JTNews | February 11, 2011

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february 11, 2011 • 7 adar 1 5771 • volume 87, no. 3 • $211 12 13 15

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More than 900 families who have escaped the tragedy of domestic violence have moved into new, beautifully furnished, safer homes in the last decade since the National Council of Jewish Women’s Shalom Bayit: Furnishing Peaceful Homes program has been around. But now the pro-gram itself is in immediate danger of closing its doors.

Currently more than 38 women are on a waiting list for the program, which has suspended operations unless organizers can raise a minimum of $100,000 to pay program staff and the costs of the moving company that retrieves donated items and delivers it to clients’ new homes. There is no cost to the clients.

Should Shalom Bayit close, it will lose its 1,700-sq.-ft. warehouse located in an undisclosed area in Redmond, where hundreds of women and men trying rebuild their lives free from a battering partner can choose quality furniture and household items.

“The need has actually increased and we still have growing num-bers of women who are survivors of domestic violence,” NCJW Presi- Page 24 X

Shalom Bayit furniture bank in danger of closingJanis siegel JTNews Correspondent

dent Sandra Elman told JTNews, in a last-minute plea for help from the Jewish community. “Given the strained economy, donations are down considerably, and grants have been reduced dramatically. We’ve been hit on both fronts.”

A donation of free warehouse space in the Seattle metro area would be a miracle of sorts that Elman believes would reflect upon the highest of Jewish values — charity.

“We have dramatically reduced our expenses and taken all possible belt-tightening measures,” Elman wrote in an open letter to NCJW sup-porters, “yet the cost of operating the program and serving women in need continues to far exceed donations on which we depend.”

On any given day, the state houses 912 survivors in either an emer-gency domestic violence shelter or transitional housing, according to a 2009 Department of Social and Health Services report.

CourTesy ellis GoldberG

The crowds that came to al-Tahrir Square during the mass protests against the Egyptian government were diverse, but largely cooperative and organized despite reported brutality from pro-government forces. However, labor strikes that have broken out across the country since Wednesday could erupt in new violence. A dispatch from University of Washington professor Ellis Goldberg, who is currently teaching in Cairo, is on page 34.

2 JTNews . www.JTNews.NeT . friday, february 11, 2011

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friday, february 11, 2011 . www.JTNews.NeT . JTNews OpiniOn

the rabbi’s turn letter to the community

“I hope I have the same enthusiasm and maybe a little more wisdom — but that’s a debatable thing, maybe somebody else can weigh in on that.” — Rabbi James Mirel of Temple B’nai Torah, on his celebration of 36 years in the rabbinate. See page 8.

Write a letter to the eDitor: We would love to hear from you! our guide to writing a letter to the editor can be found at www.jtnews.net/index.php?/letters_guidelines.html,

but please limit your letters to approximately 350 words. the deadline for the next issue is February 15. Future deadlines may be found online.

I encountered the follow-ing story on several Web sites: A number of years ago at the Seattle Special Olympics, nine contestants, all physically or mentally disabled, assembled at the starting line for the 100-yard dash.

At the gun, they all started out, not exactly in a dash, but with a relish to run the race to the finish, and win. All, that is, except one little boy who stumbled on the asphalt, tumbled over and began to cry.

The other eight heard the boy cry. They slowed down and looked back. Then they all turned around and went back. Every one of them.

One girl with Down syndrome bent down and kissed him and said, “This will make it feel better.”

Then all nine linked arms, and walked together to the finish line. Everyone in the stadium stood and cheered.

There is something about unity that touches all of our hearts. The cheering during those games was unparalleled. Can we unite as Jews?

For this we must reflect on what really makes us one people. What defines us as a single nation? What is the common denominator between all Jews, between the Chasidim in Meah Shearim and the liberals in Berkeley? Between the Yeme-nite Jews and the West Side Ashkenazim? Between Eli Wiesel and Noam Chomsky? Between the humanistic Jewish atheist and the ultra-Orthodox Jew from Boro Park?

When did the Israelites become a nation? Who was the first one who defined them as a nation? At what point did they cease to be merely a “family,” Children of Jacob, children of Israel, and become an “am,” a nation? Who crafted this transition?

You know, nothing with Jews is simple. The Bible gives us two contradictory answers.

In the beginning of Exodus, the title “nation” is conferred upon the Hebrews by none other than Pharaoh, the emperor of Egypt.

“The nation of the children of Israel is growing stronger than us,” Pharaoh said to his people. “Let us devise a clever way to rid ourselves of them.”

He then developed a program of geno-cide for the blossoming nation who, he feared, would take over Egypt and take over the world.

(We also read in Deuteronomy 26 in the portion of Ki Tavo: “Our ances-tors went down to Egypt and there they became a nation.”)

Yet later, in the same book of Exodus,

we have an entirely different story: When the Israelites left Egypt and stood at the foot of Mount Sinai, Moses tells them: “You shall become to me [God] a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”

In Deuteronomy (Ki Tavo) Moses says it clearly: “Hayom hazeh nehayata Laam!” Today you have become a nation! This is more than a cen-

tury after Pharaoh defined the Jews as a nation.

When did we become a nation? Who made us into a nation?

The Bible, in a very subtle and sophisti-cated way, teaches us of the great identity crisis that would define Jews throughout history. What does it mean to be a Jew? What does it mean to be a member of the people of Israel? What is the common thread that bonds all Jews? These are the great questions still debated today.

There are two definitions to Jewish nationhood: One given by Pharaoh, the other by Moses. Pharaoh defines us as a nation in terms of anti-Semitism. We are the group that poses a challenge to the Egyptian Empire and to humanity in gen-eral. What makes us Jewish is that Pha-raoh is threatened by us, loathes us, and is determined to destroy us.

Moses’ definition is radically different: “You shall become a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” We are bound together by a vision to construct a holy world, to grant history the dignity of purpose, to build a world saturated with light and love. What unites is a covenant of love, a shared commitment to recognize the image of God in every human being and the unity of humanity under a singular God.

I once asked someone who is extremely secular, “What makes you a Jew? Are you my brother?”

“Yes I am,” he replied. “I am Jewish. A proud Jew.”

“What connects you and I?” I responded.

“We share the same destiny,” he said. “Hitler would have sent us both to the gas chambers. Ahmadinejad sees us both as a manifestation of the devil. You are a Jew, I am a Jew. We are subject to the same fate.”

He is right. But this definition alone is the one that Pharaoh gave us. In his mind we were “Am B’nei Yisroel,” a nation in the sense that our blood is less red, that our honor is meaningless, that our prop-erty can be taken, that our freedom is non-existent. We have laws different from the others. We were a minority in Egypt with no rights at all. Discrimination against us

Jews of the world, unite!Rabbi beRRy FaRkash Chabad of the Central Cascades

is justified. Sixty-five years ago, we experienced

the same fate. Jews from Berlin and Jews from Warsaw had the same fate. Chas-sidim, Misnagdim, Ashkenazim, Sep-hardim, Jews from Bulgaria, Greece, Ukraine, Italy — we all shared the same destiny. Left-wing communist Jews and right-wing Zionists, Reform and Ortho-dox, all were decimated with the same glee and passion. We were united by hate.

“Who will define you as a Jew?” Moses asked. Pharaoh? Nebuchadnezzar? Vespa-sian? Titus? Constantine? Muhammad? Torquemada? Chmelnitzky? Adolf Eich-mann? Julius Streicher? Alfred Rosenberg? Yasser Arafat? Hassan Nasrallah? Will they answer the question of what is a Jew?

Or will it be Abraham, Moses, King

David, Rabbi Akiva, Abaye and Rava, Rashi, Rambam and the Baal Shem Tov who will tell us what it means to be Jewish?

Will we be bound only in the covenant of fate? When we suffer together, when we face a common enemy, we will unite because we have shared tears, shared fears, so we will huddle together for comfort and mutual protection?

Or will we be bound by the fact that we share dreams, aspirations, ideals? We will not need a common enemy, because we will have a common hope? Will we come together to create something new, beautiful and exciting? Will we be defined not by what happens to us but by what we commit ourselves to do? Not by a cove-nant of fate, but by a bond of faith?

To our Jewish community:

Over the last two years, the economy has taken its toll on our Jewish community and many of its vital organizations that provide important services. We are not alone in seeing a more competitive environment for fundraising. Our donors, who so generously and with such com-mitment support our Jewish community, have not been able recently to maintain their contributions at previous levels.

After a great deal of thought, and much consideration, we have made the very difficult decision to reduce and restructure our current staffing, eliminating several positions. We sincerely regret having to make these decisions. Every one of the individuals whose position is being affected has contributed to our Jewish community. We value their service and wish them the best in their future endeavors.

Key in the deliberation on these staffing cuts was our commitment to the Jewish community. We held off on making these cuts as long as pos-sible, but determined that maintaining our commitment to distributing as much funding as possible to the community was our overriding pri-ority. We feel these cuts are in the best interest of those we serve.

We continually seek more and better ways to serve our Jewish com-munity. As the economy starts to rebound, we hope that this stream-lined staffing along with increased contributions will result in additional funding for our partner agencies, in the next year and beyond.

We invite all members of the Jewish community to join us as we work to build and sustain a vibrant Jewish community that will grow and nourish generations to come.

Richard Fruchter President and CEO, The Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle

Ron Leibsohn Board chair, The Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle

4 opiNioN JTNews . www.JTNews.NeT . friday, february 11, 2011

Robert Wilkes, in the last issue of JTNews, wrote this about me:

…Many American [Jews]…sup-port pro-Palestinian groups and the BDS movement…and seek to delegit-imize Israel. They employ tropes such as “apartheid” and “Israeli-Nazi war machine” to create a smokescreen of twisted facts and history…

Among them…Seattle blogger Richard Silverstein… hyperbolically depict[s] Israel as a Nazi state inflicting a Shoah on the Palestinians.”

Before he published this, I had no idea who Robert Wilkes was. Even now, I wish I didn’t know, and didn’t have to rebut the false claims he made about my beliefs.

Let me tell you who I really am and what I really believe. I live in Seattle with my family, including three young children. We belong to Congregation Beth Shalom.

I’ve published “Tikun Olam” since 2003. It was one of the earliest blogs advo-cating Israeli-Arab peace. I am a progres-sive, or critical Zionist. I support Israel, but oppose the occupation. I support Israeli withdrawal to pre-1967 borders (with minor territorial swaps), a plan advocated by Bill Clinton, the Geneva Initiative and the Arab League in various iterations.

I believe the only way for Israel to be safe and secure is for Palestinians to have their own state in the West Bank and Gaza. As the Dr. Izzeldine Abuelaish, who in 2009 lost three daughters and a niece to an IDF tank shell during Operation Cast Lead, said in a speech at Temple B’nai Torah last month: “Israel and Palestine are conjoined twins. They must live together or they will die together.”

I don’t believe that Israeli military might, in the long run, will guarantee Isra-el’s survival. Settlements won’t. Occu-pation won’t. The only way to ensure Israel’s future is through negotiation with its adversaries.

As far as Israel itself, I believe its future lies in being a democratic state for all its citizens. While most Israelis are Jews, 1 million are Palestinian. They must be as much a part of the life of Israel as African-Americans are part of this country.

Currently, Palestinians face huge obstacles: There is massive discrimination both tacit and explicit against them. Their communities receive far less government funding for basic services, and their edu-cational opportunities and health care are inferior. There are fewer jobs for Israeli minorities and they are lower-paying, lower-skilled ones. In politics, no Jewish governing coalition will include any Arab

party, meaning that Israeli Arabs and Palestinians have very little political clout.

What many Israelis and I envision is an Israel which treats everyone equally, whether Jew or non-Jew. Judaism will not be a religion superior to any other citi-zen’s religion, nor will it be inferior. Every religion worshipped by every citizen will be respected, whether Judaism, Islam or Christianity.

We have a U.S. Constitution that guar-antees our freedoms. Israel should have one, too. Its constitution should enshrine the basic rights enumerated in our own Bill of Rights. It should ensure that all reli-gions and ethnic groups, whether minor-ity or majority, have basic rights. And those rights should not be infringed by the majority, whether Jewish or Arab.

This is what a democracy is. This is what Israel should be.

Israel is a Jewish homeland. But it should also be a Palestinian homeland (for its Palestinian citizens). If you can walk and chew gum at the same time, why can’t a country embrace two ethnic groups living together?

Why would Robert Wilkes find this so radical? Look at the United States, look at Canada, Switzerland, Ireland. These are all countries which have grappled with the con-flicts and competing interests of multiple

ethnic populations. If they have found a way to live together, I have no doubt Israel can.

Does Israel live in a dangerous neigh-borhood? Sure. Do the ideas I’ve proposed involve risks? Yes. But what’s the alterna-tive? Endless war? Can Israel live forever surrounded by hostile nations? I don’t believe so.

Now let’s address Robert Wilkes’ bit of character assassination. Do I believe the things he ascribed to me? No. I have never written, nor do I believe Israel is a “Nazi war machine.” As a Zionist, I don’t believe in delegitimizing Israel. That’s just a slogan tossed around by extremists with no substance. Nor have I ever written or do I believe Israel “inflicted a Shoah on the Palestinians.”

As a teenager, I sat in my grandmoth-er’s living room in Washington Heights asking about her family I never knew. She told me of her brothers and sisters who perished in the Holocaust. One heart-breakingly returned to Poland after emi-grating here, telling her in disgust: “T’iz a genayvushe land!”

I once published an oral history of a Hungarian survivor of Auschwitz in the Los Angeles Times. I participated in, and was a technical advisor to Pierre Sauvage’s

The Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not occupyRichaRd silveRstein special to JTNews

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to the 600 women who madeCONNECTIONS 2011 a success!

Your support will literally help thousands of people’s lives,providing food, shelter, counseling and hope to those who desperately need it.

Your Jewish community appreciates every contribution to theJewish Federation’s Community Campaign. We honor this year’s

Connections leaders for your inspiration and hard work. Thank you.

ThankYou...

Corporate Sponsors: Michele & Stan Rosen • • Seattle Iron & Metals Corp.

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friday, february 11, 2011 . www.JTNews.NeT . JTNews iNside

JTNews is the Voice of Jewish Washington. Our mission is to

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p u B l I S h e d B y J e w I S h T R a n S c R I p T M e d I a

T h e v o I c e o f J e w I S h w a S h I n g T o n

look forDatetheme

Datetheme

Remember when

insiDe this issuelaDino lessonby isaac azose

Ken kere la roza, no mira al espino.He who wants the rose does not pay attention to the thorns.

From Feb. 9, 1977, page 5.Yuri Vinetsky, refusenik from Kiev in

the former Soviet Union, tries to spread awareness of his son Valery, who is in danger of being drafted into the Soviet Army, which means he won’t be able to emigrate to Israel.

The federation’s new model 6Responding to a suffering community campaign and adjusting to a new model for staffing, fundraising, and allocations, the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle is changing the way it does business.

conservative adjustments 7The leader of the Conservative movement came through Seattle last week to discuss its new direction.

Rabbi Mirel celebrates 8A dinner gala will honor Temple B’nai Torah’s rabbi James Mirel for 25 years at the congregation and 36 in the rabbinate.

a rabbi out of water 9Most authorities think Elizabeth Goldstein is the first rabbi to ever teach at Gonzaga University. Goldstein is making the most of her opportunity.

Seattle’s Jewish supergroup? 11Three local cantors, a rabbi, and an accompanist will perform this Sunday at the Stroum JCC. JTNews takes you backstage at rehearsals.

Jews and Baseball 12Al Rosen, once of the Cleveland Indians, is one of many Jewish ballplayers who appear in a new documen-tary Jews and Baseball: An American Love Story. His eye – and his tongue – are still sharp.

Moving to a wider audience 17The next step for departing Seattle Symphony music director Gerard Schwarz is a new media program for online education.

Spring books 26JTNews book critic Diana Brement runs down at least a season’s worth of new reading on Israel, American Judaism, food, and more.

on Jews and egypt 34UW Professor Ellis Goldberg, who currently lives in Cairo, breaks down the potential Jewish consequences of democracy in Egypt.

MoRecrossword 8a view from the u: a tempest in Toronto 10Jewish on earth: adapting to change 11The arts 14M.o.T.: uw profs edit new book on Jewish identity 25community calendar 28lifecycles 35The Shouk classifieds 31

Rabbi Steven Weil, executive vice president of the Orthodox Union, presents Jessica Hoffman, co-director of Seattle’s National Council of Synagogue Youth chapter, with its Ben Zakkai Honor Society award at a reception on Jan. 30 in New York. Society members are nominated, and voted on, by its current members based on the nominees’ service to NCSY and the Jewish community.

CourTesy ou

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MAR 11Jewish & Green

Welcome new TRIBE members Robert Shindell . Barry & Suzanne Goren . Julie Ben-Simon . Phil Proberts & Alison Newsmith . David & Victoria Benoliel . Neil & Suzi Golden . Jan Pickard . Patricia Pawelak-Kort . Allan Michaels . Julie Fein . Ellen Rosenstein Brin . Fran Lilleness . Naomi Skigen . Steven and Debbie Butler . Leslie Kodish . Jane &

Aaron Rosenstein . Eve-Gail Green . Jane Orenstei . Diana & Steven Altchech . Howard & Bard Schwid . John May . Tzachi Litov . Sidney Stock . David Schwartz . Frances Roth Schill . Robin Parsons . Lee Micklin . Jessica Needle . Goldie Feinberg. Join @ jtnews.net!

