persecution of Jews. For many years, he said, he never even spoke to his children or anyone about his difficult life in Iraq, but he finally decided to open up after taking a memoir-writing class.
Samuels since has dedicated most of his free time to raising awareness of the plight of Jewish refugees from Arab lands during the last century. He has written articles about his own experiences during the Farhud and in fleeing persecution in Iraq that have drawn positive feedback from thousands of readers worldwide.
Samuels also has joined forces with the nonprofit group JIMENA (Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa) to speak to Jewish students at local venues, including UCLA’s Hillel, Congregation Kahal Joseph in West Los Angeles and Yeshiva University High Schools of Los Angeles (YULA). He said he is also slated to speak at a gathering of Christians United for Israel in San Bernardino in May.
“For me, it is important to bring out the story to the public for all to understand what happened to the Jewish community in the Arab lands,” Samuels said. “We were a 2,700-year-old community that was tortured, imprisoned, killed; [we] indirectly or directly had our properties confiscated and either had to escape from our homes or were forced out by the Arab regimes just because we were Jews.”
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Nira Sayegh: Lifelong love of Jewish education began in childhood
For most people, working full-time plus overtime hours as vice president of finance at a property management firm would be enough to stay busy.
But for Nira Sayegh, 52, of Beverly Hills, helping run NPS Realty & Management Corp. with her husband, Pinny, is only a fraction of her responsibilities.
For the past four years, Sayegh has served as a volunteer on the executive board of the Sephardic Educational Center, an international educational and cultural organization with offices in Los Angeles and a historic campus in the Old City of Jerusalem. In L.A., she puts in 10 to 15 hours or more each week managing the center’s office inside The Jewish Federation building on Wilshire Boulevard, overseeing staff, organizing events, managing the budget, raising money and remotely overseeing operations at the Jerusalem campus.
Recently, Sayegh helped organize the Los Angeles Sephardic Jewish Film Festival for the center. She also single-handedly puts together a yearly Sephardic High Holy Days service at the Intercontinental Los Angeles hotel for families without a synagogue affiliation. And she volunteers to help with Jewish community events whenever needed, such as with High Holy Days celebrations this year at the Kahal Joseph Congregation in West Los Angeles, where she is a member.
“I’m the kind of person that I need to be involved in something that I’m passionate and care about. Judaism, Israel — you’re going to find me there,” Sayegh said. “I love Judaism, I really do, and I love Israel. If there’s anything I can do to help any organization, then I do it.”
Sayegh got a taste for engaging in Jewish community and religious life as a child, after she moved from Israel to Los Angeles with her family when she was 12. The transition was difficult, Sayegh said, because she barely knew anyone, and most other children she encountered knew little about Israel and the culture she came from.
But Sayegh soon found an exciting way to connect and contribute to her new environment by working as a Hebrew-school teacher. She began in eighth grade by volunteering at the Hebrew school of the formerly Conservative Temple Beth Torah in West Los Angeles, and by ninth grade she was hired as an assistant teacher for children at the Reform congregation of Temple Isaiah, where she worked twice a week through high school and college.
Having grown up Conservative, teaching at Isaiah was the first time Sayegh experienced Reform Judaism, and she was fascinated. Although she continues to identify as Conservative, she said the experience opened her eyes and made her more appreciative and accepting of different Jewish traditions. These insights led to her support for Sephardic Judaism and the approach of blending ancient and modern traditions and accepting diversity in Jewish life.
“I learned so much about myself and Judaism, and how you can be Jewish in a different way,” she said. “I think it doesn’t matter what kind of Judaism you practice as long as you’re a good person.”
Sayegh, a mother of four and grandmother of three, said her biggest joy is witnessing the impact of the Sephardic Educational Center’s cultural excursions to Israel for teenagers, which take place once or twice a year.
“They come back with a different outlook on themselves as individuals and on life,” Sayegh said. “The impact we make on children is the most important thing because they’re going to be different the rest of their lives because of that experience.”
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Ben Schwartzman: Giving autistic kids a shot at a team sport
In early 2014, UCLA post-graduate education student Ben Schwartzman and his classmate and friend John Daniel were staring at their computer screens and robotically crunching numbers on Microsoft Excel when they both decided they needed a change.
“We were just looking at data on our computers and hating our lives,” Schwartzman said, laughing. “We were like, ‘We should do something fun.’ ”
Schwartzman, who’s pursuing a doctorate that will prepare him for a career working with autistic children, wanted to funnel his training and passion into action.
“Why don’t we just make a basketball league? That’d be so fun,” Schwartzman recalls saying to Daniel.
