Rabbi Gavriel's parents are in India on a two-week trip to collect funds
for rebuilding Nariman House, the place where the terrorists killed his son and daughter-in-law Rivka.
His father says Baby Moshe, who was saved by his Indian nanny is doing much better now. And he hopes that one day he will become the Rabbi for India.
"Chabad House will be just like before. I hope a lot more stronger, bigger and that would be a victory against the terrorists. They think it is a victory to kill innocent people, women and children. Our answer to them is just more stronger: to come back and to help more people," said Rabbi Nachman Holtzberg, father of killed Rabbi Gavriel.
On being asked how is Baby Moshe doing now, Rabbi Nachman Holtzberg said, "Thank God a lot better from what he was before. Sometimes he calls out for his parents because he sees something and remembers what happened in Bombay."
Rabbi Holtzberg emphasised that one day Baby Moshe will be the Rabbi of India.
Showing posts with label Rabbi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rabbi. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Friday, December 26, 2008
Celebrating Rabbi Feldman
A tribute to the late Rabbi Mendel Feldman.
Kenneth Lasson
Special to the Jewish Times
By almost any measure that truly counts, Rabbi Mendel Feldman — who died on Dec. 13 in Sydney, Australia, at the age of 93 — was a remarkable man.
The details of his upbringing do not presage what he meant to those of us who knew him well. He was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., studied at Yeshivat Tomchei Temimim under the previous Lubavitcher rebbe, went to Mesivta Torah Vodaas, and assumed his first pulpit in Jacksonville, Fla.
In 1958, when the revered Rabbi Simon Schwab left Baltimore’s Shearith Israel Congregation (locally known as “the Glen Avenue Shul”) for a similarly prestigious post in the German-Jewish community of Washington Heights, N.Y., Rabbi Feldman was chosen to succeed him.
On paper, the two rabbis could hardly have stood in starker contrast. Rabbi Schwab, classically trained and erudite but speaking barely a word of English, had fled Frankfurt, Germany, at the beginning of the Holocaust; Rabbi Feldman, a staunch Lubavitcher and American, a handball player and New York Giants fan, a talmudic scholar, was ebullient and plain-spoken.
But both were exceptionally charismatic, each able to establish a lasting and loving rapport with most of their congregants.
Rabbi Feldman enjoyed an even longer tenure at Shearith Israel, almost a quarter-century, before establishing a new shul, Ahavas Yisroel Tzemach Tzedek (aka “Rabbi Feldman’s Shul”), farther up Park Heights Avenue. He retired after his wife, Rochel, passed away, and immigrated to Australia to be near his son, now Rav Pinchas Feldman, chief Chabad rabbi of New South Wales.
But none of those facts reflect the essential character and humanity of Rabbi Mendel Feldman.
An Abiding Faith
Rabbi Feldman cultivated friendships like flowers, with a quiet sensitivity, and they became permanent by mutual affection.
My friendship with Rabbi Feldman began when I was a teenager, with private classes for me and my friend, Jerry Zuriff, held in the small room behind the main sanctuary at Shearith Israel. Those sessions, punctuated by college and graduate school, continued in different permutations for many years.
Most recently, they were in my home, where every Thursday afternoon, Steve Grossman and I would meet with Rabbi Feldman to learn for an hour.
We had our own rituals of choice. Rabbi Feldman would hold forth over his favorite scotch and a bowlful of nuts. Steve drank beer, I had iced tea, and the three of us analyzed and debated a variety of texts and commentaries, including Shir HaShirim (the Song of Songs), Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) and Mishlei (Proverbs).
More often than not, the conversations devolved into a passionate discussion of faith and the existence of God.
Rabbi Feldman’s faith was abiding, but intellectual as well. He had no explanation for the Holocaust, but he could not bring himself to visit the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. In this regard, too, he was simple but profound: You can’t be a true believer, he said, unless you have doubts.
His knowledge of Talmud was encyclopedic. The rabbi respected all points of view, but defended both Orthodoxy and minhagim (customs) with equal fervor, meticulous in his own observance but unusually tolerant of those less so. He constantly preached achdus (togetherness), disdaining communal divisions of all kinds. But he disliked hypocrisy, especially when it came to kashrut.
He loved nature, coming every spring to my backyard to recite the blessing over new fruit blossoms, and once laughing with delight as he planted seeds in the garden himself. He liked to read National Geographic, which nurtured his belief that all creatures and human beings are made by God.
