Trump and Netanyahu: The mixed messages of a diplomatic ... · Netanyahu, left, and President Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House on February 15. (Photo by Andrew Harrer

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FEBRUARY 23, 2017

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INSIDE THIS ISSUEReading with dementiaA look at a picture book designed for Jewish adults living with Alzheimer’s and other dementias.

Story on page 12

News in brief... A poll says most Americans view Israel favorably; Hamas has new political leader; and more.

Story on page 15

Intermarriage Israeli rabbis check families’ lineage; interrmarried in U.S. form communities with each other.

Stories on pages 3 and 11

February 24 ................................ 5:30 pmMarch 3 ........................................ 5:38 pmMarch 10 ...................................... 5:46 pm

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VOLUME X, NUMBER 4

SPOTLIGHT

At right: Israeli Prime M i n i s t e r B e n j a m i n Netanyahu, left, and President Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House on February 15. (Photo by Andrew Harrer/Pool/Getty Images)

ANALYSISBY RON KAMPEAS

WASHINGTON (JTA) – One state. Flexibility. Two states. Hold back on settlements. Stop Iran.

When President Donald Trump met Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: What a press conference!

But wait.In the Age of Trump, every post-event

analysis requires a double take. Not so much “did he mean what he said?” – he appears to mean it, in real time – but “will he mean it next week? Tomorrow? In the wee hours, when he tweets?”

This is a president who, after all, speaks of a “ban” on travelers from Muslim-ma-jority countries and then deploys his spokesmen to insist there is no ban and, by the way, don’t mention Muslims either.

So what can we take away from the February 15 Netanyahu-Trump summit?

A lot. Trump’s interlocutor on Febru-ary 15, Netanyahu, has a more evolved reputation for consistency – indeed, for coherence. And despite his renowned capacity for peregrinations of thought, Trump offered enough substance in his remarks – for instance, confirming a pivot in U.S. policy away from an emphasis on a two-state solution as an outcome to Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

So, let’s venture into the February 15 summit.

Trump and Netanyahu: The mixed messages of a diplomatic lovefest

ONE STATE, TWO STATESAt first blush, Trump appeared to headily

embrace the prospect of one state – although it’s not clear what kind of single state he meant. Would Palestinians in the West Bank be enfranchised? Comb through what he said, and his departure from the policies of his three predecessors was indeed substan-tive, but not necessarily radical.

“So I’m looking at two-state and one-state, and I like the one that both parties like,” he said, as Netanyahu chortled.

“I’m very happy with the one that both parties like. I can live with either one,” Trump said. “I thought for a while the two-state looked like it may be the easier of the two. But honestly, if Bibi and if the Palestinians – if Israel and the Palestinians are happy, I’m happy with the one they like the best.”

Trump is not endorsing a single state – he’s kicking it back to the parties: Figure it out, Trump says. Trump’s three

predecessors have also said that the final status must be determined by the Israelis and the Palestinians, but also have made clear that the only workable outcome is two states.

What’s the difference? Netanyahu, in his remarks and briefing Israeli reporters after his three-hour summit with Trump, indicated that the difference is leverage for Israel: If the Palestinians want their own state, it must adhere to Israel’s terms.

Netanyahu has always said that he be-lieves a Palestinian state should recognize Israel as a Jewish state, and that it must be demilitarized and accept Israeli security control of the West Bank. Until now, those were his preferred outcomes. On February 15, he attached a new descriptor to those terms: “pre-requisites.” That leaves little wiggle room for the Palestinians.

The Israeli leader, notably, also did not use the term “two states” and refused to afterward in his briefing with reporters.

Netanyahu said instead that others, in-cluding former Vice President Joe Biden, have cautioned him that a state deprived of security control is less than a state. Instead of pushing back against the argument, he said it was a legitimate interpretation, but not the only one.

That relieves pressure from Net-anyahu’s right flank in Israel, which has pressed him to seize the transition from the Obama administration – which insisted on two states and an end to settlement – to the Trump administration and expand settlement. Now he can go home and say, truthfully, that he has removed “two states” from the vocabulary.THE KID IN THE CANDY SHOP

Netanyahu was like the proverbial kid in the candy shop: He couldn’t have made clearer his relief at the departure of President Barack Obama. “I think that’s a change that is clearly evident since Presi-dent Trump took office,” Netanyahu said at the joint press conference, referring to Trump’s tough talk on Iran. “I welcome that. I think it’s – let me say this very openly – I think it’s long overdue.”

See “Mixed” on page 4

With full Talmud translation, online library hopes to make sages accessible

BY BEN SALESNEW YORK (JTA) – For centuries,

studying a page of the Talmud has come

with a bevy of barriers to entry. Written mostly in Aramaic, the Talmud in its most commonly printed form also lacks punc-

tuation or vowels, let alone translation. Its premier explanatory commentary, composed by the medieval sage Rashi, is usually printed in an obscure Hebrew typeface read almost exclusively by reli-gious, learned Jews. Even then, scholars can still spend hours figuring out what the text means. And that’s not to mention the Talmud’s size and cost: 37 full volumes, called tractates, that can take up an entire shelf of a library.

Helping students and readers crack these barriers and access what amounts to a library of Jewish law, ritual, folklore and moral guidance has been an ongoing endeavor. Milestones include the first (unfinished) at-tempt at an English translation by American publisher Michael Levi Rodkinson at the turn of the 20th century, an abridged version by Rabbi Chaim Tchernowitz in the 1920s, and “The Soncino Talmud on CD-ROM” from 1995. Now, a website hopes to build on these earlier breakthroughs and break all the barriers at once.

The interface of the Steinsaltz Talmud on Sefaria includes line-by-line translation, along with links to commentaries and references to a range of Jewish sources, which appear in a separate vertical. (Photo courtesy of Sefaria) See “Talmud” on page 10

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THE REPORTER ■ FEBRUARY 23, 20172

A MATTER OF OPINION

“ The Reporter” (USPS #482) is published bi-weekly by the Jewish Federation of Northeastern Pennsylvania, 601 Jefferson Ave., Scranton, PA 18510.

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FROM THE DESK OF THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

MARK SILVERBERG

BY MARK SILVERBERGDespite the fact that we have lost many

devoted members of our communities throughout the past year, our annual UJA Campaign – which concludes in May – shows that a significant number of our current Campaign donors have increased their gift this year over last year’s Campaign gift.

In addition, we have been fortunate in that two new UJA Cam-paign grants from the Schwartz-Mack Foundation (Scranton) and the Lester G. Abeloff Foundation (Stroudsburg) have just been received and two new Perpetual Annual Campaign Endowment funds have been established during the past two months through the Federation’s Legacies for Life Endowment Program. As has been the policy of the Federation for decades, only 4.5 percent of the fair market value of each P.A.C.E. Fund, determined on an annual basis, will be added to our an-nual UJA Campaigns in perpetuity, thus ensuring the perpetuation of these funds for future generations.

As an expression of our deep apprecia-tion, all donors to our 2017 UJA Campaign will be listed in our 2017 UJA Campaign Honor Roll, as will those who have estab-lished endowments with the Federation throughout the decades under our Legacies for Life Endowment Program.

Thoughts on our 2017 UJA Campaign and our Legacies for Life Endowment Program

Both will be honored in our 2016-2017 Annual Report, which will be placed on our Federation website and distributed in our Reporter newspaper in June to each and every identifiable Jewish household

in Lackawanna, Monroe, Pike and Wayne counties. It is our way of expressing our gratitude to them and to each of you for honoring and sustaining our community through your generosity and vision.

Despite these new grants and endow-ments, however, our 2017 UJA Campaign is not yet over. It is critical that our Cam-paign closes at $900,000 – slightly more than the amount raised in last year’s 2016 UJA Campaign of $893,734.

As of February 9, our 2017 UJA Cam-paign stood at $826,758, but there is still much to be done and many gifts remain outstanding. Completing our current Cam-paign and adding new contributors to our 2017 UJA Campaign rolls while there is still time is critical if we are to avoid the consequences of reducing allocations to our many Jewish educational, religious, cultural, social and recreational agencies and institutions in Northeastern Pennsyl-vania that provide our Jewish communities with so many important services.

As you know, these institutions and agencies include or have included:

� Jewish Agency for Israel and the Amer-ican Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, both of which provide a wide range of religious, medical, social, cultural and rec-reational services in Israel and throughout the world, wherever Jewish communities are isolated or threatened

� Jewish Community Center (Scranton) � Jewish Family Services of Northeastern

Pennsylvania (Scranton) � Hebrew Day School (Scranton) � Jewish Resource Center of the Poconos

(Stroudsburg) � Chabad of the Abingtons/Jewish Dis-

covery Center (Waverly) � Yeshiva Beth Moshe/Milton Eisner

Institute (Scranton) � Temple Hesed Religious School

(Scranton) � Temple Israel Religious School

(Scranton) � B’nai Harim Religious

School (Pocono Pines) � Temple Israel of the

Poconos Hebrew School (Stroudsburg)

� Bais Yaakov (Scranton) � Scranton Ritualarium

(Community Mikvah, Scranton) � Jewish Fellowship of Hemlock Farms

Religious School (Lords Valley) � Jewish Heritage Connection (Scranton) In addition, capital grants (for renova-

tions and/or security purposes) and grants for new, innovative and creative programs have also been awarded to many of these agencies, including Congregation Beth Israel (Honesdale), from the Federation’s Unrestricted Endowment Fund income.

A UJA Campaign shortfall would result in the elimination of many programs, as well as staff reductions and a scaling-down of allocations to our many funded agencies, He-brew schools and social service institutions across the board – a concern increased by the current state budget battle over extending educational tax credits to our Hebrew schools and tax-exemption status issues that may affect our region’s Jewish summer camps and JCCs – both of which issues are currently being debated in Harrisburg.

Nor will we be in a position to fulfill our commitments to Israel or to assist the thousands of frightened European Jews currently considering aliyah to Israel to escape rising antisemitism in countries where, for centuries, their ancestors con-tributed to the betterment of European life.

For Europe’s Jews, that era is now coming to an end.

In 2014, Jews in France were the target of 51 percent of racist attacks, even as they make up less than one percent of the popu-lation. As a result, 40,000 French Jews, or 10 percent of the population, have already left France for Israel. Worse, a 2013 E.U. survey found that 40 percent of European Jews fear to publicly identify as Jewish, including 60 percent of Swedish Jews. A significant portion of our NEPA UJA dollars is thus dedicated to JAFI. and the

JDC to assist in defraying the expense of this massive European aliyah.

Our communities were founded by those who believed in the continuity of Jewish life here in Northeastern Penn-sylvania, in Israel and around the world. It was their generation that contributed to the birth of the modern Jewish state and supported Israel through its many wars against those who continue to seek its destruction.

It was their generation who built our religious, recreational, housing, educa-tional and social welfare institutions and synagogues, established Hebrew Free Loan Associations to assist newly-arrived European Jewish immigrants in estab-lishing their lives here in Northeastern Pennsylvania, built our Hebrew schools and senior living facilities, and understood very well that they were planting seeds for generations of Jews here in NEPA who would follow in their footsteps.

Now, it is our turn to carry the torch of Jewish continuity into the future.

