Jewish Standard, January 6, 2013

CONSIDERING RECONCILIATION page 6
RESTORING SEPHARDI STORIES page 8

REMEMBERING WITH KNISHES page 10
REVIVING LEVYS JEWISH ROOTS page 37
JANUARY 6, 2017
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Page 3
The luck
of the Yiddish
On a recent Chanukah visit to Monsey, N.Y., we
discovered Gelt.
Not the chocolate coins, but rather the Yiddishlanguage childrens game, which is popular in the
areas chasidic communities.
The game takes players through a month;
it has 30 spaces, one for every day, divided
into rows for weeks and columns for
days. Players land on spaces and follow
instructions on difference spaces
they can draw post and mitzvah
cards (modeled on Monopolys
chance and community
chest,) receive gelt, or follow
other directions written
on the board in Yiddish
that exceeds our narrow
vocabulary.
But wait. Is that a greenclad leprechaun on the
cover of the game?
Why yes it is.
But look closely. On the
first square of the game
board itself, the leprechaun
boasts a respectable, if
decidedly un-Irish, set of peyos.
Gevalt!
LARRY YUDELSON
About the cover: Artist Irmari Nacht took a physically appealing copy of Charles
Dickens Oliver Twist a book that she discovered to be appallingly anti-Semitic
distressed, distended, and defanged it.
Candlelighting: Friday, January 6, 4:22 p.m.

Shabbat ends: Saturday, January 7, 5:30 p.m.
For convenient home delivery,

call 201-837-8818 or bit.ly/jsubscribe
Fancy a used jet?

Is first class not classy enough for
you? Have you been looking for your
own private jet? Do you prefer historical significance to that new-plane
smell?
Then the Israel Air Force has a deal
for you.
The IAF is seeking to unload 40
F-16A/B fighter planes. Made in the
U.S.A. and first delivered in 1980,
this is the plane Israel used to bomb
the Iraqi Osirak nuclear plant in 1981.
They originally had been intended to
be sold to Iran, but Israel got them
instead, after Iran broke off ties with
the United States in 1979.
In recent years, the model

dubbed the Netz, or Hawk was
retired from active service. Its now
used instead for training.
This comes as Israel has added the
first next-generation F-35 stealth
fighters to its fleet.
Haaretz, which reported on the
sale, did not indicate the price sought
for the planes. No doubt that when it
comes to flying in and out of Teterboro, a Piper would be cheaper. But
it would be priceless as an exhibit for
the North Jersey Museum of Nuclear
Non-Proliferation.
LARRY YUDELSON
Any takers?
CONTENTS
NOSHES ...............................................................4
BRIEFLY LOCAL ..............................................14
COVER STORY ................................................ 22
OPINION ........................................................... 26
DVAR TORAH........................................... 35
CROSSWORD PUZZLE ................................ 36
ARTS & CULTURE .......................................... 37
CALENDAR ...................................................... 38
OBITUARIES .....................................................41
CLASSIFIEDS .................................................. 42
GALLERY ..........................................................44
REAL ESTATE.................................................. 45
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written permission from the publisher. 2017
JEWISH STANDARD JANUARY 6, 2017 3
Noshes
Code-breakers we have plenty of!

In 1947, Walter Eytan, a codebreaker/diplomat who worked to help
establish Israel, rejected an offer of help from Rolf Noskwith, a British-Jewish
codebreaker who worked with Alan Turning in Bletchley Park during WWII.
(The spurned-but-otherwise-very-successful Noskwith died this week at 97.)
GOLDEN GLOBE TIME:
Heres a rundown
of best nominees
The Golden Globe
awards ceremony is
on NBC on Sunday,
January 8, at 8 p.m.
Jimmy Fallon will host.
Unlike the Oscars, the
Globes have separate
acting awards for best
actor/actress in a drama
and best actor/actress in
a musical or comedy.
However, the best
supporting actor/actress
award is given to only
one actor and actress,
regardless of type of film.
Here are the Jewish
acting nominees in the
movie categories: Best
actress, drama: NATALIE
PORTMAN, 35, Jackie;
best actor, drama:
ANDREW GARFIELD, 33,
Hacksaw Ridge; best
actress, musical or comedy: HAILEE STEINFELD,
20, The Edge of Seventeen; best actor, musical or comedy: JONAH
HILL, 33, War Dogs;
supporting actor (comedy or drama): SIMON
HELBERG, 36, Florence
Foster Jenkins.
Note: As I said in a recent column, best actress
(drama) nominee Isabelle
Hupert (Elle) had a Jewish father, but was raised
in her mothers Catholic
faith. Also, Aaron TaylorJohnson, nominated for
supporting actor, film
(Nocturnal Animals),
once called himself Jewish. But details are few,
and Ill just call myself
unsure about him until I
learn more.
Here are the Jewish
actor nominees in the TV
categories: Best actor,

drama: LIEV SCHREIBER,
49, Ray Donovan; best
actor, musical or comedy:
JEFFREY TAMBOR, 72,
Transparent.
Best actress, TV
drama: WINONA RYDER,
45, Stranger Things
and EVAN RACHEL
WOOD, 29, Westworld;
best actress, musical or comedy series:
TRACEE ELLIS ROSS,
44, Blackish; and
RACHEL BLOOM, 29,
My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend;
and SARAH JESSICA
PARKER, 51, Divorce.
Note: Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, Mandy Moore, and
Lily Collins also are nominated for their movie
or TV acting. All three
had one Jewish grandfather. Louis-Dreyfuss and
Moore have made it clear
that they dont identify
as Jewish. Collins has not
spoken about religious
identification.
Other categories:
KENNETH LONERGAN,
54, the director and writer
of Manchester-By-theSea, is the sole Jewish
nominee in the film directing and screenwriting
categories; original film
score: JUSTIN HURWITZ,
31, for La La Land and
HANS ZIMMER, 57, for
Hidden Figures; best
original film song: City
of Gold (from La La
Land) Hurwitz and BENJ
PASEK, 31.
Best-of awards, like
best drama film, are
given to a film or TV
shows principal pro-
Evan Rachel Wood
Tracee Ellis Ross
Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher
A heartfelt note
on Carrie and Debbie
Kenneth Lonergan
Hans Zimmer
ducers. Often these are

people little known to
the public. As with other
award shows, I prefer to
list those best of that
have a Jewish director, a
Jewish screenwriter; or,
in the case of TV shows,
a Jewish creator.
Best drama film:
Manchester-By-the-Sea,
directed and written
by Kenneth Lonergan;
best musical or comedy
film: Florence Foster
Jenkins, directed by
STEPHEN FREARS, 75.
Best TV series, drama:
The Crown, created
and written by PETER
MORGAN, 53; and
Game of Thrones, created by DAVID BENIOFF,
46, and D.B. WEISS, 46
(and often written by
them); and This is Us,

created by and written
by DAN FOGELMAN, 40.
Best musical or comedy TV series: Mozart
in the Jungle, JASON
SCHWARTZMAN, 36,
and PAUL WEITZ, 51 (cocreators) and Transparent, JILL SOLOWAY,
51 (creator and main
writer); best TV movie or
mini-series: The Dresser which is based
on a play by RONALD
HARWOOD, 82; and
The Night Manager,
directed by SUSANNE
BIER, 56; and The
Night of, co-created by
RICHARD PRICE, 67; and
The People v. O.J. Simpson, is based on a book
by JEFFREY TOOBIN,
58. Toobin helped write
Want to read more noshes? Visit facebook.com/jewishstandard
benzelbusch.com
As I write this, it is just a couple of days after the sudden deaths of CARRIE FISHER and her mother, Debbie
Reynolds. Ill have more to say in my next column, but
heres two things that struck me right away. A TV commentator whose name I didnt catch made me smile
when he said: It would have been great to hear Carries
commentary on this event.
Hes right, of course: The witty and insightful Carrie
would have said something memorable about the backto-back passing of two Hollywood icons.
Next, I remembered that Reynolds had a recurring role
as Graces Jewish mother on Will and Grace. In one
episode, the script had Reynolds using several Hebrew
and/or Yiddish words. I distinctly remember that she
pronounced them perfectly and I thought, then, Well,
two Jewish ex-husbands and a lifetime in Hollywood
certainly shows. Most Jewish actors couldnt pronounce
these words as well.
N.B.
the series, too.

Note: As in all my
columns, I only identify
as Jewish those people
who have at least one
Jewish parent and dont
identify with a faith other
than Judaism (if theyre

secular thats okay).
Converts to Judaism, of
course, I consider Jewish
(whether or not they had
a Jewish parent).
N.B.
California-based Nate Bloom can be reached at

Middleoftheroad1@aol.com
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Local
Do we have to forgive?
Franklin Lakes shul panel to look at How Are We To Relate To Our Enemies?
There is also a great deal of potential
in the discussion with Reverend Busker,
Enemies. The word sounds almost melohe continued. The Jewish and Christian
dramatic to most of us. Enemies are for
responses for how we relate to our enemies can be very different, and from a cermovies, or sagas. Theyre not real, any
tain perspective, one of the major points
more than evil is.
of departure between the two perspecBut some of us have encountered real
tives is in discussing questions like what
enemies, been face to face with real evil.
is forgiveness? Is the goal always reconciliTwo people who have had that experience Arline Duker of Teaneck, whose
ation? Is forgiveness sometimes morally
daughter, Sara Duker, was
objectionable?
blown up on a bus in JeruI am eager to hear what
salem in 1996, and Bella
Mrs. Miller will say about
Miller, whose experiences
what crimes are beyond
d u r i n g t h e Ho l o c au s t
redemption, and how
included living in bunkers
a representative of the
and selection lines at AusChristian religious tradichwitz, and much of whose
tion will respond to that
family was wiped out by the
perspective.
Nazis will speak as part of
Rabbi Prouser plans
a panel that Rabbi Joseph
to bring in all sorts of
Prouser will moderate as
sources, from the new
part of his Moral Literacy
book, Against Empathy,
Rabbi Joseph Prouser
series on January 12. (See
by Paul Bloom, to Elie
box for more information.)
Wiesels Sunflower, to
A third panelist, the Rev. Nathan Busker,
stimulate discussion. He has been thinking
the pastor of Ponds Reformed Church
about a quote from the writer Maya Angelou A wise woman wishes to be no ones
in Oakland, will talk about the Christian understanding of how to deal with
enemy. A wise woman refuses to be anyones victim. Ms. Angelou was not Jewish,
enemies.
but this is a very Jewish response, Rabbi
Although he had been planning the
Prouser said. Its one that the Jewish companel for some time, its unfortunately
munity can relate to.
timely right now, Rabbi
And then theres another
Prouser, who heads Temple Emanuel of North Jerquote, a little prayer that
sey in Franklin Lakes, said.
is anonymous but often
Thats because of the vitattributed to Irish folk wisriol and the extent of the
dom, that he plans to add
hateful rhetoric we heard
to the evening. May those
during this election cycle.
who love us love us. Those
Still, he said, it is not
who dont love us, may
intended as anything speGod turn their hearts. And
cifically political.
if God doesnt turn their
The panel will consider
hearts, may he turn their
how we relate to our eneankles. So well know them
Rev. Nathan Busker
mies. Arline Duker and
by their limping.
Bella Miller represent two
Because I grew up in
very sensitive areas of Jewish identity and
the Jewish tradition, Ive always had the
Jewish concern, in how we relate to those
notion that forgiveness is someone taking
who are our worst detractors and eneresponsibility for what they have done,
mies, Rabbi Prouser said. From a hisand requesting that you forgive them, Ms.
toric Jewish perspective, they will be quite
Duker, a psychotherapist in private practice who also teaches pastoral counseling
an effective tag team.
JOANNE PALMER
Who: Rabbi Joseph Prouser of Temple Emanuel of North Jersey

What: Moderates How are we to relate to our enemies? a panel discussion thats
part of the synagogues Moral Literacy series.
When: On Thursday, January 12, at 7:30 p.m.
Where: At the synagogue, 558 High Mountain Road in Franklin Lakes
Who else: Arline Duker, Bella Miller, and the Rev. Nathan Busker are the other panelists
For more information: Go to www.tenjfl.org or call (201) 560-0200.
at the Academy for Jewish Religion in Riverdale,

N.Y., said. In some way,
they either make amends
or express some regret
or remorse. And then the
injured party gets to think
about whether or not they
can forgive. In the Jewish
tradition, it is encouraged
that if someone makes the
attempt, we meet them
Arline Duker
partway.
In my life, the idea of
formal forgiveness hasnt been front and
center. I dont walk about holding grudges;
I like to have good relationships with people. I dont have a list of enemies I refuse
to forgive. Its not my thing.
But her situation is unusual. Both the
Eisenfeld family Sara was sitting on the
bus with her boyfriend, Matt Eisenfeld,
when it exploded, and they both died.
The two were deeply in love, and had
assumed that theyd marry and live their
lives together. When they died, their families mourned together; they have become
very close and I, at some point early in the
grappling with the murder of our children,
had to figure out how we would incorporate the fact that there were people and
groups who were sworn enemies of ours,
even though they didnt know us.
Their agenda was a terrorist agenda.
You just murder. You just kill people. You
just do whatever you need to do, for your
own ends. She does not have to go after
those people herself, Ms. Duker said. We
have armies and spies and governments to
do that for us. But I did realize that I have
needed some kind of way of dealing with
people who are my sworn enemies.
She related a conversation shed had,
years ago, not long after Saras death, with
someone who asked her if shed forgiven
the man who killed her daughter. I said,
Absolutely not, and he said You are walking around with all this anger.
I said, I absolutely am not walking
around with it. He a Palestinian man
named Hassan Salameh, who is in prison
in Israel does not take up any space in
my brain or in my heart. He is someone
I have no relationship with. Someone I
wish to have no relationship with. He is
off my radar.
I let it go. I do not want to have a relationship with him. I want to let it go. I want
to go my own way. I dont need to deal
with him.
What I really want is Sara back, and
that doesnt do it. Energy would get taken
up in revenge, but shes still gone.
Mike Kelly of Teaneck,

a reporter for the Bergen Record, wrote a book
about Sara Duker and Matt
Eisenfelds death, The Bus
on Jaffa Road. Mr. Kelly, a
very smart and sensitive
reporter, eventually got to
meet Salameh in prison.
Although he is a dispassionate reporter, he was
shocked by the man he
met. Mr. Kelly asked Salameh why he killed Sara.
She wasnt the target, Salameh told Mr.
Kelly. She was there. When Mr. Kelly
repeated Salamehs words back to him,
asking for more explanation, Salameh provided it. We dont really think about who
is being killed, Mike Kelly reported him as
saying. She was not the target. The target
was Israeli occupation. That was her bad
luck that she was on the bus.
That was her bad luck?
Mike Kelly decided that Hassan Salameh
was a psychopath, who lucked into an
environment that could make use of him.
I think that in some instances I could
Bella Miller
BRIAN MARCUS STILL HERE BOOK
see the humanity in someone else who

did something, but there is no humanity in Hassan Salameh, Ms. Duker said.
Why would I forgive him? It would feel
almost foolish. Hes in prison. I dont want
to have a relationship with someone who
is so much of a non-human being.
I look for real people in my life. I dont
have to forgive a psychopath. That makes
no sense. Forgiveness and psychopathy
have no relationship with each other.
Local
That lack of relationship between forgiveness and psychopathy is something
that Bella Miller knows well. Ms. Miller
was born in 1932, in eastern Poland; when
World War II started, she was 7 years old.
Ms. Miller was born into comfort; her
hometown, Borislaw, which now is part
of Ukraine, was known for petroleum,
she said. It supplied most of Poland.
About 30 percent of the small town was
Jewish, and my father had a beautiful,
elegant store, a clothing store, for children and ladies.
Then the war started, and the noose
around Jews began to tighten. Her father,
Egon Friedler, her mother, Serafina, and
her older brother, Edek, and young Bella,
along with other family members, were
able to find hiding places with families
who were willing to risk their lives for
them and also were paid well for it. Eventually the Jews were no longer able to find
such hiding places, and moved between
bunkers in the woods and the ghetto into
which they had been forced in the center
of town. After a series of terrifyingly close
calls, they were caught, herded into the
ghetto, and then, in its final liquidation,
shoved onto cattle cars and sent on a twoweek trip through Hungary and Austria to
get to Auschwitz. It was August, 1944.
Last April, a bus was bombed in Jerusalem; 21 people were injured, some severely.

NATI SHOHAT/FLASH90
They immediately took us off the train,

sent men and women separately, and
I never had time to say goodbye to my
father and my brother, Ms. Miller said. I
never saw them again.
They took us to a selection, and Dr.
Mengele came near me and said, How old
are you? My mother spoke fluent German,
and she said 15 in German. He looked at

me like he didnt believe it, but somehow
he let me go.
I was tall for my age. If I hadnt been, I
would have died.
Everyone else, my little cousins, went
to the gas chambers. We found later that
thats what the smoke was.
Ms. Millers mother was tattooed, but

then the Nazis realized theyd given her
the wrong number, and gave her a second
one. Ms. Miller has a tattoo too, but hers is
unusually small. I was the only one who
was tattooed then, she said, so they took
more time with it. It was less slipshod.
As the Nazis made the Jews carry rocks
from one side to the other, just to make us
work, you could hear the Russians were
getting close, Ms. Miller said. On January
27, 1945, they liberated us.
Life still was hard; there wasnt enough
food, and the anti-Semitism the mother
and daughter faced as they tried to find
somewhere to go was harsh. Eventually,
despite the very real lures of Australia, the
pair went to the United States; the boat
they took landed them in Boston. Soon,
they were sent, through the auspices of a
Jewish agency, to Omaha, Nebraska. The
Jewish community there was marvelous,
Ms. Miller said.
Ms. Miller already had learned some
English, while she was in a DP camp in
Germany. My mother used to give her
food to a woman who spoke English, to
teach me English, she said. My first
book in English was Dracula, so I learned
English from Dracula. She made friends,
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Local
Narratives from the Sephardic Atlantic

Crypto-Jews and Inquisition at center of Teaneck professors new book
LARRY YUDELSON
n a way, the new book by Dr. Ronnie

Perelis of Teaneck already has been a
major museum exhibition.
His book, Narratives from the
Sephardic Atlantic: Blood and Faith, looks
at three first-person accounts of life in the
15th and 16th centuries. It tells the stories of
the spiritual drama of descendants of Jews
who had been forcibly converted to Christianity and later persecuted by the Inquisition as those Jews came into contact with
the world-expanding discovery of the New
World and burgeoning transatlantic trade
that soon followed.
The first of the three narratives Dr. Perelis
examines is the story of Luis de Carvajal the
younger.
If the name sounds familiar to you even if
you dont specialize in 16th century Mexican
Jewish history, thats because the diary is on
display in the New York Historical Societys
exhibit, The First Jewish Americans.
The diary recently surfaced on the collectors market, decades after it was stolen from
the archives of the Inquisition in Mexico City.
Fortunately for Dr. Pereles and other historians in 1932 the diary had been transcribed.
The theft was not the diarys first brush
with crime. You might say that the diary
killed its author.
But before we get to Luis de Carvajals sad,
even tragic, and certainly painful ending, a
few words about Dr. Perelis. Although he is a
professor of Sephardic studies at Yeshiva University, he is a total Ashkenazi, albeit one
who loves Sephardic history and culture.
His entree to the world of the Sephardim
came courtesy of his great-grandparents and
grandparents, who found a haven from eastern Europe in Cuba, beginning in the 1920s.
Both of his parents were born in Cuba, but
they emigrated to Miami in 1960, shortly after
they were married and not long after Fidel
Castro came to power.
In Miami, Dr. Perelis grew up in a very
Latin Jewish environment, he said. Miami is
a very Hispanic place and for the Jewish community, a very Jewish Latino space.
He went to Israel for his college education,
studying philosophy at Bar Ilan University.
Dr. Ronnie Perelis
Next, he earned his Ph.D. from New York

Universitys Spanish department.
They were very accommodating and
encouraging of my research in a multidisciplinary way, Dr. Perelis said. It was that
research that is the core of Narratives from
the Sephardic Atlantic. In the book, though
not in the dissertation for which he first
examined the material, he focuses on what
the narratives reveal about family, both biological and spiritual. It is a focus that Dr. Perelis admits draws in part from changes in his
own life since he wrote the dissertation. He
now has a family of his own. He is married
to Dr. Tammy Jacobowitz, who teaches Judaic
studies at the SAR High School in Riverdale;
the couple has four children.
Fittingly, his interest in this material began
with a book that Ronnie found on his fathers
bookshelf: The Carvajal Family.
It was this big thick book in Spanish with
a menorah on the cover of it, he said. At
the time, he was taking a seminar in colonial Latin America literature and thought he
might use the book for a paper.
And that is how he discovered Luis de

Carvajal.
Luis was born in Spain in 1566 and was
raised as a Catholic. But when he was 13
years old, on Yom Kippur, his mother
revealed that they were Jews they
believed in the Torah and in the one true
God, and not in the Catholic faith. It had
been more than 70 years since King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella had barred the
practice of Judaism in their Christian kingdom, expelling people who would not convert. But many of the converts in fact were
crypto-Jews secretly believing in Judaism
and passing their faith on to their children.
(These secret Jews are also variously known
as conversos, anusim from the Hebrew
word for forced and the derogatory marranos, from the Spanish word for pig.)
Soon after, Luis de Carvajal and his immediate family, along with many cousins, moved
to Mexico, where his uncle had been named
governor of the New Kingdom of Leon. The
uncle, who was the first Spaniard to cross the
Rio Grande into what is now Texas, had no
children, and named Luis his heir.

