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March 14, 2018

Disabled Bodybuilder ‘Will Figure Out a Way to Do It’

Leave a Comment / Los Angeles /

Sam Mograbi’s typical week consists of planks, swimming, crunches, pushups, contact dancing, Brazilian jiujitsu and weightlifting. He focuses on bulking up his legs and back so that he can compete in local bodybuilding competitions and become a physical trainer one day.

Sam, 26, works out constantly, even though he cannot walk or control his body movements. He has cerebral palsy, which was a result of a lack of oxygen during birth, and is in a wheelchair much of the time.

The Newport Beach resident has been training for 14 years and today is solidifying his reputation as a bodybuilder with cerebral palsy. In September 2017, a video of Sam striking poses at a competition was uploaded to Facebook and has more than 9 million views, 2,000 shares and comments from people all over the world, including many who were moved to tears and inspired by the video.

“Aside from his training appointments, he’s an animal at home,” said Linda Mograbi, Sam’s mother. “He does his own routine. He dedicates all his time to his training.”

Sam started exercising in New York, where he’s from, with a trainer who immediately recognized his motivation. Linda said that, back then, Sam was physically very different. “We had to strap him into the equipment with seat belts so he wouldn’t fall out,” she said. “His balance wasn’t there.”

Though it was difficult in the beginning, Sam didn’t give up. “His trainer would really push him,” Linda said. “He didn’t give up. His trainer was in his face and was amazed because every time he would push Sam to do more, Sam would want to keep going.”

“Aside from his training appointments, he’s an animal at home.” — Linda Mograbi

Sam, along with Linda, his father Robert (Bob) and his brothers Joseph and Matthew, moved to Newport Beach in 2009, when Sam was 17. Bob founded the company Matt’s Munchies, which makes fruit leather snacks found in local and nationwide stores such as Whole Foods, Glatt Mart, Sprouts, Erewhon and Gelson’s

For five years, Sam worked at the Matt’s Munchies factory in Santa Ana but quit in July 2017 to focus on his physical activities. To ensure he can get to and from his workouts, he has help from Dennis Gomes, who has been his personal assistant for seven years. Gomes’ brother Marvin Ramirez is his trainer. Gomes records Sam’s workouts and then sends them to a family member to post on social media.

Eventually, along with training clients of his own, Sam would like to become a model for Under Armour, which he wears, and post workout routines on YouTube, Linda said. Already, he’s invented a walker for people with disabilities that’s patented, according to Gomes. “It straps around Sam’s chest and his stomach area,” he said. “He was able to work at the factory and stand for eight hours a day on that.”

Because Sam has come so far over the past 14 years, Linda said that his goal is to be able to walk. “It’s not typical to start walking at this stage in life, but he keeps progressing.”

One thing is for sure: Sam is giving hope to everyone around him, and even millions of people around the world who he’s never even met.

“I complain about something and Sam, who has a disability, doesn’t let anything hold him back,” Gomes said. “If you tell him he can’t do it, he will figure out a way to do it. He is very inspiring.”

Disabled Bodybuilder ‘Will Figure Out a Way to Do It’ Read More »

UK Activist Goes After Anti-Semites

Leave a Comment / Los Angeles /

Anti-Semitic incidents in the United Kingdom hit a record high in 2017, according to a recent study by the Community Security Trust, a Jewish nonprofit in Britain that monitors anti-Semitism.

British entrepreneur Gideon Falter, founding chair of the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, a volunteer-led nonprofit dedicated to exposing and countering anti-Semitism, said he was not surprised by the study’s findings, because perpetrators of anti-Semitic acts in the country typically do not face punishment.

“Until now, it has been relatively easy to be an anti-Semite in Britain,” Falter told the Journal during a recent fundraising trip to Los Angeles for his organization. “Essentially, if you commit an anti-Semitic crime in Britain, getting prosecuted has felt as likely as winning the lottery.”