As Jews, we are required both by our history and our traditions to secure our Jewish future in NEPA as much as we are required to preserve a strong, dynamic and secure Israel. If there is to be a next generation here, it will be because we have willed it to be so. Just as our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents did for us, so must we do the same for those who will follow us.

So, if you have not yet made your pledge to our 2017 UJA Campaign that ends in May, but are considering doing so, I hope you will do so now. The pledge does not have to be paid until the end of this year.

Please direct it to the Jewish Federa-tion of Northeastern Pennsylvania, 601 Jefferson Ave., Scranton, PA 18510, with “2017 UJA Campaign gift” written on the memo line.

Our community will be grateful for any gift in any amount you choose to give.

Please remember: We are one family, and by working together for this common vision, we will continue their legacy.

My sincerest thanks and appreciation to each of you.

Mark SilverbergExecutive director, Jewish Federation

of Northeastern Pennsylvania

BY SEFFI KOGEN(JTA) – For decades, supporters of the

U.S.-Israel relationship have insisted on strong bipartisanship rather than allying their cause with the Democrats or Re-publicans. So even while a typical bit of punditry over the past few presidencies was to assert that Bill Clinton, or George W. Bush, or Barack Obama was “the most pro-Israel president in history,” Israel advocates nevertheless kept their heads and painstakingly maintained strong relationships on both sides of the aisle.

Now some are eagerly making the same grandiose claim about President Donald Trump – that he will be the great-est friend Jerusalem has ever had. While we should and do welcome friendship from President Trump, and look forward to working with him to strengthen the American-Israeli relationship, there are dangers in this perception.

Loath to turn the crucial cause of U.S.-Israel ties into a political football, savvy advocates both on campus and off have traditionally resisted branding one party or the other as insufficiently “pro-Is-

We’ll lose college students if Israel becomes a partisan cause

rael.” But partisans have taken a different path. It is increasingly common to hear Republicans assert that they are the true keepers of the U.S.-Israel relationship – a claim that can be heard from some Democratic activists, too. Disturbingly, some prominent Democrats – particularly the young and the populist – are rejecting the old orthodoxies of the friendship. The result is that on both ends of the spectrum, and with conflicting intent, Israel’s star is being hitched to Trump’s ascendant wagon.

This is a mistake for three reasons.First, Donald Trump was not a conven-

tional candidate and his is likely not to be a conventional presidency. The animus that he inspired among Democrats was particularly acute on college campuses and may lead future Democrats to define themselves as critics of all causes President Trump embraces.

If Israel’s American friends allow their more liberal alliances to wither, and fail to nurture understanding and support for Israel among longtime co-alition partners, Israel may find itself

on the outs if and when the pendulum swings and Democrats reclaim Con-gress or the White House. Already, when asked by Pew whether they sym-pathize more with Israel or the Pales-tinians, only 33 percent of Democrats say Israel (compared with 74 percent of Republicans). This should worry all lovers of Israel, as being a true pro-Is-rael advocate means keeping the issue as nonpolitical as possible, regardless of your own political preferences.

Second, college students – many of whom are more likely to see Israel as the Goliath towering over a Palestinian David, rather than as the spunky David facing down the giant Arab world – polled as particularly allergic to Trump. The con-cern, then, is not just that the next crop of Democrats elected won’t assign proper value to the U.S.-Israel relationship, but that Israel could lose an entire generation of American friends. Remember, for many campus progressives, even Obama was too conservative – a sentiment that motivated support for Bernie Sanders.

See “Students” on page 6

3 FEBRUARY 23, 2017 ■ THE REPORTER

Check out the Federation’s new, updated website at www.jewishnepa.org or find it on FacebookÊ

DEADLINE

DEADLINESThe following are deadlines for all articles and

photos for upcoming Reporter issues.ISSUE

Thursday, February 9 ................ February 23Thursday, February 23 .................... March 9Thursday, March 9 ........................ March 23Thursday, March 23 .......................... April 6

BY JNS STAFF(JNS.org) – The Jewish National Fund nonprofit

is hosting 60 inclusion-related events through-out Israel during February’s Jewish Disabilities Awareness and Inclusion Month, with the stated goal of “ensuring that no member of Israeli society is left behind.”

“Many people with physical, emotional, and de-velopmental disabilities in Israel feel alienated from their communities, sometimes the entire family feels marginalized, complicating an already challenging life,” JNF Task Force on Disabilities Director Yossi Kahana, whose son has autism, said in a statement. “At Jewish National Fund, we open the doors to ac-ceptance and inclusion and are we changing lives for thousands of children and their families every day.”

JNF’s month-long slate of programming features representatives from the organization’s partners on year-long initiatives that assist Israelis with disabil-ities, including ALEH Negev-Nahalat Eran, a reha-bilitative village in the Negev; the LOTEM-Making Nature Accessible initiative, which brings people with special needs closer to nature through outdoor activities; the Red Mountain Therapeutic Riding Center at Kibbutz Grofit, which provides horseback riding therapy; and Special in Uniform, a program that works to integrate youths with disabilities into the Israel Defense Forces.

Jewish Disabilities Awareness and Inclusion Month coincides with North American Inclusion Month each February.

JNF hosts inclusion events across Israel for disabilities awareness month

L-r: Chen Orpaz with Israel Defense Forces Lt. Col. (Ret.) Ariel Almog, founder of the Jewish National Fund-supported Special in Uniform program, which integrates youths with disabilities into the Israeli military and assists them with their post-army careers. (Photo courtesy of Jewish National Fund)

L-r: Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi David Lau and Sephardi Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef attended a New Year’s ceremony at the national headquarters of the Israel Police in Jerusalem on September 7, 2015. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

Citing intermarriage threat, Israeli rabbis check families’ lineages

BY ANDREW TOBINTEL AVIV (JTA) – Yael knew she would have to

prove she was Jewish. But she never expected trying to get married would turn into a nearly yearlong investi-gation of her family. In the end Yael, who asked to go by a pseudonym to protect her privacy, was barred from marrying in Israel, along with her mother and older brother. Although they had long ago immigrated to this country as Jews, their lineage did not check out with the state religious authorities.

“Having an official Jewish wedding was always im-portant to me,” she said. “Now I feel like a second-class citizen. It’s very upsetting to me. It’s very upsetting to my family.”

Over the years, the Orthodox rabbis who control marriage in Israel have become increasingly stringent about checking who is a Jew. More and more marriage applicants have been sent to rabbinical courts to be vetted. And in December, those courts claimed the authority to put marriage applicants’ families on trial, too.

Anyone found not to be Jewish is added to a marriage “blacklist,” as happened to Yael and her family.

In December, lawyers from ITIM, a nonprofit that helps people navigate Israel’s religious bureaucracy, appealed to the Supreme Rabbinical Court in Jerusalem on behalf of Yael’s mother and brother, as well as family

members blacklisted in two other cases. ITIM lawyers argued that the rabbinical courts had acted outside their legal jurisdiction by adjudicating people’s Jewishness without their consent. Because Jewishness is passed down from mother to child, the rabbinical courts bring in siblings or matrilineal relatives of marriage applicants

and typically issue a ruling that applies to everyone. According to experts, this has been going on for least a decade and routinely for the past year and a half.

Rabbi Seth Farber, the director of ITIM, said the Chief Rabbinate – which officially controls much of Jewish life in Israel and oversees the rabbinical courts – is waging a destructive “inquisition.”

“The Rabbinate is challenging the very underpinnings of Zionism by placing the personal status of every Jew in doubt,” he said. “Instead of being a place that’s wel-coming to Jews, it has become a place that is looking to undermine Jewish identity.”

Elad Caplan, a legal consultant for ITIM, said the rabbinical courts investigate about 5,000 people for their Jewishness each year and find fewer than 10 percent not Jewish. But he estimated that most of those people are Jews, too, and simply cannot prove it. It is “outrageous,” Caplan said, that Israel demands documents that in many cases were created by countries in the throes of violent antisemitism. “Do we really want a Jewish state that makes blacklists of who’s a Jew and who’s not?” he asked. “Have we learned nothing from our history?”

On December 12, the Supreme Rabbinical Court ruled against two of ITIM’s appeals, saying the rabbinical courts were legitimately acting under a legal mandate to combat intermarriage. The justices cited a draft amend-ment to the courts’ regulations made a few days earlier in response to ITIM’s appeals. A similar ruling on Yael’s case is expected any day.

Rabbi Shimon Yaakovi, an attorney who directs the Rabbinical Courts Administration, defended the Supreme Rabbinical Court’s ruling and said the rabbinical courts had to uphold Jewish law. “We can’t have someone walk-ing around wrongly thinking he’s a Jew, and his family and friends believing it,” he said. “I understand people’s need to be part of the Jewish collective in Israel, but there are rules, and if we don’t obey the rules we undermine

See “Rabbis” on page 11

Save the Date!�e�ate I�a� P�ade

Sunday, June 4, 2017This year’s theme: Celebrate Israel All Together!


said it was a page out of Trump’s bible for realtors, “The Art of the Deal,” but he did not explain how looking caught off guard helped him.)

Netanyahu did another double take when Trump said, referring to his hopes for a comprehensive peace with the Pales-tinians and with Israel’s Arab neighbors, that “it might be a bigger and better deal than people in this room even understand.”

Netanyahu, notoriously cautious and small-bore in how he approaches diplo-macy, did not seem enthusiastic. “Let’s try it,” he muttered.

Trump noticed: “Doesn’t sound too optimistic,” he said to laughter.

Those snapshots of a nonplussed Netanyahu illustrated the Israeli lead-er’s conundrum: He is throwing all-in with Trump.

“There is no greater supporter of the Jewish people and the Jewish state than President Donald Trump,” he said of a president who has never visited Israel. But that very closeness binds him: How can he reject the entreaties of “no greater supporter” of Israel?

The request to stay settlement building, to go for the big deal, one that Trump said would likely require Israel to “show more flexibility than they have in the past” – what could that mean further down the line? Trump’s proven characteristics include a capacity for unpredictability, a demand for deference and a love of disruption.

Mix those qualities with talk of one state and “greater flexibility,” and the prospects of what Trump demands from Israel are more open-ended than with any previous president – for better or worse.SPECIFICS?

Lots of tough talk at the press conference.“I think, beyond that, President Trump

has led a very important effort in the past few weeks, just coming into the presi-dency,” Netanyahu said. “He pointed out there are violations, Iranian violations, on ballistic missile tests.”

So did Obama, when Iran tested missiles on his watch. What more could Trump do? No one offered specifics and Netanyahu told reporters later the time was

not ripe to offer specifics. How would they address the deal Obama reached, trading sanctions relief for Iran’s nuclear rollback, that they both reviled? Amend it? Enforce it? Trash it? No specifics.

Same when it came to the Islamic State terrorist group, also known as ISIS.

“You call for the defeat of ISIS,” Ne-tanyahu said. (So did Obama.) “Under your leadership, I believe we can reverse the rising tide of radical Islam.”

Specifics? None.LOVE MAY DRIVE US APART

An Israeli reporter asked Trump about a spike in antisemitic incidents since his election, and wondered what Trump had to say “to those among the Jewish com-munity in the States, and in Israel, and maybe around the world who believe and feel that your administration is playing with xenophobia and maybe racist tones.”

