http://blog.thejewishweek.com Click a category below to go to a specific Jewish Week blog en-us Copyright 2008 The Jewish Week Blogs - Route 17 http://blog.thejewishweek.com/ Wed, 17 Sep 2008 11:13:15 CST Jonathan Mark's Route 17 blog has moved! Check out the new, improved blog site here , and remember to update your bookmarks! http://blog.thejewishweek.com/post/Route_17_has_moved.html http://blog.thejewishweek.com/post/Route_17_has_moved.html jdbesser@gmail.com (James Besser) Wed, 17 Sep 2008 11:07:00 CST Route 17 Route 17: Politics & Jewish Values     The other day, Sen. Barack Obama's Jewish outreach director, Dan Shapiro, said the Obama campaign will emphasize to Jewish voters that the Democratic Party's values are "in sync" with "historic Jewish values," while "John McCain's values are not." That is something we hear not only from politicians but also from Jewish journalists all year long, that liberal political positions are "Jewish," based primarily on the fact that more Jews vote for Democrats. What most Jews do, though, is no the determinant of Jewish historical values. Most Jews don't keep strictly kosher but we can't therefore conclude that eating lobster is a Jewish historical value. Most Jews intermarry. Is that a value? Plenty of liberal Jews supported Stalin in the 1930s. What does that prove? Shapiro mentioned Obama's views on the Supreme Court as being somehow Jewish. Obama, like most Democrats, believes that judges should legislate liberalism from the bench. In fact, too many politicians in both parties believe that a judge ought to be able to tell Congress, in advance of any actual case, how he or she would rule, particularly on abortion. Obama has said, "We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it's like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old." In other words, the facts of a given case must be weighed against the skin color, the sexual preferences, or the unhappy childhood of the plaintiff or defendant. It's like the Jets goofing on Officer Krupke in "West Side Story,"  "Officer Krupke, you're really a square; This boy don't need a judge, he needs an analyst's care! It's just his neurosis that oughta be curbed. He's psychologic'ly disturbed!"  But according to Pirkei Avos [Ethics of the Fathers 1:8], that's not how you run a court. Instead, when serving as a judge "do not act as a lawyer; when the litigants stand before you, consider them both as guilty, [only] when they are dismissed from you, consider them both as innocent, provided they have accepted the judgment." Which value is more historically Jewish, Obama's or Pirkei Avos'? What about the value of teaching sexual abstinence? Since Gov. Sarah Palin's ascendancy, many Democrats have mocked her advocacy of teenaged sexual abstinence. We've been told by many Democrats that abstinence doesn't work. A blogger on the far left's Daily Kos wrote, "If Sarah Palin still supports abstinence-only sex education for public schools after this experience with her daughter, what does that say about her judgment as a policy maker?" It says that Palin's judgment is in line with historical Jewish values. There are more than two-dozen Orthodox high schools for girls in the 11 counties of the New York metropolitan area, from Kiryas Joel to Riverdale to Long Island and New Jersey. Combined, there are as many students in these schools as in a mid-sized American city. Every single one of these Jewish schools advocates abstinence. Sure, there are kids in some of these high schools that do "everything but," but that just goes to prove that they have been taught a sense of how far is too far, a sense that does not exist in most American public high schools. Does teaching abstinence work? Last year there were zero unwed pregnancies among these thousands of Jewish teenaged girls. Last time we checked, in American public schools where children are taught sex-ed detached from religion -- almost all of these schools run by municipalities with Democratic mayors and city councils, there were 140,000 unwed teenaged pregnancies. Who do you think has a better handle on historical Jewish values, the religious schools with zero unwed mothers, or the schools with 140,000? And what if a yeshiva high school girl gets pregnant, as did Bristol Palin? I don't really care to judge a case without the whole story, but even with several Bristol Palins, the statistics are still overwhelming in favor of abstinence. And the issue isn't whether Bristol has "historical Jewish values," the issue is whether the Democrats can claim it. What about charity? Everybody can agree that charity is a historical Jewish value. Surely on this measure of compassion the Obama supporters will be "in sync" with