Enrollment in New York State’s Jewish day schools and yeshivas increased by 4.4 percent last year.
According to data compiled by the Orthodox Jewish Public Affairs Council from statistics provided by the New York State Education Department, more than 143,000 students were enrolled in 405 K-12 Jewish schools in the state during the 2014-15 academic year.
Not surprisingly, enrollment and growth was highest in counties with the largest charedi Orthodox populations. Brooklyn enrolled 80,132 students, up from 78,759 the previous year. Other top-enrolling counties were Rockland (23,618), Orange (10,997), Queens (10,503) and Nassau (7,592), all of which experienced increases over the previous year.
Enrollment declined slightly in Manhattan, however, with 4,360 students enrolled, down from 4,408 the previous year. The greatest increase was in Rockland, where enrollment rose by 7.1 percent. Rockland County’s large haredi Orthodox population has spurred controversy in recent years, particularly in the East Ramapo Central School District, where the Orthodox-majority school board has cut the public school system’s budget dramatically. In addition, haredi schools in both Rockland and Brooklyn have been criticized in recent years for allegedly failing to meet state requirements for secular education.
Going back two years (2012-2013 vs. 2014-2015), the percentage rise in Jewish school enrollment was 7.9 percent statewide.
The growth in Jewish enrollment came despite an overall decline in nonpublic school enrollment in New York state.
According to a news released issued by Orthodox Jewish Public Affairs Council, the 143,156 students in Jewish schools receive, on average, “well below $1,500 in tax-funded services a year; compared to more than $19,500 per each public school student” saving taxpayers “at least $2.57 billion in education funding last year.”
The council claims that the private Jewish community “also directly funds the public school system,” due to property tax revenues from “properties owned by members of the Orthodox Jewish community.”
A planned appearance by pro-Israel provocateur David Horowitz ignited a firestorm at San Diego State University in advance of a May 5 lecture there by the right-wing activist.
Posters distributed on campus late last month by Horowitz’s organization called out by name seven SDSU student activists, alleging they have “allied themselves with Palestinian terrorists to perpetrate BDS and Jew Hatred.” Similar posters naming individual students have appeared in recent weeks on the UCLA campus.
On April 27, protesters at SDSU demanding a condemnation of the posters blocked the school’s president, Elliot Hirshman, from leaving campus in a police car until he spoke with them.
In a video circulated by the SDSU chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Hirshman engages the activists in a heated exchange, at close quarters, flanked by security personnel.
“We’re talking about people saying they support the boycott, divestment and sanction of Israel — that is a view, and others might share that view who might be terrorists,” Hirshman says in the video, laying out how he understood the posters.
“I don’t think that is saying our students are terrorists,” he says. “If there was a statement that said our students were terrorists and they weren’t, I would certainly condemn that.”
The San Diego Union-Tribune reported that protesters allowed Hirshman to leave only after he apologized for any hurt he might have caused.
Similar notices have appeared on five California college campuses as part of a campaign by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. The posters identify alleged SJP activists and other students aligned with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
At UCLA, posters named 16 students and professors — the most of any of the posters on the five campuses.
UCLA Chancellor Gene Block took a different approach from Hirshman: “No student should be compared to a terrorist for holding a political opinion,” he wrote in an April 15 email to individuals named on the list.
“I and my administration will continue to speak out against Islamaphobia and ethnic bias,” he wrote. “I encourage you to do the same.”
Days later, when UCLA Vice Chancellor Jerry Kang sent an email to the campus community calling the posters “a focused, personalized intimidation,” a law firm saying it represented Horowitz sent Kang a letter demanding he retract his “malicious and defamatory claims,” the UCLA Daily Bruin reported.
Rahim Kurwa, a sociology graduate student at UCLA and BDS activist who was named on the posters, praised the administration’s response.
“We’ve been meeting with them, and I think that they’re making progress,” he told the Jewish Journal.
Kurwa said that while he doesn’t feel his safety is threatened, what Horowitz is “doing is not that far from an incitement to violence.”
“It’s not hard to figure out where my office is on campus,” he said. “That is an issue.”