He picks Luis as his right-hand man and
teaches him the ropes of being a colonial governor, Dr. Perelis said.
One problem: The governor is a devout
Catholic. Luis is a passionate crypto-Jew.
(How passionate? In his diary, Luis
reported that not long after arriving in Mexico, he read the story of Abrahams circumcision in the Bible. Struck with terror, he circumcised himself in a ravine with a pair of
blunted and worn shears.) In 1589, the Inquisition which had a strong presence in Spanish Mexico arrested Luis and his sisters and
mother. (His father already was dead.)
Being arrested by the Inquisition wasnt
fatal.
The first time around, the Inquisition let
you plead for mercy and confess which
included telling them about other people
who practiced Judaism with you, Dr. Perelis
said. Then you would be released and penanced which generally meant you lost all
your property and you worked for a year or
two in some sort of charity situation like a
hospital or an orphanage under the benevolent eye of a spiritual person.
Luis got a position as a scribe and teacher
of Latin in a special school on the outskirts
of Mexico City. While hes ostensibly being
watched by the rector, hes sneaking into
the library and copying Jewish sources out
of Latin books. He found classic medieval
polemical works which argued with rabbis
about the meaning of the Torah. The authors
would quote long passages of midrash or
Rashi or Maimonides and then critique it.
This allowed Luis to poach all this rabbinic
material for his community of crypto-Jews.
He was able to create anthologies.
He says at one point, I have come to discover the truth of the 13 Principles of Faith,
something nobody knew in these lands of
captivity.
The head of the school loves him so much
that when its time for him to be done with
penances, he gives Luis letters giving him
access to all the monasteries in Mexico to
help him collect money to pay his final fine,
Dr. Perelis said.
Some people might take their escape from
the clutches of the Inquisition as a warning
Only those who have also lost a child can understand your pain
Holding Hands support group offers a place to connect with others
along this most difcult journey.
Group meets the second Wednesday of each month.
Doors open at 7:00pm. 1485 Teaneck Road, Teaneck, NJ
For more information contact us at 201-837-9090 - www.jfcsnnj.org

Local
that they should be more
cautious.
In fact, Dr. Perelis said, most
people who did the penance
didnt talk about it afterward.
They were embarrassed. You
can see it come up in different ways. There was a debate
in Amsterdam where Jews
were free to practice their
ancestral faith over memorial prayers for family members killed by the Inquisition.
Do you remember the victims? Or do you hide from the
shame of having converted
and then being caught?
Luis de Carvajal, however,
took his escape as sign of
Divine favor, and so he began
keeping his diary.
A page from the 1595 memoir of Luis de Carvajal the
He wanted to create a
Younger, who was burned at the Inquisition stake.
record of Gods kindness and
providence in his life and the
life of all the Jews in Mexico, Dr. Perelis said.
He reads his experience and that of his family
He was going to send it to his brother, who
as a biblical drama unfolding in New Spain.
had escaped to the safety of Italy.
He describes many events in over-the-top
He wrote the diary in the third person. He
theological terms.
didnt use his legal name. He used his Jewish
When his sisters are engaged to wealthy
name, Joseph the Luminous. Theres a very
converso merchants, he describes the arrival
clear Joseph narrative thats being played out.
of the grooms with trumpets playing, and
tambourines being rung, said

Dr. Perelis.
The diary was very important for his spiritual sanity and
the formation of his own identity, which was religiously very
idiosyncratic. It was actually
read by members of his circle,
almost as a book of inspiration.
They would read it along with
other prayers that he wrote.
Six years after his first arrest,
Luis was arrested again. His diary
was used as evidence against him
and against the other people he
wrote about.
On December 8, 1596, he was
burnt at the stake, along with his
mother and five sisters.
Antonio de Montezinos lived
half a century later than Luis de
Carvajal, but his story is no less
fascinating.
He was a merchant in South
America, Dr. Perelis said. He tells the story
about his travels where he encounters the
lost tribe of Reuben. He goes to Amsterdam to
tell the Jews, all former conversos. The Christians were fascinated. The rabbi of Amsterdam wrote a book, Mikveh Israel, using this
travel story as the center.
I focus on de Montezinos story. I read

it as a travel story, someone who starts
out one way and ends up in a very different place through his journey. What does it
mean to see oneself in the other? What does
it mean to be a brother? Its a very loaded,
very powerful work.
There the issue of family is much more
a question of spiritual family. He is briefly
imprisoned by the Inquisition in Columbia.
He writes that he was saying his morning
blessings. He said, Blessed are you our God,
who has not made me you would expect
him to say, non-Jew or slave or woman.
Instead, he says, has not made me a heathen, an Indian, a black person. Because
access to Jewish books was prohibited by the
Inquisition, conversos who desired to recite
Jewish prayers often relied on oral traditions.
Inevitably, their fragile memories involved
considerable distortions of the originals.
Each time he got to the word Indian, he
became overtaken by the thought that the
Indians are Hebrews. He cant get that out of
his head until he finds the Indians he met and
finds out their true story.
Was the tribe of South American Indians
he found really the lost tribe of Reuben?
I dont think about it as a true or false
story, Dr. Perelis said. One of the things you
SEE NARRATIVES PAGE 40
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Local
Knishes, kugels, and kreplach

Jewish Home at Rockleighs staff studies the culinary basics
Kreplach tour: Noahs Ark on Cedar Lane in Teaneck.
Owner Noam Sokolow already hosts the Jewish Home
Familys occasional Sweet Memories Supper Club for people with dementia, and readily agreed to have his staff lay
a table of popular deli appetizers, sandwiches and salads
for the visitors.
Nothing out of the ordinary was prepared for the occasion. This is what we have been doing every day for the
past 28 years, Mr. Sokolow said. Many Jewish Home residents were our regular customers for years, before moving to Rockleigh.
From the moment the group walked in and saw the culinary display, the chefs started commenting on the food
and its presentation, Ms. Herman reported. And then they
tucked into the Yiddishe bounty.
We had an eight-course meal with dishes such as different kinds of latkes; pastrami, corned beef and chopped
ABIGAIL KLEIN LEICHMAN

The popular Food Network show Diners, Drive-Ins and
Dives takes viewers into the kitchens of establishments
cooking up iconic American dishes, like cheeseburgers
and barbecued ribs.
In a kosher spin on that concept dubbed Knishes,
Kugels, and Kreplach, the Jewish Home at Rockleigh Russ
Berrie Home for Jewish Living is taking its culinary staff on
a tour of the regions best purveyors of classic Ashkenazi
cuisine.
The idea is to teach the professional cooks, who are not
Jewish, how to incorporate more of the authentic tastes of
residents family culture into the menu.
The Jewish Homes executive vice president, Sunni Herman, said that the initiative was inspired by the appointment of a new executive chef, Haitian native Pierre Opont.
Before his promotion, he had been a member of the facilitys dinner staff after his day job as lead cook for Meals on
Wheels of Rockland County.
Once he got the promotion we decided to take a step
back and look at the food, Ms. Herman said. We already
have rave reviews of our cuisine and we serve classic Jewish dishes like matzah ball soup and brisket, so were not
totally revamping, but looking at how to make it the best
because we have the staff and the ability. Its also about
our chefs having the experience of seeing the fundamentals of Jewish food preparation and doing something special for them as a team.
The kosher tasting tour provides an opportunity for the
staff to experience the foods for themselves, speak with
the people who cook them, and create recipes for Jewish
Home residents based on what they sample.
Older adults are at risk for poor appetites and
decreased meal consumption, Mary Reinemann, the
Jewish Homes chief clinical dietitian, said. Our menus
are well balanced and include ethnic comfort foods to
The Jewish Homes executive chef, Pierre Opont,

prepares sweet-potato latkes during Chanukah.
encourage better eating. We are always seeking to improve

the variety and range of tastes on our menu. Many of these
foods have variations, and we want each resident to have
the opportunity to re-taste their memories, enticing them
to eat more and thrive.
And so, on the fifth day of Chanukah, five Jewish Home
chefs joined Ms. Herman; the Jewish Home Familys CEO
and president, Carol Silver Elliott, and the Jewish Homes
director of dining services, Nelson Reyes, on the Jewish
Home bus for the first stop on the Knishes, Kugels, and
From left, Chris Bullock, Edwin Abreu, Nelson Reyes, Carol Silver Elliott, Snerte Leger, Noam Sokolow, Sunni
Herman, Mauro Ortiz, and Pierre Opont at Noahs Ark in Teaneck.
The idea is to teach the

professional cooks,
who are not Jewish,
how to incorporate more
of the authentic tastes
of residents family
culture into the menu.
liver sandwiches; coleslaw; and kasha varnishkes, she
said. Our team had a whole discussion about potatoes
with the Noahs Ark staff.
Mr. Reyes said the Jewish Home chefs came away with
the feeling that their opinion matters, which encourages
them to experiment. We got some great ideas and we
are planning on implementing them in the next couple of
weeks, he said.
We are always involved in continuing education for our
staff, Ms. Elliott said. We all have more to learn and it is
important to have opportunities to expand our knowledge
base.
From the bus, the Jewish Home troupe also was shown
Cedar Lane kosher establishments Maadan and Butterflake Bakery, as well as Teaneck Road Hot Bagels names
with which theyre familiar from catered family parties at
the Jewish Home.
Next on the agenda are Chap-A-Nosh in Cedarhurst,
N.Y., and Weiss Kosher Bakery and Pomegranate Kosher
Supermarket in Brooklyn. Every couple of months
another foodie field trip will be arranged, according to
Ms. Herman.
She added that this year the Jewish Home is beefing
up its afternoon snacks with more healthful finger foods,
such as carrot sticks, hummus, and pita chips. Every new
resident receives a dietary evaluation and a tailored menu,
and a cardiologist checks in to monitor the fare, she said.
The knishes, kugels, kreplach, and other Jewish Eastern European comfort foods typically rich in calories
and fat are to be offered along with a range of nutritionally balanced foods on Shabbat and special occasions as
an acknowledgement that the dining experience is one
of the central social and pleasurable experiences for residents during the day, Ms. Herman said.
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JUST ONE WEEK AWAY

OVER 1,000 JEWS
FROM OVER 70 COMMUNITIES
WILL GATHER TO HEAR MORE THAN 30 TORAH SCHOLARS
AT ONE MAJOR EVENT
Local
REPORTERS NOTEBOOK
A lot of latkes
IN THE CITY
SESSIONS ON TORAH, HALACHA, HASHKAFA
AND ISRAEL THROUGHOUT THE DAY
PRESENTED BY THE ORTHODOX UNION
SUNDAY, JANUARY 15, 2017
from 8:45 AM to 6:15 PM
Free parking
Indoors at Citi Field

Flushing, NY
Children's Programming available
FEATURED TOPICS
Moshe and Tzipporas Relationship

and Marriage
Midrash: Fact Or Fable
Living in the Diaspora Vs. Living in Israel
Are Edited Embryos Kosher? Pre-implantation
diagnosis (PGD) in Jewish law
Women and Torah Transmission: A Case Study
from 19th Century Vilna
Family Planning in Halacha
See all topics on OU.org/city

SPEAKERS INCLUDE
Rabbi Yochanan
Zweig
Prof. Nechama
Price
Rabbi Dr.
Ari Bergmann
Ms. Raizi
Chechik
Mrs. Michal
Horowitz
Rabbi
Yosef Tzvi Rimon
Mr.
Charlie Harary
Rabbi Hershel
Schachter
COME FOR ONE - STAY FOR ALL

See all speakers on OU.org/city
Children's programming: ages 2-5 & 6-10
Pre-registration required.
Lunch available for purchase
THIS EVENT IS INDOORS

REGISTRATION COST
EVENT CO-CHAIRS
$25 pp Until Jan 12th
Mr. Stephen Savitsky & Dr. Shimmy Tennenbaum
$36 pp Walk-ins
REGISTER TODAY AT OU.ORG/CITY

Noahs Ark hosts annual

Teaneck latke competition
JOSH LIPOWSKY
t was a greasy battle of enlarged

stomachs and ancient rivalries. Family dynasties were both shattered
and upheld.
On New Years Day, the last day of Chanukah, Noahs Ark in Teaneck became the
site of a starchy battle royale. This was the
annual Teaneck latke-eating contest: The
Chanukah Thunderdome.
For 10 years, I have participated in the
annual Teaneck latke-eating contest. And
each time I had been bested by one man:
Shalom Krischer of Teaneck, who had won
at least five of those contests. Would this
year be different?
As we did our pre-contest stretches, I
vowed that it would.
In addition to being the last day of Chanukah, it also was New Years Day. It was time
to turn the page.
Eight contestants lined up, including three people from the Jewish Home
at Rockleigh. It was a range of ages and
capabilities. We were so lucky we had
our friends from the Jewish Home at Rockleigh participating, Noahs Ark co-owner,
Shelly Sokolow, said.
Krischer was, of course, the early favorite. We lined up with a plate of five latkes
and a bowl of applesauce in front of us.
I pulled to an early lead as Noahs Arks
latkes slid down easily, aided by apple
sauce and enough oil to light a single
menorah for eight weeks. The first plate of
five was soon gone.
My nemesis, Krischer, was about two
latkes behind. Like the ancient Maccabees
who were far outnumbered by the GreekAssyrian army, I felt a glimmer of hope
that perhaps I could triumph against insurmountable odds.
As my third plate of latkes arrived, I
found that they werent going down
as easily as they had in the beginning.
Krischer had caught up. We were neck
and neck. Hope began to fade as we tore
into the third plate, fueled by the greasefire of our tradition.
As Noahs Ark co-owner Noam Sokolow
called time, Krischer and I had tied at 16
latkes each. In a competition where sudden death could be literal, we took a short
break to stretch and fortify our stomachs. It
would all come down to this:
Four latkes apiece. Two bowls of apple
sauce. One minute. Easy as pie? A little
sweet would have been a nice interlude,
actually.
With a young onlooker shouting Stuff
your face! I went to work. By this point my
brain was about as fried as the potatoes in
Shalom Krischer with this years kids

champion, his daughter, Penina.
front of me. And we had been here before.

Two years ago the last time Noahs Ark
hosted the contest Krischer and I also had
tied and gone to a runoff. As he had done
many times before, he triumphed that year.
But not this time.
With a sudden burst of energy, I felt the
strength of the Maccabees flowing through
me. Or maybe that was something else.
Either way, it worked. As Sokolow counted
down, I pushed the last latke in my mouth
before collapsing on my plate, secure in
being half a latke ahead. We were like
Apollo Creed and Rocky at the end of Rocky
II: two weary and beaten-down warriors.
But in the end, I edged Krischer out and
claimed the title. Nine minutes. Nineteen
latkes. One champion.
My old nemesis, Josh Lipowsky, took the
medal away from me, Krischer said after
the contest. Watch out, Josh. Next years
coming sooner than you think.
As the Noahs Ark employees reset the
contest table for the younger division,
Krischer called out to his 15-year-old daughter, Penina: The family honor rests on your
shoulders!
No pressure? Penina, a sophomore at
Maayanot in Teaneck, had won the youth
division of the contest at least three times
already. With family watching from Israel
via Facebook, Penina went to work. In the
end, she emerged victorious. It feels like
my hunger is sated, she said afterward.
The important thing is I upheld a family
tradition.
As for the secret to her success? Im a
teenager, she said. I have a teenage complex of a bottomless pit for a stomach.
This years contest returned to Noahs
Ark after a year off. The Sokolows spoke
ebulliently about bringing the contest
back to the restaurant. We like being
part of the community, Shelly Sokolow
said. This is the place where we make
real, homemade latkes.
After the contest, I celebrated like any
champion would: I peeled, grated, and
fried up another five pounds of latkes.
After all, I had to start training to defend
my title next year.
Local
Planning to study or live abroad?

Website provides cohesive resource for would-be travelers
LOIS GOLDRICH
ome websites provide helpful information on places to visit in cities

throughout the world. Others offer
basic information for people hoping to study abroad. But none, according to
Emory University senior Sydney Hertz, give
all the answers you need when you are planning to live overseas.
The 22-year-old student who comes from
Saddle River, where her parents, David and
Sharyl Hertz, still live decided to fill that
need. Together with friend and fellow student Alexandra Warren, Ms. Hertz created
All Things Abroad (www.allthingsabroad.
com) for anyone who is looking for that more
comprehensive website.
The idea for the site arose two years ago,
when, as sophomores, Ms. Hertz who
is working toward a double major, in Jewish studies and English, and is a member of
Temple Emanuel of the Pascack Valley and
Ms. Warren made plans to study abroad.
We thought about going to Tel Aviv, but the
program had been canceled the year before
because of turbulence. So we chose London

instead, Ms. Hertz said. We started looking for a resource for all our questions about
studying, traveling, and living abroad. There
were some resources online, but we didnt
feel there was a cohesive resource to answer
all our questions. That was surprising to us,
so we decided to start All Things Abroad.
Our site offers something cohesive, Ms.
Hertz continued. Its the place to answer
any questions about studying abroad. Were
working on a place on the site where you can
post questions if the answers are not already
there. Visitors may choose simply to read the
articles on the website, grouped by both topic
and city.
For example, they may want to find out
about fitness and well-being resources in
the place theyre going, Ms. Hertz said. Many
sites include articles based on second-hand
information. But on her site, articles must
be written from experience, by people who
have just been there or are planning to go.
For example, there might be a piece on how
to have an inexpensive trip to Jerusalem. The
writers will say what they did. Its authentic.
Writers for All Things Abroad are not paid;

nor are the editorial or marketing teams.
We did pay initially, but it wasnt much, Ms.
Hertz said. And most expenses including
hiring a web designer were upfront. For
that, she said, our parents helped us out,
adding that her parents are dedicated and
very excited about the project.
Were still figuring out how to monetize
the site in some way, she said. We want to
bring in money and grow the site, but we also
want to stay true to our goal of authenticity,
not to include anything we havent actually
experienced. While writers do not receive
money, its a valuable entry to put on a
resume, she said.
Both co-CEOs care about Israel, and it
shows. One of our most utilized and popular destinations on the site is Tel Aviv, and
we believe that the articles in this portion of
the site are an incredible resource for individuals studying abroad in Israel, families
traveling to Tel Aviv and surrounding cities,
and students going on Birthright, Ms. Hertz
said. In addition, Our authors have published articles featuring other
Co-CEOs Alexandra Warren, left, and

Sydney Hertz pose in Paris.
locations of particular Jewish interest. For
instance, one article focuses on essential
sites to visit in Berlin, primarily memorials
and museums honoring the Shoah.
The site was launched in September
2015. Most of the original writers were from
Emory, but as the site drew interest, particularly through social media, other writers,
from other universities, volunteered their
services. While the writers, and most of the
people studying abroad, are mostly millennials, our goal is to reach people of all ages,
SEE TRAVELERS PAGE 34
This is the child
I have prayed for...

~ Samuel I 1:27 ~
ANNUAL BENEFIT DINNER

Sunday Evening, February 26, 2017
Marriott Glenpointe Hotel, Teaneck, NJ
HONORING
Adam & Ilana
CHILL
Esther & Moshe
Rabbi Chaim & Malca
MUSCHEL
JACHTER
Moshe & Orit
ZHARNEST
Please join us to support

our communitys school for
Jewish children with special needs.
Join us for the premiere
of our inspirational film,
JACOBS FOOTPRINTS
and for a magical moment at our dinner

with Jacob Adler and his loving, dedicated
parents, Hillel and Debby.
www.sinaidinner.org 201-833-1134 x105
PANTRY PACKERS
Briefly Local
Closter congregants
help needy in Jerusalem
Rabbi David-Seth Kirshner and 47 members of Temple Emanu-El of Closter
spent the third night of Chanukah at Pantry Packers in Jerusalem, helping to pack
1,080 bags thats 1,190 pounds of quinoa, beans, and peas to be delivered to
270 needy Israeli families. Pantry Packers is a volunteering initiative of Colel
Chabad, Israels longest running social
services organization, helping the needy
in Israel since 1788.
The Emanu-El travelers, who ranged
in age from 5 to 85, spent nearly two

weeks in Israel. Everyone pitched in to
give back during the holiday season.
It was an amazing hands-on experience that the whole family can appreciate and enjoy, said Michele Goldberg,
who is in Israel with her husband and
three children for the first time. It was
great to see different generations working together for a really good cause in a
truly meaningful and memorable experience, she said.
NCJW seeks volunteers

for childrens project
At the next general meeting of the
Bergen County section of the National
Council of Jewish Women, members and
volunteers will pack 500 child-friendly,
healthy goody bags. They are to be
donated to the Center for Food Action
for distribution. The meeting will be at
Temple Emeth, 1666 Windsor Road in
Teaneck, on January 17, at 12:30 p.m.
The CFA distributes the snack packs
to children in eight local elementary
schools. Teachers discreetly place the
packs into the students backpacks when

they are out of the classrooms. Snack
packs include juices, mac and cheese,
cereals, energy bars, and other healthy
foods. The snack packs are part of an
effort to reduce childhood hunger in
local neighborhoods.
Members and guests are welcome to
volunteer.
For information, email office@
ncjwbcs.org or call (201) 385-4847.
Torah learning at Citi Field

Torah in the City, the day-long event
presented by the Orthodox Union,
a national umbrella organization for
American Orthodox Jewry, will feature
speakers from around the world who are
major thinkers, leaders, and scholars.
The public is invited to attend any part
or all of the event, held indoors at Citi
Field in Flushing, N.Y., from 8:45 a.m. to
6:15 p.m. on Sunday, January 15.
According to Allen Fagin, executive
vice president and chief professional
officer of the Orthodox Union, This
program marks an important milestone
for the OU, as the OU begins to expand
its focus to provide learning opportunities for Orthodox Jews to increase the
meaning and inspiration for their religious observance. This is where the
best and brightest of Torah Judaism
will share their views on the future of

Orthodox Jewry through important dialogue on issues of the day. This is not
to be missed by anyone who wants to
be part of the conversation that shapes
our future.
The full-day program will feature both
male and female representatives from all
walks of Orthodox Jewish life for a meaningful conversation about halacha ( Jewish law), Tanach (the Jewish Bible), hashkafa (moral and ethical codes) and Israel.
Admittance to the Torah Day of Learning is $25. Free parking and kosher food
are available. There will be childrens
programming for ages 1 to 5 and 6 to 10.
Pre-registration is required. Register at:
ou.org/citi.
The full schedule is at www.ou.org/
convention/.
upcoming at
Kaplen
JCC on the Palisades
American Ninja Night @

High Exposure!
Drop your children off for a fun and active trip to High
Exposure! They will enjoy a complete American Ninja
type experience while rock climbing, running obstacle
courses and more! Transportation and snack included.
Registration closes Jan 11.
Grades 2-6 (Ages 8-12), Sat, Jan 14, 6-8:30 pm, $40/$45
New Year, New You!

Join now & get $100 off & a massage or
personal training session!*
Not Just a Gym, A Family Wellness Center

Try us out & get a one-week pass for your entire family.
Individual, family, youth & senior membership options
available.
For details, visit membership, call 201.408.1448 or email
join@jccotp.org and save!
* Valid on new, annual memberships; 1 massage or personal
training session per adult on membership, maximum 2;
through 1/31/17; may not be combined.
Creative Arts at the JCC

new! crochet
With Gena Rodsan

Nows the perfect time to learn to crochet, or expand
your existing crochet skills in this small, hands-on class.
Make a cozy afghan, sweater, scarf, accessories and
garments. All levels are welcome.
Visit jccotp.org to sign up or call Judy at 201-408-1457.
6 Mondays, Jan 23-Mar 6, 10:30 am-12:30 pm,
$130/$155 (no class 2/20)
Wellness
kids
adults
Saturday Night Zumba Party
Open House
JCC U-Winter Term
ages 12 +, beginners welcome
the leonard & syril rubin nursery
Join our expert team of Zumba instructors

including Cat Veca- Mejia, Lauren Greene, Hila
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and light your endorphins on fire. Dance to great
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Top professors and experts present on a variety of

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Beckmann, First Ladies, How Gratitude Can Transform
Your Life, The US Entry into WWII, and Bernini in Rome.
Sat, Jan, 7, 7:30 pm, 75-min class,

Free & Open to the Community
RSVP preferred.
Visit jccotp.org/saturdaynightzumba
Come see what were all about! Your little one

can learn, laugh, share and grow at the JCC with
our innovative and child-centered programming
that allows children to explore and understand
new concepts in a fun, dynamic way. Options for
toddlers through Kindergarten.
For info, call 201.408.1436.
Jan 13, 9:30 am
For more info, call Kathy at 201.408.1454.

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to register or for more info, visit
jccotp.org or call 201.569.7900.

Kaplen
JCC on the Palisades taub campus | 411 e clinton ave, tenafly, nJ 07670 | 201.569.7900 | jccotp.org
Jewish World
A new flashpoint
brews in Congress:
Two states or
not two states
RON KAMPEAS
WASHINGTON Theres a striking difference between competing bids in Congress that both address last months U.N.
Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements.
Its not that they differ on the United Nations the two nonbinding congressional resolutions under consideration condemn the Security Council, as well as the outgoing Obama
administration for abstaining and not exercising the U.S. veto.
Heres the difference: Missing from one of the resolutions
are the word two states. In the other resolution, the twostate outcome features prominently.
Sponsors said little on the record about the differences, but
what the simultaneous introductions signal is a battle over
whether it becomes U.S. policy to regard the two-state solution as dead or alive.
In one corner is the mainstream pro-Israel community,
combining leftists and centrists and led by the American Israel
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud President Abbas, left, shakes hands with Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu before peace talks at the State Department in Washington, D.C., on September 2, 2010.

JASON REED-POOL/GETTY IMAGES
Public Affairs Committee, seeking to preserve two states

as a viable outcome for Israel and the Palestinians.
In the other is a deeply conservative and often Orthodox minority of the American Jewish community that
includes figures who are close to President-elect Donald
Trump. They want the two-state solution declared dead
in order to pave the way for Israel to annex portions of
the West Bank it still controls.
The winner in Round 1: AIPAC.
The Republican leadership of the incoming U.S. House
of Representatives has scheduled a vote on the resolution being backed by the lobby. Reps. Ed Royce (R-Calif.),
Representative Eliot Engel attends a memorial vigil

for victims of the Paris terror attack.