One year later, Schwartzman and Daniel are preparing for their second season of High Five Basketball, a summer youth basketball league for children and teens on the autism spectrum. Open to ages 6 to 15, High Five Basketball offers autistic kids three things that everyone can use more of but that may be harder for some autistic children to find — friendships, physical exercise and a sense of belonging.
Last summer, High Five Basketball ran on Sundays from July 13 to Aug. 31 at Crossroads School in Santa Monica and Crespi Carmelite High School in Encino. Fifty-five kids signed up (Schwartzman collected names at an annual autism walk at the Rose Bowl last April), and High Five Basketball has received some outside financial support that allows Schwartzman, Daniel and the two other staffers to keep enrollment costs low — only $50 for the upcoming season.
Empower Sports, a 501(c)3 that creates sports leagues for children with special needs and kids living in poverty, agreed to bring High Five Basketball under its insurance plan — at no cost to High Five Basketball. A uniform manufacturer in Ohio gave Schwartzman a discount. And Jewcer, a crowd-funding platform that helps turn ideas into projects that can benefit the Jewish community, awarded High Five Basketball a $7,500 grant, which will go a long way toward funding the group’s main costs — gym fees and jerseys.
Schwartzman said he hopes the upcoming season will begin in May, but that also revolves around his and Daniel’s academic schedules (they are still full-time students). Schwartzman isn’t sure what his role will be with High Five Basketball after he graduates — he said there are many other projects he hopes to work on. But as an avid basketball fan (Lakers) and a recreational player, the opportunity to play and teach the game he loves to the people he wants to help has been a treasure.
“The actual game days were awesome,” Schwartzman said, adding that wins and losses aren’t counted, and the performance on the court is not taken as seriously as it may be in typical youth sports leagues.
For Schwartzman, a career in autism has a very personal angle. His older brother, Joey, was diagnosed with autism in the late 1990s (the Journal did a story on him in 2001 titled “Torah Lover Beats Odds”), which prompted Ben to take an introductory course on autism when he was an undergraduate at UC Santa Barbara. That, Schwartzman said, is what started him thinking that a career in the autism field could be his path.
Schwartzman said that giving autistic kids a chance for rigorous physical exercise is known to help them improve executive functioning (which includes reasoning, problem solving and planning) — things that are often difficult for people without autism, and seemingly insurmountable for many with. He hopes the league also will help the kids become more involved in sports games during recess at school.
“A lot of the parents come up to me and say, ‘I had no idea that he could play basketball. I wouldn’t have known unless you guys did this league,’ ” Schwartzman said.
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Harriet Rechtman: Advocate for people with disabilities
“Life is like that. Every day is a new thing,” Harriet Rechtman said, dismissing any suggestion that the three decades she has spent as an advocate for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities is extraordinary. Sitting at the dining room table of the Woodland Hills home where she has lived since 1974, Rechtman speaks frankly of a life of helping others steered more by her willingness to live serendipitously than by any forethought.
Until her second son, Jamie, had seizures while still an infant in the early 1970s, Rechtman had never thought about working with people with disabilities. “I had no knowledge of it, no experience with it, didn’t know anybody growing up,” she said. But then she begins to talk at length about how a trust works, how various government agencies assist people with disabilities, and how her opinion on group homes versus apartment living has changed, among many other topics. She learned these things over many years of lovingly caring for Jamie.
Rechtman’s first professional job in disability care came when Jamie was much older, when a man named Stefen Sorsoli hired her to open Los Angeles and Thousand Oaks operations of an organization called Work Training Programs based in Santa Barbara.
After a few years, Rechtman left her position with Sorsoli, who had become something of a second father to Jamie, and on her way home from her last day she stopped by the North Los Angeles County Regional Center to say goodbye to its director, Jim Shorter, who was preparing to depart for law school.
His question to her — “What’s the worst thing you ever saw happen with a family at Work Training Program?” — and their mutual realization that there was no existing long-term care program that worked well with adult clients, many of whom no longer had families, is the moment Rechtman points to as the origin of the Foundation for Advocacy, Conservatorship and Trust (FACT).
As they worked with a group of Regional Center directors and local attorneys to put together the new organization, Rechtman grew tired of waiting for the technical details to be worked out, so she began advising clients out of her own home. At first, Rechtman worked mostly with people she had met while raising Jamie. Families trusted her advice, coming as it did from a fellow parent of a developmentally disabled child.
Because of another chance conversation with Shorter a decade later, Rechtman returned to the organization she had founded. For 15 years, until June 2014, Rechtman stood at the helm of FACT — advising families on the financial, legal and personal components of raising developmentally disabled children, and often, through FACT, managing those areas once the children were grown and their families were no longer around. Characteristically, Rechtman never took a salary for her work.