Kurwa added that posters traceable to Horowitz are a frequent occurrence on campus — he estimated they have surfaced at UCLA about four times in the past year.
The most recent poster campaign, which defined BDS as “a Hamas-inspired genocidal campaign to destroy Israel,” also hit three other University of California campuses — Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz and Berkeley.
The SDSU College Republicans, the group scheduled to host Horowitz on Thursday, said it has no intention of canceling the event in light of potential disruptions.
In a statement, the organization said it was “not aware of the flyers being posted on campus and does not know who is responsible for posting them.”
The group added, “We will not be silenced by the upcoming protests.”
Meanwhile, on May 2, Hirshman and other administrators met with members of SJP and other student leaders to discuss the posters.
A wrap-up of the meeting emailed to the Jewish Journal by an SDSU spokesperson concluded that the administration and SJP, working with the student senate, will “undertake a review of university policies to ensure we are balancing freedom of expression and protection from harassment.”
SDSU’s chapter of Hillel, the Jewish student organization, rebuked the posters.
“We strongly condemn any efforts to demonize any racial or religious group, as the inflammatory language of the flyers does,” SDSU Hillel Director Jackie Tolley wrote in a statement.
Horowitz did not respond to a request for comment before this article went to press. But in a press release on a website affiliated with the David Horowitz Freedom Center, he explained his motivation.
“We’ve decided to get up close and personal with merchants of Jew hatred on our campuses,” he said.
by David Vogel, Translated by A.C. Jacobs. Holocaust Poetry, compiled and introduced by Hilda Schiff, publ. St. Martin’s Griffin, 1996, p. 14
Biography – David Vogel was born on May 15, 1891 in the town of Satanov in the Podolia region in the Russian Pale of Settlement. The family spoke Yiddish. In 1909-1910, he arrived in Vilnius as a yeshiva student. He worked as the caretaker of a synagogue and studied Hebrew. In 1925, he settled in Paris, where he wrote prose and poetry. In 1929, he and his wife, Nada Adler, immigrated to Palestine, where their daughter, Tamar, was born. After spending time in Poland and Berlin, the family returned to Paris. When World War II erupted, Vogel and his daughter fled to southeastern France where Nada was recuperating in a sanatorium. He was interned as an Austrian citizen and freed in 1940 when the Nazis occupied France.
Various stories circulated about his life after that. In 1944-45, the Hebrew newspapers in Palestine reported his “disappearance.” He was presumed to have died in the Holocaust.
Israeli literary scholar Dan Pagis discovered that he returned to Hauteville after his release from internment camp. In 1944, he was arrested by the Gestapo, imprisoned in Lyon, and sent to Drancy, a transit camp for French Jews. Four days later, he was murdered in Auschwitz.
Temple Israel of Hollywood will commemorate Yom Hashoah on Wednesday evening, May 4 at 7 PM with the showing of the Academy Award Nominated Short Documentary “Spectres of the Shoah” about Claude Lanzmann, the director of the seminal 10-hour film “Shoah” commemorating the 25th anniversary of the film.
See http://oscar.go.com/nominees/documentary-short/claude-lanzmann-spectres-of-the-shoah
Raise a glass! The 2016 Tony Award nominations were announced this morning, and the the revolutionary Broadway megahit “Hamilton” collected the lion’s share, with a record-breaking total of 16.
Creator and star Lin-Manuel Miranda himself received three nods, for best original score, best book and best lead actor.
This makes it official: Whether we’re talking about the 18th or the 21st, “Hamilton” is the show of the century — which is about how long you’ll have to wait to get tickets.
In the meantime, while you suffer through the interminable wait, we’ve got you covered: You can watch what’s probably the greatest wedding toast in the history of wedding toasts.
At his 2010 nuptials, Miranda called on the entire wedding party to serenade his “beshert,” Vanessa Nadal, with a surprise performance of “To Life! (L’Chaim!),” the iconic showstopper from “Fiddler on the Roof” — which, incidentally, was also nominated for three Tony Awards today, including one for best musical revival.