Trump, after yet another digression on the breadth of his electoral college win over Hillary Clinton, reminded everyone that he had Jewish friends and family, and concluded that “you’re going to see a lot of love.”

And Netanyahu, who usually is not reluctant to emphasize the vulnerabilities of Diaspora Jews, backed up Trump. “I’ve known the president and I’ve known his family and his team for a long time, and there is no greater supporter of the Jewish people and the Jewish state than President Donald Trump,” he said. “I think we should put that to rest.”

That’s hardly a salve to an American Jewish community dealing almost week-ly with unsettling echoes of past slights and intolerance – most recently when the White House omitted any mention of Jews from a Holocaust commemorative statement on January 27.

Jonathan Greenblatt, the Anti-Defama-tion League’s national director, reacting to Trump’s statement, did not mention Netanyahu, but was clearly not in a mood to put anything to rest. Trump “missed an opportunity to decry the rhetoric of hate that seems to be surging online and in the real world,” he said. “Intentional or not, this emboldens antisemites.”

Mixed Continued from page 1

This new kosher deli may be Miami’s hippest restaurant

The staff at Zak the Baker’s new kosher deli in Miami (l-r): chef Melissa Sosa, Zak Stern, general manager Ashley Dugdale and server Ricardo Araujo. (Photo courtesy of Zak the Baker)

BY LUCY COHEN BLATTERMIAMI (JTA) – The first few weeks in

January were meant to be a soft opening for Zak Stern’s new traditional deli. But given the massive following that Stern – better known as Zak the Baker – has garnered for his bakery, things didn’t really turn out as planned.

“We call it a ‘rough opening’ because there’s nothing soft about it,” Stern said recently as “the deli,” as it is known to differentiate from the bakery, began fill-ing with customers eager to try the house specialties, like a vegetable omelette, served with corned beef and aioli, potato kugel and more.

Of course, the instant success of Stern’s deli isn’t too surprising given that Zak the Baker – both his bakery and the man himself – have garnered numerous ac-colades since setting up shop four years ago. A line of customers, often dozens deep, regularly snakes around the block

“Wynwood is one of Miami’s only counterculture areas,” Stern said of the artsy, industrial neighborhood, where many buildings are covered with bright graffiti. And with the opening of the deli, he’s doubled down on it.

“We’ve been able to bridge two worlds,” said Stern, who looks every bit the bearded hipster, but could also pass as a Chasid (which he is not). “It’s hard to find the religious world eating out of their shtetl, and it’s also hard for the non-religious world, or non-Jewish world, to interact with the religious world. So this kind of gives them the opportunity to sit next to someone religious and fill in the blanks. It’s a beautiful thing.

“We happen to be certified kosher, but that’s not our identity,” he said. “We’re traditional bakers and now [operate] a traditional Eastern European-style deli, and we happen to be kosher.”

See “Deli” on page 8

Heights as Israeli territory, a request that would have been politely ignored had he raised it with any of Trump’s predecessors. He was clearly hopeful about his pros-pects with Trump; the president was “not shocked” by the request, Netanyahu said.BEWARE THE CANDYMAN: WHAT DOES DONALD WANT IN RETURN?

“I’d like to see you hold back on settlements for a little bit,” Trump told Netanyahu. “We’ll work something out.”

Netanyahu appeared shocked. Trump asked Netanyahu for a temporary settle-ment freeze, the kind of request that when Obama made it sent Netanyahu and his government into paroxysms of resistance. (Netanyahu insisted to reporters later that his shocked reaction was a put-on – he

And not just regarding Iran. Whereas with Obama, Netanyahu would insist peace talks must take place without preconditions, he was now talking about “pre-requisites for peace” with the Palestinians.

Trump, to Netanyahu’s evident plea-sure, embraced one of the Israeli’s favorite causes: Palestinian incitement. Obama had also routinely mentioned the issue, but Trump made ending incitement his front and center expectation of the Palestinians, and described it in the dark terms Netanya-hu favors. “I think the Palestinians have to get rid of some of that hate that they’re taught from a very young age,” Trump said. “They’re taught tremendous hate.”

Netanyahu told Israeli reporters that he also asked Trump to recognize the Golan

outside the bakery. The customers wait – sometimes for an hour or more – for his olive-studded loaves of bread, authentic French-style baguettes, croissants and deep-dish quiches.

Stern has achieved the seemingly impos-sible: His eateries are decidedly cool and are

popular with Miami’s hipsters and foodie sets. At the same time, however, because they are kosher, they are a destination for observant Jewish Miami residents and visitors, many of whom travel about 20 minutes from the city’s more touristy areas to the Wynwood neighborhood north of downtown.

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BY JOSEFIN DOLSTEN(JTA) – The morning of her conversion, Diana Sewell

was so nervous she “was running around like a head-less chicken” in her Australia home. Meanwhile, some 9,000 miles away in Georgia, her rabbi was dealing with computer difficulties. Neither of those things put a stop to Sewell fulfilling a 60-something-year-old dream of converting to Judaism – with a little help from the internet.

After nearly an hourlong online conversation with the Beit Din, or rabbinical court, whose five members were located across the U.S., the rabbis accepted Sewell’s conversion, contingent upon her going to a local river to immerse herself, the final ritual in the process. “I didn’t walk on the floor that day, I floated,” Sewell, 82, told JTA.

Just as online learning is becoming more common in the secular world, it has also emerged as a tool for potential converts to learn about Judaism. Sites offering “online conversion” range from one-person outfits to those affil-iated with little-known groups like the Union of Jewish Universalist Communities to the organization behind Sewell’s conversion, Darshan Yeshiva, whose faculty includes rabbis ordained at various liberal seminaries.

But just as with online degrees, suspicion surrounds conversions relying on long-distance learning. “The term online conversion is not a neutral one – it is extremely polemical,” said Rabbi Juan Mejia, who has helped several communities in Latin America convert to Juda-ism through a process that relies in large part on online learning. “It is something that the Jewish community is just discovering, and for the most part it has quite a big stigma attached.”

Mejia, however, was quick to clarify that he performs only “online training for conversions,” meaning that he always performs the actual conversion ceremony in person. The traditional process for converting to Judaism varies by denomination, but typically includes counseling with a rabbi, taking classes at a local synagogue or other Jewish institution, undergoing circumcision for males, being interviewed by a Beit Din, immersing in a ritual bath, or mikvah, and adopting a Hebrew name.

“Online conversion” helps fulfill a longtime dream – but controversy dogs the process

Sewell’s conversion, which was conduct-ed entirely online with the final ceremony taking place last September, was a first for her rabbi, Rachael Bregman, who leads the Reform Temple Beth Tefilloh in Brunswick, GA. Sewell spent seven months taking classes through Darshan Yeshiva – an online platform providing long-distance learning about Juda-ism, including for the purpose of conversion – as well as speaking with Bregman every two weeks.

Sewell’s age and mobility challenges made it hard for her to travel to her conversion rabbi, as is the norm for Darshan Yeshiva. So Bregman convened the Beit Din – five rabbis rather than the traditional three because so many rabbis expressed interest in helping out – on the internet.

The event was life changing for Sewell, who did not think her longtime desire to become Jewish could become reality because the small Jewish community to which she belongs does not have a rabbi. “I wanted to be Jewish, but I wasn’t – I couldn’t be,” she said of her situation prior to learning about Darshan Yeshiva’s conversion program.

Raised Episcopalian, Sewell first became interested in Judaism at age 12 after having Shabbat dinner at a friend’s house. She started attending synagogue at 18 and, when she visited Israel in 1978, she felt as if she had “come home from a long journey.”

Upon returning from the trip, Sewell looked into con-verting at an Orthodox synagogue in Sydney – where she was living at the time – but found its traditional approach to Judaism “too restrictive.” When she moved to the town of Nowra, which is located on Australia’s southeastern coast, her longtime dream seemed to fade because its Jewish community did not have a rabbi.

Sewell’s conversion was “a very unique case” for Darshan Yeshiva, said Sara Stirne, the director of ad-ministration and student experience. Stirne said she was

not aware of any other conversions at Darshan Yeshiva in which the ritual elements of the ceremony were conducted entirely online.

The yeshiva, which first started offering its conversion program in 2014, grew out of Punk Torah, an Atlanta-based online community for unaffiliated Jews. “We don’t offer online conversion – we really try not to use that ter-minology,” Stirne told JTA. However, Punk Torah on its website lists Darshan Yeshiva as providing “Online Conversion to Judaism.”

The yeshiva offers three tracks for conver-sion, the cost of which ranges from $800 to $2,200. While learning is done via the internet, students are expected to travel to the converting rabbi for the official ceremony, Stirne said. “I don’t believe there is really such a thing as online conversion, at least not when it’s

in accordance with halachic [Jewish legal] standards,” Stirne said. “But we do use online distance learning to provide the education component of conversion to stu-dents, and then connect them with rabbis and mentors for the purposes of conducting and completing conversion to Judaism.”

Though Bregman sees conducting conversions online as “not the ideal,” she said she was open to performing additional ones. “I want to throw the borders and bound-aries to the Jewish world open wide, and I want people to come in, and I want people to feel like they can be part of Judaism readily,” she told JTA.

The majority of Reform rabbis are not as open to performing online conversions, but the movement does not have an official stance on the matter, said Rabbi Hara Person, director of strategic communications for the Reform movement’s Central Conference of American Rabbis. Most CCAR rabbis believe that “the connection to a rabbi and the connection to a community is really important in the [conversion] process because the idea is that you can’t be a Jew on your own, that being a Jew

See “Dream” on page 12

Rabbi Rachae l Bregman performed her first online con-version in September 2016. (Photo by Ellis Vener)

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Finally, supporters of the U.S.-Israel relationship should maintain, and be seen as maintaining, their in-dependence from this – or any – administration. Israel’s supporters committed to a negotiated, secure, two-state solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – the position consistently favored by American Jews and Israelis alike – may find themselves competing for the president’s support with advisers opposed to the two-state vision. A retreat from traditional U.S. policy on the conflict will present a serious challenge to pro-Israel advocacy on American campuses, where Palestinian statehood is widely seen as the only just outcome.

On campus, support for Israel must be nurtured among students on the right and the left, in the sciences and the liberal arts, among students both religious and secular, rich and poor, gay, straight and everywhere in between.

Supporters of the U.S.-Israel relationship have built ties and advanced Israel’s security and well-being with successive American presidents. In that spirit, and with that objective, advocates look forward to working with President Trump, who time and again has voiced strong support for the Jewish state.

But as they engage the new administration, pro-Israel advocates must not abandon the strategy of bipartisan and intercommunal outreach that has formed the foundation for nearly 70 years of overwhelming public support for America’s one democratic ally in the Middle East.

Seffi Kogen is the American Jewish Committee’s assistant director for campus affairs.

Students Continued from page 2

BOOK REVIEW

Genocide or crimes against humanityBY RABBI RACHEL ESSERMAN

For most of human history, governments had free reign in their treatment of anyone living within their borders. When waging war, there were also no constraints on military behavior: No world court or governing body to which people could protest widespread slaughter within a country’s boundaries or those outside of it. The terms genocide and crimes against humanity are 20th century terms, which were not always accepted as legitimate terminology by legal authorities as shown in Philippe Sands’ fascinating and compelling “East West Street: On the Origins of ‘Genocide’ and ‘Crimes Against Hu-manity’” (Alfred A. Knopf). Part history, part biography and part memoir, it explores the concepts of genocide and crimes against humanity, while also showing how World War II affected the lives of four men.