Thus, he had a kind word for everyone, making a point of saying hello to all who passed in the street on his daily walks to and from shul, including — if not especially — postal workers and other non-Jews.
He celebrated the yomin tovim with the gusto one might expect from a Lubavitcher Chasid. On Chanukah, he handed out silver dollars to children in shul. On Purim, he held court at his dining room table. With the steady parade of friends and disciples, there was really no difference between them for him, as they stopped by for a drink and words of wisdom.
Every fall, he made the long walk to our sukkah so he could make Kiddush from a large wine cup reserved exclusively for him.
Through it all, over a half-century in Baltimore, his over-arching qualities were genuine humility and essential kindness.
In all those years, I never heard him speak ill of anyone. I doubt others did either.
May his memory be a blessing.
Kenneth Lasson is a law professor at the University of Baltimore and an occasional writer for the BALTIMORE JEWISH TIMES
Kenneth Lasson
Special to the Jewish Times
By almost any measure that truly counts, Rabbi Mendel Feldman — who died on Dec. 13 in Sydney, Australia, at the age of 93 — was a remarkable man.
The details of his upbringing do not presage what he meant to those of us who knew him well. He was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., studied at Yeshivat Tomchei Temimim under the previous Lubavitcher rebbe, went to Mesivta Torah Vodaas, and assumed his first pulpit in Jacksonville, Fla.
In 1958, when the revered Rabbi Simon Schwab left Baltimore’s Shearith Israel Congregation (locally known as “the Glen Avenue Shul”) for a similarly prestigious post in the German-Jewish community of Washington Heights, N.Y., Rabbi Feldman was chosen to succeed him.
On paper, the two rabbis could hardly have stood in starker contrast. Rabbi Schwab, classically trained and erudite but speaking barely a word of English, had fled Frankfurt, Germany, at the beginning of the Holocaust; Rabbi Feldman, a staunch Lubavitcher and American, a handball player and New York Giants fan, a talmudic scholar, was ebullient and plain-spoken.
But both were exceptionally charismatic, each able to establish a lasting and loving rapport with most of their congregants.
Rabbi Feldman enjoyed an even longer tenure at Shearith Israel, almost a quarter-century, before establishing a new shul, Ahavas Yisroel Tzemach Tzedek (aka “Rabbi Feldman’s Shul”), farther up Park Heights Avenue. He retired after his wife, Rochel, passed away, and immigrated to Australia to be near his son, now Rav Pinchas Feldman, chief Chabad rabbi of New South Wales.
But none of those facts reflect the essential character and humanity of Rabbi Mendel Feldman.
An Abiding Faith
Rabbi Feldman cultivated friendships like flowers, with a quiet sensitivity, and they became permanent by mutual affection.
My friendship with Rabbi Feldman began when I was a teenager, with private classes for me and my friend, Jerry Zuriff, held in the small room behind the main sanctuary at Shearith Israel. Those sessions, punctuated by college and graduate school, continued in different permutations for many years.
Most recently, they were in my home, where every Thursday afternoon, Steve Grossman and I would meet with Rabbi Feldman to learn for an hour.
We had our own rituals of choice. Rabbi Feldman would hold forth over his favorite scotch and a bowlful of nuts. Steve drank beer, I had iced tea, and the three of us analyzed and debated a variety of texts and commentaries, including Shir HaShirim (the Song of Songs), Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) and Mishlei (Proverbs).
More often than not, the conversations devolved into a passionate discussion of faith and the existence of God.
Rabbi Feldman’s faith was abiding, but intellectual as well. He had no explanation for the Holocaust, but he could not bring himself to visit the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. In this regard, too, he was simple but profound: You can’t be a true believer, he said, unless you have doubts.
His knowledge of Talmud was encyclopedic. The rabbi respected all points of view, but defended both Orthodoxy and minhagim (customs) with equal fervor, meticulous in his own observance but unusually tolerant of those less so. He constantly preached achdus (togetherness), disdaining communal divisions of all kinds. But he disliked hypocrisy, especially when it came to kashrut.
He loved nature, coming every spring to my backyard to recite the blessing over new fruit blossoms, and once laughing with delight as he planted seeds in the garden himself. He liked to read National Geographic, which nurtured his belief that all creatures and human beings are made by God.
Thus, he had a kind word for everyone, making a point of saying hello to all who passed in the street on his daily walks to and from shul, including — if not especially — postal workers and other non-Jews.
