Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By simmons on July 16, 2017

The Israeli chief rabbinate says that its list of foreign rabbis has been misconstrued, and that the list does not imply that those rabbis cannot be trusted to vouch for the Jewish identities of their followers.

Last Saturday, JTA reported on a list of some 160 rabbis whose efforts to confirm the Jewish identities of immigrants were rejected by Israels charedi-dominated chief rabbinate. In order to get married in Israel, immigrants must provide the rabbinate proof of their Jewish identity, often in the form of a letter from a rabbi in their home community.

Rabbis from 24 countries, including the United States and Canada, are on the list. In addition to Reform and Conservative rabbis, the list includes several Orthodox leaders. Itim, the Israeli organization that obtained the list, called it a blacklist.

On Tuesday, three days after the list was released, Moshe Dagan, the rabbinates director-general, said that the characterization of it as a blacklist is misleading. In a letter to the Orthodox Rabbinical Council of America, Dagan wrote that the proof-of-Judaism letters were rejected for a range of reasons, and that the list questioned the documentation, not the individual rabbis. Dagan added that these rejections sometimes were temporary.

The list that was publicized is not a list of unrecognized/unauthorized rabbis, Dagan wrote in Hebrew. Rather, he continued, it is a list of rabbis whose letters about marriage were not recognized by the personal status and conversion division of the chief rabbinate of Israel for whatever reason.

Even though the list contained only the rabbis names and did not have any information about any documentation, Dagan wrote in bold type that it is the documents that were presented which are unrecognized, not the rabbis.

He added that I am pained by the anguish caused to the respected rabbis who appear on the list, and will do everything I can to minimize the damage as much as possible and to take care that errors of this kind will not be repeated.

Itims director, Rabbi Seth Farber, who received the list in an email correspondence with the chief rabbinate, called Dagans clarification doublespeak because the list was of rabbis names, not problems with documentation.

The letters were signed by rabbis, he said. If the problem was the documents, why did the rabbinate send me a list of rabbis names? If the problem was the documents, why didnt they just try to clear the documents instead of writing no, unacceptable.

The list contains the names of rabbis whose letters the rabbinate rejected during 2016. Of 66 U.S. rabbis included on the list, at least one-fifth are Orthodox, while almost all of the rest are Reform or Conservative. Among the Orthodox are Avi Weiss, the liberal Orthodox rabbi from Riverdale, and Yehoshua Fass, the executive director of Nefesh BNefesh, a group that encourages and facilitates American immigration to Israel.

Another of the rabbis on that list is Baruch Goodman, who directs the Chabad House at Rutgers University. The other rabbi from this region is Alberto (Baruch) Zeilicovich, who heads a Conservative shul in Fair Lawn, Temple Beth Sholom.

In a separate letter sent on Monday, Israeli Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi David Laus office apologized to Fass for his inclusion. In the letter to Fass, Laus senior aide reiterated that Lau did not know of the list before its publication, and that it does not imply rejection of the rabbis themselves.

[The lists] intention was not to invalidate rabbis, God forbid, but rather [to invalidate] letters that raised doubts and questions, wrote Rabbi Rafael Frank, the aide. The letter, also in Hebrew, said Lau very much appreciates Fass work.

The publication of the list comes on the heels of a clash between American Jewish leaders and the chief rabbinate over how to determine Jewish identity. In June, Israels Cabinet advanced a bill that would give the chief rabbinate authority over all official Jewish conversions within Israel. Following an outcry from Jewish leaders in America, the bill was shelved for six months.

The chief rabbinates distrust of some Orthodox rabbis outside Israel was evident last year, when it omitted several prominent Orthodox figures from a list of rabbis it trusts to confirm the authenticity of Jewish conversions. The rabbinate also has rejected the validity of conversions performed by prominent Orthodox rabbis in New York City and Chicago.

JTA Wire Service

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Chief rabbinate says rabbi list is not blacklist - The Jewish Standard

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Posted By simmons on July 15, 2017

Throughout my years in Jewish outreach I have heard the phrase Dont judge Judaism by the Jews utilized numerous times in response to bad behavior exhibited by religious Jews. I have even employed the expression myself once in awhile. The problem? The words have always rung somewhat hollow in my ears. For as much as there lies some philosophical truth in this expression (after all, it is not necessarily the fault of a religious system when its adherents make sinful choices of their own free will), the dynamics of human cognition perceive it quite differently. Jews, and non-Jews for that matter, judge Judaism by the actions of Jews!

Maurice Glazer, a savvy, active 77 year-old man I met earlier this year, shared with me his story of adolescent Jewish disenchantment, a story that is unfortunately not uncommon, and a disillusionment that finds its roots, not surprisingly, in the actions of Jews, not Judaism.