EUGENE GOLOGURSKY/GETTY IMAGES
the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee,

and the committees senior Democrat, Representative
Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), are the sponsors.
The other resolution, brought out by Representative Dennis Ross (R-Fla.) the House deputy majority
whip and a member of Trumps transition team is
in limbo awaiting consideration by the Foreign Affairs
Committee.
The two-state outcome appears high in the RoyceEngel resolution, in the second paragraph: Whereas
the United States has long supported a negotiated settlement leading to a sustainable two-state solution with the
democratic, Jewish state of Israel and a demilitarized,
democratic Palestinian state living side-by-side in peace
and security.
That resolution calls on the United States to seek the
repeal or alteration of the Security Council resolution, so
that it is no longer one-sided and anti-Israel.
But dont count the other side out. Trump has nominated David Friedman, who has been a major donor
to the settlement movement, as ambassador to Israel
and named Jason Greenblatt of Teaneck as his top official dealing with international relations; Greenblatt has
said that settlements are not an impediment to peace.
The family of Trumps son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has
donated to settlements.
Additionally, the Republican Party, in a platform revision this summer, removed explicit references to two
states. The Republican fundraiser who helped engineer
that change, Jeff Ballabon, told BuzzFeed News over the
long weekend that now, within the GOP, you have to
justify the notion of a two-state solution.
That might not be true yet, but the sponsors of the
resolution competing with Royces is a whos who of the
partys anti-establishment right wing. They have scored
impressive wins in recent years, not least of which is
backing the winning candidate for president.
While the resolution disapproves of the U.N. resolution and the Obama administrations abstention, it does
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Jewish World
the outcome by 2002.
Three rounds of failed
peace talks under Clinton,
then Bush, then Obama have
dampened expectations that
the outcome is set to arrive
anytime soon.
Whether the two state is
dead crowd wins the bigger
game depends on overcoming
a number of formidable obstacles. Congressional leaders,
even in this most polarizing of
eras, still seek bipartisanship.
Whatever the tensions
between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and
President Barack Obama in
recent years, congressional
Democrats have shown they
Representative Dennis Ross, left, with Ehud Barak after a meeting at the
favor pro-Israel resolutions
Israeli Ministry of Defense in Tel Aviv on August 5, 2010.
as long as they endorse two
MATTY STERN/U.S. EMBASSY TEL AVIV VIA GETTY IMAGES MARK WILSON/GETTY IMAGES
states. And Republican leaders like Royce and Representanot refer to the two-state solution.
tive Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), the majority leader who
Two states was omitted, a Ross spokeswoman, Joni
announced Thursdays vote, will always be willing to
Shockey said, because the resolution was more narrowly
tweak language to get the overwhelming majorities that
focused. The resolution is a very narrow response to
show they are bridge builders.
the U.N.s vote, specifically condemning President
Additionally, AIPACs role in this signifies the imporObamas instruction to abstain and abandon our closest
tance that the American Jewish establishment still
ally, she said.
attaches to a two-state outcome.
Where the Royce resolution emphasizes backing
Simply calling for a demilitarized and democratic
Israel in its quest for peace, the Ross resolution stresses
Palestinian state living side by side in peace and harthe alliance, saying that Congress affirms its commitmony with Israel doesnt necessarily translate into
ment to the State of Israel as our loyal friend and strong
enduring reality, American Jewish Committee CEO
ally in the Middle East.
David Harris said. Were talking about the Middle East,
Senate versions of each of the House resolutions are
after all. But given the weak alternatives, this approach
expected to be introduced in the coming days.
still seems the most feasible, particularly if Israels JewBallabon said that the Ross resolution made more
ish and democratic character are to be preserved for
sense, as it focused directly on the U.N. Security Counfuture generations.
cil Resolution 2334.
Then theres Netanyahu, who still embraces the
Instead of focusing on the real crime of 2334 its
notion of two states, however much his party and govabandonment of Israel and its legitimization of ethnic
erning coalition have abandoned the policy.
cleansing of Jews from the Jewish homeland Royces
David Makovsky, a fellow at the Washington Institute
resolution laments the damage to the Two-State Solufor Near East Policy, said Netanyahu may encourage
tion the fetishized fantasy of a peaceful PLO state, he
the Trump administration to preserve two states as an
wrote in an email.
outcome by reviving President George W. Bushs 2004
United States administrations, both Democratic and
approach. In an April 14, 2004 letter to then-Prime MinRepublican, have embraced a two-state outcome since
ister Ariel Sharon, Bush essentially recognized settlethe early 2000s. It was the solution sought by Presiment blocs bordering the 1967 lines as likely to remain
dent Bill Clinton at Camp David in 2000, and although
in Israel, and opposed expansion of settlements beyond
George W. Bush seemed at first skeptical, he embraced
the security fence now bisecting the West Bank.
A reaffirmation of the Bush letter would help establish U.S. policy at a time when a U.S. administration will
be preoccupied with other more urgent priorities, said
Makovsky, who was a member of the State Department
team that last tried to broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace
in 2013-14. This would be convenient for Netanyahu
and Trump and would retain the viability of two states.
Why would Trump defy his closest Jewish advisers
and continue to bank on a two-state outcome? Trump
has proven unpredictable. He said several times while
campaigning that he would like to take a stab at this
most knotty of American foreign policy challenges.
And the AJCs Harris and Makovksy, in separate interviews, cited another factor in the president-elects biography: He cant resist the challenge of a deal that has so
far defeated all comers.
Representative Ed Royce participates in a House
Hes a lifelong dealmaker, Harris said of the author
Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Capitol Hill
of the best-selling The Art of the Deal. This one may
on November 4, 2015.
at some point tempt him as the ultimate challenge.
MARK WILSON/GETTY IMAGES
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Jewish World
Bennett announces plans to annex Maaleh Adumim
Jewish Home leader Naftali Bennett announced that his
party is planning to draft a bill to annex the Jerusalem suburb of Maaleh Adumim. The community is east of Jerusalem, beyond the 1967 lines.
Bennetts announcement coincided with a Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee meeting about the application of Israeli sovereignty to Maaleh Adumim.
Today, we are moving forward to Maaleh Adumim, and
then to the remaining swathes of our land, Bennett said.

Left-wing Israeli political leaders came out strongly
against the proposal. Member of Knesset Michal Rozin
(Meretz) said, You are declaring war against the Palestinians and the world. The Bennett government is carrying out
the Habayit Hayehudi ( Jewish Home) vision and destroying
the future of the country.

JNS.ORG
Netanyahu questioned
by investigators
over illicit gift allegations
Israel Police Major Crimes Unit investigators arrived at
the prime ministers residence in Jerusalem to question Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for three
hours over allegations that he received illicit benefits
from two businessmen.
Police investigators questioned Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu under caution Monday on suspicion of receiving alleged illicit benefits, an official
police statement said. We cannot release further
details at this time.
Israeli Attorney General Avichai Mendelblit also
commented on the investigation.
The review comprised several cases, reviewed
successively as a single unit, he said. This review
included numerous operations, including deposing
dozens of witnesses, some overseas, some of whom
were deposed several times, and the seizure of relevant documents.
Before he was questioned, Netanyahu said, Ive
said it once and Ill say it again: Nothing will come of
JNS.ORG
this because there is nothing to find.
Islamic guards censure

Israeli archaeologist for
saying Temple Mount
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the Jewish Federation of Northern NJ, and is organized by Young Judaea.
A pre-eminent Israeli archaeologist was censured by

Islamic guards on Jerusalems Temple Mount for using
the term Temple Mount while delivering a lecture to
a student tour group.
Dr. Gabriel Barkay, who has gained international
fame for his archaeological discoveries as part of the
Temple Mount Sifting Project, was delivering a lecture
to a multifaith group of students from UCLA on the
Temple Mount Sunday when guards from the Islamic
Waqf approached him and attempted to have him
ejected by Israeli police for repeatedly using the words
Temple Mount, according to the Times of Israel.
Israeli police told the Islamic guards, who patrol the
site for the Jordanian-run Islamic Waqf, that they had
no grounds to eject Barkay, but told the Israeli archaeologist to refrain from using the term for the rest of
the visit. Barkay proceeded to refer to the site by its
initials, TM, the Times of Israel report said.
The incident comes amid Palestinian attempts to
erase Jewish connection to Jerusalems holy sites.
In October, UNESCO passed a series of Palestinianbacked resolutions that referred to the Temple Mount
exclusively by its Muslim names Haram al-Sharif and
Al-Aqsa Mosque while ignoring any Jewish or Christian ties to the holy site.
JNS.ORG
Omer Lahat, who has cerebral palsy, recently joined

the Israel Defense Forces, becoming the latest example of the Israeli militarys prioritization of the inclusion of people with disabilities.
Oxygen was cut off from Lahats brain when he was
born two months early, leading to his development of
cerebral palsy. But physical limitations did not hold
him back from attending high school and graduating
with honors, after which point he pursued his dream
to serve in the IDF through the Special in Uniform
program a partnership between the IDF, the Israeli
Ministry of Social Services, and the Jewish National
Fund that works to integrate youths with disabilities
t
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t
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Jewish World
into regular units in the military and ultimately into
Israeli society. Lahat was the programs first-ever
wheelchair-bound participant.
After first integrating into the Palmachim Air Base,
Lahat enlisted as a full IDF soldier in late December
following a Special in Uniform letter-writing campaign
that made the case for his military service to various
IDF officials. To date, Special in Uniform has facilitated
the voluntary enlistment of about 50 Israeli soldiers
with autism and other disabilities.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking at
a December 29 graduation ceremony for an Israeli
Air Force pilots course, underscored the IDFs spirit
of inclusion.
A strong nation is one that does not leave its most
vulnerable members behind, Netanyahu said. Israel
is the only nation in the world that has a strong army
with the ability to include people with disabilities.
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JNS.ORG
Israeli-Arab woman
is among 39 killed in
Istanbul nightclub attack
Lian Zaher Hassan, a 19-year-old Israeli woman from
the predominantly Arab city of Tira, was among the 39
people killed in the New Years Eve shooting attack in
an Istanbul nightclub.
The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the
attack, saying through the Aamaq news agency, In
continuation of the blessed operations that Islamic
State is conducting against the servant of the cross,
Turkey, a heroic soldier of the caliphate struck the
most famous nightclub where Christians were celebrating their pagan feast.
Israels Interior Ministry and the Israeli ZAKA volunteer emergency response group worked to return the
Arab teenagers remains to Israel for a proper burial.
ZAKA is an international humanitarian organization that honors the dead, regardless of religion, race
or gender, ZAKA Chairman Yehuda Meshi-Zahav said
in a statement.
Hassan was killed in a horrific attack and the state
is duty-bound to lend its support and bring her body
to Israel, said Israeli Interior Minister Aryeh Deri.
JNS.ORG
Ben Gurion Airport sees

11 percent rise in
2016 passenger traffic
Business boomed for Israels Ben Gurion International
Airport in 2016, with 17,387,971 passengers making their
way through the airport on flights last year an increase
of 11 percent, or 1.6 million passengers, from 2015.
At the same time, Eilats Ovda Airport reported a
97.8-percent increase in passengers in 2016, after the
airport was exempted from landing fees while construction continues on Israels new Ramon Airport,
scheduled to open in 2017.
Since Israel signed the Open Skies agreement with
the European Union in 2012, which has brought
more flights to and from European countries at
reduced prices, traffic at Ben Gurion Airport has
increased by around 50 percent. Passengers to
and from six countries have led the growth at Ben
Gurion: Turkey with 1.6 million passengers, on
mostly connecting flights; the U.S. with 1.45 million
passengers; Germany with 1.23 million passengers;
Italy with 1.5 million passengers; and Russia and
JNS.ORG
France, each with 1 million passengers.
Jewish World
Israels top security experts unveil

redrawn West Bank map for Trump era
ANDREW TOBIN
TEL AVIV Israels leading security think
tank has published a plan to redraw the map
of the West Bank in a bid to consolidate major
settlements and prevent the spread of others.
The plan, presented Monday to Israeli President Reuven Rivlin as part of the Institute
for National Security Studies yearly strategic
survey, calls for the government to allow construction in West Bank settlement blocs and
Jerusalem. At the same time, it recommends
a halt to construction in the 90 percent of the
territory outside the major settlements.
In laying out the plan, researchers Assaf
Orion and Udi Dekel argue that negotiations
with the Palestinians are unlikely to lead to a
final-status agreement. With relations deadlocked, they warn, Israel is drifting toward a
single binational state with the Palestinians,
which threatens its democratic and possibly
Jewish identity.
It is an analysis that echoes one put forth
in a speech last month by U.S. Secretary of
State John Kerry, although unlike Kerrys
plan it would proceed without direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians
intended to reach a final-status agreement
and without resolving what Kerry called all
the outstanding issues.
To preserve Israels options, including
the possibility of a Palestinian state, the
researchers say, the government should
implement their plan in coordination
with the incoming administration of U.S.
President-elect Donald Trump, which has
already signaled that it will not pressure
Israel on the settlements or negotiations.
Amos Yadlin, the director of the institute
and a former head of Israels military intelligence, said that he endorsed the plan, saying Israel had a window of opportunity
with Trump.
Israel should take this chance of a new
administration with a new approach to
promote the bottom-up independent shaping of its borders, even if the Palestinians are
still holding their extreme position, he said.
The main changes under the institutes
plan would be to Area C, the 60 percent of
the West Bank under full Israeli control per
the 1993 Oslo Accords. Besides carving out 17
percent of the area for the settlement blocs,
where 86 percent of settlers live, Orion and
Dekel suggest using up to 42 percent for
development on behalf of the Palestinians
and up to 33 percent for protection of vital
security sites, including the Jordan Valley.
The rest of Area C would keep its current
status, and settlers would be encouraged to
relocate to the settlement blocs.
The Palestinian Authority would administer the major Palestinian population centers
in Areas A and B, which comprise 40 percent
of the West Bank and are home to 99.7 percent of Palestinians, as it already largely does.
But the Israeli military would retain the right
to act as needed.
The status of Jerusalem, which Israel governs as its capital but the Palestinians also
claim as theirs, would not change. Most of
the world considers all Israeli building in the
West Bank and eastern Jerusalem illegal, but
Israel disputes this.
Orion and Dekel recommend that Israel
and the world promote security and development in the West Bank. This could bolster the
Palestinian Authoritys declining legitimacy
on the West Bank street and help prepare the
society for eventual final-status negotiations,
they say. An alternative, they say, would be
for Israel to take independent steps to politically separate from the Palestinians.
The Hamas-governed Gaza Strip would be
handled separately, ideally with a combination of military deterrence, border security
and development.
Yadlin said the Institute for National Security Studies long had preferred a negotiated
final-status agreement with the Palestinians,
The West Bank security fence that runs near Jerusalem as it looked in April 2016.
WISAM HASHLAMOUN/FLASH90
Amos Yadlin, left, the chairman of the Institute for National Security Studies, presents
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin with the 2017 strategic assessment at the presidents
residence in Jerusalem on January 2.
MARK NEYMAN/ISRAELI GOVERNMENT PRESS OFFICE
but this year concluded that the prospects for

success had gone from very low to zero.
The plan has elements that could appeal to
the right and the left, its architects say.
Despite a rightward shift in recent decades,
Yadlin said, the Israeli public was ready to
consider the institutes plan because the
political left had given up the illusion that
there was a Palestinian partner for peace and
the right no longer supported the status quo.
He cited Education Minister Naftali Bennetts
proposal that Israel annex Area C as an example of new thinking on the right, but said the
Palestinians would need part of that territory
to create a viable political entity.
Israelis basically want to see a two-state
solution, with a Jewish, democratic secure
country, but not according to the Palestinian
parameters, Yadlin said.
Ideally, he said, the Palestinians would
cooperate with the institutes plan and eventually return to negotiations for a two-state
solution. The government should leave open
that possibility anyway to fend off international condemnation like the United Nations
Security Councils anti-settlement resolution
that the U.S. allowed to pass last month, he
said. But if the Palestinians would not budge,
Yadlin said, Israel could unilaterally draw its
borders to exclude most of them.
Im not among those who are terrified by
the demographic threat [of Jews being outnumbered by Palestinians in a single state].
I think this is the biggest mistake of Kerry,
Yadlin said, referring to the Kerry speech last
week in which he warned that without relinquishing control of the Palestinians, Israel
can either be Jewish or democratic it cannot be both.
Shlomo Brom, the head of Israeli-Palestinian research at the Institute for National
Security Studies, said that he saw no chance
the current Israeli government would accept

the plan backed by Yadlin. Every right-wing
government since 2000 has avoided drawing a line around the settlements, he said,
and none were as right wing as the one we
have now.
Nor would the Palestinians be likely to
cooperate if the plan were carried out, Brom
said, since they would see their potential
future state shrink with no real gains. He
added that it would be problematic from the
point of view of international law for Israel to
change the terms of the Oslo Accords without
Palestinian consent.
The best hope to shake up the status quo
and save the two-state solution, Brom said,
was the rise of a viable centrist alternative to
Netanyahus government and increased international pressure on Israel.
The simplest option for a government
that wanted a two-state solution would be
to make the security barrier Israels provisional border allowing settlement building to the west and prohibiting building to
the east of it, Brom said. Israel then could
begin taking steps toward a Palestinian
state, unilaterally and in coordination with
the Palestinians, that he hopes would culminate in a final-status agreement, he said.
Brom recommended trading the Oslo principle of Nothing is agreed until everything
agreed for What is agreed and can be
implemented will be carried out.
Like Yadlin, Brom said he did not think
the end of the two-state solution would spell
demographic disaster for Israel. But he said
terrorism would probably force the state into
indefinite militarily rule over a stateless Palestinian population, which the world would
view as a form of apartheid.
Unfortunately, Brom said, this was the
JTA WIRE SERVICE
most likely outcome.
Jewish World
Why Tel Aviv is Israels reigning aliyah capital

ANDREW TOBIN
TEL AVIV Meet Daniel Rubin, in many
ways the new face of aliyah.
Originally from Los Angeles, Rubin, 27,
moved to Israel a decade ago to study at a
Jerusalem yeshiva. In the following years he
served in the Israeli army and bounced back
and forth between Israel and the United
States for college and work.
But last month, he and his wife made
aliyah. They settled in Tel Aviv so he could
found a startup and they could enjoy the
coastal citys Mediterranean setting. The
couple were among about 3,000 new immigrants who made this city their home in 2016,
helping Tel Aviv earn the title as the aliyah
capital of Israel for the third straight year.
Tel Aviv is young, Tel Aviv is fun, Tel Aviv
is exciting, Rubin said. And Im from L.A.,
so I love the beach.
Rubins story reflects recent trends in
aliyah.
As the wave of immigrants from the former
Soviet Union has ebbed since the 1990s, aliyah has reached historic lows. Among those
who have continued coming, a greater ratio
have been from Western countries, and they
have been more likely to choose to launch
their Israel experience in big cities. Tel Aviv,
the nations cultural capital, now is their
favorite destination.
Israel rescued millions of people from
disadvantaged societies in Muslim countries
and Eastern Europe, said Sergio DellaPergola, a pre-eminent scholar of Jewish demography and migration. But today, diaspora
Jews are overwhelmingly free people, mostly
employed and mostly urban. There are no
more rural Jews, no more persecuted Jews in
ghettos, and therefore the whole migration
balance is totally different. Aliyah is voluntary and based on Israels capability to offer
employment and a good life.
Israel was largely built by Jews escaping
persecution. In the 19th and 20th centuries,
Russian pogroms, European anti-Semitism,
and Nazi persecution populated prestate
and early Israel. The countrys Jewish ranks
swelled with consecutive floods of Jews fleeing the Middle East from the 1950s, Ethiopia
from the 1970s, and the former Soviet Union

countries from the 1990s.
In recent years, anti-Semitism in France
and war in Ukraine have contributed to
another uptick in aliyah, with Russian immigration hitting a 10-year high in 2016. But the
broader trend since the early 1990s is downward. Aliyah from the former Soviet Union
has largely run its course after bringing
almost a million immigrants to Israel and
overall numbers have reached lows seen
before only in the 1980s, data from Israels
Central Bureau of Statistics shows.
Meanwhile, immigration to Israel from
Western countries mostly Europe and
the United States has remained relatively
steady. Therefore, new arrivals from the
West now account for a much larger percentage of the total.
And apparently Western Jews prefer big
cities. Since 1989, no Israel city has attracted
more than 4 percent of new immigrants,
with Tel Aviv which is Israels second most
populous city, after Jerusalem getting just
3 percent. But in 2016, Tel Aviv was the destination for 12 percent of new immigrants.
The next three most popular cities were
Jerusalem (10 percent), Netanya (9 percent),
and Haifa (8 percent), according to the Ministry of Immigration.
In interviews with about a dozen people
who recently made aliyah to Tel Aviv or were
considering it, the citys startup scene and its
liberal, cosmopolitan lifestyle were cited as
the biggest draws.
After a year in Jerusalem, Rubin and his
wife, Talia, 23, moved to Tel Aviv. They loved
Jerusalem, Rubin said, and the modern
Orthodox community in the capital. But only
in Tel Aviv could he launch the Pub Hub, his
startup, which turns bars into co-working
spaces during the day. He opened the first
location last month on Rothschild Boulevard,
the citys most happening thoroughfare.
The vibe here the energy and the
opportunities you just cant find anywhere
else, he said.
Israel weathered the global recession
better than most countries, and Tel Aviv
is its financial and business center. The
Israeli economy has grown by an average
Israelis work at the Pub Hub at Polly Bar in Tel Aviv.
NOI ARKOBI
Israelis play on the beach in Tel Aviv.
Daniel Rubin: Tel Aviv is young, Tel Aviv

is fun, Tel Aviv is exciting.
NOI ARKOBI
of nearly 4 percent annually over the past

13 years, and unemployment has fallen
almost to 5 percent.
Much credit goes to Israels startups.
According to Tel Avivs municipal government, the city is home to about 1,450 of
the countrys 5,000 early-stage companies,
which is more than one startup for every 300
residents the highest ratio of any city in the
world. Many of those startups look to reach
the international market, providing plenty of
jobs for native English speakers.
Groups that seek to attract young people to
Israel have recognized the opportunity. Birthright Israel, which brings young Jews to visit
the country free of charge, started an entrepreneurship program this year in Tel Aviv
called Excel Ventures. And Nefesh BNefesh,
the aliyah services provider, is opening a new
office in the city next month to cater to the
growing number of American, Canadian, and
British immigrants.
What those interviewed seemed to appreciate most was Tel Avivs lifestyle the cafes,
the nightlife, and the beaches, plus the prevalence of English speakers. Tel Aviv boasts
1,748 cafes, bars, and nightclubs one for
every 230 residents along with some 1,500
restaurants, according to the municipality.
Uri Gafni, an official for Birthrights Excel,
summed up the sentiment.
NATI SHOHAT/FLASH90
Tel Aviv embodies many of the things

these young professionals are looking for
when they come to Israel they want the
nightlife and the bars and the beach and
this delicate balance between lifestyle and
work in an environment that is liberal and
open to a variety of people from all over
the world, he said.
I think its easier for secular Jews around
the world to relate to Tel Aviv than to Jerusalem. Its much sexier for Jews to hang out in
Tel Aviv, where they can finish the day and
go drink a beer on Rothschild.
Although Tel Aviv is said to attract a secular crowd, a growing number of Orthodox Jews like Rubin are coming to the city,
according to Nefesh BNefesh officials.
Seventeen percent of the immigrants they
helped make aliyah in the past two years
were Orthodox, the agencys numbers show
similar to the communitys representation
in all of Israel.
The Tel Aviv municipality has made quality-of-life investments in recent years, such
as introducing bike sharing, renovating the
central Dizengoff Square to make it more
pedestrian friendly, and creating open-air
markets. At the same time, it has branded
Tel Aviv as a world city, perhaps most
effectively with Pride Week, which attracted
more than 200,000 revelers and a handful
of American celebrities this year.
A downside of all this choice, from an
aliyah perspective, is that people can also
choose to leave. According to DellaPergola, many immigrants to Tel Aviv return
to their home countries at some point, or
to move back and forth. Even those who
build a life in Israel often get priced out of
the city, where already high housing prices
leaped 13 percent this summer from a year
earlier. The internal migration rate from
Tel Aviv to other parts of the country is
among the highest of any city in Israel, said
DellaPergola.
The good news, he said, is those who leave
are replaced by a new generation eager for its
JTA WIRE SERVICE
turn at life in the big city.
Cover Story
Irmari Nacht with Books110Terezin, on display

at the Kaplen JCC on the Palisades in Tenafly.
Open books
Englewood artist talks
about the books she redesigns
JOANNE PALMER
ooks are physical objects.