The Community Security Trust study found that the number of anti-Semitic attacks recorded in the U.K. rose slightly in 2017 to 1,382 cases, a 3 percent increase from 2016 and marking a record high. The study also determined that the number of violent anti-Semitic assaults rose to 145, compared to 108 in 2016, a 34 percent increase.

Trained in law, the 34-year-old Falter, who has worked in high-tech, commercial real estate and management consultancy, formed his organization four years ago to do what he said the government is not doing: punishing the perpetrators.

“We are trying to ensure that if somebody engages in anti-Semitism, the person suffers a criminal, a professional, a financial or a reputational cost.” — Gideon Falter

The seeds for Falter’s organization were sown four years ago following the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers by Hamas terrorists. Israel responded with a 10-day aerial bombardment of Hamas strongholds in Gaza, followed by a ground invasion, which ignited fresh anti-Semitic demonstrations in London, where protestors paraded through city brandishing “Hitler Was Right” signs.

Falter called the demonstrations “the ugliest anti-Semitic gatherings I had ever seen.” Anticipating a large police response to the demonstrations, Falter said, “instead, I saw it being tolerated.”

In response, Falter organized a counter-rally. “We got four-and-a-half thousand people together outside the Royal Courts of Justice,” he said.

Wanting to form something more enduring, Falter met shortly afterwards with Prime Minister Theresa May. “She was kind enough to go on live television and praise the work we are doing,” he said.

Falter recruited men and women who shared his vision of a volunteer-driven campaign against anti-Semitism staged heavily, but not solely, in courtrooms.

“I designed an organizational structure for a new campaign that would enable us — at a fraction of the usual cost of running a Jewish community organization — to forcefully bring about zero tolerance and enforcement of the law,” he said.

Three-and-a-half years later, Falter has brought together lawyers, journalists and IT consultants. They monitor anti-Semitic discourse on campuses, help explain the organization’s position to the government, and go into court to fight their cases in front of public galleries that are sometimes packed with neo-Nazis.

“We are trying to ensure that if somebody engages in anti-Semitism, the person suffers a criminal, a professional, a financial or a reputational cost,” he said.

The Campaign has employed the process of judicial review to scrutinize and reverse decisions made by the British government and authorities.

“We have called for zero-tolerance enforcement of the law against anti-Semitism,” Falter said. “That is what politicians have promised. But they have not delivered. Therefore, it is up to us.”

Falter said that a perceived passivity by the British Jewish community may be partially to blame.

“I never understood why some people get used to anti-Semitism,” he said. “As anti-Semitic crime surges, some Jews observe that nothing feels different to them, because nothing has happened to them personally.”

Falter said his determination to penalize those who hate Jews separated him from traditional Jewish warriors against anti-Semitism. “We use our own lawyers to privately prosecute,” he said. “We have taken the [government] to court when it has failed to act against anti-Semites.”

Last summer, the organization commissioned a controversial poll that determined that 30 percent of British Jews have considered emigrating because of anti-Semitic fears.

In a video blog reported by Britain’s Jewish News, Simon Johnson, chief executive of the Jewish Leadership Council, said the poll results were “nonsense” and “unrepresentative” of British Jewry. Johnson accused Falter’s group of “scaremongering.”

“It is beholden on organizations to never sensationalize anti-Semitism,” Johnson said.

Falter responded by calling on Johnson to apologize or resign his position. Johnson refused. However, the Jewish News removed the video “in the interest of communal relations.”

Falter traces his Jewish pride back to when he was 9 years old.

His parents are publishers who “produce beautiful facsimiles of ancient Hebrew manuscripts, the finest in the world,” Falter said.

In 1992, on the 500th anniversary of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, Falter’s parents were commissioned to produce a replica of the Alba bible, a 1430 manuscript, and present it to the king and queen in Spain. Falter and his brother accompanied their parents on the trip.