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6 commuNiTy News JTNews . www.JTNews.NeT . friday, february 11, 2011

Eric Miller is the Public Affairs Specialist for QFC. He can be reached at [email protected] or 425-990-6182.

QFC is Heart SmartBy Eric Miller, QFC Public Affairs Specialist

With Valentine’s Day right around the corner, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to talk about the ways QFC can help support your heart health. February is American Heart Month and we are proud to partner with the American Heart Association’s “Go Red For Women” as our Checkstand Charity of the month. So when you visit your neighborhood QFC florist to pick up that beautiful rose arrangement, as well as the ingredients for your romantic heart-healthy Valentine’s meal, remember that a small donation at our checkstands can have a positive impact on the health of many other hearts too!

There are three ways you can contribute this February: ask your cashier to scan a $1, $5, or $10 donation card, designate that your 3-cent reusable bag credit be donated or simply place your extra change in our coin boxes. You will be helping to fund life-saving research and education powered by the American Heart Association.

Heart disease is the number one killer of women in the United States. An alarming statistic reveals our mothers, sisters, daughters and friends are dying at the rate of 1 per minute. Heart disease actually kills more American women than the next five causes of death combined, including cancer. This is why “Go Red for Women” exists — it is a way to raise awareness and dispel the myth that this is an “older man’s disease.” It is a passionate social initiative designed to empower women to take charge of their heart health. You can begin by taking small but significant actions recommended by the American Heart Association:

1. Celebrate with a checkup Let each birthday remind you that it’s time for your yearly physical and a talk with your doctor about how you can reduce your risk for heart disease. 2. Get off the couch Work up to at least 30 minutes of physical activity on a weekly routine. Step, march, jog in place — you can even do it while watching TV. Speak with your doctor before starting a new exercise program. 3. Quit smoking in four steps If you smoke, but can’t quit “cold turkey,” cut the number of cigarettes you smoke each day in half; then cut that number in half; cut it in half again; finally, cut down to zero! 4. Drop a pound or two By cutting out 500 to 1,000 calories a day you can lose up to two pounds per week, and gradually bring yourself closer to a heart-healthy weight. 5. Become a salt detective Check out the Nutrition Facts panel on packaged foods to see how much sodium they contain. Aim for a total intake of no more than 2,300 milligrams (about a teaspoon of salt) per day.

Eating a healthy diet along with regular physical activity are important steps in reducing risk factors for heart disease. The American Heart Association recommends eating a variety of nutritious foods, and QFC offers many great-tasting, convenient, nutritious options in just about every aisle. When it comes to packaged goods, the American Heart Association’s (AHA) heart check mark is a great tool to identify a product that meets the AHA’s certification criteria for saturated fat, cholesterol, sodium and healthful nutrients. This way, we will build healthier lives, healthier hearts, and will be able to spend many more Valentine’s Days with the ones we love. Thank you for your support of the American Heart Association and “Go Red For Women.”

Remaking Jewish communityPart of it’s the economy, part of it’s Facebook, and part of it is just the way people view religion and culture. All put together, it’s clear that the way Jews see themselves and how they relate to the world is undergoing a dramatic shift, and Jewish orga-nizations from synagogues to fundraising agencies have struggled to keep up. Here are two — one local, one national — that are attempting to do just that.

Last summer, the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle held a special fundrais-ing campaign alongside its regular com-munity campaign. At the deepest point in the recession, the agency raised approx-imately $100,000 to send 236 children whose parents might otherwise have had trouble affording it to overnight Jewish camps in the region.

“We’ve been successful in going to donors for extra things, but its been frag-mented, and it hasn’t been a part of our core mission,” said Richard Fruchter, president and CEO of the Jewish Federa-tion. “If we understand that Jewish camp-ing is one of the great identity builders for youth, why is that an extra thing?… Why isn’t it part of the core work that we do?”

Thinking about situations like this, the Federation’s Center for Jewish Philan-thropy, its fundraising arm, and several key volunteers began to reinvent the Fed-

eration both in how it raises money and how, as a grant-making organization, it gives that money away.

“We have been talking about this and working on this for the past one-and-a-half to two years,” said Keith Krivitzky, the Federation’s vice president for the Center for Jewish Philanthropy. “What it’s been forcing us to do is to really look at all ele-ments of how we do business, from fund-raising to grant making and allocations to priorities.”

What has emerged — though some of the details are still being discussed and the plan has yet to be approved by the Feder-ation’s board, a vote that should happen later this month — is a model that gives donors a choice in how their money is allocated.

At the same time — and this has its current beneficiary agencies nervous about the future — the model moves from an unrestricted allocation that can be used

for anything like salaries or operations or internal initiatives to goal-based, specific projects that will be mapped out by each agency.

“Allocations will be made based upon an agency’s request to a specific goal within an impact area, and allocations will be made to agencies based upon the pro-grammatic request that they’re making,” said Amy Wasser-Simpson, the Feder-ation’s vice president for planning and community services.

The Federation began rolling out the plan about three months ago to its benefi-ciary agencies, as well as to representatives from synagogues and organizations it cur-rently does not support. A series of meet-ings explained the new system and sought feedback. Refinements, Federation offi-cials say, are ongoing.

“I have been impressed by the pro-cess in which they have listened to either me or to my staff people,” said Ken Wein-

berg, CEO of Jewish Family Service. “I think it helps our agency, but I also think it helps the Federation develop as good a model as possible by incorporating the folks who actually do the work give [them] their input.”

Judy Neuman, CEO of the Stroum Jewish Community Center, said that though she and several lay leaders have attended as many meetings as possible and have tried to be an active voice at the table, she is taking a wait-and-see approach as to how well the new model will work.

“I’m optimistic, but I don’t think any of us have any specifics to say, ‘Yes, this model is going to work,’” she said. “Change is always difficult, but sometimes at the end of that change you have a much better end result, and I think that’s what we’re really looking for as community.”

One major change for this new model is in who can receive money from the Fed-eration’s community campaign.

Federation’s newest campaign: Reinventing itselfJoel Magalnick editor, JTNews

friday, february 11, 2011 . www.JTNews.NeT . JTNews commuNiTy News 7

In response to a community campaign that is suffering and the need to create a staffing plan that reflects its new fund-raising and allocations model, the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle made per-sonnel cuts this month that by June will reduce 25 percent of its workforce.

“We’ve had a down campaign for the past two years, so there was sense that we needed to reset the level of our oper-ating costs within the Federation,” said CEO and president Richard Fruchter.

Most of the agency’s departments are being restructured, many programs consolidated, and anything not cen-tral to its core fundraising mission will either be discontinued or attempts will be made to find outside funding to keep them going. On the potential chop-ping block are education programs such as the community-wide Hebrew High School and teacher education seminars, among others.

“Unless it can afford to be fully funded for what it does, we can’t afford to run it out of here,” Fruchter said.

The cuts will shave about 19 percent from the Federation’s budget — about

“Any agency that we don’t currently give an unrestricted allocation to is a potential new partner for us,” said Amy Wasser-Simpson, the Federation’s vice president for planning and community services. “Any synagogue would be a new partner. We don’t now give them an unre-stricted allocation.”

According to Weinberg, this is the aspect of the plan that has him and other leaders of current beneficiaries nervous.

“We’re anxious over the notion of if all Jewish agencies are now eligible, does it divide the pie into too many pieces where everyone gets too small a piece?” he said.

But, he noted, he has been assured that the Federation will do what it can to keep that from happening.

Fruchter said the solution comes from the donations side: “If we raise more money, we have the ability to continue to sustain all the great work that’s done now and to really drive some innovative and exciting new ideas in the community,” he said.

The assumption by Federation officials with this new model is that there will be more money to go around, even though it has been harder in the past two campaigns to come by. It’s this aspect of the model that has them excited about what comes next: Donors will be able to decide where their dollars go.

“The next generation that’s coming up is much more interested in having an abil-ity to see where the donation goes and measure it,” Fruchter said. “They’re less enamored of the idea of umbrella giving and having enough trust to allow the orga-nization to make the allocation for them.”

The donor choice model would not mean giving to specific agencies — the

Federation has long facilitated pass-through donations — but toward specific projects or goals in what they’re calling impact areas, which are largely based upon the current community campaign pillars: Jewish education from birth to grade 12, social services, building community from college through adulthood, and helping Jews overseas.

“There are people now, no matter what age, [who say], ‘If only I could just direct my money to Israel, I don’t have to give it locally,’ you could have that. Or ‘If only I could give to human need,’ we have the opportunity to tap into people who would be philanthropic but who haven’t found the vehicle through us,” Fruchter said.

At the same time, there is “a large group of people who’ve said, ‘I’d give you more if I didn’t have to have my money go here, or if I wanted to say Israel or not here,’” Kriv-itzky said. “‘We like 85 percent, or 90 per-cent of what you do, but….’”

Donors who were comfortable giving unrestricted gifts will continue to be able to do so.

“There still are people who are perfectly happy with the way things went, know that we do a good job of prioritizing and vet-ting and making sure that their dollars are going to the places most needed,” Fruchter said. “I assume that many of the gifts will still come in as unrestricted gifts, which will give us the opportunity to move them where they’re most needed.”

The question about what constitutes the most needed is still under discussion. If the economic hardship of past two years con-tinues, for example, how will social service organizations that are seeing more need

federation makes major staff reductions$500,000 — and eliminate the equiva-lent of seven full-time positions. Eleven employees have been affected, some with reduced hours. It’s a move that has been in planning for eight months, Fruchter said.

“We knew we had to bring overhead down since we weren’t raising more money,” he said. “In our world that means cutting personnel because pro-grams are personnel. There isn’t that much more to cut.”

The Federation also sees a need to push more of the money it brings in through its community campaign out to its beneficiaries, Fruchter added.

“We want to get more money out into the community, because the community needs more in difficult times,” he said.

Despite the layoffs, with the launch of its new strategic plan in July the Fed-eration is also hiring. A major gifts and planned giving officer will round out a restructured campaign department and a community planning associate will work on looking at big-picture needs for the community.

— Joel Magalnick

PAGE 31 X

As a congregational rabbi at Adat Israel in Lower Marion, Penn., Rabbi Steven Wernick about five years ago began to recognize a shift in how his congregants began to view their relationship to their religious affiliation.

“There’s been a radical shift in the nature of Jewish identity of North Amer-ica, and that shift mirrors really all of reli-gious identity, which is much more fluid today than it ever has been in the past,” said Wernick, now the executive vice pres-ident of United Synagogue of Conserva-tive Judaism, the organization that sets the direction and guidelines for the Conserva-tive movement.

Wernick visited Seattle on Jan. 31 to meet with local rabbis and members of Congregation Beth Shalom, two days before the movement released a draft stra-tegic plan that drastically changes the way Conservative synagogues will relate to their communities. This new plan, which was created over the course of the year since Wernick took his post, is broken up into four main initiatives, with each broken down into several subsets:• Work with congregations and other Jewish organizations to, as Wernick put it, “bring about a transformation in the nature of congregational life in the next decade, a transformation that responds to this shift in identity, moving from membership to meaning and programming to purpose.”• Transform education programs, from early childhood to high school, by inte-grating all of its resources, including the Jewish Theological Seminary, Camp Ramah, and its youth groups into syna-gogue learning.• Build post-high school outreach through-out the college years and increase invest-ment in Jews in their 20s and 30s, in

particular in major metropolitan com-munities.• Adjust to demographic shifts and build infrastructure for those growing Jewish populations.

The USCJ’s board of directors is expected to vote to adopt the plan on March 13. Should the plan be adopted, every program that comes out of USCJ will fit into each of its new functions.

Noting the necessity to implement and fund the initiative, Wernick said recruit-ing what he called philanthropic investors and thought leaders to engage the move-ment’s professional and lay leaders will be a high priority.

The shift in Jewish identity that Wer-nick saw, and what he said congregational leaders across the country were seeing as well, was the idea that religious identity — and not just among Jews, but among many mainline Protestant Christians as well — has changed from identities of affiliation, which could be based on ethnicity or a spe-cific group, to an identity of purpose.

“People today are less interested in joining a group or club than they are in participating in organizations and expe-riences that they deem to be interesting,” Wernick said.

Taking that argument a step further, he said, the idea of synagogue dues as a finan-cial model becomes non-viable. A part of this plan will help them to work through such a funding conundrum.

“The challenge of the congregations is they spend so much time on member-ship and money is they forget to focus on meaning and movement,” Wernick said. “Synagogues that… are willing to take responsible risk to bring new models of engagement to bear will succeed.”

In Seattle, Rabbi Jill Borodin of Con-gregation Beth Shalom said her congrega-tion has already been working to diversify its income through new programming and by creating an endowment.

Not every synagogue or institution will survive this sea change, Wernick acknowl-edges, but as he has traveled the country, he said he has seen a universal hunger for new thinking that responds to North American Jews’ needs, within the context of the tradi-tional aspects of Conservative Judaism.

“They have kind of instinctively known it all along, but haven’t really heard it artic-ulated aloud,” Wernick said. “Once they hear it articulated aloud it’s as if it gives them permission to think about their orga-nizations in new ways, and so we respond to the challenges.”

Rabbi Jay Rosenbaum of Herzl-Ner Tamid Conservative Congregation on Mercer Island said he agrees with Wer-nick’s assessment of Judaism today.

Conservative movement embarks upon plan to retain its relevanceJoel Magalnick editor, JTNews

PAGE 23 X

Joel MaGalNiCK

Rabbi Steven Wernick, executive vice president of United Synagogue for Conservative Judaism.


Answers on page 28

The Jerusalem Post Crossword PuzzleBy David Benkof

Across1. Role in Larry Gelbart’s “M*A*S*H”6. Israel’s has a menorah on it10. Up to snuff14. Prayer recited while standing15. Hint16. Fishing spot17. Author, “The Apprenticeship of

Duddy Kravitz”20. Garfunkel and Spiegelman21. Liberal pro-Israel grp.22. Exploits23. Fifth letter of the Hebrew alphabet24. Dog biter25. ___ of knowledge26. Shofar source27. He co-founded Google29. “When you’re a ___...” (“West Side

Story” lyric)32. Subsequently35. Shipshape36. Ralph Lauren symbol37. Author, “The Uses of Enchantment:

The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales”

40. She played Lilith on “Cheers”41. Cries at fireworks42. Runs without moving43. Koch and Asner44. Exertion45. Hadassah hospital employees

(abbr.)46. No-goodnik48. “___’s Irish Rose”50. It’s eaten with an egg before Tisha

B’Av53. Swelling55. Actress Cannon (“Deathtrap”)56. Anne Frank’s father57. Author, “The Best and the

Brightest”60. Month before Nisan61. Hand lotion ingredient62. ___ B. Toklas63. Yarmulkes, in a way64. Towel inscription65. Prepares to shoot

Down1. JTS-sponsored camp2. Talmudic commentator3. “___ Dancing” (movie set in the

Catskills)4. Puts two and two together5. “Norma ___” (movie with Ron

Liebman)6. Red ___ (1917-1920)7. Famous friend of Michael

Jackson’s8. Torah ___ (textbook company)9. Island chain?10. Ladybug’s prey11. “Piano Man” singer12. Soup ingredient13. Bungles18. Storm preceder19. “Let’s go!”24. Casino game25. Snack26. French human rights crusader

Cassin28. “Phooey!”30. First name in Holocaust novelists31. Arnold and Bosley32. Philosemite Gregoire33. Lyricist Ebb34. New year of the trees35. Light on Broadway36. Hebrew University mints them38. “Thou shalt not ___ a kid...”

(Deuteronomy 14:21)39. Pre-euro money44. ___ Sea Scrolls45. Eat47. Mideast leaders49. Innocent ones50. Shel Silverstein’s “A Light in the

___”51. Group of latkes52. Development developments53. Modern Orthodox organization54. Early baby word55. Valley56. 1993 Israel-PLO Accords site58. Derisive laugh59. Reform social justice office in D.C.

Already it has been a long ride for Rabbi James Mirel. But the theme of the gala being thrown in his honor by Temple B’nai Torah indicates that Rabbi Mirel, his congregation, and the community at large can always work to make things better. This year, Mirel is celebrating 25 years at Temple B’nai Torah and 36 in the rab-binate.

“I wanted to do something beyond B’nai Torah,” Mirel told JTNews, “more like a career thing. Thirty-six years and in Seattle the whole time — it’s more of a community celebration.”

More than 420 people will be on hand to celebrate, including Mirel’s mentor, Rabbi William Cutter from Los Angeles, who officiated at the wedding of Mirel and his wife Julie, a singer. Cutter will deliver a speech at the gala and also lead a kabbalat Shabbat service at Temple B’nai Torah.

“He’s taught me a lot about how to be a rabbi and how to be a mensch,” Mirel said. “Since he’s still around, I thought, he’s the guy to come up here and do some teach-ing.”

Mirel himself has done plenty of teaching. And, like Rabbi Cutter, he has performed his fair share of lifecycles — including the baby naming 30-plus years ago of his assistant rabbi at Temple B’nai Torah, Yohanna Kinberg. Kinberg said she’s learned a lot from Mirel, who went to rabbinical school with her father.

“He’s very cool, calm, and collected,” Kinberg told JTNews. “And that’s some-thing that I’ve really learned from him. How to listen and observe before you speak — how to be a calm presence in the community, to really know that part of your role as rabbi is to give people a sense of calm, stability, and warmth in a some-what chaotic world.”