Maurice, or Morey, as he is known to his friends, loved his Yiddishkeit as a young boy. He diligently studied his Jewish studies, even tutoring others as he got older, and imagined that rabbinic or cantorial school might be in his future. Like most other boys nearing bar mitzvah age, Morey began preparing his readings many months before his date with Jewish manhood, and had his Torah portion ready on the early side. Unfortunately, the familys synagogue informed the Glazers that there was a last minute hiccup with their reserved bar mitzvah date. A wealthy family had recently moved to town and they wanted Moreys bar mitzvah date for their twins, even offering the synagogue a hefty donation of many thousands of dollars for the privilege.

The family was asked if they would share the date and split the portion in three to accommodate all three youngsters. When it became evident that Morey wasnt open to giving up on the leining (Torah recitation) that he had already prepared, it was made clear to the family that the synagogue wasnt really asking. The shul needed the money and that was that. Morey ended up finding another synagogue for his bar mitzvah, but the message from his childhood synagogue rang clear to him Judaism wasnt about lofty ethical ideals, or rapturous prayer. It was, as Morey would emotionally share with me some fifty five years after the fact, all about the money.

The rest of Moreys life reads like many future Jewish American family assimilation narratives. He had three biological children, only one of whom received a bar/bat mitzvah, and none of whom married Jewish, and three stepchildren, only one of whom married Jewish. Morey sees the bar mitzvah debacle as the beginning of the end of his Jewish love affair, and the distant source of his childrens lack of investment in their familial religion. As Morey puts it, I tended not to be strong enough to force them back into the circle of Judaism.

These days, Morey involves himself with all sorts of Jewish philanthropic causes, regarding these good deeds as a way of making up for his past (he also asked that I use his real name for this article to warn others of the dangers of not educating ones children in their heritage at a younger age).

Morey, like most others, wouldnt or couldnt distinguish between Judaism and Jews. If Jewish representatives could put money over principle, then the system they represented wasnt worth his time or his commitment.

I have also found that the opposite is true. Whereas I had quietly hoped that most baalei teshuva (newly observant Jews) found themselves primarily aroused by the search for truth and a recognition of the Torahs G-dly nature (call it the search for empirical truth), the reality, as I would quickly discover, is that the positive experiences that they encounter with observant Jews and their Jewish practice are of central influence (call it experiential truth). Delicious cholent at a Shabbos table holding greater sway than lengthy late night conversations on the historicity of the Sinai revelation (Its worth noting that this is all the more understandable in light of recent discoveries in neuroscience that find the hugely significant part played by emotion in decision making).

I believe that it is for this reason that the Torah is so concerned with our public behavior. The sanctification of G-ds name, and I shall be sanctified amongst the Jewish people (Vayikra 22:32), certainly in contention for foremost positive commandment in the Torah, and the desecration of G-ds name, And you shall not profane my holy name (ibid), considered by Rabbi Akiva as a sin for which no repentance is available.

You see, even as we regard the Torah as the faithful transmission of the divine will from Sinai, and inasmuch as we consider ourselves on solid intellectual ground in this belief, it is not like an algebraic equation, mathematically impervious to all lines of questioning and skepticism. The Torah does require an element of faith, however small that may be.

And it is precisely because of this faith gap that the experiences we have with observant Jews makes all the difference in the world. A positive experience with a religious individual or community closes the faith gap and ignites that long dormant, yet ever-present spark of emuna (faith) found in every Jew, and a negative Jewish experience widens the gap and makes it all that much more difficult to find the way home.

The voice of the Almighty is described by the prophet Eliyahu not as a loud boom, but as a still small voice (Melachim 1 19:12). Its a voice that gets easily drowned out by the the many noises of life, all vying for our attention. Its a voice all that much more challenging to hear when youre not aware of its existence. Its a voice that many of our fellow Jews need help detecting. It behooves us to be the kind of people that lead the kinds of lives, both privately and publicly, that amplify G-ds voice, helping newcomers hear its sweet sound and make the leap of faith.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Forward.

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Don't Judge Judaism By The Jews The Forward - Forward

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Posted By simmons on July 15, 2017

Review: 'The Women's Balcony,' a film by Emil Ben-Shimon

3.5Overall Score

Using Orthodox Judaism as a jumping off point for a larger conversation about broader societal issues, Emil Ben-Shimons dramedy The Womens Balcony takes on a specific religious and cultural viewpoint to spin a politically loaded, deceptively secular yarn. On a passing scan, The Womens Balcony might seem to be about a battle between organized religious tradition and modern sexual equality, but the films gently unfolding narrative turns out to be a treatise against cults of personality in any and all forms. Its also highly entertaining, occasionally laugh out loud funny, and one of the most unassuming surprises of the summer.

