Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on October 2, 2021

Jewish advocacy groups were dismayed, if not surprised, by the decision of Belgiums Constitutional Court on Thursday to uphold a ban on shechita the Jewish method of slaughtering animals for kosher consumption.

The court issued a ruling affirming the legality of the Belgian ban, originally imposed in 2017, bolstered by the decision of the European Unions highest court last December to permit EU member states to ban the slaughtering of animals without pre-stunning, despite the requirements of both Jewish and Muslim religious law on this matter.

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) made its determination after Belgiums Constitutional Court referred a lawsuit, filed by the Belgian Federation of Jewish Organizations (CCOJB), to determine whether the bans were lawful.

Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, president of the Conference of European Rabbis (CER), said that while his group was disappointed with todays judgement, we are certainly not surprised as it upholds the status quo in Belgium.

Goldschmidt added that the court ruling confirms the ban religious slaughter and brings Belgium into line with those few other countries whose bans on shechita date from the Nazi era.

In one of the earliest legislative acts of the Nazi regime in Germany, a ban was imposed on the slaughter of animals without pre-stunning in April 1933. Nazi propaganda films routinely depicted shechita as the barbaric practice of an alien people.

Other Jewish organizations issued similar condemnations of the Belgian courts decision.

The decision to curb this fundamental religious practice is a painful blow to the freedom of religion and belief of the Jewish as well as Muslim communities of Belgium, said Daniel Mariaschin, CEO of the Washington, DC-based Bnai Brith International (BBI), in a statement. The country is home to one of Europes largest Jewish communities, which will now face exceedingly difficult hurdles to access kosher meat.

Mariaschin observed that Belgium had now joined a shameful growing list of countries putting in place barriers to religious practice. He noted as well that the supportive ruling of the ECJ in the Belgian case leaves room for other governments to follow suit.

World Jewish Congress (WJC) President Ronald Lauder said that Thursdays court decision was a continued maneuver to discriminate against Belgiums Jewish and Muslim citizens.

Said Lauder: By prohibiting religious slaughter without stunning, the Belgium Constitutional Court has placed a potentially terminal obstacle to continued Jewish communal life in Europe.

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Jewish Groups Angered by Belgian Court's Decision Upholding Ban on Kosher Slaughter - Algemeiner

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Posted By admin on October 2, 2021

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett speaks to American Jewish leaders in New York City on Sept. 27. (Courtesy of the Jewish Federations of North America/Sara Naomi Lewkowicz via JTA.org)

By Ben Sales

NEW YORK The first thing Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said, facing a room full of the leaders of the American Jewish community: I wish my mom were here.

The son of American immigrants to Israel, Bennett, like his predecessor Benjamin Netanyahu, speaks a fluent, nearly accentless English, and spent years living in the United States as both a child and an adult.

But in other crucial ways, Bennett sounded different from Netanyahu in his first public address to American Jewish leaders as prime minister. The speech, delivered in Manhattan a couple hours afterhe addressed the United Nations, was given to dozens of heads of the Jewish federation system, leading rabbis and other organizational bigwigs. It was the first time many of them had seen each other since the start of the pandemic.

They received him warmly. In recent years, the relationship between Netanyahu and major American Jewish groups had soured, particularly after hefroze an agreement to expand a non-Orthodox prayer spaceat the Western Wall in Jerusalem in 2017. A month before Netanyahu left office, one of his closest aidessaidat an Israeli conference that Israel should be spending a lot more time doing outreach to evangelical Christians than you would do to Jews.

Bennett struck a different tone. Justlike he did at the U.N. earlier on Monday,Israels current prime minister drew a contrast in style from his predecessor without mentioning his name. He talked about how much Israel could learn from American Jews, and how important it was for the two poles of the Jewish community to have a mutually respectful conversation.

You have our back, and it just means a lot, he said. He added later, It doesnt mean were going to agree on everything. Were not. But were going to talk to each other and were going to listen to each other.

He also suggested that Israel and American Jewry should enter a new era. For decades, American Jews gave tens of millions of dollars to support Israels development. Now, Bennett said, Israel is doing fine on its own and should move beyond acting just as a refuge for persecuted Jews.

Since the inception of Israel, and actually it predates the inception of Israel, Israel has been the project of the Jewish people, but were doing OK, he said, citing Israels economy and tech sector. Now, we have to redesign our relationship.

What that might look like in practice remained vague. Bennett didnt make any concrete promises when it came to enshrining religious pluralism in Israeli policy, an issue that has historically been important to the people he was addressing. He hit the same notes on Iran as Netanyahu, vowing to prevent it from obtaining a nuclear bomb and saying Israel will not outsource our security to anyone, even to our best friends.

In addition, as in his speech at the U.N., he didnt discuss the Palestinians, and is on record, over and over, opposing the establishment of a Palestinian state, which most American Jews support.

And it was clear that Israel is worried about its standing in the U.S. Both Bennett and Israels U.N. ambassador, Gilad Erdan, mentioned the attempt by a handful of progressive Congress members to block additional funding for Israels Iron Dome missile defense system (it ended uppassing the House of Representativesby a vote of 420-9, with two members voting present).

While Bennett said that the episode was telling and didnt elaborate on the flap,Erdan was much harsher, saying that the Congress members who opposed Iron Dome were either ignorant or antisemitic.