The impetus for “East West Street” is an invitation Sands received to lecture at a university in Lviv, Ukraine, about his legal career, which has focused on crimes against humanity and genocide. Lviv – also known as Lemberg, Lvov and Lwów, depending on who controlled the city – serves as a connection between three Jews – Hersch Lauterpacht, Rafael Lemkin and the author’s grandfa-ther, Leon Buchholtz – and one German official, Hans Frank. Although each was in the city at a different time, Sands uses their association with Lviv as an excuse to discuss not only the origin of the legal terms genocide and crimes against humanity, but the lives of these four very different men.

After Sands visits Lviv, his curiosity is piqued: how did his grandfather survive the war? Sands beings to collect clues – photos and documents – that, at first, raise more questions than answers. Why did his grandfather, who was born in Lviv and later moved to Austria, abandon that country without his wife and daughter? Why did Sands’ mother travel to France a few days after her first birthday while his grandmother remained in Austria for a longer period of time? Who are the mysterious people in photographs from that time period? Sands’ mother can’t answer these questions because her father refused to discuss those years. So Sands carefully and

systematically searches on his own, and discovers some wonderful and moving information about individuals who helped his grandparents, including one who, in 2013, was recognized by Yad Vashem as one of its Righteous Among The Nations.

Although the biographies of Lauterpacht and Lemkin are well-done, it’s the discussions of their legal ideas that were particularly compelling – especially when compared to those of Frank, who was a supporter of the Nazi regime. Both men were looking to protect the rights of individuals, although they had different ideas on how to accomplish that. Lauterpacht preferred to focus on the idea of crimes against humanity with its attention to the individual, while Lemkin fought for the use of genocide – the idea of crimes committed based on group identity.

According to Sands, “Lauterpacht set his back against group identity in law, whether as victim or perpetrator... I was instinctively sympathetic to Lauterpacht’s view, which is motivated by a desire to reinforce the pro-tection of the individual, irrespective of which group he or she happened to belong to, to limit the potent force of tribalism, not reinforce it. Lauterpacht wanted to diminish the force of intergroup conflict. It was a rational enlightened view, and also an idealistic one.” Lemkin, on the other hand, felt that violence – at least the violence that occurred in Nazi Germany before and during the war – called for the use of the term genocide. Sands notes that while “not opposed to individual rights, [Lemkin] nevertheless believed that an excessive focus on individuals was naive, that it ignored the reality of conflict and violence: individuals were targeted because they were members of a particular group, not because of their individual qualities. For Lemkin, the law must reflect true motive and real intent, the forces that ex-plained why certain individuals – from certain targeted groups – were killed. For Lemkin, the focus on groups was the practical approach.”

Frank, who was governor general of Nazi Poland, believed in total governmental control of those within its borders. Sands notes that Frank “wanted strong gov-

ernment based on the values that protected the vision of ‘national community,’ a legal system that was informed by the ‘idea of community,’ which should prevail over all else. There would be no individual rights in the new Germany, so he announced a total opposition to the ‘indi-vidualistic, liberalistic atomizing tendencies of the egoism of the individual.’” Frank saw Hitler’s criminalization of those who were referred to as “moral criminals” – for example, Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, those with mental illnesses, etc. – as the correct path for the country. To his mind, these people threatened the health of the nation and should be eliminated. During his time as governor general, the ghetto in Lviv was created. Frank also oversaw the construction of concentration camps in territory he ruled.

The differences in these political philosophies played a role in the Nuremberg trial where Frank was a defen-dant. In simplified terms, the defense claimed that the government was responsible for any criminal actions, so those obeying the orders of their government could not be held liable. There were disagreements among the prosecutors about whether or not the defendants should be tried for the crime of genocide or for crimes against humanity, with politics playing a major role in the final decision. This section also raises a question about whether or not Frank – who converted to Catholicism after the conclusion of the war – took some responsibility for his actions, something none of the others on trial did. How-ever, based on the evidence available, Sands is unable to come to a definitive conclusion.

See “Genocide” on page 12

Each year at this time the Jewish Federation of Northeastern Pennsylvania calls upon members of our community to assist in defraying the expense of issuing our regional Jewish newspaper, The Reporter.The newspaper is delivered twice of month (except for December and July which are single issue months) to each and every identifiable Jewish home in Northeastern Pennsylvania.As the primary Jewish newspaper of our region, we have tried to produce a quality publication for you that offers our readership something on everythingfrom opinions and columns on controversial issues that affect our people and our times, to publicity for the events of our affiliated agencies and organizations to life cycle events, teen columns, personality profiles, letters to the editor, the Jewish community calendar and other columns that cover everything from food to entertainment.The Federation assumes the financial responsibility for funding the enterprise at a cost of $26,400 per year and asks only that we undertake a small letter writing mail campaign to our recipients in the hope of raising $10,000 from our readership to alleviate a share of that responsibility.We would be grateful if you would care enough to take the time to make a donation for our efforts in bringing The Reporter to your door.As always, your comments, opinions and suggestions are always welcome.With best wishes,Mark Silverberg, Executive DirectorJewish Federation of NE Pennsylvania601 Jefferson AvenueScranton, PA 18510


Registration is open for The 29th Annual Teen Symposium on the Holocaust Co-sponsored by Hilton Scranton & Conference Center and the Jewish Federation of NEPA

Grades 8 – 12 welcome with appropriate preparationChoice of Tuesday, May 9th OR Wednesday, May 10th, 2017

Time: 8:30AM registration; 8:50AM sharp program begins; 1:30PM – 1:45PM dismissal

Where: The Hilton Scranton & Conference Center, 100 Adams Avenue, Scranton, PA 18503

What: The Teen Symposium on the Holocaust is a full day program that deals with the causes and effects of the Holocaust. It also provides an opportunity for participants to meet with survivors of the Holocaust and American GIs, who liberated the Nazi concentration camps. Sessions with survivors are the core of the day. Meetings with these witnesses bring insights and understanding that only such “living history” can bring to those who hear firsthand testimony.

Each day’s program will be held at the Hilton Hotel on Adams Avenue, with breakout sessions in different conference rooms. The day will begin with two brief introductory sessions followed by the film, Children Remember the Holocaust. Breakout sessions follow, where small group meetings with survivors are held. After lunch, attendees will return to the Casey Ballroom for the production of Lida Stein and the Righteous Gentile and a guided audience discussion.

The afternoon session is a 50 minute play that follows “ordinary” people from “ordinary” families caught up in the extraordinary po-litical and social upheaval during the Nazi era. It focuses on the relationship between Lida Stein, a Jewish teenage girl, and her best friend Dora Krause, a German teenage girl. The play probes issues from the perspective of teenagers, both Jewish and non-Jewish, who are swept up in life-altering decisions about friendship, politics, and family loyalty in difficult times. The audience discussion that follows addresses two key aspects of the Holocaust era: the gradual intimidation and eventual segregation of the Jewish community from the larger society, and the characters, motivations and consequences of the decisions of friendly and non-friendly German adults and youth. It will also focus on peer pressure and its impact on decision making, family loyalty, personal responsibility, moral strength, and commitment.

The only mandatory fee involved is lunch prepared by Hilton’s food service. The cost is $7.00 for students and $10.00 for teachers. (Please note that teachers will be eating with their students).

Registration begins on a first-come, first-served basis upon the receipt of this notice to our office. It will end when all available spaces are filled. Participation requires adherence to the time schedule, which includes check in before 8:50AM. Registration deadline is April 5, 2017 with payment in full. Payees will incur a $25.00 fee if paid on the day of the Symposium.

Please be aware, and make your students aware, of the fact that the survivor they meet will have gone through one or more of many experiences in the Holocaust, but may not be a survivor of a concentration camp. School groups are divided so that participants from each school meet several people and can share what they learn upon returning to school. The program is coordinated through the Holocaust Education Resource Center (HERC) of the Jewish Federation of NEPA. For more information contact Mary Ann Mistysyn at (570)961-2300 EXT#4 or send email to [email protected]

Please Fill Out Completely

CHOOSE ONE & CIRCLE: Tuesday, May 9th OR Wednesday, May 10th

[Please note: you MUST circle your choice and if you wish to bring groups on both days, please fill out separate forms]

School Name _______________________________________________________________________________

Lead Name _________________________________________________________________________________

Email _____________________________________________________________________________________

Lead Name’s Cell or contact number ______________________________________ (in case of emergencies only)

School phone _______________________________ ext. # ___________________ Fax. # ________________

Grade Level ________________________________

# Students: _________ @ $7.00 each = $ ____________ # Teachers: _______ @ $10.00 each = $ ___________

CHECK TOTAL: $ _____________[Checks should be made payable to: JEWISH FEDERATION OF NEPA – PUT IN MEMO: HERC–The Registration should be paid in fullby April 5, 2017. A late fee of $25.00 will be added to your invoice, if paid on the day of the Symposium.

Names of all attending teachers: Subject area taught: ________________________________________ • ______________________________________________________________________________________ • ______________________________________________________________________________________ • ______________________________________________________________________________________ • ______________________________________________

Registration form may be faxed to 570-346-6147 or mailed to HERC, 601 Jefferson Ave., Scranton PA 18510. DEADLINE: SATURDAY, APRIL 5th

Please note: We do not automatically assume a school is attending this year because they attended in past years –This form must be returned by the deadline of April 5th with your choice of date clearly marked. Thank you for your cooperation!


said. “You can bake bread everywhere and it’s accessible to everyone.”

Stern quit school and went to Europe to apprentice on farms. He started with agriculture and then “zeroed in on farms with bread and cheese,” he said. When he returned to Mi-ami, in 2012, Stern launched a bread business out of his friend’s North Miami garage, selling to farmer’s markets and the like. Word of mouth sent the business soaring. “The market quickly drew a line, until the point where I was selling out of bread in less than an hour,” he said.

At one point, a woman Stern met while working at a goat cheese farm in northern Israel asked to come to Miami and apprentice for his burgeoning business. Fast forward three years and that woman, Batsheva, is now his wife and mother to his two children. He refers to her on social media as #myreligiouswife.

As a suburban kid who grew up Reform, marrying a religious woman from a small village in Israel is prac-tically intermarriage, Stern said, noting how differently the two were raised. She is the reason he started keeping Shabbat, “so she wouldn’t be alone,” he said.

And it was Batsheva who introduced him to kashrut; because of her strict observance, he made his bakery kosher. And in the years since, Stern has learned all the intricacies of running a kosher business.

Being kosher, he said, brings a real authenticity to the deli, in particular. “If we’re going to do it legit, it’s got to be kosher, that’s part of it,” he said.

European delis that catered to our great-grandparents would not have served melted cheese on their sandwiches – nor would they have sold expensive sandwiches as big as your head, he said. They also would have cured their meats in house, as Stern does. “The community here in Miami, I think, needed something that’s wholesome and soulful,” he said. “Delis aren’t fancy or expensive, as a lot of kosher restaurants are. Deli food is the working man’s food.”