The Mussayof synagogue in Jerusalem is preparing to celebrate the bar mitzvah of Osher, the young adult grandson of Ettie (Evelin Hagoel) and Zion (Igal Naor), two of the most well respected and liked members of their community. The joyous ceremony takes a turn for the worse when the balcony of the synagogue where the women sit separately from the men collapses, injuring several and leaving their rabbis wife in a coma. With the synagogue now in a dangerous state of disrepair and their rabbi suffering not only a great tragedy but also dealing with the onset of senility, the congregation is left wondering how they could rebuild.

The men of the synagogue think they have found a saviour in Rabbi David (Aviv Alush), a popular teacher at the congregations temporary prayer space in a local school. David agrees to help the people of Mussayof rebuild, but its almost immediately apparent to some members that the rabbi harbours extreme views on women. Blaming the balconys collapse on the immodesty of the synagogues female members, David starts by asking the men to make their women wear head scarves and then refuses to allocate any funds to the rebuilding of the womens balcony as a means of further punishing them. At first the women are skeptical and offended, but eventually, like their male counterparts, many find themselves swayed by the charismatic and fiery David. Ettie remains the only woman unconvinced thats Davids absolute and unwavering beliefs are hateful and backwards, and its up to her to turn the hearts and minds back towards a saner, less extremist viewpoint. Etties job convincing her fellow Jews to join her is easier said than done, especially when David makes great strides to exude absolute control over the synagogue.

Ben-Shimon directs The Womens Balcony with the quick pacing and stripped down staging of a great farce, and while some beats are more serious than hilarious, the intuitive and sharply worded screenplay from Shlomit Nehama provides plenty of dramatic and comedic material. Its a story that ebbs and flows: a life changing event brings about a rift between the women and the men, theres an initial showing of strength and support among the women, a rift develops between the women, and gradually everyone comes back together again. Its a straightforward story told from the perspective of perfectly matched adversaries, but Nehama and Shimon use the simplicity of their tale to give weight to larger issues just outside the pages of their text.

Its very easy to use a religion as a backdrop to talk about the nature of extremism because every religion that has ever graced humanity can count extremists among their ranks. The fact that The Womens Balcony is a relatively genteel and good natured story in no way dampens the insidious nature of the extremist villain at the films core. Alush makes sure that Rabbi David is eminently hateable while also using a great amount of charm and public speaking skill to showcase why people looking for religious guidance would want to follow him in the first place. Like most blowhards who cultivate a cult of personality around themselves and claim to be authorities in certain fields, Rabbi David is the type of person who talks a good game without ever rationalizing or attempting to explain his destructive talking points. His responses are straight out of the Donald Trump playbook, but he also seeks to rule with something arguably more insidious. David holds the fear of death and God over the heads of those he seeks to control, and if the people buying into his arguments are true believers then breaking the cycle of hate and mistrust that has been created becomes a cause worth rooting for, and Hagoels Ettie rises up as a genuine hero that comes from the same system of belief.

Theres something distinctly hopeful and timely that arises from The Womens Balcony beyond the storys overall themes of gender equality and the ineffectiveness of pious, aimless humans that are unwilling to think for themselves. Shimon and Nehama could have made an entertaining film with this same cast and similarly simple underlying premise, but the joy of watching The Womens Balcony comes from the larger questions brought up by the material.

If David is doing his job for the glory of God, then how much glory is too much? At what point does piety become self-serving, and how can a quest for admiration turn a noble profession into something hateful? How much power is too much power, and how careful should those wielding religious power tread around antiquated, outmoded beliefs? At what point is it the duty of a member of a religious or political group to stand up to the power structure of the organization they have fallen in line behind?

None of these questions are easily answerable, and not even a film as captivating as The Womens Balcony could possibly answer them all in a reasonable amount of time, but Sharons film is a sterling example of a work capable of raising such issues while still delivering a rousing piece of overall entertainment that audiences of any background will be able to immediately recognize and understand. It also does so without dumbing down the religious or societal aspects that make its story so unique. The characters also act with a uniform sense of realism despite their well rounded identities on paper. People dance around subjects based around politeness, a desire to maintain a sense of tradition and decorum, or sometimes out of a misplaced effort to not make things seem weird or awkward. The Womens Balcony is an unforced comedy that doesnt pull any ideological punches, and exactly the kind of nuanced crowd pleaser that audiences of all backgrounds have deserved for quite some time.

The Womens Balcony opens at TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto on Friday, July 14, 2017.

Check out the trailer for The Womens Balcony:

Aviv AlushEmil Ben-ShimonEvelin HagoelShlomit NehamaThe Women's Balcony

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Review: 'The Women's Balcony,' a film by Emil Ben-Shimon - The Gate - The GATE

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Posted By admin on July 15, 2017

In the aftermath of the drowning of Rabbi Shlomo Helbrans, leader of the Jewish Taliban cult Lev Tahor in Mexico, the ultra-Orthodox press in Israel has been rife with reports regarding the location of his funeral and burial, and speculation as to which member of the cult will succeed him as leader of the reclusive group of 40 families believed to be in a remote southern part of Mexico, weeks after fleeing Guatemala, where they had lived for three years.

