June 22, 2019

MEVO MODIIN, Israel (JTA) — “It’s an apocalypse,” Zelda Burkey, 63, blurted out in a piercing voice as we walked through the charred remains of the once beautiful Moshav Mevo Modiin. “It’s total desolation.”

Late last month, Israel was on high alert following a national outbreak of wildfires caused by excessively hot and dry weather. More than 1,000 fires would blaze throughout the country, but none with the fury that razed this cooperative village 30 minutes southwest of Tel Aviv.

Popularly known as the Carlebach Moshav, Mevo Modiin was founded more than 40 years ago by the late American rabbi and songwriter Shlomo Carlebach and quickly because known as a haven for Orthodox musicians, artists and religious free spirits.

Burkey, an English teacher originally from Brooklyn, has been here, living in the same house, almost since the beginning.

That house used to be a haven for soldiers without family in Israel, gap-year students and those going through hard times. Today the house is a shell. Returning to her home for the first time since the blaze in the company of a Jewish Telegraphic Agency reporter, Burkey worked hard to maintain her composure, sifting through what remained of her possessions.

A thick layer of ash, melted glass and metal fragments coated the floor of Burkey’s house as she picked her way through the wreckage, exclaiming when she came across the remains of particularly important or sentimental items.

“I had one of the most beautiful gardens,” she said. “I have pictures of it I can show you. [Here were] my flowers, this is my plastic table, my pool, my lemon tree, there was a gorgeous round wood table there.”

Israel’s Fire and Rescue Service initially blamed the blaze in Mevo Modiin on faulty electric wires, but has since suspected arson. The fire destroyed at least 40 of the community’s 50 homes. Also scorched were nearly 2,000 acres of national park and public land.

Moshav members have vowed to rebuild. The Jewish Agency for Israel and Jewish Federations of North America said they will offer immediate emergency assistance to the 60 families in Mevo Modiin and another community, Kibbutz Harel, whose homes were destroyed. The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews said it will provide up to $5,000 in assistance for each family.

But even if the community rises from the ashes, Burkey will always know what has been lost.

Wearing a simple blue dress and sandals, her face smudged with soot, she bent over and picked up an almost unrecognizable item.

“This is my wedding china and this is my parents’ wedding china [and] this was my great-grandfather and grandmothers’ silver that they brought from Europe to America,” Burkey said. “I had pictures, a hundred years old, that hung on this wall but you know what, at least the people survived.”

The fire happened on the same day as the minor Jewish festival of Lag b’Omer, and revelers were warned not to light the bonfires that usually mark the day. Burkey said her children were at home.

“My daughter called me and said she saw smoke,” she recalled, “and I went up to the roof as I usually do when there is a fire.”

After informing the fire department, Burkey returned to the roof. Someone on the street screamed for everyone to evacuate the moshav. She repeated the call and then came down. The fire had not yet reached the first houses but was approaching fast. Residents had been instructed to make their way to the front gate.

“We figured the firemen were going to come in, like they’ve always done before, to fight the fire, that [firefighting] planes would come. [So] my thought wasn’t to take the Torah or any important papers, my thought was to take the living things in the house,” she told JTA.

Stuffing her grandkids and dog in the car, Burkey rushed to the front gate, where they were instructed to make their way to a local, air-conditioned mall. However, Burkey was unable to enter with her pet and decided to climb a nearby hill to watch the fire.

“I photographed the whole thing and watched my house burn. Once I saw the roof go …,” she trailed off.

Burkey, who is an amateur photographer, has posted daily updates to social media detailing her neighbors’ displacement. For a reporter, she points out what once was.

”Here there were years and years and years of photo albums,” Burkey said, entering a room in her former house whose floor was covered by a thick layer of paper charred beyond recognition. “I came to see if something from my albums survived, but this is the first time I’m here and there’s just nothing.”

Over the years, a flood of young people stayed at the house, which served as a sort of unofficial home for the indigent and troubled, said Barak Schechter, 40, who was taken in by Burkey when he was 17 and “totally lost in life.” Today he is a tour operator and community activist in Beit Shemesh.

“Thousands of people passed through,” Schechter recalled. “It was unbelievable.”

For her part, rather than feel sorry for herself, Burkey saved much of her sorrow for others, lamenting that a house guest who had been staying in one of her extra bedrooms following a divorce had lost all of his possessions.

She largely kept her calm until, on the second floor of the burnt-out shell of her house, she came across markings on the wall showing the heights of her children at various ages, topped by a line with the name of her late husband. Her voice starting to crack, she hugged the wall.

“I can feel his height and all my kids,” she said in a low voice.