He celebrated the yomin tovim with the gusto one might expect from a Lubavitcher Chasid. On Chanukah, he handed out silver dollars to children in shul. On Purim, he held court at his dining room table. With the steady parade of friends and disciples, there was really no difference between them for him, as they stopped by for a drink and words of wisdom.
Every fall, he made the long walk to our sukkah so he could make Kiddush from a large wine cup reserved exclusively for him.
Through it all, over a half-century in Baltimore, his over-arching qualities were genuine humility and essential kindness.
In all those years, I never heard him speak ill of anyone. I doubt others did either.
May his memory be a blessing.
Kenneth Lasson is a law professor at the University of Baltimore and an occasional writer for the BALTIMORE JEWISH TIMES
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Jewish life flourishes where Kazakh gulag once stood
KARAGANDA, Kazakhstan (JTA) -- Liza Luchanskiy was born to a poor, Yiddish-speaking family in Berdichev, the historic, heavily Jewish city deep in the Pale of Settlement. Lured by Soviet promises of equality, she became a communist true believer, working her way up to serve on a committee in Siberia that targeted so-called enemies of the revolution.
But her zeal wasn’t enough to save her or her similarly devoted husband, Josef.
They were swept up during the frenzy of Stalin’s Great Terror, from 1937 to 1939. Josef was shot by a firing squad in 1938, and Liza was exiled by cattle car to Karaganda.
Luchanskiy was sentenced to eight years in the vast network of forced-labor camps here, on the southern edge of Stalin’s fearsome gulag. Enduring extreme cold, hunger and exhaustion, which afflicted her health ever after, Luchanskiy never let go of her faith in communism, her grandson says.
“She never blamed the system, only Stalin,” says Vilen Molotov-Luchanskiy, an internist who today heads the Jewish Cultural Center in Karaganda.
As many as 1.2 million Soviet citizens -- spanning practically all the myriad ethnic groups nationwide -- were worked to death or near death in the 75 camps that comprised Karaganda. Among them were many Jews, including many rabbis.
“There is no separate story of Jews here in Stalin’s gulag,” offers Mikhail Kreichman, who teaches Jewish history and tradition in Astana. “Many, many other nations suffered in there.”
The heart of the Karaganda slave labor machine was the railroad hub of Karaganda city, in central Kazakhstan. Once the camps were closed and emptied, it became a virtual “city of ex-convicts.”
Visiting the city today, remnants of that era can be felt still in the collective psyche and in the identity of the Jews that remain, making the Karagandan community among the more unique in the Diaspora. It may be the least assimilated Jewish community in Kazakhstan, which has some 15,000 to 20,000 Jews, because so many of the Jews here are children or grandchildren of rabbis and other traditional Jews sent to the Karaganda labor camps.
The purges of the late 1930s injected large numbers of Jews to Kazakhstan. Before that, the few Jews here either were descendants of Russian Jewish soldiers who settled in the area in the 19th century or fragments of Silk Road Bukharan Jews.
Jewish life pulsates today in Karaganda, which has 1,500 registered Jews. Chabad-Lubavitch opened its second day school in Kazakhstan here. There is a rabbi in town. The community hosts an annual festival for Jewish youth that draws some 200 participants from around the region. Last Purim, some Jews from Karaganda took a four-hour bus ride to the Kazakh capital Astana to celebrate the holiday at a synagogue there.
But the Jews here are best known for the painful history of Karaganda. When local Jews travel to other ex-Soviet republics, the mere mention of their hometown -- now Kazakhstan’s third-largest city -- typically elicits the same reaction.
“ ‘Your family was in this camp?’ That’s what they know about Karaganda,” says Bela Kamenetskaya, the head of the local Hesed welfare office. “If they come here, they expect it to look like Auschwitz. They’re surprised to see we have streets, city squares and an airport.”
Jews here say they share a special bond with their Karaganda neighbors because they all suffered together.
“The pain that every family suffered unites us even today,” says David Bitsadze, a taxi driver.
Karaganda has a lone monument to its victims nestled within a modest park. Among the trees is a striking wooden memorial, part of it carved with a cross, an Islamic crescent and a Star of David. Another part reveals tormented faces covered in barbed wire. A marble slab reads, “This soil is soaked with blood, covered by bones of the dead.”
The gulag kicked into high gear after World War II, as Moscow exploited its bottomless slave labor to rebuild a ravaged country. The region was home to four special camps renowned for brutality, as highlighted in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s landmark expose “The Gulag Archipelago.”