Standing in a huge church in Toledo, Falter said, “I looked up and saw a Star of David. I asked a guide why it was there.” The guide explained the site formerly was a synagogue that had been taken over by the Catholic church.

“The experience tore me emotionally,” Falter said. “Child that I was, I could not understand how one could be in the presence of the beautiful tradition and civilization of the Jewish people and want to annihilate it.”

Now he defends it.

UK Activist Goes After Anti-Semites Read More »

Passover Meal Prep: Leek and Beef Patties

Leave a Comment / Food /

I certainly won the Parent lottery, and I don’t think it’s an accident that I was given the ones I got. I also was exceptionally fortunate that part of my winnings came with a few stand-in mothers in the form of aunts. Although I feel the heavens showed terrible judgment when they decided not to make me a mom, I was able to channel the nurturing aspect of my personality into professional cooking. I often think that most chefs are parents in sheep’s clothing because most of us simply want to make our customers happy by feeding them well.

This year, I missed my annual early morning birthday phone call from my Aunt Dora, who died six months ago. I found myself waiting to hear her voice all day, my heart sinking a bit every hour that passed without her good wishes and blessings.

Dora’s birthday falls this week, marking the time of year that, in the past, she would have started to prepare and freeze her most iconic dish for Passover. I can’t think of a better way to honor her memory than to pass along her recipe for the most emblematic of all my childhood foods: ktzitzot prasa. Meat and leek patties are a typical food of Rosh Hashanah and Passover throughout the Jewish Sephardic world, particularly in the Balkans. Omit the meat for a vegetarian version but double the amount of potato so they hold together better.

The Bulgarian Jews, from which my father’s side of the family hails, have a vibrant tradition of foods deriving from their Spanish roots. All of my aunts prepare this dish  because it’s a must on our table for Passover. Dora taught my mother to make these and by extension taught me. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say it’s the favorite dish across all generations of our family.
These leek and beef patties aren’t difficult to make, but if each ingredient isn’t handled correctly, the whole dish will be inedible. Leeks tend to hold a lot of sand, so clean them thoroughly by slicing them lengthwise, then wash them in many changes of water. You don’t want gritty patties. Been there, done that.

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say it’s the favorite dish across all generations of our family.

You also must cook the leeks so that they are soft and don’t result in a patty that is fibrous, but not so soft that they are mushy. Done that, too. Next, grind the cooked leeks and squeeze as much water out of them as possible, so they will hold together when fried. Also, season them well. Otherwise, they’ll be bland. Dora taught me to do a test patty and adjust seasonings before cooking the rest of the batch. Then, if you’ve done all of that right, the patties must be fried in oil that is just hot enough, so they brown and don’t come out oily, but not so hot that their outsides burn before their insides cook.

Fortunately, Dora taught us all how to break up these steps so that these patties wouldn’t be too time-consuming for holidays when there were sometimes 30 or more people around her Passover table.

She would chop, clean and grind the leeks weeks in advance, straining them in the refrigerator overnight with a heavy plate on them to squeeze out liquid. The next day, she would mix them with the meat and seasonings and fry them, storing them in containers ready for the freezer.  The night before the holiday, she would transfer them to the fridge to thaw.

This Passover is the first in most of our lives without Dora, and it will be a difficult one for her family. Although I won’t be with my cousins in Israel, my parents and I will hold her in our thoughts as surely as we will squeeze lemon wedges on the
ktzitzot prasa before our first bite.

I still have some burning questions I would have liked to ask her about our culinary traditions, but it’s comforting to think that her great-grandchildren will be able to capture her essence through the soul food she so lovingly passed along.