Although she is now retired, Rechtman admits that she has not stopped working. “All I need to do for [FACT] now, which they would like for me to do, is to find them money,” she says, laughing.
And as for Jamie: After decades of seeing doctors and unsuccessfully trying their proposed remedies, a new trial medication has allowed him to live seizure-free for the past two years.
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Oron Maher: Traveling an ethical road leads to fulfillment
When Oron Maher began building his Southern California real estate business four years ago, he turned to the Los Angeles Business Journal for the scoop on his industry, and what he found disturbed him.
As he combed through its pages, he discovered what felt like too many stories about Iranian-American businessmen being accused of fraud, Ponzi scheming and other unsavory acts. And to make matters worse, the accounts of wrongdoing within the community almost always described the accused as “a member of the prominent Iranian-Jewish community of Los Angeles,” Maher explained.
“That was kind of an alarm to me.” He couldn’t ignore the hard, plain print. “We have a business ethics problem in our community,” he said.
Maher joined the board of the local Iranian-American civic action group 30 Years After and, along with fellow board member and Orange County Assistant Area Director for AIPAC Jason Youdeem, created the Maher Fellowship, a leadership training program for Iranian Jews, ages 21-35. The six-month program is a primer on Israel advocacy, community leadership and public speaking, and includes an all-expenses-paid trip to the annual AIPAC policy conference in Washington, D.C. Maher offered the lead gift for the program, which was subsequently named for him. “I can think of no better cause than to cultivate Jewish leaders,” he said.
In addition to running his real estate development company, California Real Property Inc., Maher, a 34-year-old lawyer and real estate broker, mentors aspiring business leaders. Four years ago, he founded the L.A. Business Executives Forum, a group that focuses on business education and development, and serves as a chair for the real estate section of the Beverly Hills Bar Association. “I get a huge sense of joy and fulfillment from my businesses, but business, at the end of the day, for me, is a means to an end. What drives me is the Jewish community.”
Maher said he observes the biblical practice of tithing, the mandate to donate 10 percent of one’s income to charity. It is lessons like those, among other business values, such as honest dealing and the integrity of one’s word, that he hopes to impart to the young Iranian Jews in the Maher Fellowship, as well as students he mentors from CSU Long Beach, his alma mater. He blamed a communal emphasis on materialism, which has become a symbol of immigrant success, for why some feel compelled to cheat. “I’m not opposed to people buying nice things,” he said, “And I’m not advocating being moderate or not being moderate. But if you live with higher consciousness and are really connected with your true self, you don’t have to cut corners in business in order to satisfy an urge.
“That’s what’s missing in the Persian community,” he continued, “that drive for higher consciousness and self-actualization. If we’re more focused on those things, we’d realize there’s a much higher form of happiness that comes [from inside].”
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Harriet Zaretsky: A voice for disenfranchised kids of L.A.
For 18 years, Harriet Zaretsky has been devoting her time to helping the abused, abandoned and neglected foster children that the rest of society tends to forget.
Beginning in 1996, she became a court-appointed special advocate with CASA of Los Angeles, serving as a case manager for some of the most troubled children in the foster-care system. Out of an estimated 28,000 children in foster care in L.A., CASA takes on approximately 800 cases each year that are deemed to be the most dire. “This program brings foster kids in, only when they’re failing,” Zaretsky said. “We’re dealing with the worst 30 percent of foster kids in L.A.” — meaning, the most vulnerable. In her role, Zaretsky acts as both an advocate and overseer, tracking individual cases from start to finish as children make their way out of broken homes and into the tortuous world of foster care.
“One of my first cases involved nine children,” Zaretsky recalled. “Their mother had a fourth-grade education, and they all had various challenges and medical issues — it isn’t always a happy ending. It isn’t always a happy life.”
Even though she is a licensed attorney, Zaretsky gave up a career practicing law to work full-time as a volunteer. The needs of the children are enormous, she said. As an advocate, she can offer some consolation, as advocates are often the sole consistent adult “anchor” in a foster child’s life.
“Children just move me,” she said.
The seed was planted in junior high, when Zaretsky volunteered for a local orphanage and became heartbroken at the living conditions there. “Growing up, I felt lucky, and I felt fortunate, and I saw too many children suffering,” she said. “So there’s a certain amount of appreciation you have, and then there’s this guilt: Why am I so lucky?”