Stalin’s prisoners, convicted as “enemies of the people,” were shipped to the hinterlands, typically for eight to 10 years, to toil in mines, factories or farming. In Karaganda, they extracted coal and copper, with some agriculture. Most died of starvation, disease or the cold.
One camp here was designated for the Wives of Traitors of the Motherland, housing women and their children after the husbands were shot. Still others were deported here as “internal exiles,” restricted to living in certain villages.
In a rare sign of resistance, rebellions erupted in late 1952, and again shortly after Stalin’s death in 1953. The next year the camps were shuttered.
Free to go, those who had family waiting for them back home left. Those who didn’t stayed. In some cases their laid-off jailers lived nearby.
Meanwhile, with the camps abolished, Karaganda turned boomtown. The 1960s saw a new wave of Jews: young professionals or recent graduates either ordered to the Soviet empire’s outer reaches to fill a need, or seeking work opportunities in the “virgin soil” of Kazakhstan.
Jewish professors were instrumental in creating Karaganda’s medical school, which became one of the Soviet Union’s finest, says local Jewish activist Alexander Abramovich.
“They knew they wouldn’t be deported from here,” Abramovich says with a smile.
Today, little commemorates Karaganda’s notorious past beyond the sleepy village of Dolinka, the administrative center of the camp network, 30 miles southwest of the city.
On one side of the road to Dolinka is a former labor camp, recognizable by its watchtower -- conveniently it’s been converted into a prison for garden-variety criminals. On the other side is a village of yellow sandstone homes built exclusively for officers who ruled the gulag.
In Dolinka itself, abandoned barracks that once housed women are crumbling from age and neglect. The commander’s villa is inhabited, though, with two satellite dishes planted in the front yard. A memorial museum sees a trickle of somber visitors, many of whom have come to learn about the fate of loved ones.
Moscow continues to withhold many files, says museum director Marina Klyshnikova, perhaps because of sensitivity over the perpetrators.
“Some of them are still alive,” she says.
Molotov-Luchanskiy says his grandmother spoke daily about her earlier life until she died in 1980 at age 81. Speaking Yiddish, she would tell him tales of the camp and of his grandfather.
“She wanted me to know that life wasn’t so simple, or so easy,” Molotov-Luchanskiy says.
“Hers was actually a story of a happy woman," he adds. "In life she had a great purpose, a great love and great suffering. She thought it was everything an ordinary Jewish girl could want.”
But her zeal wasn’t enough to save her or her similarly devoted husband, Josef.
They were swept up during the frenzy of Stalin’s Great Terror, from 1937 to 1939. Josef was shot by a firing squad in 1938, and Liza was exiled by cattle car to Karaganda.
Luchanskiy was sentenced to eight years in the vast network of forced-labor camps here, on the southern edge of Stalin’s fearsome gulag. Enduring extreme cold, hunger and exhaustion, which afflicted her health ever after, Luchanskiy never let go of her faith in communism, her grandson says.
“She never blamed the system, only Stalin,” says Vilen Molotov-Luchanskiy, an internist who today heads the Jewish Cultural Center in Karaganda.
As many as 1.2 million Soviet citizens -- spanning practically all the myriad ethnic groups nationwide -- were worked to death or near death in the 75 camps that comprised Karaganda. Among them were many Jews, including many rabbis.
“There is no separate story of Jews here in Stalin’s gulag,” offers Mikhail Kreichman, who teaches Jewish history and tradition in Astana. “Many, many other nations suffered in there.”
The heart of the Karaganda slave labor machine was the railroad hub of Karaganda city, in central Kazakhstan. Once the camps were closed and emptied, it became a virtual “city of ex-convicts.”
Visiting the city today, remnants of that era can be felt still in the collective psyche and in the identity of the Jews that remain, making the Karagandan community among the more unique in the Diaspora. It may be the least assimilated Jewish community in Kazakhstan, which has some 15,000 to 20,000 Jews, because so many of the Jews here are children or grandchildren of rabbis and other traditional Jews sent to the Karaganda labor camps.
The purges of the late 1930s injected large numbers of Jews to Kazakhstan. Before that, the few Jews here either were descendants of Russian Jewish soldiers who settled in the area in the 19th century or fragments of Silk Road Bukharan Jews.