For the most part, Bennett seemed happy to forgo policy discussions in favor of a charm offensive. He sought points of commonality with the crowd, talking about everything from how his mom couldnt find American cereal when she moved to Israel to how he was in New York City on 9/11. At the end of the speech, he repeated an anecdote about Israeli politeness (or lack thereof) that had also drawn a laugh from an American audience in Tel Aviv in 2012, at the beginning of his political career.

If he wanted to charm the crowd, it appeared to work. When he ended the speech by saying I love you, he got a standing ovation.

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Bennett to US Jewish Leaders: 'We Have to Redesign Our Relationship' - Jewish Exponent

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Posted By admin on October 2, 2021

The federal government has awarded seven Bay Area Jewish organizations a total of $1 million in grants to beef up security measures.

Local Jewish awardees are the Chabads of the East Bay and Solano County, Temple Sinai in Oakland, Congregation Beth Israel Judea in San Francisco, Congregation Bnai Shalom in Walnut Creek, Palo Altos Kehillah Jewish High School, and the Russian-Speaking Jewish Community of San Francisco Bay Area. Each received between $131,000 and $150,000, the maximum granted.

The federal grants are administered by the California Governors Office of Emergency Services and are meant to increase the security of nonprofit organizations at high risk of a terrorist attack.

Total U.S. funding for the Nonprofit Security Grant Program doubled in 2021 to $180 million. In recent years, Jewish institutions have had to shift their budgets toward hiring armed security guards and hardening their buildings against attacks after shootings at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and the Chabad of Poway.

Rabbi Shimon Margolin, who heads the Russian-speaking Jewish Community of SF Bay Area, a nonprofit umbrella organization, said the grant of $143,209 will be used to install a video camera, build a panic room, and pay for a security guard for their community center.

He said the issue of security for San Franciscos Russian Jews is especially sensitive after they came to the United States seeking refuge from antisemitism.

The reason we filed a refugee application and came to this country is that we thought this is the country that you wont have to secure institutions for antisemitism and attacks, said Margolin.

For Margolin, the grant, which was awarded in mid-September, comes as his community is in the midst of a heated debate over whether to identify their recently purchased Richmond District building as Jewish.

Its unimaginable that we have to come to America, and we have to hide that we are Jewish, said Margolin. He believes the Jewish community must secure itself physically and spiritually but never shy away.

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Bay Area Jewish orgs awarded $1 million in federal security grants J. - The Jewish News of Northern California

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Posted By admin on October 2, 2021

The landmark TV series The Sopranos, whose six-season run came to an end in 2007, is getting a brief resurrection with The Many Saints of Newark, a prequel that begins airing in theaters and on HBO Max this Friday, Oct. 1. While the original series played out over the course of 86 hourlong episodes, The Sopranos creator David Chase has chosen to distill Tony Sopranos origin story into a two-hour film starring Michael Gandolfini as the young Anthony Tony Soprano, originally played by his late father, James Gandolfini, who died in 2013.

While everyone knows that The Sopranos was a rich portrayal of the personal and business conflicts facing a latter-day, all-Italian gang of New Jersey mobsters (played with only a few exceptions by Italian-American actors, several of whom had previous, real life experience on the wrong side of the law), one of the shows strengths really a breakthrough in TV drama was how sensitively it dealt with the greater world surrounding the insular world of Italian north Jersey, by including characters from a melting pot of other backgrounds, including Blacks, native Americans, Eastern European immigrants and Arab-Americans. But the world of The Sopranos had a particularly strong course of Jewish characters flowing through it, who were often portrayed by Jewish actors.

This was not new to The Sopranos The Godfather movies, for example, boasted the character of Hyman Roth, based on the real-life Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky, portrayed by Lee Strasberg. But looking back on The Sopranos, one might be surprised to rediscover the depth and breadth of Jewish characters and their stories, which often served as thematic parallels or contrasts to the main plot line of how a segment of very tradition-oriented late-20th-century Italian-Americans dealt with the challenges brought about by a world changing with dizzying speed all around them.

The very first episode of The Sopranos introduced the character of Herman Hesh Rabkin (played by Jerry Adler), a loan shark who first made his fortune in the 1950s and 60s with an independent record label focused on young Black artists. As was sometimes the case with small-label honchos in real life, Hesh would add his name as a co-writer to many tunes, guaranteeing himself a steady stream of publishing royalties. As a Jew, Hesh could never be a made man or an official member of a family or crew, but he did serve as an adviser (and unofficial banker) to Tony Sopranos late father, Johnny Soprano, and then to Tony after his fathers death.

We first meet Hesh when Tonys right-hand man, Silvio Dante played with unique exuberance by Steven Van Zandt, better known to all as Little Steven (or Miami Steve, if you are of a certain vintage), longtime guitarist and foil for Bruce Springsteen in the E Street Band engineers a sit-down between an Orthodox Jewish friend, Shlomo Teittleman and Tony Soprano, to see if the latter can help Teittleman with a messy family and business squabble involving his son-in-law. By virtue of his religion, Hesh is invited to the meeting and observes on the periphery. After Tony agrees to help Teittleman but not before Teittlemans son, who is also at the table, warns his father, Youre creating a Golem, a monster to do your dirty work. Like the rabbi in the story, hell destroy you Hesh takes Tony aside and warns him against getting involved with the Hasidim, here cast as a mirror image to that of Tonys world.