For now, the menu at the deli is limited, as the kitchen undergoes renovation. (The spot where the deli stands was once the bakery, which was forced to move to a larger lo-cation down the street when the wholesale business picked up.) But Stern said there were a couple of things he knew the deli needed to have as soon as they launched – “a really good pickled vegetable plate with a pickled green tomato, a non-mayonnaisey cole slaw and house-made corned beef,” he said. (Stern’s corned beef is made on the premises in a seven-day brine.) There’s also smoked fish – and, unlike New York delis, which mostly use whitefish, Stern’s deli uses the blue runner native to Florida.

Stern is particularly excited for the upcoming deli case with traditional Eastern European foods like yapchik (a kugel with flanken), p’tcha (jellied calves’ feet) and kishke (stuffed intestine), which people can take to go. “Whatever obscure Ashkenazi food that you can’t find anywhere, we’ll have here,” he said.

But for those outside the Miami area, you’re going to need to travel to try it out. “I’m totally uninterested in creating an empire,” he said. “Zak the Baker doesn’t need to be in New York, it doesn’t mean to be in L.A. There’s plenty of room for other bearded bakers.”

BY ISRAEL HAYOM STAFF/EXCLUSIVE TO JNS.ORG

An ancient sea snail shell discovered on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem has created “tremendous interest” among researchers, who believe the find ties in with the particular shade of vibrant blue dye (“tchelet” in Hebrew) used in ancient times to color the fringes of religious garments.

The shell of the branded dye-murex (Hexaplex trunculus) snail was recently discovered as part of the Temple Mount Sifting Project underway in the Emek Tzurim National Park. The project is funded by the Ir David Foundation and directed by archaeologists from Bar-Ilan University.

Archaeologist Zachi Dvira noted that finding the shell of an ancient sea snail far inland on the Temple Mount raises questions, as the snails are generally excavated in coastal archaeological digs. “These snails were used in the luxury dye industry of ancient times,” Dvira said. “They were used to produce the colors purple and tchelet

To dye for: Snail shell found on Temple Mount colors researchers’ interest

The branded dye-murex shell discovered through the Temple Mount Sifting Project. (Photo by Jennifer Green/Ir David Foundation)

[blue]. Dye industry equipment and fragments of snail shells have been discovered at Phoenician sites along the Mediterranean coast. In Israel, these facilities are known mainly from Tel Dor.”

Dvira said the snail’s mucus secretions produced

the unique shade of blue used to dye the ritual fringed garments, cloths for use in the Temple and the clothing of the ancient priests. The rabbinical sages had deemed the species kosher (snails in general are not) so the dye could be used. Modern research generally agrees that the branded dye-murex was the snail approved by the sages.

“We find conical shells and seashells during sifting. Some were apparently used for food, which was a favor-ite of Byzantine monks. Certain seashells were used as beads or pendants, and others were used to cover walls or floors in the time of the First Temple. In the case of the branded dye-murex, we still haven’t conducted a thorough study of the distribution of this kind of find around the Mount, but it seems that dyeing facilities and shells of this type have been found at other sites in the center of Israel, too,” Dvira said.

Following the discovery, archaeologists have begun researching whether there was a dyeing facility on the Temple Mount.

The deli’s breakfast platter (Photo courtesy of Zak the Baker)

Deli Continued from page 4

On that recent morning, a couple visiting from New Jer-sey – she wore a wig; he a baseball cap in place of a kippah – were enjoying an almond croissant and oatmeal cookie at the bar of the bakery, both nodding profusely between bites to communicate that it was worth the nearly 30-minute trip.

Another woman, who didn’t outwardly appear to be religious, had just bought a loaf of cranberry walnut bread at the bakery, having traveled to Miami from her home about an hour away. In fact, she said she often drives 20 minutes to her nearest Whole Foods to procure some wholesale Zak the Baker bread. “Once you have this, how can you have any other one?” she asked, rhetorically.

While chefs like Yotam Ottolenghi in London and Michael Solomonov in Philadelphia have helped make Israeli food “the sexy thing on the block,” Stern thinks it’s time for Ashkenazi food to get the attention it deserves. “Ashkenazi food has been relegated to bland and boring, and that’s so not true,” he said. “Deli is a soulful, soulful food. I think we can shed some light on it.”

Stern, a 31-year-old Florida native, was a pharmacy student when he decided to switch gears to bread baking. “I was a 22-year-old in pharmacy school learning all these complicated things, but I was craving basic fundamental life skills; bread making is such a symbol of that,” he


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D’VAR TORAH

BY RABBI MENDEL RAICES, CHABAD OF THE MOUNTAINS

Mishpatim (Shabbat Shekalim), Exodus 21:1-24:18There’s an age-old debate concerning the interplay

between moral standards and the Torah’s teachings. Does society need the Torah to teach us how to behave, or are we, as innately moral beings, capable of figuring things out on our own?

On the one hand, the talmudic sages state, “Were the Torah not to have been given, we would have learned piety from a cat and camaraderie from an ant,” indicating man’s ability to self-teach and self-guide. On the other hand, though, the Torah clearly addresses our moral conduct: “Thou shalt not steal,” “Thou shalt not kill” and so on.

So we’re left with the question, is the Torah merely affirming the conclusions we could have made on our own, or is there something deeper at play over here, something to be gained from a uniquely God-given moral code?

Semantics? It is a subtle difference, but it has far-reach-ing implications. But first, the opening verse of this week’s Torah portion:

The Ten Commandments have been given. The two Tablets delivered. And God instructs Moses to continue teaching, “And these are the statutes that you shall place before them,” the detailed laws of employment, trade and torts. There is an unnecessary word in this verse word: “and.” Why not just say “These are the statutes etc.” and leave the “and” out?

We use the word “and” to add to what we’ve said previously. “Yesterday I went to work, and I went to school, and I spent time with my family.” Same, too, here. “And these are the statutes,” the rabbis explain,

is adding to what was said previously; namely, the Ten Commandments in last week’s portion. “Just as the Ten Commandments are from Sinai,” the rabbis explain, “so, too, are these laws from Sinai.”

Think about it: The Ten Commandments, the most central tenets of monotheistic belief – “I am the Lord your God,” “Do not have any other gods beside Me,” etc. – and the most mundane of civil law – fair treatment of workers, honesty in the workplace and property law – were all received from Sinai. The same fanfare, the same lightning and thunder, and the same Godly significance.

Morals from man, morals from God – what’s the actual difference? Here are a few ideas to think about:

� Humans are inherently subjective. “One man’s junk is another man’s treasure,” the saying goes, and the same is true for our values and standards. A God-given value system creates a set of objective standards, one that all people can agree to and work off of.

� On a deeper level, by instructing us on how to be-have between ourselves, God gave us the opportunity to turn even the simplest of interactions into a spiritual experience. When I’m honest in business I bring God into my workplace. When I treat my family properly I bring God into my home. There is no place in my life now that is devoid of God’s presence.

Next time you’re deliberating doing a favor for someone, add to the consideration that your act will bring more Godliness into your life. I guarantee it will drastically impact your perspective.

Shabbat Shalom,Rabbi Mendel Raices

Laws from Sinai

Sefaria, a website founded in 2013 that aims to put the seemingly infinite Jewish canon online for free, has published a translation of the Talmud in English. The translation, which includes explanatory notes in relatively plain language, was started by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz in 1965 and is considered by many to be the best in its class. The Steinsaltz edition of the Talmud has been in print for decades, in both modern Hebrew and English translation, and parts of it already exist on the Internet. But this is the first time it’s being put online in its entirety for free. The online edition also opens up the copyright license, meaning that anyone is allowed to repurpose it for teaching, literature or anything else.

“Ninety percent of the world’s Jews speak Hebrew and English,” said Daniel Septimus, Sefaria’s executive director. “The Talmud is in Aramaic. It will now be online in Hebrew and English. From an accessibility point of view, it’s a game changer.” (Septimus was formerly the CEO of MyJewishLearning, one of JTA’s partner sites, and sits on the board of 70 Faces Media, JTA’s parent company.)

Sefaria rolled out 22 tractates of the Steinsaltz English edition on February7 and will be publishing the entire Hebrew translation over the course of 2017. The rest of the English edition, which is as yet unfinished, will be published online as it is completed. The translation’s publication was made possible by a multimillion-dollar deal with the Steinsaltz edition’s publishers, Milta and Koren Publishers Jerusalem, and financed by the William Davidson Foundation, a family charity. The edition will be known as The William Davidson Talmud.

Translations and explanations of the Talmud already exist online. A range of apps promises free translations that can be unreliable. ArtScroll, the Orthodox Jewish pub-lishing giant, offers a digital version of its own complete English Talmud translation for $600. A comprehensive digital Jewish library published for decades by Israel’s Bar-Ilan University is also available for purchase, but not with English translation.

Besides its edition being free, Sefaria’s founders say its version of the Steinsaltz Talmud is better than com-petitors because it is untethered to the Talmud’s classic printed form. Since the mid-15th century, the Talmud has been published with unpunctuated text in a column in the middle of the page, its commentaries wrapping around it. Like all of Sefaria’s texts, which range from the Bible to Chasidic texts and works of Jewish law, the Steinsaltz translation is published sentence by sentence in a mobile-friendly format, with the translation appearing below the original. The format also allows Sefaria to link between the Talmud’s text and the myriad Jewish sources it references, from the Bible to rabbinic literature.

Click on a line of Aramaic, and a string of commen-taries, verses or parallel rabbinic sources will pop up. An algorithm Sefaria uses, which just added 50,000 such links to the Talmud, is also reverse engineered: Click on a verse in the Bible and you will see where it’s quoted

in the Talmud or other books. “This entire web of connections opens up to you just

by clicking and touching,” said Sefaria’s co-founder and CTO, Brett Lockspeiser. “It’s so clear that the structure of Jewish learning had this network-type experience. This sense of interconnectedness was already there and just needed to be brought out.” The other co-founder is the author Joshua Foer.

The project is the biggest step forward in Sefaria’s larger goal of democratizing Jewish religious scholarship by making it digitized, free and intelligible to everyone. The site also has a tool for Jewish educators to create source sheets, or short study aids with quotations from a range of Jewish books. Users have already created 50,000 such sheets.

“We have no idea what kind of devices people are going to be learning Torah on in 10 years, but we know those devices will be chomping on digital data,” Septimus said. “So having a database of these texts that’s open, flexible, free for use and reuse is a good thing.”

Another site which shares that goal, the Open Siddur Project, provides Jewish prayer text for free so people can put together their own prayer books. Its founder, Aharon Varady, said the modern-day emphasis on in-tellectual property clashes with the Jewish tradition of sharing knowledge openly and freely. “It’s the idea that Torah should be transferred without limitations,” Varady said. “Copyright is an innovation with fairly different interests than that of a living culture that is growing by educators sharing material, by teachers making source sheets with others.”

The site already offers thousands of books in open-source code, so anyone can use them, and hopes to add thousands more – the entirety of Judaic literature. Lockspeiser, a former Google software engineer, said that compared to indexing billions of web pages, the Jewish canon is no tall order. “People can’t get into the Talmud because they don’t know it’s there,” Lockspeiser said. “If it’s not in English and you type in English words in the [online search] query, it’s not going to come up. We’re opening this up just in the sense that people will find it that didn’t even know they were looking for it.”