In a cruel twist of fate, Zaretsky’s luck changed in the summer of 2007, when her teenage son, Dillon, was killed in a car accident before his senior year of high school. The tragedy irreparably altered her life, but she was compelled to respond to it: That year, she established the Dillon Henry Foundation, a nonprofit whose work reflects her son’s passions and values — surfing, the environment and global social justice. Each year, the foundation grants 10 college scholarships to deserving seniors from Dillon’s alma mater, Palisades Charter High School. It also subsidizes paid internships with the Surfrider Foundation and supports the work of Jewish World Watch, for which Zaretsky also serves on the board. Through the partnership with Jewish World Watch, Zaretsky established the Dillon Henry Community Health Clinic in the Central African Republic, which provides medical care to survivors of genocide.
And she shows no signs of slowing up anytime soon. With her 22-year-old daughter off at college in Colorado, Zaretsky decided to foster a 16-year-old boy two days a week. “It just seemed like the right thing to do,” she explained, “and I didn’t see any other way to really help him. There are interim periods in people’s lives when they could really use someone to be a help and support to them — because there are no homes for these kids.”
From her loss, a child gained — the boy has become “a part-time family member,” as Zaretsky described it, included in family vacations, holidays and other meaningful occasions.
“It was the only way to deal with the blow,” Zaretsky said of her son’s death. “If I wasn’t helping, if I wasn’t doing things that I think [my son] would be proud of, it wouldn’t work. At least by doing these things, I’m leaving a mark for him and for me. I want people to remember his name.”
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Shannon von Roemer: Doggedly devoted to canine rescue
Shannon von Roemer got the call at 9:30 p.m. on a Saturday two years ago: A woman had found a gray-and-white pit bull cowering in the bushes in Inglewood, with its paw and hip crushed and its back torn up after the animal was thrown from and dragged by a car.
Von Roemer — the founder of Jimi’s Angels dog rescue and the canine boutique Bark n’ Bitches on Fairfax Avenue — immediately called her veterinary team, which picked up the dog, amputated her gangrene-infested leg and attended to her other severe injuries.
Von Roemer then arranged for a dog trainer to work with the terrified canine until she found a suitable home for the animal.
Von Roemer, 58, does considerable pro bono work through her charitable group Jimi’s Angels, and her boutique, founded in 2006, is perhaps the first of its kind in Southern California: a humane shop that sells dogs rescued from shelters and from the streets. Von Roemer estimates that she has rescued and adopted out more than 3,500 canines in the past eight years.
Recently she’s worked with a black Labrador retriever puppy that was dumped in a trash bag inside a garbage bin with its siblings, their umbilical cords still attached; a pit bull that was left abandoned in a locked apartment without food or water; and three small pooches she took from a fellow rescuer who had become overwhelmed after seven dogs were thrown over her fence in Canoga Park.
The next day, the three pooches were happily running around with about 10 other dogs at von Roemer’s shop; on a chartreuse-colored wall hung a Los Angeles city certificate of appreciation commending Bark n’ Bitches as “the exemplary happy solution for those who abhor and seek to eliminate … puppy mill cruelty and want only the best for dogs and people alike.”
Von Roemer — who attended a Jewish day school for a time as she was growing up with her grandparents in Buffalo, N.Y. — said she has been a “dog-aholic” since getting her first pooch, a black poodle named Reggie, who “saved” her when she was a child and her divorced young parents were unable to care for her.
It was while doing volunteer work with the human homeless around 1998 that she found and adopted a 3-month-old pit bull, Jimi, who was huddling in a park near Skid Row, and who opened her eyes to the abandoned-dog crisis in Los Angeles. Von Roemer learned that 57,000 stray dogs roam the county each day, that some shelters have up to an 85 percent kill rate, and that puppy-mill breeding dogs are incarcerated in cramped rabbit hutches and then shot, drowned or otherwise killed when they can no longer produce large litters.
That knowledge helped spur her to found Jimi’s Angels, as well as to offer rescue dogs for sale at Bark n’ Bitches around 2008, four years before the Los Angeles City Council banned the sale of puppy mill-bred dogs in area pet stores.
While other shops can sell purebred puppies for thousands of dollars, von Roemer charges $350 to $450 for such dogs, a fee that includes vet visits, grooming, spay and neuter, a microchip and an online training program, as well as a 10 percent discount for all store products for the lifetime of the animal. Because the rescue dogs cost von Roemer at least $25,000 annually in medical fees alone, she also heavily relies on donations.
Prospective owners must fill out a three-page application and conduct an in-depth interview with von Roemer’s staff. “My goal is to find ‘forever’ homes for these abused and neglected animals,” she said.
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