The resulting scenes between Tonys henchmen and the errant son-in-law, Ariel, are played somewhat for comedy after Paulie Walnuts Gualtieri begins to rough him up, Silvio tells Paulie, Bupkis. Say bupkis, Paulie. Thats how they say nothing. As the stakes get higher, the violence increases, but Ariel is no pushover, describing himself as a one-man Masada as he seems almost superhumanly immune to taking a beating. Not until Tony Soprano follows Heshs suggestion that they threaten Ariel with a bolt-cutter to Make like amohel,huh? Finish thebris does Ariel begin to relent, along the way having won the admiration and respect of the gangsters, who even suggest he might come work for them, given the toughness he showed by not backing down.

This all happens in the course of the first three episodes of the first season. And in subsequent episodes, we hear Yiddishisms fall lightly from the mouths of the Italians even when the immediate situation does not involve Hesh or other Jews. They are fluent enough with criminal lingo to toss off shnorrers and gonifs as easily as meatballs and spaghetti.

The casual antisemitism of the non-Jewish characters lends a certain verisimilitude to the series. When Tony concludes a particularly tough negotiation with Hesh over a financial deal, he cannot help but make a crack about dealing with desert people right to his face. Hesh responds with a hearty, good-natured laugh, going along with the insult disguised as a joke, because he probably learned long ago this was the only way to do business in that world. Regarding the business with the Teittlemans, Paulie says at one point, Hasidim, but I dont believe em!

In no small way, The Sopranos is about a mob boss who is so stressed out he seeks psychological counseling. The very first scene in the entire series finds Tony in his new shrinks waiting room. While Tonys therapist is Dr. Jennifer Melfi (Lorraine Bracco), a fellow Italian (we learn later that Tony was given three recommendations for therapists; the other two had Jewish names), he knows enough about therapy to quote Freud, and his therapy plays out in stark contrast to the spiritual counseling his wife undergoes with a Catholic priest. When Tonys mother catches wind that he is in therapy, she says, Everybody knows that its a racket for the Jews.

Eventually, Tonys wife, Carmela Soprano (played by Edie Falco), winds up seeing her own therapist, Dr. Krakower, an older male Jewish psychoanalyst. The scene plays out thusly:

I may be overstepping my boundaries here, but you are Jewish, arent you?

Is that relevant?

Well, us Catholics we place a great deal of stock in the sanctity of the family. And Im not sure your people .

Ive been married for 31 years.

In marked contrast with Dr. Melfi, who withholds any moral judgments about her patients, favoring a relativistic approach, Dr. Krakower comes across like an Old Testament prophet seeing the world in black and white. He practically orders Carmela to take her children and leave her husband immediately; suggests that Tony turn himself in to the police and spend seven years in prison studying Dostoevskys Crime and Punishment; and refuses to charge Carmela for the session, saying he does not take blood money.

Other Jewish characters appear in the series, including Dr. Melfis supervising psychiatrist, Elliot Kupferberg, portrayed by Peter Bogdanovich. In college, Meadow Soprano Tony and Carmelas daughter, played by Jewish actress Jamie-Lynn Sigler has a Black boyfriend, Noah Tannenbaum, much to the chagrin of her father, who doesnt object to the fact that Tannenbaum is Jewish but cannot get around the color of his skin. Most of the doctors and lawyers in the series are Jewish: David Margulies portrays Tonys attorney, Neil Mink; Richard Portnow plays Harold Melvoin, legal counsel to Corrado Junior Soprano, Tonys uncle and the nominal head of the crime family; Matthew Sussman portrays Dr. Douglas Schreck, Junior Sopranos cardiologist.

While for the most part Italian actors play Italian characters and Jewish actors plays Jews, there are a few notable exceptions beyond Jamie-Lynn Sigler. Steve Schirripa, who plays Bobby Bobby Bacala Baccalieri, once told an interviewer from the Jewish Journal, My mother was Jewish, so I had a whole Jewish side of the family. My mothers maiden name was Bernstein. My grandmothers name was Moskowitz, so I know all about that world. So I was raised Catholic, but I very much identify as being Jewish as well. I had all kinds of aunts and uncles and I had the best of both worlds.

David Proval, who portrays mobster Richie Aprile, was probably the onlyyeshive bokherin the cast; he was raised in East New York, Brooklyn, where he attended Yeshiva Toras Chaim. Margulies plays Julianna Skiff, a realtor who has a fling with Tony and his nephew, Christopher. Ari Graynor portrayed Caitlin Rucker, Meadow Sopranos roommate at Columbia University, who hails from Bartlesville, Oklahoma Sandra Bernhard, Linda Lavin and Sydney Pollack also made cameo appearances in the original series.

It is not clear if The Many Saints of Newark will deal with the back stories of any of the main Jewish characters in the TV series. The only one of consequence would be Hesh Rabkin. But David Chase and his Jewish cowriter, Lawrence Konner, did cast two Jews to play main members of the Sopranos family. Corey Stoll will play a younger version of Junior and Jon Bernthal is portraying Tonys father, Johnny.

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The secret Jewish history of The Sopranos St. Louis Jewish Light - St. Louis Jewish Light

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Posted By admin on October 2, 2021

In todays Zoomcast, we will host Michael Masters, the CEO of the Secure Community Network (SCN) - the official homeland security and safety initiative of the organized Jewish community in North America.