One ultra-Orthodox website, Kikar HaShabbat, published a short but disturbing video account of life inside the cult recorded in stealth by a 14-year-old member, describing severe abuse at the hands of men in Lev Tahor.

The blurred video showed only the boys hat, chest and sidecurls as he gives his testimony from a bowed position in halting Yiddish. The website bleeped the names of the Lev Tahor members he named.

Ive lived in Lev Tahor for 12 and a half years and I want to tell you everything, the boy says. Ive been living in this hell that everyone claims is made up and untrue it is true. I want to tell you about the things that are happening in Lev Tahor.

I wrote down on a piece of paper all of the things I want to talk about, he continues. Bad things are happening here. First, I want to tell about XXXX. He is a bad teacher. He does bad things to children. He hits children, kicks them and does other bad things.

The boy continues to charge that another member of the group killed a baby and another man. He hits and kicks all of the children. He added that the men he named undressed me and beat me and kicked me many times. And did bad things to me many times. At first, I thought they were good Jews. But then I saw they were bad people.

Another ultra-Orthodox website, BHadrei Haredim, published an interview with a Philadelphia rabbi who said he was in touch with two Lev Tahor members in Mexico. He denied there wasabuse in the cult, saying only that they had a strict regime. The rabbi told the story of Helbrans death, saying that on Friday he was at a river and slipped, hit his head on a rock, was carried away by the current and lost consciousness, and that attempts by his followers to rescue him had been unsuccessful.

Feared Israeli intervention

The rabbi said Helbrans body was recovered by Mexican authorities and examined, but no autopsy was performed. Fearing that the Israeli government would intervene and bring Helbrans body back to Israel, the rabbi said, Lev Tahor members turned to the mayor of Guatemala City, where they had lived previously, asking him to request the release of the body from Mexico for burial in Guatemala. The rabbi said the entreaties had been successful and that Helbrans had been buried in Guatemala.

The group, the rabbi said, had only crossed the border to Mexico three weeks ago, after three years of living in multiple locations in Guatemala. They left, he said, because they feared apprehension by Israeli authorities. Families of Lev Tahor members have been pressuring the Israeli government for years to assist them in repatriating their relatives, claiming they are being drugged and abused, and that underage girls were regularly married off to older men. The group fled Canada three years ago, after authorities there investigated allegations that Lev Tahor was physically and sexually abusing children, and removed some of them from their homes.

A report in the Yeshiva World News said Helbrans would be succeeded as leader by Rabbi Meir Rosner, reportedly the head of Lev Tahors yeshiva.

In a 2014 story on the group in the Canadian press, a former Lev Tahor member charged that Rosner had taken his money, claiming that he wasnt capable of managing his own finances.

Another story, written the previous year, investigated the cults finances, and quoted Rosner vehemently denying that the millions of dollars flowing through the groups accounts went to line the pockets of its leadership while rank and file members lived in poverty. Two of Helbrans sons are with the group, while a third, Rabbi Natan Helbrans, remained in Canada with a breakaway faction. This week, an Israeli ultra-Orthodox website in Israel, Haredi 10, reported that Natan Helbrans followers were preparing to crown him as his fathers successor and invited members of the group in Mexico to abandon the leaders who were at his fathers side and come to Canada and accept his authority.

The younger Helbrans said he would rebuild the community on a more open, normal and successful model that would be less strict and open it to all those who seek God, indicating that while the group would remain strictly Orthodox he would do away with the Taliban-style, burka-like black robes worn by women that earned the group its nickname.

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Hasidic 'Jewish Taliban' Sect Accused By Teen Of 'Hell Is Real' Reign Of Terror - Forward

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Posted By simmons on July 15, 2017

July 14, 2017 by Gina Ravenscroft, Nigel Laing And Royston Ong, The Conversation Couples thinking about kids can be screened for genes that may cause disease in their offspring. Credit: Redd Angelo, Unsplash, CC BY-SA

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recently recommended obstetricians, gynaecologists and other related health care providers offer pre-pregnancy carrier screening for genetic diseases to all patients.

Pre-pregnancy carrier screening involves testing healthy adults for the presence of gene mutations that cause diseases that are not present in them, but if both parents have the same recessive gene, could eventuate in their children. This includes diseases such as cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophies.

Who are genetic carriers?

If both partners in a couple carry the same recessive disease, then the couple have a one in four chance of a child with that disease. Carrier couples may therefore have multiple affected children. Some recessive diseases are relatively mild but others are severe, including many that cause death at or shortly after birth.

Newton Morton, one of the founders of genetic epidemiology, estimated from population data as long ago as 1956 that each of us is a carrier of three to five lethal recessive mutations and this has been confirmed by more recent research. This means we are all carriers of something, but most of us are generally unaware of our carrier status unless we have an affected child.

