Nov 10
Jeanette Friedmanhistory, people
By JF NJS
Women saved Moses from certain death. Without Moses, there would have been no Exodus (no Exodus, no Sinai; no Sinai, no Judaism). Yet in the traditional Haggadah, these women are ignored.-
To rectify that omission, modern Jewish women will honor these heroines, and other outstanding Jewish women, at the annual JCC on the Palisades Women’s Seder on March 20.
Dr. Vivian Kanig, founder of the Jewish Women’s Agenda and one of the “Four Cups” honorees at this year’s Seder, founded the service eight years ago with Leah Richter, chair of the JCC’s Jewish Women’s Connection, following the success of Ma’ayan’s Women’s Seders in Manhattan.
Since the 1970s, the Jewish feminist movement has been struggling with the Passover story and the Seder. Many women have created rituals — notably, the Cup of Miriam ceremony and text additions — to bring important women-to the fore.-
Women’s Seders, initially greeted with skepticism, have evolved over the years. They are traditionally celebrated two weeks before the actual holiday, so as not to interfere with preparations at home.
In a traditional Seder, the only line in the service that refers to women appears in the story of the Four Sons, where it says, “Aht psach lo.” “You (feminine) must teach him,” meaning that a mother must teach her children about both Judaism and the Passover story.
According to Women’s Seder organizers, a woman’s place at the Seder table today is what she makes it, and it can be enhanced by adopting rituals that incorporate the role of women in Jewish history into her own family’s traditions.
The intent of the Jewish Women’s Connection is to bring women — excluded from the text — back to life at the Women’s Seder.
Says Richter, “[Women] are not adjuncts to Jewish history: They are key players who have been ignored, and they deserve their place in the spotlight.”
Richter asks, “How many women have heard of Yocheved, Miriam, Shifra, Puah, and Batya? All of them had important parts to play, so we decided to provide a venue in northern New Jersey where women could take part in their own seder to learn about these women and special rituals. It gives them a chance to incorporate what they like into their own family traditions.”
Each participant in the Women’s Seder will receive the newly revised Women’s Haggadah, edited by Phyllis Gordon-Brecker, Judy Chessler, Harriet Cohen, June Kane, and Toby Lubin Shifre — along with Richter and Rabbi Adina Lewittes of Cong. Sha’ar in Tenafly, who will lead the Seder. Other women have been chosen to read specific sections of the service, and each of the traditional four cups of wine has been assigned to an honoree.
Says Lewittes, “When our women gather, we are there to learn about our own experiences and history and to seek ways to use that to bring healing and redemption to ourselves, our families, and the world around us. This is an opportunity for the women to go beyond themselves and the borders that normally confine them spiritually, and it inspires [them] to see themselves as agents of change and hope.”
This year’s honorees are Dr. Vivian Kanig, a founder of the JCC’s Women’s Seder; Barbara Berman Dobkin and Eve Landau of Ma’ayan, who will share one of the four cups; the late Betty Friedan, and Ruth Warshauer, a founder of-Jewish Women’s Agenda.
The first Women’s Seder at the JCC in Tenafly attracted 150 women and was co-sponsored by the local branch of the National Council of Jewish Women.- By the third year, there were 300 participants. Now the numbers have dropped, because, as Richter explains, “Emulation is the sincerest form of flattery.”-
The organizers are thrilled that women in different communities across the area have created other venues where they, too, can learn about women’s seminal roles in the Passover story. NCJW continues to co-sponsor the Seder in Tenafly and now also co-sponsors a seder at the JCC in Washington Township.
________________________________________
The myth of the Seder orange
One thing you will not see on the Seder plate at the Women’s Seder at the JCC is an orange.- The by-now-apocryphal story goes something like this: A woman (ostensibly Susannah Herschel, the Jewish feminist and scholar) was speaking from the bima (pulpit) in a synagogue, when a man shouted, “A woman belongs on a bima like an orange belongs on a Seder plate.”
Wanting to add feminist rituals to the family tradition, years ago,-I called Dr. Herschel and asked about the story behind the orange. What she told me was a very different tale.