Theyre not only that, of course. They hold
ideas, they tell stories, they allow us, their readers, to make intellectual and emotional connections to people and places we never could and never will
meet in real life. They are repositories of knowledge and
memory. They are essential to our civilization.
But they also are physical objects. They contain words
and illustrations and photographs and maps and footnotes and cartoons, ink on paper, fonts and type sizes and
endpapers and covers and jackets, shapes and colors, texture and heft.
Irmari Nacht of Englewood is an artist who has chosen to work with books as physical objects, cutting them,
exploding them, presenting them as works of beauty and
meaning, sometimes in relation to the words they hold,
and sometimes independent of those words.
Ms. Nacht, whose work has been exhibited in galleries
around the country, in every major museum in New Jersey, and soon will be on display not for the first time at
the Kaplen JCC on the Palisades in Tenafly, does not work
only with books; she started as a painter, is a sculptor, and
is actively engaged in other media. But it is the exploding,
unfurling, twisting books that occupy most of her imagination and her wall space right now.
Irmari Weinstein (who will not explain her unusual first
A book called Les Fleurs is distressed into flower

shapes.
name everyone asks, but I never tell, she joked. The

explanations really boring, but if I tell you Id have to kill
you.) was born in Brooklyn in 1940 and grew up in Forest
Hills, Queens.
Her mother, Yetta Tobias, was born in Vilna; she got out
of Europe in 1914 with a brother and her mother. She
had another brother here, in the United States, who was
sick, and left in 1912, to go to back to Russia, for his health.
He was supposed to be very bright, and he spoke
13 languages, but he went back to Russia in 1912 for his
e
l
t
s
.
e
s
Cover Story
Clockwise from left, in an early

work, a book featuring pictures
of stones erupts; shredded towns,
villages, streams, and oceans
spring from a slivered atlas;
Books104WaterTao combines
Buddhist and Jewish ideas of
flowing water; and art made
from Jonathan Safran Foers
Everything is Illuminated,
about a young mans search for
his grandfathers Nazi-haunted
past, includes yellow triangles
that form stars.
health, Ms. Nacht repeated, making the

point that for a smart person, her uncle
made a not-so-smart decision. We knew
that he was in the Russian army in 1919
we never heard anything about him again
after that.
Yetta Tobias married Ms. Nachts
American-born father, Jerome, who went
into his fathers business right after high
school. His father had just started a company that designed ribbons, braids, and
other millinery trimmings and needed
someone trustworthy to run it. He was
18 years old; he had to grow a mustache to
look older, because he was the boss, Ms.
Nacht said. Her mother, who had begun
Hunter College, had to drop out to work.
She got a job working for Mr. Weinstein;
soon they married.
Mr. Weinstein was born in 1898, so he
was too old to be drafted into World War
II. Instead, he was an air-raid warden, his
daughter recalled. When she was born,
her father was 40 years old.
His business, which had morphed to
shoe trimmings when the hat trade died,
was in Manhattans garment district, in
the notions subsection. That business
gave Irmari a lifelong love of those kinds

of stores; shops with long thin cardboard
boxes filled with things, some utilitarian,
some miraculous, and with shopkeepers who know where everything is, even
though the boxes all look alike.
When Irmari was a baby, the family
moved to Forest Hills. We were in one of
the first apartment buildings there, she
said. The area was just beginning to be
built up. I was told that before we lived
there, the Indians did, and I thought they
meant they lived in apartment buildings.
Irmari graduated from Forest Hills
High School she was a year or so ahead
of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkle there,
but the school was huge and she didnt
know them. She went to SUNY Cortland,
majored in history, graduated, started
work on a masters degree in art history
at NYU, but dropped out to get married.
Irmari had always been an artist; shed
known she was one, in that way that so
many artists report always having known.
All her work experience, in that Mad Men
era, was in art, specifically the intersection
of art, technology, and commerce. She
worked, among other places, at American
Cover Story
Peace is a fervently hoped-for goal, created here from five similar but not identical books.
Artist magazine, in the art departments at the ad agencies

Ogilvy & Mather and Doyle Dane Bernbach, and in the art
department of Macmillan, the publisher. After that, she
started her own advertising design and PR firm, which
still is ongoing today, although now she works mainly with
longtime clients.
Ms. Nacht drew and painted when I started to do
art professionally, I started wrapping, she said that
was, she took large physical objects and swathed them in
material. The idea of wrapping turned me on, she said.
I got these tubes, six feet high, and wrapped them and
entered it into a contest. The director of the Whitney, one
of the contest jurors, accepted it and called it a sculpture.
I thought that if someone from the Whitney said it was
sculpture, then it was sculpture, Ms. Nacht said. Sculpture, she added, usually is the thing that you walk around
in an art gallery, or put your drink on. People look at the
walls, but they dont notice sculpture. They walk around
it or bump into it, but they dont
actually see it.
But then I realized that sculpture could stand up and become
sculpture, or it could go on the
walls and be something else.
Soon, she moved on to books.
In a way, working with books
connected her life with her work.
In 1963, Irmari Weinstein married Robert Nacht, then a financial
planner, whom she met at DDB. In
1967, the couple moved to Englewood, where their two sons and
their daughter grew up, and where Irmari and Bob still
live. The house was big when we first moved in, and
then it got small, and now its big again, Ms. Nacht said.
Their children all are married now, and they all live in
New Jersey.
The Nachts joined all sorts of local institutions, including Temple Emanu-El when it still was in Englewood. Ms.
Nacht now is co-president of the Englewood Historical
Society and has been on the board of the Bergen Family Center, and she is on the board of the Friends of the
Englewood Library.
All the books she works with are books no one else
wants, she said. The library de-acquisitions books, and
offers them for sale; it also holds sales of books people
have donated that are duplicates of others already in its

collection, or that do not fit into it. Later, the books no one
wants to buy are offered for free. Ms. Nacht waits until the
sales are over. I only want books that no one else wants,
she said. I want to give them a new life.
She is also passionate about recycling the idea that
something at the end of its life as one thing can live again
in a new form, she said. And its important for our
planet, and for the future.
When she works with books, she cuts strips with an
Xacto knife; each strip is exactly the same, but because
she is a human being, not a machine, there is no such
thing as one strip exactly like another. The work is mindless, but as the strips come out they have a life of their
own, she said. Im very interested in repetitiveness; in
similarities that are different.
She picks books because of some physical attributes
that appeal to her. Often its the color of the endpapers.
Normally its not the content, but
there are some exceptions, mostly
having to do with Jewish identity.
She reads the books before she
cuts them, so often the pieces,
perhaps even despite themselves,
end up saying something.
One of the main pieces at the
JCC show is Books110Terezin,
made of eight copies of a book
called In Memorys Kitchen: A
Legacy from the Women of Terezin. Terezin was the Nazi show
camp, a concentration camp
whose overseers often pretended that everything was
fine before they shipped inmates off to their deaths at
Auschwitz. The book was a collection of recipes the
women at the camp had managed to put together; the
recipes, copies of the original, were handwritten in a
Germanic kind of hand, Ms. Nacht said. It was a very
emotional thing, to realize that the women writing the
recipes down maybe because they were remembering
them, maybe because they had some hope that somehow someday they could use them again.
The women wrote a lot about paring potatoes; some
of them worked in the kitchen in Terezin, and their jobs
included paring. The pieces of the book curl like potato
arings, she said. They swirl; like potato parings each one
I thought that
if someone from
the Whitney said
it was sculpture,
then it was
sculpture.
911 shows the Twin Towers, along with the terrorists and their imaginary virgin rewards.
comes out different. But when the women in Terezin were

paring potatoes, they werent thinking about art. They
were thinking about survival.
It was a very emotional experience, she said.
Moved by the beauty of the Hebrew script, Ms. Nacht
also made art out of a copy of the Book of Isaiah. She was
careful to showcase the lettering, she said.
Much of her work comes back to issues of Jewish identity. She used Jonathan Safran Foers Everything is Illuminated to cut triangles that look like stars, and she painted
them yellow; she found the sentence I have never seen a
Jew before, but I can feel his horns, and it both horrified
her and remained with her.
She found a small, physically appealing copy of Charles
Dickens Oliver Twist and began to reread it, for the first
time since childhood, and what she found surprised and
Cover Story
appalled her. This book was so horrible to read, with the
Jew, the Jew, the Jew, that I couldnt finish it, she said.
That Jew, of course, is Fagin, the villain. I know it was of
its time, but it was so anti-Semitic that I just couldnt read
it. But now it is a pretty little object. She cut it into little
slivers, and defanged it. (You can see Ms. Nachts version
of Oliver Twist on our cover this week.)
How does she cut them? Carefully, she said. She can
work for only so long, because the cutting requires a certain kind of mindless concentration that could lead to
carelessness and injury. Xacto knives are very sharp.
She also distresses books, and when I squenched it
thats a word that seems to mean squeezing and squashing and generally smushing I might have squenched it
harder than I would have, because I was so incensed and
shocked by reading it.
An artwork born of the September 11 attacks, made of
books cut to show the numbers 911, show the terrorists and
the 72 virgins they didnt get. Peace shows the word
peace, cut out of five similarly shaped, differently colored
little books. Water and Tao shows water cut books,
painted blue tumbling in perpetual frozen beauty.
A few years ago, Ms. Nacht decided to see what would
happen to books if they were left to decompose naturally.
I wanted them to be part of nature, she said. She took
100 books again, discards that no one else wanted
arranged them in neat piles in her backyard, and waited,
photographing them monthly. At first, not much happened. Then it snowed, and soon a fawn decided that
some of them looked like lunch. More animals nibbled at
them Ms. Nacht has photos of the fawn, but never caught
any of the others in the act. Eventually, the books began

to look ancient, each in a different way; some ended up
looking like garbage, others like art. Similarities and differences at work again.
Ms. Nachts passion for books and reading has led her
to be active in another local project, this one with international roots. The Tiny Free Library builds waterproof
containers and encourages people to leave books in them
and take home books they find there. There are two such
book exchanges in Englewood, she said; one is in front of
the senior center and the other by the bus stop on Dean
Street and Demarest Avenue. Its a great way to create
community, she said.
So if you want to see a map exploding out of its borders,
or spirals of letters representing hope, loss, despair, and
potatoes, or if you want to step back from books as ideas
to look at books as fascinating, changing, glorious physical
objects, go to the JCC and take a look at Irmari Nachts art.
The informations in the box below.
Who: Irmari Nacht of Englewood
What: Will be at a reception for her art show
Where: At the Kaplen JCC on the Palisades,
411 East Clinton Ave., Tenafly
When: On Wednesday, January 18,
from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m.
Why: To celebrate her show, which will be at the JCCs
Waltuch Gallery until January 30
For more information: Call (201) 408-1456 or email
nbachrach@jccotp.org
Irmari and Robert Nacht of Englewood.
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Editorial
Remembering
Moshe Krakinowski
ometimes, no matter what William Shakespeare who usually

was right tells us, the good is
not interred with the bones.
Sometimes goodness goes bone-deep,
and somehow, miraculously, it manages
to find its way out.
As the holiday of Chanukah came
to its end, so did the life of Moshe
Krakinowski of Tenafly, a Holocaust survivor. Moshe and his wife, Miriam Shumacher Krakinowski, who died in 2010,
were from Lithuania; they fell in love in
the Kovno ghetto. Moshe saved Miriams
life by pushing her out of line, allowing
her to escape. She was rescued by a righteous gentile, Jonas Paulavicius, and his
family his wife, Antanina Paulaviciene,
their son, Kestutis Paulavicius and their
daughter, Danute Paulaviciute who all
risked their lives to save many Jews. Their
goodness is beyond understanding; may
we never be faced with the choices that
confronted them.
Meanwhile, Moshe was on a train, bound
for the camps, when he realized that he
had to get out. When it rounded a curve,
he managed to climb from a window.
The two found each other, amazingly,
came to this country, and built a new
life. Moshe became an engineer, worked
for IBM, moved his family to Poughkeepsie. His three daughters, Reva, Pnina, and
Leah, flourished. Each daughter married a
wonderful man Reva married Paul Gajer,
Pnina married Don Schoenfeld, and Leah
married Andy Silberstein.
Each of the daughters had children, and
one of those children, Joshua Gajer, now
has a newborn child of his own.
And then Miriam and Moshe grew old.
And thats when all they had done and
been through, all the love theyd manage
to retain and nourish and share, came
back, as love, when you are lucky, does.
Leah and Andy Silberstein and their two
sons, Jacob and Ethan, opened their home
to Leahs parents, and the couple moved
in. That was about ten years ago.
First, it is important to say that most of
us could not do what Leah and Andy did.
Jewish
Standard
1086 Teaneck Road
Teaneck, NJ 07666
(201) 837-8818
Fax 201-833-4959
Publisher
James L. Janoff
Associate Publisher Emerita
Marcia Garfinkle
You need a house that is big enough to

provide space, light, comfort, plumbing,
and privacy to adults, and to the aides
whom they eventually will need, maybe
full-time. You must have the resources,
the resilience, the stamina to deal with
schedules and personnel issues and the
stresses of the ever-changing parent-child
relationship; its even harder when youre
both the child and the parent. And you
must have parents whose medical needs
can be handled in your house. There
must be a hospital close by.
But even those of us who have physical
means to do that might not have the metaphysical strength. Its hard. You know that
the course upon which youve embarked
has only one possible destination. The
only questions are how long the trip will
be, how many inlets youll be allowed to
discover, and how much joy you can store
up along the way, for when you need it.
Not everyone can do it but Leah and
Andy did it. Not only did they take care of
Miriam and Moshe, they also provided an
extraordinary example to the rest of us.
Leah is the director of marketing and
communications at the Solomon Schechter Day School of Bergen County, and she
and Andy are active members of Kehillat
Kesher in Englewood. So was Moshe
Krakinowski, as the shuls rabbi, Akiva
Block, said at his funeral.
Most of the members of Kesher, a
modern Orthodox shul, are in their 30s
and 40s, and some are in the 50s now,
Rabbi Block said, but there are few in
their 80s or 90s. Moshe Krakinowski, a
man devoted to Jewishness, to learning,
to engineering, to problem-solving, to
friendship, to hope, to story-telling, and
to love, a man who like so many Holocaust survivors but not like all of them
was able to love again and also was able
to become the shuls grandfather, its
benevolent elder spirit.
So in the end, the story of the
Krakinowskis and their children and
grandchildren is a story of love. As we
start the new year, lets keep the light of
JP
that love and hope alive.
Editor
Joanne Palmer
Associate Editor
Larry Yudelson
Community Editor
Beth Janoff Chananie
About Our Children Editor
Heidi Mae Bratt
thejewishstandard.com
TRUTH REGARDLESS OF CONSEQUENCES
Correspondents
Warren Boroson
Lois Goldrich
Abigail K. Leichman
Miriam Rinn
Dr. Miryam Z. Wahrman
Advertising Director
Natalie D. Jay
Classified Director
Janice Rosen
Bystanders to Syrian
genocide, obsessed
with Jewish condos
he world recently watched in

horror as Aleppo burned, its
massacre of men, women, and
children shocking the world.
The Syrian genocide reached fever
pitch in December 2016, just as the Obama
administration had but days left in office.
But rather than scramble to save the children of Aleppo, President Obama continued not to lift a finger
to protect 500,000 Arabs
from being slaughtered.
Turns out, he and his
national security team were
too busy scheming against
Israel to take notice. Aleppo
was ignored as the administration focused instead
on condemning the Jewish
Rabbi
state with a U.N. resolution
Shmuley
that will lead to economic
Boteach
boycotts against Israel and
the possible detention and
arrests of its soldiers, like
my son, and its ministers, when they travel
abroad. Worst of all, the resolution will
almost certainly lead to Israeli leaders and
military figures being prosecuted at the
International Criminal Court at the Hague.
President Obama couldnt pass even one
United Nations Security Council Resolution
condemning Russia, Syria, and Iran for the
wholesale carnage in Syria. But it passed a
motion condemning Jews who build condominiums in Judea and Samaria, the ancient
biblical cradle of Jewish civilization.
The Chanukah holiday that just passed
demonstrates Jewish rejection of militarism and its glories in favor of Jewish
domestication. Although having won one
of the great military battles of the ancient
world through their defeat of the Assyrian
Greek inheritors of Alexander the Great,
the Maccabees decide not to stage a grand
military parade, or Roman-style triumph
celebrating their victory, but to instead go

with their wives and children to illuminate
the Temple. Jews do not celebrate military
victories, which is why till today a tourist
can travel the length and breadth of both
ancient and modern Israel and find not a
single military arch celebrating a defeat of
Jewish enemies. Plenty of memorials to soldiers abound, but not a single equestrian
statue to a conquering hero.
When Douglas MacArthur
finally returned from fighting for America for decades
in Asia he was showered with
a military-confetti parade in
the Canyon of Heroes down
Broadway, which was said to
have been the largest of its
kind in American history. No
such celebration of an Israeli
general has ever happened.
When Jews fight they do so
merely to protect life, never
for glory. Then they return
home quietly to their families, a tradition
practiced till this day by the IDF.
King David is the greatest of all Jewish
military conquerors, who forged a Jewish
empire in the Middle East 3,000 years ago.
How is he remembered today? Through
harp and lyre rather than sword and shield.
Contrast this with ISISs seeking to fly its
black flag across a global Islamic caliphate
by sword. Contrast it with the call of Hamas
and Hezbollah to use Islamic arms to vanquish their enemies on bloody battlefields.
Yet the Obama administration missed all
this, and determined that it was the Jewish
states emphasis on family life and domestication, as evidenced in a desire to build
apartments in Maale Adumim, that is the
real cause of discord in the Middle East
as opposed to radical Islamic militarism.
Settlements, rather than jihad, is the true
cause of Middle East conflict.
Shmuley Boteach has just published The Israel Warrior: Standing Up for the Jewish
State from Campus to Street Corner. Follow him on Twitter @RabbiShmuley.
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Opinion
Most tragic of all in the fall of Aleppo is the fall of Samantha Power who once held a unique position for speaking
truth to the worlds powers, but held her tongue while
people are being murdered every day in the Middle East
and North Africa. Shiites and Sunnis kill each other on a
daily basis throughout the Middle East, while thousands
die in Sudan, Nigeria, Libya and Yemen. Under Samanthas watchful eye, hundreds of thousands of Syrians have
died, and millions have become refugees.
Lets not forget that the carnage in Syria is largely a
result of Obamas disastrous foreign policy. When he precipitously pulled American troops out of Iraq, he created
a vacuum that has been filled by Iran, ISIS, al-Qaeda, and
other radical Islamic groups. Rather than work to bring
down the brutal Assad regime and support Syrians who
reject his totalitarian rule and the proposed Sharia law of
the Muslim extremists, Power stood by while Iran and its
Hezbollah terrorist puppets rushed into bolster the tottering Assad regime. Given that Syria is Irans only ally in the
region, removing Assad would have had the twin benefits
of eliminating one of the regions last dictators and leaving
Iran without a friend in the region.
Acting early on would have saved tens of thousands
of lives, prevented the devastating immigration problem that threatens to bring down Jordans pro-American
regime and seed Europe and perhaps the United States
with radical Islamists trained by ISIS and al-Qaeda to infiltrate Western societies for the purpose of committing terror and mayhem.
By failing to act swiftly and surely, Obama also opened
the door to Russian intervention. After keeping Russia
contained in the region for more than 40 years, Obamas
inaction woke the sleeping bear, and Vladimir Putins
forces are now bombing civilian areas and doing everything possible to maintain their own foothold in the
region. While Power has fiddled, Putin also has extended
his tentacles into nations that had been staunch U.S. allies
before Obama turned on them.
Obamas most devastating decision was his failure to
follow up his threat to take action against Syria if Assad
used chemical weapons. Instead, he patted himself on
the back for a brilliant diplomatic coup (as he did with
his disastrous nuclear deal with Iran) in reaching a deal
with Russia to remove and destroy Syrias chemical weapons stockpile. Just as Iran has cheated on the nuclear deal
while Obama and his U.N. mouthpiece Power have buried
their heads in the sand, Syria also ignored the toothless
warnings of the president and kept enough weapons to
continue to slaughter civilians and rebels alike.
But the biggest failure of all was Obamas blindness
on the real causes of conflict in the region. Men who
are taught they will be granted virgins for murder, sex
for violence, are creating a culture where harming others is the ultimate test of masculinity and manhood.
But contrast, men who are taught that fighting is never
something to celebrate but rather to be used only in the
defense of life are those who ultimately will reap not
discord but peace.
Hence, Hamas building weapons rather than Jews
building homes is the ultimate source of the conflict.
Hamas easily could have used Israels withdrawal in
2005, and the billions it received in international aid,
to build homes as well. But that would not have brought
glory. Firing rockets at Israel made them into truly religious men.
But heck, at least Obama, Kerry, Susan Rice, and
Samantha Power, who have missed all this, have finally
socked it to Bibi and Israel. Thatll finally teach those stubborn condo-building Jews a lesson they wont forget at
the U.N., even if it did come at the expense of the Obama
quartet being hence and forever referred to tragically as
bystanders to genocide.
Moving forward in the new year
ike many, I have spent the last