Sweet and spot-on, it’s no shocker that Miranda’s song-and-dance performance was on par with an actual stage number. Several Broadway vets took part, including music direction by “Hamilton” collaborator Alex Lacamoire (now up for best orchestration). Apparently, Miranda arranged and rehearsed the whole thing secretly in a matter of days.
“Fiddler,” of course, is one of Miranda’s favorite shows — he appeared in his school’s sixth-grade production and identified it as one of the biggest influences for his 2008 Tony-winning musical, “In the Heights.” Not long ago, he plucked the three actresses who play Tzeitel, Hodel and Chava from the current Broadway revival for a special rap-enhanced rendition of “Matchmaker” at Ham4Ham, the free sidewalk performances Miranda coordinates for the crowds lined up for “Hamilton” ticket lotteries.
That Miranda hits the hard “chet” in “l’chaim” just right may be because in elementary school, as he told The New Yorker, “all my friends were Jewish,” and he was also no stranger to singing and dancing at over-the-top Jewish events. As he told The New York Times Vows column, he met his wife — an MIT-trained scientist who is also an attorney — before his first Broadway bonanza, and he was paying the rent by performing at bar mitzvahs.
“‘I was literally one of those guys who shows up in a black satin shirt and tries to get kids and old people to dance,” he said. ‘It was bleak.’”
The future, of course, is bright, and the toasts to “Hamilton” and Miranda — a MacArthur Fellow and winner of last month’s Pulitzer Prize for Drama—are only just beginning.
Yet it’s possible that no performance will top the one he orchestrated at his own wedding.
“That’s what will be my real legacy,” Miranda told Mo Rocca last year on CBS Sunday Morning. “It’s one of the things I’m proudest of in my life.”
A long-thought lost model used by grateful Jewish workers to create a gold ring for Oskar Schindler has been donated to the Melbourne Jewish Holocaust Centre, where it will go on display.
The model that lay in the Melbourne workshop of ring maker Jozef Gross for more than 50 years.
The ring-making was portrayed in Steven Spielberg’s film “Schindler’s List” as having been made from gold sourced from prisoners’ teeth, according to the Holocaust center.
Schindler, the hero of Thomas Kenneally’s book “Schindler’s Ark” as well as the Oscar-winning film, was a German industrialist and member of the Nazi Party who saved Jews by employing them in his factory and treating them humanely. He saved about 1,200 Jews.
At the end of the war Gross, a master jeweler, made the ring for Schindler, who lost it shortly after the war. The model came to Australia with Gross.
The jeweler was a very private person and chose not to share his story with the world, telling only his family and a few others about his war experiences. Importantly, however, Gross gave an in-depth description of the process used to make the ring to his Australian business partner. The model was discovered by Gross’ son, Louis, in a box, along with other jewelry-making paraphernalia after Gross died in 1997.
The model is one of the few physical objects remaining from Schindler’s factory.
The president of the World Jewish Congress is taking the Michelin travel company to task for not including Israel in its repertoire of prestigious travel and dining guides.
In a letter to the French company, whose restaurant-ranking system influences foodies worldwide, Ronald Lauder said it is a “concerning omission” that Michelin has no guide to Israel, The Associated Press reportedTuesday.
“Israel today is a venerable amalgam of cultures and traditions, which come together to produce a distinctive and exceptional culinary scene,” he wrote. “Why, therefore, has your company refused to produce a guide to Israel’s restaurants?
“Though I am sure that it is not your intention, some have speculated that reasons other than merit color Michelin’s decision not to visit Israel,” added Lauder, a billionaire businessman and philanthropist.
Michelin has print guides for 27 countries and many city-specific guides, including a new guide to Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo in Brazil. The company’s website also excludes Israel from its list of 79 countries, among them Jordan, Turkey, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates — even Syria, which has been engulfed in a bloody civil war for the past five years.
In recent years, Israeli food and wine has garnered international prestige. Last week, “Zahav: A World of Israeli Cooking” won best book of the year at the James Beard Awards for food writing. The book’s authors run several popular restaurants in Philadelphia. In 2014, Saveur Magazine recognized Tel Aviv as an outstanding travel destination for food lovers, and in November Conde Nast Traveler reported that Tel Aviv has the “world’s best vegetarian food.”