Jewish values, rather than the McCain supporters. Guess again. According to a study by a professor at Syracuse University, written about by George Will earlier this year, although liberal families average 6 percent higher income than conservative families, conservatives give 30 percent more to charity. Conservatives also donate more time and more blood. Residents of states that voted for John Kerry in 2004 (how many homes do Kerry and his heiress wife Teresa Heinz Kerry have?) gave a smaller percentage of their income to charity than did residents of states that voted for George W. Bush, who carried 24 of the 25 states where charitable giving was above average. There are plenty of reasons to vote for the Democrats, but when one party insists that they are more in sync with Jewish values, Jewish voters should do their homework. Doing your homework is a Jewish value, too. http://blog.thejewishweek.com/post/politics_and_Jewish_values.html http://blog.thejewishweek.com/post/politics_and_Jewish_values.html jonathan@jewishweek.org (Jonathan Mark) Thu, 11 Sep 2008 10:31:00 CST Route 17 Route 17: Sarah Palin's Appeal Is Same As Chabad's     I'm getting a hunch the Republicans just might win for one reason alone, and it makes no sense, just like Chabad makes no sense to the Jewish elite. That one reason is Sarah Palin. She reminds me of about a thousand different Chabad shluchot (the rebbe's women representatives). She's seems friendly, sexy (forgive me) in an Orthodox way, with that magnetism, optimism, and accessibility that has made Chabad shluchot successful in 5,000 different locales, even though they are almost always considerably more right-wing -- religiously and politically -- than their congregants and financial supporters. Reform, Conservative and other Orthodox Jews don't get it. How is Chabad is so successful in places where there are no Chasidim? Why do liberal Jews on the Upper West Side want to send their kids to Chabad pre-schools? Why do many hundreds of non-Chasidic, even non-Orthodox students at Harvard and SUNY Binghamton want to spend Friday night meals with these Chabad Sarah Palins rather than the more mainstream, liberal Jews down the road? It makes no sense. Don't get it, do you? Who would you rather have a cup of coffee with on a bungalow porch, a cup that can turn into a three-hour conversation, Sarah Palin or Nancy Pelosi? Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton come across like the Queen of Spades of a nanny state; school marms of a school you don't want to go to. Pelosi, in particular, seems like one of those Sisterhood program chairs from a suburban temple whose calls you don't want to answer. Sarah Palin seems like one of those Chabad women who don't have enough chairs at her table for all the non-Chabad women who'd take a plane or a subway to attend the next shluchot convention in Crown Heights. Something's happening and you don't know what it is, do you, Nancy Pelosi?                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     And another thing: There are plenty of logical, rational reasons to abort America's relationship with Israel, the far left tells us, but Chabad doesn't abort and evangelicals (such as Palin) don't either. Rabbis who can't stop quoting Heschel or Soloveitchik don't get it. Americans and Jews don't need another genius. We don't need another Herr Rabbi Doctor. We have enough "scholars," believe it or not.   We don't have enough human beings who'd rather rock a Down Syndrome baby to sleep than abort it; human beings who can relate to a flunking child or the stuffiness of the sophisticates, parents who don't give a damn who's in the top shiur or who made law review.   We have too many of the best and the brightest, the wise and the brilliant, who can't communicate (and who, in the end, maybe aren't really the best or all that brilliant.) The genius of Chabad is delivering their message in a down-home way, much as Sarah Palin did at the convention. There are others outside of Chabad who know how to do it, too. Blu Greenberg, for one, the godmother of Orthodox feminism, is as smart and wise as anyone I've ever met, but like a Chabad woman she doesn't enter a room like she wants you to know what she got on her SATs (or BJEs). Her voice and manner are gentle, her visions for Judaism are prophetic and compelling, all the more so because her Judaism is poetic (she's a published poet, after all), not like Judaism's angry left whose religion has all the appeal of a term paper, all about "J," "P," Deutero-Isaiah; the kind who can't look at any biblical verse with being "troubled" by it. Chabad women know what really troubles people, and it ain't Deutero-Isaiah.                                                                                                                                                                         