She had once been invited to a lesbian Seder at Oberlin College. There, the women placed a bread crust on the Seder plate to describe their exclusion from-the mainstream,-an act-Herschel-found unacceptable. But it got her thinking about the different, marginalized people and the “varying-groups”- who comprise the Jewish nation. In particular, she thought about widows and divorcees who are rarely invited to-lifecycle events and major Jewish holiday get-togethers, like the Seder service. She realized that the Jewish nation is like an orange, with many sections creating the whole. That’s when she began putting an orange on her Seder plate.
The explanation of “many creating the whole” is offered, and the orange is broken up, blessed (using “borey pri ha etz” — Creator of the fruit of the tree), and distributed just before the main meal, after the “koreych,” the sandwich of bitter herbs, is served.
Nov 10
Jeanette Friedmanhistory
A blessed voyager among the damned
by jf njjs
A “voyage of the damned” has gone down in history as one of the most despicable acts of political cruelty just before the second World War. One of the passengers on that journey was Fred Buff, who was 18 years old when he and 936 other passengers set sail on the SS St. Louis from Hamburg and headed for Havana on May 13, 1939. None of them knew they were about to become pawns in world politics and that their story would become a symbol of the greed, apathy, callousness, hatred, and xenophobia that so characterized the Holocaust.
Fred Buff, inset, was a passenger on the SS St. Louis, here surrounded by smaller vessels in the port of Havana.
The passengers had boarded the ship amid the worsening conditions for Jews in Germany in an attempt to save their lives. But when the ship attempted to dock in Havana, where Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and his Fascist legions were in control, it was turned back. Buff is one of the lucky ones who managed to survive what happened once the ship returned to Europe.
Today, at 85, Buff, who lives in Paramus, travels from group to group and school to school to tell his story, making history personal. And since his early life played itself out against the backdrop of Hitler’s rise to power, he is able to bring the message of the futility of hatred home, especially when he talks to teens.
Buff is somewhat bemused about his popularity, but as one of the few who survived the St. Louis episode, he is living history and therefore much in demand. “When people found out I was on the St. Louis, they got hold of my phone number, and the calls started coming in,” he said in an interview. “That happened about three years ago, and since then I’ve spoken to classes in at least 20 school districts. Then one of the program directors at [the Paramus chapter of] Hadassah asked me to speak on Yom HaShoah,” which he did on Monday, April 17.
Buff was born in 1921 to a well-to-do, reasonably observant family in Krumbach, Germany, a town with 15 Jewish families among a population of about 4,500. When the Nazis took control in 1933, things became progressively worse for the town’s few Jews. His father was forced to sell his upholstery business for a fraction of its worth under Aryanization laws.
Buff was the only Jewish student who attended the regional high school in Ulm. By the time he graduated, no one was permitted to speak to him. Following Kristallnacht, Nov. 9-10, 1938, his father was arrested and incarcerated in the Dachau concentration camp for a month.
“That night,” said Buff of Kristallnacht, “everyone realized it was the beginning of the end, so my parents applied for visas. Family members had lived in the States since before the first World War. That fact, and a payment in American dollars, got me a visa and a berth on the St. Louis.” Fortuitously, his younger sister and parents left after he did, via Italy, and made it to New York long before him.
On May 28, 1939, people behind the scenes attempted to negotiate the St. Louis passengers’ freedom. The Cubans allowed a handful to disembark, consigning the rest to their fate. As the ship floated close enough to American shores to see the lights of Miami, the U.S. Coast Guard patrolled the waters so that no one could jump ship. Pleas to President Roosevelt and the State Department were ignored or rebuffed. Though the American public, at least in the media, seemed to empathize with the plight of the refugees, immigration quotas had been met, and no one was about to let anyone else into the country. A Fortune magazine poll at the time indicated that 83 percent of Americans opposed relaxing restrictions on immigration. At that same time, a bill in Congress, set to rescue 20,000 Jewish children, was allowed to die in committee. America’s gates were effectively locked.
After failing with Cuba, officials of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee negotiated landing permits for England, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France. Buff-managed to get-off in Antwerp and then out of Belgium to England, shortly before Hitler invaded. A few weeks later he boarded a British ship and joined the rest of his family in New York. For that, he is eternally grateful.
“Most of those sent back died in the Holocaust, and there are lessons to be learned from that. It’s important that we know what happened and that young people understand why you need to care about your neighbors, why they need to be involved in the political process. They need to know why they have to prevent things like that from ever happening again. That’s why we know we have to speak out on Sudan.”