SCN serves as the central organization dedicated exclusively to the safety and security of the American Jewish community, working across 146 federations.

In the conversation, Masters addressed current threats to the community and noted that SCN is training communities for emergency preparedness.

The skill sets that we're teaching are designed to empower our community, to commit to action so that we can live free from fear, he said.

My goal is that every member of the Jewish community is trained. So, whether you are walking into a synagogue or sending your kids to a summer camp in Maine, Massachusetts, Washington State, or Arizona, that our community is trained to a best practice standard, and that it is comprehensive and consistent across the community. we have a long way to go, said Masters.

According to Masters, whether it's related to bomb threats or someone making statements, if the incidents are not handled professionally and appropriately, that can have the impact of keeping members of our community from feeling safe and secure, which means they make a decision not to go to shul.

They may make a decision not to send their kids to Jewish summer camp or day school. And that is an unacceptable reality to us, he continued. We, for close to 4,000 years, as a community had dealt with threats, ranging from discrimination, expulsion, inquisition. This is another chapter in that threat dynamic. And we will come through this if we work together, he said. The mission of SCN working through and with the community is to keep this community vibrant and open.

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Why does the US Jewish community need a command center for its protection? - The Jerusalem Post

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Posted By admin on October 2, 2021

In 1993, artist and activist Gregg Bordowitz premiered his film Fast Trip, Long Drop, a not-quite documentary that made for a biting critique of media coverage of the AIDS crisis.

The film, in which Bordowitz plays a defiant talk show guest named Alter Allesman Yiddish for old everyman was shown widely at LGBTQ and Jewish film festivals. After one showing at KlezCamp, a now-defunct Klezmer music and Yiddish festival, an attendee stood and asked Bordowiz a question.

Why did you bring this here? he asked. Is this a good thing for the Jews?

Bordowitz, now 57, says audience members continue to ask that question about the film still his most famous work at nearly every Jewish festival screening.

Bordowitzs Jewish upbringing had long been an inspiration for his art. But when he was diagnosed with HIV in 1988, he, like other queer Jews, found himself on the fringe of Jewish society and largely abandoned by traditional instutions.

In response, he said, he and his peers created their own traditions and commentaries. His sense of shifting identities became, alongside the resistance and radicalization sparked by the AIDS crisis and other public health failures, a defining theme of his work one amply apparent in I Wanna Be Well, a retrospective of his work currently on display at MoMA PS1.

Photo by Kyle Knodell

Installation view of Gregg Bordowitzs Fast Trip, Long Drop (1993) in the exhibition Gregg Bordowitz: I Wanna Be Well.

That exhibit, which includes film, performance art, drawings and poems, debuted at Reed Colleges Cooley Art Gallery, and was then featured at the Art Institute of Chicago before moving to MoMA PS1, where it will be on exhibit until October 11. Bordowitz takes particular pride from the fact that MoMA PS1 is located in Queens the borough where he first learned to paint.

He grew up in the neighborhood of Glen Oaks, raised largely by his mother and grandparents, who switched to speaking in Yiddish whenever he walked into the room. He quickly learned to understand the language, and to tone down his Yinglish in non-Jewish friends homes. It was my first awareness of difference, he said. Code-switching, or adapting language and presentation to different cultural contexts, would later become a major theme in Bordowitzs work.

At his grandfathers insistence, he attended an Orthodox Hebrew school, and soon fell in love with both religion and art. As a child, his mother sent him to a neighbors house for amateur painting classes, where he worked alongside adults, often crafting Jewish-themed paintings. Shortly after his Bar Mitzvah, his mother and step-father moved the family to Long Island, where he found a refuge for his burgeoning queer identity in his schools art room.

My family wanted me to be a doctor or a lawyer or a rabbi, in that order, he said. I knew that I would go to school for visual arts.

In 1982, at 18, Bordowitz moved to Manhattan to attend the School of Visual Arts. He soon gravitated to the Lower East Side, where he relished the neighborhoods enduring Jewish character, delis and Judaica stores.

Part of being a downtown artist was that a lot of the people I knew were Jewish, he said. We were really into being in the neighborhood where our grandparents landed. He joined a flourishing queer Yiddishkeit scene, defined by a renewed, counter-cultural interest in Ashkenazi American cultural touchstones.

Klezmer bands were forming like punk rock groups all over the place, he said. I was looking for an anti-Zionist American Jewish way of being, and I found it there.

Courtesy of Gregg Bordowitz

Gregg Bordowitz with David Meieran filming for Testing the Limits Video Collective, founded to document AIDS activism, in Washington, DC. 1987.

Then came the AIDS epidemic, which struck Bordowitzs Lower East Side queer community extremely hard. Bordowitz became heavily involved in HIV/AIDS activism, including as a very early member of the grassroots political group ACT UP. His activism brought him to work in partnership with religious institutions, including Black churches and Quaker congregations.

But, Bordowitz said, When it came to talking to Jewish organizations, it was not welcome, he said. I was very angry at organized Judaism during the AIDS crisis.