In 1950, all American Jews heard of liberal Judaism (that's Conservatives, too) but almost no one heard of Chabad. Chabad seemed a relic of history. Liberal Judaism was ascendent, inevitable. The rebbe's Chabad was as fringe religiously as Sarah Palin's conservative anscestors were then on the fringe politically.    Who would have figured that in 2008, liberal pews in most of America would be emptier than their rabbis would like, while everyone has now heard of Chabad? Men and women from Chabad are all over the continent, all over the planet, raising fortunes (without charging shul membership fees), getting men to put on tefillin, getting women to go to mikvah -- men and women who, if not for Chabad, wouldn't. It makes no sense. Chabad women, like Sarah Palin, don't look at Judaism, or the United States, and then look at the world to worry "why do they hate us?" They don't blame Judaism or America first. They are happy warriors. They don't think "bitterness" is what motivates religious people, as Obama said with condescension. You come away feeling that these kind of women understand religion, they love America and religion like they love their kids, troubles and all, feeling blessed every step of the way. The high-salaried great scholars of the other denominations, none of whom went to the University of Idaho, are very good at conducting studies, at going on high-priced retreats, at developing goalposts that can be moved to allow past failures to score. Chabad women don't conduct studies. They cook a chicken (or, Sarah Palin, a moose) and invite you over on Friday night. And college students, middle-class families, international businessmen want to be there.                                                                               At the beginning of these successful relationships between Chabad and their guests, theology and politics having little or nothing to do with it. A lot of Palin's appeal has nothing to do with her theology or politics either. The other party and denominations are trying to figure it out. Maybe if they could get a grant. Maybe if they could find someone with whom they can dialogue. Chabad women and Sarah Palin don't dialogue. They talk. And they don't talk down. They win. Makes no sense, does it? http://blog.thejewishweek.com/post/Sarah_Palin_Shliach.html http://blog.thejewishweek.com/post/Sarah_Palin_Shliach.html jonathan@jewishweek.org (Jonathan Mark) Mon, 08 Sep 2008 13:31:00 CST Route 17 Route 17: A Stone For Mordechai Yasgur   This week the Jewish Week expanded the previous blog on Woodstock into a fuller story  but something struck me the more I was looking over my notes on the museum. Overall, it's a terrific museum, from the display on transistor radios (the ipods of an earlier era), to the music, both on film and interactive (touch-screens that allow one to trace the evolution of any musical  genre through the decad, from folk to r & b), to the Woodstock-era culture that now seems all too fleeting.   And yet, it occurred to me that there was not enough of a sense in the museum that Woodstock happened in Sullivan County, no real effort to depict what Sullivan County was like in 1969, and certainly no sense of how Jewish it all was. Aside from Yasgur, several other key players were Jewish, some of the musicians and a nurse were helicoptered to the site from some of the great Jewish hotels (what was that like?), among numerous examples of interaction between the Jewish locals and the festival. It wasn't an accident that Jackie Robinson broke into the minor leagues in Montreal and then into the major leagues in the diverse and open-hearted borough of Brooklyn - it's inconceivable that Jackie could have played in 1947 for the Atlanta Crackers or the St, Louis Browns, cities still choking on Jim Crow. And its no accident that Woodstock came off as well as it did in the open-hearted Jewish Catskills, rather than in those parts of 1969 America where Woodstock-types were very much thought of as the enemy. The festival couldn't even survive local opposition in other parts of New York State, before finding a home on a Jewish guy's farm, with help from a Jewish hotel owner, and assistance from many summer people who came, yes, from Jackie Robinson's Brooklyn. These people were part of the story, too. The movie "Walk On The Moon"  picked up on this, in which Diane Lane plays a seemingly straight bungalow wife up from Brooklyn, who neverthless finds herself breaking loose, every which way in the exhileration of Woodstock, and then somehow reconciling that weekend with her return to her seemingly straight Jewish life.    