Calm does not mean quiet, however. Mirel hopes that his passions for the com-munity and for the rabbinate have not wavered.

“I feel just as young as the day I started, I don’t feel a day older,” Mirel said. “I hope I have the same enthusiasm and maybe a little more wisdom — but that’s a debat-able thing, maybe somebody else can weigh in on that.”

He’s Mr. Energy,” said David Serkin-Poole, the cantor who has worked with Mirel for 25 years at Temple B’nai Torah, and played with him in a band for five years prior. “He’s the Energizer Bunny that just keeps going and keeps everything going forward. He has a clear vision of what he want to do and you better go with it, because he’s moving forward.”

Steve Katz, a co-president of Temple B’nai Torah, said Mirel’s enthusiasm has been a key to his longevity. Katz noted that it seems like Mirel has presided over every kind of lifecycle event for many of the con-gregation’s families — including his own — and that the rabbi always makes him-

self available.“He’s the supreme pastoral rabbi —

he’s there for any person at any time, whether they are members or not,” said Katz. “He has really shown such concern for our family, both in times of need and in times of joy.”

Mirel has augmented his rabbini-cal career as well, as a musician. He co-founded one of Seattle’s first klezmer groups, the Mazel Tones and currently performs with the Shalom Ensemble as he continues to relish his role in the ongoing klezmer revival.

“Whether it’s to counsel them spiritu-ally, to appear as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, or to lead music groups, Rabbi Mirel is always there to take care of the residents of Kline Galland,” said Jeff Cohen, CEO of the Kline Galland Jewish nursing facility.

Mirel says he has sought to be involved in local, national, and international causes. He was among the first of the Seattle area’s Reform rabbis to perform a same-sex wed-ding, and has taken part in various social movements, helping to provide sanctuary for refugees from Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Cambodia, as well as Jews from the Soviet Union.

“I’m not saying I was on the cutting edge,” said Mirel of his social justice work, “But that’s a big part of who I am, and a big part of what Temple B’nai Torah is.”

Richard Fruchter, CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, recalled Mirel’s progressive nature and his will-ingness to take on leadership roles beyond Temple B’nai Torah

“Rabbi Mirel has always been very sup-portive of the Federation and the commu-nity,” Fruchter said. “He’s always available to make a call to, let’s say, a legislator to remind them how important a particular bill or a service is to our community — both to our Jewish and regular community.”

Rabbi celebrates a double chai and a quarter centuryeRic nusbauM assistant editor, JTNews

Page 9 X

Joel MaGalNiCK

Rabbi James Mirel performs at the Hanukkah 2010 fundraising dinner for MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger, a pet project he has organized for several years.


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Although she’s only been at Gonzaga University a few short months, Elizabeth Goldstein has already made her mark on campus as the faculty’s only rabbi.

In fact, it is believed that Goldstein is the first rabbi ever to teach at the univer-sity. A Gonzaga spokesperson was unable to confirm whether this is true, saying the school has seen a lot of faculty pass through in its 125-year history, but he felt it was probably a safe bet.

It’s a distinction Goldstein, 38, is happy to embrace. This semester, Goldstein is leading classes in Judaism and the Hebrew Bible.

“They really seem to love having a rabbi here,” she said.

Gonzaga is a private Jesuit university and Goldstein is by no means the only member of the clergy in the religious stud-ies department.

“But they didn’t really have anyone who was teaching Judaism,” Goldstein said.

Goldstein received her rabbinical ordi-nation from the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College and her Ph.D. in Biblical Studies from the University of California at San Diego. She said it has always been her intention to teach Jewish

studies, and when she saw Gonzaga was looking for someone for such a posi-tion, she jumped at the chance.

She said she feels Gon-zaga is a particularly good fit for her.

“As a Jesuit university, Gonzaga takes a serious approach to religious stud-ies,” she said. “There’s also a heavy emphasis among Jesuits for social justice, which is a passion of mine as well.”

In addition to her academic responsi-bilities, Goldstein said she has also become a default spiritual advisor for many of Gonzaga’s Jewish students. She said she’s planning to organize a campus Passover seder and is looking for ways to act as a bridge between the university and the Spokane Jewish community at large.

“In my Judaism class, one of the requirements is for students to visit a Jewish congregation,” she said. “So that’s one way of exposing Gonzaga to Judaism and the Jewish community to Gonzaga.”

Goldstein has also involved herself in a number of the spiritual activities taking

place on campus. She said she’s been attending a Taize prayer group, which she describes as “mostly just meditation and chant-ing from Psalms.” Last month, she was invited to help lead the group with some chants of her own choosing.

“It was very fun,” she said. “The best part was watching the nuns who

were there chant in Hebrew.” She said that the university, and her

colleagues in the religious studies depart-ment in particular, have all be very wel-coming.

“Everyone has been super enthusias-tic,” she said. “It’s a great department with a lot of very smart people. We always have something to talk about.”

Moving from California to Eastern Washington was a big change for her and her family, Goldstein said, but they’re adapting to their new home.

“I just haven’t been in a place where you have to go so far to be in a big city,” she said. “But we’ve found the Jewish com-munity to be very welcoming. And I can

get what I need here — kosher meat and that sort of thing.”

Goldstein is not the only one in the family working in a Jewish capacity. Her partner, also a rabbi, is the new execu-tive director for the Spokane Area Jewish Family Services. In addition to getting acquainted with their new professional posts, the couple is busy raising two sets of twins.

Rabbi receives a warm welcome at Spokane’s Jesuit university

leyna kRow JTNews Correspondent

Elizabeth Goldstein

Father Michael Ryan, the pastor at St. James Cathedral in Seattle, has known Mirel since the 1980s. He praised Mirel as a friend, a religious leader, and as a partner.

“I quickly came to know him as a bright light in the interfaith community here,” said Ryan. “Jim has always been part of the dialogue, giving a warm and human and approachable face to the Jewish faith in our community.”

Mirel himself is just appreciative that he’s had a chance.

“I’m grateful to God that I’m still around,” he said. “And I’m grateful to the congregation for keeping me around.”

rabbi mirel W Page 8

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I don’t know about you, but I can’t pass up a gory traffic accident. I’m always among the gawkers, staring at the blood-ied victims with a mixture of repulsion and fascination. I’m ashamed of this, but it’s true.

I’m not sure that a name for my afflic-tion exists. Call it “fascination with the unmentionable.” But whatever it is, I’ve got it.

Which is why, I suppose, I have always been fascinated by anti-Semitism of all kinds. All of it, from today’s wacko Web pages charging Jewish doctors with the invention of AIDS to the ancient claim of the Babylonian historian Manetho that the Jews were thrown out of Egypt for spread-ing leprosy, throws me into a trance of morbid fascination.

Of all the fascinating anti-Semites and Judeophobes that exist in recorded his-tory, my all-time favorites are those MOTs — from Pablo de Santa Maria to Noam Chomsky — who defy all the comforts of herd thinking to “go over to the other side” of the great Jewish-goyish divide and publicly burn their Jewish bridges in a stunning auto de fe of sanctimony.

By telling “an insider’s truth” about the Jews, they liberate themselves from the confining constraints of parochial Jewish society and win the congratulations of the larger world beyond, which, in its deep knowledge and respect for all things Jewish, accords them the honor of being the “real Jews” or the “Jewish exceptions.”

It is this willingness to be “beyond good and evil” that wins my rapt attention.

The most recent object of my obsession is a newcomer to the club of Jewish “truth tellers,” Ms. Jennifer Peto, a 29-year-old Jewish woman who grew up in the Ortho-dox community of Toronto and is a prod-

uct of its Jewish day school system.

She is of late the number one celebrity in Toronto’s Jewish community by virtue of the Internet publication of her Master’s thesis, titled “The Victimhood of the Powerful: White Jews and the Racism of Hegemonic Holocaust Edu-cation.”

This graduate of the Uni-versity of Toronto, whose thesis was approved by her mentors in the gradu-ate department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education, argues, among other things, that Holocaust education is in fact a regime of indoctrination designed to use the Holocaust as a smoke screen (pardon the pun) to obscure the crimes of “racist-colonialist Zionism” in creating the State of Israel.

Let me quote from the introduction to her thesis:

“Instead of taking Jewish victim-hood as a fact, I have made it the very subject I want to interrogate. I start from the premise that Jewish people of European descent are a group that today holds power and privilege. In Israel, this dominant group oppresses Palestinians and non-white Jews.” (p. 6)

“In my thesis, I will build on the work of these and other anti-Zionist Jewish scholars. I hope to contribute to this growing body of literature by inte-grating critical anti-racist theory into Jewish anti-Zionism. My work is based in the understanding that Zionism — the belief that Jewish people have a right to a nation-state built on top of the ruins of Palestine — is a racist,

imperialist ideology that can only effectively be challenged through anti-racist, anti-imperialist theory and activ-ism.” (pp 9-10)

This thesis goes the Holo-caust deniers one better. According to Ms. Peta, you see, the Holocaust certainly happened. But the Jews in general, and the Zionists

among them in particular, have ever since used it cynically as a moral bludgeon with which to

beat the West, mired in guilt, into letting Zionism have its way with the rightful res-idents of Palestine, who now suffer under an apartheid regime that reflects the inher-ent racism of Zionist ideology.

Had enough? Not me! As a victim of “immersion in the

unmentionable” syndrome, reading such cant arouses in me not a desire to refute or capitulate. Rather it engages me phys-iologically, engendering an exhilarating rush of endorphins, an acute heighten-ing of the powers of concentration, and rapidity of breath, leading to a swoon of hyper-oxygenization. In other words, I’m hooked by the buzz.

So I read the thing — 100 pages! — online.

Critics of the piece had led me to believe that Peto “hadn’t done her home-work” and generally was uninformed about her topic. But, frankly, I learned a lot about Leftist anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.

Given her slant on the Holocaust and Zionism (which you either buy or don’t buy — there is no “case” made here), she very industriously turns up a long tradi-

tion of Jewish anti-Zionists, both vanished and living among us (mostly in Tel Aviv and Brooklyn, of course), who support and sharpen her claims.

But is Ms. Peto’s thesis, as some charge, an academic “obscenity?”

I’m not sure. True, unlike the best scholarship, she doesn’t “challenge the field.” Like any good MA candidate, she adds footnotes to an established academic tradition of anti-Zionism just this side of outright anti-Semitism (check her bibli-ography!).

This is “normal science,” whose method is no more horrendous than many other works that fail to question the govern-ing paradigms of received wisdom. It just happens to use the Holocaust as an excuse for the reckless disregard of Jewish life and safety. That it is hateful and offen-sive to most members of the Jewish com-munity says nothing about its claim to be protected by the freedom of inquiry and speech taken for granted in the academy.

But is the thesis “obscene” in the sense that it violates all standards of conven-tional scholarship to grind a genocidal axe of Jew-hatred? Well, like justice Potter Stewart opined in the obscenity trial of Louis Malle’s film, The Lovers: “I know pornography when I see it. And the motion picture involved in this case is not that.”

Sadly, Ms. Peto’s thesis is not obscene. It is a bore. I know, because I didn’t get my endorphin rush.

Martin S. Jaffee currently holds the Samuel & Althea Stroum Chair in Jewish Studies at the University of Washington. His award-winning columns for JTNews have recently been published in book form as The End of Jewish Radar: Snapshots of a Post-Ethnic American Judaism by iUniverse press.

The tempest in Toronto: “Normal anti-Semitism” in academeMaRtin JaFFee JTNews Columnist

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“I’ll change that!” Cantor David Ser-kin-Poole calls out, pointing to Isaac Azose during rehearsal on Feb. 2, then get-ting right back to the music.

Azose nods an affirmation.“That” which Serkin-Poole is referring

to is the accidental mention of God’s name in a passage of liturgical music he’s been singing, and which he’ll need to remember to replace with a similar (but meaningless) word, when the three cantors — Serkin-Poole of Temple B’nai Torah, Azose, hazzan emeritus of Congregation Ezra Bessaroth, and Bradlee Kurland of Herzl-Ner Tamid Conservative Congregation — plus one, Rabbi Simon Benzaquen of Sephardic Bikur Holim, take the stage at the Stroum Jewish Community Center on Sun., Feb. 13.

This is an encore of a performance the three cantors had last spring, but with the addition of Benzaquen and an accompa-nist, Peter Pundy, who also has the job of keeping these four in line.

“It’s a pleasure to work with such a wide variety of wonderful musicians,” Pundy says, at the same time forcing the stars of the show and its emcee, Rabbi Robert Maslow, to make decisions on what should be simple motions, such as how to instruct the audience to rise.

But right now they’re practicing, and their audience consists of a friend, the sound guy, a journalist, and a couple of

Backstage with the three cantors (plus one)Joel Magalnick editor, JTNews

We brainy homo sapiens are the latest hominid in 2.5 million years of evolution, from long-term hunter-gath-erers to recent cultivator-herd-ers. We began domesticating plants and animals just over 11,000 years ago, (you can read the executive summary in Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel). That set off an explosion of innovation that continues to this day.

Archeologists and anthropologists agree this human “big bang” started in the Fertile Crescent (arcing between today’s Iraq, Turkey and Sinai), blessed with more edible food and animal species than anywhere else on earth — emmer and einkorn wheat, barley, peas, lentils, chick-peas, olives, grapes, figs and dates, and

cows, pigs, sheep and goats. The next most abundant area, Southwest Asia, only offered wheat, peas, olives, sheep and goats.

Most of the earth’s bio-mass is bound up in wood and leaves — all indigestible, poisonous, barely nutritional, or hard for us to prepare. Among animals, most species can’t be tamed or bred in cap-tivity. Now, hunter-gather-ers need as much as a square

mile per person to find enough vegeta-tion and game to support their lives. But on an acre of land, cultivator-herders can select and grow just the species of plants and animals that can be eaten, so they constitute 90 percent rather than 0.1 per-cent of the biomass. Concentrating edible

calories enables us to feed 10 to 100 times more herders and farmers than hunter-gatherers (Michael Pollan outlines how we domesticated, and were domesticated by, plants in The Botany of Desire). Set-tled farmer-herders can also bear and feed more children, in shorter time frames, than roving hunter-gatherer bands, and grow population faster, encounter more diseases and develop more immunities, and create more space for inventing, gov-erning, and supporting armies.

From the Fertile Crescent (and South-west Asia), farming and herding spread eastward and westward. As new societ-ies encountered these ideas, some opened to them, some resisted them. Generally, societies that adopted new crops, live-stock and/or technology got better nour-ished, and outbred, displaced, conquered or killed off societies that resisted nov-

elty and change. Adapting societies grew visionaries, inventors and traders, chief-tains and religions, and became kingdoms and empires.

Among the innovators was a hardy people, distinguished by their laws and customs, curiosity and inventiveness. Their endurance over five millennia prompted Mark Twain to marvel in 1898, that despite numbers akin to “a nebu-lous dim puff of stardust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way,” the Jew “is as promi-nent on the planet as any other people.” Twain remarked that the Jew’s commer-cial importance and contributions to the world’s list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are “extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk...

If you go:

the three cantors Plus one will perform as a part of the stroum Jcc’s the Jewish touch program on sun., Feb. 13 at 2 p.m. tickets cost $10 adults/$5 students and seniors. buy tickets online at http://jew.sh/iDwv.

The key to survival? Adapt to changeMaRtin westeRMan JTNews Columnist

earth

PAGE 32 X

PAGE 33 X

Joel MaGalNiCK

From foreground to back, cantors Bradlee Kurland, David Serkin-Poole, and Isaac Azose, and the plus one, Rabbi Simon Benzaquen, will perform at the Stroum JCC on Sunday.

12 The arTs JTNews . www.JTNews.NeT . friday, february 11, 2011

On his way to becoming a perennial All-Star in the mid-1950s, Cleveland Indi-ans clean-up hitter Al Rosen received more than his share of barbs from oppos-ing dugouts and the stands.

All these years later, the slugging Jewish third baseman recalls how he dis-tinguished casual insults from malicious slurs.

“There’s a line where you can accept it because you know it’s not right but it’s not that offensive,” he says. “It’s the moment that it becomes offensive that you make a decision, and I’m sure there’s not a lot of forethought to this, but the deci-sion is, ‘I’m going to stop this right now because if I don’t it’s going to go on and on and on.’”

Rosen makes a memorable appearance in Jews and Baseball: An American Love Story, Peter Miller’s entertaining and sur-prisingly thoughtful documentary about the relationship between the national pas-time, an immigrant population and their assimilated sons and daughters.

Jews and Baseball, which boasts a first-rate narration written by New York Times sportswriter Ira Berkow and read by Dustin Hoffman, and an ultra-rare inter-view with Sandy Koufax, screens as part of the Seattle Jewish Film Festival.

Rosen wasn’t raised with any formal training in Judaism, he said in an inter-view during the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival last summer, but he knew who he was. Actually, growing up in the 1930s in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Miami (where Little Havana is today) with no other Jews, there was always some kid to remind him.

“You’re picked on, you’re made fun of, you’re the butt of jokes, and unless you assert yourself soon and often, you soon become cast aside,” Rosen relates. “Well, I was never one to be cast aside.”