Yet while Jewish organizations, he said, werent receptive to his advocacy, queer Jews were heavily involved in HIV/AIDS activism. In its early days, some media organizations mistook ACT UP for a Jewish organization, in part because its first flyer featured a Jewish star and the poem First They Came by Martin Niemller. And in 1989, Bordowitz and other queer Jews in the movement held the first ACT UP seder. That first year, the seder attracted 30 attendees, before doubling to 60 people in its second year, and 90 people in its third.

We attached the seder to our struggle, Bordowitz said.

Bordowitzs creative work also began to expand and change during the early AIDS health crisis. He started using filmmaking as a tool for documenting ACT UP protests, and co-founded a media collective dedicated to the group. He also began producing improvised video diaries and films about himself and his friends, which were intended to counter mainstream narratives about the AIDS crisis and create complex testimony about the human toll of the epidemic.

In 1988, Bordowitz was diagnosed with HIV. By 1993, in the same period that he was working on Fast Trip, Long Drop, he had become extremely ill. Unlike many of his friends, Bordowitz survived, and his close contact with death became a major theme in his artwork from the time period. In 1996, when a breakthrough was made in the understanding of drug therapies for managing HIV, greatly improving available treatment, Bordowitz used charcoal to draw a series of six self-portraits examining the effects of the early treatments on his body.

Photo by Kyle Knodell

Installation view of Gregg Bordowitzs self-portraits in mirror (1996) in exhibition Gregg Bordowitz: I Wanna Be Well.

Bordowitzs health improved, and in 1997, he found a way to return to a form of institutional Judaism when six of his friends from ACT UP decided that they wanted to have adult Bnai Mitzvah ceremonies. They chose to conduct those ceremonies through the progressive Jewish congregation Kolot Chayeinu in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and Bordowitz has been a member ever since.

I found a spiritual home, he said of the temple. Even after he began to teach film at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1998, he continued to visit New York City every month and remained committed to the congregation. These days, his religious practice includes wearing a yarmulke and observing Shabbat.

And Judaism continues to affect and inspire his work, which today often meditates on his identity as a queer Jewish man living with HIV. While his art has continued to evolve, he said, the reasons he continues to weave together shifting and intersecting parts of his identity have changed little from when he was a young man showing Fast Trip, Long Drop at KlezCamp.

When that long ago audience member asked his question implying, Bordowitz understood, a question about why he would insist on bringing together his identities as an observant Jewish man and a queer person living with HIV Bordowitz had a ready answer.

Which part of me do you want to leave the room? he said. Which part of me do you want to stay?

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The AIDS crisis strained his relationship with Judaism. Now, its integral to his art and activism. - Forward

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Posted By admin on October 2, 2021

MONSEY Rabbi Moshe (Moses) DovidTendler, a world leader in Jewish medical ethicsand professor at Yeshiva University, has died. The Monsey resident and founding rabbi of the Community Synagogue of Monsey was 95.

Tendler wasRosh Yeshiva or dean at the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary at Yeshiva University and professor of biology and the Rabbi Isaac and Bella Tendler Professor of Jewish Medical Ethics at Yeshiva College. He held degrees from New York University and a doctorate in microbiology from Columbia University.

"As a renowned scientist, beloved communal leader, and preeminent rabbinic decisor, Rabbi Dr. Moshe Tendler embodied the Torah values of our community and successfully lived a life of deep learning, commitment to others and spiritual authenticity," Yeshiva University President Dr. Ari Berman said Thursday. "The Jewish community and the broader society were elevated by his leadership, and his absence is a loss for us all."

Yoel Oz now lives in Israel but grew up in the Bronx and studied for his rabbinic ordination with Tendler at Yeshiva University from 2002-2005. "He was one of a kind. A master of Torah and a scientist who did not see any contradiction between the two; a caring person for every single individual he encountered; having a sharp sense of humor and a certain twinkle in his eye," Oz said. "He was the person you went to with the hardest Jewish legal questions of life and death."

Tendler wrote extensively about medical ethics in Jewish law. His work had important and lifesaving daily applications.

A vocal supporterof organ donation, Tendler developed key criteria under Jewish law about death and transplantation.

Tendler had supported vaccinations."It has nothing to do with religion, it has to do with ignorance," he said in a 2015 interview with The Journal News/lohud as concern spread duringa measles outbreak.

Tendler also spoke outagainst the practice of Metzizah bi peh, an ancient ritual still used by some in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community. Themouth-suctionprocedure during circumcision that had been linked to fatal cases of herpes in infants. The ritual, he said, was not a mandate of Jewish law, which "has recognized there has been an increase in knowledge of hygiene and medical advances over the centuries."

Rabbi Jesse Shore of Tenafly, New Jersey, studied with Tendler at Yeshiva University from 2014-17 while earning his rabbinic ordination and remained in touch with him over the years, calling him for advice and asking him questions. Tendlerwas warm, friendly and approachable, making him feel like he could ask questions that he couldnt ask anyone else, Shore said.

In a Facebook post on Thursday morning, Shore eulogized his mentor:

He taught me by example that our pursuits in science and our pursuits in Torah can both be animated by the same desire for an intellectual and spiritual life of savor and spice. When the New Atheism was enjoying its heyday, he once casually remarked that, 'Richard Dawkins is an atheist only because he has not studied enough science.'At first I thought he only said this for the shock value. But after several semesters observing him learn, teach, and publish, I realized that the remark was not at all intended to be provocative."