BULGARIAN LEEK AND BEEF PATTIES
3 1/2 pounds leeks, only white and light- green parts, cut into 1-inch segments
1 medium-size potato, boiled and mashed
1/2 pound ground beef
2 eggs
2 tablespoons matzo meal (optional; if you are gluten-free, add more potato)
2 teaspoons salt or to taste
3/4 teaspoon black pepper or to taste
Vegetable oil for shallow frying (don’t use extra-virgin olive oil)
1 cup chicken stock for reheating
Lemon wedges for serving

Place clean, cut leeks in a large pot and cover with cold water, bringing to a boil over high heat. Reduce heat to simmer, cover pot and cook until leeks are soft, about 15 minutes.

Put the leeks in a strainer and press with your hands until they are dry as possible.

Transfer the leeks to a food processor and gently pulse to grind, taking care to not over grind. Combine the leeks, mashed potato, ground beef, eggs, matzo meal, salt and pepper in a bowl and mix thoroughly. Let the mixture rest, covered in the refrigerator for 30 minutes.

When ready to cook, heat 1/8 inch of neutral-tasting vegetable oil in a shallow frying pan on medium heat.  Take a golf ball-size scoop of mixture in damp hands, flattening it gently into a patty, about 3 inches in diameter. Fill the
entire pan with patties but leave space between them.

Fry until cooked through and brown on both sides. Transfer to a paper towel-lined plate. Serve immediately, refrigerate or freeze for future use.

To reheat, we use a method called “papiado” in Ladino, the Judeo-Spanish version of Yiddish. Papiado-style cooking calls for evaporating excess liquid in food in an uncovered dish in the oven. Modeling on this method, we place the patties in one layer in the pan on a burner and then pour over them a small amount of chicken stock, no more than a 1/2 cup. The patties are then cooked on medium-low heat until the liquid is absorbed, and they are a bit puffy and warmed through.

Serve hot or at room temperature with lemon wedges.

Makes about 40 small ktzitzot.

Yamit Behar Wood, an Israeli-American food and travel writer, is the executive
chef at the U.S. Embassy in Kampala, Uganda, and founder of the New York Kitchen Catering Co.

Passover Meal Prep: Leek and Beef Patties Read More »

Window Pain

Leave a Comment / Poetry /

This window frame, it holds my gaze.
I wonder, how I might see beyond this pane.
See beyond the windless wall,
see the leaves when they fall
and touch the ground, the whole cycle.
The whole of the sky is not full
through the windows of my mind, not soul.
It is not all! I cannot see beyond I,
only partial pieces of this precious life.

Do I draw the curtains? Eschew the light?
See what I might find by night?
Enter a frame, a formless gaze,
no more walls, no more maze.
For no borders exist when the veils fall,
when my eyes close shut the darkness is whole.
To see nothing might offer more space
than being trapped by this window pain.

Hannah Arin is a junior at Pitzer College pursuing a double major in religious studies and philosophy.

Window Pain Read More »

Local Star Shines in NCAA Tournament

Leave a Comment / Los Angeles /

Yeshiva University in New York hasn’t been known for its basketball program over the years, but it’s now getting attention thanks in large part to the leadership of one of its rising stars, Simcha Halpert, a Los Angeles native.

Halpert, a 6-foot-3-inch sophomore guard, played four years for Shalhevet High School. He led the Yeshiva Macabees to the school’s first appearance in the NCAA Division III basketball tournament after winning the Skyline Conference, a league of small colleges from throughout the New York metropolitan area.

In the tournament’s opening-round game on March 2 — the start time for which was adjusted so it could be finished before the start of Shabbat —the Macabees lost to York College of Pennsylvania, 81-67.

The team finished its season with a record of 18-11 — and more attention than it had received since the school, with an enrollment of about 6,000 students, joined the Skyline Conference in 1998. The New York Post and The New York Times both wrote feature stories about the team’s success, with the Post offering one of its signature headlines: “YESH’ THEY CAN.”

Halpert, named the most outstanding player of the Skyline Conference, was the team’s leading scorer for the season, averaging 20.7 points per game. He made 49 percent of his field-goal attempts overall and 43 percent of his 3-point shots.