Sep 27
Jeanette Friedmanhistory, Holocaust
By Jeanette Friedman | Published 09/21/2006
Dr. Eva Fogelman, a pioneer in the Second Generation of Children of Holocaust Survivors movement in the United States (often called the 2Gs), came to the Living Room in Teaneck last week to initiate discussions about what it means to be a member of the second generation in 2006. The meeting was co-sponsored by Jewish Family Services of Bergen County and the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants. This movement began in the mid-’70s, when thousands of young adults whose parents survived the Holocaust became aware of their common family histories.
Fogelman showed a clip of her 1984 award-winning film for PBS, “Breaking the Silence: The Generation After the Holocaust,” about people coming to grips with being the children of those who survived the Shoah.
She explained that many 2Gs unwittingly experience a mourning process; it starts with shock as they confront the enormity of what their parents endured. Then there is a period of denial that is broken by a confrontation of the losses, which inevitably evokes emotional turmoil that needs to be channeled into a search for meaning. Many 2Gs saw that their parents were shunned when they arrived in their new homelands — even in Israel, Fogelman said. People thought they were mentally ill, or otherwise warped by their experiences.
But what about the mental health of the 2Gs? According to Fogelman and others, the percentage of psychopathology among 2Gs is the same as for any cohort. In fact, according to many studies (more than 150 doctoral dissertations have been written about the 2Gs) they are even more aware of reality and better adjusted than many of their American peers. They are also said to be empathic. Most were named after someone who was killed; they question how to best communicate with their parents about the past, and their identities are influenced by their parents’ survival.
Despite the movement’s being 30 years old, some 2Gs are just overcoming denial and begin to confront their family histories to start the search for their own identities. Those who were in the first groups used them to discover their commonalities and differences, their strengths and weaknesses, to heal themselves and find a meaningful way by which to remember the dead.
Some 2Gs continue to stay in these specific groups or organizations because they have become extended families. Others moved on to other organizations and groups to get involved in Holocaust education, commemoration, human rights work, or engaging in cultural endeavors that focus on consciousness-raising, or they rebuild destroyed Jewish culture by studying Jewish texts, building Jewish communities, living in Israel, and raising the next generation of committed Jews.
In every group with a history of victimization, a small percentage, anywhere from 10 to 20 percent, will be “trapped” in recreating situations where they are victimized even when they are not, and groups and organizations can be an antidote to repeating the cycle of victimhood, said Fogelman.
To this end, according to Dr. Jonathan Garfinkle, JFS associate executive director, his organization “is committed to hosting an ongoing group for members of the second generation and monthly discussion groups on such topics as communicating with their own children, coping with elderly survivor parents, end-of-life issues, Jewish identity after Auschwitz, and social action.
“These kinds of discussions,” said Garfinkle, “will help those who are just beginning to confront these issues for the first time in their lives.”
For more information about these groups, which will be free, call Rabbi Amy Bolton at JFS, (201) 837-9090.
Sep 27
Jeanette Friedmanhistory, local stories/community
By Jeanette Friedman | Published 09/21/2006 Jewish Standard
Film records quest and journey
The Partziver rebbitzen, Yita Rabinowich, who was trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto, collected Torah scrolls, and kept them on the table in her dining room.
They were piled high, and when asked what would happen to them, said that whatever would happen to her, would happen to them. She did not survive the war, and no one knows what happened to the scrolls.
Torah
Fast forward to summer 2005. Marie and Harley Lippman are planning their daughter’s bat mitzvah. Her name is Juliet and she and her family wanted to add special meaning to her lifecycle event and were casting around for ideas. They read an article about Israeli teenage girls who were in Poland and discovered a street peddler selling paper dolls, dolls he called “Jew dolls.” When the girls looked closely, they saw the dolls were made from scraps taken from a Torah. They asked the peddler where he got them, and he directed them to his uncle, who had found a scroll in the house of a Jew who “disappeared in the war.” The girls bought what was left of the Torah, managed to get it to Israel, restored it, and presented it to a synagogue in Jerusalem.
“That,” said Harley recently, “is the story that inspired us.”