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Tendler also was apast president of the Association of Orthodox Jewish Scientists and chair ofthe bioethical commission of the Rabbinical Council of America and the Medical Ethics Task Force of UJA-Federation of Greater New York.

Decades ago, as young Orthodox Jewish families joined his synagogue, Tendler and his father-in-law, the late Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, a world-renowned authority on Jewish law, worked together to establishRockland's main eruv, thought to be the largest in North America. An eruv isan unobtrusive perimeter attached to utility poles and fences that extends a boundary so Jews can performtasks prohibited outside the home on the Sabbath, such as carrying items or pushing strollers.

Rabbi Tendler was a Talmud instructor when Joseph Kaplan, a retired attorney from Teaneck,was a student at Yeshiva University high school for boys in Manhattan in the early 1960s,

He taught biology and Talmud and was also involved in cancer trials - he would often run into class with his lab coat on," Kaplan said."He wasnt just a teacher, he was getting his hands dirty with the subjects he was teaching.

Kaplan called Tendler the perfect role model for the universitys motto, Torah Umaddah, orTorah combined with secular studies

Most of the other teachers were older, European-born rabbis. He was this young American born scientist and yet he was a serious Talmudist," Kaplan said."Back in the 1960s, it was very unusual to have this combination of science and Torah in one person. He was absolutely brilliant.

A funeral for Rabbi Tendler was held Thursday at Community Synagogue of Monsey, with burial at the Monsey Cemetery.

Nancy Cutler writes about People & Policy. Click here for her latest stories. Follow her on Twitter at@nancyrockland.

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Jewish medical ethicist and Rabbi Moshe Tendler of Monsey - The Journal News

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Posted By admin on October 2, 2021

Some headlines from the last few months. March: the French government agrees to return a major landscape by Gustav Klimt to the heirs of Nora Stiasny, a Jewish woman from Vienna, forced to sell it before being sent to her death in 1942.

June: the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels returns a still life by Lovis Corinth to the family of Gustav and Emma Mayer, Jewish refugees from Germany whose belongings were looted in Nazi-occupied Belgium.

August: the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam agrees to return an early Kandinsky to the descendants of Irma Klein and Robert Lewenstein, a Jewish couple forced to sell it during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.

World War II is three-quarters of a century past now, but the fate of artworks stolen from Jewish collectors in Europe from 1933 to 1945 remains nowhere near settled. American museums (most notably the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston) are also embroiled in claims and counterclaims about what constitutes a sale under duress. This year Holocaust survivors demands reached the U.S. Supreme Court. And as museums and governments also reckon with demands to repatriate artifacts removed from former colonies, the legal precedents concerning Nazi spoliation have global significance.

So I came to Afterlives: Recovering the Lost Stories of Looted Art, a no doubt well-intentioned exhibition about plundered art that opened last month at the Jewish Museum, to explore a chapter of history that is still a current event. I left with a sense of disappointment, even bewilderment. It assembles a somewhat haphazard cross-section of looted and recovered paintings, from a history painting by the Baroque painter Bernardo Strozzi to a Matisse still life made more than three centuries later. But their full stories get drowned out in a show that flits among far too many themes: looted art, purged museums, Jewish literary and religious volumes, art made in concentration camps, not to mention some wan responses to the past from contemporary artists. Regarding one of the gravest periods in art history, Afterlives is imprecise about its subject, and sometimes outright careless about the Jewish lives it supposedly reintroduces.

Afterlives tells us from its subtitle on that it aims at recovering the lost stories of looted art. An introductory text promises to recount the stories of the people who experienced it. Two of the three paintings in the first gallery indicate the subjects stakes. A small, thick floral still life by Bonnard, now owned by the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, was one of thousands stolen by the Nazis from the French banker David David-Weill and stored in an Austrian salt mine. A bright landscape with nudes by Max Pechstein, a painter of the Expressionist group Die Brcke, was seized from the Paris home of Hugo Simon and only returned to his heirs this year.

But when you read the text beside the first painting you see in this show, Franz Marcs The Large Blue Horses of 1911, youll discover that it was never looted at all. This large oil, a prime example of the Munich avant-garde movement Der Blaue Reiter, was shown alongside the Pechstein in an anti-Nazi exhibition in London in 1938, the year after the notorious Degenerate Art show that targeted so many German modern artists. After that, The Large Blue Horses was shipped to the United States, where it appeared in a touring show of banned German art. By 1942, it entered the collection of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

To open a show about looting with a picture that wasnt looted does not inspire confidence, and Afterlives only gets foggier about what its subject really is. A collage by Kurt Schwitters, made from exile in Norway, and a landscape of Cape Cod by George Grosz, exiled in the United States, broach the fates of German artists who, like Marc, were denounced by the Nazi regime. But the show only glances at the particulars of the Third Reichs degenerate art policies, which are in any case a different question from the matter of Nazi theft.

The shows on surer footing with works of art presented as concrete proof of crime. A large, early Czanne bather and a scene of spindly figures by Picasso both belonged to Alphonse Kann, a Parisian bon vivant (and model for Prousts Swann), who left them behind when he left for London in 1938. Both are visible in a mural-size photograph of the Paris storeroom where the Nazis gathered stolen paintings: the Room of the Martyrs, in the Jeu de Paume Museum.