The Maccabees were plagued by injuries early in the season — including to their only senior — forcing them to at times play games with only seven players. But Halpert kept the team afloat, said head coach Elliot Steinmetz.

“First half of the year, he really just carried us offensively,” Steinmetz told the Journal.

Halpert would constantly battle his brothers on the basketball court.

Halpert improved his game to become more of a scorer than just a shooter, but his growth into a leader made a more significant impact on the team, Steinmetz said.

“You could see throughout the year there was stuff that he was consciously working on in terms of raising his maturity level on and off the court,” Steinmetz said.

Other team members appreciated and respected Halpert’s efforts and, as a result, he became “a respected voice in the locker room even though he’s just a sophomore,” the coach said.

Halpert said he knew from a young age that he wanted to play basketball.

“I was just always very connected to it, simply loved the game,” he said. “Whenever I had issues with friends, family or school, basketball was always a place I [could] go and completely be myself.”

Halpert would constantly battle his brothers on the basketball court after school and during Shabbat. He described the games as “intense, as they always [are] with brothers.”

At Shelhevet, his shooting prowess was “the missing piece of that team,” said his former coach, Colin Jamerson.

“Just the marksman that he is, he brought that to our team,” Jamerson said. “He got better at putting the ball on the floor and creating off the bounce. As he got to be a senior, he added the spot-up shot, he added the off-the-dribble shot. Then, he was able to start getting a little stronger and also, to add to his game, finishing at the basket, so that just made him a tough player to stop.”

Halpert said that during his time at Shalhevet and now at Yeshiva, his teams have faced taunts of anti-Semitism and then silenced them.

“Once the game actually starts, the best part is seeing them change their mind about how Jews wearing yarmulkes can actually win games,” he said.

Halpert eventually hopes to play basketball in Israel. For now, though, “This is his team,” Steinmetz said.

Local Star Shines in NCAA Tournament Read More »

Daughter Documents the Inner Arthur Miller

Leave a Comment / Entertainment /

Writer-director Rebecca Miller probes the creative mind of her father, the man behind such iconic plays as “All My Sons,” “The Crucible” and Pulitzer Prize-winner “Death of a Salesman” in her HBO documentary “Arthur Miller: Writer.”

Delving into his triumphs, failures and relationships — including his marriage to Marilyn Monroe — it’s a uniquely personal, intimate portrait of Miller’s life and creative process, told from an insider’s perspective.

“The reason why I wanted to make the film was I had access to his real personality, the way he was with his friends, and I felt that people didn’t know that about him,” Miller told the Journal. Over more than 20 years, she conducted many interviews with her father, who died in 2005.

Although the playwright was quite candid, “it was hard for him to talk about the parts of his life when he wasn’t that successful. You can see it in his face,” Miller said. “Also, when I asked him about fatherhood. He was not totally secure in what kind of father he was.”

For her, “The challenge was [finding] the balance between objectivity and subjectivity. On the one hand, this is somebody I knew and loved very well, but I needed to see him as a character,” she said. “I had to use the storyteller part of me to investigate, put things together and see the character as well as the person that I knew.”

“The secret of his plays is their humanity and how personal they were, even though he embedded them in other subjects.” — Rebecca Miller

It was important to her “for his humor to come across, his humanity and playfulness as well as the serious aspects,” she said. But her primary mission was to explore “the genesis of the plays and how they developed. Where did these great characters come from? I was interested in seeing how that cocktail of the historical and personal came together.”

As the film points out, Arthur Miller’s uncle Manny was one of the models for “Death of a Salesman’s” Willy Loman. “The Crucible,” about the Salem witch trials, was inspired by the anti-Communist witch hunt conducted by the House Un-American Activities Committee, “and also his own life and marriage and his thoughts on infidelity,” Miller said. “The secret of the plays is their humanity and how personal they were, even though he had embedded them in other [subjects].”

Later in his career, Miller wrote about Jewish subjects and characters in “The Price,” the Kristallnacht-inspired “Broken Glass,” and the Auschwitz-set teleplay “Playing for Time,” for which he won an Emmy Award.