According to AP, at least one Israeli chief, Moshik Roth, has received a Michelin star, for his work in the Netherlands.
Michelin Guide spokeswoman Samuelle Dorol told AP there are no current plans for an Israel guide, “but that doesn’t mean we will never have one.”
Former New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver has been sentenced to 12 years in federal prison on corruption charges.
Silver, 72, an Orthodox Jew who for two decades was among the most powerful men in the state, was sentenced Tuesday in Manhattan federal court and ordered to surrender to begin his prison term in July, several media outlets reported. He was convicted in November on seven corruption charges.
At the sentencing, U.S. District Court Judge Valerie Caproni called Silver, 72, one of the most corrupt elected officials in the history of New York.
“None involve an official as high up in New York government as you were,” she said, referring to other convicted politicians, The New York Daily News reported.
“None, as far as I can tell, yielded nearly as much in ill-gotten gains or lasted nearly as long,” Caproni added, noting that Silver’s “corruption cast a shadow over everything he has done. Those sorts of doubts end up corroding trust in government and that, Mr. Silver, is discernible harm to the people of New York.”
In addition to the prison time, Caproni ordered Silver to pay back more than $5 million and fined him $1.75 million.
A Democrat from Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Silver was arrested in 2015 on seven counts of honest services fraud, extortion and money laundering. He resigned his post as speaker at that time but retained his Assembly seat.
In the months between his conviction and sentencing, Malcolm Hoenlein, the chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, submitted a letter on Silver’s behalf pleading for leniency. According to the Forward, the letter, sent on the official stationery of the umbrella group in January, described Silver as “selfless.”
“In the four decades of our association, Mr. Silver volunteered his assistance, participation and support for many important civil and human rights, for advancing intergroup relations, and aiding charitable and communal undertakings,” Hoenlein wrote. “He did so without seeking public recognition.”
In a statement at the sentencing hearing Tuesday, Silver said, “Without question, I let down my constituents, I let down my family, let down my colleagues, and I’m truly, truly sorry for that.”
In a Twitter post shortly after Silver’s sentencing, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said, “Today’s stiff sentence is a just and fitting end to Sheldon Silver’s long career of corruption.”
One of Silver’s corrupt schemes involved Dr. Robert Taub, a friend of Silver and also an Orthodox Jew, who agreed to refer all his patients suffering from mesothelioma, a type of cancer commonly associated with asbestos exposure, to Silver’s law firm. The deal netted Silver over $3 million in referral fees and injury claims. In return, he gave Taub $500,000 in taxpayer funds for research projects.
The second largest scheme involved directing two major development firms into using the law firm Goldberg and Iryami, which gave Silver $700,000 in referral fees.
Prominent scholars of Jewish demography dismissed the findings of a newly published genetic study suggesting that today’s Ashkenazi Jews originate from converts to Judaism in what today is Turkey.
Titled “Localizing Ashkenazic Jews to primeval villages in the ancient Iranian lands of Ashkenaz,” the study by the University of Sheffield geneticist Eran Elhaik and three other researchers appeared in March in Oxford University Press’ prestigious scientific journal Genome Biology and Evolution.
It is based on an analysis of the genomes of 367 people, mostly from the United States, who reported having Ashkenazi lineage. Using a tool called geographic population structure, the researchers compared their genomes to those of non-Jews from German lands, south Russia and the Middle East. A match was found between the Jewish group’s genetic information and that of populations in northeastern Turkey.
In an interview with JTA, Sergio DellaPergola, a prominent demographer of the Jewish people from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, called the study, which was widely reported in mainstream media, “one of the big canards of the 21st century,” citing what he regarded as an exceedingly small study population and the absence of genetic analysis of Sephardic Jews, which he said would have undermined the findings.
Shaul Stampfer, a professor of Soviet and East European Jewry at the Hebrew University, in an email to JTA said of Elhaik’s research: “It is basically nonsense.”