Pre-pregnancy carrier screening

Historically, pre-pregnancy carrier screening programs have been tailored for specific population groups who are more likely to have a recessive disease. For example, the recessive brain condition Tay-Sachs disease, which is usually fatal in early childhood, has a high incidence in the Ashkenazi-Jewish community.

In 1969 it was discovered the loss of an enzyme (called hexosaminidase A) causes the disease. This led to the development of tests allowing carriers for Tay-Sachs disease to be identified. The first pre-pregnancy carrier screening programs in the Ashkenazi population followed in the 1970s. Since then the incidence of Tay-Sachs disease has reduced by more than 90%.

Other such targeted pre-pregnancy carrier screening programs exist in other parts of the world. For example in Mediterranean countries where there is a high rate of the recessive blood disease thalassaemia, pre-pregnancy carrier screening was offered and this also resulted in a reduction in the incidence of the disease.

Today, the country with the most comprehensive pre-pregnancy carrier screening program is Israel. It introduced a national program in 2003 and by 2015, the program was screening approximately 60,000 people annually for nearly 100 recessive conditions. The Israeli program is tailored to the different ethnic groups in the country, but also includes diseases common in all ethnic groups such as spinal muscular atrophy.

Diagnostic laboratories around the world are now using technology that can sequence multiple individuals for hundreds of disorders at once. This technology is used to diagnose many different types of genetic diseases and is more effective than standard diagnostic testing. It has also been investigated for carrier screening and can detect carriers of multiple recessive disorders.

Benefits

When pre-pregnancy carrier screening programs are introduced, they reduce death and disease associated with the screened diseases. They can save families from experiencing the tragedy of a child affected by a significant genetic disease. They also reduce the burden of recessive disease within the population as a whole.

Each recessive disease is rare but there are hundreds of recessive diseases and so collectively they have wide-ranging social and economic impacts. A study of 50 severe recessive diseases found their collective incidence to be greater than that of Down syndrome (one in 600 compared to one in 1,100).

So pre-pregnancy carrier screening programs that include many genetic diseases, as now recommended by the American College, would maximise knowledge of genetic risk for couples.

Limitations

When testing genes, some identified variations are definitely harmful while most are definitely harmless. But for some variations we can't be sure if they are harmful, and whether or not they will cause disease in any children.

And some mutations, called de novo mutations, arise spontaneously during the development of a child. These mutations cannot be detected by pre-pregnancy screening.

So while the risk of having an affected child is reduced by pre-pregnancy carrier screening, it is not eliminated.

There are no guarantees that pre-pregnancy screening will result in a healthy baby, but it will allow couples options to reduce the burden of disease associated with known disease-causing mutations.

Counselling is required before and after the test to explain the risks to couples.

There is little health risk from the test, no more than the risk associated with taking a blood sample. The cost may be prohibitive for many couples, though. While it depends on the number of genes screened, costs may be several hundred dollars per person.

Can and should we have testing in Australia?

A small number of targeted pre-pregnancy carrier screening programs have been in place in Australia for a number of years including for Ashkenazi populations, for individuals with a family history of various diseases, and in IVF clinics. In Victoria the Victorian Clinical Genetics Service offers private pre-pregnancy carrier screening.

Several Australian groups, such as the Australian Genomics Health Alliance, are researching ways to screen larger numbers of genes. It remains to be seen if Australian bodies will make similar recommendations to those in the US.

Explore further: ACOG recommends use of carrier screening before pregnancy

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What is pre-pregnancy carrier screening and should potential parents consider it? - Medical Xpress

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Posted By simmons on July 15, 2017

Rabbi David Lau, Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel, speaking in Berlin, Germany in 2013. (Sean Gallup/Getty)

Israel is and must continue to be a Jewish state, but does that mean it must be a religious state?

We pose this question because Israels religious bodies, and how they interpret Judaism, is causing some serious rifts in Diaspora relations. Fundamentally, these two communities are at odds: Judaism in Israel is overseen by an institution, the Rabbinate, that is formally associated with Orthodox Judaism. Diaspora Judaism, is pluralistic, encompassing a variety of denominations with no one denomination having much of a say of what happens in another.

How to reconcile these two approaches?

The ideal, it seems, would be if Israel could parallel developments in some European countries that are still very much Christian, but the Christian church has very little to almost no jurisdiction over peoples lives. For example, in England, the Anglican Church is led by the Queen and is the official religion of the state, but the only legal jurisdiction it seems to have is over the marriages and divorces of nobility. There, too, religious holidays are often public holidays, including some you may never have heard of, like Whitsun. And that Anglican Church does receive government support. Could that be a model for Israel? The only issue there and its a big one is that this type of religious secularism (hows that for an oxymoron) took centuries to develop, and Israel is only 69 years old.

Israel was founded on the Zionist dream: A state for Jews. Yet, with the way things are going, Israel is running into the danger of sending the message that its not a state for all Jews, but a theocracy. Thats not a message it can afford tosend.

