David Gold, co-author of “Why Should I Care?”
“Ethnic cleansing has been used throughout history as an excuse to preserve or create a cleaner, healthier, safer, stronger or purer way of life.

Good people must get rid of those who are not really people and using derogatory names is the first step in dehumanizing others. It’s the first step on a horrific road that makes extermination okay, because “they” are different, and the rules and rights attributed to “human beings” don’t need to apply to them.”

Jeanette Friedman and David Gold, in their new book “Why Should I Care?: Lessons From The Holocaust” (The Wordsmithy, LLC 2009) discuss how this type of thinking dehumanizes everyone and how this thought process can and often leads to the final step, because killing the “other” is not murder, it’s the right thing to do.

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More than 1,400 people attended two performances of “Hiding the Hellers” last week presented by Yavneh’s 80 graduating middle-school students. Based on the book “Clara’s Story,” by Holocaust survivor Clara Heller Isaacman as told to Joan Adess Grossman, the play told of the Heller family and their trials and tribulations as they faced almost certain death from betrayers and Nazis in Antwerp, Belgium. By the end of the play, the head of the family had been murdered by a trusted colleague in the diamond business and Heshie, the oldest son, had died in a forced labor camp very near the end of the war.

The play was preceded by a traditional Holocaust candlelighting ceremony with three generations of survivor families and a double recitation of the El Moleh Rachamim prayer — one for the Torah the school rescued from the Nazi warehouses in Prague and one for the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust.

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Down Under, in Melbourne, Australia, at the Yeshiva Beth Rivkah Colleges, there’s a learning revolution going on. Teachers at the K-12 school are using high tech response systems – very similar to the handheld devices developed for marketing focus groups and polling companies – to transform the at times tedious and regimental learning experience of yesteryear into a fun and interactive way to participate in class.

The results speak for themselves, says Chabad-Lubavitch Rabbi Moshe Loewenthal, director of Jewish Studies in the primary school there.

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Wednesday night, hundreds of them will gather at the center of campus as the folks at Jewish Jumbo, as the Chabad-Lubavitch center is affectionately known, celebrate the Festival of Lights by lighting a giant Chanukah menorah with the assistance of University President Lawrence Bacow.
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BY JEANETTE FRIEDMAN

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

COMMENTARY

About a week before I covered the Clinton Global Initiative in Manhattan, I read the galley proofs for Program or be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age by Douglas Rushkoff. Rushkoff has written lots of books about how our lives are affected by computers and marketing, corporations and the media, and he’s invented words we now use all the time. But instead of just re-writing the material from Wikipedia, you can read all about him here. His new book focuses on how computers and smartphones have changed our lives and what we have to do to make those tools work for us, so that we aren’t used by them.

But in a more subtle way, it is also about weapons of mass distraction — if we are all distracted by all the things we are doing on our computers and phones, we will be too busy to notice how America has fallen by the wayside. We may not realize until it’s too late that we have turned ourselves into a nation of ignoramuses — and it is just one of the issues Rushkoff talks about, issues that were significantly related to issues addressed last week at CGI.

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1,950 private/public commitments will help 300 million people over ten years

BY JEANETTE FRIEDMAN

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

While STAR magazine and other tabloids touted the confessions of a bimbo who said she got it on with Ashton Kutcher, and predicted the end of his marriage to Demi Moore, Kutcher and Moore were at the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) in Manhattan, where they formally announced their campaign to end sex trafficking in the United States. “Real Men Don’t Buy Girls” is their message, and Kutcher told American men to get off their asses and do something. One in five American men buy sex, and 75% of the women in the trade are enslaved by their pimps. The average age of entry is 13, and it is not done by choice.

Kutcher told a packed house that Tuesday marked the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. While most Americans assumed slavery was over and done, he said, there are more people enslaved now than ever before in human history — 27,000,000 — most of them sex slaves, with 80% of them women and girls. In the United States alone, he noted, there are 1,000,000 sex slaves, one third of them children under 15, many of them stolen off the streets. He and others on the panel described a number of heartbreaking cases. You can watch the panel discussion here.

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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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Ali Shahata-author of “Demystifying Islam”, Jeanette Friedman & Chuck Dicaro

by Rebecca Boroson

We don’t want to shame anyone, so we won’t name names, but certain people should be ashamed. They have been using — or rather, misusing — the Holocaust, in one case as child’s play and in another (no doubt in many others) to win an election. But think of the original meaning of the word “holocaust”: “great or total destruction by fire, a conflagration.” We must not trivialize the “great destruction” of European Jewry. That is disrespectful to the murdered millions and to those who survived to live as witnesses. It is hurtful to their heirs, who are, in effect, klal Yisrael. It is damaging to the historical record and the pursuit of truth.

And yet some Jews do it, whether thoughtlessly, which we deplore, or intentionally, which we detest.

In the first instance, we’ve just learned that a certain Jewish federation — not in our circulation area, we’re glad to say — held a truly tasteless activity for children in grades four through six at a Jewish day school: building a model of the Warsaw Ghetto with Legos, those plastic blocks that can click together to form any number of edifices. We’ve seen Lego menorahs and Lego models of Jerusalem, which compel our admiration, but the only emotion a Lego ghetto compels is disgust.