Jewish life pulsates today in Karaganda, which has 1,500 registered Jews. Chabad-Lubavitch opened its second day school in Kazakhstan here. There is a rabbi in town. The community hosts an annual festival for Jewish youth that draws some 200 participants from around the region. Last Purim, some Jews from Karaganda took a four-hour bus ride to the Kazakh capital Astana to celebrate the holiday at a synagogue there.
But the Jews here are best known for the painful history of Karaganda. When local Jews travel to other ex-Soviet republics, the mere mention of their hometown -- now Kazakhstan’s third-largest city -- typically elicits the same reaction.
“ ‘Your family was in this camp?’ That’s what they know about Karaganda,” says Bela Kamenetskaya, the head of the local Hesed welfare office. “If they come here, they expect it to look like Auschwitz. They’re surprised to see we have streets, city squares and an airport.”
Jews here say they share a special bond with their Karaganda neighbors because they all suffered together.
“The pain that every family suffered unites us even today,” says David Bitsadze, a taxi driver.
Karaganda has a lone monument to its victims nestled within a modest park. Among the trees is a striking wooden memorial, part of it carved with a cross, an Islamic crescent and a Star of David. Another part reveals tormented faces covered in barbed wire. A marble slab reads, “This soil is soaked with blood, covered by bones of the dead.”
The gulag kicked into high gear after World War II, as Moscow exploited its bottomless slave labor to rebuild a ravaged country. The region was home to four special camps renowned for brutality, as highlighted in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s landmark expose “The Gulag Archipelago.”
Stalin’s prisoners, convicted as “enemies of the people,” were shipped to the hinterlands, typically for eight to 10 years, to toil in mines, factories or farming. In Karaganda, they extracted coal and copper, with some agriculture. Most died of starvation, disease or the cold.
One camp here was designated for the Wives of Traitors of the Motherland, housing women and their children after the husbands were shot. Still others were deported here as “internal exiles,” restricted to living in certain villages.
In a rare sign of resistance, rebellions erupted in late 1952, and again shortly after Stalin’s death in 1953. The next year the camps were shuttered.
Free to go, those who had family waiting for them back home left. Those who didn’t stayed. In some cases their laid-off jailers lived nearby.
Meanwhile, with the camps abolished, Karaganda turned boomtown. The 1960s saw a new wave of Jews: young professionals or recent graduates either ordered to the Soviet empire’s outer reaches to fill a need, or seeking work opportunities in the “virgin soil” of Kazakhstan.
Jewish professors were instrumental in creating Karaganda’s medical school, which became one of the Soviet Union’s finest, says local Jewish activist Alexander Abramovich.
“They knew they wouldn’t be deported from here,” Abramovich says with a smile.
Today, little commemorates Karaganda’s notorious past beyond the sleepy village of Dolinka, the administrative center of the camp network, 30 miles southwest of the city.
On one side of the road to Dolinka is a former labor camp, recognizable by its watchtower -- conveniently it’s been converted into a prison for garden-variety criminals. On the other side is a village of yellow sandstone homes built exclusively for officers who ruled the gulag.
In Dolinka itself, abandoned barracks that once housed women are crumbling from age and neglect. The commander’s villa is inhabited, though, with two satellite dishes planted in the front yard. A memorial museum sees a trickle of somber visitors, many of whom have come to learn about the fate of loved ones.
Moscow continues to withhold many files, says museum director Marina Klyshnikova, perhaps because of sensitivity over the perpetrators.
“Some of them are still alive,” she says.
Molotov-Luchanskiy says his grandmother spoke daily about her earlier life until she died in 1980 at age 81. Speaking Yiddish, she would tell him tales of the camp and of his grandfather.
“She wanted me to know that life wasn’t so simple, or so easy,” Molotov-Luchanskiy says.
“Hers was actually a story of a happy woman," he adds. "In life she had a great purpose, a great love and great suffering. She thought it was everything an ordinary Jewish girl could want.”
Friday, May 23, 2008
Lubavitch Rabbi Given Sizable Grant for Project of Choice
Rabbi Menachem Schmidt said that he had no idea he was even being considered for a fellowship from a major foundation. But several weeks ago, the founder of the Lubavitch House at the University of Pennsylvania learned that he had been awarded a $225,000 grant to a project of his choosing.
At a March 12 press conference at its New York offices, the Avi Chai Foundation, dedicated to promoting Jewish education and identity, announced that it was handing out $1.5 million over the course of three years to four individuals and a team of two.
The recipients were selected from an initial pool of more than 40 nominations. Throughout the process, the identities of the nominators, as well as the selection committee members, were kept anonymous, said the foundation.