L-r: Sefaria Executive Director Daniel Septimus with co-founders Brett Lockspeiser and Joshua Foer. (Photo courtesy of Sefaria)

Talmud Continued from page 1

Co-Presidents: Esther Adelman & Steven Seitchik



halachah. Judaism is not being measured by feelings.”Yael said she always felt like an Israeli Jew. Her fam-

ily immigrated from Belarus when she was a baby, she explained in unaccented Hebrew, and she attended public schools, observed Jewish holidays and served in the army. She even grew up hearing her maternal grandmother’s story of Holocaust survival, she said. Then, she fell in love with a nice Israeli Jewish boy and last fall agreed to marry him. Just ahead of the planned wedding date this summer, the Tel Aviv rabbinical court scuttled her plans. In ruling she was not Jewish, the court pointed to inconsistencies in her family’s paperwork.

Yael’s grandmother, who said her documents were lost during World War II, was listed as Jewish on the birth certificate of her daughter, Yael’s mother, but as Belarusian, or not Jewish, on the birth certificate of her son. Also, Yael’s mother was listed as Belarusian on her immigration paperwork and as not Jewish on Yael’s birth certificate. Yael’s father is Jewish, but that is not relevant under Orthodox Jewish law.

Experts said the Chief Rabbinate began regularly checking the Jewishness of marriage applicants and others in response to the mass influx of immigrants from Ethiopia and the former Soviet Union, mostly in the 1980s and 1990s. Immigrants need only be related to a Jew to get Israeli citizenship, and several hundred thousand non-Jews are estimated to have arrived in those waves.

Over the decades, the experts said, the Chief Rab-binate’s worry about intermarriage has only grown. The checks became official policy in 2002. “The closer the rabbis look” into immigrants’ backgrounds, “the more nervous they get, which makes them look even closer,” said Shuki Friedman, the head of religion and state research at the Israel Democracy Institute.

But Friedman said that most non-Jewish immigrants do not identify as Jews, and so need not concern the Chief Rabbinate. Further, if the goal is to prevent assimilation, he said, the rabbinical courts’ aggressive vetting of marriage applicants and their family members is counterproductive, since it “pushes people away from Judaism.”

Rabbi David Stav, a leading religious Zionist rabbi, agreed, and said the practice is in no way required by Jewish law. “If the court found out there was an attempt to hide something or cheat the rabbis, I can understand they have to check [the person’s Jewishness] again,” he said. “Halachically speaking, though, there is no need to check anything about someone’s story unless he gives you a good reason to be suspicious.”

Stav’s rabbinical group, Tzohar, works to help non-Or-thodox Israelis access the Chief Rabbinate’s services. But when Yael came to Tzohar for help before she was investigated last year, she was disappointed. Roots – the group’s program for helping immigrants from the former Soviet Union research their Jewish heritage – failed to prove she was Jewish and reported its findings to the Chief Rabbinate.

After the rabbinical court ruled against her, Yael went her own way. She had a private modern Orthodox con-version and married her fiancé in a wedding ceremony that was not sanctioned by the Chief Rabbinate, and thus against Israeli law. Still, Yael said she held out hope that the state would recognize her, and her marriage, as Jewish before the weddings of any future children.

Rabbis Continued from page 3

Jason and Julianne Kanter started talking about religion more seriously when they started to think about having children. (Photo courtesy of Julianne Kanter)

Outside the synagogue, intermarried are forming community with each other

BY BEN SALESNEW YORK (JTA) – Leading up to their wedding in

2012, Julianne and Jason Kanter hadn’t really discussed how they would incorporate their respective religions into

their home. Julianne was raised by Catholic and Presby-terian parents, while Jason grew up culturally Jewish. At first, it was simple to mark their different backgrounds. In December, the couple celebrated Christmas with Julianne’s relatives and lit a menorah and served latkes at Christmas dinner.

But now that they’re thinking of having kids, the Kanters have started to talk religion more seriously. And they realized they needed a space to learn about Judaism without the expectations that came with joining a synagogue. “To talk about how are we going to incor-porate Judaism into our lives – what does that mean? What will that look like?” Julianne Kanter said. “I didn’t know enough about it to feel comfortable teaching my kids about it.”

Since last year, the Kanters have found Jewish connec-tion through a range of initiatives targeted at intermarried or unaffiliated couples. Last June, they went on a trip with Honeymoon Israel, a Birthright-esque subsidized tour of Israel for newlywed couples with at least one Jewish partner. And in the months since, they have built community at home in Brooklyn through two discussion groups where intermarried couples get together to meet, eat and talk about shared challenges and experiences.

In one group, called the Couples Salon, five to six couples share a light meal, introduce themselves and drop questions they have prepared in advance into a bowl. A moderator who can also participate picks out a question and the group talks – whether about how to deal with familial expectations, how to celebrate holidays or how to share a ritual with your kids. The salons have happened once a month, with different couples, since August.

“We wanted the perspective of people who were in similar situations, which the synagogue is not,” Jason

Kanter said. “It was nice to go to a group where every-one was in the same sort of boat. There’s real dialogue rather than someone telling you their opinion of what your situation is.”

A growing number of initiatives are giving intermarried couples a Jewish framework disconnected from syna-gogue services and outside the walls of legacy Jewish institutions. Instead of drawing them to Judaism with a preconceived goal, these programs allow intermarried couples to form community among themselves and on their own terms. “I wanted to find a way to create a space for couples that come from mixed religious backgrounds to ask questions in a safe space,” said Danya Shults, who runs the Couples Salons as part of Arq, a Jewish culture group, and organized her fifth salon earlier this month. “I’m not a synagogue. I’m not expecting them to join. I’m not expecting them to convert.”

See “Intermarried” on page 13

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means being part of a community, so I think there’s a concern among our rabbis about people who do the conversion process only online,” Person told JTA.

Nevertheless, Person added, some rabbis affiliated with the Reform rabbin-ical group are using distance learning to help meet the needs of Jews who for geographic reasons are not able to attend classes about Judaism.

Bregman believes resistance to online conversions stems from a reluctance toward change. “I think that there’s a lot of hesitancy around much of the new technology and new tools that are emerging and that have been emerging over the last five to 10 years, like Darshan Yeshiva, like an online conversion,” she said. “These are entities which challenge the status quo, and the status quo doesn’t usually like to be challenged.”

Mejia, who received rabbinic ordina-tion from the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary of America, is also aware of this hesitancy and says it motivates him to be stringent with po-tential converts. Many find him through Kol Tuv Sefarad, his online resource for descendants of Sephardic Jews who are interesting in exploring, and sometimes reclaiming, their Jewish roots. “I’m ex-tremely draconian in that because I know how poorly regarded this phenomenon of long-distance learning for conversion is in

the Jewish world,” he told JTA, explaining that his candidates for conversion must study with him for about 100 classes of about one to one and a half hours each.

The reason some are hesitant to accept conversions that incorporate online ele-ments can be traced back to Jewish laws meant to ensure that potential converts were sincere in their desire to embrace Judaism, said Sylvia Fishman, a professor of Judaic studies at Brandeis University who has published a book about conversion. “I don’t think it’s possible to really come to an understanding of a human being and why they want to do this and how they envision their lives afterward unless you spend some time with them,” she told JTA. “I think that’s why rabbis have distanced themselves from online conversion.”

Fishman said conversions incorporat-ing online elements are “better than noth-ing,” but that in addition to not getting to know their rabbi in person, those relying on distance learning may also miss out on becoming involved in a Jewish community as part of their conversion process.

Meanwhile, Sewell said her life has completely changed since her conversion. “I’m just so [much] more at peace with myself and more content in life generally,” she said. “I never expected it to happen at all, and I’m just so grateful for it, I thank God every day for the conversion.”

Dream Continued from page 5

This summary doesn’t do justice to the amount of material covered in “East West Street.” Sands does a thorough, systematic job in outlining all he discov-ers. His interviews of the sons of two figures in the Nazi government in Poland show the different ways contemporary Germans view what occurred during the war. His careful and caring portrayals of

Genocide Continued from page 6

Lauterpacht and Lemkin – including what occurred to the members of their families who were unable to escape the Nazis – is nuanced and moving. The chapters about Nuremberg were captivating and made the book almost impossible to put down. Sands’ powerful, absorbing work should be read by anyone interested in World War II or the history of human rights.

Eliezer Sobel’s mother, Manya, read his first book for adults with memory loss, “Blue Sky, White Clouds.” (Photo courtesy of Eliezer Sobel)

Finally, a book for Jews with Alzheimer’sBY LISA KEYS

NEW YORK (JTA) – The book is large and fits comfortably on a lap. The color photographs nearly fill each page. Each image depicts real people doing everyday Jewish things – a young girl eating matzah ball soup; a bubbe and her grandchildren lying in the grass; a man wearing tefillin, praying. The sentences are in large print; they are simple (“Mother says the blessing over the candles”) and easy to read.

But the book is not for young children learning how to read, nor is it for parents to introduce Judaism to their preschoolers. Rather it is designed for those suffering from dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, a progressive type of dementia that causes a

slow decline in thinking, memory and rea-soning. The book – a series of independent pictures and captions – requires no memory to read and follow along, allowing those with memory-loss issues to enjoy and engage with each image on its own terms.

“L’Chaim: Pictures to Evoke Memo-ries of a Jewish Life,” by Eliezer Sobel, is probably the first book of its kind – a Jewish-themed book created explicitly for adults with Alzheimer’s or dementia. “There’s such a richness to Jewish content and imagery and history and culture,” Sobel, 64, told JTA. “There are so many Jewish people in Jewish nursing homes, and Jewish families with loved ones who have dementia.”

Sobel’s family is among them. The author took inspiration from his mother, Manya, 93, a refugee who fled Nazi Germany and has suffered from Alzheimer’s for 17 years. As her memory deteriorated, her language slowly disappeared with it, Sobel said. Eventually, a few years ago, it seemed gone for good. However, “One day I walk into the living room, and she was thumbing through a magazine, reading the big print headlines aloud, correctly,” he recalled. “I said, ‘Omigod! Mom can still read!’”

Sobel, who lives in Red Bank, NJ, said he headed to the local Barnes and Noble to get her a picture book for dementia patients. “It seemed like the most obvious thing in the world,” he said.

Instead, he learned that such a thing didn’t really exist. After unsuccessful trips to bookstores and searches online, Sobel called the National Alzheimer’s Associa-tion. He said the librarian he spoke with on the phone was stumped at first – she said that while there were more than 20,000 books for caregivers, she didn’t know of anything for the patients themselves.

Eventually the librarian turned up a few books for Alzheimer’s patients: Lydia Bur-dick has a series of three books for adults with the disease, including “The Sunshine On My Face.” In subsequent years, a few more have appeared, such as those by Emma Rose Sparrow. Still, the market for such products is very small, even though some 5.8 million Americans have Alzheimers, according to the Alzheimer’s Association.

Inspired, Sobel – a writer (previous books include the novel “Minyan: Ten Jewish Men in a World That is Heart-broken”) and leader of meditation and creativity retreats – published his first book for adults with dementia, “Blue Sky, White Clouds: A Book for Memory-Challenged Adults” in 2012. Like “L’Chaim,” the book

is a series of large color photographs of things like birds, trees and babies with captions such as “The baby is fast asleep” and “Snow covers the trees.”