“He felt that organized religion incited violence in people,” Miller said. “But I think he felt himself to be completely Jewish, no question. He didn’t have a relationship to ritual, but I think he had a relationship to God.”

Born in New York to Polish-Jewish parents who “did their best to assimilate, he was an American first, and then a Jew. When he first started writing, he wanted to be part of a larger conversation,” Miller said, explaining why characters like “Salesman’s” Loman family are not written as Jewish. “It wasn’t a question of denying. He wanted to speak to all of the country.”

Raised neither Jewish nor in the Christian faith of her mother, photographer Inge Morath, Miller, searching for spiritual guidance, tried on Catholicism for size in her early teens. But she “became much closer to Judaism and identifying at least culturally as a Jew” when she wrote the book “Jacob’s Folly,” about an 18th century Jew who is reincarnated as a fly as punishment for bad deeds. “I’m very connected to the Jewish part of myself,” she said.

Although she doesn’t believe she was genetically destined to write, Miller, having started out as an artist, saw filmmaking as “the perfect union between writing and painting.” She is best known for the independent films “Maggie’s Plan” and “Personal Velocity” (and to some, as the wife of Oscar-winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis),

Miller would like those who see the documentary to “go back to Arthur Miller’s work, perhaps some of the lesser-known plays, with fresh eyes,” she said. “I hope they’ll read these plays again, with renewed insight and enthusiasm.”

“Arthur Miller: Writer” premieres March 19 on HBO.

Daughter Documents the Inner Arthur Miller Read More »

Trusting Our Flaws

Leave a Comment / Soul of Hollywood /

While watching Disney’s “A Wrinkle in Time” I felt I had been transported to the study halls of my yeshiva — and not in a good way.

Until a week ago, “A Wrinkle in Time” was an award-winning fantasy novel beloved by children, teens and adults for more than half a century. But now, it’s a big-budget flop that tantalizes and teases but ultimately fails to move or inspire.

The movie generally sticks to the novel’s storyline about Meg, a brilliant but troubled young girl whose scientist father goes missing. With the help of omniscient ancient witches, played by Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling and Oprah Winfrey, Meg learns how to “tesser” — find the wrinkles in the universe to travel through space and find her father. The witches tell Meg that her father discovered “tessering” and had been on a space journey when he was trapped by the all-encompassing dark force of evil called The IT. They accompany Meg on her journey to defeat The IT’s darkness with the light of love.

The broad strokes of the story are the same in the book and the film. However, the film does not practice what it preaches. It is afraid to embrace itself.

The lesson of ‘A Wrinkle in Time’ is that we are most powerful when we accept that our flaws are what make us unique.

Madeleine L’Engle wrote “A Wrinkle in Time” in the same spirit C.S. Lewis wrote “The Chronicles of Narnia” series: A fable with modern, liberal Christian values. In the novel, Christianity is part of the story. In the movie, it does not exist.

The novel often explains the supernatural with fantasy physics, giving it a very academic and science-y feel. The witches are considered angels of light and are quirkier in the book than in the movie. Their conversations are more thought-provoking and frequently riff on philosophy and religion in ways that challenge the readers.

Meg is darker and stranger in the book than in the movie and her father is more flawed and less forgivable in the book.

I understand that Disney stripped the movie of its strong, Christian overtones and made its difficult themes more palatable for fear of alienating audiences. Instead, it decided to tell the story with a “universalist” message.

This form of insular thinking also plays out in our religion. The Orthodox Jewish community also is afraid of the outside world. Unnecessary interactions with outsiders often are discouraged, for fear a yeshiva student might bolt if they see too much of the outside world.

The lesson of “A Wrinkle in Time” is that we are most powerful when we accept that our flaws are what make us unique. Erasing our flaws is not the goal. Struggling with our flaws and using our personalities to make a difference in the world is the goal.