"Obviously, it's not something we expected. [But] it's nice to know that somebody thinks you are doing something right," said Schmidt, 54, who has spent roughly 30 years in Philadelphia as a rabbi affiliated with the Chabad Lubavitch movement.
Schmidt said that he plans to use the money to bolster two organizations he's created: the Old City Jewish Art Center and the Jewish Heritage Programs.
The art center opened in 2007. It hosts rotating exhibitions and, on nights corresponding to the first Friday program -- when Old City galleries remain open until well after dark -- Chabad hosts a Shabbat dinner in the space.
Schmidt envisions a lot more happening there, from regular lectures and classes about the intersection of art, personal expression and Judaism, along with a series of musical performances.
"Whether or not a person is in services on Friday night or not is really immaterial. There are many opportunities to connect Jewishly, as well as portals of engagement," noted Schmidt, who also plays guitar for a group called the Baal Shem Tov Band.
In 1993, Schmidt started the Jewish Heritage Programs in order to facilitate peer-to-peer programs that would focus on Jewish identity. Begun at the University of Pennsylvania, it now holds events throughout Philadelphia, as well as in New York and Florida.
Specifically, Schmidt is hoping to upgrade JHPs mentoring program, which pairs college students with young professionals who offer both career and life guidance. He said that the mentoring program has existed as a kind of side project; he wants it to become more formalized.
He acknowledged that $75,000 a year is not nearly enough to pay for all the programs he'd like to put together. In fact, he said the recognition may be at least as important as the monetary award.
The other, nonlocal recipients were: Betsy Dolgin Katz, North American director of the Florence Melton Adult Mini-School of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Rabbi Elie Kaufner, co-founder of the New York-based Mechon Hadar: An Institute for Prayer, Personal Growth and Study; Rabbi Dov Linzer, head of academics at the Yeshivat Chovevei Torah Rabbinical School in New York; and Ariel Berry, the current editor of Presentense magazine, and Aharon Horowitz, who along with Berry co-founded a group called the Creative Zionist Institute.
At a March 12 press conference at its New York offices, the Avi Chai Foundation, dedicated to promoting Jewish education and identity, announced that it was handing out $1.5 million over the course of three years to four individuals and a team of two.
The recipients were selected from an initial pool of more than 40 nominations. Throughout the process, the identities of the nominators, as well as the selection committee members, were kept anonymous, said the foundation.
"Obviously, it's not something we expected. [But] it's nice to know that somebody thinks you are doing something right," said Schmidt, 54, who has spent roughly 30 years in Philadelphia as a rabbi affiliated with the Chabad Lubavitch movement.
Schmidt said that he plans to use the money to bolster two organizations he's created: the Old City Jewish Art Center and the Jewish Heritage Programs.
The art center opened in 2007. It hosts rotating exhibitions and, on nights corresponding to the first Friday program -- when Old City galleries remain open until well after dark -- Chabad hosts a Shabbat dinner in the space.
Schmidt envisions a lot more happening there, from regular lectures and classes about the intersection of art, personal expression and Judaism, along with a series of musical performances.
"Whether or not a person is in services on Friday night or not is really immaterial. There are many opportunities to connect Jewishly, as well as portals of engagement," noted Schmidt, who also plays guitar for a group called the Baal Shem Tov Band.
In 1993, Schmidt started the Jewish Heritage Programs in order to facilitate peer-to-peer programs that would focus on Jewish identity. Begun at the University of Pennsylvania, it now holds events throughout Philadelphia, as well as in New York and Florida.
Specifically, Schmidt is hoping to upgrade JHPs mentoring program, which pairs college students with young professionals who offer both career and life guidance. He said that the mentoring program has existed as a kind of side project; he wants it to become more formalized.
He acknowledged that $75,000 a year is not nearly enough to pay for all the programs he'd like to put together. In fact, he said the recognition may be at least as important as the monetary award.
The other, nonlocal recipients were: Betsy Dolgin Katz, North American director of the Florence Melton Adult Mini-School of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Rabbi Elie Kaufner, co-founder of the New York-based Mechon Hadar: An Institute for Prayer, Personal Growth and Study; Rabbi Dov Linzer, head of academics at the Yeshivat Chovevei Torah Rabbinical School in New York; and Ariel Berry, the current editor of Presentense magazine, and Aharon Horowitz, who along with Berry co-founded a group called the Creative Zionist Institute.