If Kennedy and King are noted in the museum, the fact is that Israel's Six-Day War miracle win in 1967 was as much as part of the Jewish messianic sixties that opened hearts, that thrilled millions of young, middle-aged and older Jews to the messianic possibilities, to the dreams and hopes that echoed that August weekend on Yasgur's farm. Max Yasgur said at the time, "If the generation gap is to be closed, we older people have to do more than we have done." That was not a common sentiment in the Nixon years. Yasgur was very much a Jewish guy. Not long after Woodstock he took a trip to Israel where, the story goes, he met Ben-Gurion, of all people, who didn't have to be told who Yasgur was. There used to be a stone on the site of the festival,  the only commemorative marker on the Woodstock site before the creation of the new Bethel Woods Center for the Arts. But if you're in the neighborhood, you might want to visit another stone where Mordechai Binyamin Yasgur rests in peace, in Liberty N.Y., on the grounds of Ahavath Israel.   http://blog.thejewishweek.com/post/remembering_Mordechai_Yasgur.html http://blog.thejewishweek.com/post/remembering_Mordechai_Yasgur.html jonathan@jewishweek.org (Jonathan Mark) Sun, 24 Aug 2008 14:01:00 CST Route 17 Route 17: The Cossacks Are Coming      Call me nostalgic, but my favorite part of the Russian-Georgian war was the Cossacks. In the end, you need your enemy. If the Dodgers disappeared from the face of the earth, Giants fans would be the sorrier. Many college football fans hate Notre Dame but everyone wants to see them play. I'd like to see the Cossacks, provided I'm not dressed like Motle Kamzoil when they come galloping by. According to the Guardian, early in the war, "Units of armed Cossacks from across the North Caucasus region that borders Georgia were poised to join the battle…. Under Russia law, Cossacks - the descendants of runaway serfs and outlaws who in the past were employed by the Kremlin to protect the country's southern border - are allowed to carry arms and carry out policing functions in cooperation with interior ministry forces. "At the Vladikavkaz headquarters of the Terek Cossacks today a group of men sat under portraits of fierce looking warriors with drooping moustaches watching television coverage of Georgian artillery shelling Tskhinvali…. In Volgograd the leader of the Don Cossacks, Viktor Vodolatsky called on all Cossacks under 40 years of age to volunteer to fight." The Terek Cossacks? The Don Cossacks? Who knew they had two teams? I guess Chmielnicki was out of town, in his August dacha. Runaway serfs and outlaws? Warriors with drooping mustaches? Can't we get some Jews to challenge these guys to a rematch? Viktor Vodolatsky, I'd like you to meet the sons of Vladimir Yevgenyevich Jabotinsky.       http://blog.thejewishweek.com/post/Cossacks_are_coming.html http://blog.thejewishweek.com/post/Cossacks_are_coming.html jonathan@jewishweek.org (Jonathan Mark) Fri, 22 Aug 2008 16:20:00 CST Route 17 Route 17: When Oz Landed On Kansas "Well I dreamed I saw A child of God, He was walking along the road…"  - Joni Mitchell, "Woodstock" Last weekend, Aug. 15-18, was the 39th anniversary of Woodstock, at Yasgur's Farm on Hurd Road, right off Route 17B. I was in Camp Hili that summer, less than a mile away, across White Lake. One could hear Janis Joplin through the clouds in the night. There was a kid who had a bar mitzvah scheduled that Shabbos in camp; some of his guests were stuck on Route 17 with Woodstock Nation, some of whom parked their cars on the road and walked. They didn't realize that 17 was always like that on a Friday afternoon. The day or so before, hitching back to camp from Monticello, I was given a ride in a van that had an 8-track in the glove compartment playing the first Crosby, Stills & Nash album. It was the first time I heard CSN and the first time I saw an 8-track. In what was still the Castkills' Jewish heyday, the festival and its pilgrims spilled over into the nearby roads and towns. On Shabbos afternoon, bungalow Jews went for walks along the road. At night, after Shabbos, I, all of 17-years, went out to look for this Oz that landed on my Kansas. It was a night when you met people and were carried on a wave into someone's smoky, dimly lit  home, crowded with young strangers who didn't think they were strangers. For decades there was only a stone slab, with a metal plaque marking the spot on Hurd Road. The stone named all the musicians, a surprising number of whom were obscure, some one-hit wonders, who performed on that 1969 weekend. One August anniversary in the 1980s, in the last years of Grossinger's, that