Forty-three years ago, parshat Vayigash
week searching for inspiration
5734, I celebrated my bar mitzvah in Jeruas we reflect on 2016 and anticisalem. I am so blessed that my parents
made this a priority for me (and for my
pate 2017.
brother, five years before) because this
Despite the great uncertainties and chalrite of passage forged a deep and lifelong
lenges which confront us here at home,
connection to eretz Yisrael, medinat Yisin Israel, and around the world I am an
optimist at my core, and while I am not
rael, and am Yisrael to the land, the
a prognosticator, I do believe that we can
state, and the people of Israel. While I
move forward in a positive way.
did not highlight this in my bar mitzvah
Jeremy J.
Focused as I am on the Jewish commu- Fingerman
speech at the time, I recognize now the
message of a strong connection between
nal scene, I am particularly concerned
the diaspora and Israel as expressed in
with how we interact with one another.
How can we overcome the communal conflicts we face Vayigash. God tells Jacob not to fear taking his family
down to Egypt, and promises to make them a great
as this new year begins?
nation there and bring them back up to the land of
Since we each play a role and each one of us can
make a difference, I have three suggestions for consid- Israel. Jacob made clear to his children that which
was most important to him, and in doing so, he set an
example to be emulated.
This past Shabbat, Rabbi Shmuel Goldin of Congregation Ahavath Torah in Englewood reminded us of
the power of our actions. Our children and I would
expand to our neighbors, colleagues, and friends are
listening and watching not only to what we say, but
also to what we do. We each can make a difference by
the example we set.
Finally, I advocate strongly for participating for
getting or staying involved in something you find
meaningful, and for remaining part of the process.
What will be the implications of the recent U.N. resolution? Can anyone predict what will happen as the
new administration settles into its new role? How will
the increasing polarization of Israeli society affect its
relationship with the diaspora?
To overcome some of our uncertainties and chaleration that already are helping me stay optimistic. By
lenges as we enter 2017, we cant just sit back. We must
doing so, I sincerely hope we can move forward into
participate actively if we are to repair and heal our
the year constructively and effectively.
world. From my perspective, we must work together
First, I suggest we prioritize learning taking time
in partnerships and collaborations as we break down
to reflect, to consider, and to grow.
barriers that divide us. New social entrepreneurs are
Three weeks ago, I was humbled and honored to par- bringing new alternatives and approaches to foster
ticipate in a day of learning with the Jim Joseph Foun- engagement and activism, in some cases within existdation in San Francisco in tribute to 11 years of out- ing institutions; innovation succeeds through involvestanding visionary leadership by its founding executive
ment and participation.
director, Dr. Charles Chip Edelsberg. Spending the
When it comes to how we can increase participation,
day of reflection with some of the leading Jewish aca- I look to the Reform movement as a model with its call
demics, philanthropic professionals, and board lead- for audacious hospitality or for what others refer to
as radical inclusivity. For me, the message is clear:
ers, we considered risks taken, results generated, and
lessons learned. Our interactions with each other that we are far stronger when we include everyone and parday were honest, direct, and data-driven, and revealed
ticipate together recognizing, respecting, and wela yearning for continuous improvement, individually
coming differences in our collective community.
and organizationally.
As we enter the new year, I am excited to help all
In the rush of everyday life, we seldom take the time
of us move forward productively and meaningfully by
to learn from our experiences, to listen to each other, learning, transmitting, and participating in a respectand to contemplate what could be. Doing so might
ful, unified way.
channel our energies effectively in constructive, helpful ways.
Jeremy J. Fingerman is the CEO of the Foundation for
Second, I believe deeply in the power of transmitting
Jewish Camp. He lives in Englewood with his family; he
in passing along our values from each generation to
is vice president of Congregation Ahavath Torah there.
the next and modeling the example we want to be.
Write to him at Jeremy@jewishcamp.org
In the rush of
everyday life, we
seldom take the time
to learn from our
experiences, to listen
to each other, and
to contemplate what
could be.
The opinions expressed in this section are those of the authors, not necessarily those of the newspapers editors,
publishers, or other staffers. We welcome letters to the editor. Send them to jstandardletters@gmail.com.
Opinion
The alt-right is alt wrong!
n a year rich in disturbing politiHeil Trump, heil our people, heil our
cal developments, one of the most
victory. Next, characterizing the mainstream media as the Lugenpresse (the
troubling is the emergence of the
lying press), he continued, one wonders
alt-right from the fringe shadows
whether these people are people at all,
of American politics.
or instead soul-less golem animated by
The alt-right crawled out of the dark
some dark power. He went on to declare
alleys and sewers of our society promoting plutocratic policies for the benefit of
the role of those assembled in the room
the wealthy. Masquerading in the guise of
was to conquer or die that to be white
Dr. Mark Gold
economic nationalism, the alt-right
is to be a striver, a crusader, an explorer
explicitly rejected traditional American
and a conqueror. To applause and Nazi
right-wing politicians promoting similar
salutes, he continued, America was,
views, instead melding those policies with
until this past generation, a white country
racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and antidesigned for ourselves and our prosperity.
Semitism. Pandering its message of hate
It is our creation, it is our inheritance and
to the vulnerable, the alt-right seeks the
it belongs to us. You can listen to the full
support of people who have much to lose
speech google for it on YouTube. (Warning: you may need an adult beverage or
from its program.
two to sit through the whole thing.) This
The alt-right of the United States
was the master race ideology against
is inspired by and aligned with similar
Hiam Simon
which Americas Greatest Generation
movements in Europe as well as Putins
fought until victory in 1945.
Russia. While it may seem contradictory
Andrew Anglins opinions and ideology
that different national movements, each
are best described in his own words:
promoting their own nativist, anti- immigrant chauvinism, should find inspiration in each other, it becomes
White man are you sick and tired of the Jews
clear when we recognize that their ultimate enemy,
destroying your country through mass immigration
their universal targets, are an inclusive democracy and
and degeneracy? Join us in the struggle for global
the belief that there should be a governmental responwhite supremacy at The Daily Stormer. March 2016
sibility to preserve and protect civil society. They all
Jews, Blacks and lesbians will be leaving America
view social justice and a liberal state with contempt.
if Trump gets elected and hes happy about it. This
Of course we have seen this before. It is 71 years
alone is enough reason to put your entire heart and
since the world emerged from the ashes of global war
soul into supporting this man. April 26, 2016
ignited by con men promoting the same poisons. Yet,
And following Donald Trumps announcement during the presidential campaign that he would deport all
here we are again.
Muslims, Andrew Anglin wrote: Get all of these monWe should have no illusions about the danger.
keys the hell out of our country now! Heil Donald
The alt-right uses social media and non-mainstream platforms such as Breitbart News to promote
Trump THE ULTIMATE SAVIOR. (Time for another
drink perhaps?)
The alt-right has tried, so to speak, to whitewash
its image, in a concerted effort to normalize its hateful
extremism and somehow get itself included as part of
the American conversation, but it differs from traditional
conservatism in its vicious racism, viewing native-born
residents limited to white, European Christians, (and,
on occasion, only males) as Americas only legitimate
citizens. While vicious racism and nativism are essential
defining characteristics of the alt-right, in its economic
views it shares the features of the narrowest perspectives
of corporate self-interest at the expense of the very people
who so proudly wave its flag.
Its platform proudly proclaims the elimination of all
institutions and regulations that have moved our civil society into the modern era. It combines a call for the effective
elimination of collective bargaining and the removal of
their hate and instill distrust and fear of the other.
regulatory protections with trade protectionism and tarSteve Bannon, the former chief executive of Breitbart News, proudly proclaimed the site as the home
iffs, a kind of pure capitalism except where that would
of the alt-right. He will hold the newly created posibe inconvenient to entrenched corporate interests. The
tion of White House chief strategist, created by the
alt-right wants to make America great again by dragging us back to the late 19th century with the return of past
Trump transition team. That position needs no Senate
economic abuses financial trusts, high prices, false marapproval. Bannon will have the ear of our new president, and that brings up a crucial question who will
keting, unsafe unregulated products, and the unsafe and
Bannon be listening to?
abusive labor conditions that made the rich richer and the
The real core of this rotting apple called the altpoor poorer. These were the practices and the horrendous
right is represented by such figures as Richard Spenconditions that led to the reforms of the Progressive era.
cer, president of National Policy Institute, and Andrew
The Progressives successfully broke up the monopolies,
Anglin of The Daily Stormer, an American neo-Nazi
lowered tariffs, introduced regulatory and worker protections, and created middle class prosperity. The improvewhite supremacist news and commentary website.
ments that followed included Social Security, Medicare,
Delivering the closing speech at the NPI annual
Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act all of which are
conference on November 19, 2016, Spencer began:
Pandering its
message of hate to
the vulnerable, the
alt-right seeks the
support of people who
have much to lose
from its program.
The The question

remains can this vile
destructive force ever
be put back into the
sewer it crawled out of?
Trump may believe
he was only using the
alt-right to ensure
voter support, but this
demands the question
who is using whom?
targets of both the alt-right and the more conventional
conservatives whom the alt-right disdains.
The alt-right, which is itself a polished moniker for
neo-Nazi white supremacists, often calls itself populist,
purposely choosing to make itself attractive to the weakest
and angriest among us. While the politics of Trump and
Bannon are not the same as that of neo-Nazis Spencer and
Anglin, the Trump platform and its alignment with and
favor for anti-democratic forces, its embrace of fake news
to promote false ideas that enhance its position, its own
exploitation of racism and misogyny, and the menacing
implied threats of its mass rallies have created a dangerous confluence.
Trump and his campaign cannot be blamed for creating
the alt-right. Neo-Nazis, skinheads, white supremacists,
and racists have lived among us for generations. What the
campaign can be blamed for is the first steps toward normalization of this extremist fringe.
The question remains can this vile destructive force
ever be put back into the sewer it crawled out of?
Trump may believe he was only using the alt-right
to ensure voter support, but this demands the question
who is using whom?
The Associated Press has issued the following guidelines
for use of the term alt-right: Alt-right (quotation
marks, hyphen and lower case) may be used in quotes or
modified as in the self-described or so-called alt-right
in stories discussing what the movement says about itself.
Avoid using the term generically and without definition,
however, because the term may exist primarily as a
public-relations device to make its supporters actual
beliefs less clear and more acceptable to a broader
audience. In the past we have called such beliefs racist,
neo-Nazi or white supremacist.
Dr. Mark Gold of Teaneck holds a Ph.D. in economics
from NYU. He is on the executive board of Partners
for Progressive Israel, a member organization of the
American Zionist Movement and an affiliate of the World
Union of Meretz.
Hiam Simon of Englewood is the chief operating officer
of Ameinu, the leading progressive Zionist membership
organization in the United States. He lived in Israel for
many years, where he was the dean of students for what
is now the Alexander Muss High School, and he was an
artillery sergeant in the IDF.
Opinion
The truth Hertz
abbi Joseph H. Hertz is

diminishes the moral prestige of Great
remembered by many as the
Britain is a setback to civilization and
late, great chief rabbi of the
humanity.
United Kingdom, serving in
In Yevamot 97A, the Talmud observes:
that high office from 1913 to 1946, leading
When a teaching is cited in the name
a vast Jewish community through both
of a departed scholar, his lips move in
world wars.
the grave. The year that has now passed
He previously had served congregamarked the 70th anniversary of Rabbi
tions in Syracuse, N.Y., Manhattan, and
Hertzs death, but Chief Rabbi Joseph H.
Rabbi Joseph
South Africa. Even before assuming the
Hertz continues to speak to the Jewish
H. Prouser
pulpit, Hertz made history as the first
people in the wake of the recent infamous anti-Israel resolution of the United
rabbi ordained by the Jewish Theological
Nations Security Council, which shameSeminary of America. Even to those unfamiliar with these achievements, Hertz is remembered
fully was supported by Great Britain, and which the
as the eponymous editor of the Hertz Chumash his
United States permitted by withholding its customary veto.
ubiquitous (and now somewhat dated) commentary
Prime Minister Netanyahu has alleged that American
on the prosaically titled Pentateuch and Haftorahs,
complicity was in fact far more insidious, and included
which provided entre to the weekly Torah reading for
active encouragement and participation in the drafting
generations of English-speaking synagogue-goers.
and presentation of the resolution. Secretary of State
Alas, Rabbi Hertz is less remembered for his many
John Kerrys subsequent speech describing the Kotel
sermons, speeches, and articles on a variety of challenges confronting the Jewish people during his rabas Palestinian territory occupied by Israel lends a meabinic tenure. His insightful, eloquent, often poetic
sure of credence to the Israeli premiers allegations,
pen continues to offer wisdom to a Jewish commuand reprises the treachery of 1929. Britains prime
nity beset by political detractors, and in particular,
minister Teresa Mays surprising reproach of Secretary
by a shamelessly biased and hostile United Nations
Kerry does little to mitigate its guilt in supporting the
Security Council.
original resolution.
In October of 1929, the Chief Rabbi addressed a
That which Rabbi Hertz declared as a loyal subject
demonstration of protest at Londons Kingsway Hall.
of the crown, American Jews properly assert today in
(For the full text of the address, see J. H. Hertz, Affirreference to our own national leadership. The adminmations of Judaism, Soncino Press 1975, pp. 211-214.)
istrations abandonment of its Israeli ally is more than
The demonstration had been occasioned by British
an offense against the Jewish state and an insult to
forces occupying Jerusalem, who had sacrilegiously
every Jew. It is a blot on the name and reputation of the
and by force removed benches and screens from the
United States, and on the American presidents role as
Wailing Wall, causing commotion and injury to Jewish
leader of the free world.
worshippers during Yom Kippur services not quite
The United Nations resolution, and its tacit approval
two weeks earlier. The same officials subsequently had
by the Obama administration, diminishes the moral
removed the aron kodesh, the holy ark housing the
stature of the United States, and whatever diminishes
Torah scroll, from the Kotel, further impeding Jewish
the moral prestige of the United States is a setback to
worship. These actions were undertaken in response
civilization and humanity. Such a diminution in moral
to pressure (the threat, Hertz averred) of the Muslim
standing, such a failure in moral leadership, ill serves
supreme council.
the cause of democracy and undermines the stability
Rabbi Hertz understood even in 1929 that interferof the free world.
ence with Jewish access to the Kotel was an attack on
Rabbi Joseph H. Hertz did not live to see a sovereign
Jewish history. An attack on the truth. His Kingsway
State of Israel. He did not live to see the unification
address therefore carefully detailed the history of Jewof Jerusalem in 1967. He did not live to see the area
ish attachment to Jerusalem, the Temple Mount, and
of the Western Wall reclaimed from daily desecration.
the Western Wall. To this end, he adduced not only
Nor did he live to see the Jewish states principled restoration of free access to the holy sites of all faiths in
Jewish classical and medieval sources, but corroborating and compelling historic evidence from throughout
Jerusalem. Yet almost 90 years after he addressed his
the millennia, with special emphasis on the writings of
audience in Kingsway Hall, Rabbi Hertzs lips continue
the Church Fathers: testimony which even our eneto move, and to offer todays Jewish community as
mies cannot challenge.
well as leaders of Britain and the United States moral
Perhaps the most poignant passage in Hertzs
clarity and direction both timely and timeless.
address is his assertion that the hearts and souls of
The as yet unanswered words of prayer with which
seventeen million Jews vibrate with indignation at this
he concluded his 1929 remarks on the history of
Wailing Wall incident. The chief rabbi was making
the Temple Mount should be on our lips and in our
reference to the global Jewish population of the prehearts today:
Holocaust era. Fully one-third of those 17 million Jews
We earnestly pray for a final and lasting solution,
would be murdered in the 15 years that followed his
that shall vindicate and assure us our rights over this
pained remarks. The worldwide population of Jews
sacred relic of Israels sanctuary. Our fire burned on it
even today does not approach the number accurately
in the days of old; our blood defended it when assailed
cited by Rabbi Hertz in 1929.
by insolent foes; and our tears have bathed it in our
Rabbi Hertzs moral clarity in response to the Britbitter lamentation throughout the ages. May it soon be
ish-supported assault on the Jewish history of the Temgiven us to rejoice over its final and definitive return to
ple Mount resides in his recognition of its profound
the Jewish people.
consequences. This action is far more than a humiliation to every Jew: it is a blot on the British name, and
Joseph H. Prouser is the rabbi of Temple Emanuel of
diminishes the moral prestige of Britain. And whatever
North Jersey in Franklin Lakes.
Letters
Thats not an apology
Although the headline for Aakash Dalals letter says he

apologizes (Letters, December 30) he never says the
words I am sorry.
He only acknowledges that he empathizes with his
victims. It seems the only thing he is sorry about is
what he will miss in the outside world as a result of his
actions. Aside from questioning the point of even giving this convict a forum, I hope that once Mr. Dalal is
sentenced, he will use his time wisely to reflect upon
his actions and accept responsibility rather than place
blame on a political campaign. Maybe then he will
understand the gravity of his crimes, and the fear and
suffering he inflicted on his victims.
Beatrice Baum
Bergenfield
JFNNJ deplores the U.N. vote
Our position and statement on United Nations Security

Council Resolution 2334 is rather clear. While this is a
complex issue on a geopolitical level, with socio-economic impacts for all residents of the area, the Jewish
Federation of Northern New Jersey remains dismayed
and disappointed by the UNs adoption of a resolution
that strongly attempts to undermine Israels global
legitimacy.
Israel long has been the outmanned and outnumbered underdog at the United Nations, and for as long
as anyone can remember, the great equalizer in this
equation has been the steadfast support of the United
States of America. Time after time UN resolutions were
either directly or pre-emptively defeated, thanks to
the great support of the United States. Therefore it is
not unreasonable to be upset, distraught, and disillusioned by a break in pattern here.
Israel, despite its best attempts to play by UN rules,
is an island unto itself at this international body. The
resolution strikes at the very core of Israels fears and
concerns, and that alone should have warranted a different reaction from our president and the administration. Focusing only on Israels role in the conflict is to
ignore the larger obstacles to peace.
Like the Washington Post and other publications,
we remain perplexed by exactly how our countrys
abstention on the resolution will further the path
toward peace.
In the end, though, our position on this matter is
focused solely on the resolution itself being antiIsrael, and the concern about the precedent set by the
administrations actions. Israel needs the support of
the United States and the benefit of the doubt when it
feels threatened or at risk. The passage of UN Resolution 2334 therefore is a major disappointment.
Jayne Petak, President
Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey
Jason Shames, CEO
Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey
Paramus
Shameful action by U.S.
It is entirely acceptable for the United States to (fervently) disagree and remonstrate with Israels settlement
policy. This has been the approach of the past three
presidents administrations.
However, to abandon her to the tender mercies of
the United Nations wolf pack is unconscionable. We
should not punish nor extort with threats or otherwise
actively interfere with our good friends internal affairs.
They (like we) are a sovereign state with a democratically elected government.
Jerrold Terdiman MD
Woodcliff Lake
Opinion
Indyk statements on Israel

and Jews prompt calls for clarification
WASHINGTONSeveral Jewish organizaIn that conversation, in 1989, Indyk
tions and leaders are expressing alarm over
reportedly said Israelis are paranoid,
former U.S. diplomat Martin Indyks role in
arrogant, and think that the rules of society do not apply to them because they
the Obama administrations recent Israel
are the goys rules. Connecting Israeli attipolicy moves.
tudes to what he characterized as Jewish
Indyk served as U.S. ambassador to Israel,
attitudes in general, Indyk reportedly said
and then assistant secretary of state, between
that Jews would do whatever they can to
1995 and 2001, followed by a stint as President
avoid paying taxes, and that Jews believe
Barack Obamas envoy for Israeli-Palestinian
Rafael Medoff
it is justified to find a way to ignore the
negotiations in 2013-2014.
law or get around it. He added, In my
Reliable Washington sources report that the
own family, my grandfather used to stay up
maps and proposals Indyk and his aides formulated in recent years still are central to the Obama administranights to figure out how to avoid paying taxes.
tions strategy for the Palestinian issue. Indyk also is said to
The reported remarks echo three of the most infamous
have remained in contact with key U.S. policymakers, even
centuries-old tropes of anti-Semites, Professor Eunice G.
though he left the Obama administration and now is executive
Pollack, a historian of anti-Semitism and co-editor of the
vice president of the Brookings Institution.
Encyclopedia of American Jewish History, said.
In media interviews and on Twitter in recent days, Indyk
You have an updated version of the classic Jewish swindler, combined with the disloyal Jew who evades his patrihas emerged as one of the most vociferous defenders of the
otic duty to pay taxes, and the millennia-old arrogant Jew
Obama administrations December 23 vote against Israeli
who, in a more religious era, was accused of deriving his
settlements at the United Nations. He also is one of the most
arrogance from his partner, Satan, Pollack said.
vocal opponents of President-elect Donald Trumps nomination of attorney David Friedman as U.S. ambassador to Israel.
Indyk has not responded to multiple inquiries about the
Indyks credibility now is being called into question, howstatements. The quotations were first raised by the organiever, as several Jewish organizations are urging him to clarify
zation Amcha the Coalition for Jewish Concerns, headed
whether or not he made a series of unusually harsh remarks
by Rabbi Avi Weiss, when Indyk was nominated as ambassador to Israel in 1995. But they were not picked up by the
about Israel and Jews in a tape-recorded private conversation
news media at the time and were not raised by senators at
when he was executive director of the Washington Institute
his confirmation hearing.
for Near East Policy, a prominent think tank.
U.S. special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations

Martin Indyk, right, greetns U.S. Secretary of State
John Kerry at Israels Ben Gurion International Airport
on January 5, 2014.

MATTY STERN/U.S. EMBASSY TEL AVIV/FLASH90
Farley Weiss, president of the National Council of Young

Israel, said, I hope he didnt say such things, and if he did, I
hope he will disavow them. Either way, he needs to address
the controversy.
Sarah Stern, president of the Endowment for Middle East
Truth, a pro-Israel think tank in Washington, said in a statement that her organization is calling on Ambassador Indyk
to immediately clarify whether or not he made these horrific
statements. Stern said it would be very ironic for Indyk to
oppose the David Friedman nomination over past statements
SEE MARTIN INDYK PAGE 40
Blaming Obama doesnt advance

the cause of Middle East peace
hat did Secretary of State

State Department, specifically indicting both
John Kerry say last week
Hamas and Palestinian Authority President
that caused former Israeli
Mahmoud Abbas. He spoke about Americas
ambassador to the United
strategic partnership with Israel and his own
States Michael Oren to say that U.S. policy
heartfelt personal connection to that nation.
toward Israeli has become sad, tragic and
And most important, Kerry made a powerful case that the only lasting solution envidangerous?
sions two states, Israel and Palestinian, for
That led Sen. Ted Cruz to say that Kerry
two peoples. The secretary was right, too, to
and President Barack Obama are relentless
Rabbi Rick
shine a spotlight on Palestinian incitement
enemies of Israel?
Jacobs
of violence and the veneration of terrorThat inspired Israeli Prime Minster Netanyahus spokesman to refer to the American
ists, and on the runaway freight train of the
abandonment of Israel?
settlement expansion, driven by the most
Nothing that successive American administrations,
right-wing elements in Israeli politics and supported by
Democratic and Republican alike, have not said before.
the Israeli government.
But that, of course, is hardly a measure of success. If the
The entire settlement enterprise is designed to make
goal of Kerrys Dec. 28 speech was to defend the U.S. decithe realization of a two-state solution more difficult, if
sion to abstain on an unbalanced, ill-timed United Nations
not impossible. And it is impossible to ignore the trends
Security Council resolution last Friday, then it was a failby the government in Israel to solidify and thicken the
ure. Further, the administrations regretful and wrongsettlements, even at the expense of legislating to upend
headed, although not unprecedented, decision to abstain
the Israeli Supreme Court. Settlements, of course, are far
rather than veto a deeply problematic Security Council
from the only impediment to progress. Kerry made his
resolution affected the way most American Jews and Israeview clear: Let me emphasize, this is not to say that the
lis heard Kerrys speech. If the speech had been given folsettlements are the whole or even the primary cause of
lowing a U.S. veto, his words would have been listened to
this conflict; of course they are not. Nor can you say that if
with far more openness.
the settlements were suddenly removed, youd have peace
Kerrys fiery and intense speech reviewed U.S. policy
without a broader agreement. You would not.
in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He offered some of the
Let us, in turn, be crystal clear: The significant obstacles to peace fall overwhelmingly on the Palestinian side,
most forceful denunciations of Palestinian instigation of
including an unwillingness to clearly recognize Israels
violence that we have ever heard from the podium at the
President Barack Obama and Secretary of State