The show then veers away from fine art to Jewish religious texts and ritual objects, mostly from this museums permanent collection, that were shipped from Danzig to New York for safekeeping in 1939. The Jews of Danzig were almost entirely exterminated, and after the war these Torah shields and Kiddush cups were redistributed to Jewish communities elsewhere. Their survival is testament to the extraordinary efforts of Americans and others who led Jewish cultural reconstruction but that communitarian and spiritual undertaking doesnt blend seamlessly with the legal challenges of recovering the stolen art of individual Jews.

In all this miscellany, the actual victims of Nazi looting become an afterthought and are even treated as interchangeable. The lives of the men and women who actually owned these particular paintings, from Alphonse Kann to David David-Weill, are well known and well researched. But rather than reinscribe them onto the art they once owned, Afterlives instead offers 10 images of well, some other persecuted Jews, as photographed by August Sander, the great portraitist of interwar Germany. It is a metonymy that suggests that the irreducible lives and fates of the dispossessed are not this shows concern, and certainly havent been recovered as we were promised at the outset.

If looting and restitution were this shows true focus, then at the very minimum each label should have outlined, in chronological order, the owners of these artworks from their creation to the present day. That was the strategy of Gurlitt: Status Report, the two-part blockbuster outing of a collection with a Nazi provenance, staged in Bern and Bonn in 2017. Beside each painting or drawing, a label tracked its movements from the studio onward to insist that you were looking not (or not merely) at objects of beauty, but at evidence of a crime.

Or show the backs of some of these paintings, where their labels could testify to their theft and recovery. The Jewish Museum has borrowed from Richmond a pastoral scene by Claude Lorrain, Battle on a Bridge, confiscated by the Nazis from the Paris art dealer Georges Wildenstein. The text alongside mentions that the painting was destined for Hitlers never-built art temple in Austria. But only in the catalog did I learn that it bears a Fhrermuseum inventory number No. 2207 right on the stretcher bar. Why not hang the painting on stanchions, so we can see the Nazi scar on the verso? Or at least picture the reverse side on the label? Thats how the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in Oslo did it in 2015, after discovering that the museum owned a Matisse looted like the two in this show from the Parisian art dealer Paul Rosenberg.

Rather than disclose looting through exhibition design, the Jewish Museum cedes more than a quarter of the shows square footage to contemporary artists for their responses, but they mostly obscure more than they reveal. One worthy of the task is Maria Eichhorn, whos spent two decades undertaking research-based projects on the provenance of art stolen by the Nazis. Here she has gathered dozens of books in New York libraries with bookplates from Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, whose research arm was led by Hannah Arendt. From a loudspeaker we hear an actor reading Arendts field reports, whose exactitude matches Eichhorns own document-by-document approach to dispossession.

Would that the other contemporary projects showed the same Arendtian rigor. Lisa Oppenheim, an American photographer, collages a looted still life and occluded satellite imagery of the Parisian house from which it was stolen a literal fogging over of well-known victims. (It only took me a minutes Googling to discover that the owners were the prominent Michel-Levys; the label here calls them only the Jewish family.)

Dor Guez, an artist of Jewish and Palestinian descent, has been given substantial acreage for an archival farrago of his grandfathers handwriting samples and his grandmothers costume patterns, evoking their immigration from Tunisia to Israel in 1951. In an exhibition about, say, migration and family, it might have a passing interest. But Ive got no clue why this tangential project gets the last word in a show that ought to have been about the victims of looting and the objects they lost.

It says everything about this shows lack of focus that I learned more about one artists family than I did about Hugo Simon, who left the Pechstein landscape behind when he fled to Brazil; about Alphonse Kann, separated from that large Czanne bather and little Picasso; about Oscar Bondy, the Viennese industrialist whose Strozzi was stolen in the wake of the Anschluss. Theirs were the lost stories Id come for. I could hardly find them.

Afterlives: Recovering the Lost Stories of Looted ArtThrough Jan. 9 at the Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Ave. at 92nd Street, Manhattan, 212-423-3200, thejewishmuseum.org.

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In Afterlives, About Looted Art, Why Are the Victims an Afterthought? - The New York Times

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Posted By admin on October 2, 2021

Joshua Nelson gets called a lot of things. One is the prince of kosher gospel, a moniker the New Jersey-based musician has earned after 20 years of performing traditional Jewish tunes in the style of the queen of gospel song, Mahalia Jackson.

But Nelson calls himself a walking dichotomy. He says he thinks most people dont understand the truth of just how connected all of humankind is.

On the surface, we look like were all separated, and thats the way we think things are. But me, Im Jewish, and I sing like Mahalia Jackson. So, Im Jewish and Black. To me, theres no division, Nelson explains.

Nelson is in Kansas City this weekend as a guest not only of Union Station and part of the Auschwitz: Not long ago. Not far away but also of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

The United Nations Creative Cities Network consists of 246 locations worldwide, nine of which are in the United States. The categories are: crafts and folk art, design, film, gastronomy, literature, media arts and music.

Kansas City is the only city in the United States designated as a music city.

With that designation comes benefits such as the ability to bring people like Nelson to town to do the serious work of unification.

Jacob Wagner

Anita Dixon-Brown is the executive director of UNESCO Creative City of Music-Kansas City. She applied for and then accepted the designation just before the United States pulled out of UNESCO, effective in late 2018.