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Israel: Jewish but not religious? - Intermountain Jewish News

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Posted By simmons on July 15, 2017

While the anti-Semites continue to spin their wheels trying to convince college student governments to adopt meaningless divestment resolutions and persuade rock stars to boycott Israel, the prime ministers of Israel andIndiaare having a lovefest and the worlds most populous democracy is signing contracts with Israel worth billions of dollars. What must be particularly galling to theBDSadvocates is that India was once a vigorous adherent to the Arab League boycott. The change in Indias posture toward Israel did not happen overnight.

India is one of the few countries whereanti-Semitismhas been non-existent. For decades, however, it was one of the leaders of the nonaligned countries in the United Nations, and pursued a hostile policy toward Israel in part out of fear of alienating the Arab and Muslim countries, as well as its 110 million Muslims citizens.

In 1988, India excluded Israel from the World Table Tennis Championships in New Delhi and, in 1990, three prominent Indian musicians were told not to travel to Israel and canceled plans to perform at the World Music Festival. That same year, four Israeli tennis players were denied visas to participate in a tournament after their entry fees had been accepted.

Indian policy slowly began to change in 1991. One of the first signs of a thaw came in June when seven Israelis and one Dutch tourist were kidnapped by Muslim terrorists in Srinagar, Kashmir. One 22-year-old Israeli was killed. The Indian government worked with Israel to secure the release of other Israelis who eventually escaped.

Still, on Nov. 26, Indias external affairs minister was quoted as saying ambassadors could not be exchanged until genuine progress was reached in Middle East peace talks. By this he meant Israel had withdrawn from the territories and allowed the creation of a Palestinian state. The IndianStatesmannewspaper called it a mindless pronouncement.

That same month, a delegation of the World Jewish Congress met Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao and asked him to upgrade Israels consular office in Bombay to an embassy. That office, established in the 1950s to help Indian Jews emigrate, was Israels only diplomatic post in India. By that time, approximately 35,000 Indian Jews were living in Israel and 6,000 remained in India.

Then, in December, India surprised Israel by voting to repeal the odious UN resolution slandering Zionismas a form of racism. I was the editor of AIPACsNear East Reportat the time and wrote that the next logical move would be for India to normalize relations and open an embassy in Jerusalem. I was subsequently invited to write an article forThe Indian-Americanmagazine on Israel-India ties. At the time, trade with India was approximately $200 million, mostly consisting of polished diamonds. I argued India could benefit from direct trade, cultural and academic exchanges and sharing the lessons of coping with massive influxes of refugees that strain the nations absorptive capacity.

One catalyst for taking the next step was Indias desire to participate in the international Middle East peace conference planned for Moscow on Jan. 28, 1992. China established full diplomatic relations with Israel to win a seat at the table and India did not want to be left out. TheBush administration, which had lobbied India to vote for the repeal of the Zionism resolution at the UN, made it clear that Israel would not agree to their participation if relations were not normalized.

India was also being encouraged to improve ties with Israel by the one-million-strong Indian community in the United States. Narayan Keshavan, the Washington Bureau Chief ofThe Indian-American, noted that influential leaders such as Dr. Mukund Mody of the Overseas Friends of the Bharatiya Janata Party and Kamal Dandona of the Indian National Congress of America, which backs the ruling party in New Delhi, have pushed for better Indo-Israeli relations.

Like many other countries, India also believed that improving ties with Israel would ingratiate the country with thepro-Israel lobbyin the United States, which would then support policies favorable to New Delhi. The policy shift was also related to fears that Pakistan might be the country to benefit if it were to tilt toward Israel. India also hoped to take advantage of the shared interest with Israel in preventing Pakistan from becoming a nuclear power.

Keshavan noted that the Rao government had nothing to lose domestically because his party could not count on the Muslim vote anyway and the opposition supported the establishment of full diplomatic relations with Israel. The Arab states were also in no position to protest after the participation of Syrians, Jordanians, Lebanese, and Palestinians in talks with Israel at theMadrid conferencein 1991.

On Jan. 29, 1992, India announced it would establish full diplomatic relations with Israel. A few months later, the two nations signed an agreement to increase cooperation between Indian and Israeli industries. An agreement was also initialed to allow Air India and El Al to operate flights between the two countries and to promote tourism.

Today, trade is booming. India is Israels ninth leading trade partner. Exports have risen from $200 million in 1992 to $4.2 billion in 2016. In the past decade alone, Israels exports to India have risen a total of about 60 percent. Israeli companies with representative offices or manufacturing plants in India include Teva, Netafim, Check Point, Amdocs, Magic Software, Ness Technologies, Israel Aerospace Industries, Elbit, Verint, Mobileye and HP Indigo.