John Kerry confer during a bilateral meeting with
Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos in Manhattan last September.
DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES
very right to exist and ongoing incitement to terrorism

that leads to murderous acts.
Kerry is also correct, of course, that the United States
should not, and cannot, dictate a solution. But his speech
reminds us that the United States has an indispensable
role to play. And it is simply impossible to ignore that
the support for Israel bipartisan support that has been
Israels bedrock, a strong pin in its own security is critical. This administration has provided Israel with unprecedented support, U.S. military aid that is unmatched.
It would also be wrong to ignore the harshness of the
unprecedented and troubling criticism aimed at the
Obama administration. Its as if name calling were being
allowed to substitute for substantive debate. It is inexcusable to accuse the president or his secretary of state of
being anti-Israel when they express views held by many
SEE BLAME PAGE 40
Jewish World
Israeli soldier who shot downed Palestinian

terrorist convicted; politicians react
JTA STAFF
TEL AVIV An Israeli soldier who shot a
downed Palestinian terrorist was convicted
of manslaughter in an Israeli military court.
The verdict against Sgt. Elor Azaria, 20,
was read out Wednesday by a panel of
three judges at the Israel Defense Forces
headquarters in Tel Aviv.
Hundreds of protesters outside the
venue clashed with police and several were
arrested over the course of the more than
three hours it took to read the decision.
The judges rejected the defenses claims
and its version of what occurred in the
March 24 shooting.
He opened fired in violation of orders,
the terrorist did not pose any threat, the
judges wrote in their verdict. The fact
that the man sprawled on the ground was
a terrorist who had just sought to take the
lives of IDF soldiers at the scene does not
in itself justify disproportionate action.
Azaria, a medic in the elite Kfir Brigade,
came on the scene following a Palestinian
stabbing attack on soldiers in Hebron in
the West Bank.
One assailant was killed, and Abdel Fattah al-Sharif was injured. Minutes later,
while Sharif was lying on the ground,
Azaria shot him in the head; his action
was captured on video by a local resident for the Israeli human rights NGO
BTselem. Azaria was arrested the same
day and indicted nearly a month later.
Autopsy reports showed that Azarias
shots killed Sharif.
Before shooting Sharif, Azaria had cared
for a stabbed soldier.
The case has been controversial in
Israel, with some on the political right calling for solidarity with Azaria and others,
including military leaders, suggesting that

such calls reflect a national crisis of ethics.
Azarias defense team said it would
appeal the verdict.
The conviction divided Israel lawmakers, with some seeking a pardon for the
soldier and others urging respect for the
rule of law.
Among those calling for a pardon were
opposition lawmaker Shelly Yachimovich, who previously served as head of the
Labor Party.
The verdict against Sgt. Elor Azaria, 20,
was read out Wednesday by a panel of
three judges at the Israel Defense Forces
headquarters in Tel Aviv.
Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman, in
a statement delivered outside the courtroom, called the verdict against Azaria
very difficult. But Even those, like
myself, who like the verdict less, must
accept and respect it, he said.
Naftali Bennett, who heads the prosettler Jewish Home party, refuted
the verdict.
Today a soldier who killed a terrorist
who deserved to die, who tried to slaughter a soldier, was placed in handcuffs and
convicted as a criminal, Bennett said in a
statement posted on Facebook.
Bennett called the criminal proceedings
contaminated from the start, citing the
fact that high-ranking army officials were
condemning Azaria within hours of the
March 24, 2016, incident in which Azaria,
a medic in the elite Kfir Brigade, shot the
assailant, Abdel Fattah al-Sharif, in the
head as he lay subdued on the ground.
Sharif and another attacker had stabbed
Israeli soldiers in the West Bank city of
Hebron, a flashpoint for Palestinian violence against Jewish Israelis.
Addressing soldiers, Bennett said: You

are our heroes; the people are behind
you. Continue to watch over the citizens
of Israel and yourselves without fear.
Culture and Sports Minister Miri Regev
of the Likud party sent an official pardon
request to the defense minister, according
to reports.
Re gev said in a Facebook post
that Az arias trial should never
have happened.
A combat incident in which a terrorist
is killed by an Israel Defense Forces soldier shouldnt get to the criminal level,
she wrote, adding that Azaria should
have been disciplined by his commander
and not subject to the judgment of politicians and the media even before the military investigation.
Isaac Herzog, head of the opposition
Zionist Union coalition, called for the criticism of the judges and the IDF to stop. He
called Azaria the victim of a situation,
and said it is impossible to ignore the
circumstances of the incident, reflecting
an impossible situation in a complex setting that IDF soldiers deal with day in and
day out.
Tzipi Livni, who also heads the Zionist
Union, said in a statement also posted on
Facebook that brave leadership needs to
come out today on the side of the IDF and
against the violence in the streets and say
that the verdict must be accepted. That
is the only way to stop the bleeding and
polarization in Israeli society that has been
created by the case.
Yair Lapid, head of the centrist Yesh Atid
party, called on Israelis and politicians to
end the violence and stop the irresponsible statements coming from within the
political system.
He added: The court has made its decision and now we also have a role to prevent a rift in our society and to ensure no
harm comes to the peoples army.
Arab-Israeli lawmakers said the verdict
was not enough.
Dozens of other soldiers and commanders who have senselessly killed Palestinians should also have been convicted,
said Arab Joint List lawmaker Ahmed Tibi.
The head of the Arab Joint List, Ayman
Odeh, used the conviction as an opportunity to criticize Israels military rule over
much of the West Bank.
While it is clear that a soldier is responsible for his own actions, those really
responsible are the governments of Israel,
which for 50 years now have chosen to
turn young men and women into soldiers whose job it is to maintain military
rule over a civilian population devoid of
rights, Odeh said.
The father of the dead terrorist told
reporters that he felt good about the
verdict, which he called fair. Other family members were quoted as saying that
they would take Azaria to the International
Criminal Court for prosecution.
Azaria family spokesman Sharon Gal
told reporters that the verdict made it
seem like the court was detached from
the fact that this was the area of an attack. I
felt that the court picked up the knife from
the ground and stabbed all of the soldiers
in the back with it.
The shooting was captured on video,
and Azaria was arrested the same day and
indicted nearly a month later. Autopsy
reports showed that the shots by Azaria
killed Sharif.
Azaria will be sentenced at a later date.
JTA WIRE SERVICE
BRIEFS
Israel issues new policy against

returning Hamas terrorists bodies
Israels diplomatic-security cabinet ruled
Sunday that the bodies of Hamas terrorists will no longer be returned to their
families for burial. Instead, the bodies
will be buried in a special cemetery for
enemy combatants.
Under the new policy, the bodies
could be exhumed and handed back for
burial if Hamas proves willing to strike
deals. The policy change came as a result
of a meeting to formulate ways to pressure Hamas to return the dead bodies
of two Israeli soldiers and two citizens
being held captive by the terrorist group.
Staff Sgt. Oron Shaul and Lt. Hadar
Goldin were killed in Gaza during Operation Protective Edge in 2014. Ethiopian
Jewish umbrella group calls for

canceling upcoming Paris peace conference
Israeli Avera Mengistu and Bedouin

Israeli Hisham al-Sayed, both suffering
from mental health issues, crossed into
Gaza willingly in 2014 and 2015 and were
captured by Hamas.
For two years and five months, nothing has been done to secure the return
of Oron and Hadar. The prime minister is responsible for turning his words
into actions, the Goldin family said in
a statement.
The Shaul family said, As far as were
concerned nothing has changed, and
were waiting for the prime minister to
show leadership and take action to bring
Oron home.

JNS.ORG
The Conference of Presidents of Major

American Jewish Organizations is calling
on French President Francois Hollande
to cancel or postpone the upcoming Paris
Middle East peace conference, saying it is
ill-conceived, poorly timed and damaging
to prospects for peace.
The Jewish umbrella organization, representing 50 member groups, also urged
President Barack Obama not to participate
in the Jan. 15 conference in the French capital, which Israeli officials will not attend.
We call on leaders of all the invited
countries, as well as members of the
[Obama] administration and Congress
to work to cancel the Paris meeting and
refocus on the parties coming together
for direct negotiations without preconditions, Stephen M. Greenberg, chairman,

and Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice
chairman and CEO of the Conference of
Presidents, said in a statement.
Greenberg and Hoenlein added that it
makes no sense to hold such a conference
when the incoming Donald Trump administration will not be there to discuss an
essential component of U.S. foreign policy
with which it will be engaged. Possible
outcomes of the conference, they said,
would add further uncertainty that will
harm future prospects while unnecessarily inserting a new element of instability to
the region.

JNS.ORG
Keeping Kosher
Sabrina Weis, a senior at Pascack

Hills, prepares a wrap with her
friend.
Spencer Berson and Noah Kindler,

freshmen at Pascack Hills, enjoy
the wrap-making with their friend.
Brunch-making with special needs teens

Last month, Valley Chabads Friendship Circle gathered for its Sunday Circle session, where high school teens work with special needs children and teens. Chef Joel
Scheinzeit from the Grange in Westwood led a session on making veggie wraps. Lisa
Friend, Heidi Pollack, and Fern Rome coordinated the event.
Deliveries from Cedar Market

speeding along via email
Cedar Market, the home of fine foods
and great savings in Teaneck, ended
the year having made a record-setting
number of free home deliveries, the
supermarket announced.
Delivering fresh foods with wildly
low prices is what our delivery team is
focused on, said Eli Langer, chief marketing officer at Cedar Market. Sending in an order request is as easy as
emailing Orders@TheCedarMarket.
com. Were thrilled that thousands of
homes have taken advantage of this
free service.
Customers create a weekly shopping list, email it, and Cedar Markets
employed shoppers do the rest.
Once all the items are checked out,
the stores delivery vans speed off to
deliver customers delicious groceries. The store says its digital team is
working on creating a website that will
make online ordering even easier.
To receive delivery location information and more, email Orders@
TheCedarMarket.com to receive
an instant auto-reply with all the
information.
Challah baking 101
In preparation for Shabbat at the synagogue, the aleph and bet classes of
the Glen Rock Jewish Centers Hebrew school baked challah from scratch.

COURTESY GRJC
Keeping Kosher
Chanukah prep with children
Students in Shomrei Torahs religious school in Wayne created edible dreidels

and chanukiyot for Chanukah.
COURTESY ST
Bris Avrohom of Fair Lawns JTeen Club gathered to prepare for its Chanukah
Wonderland by baking Chanukah cookies.
COURTESY BA
Launch of new website

about kosher food
Kosher.com is a new resource for all things kosher. It
has thousands of recipes, lifestyle articles, and videos.
Kosher.com is the first site to create an extensive database of recipes from cookbooks and magazines such
as Ami and Mishpacha, and is also producing original
recipes and videos.
Kosher.com is for anyone who wants to try new recipes, get new menu ideas, read about kosher travel, or
learn new techniques for cooking and party planning.
It features experts like Jamie Geller, Victoria Dwek,
Jay Buchsbaum, Renee Muller, Naomi Nachman, Esty
Wolbe, Heshy Jay of Scoop & Company, and more.
Kosher.com aims to be a one-stop resource for
all things related to kosher food. Its lifestyle section
promises to inspire readers with original and creative
tablescapes, holiday themes, and weeknight dinner
ideas. The community section lets people interact
with each other, ask questions, and get answers from
the sites experts.
Kosher.com also features a Community Chefs section. Anyone can become a recipe contributor by
applying and submitting their own recipe.
Kosher.com is geared for everyone from the
rookie who cant boil water up to the gourmet balabusta looking for new and creative ideas to impress
company (and even their mother-in-law). For the newcomer to kosher, there is basic information explaining
what kosher is all about, and for the longtime kosherkeeper, it has useful reminders, charts, and news
about the latest trends in kosher food, provided by a
partnership with the kashrus experts of the OU.
More than 400,000 likes.
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on Facebook.
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Dear Rabbi Zahavy
Your Talmudic Advice Column

Dear Rabbi Zahavy,
I recently realized that a religious publication that I thought was factual has at times
presented fictional material as fact. I would
rather not reveal the source, because that will
expose me in two ways. First, it will let people
know how gullible I have been. And second, it
may expose me to social criticism for doubting
authoritative religious writings.
Am I a nave rube for not picking up earlier that people make stuff up, call it fact, or
even sacred fact, and will not tell us that it
is fiction?
Awoken in Weehawken
Dear Awoken,
Its hard to answer an elliptical question
that leaves out details. I dont know exactly
what you previously thought was factual and what you believe you now know
is fictional.
We all tend to accept what we read at face
value much of the time. It would be exhausting for us to question and doubt every written factual item that we encounter. So you
took published material as fact, when perhaps some of it was fabricated in order to
make a point or teach a lesson.
In religious writings the use of parables
or stories is common, and helps to put a
face on human strivings, conflicts, doubts,
and other challenges. The midrash and the
aggadah, for instance, are literary genres
that use narratives, allegories and legends
to teach moral lessons based on biblical and
rabbinic personalities and events.
Rabbi Ari Shvat explains in a paradoxical way that all midrashim are true, yet
not all are historically factual, and the best
thing to do is to study them with a rabbi
who is experienced in the field and constantly search for the deeper meaning.
That formulation helps define the quandary of understanding religious principles
and articles of faith.
By definition, faith is not something
that needs to be or can necessarily be
proven. But it is a cornerstone of religious
belief. What if you woke up and began to
question the factuality of your published
Travelers
from page 13
Ms. Hertz said.

Whats really important and the reason for our name is that we want it to be
a resource for anyone traveling or living
abroad. While right now most of the articles
come from the younger age group, weve had
articles from people in other age groups as
well. Our goal is to make it useable for people
of all ages. In addition to articles, we have a
section called Quick List, which has things
like where to go for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, all varied by price range.
Being on a college campus is an incredible resource, she continued. So we started
34 Jewish Standard JANUARY 6, 2017
sacred religious books in the same way that

you now doubt the complete veracity of
that other publication?
What if you realized suddenly that a lot of
stuff you accepted as true, straightforward
fact, or wait, that a lot of revered writing
that you took as factual non-fiction, might
actually be made up, invented, augmented,
illuminated, or exaggerated?
That would be totally okay with some
stipulations. If you continue to attend shul
and pay your dues, if you do not share your
disillusionment and doubt with friends and
family, if you continue to go along with the
tradition, then you are demonstrating a
level of faith that does not require empirical evidence. You may take personal satisfaction that you have awoken and are not a
complete fundamentalist rube, but you may
also find comfort and meaning in adhering
to practices even if you dont view them as
based on empirical fact.
Neuroscientists who map the brain have
begun to explore the complex ways our neurons process the visible world, the world we
experience, the world of fact.
The parts of our brain that process
dreams, aspirations, questions, confusion,
doubt, and faith still are mostly a mystery.
Your awakening is a personal step in the
direction of making sense of the neural processes that are critical for human existence
and contribute to the well-being of individuals and society.
You certainly are not a rube. Good luck
in all of your serious quests for knowledge.
Dear Rabbi Zahavy,
My son has questions that I find challenging to
answer. He makes note of the mention of giant
humans in the Bible, and yet no evidence or
remains have been found to confirm that
giants walked the face of the earth. He also
finds it strange that the creation of dinosaurs,
whose existence is backed up by tangible evidence, was never referred to in the Bible. I
guess this is the classic science vs. religion
conundrum, but I would be interested in how
you might answer his specific questions.
Bewildered in Bergen
here, and found our first writers. The Emory

campus was our first network people
we knew, fraternities, sororities, social
media. People contacted us even before we
launched. We got the word out with a Facebook page and an Instagram account. We
found writers among people going abroad
and those who had just gotten back.
Ms. Hertz said she would very much like
the site to be of interest to the Jewish community. From the first day we launched, we
had Tel Aviv as a destination, she said. Its
extremely popular in our circles, for those
planning to study abroad, and as a travel destination. In addition to information about
the city, the site includes information on
Dear Bewildered,
that you ought to answer
Your son is most certainly not
your sons type of question
the first to uncover this type
as follows. You must become
of quandary. What advice do
comfortable with mystery
you think that your son wants?
and our limited powers of
Rabbi Tzvee
Among the strange things
understanding. Everything
Zahavy
in Scripture, do these alone
we purport to understand
bother him?
is only a sliver of a glimpse.
Please accept that I am not
Both science and religion ultimately are flawed and limited attempts at
going to be able to reconcile religion and
trying to get at the Truth.
science here in a column in the local Jewish newspaper. But let me try to offer some
Just to be clear, let me add a few thoughts.
advice. When you do take a close look, you
The field of ethnobiology teaches us that
may find that there are many troubling
we humans have evolved to cherish and
things about the Bible.
rely on both science and religion, because
For example: I have studied science and
doing so makes us stronger and fitter. Science provides us with great power to know
find that it conflicts with the Tanach, in
and control the world via experimentation
ways like those you mentioned. I believe
and invention and engineering.
that science is based on solid empirical evidence and study. Does that mean I must
And have no doubt, religion inspires
believe that the Tanach is false? If science is
us to great heights and binds us together
truth, maybe you want to ask, why I should
to achieve national, social, and communal goals and benefits for the sake of
continue to be a religious Jew?
If that is the case, I have an answer. Yes,
all humanity.
you should continue to be a religious Jew,
Humankind will not survive and thrive
even though science and religion may be
without all our great human accomplishments and disciplines. I cant argue with
incompatible in many ways. Each discipline of the intellect deals with different
those who say put science first. Yet I cannot
challenges of humankinds eternal quest to
disagree with those who say religion is indispensable to human existence.
explain existence. Science explains a massive set of concerns about the physical and
I hope those thoughts help you and your
biological universe. It has paradigms and
child respect and ponder the great ways
models for verifying its conclusions. It is
men and women seek to use the powers
based on rigorous disciplines of investigaof science and religion to create goodness,
tion and thought. And religion explains an
mercy, and lovingkindness in our world.
equally great number of questions about
life and the spirit.
Tzvee Zahavy received his Ph.D. from Brown
Both modes of thinking and investigating
University and his rabbinic ordination from
life are powerful and true in their own ways.
Yeshiva University. He is the author of many
My view is that trying to reconcile them
books about Judaism, including The Book
is a worthy task, but not one that has much
of Jewish Prayers in English, Gods Favorite
chance of success. They are fundamentally
Prayers and Talmudic Advice from Dear
incompatible disciplines.
Rabbi which includes his past columns
A wise friend of mine told me recently
from the Jewish Standard and other essays.
The Dear Rabbi Zahavy column offers mindful advice based on talmudic
wisdom. It aspires to be equally open and meaningful to all the varieties and
denominations of Judaism. You can find it here on the first Friday of the
month. Please email your questions to zahavy@gmail.com.
Israel itself, how to make a phone call, restaurants, and the weather. It also suggests ways
to spend weekends.
One writer from Emory just graduated
and is moving to Israel to study at Neve College for Women in Jerusalem. Shes committed to writing articles about her experience.
We also have a bunch of writers studying in
Israel this coming semester who are planning to put something together, and we have
a wonderful relationship with Birthright
through social media. Wed love to support it
because its incredible.
Shes been interested in history from the
time she was young, Ms. Hertz said, and her
entire family loves to travel. That combination,
she said, has been very helpful in her work.

Were trying to build a community of people
who love traveling and want to talk about it.
Its directed to everyone older and younger
and from all socioeconomic backgrounds. At
heart is a desire to build a fully integrated community coming together through their love
and passion for traveling. Its important to us
and I think its achievable.
One way to reflect on your experiences
is by writing about them. Were getting
great feedback from writers, who say it was
an enjoyable process to think back on their
travels. Many people are craving this kind of
opportunity, either to get involved or to read
about anothers experience.
Dvar Torah
New Years Resolution: Reconciliation
very New Year, I tell the parable

of a king who was blessed with
an only son. The king reared
his son lovingly from childhood
and rejoiced at his wedding. His greatest
hope was for his son to live a life of integrity and virtue. But he was doomed to bitter disappointment.
The young man did not fulfill his fathers
hopes and dreams for him. His behavior turned his fathers love into hostility,
which caused his father to banish him
from the kingdom. For many years the
young man wandered from city to city,
from village to village.
After years of wandering, the son
yearned to return home. Finally, he found
his way back to the palace, threw himself
at his fathers feet, and implored him for
forgiveness. Father, father, he cried out
in anguish, if you do not recognize my
face, surely you must remember my voice,
which has not changed. At that moment
the king realized that it truly was his son,
and after a tearful reconciliation he was
welcomed back home to the royal palace.
When the story is told on Rosh Hashanah, the message is clear. It is a parable
about teshuvah (repentance and reconciliation) with God. It is a reminder that once
we return home to the palace, or more
precisely once we return to God, God will
take us back.
Enemies
FROM PAGE 7
got jobs, got an education, and after two

years my mother decided it was time to
move on. We got on a train and went to
New York.
In New York, Ms. Miller went to college,
earning a degree in business from Baruch.
She met a handsome World War II Army
veteran, Robert Miller; the two married
in June 1955 and had three children and
one grandchild together. Mr. Miller died
in 2014.
In 1968, the young family moved to
Montvale, where they lived until Bella and
Bob moved to Wanaque in 2010.
My sweetheart grew up in Wyckoff,
Ms. Miller said. His family were the first
Jews in Wyckoff; he was born in Passaic,
where his father had two drug stores, but
he lost them both during the Depression.
But he got a store in Wyckoff.
That drugstore, Millers Pharmacy, is
still in Wyckoff; Mr. Miller was its business
manager and now his nephew runs it.
So Ms. Miller has a lot of experience that
can reflect on her views of how to treat
enemies.
I cannot forgive and forget, she said.
reconciliation, he weeps
Yet, on this first Shabbat of
upon the brothers, finally
the secular New Year, and as
allowing the brothers to
we read parashat Vayigash, the
speak to him, after so many
story holds another message.
years of truly being unable.
It becomes a reminder of the
What was it about that
power of teshuvah between
moment together that
a father and a son, or more
caused Joseph to finally
precisely between one person and another. Secular New
reveal his identity to his
Rabbi Loren
Year celebrations include makbrothers and behave in
Monosov
ing resolutions for the coming
such a way that he was able
Conservative
year, which more often than
to move forward a relationTemple Emanuel of
ship that was so troubled?
not includes reconciling chalthe Pascack Valley,
Woodcliff Lake
lenging relationships from the
The answer is teshuvah.
year past.
Ramban teaches that comOur parashah this week
plete repentance is done by
drives home this important message.
the one who is confronted by the identical situation in which he transgressed and
As the parashah begins, Joseph is standing before his 11 brothers. Benjamin is
so it is within his power to commit the
accused of theft and is facing a punishsame sin, but he does not succumb, not
ment of imprisonment. The brothers fear
out of fear or weakness, but because of
returning to their father, Jacob, without
true repentance.
him. Judah pleads on Benjamins behalf,
Josephs brothers were faced with the
offering himself in Benjamins stead,
same scene from earlier in their history.
only to realize that the man with whom
Years ago, they threw Joseph into the
he is pleading is the man he had helped
pit and reported his false death to their
throw into a pit and sell, a long time ago.
father, Jacob. Would they be willing to
The relationship between Joseph and
return home without Jacobs beloved Benjamin, or had they repented? Was history
his brothers has been fractured for so
to repeat itself or would the story, and the
many years.
Finally, at this moment in our parafamily, move forward?
shah, Joseph finally reveals his true idenJudah the brother who suggested years
tity to his brothers. In this moment of
ago that Joseph be sold finally stood up
for what he knew was right and pleaded

for Benjamins release. Seeing that Judah
had done true repentance, Joseph was
moved to reveal his true identity and open
the lines of communication between himself and his family, ultimately paving the
way to be reunited with his father Jacob.
Reconciliation is not a simple matter.
The challenge exists for both the one
doing the repentance and the one who
is willing to welcome someone back. It
takes a willingness on the part of the one
doing repentance to work toward finding
his metaphorical way home. At the same
time, it takes openness and willingness to
receive the person home. When it comes
to our relationships with God, it is clear
that God is willing to take us back home,
when we make the effort to return. Yet,
with our human relationships that is often
the challenge; ensuring a willingness to
accept someones teshuvah and resume
a relationship.
This is the work we face entering this
secular New Year. Our resolutions are
for naught if we are unwilling to appreciate others repentance and begin to
work toward repairing the damaged relationships in our lives. Joseph reminds
us of rising beyond ones past and moving forward.
This first Shabbat of 2017 should be one
of going forward together.
leads is an open and welcoming community which is shorthand for saying