A new home, a new life
Rabbi Mordechai Weiss, who made aliyah from Teaneck, is now a tour guide as well as a religious guide.
Ronda Israel, a New Jersey school administrator turned Israeli chocolate-maker, encourages anyone contemplating aliyah to think outside the box.
"If your heart is here, you will say, I can live here and be a productive Israeli. I can take the skills God gave me over a lifetime and do something with them that doesn't have to be the same thing I did before," Israel says.
While many new Israelis choose to commute or telecommute to their diaspora jobs, others make major career changes in order to earn a living in the Middle East.
Ronda Israel, a New Jersey school administrator turned Israeli chocolate-maker, encourages anyone contemplating aliyah to think outside the box.
"If your heart is here, you will say, I can live here and be a productive Israeli. I can take the skills God gave me over a lifetime and do something with them that doesn't have to be the same thing I did before," Israel says.
While many new Israelis choose to commute or telecommute to their diaspora jobs, others make major career changes in order to earn a living in the Middle East.
Monday, May 05, 2008
Newsweek Publishes Annual “50 Most Influential U.S. Rabbis” List
Newsweek has published its second annual list of the “50 most influential rabbis in the U.S.” As was the case last year, the first time the list came out, the top 50 is destined once again to become the subject of intense debate surrounding the names on the list, the criteria for selecting them, and the identity of the selectors. Setting aside petty rivalries and the squabbling about why so-and-so made it into the top 10, why he (or she) is absent, and how they could have him on a list of rabbis to begin with, the most pertinent observation that has been made about last year’s rankings, and again now, is that the obvious prerequisite for making it onto the list is an effective public-relations operation and high-visibility media presence.
The three who compiled the list are all major players in the American media market, and besides being quite obviously warm Jews who enjoy calling themselves machers, it is difficult to say what other expertise they have that enables them to assess a rabbi’s influence. And the criteria they put together for grading the rabbis says as much.
A total of 30 points is awarded depending on how well they are known nationally and internationally and whether they have a media presence. Another 30 points are available for political and social influence and having a greater impact beyond the Jewish community. In other words, 60 percent of their ranking is based on factors not usually connected with a rabbi’s traditional role. Their Jewish leadership, their influence on Judaism, their work with their own communities, and the size of those communities counts for another 40 points.
The compilers took this observation to heart, and this year, while keeping the main list more or less the same (with changes in the rankings, of course) added a second list of the “Top 25 Pulpit Rabbis in America,” those with the ability to inspire and lead communities and individuals.
However, this column is not going to be about what makes a rabbi influential in America; you can read about that in dozens of blogs.
What really interested me is that when looking at this combined list of 75 influential rabbis of one of the largest and richest communities in Jewish history, none of them have any significant influence in that other major Jewish community, Israel. Almost none of them are even known in Israel, outside a very small group of people concerned with Israel-Diaspora relations. Marvin Hier, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, appears at the top of the list for the second time. He might be one of the best-connected Jews in Hollywood, but I’m willing to bet that 99 percent of Israeli Jews have never even heard of him or the Wiesenthal Center, or else they think that it deals with Nazi-hunting.
Number two on the list (up from 12 last year), Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, might have been interviewed twice over the last few months in Haaretz, but his influence on anything that happens in Israel is less than negligible. Even within the small Israeli Reform community, his power is limited due to the independent positions taken by the Israeli Reform movement and the uneasy relationship it has with its American “parent organization.”
Last year’s number two, down to four on the current list, Yehuda Krinsky of Lubavitch, and arguably the most powerful figure in the Chabad establishment in the U.S. following the Rebbe’s death, while not being a household name, is probably the only rabbi on the list with some kind of influence outside America, due to the international character of the Lubavitch movement.
But since the whole Lubavitcher structure is based on strong shlichim (emissaries) running their own show wherever they’re based, and anyway, even when the Rebbe was alive, it was already seriously factionalized, Krinsky would find it hard to overrule the Israeli leaders. Besides, Chabad has a lot less influence on Israeli politics today than it did a decade ago, when it had the ear of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Another Lubavitcher on the list, Shmuley Boteach (number nine), enjoyed in the 1990s a brief period of notoriety in Israel for his books on sex, but that has long since passed. Number 11, Kaballah guru Yehuda Berg, gets a brief mention in the Israeli press whenever his acolyte, Madonna, comes for one of her visits, but that’s it. Number 16, Zalman Teitelbaum, leader of the Satmar chassidim (well, at least some of them) has a middle-sized community also in Israel, but their radical anti-Zionist ideology renders them entirely irrelevant outside the charedi world. The rest of the list are total nonentities in Israel, and indeed almost anywhere else in the Jewish world outside the U.S.