That’s not false bravado. Even at 86, the wiry Rosen gives off the vibe of a man who won’t be pushed around. As he describes his adolescence, it’s easy to see why he wasn’t hesitant to use his fists to silence an anti-Semite in the minors or even after he reached the big leagues in 1947.

“Some kids are bigger than others, and they want to be bullies,” he notes. “And

sometimes you have to know that you’re not going to win, but you have to take on the bully. That’s what happened more than once in my growing up in the southwest section of Miami.”

Rosen came within one hit of the elu-sive batting Triple Crown in 1953, and garnered the American League MVP award in a unanimous vote. But both-ered by injuries and livid at the way Indi-ans general manager (and Detroit Tigers legend) Hank Greenberg treated him—cutting his salary after the 1954 season and trading him to Boston after the ’56 campaign—Rosen retired at the age of 32 rather than start over in a new city.

Jews and Baseball suggests that Green-berg was tougher on Rosen, a fellow member of the tribe, than he was on any other Tribe player. When I bring up his predecessor’s name, Rosen only says, “Greenberg and I were not friendly.”

He does credit Greenberg with being the first great Jewish ballplayer, and for inspiring other Jews to enter the game. But Rosen attributes the decline in overt anti-Semitism to the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.

“Once the Jew began to fight, people realized the Jews were not just shopkeep-ers, nor were they just accountants or doctors or lawyers or musicians,” Rosen declares. “I think there was a metamor-phosis that took place. All of us who were in [public] life benefited from that.”

Speaking of fighting, Rosen was long-time teammates with Larry Doby, who broke the color barrier in the American League two months before Rosen was called up.

“I don’t know that Doby was of any help to me as a Jew or I was any help to Doby as a black man,” Rosen says, before recount-ing an incident in Texas involving a cabbie who refused to drive the black player.

“I got out of the cab and told him he was going to take us and he said, ‘No, I’m not,’ and I grabbed him and punched him,” Rosen says. “I think that sort of resolved Doby’s feelings about how I felt about him.”

Rosen returned to baseball in the late 1970s as president of the Yankees after his old friend, George Steinbrenner, bought the team. Rosen was also a successful GM with the Houston Astros and San Francisco Giants, and he continues to follow the game and hold strong, well-considered opinions.

If one word could be used to describe Al Rosen, it would be character.

“I wore my feelings on my sleeves,” he confides. “I always felt that I want to con-duct myself that, if I were walking down the street, one Jew could look at another Jew and say, ‘He’s a mensch.’ That was sort of ingrained in me.”

Former ballplayer Al Rosen still slams line drivesMichael Fox special to JTNews

In film terms, they might be called Ocean’s Seven, but with a few crucial dif-ferences from the movie series: Instead of engineering intricate, flawlessly planned heists, this group of volunteers gives dozens of hours a week to ensure that every aspect of handling a death of a fellow synagogue member is managed smoothly, carefully and judiciously; instead of innu-merable inane sequels, this group gets better and more effective over time; and rather than finishing the job and disap-pearing into the woodwork, this group is in it for the long haul.

Also, said Herzl-Ner Tamid Conser-vative Congregation’s executive director Nadine Strauss of the seven members of its cemetery committee, not one of them would take the honor of the synagogue’s humanitarian award alone.

“It was all for one or one for all,” Strauss said.

Could Clooney or Pitt or Roberts say the same thing?

When Herzl-Ner Tamid holds its “Hooray for Herzlwood” event this week-end, it is honoring several members of its own community that have done much for the greater community as well — with an Oscars theme.

Anyone who attends lunch during Passover at Hillel at the University of Washington will recognize Paul Malakoff as the guy in the apron — he’s the guy who started the lunches and is always there to ensure everything runs smoothly. But he also was instrumental in starting Herzl-Ner Tamid’s endowment and began a pro-gram at Seattle’s Garfield High School that raised money to give out 50 $1,000 schol-arships for students there.

Iantha Sidell is the former board chair of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, and current capital campaign chair for the Stroum Jewish Community Center, but calls Herzl-Ner Tamid her home.

Two of their young leaders are being honored as well: Jonathan Langman

helped to start the NextGen young adults group and used his financial knowledge that “helped us through that economic slump,” Strauss said.

Dan Mintz wins the Unsung Hero award. He is “one of those people that every organization wants. He can do any-thing and does so much of it all,” Strauss said. “He’s created all kinds of programs that bring people that pass through our doors a sense of community.”

But Strauss was most emphatic about the ongoing efforts of the cemetery committee.

“They volunteer all their time to run every aspect of that memorial park, from the first call that comes in from the chevra kadisha [burial society], from the rabbi, to the family, to the moment that they are ushered to their final resting place, fur-ther on to the unveiling,” she said. “[Even if] it’s the middle of the workday, it just doesn’t matter, and it’s extraordinary.”

Two of the members of that commit-tee, George Siegel and Johnny Cohn, have

been volunteering for 33 years apiece. Elaine Weinstein has done it for 23 years, Jack Farber for 22. Peter Michel, Corinne Farber, and Steve Burns round out the group.

Herzl-Ner Tamid’s rabbi, Jay Rosen-baum, said he appreciates what his mem-bers have done for their community.

“When you look at all of them together, you’re grateful how much effort has gone in by so many people from so many gener-ations, each in their own way,” he said.

Awards from a different kind of “academy”Joel Magalnick editor, JTNews

If you go:

“hooray for herzlwood” takes place on sat., Feb 12 from 7–11 p.m. at herzl-ner tamid con-servative congregation, 3700 e mercer Way, mercer island. Visit www.h-nt.org/herzlwood.htm for ticket and rsVP information.

CourTesy seveNTH arT releasiNG/sJFF

L.A. Dodger Sandy Koufax takes the field, a still from Peter Miller’s Jews and Baseball.

If you go:

the seattle Jewish Film Festival runs march 3 and 12–20. Jews and Baseball: An American Love Story screens sun., march 13 at 11 a.m. at AMC Pacific Place 11, 600 Pine st., seattle. Visit www.seattlejewishfilmfestival.org for tickets and further information.

friday, february 11, 2011 . www.JTNews.NeT . JTNews The arTs 13

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Editor’s Note: This is the second in a multi-part series honoring Seattle Symphony Music Director Gerard Schwarz’s final season.

Seattle Symphony has already released its schedule of concerts for next season, starting in September of 2011, when its new music director, Ludovic Morlot, takes over. But right now, at the midway point in this season celebrating Schwarz’s 26-year legacy as music director, the soon-to-be Conduc-tor Laureate is excited about “one of the most important things, if not the most important thing I’ve ever done”: an educa-tional TV project, to be aired on PBS.

The series is being called “All-Star Orchestra.” Schwarz is music director and conductor of an inaugural season of eight one-hour-long shows designed “to talk about and then perform the greatest music.

“There has been an enormous out-pouring of excitement” about the proj-ect, Schwarz says, “and there are still loose ends” at this midwinter point. “If all fund-raising is complete, the first year will be recorded at the end of August 2011.”

Is Gerard Schwarz doing a Leonard Bernstein? Not quite, insists the conduc-tor who once played principal trumpet in Bernstein’s New York Philharmonic.

“What Leonard Bernstein did — fabu-lously, with his Young People’s Concerts — was, pick a subject. I’ll do that. Talk about it. I’ll do that, but more! And it’s not just me. It’ll be historians, could be another performer, could be a musicologist, a biog-rapher of a composer, whoever has some-thing to offer. And then we’re going to play the piece. Complete.”

The “All-Star Orchestra” will be made up of musicians from all over the country.

“The greatest of the great will come together for a week in New York, and record these eight shows — television shows, not concerts,” Schwarz says.

There will be no studio audience; the audience addressed is the one watching the screen.

Who’s this “greatest of the great”? Is their concertmaster Yitzchak Perlman?

“No,” smiles Schwarz, emphasizing that this is not a group of famous soloists. “They’re orchestral musicians. So in the first violin section there’ll probably be 12 or 14 concertmasters. And they’ll rotate,” meaning the solo honors will be shared.

“The same with all the sections,” he adds. “In the winds, we pick individuals who will create their favorite section. It’ll be people from here, Seattle, obviously, as well as from the New York Philharmonic and the [Metropolitan Opera Orchestra], and Cleveland and Chicago and Boston, and so forth.”

All the players are to come from Amer-ican orchestras. The project, Schwarz says, is “to create a musical library,” produc-ing as many eight-show seasons as pos-

Next stop for Maestro Schwarz: New media project for music education gigi yellen-kohn JTNews Correspondent

sible over an undetermined number of years. That library will consist not only of the one-hour shows, Schwarz adds, but “the intention is to have a DVD for each show plus an extended educational com-ponent to be released in conjunction with the airing of each show.”

Of course, an interactive Web site is part of the plan.

Schwarz and his team are particularly excited about the bonus material they plan to release after each show airs:

“So we do the Beethoven 5th, let’s say,

and you can click on Beethoven’s life, you can click on what was life like in Vienna in the early 19th century; click on interviews with the players; you can click on rehearsal shots,” he says.

And then there’s to be the thrill of moving in close to the music-making itself: “You can be your own camera-man or woman: you can pick the cameras you want to look at, so if you’re an oboe player and you want to look at the oboe player, you punch the oboe camera, and we have nine cameras that you can actu-ally choose.”

One of the tracks will be Schwarz him-self, voicing his thoughts while he’s con-ducting. “Can you imagine what that’s going to be like?” Schwarz laughs.

Ultimately, it’s the current state of school music education, or lack thereof, that inspired this project.

“We’re going to have a teacher’s guide—it’s not so much for school sys-tems that have big music programs—there aren’t many left of those,” he laments.

Rather, he points out, “There are so many communities that don’t even have sym-phony orchestras. So a teacher of mathemat-ics who’s interested could, with the teacher’s guide and the material, learn enough to teach the kids. The teacher’s guides will be

specific, so if it’s primary school, this one, secondary school, that one.”

Recording will take place probably in the Juilliard complex at Lincoln Center.

A series sounds like it could be expen-sive, but according to Schwarz, it’s “not as expensive as you might think. A budget of maybe $2.5 million for eight one-hour TV shows. Usually you spend that much on eight commercials of 30 seconds each!”

There’s quite a team involved in this project, some in New York and some in Seattle. Schwarz, as music director, works with “a whole group that weigh in on the programming, and two personnel manag-ers in New York to line up the musicians,” he says. “It’s just huge.”

So, no resting on laurels for the future Conductor Laureate of Seattle Symphony. While he’s enjoying the celebrations of his long service here, he’s already busy secur-ing a future, not just for his own musical life, but for the life of the very music itself.

If you go:

the Jewish themes woven throughout Gerard Schwarz’s final season continue on Feb. 17 and 19 with a “Viola spectacular with Pinchas Zukerman.” at benaroya hall, 200 university st., seattle. For tickets, visit www.seattlesymphony.org.

beN vaNHouTeN

Gerard Schwarz

14 The arTs JTNews . www.JTNews.NeT . friday, february 11, 2011

~ February 26 ~

ISRAEL PHILHARMONIC

ORCHESTRA with CONDUCTOR

ZUBIN MEHTAThe legendary ensemble makes a rare Seattle stop for what is sure to be an unforgettable evening.

Sponsors: Martin Selig & Catherine Mayer

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February 12, 8 p.m.Joan riversJoan Rivers, who says she was alive for the invention of gambling, brings her act to the Snoqualmie Casino. Once known as Joan Alexandra Molinsky Sanger Rosenberg, the smart-alecky comedienne, part-Jewish and part-plastic, has been at it for decades. At Snoqualmie Casino Ballroom, 37500 SE North Bend Way, Snoqualmie.

tuesday, February 15, 7 p.m.David VolkDavid Volk’s The Cheap Bastard’s Guide to Seattle was our readers’ favorite source for af-fordable Seattle fun in the “2010 Best of Every-thing” survey. As a humorist, Volk will surely guide you to an entertaining evening – and then many affordable and equally entertaining evenings thereafter. At Ravenna Third Place Books, 6504 20th Ave. NE, Seattle.

February 17 and 19, 7:30 and 8 p.m.Viola spectacular with Pinchas Zukermanclassical concertYet another ultra-talented Is-raeli classical musician comes to Seattle: This time it’s the multi-dimensional Pinchas Zuckerman performing viola. Zuckerman was

born in Tel Aviv just months after the declaration of Israeli statehood. He is also principal guest conductor of Britain’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. At Benaroya Hall, 200 University St., Seattle. Tickets at www.seattlesymphony.org.

Wednesday, February 23 at 1 p.m.shir l’shalom: songs of Peacesing-a-longIn response to a campus art exhibition that calls Hebrew a “language of abuse,” the Evergreen State College Hillel invites people to join them in singing Hebrew songs of peace. The event is free and all are invited — no Hebrew knowledge required. At the Evergreen State College, Red Square, 2700 Evergreen Parkway, Olympia.

tuesday, February 15, 7:30 p.m. shraga biran: We all could Profit from your ideaslectureShraga Biran is an Israeli attorney and civic leader, and the author of Opportunism: How to Change the World – One Idea at a Time. He envisions a world full of citizens unafraid to lay claim to their ideas and benefit from them financially. At Town Hall, 1119 8th Ave., Se-attle. Tickets $5.

saturday, February 12, 8–11 p.m.sassonKlezmer and Jewish musicSeattle’s trio of young Jewish art-ists are performing a motzei Shab-bat gig at the Island Crust Café. Mixing between klezmer, jazz fu-sion and old standards, have some pizza and sit back to enjoy the show. Free. At Island Crust, 7525 SE 24th St., Mercer Island.

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THE NEW HYATT REGENCY BELLEVUE…CELEBRATE IN STYLE

Now you can invite your family and all your friends to the Hyatt Regency Bellevue

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n Alana: Antique & Estate Jewelry

Everything in Alana’s is a treasure — something exquisitely beautiful that can’t be found anywhere else.

“People come to Alana’s to find something different,” says owner Alana Fornoni. “They don’t want something someone picked out of a catalogue or something all their friends have. They also would like to know the story behind the piece.”

Alana is happy to share that story, if she knows it. But she has observed that most people inherit a piece of jewelry with no idea who owned it originally or what it’s worth. With her expert eye and years of experience, Alana recognizes quality when she sees it and can usually tell the owner when their jewelry was made and its market value. For more information about Alana: Antique & Estate Jewelry, visit www.alanajewelry.com. The Web site has extensive photographs of inventory and pricing.

n The Bellevue Club and Hotel BellevueThe Bellevue Club and Hotel Bellevue is a four-

star, four-diamond, internationally recognized boutique property that provides a private retreat in luxurious accommodations. Located in Bellevue, they are one of the Eastside’s premier, most-sought-after locations to celebrate a special event.

Their versatile and beautifully appointed Olympic Ballroom is the perfect setting for your special occasion. Their newly designed ballroom has rich textural mixes of warm woods, resin walls and a glass focal point. Suspenseful, color changing accent walls and cove lighting to match your décor. Your guests will find the intimate scale and elegant atmosphere to be truly exceptional. Whether you prefer a sit-down dinner, an elaborate buffet or hors d’oeuvres reception, their culinary team will assist you in creating the perfect menu with classic elegance to suit your style. They will help you to create a spectacular event with their attentive and professionally trained culinary and service staff. Private, professional and prestigious, they are the Eastside’s only social address. Contact [email protected] or 425-688-3380.

n Beverly Hunnicutt StudioBeverly Hunnicutt Studio has been at the top of Queen Anne Hill on Crockett

Street for 29 years. Beverly’s work has been featured in the Seattle PI and on KOMO–TV.

Wedding gown design and alterations are her specialty. Custom gowns can be made from pictures, patterns or existing garments. Family heirloom gowns and bridesmaid dresses can be altered and recut. Beverly has experience with all types of fabrics and garment styles. Treat yourself to a friendly and personal experience with your wedding gown. If you have any questions about wedding gown design or alterations, please call Beverly at 206-283-0655.

n Cinema BooksCinema Books is the film bookstore of the Northwest. Collections include

biographies of movie stars and directors, glamorous picture books of Hollywood, posters, stills and cards of the stars, and technical filmmaking books for the novice or professional. They also carry criticism and reference film books to lead you to movies you may have missed. Call 206-547-7667 or visit www.cinemabooks.net.

n City Catering CompanyWeddings have a special place in the world. No celebration carries

as much meaning as a wedding day. Weddings are remembered for what they represent and for how they were made special... their food, decor, and atmosphere. Named Seattle’s most creative caterer by Seattle Magazine, City Catering Company has been designing events since 2001. Contact www.citycateringcompany.com or call 206-721-0334.

n Dani Weiss Photography

Dani Weiss has traveled the world perfecting her skills as a photographer and building a portfolio of her specialty: People and places. Portraits, weddings, B’nai Mitzvah, anniversaries, and family reunions are captured by Dani in a true-to-life documentary style. Dani has

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been a professional photographer since 1987. In addition to family celebrations photography, she shoots portraits and works freelance for several publications. Dani recently won the JTNews’ “Best of Everything” survey for the fifth year in a row and was just voted the Brides Choice Award on Wedding Wire for the second year in a row. She holds a degree in Fashion and Commercial Photography as well as Photojournalism. She is currently involved with the Seattle Professional Photographers’ Association and the Greater Seattle Business Association. Contact her at www.daniweissphotography.com or 206-760-3336.

n Emmanuel’s Fine Rug & Upholstery Specialists

They’ve been cleaning rugs, carpets, furniture and fine Orientals for 103 years. You can count on them! Highest-quality carpet cleaning, custom in-plant rug washing, rug repair and blind and upholstery cleaning. They specialize in Oriental care, repair and mending and restoration. Emmanuel’s is the place to go for consigned new and antique Orientals, rug sales and appraisals, as well as on-site carpet cleaning and maintenance. Fifteen percent off all in-home

services and 30 percent off all cash-and-carry cleaning services. Gift certificates available. For more information call 206-322-2200, fax 325-3841, or visit www.emmanuelsrug.com.

n Fremont Jewelry DesignFremont Jewelry Design is a small, comfortable, boutique-like shop where there

is true passion when it comes to designing and creating jewelry. It flows from owner Lisa Magetteri’s desire to make her customers’ jewelry dreams come true. Design elements are drawn from customers’ ideas as well as her own sense of style. The heart of the business is in listening and understanding you to create the perfect piece.