DellaPergola said that “serious research would have factored in the glaring genetic similarity between Sephardim and Ashkenazim, which mean Polish Jews are more genetically similar to Iraqi Jews than to a non-Jewish Pole.”
He noted the “great genetic similarity” between Ashkenazim and the Jews of Rome, who came from the Land of Israel and later from the Mediterranean. “In no way the explanation that Elhaik gives of the origins of the Jews in Europe can apply to the Jews of Rome. Therefore his explanation is wrong,” DellaPergola said.
Calling Elhaik’s work “a falsification,” he added that Elhaik’s team “removed from the equation the population groups that would have refuted their findings, and then selected the results they wanted to find.”
Asked for a reaction, Elhaik wrote in an email to JTA: “Our study is the largest genomic study on Ashkenazic Jews to date and the first of its kind on Yiddish speakers using an unbiased tool that returns the geographical coordinates where target DNA has originated.”
He added that “studying the DNA of non-Ashkenazic Jews would not change the DNA of Ashkenazic Jews nor the predicted origin of their DNA (i.e., ‘ancient Ashkenaz’ in northeastern Turkey). The proximity of “ancient Ashkenaz” to Slavic lands, rather than to Germany is further evidence to support the hypothesis of the Slavic origin of Yiddish.”
Stampfer has criticized Elhaik’s research before, including Elhaik’s 2012 study, also published in Genome Biology and Evolution, titled “The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and the Khazarian Hypotheses.”
In that study Elhaik supports a disputed theory that centers on the presumed mass conversion to Judaism of the Khazars — an extinct multiethnic kingdom that included Iranians, Turks, Slavs and Circassians — in the eighth century. Largely unsupported by genetic studies, it is popular in anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist literature because it “is seen to dispel the notion of Jewish peoplehood, presenting it as a hoax,” DellaPergola said.
The story is an all-too-familiar horror tale: An adult in a position of power – in this case a Chasidic school principal – is accused of sexually abusing a child in his care.
But one thing makes this episode very different: The encounter was captured on a hidden camera and posted online this week for all to see.
Difficult to watch, the 11-minute clip offers a rare glimpse of what an incident of this sort actually looks like rather than as it may be refracted through memory days, weeks or years later in court, in the media or in the privacy of a therapy session.
The video, which is now being probed by police, was first widely circulated Saturday night on the messaging service WhatsApp and later posted on Facebook in an abridged form before being removed by administrators. It shows an older, bearded Hasidic man taking his seat in a small office and then pulling a young boy with peyos sidecurls between his legs.
Over the course of several minutes, the bespectacled man wearing a black hat caresses the boy, jerks him back and forth, and appears to kiss him repeatedly and rub against him. At one point the boy tries to escape the man’s clutches but is grabbed back. Both remain fully clothed throughout the encounter. A volume of Deuteronomy, a book of Psalms and other religious tomes lie on the nearby desk.
Filmed from an overhead camera without audio, the video shows neither the man’s nor the boy’s unobstructed faces. The boy, who has a closely shaved head under his black velvet yarmulke, looks to be anywhere from 5 to 9 years old.
Activists say the man is a principal at the main yeshiva in Kiryas Joel, a Satmar village located within the Town of Monroe in New York’s Orange County. The K-12 yeshiva, United Talmudical Academy, has some 6,000 students, according to school resource websites. A message left by JTA with administrators at the school on Tuesday was not returned.
State police are investigating the incident, according to the Journal News, the local paper that first reported the incident.
Christopher Borek, the chief assistant district attorney for Orange County, said his office had received a copy of the video but declined to say whether or not the incident is under investigation.
“I can tell you that in general our office treats all allegations of sexual abuse of children as extremely serious,” Borek told JTA, noting that a designated unit handles such allegations. “We never comment on investigations even to confirm if the investigation is ongoing or not unless or until charges are filed.”
The encounter at the Kiryas Joel yeshiva allegedly took place before last Yom Kippur and was filmed by someone who planted the hidden camera because he believed kids at the yeshiva were being subjected to inappropriate behavior.
Boorey Deutsch, an activist against sexual abuse in the haredi Orthodox community who shared the video on Facebook, said the person who made the video – whom Deutsch declined to identify — decided to go public with it because local authorities in Kiryas Joel who were shown the recording declined to take any action.