A list of the most influential rabbis in Israel would read like this: Yosef Elyashiv, Ovadia Yosef, the Gerrer Rebbe, Mordechai Eliyahu, and so on—elderly ultra-Orthodox leaders of chassidic sects, Litvak yeshivas, or their Sephardi counterparts and groups of radical young settlers. These rabbis command the allegiance of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of followers, control political parties and whole government coalitions, who with one word can launch huge demonstrations, block the entrance to Jerusalem, ruin businesses, build or dismantle settlements, and decide the fate of peace treaties between Israel and its Arab neighbors. (Haaretz)
The three who compiled the list are all major players in the American media market, and besides being quite obviously warm Jews who enjoy calling themselves machers, it is difficult to say what other expertise they have that enables them to assess a rabbi’s influence. And the criteria they put together for grading the rabbis says as much.
A total of 30 points is awarded depending on how well they are known nationally and internationally and whether they have a media presence. Another 30 points are available for political and social influence and having a greater impact beyond the Jewish community. In other words, 60 percent of their ranking is based on factors not usually connected with a rabbi’s traditional role. Their Jewish leadership, their influence on Judaism, their work with their own communities, and the size of those communities counts for another 40 points.
The compilers took this observation to heart, and this year, while keeping the main list more or less the same (with changes in the rankings, of course) added a second list of the “Top 25 Pulpit Rabbis in America,” those with the ability to inspire and lead communities and individuals.
However, this column is not going to be about what makes a rabbi influential in America; you can read about that in dozens of blogs.
What really interested me is that when looking at this combined list of 75 influential rabbis of one of the largest and richest communities in Jewish history, none of them have any significant influence in that other major Jewish community, Israel. Almost none of them are even known in Israel, outside a very small group of people concerned with Israel-Diaspora relations. Marvin Hier, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, appears at the top of the list for the second time. He might be one of the best-connected Jews in Hollywood, but I’m willing to bet that 99 percent of Israeli Jews have never even heard of him or the Wiesenthal Center, or else they think that it deals with Nazi-hunting.
Number two on the list (up from 12 last year), Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, might have been interviewed twice over the last few months in Haaretz, but his influence on anything that happens in Israel is less than negligible. Even within the small Israeli Reform community, his power is limited due to the independent positions taken by the Israeli Reform movement and the uneasy relationship it has with its American “parent organization.”
Last year’s number two, down to four on the current list, Yehuda Krinsky of Lubavitch, and arguably the most powerful figure in the Chabad establishment in the U.S. following the Rebbe’s death, while not being a household name, is probably the only rabbi on the list with some kind of influence outside America, due to the international character of the Lubavitch movement.
But since the whole Lubavitcher structure is based on strong shlichim (emissaries) running their own show wherever they’re based, and anyway, even when the Rebbe was alive, it was already seriously factionalized, Krinsky would find it hard to overrule the Israeli leaders. Besides, Chabad has a lot less influence on Israeli politics today than it did a decade ago, when it had the ear of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Another Lubavitcher on the list, Shmuley Boteach (number nine), enjoyed in the 1990s a brief period of notoriety in Israel for his books on sex, but that has long since passed. Number 11, Kaballah guru Yehuda Berg, gets a brief mention in the Israeli press whenever his acolyte, Madonna, comes for one of her visits, but that’s it. Number 16, Zalman Teitelbaum, leader of the Satmar chassidim (well, at least some of them) has a middle-sized community also in Israel, but their radical anti-Zionist ideology renders them entirely irrelevant outside the charedi world. The rest of the list are total nonentities in Israel, and indeed almost anywhere else in the Jewish world outside the U.S.
A list of the most influential rabbis in Israel would read like this: Yosef Elyashiv, Ovadia Yosef, the Gerrer Rebbe, Mordechai Eliyahu, and so on—elderly ultra-Orthodox leaders of chassidic sects, Litvak yeshivas, or their Sephardi counterparts and groups of radical young settlers. These rabbis command the allegiance of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of followers, control political parties and whole government coalitions, who with one word can launch huge demonstrations, block the entrance to Jerusalem, ruin businesses, build or dismantle settlements, and decide the fate of peace treaties between Israel and its Arab neighbors. (Haaretz)
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
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