hotel tried to have a Woodstock weekend but not too many guests cared. They had invited media coverage and I was one of maybe three guys who covered what little there was to cover. On my way home, I drove to White Lake. The old summer camp was in ruins, papers and color war placards strewn about in the old abandoned dining room. I drove to Hurd Road, to the shady area where the stone marked the spot. That Sunday morning it was as overgrown and empty as some of the abandoned hotel lawns down the road. Then, when almost no one was around, John Sebastian drove by, alone in his car, from his home in the Hudson valley, wanting to see the old hillside. If you're lucky, after paradise gives way to a parking lot, the parking lot gives way to a museum , and this one is worth a several-hour excursion the next time you're in the mountains. Last week, the Allman Brothers and Bob Weir played at the Bethel Woods Center, the music facility built over Yasgur's place. The Jonas Brothers played there last week, too, which only goes to show you something or other. Joe Cocker came back earlier this summer. And like a grown-up going on Facebook, The New York Philharmonic played there earlier this summer, too, saluting history by playing a surreal symphonic version of Jimi Hendrix' already surreal "Star Spangled Banner," giving proof through the night that our flag was still there.       http://blog.thejewishweek.com/post/When_oz_lands_on_Kansas.html http://blog.thejewishweek.com/post/When_oz_lands_on_Kansas.html jonathan@jewishweek.org (Jonathan Mark) Mon, 18 Aug 2008 14:48:00 CST Route 17 Route 17: Hobo's Lullaby There's nothing like August in Iowa. If all the fussing over kosher cows in Postville, Iowa, has you in the mood for milchig, let's you and I drive the road just east of Des Moines to see the famous Butter Cow at the wonderful Iowa State Fair, going on now. Every self-respecting trumbenick knows that August in Iowa also means the annual Hobo's Convention, on a road just outside Britt, and we hear it was quite a convention this past week. (At the Hobo's Convention, do they have a "plenary" and "breakout sessions"?) If you think Route 17 doesn't run through Iowa, think again. There are Jews everywhere, even on the Big Rock Candy Mountain. Here's a hobo glossary advising bindle stiffs that  "goy" means: "a hobo who can work the Jewish agencies. Plural, goyim." Also "Rabbi: frequent moniker of a Jewish hobo." And, of course, "Trumbenick: A Jewish hobo." Not all hobos stay hobos. One ended up giving $500,000 to the Jewish National Fund. If this has you in the mood for riding the rails, hobos suggest a ride on these . This brings me to a very big problem with John McCain. At a time when both the political and economic costs of importing energy from the Middle East are bordering on disaster, McCain has been as big an impediment as anyone in Washington to the revival of the American railroad. Train service has been rising considerably, but infrastructure is hurting and Amtrak is lagging in buying new passenger cars. Insensitive cuts in train service, even to major cities, have hit bone. For example, there's now only one train from New York to Cleveland and it arrives at the ungodly hour of 3:27 a.m., and that's the only train from Cleveland to Chicago. In too many cities, trains don't leave, arrive, or come often enough to make trains a viable alternative to other forms of transportation, even if the public wanted. Too many Republicans, such as McCain, take the Marie Antoinette position that the public can drive or fly, that the lack of riders on the 3:27 means the public doesn't want to ride Amtrak, when the public is only answering an unfair question. More American money is going to reconstruct Baghdad than to reconstruct American trains. McCain, when he was chairman of the transportation committee, killed billions of dollars that could have gone for train service, demanding that Amtrak be more self-sufficient and charging that Amtrak is a symbol of government waste. Imagine all the government waste in the last decade and imagine thinking Amtrak. That was McCain's kind of foresight earlier this decade, and few have been more shortsighted. Today, with oil prices and airline chaos, there may be no greater wisdom than a decent national rail service, and no energy option so easily available.  A recent Times editorial was right, the national rails deserve a fighting chance. To leave you on a lovely Iowa summer night, gentle reader, here's Emmylou Harris singing "Hobo's Lullaby," , Arlo Guthrie singing the same  and Johnny Cash on the "City of New Orleans."   