“A Wrinkle in Time” succumbed to The IT of strict conformity and groupthink. It is not just a beautiful story being held back by its flaws. The challenging non-universalist “flaws” make it special. They replaced its imperfections with perfect costumes and impeccable set design because they thought we couldn’t handle it. That is why it flopped.

Religion and films like “A Wrinkle in Time” should embrace their limitations and trust their audiences. We can handle it.

Eli Fink is a rabbi, writer and managing supervisor at the Jewish Journal.

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Deadline Is Near — Surprise Me!

Leave a Comment / Israel, Rosner's Domain /

One of the common myths about Israel’s last election (2015) is that the polls were way off. The people were expecting a win for Labor’s Yitzhak Herzog and ended up having Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister. Indeed, the 30-seat-win for Likud was a surprise, as on average the surveys before the election predicted a 22-seat loss for Likud. But the polls’ great error is a myth. Their error was in predicting the exact number of seats for each party. But they were successful in predicting the more important number — the number of seats for each political bloc.

A few days before the last election, I looked at these polls, which some Israelis interpreted as optimistic for the left because of Labor’s advantage. I then wrote the following sentence: “The numbers don’t really add up for Netanyahu’s competitors. For them to form a coalition would require an electoral miracle.” Herzog was riding high, but the math was against him. It still is. Not against Herzog personally, but against the bloc of which he is a part.

Voters shop around in the neighborhood, they move from Likud to the Jewish Home or from Labor to Yesh Atid. But they rarely vote for a party that would risk their political bloc. For such a thing to happen, there needs to be a formidable figure like Ariel Sharon. For such a thing to happen, there needs to be a tiebreaking crisis.

Yair Lapid (Yesh Atid), Avi Gabbay (Labor) and all other self-appointed candidates to replace Netanyahu are no Sharon. They can steal one another’s voters, but they have a hard time stealing the voters of the other bloc. That is, if you believe the polls. The latest polls predict that the current 67-member coalition will get 67 seats, 63 seats, 67 seats, 67 seats, 64 seats, 66 seats, 63 seats.

Israelis rarely vote for a party that would risk their political bloc.

True, this is not a huge advantage. But coalition building is a tricky art, in which one has to count not only the number of seats available for the likely coalition but also the number of seats available for an alternative coalition. Counting these, one realizes that all alternatives still put the Likud Party as a likely winner. It can re-form the current coalition or turn to form a coalition with some of the more centrist parties. Its rivals do not have this option. Not if the numbers resemble (they don’t need to be exact) the polls.

There is another myth, or a common cliché, that should be treated with suspicion. It’s the election-surprise myth: An election is like a road trip without a map, where you have a starting point but the end point is unknown. It is true for Americans, because all that is needed is a 2-3-point deviation in the polls and you get Donald Trump instead of Hillary Clinton. It is not true in Israel, where we build coalitions and need them to be somewhat stable to survive.

When did we have election surprises? It is quite rare. 1996 comes to mind, because of the notion that half a year after the Yitzhak Rabin assassination it was incumbent on voters to give the Labor Party its victory. But 1996, when Netanyahu first became prime minister, was an exception. It was the first of only three rounds of elections in which the prime minister was elected directly by the voters. It was personally Netanyahu vs. Shimon Peres, and not Likud vs. Labor as we have today. When you have a two-way personal race, the too-close-to-know surprise is a constant feature. When parties are elected, and blocs counted, there are few surprises: Netanyahu was likely to win in the last three rounds, Ehud Olmert was likely to win before him, Sharon was not a surprise in 2001, nor was Ehud Barak in 1999 (the last two were elected directly).

Of course, this does not mean that surprises can never occur. But they are quite rare, and seem to be even rarer today. This explains why this week we saw a Netanyahu who wants an early election in Israel — he could win and form a coalition. This explains why this week we saw his coalition partners working hard to sabotage his plans — come election, they will be the ones having to fight harder to not lose seats to one another. On Sunday, the crisis was mild; on Monday, it was raging; on Tuesday, it was a roller coaster. On Tuesday night, it seemed almost over.