Leaving her house, she ran into several other residents who had arrived to pick through the wreckage of the now-abandoned town, greeting them warmly and smiling.

“Everyone is alive and everyone is unscathed,” she said before getting into her car to go to her temporary digs at Kibbutz Chofetz Chaim. Even though she does not have home insurance, she still expects to return and rebuild.

“I lost memories, I lost my home. But you know what, when I look around and I see no one was killed [and] no one was hurt, I remember the Carmel fire, with the people burning in a bus [and] all I can say is thank God we will go out and we will rebuild it again,” she said.

In 2010, 38 passengers died when a fire in the northern Carmel Forest engulfed the bus in which they were traveling.

“We are a people who will come out of the fire stronger than we went into it,” Burkey said. “We’re coming back. We’re gonna rebuild, we’re going to make it better and stronger. This is our home.”

The British government declared a top-performing Jewish school to be “inadequate” because it teaches girls and boys separately.

King David High School in the Manchester area was downgraded this year by Ofsted, the British government’s regulatory authority for education, the Manchester Evening News reported last week.

It had been rated by Ofsted as “outstanding” in keeping with its being one of the top-rated and best-performing high schools in the country but was found to be practicing “unlawful segregation” of pupils “on the grounds of faith and belief and sex.”

The school of 800 pupils may be shut down if it continues to be found inadequate in subsequent inspections.

In a letter sent to parents, the school’s governors said its lawyers dispute the findings and believe Ofsted “is wrong on the law.” A legal challenge to the inspection results could now follow, the Evening News reported.

The school has two separate streams, Yavneh Girls and Yavneh Boys, which offer Modern Orthodox Jewish education at secondary school level.

Many Orthodox schools insist on total gender separation in education.

Ofsted said in its report: “This is unlawful segregation on the grounds of faith and belief, and sex. Pupils affected by this segregation suffer detriment.”

King David High School is a public school. Belgium, too, has Orthodox public schools. Gender segregation and the refusal of some teachers to teach sexual education lessons and evolution have led to repeated conflict with authorities there.

A Hamburg rabbi and a Jewish leader were spit on and accosted during an anti-Semitic incident on the street.

Shlomo Bistritzky, the regional chief rabbi in Hamburg, and local Jewish community member Eliezer Noe were leaving a meeting with Mayor Peter Tschentscher at Hamburg City Hall on Thursday afternoon when a passer-by threatened and spat on them, the German media reported.

A 45-year-old man of Moroccan background was arrested following a struggle with police.

Bistritzky told the Hamburg Abendblatt newspaper that the man first said “Shalom” to them.

“Then he said something that sounded threatening. We faced him and asked him what he had said,” Bistritzky continued. “He then reached under his shirt and pulled out something … and began to threaten us verbally.”

The object reportedly turned out to be a lighter; the man held out the open flame while spewing insults and spitting at the men. He reportedly spoke both Arabic and German.

Bistritzky took a cellphone photo of the man and ran back to City Hall, where police were standing. The officers attempted to speak with the man, who then tried to flee, while spitting on Bistritzky and Noe again.

Police eventually subdued and arrested the man, placing a “spit protection hood” on him.

Bistritzky told the Abendblatt that he “never thought something like this could happen in Hamburg, let alone in this spot. We took it as a bad sign, too, that the attacker was released after two hours.”

The state police have taken over the investigation.

Bistritzky is a Chabad-Lubavitch emissary in Hamburg.

In January 2018, Central Synagogue in New York City placed a one-year moratorium on using the music of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach. On Friday, his daughter will perform there.

The moratorium, announced in a sermon by Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, was part of the Jewish communal reckoning with the #MeToo movement. Accusations of sexual abuseagainst Carlebach, a prolific Jewish religious composer and spiritual leader were first published in Lilith magazine in 1998, four years after his death.

Now, nearly a year and a half after the moratorium, Neshama Carlebach will sing from the synagogue’s podium. She has carried on her father’s legacy, and is also a performer in her own right who sings her own songs as well as her father’s.

On Friday, she will perform an original composition included on her latest album, “Believe.” She also said the synagogue will sing one of her father’s songs because the moratorium on his music has ended.

Central Synagogue did not respond to a request for comment.

“I’m very grateful to Angela on a lot of levels,” Carlebach told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Friday. “I really believe she was doing what she felt was right in terms of hearing women and making a difference, trying to make a statement of solidarity and really comfort.”

In a Times of Israel essay last year, Carlebach acknowledged that her father had hurt some women. But she also defended him as a kind and caring spiritual leader who advanced women’s rights.