Other services offered are jewelry/watch repairs, engraving, appraisals, pearl/bead re-stringing and a unique retail selection.

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n Herzl-Ner Tamid Judaica Shop Herzl-Ner Tamid Judaica Shop has what

you need to “Do Jewish!” From traditional to unique, artisan to boutique, come see an amazing variety of merchandise to make your simcha special: Ketubot or personalized kippot; jewelry in gold, silver, enamel, ceramic, acrylic; tallitot in many fabrics, sizes, and colors; mezzuzot in metals, acrylic, wood and mixed materials; ritual and holiday items, and much more. See artisan Judaica by Adi Sidler, Judit Leiser, Emily Rosenfeld, Gary Rosenthal, Lalo and other artists. Open Wednesdays from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. and the second Sunday of the month from 10 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. Also open by appointment for your convenience. Call the shul office at 206-232-8555. For more information visit www.h-nt.org/judaicashop.htm. At 3700 E Mercer Way, Mercer Island.

n Hyatt Regency BellevueOn Seattle’s Eastside, nine miles from downtown

Seattle, Hyatt Regency Bellevue offers 733 guestrooms and 70,000 square feet of event space following a stunning 2009 $185-million expansion. Ideally located in the heart of The Bellevue Collection, a premier urban streetscape with more than 250 shops, 45 restaurants and lounges, a landmark cinema, a stylish billiards and comedy club, day spas, and upscale bowling lanes — all connected to the hotel via convenient sky bridges. With Asian-inspired elegance, the new 17,745-square-

foot grand ballroom is the largest hotel ballroom east of Lake Washington, and the third largest in Washington State. The hotel specializes in customized menus for your wedding, Bar or Bat Mitzvah, or special family occasion. Group overnight room rates are available. Please contact their catering consultants at 425-698-4240 or visit bellevue.hyatt.com.

n Joel Dames PhotographyAward-winning photographers Joel and Hitomi are prepared to capture your

every simcha. They offer DVD full-resolution printable images and 60-day private Web sites as well as glove-leather coffee table albums digitally designed by graphic designer Hitomi. Read testimonials at www.joeldamesphotography.com, or call 206-367-1276 for more information.

n KasparsYou will remember your special day for the rest of your life,

so choosing the right partners to help you is an important decision. The team at Kaspars Special Events and Catering, with more than 20 years of experience and a reputation for excellence, will support you through the entire planning process, including venue selection, menu creation, ceremony, and reception planning, ensuring you are stress-free.

Family owned and operated, Kaspars’ passion is to provide creative, fresh cuisine and superior service at a reasonable price. They cater to groups of all sizes, both within Kaspars as well as at off-site locations including private homes. Whether you are entertaining a few or a few hundred guests, the elements for success are the same: Superb fare, impeccable service, the proper ambience, and the right caterer! Kaspars Special Events and Catering has it all. Call 206-298-0123, fax 206-298-0146 or visit www.kaspars.com.


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For event planning call… 206.548.2590 –or– email [email protected]

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n The Landing and Northcut Conference RoomGive your casual graduation party an extra touch

of elegance, welcome your teen into adulthood with sophistication, or make your wedding sparkle. The Landing also transforms into the perfect setting for your theatre performance, wedding reception, prom, live band, or dance workshop. The patio with open terrace setting extends the pleasant ambience of any special events.

The Northcut Conference Room meeting facility is an extraordinary setting for your off-site meetings, conferences, executive retreats, and ideas for all-staff retreats. For more information, please contact 206-786-0627 or [email protected].

n The Little Red BistroThe Little Red Bistro could very well be the most unique bistro and event space

in the Northwest. Some have described it as part Cirque, part soirée, with touches of fine dining elegance. The brainchild of highly accomplished artist Jeff Hengst and filled with art, antiques, rich colors and velvet curtains, this place makes you feel like you have been transported to magical places you may be longing to revisit. The menu is French bistro-style (including Vietnamese and Cajun touches) and the catering menu is growing fast to include what is needed to support many wonderful occasions. The 250-person event space is perfect for weddings, rehearsal dinners and all kinds of celebrations. Contact Jeff at 206-963-0633. Bon appetít.

n Mary FrimerJohn L. Scott Real Estate Residential Specialist • Full-service real estate — first-class service, first-class results • President’s Gold award 2009 • Fluent in Spanish Contact Mary for all your real estate needs! 206-391-6161 or

[email protected]. Located at 11040 Main St. #200, Bellevue, WA 98004.

n Menashe & Sons JewelersMenashe & Sons is a full-service store featuring a large estate jewelry department,

custom design jewelry, and a complete repair department for clocks, watches, and jewelry. The store has a G.I.A. gemologist on staff for a full appraisal service. It also has one of the largest diamond engagement inventories in the city of Seattle. Menashe & Sons specializes in one-of-a-kind custom jewelry pieces featuring oriental jade, Tahitian pearls, fine emeralds, rubies, sapphires, and tanzanite.

For honest, professional service call 206-932-4272 or visit www.menasheandsons.com.

n Mercer Island’s Community Center at Mercer View

The Community Center at Mercer View overlooks Luther Burbank Park, Lake Washington and the Cascade Mountains. This center is a primary event hot spot in the Northwest.

While this state-of-the-art facility may be a community center in name, the quality of the venue competes with many upscale wedding locations while remaining at competitive rates. Conveniently located between Seattle and Bellevue, the CCMV offers several room accommodations for wedding-related events, with free parking available for over 220 vehicles.

The Mercer Room, a sophisticated, modern space, provides banquet seating for 200 guests, three levels of lighting, and many more amenities. The adjoining terrace features tables, chairs, warm lighting and cover. A catering kitchen is also available for rent and you are welcome to bring in a caterer of your choosing.

Reservations are taken 18 months in advance! Visit www.mercergov.org/mercerroom or call 206-275-7609 to reserve your date!


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n Nosh Away CateringVoted best caterer by JTNews readers! Nosh Away, Inc. is

a full-service kosher catering company servicing the greater Seattle community. Size and type of event have no limitations. Whether it is dinner for two, or a gala event for 2,000, Nosh Away will bring to bear amazing concern for the event by paying meticulous attention to all of the details that ensure success. Nosh Away has teamed up with many venues in the Seattle area to provide customers and guests with a wonderful dining experience, providing excellent quality and professional service. Under kosher supervision of the Va’ad of Greater Seattle, their 3,000-square-foot, fully equipped commissary and bakery operates daily to provide for all of Nosh Away’s catering needs. www.noshaway.com.

n Onionskin DesignJoan Lite Miller specializes in one-of-a-kind invitations

for weddings and B’nai Mitzvah, custom ketubot, English and Hebrew calligraphy, expressive hand lettering, original paper-cuts and logo design.

For more information, call 206-527-6320 or visit www.onionskindesign.com.

n Pedersen’sThe Event Rental ExpertsStylish party rentals including:• Specialty linen • Glassware • Tables • China • Cutlery • Chair covers • Designer chairs • Catering equipment • Unique tabletop items. 4500 4th Ave. S, Seattle. Call 206-719-5400 or visit www.pedersens.com.

n Photos by RachelleRachelle Erickson’s style reflects her artistic eye and lends a fresh, modern

spin as a “lifestyle photographer,” capturing all the love, laughter, tears, family and friends of your wedding day that makes it priceless! With 18 years of experience, she is dedicated to telling your story that you will cherish forever. Contact Rachelle Erickson at 425-829-0532 or visit www.photosbyrachelle.com.

n PogachaPogacha of Issaquah is a casual fine-

dining restaurant nestled in Issaquah with easy access from I-90. They pride themselves on their fresh delicious food, exceptional service, and friendly neighborhood atmosphere. Pogacha has two private dining rooms and full-service catering, and they are delighted to provide personalized event planning with their friendly Pogacha touch.

They offer Northwest cuisine with an Adriatic flair. All of the food is made from scratch, using only the freshest ingredients. For questions or information, contact event dining manager Sarah Barnes at 425-392-5550 (office), 425-269-2616 (cell) or [email protected]. For catering contact Justin McMartin at 425-894-7441.

n Rent-a-Chef CateringThierry Adam specializes in private events. He

designs, prepares and serves elegant dinners at home or on location. Serving the Jewish community for 27 years, Thierry is able to prepare his menu to accommodate dietary laws and preferences. He specializes in French cuisine, but can tailor every meal to the client’s taste and budget. He excels at B’nai Mitzvah parties, weddings and business and private dinners from four to 80 people — perfect for an intimate affair. This is world-class catering perfect for special occasions. Contact Thierry at 206-622-8199, 800-593-2283, [email protected] or www.rent-a-chef-catering.com.

n The RuinsThe Ruins is a private dining club with catering facilities open to the public.

It is one of the most unique venues in the country. The founder and creator, Joe McDonnal, built a mansion inside of a warehouse with landscaped gardens and four beautifully appointed rooms. The rooms used collectively can accommodate up to 160 for a seated dinner, or 250 for a stand-up cocktail reception. From beginning to end, their professional staff and beautiful venue will offer you and your guests a truly unique and memorable experience. Contact The Ruins at 206-285-7846 or visit www.theruins.net.

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n Shawn’s KugelShawn’s Kugel is the premier Jewish band in the Pacific Northwest. Voted

Best Jewish Band by JTNews readers in 2007, they have performed for enthusiastic clients for more than 11 years. They specialize in getting guests to participate in folk dancing and horas at weddings, B’nai Mitzvah and other lifecycle events. Shawn’s Kugel has released four CDs, with the latest being Odyssey.

Check out Shawn’s Kugel on MySpace, CD Baby, or iTunes to hear some songs and learn more about this Northwest treasure. Contact 206-523-9298 or [email protected] or visit pweb.jps.net/~shawnsax.

n Tulalip Resort CasinoThe AAA Four Diamond Tulalip Resort Casino

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To plan your special day at Tulalip Resort Casino, please contact James Hillman at 360-716-6830, [email protected] or www.TulalipResort.com.

n What the Chelm!What the Chelm! has enlivened simchot since 1993 and entertained at countless

B’nai Mitzvah and weddings around the Puget Sound area. Public performances have included Folklife, Klezfest, the Juan de Fuca Festival and moving the Boise synagogue to its new home, as well as annual gigs for the Bellingham Parks and the Whatcom Museum. The band plays klezmer, Israeli, Yiddish, Ladino and other types of music. Contact Dan Raas at 360-676-1621 or visit www.whatthechelm.com.

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“I think he really understands what the challenges are, how things have changed over the last 30 years or so, and I think he’s committed to out-of-the-box thinking and some really creative action,” Rosen-baum said.

Herzl-Ner Tamid, he said, is constantly working on new ways of making atten-dance compelling and interesting.

“The burden of proof is on the Jewish institution to prove that we are worth a look, we are worth the commitment,” Rosenbaum said. “There’s no automatic, it’s not going to happen by inertia, it’s not going to happen by nostalgia.”

Congregation B’nai Torah, a small, mostly lay-led Conservative synagogue in Olympia, has questioned in the past whether its dues are worth the services they receive. According to Stan Finkel-stein, B’nai Torah’s president, “what they’re doing is probably the right thing, maybe a little bit late in coming,” he said. “Will it work? I’m optimistic that if they step back enough and say, ‘What’s wrong and what do we do to fix it?’ they can make some progress, but it takes regional people

who are committed to it.”Being an hour or more from the closest

Conservative shuls in Seattle, Finkelstein said the emphasis on greater regional ser-vices would be welcomed.

Beth Shalom’s Borodin agreed, saying she receives calls from small communities wanting services that she doesn’t have the resources to provide. Beth Shalom, how-ever, would likely not be terribly affected by this new strategic plan because they’re doing many of the things it calls for already.

“All of the problems they’re respond-ing to are not problems we’re seeing as a congregation,” Borodin said. “We’ve actu-ally had a large increase in members and we are a very vibrant place.”

One comment she heard from Wer-nick during his visit was that Beth Shalom was the only community he had visited — of 100 in his first year — in which young adults came to his presentation and asked questions.

“‘How do you integrate young adults into the congregation?’” Borodin said he asked her.

That question, and how to engage col-lege students, are where Borodin said she

would like to see more emphasis.Wernick began oversight on the strate-

gic planning process when he took his lead-ership post a year ago, but it came about as a result of duress. At around the time Wer-nick came in, a number of prominent syn-agogues and rabbis formed a coalition called Hayom (Today) that demanded changes in governance and a better return on their congregations’ investment. USCJ worked closely with Hayom on building its plan, Wernick said.

Rabbi Michael Siegel, one of Hay-om’s leaders from Chicago, told the JTA news service that he appreciates the effort, but called it a good first step that would require a “leap of faith” on the behalf of its member congregations.

Borodin had similar, though less harsh, sentiments.

“I don’t think it’s particularly trail-blazing or radical or visionary,” she said. “I think it’s a realistic plan that will take the movement 100 steps forward. Because the movement structure is so antiquated, there’s a lot of work to be done. I think this is the right way to approach how to get there.”

Rosenbaum of Herzl-Ner Tamid said

he hopes this plan will allow the move-ment to overcome what he said was its inability to connect its member syna-gogues together.

“There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on in all the congregations in America. Everybody’s doing at least one thing that’s really working,” he said. But “there’s not connective tissue. We’re not a movement, as we really ought to be.”

Still, Rosenbaum said he likes what he sees so far.

“I’m impressed with what Rabbi Wer-nick has already done, and with his vision,” he said. “I’m optimistic that some-thing is going to happen.”

Ultimately, what Wernick believes should happen is that the Conservative movement will create sacred communi-ties “that [add] to a person’s sense of rela-tionship with the Divine. Social justice that really gives people an opportunity to change the world, but most importantly, to get out of the mud of thinking that the goal is membership,” he said. “The goal is to engage Jews in Jewish life, and the more Jews that we engage, the more Jews will support the institutions that engage them.”

CONSERvATIvE MOvEMENT W Page 7

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Of the approximately 887 emergency domestic violence shelters and safe-home programs and the 43 domestic violence programs that contract with the state, Shalom Bayit takes referrals from more than 20 of these programs.

Other county and state agencies simul-taneously help survivors find housing, employment, and school placement for their children.

Shalom Bayit is the only program of its kind in Washington, and one of the few in the country that stores, distributes, and delivers household furnishings to these victims.

“We are now facing a tremendous financial crisis,” said Karen Besserman, NCJW Seattle Section’s executive direc-tor. “Without our programming, a lot of these women — these victims and their

families — may be able to get a house, but they will certainly have trouble turning it into a home.”

Operational funds for the Shalom Bayit program also come from NCJW’s $50 per year membership dues. NCJW’s Seattle Section currently has 400 members.

Though Shalom Bayit had served approximately 150 families per year, mainly women and children, Besserman said, in 2009 referrals spiked to 250.

“We’ve seen a greater increase in the need for our services in difficult economic times,” she said. “I think you see greater incidences of domestic violence.”

Since the program was created in the fall of 2001, Shalom Bayit has collected over 14,000 pieces of “gently used” furni-ture from nearly 2,000 donors. More than 96 percent of its clients are not Jewish.

“Our mission is to serve everyone,” said Jennifer Cohen, a former co-presi-

dent of the NCJW Seattle section who has been a volunteer with the organization since 1998. Cohen received its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010 for creating the Shalom Bayit program.

In the early days of the program, Shalom Bayit staff would give its clients a mezuzah to place on their doors to wel-come them into their new home.

“We had a lot of Jewish clients at the beginning,” said Cohen, telling one of her favorite stories from the early days of the program, when a Jewish woman who had selected a living room full of nearly-new furniture, brought her to tears.

“At the end, I gave her a mezuzah, and she just looked at it, she hugged me, and she said, ‘This is all I needed.’”

Cohen recalled another story of one young mother she helped move into a new apartment after escaping abuse at the hands of her spouse. The two women

watched her five young sons, all under the age of 10, jump up and down on their new beds, laughing and shrieking over not having to sleep on the floor in their sleep-ing bags again for one more night. It was a time of joy and not for scolding, recalled Cohen.

“They’ve had so many things controlled for them,” Cohen said. “The women come in and select what they want that would help them create a home. That is really important — to have that choice.”

Besserman said the board is exploring the idea of spinning Shalom Bayit off of NCJW in the hopes of reducing expenses.

That “is certainly our hope,” Besser-man said. “But we’re desperately seeking support to buy some time.”

For more information on the Shalom Bayit program visit www.ncjwseattle.org or call 425-558-1894.

