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RSSJEWISH WEEK: WE NEED A JEWISH SNOPES
May 17
Read this in the Jewish Week. Written by Dan Sieradski, full disclosure
he is my son…
The Standard: Yavneh Play Honors Unlikely Hero
May 17
education, local stories/community No Comments
Jeanette Friedman • Local
Published: 14 May 2010
Charles and Rabbi Moshe Rosenbaum traveled from Geneva and Jerusalem to Paramus last Thursday to watch the Yavneh middle school graduating class perform “The Unlikely Hero,” a play honoring their father, Pinchas Rosenbaum, who saved Jews in Hungary during the Holocaust. In this production, Pinchas the younger was played by Leora Hyman and the older by Philip Meyer. The script was written and the scenery was designed and painted by members of the graduating class.
The script was adapted from interviews commissioned by the two brothers and their sister Leah, lifelong friends of Yavneh’s Rabbi Shmuel Burstein. Though he knew the family, the teacher first heard the story 25 years ago at dinner honoring the memory of Pinchas Rosenbaum, who died in 1980. According to Charles Rosenbaum, his father rarely spoke about his rescue efforts. But as his children traveled the world, they were approached by those he rescued who told them their stories.
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Viral E-mails: Dangerous to the Community
May 13
Internet, Jews, middle east, politics No Comments
MALCOLM HOENLEIN TALKS TECHNOLOGY AND THE JEWISH WORLD
May 13, 2010–The e-mail came from a news source in Europe, who got it from a guy in New York, who got it from a couple in Los Angeles, who got it from a guy who “just received this from my friend in Israel, who moves in high circles, who heard it from a consultant to the United States who meets once a month with the President in the White House. He is in the know. This is what actually has happened with the relationship with Israel and the U.S.A. and it is not pretty.”
What followed was a litany of “crimes” by the U.S. administration against Israel. Some of them were based on kernels of truth that had been convoluted into “reports” designed to galvanize people into action by injecting them with the fear factor. One accusation was exaggerated truth. Others were patently ridiculous, and some of them were oversimplifications of complicated diplomatic matters that are not controlled by anyone in the U.S. Some were outright lies.
How does one find out the truth behind these viral e-mails? One way is to check with Malcolm Hoenlein, Executive Vice Chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations (COP). As a fellow who spends most of his time getting his news first hand from newsmakers and reporters, he is a human aggregator who has to have his finger on the facts (or his nose in the news), day in and day out.
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Why We Wrote Why Should I Care?
Mar 18
There are hundreds of books about the Holocaust on classroom and library shelves, but my co-author, David Gold and I decided that books and videos that hit people on the head with huge numbers of dead people—and even survivor memoirs—weren’t always reaching students. All you had to do was look around to see we were failing! People didn’t seem to understand that the Holocaust’s main lessons were about the way people treated each other, how they made decisions, and what they believed when they read newspapers and listened to the radio. Rare was the course that made students understand they had to have values and take responsibility for their own actions.
So we sat down in front of our computers, clicked on Googletalk and together wrote Why Should I Care? Lessons from The Holocaust, a “living” book that is constantly revised on the Internet and in paperback; designed to grab young peoples’ attention and make them think about the world and their role in it.
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Teaneck Suburbanite: Holocaust educators donate library to THS
Mar 18
Holocaust educators donate library to THS
By Howard Prosnit, Teaneck Suburbanite
Thursday, March 18, 2010
On the day after Halloween in 1979, Jeanette Friedman Sieradski was dropping off her children for pre-school at B’Nai Yeshurun when she saw that the synagogue had been defaced with swastikas and anti-Semitic graffiti.
Friedman, whose parents survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps, was appalled. But the experience changed her life, marking the beginning of three decades of Holocaust research and education.
Soon after the encounter, Friedman, an Ogden Avenue resident at the time, founded the first Second Generation Group of the children of Holocaust survivors in New Jersey. In 1980, she was appointed by Gov. Thomas Kean to the New Jersey Holocaust Education Commission. Locally, she began working with former Teaneck social studies teacher Ed Reynolds to revise the Holocaust curriculum used in the schools.
At the time, Teaneck schools used the Teaneck-Vineland curriculum, which Friedman found objectionable.
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