that it is open and welcoming to everyone, including members of the LGBT community. That is somewhat challenging for
some people; one person wrote a scathing letter attacking me over that issue, he
said. So I want to explore that area a little
how sometimes the thing we do to make
enemies is unintentional.
His experience with enemies does
show, he said, that there isnt one size
that fits all.
Christian theology does call for victims
to forgive their abusers, but its more complicated than it might seem, he said. The
first misunderstanding that Christians
have is that it has to happen immediately.
Sometimes it takes time.
Does it have to happen at all? I think that
we are called to forgiveness, but maybe not
when we think it should happen, or when
other people think it should happen.
And we tend to confuse forgiveness
with trust, he added. I remind people
that while we are called to forgive, we are
not called to trust. I can forgive a person,
but that doesnt mean that I will turn the
keys over to that person. And that means
some liberation, and I can move into the

forgiveness a little faster.
In the Christian world, to some extent,
the burden is on the victim to reach out
to the abuser. Although I am the victim,
I have the burden to go and say, You
harmed me. You hurt me. We struggle with
that as well. When I am hurt, I turn away. I
cut you off. But we are called to re-engage.
Yes, he said, the victimizer has some
responsibilities as well. Eventually the
other person is called to come with a
repentant heart. There should be some
change in them. If I come to them and
share my hurt and pain as a fellow human
being, they should start to find the empathy that will bring them to realize that
what they did was wrong, and to bring
change within them.
Transformation doesnt always happen, Rev. Busker added. And, he repeated,
it takes time. I am intrigued by people,
when something tragic has happened to
them, and right away they are saying, I forgive them. I really think that it takes time.
So three speakers, three different histories, probably two perspectives, give or
take. Theyll discuss, maybe heatedly, but
they wont leave as enemies.
It would be very difficult. They killed one

million little Jewish children. The innocence was killed. If wed had all those people, who knows? Maybe we would have
found a cure for cancer.
Reconciliation? No! How can you forgive something like this? How can you
reconcile? There is not a chance. It is
beyond objectionable. There are people
who still want to kill us. Who is qualified
to forgive? The Good Lord. What constitutes remorse? I cannot answer that. It is
beyond any answer.
The Holocaust is beyond forgiveness.
The Rev. Nathan Busker has not had the
same devastating experience with enemies
that Ms. Duker and Ms. Miller have had,
but he said that we can have enemies on
both the macro level and the micro, and
for myself its more on the micro level.
He had led a church in Colorado before
he moved to New Jersey, and in that congregation he struggled with the enmity of
some of its members, who were looking
to inflict damage on me not physical but
emotional and spiritual and vocational,
he said. He learned a great deal, much of it
painful, from that experience.
And now, in Oakland, the church he
Briefs
Crossword
GETTING ANIMATED BY YONI GLATT
Defeating projections, Israeli

economy grows by 3.5 percent in 2016
The Israeli economy grew by 3.5 percent in
2016, exceeding the Bank of Israels original
prediction of 2.8 percent growth, the central
banks research department said.
The banks data indicates that Israelis
standard of living grew by 2.9 percent last
year, that private consumption rose by
5.9 percent, and that per capita growth
increased by 1.5 percent. The Bank of
Israel had initially predicted 0.5 percent
per capita growth in 2016. The year has
KOSHERCROSSWORDS@GMAIL.COM
DIFFICULTY LEVEL: EASY
also seen unemployment in Israel drop to

a record low of 4.8 percent.
According to the data, first quarter economic growth was slow in 2016, but the
economy began accelerating in the second
quarter, when overall investments jumped by
10 percent double the central banks original projection. Imports (excluding defense
imports) rose by 10.2 percent last year, and
overall consumption (excluding defense consumption) grew by 4.3 percent.
JNS.ORG
Most impressive Jewish baseball

team ever assembled to visit Israel
Ten American Jewish professional baseball
players who are representing Israel in an
international tournament are visiting the
Jewish state for a week starting January 3.
The players are members of Team Israels
squad for the next World Baseball Classic
tournament, which is scheduled for March
2017 in Seoul, South Korea. The visiting
group includes Ty Kelly of Major League
Baseballs New York Mets, Ryan Lavarnway
of the Oakland Athletics, Jon Moscot of the
Cincinnati Reds, Corey Baker of St. Louis
Cardinals Minor League system, Gabe
Kapler of the Los Angeles Dodgers front
office, and free agents Ike Davis, Sam Fuld,
Josh Zeid, Cody Decker, and Jeremy Bleich.
The team is clearly the most impressive

Jewish baseball team ever assembled, and
we are very proud that they will be representing our country at the WBC, said Peter
Kurz, president of the Israel Association
of Baseball.
According to the WBCs rules, the
American Jewish players can take the
field for Israel in the international competition because they are eligible for
Israeli citizenship.
While in Israel, the players will visit Tel
Aviv, Jerusalem, an Israeli Air Force base,
the Masada fortress and the Dead Sea, in
addition to meeting Israeli baseball players
JNS.ORG
and practicing for the WBC.
Israel sees 27,000 new immigrants

in 2016, slight dip from previous year
Israel saw approximately 27,000 new immigrants arrive in 2016, with newcomers from
Russia and Brazil rising significantly but overall immigrations down from 31,000 in 2015,
according to year-end figures from the Jewish
Agency for Israel and the Israeli Ministry of
Aliyah and Immigration Absorption.
Some 7,000 immigrants arrived in Israel
from Russia, which was the highest country total, up from 6,600 who arrived in
2015. But all the other top countries for aliyah saw declines from their 2015 totals.
Approximately 5,500 immigrants arrived

from Ukraine, compared to 7,221 who came
in 2015. An estimated 5,000 new immigrants
came from France, compared to 7,900 in
2015. Aliyah from the U.S. amounted to 2,900
immigrants, compared to 3,070 last year.
Nevertheless, there were increases in aliyah from some other countries. Newcomers
from Brazil increased significantly, with some
760 immigrants in 2016 compared to 497 in
2015. Immigration from Belarus and South
Africa also saw increases last year. JNS.ORG
Dozens of New Zealand pro-Israel

groups slam anti-settlement UN resolution
Twenty-seven pro-Israel organizations
in New Zealand wrote a letter to Prime
Minister Bill English strongly objecting to
his governments support for the recent
United Nations Security Council resolution
targeting Israeli settlements.
The December 23 resolution was first
introduced by Egypt, which backed down
after President-elect Donald Trump intervened, before New Zealand took the lead
in pushing for a vote along with Senegal,
Malaysia and Venezuela.
Haaretz reported Thursday that ahead
of the vote, the U.K. worked with the Palestinian Authority to pressure New Zealand
to push the vote forward.

We are ashamed of the role of New Zealand in this travesty and feel betrayed by
our government, the New Zealand proIsrael groups letter stated. New Zealand
partnered with Malaysia, Senegal and Venezuela to sponsor the resolution, countries
which do not share our liberal Western values. The resolution has been praised by
Islamic Jihad and Hamas. This is nothing
to be proud of.
New Zealands support for the resolution came just a week before the end of
the countrys two-year term on the Security Council.
JNS.ORG
Across
1. Bava ___ (Talmud Tractate)
6. City that doesnt allow Jews entry
11. ___ the love of G-d!
14. Biblical brother often paired
with Gad
15. Norman Lears ___ the Family
16. Oliver Stones ___ Given Sunday
17. Cartoon family that breaks all
the Commandments?
19. YUs high school for boys
20. Mother who brokered a temporary
cease-fire in the 1982 Lebanon War
21. Unreturned serve for Sela
22. Jerusalem or a National Park in
62-Down
23. Israeli news site
24. Avrahams oldest
27. Mix (the cholent)
29. Towards Genesis
32. Theyre near this puzzle
35. One of 49
37. Mark of Cain, e.g.
38. Bird locale for doing the mitzvah of
Shiluach HaKan
40. What some might do at the Kotel
on 9 Av
42. Young Frankenstein hunchback,
and others
43. Allergen in most challah
45. Kippur and HaZikaron
47. Jew
48. Empire that ruled Jerusalem for
400 years
50. The Plot Against America author
52. Yoni Netanyahu helped free several
of them
54. ___ Olam
58. Steven Bochcos Blue cop show
60. Davids was 70 at his end
61. Shtetl locale
63. Rock genre of Joe Trohmans Fall
Out Boy
64. Cartoon about writer R.L.s ancestors? (with The)
66. What ppl. used to use to tape
The Nanny
67. Esa ___
68. End an IDF mission early
69. Common tree in Israel
70. Rabbi Avi that made headlines
71. Simcha dances
Down
1. Mashuga like the Joker
2. How some look after fasting
3. ___ Will Be Blood (Day-Lewis film)
4. Does teshuva, in a way
5. Ben Canaan and Gold
6. Where Israel is outlined
7. Idinas Queen of Arendelle, and others
8. Say G-d willing by you at a wedding, e.g.
9. Rav Chen or City (viewing centers)
10. Response to a Talmudic Q
11. Cartoon about a gentile man of
the house?
12. Im ___ you! (Im no yutz!)
13. Baseballer Braun
18. Bialik who played Blossom
22. 1983 Woody Allen title character
25. Recent red states of those in
blue states?
26. Chagall, e.g.
28. Poles that might be idoltarous
30. First name in Israeli basketball
31. ___AQ, where many Israeli stocks
are traded
32. 2013 Best Picture winner with
52-Across
33. Yutz
34. Cartoon thats pure tref?
36. Star of Stevens Jaws
39. Respected an elder
41. Make like Ben Stein in Ferris
Buellers class
44. Actress Portman
46. Greatest of the prophets
49. Voldemorts snake that tries to kill
Radcliffes Potter
51. Maker of kosher (and tref) gummies
53. Simmons and Kelly
55. Jewish Federation funder
56. Work by Gershwin or Mozart
57. Bird locales for doing the mitzvah of
Shiluach HaKan
58. Har where 46-Down died
59. JCC alternative
62. See 22-Across
64. Rob Reiners A ___ Good Men
65. Frank McCourt memoir or a contraction for Lazarus
The solution to last weeks puzzle is

on page 43.
Arts & Culture

Philosopher Bernard-Henri Lvy
revisits Jewish roots in new book
CNAAN LIPHSHIZ
PARIS Its a vague childhood memory,
but the French celebrity philosopher Bernard-Henri Lvy still remembers the first
time he was bullied for being Jewish.
Three idiots in a Paris play yard tell me:
You dont get to have Christmas presents
because youre a dirty Jew and Jews killed
Jesus. Maybe I cry a bit on the street later,
but first I start hitting, the 68-year-old
Lvy, who was born in what today is Algeria but grew up in France, recalled in an
interview earlier this month.
More than half a century later, Lvy
a slender man with wavy gray hair who is
one of Frances most recognizable personalities still is embracing his Jewish identity and confronting anti-Semites.
But since that childhood incident, Muslim extremists have taken anti-Semitism in
France from schoolyard taunts to terrorism,
with many deadly attacks on Jewish targets.
This return of anti-Semitism, Lvy
said, perhaps prompted him to write
one of his most Jewish books ever, The
Genius of Judaism. The English-language
translation will be released next month in
the United States, and Lvy will do a Q&A
with Charlie Rose at the 92nd Street Y in
Manhattan on January 11.
In the book, Lvy, a non-observant Jew,
traces the Jews misunderstanding with
the nations to their definition as a chosen people.
Far from suggesting superiority, Lvy
writes, this status means that Jews are the
guardians of a treasure of knowledge
found in sources that Lvy has studied for
decades: the Talmud and the writings of
such sages as Rashi, Rambam, and the Malbim. Much of the book is devoted to his
musings about their writings, as well as
reflections on his own past.
The Genius of Judaism is one of the
most personal books Lvy has ever written. He is an influential, poker-faced intellectual who neither smiles much during
interviews nor engages in small talk. The
book in a certain manner sums up my
life, holds the key to my endeavors and
traces the roots of my worldview, he said
at a video editing studio in Paris, where he
is preparing a documentary about Iraq.
In the book, Lvy advocates a definition
of Judaism that emphasizes work, not
belief. Study, not worship, he said.
Unlike his role as a moral authority on
current affairs Lvy has made several
high-profile trips to conflict zones, arguing for humanitarian intervention The
Jewish element in me, it does not live in
this time or the other, he said.
Bernard-Henri Lvy, shown wearing his trademark white collar shirt, muses
about Talmudic sages and reflects on his life in his latest book.
ALI MAHDAVI
An outspoken advocate of Israel and

prominent supporter of the fight against
anti-Semitism, Lvy is among several
well-known French Jewish intellectuals
along with philosopher Alain Finkielkraut
and historian Georges Bensoussan who
have come under attack recently from
the far left, particularly in a secularist
society where many resent ethnic and
religious affiliations.
Not that Lvy minds.
I was always proud to be Jewish, he
said. I always believed it was a source of
glory, never anything to question or be
ashamed of. Let them call me what they
want.
In France, Lvy is revered by some and
hated by others in part for his influential activism in conflict zones, including
his perceived key role in bringing about

Frances intervention in the former Yugoslavia and Libya, according to a 2014 documentary about him by the France 2 television channel. His support for Israel has not
earned him many fans.
Vilified by nationalists and conservatives
who resent his humanist agenda, he also is
assailed by radical leftists, who accuse him
of serving neo-colonialist governments
that they say are seeking pretexts to invade
foreign countries.
So intense is the hatred of Lvy in certain quarters that in 2010, Le Figaro published an article analyzing the sentiment.
Titled BHL, Frances most hated darling, the story referred to countless death
threats online, accusations of corruption,
and conspiracy theories.
Lvy insists that the considerable antagonism he provokes, particularly among

left-wingers, is primarily over support of
Israel, he said.
Despite his vocal criticism of its settlement policy, Lvy has defended Israel consistently. In a 2010 speech in Tel Aviv, he
said of the Jewish state and its military: I
have never seen such a democratic army,
which asks itself so many moral questions.
There is something unusually vital about
Israeli democracy.
Lvy said he also holds Israel to a high
moral standard for this reason. Israels
indifference when it comes to refugees
from Syria didnt measure up to the stature of a Jewish state, he said, adding that
President Barack Obama has a crushing
responsibility for the humanitarian disaster there.
Lvy, who with his two siblings sold
their late fathers wood-import empire
for an estimated $155 million in 1997, has
used his wealth to become one of Frances
most talked-about personalities, producing films, books, and publications, including the La Rgle du Jeu, a cultural review
magazine that he launched in 1990. BHL,
as he is known locally, also has made
countless appearances on French talk
shows and used his fortune and celebrity
to leave a remarkable impact on international politics.
In 2011, he toured Libya with private security guards to chronicle the bloody ouster of
SEE LVY PAGE 41
Calendar
session course through
March 6, at the Kaplen
JCC on the Palisades,
10 a.m. 411 E. Clinton Ave.
(201) 408-1457.
Saturday
January 7
Adoption support in
Ridgewood: Adoption
Memory loss:
lawyer Debra Guston

offers a pre-adoption
workshop at a meeting
of the New Jersey
chapter of the Adoptive
Parents Committee
in Ridgewood,
6-8 p.m. Refreshments.
79 Chestnut St.
(201) 301-2816 or www.
adoptiveparents.org.
Alzheimers New Jersey

holds a community
education program,
Understanding Memory
Loss, at a Senior Source
meeting, 1:30 p.m., on
the second floor at the
Shops at Riverside, Suite
310, in Hackensack.
(201) 342-0962 or www.
seniorsourcellc.com.
Rabbi Yonason Sacks
The Orthodox Union

sponsors the Day of
Torah & More indoors,
for women and men,
at Citi Field Convention Center in
Queens on Sunday, January 15,
from 8:45 a.m. to 6:15 p.m.. The
day will feature 30 speakers from
all over the Orthodox world, who
will offer talks on the future of
Orthodox Jewry. Topics include
halacha (Jewish law), Tanach
(Bible), hashkafa (moral and
ethical code), and Israel. Rabbi
Yonason Sacks, pictured above,
the rosh yeshiva of Lander College
for Men; Mina Glick; Rabbi Shalom
Rosner; and Rabbi Menachem
Genack are among the speakers.
Free parking, kosher food, and
childrens programming are
available. Register at ou.org/citi.
Courtesy OU

jan.
Zumba in Tenafly:
The Kaplen JCC on
the Palisades hosts a
Zumba party with exotic
rhythms, high-energy
Latin and international
beats, and easy-to-follow
moves, for everyone 12
and older, led by a team
of skilled, inspirational
JCC Zumba instructors,
7:30-8:45 p.m. 411 East
Clinton Ave. Roberto
Santiago, (201) 408-1481,
www.jccotp.org, or
rsantiago@jccotp.org.
Israeli wine tasting:

Lauren and Greg
Sandler host an Israel
wine tasting for adults,
particularly Temple
Beth Tikvah religious
school parents, at
their Wayne home,
7:30-10:30 p.m. Tasting
led by a wine expert
from Kedem Winery.
Appetizers and desserts.
Proceeds benefit TBT
religious school and
family programs. Greg,
(201) 704-3768.
Wine and whiskey

in Englewood:
The sisterhood of
Congregation Ahavath
Torah offers a night
of wine and whiskey
tastings by Wine Country
Stores and music by
George Stass, 8 p.m.
Cheeses, appetizers, and
snacks. 240 Broad Ave.
www.ahavathTorah.org/
sisterhoodevents.
Sunday
January 8
Red Apple Rest:
The mens club and
sisterhood of Temple
Beth El of Northern
Valley in Closter host
brunch and a program
on the Red Apple Rest,
9:30 a.m. Author Elaine
Freed Lindenblatt,
the youngest child of
15
the Red Apple Rests

founder, Reuben Freed,
discusses her book,
Stop at the Red Apple.
The restaurant was on
old Route 17 on the
way to the Catskills. 221
Schraalenburgh Road.
(201) 768-5112 or www.
tbenv.org.
Misha Piatigorsky
Jazz in Glen Rock:
New York-based jazz
pianist Misha Piatigorsky
performs original jazz
compositions and the
music of John Coltrane
and Miles Davis at
the Glen Rock Jewish
Center, 5 p.m. Bassist
Charlie Dougherty and
two GRJC members
saxophonist Jeremy
Fishman and drummer
Sam Fishman will join
him. Refreshments. The
concert will be recorded
and available online.
682 Harristown Road.
(201) 652-6624 or grjc.
org.
Israeli film in Tenafly:

IAC Cinematec, a
series of Israeli films at
the Kaplen JCC on the
Palisades, offers the New
Jersey premiere of Mr.
Gaga Sun, 8 p.m. Series,
with English subtitles,
continues February
19, March 5, and May
28. 411 E. Clinton Ave.
(201) 408-1409.
Monday
January 9
Memoir writing in
Tenafly: Ruth Padawer
begins Memoirs: Explore
Your Life Through
Writing, an eight-
Tuesday
January 10
Music in Tenafly: The
Alacorde Piano Trio,
with violinist Jee Sun
Lee, cellist Suji Kim,
and pianist Jacqueline
Schiller-Audi, performs
at the Kaplen JCC
on the Palisades,
11 a.m. 411 E. Clinton Ave.
(201) 408-1457.
Friday
January 13
Nursery school open
house in Tenafly:
The Leonard & Syril
Rubin Nursery School
at the Kaplen JCC
on the Palisades
holds an open house,
9:30 a.m. 411 E. Clinton
Ave. (201) 408-1436 or
eyurowitz@jccotp.org.
Saturday
January 14
Shabbat in Teaneck:
Temple Emeth holds a
Shabbaton exploring the
themes of Let There Be
Water by Seth M. Siegel,
this years JNNJ One
Book One Community
selection. Torah study,
9 a.m.; services at 10:30,
where Rabbi Sirbu will
incorporate themes from
Siegels book; lunch at
noon; and ending with
a discussion, Water
and Environmental
Peacebuilding in Israel,
by Shahar Sadeh, Ph.D.,
of Columbia University.
1666 Windsor Road.
(201) 833-1322.
Sunday
January 15
Matt Chertkoff
Kosher jazz in Fort Lee:
The JCC of Fort Lee/
Cong. Gesher Shalom
hosts Kosher Jazz With
Matt Chertkoff, a CSI
Scholar Fund program,
1 p.m. Chertkoff plays
with a four-piece combo
and he explains how
Yiddish songs speak to
the Jewish experience
and how religious
melodies morph into
jazz. 1449 Anderson Ave.
(201) 947-1735.
Kabbalah in Fair Lawn:

Bris Avrohom holds the
second part of a fourweek Kabbalah course
focusing on Jewish
observances as a model
for educating children,
8 p.m. 30-02 Fair Lawn
Ave. (201) 791-7200 or
www.JewishFairLawn.
org.
Wednesday
January 11
Using your iPad:
The EGL Foundation
Computer Center for
Adults 40+ at the Kaplen
JCC on the Palisades in
Tenafly offers a course
on the iPad, 1:30 p.m. 411
E. Clinton Ave. MaryAnn,
(201) 569-7900, ext. 309.
Concert in Wayne:
The YMCA of Wayne
begins a new Backstage
at the Y series with a
performance by the Hit
the Roof Band in the
Rosen Performing Arts
Center, 11:45 a.m. The
Metro YMCAs of the
Oranges is a partner of
the YM-YWHA of North
Jersey. 1 Pike Drive.
(973) 595-0100.
Yiddish music in
Franklin Lakes: Temple
Emanuel of North Jersey
plays a recording of
the Folksbiene Yiddish
Theaters American
Treasures concert, 1 p.m.
Ice cream and popcorn.
558 High Mountain Road.
(201) 560-0200 or www.
tenjfl.org.
Life with children:

Joanna Faber, daughter
of award-winning author
Adele Faber, offers a
hands-on workshop
based on the best-selling
books How To Talk So
Kids Will Listen and
Listen So Kids Will Talk
by Adele Faber and
Elaine Mazlish at the
Chabad Center of Passaic
County, 7 p.m. 194 Ratzer
Road. (973) 694-6274.
Sarah Rindner
Michael Laves
Book discussion: The

Jewish Center of Teaneck
holds its first Leaves of
Faith book club with
a discussion of Marilyn
Robinsons novel Lila,
8 p.m. Discussion led by
Professor Sarah Rindner,
who teaches English
literature at Lander
College for Women
and has taught English
at Maayanot and SAR
high schools. 70 Sterling
Place. (201) 833-0515 or
jcot.org.
Television concert:
Acclaimed Israeli
cantor/Broadway star
Dudu Fisher debuts
a concert on NJTV,
8 p.m., in anticipation
of an upcoming public
television concert on
stations nationwide in
March. It also can be
seen on WLIW21 on
January 22 at 7:30 p.m.,
and on Channel 13 in
February. Dudu Fisher in
Jerusalem is distributed
by American Public
Television and presented
by WPBT, Miami.
Singles
Sunday
January 8
Seniors meet in West
Nyack: Singles 65+
meets for a social bagels
and lox brunch at the
JCC Rockland, 11 a.m. All
are welcome, particularly
if you are from Hudson,
Passaic, Bergen, or
Rockland counties. 450
West Nyack Road. Gene
Arkin, (845) 356-5525.
Thursday
January 15
Widows and widowers
meet in Glen Rock:
Movin On, a monthly
luncheon group for
widows and widowers,
meets at the Glen Rock
Jewish Center, 12:30 p.m.
682 Harristown Road.
$5 for lunch. Next
date, February 16.
(201) 652-6624 or email
Binny, arbgr@aol.com.
Gadi Dagon
Calendar
Israeli film series starts Sunday