A comment on www.jewschool.com points up the irony: “You know, when I think about the senseless slaughter of 10,000,000 innocent Jews, Roma, queers, political dissidents, and other undesirables, I think Lego. Because the sheer shock and stupendous horror of history’s most brutal, horrid genocide are so effectively communicated by children’s toys.”

This is not to say that in the hands of a gifted artist, Legos or other building blocks might not be used to communicate the horror or, perhaps, the banality of evil, in Hannah Arendt’s pointed phrase. But please — not as a “fun” school project.

As for the second instance, one of the most unpleasant political ads we’ve seen in this most unpleasant election season included a candidate’s photograph with Elie Wiesel, a Nobel peace laureate and respected Holocaust witness and chronicler. The clear implication was that Wiesel had endorsed the candidate and that Jews, therefore, should vote for him.

It’s unlikely that Wiesel would endorse any candidate, so we’ve put in a call to Wiesel’s office to ask what he thought of the ad and are waiting for a response.

Meanwhile, dear readers, while we got our usual boost out of voting amid other civic-minded people at the polls, we are glad to see the end of this election season. No doubt you are, too. RKB

RIVER EDGE – Students at the Rosenbaum Yeshiva of North Jersey were thrilled on Monday morning when they headed back to classes after the Rosh HaShanah break. The mitzvah scale in the main concourse, the centerpiece of a “Tip the Scale” program that teaches the children from grades one through eight about good deeds, repentance, and prayer, was weighed down by so many good deeds. For weeks, beginning in Elul, students had been loading the good deeds they’d done unto the scale, and the scale was tipped in their favor. The scale is the symbol of Tishrei, the month where God decides who is inscribed in the book of life, and people are urged to do a “din ve cheshbon” — an examination of their lives during the previous year, a balancing of the accounts, so to speak.

On Monday, just one day after Rosh HaShanah, the scale could have been tilted in the wrong direction! Jealousy, disrespect, arguing, and improper speech had appeared in big bold letters on the opposite side of the scale. Students did more mitzvot — good deeds — to bring things into balance.

Boys in the first grade at Rosenbaum Yeshiva of North Jersey are proud of the mitzvot they and their schoolmates have done to help “tip the scale.”

“The Tip the Scale” project was the brainstorm of school principal for Judaic studies, Rabbi Harvey Horn, who was inspired by a sermon given by Rabbi Dovid Feinstein of Mesivta Tifereth Jerusalem on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. In that address, Feinstein had offered concrete examples of how to incorporate teshuvah, tefillah, and tzedakah (repentance, prayer, and charity) into daily life, and Horn realized that among these activities were age-appropriate actions that could benefit all the students at RYNJ.

With character-building a critical issue at this time of year, each child was asked to incorporate one extra good deed into his or her daily routine. Parents were asked to send in signed mitzvah cards attesting to their children’s mitzvot. As the children dropped the cards into the baskets on the scale, the weight of their good deeds was interpreted as bringing the world back into harmony.

The scale was built by Dovid Nulman, a music teacher at the school. The boys in Honny Aron’s first-grade class made the paper flowers that decorated the “Good Deed” basket on the scale.

In addition to good deeds, students were also asked to express how they could improve or change certain character traits and to describe acts of chesed (kindness). The question posed to all the students was, “What are you doing to tip the scale?”

Eli Sadeck’s act of kindness was truly magnanimous. On Monday night, he went to the Mets game and caught one of the balls that popped into the stands. When his sister was upset because she didn’t have one, he presented her with his prize. Ezra Friedman, who recycles, says that since Rosh HaShanah is the Earth’s birthday, he is really helping out. Mordechai Glatter who practices giving charity via Tomchei Shabbat, which feeds the poor on Shabbat, hopes that everyone will have a sweet year with the sweet packages he distributes.

Horn saw Tip the Scale as a meaningful and educational project that was good for all age groups. “I thought the entire school could be concentrating on this project all at once, making it a more serious undertaking, with the older children setting examples for the younger children to see, as the older children also dropped cards in the basket. Even the teachers were dropping cards in the mitzvot basket as they accepted taking mitzvot upon themselves as well.”

Horn said, “During the month of Elul we wanted the children to think positive and to start doing acts of chesed to each other. Our goal for them was to enter Rosh HaShanah in a positive mode, feeling that they were on the right path to tipping the scales in honor of a good year. When they entered the building on Monday and saw the scale tipped in such a favorable way, it made them feel very good about themselves and the way they davened on Rosh HaShanah. I want them to feel that the time that they spent in shul was a terrific start and that by sitting and trying to daven and have kavannah [serious intent], they were off and running in the right direction. In fact, many students brought in tons of mitzvah cards on Monday that stated how nicely they davened.”

Until Yom Kippur, RYNJ teachers will encourage their students to keep up the good work. They have been emphasizing that each mitzvah a Jew does has a positive effect on the person doing it and sets an example that affects others.

Said the rabbi, “At our ‘kick-off’ assemblies, we emphasized the concept of achdut [unity] and kiddush haShem (sanctifying God’s name); that our positive actions have an effect on the entire people of Israel; that one mitzvah leads to another, and by doing mitzvot, we set an example for all peoples to look up to. I believe the purpose of Jewish education is kiddush HaShem, to create students who will internalize and be role models of true derech eretz [respect]. This has always been a goal of our yeshiva.”