SHALOM BAYIT W PAGE 1

Camps

friday, february 11, 2011 . www.JTNews.NeT . JTNews m.o.T.: member of The Tribe 25

It happened, as these things often do, at a conference.

“It,” being Boundaries of Jewish Identity (Univer-sity of Washington Press), a new collection of essays on Jewish identity edited by UW Professors Susan Glenn, the Howard and Frances Keller Endowed Professor in His-tory, and Naomi Sokoloff, Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Professor of Comparative Literature.

The essays that make up the book began as papers presented at a 2007 con-ference organized by the two professors.

“I was interested in two things,” Susan explained to me, “how social scientists were trying to put a public face on Jewish [culture] and Jewish identity [and] the relationship between what they were doing and…popular culture.”

The conference was a “huge success,” she says. “People were so fascinated.”

Both Susan and Naomi singled out the keynote address — and the book’s first essay — as among the most interest-ing works. “Are Genes Jewish? Concep-tual Ambiguities in the New Genetic Age”

is by Susan Martha Kahn of Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

“The lead article in the collection,” observes Naomi, “about changing genetic research and assisted repro-duction…strikes me as a very contemporary issue that will affect many different com-munities…on deciding on identity issues.”

That article “generated the most amazing conversations,” says Susan. “It highlights the

importance of a book like this,” and “the many different forms this conversation can take.”

Prof. Glenn’s work in the book centers on the intriguing and entertaining prac-tice or game by which Jews have tried to identify who is Jewish on the basis of their looks. This goes against social scientific writings, which attempted to undercut the notion that you could tell who was a Jew on the basis of physical features.

“There’s this intense curiosity among Jews to try and find other Jews,” she says.

Haven’t we all done that? Susan calls this “Jewhooing.”

I asked Naomi if she thought the inter-est in Jewish identity is stronger among unaffiliated Jews than affiliated, and she disagreed.

“Jews move in and out of identities a lot,” she says, depending on a variety of factors. “Every generation finds itself in some way,” she adds. “We didn’t put this volume together to specifically speak about groups at the margins.”

A member of Temple De Hirsch Sinai, Naomi says her Yiddishist-Socialist grand-parents might be shocked that she attends synagogue.

“I came from a secular but highly Jew-ishly identified home,” she says.

Prof. Sokoloff’s piece in the book, “Jewish Character? Stereotype and Identity in Fiction from Israel by Aharon Appelf-eld and Sayed Kashua” examines the use of Jewish stereotypes in defining Jewish iden-tity in two specific works by those prom-inent Israeli writers, one a well-known Holocaust survivor and the other an Israeli Arab. Naomi will continue this discussion with the general public at an April 12 lec-ture at the Stroum SJCC, part of the Israel 360 lecture series organized by the UW’s Stroum Jewish Studies Program.

Susan’s scholarship and teaching have

focused on 20th-century cultural and social history and she says anti-Semi-tism, particularly in the 20th century, is an enduring interest of hers and the subject of one of her UW classes.

“Everyone thinks they know what it means, but it’s used very elastically,” she says.

She has also taught — although not recently — “a really fascinating course on Jews and blacks in the United States.”

Both Susan and Naomi say that most of the students in their classes are not Jewish, with the possible exception, Naomi says, of advanced Hebrew.

I couldn’t resist asking Prof. Glenn if she thought there was a difference between East Coast and West Coast Jews.

“It depends on context,” she responded, illustrating her point with an anecdote: Growing up in L.A. she felt quite Jewish, but while doing research at the YIVO Institute in New York, “I was fascinated by how un-Jewish I felt in that context.”

Gad Barzilai of the UW’s Jackson School and the Lucia S. and Herbert L. Pruzan Professor of Jewish Studies, has an essay in the book, too, titled “Who is a Jew? Categories, Boundaries, Communi-ties, and Citizenship Law in Israel.”

UW profs edit new book on Jewish identityby diana bReMent JTNews Columnist

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diana bReMent JTNews ColumnistIt’s probably no accident that the two chapters on

Israel in Rabbi Jonathan Sack’s new book, Future Tense (Schocken, cloth, $26.95) occupy almost the exact center of the work. Sacks is England’s chief rabbi, and a pro-lific and eloquent writer. Israel is just one component of this book that captures the rabbi’s worries on the state of the Jewish people — over-assimilated, over-intermarried, fractious and factionalized, he says. As a microcosm of the Jewish world, Sacks calls on Israel to be the beacon of justice the Bible says it is, to create “a new civic Judaism, one that embraces religious and secular, Jew and Palestin-ian, alike.” (Perhaps he could extend this attitude to inter-denominational relations within Judaism.)

Two other sides of Israel — with its dizzying array of facets — are presented in Lone Soldiers by Jerusalem Post columnist Herb Keinon (Devora, cloth, $27.95) and By Hook and by Crook: Israeli Settlement Policy in the West Bank, a report from B’tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.

Lone Soldier is the uplifting story, told in words and photos, of Jews from around the world who come to Israel to serve as volunteers in its otherwise all-conscrip-tion army. Oftentimes living out of their cultural and lin-guistic element, they are dubbed “lone soldiers” and their plight can indeed be lonely but for the help they get from reserve officer Tzvika Levy, a volunteer himself, who seeks them out and provides a sense of connection and family. The lone soldier phenomenon is increasing, according to the author, because of the Birthright program, which is exposing increasing numbers of young Diaspora men and women to Israel and the IDF.

The B’tselem report is not so uplifting. It’s a detailed — though short — accounting of the legal maneuvers to which Israel has resorted in order to acquire land to build Jewish settlements in the West Bank. The report demon-strates the deception behind these land claims, calling the settlements “illegal.”

The same Birthright program that has brought more lone soldiers to Israel is the topic of artist Sara Glidden’s fascinating graphic (comic book) memoir, How to Under-stand Israel in 60 Days or Less (Vertigo, cloth, $24.99). Glidden arrived in Israel a confirmed skeptic with decid-

edly negative views about her host country. As the tour proceeds and she learns about both Israel’s history and the

lives of all of its residents today, she struggles to assimilate her beliefs and her experiences, at times becoming emo-tionally overwrought. Despite her doubts she honors those she meets on her trip with balance and an open mind. Glidden’s account is moving and honest, funny and enter-taining, and she captures some of the combination of angst and affection American Jews often feel about Israel.

Among the most moving sections of Glidden’s Birth-right tour comes when the group meets a bereavement group. Glidden pays tribute to the victims of terrorism, depicting them as ghosts who stand beside their surviving family members as they share their stories.

In A New Shoah, (Encounter, cloth, $27.95) Italian journalist Gulio Meotti also honors Israeli victims of Isla-mist terrorism by telling the stories of their lives. Meotti is outraged at these deaths, which he feels are generally ignored by media in the West. He draws a straight line between Nazi anti-Semitism and Islamist anti-Zionism, calling both an excuse to kill Jews.

While the writing is impassioned, Meotti’s tone can be strident and a little off-putting. There’s no arguing, how-ever, with his tender obituaries or his view that these vic-tims probably deserve more recognition, even within Israel. Some of their plights are all the more tragic because they are either Holocaust survivors or their descendants. While generally well translated, there are still some errors in English and continuity within.

Finally, an Israeli-Moroccan author, Therese Zri-hen-Dvir, puts her tribute to Israeli victims of terrorism into novella form in Stairway to Heaven (Gefen, paper, $14.95). The life of protagonist Naomi is permanently altered when she witnesses a terror attack on soldiers wait-ing at the Beit Lid junction, a waypoint between Tel Aviv and Haifa. The attack is real — it happened on January 22, 1995 — as are all the events in the story, although parts have been fictionalized for privacy. A memorial there, a stairway with 22 soldiers climbing it, inspired the author when she saw it in 2003. She interviewed surviving fami-lies and incorporates their words into a moving homage, weaving the fictional details of Naomi’s life with the sto-ries of the dead. By the time Naomi’s grandson is born, she is, despite her pain — her own and her country’s — con-vinced that “life will always beat death.”

Spring books:

peRSpecTIveS on ISRael

friday, february 11, 2011 . www.JTNews.NeT . JTNews spriNg books 27

by diana bReMent JTNews Columnist Art and HolocaustBurning Forest: The Art of Maria Frank Abrams, by

Matthew Kagan (Northwest Museum of Art, cloth, $40). This book gets high marks on all counts. It is the captivat-ing biography of Maria Frank Abrams, Seattle-area artist and Holocaust survivor; it is a lavishly illustrated con-temporary art history text; and it highlights the career of a local artist who enjoyed success in a field that is challenging for anyone, but was par-ticularly so for women in the mid-20th century. The author, an art critic and author of 15 other books, told this reviewer that he decided to write the book after Abrams had a revival show at Woodside Gallery in 2005, not only because of her artis-tic contributions, but because “it’s always the right time to have something about remembering a Holocaust survi-vor because their number is diminishing and we need to record their stories.” This is a beautiful book, to be enjoyed on many levels.

FictionTwo new novels, one adult and one for pre- and

younger teens, have much in common. Both are stories of Orthodox Jewish families living in the Boston area with smart female protagonists struggling with Jewish commu-nity and family life.

From Naomi Ragen, Orthodox feminist commentator and author, playwright and Internet colum-nist, comes The Tenth Song, about a family in crisis (St. Martins, cloth, $24.99). Abigail Sam-uels, a mother, grand-mother, bastion of her community and wife of a successful CPA, is happily planning her youngest daughter Kay-la’s wedding when her husband is thrown into the middle of a very

public international scandal. As their lives quickly unravel, Kayla flees to a desert commune in Israel. Abigail follows, but instead of a rescue she learns more about her family — and herself — than she ever did at home.

In One Is Not a Lonely Number, award-winning author Evelyn Krieger brings us Talia Shumacher, the daughter of a wealthy Orthodox couple who struggles with the idea of being an only child in a community that values big fam-ilies (YM Books, paper, $15.95). As she worries over her fate, she also faces academic and social challenges typi-cal of her age: Friendships gone wrong and an important math tournament looming. Plus, she has to figure out why her parents have let a former ballet dancer stay in their house long-term.

Both books use the novel form to teach about Judaism. Ragen delves into prayer and mysticism, and exam-ines how we treat people when things go wrong in their lives (not well, usu-ally). Kreiger introduces Orthodox life to the unfamiliar reader openly and positively. This edu-cational approach some-times hijacks the flow of each book, but overall these are absorbing stories and good reads.

FoodKosher Nation: Why More and More of America’s

Food Answers to a Higher Authority, by Sue Fishkoff (Schocken, cloth, $27.95). Another great book from jour-nalist Fishkoff (The Rebbe’s Army), this one takes us inside the world of keeping kosher and kosher food production. Fishkoff covers the history of kosher food in America, then

delves into the worlds of kosher wine, meat and processed foods and the people responsible for them. She examines the disappearance of the kosher deli and the lives of mashgichim — the mostly men and a few women who take on the often tedious work of supervising kosher pro-duction, including one who works in China. Quite a few locals receive

mention in the book, and readers will learn that it’s not just Jews who shop for kosher food and why so many manu-facturers go to the trouble and expense of getting rabbinic approval and reach the consumers driving this multi-multi-billion dollar business. Finally, Fishkoff explores the new moral and ethical approach to food influencing kosher keeping — or is it the other way around?

Text StudyTruths Desired by God: An Excursion into the Weekly

Haftarah, by Meir Tamari (Gefen, cloth, $29.95). We are enjoined to study Torah on Shabbat, but not the Haftarah — the selection from the Prophets read in synagogue after the weekly Torah selection. Tamari, an economist better known for his work in business ethics, questions that tra-dition, arguing we have just as much to learn from these books in which “[a] major part of Judaism’s special and specific message is played out.” He offers a quick and insightful analysis of each of the 54 regular readings plus those for festivals and holy days, and through the lens of ethics and 30 years in Israel, makes these relevant to his-tory and the present day.

Torah Tapestries: Words of Wisdom Woven from the Weekly Parasha-Bereishis, by Shira Smiles (Feldheim, cloth, $19.99). Smiles, a well-known women’s teacher in

the Orthodox world, does a very good job explaining the basics of each Torah portion in Bereshit, highlighting sig-nificant elements and showing their relevance. An index and glossary serve the beginning student well.

Where’s My Miracle: Exploring Jewish Traditions for Dealing with Tragedy, by Morey Schwartz (Gefen, cloth, $24.95). Put this book on the shelf next to the classic When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Analyzing a wide variety of Talmudic sources, Rabbi Schwartz — with a background in psy-chology — demon-strates that there is no one Jewish view on why bad things happen to us, why the just sometimes suffer, and the wicked sometimes prosper.

Non-FictionThe Fiddler in the Subway, by Gene Weingar-

ten (Simon & Schuster, paper, $15.99). After an early career as a reporter, Weingarten spent 20 years as an editor, includ-ing time at the Miami Herald where he edited Dave Barry (yes, he’s that Gene) and learned to write humor from the man himself. He then returned to journalism at the Washington Post, for-tunately for us, because whether being funny or serious he is a talented

writer with an amazing ability to capture both the facts of, and the emotion behind, a story. There isn’t a lot of Jewish content here, but the pieces about his father are among the best in this collection.

Who Knew?! Unusual Stories in Jewish History, by Jack Cooper (Gefen, cloth, $21.95). Did you know a medieval Spanish Jew once headed the king’s army? That Rasputin had a Jewish business manager? That Hitler couldn’t pass his own “Aryan” test? With his background in education, Cooper has put retirement to good use compiling this entertaining and inter-esting book of little and lesser-known Jewish history from biblical to modern times. No story here is more than a page long, so Who Knew?! makes good reading for everyone in the family, from adults on the run to older kids.

Books in brief

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Have you visited the new online Jewish community calendar? Find it at calendar.jtnews.net!

ongoing eventsEvent names, locations, and times are provided here for ongoing weekly events. Please visit calendar.jtnews.net for descriptions and contact information.

FRidays12:30–3:30 p.m. – bridge GroupStroum Jewish Community Center 12:30–3:30 p.m. – drop-in Mah JonggStroum JCC 9:30–10:30 a.m. – sJCC Tot shabbatStroum JCC 11 a.m.–12 p.m. – Tots Welcoming shabbatTemple B’nai Torah

satuRdays9–10:15.am. – learner’s Minyan with ron schneeweissCongregation Beth Shalom (2nd Saturday of month)10 a.m. – Morning youth ProgramCongregation Ezra Bessaroth9 a.m.–10:30 a.m. – Temple b’nai Torah adult Torah studyTemple B’nai Torah5 p.m. – The ramchal’s derech Hashem, Portal from the ari to ModernityCongregation Beth Ha’Ari Beit Midrash

6:30 p.m. – avot ubanimSeattle Kollel9:45 a.m. – bCMH youth servicesBikur Cholim-Machzikay Hadath

sundays10:15 a.m. – sunday Torah studyCongregation Beth Shalom7:30–10:30 p.m. – He’ari israeli dancingDanceland Ballroom8:30 p.m. – Talmud, yeshiva-styleEastside Torah Center

Mondays10 a.m.–2 p.m. – JCC seniors GroupStroum JCC12:30 p.m. – Caffeine for the soulChabad of the Central Cascades7 p.m – Csa Monday Night ClassesCongregation Shevet Achim (at Northwest Yeshiva High School)10 a.m – Jewish Mommy and MeWest Seattle Torah Learning Center (at Hiawatha Community Center)8:30 p.m. – Talmud in HebrewEastside Torah Center

1 a.m.–12 p.m. – Women only Torah study ClassChabad of the Central Cascades

tuesdays11 a.m.–12 p.m. – Mommy and Me ProgramChabad of the Central Cascades. Call for location.12 p.m. – Torah for WomenEastside Torah Center (at Starbucks Bellevue Galleria)7 p.m. – alcoholics anonymous MeetingsJewish Family Service7 p.m. – Teen CenterStroum JCC7–8 p.m. – Hebrew i (alef bet)Congregation Beth Shalom.7:30 p.m. – Weekly round Table Kabbalah ClassEastside Torah Center (call for location)8:15–9:30 p.m. – living Judaism-The basics with Mary PotterCongregation Beth Shalom

wednesdays11:45 a.m.–12:30 p.m. – Talmud berachotTullys Westlake Center1:30 p.m. – book Club at the stroum JCCStroum JCC

7 p.m. – beginning israeli dancing for adults with rhona FeldmanCongregation Beth Shalom7–8 p.m. – beginning Modern HebrewCongregation Beth Shalom7–8:30 p.m. – Modern Hebrew literatureCongregation Beth Shalom (1st Wednesday)7–9 p.m. – Teen lounge for Middle schoolersNCSY (at Congregation Bikur Cholim-Machzikay Hadath)7:30 p.m. – Parshas HashavuahEastside Torah Center8:15 –9:15 p.m. – resurrection, the after-life & reincarnationCongregation Beth Shalom

thuRsdays10–2 p.m. – JCC seniors GroupStroum JCC6:50 p.m. – introduction to HebrewHerzl-Ner Tamid Conservative Congregation7 p.m. – Junior Teen CenterNCSY (at the Stroum JCC)8–10 p.m. – Teen lounge for High schoolersCongregation Bikur Cholim-Machzikay Hadath 8–9:30 p.m. – beth shalom beit MidrashCongregation Beth Shalom (2nd Thursday of month)

Candle lighting Times02/11/11 .......................... 5:08 p.m.02/18/10 ..........................5:18 p.m.02/25/11 ......................... 5:29 p.m.03/04/11 ......................... 5:40 p.m.

satuRday 12 FebRuaRy7–11 p.m. – Herzlwood

Nadine Strauss at [email protected] or

206-232-8555, ext. 203 Fundraiser for Herzl-Ner Tamid Conservative Congregation with a Hollywood theme, featuring dessert reception, awards, and more. At Herzl-Ner Tamid, 3700 E Mercer Way, Mercer Island.5–7 p.m. – sJCC Family Fun Night Performance

Deborah Jacoby at [email protected] or

206-388-0824 or http://jew.sh/GFBXSavor the last moments of Shabbat, enjoy dinner, and watch Rosie the Riveter, an original musical from the 5th Ave. Theater’s Adventure Musical Theater Touring Company — with a Q&A after the show. $45. At the Stroum Jewish Community Center, 3801 E Mercer Way, Mercer Island.5:45 p.m. – sJCs Gala 2011

Karen Friedman at

[email protected] or 206.522.5212 or www.sjcs.net/gala.phpJoin the community as Seattle Jewish Community School celebrates its 20th year. Honorees are Julie Lyss and David Loren, and David Korch will be presented with the Kaplan Award. Light cocktail reception begins at 5:45 p.m. Program and live auction begin at 7 p.m. $90 per person. At Seattle Jewish Community School, 12351 8th Ave. NE, Seattle.