http://blog.thejewishweek.com/post/Hobos_lullaby.html http://blog.thejewishweek.com/post/Hobos_lullaby.html jonathan@jewishweek.org (Jonathan Mark) Tue, 12 Aug 2008 13:41:00 CST Route 17 Route 17:  The Games Of Tisha B'Av   This past Saturday night, Tisha B'Av, Eicha was read at the Beijing Chabad, with Israeli President Shimon Peres and other Olympics visitors in shul. Surely, they broke their fast at Dini's, the only kosher Chinese restaurant in China. They deliver throughout Beijing, even throughout China, but don't think they leave their menus in Forbidden City doorways. NBC will probably miss this item on the Saudi Arabian ban against their women participating in the Olympics. (Check out the uniforms of their women's soccer team). And here's a pair of items on an Iranian swimmer dropping out of the Olympics because he refused to swim in the same pool as an Israeli swimmer.  The swimmer later changed his story, saying he was sick, sick of Israel most likely. This is more like the 1936 Hitler Olympics than most want to admit. Follow this link to a pdf that opens into a chart of the numerous Chinese forced labor camps within a shout of the games. Yes, last Saturday night and Sunday was Tisha B'Av, the saddest day of the Jewish year, a time to mourn our victory over fascist Japan. According to Marla Feldman of the Commission on Social Action of Reform Judaism, it was very bad that we defeated Hitler's ally by nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki instead of… what? Having a dialogue? What's particularly perverse about this piece is that at a time when Iran is threatening to do a Hiroshima on Israel, Israel is not mentioned in this article whatsoever. Strange. Iran is mentioned, but only linked to North Korea, nothing about Iran  being a Hitler wannabe. Of course, there was no hint in her article that the Holocaust lasted as long as it did because the United States had to fight simultaneous wars in Europe and the Pacific. No sense from her that American boys were dying in Nazi-level Japanese prisoner of war camps that were only liberated, and all the faster, because we took out Hiroshima and Nagasaki, instead of letting the war drag on for months at the cost of tens of thousands of American soldiers and POWs, Reform boys among them. What did Reform Jews serving in the Pacific think of nuking Japan? Of course, Reform Jewish soldiers, back then, thought "social action" meant beating the bad guys (Japan), not that we, the Americans, were the bad guys. Did you ever notice how for so many progressive Jews our Jewish holy days are never about Judaism but how the Jews and Americans are the bad guys? Tisha B'Av is really about how bad we were to Japan; Chanukah is really how bad we are about intermarriage; Pesach is really about how bad Israel is to the Palestinians; Succos is about how we don't take care of the homeless, even though we do; and Shavuous, well, no one really cares about Shavuous. I'll help my progressive friends out. Let's see, how mean we were to Japan is already taken. How about tying Shavuous to the evils of the Louisiana Purchase or maybe the Pullman strike of 1894? Something, anything, it doesn't have to make sense, so long as Shavuous is not actually about Shavuous. You'll see, by next year the custom of eating dairy on Shavuous will be turned a command to eat dairy as a way to show how progressives are so ethical and so angry at Agriprocessors and kosher meat and so much better than the Orthodox. Protesting kosher meat, of course, is the cause de jour of so many Jews who don't keep kosher in the first place, and so many rabbis whose congregants don't keep kosher, either. Some of these people are sincere, I know, and there's reason to investigate Agriprocessors. But Heksher Tzedek (the neo-PETA attack on Kosher meat) is also a hypocrite's delight. They say we need illegal aliens because they'll do work Americans won't do, but we're supposed to be angry at Agriprocessors for hiring them to do that work that American unionized workers won't do. We say we love illegal aliens but we don't want Agriporcessors to hire them. We say we love how industrious the illegals are but then we say it is bad that are given more than a 40-hour work week. Plenty of Julius and Ethel Ethicals will stomp their feet about how unethical kashrut and Orthodox Jews are, and then go out and get a non-kosher turkey sandwich or a burger about whose slaughter and slaughterhouse they know nothing and care less.  