Military cooperation is especially robust, with Israel selling billions of dollars worth of weapons systems to India. The Indian Navy makes port visits in Haifa and the IDF and Indian military have engaged in joint exercises. In June, for example, pilots from India joined counterparts from Israel, the United States, Germany, France, Italy, and Poland in the largest aerial training exercise ever held in Israel.

Israelis can be found throughout India, as it has become a popular tourist destination, especially for Israelis following their army service. The number of tourists from India has also increased dramatically, with 40,000 Indian nationals vacationing in Israel in 2015.

Following the visit of Prime Minister Modi, Israeli-Indian relations can be expected to grow exponentially in a variety of spheres. Can you think of a more powerful rebuke to the BDS movement than the strengthening of ties between Israel and a country of 1.3 billion people?

Dr. Mitchell Bard is the author/editor of 24 books including the 2017 edition of Myths and Facts: A Guide to the Arab-Israeli Conflict, The Arab Lobby, and the novel After Anatevka: Tevye in Palestine.

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The remarkable change in India-Israel relations - Heritage Florida Jewish News

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Posted By richards on July 14, 2017

Israel Hayom

'The main reason for French aliyah is Zionism, and that is fine' Israel Hayom French Ambassador to Israel Helene Le Gal says she supports French Jews who "want to come to Israel for Zionist values" She says France and Israel share common values and stresses that despite terrorism, France is still a preferred tourism destination. UN Resolution Anti-Zionism = Anti-SemitismIntermountain Jewish News Thomas L. Friedman: A double blow to IsraelPittsburgh Post-Gazette Inclusion and the Jewish group that demonizes JewsJNS.org Rutland Herald -Heritage Florida Jewish News -The Jewish Press - JewishPress.com all 65 news articles »

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'The main reason for French aliyah is Zionism, and that is fine' - Israel Hayom

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Posted By simmons on July 14, 2017

One day before the outbreak of the first world war, a precocious boy called Gerhard Scholem burst into a room at home and began the rite of symbolically castrating his father. Papa, I think I want to be a Jew, he exclaimed. He was planning to learn Hebrew, study the Bible and become a Zionist. His father, an assimilationist German businessman who despised his Jewish heritage, was appalled: You want to return to the ghetto? he asked. Youre the ones who are living in the ghetto, his son snapped back. Only you wont admit it.

Scholem meant that his father had established the family in a gilded bourgeois Jewish prison within a hostile German society his friend, Walter Benjamin, who grew up in a similarly privileged west Berlin milieu, described it as something of a ghetto held on lease. These rebellious sons turned out to be unwittingly prescient.

Such Oedipal confrontations were common in German-speaking lands during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as the privileged sons of Jewish businessmen rebelled against their fathers devotion to bourgeois accumulation and deluded patriotism for a Wilhelmine polity that denied Jews equal rights. Some rebels such as Gerhards brother Werner (who would die in 1940 in Buchenwald) became communists. Others, Scholem for one, were attracted by the Zionist hopes advanced by political activist Theodor Herzl and philosopher Martin Buber. Scholem kept a portrait of the former on his bedroom wall, and felt a jolt of electricity when he heard Buber lecture and identify Jews as Orientals for whom the priority was mutuality and community, processes and relationships against the atomised, petrified western man of the senses.

He dreamed that the Jews could replace, as George Prochnik puts it, the attitude of impotent suffering with rambunctious perilously naked self-expression. Instead of being strangers in European lands, Jews could go home and become themselves not hobbled melancholics of the diaspora, nor spiritless worshippers of degrading consumer capitalism.

This at least was the messianic dream that led Scholem in 1923 to quit Germany for Palestine, where the young philologist and scholar of that mystical thread of Judaism called Kabbalah spent the rest of his life. That was the year of Hitlers beer hall putsch, only 10 years before the Nazi leader was elected German chancellor and 19 before the Wannsee conference implemented the Final Solution. Scholem figures as an antithesis of Stefan Zweig, subject of Prochniks previous book, the cosmopolitan humanist who couldnt abandon his idealised vision of European culture: Scholem is a hero to the author because of the virtuosity with which he developed alternative, non-European Jewish, visions.

In Jerusalem, Scholem changed his first name, becoming Gershom the name given by Moses to his son after the escape from Egypt. It was after that escape that Moses said: I have been a stranger in a strange land, with its implication (encoded in one meaning of the name Gershom) that the prophet was home after the woes of exile. But, for Scholem, anarchically esoteric exegete that he was, Gershom also meant Stranger is his name. Prochnik tells us he revelled in this paradox, glossing it thus: Once a stranger, now home; forever a stranger, by destiny. He was never at home, not quite.