Chamber music at Kaplen JCC
The Thurnauer Chamber Music series at
the Kaplen JCC on the Palisades presents
Postcards from the Old World on Saturday, January 7, at 7 p.m. Join artistic director/violinist Sharon Roffman and friends
for an evening of music from central
Europe, featuring music by great Czech
and Hungarian composers of the 19th
and 20th centuries. The concert features

trios written in the Terezin concentration
camp by Hans Krasa and Gideon Klein and
includes works of Antonin Dvorak, Zoltan
Kodaly, and Ernst von Dohnanyi. Guest artists include violist Dov Scheindlin and cellist Clancy Newman. For information, call
(201) 408-1465 or go to www.jccotp.org.
The Kaplen JCC on the Palisades presents IAC Cinematec, a U.S. public introduction to Israeli films, filmmakers, and
daily life in Israel. The four-film series
will be screened with English subtitles,
and a guest director, actor, or a film professional will discuss the film.
The series begins on Sunday, January
8, with Mr. Gaga. There will be a reception at 7:30 p.m., and the film will follow
at 8. Gagas director, Tomer Heymann,
will be joined by by Eran Polishuk, director of film and media at the Israeli Consulate. Before the film there will be a Gaga
dance workshop. For information, call
(201) 408-1427 or go to www.jccotp.org.
Twist of Faith run extended

The ongoing run of the comedy/drama
Twist of Faith at the Black Box Performing Arts Center of Teaneck has
been extended. The newly revised production of the Off-Broadway hit was written and directed by Michael Gurin. The
show, based on an original concept by
Matt Okin, features two young professional actors, Jake Levine and Joseph
Ramondino.
Performances are set for Tuesday,
January 10, at 9:15 p.m.; and Thursday,

January 19, and Thursday, February 2,
both at 8 p.m., at Black Box Studios new
home, Teanecks Black Box Performing
Arts Center, 200 Walraven Drive, just
off Palisade Avenue in Teaneck. (GPS
address is 290 Walraven Drive.) Both
Thursday night shows will be followed by
an audience talkback with the performers and creative team. Call (201) 357-2221
or go to www.blackboxpac.com/twist.
Early bird special for Tenafly camp

There is an early bird special for summer
2017 at the Neil Klatskin Day Camps at the
Kaplen JCC on the Palisades in Tenafly.
Families who sign up for the full eight
weeks by January 15 will save $350 on the
price of camp. The discount will be prorated for enrollment of less than 8 weeks.
The camps offer 3- to 7-year-olds a
nonstop summer adventure, where they
can enjoy the outdoors, learn new skills,
make new friends, and explore personal
interests. Age-appropriate programming includes sports, Red Cross instructional and recreational swim, Tae Kwon
Do, yoga, art, drama, music, Judaic
programming, and special events. The

camp provides lunch, snacks, towel service, and camp swag.
Camp is set on a 21+-acre campus that
has three pools, a sprinkler park, sports
facilities, a low ropes course with a zip
line, indoor rainy-day facilities, and
more. The youngest campers, the 3- and
4-year-olds, are based in air-conditioned
rooms with head counselors who are
certified educators. Registration options
include four, five, six, seven, or eight
weeks. Five- to 9-year-old children with
special needs can participate as well.
The Jazz Passengers
Courtesy TBENV
Music series at Closter shul

Temple Beth El of Northern Valley offers MusicLAB (Live at Beth El), a new series
underwritten by Whole Foods Market. The first concert, Saturday, January 14, at
8p.m., features the Jazz Passengers. Bucky Pizzarelli performs on March 4.
The shul is at 221 Schraalenburgh Road in Closter. For information, call (201) 7685112 or go to tbenv.org/musiclab.
Jewish Standard JANUARY 6, 2017 39
Local/Opinion
Narratives
FROM PAGE 9
see when you read a lot of colonial narratives is that there are things like this text
that are presented in a very factual way
that nonetheless strain belief. Sometimes
we know theyre actually true. Sometimes
we know theyre stretched. Sometimes we
know theyre completely made up.
Were dealing with this brave new world,
and people are wrapping their heads around
it the best they can.
I believe that he did not lie. I dont believe
he fabricated it. He got nothing out of it. He
seemed very sincere. I dont think hes trying
to make something up.
My good friend Jonathan Schorsch
devotes the last chapter of his book Swimming the Christian Atlantic to this text.
He tries to think about it ethnologically.
What do we know about that part of South
America at that time?
Martin Indyk
FROM PAGE 30
that Friedman made, if Indyk made the

repulsive remarks he is alleged to have
made prior to his own nomination.
In a tweet that was quoted in the New
York Times and elsewhere, Indyk sarcastically asserted that Friedman would be a
great ambassador for the deep settler state.
But David Friedman needs to be U.S. envoy
to all Israelis. Is he up for that? In an interview with CNN anchor Chris Cuomo, Indyk
said Friedmans call for moving the U.S.
embassy from Tel Aviv to western Jerusalem
is incendiary because it would imply that
the United States was recognizing Israeli
sovereignty over all of Jerusalem, including
the Arab part...which has the third-holiest
mosque in Islam.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean
of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said that
Indyk forgot to mention that what he
calls the Arab part of Jerusalem includes
a large Jewish community, the Western
Blame
FROM PAGE 30
Israelis. Indeed such anti-Israel voices

as former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud
Barak welcomed Kerrys speech.
Some honest reflection is a good thing at
the end of this year, which coincides with
the end of the eight-year Obama administration. The plain truth is that the Palestinians, the Israelis, and the United States
have not been blameless during this latest
chapter of working toward peace. Blaming
He starts thinking about runaway Indian

colonies. Some of the runaway tribes who
went out to the mountains and constituted
a new society were already Christianized
by the time they did that. They spoke in
very antinomian biblical terms about the
end of days, about the justice that would
rain down on the Spanish. These messianic
ideas might have been part of what de Montezinos encountered.
The other thing to remember is that
there is a long history of people reporting
to have met, or to be, members of lost tribes
of Israel.
One of the problems that the Europeans
had when they came to America was figuring out where to place the native Americans
in their anthropological scheme. Are they
part of the descendants of the children of
Noah? If they are, why havent we heard of
them? Where do we put them?
One of the theories that was very popular is that theyre the lost tribes. It was a
pretty common conjecture. People would

find common practices between Judaism
and the tribes, linguistic proofs. Theyre
not convincing to me, but at the time they
seemed to have worked, Dr. Perelis said.
The third memoir Dr. Perelis writes about
in Narratives from the Sephardic Atlantic
is not written by a converso, but rather by
an Old Christian, the term for those Catholics in the Spanish-Portuguese world who
were not of converted stock. His name was
Manuel Cardoso de Macedo.
He starts his life as the son of a well-todo merchant in the Azores, said Dr. Perelis.
His father does a lot of business with England, so he sends his 14-year-old son there
to study English. It was the end of the 16th
century. He sent this good Catholic kid to
one of the centers of Protestant radicalism.
The boy loved it. He loved reading the Bible
on his own. He went to London and bought
seven books of the seven sects and read
them all to decide what to be.
He led a double life. Eventually word got

out and he was confronted by the bishop. He
declared his faith in Calvins ideas. Hes in
the Inquisition for a couple of weeks and he
meets a converso.
That changed his life. He realized there
are Jews who actually exist in the world.
He had never met anyone who kept the
things that the Bible said. After his release
in Portugal, he connects with the conversos family members and decides he
wants to live like a Jew. He arranges their
escape from Portugal very heroically. He
goes to Homburg, becomes circumcised,
eventually makes it to Amsterdam where
he writes his life down.
If this all sounds fascinating to you Dr.
Perelis said he is often advised to turn it into
a screenplay Dr. Perelis wont disagree.
I feel Ive been so lucky, he said. So
many people who write books get so sick of
their material by the end. I still find the stories powerful and eye-opening.
Wall, the Temple Mount, and the Mount

of Olives, which contains the oldest Jewish cemetery in the world. That mosque
is the third-holiest site to Islam, but Har
Habayit (the Temple Mount) is Judaisms
holiest site. Cooper said the current
status quo, in which the U.S. does not
recognize any part of Jerusalem as sovereign Israeli territory, is patently unfair.
The Wiesenthal Center, World Jewish Congress, National Council of Young
Israel and other Jewish groups have
endorsed the Friedman nomination.
EMETs Stern said that Indyks judgment and objectivity were severely
undermined two years ago, when it
was revealed that he had accepted a
$14.8-million contribution from the government of Qatar for the Brookings Institution. Qatar is the largest financer of the
terrorist organization Hamas.
Adam Kredo, a senior foreign policy
writer for the politically conservative
website Washington Free Beacon, said
that Indyk is known among reporters
for anonymously criticizing Israel in the

press, for planting stories meant to pressure the Jewish state into making concessions, [and for] leading the Obama
administrations efforts over the years to
discredit Israel and blame it for the failure in peace talks.
Indyk took to Twitter this week to
accuse Kredo of spreading fake news
when Kredo reported that Vice President Joe Biden was involved in lobbying
on behalf of the U.N. resolution against
settlements. Israeli government officials subsequently publicly charged that
Biden personally lobbied the government
of Ukraine to back the resolution. Biden
has denied the accusation, and there has
been no evidence to support it.
At the same time, Indyk was engaged
in a Twitter mini-war last week with both
an Israeli embassy official and a former
colleague. It began with Indyk tweeting
that the U.N. resolution was not an attack
on Israel but was aimed only at settlers,
who undermine peace negotiations [and]
are hurting Israel. Reuven Azar, deputy

chief of mission at Israels embassy in
Washington, replied, Please dont lie to
your followers. This pro-BDS resolution
is unprecedented.
Indyk shot back, Diplomats are sent
abroad to lie for their country. But that
doesnt include accusing people of lying.
Leave that to your political bosses. Azar
responded, Well keep fighting for our
country and youll keep lecturing us,
to which Indyk sarcastically replied,
Happy Hanukkah to you too.
Robert Satloff, who serves in Indyks
former post as executive director of the
Washington Institute for Near East Policy, weighed in on Azars side, tweeting,
I disagree w/my friend @martin_indyk.
Weve tried and failed using chainsaw on
settlement issue; it needs a scalpel.

JNS.ORG
one party is hardly accurate or constructive. Too many Israelis hold the Palestinians totally responsible, and too many Palestinians hold only Israel responsible and
yes, too many Americans also apportion
responsibility unfairly on one of the two
sides. And the incoming U.S. administration seems to hold the Obama administration as the main culprit in the current
stalemate. None of these approaches is
accurate or constructive.
As a new U.S. administration prepares
to take office, we hope and pray it will
not begin by abandoning a two-state

solution. No one naively believes that two
states for two peoples living side by side
in security and peace is around the corner, but it remains a beacon of possibility, especially when all the other options
are so deeply flawed.
At the end of the day, the long, deep
bipartisan support for the State of Israel
must not be undermined. I am deeply
afraid that Israel is becoming a completely partisan issue, and for that there
is plenty of blame to go around. Id ask
no, beg that the U.S., Israeli and Palestinian leadership, present and future,
stop blaming everyone else and accept
responsibility for moving us forward, not
backward.
Now that Chanukah has ended, lets
not let the light go out the light of courageous leadership, the light of truth and
JTA WIRE SERVICE
the light of peace.
Dr. Rafael Medoff is the director of the

David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust
Studies.
Rabbi Rick Jacobs is president of the

Union for Reform Judaism, the largest
Jewish movement in North America.
Obituaries
Dorothy Baig
Dorothy Baig, ne Larmon, 103,

of Pompton Lakes, formerly of
Prospect Park, died January 3.
Predeceased by her husband,
Benjamin, and a daughter,
Barbara, she is survived by
a son, William (Karla); four
grandchildren; five greatgrandchildren, and two
great-great-grandchildren.
Donations can be sent to
the American Cancer Society.
Arrangements were by Louis
Suburban Chapel, Fair Lawn.
Hannah Coen
Hannah Gertrude Coen, 77, died

December 6.
A classical pianist, she co-owned
Edwards Mens Clothing Store in
Brooklyn.
Edward, and a daughter, Andrea
Goodman, she is survived
by a son, Robert, and five
grandchildren.
Arrangements were by Eden
Memorial Chapels, Fort Lee.
Aharon Ivanir
Aharon Ivanir, 86, of Fair Lawn

died January 1. Arrangements
were by Louis Suburban Chapel,
Fair Lawn.
Lvy
FROM PAGE 37
its longtime tyrant Moammar Ghadafi. With a single phone call, Levy
arranged for rebel leaders to meet
then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Levy flew them to Paris at his
own expense about $160,000
according to Frances Channel 2.
Weeks later, France intervened
militarily in Libya, effectively ending
Ghadafis 42 years in power. Levy was
with Sarkozy on stage when the president delivered a speech in Benghazi
after Ghadafis fall.
Famously, Levy a former Maoist whose father was a decorated
fighter in the Allied invasion of Italy
was filmed giving an interview in
1992 to a journalist in Sarajevo under
mortar fire. During that visit to the
former Yugoslavia, he arranged for
then-French President Francois Mitterrand to visit the besieged capital,
paving the way for the return of U.N.
peacekeepers there.
In 1993, a suspension of air traffic
left Levy stranded in Sarajevo on his
wedding day. So Mitterrand sent a
Rachel Kaplan
Rachel D. Kaplan, 50, of

Englewood, formerly of Teaneck,
died November 23.
A self-employed lawyer, she
graduated Tufts University and
Northwestern School of Law at
Lewis & Clark College. She was
a member of Temple Emeth in
Teaneck.
Predeceased by her father,
Howard, she is survived by her
mother, Carol, ne Silber, of
Teaneck; sisters, Deborah Falkow
(Howard), and Sarah Kaplan
(Peter Bogdanow), and nieces and
nephews.
Donations can be sent to
Temple Emeth, Teaneck.
Isak Meryam
Isak Meryam, 90, of Paterson

died January 3.
Leon Presman
Leon Presman, 90, of Highland

Beach, Fla., died December 28.
Born in Argentina, he owned
Presman Jewelry Manufacturing
in New York City, before retiring.
He is survived by his wife, Aida,
plane to extract him and bring him

to his bride, actress Arielle Dombasle, according to France 2. He and
Dombasle, his third life partner, are
still married, despite reports that he
was seeing other women.
In addition to Levys influence on
women, He has such a powerful
gravitational force that even the president likes, perhaps even wishes, to
work side by side with Bernard-Henri
Levy, Bernard Kouchner, a former
foreign minister of France, said in the
Channel 2 documentary. Its a great
talent he has had, to persuade those
in power.
But some of Levys critics are irked
primarily by what they regard as his
vanity, which they perceive in his
trademark white collar shirt, which
typically is unbuttoned nearly to his
navel during public appearances.
Sometimes his views are consumed by his personality, Anne Sinclair, a well-known French television
journalist, told France 2. Seeing
that black suit with the white shirt
in the dunes of Libya I, too, find it
annoying.
But, Levy says, A vain person puts
ne Schuster, children, Danny of

Fort Lee, Richard of North Bergen,
and Silvia Presman of Closter, and a
brother, Abe.
June Rogers
June Arlene Rogers, 89, ne Trager,

of New York City died December 27.
She was a member of Temple Sinai
of Bergen County in Tenafly.
Arnold in 1977, she is survived
by daughters, Wendy Rogers and
Nancy Stern, both of Fort Lee, and
a granddaughter.
Obituaries are prepared with

information provided by funeral homes.
Correcting errors is the responsibility
of the funeral home.
Robert Schoems Menorah Chapel, Inc

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28. He is survived by his wife,
Marilyn, children, Donna
Weinberg (Mark), June Weinstein
(Lee), and Gary (Mary); a sister,
Lois Ratner, and grandchildren,
Maddi, Brett, and Cydney.
Contributions can be sent to
an Alzheimers based charity
or Cancer Care. Arrangements
were by Gutterman and Musicant
Jewish Funeral Directors,
Hackensack.
him or herself ahead of others. Honestly, I think a substantial part of my

life was spent doing the opposite.
Putting myself behind others, sometimes while risking my life.
In The Genius of Judaism, Levy
recalls some of these adventures,
including his reluctance to leave
the relative safety of his hotel room
in war-torn Sarajevo. Years later he
would return to that moment, relating the experience to the biblical
prophet Jonahs reluctance to preach.
And he revisits his disillusionment
following the rise in fundamentalism, which dashed his hope in 1979
that he was at the apogee of the age
in which God had died, he writes.
It had been beautiful. It had been
huge.
Suspicious of worship, Levy said he
nonetheless has striven to imbue his
daughter and son novelist Justine,
42, and lawyer Antonin-Balthazar, 36
with Jewish values and culture.
I did not enroll them to Jewish
schools, he said, but I hope they
will follow my travel itinerary from
the secular world to the treasure of
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Gallery
1
n 1 From left, Rabbi Dov Drizen of Valley Chabad

and Cantor Alan Sokoloff of Temple Emanuel of the
Pascack Valley join Woodcliff Lakes Mayor Carlos A.
Rendo at the Borough of Woodcliff Lakes menorah lighting.
n 2 The Chabad Jewish Center of Upper Passaic County partnered with the local Home Depot and hosted
a menorah-building workshop at the store. More than
50 children participated. PHOTO COURTESY CHABAD
n 3 The JCC of Paramus/Congregation Beth Tikvah held its
annual faculty/board of education dinner last month. Rabbi
Arthur Weiner, Cantor Sam Weiss, and education director Marcia
Kagedan are shown here with teachers and board members.
n 4 The Jewish Center of Teanecks Menorah Men keyboardist Josh Levine, trumpeter Amir Cohen, and drummer Jonathan Resnick performed at the shuls Chanukah community
youth party. Levines and Resnicks sons are shown with them.
Meredith Levine chaired the party committee. MICHAEL LAVES
n 5 Last month, participants in the JLI course How Success
Thinks at Lubavitch on the Palisades celebrated their classs
graduation. The six-week class was led by Rabbi Mordechai
Shain. The next course is The Dilemma: Modern Conundrums. Talmudic Debates. Your Solutions. COURTESY LOTP
n 6 Ilan Mendelson of Teaneck with the 770-One MissionOne Nation menorah he entered in Tenaflys Lubavitch on
the Palisades community menorah contest. COURTESY LOTP
Real Estate & Business
Israeli high-tech exits at $10 billion in 2016

Viva Sarah Press
The Israeli high-tech arena posted $10 billion in exits
in 2016 including the $4.4 billion Playtika acquisition
in July according to the annual end-of-year market
report by IVC-Meitar.
A breakdown of the numbers shows Israeli high-tech
companies closed 104 deals including 93 mergers
and acquisitions with a total value of nearly $8.8 billion; eight buyouts that generated $1.22 billion; and
three small IPOs garnering $15.1 million, according to
the IVC-Meitar High-Tech Exits Report, published on
January 3, 2017.
Including Giant Interactive Groups acquisition of
Israeli social games developer Playtika, overall Israeli
high-tech exits in 2016 topped 2015s $9.02 billion.
The IVC Research Centeran online provider of data
and analyses on Israels high-tech, venture-capital and
private-equity industries reports that without the
Playtika deal and the acquisition of EZchip by Mellanox for $811 million (which account for about 50 percent of total M&As and thus skew the data), 2016 actually posted fewer deals as compared to the year before.
Following several years of growth both in terms of
deal numbers and their proceeds, 2016 presents an
obvious slowdown, Alon Sahar, partner at law firm
Meitar Liquornik Geva Leshem Tal, which specializes
in representing technology companies, said. The
analysis excluding the Playtika deal yields figures that
are substantially lower than in previous years. Its
impossible to tell whether this is the beginning of a
new trend or a natural correction due to significant
hikes in previous years. We will need to wait a few
quarters to see whether or not the market is facing a
profound change.
Report editors arent sure the drop in overall deals
is a bad thing: We believe the numbers represent a
true change in the Israeli entrepreneurs and investors state of mind, preferring company growth over
early acquisition.
Koby Simana, CEO of IVC Research Center, said,
2016 was by no means sub-par. In fact, it proved better than the previous year in terms of the average exit
multiple, and was one of the best in multiples overall. This, coupled with the relatively lower volume of
deals compared to 2015, suggests to us that entrepreneurs and investors may not be pushing for exits as
they once did. Instead, it seems investors are looking
closely into other alternatives. An opportunity to sell
requires positive returns and substantial multiples,
otherwise companies and investors choose to wait
patiently, opting for company growth.
Indeed, without Playtika, the IVC analysis shows
We believe the
numbers represent a
true change in the
Israeli entrepreneurs
and investors state of
mind, preferring
company growth over
early acquisition.
2016 numbers were similar to 2012s $4.76 billion in 92

deals and was far above 2008-2010s average $2.65 billion
in 86 deals.
Ethosia CEO Eyal Solomon, whose high-tech humanresources company also produces an end-of-year market
report, echoes that 2016 was a good year overall in Israeli
tech despite world predicaments.
The year began with a strong push from 2015, which was
a fantastic year for high-tech, Solomon said. As the year
progressed, and in the wake of the uncertainty created by
Brexit, the US elections and the concern of investors regarding what is happening in the stock market, some global companies scuffled along and even stopped investing. However,
See high-tech page 46
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towards the end of the year, we saw

that these events did not affect longterm stock exchanges and the market
returned to being zealous, with a rally
of funding.
In 2016, Israeli companies buying
other Israeli companies proved to be a
hot trend, accounting for 27 percent of
M&As.
In general, Internet companies led
exits in 2016, according to the IVC-Meitar
report, with 55 percent of total exits and
more than twice the sectors average in
the past five years.
Semiconductors followed with 16
percent of the exits amount, with three
deals exceeding $200 million each
Mellanoxs acquisition of EZchip ($811
million), Ciscos acquisition of Leaba
($320 million) and Sonys acquisition of
Altair ($212 million).
Nearly 50 other Israeli companies
made at least one M&A deal in 2016,
either in Israel or abroad, according to
the report.
Amdocs, ironSource, Somoto and
SuperCom each made two Israeli acquisitions in 2016.
Overall, M&A expenditures by Israeli
companies hit an all-time record of $3.28
billion, in addition to over $45 billion in
M&A deals made by Teva Pharmaceuticals in 2016.
For the first time, the IVC-Meitar
report categorizes Israeli high-tech exits
by sector to show where the local ecosystem is strongest. The report highlights cybersecurity, advertising technology and automotive technologies as
the countrys most prominent segments.
There are over 450 cybersecurity
companies,420 ad-tech companies and
260 automotive tech companies operating in Israel today.
While capital-raising for cybersecurity
reached a record number in 2016 nearly
$700 million the number of exit deals
and their proceeds have dropped.
Fourteen Israeli cybersecurity exits
were closed in 2016, garnering a total of
$662 million, a sharp 48 percent drop,
compared to 2015s $1.27 billion in 20
deals, according to the IVC report.

The largest cyber exit in 2016 was the
$293 million acquisition of CloudLock
by Cisco, slightly below 2015s Adallom
acquisition by Microsoft, which closed at
$320 million.
The fact the cluster continues to
generate superb returns, and the obvious interest from investors including
growth rounds and late-stage capital
means companies are not pressured to
make exits, and that deals are closed
only when they benefit both investors and entrepreneurs. With over
450 active Israeli cybersecurity companies today, this sector is likely to
continue to expand, while producing
individual exits, according to the IVCMeitar report.
According to the IVC-Online Database,
in the past three years, 35 ad-tech companies have been acquired or merged,
five held IPOs (four in 2014) and one was
acquired in a buyout, resulting in a total
of $1.89 billion in exits.
The largest deals during that period
include the $200 million acquisition of
Exelate by Nielsen and the $150 million
acquisition of SuperSonic by ironSource,
both in 2015.
Israels automotive sector is led by
Mobileye, which logged both the largest
buyout deal of $400 million in 2013 and
the largest IPO, generating over $1 billion in 2014 while its market cap nearly
doubled since.
In 2016, six exit deals garnered a total
of $205 million in the automotive cluster. The largest was Harmans $75 million
buyout of TowerSec.
Ethosias report concurs that Israels
automotive technologies are likely to
shine in 2017, alongside new disruptive
tech for more traditional sectors.
We believe 2017 will be characterized by extensive capital-raising and
that the market will return to a boiling
point because of the developing of new
technologies as well as a new increase
in demand from traditional companies
in the banking, automotive, insurance,
and many other sectors, Ethosias Solomon said.
ISRAEL21C

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