“If patients see the pictures, say the names of the pictures, make some comments or are in any way affected by the books, that’s a good thing, period,” David Teplow, a professor of neurology at UCLA, told JTA. (Teplow provided a blurb for “Blue Sky”: “It certainly appears to be necessary to fill a void in this area of publishing, namely the realistic repre-sentation of images and ideas for people with memory and cognitive impairment.”)

Plus, Teplow added, “There are lot of Jewish people who have Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias. Certainly it’s an im-portant project for the Jewish community.”

For Sobel, having a Jewish-themed follow-up to “Blue Sky” was a bit of a no-brainer. “It seemed natural to me,” he said. “It’s who I am; who we are. Especially my mother, the history of her Holocaust experience – it was a big part of my growing up, how she and her family got out, what they experienced.”

See “Book” on page 15

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BY ISRAEL HAYOM STAFF/EXCLUSIVE TO JNS.ORG

Israel is scheduled to become the fourth country to land a spacecraft on the moon, with a launch planned for the end of 2017 by billionaire businessman Elon Musk’s SpaceX company.

The launch is set to send satellites from several other countries into space, but the Israeli spacecraft is the only one designed to continue to the moon. The dishwash-er-sized spacecraft was built by the Israeli SpaceIL team for Google’s Lunar XPRIZE competition, which aims to promote space technology and interest in the private sector. Thanks to advanced innovation and engineering, the Israeli team was the first to reserve a spot for a space launch out of 33 teams in the competition.

Israel slated to be fourth country to land vehicle on the moon

A model of the Israeli SpaceIL team’s spacecraft for landing on the moon in Google’s Lunar XPRIZE competition. (Photo by Wikimedia Commons)

The salons began last year, as did Circles of Welcome, a similar initiative by JCC Manhattan, where five to seven intermarried or unaffiliated couple meets monthly, usu-ally in someone’s home, to learn and talk about Judaism with a rabbi or rabbinical student who serves as “men-tor.” In Northern California’s Bay Area, two somewhat older programs, Jewish Gateways and Building Jewish Bridges, offer group discussions, classes and communal gatherings for intermarried couples.

The programs are at once a reaction to rising intermarriage rates and to the rejection that intermarried couples have long experienced from parts of the Jewish community. While most Jews married since 2000 have wedded non-Jews, the Conservative and Orthodox movements do not sanction inter-marriage, while the Reform movement, the most welcoming to intermarrieds of the three largest Jewish denominations, encourages conversion for the non-Jewish spouse.

“Because of the history of interfaith families not being welcomed and not being accepted – that has meant, in some instances, for interfaith families that want to expe-rience Jewish life, they have to figure that out using other resources,” said Jodi Bromberg, CEO of InterfaithFamily, which provides resources for intermarried couples “ex-ploring Jewish life and inclusive Jewish communities.”

Often, said Honeymoon Israel co-CEO Avi Rubel, intermarried couples also have friends from a range of backgrounds. So they’re uncomfortable with settings that, by their nature, are not meant for non-Jews. “When it comes to building community and meeting other people, people want to bring their whole selves into something,” Rubel said. “Which often in America means being in-clusive of non-Jews and other friends. When they’re at a Jewish event, they don’t want it to feel exclusionary.”

Mainstream Jewish organizations have become more supportive of including intermarried families. Several Conservative rabbis have voiced support for performing intermarriages, and the movement is set to allow its con-gregations to accept intermarried couples as synagogue members. Honeymoon Israel, launched in 2015, is funded by various family foundations and Jewish Federations.

But organizers of the independent initiatives, and inter-married couples themselves, say even a welcoming syna-gogue can still be an intimidating space. The couples may not know the prayers or rituals, may feel uncomfortable with the expectation of becoming members, or may just feel like they’re in the minority. “It’s a privilege of inmarried Jews with children in any social circumstance,” said Steven M. Cohen, a Jewish social policy professor at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, referring to synagogue membership. “The people that fit the demographic of the active group are the people who feel most welcome.”

Rabbi Avram Mlotek, a Circles of Welcome mentor and Orthodox rabbi, says his movement’s opposition to intermarriage doesn’t come into play as he teaches cou-ples about Judaism. “Because of my own commitment to my understanding of halachah, there will be areas in

The “ticket to the moon” cost the Israeli team more than $10 million, a sum reached with funding by the group’s two main benefactors: Morris Kahn’s Kahn Foundation and Dr. Miriam and Sheldon Adelson’s Adelson Family Foundation.

After landing on the moon, the spacecraft is ex-pected to take photos and videos of the moon and broadcast them to Earth. The spacecraft is designed to travel 500 yards across the surface of the moon by hopping, instead of roving like other spacecraft in the competition.

If all goes as planned, SpaceIL will meet the con-ditions of Google’s XPRIZE competition and win $20 million. The team plans to use the prize money to promote science in Israel.

Intermarried Continued from page 11

which the couples and I will not see eye to eye,” he said, using a Hebrew term for Jewish law. “But that’s like the 10th or 15th conversation. That’s not the first or second or third or even fifth. There’s so much more to learn about them, and for me to be able to share also about myself, before even getting to that point.”

That doesn’t mean intermarried Jews will remain forever separate, said Rabbi Miriam Farber Wajnberg, who runs Circles of Welcome at the JCC Manhattan. She sees the program as a stepping-stone to a time when the larger community is more open to non-Jewish spouses. “We expect and hope that this program won’t need to exist in the future, that we won’t need to create a special program to help couples get access to Jewish life,” she said. “It will just be happening automatically.

But Julianne Kanter, who facilitated her own Couples Salon on February 8, isn’t sweating over which synagogue to join. She said that for now, she and her husband feel a sense of belonging in the intermarried groups that have formed. “To me, I feel like these are the people who get us,” she said. “This is our community, and we’re just really lucky.”

Music prayer websiteThe website Nava Tehila offers a “Mu-

sical Prayer Archive” at www.navatehila.org/35897/Musical%2DPrayer%2DArchive. According to the website, “you can listen and

download home-made and professional recordings of our songs, watch clips, and download notes and chords.” In the future, the site hopes “to upload articles and tips about musical prayers, as well as explanations and examples of leading prayers with ‘intentions’ – facilitation with words woven around a topic or a direction (what we call a journey) as a way to create meaningful and relevant prayer for different audiences.”


Feature Films (as of September 2016)Dough - An old Jewish baker (Jonathan Pryce) takes on a young Muslim apprentice to save his failing kosher bakery. When his apprentice’s marijuana stash accidentally falls in the mixing dough, the challah starts flying off the shelves! DOUGH is a warmhearted and humorous story about overcoming prejudice and finding redemption in unexpected places. (Shown at the 2017 UJA campaign opening event)Everything is Illuminated - “Everything is Illuminated” tells the story of a young man’s quest to find the woman who saved his grandfather in a small Ukrainian town that was wiped off the map by the Nazi invasion. What starts out as a journey to piece together one family’s story under absurd circumstances turns into a meaningful journey with a powerful series of revelations -- the importance of remembrance, the perilous nature of secrets, the legacy of the Holocaust, and the meaning of friendship. (Donated by Dr. and Mrs. David Malinov)Europa Europa - Based on the autobiography of Solomon Perel, this movie recounts the severe actions a young boy must take in order to survive the Holocaust. (Donated by Dr. and Mrs. David Malinov)Hidden in Silence - Przemysl, Poland, WWII. Germany emerges victorious over the Russians and the city comes under Nazi control. The Jews are sent to the ghettos. While some stand silent, Catholic teenager, Stefania Podgorska, choose the role of a savior and sneaks 13 Jews into her attic.Inspired by real events, Munich reveals the intense story of the secret Israeli squad assigned to track down and assassinate the 11 Palestinians believed to have planned the 1972 Munich massacre of 11 Israeli athletes - and the personal toll this mission of revenge takes on the team and the man who led it.Music Box - In this intense courtroom thriller, Chicago attorney Ann Talbot (Jessica Lange) agres to defend her Hungarian immigrant father against accusations of heinous war crimes committed 50 years earlier.Remember - With the aid of a fellow Auschwitz survivor and a hand-written letter, an elderly man with demntia goes in search of the person responsible for the death of his family. (shown at the 2017 UJA campaign opening event)Munich - Inspired by real events, Munich reveals the intense story of the secret Israeli squad assigned to track down and assassinate the 11 Palestinians believedto have planned the 1972 Munich massacre of 11 Israeli athletes - and the personal toll this mission of revenge takes on the team and the man who led it.Son of Saul - October 1944, Auschwitz-Birkenau. Saul (Géza Röhrig) is a Hungarian member of the Sonderkommando, the group of Jewish prisoners forced to assist the Nazis. While working, Saul discovers the body of a boy he takes for his son. As the Sonderkommando plans a rebellion, Saul decides to carry out an impossible task: save the child’s body, find a rabbi to recite the mourner’s Kaddish and offer the boy a proper burial.(shown at the 2017 UJA campaign opening event)The Book Thief - THE BOOK THIEF tells the inspirational story of a spirited and courageous young girl who transforms the lives of everyone around her when she is sent to live with a new family in World War II Germany.The Jolson Story - THE JOLSON STORY is classic Hollywood biography at its best; a fast-paced, tune-filled extravaganza following the meteoric rise of legendary performer Al Jolson. THE JOLSON STORY was nominated for six 1946 Academy Awards , winning two, (Best Musical Scoring and Best Sound Recording). The Other Son - As he is preparing to join the Israeli army for his national service, Joseph discovers he is not his parents’ biological son and that he was inadvertently switched at birth with Yacine, the son of a Palestinian family from the West Bank. This revelation turns the lives of these two families upside-down, forcing them to reassess their respective identities, their values and beliefs.Woman in Gold - Based on the true story of Maria Altman, played by Helen Mirren, who sought to regain a world famous painting of her aunt plundered by the Nazis during World War II. She did so not just to regain what was rightfully hers but also to obtain some measure of justice for the death, destruction and massive art theft perpetrated by the Nazis. (Donated by Dr. and Mrs. David Malinov)