Certainly if Scholem had been a stranger in Germany, he was to be differently alienated in his new home. Prochnik takes us through the history of British mandate-era Palestine to the creation in 1948 of the state of Israel, whose birth pangs were witnessed by Scholem. From the heights of the newly founded Hebrew University on Mount Scopus, the professor looked down on his disappointing people like a new Moses on Mount Sinai finding that, instead of Zionism meaning the transcendent salvation of the Jewish people, in practice it involved the recrudescence of godless western materialism, dubious religious conservatism and heartless treatment of the Arab population. He stayed but became something Guardian readers can identify with, a remoaner.

Yet Scholem also became a source of pride to the new Israel, symbol not of its martial valour or economic chutzpah but its intellectual excellence. Prime minister David Ben-Gurion reportedly shut his office for five days in 1957 and went to bed to read Scholems magnum opus on the false Jewish messiah, Sabbatai Sevi. Imagine, by way of parallel, Theresa May suspending Brexit negotiations to curl up with volume three of philosopher Derek Parfits On What Matters.

But thats only one thread of this ardent, beautifully written book. The other is Prochniks parallel rebellion and Zionist awakening in the late 1980s when he quit the US, converted to Judaism, learned Hebrew and settled in Jerusalem. He describes his upbringing in Fairfax City, Virginia, as spiritual violation. The despoliation he witnessed as malls consumed Americas wilderness resonated somehow with the ruins of European history that my fathers family had fled. Israel promised, or so it seemed, escape from both ruins. Like his hero, Prochnik was a first-born son sticking it to the old man for letting the flame of his Jewish identity burn down as low as it could go.

And so, one day in the late 80s he flew to Israel clutching his battered copy of Scholems On the Kabbalah and Its Mysticism. In Jerusalem he married Anne, an artist and teacher, and raised three children, all the while struggling with his writing career and with his place in, and commitment to, Israel. Like Scholem, only more so, he was both beguiled by and estranged from its realisation of Zionism rising consumerism, irksome dress codes, the unresolved Arab question.

As he delved deeper into Scholems mystical Jewish thought, Prochnik explored the notion of the Shekinah, roughly the glory of the divine presence interpreted in Kabbalism in feminine terms. Just as Aristophanes had imagined in Platos Symposium human nature split into gendered halves who yearned for their original wholeness, so Scholem suggested that a part of God Himself is exiled from God, namely the feminine part, who is the spiritual personification of exile and Jewish exile in particular. For Kabbalists and for Scholem, humanitys task of bringing Gods masculine and feminine aspects back to their foundational unity was akin to Zionisms dream of overcoming Jews exile.

One imagines Prochnik looking up from his exciting esoteric readings, to be confronted with Israels sometimes disappointing reality, gender-wise. Jewish religious practice, at worst, was hardly premised on rediscovering that foundational unity: Orthodoxy effectively cut women out completely from non-domestic religious activity, Prochnik writes. I felt there had to be a more meaningful role for women than just replicating male functions in a ritual territory demarcated and dust covered by men.

Other demarcations slowly impinge on Prochnik. At one poignant moment, he wonders why Arab boys cleaning tables at a restaurant arent at school. While he is graceful in admitting his omissions of empathy, the book reads as if he sometimes lost sight of how, to repurpose Walter Benjamins remark, Israeli civilisation, like every other in human history, has its barbarous flip side.

His estrangement came to a head with the 1995 murder of Yitzhak Rabin by ultraconservative student Yigal Amir, who was opposed to the prime ministers support for the Oslo peace accords that entailed Israeli withdrawal from West Bank settlements. The villain of Israels recent history, for Prochnik, emerges as the nations current prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who, before Rabins murder, made the breasts of conservatives swell with a sense of their own vigilante machismo while sending psychopaths into a frenzy.

He doesnt quite indict Netanyahu for creating favourable circumstances for Rabins assassination, but when Bibi was months later elected prime minister, it was time for Prochnik and Anne to leave for the US. He writes: the very thing that once drew us was what we needed to renounce. Worse, their marriage, founded on the joy of their Israeli adventure, couldnt survive the rupture. What remains, however, is Prochniks adoration for Scholem, and his unrealised and perhaps unrealisable notion of Zionist transcendence.

Stuart Jeffriess Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School is published by Verso.

Stranger in a Strange Land: Searching for Gershon Scholem and Jerusalem s published by Granta. To order a copy for 21.25 (RRP 25) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over 10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of 1.99.

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Posted By simmons on July 14, 2017

Jewish Chronicle

Synagogue membership? There are reasons to be hopeful Jewish Chronicle Following last week's JPR report, it is important to spell out what this data means for the United Synagogue. Although the study did not supply specific data for the US, we recognise that as by far the largest synagogue movement of any denomination, we ... Why there are no women on the Chief Rabbinate's 'blacklist'Jewish Telegraphic Agency APN's Aaron Mann in Times of Israel blog: American Jewish leaders must be vocal on prayer and peace in IsraelAmericans for Peace Now Fourteen Flaws in Tom Friedman's 'Israel to American Jews' New York Times ColumnAlgemeiner State Times -Al-Monitor all 65 news articles »

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