The Lippmans, who live in New York City, found Rabbi Adina Lewittes, a Bergen County rabbi, who helped them locate a reparable Torah scroll through a broker on the Lower East Side. The scroll they chose had been written sometime in the 1870s in Strasbourg, France, and was sponsored by a wealthy Polish family. Juliet’s grandparents had come to the states from Poland at the turn of the 20th century, Her father had been a Fulbright scholar in Poland for two years in the late ’70s, and her mother is French, so there were links between the past and present. The family hired Ellen Friedland and Curt Fissel of Jem/Glo Productions, which is based in Bergen County, to look into the Torah’s provenance and film the entire experience of repairing and donating the Torah in Poland for them.
“When we planned the Hachnosat Sefer Torah [the welcoming of a Torah to a congregation, a festival that resembles a wedding in many ways], we expected a small crowd to celebrate our simcha with singing and dancing in the streets of Warsaw. Instead there was a miracle, because more than 170 Israel Defense Forces officers who happened to be in Warsaw joined us in our jubilation. We danced through the city’s main park, an area that had been off limits to Jews during the Holocaust, and our event took place on the anniversary of the day that Jorgen Stroop told Hitler Warsaw was Judenrein and that the ghetto was destroyed. The irony of our celebration was not lost on anyone!”
The Jem/Glo film, which began as a 17-minute film for the family, was increased to 28 minutes and aired last week on national PBS as “A Torah Returns to Poland.” Jem/Glo director Ellen Friedland said in an interview, “It grew legs. The film was received enthusiastically by the people with whom the Lippmans shared it, and earned a Summit Award and a silver Telly Award. We all realized the subject had an impact on those beyond immediate family and friends, so we expanded it and went looking for additional information.”
Here’s what Friedland and Fissel discovered on their hunt: “We knew from the spindles that the Torah was written in 1876 in Strasbourg by a scribe named Avraham Schwab and commissioned by a couple named Avraham Zev and Beila Schwab and their six children; we also knew from the scribe on the Lower East Side that it had been found in Poland and brought to New York.
Schwab was buried in the main Jewish cemetery in Strasbourg 13 years after the Torah was written. By studying the history of Alsace, we discovered that the Schwabs’ descendants had disappeared, though they would almost certainly have lived in the vicinity of the scribe and that the Torah would have served the local community.
“All the rabbis and scholars in Strasbourg and Poland agreed that the only imaginable way the Torah would have landed in Poland was by accompanying its community on a deportation to Auschwitz during the Holocaust. The fact that this Torah had survived when its community members had not seemed to us to multiply in spiritual value the initial tzedakah of Harley and Marie Lippman in donating it to a living and needy Jewish community.”
Friedland and Fissel, who have recorded many family journeys to Europe to trace roots, say this story is different from most of the stories they’ve covered.
Fissel told the Standard: “It is significant that the Lippmans purchased the Torah. But unlike other folks who purchase and donate Torahs, they did not send it alone on a plane to Poland; they accompanied it as if it were a family member. They spent several days meeting Jewish community members in Poland and visiting community institutions, and they were center stage, surrounded by 170 members of the IDF visiting the country at that time as well. In addition, many members of the Jewish community from around all of Poland came to join them as they marched and danced through the streets of Warsaw to dedicate the Torah and give it back to a European Jewish community.”
Said Friedland, “What touched us so deeply about this one was the unique bridge the Lippman family built to connect the Jewish past with the Jewish present and future to the redeveloping Jewish community of Poland, the American Jewish community, and the Israeli community. Imagine all the potential for creating good will around the world if others take their lead!”
The documentary is being distributed by the National Educational Telecommunications Association to PBS stations around the United States. While stations often need several months of advance notice of a program for scheduling purposes, within six weeks it was aired on 32 percent of PBS markets, and it is likely to be broadcast around Chanukah.
“The film will be shown in Israel in February 2007 with Hebrew subtitles,” Friedland said, “and the family will have a reunion with many of the soldiers who had joined us in Warsaw.”
Said Juliet, the bat mitzvah girl, “I felt good about being able to give something so important back to the community. My friends thought it was a good idea and was more meaningful than just a party because it related to my Jewish heritage.”
Jul 30
Jeanette Friedmanhistory, people
Midas Ha Din: Jewish Blame
By Jeanette Friedman
I am not going to bother writing down the quotes and naming sources. Every reader of Jewish newspapers and blogs, and just about everyone who gets into a discussion about the current situation in the Middle East seems to be blaming the Jews, including the Jews.