Non-Feature Films 2016Above and Beyond - In 1948, just three years after the liberation of Nazi death camps, a ragtag group of skilled American pilots - both Jewish and non-Jewish, answered a call for help. In secret and at great personal risk, they smuggled planes out of the U.S., trained behind the Iron Curtain and flew for Israel in its War of Independence. This band of brothers not only turned the tide of the war, they also embarked on personal journeys of discovery and pride. (Shown at the 2016 UJA campaign opening event)Everything is a Present: The Wonder and Grace of Alice Sommer Hertz - This is the uplifting true story of the gifted pianist Alice Sommer Hertz who survived the Theresienstat concentration camp by playing classical piano concerts for Nazi dignitaries. Alice Sommer Hertz lived to the age of 106. Her story is an inspiration.Follow Me: The Yoni Netanyahu Story - Yoni Netanyahu was a complex, passionate individual thrust into defending his country in a time of war and violence. The older brother of Benjamin Natanyahu, the current Israel Prime Minister, Yoni led the miraculous raid on Entebbe in 1976. Although almost all of the Entebbe hostages were saved, Yoni was the lone military fatality. Featuring three Israeli Prime Ministers and recently released audio from the Entebbe raid itself.Hava Nagila (The Movie) - A documentary romp through the history, mystery and meaning of the great Jewish standard. Featuring interviews with Harry Belafonte, Leonard Nimoy and more, the film follows the ubiquitous party song on its fascinating journey from the shtetls of Eastern Europe to the kibbutzim of Palestine to the cul-de-sacs of America.If These Knishes Could Talk tells the story of the New York accent: what it is, how it’s evolved, and the love/hate relationship New Yorkers have with it. It features writer Pete Hamill, director Penny Marshall, attorney Alan Dershowitz and screenwriter James McBride, along with a cast of characters from Canarsie to Tottenville. In between, it explores why New Yorkers eat chawclate and drink cawfee, and how the accent became the vibrant soundtrack of a charming, unforgiving and enduring city.Israel: The Royal Tour - Travel editor Peter Greenberg (CBS News) takes us on magnificent tour of the Jewish homeland, Israel. The tour guide is none other than Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The viewer gets a chance to visit the land of Israel from his own home!Jews and Baseball: An American Love Story (narrated by Dustin Hoffman)- This documentary portrays the contributions of Jewish major leaguers and the special meaning that baseball has had in the lives of American Jews. More than a film about sports, this is a story of immigration, assimilation, bigotry, heroism, the passing on of traditions, the shattering of stereotypes and, most of all, the greatest American pastime.Nicky’s Family - An enthralling documentary that artfully tells the story of how Sir Nicholas Winton, now 104, a British stockbroker, gave up a 1938 skiing holiday to answer a friend’s request for help in Prague and didn’t stop helping until the war’s beginning stopped him. He had saved the lives of 669 children in his own personal Kindertransport.The Case for Israel - Democracy’s Outpost - This documentary presents a vigorous case for Israel- for its basic right to exist, to protect its citizens from terrorism, and to defend its borders from hostile enemies.The Israel Course - A 7-part Israel education series that sheds light on the Holy Land through the ages. Featuring biblical scholars and Middle East experts, including Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, Emeritus Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, Ambassador Dore Gold, Princeton professor Bernard Lewis and many others.The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg - As baseball’s first Jewish star, Hammerin’ Hank Greenberg’s career contains all the makings of a true American success story.Unmasked: Judaophobia - the Threat to Civilization – This documentary exposes the current political assault against the State of Israel fundamentally as a war against the Jewish people and their right to self-determination.

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NEWS IN BRIEF

Sobel’s mother arrived in the U.S. at age 14, shortly after Kristallnacht in 1938. Though she escaped Germany with her immediate family – her grandmother was left behind and died in a labor camp – she remained scarred by her experiences and raised her kids to be wary of outsiders. “Fair Lawn, NJ, was kind of like ‘Leave It To Beaver’ – perfectly safe and lots of Jewish families,” Sobel said of his home-town in the New York City suburbs. “But my mom kept an axe under the bed when my dad wasn’t home.”

The family kept kosher; they had Friday night Shabbat dinners and Sobel attended synagogue on Saturdays with his father. “My mother’s idea of keeping Shabbat was she didn’t clean the house; she’d do something she enjoyed,” he recalled. “We’d drive – but not past the rabbi’s house.”

Sobel said that while he and his mother “were at loggerheads for a lot of my adult

life,” when her Alzheimer’s set in, she was released from her terrible memories. “It was almost a blessing to be around her; someone who radiated love and welcoming to everyone,” he said. “I was freed up to feel and express my love for her, which had been bottled up since my teenage years.”

The books, he said, seemed to provide her some comfort and – just as important – entertainment. Sobel’s father, Max, took care of his mother until he fell and suffered a traumatic brain injury himself three years ago, on their 67th wedding anniversary. (He died in November.)

“I watched my father, tearing his hair out, looking for things to do with her,” Sobel said. “There are so few resources for that. If she enjoyed being with the book in the moment, we could do it again the next day, or the next hour. We could read it 100 times – it never got old.”

Book Continued from page 12

From JNS.org

Gallup poll: 71 percent of Americans view Israel favorably(Israel Hayom/Exclusive to JNS.org) – Although an increasing number of Ameri-

cans oppose the establishment of a Palestinian state, a new Gallup poll shows the U.S. public is divided over that issue. Currently, 45 percent of Americans say they support the creation of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, and 42 percent are opposed to it, the latter figure representing a 5-percent increase from last year. According to the survey, a large portion of the American public supports and views Israel favorably. Of the Americans polled, 71 percent said they support Israel and 27 percent expressed an opposing view. This was the fourth consecutive year in which support for Israel in the Gallup poll remained above the 70-percent mark. The low point in American public support for Israel – at 49 percent – came in the 1989 Gallup survey. The high point came just two years later, in 1991, when support reached 79 percent. In the realm of political affiliation, Republicans expressed 81 percent support for Israel in the new poll, while 61 percent of Democrats said they support the Jewish state.Hezbollah leader boasts about hitting Israel’s nuclear facilities

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah boasted about being able to target Israel’s nu-clear facilities in Dimona, while chiding Israel for being afraid of the Lebanese terror group’s “might.” “Israel knows we can turn the reactor in Dimona from a threat to us into a threat against itself, with our missiles,” Nasrallah said in remarks broadcast on Feb. 17 on Hezbollah’s Al-Manar satellite station, boasting that Hezbollah could turn “Israel’s main weapon into a threat against Israelis themselves.” “If Hezbollah is weak-ened, Israel will see it as an opportunity for war. Support for Hezbollah in Lebanon protects Lebanese people from war. ...Israel is aware of Hezbollah’s might and is afraid of us,” he added. Nasrallah said the recent meeting between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump marked “a semi-official announcement of the death of the path of [Israeli-Palestinian] negotiations. ...The Israeli plot is to establish a limited government in Gaza and prevent the Palestinians from returning to the other lands stolen from them. For the Israelis, there is no such thing as a Palestinian state.”Israel’s economy posts strongest quarter since 2013

(Israel Hayom/Exclusive to JNS.org) – Israel’s economy grew by an annualized 6.2 percent in the last quarter of 2016, marking its strongest quarterly performance since the second quarter of 2013, the country’s Central Bureau of Statistics said on Feb. 16. The economy grew by an annualized 4.2 percent in the third quarter of 2016 and 5.3 percent in the second quarter. The data showed that, year on year, the economy grew 5 percent in the second half of 2016, following 3.2-percent growth in the first half of the year. The increase in gross domestic product in the second half of 2016 reflected a 3.5-percent increase in public consumption, and 2.9-percent growth in private consumption per capita. Israel’s exports of goods and services, excluding diamonds and start-ups, were up 4.5 percent in 2016, and investments in fixed assets climbed 10.2 percent. Imports of goods and services went up 10.6 percent in the second half of 2016, the report said.Report: Iran continues to call for Israel’s destruction, despite nuclear deal

Iran’s leadership has continued to call for Israel’s destruction since the nuclear deal was forged in July 2015, according to a new report published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. “There is absolutely no indication of one iota of moderation by the Iranian elite in their hostile intentions toward Israel since the conclusion of the Iran nuclear agreement. Iranian policy in this regard is driven by the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps,” former Foreign Ministry director-general Dore Gold, who heads the JCPA, said. The report by the JCPA includes a compilation of statements by Iranian leaders, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, that has called for Israel’s destruction. According to the report, Iran’s long-range missile program demonstrates the state’s commitment to the hatred of Israel. It noted how the missiles are frequently inscribed with slogans such as “Israel should be wiped off the face of the earth.” The report added that Ayatollah Khamenei “paves the way” for the fierce anti-Israel rhetoric in the military and the nation. “The combination of an extreme Islamist ideology that repetitively preaches the destruction of Israel, boasts of its advanced missile program, and seeks to return to the bosom of the Western world makes Iran all the more dangerous,” the report said. “This over-confident Iran continues to export terrorism to Palestinian terrorist organizations, Hezbollah, and subversive groups in the Gulf states, some of which undermine American interests.” Meanwhile, Iran said on Feb. 16 that it views Israel’s nuclear arsenal as the “biggest threat” to world peace, a day after President Donald Trump vowed to prevent Iran from ever obtaining a nuclear weapon. Israel is the “biggest threat to the peace and security in the region and the world,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Ghasemi said, state news agency IRNA reported. “The bitter truth is that these unjust claims are

being repeated by the Zionist regime that doesn’t abide by any international laws and has hundreds of warheads in its atomic arsenal,” Ghasemi added.Noble Energy to invest $550M in Israel’s Leviathan gas field

(Israel Hayom/Exclusive to JNS.org) – The American production company Noble Energy is expected to announce in the coming days an investment of $550 million in the development of Israel’s Leviathan gas field, according to a company outlook and guidance report for 2017 published on Feb. 13. The $550 million represents one-fifth of the company’s global investments of $2.3 billion to $2.6 billion for 2017. Noble Energy President and CEO David Stover said in the guidance report, “We have a tremendous opportunity with the Leviathan project offshore Israel. In 2017, our teams will begin project development, with first gas targeted for the end of 2019. I have no doubt that our outstanding track record of major project execution will again deliver substantial value to the company.” The report also said, “Capital expenditures in the Eastern Mediterranean for the initial development of the Leviathan project include drilling one production well, long-lead investment items and ramp up of construction activities. The company will also complete an additional production well at Tamar [gas field], which was drilled in the fourth quarter of 2016.” Israel is currently engaged in discussions with Turkey, Cyprus, Greece and Italy over the possibility of exporting its natural gas via underwater pipelines.Hamas official: new Gaza political leader draws inspiration from Hezbollah

(Israel Hayom/Exclusive to JNS.org) – Hamas’ newly elected political leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, is expected to concentrate his efforts on strengthening the Pal-estinian terrorist organization’s “military wing” and will draw inspiration from the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah, according to an unnamed senior Hamas official. “He will focus on turning Hamas’ military wing into the strongest body in the Gaza Strip,” the official told Israel Hayom. The official said Sinwar is likely to make a number of internal and structural changes to Hamas. “We must remember that for the last six months, [Sinwar’s predecessor Ismail] Haniyeh has been out of Gaza in his election campaign in the Persian Gulf principalities and Arab states, and that Sinwar was es-sentially leading the movement,” he said. “[Sinwar] can put into practice Hamas in Gaza’s policies related to foreign affairs and security, including relations with Egypt and the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, the conflict with Israel and dealing with the civilian population in the Gaza Strip. ....In contrast with Haniyeh, the new leader will focus on sweeping logistical changes in the policy of Hamas in Gaza. ...His model is Hezbollah, and he will allocate considerable funds to that end at the expense of civil and welfare activities undertaken by the movement during Haniyeh’s rule.”

Dear Dassy,

On behalf of Operation Gratitude and the heroes who receive our care packages, I thank for your generous donation of gift cards. Your contri-bution will enable us to send over 200,000 Care Packages this year to the tens of thousands of brave men and women still deployed overseas in harsh and remote areas; to their children anxiously awaiting their return; and to Veterans, New Recruits, First Responders, Wounded Heroes and their Care Givers.

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Trump and Netanyahu: The mixed messages of a diplomatic ... · Netanyahu, left, and President Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House on February 15. (Photo by Andrew Harrer