There are, in fact, ways to bring the wisdom and beauty of Jewish holy days to reflect on modern times. The most brilliant example is Clal President Rabbi Irwin Kula's usage of the Eicha trop to chant the transcripts of the final telephone calls from the World Trade Center on 9/11. Why that works is, first of all, he is not mourning contributors to the Imperialist Japanese war machine, he is mourning total innocents, Jews and non-Jews together; and second because he does not imply that we can't understand Tisha B'Av without first understanding Hiroshima or 9/11. He is saying the opposite, we help the world and ourselves better understand the exquisite pain and love of those final calls from the highest floors by first understanding Tisha B'Av, and the holy blues of Eicha. (Here's a link for more on Clal). If the mourners of Hiroshima get Tisha B'Av wrong, Rabbi Avi Weiss and Glenn Richter get it right, as they do every year on Tisha B'Av, with a prayer vigil "for Israel and Jews in Danger," at the Isaiah Peace Wall, across the street from the UN. They've been doing it for 31 years; back when Georgians were still Russians, back when yeshiva kids were on the sidewalks all through the year -- all through the '60s, '70s and '80s -- protesting on behalf of Jews behind the Iron Curtain. Howard Jonas, of the IDT Corporation, said at the vigil: "In the past, we protested for Soviet Jews.  It seemed the Kremlin would never fall, but it did and the Jews came out.  Today, the situation is even worse.  Oil money is flowing to our enemies; Iran is trying to wipe us out.  But right and God are on our side.  It's right to protest and to pray." "We're in the eye of a storm," said Rabbi Weiss. "To the north of Israel is Hezbollah, to the south Hamas… [To the east] Iran, with missile technology supplied by China, threatens genocide against Israel." No one ate meat at this rally. Must have been some kind of protest. http://blog.thejewishweek.com/post/The_Games_of_Tisha_BAv.html http://blog.thejewishweek.com/post/The_Games_of_Tisha_BAv.html jonathan@jewishweek.org (Jonathan Mark) Mon, 11 Aug 2008 18:05:00 CST Route 17 Route 17: First Draft Of A Love Story   Let's take a trip to Munkatch in March, 1933, five minutes to midnight . First stop: The wedding of the Rabinowitz boy to Frime Chaye Rivke Shapira - daughter of the Munkatch rebbe, Eleazer Shapira. The bride was to become the mom of the present Munkatcher and Dinover Rebbes. Newspapers say 20,000 well-wishers gathered in the crowded streets for wedding. Horses pulled carriages. Dozens ride bicycles. Who are they? Then, the Munkatcher Rebbe makes a speech asking Jews in America to keep Shabbos. Perhaps the rebbe, who himself will soon die, sees what the rest of the Jews in this video can not; that those at this wedding who won't be killed within the decade will likely renew their life in these blessed United States. The rebbe is speaking to the survivors and the unborn. What is there for the rebbe, father of the bride, to say, other than to hope the survivors remember Shabbos, to remember what Shabbos meant in Munkatch, once upon a yesterday. In fact, the children of these Munkatcher chasidim, 75 years after this video, are indeed here in America. They drive up Route 17, exit on Route 42, and summer in an old Catskills hotel now named Camp Chaim V'Shulem Munkatch.    We then go cross-town, a choir of little children is singing Hatikvah; coming across other, very differernt little children in the courtyard of a chasidic cheder; and from there along the streets, meeting an outdoor book peddler and weavers. The visit ends with an extraordinary scene of more than a hundred men and women dancing together, exhilarated, in spirited circles. The person I enjoyed most in the video was not in the video at all - the cameraman. Who was he? He must have appreciated all the Jews of Munkatch, from the chasidim to the Zionists to the street vendors. He must have felt comfortable enough with each of these people and scenes, sensing that everyone and every moment,  from wedding party to weavers, was worth preserving, if only on film. That holy man with a camera, in his nine minutes of film, reminded me of something I've always loved about Jewish journalism; that we chronicle not just the leaders but the kaleidescope of Jewish lives. We shouldn't have to wait, we shouldn't need the haunting hindsight of this video, to sense the beauty of our neighborhoods, of each other. What I love about that cameraman is what I love about The Jewish Week: We're not just the first draft of history but the first draft of a love story, no matter how it ends.   http://blog.thejewishweek.com/post/First_draft_of_a_love_story.html http://blog.thejewishweek.com/post/First_draft_of_a_love_story.html jonathan@jewishweek.org (Jonathan Mark) Mon, 04 Aug 2008 16:55:00 CST Route 17 Route 17: Nothing 'Rare' About Holocaust Torahs   I've been subscribing to a news alert for the word "Holocaust" (amazing how much news there is about something that ended 63 years ago) and a variation of one headline