Former president Donald Trump cited anti-Israeli bias as a reason for the withdrawal; the United States hadnt funded UNESCO since its 2011 inclusion of Palestine as a member state due to a 1990s-era mandate concerning U.N. recognition of the same.

President Joe Bidens proposed 2022 budget shows renewed United Nations funding, but it requires Congressional approval.

In spite of the current U.S. nonmember observer status, Dixon-Brown says the designation still gives Kansas City a seat at the international table when it comes to discussion of all things creative.

With that seat comes great responsibility. We understand that UNESCO is this huge thing with a huge voice, Dixon-Brown says. Shell combine that voice with Nelsons.

She says that Nelson naturally brings together the Black and Jewish communities through his work, and she hopes that these upcoming events will strengthen their ties and draw more people to the Auschwitz exhibition.

Little Black kids like me, Dixon-Brown says and pauses. I knew Mrs. Silverberg.

Mrs. Silverberg's story

Growing up next door to a Holocaust survivor changed her worldview.

She was the nicest lady in the world. I noticed that she had tattoos on her arm, and I asked her what they were. And she told me, That was a very bad time. You have to ask your mother, she says.

It wasnt until accepting the UNESCO designation a few years ago that Dixon-Brown visited Krakow and the infamous camp.

Mrs. Silverberg had urged Dixon-Brown to be useful to others.

I kept that in my mind over 50 years, until I went to Auschwitz and saw what happened to my friend. You know, I was dumbstruck, she says.

Nelson says its important to see each others pain, each others glory. Im African American, he says, and I know a lot of African Americans think that theyre the only ones in the world who have been discriminated against. And no, we arent. There are others.

He says that when he first started singing kosher gospel music, the rabbis he knew asked him to explain himself. They werent against the sound, they only wanted to understand its origins and why Nelson wanted to sing that way.

Nelson explained to them that the sound of gospel predates the African American conversion to Christianity.

Enslaved Africans working American fields were from numerous tribes and didnt have a common language, so they communicated through what he calls moaning and groaning. Once they did have a common language, that transformed into work songs.

That moaning and groaning and that soul is basically what they put in their spirituals in Christian music once they became Christian. But the soul was pre-Christian, Nelson says.

The rabbis accepted his explanation, and the sound has become increasingly popular in Jewish worship.

Its important that other cultures, especially the African-American community, see how a people were hated and how they rose, he says. Maybe we can learn something for our own community.

Joshua Nelson and Rabbi Kramer Shabbat on Friday, Oct. 1 from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. at BNai Jehudah, 12320 Nall Ave, Overland Park, KS 66209. Free and open to the public with registration.

An Evening with Joshua Nelson on Saturday, Oct. 2 from 4:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. at Unity Temple on the Plaza, 707 West 47th Street, Kansas City, MO 64112. Free and open to the public with registration.

We wear the Mask, A Tribute to Mahalia Jackson by Joshua Nelson on Sunday, Oct. 3 from 4:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. at Jamison Memorial Temple, 3115 Linwood Boulevard, Kansas City, MO 64128. Free and open to the public with registration.

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'The prince of kosher gospel' is coming to Kansas City to unite Jewish and Black communities - KCUR

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Posted By admin on October 2, 2021

We Jews never really finish. In Pirkei Avot we learn that our job is not to complete the task, nor are we free to desist from doing all we can. Ours is a tradition calling us to act, to engage, to do even if we never complete the work. We Jews have never been a people content to sit on our laurels.

So it is that as soon as we finish reading Deuteronomy, we immediately return to Genesis. This week we return to the beginning, to the very act of creating the world. In the beginning, God spoke, and the universe reacted. By the end of six days, God takes a day for rest, having concluded the work of creation.

One might assume that God had completed creation by the end of that first week. After all, the whole of the physical world had come into being because of the power of Gods words. Might God really have retired from the work of creation after only one week?

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The second chapter of Genesis tells a different story. Another round of creation, this time the story of the Garden of Eden. After that, humanity grows and soon we encounter the Tower of Babel. Clearly the work of creating the world continued long after that first week. So too with us.

We are not yet completed; each of us continues to learn and grow and move closer to completion. Our world is not yet completed; we continue to work toward its completion. Our tradition in exquisiteness and subtlety reminds us again and again we never fully reach perfection. Our world is never fully completed.

As we continue to live through a pandemic, the reminder offered in the opening words of Bereshit seem especially poignant. As much as we may all wish to fully move beyond the pandemic, we may not have that luxury. COVID-19 likely will be an ongoing part of our world. We, like God in the creation story, will never fully remove ourselves from the pursuit of health and wholeness.

We Jews possess a gift our nation and world need us to share. We understand that perfection may not be possible, but the pursuit remains a most powerful force. Our world needs this unique Jewish lesson now more than ever. We may never reach full control over the virus, but through exploration, scientific experimentation, learning and growing, we can move ever closer to the goal.

Our people from the earliest of times understood the need to keep moving, to keep pushing forward, even in dark or challenging times. We have endured because, in spite of everything, we Jews never stopped pursuing. In beginning again, we recommit ourselves to the challenge of being like God continually creating, continually reaching for health, wholeness and holiness.PJC

Rabbi Daniel J. Fellman is the senior rabbi at Temple Sinai. This column is a service of the Greater Pittsburgh Rabbinic Association.

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