PAGE 30 X

Dentists (continued)

Wendy Shultz Spektor, D.D.S.425-454-1322☎☎[email protected]☎✉www.spektordental.com ��

Emphasis: Cosmetic and Preventive Dentistry • Convenient location in Bellevue

Financial Services

Hamrick Investment Counsel, LLCRoy A. Hamrick, CFA

206-441-9911☎☎[email protected]☎✉www.hamrickinvestment.com��

Professional portfolio management services for individuals, foundations and nonprofit organizations.

Mass Mutual Financial GroupAlbert Israel, CFP

206-346-3327☎☎[email protected]☎✉

Jamison Russ206-346-3266☎☎[email protected] ☎✉

Retirement planning for those nearing retirement • Estate planning for those subject to estate taxes • General investment management • Life, disability, long-term care & health insurance • Complimentary one hour sessions available

Solomon M. Karmel, Ph.D First Allied Securities

425-454-2285 x 1080 ☎☎www.hedgingstrategist.com ��

Retirement, stocks, bonds, college, annuities, business 401Ks.

Funeral/Burial Services

Congregation Beth Shalom Cemetery206-524-0075☎☎[email protected]☎✉

This beautiful new cemetery is available to the Jewish community and is located just north of Seattle.

professional directory to jewish washington

2/112011

Care Givers

HomeCare Associates A program of Jewish Family Service

206-861-3193☎☎www.homecareassoc.org��

Provides personal care, assistance with daily activities, medication reminders, light housekeeping, meal preparation and companionship to older adults living at home or in assisted-living facilities.

Hyatt Home Care ServicesLive-in and Hourly Care

206-851-5277☎☎www.hyatthomecare.com ��

Providing adults with personal care, medication reminders, meal preparation, errands, household chores, pet care and companionship.

Catering

Leah’s Catering, Inc. Seattle’s Premier Kosher Caterer


Full Service • Glatt Kosher Delivery or Pickup • All your catering needs. • Va’ad supervised.

Madison Park CafeSimmering in Seattle for over 30 years

206-324-2626 ☎☎Full service catering for all your Jewish life passages: Bar/Bat Mitzvahs • Weddings • Brit Milah • Special Occasions. Karen Binder

Matzoh Momma Catering Catering with a personal touch

206-324-☎☎ MAMAServing the community for over 25 years.Full service catering and event planning for all your Life Cycle events. Miriam and Pip Meyerson

Certified Public Accountants

Dennis B. Goldstein & Assoc., CPAs, PSTax Preparation & Consulting

425-455-0430☎☎425-455-0459 [email protected]☎✉

Newman Dierst Hales, PLLCNolan A. Newman, CPA

206-284-1383☎☎[email protected]☎✉www.ndhaccountants.com ��

Tax • Accounting • Healthcare Consulting

College Placement

College Placement Consultants425-453-1730☎☎[email protected]☎✉www.collegeplacementconsultants.com ��

Pauline B. Reiter, Ph.D. Expert help with undergraduate and graduate school college selection, applications and essays. 40 Lake Bellevue, #100, Bellevue 98005

Welcome!Like a warm handshake, the Professional Directory introduces you to our local Jewish community. Online and distributed free in print all around the Sound.

Find out more. Call 206-441-4553 today and talk with one of our representatives.

In printJune 24

Space DeadlineMay 20

Reach everyone in our local Jewish community.

Photographers

Dani Weiss Photography 206-760-3336☎☎www.daniweissphotography.com��

Photographer Specializing in People.Children, B’nai Mitzvahs, Families, Parties, Promotions & Weddings.

Meryl Schenker Photography206-718-0398☎☎www.merylschenker.com ��

Family Portraits, Weddings, Bar/Bat Mitzvahs, Business Photos, Private Lessons. 20 years experience as a professional photographer.

Physician

Vision Improvement Center of Seattle, PSJoseph N. Trachtman, O.D., Ph.D.


108 5th Avevue S, Suite C-1 Seattle, WA 98104 Serving the Central District. Vision improvement and rehabilitation.

Senior Services

Jewish Family Service206-461-3240☎☎www.jfsseattle.org��

Comprehensive geriatric care manage-ment and support services for seniors and their families. Expertise with in-home assessments, residential placement, fam-ily dynamics and on-going case manage-ment. Jewish knowledge and sensitivity.

The Summit at First Hill206-652-4444☎☎www.klinegallandcenter.org��

The only Jewish retirement community in the state of Washington offers transition assessment and planning for individuals looking to downsize or be part of an active community of peers. Multi-disciplinary professionals with depth of experience available for consultation.

College Placement (continued)

Linda Jacobs & AssociatesCollege Placement Services

206-323-8902☎☎[email protected] ☎✉

Successfully matching student and school. Seattle.

Counselors/Therapists

Jewish Family Service Individual, couple, child and family therapy

206-861-3195☎☎www.jfsseattle.org��

Expertise with life transitions, relationships and personal challenges. Jewish knowledge and sensitivity. Offices in Seattle and Bellevue. Day and evening hours. Subsidized fee scale available.

Frances M. Pomerantz, MSLicensed Marriage & Family Therapist

425-451-1655☎☎[email protected] ☎✉

Specializing in couples and individuals. Facilitating better communication, more satisfying relationships, increased self-awareness and personal growth. Day & early eve hours available. 1621 114th Ave. SE, #224, Bellevue 98004

Dentists

Toni Calvo Waldbaum, DDSRichard Calvo, DDS

206-246-1424 ☎☎Cosmetic & Restorative Dentistry Designing beautiful smiles 207 SW 156th St., #4, Seattle

Warren J. Libman, D.D.S., M.S.D.425-453-1308☎☎www.libmandds.com��

Certified Specialist in Prosthodontics: • Restorative • Reconstructive • Cosmetic Dentistry 14595 Bel Red Rd. #100, Bellevue

Martin A. Rabin, D.M.D., P.S. Kirkland: 425-821-9595☎☎Seattle: 206-623-4031☎☎www.rabinimplantperio.com��

Specializing in Periodontics.Dental Implants • Cosmetic Gum Surgery Oral Conscious Sedation

Arnold S. Reich, D.M.D.425-228-6444☎☎www.drareich.com ��

Just off 405 in N. Renton • Gentle Care • Family • Preventive • Cosmetic Dentistry

Michael Spektor, D.D.S.425-643-3746☎☎[email protected] ☎✉www.spektordental.com��

Specializing in periodontics, dental implants, and cosmetic gum therapy.Bellevue

Funeral/Burial Services (continued)

Hills of Eternity CemeteryOwned and operated by Temple De Hirsch Sinai

206-323-8486☎☎Serving the greater Seattle Jewish com-munity. Jewish cemetery open to all pre-need and at-need services. Affordable rates • Planning assistance.Queen Anne, Seattle

Graphic Design

Spear Studios, Graphic Design Sandra Spear


• Newsletters • Brochures • Logos • Letterheads • Custom invitations • Photo Editing for Genealogy Projects

Insurance

Abolofia Insurance AgencyBob Abolofia, Agent

425-641-7682☎☎425-988-0280 [email protected] ☎✉

Independent agent representing Pemco since 1979

Eastside Insurance ServicesChuck Rubin, agent

425-271-3101☎☎425-277-3711 F

4508 NE 4th, #B, RentonTom Brody, agent

425-646-3932☎☎425-646-8750 F

2227 112th Ave. NE, Bellevue We represent Pemco, Safeco, Hartford & Progressive

www.e-z-insurance.com ��

Mohelim

Rabbi Simon Benzaquen206-721-2275 • 206-723-3028☎☎

Fastest Mohel in the WestCertified Mohel

30 commuNiTy caleNdar JTNews . www.JTNews.NeT . friday, february 11, 2011

Should you consider long-term care

insurance? Let us help.

206-448-6940 7525 SE 24th Street, Suite 350

Mercer Island, WA [email protected]

Marvin Meyers

Serving the community with dignity & respect.

Burial CremationColumbarium Receptions

On Queen Anne at 520 W. Raye St., Seattle(In front of Hills of Eternity Cemetery)

PleAse cAll 206-622-0949 or 206-282-5500

Barbara Cannon

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sunday 13 FebRuaRy9 a.m.–4 p.m. – young Jewish snowshoeing trip to snoqualmie Pass

Aaron Mass at

[email protected] or 206-719-5204 or http://jew.sh/OhTrSeattle Jewish Singles Outdoors Group leads a snowshoeing trip to Commonwealth Basin by Snoqualmie Pass. Moderate difficulty. Meet at Nordic Rental Equipment Center, 1001 State Route 906, Snoqualmie Pass.

Monday 14 FebRuaRy7–9:30 p.m. – locating Jewish records on the New National archives Web sites

[email protected] or or www.jgsws.org

Carol Buswell, education specialist at the National Archives’ Seattle facility, will show techniques for using the redesigned NARA Web site and other new resources to discover Jewish family, community, and political records. Free for members of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Washington State, $5 for nonmembers. At the Stroum JCC, 3801 E Mercer Way, Mercer Island.3–4:30 p.m. – Sacred Treasure – The Cairo Genizah

Jennifer Cohen at [email protected] or

206-543-0138 or jsis.washington.edu/jewishMark Glickman’s multimedia presentation will share highlights of the Cario genizah — how it was discovered, what it contained, and some fascinating new tools now used to preserve and study genizah manuscripts. Free and open to the public. At 202 Communications Bldg. (Simpson Center), UW Seattle Campus, Seattle.

wednesday 16 FebRuaRy3–4:30 p.m. – The specter of ‘Godless Jew-ry’: secularism and the ‘Jewish Question’ in late Nineteenth-Century Germany

Jennifer Cohen at [email protected] or

206-543-0138 or jsis.washington.edu/jewishTodd Weir from Queen’s University in Belfast examines the relationship between secularism and the so-called “Jewish question” from three vantage points. Free and open to the public. At 317 Thompson Hall, University of Washington, Seattle.

7–8:30 p.m. – Peer Pressure and Making Healthy Choices

[email protected]

Learn new and appropriate tools for parenting a tween or a teen. Plus network with fellow parents. Led by Diane Zipperman. $10. At MMSC Day School, 8511 15th Ave. NE, 2nd Floor, Seattle.7–9 p.m. – Hospice: Honoring life in its Final stages

Emily Harris-Shears at [email protected]

or 206-861-8784 or http://jew.sh/GodYHospice is a specialized method of care with a holistic focus on the patient and family during the final phase of life. Led by professionals from Kline Galland Hospice Services. Advance registration required. $10/session; $45/all five sessions. At Temple B’nai Torah, 15727 NE 4th St., Bellevue.

thuRsday 17 FebRuaRy12–1 p.m. – lunch and learn

Rabbi David Fredman at

[email protected] or 206-251-4063 or seattlekollel.orgExperience the Torah from a subterranean level. Learn about what’s under the surface of the text and explore what valuable treasures the Torah has to offer. No charge for class, reduced lunch prices. At Island Crust Pizza, 7525 SE 24th St., Suite 100, Mercer Island.10 a.m.–12 p.m. – sJCC Parent Talk: sibling rivalry

Kim Lawson at [email protected] or

206-388-0829 or http://jew.sh/5dwnWhile many kids become the best of friends with their siblings, it’s common for brothers and sisters to fight. It’s also common for them to swing back and forth between adoring and detesting one other. $10. At the Stroum JCC, 3801 E Mercer Way, Mercer Island.10–11:30 a.m. – The voice of Jewish Wash-ington: The JTNews

Ellen Hendin at [email protected]

or 206 861-3183 or http://jew.sh/uu2SJoel Magalnick, editor of JTNews, will discuss the realities and challenges of working for a Jewish newspaper, what he does and how he does it, and current hot news topics relevant to our community. RSVP by Feb. 11. Free. At Temple B’nai Torah, 15727 NE 4th St., Bellevue.

FRiday 18 FebRuaRy6–9 p.m. – open House, shabbat, Jewish Food Night

[email protected] or

206-528-1944 or secularjewishcircle.orgJoin Secular Jewish Circle to celebrate Jewish food, its meaning and history, and the memories built around it. Learn about Jewish food, and Seattle’s only secular Jewish group. Free. At Secular Jewish Circle of Puget Sound, 117 East Louisa St., Seattle.

wednesday 23 FebRuaRy7–9 p.m. – burials, Funerals and Cemeteries: Jewish Traditions and Practical Concerns

Emily Harris-Shears at [email protected]

or 206-861-8784 or http://jew.sh/GodYIn Jewish tradition, funerals take place just days after a person passes away. What practical information do you need to know? With Ross Kling of the Seattle Jewish Chapel. Scholarships are available. Advance registration required. At Temple B’nai Torah, 15727 NE 4th St., Bellevue.7–9 p.m. – The interfaith amigos

Amanda Tingle at [email protected] or

206-542-7477 or rbccucc.orgRichmond Beach Congregational Church United Church of Christ hosts a conversation with “The Interfaith Amigos” focused on the process of building interfaith relationships. Free. At RBCCUCC, 1512 NW 195th St, Shoreline.

thuRsday 24 FebRuaRy7–9 p.m. – Challah baking Class

Carol Benedick at

[email protected] or 206-524-0075 or https://bethshalomseattle.org/event_details.php?id=308Join Susan Monas in the Beth Shalom kitchen and learn how to bake a great challah. Class size limited. RSVP on CBS’ Web site. At Congregation Beth Shalom, 6800 35th Ave. NE, Seattle.12–1 p.m. – lunch and learn

Rabbi David Fredman at

[email protected] or 206-251-4063 or seattlekollel.orgExperience the Torah from a subterranean level. Learn about what’s under the surface of the text and explore what valuable treasures the Torah has to offer. No charge for class, reduced lunch prices. At Island Crust Pizza, 7525 SE 24th St., Suite 100,

award-winning PBS documentary, “Yid-dish: Di Mameloshn.”

I don’t abuse the Holocaust to score political points. The memory of the 6 mil-lion are too sacred for that.

Robert Wilkes doesn’t know me. If he’s bothered to read a single word I’ve writ-ten, he apparently hasn’t understood it. I’d prefer to think he hasn’t, and bases his calumnies about me on what others have told him.

But before I criticize the views of others I do due diligence and read what they’ve written. I quote their words and then cri-tique them. Wilkes didn’t bother to do me that favor.

There is an odious, intolerant, violent process of demonization in this country that led to the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. It’s also played out in the furor over the so-called Ground Zero mosque. Listen to Glenn Beck on any given night and you’ll hear about Jewish bankers, or Nazi leftists, or jihadi Muslims, or similar venom against the feared minority du jour.

That, to me, is what Mr. Wilkes repre-sents. He wants to turn me into a cartoon, a demon, someone you can hate as he does.

We Jews have given the world so much learning, culture, music, language, ideas. Do we have to give the world hate as well? Is that our legacy?

Judaism values one’s good name above all else. Someone who lies about anoth-er’s beliefs commits a grave form of gossip called motzi shem ra. Robert Wilkes has stolen my good name and I won’t let him do it. I want my good name restored to me.

Richard Silverstein is a freelance journalist and blogger living in Seattle. His blog is at www.richardsilverstein.com.

SILvERSTEIN W Page 4

Mercer Island.10–11:30 a.m. – What are you sayng!

Ellen Hendin at [email protected]

or 206 861-3183 or http://jew.sh/YQQICandace Kukino, Au.D. helps understand how to hear, common causes of hearing loss, and how to improve your ability to communicate. Technology specialist Steve HiIlson will show a variety of assistive listening and alerting devices. RSVP by Feb. 17. Free. At Hearing and Speech and Deafness Center, 1625 19th Ave., Seattle.

FRiday 25 FebRuaRy 7 p.m.–9 p.m. – Thank God it’s shabbat ‘Chappy’ Hour and services

Orly Feldman at

[email protected] Nosh and schmooze with other Jews and toast the start of the weekend. Chappy hour starts at 7 p.m.; service begins at 8 p.m. At Temple B’nai Torah, 15727 NE 4th St., Bellevue.

sunday 27 FebRuaRy4:30–9 p.m. – NyHs dinner & auction

Melissa Rivkin at [email protected] or

206-232-5272, ext. 515 or www.nyhs.netNorthwest Yeshiva High School’s annual dinner and auction with John Curley. $150. At the Grand Hyatt, 721 Pine St., Seattle.