Then the newspaper was put to bed. You want to call it election surprise? These are exactly the kinds of nasty surprises we writers must bear: Having to write about a crisis when the deadline is near.

Shmuel Rosner is senior political editor. For more analysis of Israel and international politics, visit Rosner’s Domain at jewishjournal.com/rosnersdomain.

Deadline Is Near — Surprise Me! Read More »

Spending Time With a Watchmaker

Leave a Comment / Israel /

Boris Sankov holds court behind a heavily armed steel door, tucked away in a corner of the L.A. Mayer Museum of Islamic Arts in Jerusalem, where he is responsible for repairing and maintaining the museum’s vast collection of watches.

Sankov, 77, his silver-gray hair pulled back in a tight ponytail, is delighted to show off his workshop, filled with dozens of lathes and small mechanical devices. He speaks deliberately, in heavily-accented Hebrew, with Russian words thrown in.

“Did you ever see a young watchmaker?” he asks proudly, not waiting for an answer. “No one does this kind of work anymore. It’s too demanding, and you really can’t make any money. But these watches here are special.”

In addition to its collection of Islamic art, the museum is also home to one of the world’s most spectacular collections of rare watches, clocks and music boxes, most from the 18th and 19th centuries. The collection includes 55 timepieces that were made by the famous Parisian watchmaker Abraham-Louis Breguet (1747-1823).

The value of the collection is hundreds of millions of dollars. About half of the watches are on display next door, in a temperature-regulated, darkened hall,  protected by state-of-the-art security systems.

“Did you ever see a young watchmaker? No one does this kind of work anymore.” — Boris Sankov

“I am the only one who is allowed to handle and wind the watches,” Sankov says. That includes the Marie Antoinette watch, valued at about $30 million.

The collection, which once belonged to David Lionel Salomons (1851-1925), the first Jewish Lord Mayor of London, was stolen in 1983 by Na’aman Diller, a notorious Israeli international antiquities thief. The collection was discovered 25 years later and nine of the 106 watches were returned. Some of the pieces were rusted or their mechanisms had been warped by humidity. Worse, Diller had dismantled most of the watches and stored their intricate, precious parts in medicine bottles, shoe boxes and other unlikely places and then scattered them across the world.

“That’s when the museum called on me,” Sankov says. “They had heard of my reputation.

“OK, I’m a schvitzer, a showoff. I know that. Look at what I have done here. These watches were made by hand hundreds of years ago, and the tools to fix them and the parts we need don’t exist anymore. So I make my own lathes, my own springs. I invent machines.”

Sankov grew up in the Soviet Union. His grandfather had been a watchmaker, his father a jeweler and his mother a doctor. “Ach, we were once a big family — my mother had eight brothers and sisters. But the war and the Nazis took them all.”

He and his immediate family survived by going into hiding. After the war, the family settled in Ukraine. His mother had been Jewish, but Sankov was not raised as a Jew and did not even know he was Jewish. He had heard anti-Semitic comments but didn’t know they were about him until one day he overheard people talking about him.

In 1972, he left for Israel. “I hated the goyim and they hated me, so it was time to go.”

In Israel, he became a gym teacher and fixed watches on the side. But it became difficult to find parts for the older watches. And, he says, few people care.

“I once fixed a clock owned by Haim Nahman Bialik [a famous Hebrew language poet]. It plays “Hatikvah” every hour. Who cares about watches and clocks anymore?” he continues. “Now, everything is automatic. It’s annoying, but, nu, what can you do? The world moves on. Actually,” he smiles, “I don’t wear a watch anymore, either. I just look at my smartphone.”

Eetta Prince-Gibson is editor-in-chief of the Israeli-based Jerusalem Report.

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