What this reminds me of is the way my relatives, Rabbi Joel Teitlebaum, the Satmar Rebbe, and my uncle’s father-in-law, the Minchas Elazar, the Wonder Rabbi of Munkacs, both blamed the Zionists for the Holocaust. It’s like the haredi thinking today: that the Holocaust was a punishment on the Jews for believing in the Enlightenment, for eating ham in the rebbe’s courtyard on Yom Kippur—as if Hitler didn’t have the idea, regardless of the apostates, the Reform movement, or the Zionists.
The tune today is the same, only the lyrics are different. I hear constant accusations against Ehud Barak, the former Prime Minister of Israel, and against Ehud Olmert, for pulling out of Southern Lebanon and Gaza, and thereby causing today’s “situation� (matzav). Sharon, they claim, was justly punished by being felled like a large oak tree. Perhaps thousands of martyrs in a new Masada would have placated all the armchair quarterbacks and self-styled strategic experts who decried the forcible eviction of an indefensible population. Imagine all those poor Gush Katif settlers, who were treated so abominably by their own, if they would still be there. This confrontation was coming, disengagement or not—and it has been years in the making.
It is time to face reality: Israel’s wars have not been about occupation. It’s about Jews being allowed to exist. And that is NOT permitted. On this one issue, Sunnis and Shiites are united: Jews need to be killed wherever they live.
Ehud Barak understood this very clearly. He knows the Arab mentality. In Taba, he knowingly called Arafat’s bluff. Don’t believe me? Ask Bill Clinton and Dennis Ross. They finally got Arafat’s number and wanted to prove it to the world, in order to negate Oslo. Barak always understood that this was about Israel’s existence, not occupation.
How do I know? One day in Jerusalem, I walked over and thanked the former Prime Minister for putting an end to eight years of the charah (crap) called Oslo. He gave me two thumbs up, and said one word in Hebrew: “Hayvant.� I got it.
Olmert, as well, knows he has no negotiating partners, despite the disingenuous pantomime staged for the world community. How does one deal with the likes of an Abu Mazen and his Holocaust denial, his thugs, and the PA presses as they continue to publish record numbers of Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion? Two weeks before the disengagement I challenged him to ask Abu Mazen if he still believed his doctoral thesis. “Yes or no,� I said, “and then you know who you are dealing with.� Olmert promised to send Abu Mazen my regards.
While the world community beat its “humanitarian� breasts and the Arab League jiggled around in its coin purse and eked out a few charitable pennies, Iran, Syria and Al Queda have all been “investing� in the region while the impoverished Palestinians destroyed the $14 million greenhouses that were supposed to provide them with a living. Arms and heroin sales—as well as petrodollars and market manipulation— are all in play. So are China and North Korea, not to mention Russia and the U.S. The Middle East is the world’s battleground, and right now we will find out once and for all what lessons the people and leaders of the world learned from the political pusillanimity and appeasement that became the Holocaust.
This war wasn’t caused by the Jews, no matter what the Kachniks, righties, haredim, socialist lefties and antisemites say. (Just ask Mel Gibson, who rants “F**n’ Jews. They’re responsible for all the wars in the world.�) This war is not a punishment from God. It is a war created by very skilled Jew haters who have been using Hitlerian propaganda methods since 1939 to poison the lifeblood of their own children with hatred against the infidel and calling for the destruction of the Jewish people, Hindus, Christians, Bahai and others everywhere on God’s green Earth.
Today the Israelis are protecting the world’s infidels from the Islamofascists, and all the spin doctors and mavens, please do the world a favor, just shut up and let them do the job. Remember, the people who chose to surround themselves with terrorists had options…and they chose hatred, violence, war and death. Israel is trying to stop it and let them know this will not stand.
But we know what will happen. The world condemns Israel for wiping out terrorists and will wait for the fancy ghetto called Israel to go up in flames and claim another 6,000,000. Those survivors of the Holocaust who haven’t already died will not be spared the vision of knowing that all of their suffering and teaching was in vain, and that everything they built will once again be destroyed because good people will do nothing to stop the terror and the hate and will stand idly by with folded arms, as Hamas, Al Queda, Iran, Syria and Hezbollah claim victory because of the stupidity of the world.
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