CALENDAR W Page 28


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but bringing in less money bridge the gap? “That’s partly where the unrestricted

[funds] will come in,” Wasser-Simpson said.

Though a formula has not yet been devised, Wasser-Simpson said, priorities based upon the needs of any given year would be developed and constantly revis-ited to ensure that the Federation is allo-cating its available dollars in a way that best benefits the community.

Ultimately, the Federation is setting its future course as a leaner version of itself that funds projects based upon their abil-ity to grow and engage the Jewish commu-nity, while calling upon organizations to do more of the heavy lifting.

By working to eliminate redundancy among programs and services throughout the community and increasing collabora-tion among all local Jewish organizations, Federation officials hope to reverse their own declining fortunes while increasing those of the community they serve.

FEDERATION W Page 7

(JTA) — A retiree living in Bellevue accused of committing genocide and other crimes as a Nazi officer during World War II died a month before his denaturaliza-tion trial.

Peter Egner, 88, died Jan. 26, Reuters reported.

Egner, a Yugoslavia native, was accused of joining in April 1941 the Nazi-con-

trolled Security Police and Security Ser-vice in German-occupied Belgrade, a Nazi mobile killing unit that participated in the mass murder of more than 17,000 Serbian civilians during World War II.

Egner came to the United States in 1960 and became a citizen six years later.

accused nazi dies before denaturalization trial

PAGE 32 X


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JCC employees. Still, applause is enthusiastic. Last

year’s show sold out the house, which was a reason Benzaquen wanted to join in.

“He is a frustrated hazzan,” Azose says of his rabbi friend.

Actually, Benzaquen notes, he actu-ally was a cantor, many years ago when he lived in London. On stage now, he’s clearly having a wonderful time.

“They’re nice people, I like them,” he says of his co-performers, wearing a sly grin.

As the foursome practices a selection, a well-known ending to a daily prayer, Pundy stops the piano and tells them to slow down.

“We get excited,” Serkin-Poole says.The quartet and Purdy all worked

together to build their set list, and while we won’t give away too much about what they’re singing so as not to ruin the surprise, we will say that the audience will hear a departure from each cantor’s native culture.

“We flipped it,” Serkin-Poole says. “Each one should do the opposites.”

Kurland, while rehearsing a Sep-hardic tune, asks of Azose: “Check on my Ladino.”

Azose waves a finger from the floor as he hears a mistake.

“Beautiful! Beautiful!” Benzaquen calls out once Kurland finishes.

Cantorial music’s golden age passed decades ago, and much of the audience will likely consist of people who remem-ber when many cantors were the stars of the show. More than a few left their posts at synagogues to make records and tour the country to sold-out crowds.

But many others will be there to hear a mix of Jewish and Israeli liturgical and folk music from real professionals — not an event that happens very often in these parts.

On the top of the JCC’s grand piano, Azose points to a flyer for a performance very much like theirs, that featured five cantors from around the Seattle area, in the same venue, nearly 30 years to the day. Only two of those singers, Azose and operatic tenor Melvyn Poll, are still alive today.

Come February 13, you won’t find the cantors in blue jeans, they’ll have their stage exits down, and they’ll be having just as much fun as they were getting ready for the event.

And by the way, you’ll want to request the encore. It’s worth the extra applause.

CANTORS W PAGE 11

wwwwww.jtnews.net

The U.S. Justice Department filed a lawsuit in 2008 attempting to strip Egner of his citizenship, saying he lied about his Nazi past on his citizenship application.

Egner admitted volunteering to serve in the Security Police and Security Service as well as guarding prisoners as they were being transferred to concentration camps.

He also admitted serving as an interpreter during interrogations of political prison-ers that sometimes involved severe torture. Prisoners often were executed following their interrogations.

Serbia’s justice minister on Nov. 26 formally requested Egner’s extradition to stand trial in Serbia.

— JTA World News Service

BELLEvUE NAZI W PAGE 31

friday, february 11, 2011 . www.JTNews.NeT . JTNews Jewish oN earTh 33

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What is the secret of his immortality?”The answer: Adaptability. We have

adapted the Fertile Crescent’s original foods and animals — and ourselves — to grow on terrains and in weather through-out the world using selective breeding, hybridizing, trial and, of course, error. Even so, our biggest adaptation challenges still face us. According to Earth Institute founder Lester Brown, most great societ-ies have collapsed by mismanaging their water, soil, and food resources. On top of that, our inventions have created byprod-ucts — greenhouse gases and pollutants, that are changing our climates, acidify-ing and blooming hydrogen sulfide in our oceans, and threatening our very survival.

These are things to which we cannot adapt. They’re poisoning us. So we must stop creating them or risk extinction. Scien-tists have tracked a dozen mass extinctions so far in Earth’s history, and University of Washington scientist Peter Ward expects another within 200 years if we continue on our current trajectory. Rising tempera-tures will melt our polar ice caps, raise sea levels by up to 240 feet, and stop worldwide ocean currents and oxygen production. Sea life will rot, hydrogen sulfide will bloom, and life as we know it will end.

Lester Brown doesn’t necessarily see this as depressing information. Rather, he asserts, in Plan B 4.0, that by spending about $200 billion, and working like our lives depended on it, we can solve all our environmental problems. How? Improve resource efficiency, plant trees, educate women, reformulate chemicals — and eat less meat. Producing one pound of meat requires energy equivalent to lighting a 100W bulb for 20 days, and creates as much greenhouse gases as driving a car 160 miles. Memo to reader: Cut back on burg-ers and brisket.

It’s up to us to carry on.

Author and teacher Martin Westerman writes and consults on sustainable living. He can be contacted with questions at [email protected].

JEWISH ON EARTH W PAGE 11

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34 world News JTNews . www.JTNews.NeT . friday, february 11, 2011

Editor’s note: Ellis Goldberg, a professor of political science at the University of Washington, is currently teaching at the American University in Cairo. Below is an abridged post from a blog he has been writing that documents the past weeks’ protests from up close. Read is regular dispatches at nisralnasr.blogspot.com.

I understand the concern among many Israelis and within the Jewish community in the U.S. about events in Egypt just as I understand the fears that too sudden an access of democracy in Egypt will bring the Muslim Brotherhood to power, which will more or less inevitably (so the argu-ment goes) lead to a denunciation of the Camp David Accords and the creation of a solid bloc of Arab enmity against the Jewish state and, probably in collabora-tion with Hamas in Gaza if not with Fatah in the West Bank, the elimination of Israel in a paroxysm of war.

I understand those fears just as I under-stand those Americans who have been reluctant to do anything (as opposed to saying anything) to further weaken the regime. Mubarak has been our ally for 30 years and it would be at best unseemly and at worse wrong and unwise to abandon him at the first sign of trouble. We should, at least, wait a bit before abandoning him.

I understand those fears and concerns, and as with all deeply felt understandings of politics I am far from telling those who hold them that they should simply dismiss them. They cannot.

What I fail to understand is the con-struction of Mubarak and his regime as being in any sense friendly to Israel or even a solid support for the Israeli state. Mubarak, as far as I can tell, no more cares for Israel than do most Egyptians and his regime has been as hostile to Israeli society and Israelis as any other element in Egypt.

As far as I can tell, Mubarak, in 30 years, has visited Israel once very briefly: to attend the funeral of Yitzhak Rabin. Unlike Sadat he never addressed the Knes-set nor has he shown any interest even in reciprocating state visits that Israeli lead-ers paid to Egypt. The Egyptian govern-ment (though perhaps personally not all of its high officials) has been unremittingly hostile to Israel through the print media, the television, and indeed the efforts of its police. Egyptian movies abound in descriptions of evil Israelis who kidnap, torture, or otherwise abuse good-hearted Egyptians and (more rarely) Palestinians.

So much is this the case that it has even become a bit of a joke among young mid-dle-class Egyptians. In one film, an Egyp-tian is kidnapped to Israel as part of a nefarious and complicated plot. Managing to escape, the Egyptian hero then attempts the complex journey back to the home-land. Yet, as some Egyptian viewers noted, why doesn’t he just go to the Egyptian embassy in Tel Aviv which, as far as the movie is concerned, doesn’t exist. In other

words, in the Egypt of Husni Mubarak — although officially Egypt has diplomatic relations with Israel — this is not permit-ted to be part of the normal imaginative or cognitive map of ordinary Egyptians. And this is the regime on which the Israeli gov-ernment wishes to rely?

The Muslim Brotherhood has said that they would abrogate the peace treaty. Some of my academic friends — people I respect — say the Brotherhood has by now become a different political force than they once were. They are now liberals or perhaps social democrats who simply happen to pray in the direction of Mecca. Others tell me that the Muslim Broth-erhood are nothing of the kind: they are blood-thirsty fanatics who can hardly wait to get out of their confining suits and ties, don traditional robes and turbans, and slit the throats of infidels.

The question for now in Egypt is not whether the Muslim Brotherhood comes to power. The army is not, for its own rea-sons, going to let that happen. The ques-tion for now is whether there can be any significant changes in the rules governing a hierarchical and authoritarian military system that has been in place since 1952 and that fought its own wars with Israel when it pleased and made peace when it pleased and that obstructed Israeli policy in Gaza when it pleased and cooperated to make it more effective when it pleased.

And the reason it pleased to do what it did in the years since Anwar Sadat, himself an authoritarian leader, came to power after Abdel Nasser died has to do with some home truths. Egyptians got tired of doing most of the dying in wars with Israel; Egyptians got tired of facing the destructive barrage of the Israeli war machine in the pursuit of the chimera of Arab nationalism; Egyptians got tired of paying the price for the inflated and irre-sponsible rhetoric of military regimes that proved to be incompetent at doing what they claimed to do best: defending the national borders.

Egyptians got tired but that doesn’t

mean they decided that the Israelis were their best friends. The best construction you can put on local feelings is that most Egyptians find Israeli policies toward the Palestinians in West Bank and especially Gaza somewhere between repellent and abhorrent.

But would a democratic Egyptian gov-ernment be more inflexibly anti-Israeli than the present government? If you think of a democratic government as one that carries out the will of the majority regard-less of any other considerations (the will of the minority, prudence, the role of inter-est groups), then that might be the case. I notice that both the left and right in the U.S. seem to wave the flag of anti-Israeli Islamism in the face of any government initiatives in support of democracy.

But if by democracy we meant some-thing that many Egyptians have had in mind and have even experienced in the past two weeks, then things might be dif-ferent. Not immediately but perhaps —

and let me underline that perhaps — in the longer run. What if by democracy we meant a system that allowed for and even encouraged the expression of pluralism in society: religious pluralism, political plu-ralism, and social pluralism? Israel would not become any more popular tomorrow but at least those who wanted to visit it, to describe — for worse, as well as for better — what they saw, and to discuss what would be the most appropriate policies for achieving what many here want — recog-nition of a Palestinian state with its own secure borders and the end of Israeli settle-ments in the West Bank — would all have the opportunity to do so.

Such an Egypt would, of course, put far more pressure on Israel than does the present government to change its policies. It might, depending on exactly what polit-ical and social forces upheld it, also be a far more powerful agent for change in Israeli policy than is the present government. For the moment, in other words, within Israel itself the notion that security is congruent with settlement in the West Bank remains a plausible political argument. That would be a more difficult argument to uphold if their interlocutor was a democratic gov-ernment in Egypt committed both to peace and to Palestinian statehood rather than an authoritarian dictatorship.

It is not so clear to me, in fact, that such a government would necessarily want to abrogate the treaty; it might simply, instead, insist that it has not yet been implemented and indeed that the Israeli government had a variety of obligations to which it could be expected to conform.

So, although I am far from religious, let me put this in terms that bring together both popular, contemporary Egyptian and traditional Jewish imagery. Why exactly is it that the security of the Jewish state is achieved by relying on Pharaoh?

On Jews and Egypt: Dispatches from the front linesellis goldbeRg special to JTNews

CourTesy ellis GoldberG

CourTesy Jds

Rabbi Jay Rosenbaum of Herzl-Ner Tamid Conservative Congregation speaks with Jewish Day School middle school students at its weekly “Lunch and Learn” program about the situation in Egypt. The rabbi asked, “Should we oppose Egyptian democracy?” and cited how historically, a population wanting and moving toward democracy has not always had a positive end result. Rosenbaum also expressed concerns about the future of existing peace treaties in the Middle East and what will happen with Israel.

friday, february 11, 2011 . www.JTNews.NeT . JTNews lifecycles 35

Express yourself with our special “Tribute Cards” and help fund JFS programs at the same time…meeting the needs of friends, family and loved ones here at home. Call Irene at (206) 861-3150 or, on the web, click on “Donations” at www.jfsseattle.org. It’s a 2-for-1 that says it all.

2-for-1 “ Happy Anniversary” Cards

Famed violist Emanuel Vardi, whose life story encompasses nearly a century of politics, art and music, died at his North Bend home on Jan. 29 at the age of 95. Born April 21, 1915 in Jerusalem, Vardi was accepted to New York’s The Juilliard School when he was 12 years old. He went on to be considered one of the greatest vio-lists of the 20th century. He had a long con-cert career; worked in early television; and as a conductor, producer, arranger and commissioned fine artist.

“He was a true individual — musi-cally and artistically — and he had a dose of ‘rebel’ in him, so he was always trying new things,” said Lenore Vardi, his wife of 26 years.

Vardi’s father was a respected violinist and violin teacher who started Emanuel on the violin when he was 2-1/2. He attended Juilliard, where he studied violin and viola under Edouard Dethier, but left when he

Jennifer Gamelin and David Arensberg

Jennifer and David were married on January 15, 2011 at the Washington Athletic Club in Seattle. Rabbi James Mirel of Temple B’nai Torah officiated the ceremony.

Jennifer is the daughter of Gordon Gamelin and Susan McDaniel of Spokane. Her grandparents are Beverly Gamelin of Spokane and the late Ronald Gamelin, and Loretta Hamley of Spokane and the late Mack Hamley.

Jennifer graduated from Ferris High School and holds a bachelor’s degree in Communi-

cations from Washington State University. She works as a nurse technician. David is the son of Jim and Marilyn Arensberg of Bellevue. His grandparents are Bert and Esther

Arensberg of Kirkland, and Shirley Fleischmann of Kirkland and the late Stanley Fleischmann. David graduated from Newport High School and holds a bachelor’s degree in Business from

the University of Washington. He works as a senior account manager at Washington Athletic Club. The couple lives in Seattle.

emanuel vardi: 95-year-old “art Rebel” once played for fdR

was offered a job with the NBC Symphony Orchestra under Arturo Toscanini.

During World War II, Vardi joined the U.S. Navy Band. At one point, Eleanor Roosevelt heard Vardi and whisked him to the White House to play viola for FDR. He is one of only two violists in the world to have given a solo recital at Carnegie Hall.

Fine art was a lifelong interest, so Vardi used his GI Bill to study at Florence’s Aca-demia de Belle Arte from 1950-52. After his return to New York, he attended The Art Students League and the Brooklyn Museum Art School, but music was his pri-mary focus.

Throughout his long solo career, Vardi recorded and performed with some of clas-sical music’s biggest stars — Itzhak Per-lman, Arthur Rubenstein, Van Cliburn, Vladimir Horowitz — as well as with popu-lar musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Nina Simone and Barbra Streisand. Vardi conducted orches-tras for live performances, movie scores and television and was the South Dakota Symphony’s music director and conductor in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

After a wrist injury, then a fall that hurt his shoulder, Vardi stopped performing in 1993. He gave master classes throughout the world and served as music director of several festivals.

The music-themed paintings of Eman-

Mary Miller

Emanuel vardi paints in his studio in 2009.

How do i submit a lifecycle announcement? Send lifecycle notices to: JTNews/Lifecycles, 2041 Third Ave., Seattle, WA 98121E-mail to: [email protected] Phone 206-441-4553 for assistance. Submissions for the February 25, 2011 issue are due by February 15.Download forms or submit online at www.jtnews.net/index.php?/lifecyclePlease submit images in jpg format, 400 KB or larger. Thank you!

life

uel and Lenore Vardi surrounded the Greta Matassa Quartet at the 2009 Belle-vue Jazz Festival, shortly after they moved to North Bend. Emanuel acted as musi-cal advisor to the Vardi Chamber Players at this past summer’s Snoqualmie Valley Festival of Music while Lenore served as musical director and violinist.

Their art was the centerpiece of two

recent shows in Waikiki and is currently featured at the Laurel Tree Gallery in Duvall and Revolution Gallery in Issaquah.

Along with his wife, Vardi is survived by his daughters, Andrea Smith of Fair-field, Iowa and Pauline Normand of Bon-secours, Quebec. Memorial gatherings are expected in the Seattle area in the coming weeks and in New York later this year.

36 JTNews . www.JTNews.NeT . friday, february 11, 2011

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Call Becky at 774-2238 to join, or log on to www.jtnews.net and click the MOT button. Important! When you sign up online, be sure to include the title you would most prefer in the “company” field so we know you want one of the gifts! The books are offered on a first-come, first-serve basis, and when they’re gone, they’re gone. We’ll do our best to send you the book you specify, but will select another for you if it is no longer available.

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