After posting a 36-second clip from the video, which got some 27,000 views before being removed by Facebook, Deutsch was inundated with comments by supporters and those who questioned whether the video indeed shows any sexual abuse. Skeptics said it could be an innocent encounter between an administrator showing affection for a student who required either special attention or discipline.
Deutsch vehemently disagrees.
The video below is disturbing.
“Some people said: ‘That’s how he showed love and dedication to the children for many years.’ But you do not show dedication and love to a child by kissing him in the face and pulling him into your body. This is inappropriate,” Deutsch told JTA. “There are still thousands of kids under his hands. He can do it again because nobody is taking action — again. It’s our job to stand up. If nobody else will stand up, I will stand up. I will make it happen.”
Deutsch, who grew up in the Satmar neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is a well-known figure in the Chasidic community. His wife was the person who, beginning at age 12, was sexually abused for three years by Nechemya Weberman, an unlicensed Satmar therapist. Weberman was convicted in 2012 on 59 counts of sexual abuse, including oral sex, and sentenced to 103 years in prison. Throughout the trial and after the verdict, Weberman’s supporters decried Deutsch’s wife as a “slut” and made her and Deutsch the targets of vitriolic attacks.
Deutsch said many haredi Orthodox boys who are subjected to encounters like the one portrayed in the video only realize their inappropriateness years later, if at all.
“Some people are still in the box and they don’t want to say it’s sexual,” he said.
Nuchem Rosenberg, an outspoken Chasidic advocate against sexual abuse who operates a hotline for the Chasidic community, says he has fielded 20-30 phone calls in the last few days from women in Kiryas Joel worried about their children attending the yeshiva where the incident allegedly took place.
“When they saw this video, they are totally under shock,” said Weberman, who in 2012 was attacked with bleach by a Chasidic assailant angered by Rosenberg’s activism. “These women said, ‘Is this where we are sending our children to learn and get holy and learn the word of God?’”
Naftuli Moster, an advocate for state intervention in haredi schools to compel them to offer state-mandated, grade-appropriate English and math, also has been caught up in the firestorm over the video. He was interviewed by a local TV station about the video, and was involved beforehand in discussions about how to release it publicly.
Even for those who argue that this is not a case of sexual abuse, it’s impossible to say the school administrator’s behavior is in any way acceptable, Moster told JTA.
“There’s definitely a certain type of abuse taking place. He’s definitely doing something wrong. Maybe decades ago people used to do this in small yeshiva settings and thought it was OK,” Moster said. “But he’s pinning this kid between his legs. He’s holding him by the neck at one point. He seems to be kissing him. The kid is visibly scared.
“Whatever it is, it’s just wrong,” Moster said. “He has to go.”
Republican presidential front-runner insists Israel should keep building settlements in the West Bank because the Palestinians had fired “thousands of missiles” at Israel over the years.
In an interview with “>Trump said during as campaign rally in Terre Haute, Indiana. “A lot of my Jewish friends say, ‘You will never be able to make the deal’ because there are so many years of hatred, especially on the other side. You know, they grow up as young children hating, hating, hating Israel. I think the deal can be made. But we got to be smart, and we got to use our best people; gotta use me, but you got to use our best people. And I know the best people.”
The Republican presidential hopeful also expressed hope he would have a “very good” working relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “I don’t know him that well, but I think I’d have a very good relationship with him,” Trump told DailyMail.com. “I think that President Obama has been extremely bad to Israel. The Iran deal is a disaster for Israel.”
Trump had planned to meet with Netanyahu last year during a visit to Israel, but shortly after the meeting was reported, the prime minister’s office sent out a statement rejecting Trump’s comments about Muslims. “Prime Minister Netanyahu rejects Donald Trump’s recent remarks about Muslims,” the statement said. “The State of Israel respects all religions and strictly guarantees the rights of all its citizens. At the same time, Israel is fighting against militant Islam that targets Muslims, Christians and Jews alike and threatens the entire world.” Trump then postponed the trip.