keeps coming up: "Jewish temple in New Bern receives rare Torah scroll restored after Holocaust." (That from South Florida's Sun Journal, July 18, 2008). About a year ago, I started keeping a file. A year ago someone e-mailed a story idea: "Breaking News. Tell the edtors. "A 250-year-old Torah brought to Israel." The Torah scroll, according to the e-mail, was "hidden during World War II," and was found in Krakow, 1998, by a Jewish tourist who brought it to the United States, and now was bringing it to Israel, as that tourist was now making aliyah. And from The New York Times: "From Auschwitz, a Torah as Strong as Its Spirit" (April 30, 2008). The story begins, "The back story of how a Torah got from the fetid barracks of Auschwitz to the ark of the Central Synagogue at Lexington Avenue and 55th Street is one the pastor of the Lutheran church down the street sums up as simply miraculous. It is the story of a sexton in the synagogue in the Polish city of Oswiecim who buried most of the sacred scroll before the Germans stormed in and later renamed the city Auschwitz." This past April, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, who thankfully escaped from the Holocaust on the Kindertransport, paid to have a Torah restored, a Torah hidden in Germany by a Roman Catholic housekeeper at great risk. Returned to the family that owned it after the war, the Torah was used by the remnants of a congregation in Haigerloch until it folded, when it was then given to the Hebrew Tabernacle congregation in Washington Heights. In need of restoration to be kosher, this was done in the name of Manfred Westheimer, the late husband of Dr. Ruth, whose name is inscribed on the Torah.    Each one of these stories is more beautiful than the next. One can't help being moved when imagining where each of these Torahs has been, the little kids who reached up to kiss it on Shabbos mornings lost to history, the people who danced with them on Simchas Torah, and the shuls they once called home. Just one thing. A Holocaust-era Torah is hardly "rare." There are more Holocaust-era Torahs that survived the war than there are Conservative (700) and Reform (900) synagogues in North America. There are 1,564 Torah scrolls in the repository of London's Westminster Synagogue alone. In 1964, those scrolls were purchased by a London Philanthropist from the Prague museum that was holding Torah scrolls confiscated by the Nazis (intended for a perverse Nazi museum on the Jews, after the Final Solution was finalized). More than 1,400 of those scrolls from that London congregation are loan to various synagogues, most in the United States. On top of that, there have been numerous scrolls found by private individuals, such as the one found in Krakow and the one retrieved from Oswiecim, and the one restored by Dr. Ruth. On top of that, there are more than 400 other Holocaust-era Torah scrolls found in Ukraine and elsewhere in Eastern Europe that are now being restored in the Baltimore area. According to the Washington Post, more than 2,400 Torah scrolls survived the war. Charlottesville, Virginia's Beth Israel Congregation has a page on their web site explaining how they got theirs. At this point, is there any reader that has not seen a Holocaust-era Torah scroll on display in some synagogue's glass case? Most Orthodox congregations haven't joined this phenomenon. Some reasons might be:  The London repository with the largest collection is Reform, and Orthodox shuls would be out of the loop that made these Torahs available; most Orthodox synagogue buildings are urban, smaller than Reform and Conservative buildings, and simply don't have the room. These shuls are less inclined to display any ritual items behind glass, in general. An Orthodox Jew might also reason that if a Torah is useable it should be kept in the ark and not rolled open and kept behind glass; and if the scroll is not useable, perhaps it should be buried or retired to a more serious museum setting rather than kept in the casualness of synagogue hallways. If worn-out Torahs and siddurs are to be buried, than this may not be proper burial. It may be more akin to the "Bodies" exhibit, where dead people (how'd they die?) are put on display, their muscular and skeletal selves available for educational gawking. It is a remarkable story, though, that thousands of Torah scrolls survived the flames of war. May they always have a home. But the one thing these Torahs are not is "rare."   http://blog.thejewishweek.com/post/Route_17_Nothing_Rare_About_Holocaust_Torahs_.html http://blog.thejewishweek.com/post/Route_17_Nothing_Rare_About_Holocaust_Torahs_.html jonathan@jewishweek.org (Jonathan Mark) Fri, 01 Aug 2008 11:24:00 CST Route 17